Stephens, John Lloyd: Incidents of travel in Egypt, Arabia Petraea, and the Holy Land: with a map and angravings (Band 2) (1837)

JEWISH HOSPITALITY.

I7T

were waiting for me, and I bade farewell to my
Jewish friends. I could not offer to pay the old
rabbi with money for his hospitality, and would
have satisfied my conscience by a compliment to
the servants; but the son of the good old man,
himself more than sixty, told Paul that they would
all feel hurt if I urged it. I did not urge it; and the
thought passed rapidly through my mind, that while
yesterday the children of the desert would have
stripped me of my last farthing, to-day a Jew
would not take from me a para. I passed through
the dark and narrow lanes of the Jewish Quarter,
the inhabitants being all arranged before their
houses;. and all along, even from the lips of the
maidens, a farewell salutation fell upon my ears.
They did not know what I had done nor what I
proposed to do ; but they knew that I intended a
kindness to a father of their tribe, and they thanked
me as if that kindness were already done. With
the last of their kind greetings still lingering on my
ears, I emerged from the Jewish Quarter, and it
was with a warm feeling of thankfulness I felt, that
if yesterday I had an Arab's curse, to-day I had a
Jewish blessing.,