Читать книгу The People of Palestine. An enlarged edition of "The Peasantry of Palestine, Life, Manners and Customs of the Village" онлайн

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If you awake in the early hours of morning you will hear the monotonous rumble of the stone mills, telling that the day’s work for the women has begun. When the spring is very small or low, and it takes a long time to fill a jar, the women and young girls will sometimes go out before it is light to get the first turn at the trickling stream. Long journeys are made into the waste places to secure headloads of brush or grass-fodder. A woman usually wears a dark blue crash dress while at work. Her legs and feet are bare; perhaps she carries a rough pair of shoes such as the men wear, but they are for the briers and stones outside the village. Should she put them on within the village the other women would laugh at her and call her proud or citified.

Unmarried women are very scarce among the peasantry. Marriage usually comes at an early age for girls. One of the owners of a house that we had to hire for the work of the new boys’ training school had as wife such a mere slip of a girl that we were curious to know her age. She couldn’t tell us how old she was, but said that she had been married five years. A companion with her ventured the guess that her age was thirteen years. The little wife seemed happy and was the only peasant wife I ever saw receiving any affectionate attentions from her husband. She was a pretty girl and seemed to be a pet in the family. She had her own little ways of enjoying her little life. One day, when some much poorer women from el-Bîreh were toiling on the house which her husband’s family was building, bringing stone and mortar on their heads, Mrs. Thirteen-years put on her best dress of blue with some Bethlehem needlework on the breast, adorned her fingers with the rings of cheap nickel and glass, commonly worn, and taking a piece of embroidery, stood thus, plying her needle genteelly, where the other women were toiling at their severer task. Many were the glances they threw at her, but when they looked her eyes were on her handiwork.