Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/101

 The Powers of Evil in Jerusalem. 73

this slaughter have no where to lay their head, and their enemies rejoice ! " Many of the popular tales about Solomon attribute to him a kind of second sight, as for instance it is said that when he sent to Pharaoh to ask for workmen for the building of the Temple, the Egyptian astrologers selected those who would die within the year, but Solomon promptly sent them back dressed in shrouds.

The Jerusalem children, both Jews and Moslems, seem to have few games except such as have been introduced by European — chiefly German and American — schools. Among the curiosities in the Armenian Museum are some very ordinary dolls. Hoops, balls, skipping-ropes, one seldom sees. In the north of Palestine, where life is brighter and less Europeanised than in Judaea, the boys play hockey and the girls hop-scotch. The one really characteristic game is a highly elaborated variant of " knuckle-bones," or the Scotch " chucky-stanes," played for the most part with the tesserae to be picked up within a few yards of anywhere. One game may last at least an hour, and is accompanied by songs, some of which are mere nonsense rhymes, while others have traces of meaning. The girls especially attain great skill, and it is the only occasion on which I have seen boys and girls playing freely together. A young man here said to me one day, speaking of the daughters of a neighbour, " They are ashamed to meet me now because we used to play Hassa together." A Jew told me that the ball-playing of the maidens of Jerusalem was one of the causes which led to the destruction of the Temple ! May some association of ideas with the Nausicaa of heathen Greece have led to this condemnation of an amusement which might have had valuable hereditary influence upon the female outline of the Jewish race ?

One of the most interesting places in Jerusalem is the Cotton Grotto discovered in 1852, probably the "royal grotto" of Josephus {Bell. Jud., v. 4, 2.), and which, for the