especially at festive seasons, was unlimited. No one considered his house his own, and no

stranger or pilgrim but found reception. And how much there was to be seen and heard in

those luxuriously furnished houses, and at those sumptuous entertainments! In the

women's apartments, friends from the country would see every novelty in dress,

adornment, and jewellery, and have the benefit of examining themselves in looking-

glasses. To be sure, as being womanish vanity, their use was interdicted to men, except it

were to the members of the family of the President of the Sanhedrin, on account of their

intercourse with those in authority, just as for the same reason they were allowed to learn

Greek.29 Nor might even women look in the glass on the Sabbath.  30 But that could only

apply to those carried in the hand, since one might be tempted, on the holy day, to do

such servile work as to pull out a grey hair with the pincers attached to the end of the

glass; but not to a glass fixed in the lid of a basket;31 nor to such as hung on t he wall.32

And then the lady- visitor might get anything in Jerusalem; from a false tooth to an

Arabian veil, a Persian shawl, or an Indian dress!

While the women so learned Jerusalem manners in the inner apartments, the men would

converse on the news of the day, or on politics. For the Jerusalemites had friends and

correspondents in the most distant parts of the world, and letters were carried by special

messengers,33 in a kind of post-bag. Nay, there seem to have been some sort of receiving-

offices in towns,34 and even something resembling our parcel-post.35 And, strange as it

may sound, even a species of newspapers, or broadsheets, appears to have been

circulating (Mikhtabhin), not allowed, however, on the Sabbath, unless they treated of

public affairs.36

Of course, it is difficult accurately to determine which of these things were in use in the

earliest times, or else introduced at a later period. Perhaps, however, it was safer to bring

them into a picture of Jewish society. Undoubted, and, alas, too painful evidence comes

to us of the luxuriousness of Jerusalem at that time, and of the moral corruption to which

it led. It seems only too clear, that such commentations as the Talmud37 gives of Is. iii.

16-24, in regard to the manners and modes of attraction practised by a certain class of the

female population in Jerusalem, applied to a far later period than that of the prophet. With

this agrees only too well the recorded covert lascivious expressions used by the men,

which gives a lamentable picture of the state of morals of many in the city,  38 and the