being expanded upon ropes from one side of the parapet wall to the other, may be folded or unfolded at pleasure.

The Psalmist may allude to some covering of this kind in that beautiful expression of spreading out the heavens like a curtain.*

When any of these cities is built upon level ground, one may pass along the tops of the houses from one end of it to the other, without coming down into the street. If, then, our Saviour, at the healing of the paralytic, was preaching in a house of this fashion, we may, by attending to the structure of it, give no small light to the circumstances of that history. St. Mark speaks of breaking up the roof; but the original words will denote with propriety enough the undoing or removal of any kind of covering, of the veil which I have mentioned, as well as of a roof or ceiling. And the passage in St. Luke, "they let him down through the tiling," should be rendered, "they let him down over, along the side, or by the way of the roof."

All, therefore, that was to be done in the case of the paralytic, was to carry him up to the top of the house, either by forcing their way through the crowd up the staircase, or by conveying him over some of the neighbouring terraces, and there, after they had drawn away the veil or awning, to let him down along the side of the roof through the opening, into the midst of the court before Jesus.-See SHAW's Barbary, vol. i. pp. 374-376, 381-386.

PAVEMENTS AND FLOORS.

EXODUS XXIV. 10.

"And they saw the God of Israel and there was under his feet, as it were, a paved work of a sapphire-stone, and as it were the body of heaven in his clearness."

* Psalm civ. 2; Isaiah xl. 22.

2 CHRON. vii. 3.

"And the children of Israel,...bowed themselves with their faces to the ground upon the pavement (of the court-see ch. vi. 13) and worshipped."

ESTHER i. 6.

"A pavement of red, and blue, and white, and black marble;" or (as in margin), of porphyre, and marble, and alabaster, and stone of blue colour.

The upper classes in Persia pave their courts very nicely, on the borders and through the centres (the other parts being planted with shrubs), and the floors of their houses also are laid with painted tiles.

Polished marble was not used in the days of Moses for pavements. He refers to the most splendid floors which Egypt then knew, and which were formed of painted tiles (or bricks). These tiles were the colour of blue (the sapphire stone being blue) in the pavement Moses saw. And Le Bruyn tells us, that the mosque at Jerusalem is almost all covered over with green and blue bricks, which are glazed; so that when the sun shines, the eye is perfectly dazzled. But as these bricks are not transparent, Moses, in order to describe the pavement under the feet of the God of Israel with due majesty, represents it as like the floors of painted tile he had seen, but transparent as the body of heaven.-See LE BRUYN, tom. ii.; HARMER's Observations, vol. i. pp. 359-361.

"The court of the governor's house at Damascus was paved with coloured marbles, arranged in various devices of Mosaic work."-BUCKINGHAM's Arab Tribes, p. 340.

A

"In general (in Cairo) there is on the ground floor an apartment in which male visitors are received. small part of the floor, extending from the door to the opposite side of the room, is six or seven inches lower than the rest in a handsome house (this part) is paved with white and black marble, and little pieces of red tile,

inlaid in tasteful patterns."-LANE'S Modern Egyptians, vol. i. pp. 11, 12.

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GALLERIES.

CANTICLES ii. 9.

"My beloved is like a roe, or a young hart behold, he standeth behind our wall, he looketh forth at the windows, showing himself through the lattice."

vii. 5.

"The king is held (bound) in the galleries."

"The court is for the most part surrounded with a cloister,...over which, when the house has one or more stories (and I have seen them with two or three) there is a gallery erected,...having a balustrade, or else a piece of carved or latticed work going round about it, to prevent people falling from it into the court." SHAW'S Barbary, vol. i. p. 376.

The Rev. Pliny Fisk, missionary to Palestine, describing a Jewish wedding which he had witnessed, writes, "At the opposite end of the court (where we were seated), was a kind of gallery, where the bride was making preparations for the ceremony, and in front of which hung stripes of different coloured paper, red, pale red, and yellow; some of them covered with gold leaf. Now and then the bride showed herself through the lattice, or wooden net-work, which stood in front of the gallery. It reminded us of Solomon's Song,-'My beloved looketh forth at the windows, showing himself through the lattice."—Memoirs of Rev. Pliny Fisk, p. 239.

CHAMBERS.

1 KINGS Xxii. 25.

"And Micaiah said, Behold thou shalt see in that day, when thou shalt go into an inner chamber (chamber in a chamber-margin) to hide thyself."

2 KINGS i. 2.

"And Ahaziah fell down through a lattice in his upper chamber."

iv. 10.

"Let us make a little chamber, I pray thee, on the wall ;......and it shall be, when he cometh to us, that he shall turn in thither."

ix. 2.

"Go in,..and carry him (Jehu) to a chamber, in a chamber," (marg. reading): or, into the most private chamber.

xxiii. 12.

"The altars that were on the top of the ber of Ahaz...did the king beat down."

JEREMIAH Xxii. 13, 14.

upper cham

"Woe unto him that buildeth his house by unrighteousness, and his chambers by wrong....That saith, I will build me a wide house, and large chambers, and cutteth him out windows; and it is ceiled with cedar, and painted with vermilion."

LUKE Xxii. 11.

"And ye shall say unto the good man of the house, The Master saith unto thee, Where is the guest-chamber, where I shall eat the passover with my disciples? And he shall shew you a large upper room furnished: there make ready."

ACTS ix. 37.

"They laid (Tabitha) in an upper chamber."

XX. 8, 9.

"And there were many lights in the upper chamber, where they were gathered together. And there sat in a window a certain young man named Eutychus, being fallen into a deep sleep and as Paul was long preaching, he sunk down with sleep, and fell down from the third loft, and was taken up dead."

:

From the cloisters and galleries, we are conducted into large spacious chambers.* One of them frequently serves a whole family, particularly when a father indulges his married children to live with him, or when several persons join in the rent of the same house. From whence it is, that the cities of these countries, which are generally much inferior in bigness to those of Europe, yet are so exceedingly populous, that great numbers of the inhabitants are swept away by the plague, or any other contagious distemper.

In houses of better fashion, these chambers, from the middle of the wall downwards, are covered and adorned with velvet or damask hangings, of white, blue, red, green, or other colours, suspended upon hooks, or taken down at pleasure; but the upper part is embellished with more permanent ornaments, being adorned with the most ingenious wreathings and devices in stucco and fret-work. The ceiling is generally of wainscot, either very artfully painted, or else thrown into a variety of panels, with gilded mouldings and scrolls of the Koran intermixed. The prophet Jeremiah exclaims against the eastern houses that were "ceiled with cedar, and painted with vermilion."

Mr. Lane mentions that the ceilings of handsome houses in Egypt are often richly decorated. "Numerous thin strips of wood are nailed upon the planks, forming patterns curiously complicated; yet perfectly regular, and having a highly ornamental effect...the strips are painted yellow, or gilt; and the spaces within painted green, red, and blue."+

To most of the Eastern houses there is a smaller one annexed, which sometimes rises one story higher than the house; at other times it consists of one or two rooms only,

The houses in Bagdad consist of ranges of apartments opening into a court within the building; the rooms underground are occupied when the heat is intense; and from these, in the cool of the evening, the families go up on the terraces. The houses are not nearly so high as ours, and several families inhabit frequently one house.

+ Modern Egyptians, vol. i. p. 15.