The villages here are small, few, and far between, and there is room for a large population; but the most tempting land of all is the tract between Umm-el-Fahm and the sea, where the oak-trees which are scattered over the pastures and cornfields attain a large growth, and the country presents the appearance of an immense park. From an artistic point of view the woods and the farm lands are so combined as to form the most perfectly diversified scenery, just where the rolling hills slope gently down into the plain of Sharon. It was across this country that our road lay to Cæsarea, which was our objective point, first, through the thick copse of the upper valleys, and so out upon the park-like uplands, where the whole population was out in the fields gathering the crops, which strings of camels were conveying to the village threshing-floors. Here and there was a money-lender from Acre or Beyrout, squatting under an umbrella, to see that the peasantry did not rob him of his share. This is a busy time with these gentry, who are the bloodsuckers of the fellahin, to whom they advance money at exorbitant rates of interest, while the latter, in revenge, resort to every conceivable device to conceal from them the real extent of the crop, and to make the proportion coming to them as small as possible.
At one village called Arareh I found three old Roman arches, a fine fragment of a column, and some rock-cut tombs, which seem hitherto to have escaped observation. The remains indicate that it must have been a place of considerable importance, but I have not yet been able to identify it. The plain of Sharon, where we struck it, is being by degrees brought into cultivation, partly by colonists, Circassian and Bosnian, and partly by native capitalists. The peasantry themselves are rapidly losing all proprietorship in the soil, unable to contend against the exactions of the government tax-gatherer, on the one hand, and of the usurious money-lender, on the other; but while they are yearly becoming more impoverished and dependent, the wealth of the country is steadily increasing, and its development must follow as a matter of course, though, in accordance with the tendencies of modern civilization, it will be at the expense of the masses.