Though Haifa is comparatively modern, there are some traces of old ruins in the town, the walls of an old crusading castle, one or two caverns, which bear marks of having been inhabited in the rocks immediately behind them, and the crumbling remains of an archway, dating, probably, from a period anterior to the crusades. Prior to the arrival of the colonists of the Temple Society, Haifa was as dirty as most Arab villages. It is now well paved throughout. The houses, all constructed of white limestone, quarries of which abound in the immediate vicinity, give it a clean and substantial appearance, and contain a bustling and thriving population of about six thousand inhabitants. Under the high cactus hedges at its eastern gateway are usually to be seen, squatting amid sacks of grain, hundreds of camels, which, attended by wild-looking Arabs, have arrived with their loads of cereals from the Hauran, on the other side of the Jordan; for Haifa is gradually becoming one of the great grain-exporting ports of the country, and one or two steamers are generally to be seen loading in the harbour.
Leaving the town by the western gateway, we ride for about a mile parallel to the seashore between high cactus hedges, and suddenly find ourselves apparently transported into the heart of Europe. Running straight back from the beach for about half a mile, and sloping upward for about a hundred feet in that distance, to the base of the rocky sides of Carmel, runs the village street. On each side of it is a path-way, with a double row of shade-trees, and behind them a series of white stone houses, of one and two stories, generally with tiled roofs, each surrounded with its garden, and each with a text in German engraved over the doorway. There is another, smaller, parallel street. The whole settlement contains about sixty houses and three hundred inhabitants. The English, American, and German vice-consuls are all colonists. There is a skilled physician, an architect, and engineer in the colony, an excellent hotel, a school, and meeting-house. The German government subscribes two thirds and the colonists one third of the funds required for the school. Some of the colonists are in business, and have stores in Haifa. There is also a good store in the colony, where all the most important trades are represented. There is one wind grist, and one steam mill, the latter in process of erection. There is a manufactory of olive-oil soap, the export of which to America is yearly increasing, and now amounts to 50,000 pounds, and which may be purchased in New York by such of your readers as have a fancy to wash their hands with soap direct from the Holy Land, made from the oil of the olives of Carmel, at F. B. Nichols's, 62 William Street. There is also a factory for the manufacture of articles from olive wood.