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who used the proud inhabitants of the city with great arrogance. The Arabs, disunited by the feud between the Keys and Yemen factions, could not oppose their tyranny. The Kurds became lords of Hebron, and espousing neither party hectored both. They built fine houses on the hill-side north of the Haram, and planted orchards of foreign trees till then unknown. Now, it is a custom in Palestine for anyone passing along a road to pick fruit hanging over an orchard wall without rebuke.^[1] But the Kurds, if they caught a man gleaning from the skirts of their plantations, would cut off both his hands. They were hateful in all their ways. At last, their tyranny grew so unbearable that the two rival factions were at one in the determination to have done with it, only waiting an occasion for a general rising. On an evening, of the feast of Bairam, the Kurds and their Agha were drinking coffee in the market-place, when the Agha suggested that they should send for Budriyeh, the daughter of a notable of the city, to make fun for them. The men of Hebron flew to arms at this insult, which was soon washed out in blood, for the Kurds were unprepared, having always regarded the townsmen as unwarlike dogs. Most of them were killed. A remnant, including the Agha, fled to Beyt Ummar, Beyt Fejjar, and other villages.

They never came back in force to Hebron, but their leader one day disguised himself as a woman and presented himself at the door of the father