book and pencil in hand—he addressed one of them in rapid Turkish, and inquired if he could tell anything about the spot.

The sublime ignorance of the Turk recoiled at this imputation of knowledge. But without rising, he slowly removed the pipe from his mouth, and as if it were enough that Allah knew all, he said contemptuously,

"You Frank, I don't know what I had for breakfast.'

Crossing a little ridge, we came nearer to the mountains. I fancied the eyes of Khadra lighting the dark gorges, and in the afternoon we entered a narrow valley of the hills of Judea. As we left the wide plain smiling in the sun, I heard a voice in my mind crying: "In those days came John the Baptist preaching in the wilderness of Judea." I looked upon the rough edges of that wilderness, and saw that they were low, and stony, and treeless. The valley was planted with bright green grain, and in the lone water-courses among the stones, there was the blent beauty of a thousand wild flowers.

But upon the steep mountain sides, rocks and sterile patches lay in grim desolation, consoled by infrequent shrub oaks and laurel; and winding among them, deeper and farther into the hills, by

lonely huts and ruined wells, and ragged olivegroves upon terraces, we found a spot less dreary than the most, and there the camp was pitched.

IV.

JERUSALEM OR ROME.

AMONG the mountains, the night air was as cold as that of our October. The camp lay at the entrance of a narrow gorge, and the door of the tent commanded the valley behind us.

Golden Sleeve warned us, as he brought in the leathery tea, that this was the very place to anticipate the onset of "bad people,” and we, remembering the oriental proverb that "the worst Muslim are those of Mecca, and the worst Christians those of Jerusalem," were ready to believe. But it was worth while to come to Jerusalem, were it only to prove that there could be "worse Christians" than those we had left behind.

Nor was it more consoling when the commander entered later in the evening, to announce the arrival of a party of Muslim pilgrims; for Jerusalem is holy to the sons of the Prophet as well as to us. I inquired anxiously if they were making the pilgrimage for the first time. For what say the astute Arabians? "If thy neighbor have made one pil

grimage, distrust him. But if he have made two, make haste to leave thy house."

These little ripples of incident died away upon the surface of the grave thoughts of that evening. Jerusalem was then no fable or dream, but it lay beyond these mountains, and I should see it to

morrow.

I wrapped myself in my capote, and sat smoking at the door of the tent.

To any young man, or to any man in whose mind the glow of poetic feeling has not yet died into "the light of common day," the first view of a famous city is one of the memorable epochs of life. Even if you go directly from common-place New York to common-sense London, you will awake in the night with a hushed feeling of awe at being in Shakespeare's city, and Milton's, and Cromwell's. More agreeable to your mood is the heavy moulding of the banquetting-room of Whitehall, than the crystal splendors of the palace in the park. Because over the former the dusk of historical distance is already stealing, removing it into the romantic and ideal realm.

But more profound, because farther removed from the criticism of contemporary experience, is the interest of the Italian cities. They represent characteristic epochs of human history. Rome, Florence

Venice, are not names merely, but ideas. They were the capitals of power, that, in various ways and degrees, ruled the world.

Deeper still is the feeling that hallows the cities beyond Italy; for beyond Italy are Athens and Jerusalem.

Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem-the physical, the intellectual, and the moral, do we long doubt which is the greatest?

The art of Greece is still supreme. The Empire of Rome has never been rivalled. But the spirit which has inspired art with a sentiment profounder than the Greek-the faith which has held sway subtler and more universal than the Roman-are they not the spirit and the faith that make Jerusalem, El Khuds or the holy, because they were best illustrated and taught by a life whose influence commenced there?

More cognate to ready sympathy, more appealling to the sensuous imagination is the pomp of imperial Rome, as with camp-fires burning from the Baltic to the Euxine, and from farthest Euphrates to the Pillars of Hercules, its gorgeous confusion of barbaric splendor and Grecian elegance, gleams athwart the past.

Fascinated by that splendor, as by auroral fires streaming through the sky-recognizing the forms