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 olive groves upon terraces, we found a spot less dreary than the most, and there the camp was pitched.

CHAPTER 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 neighbour has made one pilgrimage, distrust him. But if he has 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.

Το 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 Shakspeare's city, and Milton's and Cromwell's. More agreeable to your mood is the heavy moulding of the banqueting-room of Whitehall, than the crystal splendours 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?

But

The Art of Greece is still supreme. The Empire of Rome has never been rivalled. 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 appealing 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 splendour and Grecian elegance gleams athwart the past.

Fascinated by that splendour, as by auroral fires streaming through the sky-recognising the forms of its law, its society, and its speech, inherent in his own-marking over all historic lands and submerged in African solitudes the footprints of its triumphant march, the young student revering in Rome the might of his own human genius going out to possess the earth, reaches the gates of its metropolis with an ardour that merges in romance.

Hence were hurled the thunderbolts that shook the world, and whose vibrations tremble yet. Hither comes the poet, the philosopher, the statesman, the scholar; and in no city of the world was there ever assembled so much human genius in every kind, and in every time, as in Rome.

Do you remember, Xtopher, when we came to Rome over the hushed desolation of the Campagna, that separates it from the rest of populous Italy, as the grim belt of the middle ages separates it in history in modern times?

It was at sunset of a late October day. Trees had not waved to us, nor birds sang, since we left the park-like woods of Civita Castellana in the sultry, cloudy morning. Solitary shepherds in rough skins, knitting and croning melancholy