CHAPTER XVI.

AVE MARIA !

As we entered the hills of Galilee, low, and bare, and stony, the mighty romance of the morning ended, and our minds were filled with a very humble story.

We wound among the hills in silence, stumbling up one of the worst paths in Palestine, and at length, quite in their heart, descended under trees upon a secluded and lovely valley. It was dotted with olive groves, and oaks, and pomegranates, with groups of Arabs, and camels, and horses, and occasional flocks. The same low stony hills, like swelling, bare uplands, inclosed it, and in the depths of the valley, leaning against the mountains and holding up to welcome us, a minaret, a few cypresses, and a palm, lay little, gray, flat-roofed Nazareth.

The valley was tranquil as a pastoral picture, and the rocky, steep hills were grim and melancholy. All the greener, therefore, were the trees, all the more gracious and significant the smooth pasture upon which the animals quietly grazed.

We descended into the valley with extreme satisfaction, for it is one of the places which satisfy imagination. Its seclusion and domesticity of aspect harmonise with the sentiment of the maternal instincts, and they are strong in your sympathy the day you come to Nazareth, for it is a day consecrate to the Madonna.

Over these hills she walked, the Virgin Nazarene, from the gray little village leaning upon the mountains. And as she paused by this fountain, filling her vase with water, even as yonder Nazarene girl is filling hers this afternoon; or, as fascinated by the thoughtful twilight, she strayed quite away from the little village; still she meditated the promise to some daughter of Israel, and returning at evening with thoughts stranger and brighter than the stars, wondered and wondered again, "Can any good come out of Nazareth?"

As, descending into the plain, the words rose to my mind, the music of the convent bell came ringing down the valley. Sweet and strange was that music in the pensive silence of Palestine. It sang my thoughts to meditation, and my heart sang hymns, and preached of remembered days and places--June Sundays in country churches, to which we walked along the edges of fields, and under branching elms hushed in Sunday repose; the long village road, with the open wagons and chaises, in

which the red-handed farmers in holiday suits drove the red-cheeked family to the church-door; the bare wooden church, full of daylight, with the square hole in the ceiling, through which the sexton looked to see if the parson were in the pulpit; the gray-haired minister, in his winter woollen gown or summer silk one, and always with black gloves, slit in the middle finger that he might turn the leaves; the reading of the Bible in a cheerful, sing-song tone, to which its choicest sentences always sing themselves now; the setting the tune with nasal psalmody and the growling bass-viol, as if a hidden artist were playing upon a lazy lion; the long sermon, of which I faithfully remembered the text and forgot the drift, and in which the names of Galilee, and Mary, and Nazareth were sweet sounds only, filling my mind with vague imagery, whose outline has long since faded; the flowers and the sunny hay-fields breathing sweetly in at the open window, and all the sweeter when the pastor read, "Yet I say unto you, Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these;" the people in the pews, all whose faces have vanished now, save hers, so many years my elder, yet still radiant with youth, queenly in beauty and in bearing, who came, when all were seated, following the old grandfather with powdered hair and gold-headed cane, and who sat serene during the service, while I, an eight years'

child, felt a vague sadness overshadow the sweet day, and quite forgot the sermon.

This was the music of the convent bell of Nazareth. In that calm Syrian afternoon, Memory, a pensive Ruth, went gleaning the silent fields of childhood, and found the scattered grain still golden, the morning sunlight yet fresh and fair.

Troops of girls passed us as we came to the town. Their arms and hands were touched with kohl. they wore strings of pewter coins for necklaces, and their heads were girt with brilliant handkerchiefs. They did not veil their faces, and at times from out the throng great eyes rose bewilderingly upon our gaze. I saw many an eye in the Nazareth girls, whose light would have illuminated an artist's fame for ever, could he have fixed it within the pictured face of his Madonna.

The traditions which cluster around Nazareth are so tender and domestic, that you will willingly believe, or at least you will listen to, the improbable stories of the friars, as a father to the enthusiastic exaggerations of his child. With Jerusalem and its vicinity, the gravity of the doctrine is too intimately associated to allow the mind to heed the quarrels and theories about the localities. It is the grandeur of the thought which commands you. But in Nazareth it is the personality of the teacher which interests you. All the tenderness of

the story centres here. The youth of the Madonna and the unrecorded years of the child, belong to Nazareth. Therefore imagination unbends to the sweet associations of domestic life. The little picture in the Uffizi recurs again, and the delicate sketches of Overbeck, illustrating the life of Christ, in which, as a blooming boy in his father's shop, he saws a bit of wood into the form of a cross, looking up smilingly to the thoughtful Joseph and the yearning Mary, as when he brings her the passionflower in the pleasant room.

The tranquil afternoon streams up the valley, and your heart is softened as if by that tender smile of Mary; and yielding to the soliciting friars, you go quietly and see where Joseph's house stood, and where the angel Gabriel saluted Mary, and the chimney of the hearth upon which she warmed food for her young child and baked cakes for Joseph when he came home from work, and the rock whence the Jews wished to cast Jesus, and another rock upon which he eat with his disciples.

You listen quietly to these stories, and look at the sights. The childish effort to give plausible form to the necessary facts of the history of the place, is too natural to offend. When the pretence is too transparent, you smile, but do not scold. For, whether he lived upon this side of the way or upon that, this is the landscape he saw for thirty years.

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