I.

Palm Sunday.

PALM SUNDAY dawned over Palestine. It was a soft bright morning, the last of our miserable imprisonment. The day before, Wind and Shower had passed out of the great gate toward Jerusalem. Leisurlie was already gone, and soon after sunrise our camels entered the court to be loaded. The Howadji were incensed with assafedita, and adjudged clean. We should not imperil the health of Syria, and might go to Jerusalem.

In the silence and ennui of those quarantine days, I had full time to remember the country in which we were, and the city to which we were going. Even here in Syria, here in Gaza, city which I had vaguely figured to myself when, a child, I listened wondering to the story of Samson, even here the day came with the old Sabbath feeling, with that spirit of devotional stillness in the air which broods over our home Sundays, irksome by their sombre gravity to the boy, but remembered by the man with sweet sadness.

The shadow of the cross suddenly fell athwart the gleam of the crescent. That Palm Sunday morning, the

image which is the genius of Palestine, passed into my heart over reverential thoughts, and hushed hopes, as over strewn olive-branches and under palms Christ entered Jerusalem. Behind and before, the Desert and Damascus,-lay the peculiar Orient. But we entered now upon a land consecrated by one life to universal and eternal interest.

The day was warm, the air was still, and we paced stately out of the court into the lonely landscape of Palestine, and turning toward Jerusalem, a myriad emotions whispered in that morning-" hosanna, hosanna!"

At the gate too, as if so fit a figure of our strictly oriental and poetic dreams must not mingle with our changing thoughts, the grave old Armenian and the beautiful Khadra went another way, and we should not meet again until we reached Jerusalem. As, upon his docile white mare, the venerable father piloted his little caravan away, I could still catch glimpses of the daughter looking curiously at us with her dreamy eyes, could still see the tall camel driver walking slowly before her palanquin.

It disappeared behind a hedge of cactus. For many days I did not see her again. But a solitary Palm upon a hillock still watched her going, and waved its boughs slowly toward me in melancholy farewell.

I was consoled, however, by my release from prison, and no landscape was ever more beautiful than that which greeted my eyes this morning-doubly beautiful for the long desert journey, and the dreary Quarantine. The little hill on which stands Gaza, waved in gentle and graceful undulations, bearing pomegranate, and orange,

and date trees, mimosas, and acacias in its swell, and among them wound quiet lanes hedged by prickly pear and aloe. Grain waved softly from the distance, and out of the luxurious green, rose the minaret of Gaza, with groups of low houses clustering around it.

Gaza was called the capital of Palestine, and in the ruins of white marble sometimes found there, it is hard to see any thing else than the remains of the temple which Samson destroyed.

Our road led by a cemetery of domed tombs. It was bare and desolate, like a ruined town. Then, passing along a spacious avenue, shaded with trees, we emerged upon a sea of grain. It was darkened at intervals by venerable, scraggy olives, and rocking through it upon MacWhirter, I saw, beyond, a vast reach of bare, green land, partly grain, partly waste. Far away upon the eastern horizon,-a misty blue rampart,-stretched a range of hills, the mountains of Judea. Toward the west the green shrank away into low, melancholy sand-mounds, and so crept to the sea.

The landscape was so fresh and fair, that I could have Jung with the meadow-larks that darted, singing, in the sun. But it was so lonely, and mournful, that the song would have been too sad for a bird's singing. Far as I could see, before and around me, there was no town, no sign of vigorous life. It was akin to the sublime solitude of the Roman Campagna, if to its present desolation you add the nodding grain of its earlier cultivation. In outline, and extent, and hue, the hills were not unlike the Sabine or Volscian mountains, seen from Rome.

But not the glittering fame of Roman story consecrates the Campagna hills to the imagination, as the bleak Judea mountains are consecrated by a single life. The tranquil sweetness of the summer sky breathes over this landscape as does that gracious memory over the human heart. In Palestine that figure is forever present. On these infinite, solitary grain-tracts moves that form, as in Uhland's ballad the reapers see the image of their benignant pastor walking in the pleasant morning. It informs the landscape with an inexpressible pathos. A man of sorrows, and broken-hearted. Reviled, persecuted, and martyred, now as then, and more than ever at Jerusalem.

Passing this tract upon a grassy path, we crossed a belt of low hills, and descended into a series of basins, or dry lake-like reaches of arable land. There were infrequent groves of olives, whose silvery, sere foliage, and rough, gnarled trunks, did not disturb the universal sadness by any gayety of form or feeling. All day the blue line of the Judean hills waved along the horizon, pointing the way to Jerusalem. Patches of grain sang in the low wind. Grain makes the landscape live, thrilling it with soft motion. Grass or turf is like lining, but grain like long silken hair.

Hun

Presently we were in the midst of ploughing. dreds of acres of ploughed land stretched beyond sight, and the general agricultural activity was strange to see. The plough was the same that Joseph and Mary saw when they fled along this land to Egypt, and the teams of camels and donkeys harnessed together, and the tur