traveller's mind to-day, as to the Egyptian mind then, and surely not the least satisfaction of travel is the intellectual and moral perception of the traveller, revealing to him the reason and naturalness of the different achievements of different nations. This implies, of course, that there is not an essential and fatal difference in men, and that a Hoosier can understand an Arab, and an Esquimaux a Sicilian.

The proof lies in individual experience. Many a youth, musing upon the story of Greece and Rome, and then going to visit their remains, is secretly surprised at the want of strangeness in the impression they produce. He is not startled in the Forum. He is only pensive in the Coliseum. He is but solemnized at Aboo Simbel. It is not as if he had stepped into a dream, as he supposed it would be, but he feels a natural sympathy with the mighty ruins and the triumphant time they recall, as if he were visiting his own ancestral estates in another country.

But if the boy thus loses the excitement of wonder, the man gains a sweeter wisdom. His own experience explains to him the secret of Greece and Rome. The race is one,—as in form, so in essence, the complexion differing. He perceives that all civilizations, and artistic, intellectual and military achievements are but blossoms of the same tree. It flowers in swart Egypt-in glowing Syria -in polished Greece-in red Rome-in fierce Huns and swift Goths-in wise England-in eager America; and he, youngest child of the race and of Time, stands beneath those spreading boughs and beholds the various splendor of the flowers flashing and fading, but all fed

by the same life, and offering but a single beauty to the pensive eye of thought.

A perfect day broke over Esdraëlon. The great plain stretched, unmarked by villages or forests, or any sufficient forms of life, thirty miles in length and eighteen in breadth. Our way lay across it to the hills that skirted it to the north. They were the hills of Galilee.

In the sunrise we descended to the plain. It was brilliant with flowers, and with grain, and lay to the sun like a vast, fertile meadow. The snowy Hermon, in the deep blue distance, gave it dignity and grandeur. There was occasional ploughing, but the spectral husbandmen, who can never secure their crops against the predatory Arabs, and the teams of camels and donkeys, only deepened the superb lifelessness of the flowery level, over which innumerable birds revelled in the morning air, as if to purify with song, the interval between the fierce past and the fierce future, prophesied for the region. On the solitary plain it was not difficult to make the words of Deborah the refrain of their singing, “The highways were unoccupied: the inhabitants of the villages ceased, they ceased in Israel."

We too loitered idly over the mighty battle-field, singing. Assyrians, Jews, Gentiles, Saracens, Egyptians, Persians, Druses, Turks, Arabs, Crusaders, and Frenchmen had here fought through the dim centuries of history, and we American Howadji remained masters of the field. The very stars in their courses fought against Sisera in the shadow of yonder mountain, and we trotted leisurely along, humming Vedrai Carino.

I shared in that moment the feelings of a young military scholar whom I once met in the cars going from Baden to Basle. A dreamy summer day flushed the landscape, and the father, telling endless battle-stories to stimulate his son's ardor, suddenly pointed out a monument to Marshal Turenne. We saw it vaguely as we darted by. But I marked no kindling ambition in the boy-soldier's eye, only a gleam of satisfaction,—as if it were better to be young, alive, and in the cars, than old, dead, and famous, like the Marshal Turenne.

Even so, Sisera and Saul, Josiah and Vespasian, were but ghosts glimmering in the radiant day. Their lives, and fightings, and deaths, were only themes of idle reverie in the intervals of singing. Happy the thought that distils one pure drop of wisdom from old history.

"O Allah!" said to me the graybeard merchant in the bazaar of Damascus-" what acres of roses have gone to this little vial of attar of rose !"

Yet as toward noon we neared the hills of Galilee, through the murky gleam of universal military glory which hung over the plain of Esdraëlon stole a more penetrant ray. Across the fiery flash of scimitars, and the cloud of hurtling arrows, and the glittering Roman eagles, a palm branch waved and hushed them into defeat. As we neared the hills of Galilee the resounding echo of arms died away, and in visions of the noon,—surpassing those of twilight,-triumphant among all those hosts, and subduing Emperors, Sultans, and Kings, rode upon a donkey a greater than Solomon, a King crowned with thorns and sceptered with a palm branch.

XVI.

Ave Marial

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 Naza

reth.

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 satisfac

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tion, for it is one of the places which satisfy imagination. Its seclusion and domesticity of aspect harmonize 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 holyday 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