il of sieges
and assaults. It is a great fort built out into the sea, and nearly
everyone who wanted to get possession of the Holy Land has tried first
to take Acre as the key to it. One of the most memorable sieges was that
of two years in the reign of our own King Richard I., who ended it by
arriving with fresh troops and helping his allies the French; but it is
reckoned the two countries, between them, lost 100,000 men, one way and
another, before they took the stubborn town. After that it remained in
English hands for a century.

The Turks held it in much later times against Buonaparte; they were
helped by an Englishman, Sir Sydney Smith, and if Acre is celebrated for
nothing else it should be celebrated for the fact that it held out for
sixty-one days against Buonaparte, who was in the end obliged to give
up and go away!

[Illustration: WOMEN WITH BUNDLES, WHICH THEY ALWAYS THINK NECESSARY TO
DRAG ABOUT WITH THEM.]

We drove this morning, with three horses abreast, across the twelve
miles of sandy bay between Haifa and Acre, in one of the ramshackle
waggonettes that take the place of omnibuses and carry any passengers
who want to go. We came with numbers of natives, chiefly women, and
innumerable bundles and bags, which they always think it necessary to
drag about with them. We did not get here till midday, and after
spending a few hours we had seen all we cared to of the place, and were
ready to go back. But in the East things are not done like that. So we
waited and waited long after the hour the omnibus was said to return,
and when at last the driver did saunter up, the scarecrow horses had to
be sought for, and then the harness, of course, had to be mended with
string, and that wasn't nearly the end, because, after waiting again a
long time for nothing at all that anyone could see, a Turkish woman who
was evidently of some consequence, attended by a maid and quantities of
baggage, came up, and everyone had to turn out until all her things were
stowed away. So it was nearly nightfall before we got off.

The sands are in most places firm and make good going, but a couple of
rivers run down across them to the sea; one of these is that "ancient
river, the river Kishon," mentioned in Deborah's song of triumph when
the Israelites had overcome their enemies. These rivers have to be
crossed with care, and, not so long ago, some people got bogged and were
set upon by robbers and stripped, and one was drowned by the