emple, must have pressed this road
with his sacred feet, must have looked with deep, inquiring eyes upon
these fields and hills. There was enough in the early hour and the
associations of the scenes through which we were passing to keep us for
a long time silent. My horse stumbled and brought us both back from
Dreamland. A look ahead showed us--for the sun was now above the
hills--that the worst piece of road in Palestine was just before us. It
is wholly unartificial: for years no human hand has touched it, except
as mine did when, on dismounting and undertaking to pick my way over the
rocks, I found myself on all-fours. In fact, this Oriental boulevard is
made up for some distance entirely of boulders, round and sharp,
triangular and square, which the spring freshets of the last five or six
decades were regretfully obliged to leave behind. After a short halt for
lunch, about two o'clock, the muleteer assured us, on starting again, we
had still five hours of steady pushing before us, and said something in
the same breath about robbers. Men of his class all through the East are
notorious cowards; but we had been told in Jerusalem that such dangers
were not altogether imaginary, and, almost as our guide spoke, we heard
shrieks, and for a moment we all thought the nefarious crew were at
their work just ahead. The muleteer dropped mysteriously to the rear,
and we rode on over a slight ascent, and there we saw a tall Samaritan
exerting himself in a way most unlike the good one of the parable. He
appeared to be a man of importance,--probably a sheik. His horse, tied
to a little tree, was a very handsome one, and gayly decked out with red
leather and ribbons. He had hold of the hind legs of a poor little goat,
and was intent on pulling the creature away from a smaller man, much
more poorly dressed, whose hands had a death-like grip of the horns. I
was for setting lance in rest and charging to the rescue; but my more
cautious friend put one or two questions to the sheik, who told, in a
somewhat jerky style,--perhaps the result of the strugglings of the goat
and the man at the other end of him,--as straightforward a story as was
possible under the circumstances. He was the proprietor of the hut the
owner of the goat lived in. He had come to collect his lawful rent, and
he knew the money was ready, but he couldn't get it, and so had seized
the only movable object of any value. The poor wretch, who still had
the goat by the horns, d