ed. We went to bed very hungry, but very tired, and in the
morning, before breakfast, hunted out the house of an English
missionary, who took pity on us and gave us to eat. But it is an unusual
thing for any one to leave Nablous without having an experience of some
sort more or less disagreeable to fasten the name of the place in his
recollection. When the brilliant author of "Eothen" sojourned for a day
or two in this "hot furnace of Mohammedanism," as he calls it, the whole
Greek population chose him as an involuntary deliverer of a young
Christian maiden who had been perverted by rich gifts to the faith of
Islam, or at least to a belief that a rich Mohammedan was to be
preferred as a husband to a poor Christian. They stare upon you now, as
they did then, as you walk through the streets and bazaars, "with fixed,
glassy look, which seemed to say, God is God, but how marvellous and
inscrutable are his ways, that thus he permits the white-faced dog of a
Christian to hunt through the paths of the faithful!"

We went, of course, to the little Samaritan synagogue, to see the famous
copy of the Pentateuch, whose age no man knoweth. We rode up the steep
slopes of Gerizim to the ruins of the temple where the woman of Samaria
said her fathers had always worshipped, and then, in a pouring rain, we
started for Jenin. Hassan sunk his head down in a huge Oriental cloak,
undoubtedly manufactured in Birmingham or Manchester, and his horse,
left to himself, lost his way, for a Palestine road may at any time,
like a Western trail, turn into a squirrel's track and run up a tree.
When we found ourselves again we were all wet and not in the best of
humor, but in sight of the old city of Samaria on her high hills.

The magnificent capital of Ahab and Jezebel, we saw at a glance, is now
only a ruined, dirty village, where a European could not hope for
shelter for a night. The hills sank into a heavy plain that seemed
interminable. The short twilight faded into untempered darkness. Hassan
was again in the rear. He would have fled incontinently at the first
sign of danger. Our only consolation was that his horse was tired and he
couldn't get very far away from us under any circumstances. I had a
letter to a Christian at Jenin that was thought to be good for supper
and lodging. We filed through the muddy streets to the door of the
Christian's house, sent in the letter by Hassan, and a man came out,
saluted us, told us to follow and he would ta