ocks and gathered huge balls of the thick adhesive earth, deposited
every hundred yards or so to give place to others. We rode through the
dirty little village of Nain, where once a widow's son, carried out to
burial, heard the only voice that reaches the dead and rose from his
bier; but all solemn and tender thoughts were frightened away by the
crowd of maimed and blind and ragged and hungry men, women, and children
that came pouring out of the huts, crying, begging, demanding
_backsheesh_. "This," one of our American consuls said, "is the language
of Canaan now;" and it is one of the least melodious of earth. We
lunched on the dry grass in the sun in full sight of Tabor, on the
remnants of what the good missionary at Nablous had given us, and,
tightening our saddle-girths, we began the ascent of the mountain. We
clambered up the rude bridle-path, covered with loose stones, and
knocked timidly, with the remembrance of our Nablous experiences, at the
door of a large and very sightly monastery. Almost immediately a monk of
kindly face and soft black Italian eyes gave us a cordial greeting, and
the unexpectedness of it nearly enticed us into throwing our arms around
his neck and leaving an Oriental salutation upon his cheek. He led us
into a large, clean refectory, and then into two clean rooms. I might
use other epithets, but none other means so much in the East. After a
very satisfying supper, the good monk--he was so good to us, we tried to
think he was as clean within as the rooms of his monastery--took us out
to the pinnacle of the mountain and enjoyed our enthusiasm over the
magnificent view that was spread out before us. Almost the whole of
Palestine was within sight beneath us. We looked southward, across the
plain we had struggled over so laboriously, to the mountains behind
Jerusalem. We could see the depression where the Dead Sea lay in its
bowl, encircled by the hills of Moab. To the west we were looking upon
Carmel, at whose base the blue waves of the Mediterranean sigh, and
moan, and thunder. To the east, across the Jordan, from which the mists
of evening were already rising, we could distinguish the wild, deep
ravines of the land of the Bedawin; and in the north, grandest of all,
stood Hermon, his great white head touched with the crimson of the
setting sun, just plunging, like an old Moabite deity, into the
mountains of Lebanon beyond. By almost common consent it is agreed among
the Biblical scholars of our