day that not here on Tabor where we stood,
but northward, there on one of the peaks of Hermon, was the place where
our Lord was transfigured; but the Christian imagination, like the
Christian consciousness, is not always submissive to fact, and we shall
continue, with the larger part of the Christian world, to think of Tabor
as the Mount of Transfiguration, while we speak of Hermon as the true
site.

We had an easy ride the next morning to Nazareth, and a kindly reception
from the monks. The hospitality at all these convents is untrammelled by
pecuniary conditions; but all travellers who have purses and hearts and
consciences do, in fact, on their departure, present the Superior with a
sum about equal to the charges for the same length of time at an Eastern
hotel. I mention this in the interests of historic truth, and not with
any desire to throw a garish light of self-interest upon the cordiality
of these Latin "religious." We were in the heart of the little city
where He whom millions of human beings call their Saviour and God lived
for more than twenty years. Somewhere among these houses that fill the
valley and cling to the hill-side was Joseph's home. Not a house, of
course, is here now that was here then; all the sacred places they show
you--the Virgin's home, the place of the Annunciation, the workshop of
Joseph--must be unauthentic; but these hills are what they were. They
shut out the great world He had come to redeem, but not the heavens
above Him or the sinfulness and needs of the segment of humanity around
Him. When we rode toward Tiberias in the early morning there were a
dozen or more of the girls of Nazareth going out to Mary's spring, as
the fountain at the entrance of the town is called; but their garments
were ragged and uncleanly and their swarthy faces heavily tattooed, and,
while we were ready to accept the season of the year as an excuse for
any deficiency in the attractiveness of the landscape, we could not
admit it in extenuation of the uncomeliness of the maidens of Palestine.
Their beauty we believe to be almost entirely a fiction of the tourist's
imagination.

On our way to the Sea of Galilee we passed through Cana, where they show
you still some of the water-pots in which "the conscious water blushed"
when it saw its Lord, and crossed the plain of Hattin, on one of whose
round, horn-like acclivities the Sermon on the Mount is said to have
been given. Here the Crusaders made their last stand