that
one of the brave soldiers, in consideration of the great risk involved
in the enterprise, had concluded to raise his price, and of course his
companion, deeply as he regretted it, felt compelled to follow his
example. We at once sent back word that our poverty would not permit us
to accede to their most modest request, and threw ourselves on the
Superior of the convent to extricate us from our dilemma. A guard had
now become a necessity, for the poor muleteer was so badly frightened by
all the terrible things he had heard, that if we had promised him his
weight in gold to be delivered at Beirut he would not have stirred a
step unprotected. A request was sent to the commandant of the city, and
he was pleased to present us with a Kurdish cavalryman, who was to be
our slave for the next four days, if on our part we would agree to pay
him well and do as he said. We were now humble. We promised, and the
Kurd came riding to the gates of the convent the next morning at the
hour fixed for our departure. He was immensely long and lean. He looked
hungry all over. Even his musket, longer by some inches than himself,
had the appearance of existing on a very low diet of powder and ball. An
awful doubt of its efficacy crept into my heart, but we gave him the
matutinal greetings of the country, and our cavalcade followed at his
heels.

We rode along the lake at a fairly rapid walk to the little mud village
of Magdala, the home, it is supposed, of Mary Magdalene. We stopped to
breathe our horses at Khan Minyeh, the site, some scholars assert, of
the once beautiful city of Capernaum, and then rode along a rocky road
to Tel Hun, at the end of the lake, chosen by the best judgment of the
day as the actual spot where the city, exalted by her pride to heaven,
rested lightly on the earth. We picked our way in and out among fluted
marble columns, the very ruins, some insist, of the synagogue which the
good centurion built for the city he loved. Here, then, may have been
the home of our Lord during those earliest days of his public ministry,
the happiest days of his earthly life, before baffled hate had begun to
weave its net around him.

Our course now lay due north, away from the lake, across trackless
fields covered with round basaltic stones. The Kurd's horse was a better
one than ours, and it was all we could do to keep him in sight. The sun
was hot. What would it have been on those hills in midsummer? We threw
off our heavy coats