, 'has agreed to keep the arms for three
months, you paying the usual rate of interest on the money. This is but
just. May your new friend at Beiroot be more powerful than I am, and as
faithful!'

'Beautiful Rose of Sharon! who can be like you! You inspire me; you
always do. I feel persuaded that I shall get the money long before the
time has elapsed.' And, so saying, he bade her farewell, to return, as
he said, without loss of time to Beiroot.

CHAPTER XXIX.

_Capture of the New Crusader_

THE dawn was about to break in a cloudless sky, when Tancred,
accompanied by Baroni and two servants, all well armed and well mounted,
and by Hassan, a sheikh of the Jellaheen Bedouins, tall and grave, with
a long spear tufted with ostrich feathers in his hand, his musket slung
at his back, and a scimitar at his side, quitted Jerusalem by the gate
of Bethlehem.

If it were only to see the sun rise, or to become acquainted with nature
at hours excluded from the experience of civilisation, it were worth
while to be a traveller. There is something especially in the hour that
precedes a Syrian dawn, which invigorates the frame and elevates the
spirit. One cannot help fancying that angels may have been resting on
the mountain tops during the night, the air is so sweet and the earth
so still. Nor, when it wakes, does it wake to the maddening cares of
Europe. The beauty of a patriarchal repose still lingers about its
existence in spite of its degradation. Notwithstanding all they have
suffered during the European development, the manners of the Asiatic
races generally are more in harmony with nature than the complicated
conventionalisms which harass their fatal rival, and which have
increased in exact proportion as the Europeans have seceded from those
Arabian and Syrian creeds that redeemed them from their primitive
barbarism.

But the light breaks, the rising beam falls on the gazelles still
bounding on the hills of Judah, and gladdens the partridge which still
calls among the ravines, as it did in the days of the prophets. About
half-way between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, Tancred and his companions
halted at the tomb of Rachel: here awaited them a chosen band of twenty
stout Jellaheens, the subjects of Sheikh Hassan, their escort through
the wildernesses of Arabia Petraea. The fringed and ribbed kerchief of
the desert, which must be distinguished from the turban, and is woven
by their own women from the hair of the camel