thousand children were
slaughtered by Herod when he was seeking the life of the infant Saviour.

We went to the Milk Grotto, of course--a cavern where Mary hid herself
for a while before the flight into Egypt. Its walls were black before
she entered, but in suckling the Child, a drop of her milk fell upon the
floor and instantly changed the darkness of the walls to its own snowy
hue. We took many little fragments of stone from here, because it is
well known in all the East that a barren woman hath need only to touch
her lips to one of these and her failing will depart from her. We took
many specimens, to the end that we might confer happiness upon certain
households that we wot of.

We got away from Bethlehem and its troops of beggars and relic-peddlers
in the afternoon, and after spending some little time at Rachel's tomb,
hurried to Jerusalem as fast as possible. I never was so glad to get
home again before. I never have enjoyed rest as I have enjoyed it during
these last few hours. The journey to the Dead Sea, the Jordan and
Bethlehem was short, but it was an exhausting one. Such roasting heat,
such oppressive solitude, and such dismal desolation can not surely exist
elsewhere on earth. And such fatigue!

The commonest sagacity warns me that I ought to tell the customary
pleasant lie, and say I tore myself reluctantly away from every noted
place in Palestine. Every body tells that, but with as little
ostentation as I may, I doubt the word of every he who tells it. I could
take a dreadful oath that I have never heard any one of our forty
pilgrims say any thing of the sort, and they are as worthy and as
sincerely devout as any that come here. They will say it when they get
home, fast enough, but why should they not? They do not wish to array
themselves against all the Lamartines and Grimeses in the world. It does
not stand to reason that men are reluctant to leave places where the very
life is almost badgered out of them by importunate swarms of beggars and
peddlers who hang in strings to one's sleeves and coat-tails and shriek
and shout in his ears and horrify his vision with the ghastly sores and
malformations they exhibit. One is glad to get away. I have heard
shameless people say they were glad to get away from Ladies' Festivals
where they were importuned to buy by bevies of lovely young ladies.
Transform those houris into dusky hags and ragged savages, and replace
their rounded forms with shrunke