prayers, and he was
pleased with the gift of a box of matches to light his lamp.

A loftier range still separated Dr. Grant from Tiary, the "munition
of rocks," which he describes as "an amphitheatre of mountains
broken with dark, deep defiles and narrow glens, that for ages had
been the secure abodes of this branch of the Christian Church." He
had been warned at Mosul, not to enter this region without an escort
from the Patriarch. But he could not afford the delay, and as the
bishop encouraged him, he resolved to go alone. Exchanging his
Turkish boots for the bishop's sandals, made of hair, to avoid a
fatal slip on the smooth, narrow ledges of the mountain, he set off
early on the 18th. An hour and a half brought him to the summit.
Retiring to a sequestered corner, where he could feast his eyes with
the prospect, his thoughts went back to the period when the
Nestorians traversed Asia, and, for more than a thousand years,
preached the Gospel in Tartary, Mongolia, and China. Though the
flame of vital piety was almost quenched on their altars, his faith
anticipated the day when those glens would reecho the glad praises
of God; and down he sped, over cliffs and slippery ledges, to the
large village of Lezan, on the banks of the noisy Zab. Scarcely had
he entered it, when a young man, the only one he had ever seen from
this remote region, from whose eyes he had removed a cataract a year
before, came with a present of honey, and introduced him at once to
the confidence of the people. He became so thronged with the sick
from all the region, that he had to forbid more than three or four
coming forward at once.

Leaving Lezan, he went up to Ashita, where he became the guest of a
priest, reported to be the most learned of living Nestorians, who
had spent twenty years in copying, in beautiful style, the few works
of Nestorian literature; but even he had not an entire Bible. He was
electrified by Dr. Grant's account of the press, that could do his
twenty years' work in a less number of hours. At Kerme, where he
arrived on the twenty-fifth, almost exhausted by a walk of ten long
hours, he was soon recognized and welcomed by a Nestorian, who had
received medical aid from him two years before at Oroomiah. Starting
the next morning for the Patriarch's residence, he forded a river on
horseback, that was fifty or sixty yards across. He was now on the
caravan road from Salmas to Julamerk. In the more precipitous
places, the rock had