at the hotel," grumbles her husband, a rosy,
bald-headed man in plaid knickerbockers, "no bottled beer; beastly
little hole!"

"A voyage of the most fatiguing, of the most perilous, I assure you,"
says a little Frenchman with a forked beard. "But I rejoice myself of
the adventure, of the romance accomplished."

"I want to know," piped a lady in a green shirt-waist from Andover,
Mass., "is there really and truly any danger?"

"I guess not for us," answers the dominating voice of the conductor of
her party. "There's always a bunch of robbers on that road, but I have
hired the biggest man of the bunch to take care of us. Just wait till
you see that dandy Sheikh in his best clothes; he looks like a museum of
old weapons."

"Have you heard," interposed a lady-like clergyman on the other side of
the table, with gold-rimmed spectacles gleaming above his high, black
waistcoat, "what happened on the Jericho road, week before last? An
English gentleman, of very good family, imprudently taking a short cut,
became separated from his companions. The Bedouins fell upon him, beat
him quite painfully, deprived him of his watch and several necessary
garments, and left him prostrate upon the earth, in an embarrassingly
denuded condition. Just fancy! Was it not perfectly shocking?" (The
clergyman's voice was full of delicious horror.) "But, after all," he
resumed with a beaming smile, "it was most scriptural, you know, quite
like a Providential confirmation of Holy Writ!"

"Most unpleasant for the Englishman," growls the man in knickerbockers.
"But what can you expect under this rotten Turkish government?"

"I know a story about Jericho," begins a gentleman from Colorado, with a
hay-coloured moustache and a droop in his left eyelid--and then follows
a series of tales about that ill-reputed town and the road thither,
which leave the lady in the lace cap gasping, and the man with the
forked beard visibly swelling with pride at having made the journey, and
the little woman in the green shirt-waist quivering with exquisite fears
and mentally clinging with both arms to the personal conductor of her
party, who looks becomingly virile, and exchanges a surreptitious wink
with the gentleman from Colorado.

Of course, I am not willing to make an affidavit to the correctness of
every word in this conversation; but I can testify that it fairly
represents the _Jericho-motif_ as you may hear it played almost any
night in the Jerusalem hotels.