ater ever flows;
and through the crowd of beggars and loiterers and pilgrims at the
crossroads; and up over the shoulder of the Mount of Olives, past the
wide-spread Jewish burying-ground, where we take our last look at the
towers and domes and minarets and walls of Jerusalem. The road descends
gently, on the other side of the hill, to Bethany, a disconsolate group
of hovels. The sweet home of Mary and Martha is gone. It is a waste of
time to look at the uncertain ruins which are shown here as sacred
sites. Look rather at the broad landscape eastward and southward, the
luminous blue sky, the joyful little flowers on the rocky slopes,--these
are unchanged.

Not far beyond Bethany, the road begins to drop, with great windings,
into a deep, desolate valley, crowded with pilgrims afoot and on
donkey-back and in ramshackle carriages,--Russians and Greeks returning
from their sacred bath in the Jordan. Here and there, at first, we can
see a shepherd with his flock upon the haggard hillside.

"As for the grass, it grew as scant as hair
In leprosy."

Once the Patriarch and I, scrambling on foot down a short-cut, think we
see a Bedouin waiting for us behind a rock, with his long gun over his
shoulder; but it turns out to be only a brown little peasant girl,
ragged and smiling, watching her score of lop-eared goats.

As the valley descends the landscape becomes more and more arid and
stricken. The heat broods over it like a disease.

"I think I never saw
Such starved, ignoble nature; nothing throve;
For flowers--as well expect a cedar grove!"

We might be on the way with Childe Roland to the Dark Tower. But instead
we come, about noon, through a savage glen beset with blood-red rocks
and honeycombed with black caves on the other side of the ravine, to the
so-called "Inn of the Good Samaritan."

The local colour of the parable surrounds us. Here is a fitting scene
for such a drama of lawless violence, cowardly piety, and unconventional
mercy. In these caverns robbers could hide securely. On this wild road
their victim might lie and bleed to death. By these paths across the
glen the priest and the Levite could "pass by on the other side,"
discreetly turning their heads away from any interruption to their
selfish duties. And in some such wayside khan as this, standing like a
lonely fortress among the sun-baked hills, the friendly half-heathen
from Samaria could safely leave the stranger whom