and fish in the market,
and go through the Mission Hospital, where one of the gentle nurses
binds up a foolish little wound on my wrist.

In the afternoon we sail on the southern part of the lake. The boatmen
laugh at my fruitless fishing with artificial flies, and catch a few
small fish for us with their nets in the shallow, muddy places along the
shore. The wind is strange and variable, now sweeping down in violent
gusts that bend the long arm of the lateen sail, now dying away to a
dead calm through which we row lazily home.

I remember a small purple kingfisher poising in the air over a shoal,
his head bent downward, his wings vibrating swiftly. He drops like a
shot and comes up out of the water with a fish held crosswise in his
bill. With measured wing-strokes he flits to the top of a rock to eat
his supper, and a robber-gull flaps after him to take it away. But the
industrious kingfisher is too quick to be robbed. He bolts his fish with
a single gulp. We eat ours in more leisurely fashion, by the light of
the candles in our peaceful tent.

V

MEMORIES OF THE LAKE

A hundred little points of illumination flash into memory as I look back
over the hours that we spent beside the Sea of Galilee. How should I
write of them all without being tedious? How, indeed, should I hope to
make them visible or significant in the bare words of description?

Never have I passed richer, fuller hours; but most of their wealth was
in very little things: the personal look of a flower growing by the
wayside; the intimate message of a bird's song falling through the sunny
air; the expression of confidence and appeal on the face of a wounded
man in the hospital, when the good physician stood beside his cot; the
shadows of the mountains lengthening across the valleys at sunset; the
laughter of a little child playing with a broken water pitcher; the
bronzed profiles and bold, free ways of our sunburned rowers; the sad
eyes of an old Hebrew lifted from the book that he was reading; the
ruffling breezes and sudden squalls that changed the surface of the
lake; the single palm-tree that waved over the mud hovels of Magdala;
the millions of tiny shells that strewed the beach of Capernaum and
Bethsaida; the fertile sweep of the Plain of Gennesaret rising from the
lake; and the dark precipices of the "Robbers' Gorge" running back into
the western mountains.

The written record of these hours is worth little; but in experience and
in memo