ders, and the waving of thy reeds;
the sweet, faint smell of thy gold-flowered acacias will return to us
from purple orchids and white lilies. Let the blessing that is thine go
with us everywhere in God's great out-of-doors, and our hearts never
lose the comradeship of Him who made thee holiest among all the waters
of the world!

* * * * *

The Khan of Joseph's Pit is a ruin; a huge and broken building deserted
by the caravans which used to throng this highway from Damascus to the
cities of the lake, and to the ports of Acre and Joppa, and to the
metropolis of Egypt. It is hard to realize that this wild moorland path
by which we are travelling was once a busy road, filled with camels,
horses, chariots, foot-passengers, clanking companies of soldiers; that
these crumbling, cavernous walls, overgrown with thorny capers and wild
marjoram and mandragora, were once crowded every night with a motley mob
of travellers and merchants; that this pool of muddy water, gloomily
reflecting the ruins, was once surrounded by flocks and herds and beasts
of burden; that only a few hours to the southward there was once a ring
of splendid, thriving, bustling towns around the shores of Galilee, out
of which and into which the multitudes were forever journeying. Now they
are all gone from the road, and the vast wayside caravanserai is
sleeping into decay--a dormitory for bats and serpents.

What is it that makes the wreck of an inn more lonely and forbidding
than any other ruin?

A few miles more of riding along the flanks of the mountains bring us to
a place where we turn a corner suddenly, and come upon the full view of
the upper basin of the Jordan; a vast oval green cup, with the little
Lake of Huleh lying in it like a blue jewel, and the giant bulk of Mount
Hermon towering beyond it, crowned and cloaked with silver snows.

Up the steep and slippery village street of Rosh Pinnah, a modern Jewish
colony founded by the Rothschilds in 1882, we scramble wearily to our
camping-ground for the night. Above us on a hilltop is the old Arab
village of Jauneh, brown, picturesque, and filthy. Around us are the
colonists' new houses, with their red-tiled roofs and white walls. Two
straight streets running in parallel lines up the hillside are roughly
paved with cobble-stones and lined with trees; mulberries,
white-flowered acacias, eucalyptus, feathery pepper-trees, and
rose-bushes. Water runs down through pipes fr