om a copious spring on the
mountain, and flows abundantly into every house, plashing into covered
reservoirs and open stone basins for watering the cattle. Below us the
long avenues of eucalyptus, the broad vineyards filled with low, bushy
vines, the immense orchards of pale-green almond-trees, the smiling
wheat-fields, slope to the lake and encircle its lower end.

The children who come to visit our camp on the terrace wear shoes and
stockings, carry school-books in their bags, and bring us offerings of
little bunches of sweet-smelling garden roses and pendulous
locust-blooms. We are a thousand years away from the Khan of Joseph's
Pit; but we can still see the old mud village on the height against the
sunset, and the camp-fires gleaming in front of the black Bedouin tents
far below, along the edge of the marshes. We are perched between the old
and the new, between the nomad and the civilized man, and the unchanging
white head of Hermon looks down upon us all.

In the morning, on the way down, I stop at the door of a house and fall
into talk with an intelligent, schoolmasterish sort of man, a Roumanian,
who speaks a little weird German. Is the colony prospering? Yes, but
not so fast that it makes them giddy. What are they raising? Wheat and
barley, a few vegetables, a great deal of almonds and grapes. Good
harvests? Some years good, some years bad; the Arabs bad every year,
terrible thieves; but the crops are plentiful most of the time. Are the
colonists happy, contented? A thin smile wrinkles around the man's lips
as he answers with the statement of a world-wide truth, "_Ach, Herr, der
Ackerbauer ist nie zufrieden._" ("Ah, Sir, the farmer is never
contented.")

II

THE WATERS OF MEROM

All day we ride along the hills skirting the marshy plain of Huleh. Here
the springs and parent streams of Jordan are gathered, behind the
mountains of Naphtali and at the foot of Hermon, as in a great green
basin about the level of the ocean, for the long, swift rush down the
sunken trench which leads to the deep, sterile bitterness of the Dead
Sea. Was there ever a river that began so fair and ended in such waste
and desolation?

Here in this broad, level, well-watered valley, along the borders of
these vast beds of papyrus and rushes intersected by winding, hidden
streams, Joshua and his fierce clans of fighting men met the Kings of
the north with their horses and chariots, "at the waters of Merom," in
the last great battle