oke through flying clouds, with a bitter, wet, west wind
rasping the bleak highlands. There were spiteful showers with intervals
of mocking sunshine; it was a mischievous and prankish bit of weather,
no day for riding. But the Lady was indomitable, so we left the
Patriarch in his tent, wrapped ourselves in garments of mackintosh and
took the road again.

The country, at first, was wild and barren, a wilderness of rocks and
thorn bushes and stunted scrub oaks. Now and then a Greek partridge, in
its beautiful plumage of fawn-gray, marked with red and black about the
head, clucked like a hen on the stony hillside, or whirred away in low,
straight flight over the bushes. Flocks of black and brown goats, with
pendulous ears, skipped up and down the steep ridges, standing up on
their hind legs to browse the foliage of the little oak shrubs, or
showing themselves off in a butting-match on top of a big rock. Marching
on the highroad they seemed sedate, despondent, pattering along soberly
with flapping ears. In the midst of one flock I saw a fierce-looking
tattered pastor tenderly carrying a little black kid in his bosom--as
tenderly as if it were a lamb. It seemed like an illustration of a
picture that I saw long ago in the Catacombs, in which the infant church
of Christ silently expressed the richness of her love, the breadth of
her hope:

"On those walls subterranean, where she hid
Her head 'mid ignominy, death and tombs,
She her Good Shepherd's hasty image drew--
And on His shoulders, not a lamb, a kid."

As we drew nearer to Hebron the region appeared more fertile, and the
landscape smiled a little under the gleams of wintry sunshine. There
were many vineyards; in most of them the vines trailed along the ground,
but in some they were propped up on sticks, like old men leaning on
crutches. Almond and apricot-trees flourished. The mulberries, the
olives, the sycamores were abundant. Peasants were ploughing the fields
with their crooked sticks shod with a long iron point. When a man puts
his hand to such a plough he dares not look back, else it will surely go
aside. It makes a scratch, not a furrow. (I saw a man in the hospital at
Nazareth who had his thigh pierced clear through by one of these
dagger-like iron plough points.)

Children were gathering roots and thorn branches for firewood. Women
were carrying huge bundles on their heads. Donkey-boys were urging their
heavy-laden animals along the road, and camelee