ildhood.

I cried out at sight of one of the photographs and looked at it, first
with eagerness, and then with disappointment. It had seemed of a sudden
most familiar, in much the same way that my father's barn would have been
in a photograph. Then it had seemed altogether strange. But as I
continued to look the haunting sense of familiarity came back.

"The Tower of David," the missionary said to my mother.

"No!" I cried with great positiveness.

"You mean that isn't its name?" the missionary asked.

I nodded.

"Then what is its name, my boy?"

"It's name is . . ." I began, then concluded lamely, "I, forget."

"It don't look the same now," I went on after a pause. "They've ben
fixin' it up awful."

Here the missionary handed to my mother another photograph he had sought
out.

"I was there myself six months ago, Mrs. Standing." He pointed with his
finger. "That is the Jaffa Gate where I walked in and right up to the
Tower of David in the back of the picture where my finger is now. The
authorities are pretty well agreed on such matters. El Kul'ah, as it was
known by--"

But here I broke in again, pointing to rubbish piles of ruined masonry on
the left edge of the photograph.

"Over there somewhere," I said. "That name you just spoke was what the
Jews called it. But we called it something else. We called it . . . I
forget."

"Listen to the youngster," my father chuckled. "You'd think he'd ben
there."

I nodded my head, for in that moment I knew I had been there, though all
seemed strangely different. My father laughed the harder, but the
missionary thought I was making game of him. He handed me another
photograph. It was just a bleak waste of a landscape, barren of trees
and vegetation, a shallow canyon with easy-sloping walls of rubble. In
the middle distance was a cluster of wretched, flat-roofed hovels.

"Now, my boy, where is that?" the missionary quizzed.

And the name came to me!

"Samaria," I said instantly.

My father clapped his hands with glee, my mother was perplexed at my
antic conduct, while the missionary evinced irritation.

"The boy is right," he said. "It is a village in Samaria. I passed
through it. That is why I bought it. And it goes to show that the boy
has seen similar photographs before."

This my father and mother denied.

"But it's different in the picture," I volunteered, while all the time my
memory was busy reconstructing the photograph. The gen