s. The journey to the Dead Sea, the Jordan and
Bethlehem was short, but it was an exhausting one. Such roasting heat,
such oppressive solitude, and such dismal desolation can not surely exist
elsewhere on earth. And such fatigue!

The commonest sagacity warns me that I ought to tell the customary
pleasant lie, and say I tore myself reluctantly away from every noted
place in Palestine. Every body tells that, but with as little
ostentation as I may, I doubt the word of every he who tells it. I could
take a dreadful oath that I have never heard any one of our forty
pilgrims say any thing of the sort, and they are as worthy and as
sincerely devout as any that come here. They will say it when they get
home, fast enough, but why should they not? They do not wish to array
themselves against all the Lamartines and Grimeses in the world. It does
not stand to reason that men are reluctant to leave places where the very
life is almost badgered out of them by importunate swarms of beggars and
peddlers who hang in strings to one's sleeves and coat-tails and shriek
and shout in his ears and horrify his vision with the ghastly sores and
malformations they exhibit. One is glad to get away. I have heard
shameless people say they were glad to get away from Ladies' Festivals
where they were importuned to buy by bevies of lovely young ladies.
Transform those houris into dusky hags and ragged savages, and replace
their rounded forms with shrunken and knotted distortions, their soft
hands with scarred and hideous deformities, and the persuasive music of
their voices with the discordant din of a hated language, and then see
how much lingering reluctance to leave could be mustered. No, it is the
neat thing to say you were reluctant, and then append the profound
thoughts that "struggled for utterance," in your brain; but it is the
true thing to say you were not reluctant, and found it impossible to
think at all--though in good sooth it is not respectable to say it, and
not poetical, either.

We do not think, in the holy places; we think in bed, afterwards, when
the glare, and the noise, and the confusion are gone, and in fancy we
revisit alone, the solemn monuments of the past, and summon the phantom
pageants of an age that has passed away.

CHAPTER LVI.

We visited all the holy places about Jerusalem which we had left
unvisited when we journeyed to the Jordan and then, about three o'clock
one afternoon, we fell into proces