by paths incredibly steep and stony, and towards evening reached Saida, the ancient Sidon, where we obtained permission to pitch our tent in a garden.  The town is built on a narrow point of land, jutting out from the centre of a bay, or curve in the coast, and contains about five thousand inhabitants.  It is a quiet, sleepy sort of a place, and contains nothing of the old Sidon except a few stones and the fragments of a mole, extending into the sea.  The fortress in the water, and the Citadel, are remnants of Venitian sway.  The clouds gathered after nightfall, and occasionally there was a dash of rain on our tent.  But I heard it with the same quiet happiness, as when, in boyhood, sleeping beneath the rafters, I have heard the rain beating all night upon the roof.  I breathed the sweet breath of the grasses whereon my carpet was spread, and old Mother Earth, welcoming me back to her bosom, cradled me into calm and refreshing sleep.  There is no rest more grateful than that which we take on the turf or the sand, except the rest below it.

We rose in a dark and cloudy morning, and continued our way between fields of barley, completely stained with the bloody hue of the poppy, and meadows turned into golden mosaic by a brilliant yellow daisy.  Until noon our road was over a region of alternate meadow land and gentle though stony elevations, making out from Lebanon.  We met continually with indications of ancient power and prosperity.  The ground was strewn with hewn blocks, and the foundations of buildings remain in many places.  Broken sarcophagi lie half-buried in grass, and the gray rocks of the hills are pierced with tombs.  The soil, though stony, appeared to be naturally fertile, and the crops of wheat, barley, and lentils were very flourishing.  After rounding the promontory which forms the southern boundary of the Gulf of Sidon, we rode for an hour or two over a plain near the sea, and then came down to a valley which ran up among the hills, terminating in a natural amphitheatre.  An ancient barrow, or tumulus, nobody knows of whom, stands near the sea.  During the day I noticed two charming little pictures.  One, a fountain gushing into a broad square basin of masonry, shaded by three branching cypresses.  Two Turks sat on its edge, eating their bread and curdled milk, while their horses drank out of the stone trough below.  The other, an old Mahommedan, with a green turban and white robe, seated at the foot of a majestic sycamore, over the high bank of a stream that tumbled down its bed of white marble rock to the sea.

The plain back of the narrow, sandy promontory on which the modern Soor is built, is a rich black loam, which a little proper culture would turn into a very garden.  It helped me to account for the wealth of ancient Tyre.  The approach to the town, along a beach on which the surf broke with a continuous roar, with the wreck of a Greek vessel in the foreground, and a stormy sky behind, was very striking.  It