We descended by a very steep path, over occasional beds of snow, and reached the Cedars in an hour and a half.  Not until we were within a hundred yards of the trees, and below their level, was I at all impressed with their size and venerable aspect.  But, once entered into the heart of the little wood, walking over its miniature hills and valleys, and breathing the pure, balsamic exhalations of the trees, all the disappointment rising to my mind was charmed away in an instant There are about three hundred trees, in all, many of which are of the last century’s growth, but at least fifty of them would be considered grand in any forest.  The patriarchs are five in number, and are undoubtedly as old as the Christian Era, if not the Age of Solomon.  The cypresses in the Garden of Montezuma, at Chapultepec, are even older and grander trees, but they are as entire and shapely as ever, whereas these are gnarled and twisted into wonderful forms by the storms of twenty centuries, and shivered in some places by lightning.  The hoary father of them all, nine feet in diameter, stands in the centre of the grove, on a little knoll, and spreads his ponderous arms, each a tree in itself, over the heads of the many generations that have grown up below, as if giving his last benediction before decay.  He is scarred less with storm and lightning, than with the knives of travellers, and the marble crags of Lebanon do not more firmly retain their inscriptions than his stony trunk.  Dates of the last century are abundant, and I recollect a tablet inscribed:  “Souard, 1670,” around which the newer wood has grown to the height of three or four inches.  The seclusion of the grove, shut in by peaks of barren snow, is complete.  Only the voice of the nightingale, singing here by daylight in the solemn shadows, breaks the silence.  The Maronite monk, who has charge of a little stone chapel standing in the midst, moves about like a shade, and, not before you are ready to leave, brings his book for you to register your name therein, I was surprised to find how few of the crowd that annually overrun Syria reach the Cedars, which, after Baalbec, are the finest remains of antiquity in the whole country.

After a stay of three hours, we rode on to Eden, whither our men had already gone with the baggage.  Our road led along the brink of a tremendous gorge, a thousand feet deep, the bottom of which was only accessible here and there by hazardous foot-paths.  On either side, a long shelf of cultivated land sloped down to the top, and the mountain streams, after watering a multitude of orchards and grain-fields, tumbled over the cliffs in long, sparkling cascades, to join the roaring flood below.  This is the Christian region of Lebanon, inhabited almost wholly by Maronites, who still retain a portion of their former independence, and are the most thrifty, industrious, honest, and happy people in Syria.  Their villages are not concrete masses of picturesque filth, as are those