is not at all common.  The very able Anglo-Catholic leader, to whom I have already referred, uttered to me a paradox that was a very practical truth.  He said he felt exasperated with the Christian sects, not for their fanaticism but for their lack of fanaticism.  He meant their lack of any fervour and even of any hope, of converting each other to their respective religions.  An Armenian may be quite as proud of the Armenian Church as a Frenchman of the French nation, yet he may no more expect to make a Moslem an Armenian than the Frenchman expects to make an Englishman a Frenchman.  If, as we are told, the quarrels could be condemned as merely theological, this would certainly be the very reverse of logical.  But as I say, we get much nearer to them by calling them national; and the leaders of the great religions feel much more like the ambassadors of great nations.  And, as I have also said, that ambassadorial atmosphere can be best expressed on the word irony, sometimes a rather tragic irony.  At any tea-party or talk in the street, between the rival leaders, there is a natural tendency to that sort of wit which consists in veiled allusion to a very open secret.  Each mail feels that there are heavy forces behind a small point, as the weight of the fencer is behind the point of the rapier.  And the point can be yet more pointed because the politics of the city, when I was there, included several men with a taste and talent for such polished intercourse; including especially two men whose experience and culture would have been remarkable in any community in the world; the American Consul and the Military Governor of Jerusalem.

If in cataloguing the strata of the society we take first the topmost layer of Western officialism, we might indeed find it not inconvenient to take these two men as representing the chief realities about it.  Dr. Glazebrook, the representative of the United States, has the less to do with the internal issues of the country; but his mere presence and history is so strangely picturesque that he might be put among the first reasons for finding the city interesting.  He is an old man now, for he actually began life as a soldier in the Southern and Secessionist army, and still keeps alive in every detail, not merely the virtues but the very gestures of the old Southern and Secessionist aristocrat.

He afterward became a clergyman of the Episcopalian Church, and served as a chaplain in the Spanish-American war, then, at an age when most men have long retired from the most peaceful occupations, he was sent out by President Wilson to the permanent battlefield of Palestine.  The brilliant services he performed there, in the protection of British and American subjects, are here chiefly interesting as throwing a backward light on the unearthly topsy-turvydom of Turkish rule.  There appears in his experiences something in such rule which we are perhaps apt to forget in a vision of stately Eastern princes and gallant Eastern warriors,