within certain limits around which there are lines as definite and as impassable as if drawn by an Irish servant of some years’ experience in the United States.  You must not travel more than thirty miles a day; you must not change the route agreed upon, unless roads become impassable; and there are other, minor regulations, to which you are expected to submit, and, if you do, your progress through the land, if not triumphant, will be at least comfortable.  You will find every day at noon, spread under some wide-armed tree, a cold lunch that even a somewhat difficult taste would consider fairly appetizing; and at nightfall you dismount before the door of your tent and sit down to a dinner of many courses, which to a stomach jounced for ten hours over a saddle seems a very fair dinner indeed.  Your breakfast is what a Frenchman would call a dejeuner a la fourchette; and as you put down your napkin, your tent is folded almost as quickly and as silently, and you mount your horse, standing ready for another thirty miles.  Yet, if you have just come from Egypt and three months on a dahabeah, you will not hesitate to call this luxurious mode of passing from Dan to Beersheba “roughing it in Palestine.”

But it was my good fortune, after journeying from Beirut to Jerusalem with dragoman and muleteers and tents, like a prince, to go up through the country like a private citizen.  I fell in with a young man in the Holy City, bora of American parents at Sidon, who had been educated in America and was now on his way back to his birthplace to spend his life in the sacred fields as a missionary.  He was thoroughly equipped for roughing it, with a splendid physique and perfect health, imperturbable spirits, and a rare command of classic and vernacular Arabic.  He wanted to go to Beirut with as few impedimenta as possible, and, after some talk, we merged our two parties into one.  Our preparations for the journey were of the simplest sort.  We agreed to dispense with dragomans and cooks and tents and trust to the land for food and shelter.  We engaged three good horses and a muleteer.  We strapped our baggage on the muleteer’s horse, drew lots for the choice of the other two, and turned our faces northward.

It was long before daybreak, one Monday morning, when we stole quietly out of the Jaffa gate and took the road for Nablous.  We were leaving behind us the most sacred spot on earth to Jew, Catholic, Greek, and Protestant; but from the road that stretches out before the Jaffa gate all the holy places of Jerusalem are invisible.  The round dome over the Sepulchre was hidden behind the city’s wall and the intervening houses.  The Dome of the Rock, as the beautiful mosque of Omar is called, the most striking and brilliant object of the whole city from the Damascus gate, is beneath the hill of Golgotha.  Only the Valley of Hinnom, and the Hill of Evil Counsel, and the slopes leading to Bethlehem, caught our parting gaze.  But an American Protestant turns his back upon the