Holy City with a very different feeling from that of the old Crusaders.  He cannot see the Turkish Mohammedan soldiers guarding the tomb of Christ without a choking sensation in the throat, but he believes that life has nobler battles for him than fighting the unbeliever for the empty sepulchre of his Lord.  The surroundings of all the sacred places are so inharmonious that, while he can never regret his pilgrimage, he can scarcely regret that it is over.  We rose in our saddles, and, turning, took our last look at the Holy City with very mingled emotions, and then settled down to the hard day’s work before us.

We were on the great pilgrim-route, which twenty centuries ago was annually crowded with pilgrims from the north hastening to Jerusalem for the Passover feast.  The Child of Nazareth, when, at the age of twelve, he went for the first time to the Temple, must have pressed this road with his sacred feet, must have looked with deep, inquiring eyes upon these fields and hills.  There was enough in the early hour and the associations of the scenes through which we were passing to keep us for a long time silent.  My horse stumbled and brought us both back from Dreamland.  A look ahead showed us—­for the sun was now above the hills—­that the worst piece of road in Palestine was just before us.  It is wholly unartificial:  for years no human hand has touched it, except as mine did when, on dismounting and undertaking to pick my way over the rocks, I found myself on all-fours.  In fact, this Oriental boulevard is made up for some distance entirely of boulders, round and sharp, triangular and square, which the spring freshets of the last five or six decades were regretfully obliged to leave behind.  After a short halt for lunch, about two o’clock, the muleteer assured us, on starting again, we had still five hours of steady pushing before us, and said something in the same breath about robbers.  Men of his class all through the East are notorious cowards; but we had been told in Jerusalem that such dangers were not altogether imaginary, and, almost as our guide spoke, we heard shrieks, and for a moment we all thought the nefarious crew were at their work just ahead.  The muleteer dropped mysteriously to the rear, and we rode on over a slight ascent, and there we saw a tall Samaritan exerting himself in a way most unlike the good one of the parable.  He appeared to be a man of importance,—­probably a sheik.  His horse, tied to a little tree, was a very handsome one, and gayly decked out with red leather and ribbons.  He had hold of the hind legs of a poor little goat, and was intent on pulling the creature away from a smaller man, much more poorly dressed, whose hands had a death-like grip of the horns.  I was for setting lance in rest and charging to the rescue; but my more cautious friend put one or two questions to the sheik, who told, in a somewhat jerky style,—­perhaps the result of the strugglings of the goat and the man at the other end of him,—­as straightforward