cheek.  He led us into a large, clean refectory, and then into two clean rooms.  I might use other epithets, but none other means so much in the East.  After a very satisfying supper, the good monk—­he was so good to us, we tried to think he was as clean within as the rooms of his monastery—­took us out to the pinnacle of the mountain and enjoyed our enthusiasm over the magnificent view that was spread out before us.  Almost the whole of Palestine was within sight beneath us.  We looked southward, across the plain we had struggled over so laboriously, to the mountains behind Jerusalem.  We could see the depression where the Dead Sea lay in its bowl, encircled by the hills of Moab.  To the west we were looking upon Carmel, at whose base the blue waves of the Mediterranean sigh, and moan, and thunder.  To the east, across the Jordan, from which the mists of evening were already rising, we could distinguish the wild, deep ravines of the land of the Bedawin; and in the north, grandest of all, stood Hermon, his great white head touched with the crimson of the setting sun, just plunging, like an old Moabite deity, into the mountains of Lebanon beyond.  By almost common consent it is agreed among the Biblical scholars of our day that not here on Tabor where we stood, but northward, there on one of the peaks of Hermon, was the place where our Lord was transfigured; but the Christian imagination, like the Christian consciousness, is not always submissive to fact, and we shall continue, with the larger part of the Christian world, to think of Tabor as the Mount of Transfiguration, while we speak of Hermon as the true site.

We had an easy ride the next morning to Nazareth, and a kindly reception from the monks.  The hospitality at all these convents is untrammelled by pecuniary conditions; but all travellers who have purses and hearts and consciences do, in fact, on their departure, present the Superior with a sum about equal to the charges for the same length of time at an Eastern hotel.  I mention this in the interests of historic truth, and not with any desire to throw a garish light of self-interest upon the cordiality of these Latin “religious.”  We were in the heart of the little city where He whom millions of human beings call their Saviour and God lived for more than twenty years.  Somewhere among these houses that fill the valley and cling to the hill-side was Joseph’s home.  Not a house, of course, is here now that was here then; all the sacred places they show you—­the Virgin’s home, the place of the Annunciation, the workshop of Joseph—­must be unauthentic; but these hills are what they were.  They shut out the great world He had come to redeem, but not the heavens above Him or the sinfulness and needs of the segment of humanity around Him.  When we rode toward Tiberias in the early morning there were a dozen or more of the girls of Nazareth going out to Mary’s spring, as the fountain at the entrance of the town is called; but their garments were ragged and uncleanly and their swarthy faces heavily tattooed, and, while we were ready to accept the season of the year as an excuse for any deficiency in the attractiveness of the landscape, we could not admit it in extenuation of the uncomeliness of the maidens of Palestine.  Their beauty we believe to be almost entirely a fiction of the tourist’s imagination.