his example.  We at once sent back word that our poverty would not permit us to accede to their most modest request, and threw ourselves on the Superior of the convent to extricate us from our dilemma.  A guard had now become a necessity, for the poor muleteer was so badly frightened by all the terrible things he had heard, that if we had promised him his weight in gold to be delivered at Beirut he would not have stirred a step unprotected.  A request was sent to the commandant of the city, and he was pleased to present us with a Kurdish cavalryman, who was to be our slave for the next four days, if on our part we would agree to pay him well and do as he said.  We were now humble.  We promised, and the Kurd came riding to the gates of the convent the next morning at the hour fixed for our departure.  He was immensely long and lean.  He looked hungry all over.  Even his musket, longer by some inches than himself, had the appearance of existing on a very low diet of powder and ball.  An awful doubt of its efficacy crept into my heart, but we gave him the matutinal greetings of the country, and our cavalcade followed at his heels.

We rode along the lake at a fairly rapid walk to the little mud village of Magdala, the home, it is supposed, of Mary Magdalene.  We stopped to breathe our horses at Khan Minyeh, the site, some scholars assert, of the once beautiful city of Capernaum, and then rode along a rocky road to Tel Hun, at the end of the lake, chosen by the best judgment of the day as the actual spot where the city, exalted by her pride to heaven, rested lightly on the earth.  We picked our way in and out among fluted marble columns, the very ruins, some insist, of the synagogue which the good centurion built for the city he loved.  Here, then, may have been the home of our Lord during those earliest days of his public ministry, the happiest days of his earthly life, before baffled hate had begun to weave its net around him.

Our course now lay due north, away from the lake, across trackless fields covered with round basaltic stones.  The Kurd’s horse was a better one than ours, and it was all we could do to keep him in sight.  The sun was hot.  What would it have been on those hills in midsummer?  We threw off our heavy coats, that had been more than comfortable in the early morning along the lake, and pushed doggedly on.  To our left, higher even than the hill we climbed, was holy Safed, to which it is thought our Lord may have pointed when he spoke of a city set upon a hill, that cannot be hid; and straight before us, the object of our hopes and efforts, was snow-clad Hermon, as beautiful, we thought, as an Alp.  We crossed the mountain at last, and, as our horses waded through a deep brook on the other side, the Kurd bent slightly in his saddle, and, reaching down, brought up great handfuls of water to stay his thirst, without stopping for an instant.  There was a sly twinkle of pleasure in his eye when the muleteer told him we had admired his skill.