of fleas which attended at my church alone must have been something enormous.  It was a carnal, self-seeking congregation, wholly inattentive to the service which was going on, and devoted to the one object of having my blood.  The fleas of all nations were there.  The smug, steady, importunate flea from Holywell Street; the pert, jumping puce from hungry France, the wary, watchful pulce with his poisoned stiletto; the vengeful pulga of Castile with his ugly knife; the German floh with his knife and fork, insatiate, not rising from table; whole swarms from all the Russias, and Asiatic hordes unnumbered—­all these were there, and all rejoiced in one great international feast.  I could no more defend myself against my enemies than if I had been pain a discretion in the hands of a French patriot, or English gold in the claws of a Pennsylvanian Quaker.  After passing a night like this you are glad to pick up the wretched remains of your body long, long before morning dawns.  Your skin is scorched, your temples throb, your lips feel withered and dried, your burning eyeballs are screwed inwards against the brain.  You have no hope but only in the saddle and the freshness of the morning air.

CHAPTER XII—­MY FIRST BIVOUAC

The course of the Jordan is from the north to the south, and in that direction, with very little of devious winding, it carries the shining waters of Galilee straight down into the solitudes of the Dead Sea.  Speaking roughly, the river in that meridian is a boundary between the people living under roofs and the tented tribes that wander on the farther side.  And so, as I went down in my way from Tiberias towards Jerusalem, along the western bank of the stream, my thinking all propended to the ancient world of herdsmen and warriors that lay so close over my bridle arm.

If a man, and an Englishman, be not born of his mother with a natural Chiffney-bit in his mouth, there comes to him a time for loathing the wearisome ways of society; a time for not liking tamed people; a time for not dancing quadrilles, not sitting in pews; a time for pretending that Milton and Shelley, and all sorts of mere dead people, were greater in death than the first living Lord of the Treasury; a time, in short, for scoffing and railing, for speaking lightly of the very opera, and all our most cherished institutions.  It is from nineteen to two or three and twenty perhaps that this war of the man against men is like to be waged most sullenly.  You are yet in this smiling England, but you find yourself wending away to the dark sides of her mountains, climbing the dizzy crags, exulting in the fellowship of mists and clouds, and watching the storms how they gather, or proving the mettle of your mare upon the broad and dreary downs, because that you feel congenially with the yet unparcelled earth.  A little while you are free and unlabelled, like the ground that you compass; but civilisation