It was easy to think these thoughts.  But it was not easy to bring myself up to the magnitude of the situation.  I could sit off several thousand miles and imagine the angel appearing, with shadowy wings and lustrous countenance, and note the glory that streamed downward upon the Virgin’s head while the message from the Throne of God fell upon her ears—­any one can do that, beyond the ocean, but few can do it here.  I saw the little recess from which the angel stepped, but could not fill its void.  The angels that I know are creatures of unstable fancy—­they will not fit in niches of substantial stone.  Imagination labors best in distant fields.  I doubt if any man can stand in the Grotto of the Annunciation and people with the phantom images of his mind its too tangible walls of stone.

They showed us a broken granite pillar, depending from the roof, which they said was hacked in two by the Moslem conquerors of Nazareth, in the vain hope of pulling down the sanctuary.  But the pillar remained miraculously suspended in the air, and, unsupported itself, supported then and still supports the roof.  By dividing this statement up among eight, it was found not difficult to believe it.

These gifted Latin monks never do any thing by halves.  If they were to show you the Brazen Serpent that was elevated in the wilderness, you could depend upon it that they had on hand the pole it was elevated on also, and even the hole it stood in.  They have got the “Grotto” of the Annunciation here; and just as convenient to it as one’s throat is to his mouth, they have also the Virgin’s Kitchen, and even her sitting-room, where she and Joseph watched the infant Saviour play with Hebrew toys eighteen hundred years ago.  All under one roof, and all clean, spacious, comfortable “grottoes.”  It seems curious that personages intimately connected with the Holy Family always lived in grottoes—­in Nazareth, in Bethlehem, in imperial Ephesus—­and yet nobody else in their day and generation thought of doing any thing of the kind.  If they ever did, their grottoes are all gone, and I suppose we ought to wonder at the peculiar marvel of the preservation of these I speak of.  When the Virgin fled from Herod’s wrath, she hid in a grotto in Bethlehem, and the same is there to this day.  The slaughter of the innocents in Bethlehem was done in a grotto; the Saviour was born in a grotto—­both are shown to pilgrims yet.  It is exceedingly strange that these tremendous events all happened in grottoes—­and exceedingly fortunate, likewise, because the strongest houses must crumble to ruin in time, but a grotto in the living rock will last forever.  It is an imposture—­this grotto stuff—­but it is one that all men ought to thank the Catholics for.  Wherever they ferret out a lost locality made holy by some Scriptural event, they straightway build a massive—­almost imperishable—­church there, and preserve the memory of that locality for the gratification of future generations.  If