He went through this peaceful land with one hand forever on his revolver, and the other on his pocket-handkerchief.  Always, when he was not on the point of crying over a holy place, he was on the point of killing an Arab.  More surprising things happened to him in Palestine than ever happened to any traveler here or elsewhere since Munchausen died.

At Beit Jin, where nobody had interfered with him, he crept out of his tent at dead of night and shot at what he took to be an Arab lying on a rock, some distance away, planning evil.  The ball killed a wolf.  Just before he fired, he makes a dramatic picture of himself—­as usual, to scare the reader: 

“Was it imagination, or did I see a moving object on the surface of the rock?  If it were a man, why did he not now drop me?  He had a beautiful shot as I stood out in my black boornoose against the white tent.  I had the sensation of an entering bullet in my throat, breast, brain.”

Reckless creature!

Riding toward Genessaret, they saw two Bedouins, and “we looked to our pistols and loosened them quietly in our shawls,” etc.  Always cool.

In Samaria, he charged up a hill, in the face of a volley of stones; he fired into the crowd of men who threw them.  He says: 

“I never lost an opportunity of impressing the Arabs with the perfection of American and English weapons, and the danger of attacking any one of the armed Franks.  I think the lesson of that ball not lost.”

At Beit Jin he gave his whole band of Arab muleteers a piece of his mind, and then—­

“I contented myself with a solemn assurance that if there occurred another instance of disobedience to orders I would thrash the responsible party as he never dreamed of being thrashed, and if I could not find who was responsible, I would whip them all, from first to last, whether there was a governor at hand to do it or I had to do it myself”

Perfectly fearless, this man.

He rode down the perpendicular path in the rocks, from the Castle of Banias to the oak grove, at a flying gallop, his horse striding “thirty feet” at every bound.  I stand prepared to bring thirty reliable witnesses to prove that Putnam’s famous feat at Horseneck was insignificant compared to this.

Behold him—­always theatrical—­looking at Jerusalem—­this time, by an oversight, with his hand off his pistol for once.

“I stood in the road, my hand on my horse’s neck, and with my dim eyes sought to trace the outlines of the holy places which I had long before fixed in my mind, but the fast-flowing tears forbade my succeeding.  There were our Mohammedan servants, a Latin monk, two Armenians and a Jew in our cortege, and all alike gazed with overflowing eyes.”

If Latin monks and Arabs cried, I know to a moral certainty that the horses cried also, and so the picture is complete.