buildings.  Pilgrims in better circumstances are often stricken down by the sun and the fevers of the country, and then their saving refuge is the Convent.  Without these hospitable retreats, travel in Palestine would be a pleasure which none but the strongest men could dare to undertake.  Our party, pilgrims and all, will always be ready and always willing, to touch glasses and drink health, prosperity and long life to the Convent Fathers of Palestine.

So, rested and refreshed, we fell into line and filed away over the barren mountains of Judea, and along rocky ridges and through sterile gorges, where eternal silence and solitude reigned.  Even the scattering groups of armed shepherds we met the afternoon before, tending their flocks of long-haired goats, were wanting here.  We saw but two living creatures.  They were gazelles, of “soft-eyed” notoriety.  They looked like very young kids, but they annihilated distance like an express train.  I have not seen animals that moved faster, unless I might say it of the antelopes of our own great plains.

At nine or ten in the morning we reached the Plain of the Shepherds, and stood in a walled garden of olives where the shepherds were watching their flocks by night, eighteen centuries ago, when the multitude of angels brought them the tidings that the Saviour was born.  A quarter of a mile away was Bethlehem of Judea, and the pilgrims took some of the stone wall and hurried on.

The Plain of the Shepherds is a desert, paved with loose stones, void of vegetation, glaring in the fierce sun.  Only the music of the angels it knew once could charm its shrubs and flowers to life again and restore its vanished beauty.  No less potent enchantment could avail to work this miracle.

In the huge Church of the Nativity, in Bethlehem, built fifteen hundred years ago by the inveterate St. Helena, they took us below ground, and into a grotto cut in the living rock.  This was the “manger” where Christ was born.  A silver star set in the floor bears a Latin inscription to that effect.  It is polished with the kisses of many generations of worshiping pilgrims.  The grotto was tricked out in the usual tasteless style observable in all the holy places of Palestine.  As in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, envy and uncharitableness were apparent here.  The priests and the members of the Greek and Latin churches can not come by the same corridor to kneel in the sacred birthplace of the Redeemer, but are compelled to approach and retire by different avenues, lest they quarrel and fight on this holiest ground on earth.

I have no “meditations,” suggested by this spot where the very first “Merry Christmas!” was uttered in all the world, and from whence the friend of my childhood, Santa Claus, departed on his first journey, to gladden and continue to gladden roaring firesides on wintry mornings in many a distant land forever and forever.  I touch, with reverent finger, the actual spot where the infant Jesus lay, but I think—­nothing.