You can not think in this place any more than you can in any other in Palestine that would be likely to inspire reflection.  Beggars, cripples and monks compass you about, and make you think only of bucksheesh when you would rather think of something more in keeping with the character of the spot.

I was glad to get away, and glad when we had walked through the grottoes where Eusebius wrote, and Jerome fasted, and Joseph prepared for the flight into Egypt, and the dozen other distinguished grottoes, and knew we were done.  The Church of the Nativity is almost as well packed with exceeding holy places as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre itself.  They even have in it a grotto wherein twenty thousand children were slaughtered by Herod when he was seeking the life of the infant Saviour.

We went to the Milk Grotto, of course—­a cavern where Mary hid herself for a while before the flight into Egypt.  Its walls were black before she entered, but in suckling the Child, a drop of her milk fell upon the floor and instantly changed the darkness of the walls to its own snowy hue.  We took many little fragments of stone from here, because it is well known in all the East that a barren woman hath need only to touch her lips to one of these and her failing will depart from her.  We took many specimens, to the end that we might confer happiness upon certain households that we wot of.

We got away from Bethlehem and its troops of beggars and relic-peddlers in the afternoon, and after spending some little time at Rachel’s tomb, hurried to Jerusalem as fast as possible.  I never was so glad to get home again before.  I never have enjoyed rest as I have enjoyed it during these last few hours.  The journey to the Dead Sea, the Jordan and Bethlehem was short, but it was an exhausting one.  Such roasting heat, such oppressive solitude, and such dismal desolation can not surely exist elsewhere on earth.  And such fatigue!

The commonest sagacity warns me that I ought to tell the customary pleasant lie, and say I tore myself reluctantly away from every noted place in Palestine.  Every body tells that, but with as little ostentation as I may, I doubt the word of every he who tells it.  I could take a dreadful oath that I have never heard any one of our forty pilgrims say any thing of the sort, and they are as worthy and as sincerely devout as any that come here.  They will say it when they get home, fast enough, but why should they not?  They do not wish to array themselves against all the Lamartines and Grimeses in the world.  It does not stand to reason that men are reluctant to leave places where the very life is almost badgered out of them by importunate swarms of beggars and peddlers who hang in strings to one’s sleeves and coat-tails and shriek and shout in his ears and horrify his vision with the ghastly sores and malformations they exhibit.  One is glad to get away.  I have heard shameless people say they were glad to get away from Ladies’