Jesus asked him to come home with them, and said his mother and his sisters were grieved at his long absence, and would be wild with delight to see his face again?  Who ever gives a thought to the sisters of Jesus at all?—­yet he had sisters; and memories of them must have stolen into his mind often when he was ill-treated among strangers; when he was homeless and said he had not where to lay his head; when all deserted him, even Peter, and he stood alone among his enemies.

Christ did few miracles in Nazareth, and staid but a little while.  The people said, “This the Son of God!  Why, his father is nothing but a carpenter.  We know the family.  We see them every day.  Are not his brothers named so and so, and his sisters so and so, and is not his mother the person they call Mary?  This is absurd.”  He did not curse his home, but he shook its dust from his feet and went away.

Capernaum lies close to the edge of the little sea, in a small plain some five miles long and a mile or two wide, which is mildly adorned with oleanders which look all the better contrasted with the bald hills and the howling deserts which surround them, but they are not as deliriously beautiful as the books paint them.  If one be calm and resolute he can look upon their comeliness and live.

One of the most astonishing things that have yet fallen under our observation is the exceedingly small portion of the earth from which sprang the now flourishing plant of Christianity.  The longest journey our Saviour ever performed was from here to Jerusalem—­about one hundred to one hundred and twenty miles.  The next longest was from here to Sidon—­say about sixty or seventy miles.  Instead of being wide apart—­as American appreciation of distances would naturally suggest—­the places made most particularly celebrated by the presence of Christ are nearly all right here in full view, and within cannon-shot of Capernaum.  Leaving out two or three short journeys of the Saviour, he spent his life, preached his gospel, and performed his miracles within a compass no larger than an ordinary county in the United States.  It is as much as I can do to comprehend this stupefying fact.  How it wears a man out to have to read up a hundred pages of history every two or three miles—­for verily the celebrated localities of Palestine occur that close together.  How wearily, how bewilderingly they swarm about your path!

In due time we reached the ancient village of Magdala.

CHAPTER XLVIII.

Magdala is not a beautiful place.  It is thoroughly Syrian, and that is to say that it is thoroughly ugly, and cramped, squalid, uncomfortable, and filthy—­just the style of cities that have adorned the country since Adam’s time, as all writers have labored hard to prove, and have succeeded.  The streets of Magdala are any where from three to six feet wide, and reeking with uncleanliness.  The houses are