the broad, level plain of Esdraelon, checkered with fields like a chess-board, and full as smooth and level, seemingly; dotted about its borders with white, compact villages, and faintly penciled, far and near, with the curving lines of roads and trails.  When it is robed in the fresh verdure of spring, it must form a charming picture, even by itself.  Skirting its southern border rises “Little Hermon,” over whose summit a glimpse of Gilboa is caught.  Nain, famous for the raising of the widow’s son, and Endor, as famous for the performances of her witch are in view.  To the eastward lies the Valley of the Jordan and beyond it the mountains of Gilead.  Westward is Mount Carmel.  Hermon in the north—­the table-lands of Bashan—­Safed, the holy city, gleaming white upon a tall spur of the mountains of Lebanon —­a steel-blue corner of the Sea of Galilee—­saddle-peaked Hattin, traditional “Mount of Beatitudes” and mute witness brave fights of the Crusading host for Holy Cross—­these fill up the picture.

To glance at the salient features of this landscape through the picturesque framework of a ragged and ruined stone window—­arch of the time of Christ, thus hiding from sight all that is unattractive, is to secure to yourself a pleasure worth climbing the mountain to enjoy.  One must stand on his head to get the best effect in a fine sunset, and set a landscape in a bold, strong framework that is very close at hand, to bring out all its beauty.  One learns this latter truth never more to forget it, in that mimic land of enchantment, the wonderful garden of my lord the Count Pallavicini, near Genoa.  You go wandering for hours among hills and wooded glens, artfully contrived to leave the impression that Nature shaped them and not man; following winding paths and coming suddenly upon leaping cascades and rustic bridges; finding sylvan lakes where you expected them not; loitering through battered mediaeval castles in miniature that seem hoary with age and yet were built a dozen years ago; meditating over ancient crumbling tombs, whose marble columns were marred and broken purposely by the modern artist that made them; stumbling unawares upon toy palaces, wrought of rare and costly materials, and again upon a peasant’s hut, whose dilapidated furniture would never suggest that it was made so to order; sweeping round and round in the midst of a forest on an enchanted wooden horse that is moved by some invisible agency; traversing Roman roads and passing under majestic triumphal arches; resting in quaint bowers where unseen spirits discharge jets of water on you from every possible direction, and where even the flowers you touch assail you with a shower; boating on a subterranean lake among caverns and arches royally draped with clustering stalactites, and passing out into open day upon another lake, which is bordered with sloping banks of grass and gay with patrician barges that swim at anchor in the shadow of a miniature marble temple that rises out of the