The Synagogue.-Ideal Speculation.-A Ride in the Rain.-An Ex-official. -Joppa.-A Moral Phenomenon.-Reverence for the Grave.

ABOUT nine o'clock the next morning I was with him, and in a few moments we were sitting in the highest seats in the synagogue, at the foot of Mount Zion. My old friend the rabbi was in the desk, reading to a small remnant of the Israelites the same law which had been read to their fathers on the same spot ever since they came up out of the land of Egypt. And there they sat, where their fathers had sat before them, with high, black, square-topped caps, with shawls wound around, crossed in front, and. laid very neatly; long gowns fastened with a sash, and long beards, the feeble remnant of a mighty people; there was sternness in.their faces, but in their hearts a spirit of patient endurance, and a firm and settled resolution to die and be buried under the shadow of their fallen temple.

By the Jewish law the men and women sit apart in the synagogues; and, as I could not understand the words of exhortation which fell from the lips of the preacher, it was not altogether unnatural that I should turn from the rough-bearded sons of Abraham to the smooth faces of their wives and daughters. Since I left Europe, I had not been in an apartment where the women sat with their faces uncovered; and, under these circumstances, it is not surprising that I saw many a dark-eyed Jewess who appeared well worthy of my gaze; and it is not a vain boast to say, that while singing the songs of Solomon, many a Hebrew maiden turned her bright black orbs upon me; for, in the first place, on entering we had disturbed more than a hundred sitting on the steps; secondly, my original dress, half Turk, half Frank, attracted the eyes even of the men; and, thirdly, the alleged universal failing of the sex is not wanting among the daughters of Judah.

The service over, we stopped a moment to look at the synagogue, which was a new building, with nothing about it that was peculiar or interesting. It had no gold or silver ornaments; and the sacred scroll, the table of the Law, contained in the holy of holies, was all that the pride of the Jew could show. My friend, however, did not put his own light under a bushel; for, telling me the amount he had himself contributed to the building, he conducted me to a room built at his own expense for a schoolroom, with a stone in the front wall recording his name and generosity. We then returned to his house; and, being about to sit down to dinner with him, I ought to introduce him more particularly to the reader. He was a man about fifty-five, born in Gibraltar to the same abject poverty which is the lot of most of his nation. In his youth he had been fortunate in his little dealings, and had. been what we call an enterprising man; for he had twice made a voyage to England, and was so successful, and liked the country so much, that he always called himself an Englishman. Having accumulated a little property, or, as he expressed it, having become very rich, he gratified the darling wish of his heart by coming to Jerusalem, to die and be buried with his fathers in the Valley of Jehoshaphat. But this holy purpose in regard to his death and burial did not make him under-value the importance of life, and the advantages of being a great man now. He told me that he was rich, very rich; that he was the richest, and in fact, the only rich Jew in Jerusalem. He took me through his house, and showed me his gold and silver ornaments, and talked of his money and the uses he made of it; that he lent to the Latin Convent on interest, without any security, whenever they wanted; but as for the Greeks-he laughed, laid his finger on his nose, and said he had in pledge jewels belonging to them of the value of more than twenty thousand dollars. He had had his losses too; and while we were enjoying the luxuries of his table, the leaven of his nature broke out, and he endeavoured to sell me a note for fifteen hundred pounds, of the Lady Esther Stanhope, which he offered at a discount of fifty per cent; a bargain which I declined, as being out of the line of my business.

I remember once the American fever came upon me in Athens; when, sitting among the ruins of the Acropolis, upon a broken column of the Parthenon, I speculated upon the growth of the city. I bought, in imagination, a piece of ground, and laid it out in lots, lithographed, and handsomely painted red, blue, and white, like the maps of Chicago, Dunkirk, and Hinsdale; built up the ancient harbour of the Piraeus, and ran a railroad to the foot of the Acropolis; and I leaned my head upon my hand, and calculated the immense increase in value that must attend the building of the king's new palace, and the erection of a royal residence on the site of Plato's academy. I have since regretted that I did not "go in" for some up-town lots in Athens; but I have never regretted not having shaved the note of the Queen of the East, in the hands of the richest Jew in Jerusalem.

It was Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath. The command to do no work on the Sabbath day is observed by every Jew, as strictly as when the commandment was given to his fathers; and to such an extent was it obeyed in the house of my friend, that it was not considered allowable to extinguish a lamp which had been lighted the night before, and was now burning in broad daylight over our table. This extremely strict observance of the law at first gave me some uneasiness about my dinner; but my host, with great self-complacency, relieved me from all apprehensions, by describiqg the admirable contrivance he had invented for reconciling appetite and duty-an oven, heated the night before to such a degree that the process of cooking was continued during the night, and the dishes were ready when wanted the next day. I must not forget the Jew's family, which consisted of a second wife, about sixteen, already the mother of two children, and his son and son's wife, the husband twelve, and the wife ten years old. The little gentleman was at the table, and behaved very well, except that his father had to check him in eating sweetmeats. The lady was playing on the floor with other children, and I did with her what I could not have done with a bigger man's wife-I took her on my knee and kissed her. Among the Jews, matches are made by the parents; and, immediately upon the marriage, the wife is brought into the household of the husband. A young gentleman was tumbling about the floor who was engaged to the daughter of the chief rabbi. I did not ask the age of the lady, of course; but the gentleman bore the heavy burden of three years. He had not yet learned to whisper the story of his love to his blushing mistress, for, in fact, he could not talk at all; he was a great bawling boy, and cared much more for his bread and butter than a wife; but his prudent father had already provided him.

On, the morning of the twenty-first I set out for Jaffa, the ancient Joppa. It was a bright and beautiful morning when I left the Bethlehem Gate; but, before I had been an hour on my way, it began to rain, and continued nearly the whole day. About three hours from Jerusalem we came to the village of Abougos, the chief of the most powerful families of Fellahs in the Holy Land. Nearly all his life he had been more or less in arms against the government; and his name was known among all the Christians in the East as the robber of the pilgrims to the Holy Sepulchre. I had met and spoken with him outside of the walls of Jerusalem, and during the rain, as I approached his village, I determined to stop and throw myself upon his hospitality for the night; but the returning sunshine deceived me, and I passed on, admiring the appearance of his village, which had much the best of any I had seen in the Holy Land. About an hour afterward I was repenting, under a merciless rain, that I had not fulfilled my purpose. Riding three hours longer, stopping from time to time under a rock or tree, I was ascending the last range of mountains; before me were the fertile plains of Sharon; and across the plain, still at a great distance, was Ramla, the ancient Arimathea, the city of "Joseph the counsellor, the good man, and just." To the right, bordering the sea, was the range of Mount Carmel; but the rain was pelting in my eyes so that I could see nothing of it. I had been eight hours on the back of one of the most stubborn mules that ever persisted in having their own way; toiling with all my might, with blows and kicks, but finding it impossible to make him move one step faster than he pleased; and when the tower, the mosque, and the minaret of Ramla were before me, at the other side of a level plain, and an hour's smart riding would have carried me there, I was completely worn out with urging the obstinate brute; and with muttered threats of future vengeance, wound my cloak around me, and hauling my umbrella close down, and grinding my teeth, I tried to think myself resigned to my fate. A strong wind was driving the rain directly in my face, and my mule, my cursed mule, stopped moving when I stopped beating; and, in the very hardest of the storm, when I would have rushed like a bird on the wing, turned off from the path, and fell quietly to browsing on the grass. Afraid to disarrange my umbrella and cloak, I sat for a moment irresolute; but the brute turned his face round, and looked at me with such perfect nonchalance, that I could not stand it. I raised my club for a blow; the wind opened my cloak in front, puffing it out like a sail; caught under my umbrella, and turned it inside out; and the mule suddenly starting, under a deluge of rain I found myself planted in the mud on the plains of Sharon. An hour afterward I was drying my clothes in the house of our consular agent at Ramla. There was no fire-place in the room; but I was hovering over a brazier of burning charcoal. I spent that night and all the next day in Ramla, although a quarter of an hour would have been sufficient to see all that it contained, which was simply nothing more than is to be found in any other village. The consul gave me a dry coverlet; and while some of his friends came in to look at and welcome the stranger, I laid myself down upon the divan and went to sleep.

The next morning I was unable to move; the fatigue, and particularly the rain of the preceding day, had been too much for me, and I remained all the morning in an up-stairs room, with a high ceiling and a stone floor, lying on a rug in one corner, cold, desponding, and miserable. In the afternoon I went down into the large room, to talk with the consular agent. But a year before he had flourished in all the pomp and pride of office. The arms of our country were blazoned over his door, and the stars and stripes had protected his dwelling; but a change had come over him. The Viceroy of Syria had ordered the flags of the consuls to be taken down at Ramla, and forbidden any of his subjects to hold the office except in the seaport towns. I could not help thinking that he was perfectly right, as it was merely allowing them the benefit of a foreign protection, to save them and their families, with two or three janizaries, from their duties to himself; but I listened attentively to the complaints of the poor agent. His dignity had been touched, and his pride humbled in the eyes of his townsmen; for the governor had demanded the usual duty from his sons, and had sent his executive officers with the summary order, the duty or the bastinado, The agent owed his appointment to Commodore Patterson; and talked of him and Captain Nicholson as friends who would see justice done him if he could communicate with them. I was afterward struck with a display of delicacy and a sense of propriety that I had not expected from him; for, although he charged me with many messages to Commodore Patterson, he requested me not to mention his difficulties in the matter of the agency, as he had already made representations to the consul at Beyroot, who had laid them before Commodore Porter at Constantinople; and an application in another quarter would look like distrusting their ability, or their willingness to resent, what he called an indignity offered to the American flag. Annoyed at seeing the women dodging by, with their faces covered, and always avoiding me, I told him that, being a Christian and holding an appointment under our government, he ought to conform to our customs, and treat his women more as companions; or, at least, to let them come into the same room, and sit at the same table with him. He listened, but could not see any reason in my proposition. He said it might do for us; for with us the wives always brought their husbands money (the ignorant, uninformed barbarian), but in Syria (he sighed as he said it) they never added a para to the riches of their lords.

The next morning I set out again for Jaffa. The road lies through a rich plain; and in three hours, passing a large detachment of Turkish soldiers, encamped outside, and waiting a transport to carry them to Alexandria, I was entering the gate of the ancient city of Joppa. Believed to have existed before the deluge, the city where Noah dwelt and built his ark; whence Jonah embarked for Tarshish, when he was thrown overboard and swallowed by a whale; the port used by Solomon to receive timber from Tyre for the building of the temple, and by all the kings of Judah to connect the city of Jerusalem with foreign people, Jaffa is now a small Turkish town on the shores of the Mediterranean, built on a little eminence projecting into the sea, and containing a population of from ten to fifteen thousand Turks, Arabs, Jews, and Christians. It has a fine climate, and a fine country around it; and the orange-gardens are the finest on the shores of the Mediterranean. Although the seaport of Jerusalem, its harbour has always been bad; and when I was there the wreck of a Turkish man-of-war was lying on the beach; and that same night, there being a severe storm, the little Greek pilgrim vessels were considered in great danger.

There is nothing of interest in the modern city of Jaffa. Its history is connected with the past. The traveller must stand on the shore, and fill the little harbour with the ships of Tarshish, or imagine Noah entering the ark with his family, by whom the earth was to be repeopled; or wander through the narrow streets and ask himself, Where is the house of Tabitha, whom Peter " raised from the dead?" or that of Simon the tanner, where Peter "tarried many days?" and he may feel a less holy, but hardly less powerful interest, in standing by the gate where, for many years, a large pyramid of sculls attested the desperate struggle of Napoleon; or, in walking through the chambers of the Greek convent, then used as a hospital for the French, and the monks will show him an apartment where, when all hearts were sinking within them for fear, he visited and touched the sick of the plague, restored the drooping courage of his soldiers, and almost raised the dying from their bed of death. Besides the interest attached to this place by reason of its great antiquity, and the many important events of which it has been the scene, I remember it with much kindness on account of the American consular agent, and the cordial manner in which he received me. He was not at home when I arrived; but in a few moments he came in, and, taking both my hands in his, pointed to the American arms on the wall, ordered the stars and stripes to be hoisted on the top of his house, and, with all the extravagance of the East, told me that all he had was mine. I had a great mind to take him at his word, and begin by appropriating a beautiful emerald that I saw on his finger; but, for the present, I contented myself with asking merely for a dinner, which was soon prepared; and I sat down to dine in the ancient city of Joppa, with my country's arms before me, and my country's banner waving above.

The agent was an Armenian, and a strict observer of all the requisitions of his exacting creed; he was rich, and had no children; and, what I never before heard from the lips of man, he said that he was perfectly happy. I was the first American who had visited him since he had received his appointment; and it seemed as if he could not do enough for me. He had repaired and reconstructed the whole road from Jaffa to Jerusalem; and when I asked him what reward he promised himself for this, he answered that he had done it for God, the pilgrims, and his own honour. I remained with him that night, and would have gone early the next morning, but he would not part with me so soon; I dined with him again; and in the afternoon, escorted to the gate by two janizaries, each with a large silver-headed mace in his hand, I left, probably for ever, my Armenian friend and the ancient city of Joppa. I do not know when I parted from a man with more regret.*

I slept that night at Ramla; and the next day, about four o'clock, in company with several hundred pilgrims, I was again entering the Bethlehem Gate. Notwithstanding the munificence of my Armenian friend, the road from Jerusalem to Jaffa, a road travelled from the time when Jonas went thither to embark for Tarshish, is now a mere mule-path, on which I was several times obliged to stop and turn aside to let a loaded mule pass by.

I had seen everything in Jerusalem that it was the duty of a traveller to see. My time was now my own, for idling, lounging, or strolling, in the luxurious consciousness of having nothing to do. In this humour I used to set forth from the convent, never knowing where I should go or what I should do; and, whenever I went out with the deliberate intention of doing nothing, I was always sure of finding enough to occupy me. My favourite amusement in the morning was to go out by St. Stephen's Gate, and watch the pilgrims as they began their daily round of visits to the holy places. Frequently, if I saw a group that interested me, I followed them to the Garden of Gethsemane and the Mount of Olives; sometimes I stopped in the Valley of Jehoshaphat, and, sitting down on the grave of an Israelite, watched the Jewish pilgrims. One morning, I remember, Paul and I were together; and we saw a young girl kissing the tomb of Zachariah, and weeping as if her heart would break. Paul asked her, rather roughly, what she was crying about; and the poor girl, looking at him for a moment, burst into a flood of tears, and told him that she was weeping over the tomb of the blessed prophet.

But there are few things connected with my journeying in the Holy Land which I look back upon with a more quiet satisfaction than my often repeated and almost daily walk around the walls of Jerusalem. It was a walk of between three and four miles; and I always contrived, about half an hour before the gates were closed, to be sitting on a favourite tombstone near St. Stephen's Gate. The great Turkish burying-ground is outside the wall, near this gate; and regularly, on a fine afternoon, towards sunset, the whole Turkish population, in all their gay and striking costumes, might be seen wandering among the tombs. Few things strike a traveller in the East more than this, and few are to us more inexplicable. We seldom go into a graveyard except to pay the last offices to a departed friend, and for years afterward we never find ourselves in the same place again without a shade of melancholy coming over us. Not so in the East; to-day they bury a friend, to-morrow they plant flowers over his grave, and the next day, and the next, they tend and water them, and once a week, regularly, they sit by the grave. On every holyday it is a religious duty to go there; and as often as they walk out for health or pleasure, they habitually turn their footsteps to the burial-ground. To them the grave is not clothed with the same terrors. It is not so dark and gloomy as to us. They are firmer believers than we are, though, as we think, in a false and fatal creed; and to them there is a light beyond the grave, which we of a better faith can seldom see. It was a beautiful picture to behold the graveyard thronged with Turkish women, in their long white veils. It would, perhaps, be too poetical to look upon them all as mourners. Perhaps, indeed, it would not be too much to say that, of the immense multitude who, day after day, are seen flitting among the tombs, many a widowed fair one, over the tomb of a dead lord, is dreaming of a living lover.

But there was one whom I noticed every day; she was always sitting by the same stone, and I always noticed her as one of the first to come out and one of the last to return. She was a young Sciote girl, mourning over the tomb of her young lord; and well she might, for he had been to her a friend and protector, and she had been his only bride. When her father's house was laid in ruins, and her gray-headed sire and her manly brothers were slain before her eyes, he had saved her from the bloody cimeter, or from a fate worse than death; and he had wooed her, not as a Turk and master, but as a lover. He had won her young heart; and she had forgotten her kindred and her country; he had died with his bloody cimeter in his band, and she thought only of the dead when she stood beside his grave.
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Desert of St. John.A Midnight Procession.-Road to Jericho.-A Community of Women.-A Navigator of the Dead Sea--A Dance by Moon-light.-A rude Lodging.

IN company with Mr. Whiting, I started for the Desert of St. John the Baptist. Passing the Pool of Gihon, where Saul was anointed king by Zadoc and Nathan, we came to the Convent of the Holy Cross, the great altar of the chapel being erected, as the monks pretend, over the spot where grew the tree from which the cross was made. Moving on among hills and valleys, on our right was a distant view of Ramah, the country of Samuel the seer; and before us, crowning the very top of a high hill, were the ruins of the palace and the burial-place of the warlike Maccabees. The Convent of St. John is built on the spot where John the Baptist was born. There is no doubt of this, say the monks; for beneath the great altar of the church is a circular slab of marble, with an inscription almost effaced: "Hic natus est precursor dei," here the forerunner of the Lord was born. This convent is in a fine situation; a small Christian village is attached to it; the top commands a beautiful view of the mountains, cultivated in terraces; and directly in front is the great Valley of Turpentine, or Elah, the battle-ground of the Israelites and Philistines, of David and Goliath. Taking a Christian boy with us as guide, we entered the valley; and, following the stream to its source, in about two hours we came to the place where, it is said, Saul and the men of Israel pitched by the Valley of Elah, and set the battle in array against the Philistines. It was precisely the spot where the scene, so graphically recorded in Scripture, might have taken place. "And the Philis- tines stood on a mountain on the one side, and Israel stood on a mountain on the other side, and there was a valley between them." On each side of me was a mountain, and the brook was still running, near from which the shepherd-boy gathered the five smooth stones. The boy who accompanied us told me that the precise stones had never yet been found, though the monks had often searched for them.

At the extreme end of the valley is the Desert of St. John, where was heard, for the first time, the voice of one crying in the wilderness, "Prepare ye the way of the Lord; make his paths straight." Directly in front, at the top of the mountain bounding the valley,.is an open door in the rock, leading to the grotto in which the prophet lived. There is no appearance of a desert in this place, except solitude; and if it be merely a locality fixed upon by the monks, they could not have selected one more inappropriate. It is one of the prettiest and best cultivated spots in the Holy Land; and sitting in the door of the grotto, with an Armenian pilgrim by my side, and looking out upon the valley and the mountains, all around terraced and cultivated to the very summits, all still and beautiful, I thought I had never seen a place better qualified to inspire a pious, philosophic, and happy state of mind, than this Desert of St. John. We returned by a different road, searching on our way for the pool where Philip baptized the eunuch of Queen Candace; but, after losing ourselves once or twice, and fearing a threatening shower, we returned to the city unsuccessful.

At about ten o'clock that evening, the monks, under a guard of soldiers and a crowd of pilgrims, each with a candle in his hand, left St. Stephen's Gate in solemn procession. With a loud chant they crossed the Valley of Jehoshaphat, wound around the foot of the Mount of Olives to Bethpage and Bethany, said mass in the tomb of Lazarus, and returning, prayed and chanted on the Mount of Olives and in the Garden of Gethsemane; and at about daylight the next morning returned to the convent.

For several days I had been preparing for a journey to the Dead Sea; but a mysterious influence seemed still to hang about the borders of that water; and now, when all the rest of the Holy Land was perfectly tranquil, the Fellahs were in commotion among the barren mountains around it. I had waited two or three days at the request of the governor; but, hearing of nothing in particular to prevent me, I determined to set out. The Sicilian priest who had proposed to accompany me could not go; and at about eight o'clock I was sitting on my horse alone, outside the St. Stephen's Gate, waiting for Paul, who had gone to the governor for a letter which he had promised me to the aga of Jericho. Attracted by the uncommon beauty of the morning, half the population of Jerusalem had already gathered without the walls. Joining a party of pilgrims, I followed once more the path I had so often trodden across the Brook Kedron and the Valley of Jehoshaphat; and, parting with them at the foot of the Mount of Olives, I wound around its base, and fell into the road to Jericho and the Jordan. We must have passed Bethpage, though there is nothing to mark where it stood; and in about an hour we came to Bethany, now a ruined Arab village, though the monks still show the house of Martha and Mary, the tomb of Lazarus, and even the barren fig-tree which was cursed by our Lord. The tomb of Lazarus is a large excavation in the rock; and the sepulchral chamber is at the foot of a staircase of ten or twelve steps.

Not far from Bethany we came to a fountain enclosed with marble, and soon after to a valley, where, the monks say, our Saviour, in coming from beyond the Jordan, at the prayer of the sisters of Lazarus, reposed with the disciples. In about two hours we were among the mountains. The scene every moment became wilder and more rugged; and, except in the wilderness of Sinai and among the wastes of Idumea, I never travelled so dreary a road as in "going down to Jericho." It is on this desolate route that our Saviour lays the scene of the parable of the good Samaritan and nowhere could a more forcible illustration be given of the heartlessness of the priest and the Levite, in "passing by on the other side." Ascending for some distance by the precipitous side of a yawning chasm, where a false movement of my horse might have dashed me to atoms, from the top of the Mountains of Desolation I looked to the left upon a higher and still wilder and more dreary range; and, towering above all the rest, in gloomy grandeur, its naked sides pierced with doors for the cells of hermits, was the mountain of our Saviour's fasting and temptation; before me were the plains of Jericho, the Valley of the Jordan, the Mountains of Arabia, and the Dead Sea. A high, square building, like a tower, marked the site of Jericho, and a small stream, running between two banks of sand, was the hallowed Jordan.

Descending the mountain, on our left, directly at the foot, were the remains of an aqueduct and other ruins, which, in all probability, were part of the ancient city of Jericho. The plain commences at the foot of the mountains; the land is fertile, and well watered with streams emptying into the Jordan; but for the most part wild and uncultivated. About half way across we passed the edge of a stagnant pool, nearly covering a Mussulman burying-ground; the tombstones were washed from their places, and here and there the ghastly skeletons were visible above the muddy water. In one place, crossing a stream, we met three Abyssinians, who had come from the remotest point in the interior of Africa where the name of Christian is known, to bathe in the sacred Jordan. Two or three times we were obstructed by brick fences, intended as ramparts, to protect the inhabitants and their flocks against the incursions of wolves; and at about four o'clock we arrived at the ruined village of Jericho.

I have observed that travellers generally, when they arrive at any place of extraordinary interest, find the right glow of feeling coming over them precisely at the proper moment. I never had any difficulty in Italy; for.there, in the useful guidebook of Madame Starke, beautifully interspersed with valuable information about hotels, post-horses, and the price of washing linen, the reader may find prepared for him an appropriate catalogue of sensations for almost every possible situation and object, from a walk in the Coliseum by moonlight to a puppet-show at San Carlino in Naples; but, in a country like this, a man is thrown upon his own resources; and, notwithstanding the interest attached to the name of Jericho, I found it a hard matter to feel duly excited.

Jericho was the first city in Canaan which fell into the bands of the Israelites. It was long the second city of Judea; and, according to the Jewish Talmud, contained twelve thousand priests. It had its hippodrome and amphitheatre, and in its royal palace Herod the Tetrarch died. But the curse of Joshua seems, to rest upon it now: "Cursed be the man before the Lord who shall rebuild Jericho." It consists of fifty or sixty miserable Arab houses, the walls of which on three sides are of stones, piled up like the stone fences of our farmers, most of them not so high as a man's head, and the front and top either entirely open or covered with brush.

The old fortress in which I expected to sleep I found entirely abandoned, and the apartments used as a shelter for sheep and goats. I expected to find there the aga, quietly smoking his pipe, and glad to receive and gossip with a stranger; but I had mounted to the top, and looked out upon the extensive plains of Jericho and the Valley of the Jordan without meeting a single person; and it was not until I had gone out of the gate, and, with the bridle in my hand, was walking back into the village, that I noticed, the remarkable circumstance, so different from the usual course of matters in Arab villages, that no throng of idlers had gathered around me. . In fact, I had passed through the village, gone to the fortress, and come back, without seeing a man; and soon found that there was not a male in the village above ten years old, except the aga, and one passing Arab. It had numbered sixty men, of whom Ibrahim Pacha had ordered a levy of twenty-four for his army. The miserable inhabitants had decided among themselves upon nineteen who could best be spared; and, unable to supply the rest, in a spirit of desperation had abandoned their village; and, taking with them all the boys above ten years old, fled to the mountains around the Dead Sea, where they were now in arms, ripe for rebellion, robbery, and murder.

I found myself very much at a loss; the aga was a stranger there, and knew nothing of the localities ; and I could not find a boy old enough to conduct me to the Well of Elisha. Some of the women knew where it was, but they would not go with me, though I asked them in all courtesy; and, taking my direction from. them, and fixing my eyes on the naked top of the mountain of our Saviour's temptation, in about half an hour I reached the miraculous fountain where, at the request of the men of Jericho, Elisha “cast salt into the spring and healed the water." It is enclosed in a large marble basin, and several streams, constantly running from it, refresh and fertilize the plains of Jericho. Riding on a short distance farther, I came to an aqueduct and the ruins of a Greek convent, at the base of the “exceeding high mountain" from whose top the devil showed our Saviour all the kingdoms of the world. The naked sides of the mountain are studded with doors, opening to the cells of anchorites and hermits, who there turned their backs upon temptation, and, amid desolation and solitude, passed their days in penance and prayer.

It was dark when I returned to Jericho. Before going away the aga had taken me to his hut, and wished me to pass the night with him; but, as two horses had already taken their places before me, and the hut was perfectly open, having merely a roof of branches, and nothing at all in front, I had looked round and selected another for my lodging-place, chiefly from the circumstance of its having a small boat set up on its side before it, so as to form a front wall.

That boat told a melancholy tale. It was the only one that had ever floated on the Dead Sea. About eight months before, Mr. Costigan, an Irish traveller, who had been some years in the East, had. projected a most interesting journey, and, most unhappily for himself and the interests of science, died almost in the moment of its successful accomplishment. He had purchased his boat at Beyroot, and, with a Maltese sailor for his servant, in spite of many difficulties and impediments from the Arabs, had carried it across the country on a dromedary, and launched it on the Sea of Galilee; he had explored this most interesting water, and entering the Jordan, followed it down until he narrowly escaped with his life among the rocks and rapids of that ancient but unknown river; and then constantly obstructed by the Arabs, even the governor of Damascus refusing him any facilities, with great difficulty he succeeded in bringing his boat by land to the Dead Sea. In the middle of July he had embarked with his servant to make the tour of the sea, and eight days afterward the old woman in whose tent I lodged had found him lying on the shore alone, gasping for breath. She had him carried to her hut, where he lay till the Rev. Mr. Nicolaisen, the English missionary at Jerusalem, came for him, and the second day after his arrival in Jerusalem he died. With his dying breath he bore the same testimony to the kindness of woman under the burning sun of Syria, that our countryman Ledyard did in the wilds of Siberia; for, while lying upon the shores of the Dead Sea, the Arabs gathered round him only to gaze, and would have left him to die there if this old woman had not prevailed upon two of her sons to carry him to her hut.

That boat was interesting to me for another reason. Nothing, not even the thought of visiting Petra and the land of Idumea, affected me so strangely as the idea of making the tour of this sea; and, notwithstanding the miserable state of my health, shattered by my journey in the desert, as soon as I heard, after my arrival at Jerusalem, that there was a boat at Jericho, I began to think of taking advantage of it. If I had succeeded in this, I should consider my tour the most perfect and complete ever made by any oriental traveller. I had hunted up the oars, sail, &c.; but on my return from Jaffa I was compelled to abandon all thoughts of making the attempt. Still, when I saw the boat, all my ardour revived; and never, in my lonely journeyings in the East, did I wish so earnestly for the comfort and support of a friend. With a companion, or even with a servant, who would encourage and support me, in spite of my health I should certainly have undertaken it; but Paul was particularly averse to the attempt; the boat was barely large enough for two; and I was compelled to give up the thought.

That evening I saw at Jericho what I never saw before. It was a beautiful moonlight night, and all the women were out of doors singing and dancing. The dance was altogether indescribable; consisting not of wanton movements, like those of the dancing girls in Egypt, but merely in joining hands and moving round in a circle, keeping time to the music of their own voices. I had never seen so gay and joyous a scene among the women in the East; and though their fathers, and brothers, and husbands, and lovers were away among the mountains, I did not feel disposed to judge them harshly. It was so rare, in that unhappy country, to see anything like gayety of heart, that if they had been dancing over the graves of their husbands I should have been inclined to join them. And they did not shun us as the Moslem women generally do; they talked with us with their faces uncovered; and I remember a young Arab girl, not more than sixteen, who had a child in her arms, and who told me that its father had fled to the mountains, and she put the child in my arms while she joined in the dance. In fact, my situation began to be peculiar; the aga had gone off to look for some one who would accompany me to the Dead Sea; and among perhaps more than a hundred women, that night Paul, and I, and my muleteers were the only men in Jericho. In justice to the poor Arab women, however, I would remove from them any imputation of want of feeling or hardness of heart; for I have no doubt the young girl who left her child in my arms loved its father as warmly as if they were all clad in purple and fine raiment every day.

I would have been better satisfied, however, if that night they had ceased their merriment at an earlier hour; for long after I had lain down on my stony bed, their song and laugh prevented my sleeping; and when they had retired, other noises followed: the lowing of cattle, the bleating of sheep and goats, the stamping of horses, the crying of children, and the loud barking of the watch-dog; and, finally, the fierce assault of the voracious insects that always swarm in an Arab's hut, drove me from my bed and out of doors. The cool air refreshed and revived me, and I walked by the light of a splendid moon among the miserable huts of the village, hunted and barked at by the watching wolf-dog, and perhaps exciting the apprehensions of the unprotected women.

I leaned against a high fence of brush enclosing some of the huts, and mused upon the wonderful events of which this miserable place had been the scene, until my eyes began to close; when, opening a place among the bushes, I drew my cloak around me and crawled in, and soon fell fast asleep. Once during the night I was worried and almost dragged out of my burrowing-place by the dogs, but I kicked them away and slept on. At daylight the aga was pulling me by the shoulder, armed to the teeth, and ready to escort me. I shook myself and my toilet was made; and before the laughers, and singers, and dancers of the previous night had waked from their slumbers, we were, mounted and on our way to the Jordan.

The River Jordan.-The Dead Sea.-Force of Example.-Buoyancy of the Dead Sea.-A Perilous Aacent.--A Navigator of the Dead Sea.- Story of the Voyage-The Convent of Santa Saba.

Moving directly from the ruined village, we soon left the fertile plains of Jericho and entered the barren valley of the Jordan. It was washed and torn by the mountain torrents, full of gullies and large sand-hills; and in about an hour and a half we were standing on the banks of the river, at the most hallowed spot on the margin of that sacred stream, where, eighteen hundred years ago, John baptized the Redeemer of the world; and where, year after year, thousands of pilgrims throw themselves into the river with the blind belief that, by bathing in its waters, they wash away their sins. As a pious pilgrim, it would have been my duty, perhaps, to do the same ; but the reader will please remember that it was the last day of March; that I had slept in a bush; that my limbs were stiff; and that it was not yet six o'clock in the morning, and that I had not breakfasted. Sitting down, then, on the bank, I made my morning meal, and drank as devoutly of its water as any pilgrim who ever stood by Jordan.

I afterward followed the river close along its bank till it emptied into the Dead Sea, and nowhere found any spot that, for beauty of scenery, could be compared with this consecrated bathing-place of the pilgrims. The bank here is about tenor twelve feet high; a clear, level table of land, covered with rich grass, and large bushes on the edge overhanging the river. Judging by the eye, the river is here about thirty paces broad; the current is very rapid, and the pilgrim, in bathing, is obliged to hold on by the bushes to avoid being carried away. Here, it is said, the wild beast still has his haunt; and the traveller sometimes, when the river is rising, may realize the expression, "He shall come up like a lion out of the swelling of Jordan." Op- posite, the bank is low, and the bushes grow down to the water's edge. Immediately below this the river narrows to ten paces; and there is not another spot on the the Jordan which can attract the eye of the traveller. It is a small, broken, and muddy stream, running between banks of barren sand, without bloom or verdure; and if it were not for the associations connected with it, a man would turn from it as the most uninteresting of rivers. In one place I saw an Arab wading across; and the river there, so far as I could judge, had not fallen more thin two feet. I followed it as closely as the cracks and gullies would allow, cutting off none of the bends. For the last two or three miles it runs between perpendicular banks of sand, from five to ten feet high, and its pure waters are already corrupted by the pestiferous influence of the bituminous lake. On the left it stops even with the shore; but on the right the bank runs out to a low, sandy point, round which a quantity of drift wood is collected ; and here, with a gentle ripple of its waters, the Jordan is lost in the Dead Sea.

I lollowed it almost to the very point, until my horse's feet sank above his fetlocks in the wet sand. It was the old opinion, and was counted among the wonders of the Lake Asphaltites, that the river passed through without mingling with the waters of the lake; and Pococke says, "I thought I saw the stream of a different colour;" but Pococke did not follow the river down to the extreme point. I did; and could see most distinctly the very spot where the waters mingled; instead of the river keeping its way tbrough, its current was rather stopped at once by the denser water of the lake; and, in fact, for two or three miles above its mouth, the Jordan is impregnated with the salt and bituminous matter of the lake.

Almost at the moment of my turning from the Jordan to the Dead Sea, notwithstanding the long-credited accounts that no bird could fly over without dropping dead upon its surface, I saw a flock of gulls floating quietly on its bosom; and when I roused them with a stone, they flew down the lake, skimming its surface until they had carried themselves out of sight. From the point on which I stood, near its eastern shore, the sea was spread out before me, motionless as a lake of molten lead, bounded on either side by ranges of high and barren mountains, and on its southern extremity by the great desert Valley of El Ghor; constantly receiving the waters of the Jordan, but, unlike other waters, sending no tribute to the sea. Pliny, Diodorus Siculus, and Josephus describe it as more than sixty miles long; but Mr. Banks and his companions, by observation from elevated heights, make it not more than thirty; and, as the ancients were better acquainted with it than modern geographers, it has been supposed that the lake has contracted in its dimensions, and that part of the Valley of El Ghor was once covered by its waters. Moving on slowly from the point of the Jordan, the shores low and sandy, strewed with brush and driftwood, and rising in a slope to the sandy plain above, I rode along nearly the whole head of the lake, with my horse's feet in the water, and twice picked up a large piece of bitumen, almost like common pitch, supposed to be thrown up from the bottom of the lake. The sand is not bright like that of an Atlantic or Mediterranean beach, but of a dirty, dark brown. Thte water is exceedingly clear and transparent, but its taste and smell are a compound of all that is bad.

It was now the last day of March, and even before we left, the plains of the Jordan the sun had been intensely hot; without a branch or leaf to break its force, it poured upon the dreary waste around the Dead Sea with a scorching and withering heat. It was on this shore that the Knight of the Leopard encountered the Saracen Emir; and in the sandy plain above is the beautiful scene of the Diamond of the Desert, in the opening of Scott's Crusaders. The general features of the scenery along the northern shore of the Dead Sea are admirably described. The Diamond of the Desert is, of course, the creation of the author's fancy; and the only actual error is in placing the wilderness of Engaddi, which Scott has confounded with the mountains of Quarantania, but which is really,half way down the borders of the sea. It was two -o'clock when my guards, having conducted me along the head of thq sea, proposed returning to Jericho. I had already had some difficulty with them. Twice disappointed in my purposed exploration of this sea; once in my wish, conceived on the top of Mount Hor, to strike it at its southern extremity, and coast along its borders and then, in the still more attractive project of exploring it in a boat, instead of returning to Jericho, my desire was to go down the borders of the sea, and turn up among the mountains to the convent of Santa Saba. At Jerusalem I could not hire horses for this convent, because, as they said, it was a dangerous route; and I took them for Jericho, hoping in some way or other still to accomplish my object. By accident, an Arab from Santa Saba had come to Jericho during the night; and in the morning I told the aga and his companion that I would not have them as my escort at all, unless they would go with me to the convent. They at first objected, but afterward promised to go as far as I wanted them;. now they again made objections. I thought it was to enhance the value of their services; but in a few moments they told me they would not go any farther; that the order of the governor was to protect me to the Dead Sea and back to Jericho. The worst of it was, that my muleteers refused to go without the guard; and, although we had a guide with us.who, told us there was no danger, though we had not met a single Arab since we left Jericho, and though. we could see many miles down the lake, and plainly distinguish the wild track up the bare side of the mountain to the open country above, they were "afraid of the bad Arabs." I was determined, however, not to go back to Jericho. I had no idea of sleeping in the bushes again; and, spurring my horse, I told Paul to follow me, and they might do as they pleased. The aga and his companion bade me farewell, and, dashing over the arid plain, were soon hidden from view by hillocks of sand. I continued along the shore; and, after a few. moments' consultation, my Arabs quietly followed me.

Since early in the morning, I had had the sea constantly before my eyes. While riding along the northern shore, the general aspect was very much the same; but, as soon as I turned the head, and began to move along its side, the mountains every moment assumed a different aspect, although everywhere wild, rugged, and barren. At three o'clock we were approaching a place where the mountain rises precipitously from the lake, leaving no room for a passage at its foot; my eyes were fixed upon the lake, my thoughts upon its mysterious properties., The ancients believed that living bodies, and even heavy metals, would not sink in it; and Pliny and Strabo have written of its extraordinary buoyancy.. Before I left Jerusalem, I had resolved not to bathe in it, on account of my health; and I had sustained my resolution during the whole of my day's ride along its shore; but, on the point of turning up among mountains, I could resist no longer. My clothes seemed to come off of their own accord; and, before Paul had time to aik me what I was going to do, I was floating on its waters. Paul and the Arabs followed; and, after splashing about for a while, we lay like a parcel of corks upon its surface.

From my own experience, I can almost corroborate the most extravagant accounts of the ancients. I know, in reference to my own specific gravity, that in the Atlantic or Mediterranean I cannot float without some little movement of the hands; and even then my body is almost totally submerged; but, here, when I threw myself upon my back, my body was, half out of water. It was an exertion even for my lank Arabs to keep themselves under. When I struck out in swimming, it was exceedingly awkward; for my legs were constantly rising to the surface, and even above the water. I could have lain there and read with perfect ease. In fact, I could have.slept, and it would have been, a much easier bed than the bushes at Jericho. It was ludicrous to see one of the horses. As soon as his body touched the water he was afloat, and turned over on his side; he struggled with all his force to preserve his equilibrium; but the moment he stopped, moving he turned over on his side again, and almost on his back, kicking his feet out of water, and snorting with terror. The worst of my bath was, after it was over, my skin was covered with a thick, glutinous substance, which it required another ablution to get rid of; and after I had wiped myself dry, my body burnt and smarted as if I had been turned round before a roasting fire. My face and ears were incrusted.with salt; my hairs stood out, "each panicular hair on end;" and my eyes were irritated and inflamed, so that I felt the effects of it for several days. In spite of all this, however, revived and refreshed by my bath, I mounted my horse a new man.

Modern. science has solved all the mystery about this water. It has been satisfactorily analyzed, and its specific ity ascertained to be 1.211, a degree of density unknown in any other, the specific gravity of fresh water being 1.000; and it has been found to hold in solution the following proportions of salt to one hundred grains of water-

					Grains
               Muriate of lime,		 3.920
               Muriate of magnesia,	10.246
               Muriate of soda,		10.360
               Sulphate of lime, 	 0.054
   
					24.580 
         					

Except the ruined city of Petra, I never felt so unwilling to leave any place. I was unsatisfied. I had a longing desire to explore every part of that unknown water; to spend days upon its surface; to coast along its shores; to sound its mysterious depths, and search for the ruins of the guilty cities. And why not? If we believe our Bible, that bituminous lake covers the once fertile Vale of Siddim, and the ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah; and why may we not see them! The ruins of Thebes still cover for miles the banks of,the Nile; the pyramids stand towering as when they were built, and no man knows their builders; and the traveller may still trace, by "the great river, the Euphrates," the ruins of the Tower of Babel. Besides, that water does not destroy; it preserves all that it touches; the wood that falls into it becomes petrified by its action; and I can see no good reason why it should hide for ever from man's eyes the monuments of that fearful anger which the crimes of the guilty had so righteously provoked.

Except to the summit of Mount Hor, I never had so desperate a climb as up the barren mountain on the borders of the Dead Sea. We had not found any water fit to drink since we left the Jordan, and turned up a little before we reached the place we had intended, the guide telling us that here we would find a spring. We were soon obliged to dismount; and even our sure-footed horses, trained as they were to climbing mountains, slipped, faltered, and completely failed. Our guide told us that he had never ascended with horses before; and, looking forward, the attempt seemed utterly impossible; but the noble animals climbed with the intelligence of men, holding on with their fore-feet as if they were hands, and the Arabs above pulling them by the mane, or pushing from below. One of them, in climbing an almost perpendicular height, fell over backward. I thought he was killed; and my Arabs, irritated by toil, thirst, and the danger to their horses, sprang upon the guide, and I believe would have killed him if Paul and I had not interfered. Taking off the enormous saddle, we all joined above and below, and hoisted and pushed him up almost bodily.

It was nearly dark when we reached the top of the mountain, and I sat down for a moment to take a last look at the Dead Sea. From this distance its aspect fully justified its name. It was calm, motionless, and seemingly dead; there was no wave or.ripple on its surface, nor was it hurrying on, like other waters, to pay its tribute to the ocean; the mountains around it were also dead; no trees or shrubs, not a blade of grass grew on their naked sides; and, as in the days of Moses, "Brimstone and salt, it is not sown, nor beareth, nor any grass groweth thereon." One thing had especially attracted my attention in ascending the mountain; on attaining a particular point, we had a clear view of the whole sea, and at the extreme end we saw distinctly what Paul and I both at once called an island. M. Seetzen, one of the earliest modern travellers who visited this sea:, imagined that he had discovered a large island in the same direction; and though no one believed in its reality, I had then seen no satisfactory explanation of the appearance. I could not be deceived in what I saw. There never was anything that looked more like an island, and I afterward received an explanation which to me at least was perfectly satisfactory. It comes from one who ought to know, from the only man who ever made the tour of that sea, and lived to tell of it ; and, relying upon the interesting nature of the subject, I make no apology for introducing it here.

When the unhappy Costigan was found by the Arabs on the shore of the Dead Sea, the spirit of the enterprising Irishman was fast fleeting away. He lived two days after he was carried to the convent at Jerusalem, but he never once referred to his unhappy voyage. He had long been a traveller in the East, and long preparing for this voyage; had read every book that treated of the mysterious water, and was thoroughly prepared with all the knowledge necessary for exploring it to advantage. Unfortunately for the interests of science, he had always been in the habit of trusting greatly to his memory; and, after his death, the missionaries in Jerusalem found no regular diary or journal, but merely brief notes written on the margins of books, so irregular and confused that they could make nothing of them; and, either from indifference, or because they had no confidence in him, they allowed Costigan's servant to go without asking him any questions. I took some pains to trace out this man; and afterward, while lying at Beyroot, suffering from a malady which abruptly put an end to my travels in the East, Paul hunted him out and brought him to me. He was a little, dried-up Maltese sailor; had rowed around that sea without knowing why, except that he was paid for it; and, what he told me bore the stamp of truth, for he did not seem to think that he had done anything extraordinary. .He knew as little about it as any man could know who had been over the same water; and yet, after all, perhaps he knew as much as any one else could learn. He seemed, however, to have observed the coast and the soundings with the eye of a sailor, and I got him to make.me a map, which has been engraved for this work, and on which I marked down the particulars as I received them from his lips. The reader will see by it that they had completed the whole tour of the lake. They were eight days in accomplishing the task, sleeping every night on shore except once, when, afraid of some suspicious Arabs whom they saw on the mountains, they slept on board, beyond the reach of gunshot from the land. He told me that they had moved in a zigzag direction, crossing and recrossing the lake several times; that every day they sounded, frequently with a line of one hundred and seventy-five brachia (about six feet each); that they found the bottom rocky and of very unequal depth, sometimes ranging thirty, forty, eighty, twenty brachia all within a few boats' length;* that sometimes the lead brought up sand, like that of the mountains on each side; that they failed in finding bottom but once, and in that place there were large bubbles all around for thirty paces, rising probably from a spring; that in one place they found on the bank a hot sulphur spring; that at the southern extremity Mr. Costigan looked for the River of Dogs, but did not find it; that. in four different places they found ruins, and could clearly distinguish large hewn stones, which seemed to have been used for buildings; and in one place they saw ruins which Mr. Costigan said were the ruins of Gomorrah. Now I have no doubt that Mr. Costigan talked with him as they went along, and told him what he told me; and, that Mr. Costigan had persuaded himself that he did see the ruins of the guilty city; he may have been deceived, and probably was; but it must have been the most intensely interesting illusion that ever any man had. But of the island, or what Paul and I had imagined to be such:-He said that they too had noticed it particularly; and when they came towards the southern extremity of the lake, found that it was an optical deception, caused by a tongue of high land, that put out for a long distance from the middle of the southern extremity, as in the map; and being much higher than the valley beyond it, intercepted the view in the manner we had both noticed; this tongue of land, he said, was composed of solid salt, tending to confirm the assertion of Strabo, to which I referred in my journey through Idumea, that in the great valley south of the Dead Sea there were formerly large cities built entirely of salt. The reader will take this for what it is worth; it is at least new, and it comes from the only man living who has explored the lake.

He told me some other particulars; that the boat, when empty, floated a palm higher out of the water than on the Mediterranean; and that Costigan lay on the water, and picked a fowl, and tried to induce him to come in; that it was in the month of July, and from nine to five dreadfully hot, and every night a north wind blew, and the waves were worse than in the Gulf of Lyons; and, in reference to their peculiar exposures, and the circumstances that hurried poor Costigan to his unhappy fate, he said that they had suffered exceedingly from the heat, the first five days Costigan taking his turn at the oars; that on the sixth day their water was exhausted, and Costigan gave out; that on the seventh day they were obliged to drink the water of the sea, and on the eighth they were near the head of the lake, and he himself exhausted, and unable any longer to pull an oar. There he made coffee from the water of the sea; and a favourable wind springing up, for the first time they hoisted their sail, and in a few hours reached the head of the lake; that, feeble as he was, he set off for Jericho, and, in the mean time, the unhappy Costigan was found by the Arabs on the shore a dying man, and, by the intercession of the old woman, carried to Jericho. I ought to add, that the next time he came to me, like Goose Gibbie, he had tried whether the money I gave him was good, and recollected a great many things lie had forgotten before.

The reader cannot feel the same interest in that sea which I did, and therefore I will not detain him longer. In three hours, crossing a rich and fertile country, where flowers were blooming, and Arab shepherds were pasturing their flocks of sheep and goats, we had descended the bed of a ravine, where the Kedron passes from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea, at the foot of the mountains of Santa Saba. It was night when we arrived; and, groping our way by the uncertain light of the moon, we arrived at the door of the convent, a lofty and gigantic structure, rising in stories or terraces, one above the other, against the sides of the mountain, to its very top; and then crowned with turrets that, from the base where I stood, seemed, like the tower at which the wickedness of man was confounded, striving to reach to heaven.

We "knocked, and it was opened to us;" ascended two or three flights of steps, climbed up a ladder, crawled through a small door, only large enough to admit one at a time, and found ourselves in an antechamber, surrounded by more than a hundred Greek pilgrims. A monk conducted us up two or three flights of steps to the chamber of the superior, where we took coffee. In a few moments we followed him again up two or three more flights of steps to a neat little room, with a divan and a large pile of coverlets. I thought of the bush in which I had lodged the night before, spread out a few of the coverlets, crawled in among them, and in a few moments the Dead Sea, and the Holy Land, and every other land and sea were nothing to me.