should call cockney gardens, if we saw them
at Brixton, is the result. We heard dismal
stories of the fate of the misguided people
who had built them, and their general air of
desolation and premature decay made all
credible. " The Sun Fire Office, London,"
on a metal plate over the front door of
the hotel, looked strangely familiar, as did
the cuttings from the Illustrated News
which ornamented some of its walls; and
when we mounted to its flat roof to view
the adjacent country, and strain our eyes
in the direction of Jerusalem, it was with
a smile at the incongruities attending our
early experiences of the Holy Land. The
house of Simon the Tanner is pointed out
in the town, but whatever may be the
truth as to the site, the building itself is
palpably modern, and we were content with
a cursory inspection. We talked of the
sieges of Jaffa, its importance in the time
of the Crusades, the frequent shelling it
has experienced, and the singular
inefficiency of its defences. But we were eager
to be off. We should return by way of
Jaffa, our time in the Holy Land was
limited, and we longed to set eyes on
Jerusalem with the least possible delay.
The horses brought us by Alee Sulyman,
our dragoman, were not very promising,
and George, who is a man of great equine
knowledge, insisted on his steed being
changed before we had gone many
hundred yards. Then our little cavalcade got
fairly to work, and we were soon on our
way, and slept that night at the Convent of
Ramleh, half way between Jaffa and Jerusalem.
Mahomedan tombs on the roadside,
Mahomedan figures bowed in prayer, or
stalking gravely on, a noisy crew of Arab
merchants chaffering in the rude open
market-place, and beggars clamouring for
backsheesh, were all passed in the
outskirts of the town. Miss Martineau and
the Dean of Westminster, as well as other
travellers, have remarked on the striking
similarity between many of the natural
features of Palestine and certain portions
of England, and Derbyshire and
Westmoreland were constantly before us as we
went up to Jerusalem.

We were now on the high road to the
Holy City, and were riding through a
cultivated plain. The fields were irregular,
and their divisions untidy; the husbandmen
were in rags, and the cattle starved
and poor; but the general features of the
landscape, its stoniness, and the surrounding
masses of purple hills, all reminded
us of the stone-moors at home. The very
atmosphere was like a taste of England,
after the baking air of Egypt. The sky was
black and lowering, and a bleak and biting
wind swept down from the mountains,
bringing rain with it, the first we had felt
or seen for many weeks. The road was
in excellent order, quite up to the average
of provincial highways in England, for the
recent visit of the Emperor of Austria and
the Crown Prince of Prussia to Jerusalem
had put the Turkish governor of Palestine
on his mettle, and forced labour and cruelly
heavy taxation had enabled him to repair
this road a few weeks before our visit.
At Ramleh we were received hospitably
by the good fathers, and had a dinner and
wine served us of a quality which made us
believe fully in the sternness of conventual
discipline. It was when we were
contemplating our quarters for the night
—also of a strictly penitential character, and
consisting of close and stuffy cells of limited
proportions, holding three and two beds
respectively —that we made the acquaintance
of an Irish father, who, after conversing
with the sheik in French, German, and
Italian, put the question plainly, " were
we English?" I shall not readily forget
the richness of the brogue in which he
retorted, " So om oi! don't I come from
Dublin?"

Ramleh, which the Mahomedans insist
is the Rama of Samuel, a tradition for
which there is no satisfactory evidence, is
a miserable spot. Seen from a distance its
domes and edifices are imposing, and the
stranger imagines he has before him a
prosperous and important city. But the
mirage of the desert is not more illusory
than this first view. There are three
convents and a couple of mosques in tolerable
preservation, but the rest of the town is a
mass of ruins which have once been houses,
and of houses which are on the verge of
becoming ruins. Save that it is a
convenient resting-place between Jaffa and
Jerusalem, it would receive but scant
attention from wayfarers; but as it is, most
travellers of the class who prefer to sleep
beneath a roof so time their journey as to
stay there the night.

Leaving Jaffa about two in the afternoon,
we had spent rather more than three hours
on the road; leaving Ramleh at six the
next morning we passed under the Damascus
Gate of the Holy City soon after two
in the afternoon. The road continued in
excellent condition all the way, but it wound
along the sides of, and eventually crossed,
the mountain ridges which hid Jerusalem