man Monsieur Dextre, and his will be Monsieur
Sinistre; announce your one-legged man as
Signor Hoppito, and his will be blazing over
the town as Signer Skippito.

The duffer is the shadow that follows success.
When you walk in the sun of prosperity, he never
leaves your heels.

IDYLS OF THE HOLY LAND.

ALTHOUGH the wave of civilisation tends
always to the West, the tide of men's thoughts
and fancies turns ever back to the East; and
whether it is Greece or Palestine, India or Cathay, in
the "morning land" has always lain our hopes,
our poetry, our Olympus, and our Eden. Half
historical half mythical traditions spring up
round the roots of each faith professed by men;
and the mystic Merù which every creed owns
as its central point, whatever the distinguishing
name and varying locality, is sure to be the
seed-bed of all the most glowing fables and
sweetest poems belonging to the faith. The
well where Jacob met Rachel and kissed her, is
rendered holy in a graver sense, by the words
which one we are taught to adore spoke to the
Samaritan woman on its brink.

The latest work on the Holy Land, by Mr.
Hepworth Dixon, takes us by this sentiment of
realistic holiness, so to speak; and shows us
the sacred places, not so much as they are at
this day, nor with merely mystical enthusiasm
concerning them in the past, but as they were
in their human and actual conditions in the
times when Ruth loved and Mary prayed, when
David sinned and sorrowed, and JESUS wrought
and suffered. His book is a collection of the
idyls of the Holy Land—of idyls ever young
and ever precious.

Bethlehem—the City of David, the "Place
of Fruit," according to the meaning of its
ancient name Ephrath—means the "House of
Bread." Here Rachel, the typical mother of
Israel, died and was buried, and "Jacob set
a pillar on her grave. The tale is so ancient
that it carries you back to a time, when, as
yet, the Hebrews were not, and Bethlehem
was not. The green ridge of hill, with its
avenues of oak, its gardens of grapes and olives,
was then in possession of the Canaanites, in
whose idiom it was called Ephrath, the Place
of Fruit. The Jebusites held the neighbouring
rock of Zion; and sheikhs from beyond Jordan
pitched their black tents around its springs,
and lodged their cattle in its caves. Jacob,
one of these sheikhs, a man who had been
dwelling in the Hauran, the country of his
uncle Laban, where he had been serving four-
teen years for his two wives, Leah and Rachel,
was journeying along this stony track from
Bethel, he and his wives and their little ones,
his man-servants and maid-servants, a great
host, with a train of camels, a herd of ewes and
rams, a flock of steers and milch kine, and
multitudes of goats. The sheikh was going up to
Hebron, where Isaac, his father, dwelt. But
Rachel, his younger and more beloved wife,
then great with child for the second time,
fainted by the way. The death of Rachel, the
dearly loved wife, and the birth of her son
Benoni, lent an abiding poetry to Bethlehem;
consecrating its soil to the royal line; and her
burial on the green ridge, in the shade of fig-trees
and olives, making the spot holy for ever in the
eyes of all her race." This is the first idyl
connected with Bethlehem, and if not as sacred
in our eyes as in the eyes of the Jewish nation,
it is at least as beautiful, while leading up to
what we regard as the more perfect fulfilment
of the divine drama enacted in Judæa.

The second idyl is that of Ruth. Seasons of
drought, by no means rare, bring uncounted
miseries to the country round about Bethlehem.
Standing on the borders of the desert, its springs,
are few, though their waters are pure and sweet.
One year of drought will dry up the wells
and wither the herbage from the roots; and
four or five seasons of scanty rain suffice to
create a famine. It was such a time of drought
that sent Abraham from Bethel down into
Egypt; that drove Isaac into the plains of
Gerar; that made the ten sons of Jacob go
ask for aid from the brother they had sold into
bondage; and that now, in the days of the
Judges, in the generation of Boaz, the son of
Salmon, forced Elimelech, the Bethlehemite and
a kinsman of Boaz, to seek for bread in the
abounding fields of Moab, the mountains of
which country he could see from his house-top.
So, taking with him Naomi, his wife, and his
two sons, Mahlon and Chilion, he passed out
from Ephrath and through the wilderness to
Moab, beyond the Dead Sea. And he dwelt
there until he died. Mahlon and Chilion also
died, after having taken to them as wives two
women of the country, Orpah and Ruth; and
then Naomi, having heard that the Lord had
visited his people in giving them bread once
more, arose with her daughters-in-law that she
might return from the country of Moab. Orpah,
the widow of Chilion, kissed her, wept, and
went back to her old house; but Ruth, the
widow of Mahlon, clave to her, and would not
leave her, saying those sweet words which have
passed into a very proverb of loving constancy
enduring for all time: "Intreat me not to leave
thee, or to return from following after thee: for
whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou
lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my
people, and thy God my God."   "And so," says
Mr. Dixon, "in the early spring-days, when even
the desert hills are alive with the green of herbs
and shrubs, the two women who were to renew
the blood of Judah, and in whose posterity the
whole earth was to be one day blessed, came up
from Moab, through the ways of the wilderness,
to a city which knew them not." By the law of
Moses, Ruth could have claimed that her
husband's next of kin should have taken her for his
wife; but she would not claim this her right,
trusting rather to herself and to God's good
grace for protection and support. When the
barley harvest came she went into the fields of