at the Ford from Galilee, on its way up to Jerusalem for the Passover: with it, apparently, the Virgin-mother, the holy women, and many of those disciples in whose presence it was right that he should suffer death; so that many witnesses who knew him in the flesh could testify his return to life. With them he crossed the Jordan for the last time; marching over the burning plain and under the branching dates to Jericho at the mountain base. This Jericho of to-day-a hedge of briers, a dozen round huts, two copious springs, a beck of water, a square stone pound, a patch of swamp, a ruined aqueduct, a mound of earth in which may lie column and statue, a handful of men, neither Jews nor Arabs, but a peculiar people, small in size, moonfaced, blue in tint, tatooed, and women who are soft and winsome, like the Egyptian almeh in style and figure is not the Jericho into which Jesus marched with the Galilee caravan.

Jericho was a City of Palaces, smothered in balsams and scented shrubs. Cleopatra loved it. Herod the Great lived in it and died in it. Its towers, its gates, and theatres might have won the prize from Cæsarea and Ptolemais. Gardens of oranges, dates, and pomegranates extended from its ramparts on every side; a circus stood beyond the wall; a college flourished within; a town adding the charms of a Nilotic climate to the artistic beauties only to be derived from Greece. This shining city was no fit home, not even for a night, of poor Galilean boatmen, carpenters and potters; men who drove their own asses, baked their own bread, drew their

own water, and either carried their own tents or slept on the bare ground. So the caravan of pilgrims marched through the city, in by one gate, out by another; the women seated on asses, the men and lads trudging beside them, bearing sprigs of myrtle and fronds of palm; the whole company singing hosanna as they wound their way past the portico of Herod and the temple of Zeus. In the western suburb of this royal city they encamped.

JESUS passed through the streets with this caravan: not staying in the Greek city; but on its skirt, in the house of Zacchæus, whom he called from the sycamore-tree.

Zaccheus was a member of a class, Jewish by birth, Roman by adoption, whom their countrymen called sinners; that is to say, not men who were leading an immoral life, but who openly discarded the precepts of their Oral Law. Like St. Matthew, he was a tax-man, a servant of the State, having dealings with the Gentiles, which rendered him ceremonially unclean. JESUS called him from the tree; spoke softly to him; went home with him to be his guest; circumstances over which some of the multitude mourned and murmured, saying, he had gone to lodge in a house that was defiled. As yet, they could not see how much of their Oral Law, with its fancies and traditions, had been swept away. Even among the Twelve, strange doubts appeared to remain; for when JESUS told them his hour was nigh, they imagined that he was at length going up to Jerusalem to assume his earthly crown, and they began quarrelling among themselves as to which of

them should sit on his right hand, which on his left. Again, he had to rebuke their pride; again he had to tell them that in his kingdom the highest office was that of being the servant of all.

Next day, being Thursday, the caravan moved up the wild and steep ascent of the wilderness; first climbing up the Wady Kelt, along a Roman road; then rounding the shoulders of stony hills, here and there speckled with grass and shrubs; toiling up, higher and higher, through desolate glens, in which the bandit and the panther lurked, until sundown brought them to the desert khan the Good Sama

ritan's inn. Early next day on foot, the caravan would reach Bethany about the hour of noon; and there, in the house of Martha and Mary, among the outcast and the poor of Israel, Jesus took up his abode for the Holy Week.

CHAPTER XXIII.

Gathering for the Feast.

COMING into Bethany, the nearest point of the great road to Galileans' hill, the caravan would break up, the company dispersing to the south and north; some seeking for houses in which they could lodge; others fixing upon the ground where they meant to encamp. Those marched round Olivet to the south, following the great road, crossing the Cedron by a bridge, and entering the Holy City by the Sheep gate, near Antonia; these mounted by the short path to the top of Olivet, glancing at the flowers and herbage, and plucking twigs and branches as they climbed. Some families, having brought their tents with them from Galilee could at once proceed to stake the ground; but the multitude were content with the booths called Succoth, built in the same rude style as those in which their father Israel dwelt.

Four stakes being cut and driven into the soil, long reeds were drawn, one by one, round and through them; these reeds, being in turn crossed and closed with leaves, made a small green bower, open on one side only; yielding the women a rude sort of privacy, and covering the young ones with a frail defence from both noontide heat and midnight dew. The people had much to do, and very little

time in which it could be done. At sundown, when the shofa sounded, Sabbath would begin; then every hand must cease its labour, even though the tents were unpitched, the booths unbuilt, the children exposed, the skies darkening into storm. Consequently, the poles must be cut, the leaves and branches gathered, the tents fixed, the water fetched from the wells, the bread baked, the cattle penned, the beds unpacked and spread, the supper of herbs and olives cooked, before the shofa sounded from the Temple wall. But every one helped. While the men drove stakes into the ground and propped them with stones, the women wove them together with twigs and leaves, the girls ran off to the springs for water, the lads put up the camels and led out the sheep to graze. In two or three hours, a new city had sprung up on the Galileans' hill; a city of booths and tents; more noisy, perhaps more populous, than even the turbulent city within the walls.

This Galileans' hill made only one field in a great landscape of booths and tents. All Jewry had sent up her children to the feast; and each province arrayed its members on a particular site. The men of Sharon swarmed over Mount Gibeon, the men of Hebron occupied the Plain of Rephaim. From Pilate's roof on Mount Zion, the lines and groups of this vast encampment could be followed by an observer's eye down the valley of Gihon, peeping from among the fruit-trees about Siloam, dotting the long plain of Rephaim, trespassing even on the Mount of Offence, and darkening the grand masses of hill from Olivet towards Mizpeh. All