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YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

THE LIBRARY OF THE
DIVINITY SCHOOL

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A LEAVE OE ABSENCE
AND OTHER LEAVES

A LEAYE OF ABSENCE
AND OTHER LEAYE8
BY
JOHN CALVIN GODDARD

PRIVATELY PRINTED
SALISBURY, CONNECTICUT
M C M I

coptrigbt, 1901
By John Calvin Goddakd

DEDICATED TO

MISS MAEY ELDEIDGE

OF NOEFOLK, CONNECTICUT

IN GEATEFUL
EEMEMBEANCE

' I am a part of all that I have met.''
— Tennyson, " Ulysses.

CONTENTS

PAGE

I The Look before you Leap . . 1
II The Log  5
III The Rail  14
IV Naples  24
V The Mediterranean . . . . 30
VI Egypt  36
VII Cairo  42
VIII Jaffa  62
IX Jerusalem  68
X Carmel  78
XI Nazareth  86
XII The Sea of Galilee .... 91
XIII Farewell to Holy Land . . 99
XIV My Farthest East .... 103
XV Asia Minor  115
XVI Constantinople  120
XVII The Isles of Greece .... 136
XVIII Italy  150
XIX Rome  155

IX

XX Florence and Milan .

PAGE
162

XXI Travelling across Europe .

169

XXII Paris the Gay and the Fair .

174

XXIII England 

187

XXIV Cathedrals and Universities .

193

XXV English Sights and Insights .

200

XXVI The Home of Shakespeare

204

XXVII Homeward Bound . . .

209

THE LOOK BEFORE YOU LEAP
BEFORE plunging into this ministerial vol
ume, the reader is cautioned against mis
taking it for a book of theological doctrine.
On the contrary, there is far too little of anything
improving in it! Prior to grappling with this jour
ney, the minister took off his coat (that Old
Grimes-like coat, " all buttoned down before "),
broke away from his white and other ties, and en
deavored to pass as the average man without any
adventitious aid from " the cloth." This does not
mean, necessarily, that he fell from grace, that he
did in Rome as the reamers do, nor that he disap
pointed the devout parishioner of his, who peti
tioned in prayer meeting that " our pastor might
not lose his religion while absent from us." It
means merely that he used his eyes and ears chiefly
as a man, not as a minister, so that this book is not
to be suspected of homilies in disguise, nor is it
1

A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
written to be put under the pillow with Thomas a
Kempis. On the other hand, it does not aspire to be a guide
book, interfering with the sale of Basdeker, nor
does it contain " footprints that, perhaps, another "
might use in the amiable but impossible way sug
gested by Mr. Longfellow, licensed poet. No, it is
simply a book of observations, such as any Connecti
cut Yankee might make in King Arthur's and other
courts, originally written without thought of print
er's glory, but as a matter of epistolary interest to
friends at home. Hence, it contains not so much in
formation as observation, ranging over a small field
of fact and a wide one of comment, taken from the
point of view of one whose angle of incidents is
confessedly smaller than his angle of reflection.
They that go down to the sea in ships generally
do so at their own risk and equally at their own ex
pense. Even Jonah, we learn, " paid the fare there
of " without any mention of " clerical discount,"
which is the only thing related to his credit on the
entire voyage. But the maker of this pilgrimage
had not even that to his credit! Another hand than
his signed the warrant, and all he had to do was to
write on the back of it, after the manner of that
simple-minded parson in his first banking experi
ence, " I heartily endorse this check." His Church
and Society generously gave him leave of absence,
and a group of friends supplied " the supply." A

AND OTHEE LEAVES
telephone was put in and cablegrams were sent out,
to say nothing of countless messages that reached
him by wireless telegraphy. A certain friend insured
his life against accident, all unbeknown to the travel
ler, rating his age six years too low, and his weight
six pounds too high, so that the one error off-set the
other; and between that policy and Providence, he
escaped the small-pox, pneumonia, and broken
bones that carried off fourteen of the party imme
diately in advance of his. He was wonderfully fa
vored in weather also, so that an umbrella purchased
in Messina was never raised, another bought in
Naples was used once, and all this in face of the fact
that the party joining his at Athens had seventeen
successive days of rain in " Sunny Italy." Other
gifts and favors there were, not particularized here,
but all indelibly printed on the memory. His ca
reer abroad was ably administered by The Bureau
of University Travel, of Ithaca, N. Y., and much
of his enjoyment, especially in art and history, was
due to their scholarly and devoted representatives.
Finally, while it may be seen that the leaves con
tributing to this book have been gathered from
Church Records and traveller's note-books, yet not
the least contribution to its being was a certain gen
erous " leave to print," vtdthout which it might
have been bom to blush unseen among the foliage
of foreign correspondence.
With this fair understanding had in advance, the

A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
reader is invited to follow the narrator in his jour
ney, cutting a swath through three continents, four
teen thousand miles long, and a foot and a half wide,
" which is the measure of a man."

n
THE LOG
THE log of this good ship, the St. Louis, flying
the American flag, begins with clearing the
dock at 10 A. M. sharp, Wednesday, Feb
ruary 21, 1900 A. D., in which function we are as
sisted by a large detachment of Greater New York.
" Eyes, look your last ! Arms, take your last em
brace ! " That is what the bugle said, and every
body not bound for Europe goes down the gang
plank. " All ready to cast off? " " Aye, aye, sir! "
" Hold there ! " Here comes the inevitable wo
man, with three children in her wake, having big
box, little box, band-box, and bundle, puffing, pant
ing, scurrying aboard — the very last! Then we
start for England, stern first: swing out into the
North River, leaving a pier full of people waving
the white flag of peace.
Everybody now seeks the steward who sorts the
mail, for in one hour the pilot will leave the vessel.

A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
and with him goes the last chance to acknowledge
" steamer letters." The G box is full and imme
diately he deals me out a full hand. A slip of the
pen? Not at all, my friend. A " full hand," is as
old as the hills, forsooth the seven hills of Rome.
Virgil in his finest passage begins with
"Mcmibus date KUaplenis."
So VTith a full hand, I repeat, he fills my own.
There are twenty-two letters, four telegrams, and a
receipt that calls for a basket of fruit and a box
of " goodies." My feelings are those of Naomi, who
said, " I went out full."
After steamer letters, the next proper thing is to
scan the passenger list. Byron observed that fame
consists in getting killed in battle and having your
name spelled wrong in the newspapers. A part of
this truth applies to all lists of printed names; they
are usually possessed of the printer's devil. It was
so with this one, and the writer's friends, if they had
recognized the reference, might have thought that
he was fleeing the country under an alias. With
us are numbered a hundred and fifty ground and
lofty tumblers, rough riders, gymnasts, contortion
ists, snake-charmers, and other performers, going
over to join " The Greatest Show on Earth." These
are kept in a cage by themselves, and do not eat at
the first table. But they will not be lonesome. The

AND OTHEE LEAVES
Atlantic will develop other tumblers and contor
tionists before the voyage is over.
We steam past the Statue of Liberty, past Sandy
Hook and Scotland Lightship. Down there to the
right is the Jersey coast. The historian vsdll tell us
that the companion to this ship, the St. Paul, once
tried to run down the coast of New Jersey, being
nineteen miles out of her reckoning. But New Jer
sey always was stubborn, as Lord Howe discovered
as far back as Washington's time, and inconsider
ately refused to get out of the way. So the good
ship hung on a sand-bar for six days and nights,
praying for a high tide, and not knowing the while
whether she was bom to be hung or to be drowned.
But, as on another critical occasion, " the Lord sent
a strong east wind aU that night," and by means of
it the big vessel finally backed off into deep water.
Moral: Beware the bar, whether it be off Barnegat,
or nigh a Raines hotel.
And now the pilot clambers down the side of the
vessel into his little yawl, the last link is broken that
binds us to America, and we are on the high seas.
The next morning, the Birthday of the Father of
his Country, is greeted with a wet sail and a flowing
sea. Only one man at my table for breakfast, and
he ate abstemiously. (If I were the Autocrat of
the Breakfast Table, I would remark on that last
word, as containing all the vowels of the English

A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
language, and in their order. Beware of it, not so
much of the word, as of the idea of the word. Use
the idea sparingly, and its companion in danger,
" facetiously.") The deck presents much pictu
resque scenery, and all of it entirely visible to the
naked eye. Good place to study human nature. All
of a man's characteristics come out at sea, also other
things. One passenger, a horseman, had drawn a
position close to the rail. He explained that it was a
favorite place with jockeys. Another man was dis
covered, looking as if he wanted something. Be
ing asked what he wanted, he rephed, " The earth."
There was a commercial traveller, too, with a very
accommodating spirit; he seemed willing to throw
off ten per cent. The writer of the cvii Psalm
had been to sea. His language is, " They reel to
and fro, and stagger like a drunken man, and are
at their wits' end."
But not everybody was at their wits' end. Some
people had their wits very much about them, and
made up a pool on the day's run. The greenhorns
and land lubbers were all " at sea," in their calcu
lation, forgetting that the day from noon to noon,
going easterly, is nearly forty minutes short of
twenty-four hours, and any calculation based on
the last westward run of the vessel would be about
eighty minutes astray. Now the last posted day's
run of the vessel was in the 470s. So the bidding
started at 440, and every number from that up to
8

AND OTHEE LEAVES
459 was sold. The auctioneer looked hard at the
writer, when bidding was active, as though I were
a sporting character, but I fooled him! I confess to
many faults, but am not
One of those who do not know beans,
And are easily told what they tell the marines.
There was a shrewd man in the far comer, who
quietly waited until the money was all in the pool,
and the choice of " high or low field " was auctioned
off. He paid high for the choice, £14, and, to
everybody's surprise, chose " low field." But he
knew his ground, or rather his water, and, when
the run turned out to be 436 knots, he took in £26,-
14s, 6d, and twenty-four passengers besides.
The next day we ran into a hard easterly blow.
There is much tintinnabulation of the bell. The
one case that Edgar Allan Poe did not account for
in his runic rhyme was that of the stewardess' bell.
It rings importunately, impatiently, imperiously,
impiously, and several other ways beginning with
imp. Under the circumstances, I could but think
of those feeling lines in Scott,
0 woman, in our hours of ease
Uncertain, coy, and hard to please,
And variable as the shade —
But man, when he is ill at sea.
And thou art looking for a fee,
Can count on thee, my maid.
9

A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
The ship has a fine library, uniformly bound in
red leather, presented by the citizens of St. Louis.
It looks paradoxical, however, to see the name of the
steamer and her address printed on books and life
boats as " St. Louis, N. Y." We usually write it
" St. Louis, Mo." A fine pipe-organ is also on
board, and music is enjoyed every night from nine
until ten.
It is noteworthy how much motion there is to so
large a vessel, whose length is put down at 554 feet.
They have rigged ropes on the stairways to assist
people up and down in their zigzag journeys. The
tables have metal fences to enable passengers " to
have and to hold " the dishes thereof, while the
caraffe is held in place by a ring and clamp. Sea
men distinguish two kinds of motion, the first a
" teeter board " action, in which the bow and stern
alternately rise and fall, this is called " pitching."
The other motion is at cross purposes with the first,
a pendulum action from side to side, and is called
" rolling." The former is durable, the latter is un
endurable. A school of porpoises were seen this morning,
playing leap-frog with the waves, and apparently
racing with the boat. They would leap out of the
water as gracefully as a fawn over a fern, and
plunge into a breaker, only to leap out of it again
into the next one. It was a cheerful and exhilarat
ing sight, bringing a smile to all the " Palefaces."
10

AND OTHEE LEAVES
Divine service was held in the cabin on Sunday.
The Episcopal prayer-book was used, and service
was read by a rector from Massachusetts. The
organ was a great support, and the singing, which
was hearty, was largely reinforced by a choir of
table stewards. No sermon was preached, but all
seemed to enjoy the worship of God in that unac
customed sanctuary. " The sea is His, and He made
it." At last the sun ! The invalids come out of their
hiding places, thank God, and take courage.
Sighted the " British King " off the starboard bow,
though whether it refers to His Majesty William
IV, deceased, or to Edward VII to be, does not ap
pear. Shuffle-board and ring-toss are " on deck,"
literally and figuratively. Mild romances in prog
ress also, cases where spectators see most of the
game. Matches, they say, are made in heaven;
occasionally also they are made at the level of the
sea. An American manufacturer, from Illinois, fell
into conversation with me. He stated that he sold
goods all over Europe and was accustomed to travel '
from Norway to Greece. Contrary to my supposi
tion, he claimed that American machinery had a
solid reputation in Europe for good wearing quality
and for not easily getting out of order. Asking him
how it was that we were able to compete with Eu
ropean cheap labor, he replied that a German manu-
11

A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
facturer had recently asked him that very question,
and he had returned the following answer : " It is
by virtue of machinery that we do it. Your great
vessel. Kaiser Wilhelm der Orosse, has a capacity
of 30,000 horse-power. That is, the vessel requires
the equivalent of a hundred and fifty thousand men
to run it ten hours, a man's day. It would take
150,000 more to run it ten hours longer, and 60,000
more to make up the remaining four hours of the
twenty-four. Total, 360,000 men to run the
Kaiser froin noon to noon. Now your great Ger
man army, great it is, could not supply men enough
to run two such vessels a year. Machinery does it
readily. Americans lack men, but they more than
make up for it in machines." Moreover, my friend
continued to me, " American operatives have what
I call ' machine sense.' The understanding of ma
chinery is second nature to them. A German will
' man ' a loom with a girl. But in America I have
seen one girl keep five such machines running, and
with no more effort." I thought it a striking fact
and illustration.
The last night out we had what the printed pro
gramme called A GRAND CONCERT in the
cabin. (Every steamer now carries a printing
press.) The programme included organ, comet, and
mandolin solos, recitations, songs, and a fancy
dance by a little miss, who might better have been
12

AND OTHEE LEAVES
abed at her tender age. The United States Commis
sioner, in charge of the American Exhibit at the
Paris Exposition, was the Chairman, and made a
felicitous speech on what he termed " The World's
Peace Contest." The concert was in aid of the
widows and orphans of sailors and disabled seamen.
It closed with a verse each from " God Save the
Queen," and " My Country 'tis of Thee." It does
an American good to hear all those Parthians,
Modes, Elamites, and dwellers in Mesopotamia, who
have not a drop of New England blood in their
veins, sing " Land where my fathers died,
Land of the Pilgrims' pride,"
in a roar loud enough to drown the engine !
Land ho! Sighted the Scilly Islands at four
o'clock and threw up our hats! Everybody busy
now in vsrriting cablegrams, telegrams, letters and
postals. Money is being changed and baggage is
being checked. Stewards go about in a receptive
mood, and the tip comes to the top. From New
England to Old England is but a span on the map,
but between the two is a great gulf fixed. May I
be found in due season on the right side of it !

in
THE RAIL
AFTER the log the rail; after the cabin the
cab; after three thousand miles of sea came
fifteen hundred of land. To be exact,
from Southampton, England, to Naples via Lon
don, with the exception of twenty-three miles across
the Channel, stretches an iron " line," (they never
say track or road over there), of fifteen hundred and
forty miles. This I did in fifty-two hours of con
tinuous travel. Every moment of that journey I
was in suspense lest I should not catch the steamer
out of Naples. The steamer, however, was caught
and four days extra with it. I am reminded of the
man who came flying down the dock, shouting
all the way, " Hold on ! " did not wait for the gang
plank, but cleared the twelve feet of water with a
spring, saying as he landed on the deck, " Well, I
made it! " " Yes, you did make it," said the cap
tain; " but this boat is not going out, it is just com-
14

AND OTHEE LEAVES
ing in." It was with a like margin I " made it " at
Naples. On landing at Southampton, we were so glad,
as the man said, " to get once more on vice versa,"
that we left the vessel with a cheer. Xenophon's
army shouted, when they sighted the sea, and cried,
" Thalatta ! thalatta ! " Ours was the same im
pulse, only it was the " reverse current." We ran
the gauntlet of the custom-house, a mere form, and
were soon among the hills and dales of England.
" What a well-groomed country it is ! " says Dr.
Holmes in his " Hundred Days." Everything agri
cultural is as true and regular as the lines of a fort.
The furrows look as if they had been run by a theod
olite; the hedges are as well clipped as a French
man's beard. Every fleld is as clean of weeds as
Broadway. The very roads are swept and garnished,
and " the lion on your old stone gates " looks as if
he had been wiped daily with a chamois skin.
It was a brilliant day in London when I passed
through. The sun actually shone, and everybody
was in good humor over the news from Africa, for
Cronje had just surrendered. The Houses of Parlia
ment, the Monument, the great hotels and parks,
all smiled their best. Big Englishmen walked
along, looking as if they could down the world, all
brawn, brains, and backbone. The last frequently
begins where the brains leave off, so that many an
15

A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
Englishman has little or no neck, his coat collar
making close connection with his hat.
I crossed " town " as quickly as possible, to catch
a train out of Charing Cross, and soon we were
whirling through the green fields of Kent, famous,
as Mr. Jingle tells us, for " apples, cherries, hops
and women." It is known, also, as the garden of
England. Although it is too early for flowers, the
grain is up and the grass shows finely. Oh those
English lawns! " How do you ever produce such
velvety grass? " asked an American. " Cut it
twice a week for three hundred years," was the re
ply. At Dover we strike the sea and with it the most
historic shores of England. It was here that the
mariner, weedy and long, told the yarn of the Nancy
Bell. A little to the west of us the battle of Hast
ings was fought, and England became Norman-
dized. In this same county Augustin, the monk,
landed twelve centuries ago, and began the work of
foreign missions in England, an enterprize that has
made both England and America the nations they
are. Hereabouts, too, landed Julius Caesar, six cen
turies earlier still, the bold islanders wading out into
the sea to meet him.
The English Channel is not wide, it is not deep,
but it will do. It does do a great many of the nobil
ity and gentry of these parts. The Channel is only
twenty-three miles wide at Dover, and although the
16

AND OTHEE LEAVES
monopoly line at this crossing charges three-dollars
more for the privilege of going the shorter distance,
they get the bulk of the business. One soon dis
covers the reason! Such abject misery as most
travellers display, for one hour and twenty minutes
by the clock! This accounts for the periodic agita
tion of the project to tunnel the Channel. It is en
tirely feasible, but it has been voted down in Parlia
ment, year after year, partly out of vague fear of
Europe's stealing a submarine march on them some
night, as Cyrus did on Babylon, and partly out of
sentiment, lest it vitiate the insularity of the " right
little, tight little island." Hence, to this day, the
Englishman crosses the most natively depraved
waters on the planet in the shakiest of craft, experi
encing in its misery and effect upon his spirits, such
blight as never was on sea or land.
One knows the difference between France and
England right away. The laborer wears a blouse
that looks neither male nor female, but as Tam
O'Shanter would say, " a cutty sark." They seize
your luggage vi et armis and refuse to listen to the
best Connecticut French you have in stock. But
I was successful in holding on to my belongings,
passing the custom officer, tipping the guard, get
ting a luncheon, and finding the right place in the
train, all in forty minutes. It takes eight hours to
go from London to Paris by the fastest train. In
17

A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
America one can go from New York to Buffalo,
444 miles, in the same time; but, then, one can cross
the Hudson River with less trouble than the Eng
lish Channel.
" When a man travels, his trouble begins." It
begins with the French language. I do not refer,
of course, to the favored soul who has taken the de
gree of A.M. (Accomplished Meanderer), who
knows all the syntax of Europe and the idioms there
of, but to the ordinary two-talent man, who has been
taught that peculiar brand known as Yale College
French. To him the French of France is an un
known tongue. It is as full of stones as a sheep lot.
Mr. Stanley was called by the natives, " Bula Ma-
tari," " Breaker of Stones." It may be that he can
" on, Stanley, on," through the Congo of the French
language, but no Yale graduate can do it. His
primal difficulty is trying to recall, on the spur of
the moment, " what does the lexicon say about the
thing? " Does " poser " mean laying an egg, or
laying a table-cloth, or is it some other kind of poser?
In the Concord School of Philosophy, a lecturer
once defined being as " the thingness of the here;"
the trouble with your French vocabulary, when
you want it, is that it has no definite being, neither
thingness of the here nor hereness of the thing.
There is a strange irrelevance, too, between the form
your question finally takes and the unexpectedness
18

AND OTHEE LEAVES
of the Frenchman's answer; it reminds you of that
historic interchange of thought, " Do you like
cheese?" " No, but my brother-in-law plays the Ger
man flute." Still there are compensations. As they
say in Smith College, " It is a poor mule that can
not kick both ways," and it is consolatory to think
that they do not understand you any better than you
do them.
My stay in Paris this time was confined to one
hour and thirty-five minutes. I was met at the
North Station by a friend who conducted me safe
ly to the place of departure, through the gayeties and
pitfalls for youth of this luxurious city. He placed
me in the Italian Express, and left me to the roulette
of fortune. Said fortune appointed me to a cab con
taining a young Belgian. After a meagre conver
sation in broken French, he composed his mind for
sleep by opening a bulging bottle of Belgic liquor.
Of this he partook several " fingers " at once, and
continued the process in blocks of five through the
night. His suspiration was terrific! It was said
afterward that this first of March was the coldest
night of the winter. I can believe it. Nevertheless,
there was little provision made to expel the winter's
flaw. There are no stoves or steam-pipes on the Eu
ropean car. A semblance of warmth is maintained
by cans of hot water, which are dragged in with
a clatter every fifty miles, and banged upon the
19

A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
floor. They look something like a flattened milk
can, and hold three gallons apiece. At various sta
tions one can hire a pillow or a blanket for a franc,
and these three sustain life, if not sleep and comfort,
until the journey is over.
I awoke near the French frontier next morning,
and found myself among snowy mountains and ice
bound lakes. Beauty everywhere ! But it was cold
as a glacier crevasse. At Modane we crossed the Ital
ian frontier and boarded a " restaurant wagon,"
which is French for dining-car. Providence
brought me vis a vis with a fine old English gentle
man, one of the real old school, and I enjoyed him
Inore even than the breakfast. He asked me some
of those delicious questions, that only people in dense
ignorance of America can ask. I did not tell him
that we shot bear in the upper end of Manhattan
Island, nor even that Dr. Parkhurst enjoyed hunt
ing " the Tiger " in those preserves. I knew that
that would stagger him. Nor did I say, as Eugene
Field on a like occasion, " When I was first caught,
I was living in a tree." But I did have occasion to
inform him that American women were usually
well informed, and could converse understandingly
even with a British subject. Soon after breakfast
we entered the Mons Cenis tunnel, or series of tun
nels, requiring twenty-two minutes to make the pas
sage. We catch glimpses of mountains, glaciers,
20

AND OTHEE LEAVES
snow-drifts, waterfalls, valleys, embankments, in
bewildering confusion, interspersed with blackness
of darkness, marking the entrance to a tunnel. Then
we go down, down, down. For the summit of the
grade is more than five thousand feet above sea
level. At length we reach the broad and fertile
plains of Piedmont, " Foot of the Mountain.". Here
is Turin itself, and now we realize that we are in
Italy. In Italy one meets a new nature. The people
show their excitability in high-strung voices, in rapid
speech, in shrugs, grimaces, and gestures. They talk
so much with their hands, and are so dependent upon
them, that a hand-cuffed Italian would be dumb.
They are an emotional race, and the Saxon looks on
with amazement when he sees two able-bodied men
kiss each other on the cheek, turning the other also.
The least incident throws these Latin races into ex
citement; important news produces panic; a catas
trophe in reality begets spontaneous combustion. If
you see a throng of people on a street corner, all
talking at once, and gesticulating violently, you
need not jump at the conclusion that Italy has lost
its boot, or that the dome of St. Peter's has fallen in.
No, the whole case is that " Jacko, the donkey, has
eaten up Mother Goose, her cabbage."
We flitted past Turin, past Genoa, where every
American takes off his hat; past Pisa, where the
21

A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
towers, like certain Christians, lean " as near to
earth as they can be without falHng;" then we
passed another purgatorial night, five of us, in a
space little larger than a dog kennel, " and so we
went toward Rome." Yet I saw only five minutes
of Rome on this occasion. It is chiefly connected
in mind at this writing vrith a huge sandwich, which
was the only thing I could buy, on the run between
train and train, and ate with the relish of a fifteen
hours' fast in the real Appian way. Every turn of
the wheel thereafter brought us in view of classic
places. On yonder road the Apostle Paul trudged
as prisoner in company with the beloved physician.
Over there stood the residence of Cicero. In that
little city set upon a hill were bom Juvenal and
Thomas Aquinas. Every acre of this country has
been told in verse or painted in color. At half -past
one we rolled into Naples, and realize that the long,
hard joumey is happily ended.
On the whole, few Americans enjoy European
methods of travel. There is no such opportunity
to move about, visit with friends, open a window,
procure a drink of water, or get light enough to read
by, as in the United States. On certain rare occa
sions, when one wants privacy, he can secure it more
easily in Europe, but all of the life, incident, pano
rama of the railway car is lost to him. There is no
opportunity to watch the newly wedded pair, nor to
23

AND OTHEE LEAVES
enjoy the usual pastimes of American travel. In
stead of which, one has a cooped up, airless, and un
comfortable feeling, mingled with the glare of of
ficial eyes, suggesting the suspicion that you have
" done something." Yes, it will do me good to get
into " the Norfolk car," on the Harlem Railroad,
some pleasant afternoon, and presently hear the
cheery call of the conductor, " Tickets, please ! "

rv
NAPLES
" ^^ ^^ Naples and die," runs the proverb, and
^^ here it was before me !
^^^ The entrance is not as impressive by land
as by water, when in the latter case a vision bursts
upon the traveller, for the sea and mountain are the
glory of the city. But there is beauty still in abun
dance. The famous plain, one of the most fertile
tracts of land in the known world, is teeming with
vine and fruit tree, just budding into bloom. The
city itself is swarming with life. The ordinary Ital
ian character, Marion Crawford tells us, is tinged
with a gentle melancholy. One perceives this in the
faces of the handsome officers and in the graceful
lines of many a noble dame. But the Neapolitan is
lighthearted and gleeful. His street songs are full
of life and " catchy " to a degree. Among, the most
beautiful of these is the " Santa Lucia." Santa
Lucia is the Billingsgate of Naples, but all that dirt,
clamor, fish haggling and breach of the Third Com-
24

AND OTHEE LEAVES
mandment is intermingled with the melody of
Paradise. One of the first things that struck me in Naples
was a box with an angel on it, presented in the name
of charity. I promptly cashed the request, and the
black-robed figure promised to bum a candle for me
at a holy shrine. I trust it was not a case of the light
that failed. I had not gone far before I was honored
with another request, and with several more before
reaching the hotel. In fact, I here learned my first
lesson in Eastern importunity, which increases tow
ard the sun rising, according to the square of the
distance. It is performed with the energy of Scipio
and the perseverance of Bruce. Akin to these re
quests, are the numerous invitations to ride ex
tended by the cabmen, who lie in wait for the stroll
ing visitor. They call out incessantly, often at the
distance of a block, " Reet! Reet! " By this they
seem to mean " Ride ! Ride ! " and flatter them
selves, just as we do in attempting Italian, that our
accent and pronunciation are irreproachable. One
of them persistently followed me for blocks, in spite
of my remonstrance, until at length he rode off in
dudgeon, expressing the pious hope, " May the devil
fly away with you! "
The beauty of Naples is mainly in its situation.
It is a case where God made the country; man made
the town. The old town, not the new, is moth-
25

A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
eaten, rusty, faded and crumbling. It calls for soap.
It is all out of paint and putty. The streets need
the man with a hoe; the walls need the man with a
white-wash brush. The city is splendidly supplied
with water, and commands at all times such a view
from its curving shore as comes but once this side
of the crystal sea. Old Vesuvius gives a tragic cast
to the city, its cloud of smoke, like the skeleton at
Roman feasts, being a perpetual memento mori.
The people of Naples are bom gamblers; everywhere
the sign of the lottery is visible, and tickets can be
procured at as low as two cents. The government
manages the scheme, and it is conducted fairly.
Perhaps we ought not to cast stones too severely at
this evil, for Connecticut builded her Groton Monu
ment by aid of a State lottery, and South Canaan
Meeting House, among others, was erected by means
of the same. The fathers eased their conscience in
those " good old days " by quoting Solomon, " The
lot is cast into the lap; but the whole disposing there
of is of the Lord." So the lottery continues to
entrap the gay Neapolitans, while the government
knows not how to forego the revenue thus raised.
The shops of Naples atone for the dilapidation of the
streets. They are full of attractive things, tempt
ingly displayed in windows, which open upon the
sidewalk. It is an ideal place for purchasing Santa
Claus gifts. Naples has a reputation also for her
26

AND OTHEE LEAVES
sweets, of which Neapolitan ice cream is but a sam
ple. One rarely sees, even in Paris, such artisti
cally delicious and bewilderingly fascinating cakes,
jellies, fruits and candies. " 'Twould tempt the
dying anchorite to eat! " A walk through her thor
oughfares imposes a severe strain upon the Tenth
Commandment. It was in Naples that I made my first try in photog
raphy. The initial attempt was signalized by neg
lecting to turn off the shutter. Ministers are said to
have a weakness that way, that is, in not readily
turning off the shutter. Still, " Success does not
consist in making no mistakes," says Mr. Billings,
" but in not making the same mistake twice."
Thereafter I did better and " snapped " many an in
teresting scene and person. In Santa Lucia I hired
the privilege of taking an old woman with babe
in arms for three cents. But the terms of the con
tract leaked out, whereupon they swarmed upon me
from all quarters, offering job lots in babes, old
women, cripples, plain and fancy, at three cents,
two cents, one cent, two for a cent — the market was
soon glutted.
It was here, also, I fell in with a choice party of
travellers from Boston, under escort of a Yale pro
fessor. " We pine for kindred natures to mingle
with our own." But we never pine so much for this
compound as when we are admiring something
27

A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
alone. Once I broke over an impassible barrier and
addressed an Englishman without introduction; it
was at Dresden, in the little room of the Sistine Ma
donna, the occasion being my absolute need of speak
ing to somebody as an outlet to pent-up feelings.
But it was not a success ! An Englishman's house is
his castle, so is his reserve. However, now that I am
on the subject, I wish to bear willing testimony to
the fact that on this tour a marked change appeared
in the bearing of the English traveller. He ap
peared far more affable and spontaneous than ever
before. Others remarked this fact, and called my
attention to it. It is partly due to the increased re
spect and good-will felt toward Americans, and part
ly to the great increase of travel brought about by
Thomas Cook & Son, which has continentalized
their insularity. To return to my companions, it
was a rare pleasure to meet such a group and ac
company them, as I did, to Cairo.
Two of us organized an expedition to Pompeii.
One remarks, on arrival, the strange proximity of
the railroad and the buried civilization, contrasts
separated by eighteen centuries now brought to
gether. The catastrophe occurred on the 24th of
August, A.D. 79. It was probably attended with
no great loss of life, as the first shower of ashes was
but three feet deep. After an interval utilized in
general escape, came a second shower of molten peb-
28

AND OTHEE LEAVES
bles, " hail-stones and coals of fire." Few skeletons
have been found, and few articles of value, indicat
ing time for removal. Here and there the bread is
in the oven, the trussed fowls are on the gridiron.
The streets have deep ruts cut by chariot wheels.
The shops have their signs still visible. The fres
coed walls still bear testimony against a deadened
sense of shame. They were evidently an out-of-door
people, spending much time at the forum, theatre,
and bath, not holding the Saxon belief, " there's no
place like home." The dwellings are small and un
comfortable, according to our ideas; though, as in
the house of Pansa (which one may see reproduced
at Saratoga), there is great wealth and beauty.
Wendell Phillips on " The Lost Arts," is eloquent
and captivating. Gibbon's dictum that the time
when this city was destroyed was, on the whole, the
golden age of the race, is worthy of attention; but,
for my part, the civilization and life of Pompeii offer
little attraction. " Say not thou, what is the cause
that the former days were better than these? for
thou dost not enquire wisely concerning this."
Pompeii is of great interest to the antiquarian, and
brings back the past vividly, but every traveller is
glad at heart to ride back to his comfortable hotel,
face a Neapolitan table d'hote and leave Pompeian
arts and luxuries behind him.

29

THE MEDITERRANEAN
WE sailed out of the incomparably beauti
ful bay of Naples, late in the afternoon,
on the Italian ship " Indipendente."
Naples, more than New Orleans, is the Crescent
City. Its arms encircle that lovely bay for miles.
A commanding fortress crowns the height back of
the city, and old Vesuvius, perpetually puffing his
pipe, stands guard like a sentinel. Clouds added
purple and gold to the scene, " and there is that
great and vride sea, wherein are creeping things in
numerable," lights and shadows creeping over its
surface, little boats of singing sailors creeping at
night-fall to port. We drank it all in and were
thankful. All that night we steamed down the western coast
in a calm sea. We rose in comfortable time to see
the vessel pass through the famous straits of Scylla
and Charybdis. If Italy be considered a boot, then
Sicily may stand for the football, both caught in the
30

AND OTHEE LEAVES
act of making a goal from field. The narrow space
between them makes the strait, illustrative of the
difficulty, ancient and modern, of avoiding error on
either side. The strait is full of tidal currents and
whirlpools. In one of these the youth plunged for
King Ferdinand's cup, and afterwards (once too
often, alas!) for the princess' ring, as sung by
Schiller in his ballad of " The Diver."
Messina, the chief of port of Sicily, is not far
from the entrance to the strait, situate on an arm
of land shaped like Cape Cod and known as " The
Sickel." But the citizens are quite different from
" Cape Cod Folks; " yes, teetotally so. Soap is dear
apparently, in Messina, and in lieu of sand and
gravel, they throw garbage upon the streets. The
Selectmen say it comes cheaper, and enables them
to run the town on a twelve mill tax. This is a great
port for oranges, and the golden spheres are every
where. There are oranges by the box, the hogshead
and the thousand. After exhausting the narrow
and gloomy streets, I climbed the hill and found
myself " fominst " a certain villa surrounded by a
high wall. A slip of a girl ran out of an alley and
inquired something of me in an unknown tongue.
Risking the chances against its being a proposal of
marriage, I nodded " Yes." Whereupon she led
me to a gate, and promptly held out her hand in
true Italian style. I crossed her palm with a soldo
31

A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
and was ushered into a delightful old garden. An
other demoiselle came out with her knitting and
showed me over the place; it was a bower of roses,
an Arabia Felix of orange trees, and a Delectable
Mountain of heavenly views. The city lay at our
feet, the straits could be viewed through their entire
length, the mountains of Calabria lay in front of us,
and Sicily back of us, a wonderful and glorious
scene. The maid loaded me with flowers and oranges
and took the nickel coins I gave her with a proper
courtesy. Then I was ferried back to the anchored
ship, and became the object of envy to the entire
cabin. We steamed out of the harbor that afternoon still
going toward the south. Our course traversed the
waters sailed over by the Apostle Paul in his jour
ney to Rome. Five miles from Messina we came
to Rhegium, a port touched by his vessel after they
had " fetched a compass from Syracuse." I took a
snap-shot at this for St. Paul's sake. A few miles
further on we came abreast of the toe of Italy's boot,
a kind of Land's End, and I trained the camera on
that also. We had been discussing the possibility
of seeing old ^tna, which Hartford people would
tell you was named after an insurance company in
that city, the loftiest volcano in Europe, exceeding
ten thousand feet, and one of the sights of the Medi
terranean. But, to our great disappointment, the
32

AND OTHEE LEAVES
air was hazy, ^tna was thirty miles away and an
object only ten miles distant was scarcely visible.
Many glasses were turned longingly in that direc
tion, but, as if to intensify the difficulty, a long
stratum of cloud hid the horizon. We were about
leaving it in despair, when the cry was raised, " Look
above the clouds! " And there, indeed, was the
great mountain, towering over earth, sea and cloud,
its snowy cone protruding majestically into the
blue. It was a wonderful and rapturous surprise.
In that same hour we learned a lesson. The Moun
tain was a schoolmaster to bring us to truth, the
truth that the grandest things in life are often
missed, because we look too low for them.
The sail up the Mediterranean can be, on occa
sion, one of the rarest of pleasures; but, as the sweet
est things in life, when sour, become the sourest,
so it is on this Middle-of-the-Earth Sea. I am now
fully satisfied that the Mediterranean need not take
back water in presence of any seas that be, in point
of nausea-ability. Neptune seems to have sum
moned every one of his sea-dogs and cried " Sick
'em! " Our company has completely collapsed. I
am almost ashamed to be so well myself, the feeling
perhaps that a wooden-legged man might experi
ence, if every other person in his company were
suffering from corns. Our steamer has something
to answer for in this instance. Sea-sickness is what
33

A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
it is the world over, but the same on an Italian line
can only be expressed in italics. This line was origi
nally known as the " Florio and Rubbatino," but
I hazard the conjecture that it sounded so much like
" Floor-I-you and Rub-it-in-o " that they changed
it to the " Navigazione Oenerale Italiana," which
is more non-committal. Another feature of our
voyage was the wind, which blew with a persistency
that made us think of Jonah's and St. Paul's gales
in these same waters. It was off the coast of Crete,
which we could dimly see, that this Levanter struck
us. St. Luke describes the same wind as coming
down from Crete. The old version called it Euroc-
lydon, the new calls it Euraquilo, our cabin called
it a worse name than either. The explanation com
monly given is that the cold air of the mountains
makes a vis a tergo in the rear and the hot sands
of Africa make a vacuum in front, of which the E.
N. E. wind is not slow to avail itself. We learned
also, why the writer of the " log " in Acts xxvii
called the same wind " tuphonihos," typhoon-like.
We were in the deepest part of the Mediterranean,
and had plenty of water to drown in, say twelve
thousand feet; one of the younger members felt sure
we would take advantage of ii. So the days dragged
on wearily for the sick, times that tried men's souls,
likewise their digestive apparatus. The voyage led
some even to describe it in the same terms as the lad
34

AND OTHBK LEAVES
did the sermon, " The beginning was pretty good,
and so was the end, but it had too much middle,"
We tried to organize a daily religious service in the
cabin, but were able to hold two only. The other
days no one could navigate in safety from one part
of the vessel to another. I suppose that this stormi-
ness was exceptional, for often the Mediterranean
is a Lake Placid, its shores sapphire, its waters
" darkly, deeply, beautifully blue." But the ex
perience had its lesson; it put us in touch with the
great apostle, and gave a vivid significance to the
xxviith of Acts, said to be the most dramatic
chapter in the Scripture.
On Sunday afternoon we sighted the pharos, or
lighthouse, of Alexandria, and all at once we realize
that we are in the old world, back in the Old Testa
ment, on the other side of the flood.

VI
EGYPT
EGYPT is the land of mystery. Her appro
priate emblem is the Sphinx, looking out
upon the illimitable, asking questions that
no man can answer. The very origin of the land
is mysterious, a ribbon of verdure delimited by sand,
a " palm-girt path of civilization walled in by two
deserts." Egypt is the gift of the Nile, it is all " made "
land, as much so as the Back Bay of Boston. The
annual overflow of the great river and its sources have
furnished science with problems and bones of con
tention for ages. Not until our own generation has
" The Battle of the Nile " over its own head-wat«rs
been decided. But the river is only the beginning
of her mystery. There remain the pyramids, which
after all these centuries continue to be classed
among the Seven Wonders of the World. There
are Those temples, palaces, and piles stupendous,
Of which the very ruins are tremendous.
36

'AND OTHEE LEAVES
It is the land of the mummy, " the leathern Pha
raoh grinning in the dark." It is the land of the
triangle, beginning with the delta and ending with
the apex of the pyramid. And all this mysterious-
ness is appropriately encompassed by the desert,
silent, sombre, soulless, a " No Man's Land," the
home of mirage.
Accordingly, one enters Egypt on the tip-toe of
expectancy, and with a delightful sense of being
let into a secret. It was at Alexandria that the light
was first turned upon "Egyptian darkness." As soon
as we entered the harbor, we were surrounded by a
howling mob of boatmen, porters, " baggage
smashers," and officials. They swarmed like cats,
monkeys, locusts, up the side of the vessel, seized
everything that could be handled, each claiming
to be " the only, original Jacobs," the one man in
port capable of putting us properly ashore. Our
conductor at once engaged one man for the entire
contract, and the latter rose to the occasion. He
promptly laid about him with a rope, and succeeded,
after gigantic effort, colossal profanity, and Sabbath-
breaking extraordinary, in getting us and our be
longings into our boats. The custom-house officer
was a woman, who took our word for it that we had
nothing dutiable, and promptly chalked every
piece with an " M," which, after our superfluous
trouble in getting there, was conjectured to stand
37

A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
for " Much ado about nothing." It was then a
joyous experience for all those storm-tossed pas
sengers to drive to the Khedival Hotel, and lie
down on a still and level surface. It was, " resting
weary limbs at last on beds of asphodel."
Alexandria is a city with a past. Here fled many
of the Jews after the destruction of Solomon's Tem
ple, until they were estimated by Philo in his day
at one million; here the Old Testament was trans
lated into Greek, forming the version that was
chiefly used by the Apostles and generally quoted
in the New Testament. Great schools of learning
flourished here, and the finest library of antiquity
was gathered, only to suffer the fate of burning by
order of Omar, an irreparable loss to scholarship.
The fire of Alexandria always brings a chill to the
heart of scholars. Here Cleopatra held her court
and entertained Csesar; as one has felicitously put
it, " The Enchantress of the Nile captured the heart
of the Conqueror of the world." It was probably
a good place for ministers, too, along with other
notabilia, for ApoUos was reared here, described by
his friend St. Luke as " an eloquent man and
mighty in the Scriptures." On this account I drank
in all the air I could, in hope of its being a homileti-
cal tonic. It is a flat, unpromising enough city in
these days, with " Ichabod " viritten over every part
of it. It has been so burned, bombarded, bullied
38

AND OTHEE LEAVES
and buncoed that Alexander redivivus would be
liabl§ to say to it now, as he did to the cowardly sol
dier who bore his name, " Either change your name
or change your nature." However, it is still a port
of importance (no levity intended), and Egypt
could not do business without it.
In Alexandria I saw my first camel, that ship of
the desert, that companion of the Arab, that bunchy,
patchy, untidy creature, looking so picturesque in
the chromo and so gawkyesque in the open air. He
is patient, imperious, disdainful, self-centred.
When his rations give out, it is said that he lives
upon his own hillock of flesh; hence they say in the
House of Eli Yale, when a man develops unsus
pected energy, " He humps himself." He is uglier
than Thersites, " the ugliest man who came to
Troy;" the which he does not mind in the least.
His gait is such, that the Arabs have a provetb,
" There ai'C fourteen different ways of being un
comfortable on top of a camel." I tried several of
them myself before leaving the country. But we
did not tarry long in Alexandria, the treasures of
Egypt are higher up the river.
The next morning we steamed out of the city for
Cairo. The road crosses the delta of the Nile,
which has been compared to an open fan; at one
corner Alexandria, while Cairo is the jewel set in
the handle. Everything is green, and farming is
39

A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
well advanced. The annual rise has not begun, but
preparations are being made for its arrival. The
fields are full of men, women, and children, with
camels, donkeys, buffalo-looking oxen and cows that
remind one of Pharaoh's kine, " very ill-favored
and lean-fleshed." Their milking capacity I esti
mated at one pint to the herd. The houses were not
very attractive, by reason of the thatched roofs,
giving them a shock-headed appearance, not unlike
a foot-ball player's dome of thought at the end of
the first half. Here are the water-wheels turned by
the " fellaheen," or sons of the soil. The latter
are said to chant a monotonous song.
They beat us, they beat us;
They starve us, they starve us;
But there's some One above
Who will punish them well,
Who will punish them weU.
This, however, is the song of the past. The con
dition of all Egyptian people is much ameliorated
of late years.
Our railroad ran down beside one of the principal
mouths of the Nile. There are two of them, bear
ing the pretty names of Rosetta and Damietta. We
crossed each of them and thus made acquaintance
with the great Father of Rivers. It is an impressive
stream. It has ever exerted a strange spell upon
the nations. The great length alone, four thousand
40

AND OTHEE LEAVES
miles, would rank it among the three mighties of
water highways. Upon it has floated the cradle of
Moses and the barge of Cleopatra. A fellow travel
er from Massachusetts put in my hands that day a
volume, pointed to a paragraph and said, " That
page alone is worth the price of the book." The
gist of the paragraph was that the civilization of
Egypt, which early made her the advance guard of
the world, was drawn, like Moses himself, from the
great river. The need of controlling its course and
directing its current, it stated, taught them the
science of land surveying and of hydraulics. The
annual overflow obliterating all landmarks, led to
the registering of lands and to teaching the sacred-
ness of property. Disputes arising, led to the estab
lishment of settled laws and the enforcement of
judical decisions. The river is thus responsible for
the foundation of social, legal, and political order.
The Nile was to Egypt not alone the Father of
Rivers, but the Mother of Arts. One sees the Nile
to advantage from Cairo upward, a voyage that
many take with picturesque delight. At my arrival
the river was lower than usual, and many a boat
up the river had been tied to the bank, waiting for
the moving of the waters.

VII
CAIRO
CAIRO ! That weird and fascinating city, the
meeting point of two civilizations, two con
tinents, two ages. The camel and the trol
ley in the same street! Ibrahim the sheikh and
Jones the drummer cheek by jowl (N. B. In the
above antithesis Ibrahim represents " by jowl.")
At the grand hotels are throngs of Europeans in
evening dress: out in the street other throngs dressed
like the prodigal son. It is " show " enough to war
rant an admission fee, just to sit on Shepherd's bal
cony and look out upon the street below. Such a
moving panorama of all nations, such a kaleidoscope
of five continents, such a Babel of all languages!
You rub your eyes to make sure you are not dream
ing, rub your ears to make certain of your hearing,
rub some other spot to make sure of catching the
wicked flea, which was just previously tangential
to your surface. The latter is one of the institu
tions of the country, to be reckoned with in all itin-
42

AND OTHEE LEAVES
eraries through the East, not lightly and unadvised
ly to be dismissed with a wave of the hand. He is
like Mr. Quilp's dog, " he lives on the right side of
the street, but generally lurks upon the left." He
is afraid of nothing and nobody. Like the war horse
in Job, " He goeth on to meet the armed men; he
mocketh at fear and is not affrighted." He scom-
eth the clenched fist, and at pennyroyal he " chor
tles in his joy." Everybody tries to look uncon
cerned in his presence, but few are able to keep the
mask on for long. I was once treating my left side
with furtive attrition, when a lady said to me with
empressement, " I deeply sympathize! " It is said
that one of Professor Maspero's slabs contains this
inscription, deciphered by the Academy,
" A querulous old hippopotamus
Once to Nature made this plea,
Why don't you copper-bottom us,
Or kill the elusive flea? "
This is no fancy sketch. The flea is not a subject
that can be skipped. It is one of the ten plagues of
Egypt that live on to afflict our missionaries. Every
one of them will tell you that it is part of their
cross, which has to be endured, though never to be
reconciled unto.
One of the first sights of Cairo is the Ghizeh
Museum. It is full of mummies and tablets from
43

A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
three to six thousand years old. One sees all the
domestic life of the age of Moses, and " all the
learning of the Egyptians," in which he was in
structed, completely set forth. There are the pots
and kettles, the needles and hair-pins of Uarda and
othei: ancient females. He sees what Isaiah enu
merates in the third chapter as " the bravery of
their tinkling ornaments, their round tires like the
moon, the tablets, and nose jewels, the wimples and
the crisping pins." I had always wondered how
the prophet came to be so conversant with the treas
ures of the toilet, but I now conjecture that he had
simply looked over and listed some such cabinet as
this. The scarabseus is greatly in evidence also in
this collection. He is carved in stone, cut in cameo,
sunk in a die, and withal is as multitudinous as he
is ubiquitous. This beetle was anciently supposed
to be capable of perpetuating himself, hence was
chosen as the emblem of immortality. According
ly the Egyptian lived with the scarab to the end
of life and in death they were not divided. They
share the same tomb unto this day. The mummy
is always an interesting and impressive object. He
illustrates the fundamental principle of Egyptian
philosophy. All their lives long they were prepar
ing to die. As Emerson says. " Their priesthood
was a senate of undertakers; every rich man was a
pyramidaire." To be well buried was more im-
44

AND OTHEE LEAVES
portant in their eyes than to be well bom. He re
garded his tomb as his real home, and his dwelling
house as an inn on the way to it. The art of em
balming was carried to perfection in public institu
tions. But this did not prevent mistake then, any
more than book-keeping does now. Occasionally
they got the wrong tag on in the works, and sent
home a female subject instead of a male. The
mummy did not care, nor would it ever have been
known on earth, if some modem professor had not
discovered it. That is the weak spot in antiquarian-
ism, it is always unearthing some shady secret that
had much better stay buried. I once asked a gen
tleman, who had spent several hours over our church
records, whether he had discovered anything of
value concerning his ancestry. He replied, "Yes;
I have found that one of them had been excommu
nicated for hard drinking, and another for profane
swearing." It brings a very strange feeling over one to look
upon the features of those who have been entombed
for millenniums. I need not ask thee if that hand, when armed.
Has any Roman soldier mauled and knuckled.
For thou wert dead and buried and embalmed,
Ere Romulus and Remus had been suckled.
Exceedingly striking was the face and figure of
45

A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
Rameses II, father of the Princess who drew Moses
from the water.
My party having great faith in a Yale education,
requested me to translate some of the hieroglyphic
inscriptions. Realizing that the reputation of the
University was at stake, I complied with the request.
The passage selected consisted of these figures cut in
red granite.

e

,u/tfin,

It was clear to my mind that the above was part
of a love-letter, addressed to the patron princess of
Moses by an up-the-river prince, and meant:
"0 Bird of Paradise!
I lie at thy feet like a dog.
Give me, 1 pray, thy royal heart,
And accept the gift of this golden comb."
This may not have been satisfactory to the
princess, but it was perfectly so to the ladies of our
party. 46

AND OTHEE LEAVES
A visit to the bazaars is also one of the features
of Cairo. They are concentrated in certain narrow
lanes and courts around Mgoski Street. By narrow
I mean five to seven feet wide. The shops are
about as big as a sentry box, the merchant being
squatted in front, on the look out for his prey. They
are as hungry as wolves in Russia, and as persistent
as the spider of Bruce. No traveller can resist the
attraction of their wares, and, in spite of aU previous
experience in their over-reaching grasp, returns like
the moth to the candle. The tour of the bazaars is
usually made on donkey-back. There are fifty
thousand of these little quadrupeds in Cairo and all
of them " sporty." They are controlled by a don
key drivers' trust, a species of lads who are sharper
than a Bowery boy and more philosophical than the
gamin Gavroche. One of them took my measure
at a glance, introducing himself as Mehemet Ali
and his donkey, " the finest in Cairo," as " Yankee
Doodoo." I expressed some misgivings lest an
American and that beast of burden might experi
ence stars and stripes between us, but he allayed my
fears, induced me to mount, and forthwith drove
the steed at a breakneck pace through the crowded
quarters. I thought of my friend, a Presbyterian
divine, who had been elected to fracture his collar
bone donkey-wise, that very month of grace. I
thought of an obituary I once read, " He met his
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A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
death at the hands of a horse." Also I thought of
that Irish paragraph on a similar occasion, " He
broke his neck, but otherwise sustained no injury."
However, we were in for it, and I proposed to im
prove the shining hour. O but once we were off,
it was a phantasmagoria of delight! Such crowded
lanes and crooked alleys! Such bewildering places
and motley folk! Such cries, imprecations, impor
tunities and compulsions to come in! There was
other excitement, too. Yankee Doodoo would dash
into a seething mass of humanity, while I held my
breath in expectation of colliding with some stately
son of Abraham, and of instantly horizontalizing
his perpendicularity. But just at the critical mo
ment he managed to miss him by a hair, and my
heart went back from my throat to its proper lati
tude and longitude. Here one sees the artizans ex
ercising their trades in the little shops with rarest
skill, despising all the inventions and labor-saving
devices of to-day. For example, I saw men pulver
izing spices, not with a New England mill, but with
a stone pestle heavy as a hickory log and in a stone
mortar big as a chopping block.
What have I not seen to-day? The prison where,
they allege, Joseph was confined, a square well of
a place, looking like the bottomless pit, great grooves
in the stone coping, where the ropes for letting
down prisoners and provisions had worn. I saw the
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AND OTHEE LEAVES
lane where the Mamelukes were massacred. Mame
lukes mean " White Slaves," and were originally
Circassian followers of the Caliphs, or " successors "
of the Prophet. Their massacre was ordered in
1811 by Mehemet Ali, who invited them treach
erously to a feast, and then had his minions set upon
them in their trap. One only escaped, by leaping
his horse over the parapet, a fearful leap, recalling
the escape of Israel Putnam down Horse-Neck Hill.
I saw the wonderful view of the City from its Cita
del with its eight hundred mosques sending their
minarets into the sky. I visited the mosque where
thousands of young Mohammedans from all parts of
the world are gathered to learn the " sum of human
wisdom," the Koran; all studying aloud at once in
groups of two to thirty, in ages from seven to forty,
seated upon the ground, swaying back and forth to
cudgel the memory, or beating the palm upon the
breast, cramming the mind with wholesale doses of
the one book, exercising no powers of reflection,
comparison or deduction, " ever learning, but never
coming to a knowledge of the Truth." I saw the
men at prayer and I confess to at least one feeling
of admiration for these followers of Islam. It is
because they are not ashamed of their religion,
make no pretence of putting it out of sight. If
" open confession is good for the soul," then they
have that much to their credit. I saw Bulaq, the
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A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
ancient port, with its strange shops and equally
strange shopping ways. I saw funerals pass with
the hired wallers in tow, as also the Koran chanters
and the extoUers of the virtues of the deceased; with
them also the crowd of curiosity mongers and small
boys eager to " see the show." I saw also the newer
City which His Majesty, the Khedive, is slowly
building up. He is an up-to-date admirer of the
fine arts, and proposes to Parisianize his capital, if
he can. He built an opera house some years ago,
and engaged Verdi to compose and set upon the
stage an opera, based on the ancient glories of his
realm. The result was Aida, and the occasion
marked one of the events of the musical world. I
saw his famous runners that precede his carriage,
bright colored in silken ribbons, each of them an
Asahel " as light of foot as a wild roe." I saw also
the advent of summer luxuries, to vrit, strawberries
and mosquitoes. The latter require no acquain
tance with the Arabic tongue in order to be under
stood. Their voice is the voice of Egypt, but their
sting is the sting of New Jersey. I saw also the
Hon. Consul General for America and procured
from him a passport, accurately describing my per
sonal appearance; and once more I took oath upon
the Bible to support the United States Constitution,
for which privilege I paid the paltry sum of $3.77^,
and thought it cheap enough. 50

AND OTHEK LEAVES
The most remarkable sight in Cairo is that of the
pyramids. They lie just out of the City, at the end
of a long and picturesque road, skirted by handsome
trees. We drove by carriage; but think of it, one
can go by trolley car ! The pyramids are not as im
pressive at first glance as expected, producing the
same effect as the first sight of St. Peter's in Rome,
and for the same reason. The proportions are so fine
that the sense of size is lost. But they grow upon you.
As one looks up that vast stairway, higher than
most cathedral towers, counts the steps, and gauges
the masonry of a single course, he is prepared to be
lieve that the largest one consumed the labor of a
hundred thousand men for twenty years. Here are
thirteen acres of solid masonry uprising to a vanish
ing point, and containing material enough to build
a wall ten feet in height around all of France. They
have been broken into for plunder, been despoiled
for buildings in Cairo, but they still lift their grand
triangles toward the stars. We ate our luncheon at
the base of the largest, called the Pyramid of
Cheops, and felt apologetic.
How insignificant are men in presence of these
hoary sentinels! We thought of Napoleon, who
exhorted his troops on yonder plain, that forty cen
turies looked down upon them. We thought of
Moses as standing where we stood, looking out upon
the same desert, and afterward writing, "For a
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thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday
when it is past."
We went to the Sphinx near by, and looked upon
those calm Egyptian features. Was it the Sphinx
St. John had in mind, when he wrote, " And the
third beast had a face as a man? " It is a serene,
unvexed, incommunicative face. It smiles win-
ningly as if implying that the secret of life, what
ever it is, does not end in tombs and wildernesses.
I thought of Merson, who pictured the Virgin in
the arms of the Sphinx, the Christ in the arms of
both; as though finding the world's problem in the
face of the one. Heaven's answer in the face of the
Other. Then we came back again, dogged by a horde of
Arabs, who make of these mysteries their market
place. We must ride the camel, must mount the
pyramid, must barter for relics. They swore to
each other's lies, " stood in " with each other on the
same fake, conspired in the same ring for gulling
us with the same tale, and all the while we knew
that their arts were mere " springes to catch wood
cock." One Arab did his best to induce me to wager
a coin as to the time it would take him to mount
the summit. I told him that he was a fraud and
that I was no bettor. This retort was lost upon his
pagan mind. Then he claimed to have been the
original man that escorted Mark Twain to the top.
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This, however, was immediately disputed by other
liars and fabricators, under cover of which colloquy
I escaped. What is the meaning of the pyramid? Who can
pluck out the heart of its mystery? Some regard
them as astronomical apparatus, as evidenced by
their exact orientation, and by the interior gallery
pointing like a telescope toward the North Star. Dr.
Piazzi Smyth would have us regard them as temples
of prophecy, and constructs a wondrous scheme of
human destiny from their labyrinthine interior.
But modern scholarship regards them as resurrec
tion chambers, as tombs built to guard sacred dust
from the overflow of the Nile, as well as from the
obliteration by sand. This last factor accounts for
their mathematical form. They are each the local
habitation of some kingly form, and with the local
habitation bear a name. The greatest one is called
" The glorious;" another, " The firm and beauti
ful;" a third has the inviting name, " The cool;"
while the most Easter-like of all is called " The
rising soul." Probably all of them are more the
monuments of royal pride than piety, even as one of
this same kingly race inscribed his epitaph,
" My name is Ozymandias, king of kings,
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair."
After all, the question will occur to the traveller,
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Was it worth while? Does not a single great rail
way or a city library add more to the sum of human
happiness than a pyramid? Here are massed giant
constructions, one of the Seven Wonders of the
World, from Herodotus' day until ours. But
wonder is not the greatest feeling of the heart,
though Wordsworth wrote, "We live by ad
miration." Wonder is not placed by the inspired
Apostle in the 13th of First Corinthians, among
the three mighties of the soul. " All the world
wondered after the beast," we are told; but it would
be an inadequate and inferior statement to chroni
cle, if it were true, " All the world wondered after
God." The Divine merits and invites from human
hearts a greater homage than that. The wonder of
the world may be a pyramid; the greatest thing in
the world is love.
GETTING OUT OF EGYPT
I left Egypt, even as the Children of Israel be
fore me, hurriedly. My bread was yet in the knead
ing trough, or more literally, my clothing was yet
in the grasp of the laundry, when it became neces
sary to move on. The Egyptians did not press their
ear-rings and other treasures upon me, but showed
a robust solicitude for mine. " Bucksheesh " is the
key that unlocks everything in the East. By it you
get into temples, mosques, museums, gardens, pris-
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A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
ons, palaces and favors of every kind. By it you
get out of scrapes, out of quarantine, out of your
just deserts, out of purgatory even, for the system
has been extended by thoughtful minds into the
next world. Nobody is too high or too low for
bucksheesh. It affects " the mighty man, and the
man of war, the judge and the prophet, and the pru
dent, and the ancient, the captain of fifty." No
man is too pompous or too pious to refuse it. Some
people make it the first rule of oriental travel,
" When in doubt, tip." It need not be in gold, not
always in silver, but it is cheaper to do it in any
coin than to do without it. The traveller has his
misgivings, his grumblings, his shamefacedness,
but he always ends by taking out his purse and per
forming an example in subtraction. So I carried
at all times a plentiful supply of copper and nickel
coins; it " made the wheels go round."
A vast crowd had assembled at the station, which
was augmented by similar crowds at every succeed
ing station. For many a Gamaliel ben Hassan was
departing for Mecca, and all of his kinsmen and the
rest of the 8th Ward came down to see him off.
The railway was a narrow gauge affair, and I had
to " sit close," Arabs to the right hand, Arabs to
the left hand. We were all hot, the Faithful and
the Infidel alike, but I took it as coolly as any of
them, knowing that they did not feel any worse
55

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about my company than I did about theirs. Our
route lay through the land of Goshen. It did not
bear any resemblance to the " Cheese Town," of
Litchfield County, but, for all that, it is counted
still the pick of the country. It was so as far back
as when Pharaoh said to Joseph, " in the best of the
land make thy father and brethren to dwell." There
are more water courses, principally artificial, and
more trees than elsewhere, hut it is a flat and un-
picturesque country nevertheless. No allowance is
made for refreshment by rail, and one has recourse
to the Arab vendors, who crowd the windows at
every platform. Little birds of the snipe family
are exposed for sale, greasy, unclean, looking as if
they had not been washed since they left the Nile.
I concluded that a man, if he took any at all, should
eat a cake of soap with each bird. Profound re
flection, induced by hunger, led me to the conclu
sion that boiled eggs and oranges would probably
be as free from dirt as anything on the menu, and I
acted accordingly. It requires considerable cour
age to eat the things set before you at railway sta
tions in Egypt, and ask no questions; yes, I may say
a man cannot go through those parts at all without
" sand." At Tell el Kebir we pass the place where the
English defeated Arabi in 1882, and noted the
graves of the soldiers who fell in battle, all so well
56

AND OTHEE LEAVES
kept. It is an out-of-the-way place, indeed, for a
Yorkshireman to lay his bones. But war is never
hampered by sentiment. I thought, too, as I looked
on those quiet mounds, of Dr. Thomas Browne's
statement in the Urn Burial, that to the dying man
it makes no difference where they lay him —
" Whether in St. Innocent's churchyard or in the
sands of Egypt."
At Ismailia we strike the Suez Canal, and the
great crowd of Mohammedans leave for the Red
Sea, and the Tomb of the Prophet. We are now at
the Isthmus, " the key of Egypt." Geologists tell
us that the waters of the Red Sea and of the Medi
terranean once fraternized, but it was long since,
because, even in Herodotus' day, the neck of land
was as wide as now. The famous canal is another
illustration of the truth, " there is no new thing
under the sun." The Pharaoh just before the Ex
odus had one; the Pharaoh that slew King Josiah
had another. This one is the fourth or fifth of one
sort or another that has married the two seas in the
desert. The present scheme was advocated by Na
poleon, a hundred and two years ago, and, no doubt,
would have " gone through," if it had not been for
an engineer's mistake in calculation. The higher
mathematics and some other ics and isms are often
well up in the air, and it would no more do to im
peach their veracity than to commit the sin men-
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tioned by Sidney Smith, that of speaking dis
respectfully of the equator. But when mathema
tics and some other arts do go astray, they stick at
nothing. It was once demonstrated in Yale Col
lege that an ocean steamer could never go more
than ten knots an hour, for, so the theorem proved,
the water would otherwise rise up in advance and
operate against the prow as a stone wall. But some
blunderer, who did not know any better, went and
tried it, and thereby spoiled a fine algebraic theory.
Now the expert employed by Napoleon calculated
that the Red Sea was thirty-three feet below the
level of the Mediterranean; the calculation was
about thirty-two feet and eleven inches out of the
way, but it was enough to delay the attempt for
sixty years. In 1836 a young consular clerk was
sent to Egypt by the French. He became interested
in Napoleon's project, talked it up in season, out of
season. By 1859, this young man, De Lesseps,
was able to throw his first spade of sand to the sun.
Twenty thousand men labored for months before
machinery could be applied at all. At one time the
expense of supplying these laborers with water
alone exceeded $1,600 per day. " Cheap as water,"
is a proverb that does not go in the East. In ten
years they sank twenty-six feet and ninety-five mill
ion dollars. The canal, including the passage
through the " Bitter Lakes," is just a hundred miles
58

AND OTHEB LEAVES
long. It is lighted by electricity at night, so that
passage can be made any hour in the twenty-four.
It is handsomely coped with cut stone and is main
tained in a thrifty, ship-shape manner. It creates
a strange feeling in the beholder to see a great East
Indiaman making a stately march across the desert
on that Isthmian highway. The justification of that
enormous expense is to be seen in this one item, it
shortens the distance between London and Bombay
by 5,500 miles, or forty-four per cent, of the entire
voyage. The canal has a great bearing on our own
project across the Isthmus of Panama. The engi
neering difflculties are much greater with us, for the
Andes and the Rockies mingle their foot-hills on
the Mexican Isthmus, while there are no hills at all
on the Suez. But the necessities of commerce and
of statesmanship are imperative: deep calleth unto
deep across that American interval, and when the
right Pathfinder has arisen, we of this generation
shall sail through from sea to sea.
At seven-thirty we arrived at Port Said. The
first difficulty with this place consists in pronounc
ing it. There is an Arab guttural in the centre of it,
but passing that or swallowing it, the traveller learns
that the word is dissyllabic, with accent on the last,
so he says something like Sah-eed, and the secret
is out. Port Said is a city of thirty thousand peo
ple to-day, living on a salt marsh, with a harbor that
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A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
is simply a "dug-out." They have built a rock
pier a mile long into the sea to keep back the en
croachment of the Nile mud from the West, and
have reared a light-house which is one of the tallest
in the world, whose light is visible for twenty-four
miles. Everything is artificial at Port Said, the
canal, the harbor, the town site, the society. The
latter is made up of the riff-raff of all nations, with
a dash of darkest Paris thrown in. But the town
has a future, has its good with the bad, is already a
formidable rival to Alexandria, and, who knows,
may yet be one of the world's metropolises.
This was my last glimpse of Egypt. The traveller
naturally looks back after his tour of a country,
however brief, and sums up his impressions. First,
it is a country that appeals to him from its immense
antiquity. " Art is long," but never does it seem
so long as in the Nile Valley. Next, it appeals to
him as the home of Israel for four hundred years,
the people who went down into Egypt a family, and
came back a nation. A fiat and monotonous coun
try has little attraction to a New Englander, but
it was in just such a country that the Netherlanders
grew up to be the race they are. Egypt has been a
fountain of civilization in her day, and her day is
not yet over. There is a promise concerning her
that still bides its time. " In that day shall Israel
be the third with Egypt and with Assyria, even a
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blessing in the midst of the land; whom the Lord of
Hosts shall bless, saying. Blessed be Egypt, my
people." It is possible that the blessing is partly
coming to a realization through the English occu
pancy. The Englishmen have in the East, what
gardeners call " a growing hand," and everything
is thrifty under their touch. The revenues are hon
estly collected and applied. The officials and
soldiers have an alert and " dress parade " look, that
is nowhere else observable. Christian England, too,
has asserted itself in Egypt; I learned of some of the
finest young men of Oxford and Cambridge, who
had dedicated their lives to the uplifting of the
blackest quarters in Cairo. No one can survey the
beneficent effects of British rule in Egypt, that has
begun to lift a bankrupt and discouraged nation to
thriftiness, that is changing a turbulent and dis
satisfied population into an aspiring manhood, with
out realizing that the cross of St. George has come
somewhere in touch with the Cross of Jerusalem,
and in this sign there is conquest.

VIII
JAFFA
IT took the Israelites forty years to get out of
Egypt; it took us nine hours. The Mediter
ranean was calm, the moon bright, the night
beautiful, so that few were willing to follow the
example of the Prophet Jonah, in those same waters,
who, " was gone down into the sides of the ship, and
he lay and was fast asleep." The next morning the
coast of Palestine lay before us, just as it appeared
to Richard of the Lion-heart, to the Apostles, to
Solomon's engineers in charge of the rafts floated
down from Lebanon. It is a low, white-beached
coast backed by distant hills. This is Jaffa, the an
cient Joppa, and the only harbor known to the Jews
in all their history. A short distance from the
sandy beach is a line of rocks protruding from the
sea, sheltering in a feeble way a small anchorage
between them and the land. In a feeble way, I re
peat, for the slightest vrind lashes the whole ex
panse. Steamers always lie well out in the road-
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stead, and frequently the surf makes it impossible
to land passengers at all. The passage, when made,
lies between two storm-beaten rocks, not twenty feet
apart, through which the boatmen row, singing a
refrain of "Haley! haley!" "Pull away! pull
away! " To one of those rocks, the 'longshoremen
say, Andromeda was chained, until rescued by Per
seus. Jaffa is one of the oldest cities in the world,
a city set upon a hill. It derives its name from
" japhah," to shine, on account of its sunny appear
ance, and well does it fulfil the role this morning.
A beautiful plain surrounds it, where grow those
luscious Jaffa oranges, famous the world over. A
basketful for a franc, basket and all ! It makes the
mouth water unto this day!
At Jaffa one has his first experience in Palestin
ian character. He early learns that he is in " the
land of promise," and of promise only, of fair words
spoken but not kept, of engagements that are al
lowed to run on, well, as long as the one chronicled
at Bridgewater, Mass., between Captain Thomas
Baxter and Miss Whitman, " a long and tedious
courtship of forty-eight years, which they both sus
tained with uncommon fortitude." Yes, it requires
similar fortitude and some other virtues to deal with
the inhabitants of the land to-day. " This is a plenty
patience country," said a Syrian servant to his mas
ter. It is a plenty dirty country, also; and, on the
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principle that " shoemakers' children go barefoot,"
one of their chief industries is the making of soap.
This is the land of the dragoman. He is in a
class by himself. He is like EHhu, the son of Bara-
chel, the Buzite, " full of matter," little of which
is reliable. He is a good illustration of the proverb,
" It is better not to know so much, than to know so
many things that ain't so." The queer part of it,
too, is that he is full of apparently exact statements,
told with a serious air, and dropping from his dis
course incidentally, as it were, like the phrase in the
lawyer's challenge to " meet me at sunrise in the
four acre lot, be the same more or less." He tells
you the greatest " whoppers " with a face like
Samuel's. He will point to a granite rock, having
two holes drilled in it, as though made for spokes to
fit into, and say, " Do you see those holes? That is
where the angel Gabriel ran his fingers in." He
professes to be an antiquarian, but is no more simi
lar to a real scholar than scalawag is to Scaliger. At
first you resent his imposition of legends, fairy sto
ries and pure lie, as being a reflection on your in
telligence. After a while you are amused, give him
free rein and let him gang his ain gait. My first
experience with him was in Jaffa. There were three
places pointed out as the house of Simon the tanner,
but our drago conducted us to the one with whose
owner he had probably made the best arrangement.
Now, said house is nothing less than an old Moham-
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medan chapel, possibly built over the traditional
site, but not a stick or stone of the original could
possibly be there. Yet he showed us the stair where
Peter mounted, yea, the very place on the roof
where he slept! And here I learned my first les
son in Turkish travel, namely, to take everything
told you with a grain of Turk's Island salt. All the
holy places are encrusted with legends, utterly puer
ile and bare-faced. All of them are surrounded
with tawdry paper flowers, cheap chromes, tallow
candles and the like, that do their best to dissipate
the reverence and sentiment that should properly
be associated with them. The traveller in Holy
Land must rely upon his own knowledge of Script
ure, upon reputable guide-books and trustworthy
scholarship, otherwise his faith will be weakened,
not fortified by his tour.
As I looked off from the roof of the alleged house
of Simon, I asked myself, " What is there here that
one can safely rest upon? " It is " hard by the sea"
for one thing, and, for another, there is the Medi
terranean itself, looking even as it did to the fast
closing eyes of the Apostle, brown, gray, blue, green,
purple, and all very good. That sea, washing the
shores of the Gentiles, was the highway over which
the gospel was to go, so soon as Peter had learned
that nevermore were any sons of Adam to be counted
common or unclean.
There is little to do in Joppa, but we did it con
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scientiously. We picked our way through the dogs
and children carpeting the streets, dodged the
camels and the beggars, and regaled ourselves -with
the orange and the orange blossom. We visited the
mission-school kept by Miss Amott, an English lady,
and heard some familiar hymns sung in Syriac. I
did not see the consul, bearing the singular name of
Mr. Hardegg, but I saw his neighbor, who might
be named Mr. Hardnut, and a good many of his
relatives. Here is where Dorcas entered the king
dom of heaven through the eye of a needle, and I
aver on the testimony of two writers and my own
eyesight, that few places need a Dorcas Society more
unto this day. After lunching at the hotel, we set
our faces toward Jerusalem, fifty-four miles distant
by railway. The line crosses first the Maritime
Plain, or Philistia. It is a beautiful expanse, fair
as a garden of the Lord, full of grain and orchards.
It was into those grain fields that Samson turned
the foxes with firebrands, and got himself disliked.
We were fortunate enough to spy two foxes, more
like jackals, reminding me, indeed, of the coyotes
on our frontier. They were graceful creatures, and
when the train drew near they ran like yellow
flames of wild-fire. We soon began to climb, for we
were in the Hill Country of Judea. In liese de
files Saul came out after David, in a way that sug
gested to David the familiar sports of the camp, " to
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hunt thy servant as a flea, or as a partridge upon
the mountain." The railway winds in and out along
the steep valley, but always climbing, for there are
twenty-six hundred feet to mount before reaching
the holy city. At sunset we stop half a mile short of
the Jaffa gate, and realize that before us lies what
is to millions of people below and to a great cloud
of witnesses above, the most sacred spot on earth.

IX
JERUSALEM
THE Roman Army caught their first glimpse
of the city from Mount Scopus on the
north. The Crusaders approached it from
the west, breaking into the tearful and enthusias
tic cry, " Jerusalem! Jerusalem! " The yearly pil
grims to the passover and the palm-bearers of Our
Lord's triumphal entry approached it from the east,
where the finest view of the city is obtained, as it
bursts into view over the shoulder of the HiU of
Olives. " It was a city," says Josephus, " from
which the traveller turned away his eyes as from the
sun at noonday; " a city of towers and palaces, as it
were, of mingled gold and snow. A passion for his
city ran in the Jew's blood. To love her was more
than patriotism, it was religion. Tears mingled with
his voice as he sang, " If I forget thee, O Jerusalem,
let my right hand forget her cunning." It is a city
that has passed through vicissitudes making the an
nals of others seem commonplace. Twenty-seven
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times it has been besieged, seventeen times been
desolated by conquerors; it has been razed to the
ground, a new city with a new name, ^lia Capi-
tolina, supplanted it, only to be again destroyed; it
has been made unrecognizable to its own population,
so that, if a Jew had come upon it, however well he
had known it before, he would ask, " What place
is this? " And yet, it has revived, has risen from its
grave, no longer deserving of its ancient emblem, a
woman seated upon the ground, but rather of one
standing on her feet. Jerusalem! the beloved of
David, and of The Son of David, the ambition of
Roman legions, the goal of Crusading Europe, the
prey of desecrating Turks, the present raffle prize
in the crafty game of a Sultan; oh the surface of
things, the sport of fate, beneath the surface, the
never-forgotten of Providence.
With such emotions struggling in the soul the
Christian enters Jerusalem. Now let me deliver a
round unvarnished tale of his subsequent emotions.
I did not lose my head through sentiment; I nearly
lost my feet through sHme. The prophet Jeremiah
pronounced it a cage of unclean birds; it is the same
to-day. The streets are slippery with filth and gar
bage, its many well-defined and several odors re
minding one of Coleridge's arraignment of Cologne.
Innumerable curs still go round about the city and
make a noise like a dog. Water is scarce. A pla-
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A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
ard by your wash-basin reminds you of the same,
adding, with an eye to economy, that it is so ex
pensive that many people cannot afford to wash at all,
which fact is easily corroborated by acquaintance
with your fellow-townsmen. It is not only soapless,
it is hopeless. It is given up to strife. It is the
home of warring factions, living in separate parts of
the city, under the general law that " the Jews have
no dealings with the Samaritans." The City of
Peace is the City of Acrimony. Furthermore,
a plague has fallen upon it against which there is no
quarantine. Protestants, Catholics and Jews have
lavishly contributed to the misery of Jerusalem,
pauperizing it by misguided charity. Dr. Selah
Merrill estimates that two-thirds of the fifty thou
sand inhabitants receive charitable aid in some form.
The result is the blight of commercial enterprise.
The city is not as large as one fancies, and as appears
from views of it in print. To " walk round about
Zion " would take only a good hour. Each side of
the four, roughly speaking, would measure about
as far as from Wanamaker's store to the upper end
of Madison Square. I was prepared for certain re-
pellant features of the city, such as rags, filth, beg
gary and discord, and had discounted them in ad
vance. But nothing could permanently dislodge the
ineradicable reverence attached to the place. Zion's
" perfection of beauty " is, indeed, veiled. The
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garden of the Lord — the boar out of the wood doth
waste it. The lily work of the temple — they have
broken down the carved work thereof with axes and
hammers. Nevertheless, the devout mind always
comes back to this, Jerusalem may have no present,
but she has had a past, she will have a future.
One goes about the city on donkeys accompanied
by a dragoman. The latter is useful in negotiating
with the citizens, gate keepers, bucksheesh strikers
and others, but is full of old wives' fables. The his
torical sense is lost in the East, and they seem never
to have heard an address delivered by the author
on Commencement Day, entitled " The decay
of romance." For romance and romancing is in good
healthy activity in every dragoman, guide and key-
holder of my knowledge, from Dan to Beersheba.
On this account many of the " show places " of the
city are of great suspicion to the investigator.
The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, for instance,
is of doubtful reverence to me. I value it mostly
for the sake of the devout, but mistaken, souls who
have worshipped there. Its very situation makes it
impossible. It never could have been without the
city walls, except upon the violent supposition that
they made at this point a long re-entrant angle.
But passing that, it is a place full of superstitious
myths. Here they point you out the altar of Mel-
chizedek, the chapel of Adam, the centre of the
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A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
earth, the altar of the Penitent Thief, and a score of
other incredulities. All this is encompassed with
chapels and churches of various sects, suggesting dis
cord rather than unity. Yet it was this spot, er
roneously located and full of errors, for which Eu
rope fought madly with Asia in crusading fury.
The Via Dolorosa is another improbability. Not
a stone or timber of the original way taken by our
Lord can possibly be extant, and yet the Via is
marked with " stations," each credited with full de
tails. The same applies to Bethlehem, six miles away,
which I visited, on donkey back, with my kindly
hearted dragoman. It is a pleasant joumey, and
the road is very suggestive of memories, though the
legends told you make your incrudulity rise to the
top. That monument may or may not be the tomb
of Rachel, you cannot tell. That well at the en
trance of the city may or may not be the one for
whose water David longed. The Grotto of the Na
tivity awakens your suspicions, though you enter
sympathetically into the two rival services that are
being held there- in competing chapels on the spot.
But other things you do receive and freely. There
before you are the undoubted fields where Ruth
gleaned and shepherds watched their flocks. There
is the site, if not the buildings, where David lived
and Christ was born. Bethlehem is still small, her
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thrift is precariously dependent upon the carving
of souvenirs in olive and pearl; it is not cleaii; it
groans under Turkish rule; but, for all that, " Thou
are not the least among the thousands of Judah."
But to return to Jerusalem itself, what is there,
after all, that satisfies and repays the visitor? Let
us ascend the Mount of Olives on the east, and like
Our Lord, sit over against the city. There it lies be
fore us in its noble expanse. The general features of
it, told in psalm and prophecy, stand out. " Jeru
salem is builded as a city that is compact together."
It is one upon which the traveller comes suddenly,
there are no suburbs. It is an elevated city, built
on two hills, Zion to the west, Moriah to the east
on which stood the Temple, and now stands its suc
cessor, the Mosque of Omar. Between them ran
the Tyropoean or Cheesemakers' valley, now almost
filled up and the wall carried across it. About it
are hills, yet not as I expected, rising above the city,
for, with the exception of Olivet, there is no land
adjacent to Jerusalem higher than itself. " The
mountains round about Jerusalem " can only refer
to the Mountains of Moab, that loom up grandly
across the Jordan, and look so surprisingly near.
Jerusalem is also a buried city, heaps upon heaps,
and graves within graves. The ancient city is
twenty to thirty feet below the surface. It is a
venerable city; if Josephus were right in calling its
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A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
age 2177 at its destmction by Titus (A.D. 70),
then it is now 4007 years old. It is a miscellaneous
city, with suggestions of Moslems, Crusaders, Ro
mans, Christians and Jews all through it.
The first object that might strike an observer are
the walls and foundations. It was so anciently,
" Mark well her bulwarks;" it made part of the im
agery of prophecy, " Thou shalt call her walls Sal
vation, and her gates Praise," while in Revelation
that splendid list of foundations is enumerated, the
first, jasper, the second, sapphire, the third, a chal
cedony. The present walls are from ten to fifteen
feet wide, and from twenty-five to forty high. In
one place are a few massive substructions, and here
on every Friday assemble the Jews, standing each in
the shroud in which he will be buried, to wail over
their fallen and desecrated capitol. The lament
used is the pathetic language of Isaiah Ixiv, and
Psalm Ixxix, " Our holy and our beautiful house,
where our fathers praised Thee, is burned up with
fire; and all our pleasant things are laid waste; "
" We are become a reproach to our neighbors, a
scorn and derision to them that are round about
us." As the most prominent feature of Jerusalem of
old was the Temple, so its successor, the Mosque of
Omar, is the most striking feature to-day. The site
itself is the undoubted locality of the holy place of
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old. It has had a great history. Here Abraham
offered his son Isaac, here David reared the altar on
the threshing-floor of Araunah, here Solomon
wrought his miracle in stone, without sound of ham
mer. " Like some tall palm, the noiseless fabric
gi'ew." Here, too, was reared the second Temple,
whose glory was to be greater than the former, be
cause to it should suddenly come the Lord of the
Temple. A shaft sunk by explorers on the east side
has disclosed some of the foundations of Solomon,
marked with the inscriptions of his Phenician archi
tects. A surprising feature of this temple area is
the dome of the original rock protruding above the
surface, a mass sixty-five by forty-five feet in dimen
sions. Many are the conjectures of scholars as to this
remarkable rock, perhaps the most reasonable being
that it is the base of the old altar, left bare on pur
pose, because originally altars had to be erected with
out tools. Beneath it is a chamber thought to be for
the disposal of the blood and refuse of the offerings.
Beneath that again is a well, perhaps connected vfith
the ablutions of the altar. This well illustrates Mo
hammedan legend perfectly. According to them,
it is the opening into Hades, and was formerly used
as a kind of post-office between the two worlds, until
a certain widow of Jerusalem, brought so many
tales from the dead to the hving and vice versa, that
she first involved the whole city in discord, and,
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A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
next, raised such a commotion in the world below
that it was forthwith closed.
The Mount of Olives is one of the most attrac
tive places of all. On it is Gethsemane, probably
not the original site, but near it, which, by reason of
its trees, shrubbery and quiet, easily suggests the
garden where Jesus oft-times resorted with His dis
ciples. Toward the east one sees the blue waters of
the Dead Sea, astonishingly near, as if in the next
township. Far below us it is, 3,700 feet below, the
lowest water level on the surface of the earth. A
Greek church and tower crown the summit of Olivet.
Shepherds and flocks are to be found on the slope.
The reverent mind pictures King David toiling up
that summit, while Shimei, lurking near, is casting
dust and stones; it pictures the vast Passover crowds
from all over the world, spread out in tents on this an d
surrounding hills, like the sand that is by the sea
shore for abundance. It pictures the procession of
palm-bearers winding over its shoulder and down
through St. Stephen's gate at our feet. It pictures
the smaller group that was led out later as far as
Bethany, when the Leader was parted from them,
and a cloud received Him out of their sight. It is
the last spot on earth trodden by Our Lord. " Take
thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon
thou standest is holy ground."
One beautiful Sabbath afternoon I went out to
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the little knoll north of the city, that appealed to
me as being the probable site of Calvary. Its posi
tion corresponds with all we know of that green hill
far away without the city walls. The grottos below
supply cavernous eyes that make the rounded hill
resemble still more the place of a skull. Near by is
a recently exhumed garden and rock-made tomb,
the reputed garden of Joseph of Arimathea, which
are quietly maintained in simple beauty by a devout
English lady. I stood by the place of the cross and
looked toward the city, which I suppose, our
Saviour also faced. It was a noisy, squalid and pes
tilential city that I saw, still needing, and in large
measure rejecting the Son of God. As it is still,
even in its vileness, " beautiful for situation," so a
few years of Christian rule might once more make
it " the joy of the whole earth."
Unquestionably, as surely as the promises of God,
this result will some day be brought about. A
Voice will yet cry, " Arise, shine, for thy light is
come, and the glory of God is risen upon thee."
Then shall the Daughter of Zion awake, and put
on her beautiful garments. But the vision tarries;
they still wait for it ; and meanwhile " Jerusalem
shall be trodden down of the Gentiles, until the
times of the Gentiles be fulfilled."

77

CARMEL
THE usual route north from Jerusalem is
through Samaria, and by camel, donkey, or
horse. It is tent life, but no picnic. I did
not make this overland joumey, solely for lack of
time, since I must push on and join a party in ad
vance of me. So I returned to Jaffa by rail, and
" took shipping " up the coast. We left the Holy
City early in the morning, our train drawn by an
American locomotive. The guard, or as we would
say, brakeman, was an Arab, innocent of the Eng
lish tongue. But we met each other on neutral
territory, the French language, which he used in
arabesque and I in picturesque style, both enjoying
the effect. There was no Frenchman present to call
us down, so we stood on the rear platform, admiring
the scenery and guessing at each other's idioms with
mutual satisfaction. The day was fair, and so were
the flowers. The Maritime Plain was luxuriant in
standing grain, and the orchards near Jaffa were
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AND OTHEK LEAVES
altars of incense. I am not surprised to learn that
the scent of the oranges is borne out to sea, and is
perceptible miles from the shore.
Our steamer proved to be the " El Kahira," of
the Khedival Line. We had another exciting pas
sage in boarding her, owing to the boatmen hav
ing a riot over every passenger, which is a custom of
the country, and keeps life from being monotonous.
It was a lovely night, and greatly did we enjoy the
sail up the coast. We thought of Paul, of Richard
the Lion-hearted, of Saladin the equally leonine,
and of Napoleon, all of whom had passed over the
same course. At ten o'clock we rounded the bold
promontory of Carmel, and dropped anchor in the
little harbor of Haifa, at the southern end of the
Bay of Acre.
Haifa is the best harbor on the Palestinian coast.
It nestles under Mount Carmel, which here boldly
assails the sea with a mass of rock five hundred and
fifty feet in height. It is not a Biblical city, but
flourished during the Crusades. Here Richard
Coeur de Lion lay sick of a fever for weeks, until
the report reached England that he was dead.
Above the town on the brow of the hill stands the
Carmelite Monastery, which we visited next morn
ing, and were regaled by the hospitable inmates. I
examined the library, but its literature was so me
diaeval that I saw scarcely a single familiar book.
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A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
Near it is shown the cave where Elisha fed the
prophets in hiding. In an ancient record Carmel
is called "the Mount of a thousand caves." This
monastery is the finest of its kind in Palestine. The
monks claim that Elijah himself was the founder
of the brotherhood; which complaisant belief I did
not think it worth while to disturb. Within its
walls Napoleon left his wounded in 1799; all were
massacred by the Arabs; a strange place for
butchery, this house of peace. The present town of
Haifa is a thrifty place, due to the German colony
of Templeites, who have settled there. Their stone
houses, tree-lined roads, trim gardens, school-
house, church, and other public buildings give an
enterprising air to the place. The Templeites are
a people who believe in the near coming of Our Lord,
and hold that, preparatory to the event, a body of be
lievers must be made ready for Him, as a house for
an expected tenant, ready in life and practice. I
opine that their name comes from the prophetic ex
pression " The temple of the Lord are we." This
is a doctrine that nobody will dispute, and all will
commend; though whether it is necessary to go to
Palestine in order to enforce it may be doubted.
But here they are, three hundred of them, with
others elsewhere, trying to establish themselves with
in easy communication of Jerusalem, so as to be
ready when the hour comes, living a quiet, industri-
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ous life, " providing things honest in the sight of all
men." Our landlord was of the colony, and so were
my next two hosts, at Nazareth and Tiberias. They
reminded me of Quakers, and won my hearty re
spect. They have been thirty years in Haifa; the
monks seven hundred. But the former have gained
the regard of their neighbors and have blessed the
country about them, bringing vehicles, good roads,
and thrift, as the Carmelites never have. For true
religion is not a dream upon a hill-top, it is a life
in the valley.
A beautiful beach curves around from Haifa to
Acre, twelve miles long, forming a miniature Bay
of Naples. It is hard enough to drive upon, and
the horses' hoofs not leave a dent. It is the home of
the murex, from which was made the famous
Tyrian purple in the city a few miles north of us
on the coast, distinctly visible from the Carmel
Monastery. The dye was extracted from a vessel
in the fish's throat. It was this Our Lord referred
to in the phrase, " fine linen and purple." Napo
leon called Acre, " the key of Palestine." It has
sustained fifteen sieges, and no similar area on the
face of the earth has been so drenched with blood.
When taken by the Saracens, sixty thousand people
were put to death. Aceldama! It is now a city of
nine thousand, and is fortified after Turkish notions,
but a modem fleet could knock it to pieces in twenty
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A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
minutes. It was last bombarded in 1840, by Ad
miral Napier, and seems not to have recovered from
the shock. The masonry of the walls and piers is
in bad repair. An old Moslem took us through its
narrow streets, amid the suspicious looks and scowls
of Arab faces. An officious Turkish soldier forbad
my taking a picture, perhaps afraid that I would
give away the plan of their dilapidated old forti
fication, but, all the same, I got one on the sly.
Then we drove back over the smooth beach, past
the place, where, it is claimed, glass was first dis
covered by the kindling of a fire on the shore. All
this is territory that never was owned by Israel. It
was the Phoenicia of old, whence came the builders
of Solomon's temple, whence came the woman who
cried after Him. It is a long strip by the sea, a "shoe
string district," indeed, a few miles only in width,
but filled with an ingenious, enterprising. Yankee
like race. One of the finest things I saw in all my
travels came from this very district, a beautifully
carved sarcophagus, now in the museum at Constan
tinople. The next day we drove on to Nazareth, twenty-
three miles. Our wagon was American built,
driven by " Andreas,'" a famous linesman, second
only to his father, who had driven the Kaiser a few
months before, and received a decoration for the
exploit. The Kaiser left a great impression on all
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that country, as of a " Big Injun," indeed. It left
an impression on Mr. Cook himself, so his agent told
me, inasmuch as the Turkish government had con
tracted with him for the tour, and he had yet to see
the color of their money. Our road lay along the
base of Mt. Carmel for a while. It is a beautiful
range and reminded me forcibly of the Taconic, only
it is not now so well wooded. But, " the excellency
of Carmel " was a proverbial phrase of old, alluding
to its richness, and when Amos would paint the
coming judgment he says, " the top of Carmel shall
wither," as if one should say, " the leaves in Val-
lombrosa shall cease." Carmel itself signifies " the
vineyard of God," and, with its adjacent plain of
Jezreel, was the very Eden of Canaan. A railway is
building from Haifa to Damascus, skirting the Sea
of Galilee, and we drove alongside of it for a dis
tance. In six miles we came to the Kishon, here
spanned by a handsome railway bridge of stone. It
is the place " where the battle was fought," when
Barak, " the Lightning Flash," fell upon the hosts of
Sisera. Deborah was the Barbara Frietche of Israel ;
she could not lead an army, but she could inspire
it; she " took up the flag that the men hauled
down " and cheered them on. The place is miry;
we had great difficulty in passing it, which very
fact accounted in part for the rout of old. The
nine hundred chariots on which Sisera relied were
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A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
mired, the stream rose in its bed " that ancient river,
the river Kishon," and swept them away; then
" the horse hoofs were broken by means of the pranc-
ings, the prancings of the mighty ones." A thun
der-storm added to their discomfiture, and to the
poetic imagination of Israel, " the stars in their
courses fought against Sisera." This is the first of
those great battles that have made this Plain of
Jezreel or Esdraelon famous in all history.
This plain cuts like a wedge the great backbone
of Canaan, extending from the Mediterranean near
ly to the Sea of Galilee. It is flanked by two sen
tinels, Carmel on the west, and Tabor on the east.
It took its name from the royal city of Jezreel, to
which Elijah once ran before the rain in record-break
ing time. It is very fertile, and, in Our Lord's day,
contained two hundred villages. I dwell upon this
plain, because it lay under the eyes of the Boy
Christ, whose home was on the hills north of it.
It was a great page of national history that lay thus
open before Him, where were fought the battles of
Barak and Gideon, of Saul and David, where Josiah
also, the last of the good kings, met his death from
Pharaoh Necho. It was here, too, that He went
round about the villages in that " circle of the Gen
tiles," when the people that sat in darkness saw a
great light. I thought of these things as we bowled
along after our three horses abreast, or passed a long
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train of camels, twenty strong, loaded with wheat
for the sea. Every mile was eloquent with history.
There was the place where Elijah held his sacrifice
with multitudes, multitudes in the valley of de
cision; and near it the hill where the priests of Baal
met their fate. We picnicked in a fine oak grove,
and at four o'clock drew into the town of Nazareth.

XI
NAZARETH
NAZARETH is surrounded by some of the
most fertile soil in Palestine. It is here
that Asher " dipped his foot in oil." Ac
cording to the rabbis, it was easier to rear a grove of
olives in Galilee than one child in Judea. The cost
of living was also only a fifth of that in the south-
em district. It lies half-way between the two seas,
the Mediterranean and Galilee, overlooking the
great plain, and hemmed in by sightly hills. As I
looked on the town from above, I noted that it was
pear-shaped, with the principal buildings in the
stem. It is not a clean place, much garbage being
thrown into the streets. There is an altar dedi
cated to the Angel Gabriel in one of the churches,
but if some of the offerings thereon were only dedi
cated to one of Waring's " white angels," it would
be healthier for the place, and keep " the angel "
busy besides. But Palestine, though full of dust,
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AND OTHER LEAVES
seems never to have learned the ethics of the dust,
the duty of being clean.
We visited the so-called holy places, and, I grieve
to state, felt a certain suspicion mingled with re
pulsion for them all. All are surrounded by
church walls of rival sects, and are replete with
tawdry emblems and cheap chromes. If they
would only leave such sacred places alone, or sur
round them with a low stone wall, it would greatly
add to their sanctity. But we are dubious all the
time of their genuineness, because of the rivalry ex
isting between place and place, and because of the
commercial spirit that shows in all their vested
keepers. What did I take satisfaction in? First, in the
" Fountain of the Virgin." It is a flowing well in
the midst of the city, resorted to at all hours, abun
dant, convenient. It seemed probable that Mary
and her wondrous Son, might oft have resorted
thither. The well, or fountain rather, is in a re
cess, arched over with stone of modern work, at a
corner of two streets. I sat on a wall near by and
watched the women and children gather there.
They have long jars, which are balanced grace
fully on the head, without support from the hands.
I photographed several of them as they departed
from the fountain. The women of Nazareth are
reputed to be fairer than their sisters, a boon re-
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A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
ceived from the Virgin. Conder thinks their faces
more Italian than Arabian in feature; I agree with
him. The fountain is the most attractive spot in the
city, and " meet me at the fountain " might easily
be a local saying. But the shops are attractive, too;
the trades are carried on with little variation from
bygone ages. I watched the carpenter, the black
smith, the leather worker, feeling that I was look
ing upon the artisanship of two thousand years ago.
I saw a plough made, for example, that was of the
same pattern used by Elisha, when Elijah found
him with twelve yoke of oxen. The children, also,
are interesting. I know not how many strains are
mingled in the present stock, but I felt that I saw
such faces as marked the companions of Him who
there increased in wisdom and stature, and in favor
with God and man. An English Orphanage is one
of the features of the town. I heard their sweet
young voices in the English church, which we at
tended. It was a happy thought to connect the im
provement of their childhood with the advancing
childhood of Christ.
The most impressive feature of all was the view
from the hill back of the city. It is the finest in
Palestine, and one of the most extensive I have ever
seen. My mind associates it in extent and impres-
siveness with the view of Moses from Pisgah's
height, and with the survey of Christ Himself when

AND OTHEE LEAVES
' the Devil took Him up into an exceeding high
mountain." Certainly the eyes of the Boy Christ
must have kindled, as they looked off from that
commanding height. As a spectacle alone, it is
wonderfully beautiful. On one side glistens the
Mediterranean with its white ribbon of sand, on the
other the Sea of Genessaret, harp-shaped, harp-in
spiring. To the south stretches the lovely plain,
rimmed by the hills of Samaria; to the north rises
the snowy peak of Hermon. I wonder that more is
not made of Hermon in the Scriptures. It is the most
beautiful and conspicuous object in all the land.
It rises like a vision from many a vantage ground,
and the traveller's utterances thereat are set with
exclamation points. Yet it is not specially promi
nent in Israel's poetry. " As the dew of Hermon,"
is referred to, and the Ixxxixth Psalm declares,
" Tabor and Hermon shall rejoice in Thy name."
But I should expect the Hebrew Poets to show an en
thusiasm such as the Japanese have for Fujiyama,
who make it a point of honor never to paint a picture
without including their snow mountain. But while
the view is fine as scenery, it is still finer as history.
It must have stirred the heart of a patriotic boy
to look around upon those battle-fields and grounds
where history had been made. There is the place
where Jonah was reared, and there the retreat of
Endor's witch; there the field where the fleece was
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A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
laid under the stars, and there the mountain where
fell that father and son, who were lovely and pleasant
in their lives, and in death were not divided. A
hundred Old Testament memories greet the behold
er, a hundred more connected with Our Lord Him
self, the brow of the hill whence His countrymen
would have cast Him headlong, the home of Zebe-
dee, the mountain of Transfiguration, the cities
where He did many of His mighty works, and on
the opposite side of the map Tyre and Sidon, which,
under similar privileges, would have repented in
sackcloth and ashes. It was Sabbath morning,
when I took that view, the mountain was delectable,
the sordid Palestine of to-day was transfigured, and
I said, " It is good to be here! "

XII
THE SEA OF GALILEE
THE following day we drove twenty miles fur
ther to the Sea of Galilee. We passed
through the village of Cana, a wretched lit
tle place, needing more than six water pots of water
for purification, and suggesting anything but the
gayety of weddings. Cana offers a sad example of
the commercial spirit that is eating the heart out of
religion in Palestine. They used to be Orthodox
Greeks, but, on discovering that they had a price
in the market as a " holy place," they promptly ac
cepted overtures elsewhere, and are now doing busi
ness under another sign. " Thrift, thrift, Horatio !"
At Cana I saw on a door-step a child of two years
old. I was in doubt of his ability to speak at all, but
the doubt was set at rest as soon as he caught sight
of me, by opening his mouth and saying, " Buck
sheesh! " Many of the children are very pretty,
all are interesting, but it pains one to see how they
are taught to be beggars from infancy. I photo-
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graphed some of them; one little lad at the watering
place was very shy and embarrassed, but we assured
him we meant no bodily harm, and he finally sur
rendered to our lenticular gun.
This reminds me of an incident happening to a
clerical friend of mine on Mount Ebal. It is not
commonly ascended by tourists, but he climbed to
the summit by an old faint trail. All went well
until his return, when a Bedouin rose up out of the
earth and made fierce signs in " your-money-or-
your-life " way. My friend was alone, unarmed,
distant from any possible assistance. The highway
man drew a long glittering knife, and visions of
slaughter danced before the minister's eyes. What
was to prevent his being murdered and left for
dead upon the mountain? But an inspiration seized
him. Quick as a flash he pulled out his field glasses
and trained them on " Jack Sheppard." Evidently
the latter's imagination, debauched by an evil con
science, pictured the instrument as some Maxim
gun of the latest pattern, fearsome, grewsome,
deathsome. He lost no time in throwing up his
hands and crying " Yi ! yi ! yi ! " which, being in
terpreted meant, " Don't shoot. I'll come dovra."
Then the dominie made him throw down his weap
on; after that made him get over the precipice and
hang by his hanrls. Aye, the man of piety made
him get over the brink a little more than was strictly
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necessary, rubbing it in as a wholesome lesson; for
this mountain was the very spot where the law was
once read and the curses thereof were given particu
lar emphasis. The man in wild-eyed terror kept
his gaze fixed on " that shooting iron " and obeyed
with meekness and respect. This story teacheth,
first that, the world over, conscience doth make cow
ards of us all ; next, that a man's five wits are often
as good as a man's seven-shooter, although in a mi
nority of two; lastly, that it is pretty hard at any
time to make a minister hold-up. If he wants to, he
will go on and nobody can stop him.
At one place on our journey we passed eleven
camels. They shied at the unusual sight of three
horses abreast, and the drivers held our Jehu re
sponsible for it. A sharp altercation took place in
Arabic, which is a language made for disputation.
I thought they would certainly set upon him, which
fracas would have involved the rest of us, but they
contented themselves, at length, with the remark,
"If it were not for the travellers with you, we
would show you a thing." I am glad they did not
show it. The flowers everywhere are in great pro
fusion, a glorious sisterhood. Prominent among
them are the bright scarlet poppies, more common
even than ox-eyed daisies in New England. They are
brilliant and graceful flowers, and are commonly
considered the so-called " lilies of the field," which
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outranked Solomon in glory. The road soon be
gins to descend, and ultimately leads the traveller
to a region below sea level. It is a singular fact, to
which Dr. Smith calls attention, that Christ spent
the greater part of His ministry in a trench six hun
dred and eighty feet below the Mediterranean. It
is as if He sought to reach a " submerged tenth."
One goes from the temperate to the tropic zone in
passing from Nazareth to Capernaum, from the city
of His childhood to the city of His adoption.
The Lake of Gennesaret, or Sea of Galilee, or
Sea of Tiberias, bursts upon one from the hill above
Tiberias, and the vision stays with the beholder for
life. It is a beautiful sheet of water, clear and lus
trous. It is shaped Hke a harp, like a pear, like
South America, but fairer than all combined.
" The Lord hath made seven seas," said the Rabbis,
" but He hath chosen Gennesaret for HimseK."
That is, as there was a chosen nation, and a chosen
land, so there was a chosen sea. It is not large;
bulk is not necessary to greatness. Twelve miles by
eight, but it is enough. In Our Lord's time it was
circled by a chain of cities and by an unbroken
ring of buildings. Great roads flanked it. Beside it
caravans and commerce ran their trunk lines. Now
it is circled by the pebble and the reed; its beach is
trodden by the lizard and the crane ; its teeming thou
sands have gone over the hills and far away. There
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are a few villages in place of the cities, the largest of
these is Tiberias. " It is strange that a black-heart
ed Emperor, who never saw the lake should
have left his name upon it," and there be no local
trace of Him who taught by its beaches, walked
upon its surface as upon a sea of glass, and called its
finny tribes to the right side of the boat.
Our hotel was situated just within a quaint old
Crusaders gate. Near by an English mission was
established, making a brave fight against heathen
odds. The village is strewn with stones, rubbish,
children and dogs. The night was full of stars, the
mind full of memories. An English party took oc
casion to sing, " 0 Galilee, sweet Galilee,
Where Jesus loved so oft to be."
The next was a red-letter day. We took boats
and sturdy boatmen, wearing the crimson shirts and
emblems of the great Cook, and rowed to the upper
end of the lake. We landed on the delta of the
Jordan, a part of the Plain of Gennesaret, and the
site of the ancient Bethsaida (one or two in number),
so difficult to locate by the scholars. Far above us
towered Mount Hermon with his snow-cap on. It
is the snow on those mountains, present the year
aroimd, that accounts for the cold cyclonic blasts
sweeping down the Jordan valley, and into that
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A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
tropic depression, which have ever rendered the
lake so fitfully tempestuous. We landed at the
mouth of the river and looked across the plain
where the Five Thousand were fed. A group of
Bedouins are living there now in comparative wret
chedness, reminding one of Indians on the plains.
They emerged from their tents, and several of
the children and old women sat as models for
our cameras. They were planting melon-seed in a
scratched-up garden, but we were told that their
diet consists mainly of fish and cucumbers. The Jor
dan was as wide as Broadway, and somewhat dis
colored from the melting snows. Nevertheless, its
coolness did not prevent our dipping into the lake
a few hours later. We had, indeed, a fine swim, and
I was proud to follow in the foot-strokes of St. Peter.
Our luncheon was enjoyed on a rocky shore near
Tell Hum, the generally accepted site of Caper
naum. There before us lay the steep place across
the lake, where the swine ran violently down. To
our .right were the Horns of Hattin, where the Beati
tudes were dehvered. And all about us were the
shores that re-echoed the voice of Him who spake
as never man spake. Capernaum consists of a few
broken columns close to the shore. It had been
taken possession of quite recently by some priests,
who were going to make a living out of it as a
"holy place."
The Sea of Galilee grows upon one, the more it

AND OTHEE LEAVES
is seen. The hills are vividly green, the waters
vividly blue. Water-fowl are seen constantly upon
its surface. The boatmen have variegated and
graceful costumes. Camels, donkeys, and Bedouins
picturesquely line its banks, while the mins of
places, whose doom was foretold by Our Saviour,
bear silent testimony to Him. It must always have
been a restful scene to look upon, even in the height
of its activity, for its beauty is of the kind that does
not excite, but calms the mind with sense of pleasure.
The lake once teemed with fish, and every Israelite
had the right of fishery. Two thousand craft sailed
its waters in the time of Christ, making that guild
of watermen from whom Our Lord drew His fol
lowing. A great scholar has called attention to the
fact that it was not from the discontented classes
He called His associates, as David in the cave
of AduUam, but from men of honest toil and of
daily duties. All in all, the Sea of Galilee is the
most satisfying place to me of all that are associated
with the Son of the Blessed. There is less of sordid
human meddlesomeness there than in any other part
of Holy Land. The hills and the waters are there
just as He saw them, untarnished by the touch of
man. The heavens remain as they were when He
spent the night on the mountain, their steady lights
still mirrored " Like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.''
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A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
The changeless scene commemorates the Un
changeable One, " Jesus Christ, the same, yesterday,
and to-day, and forever."

xni
FAREWELL TO HOLY LAND
WE turned our backs upon the harp-like sea
vrith the reluctance of those who leave
music behind them. Once more we as
cended the hill and traversed the great plain. There
were the Horns of Hattin, famous for the Sermon on
the Mount and for the Waterloo of the Crusaders,
" where a false Christianity met its judicial end
within view of the scenes where Christ proclaimed
the gospel of peace." Once more we were impressed
with this battle-field of nations, and could see, what
an English officer has asserted, that if another war
should invade Palestine, the plain of Esdraelon
would certainly be its theatre. Nor is it surprising
that the Apostle John saw in it the symbolic arena
of that final confiict, " God and Magog to the fray,"
as though the opposing forces were massed in
front of the bordering city of Megiddo, " And he
gathered them together into a place called in the
Hebrew tongue, Armageddon." Yet it was all fair
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A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
and peaceful, as we saw it, containing nothing more
warlike than the horns of grazing cattle, each land
owner seeming, for the moment, to have inherited
the pastoral blessing, " to every one grass in the
field." While waiting for the steamer at Haifa, we drove
down the coast and viewed the ruins of Athlit.
This was the last castle held by the Crusaders in
their temporary grasp of Holy Land. It was a mas
sive ruin, full of arches, battlements, and towers.
The banquet hall was a high vaulted chamber, a
hundred and twenty feet by thirty-six. No doubt
it had often resounded with the shouts of Richard
and his Cross-wearing followers. Crusaders look
well in oil and water colors, but they were a hard
lot to the naked eye. Athlit is a castle by the sea,
pounded by the waves on three sides of it. A beau
tiful beach flanks it, and we accepted the invitation
of the Mediterranean to dash into its waves.
The Mediterranean is salter than the Atlantic, by
reason of the fact that its rainfall is less than half
its evaporation. I was surprised to learn, too, that
though there are all kinds of currents at Gibraltar,
surface, bottom, mid-depth, and inshore, yet the pre
vailing flow is inward, not outward. Our guide
warned us against sharks, but we had had so much
experience with them by land that we did not fear
them by sea. The most of a fish we could evoke
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AND OTHEE LEAVES
from the waters was a friendly porpoise, who swam
in shore to learn how far Americans differed from
Armenians. That was our last glimpse of Canaan, the birth
place of the Bible, the land that above all others
has given form and feature to its language. I was
glad to sense something of David's meaning, " I
will lift up mine eyes unto the hills; from whence
Cometh my help?" I was glad to tread softly the
graves of patriarchs and prophets, and the paths that
the place of His feet had made glorious. It is some
thing of an incentive always to stand on the heights
of history, or in valleys where sun and moon did
also stand still. No American can be unmoved at
Mount Vemon ; no Christian be heartless in the place
where Jesus went about doing good. But I am per
suaded that Providence did not mean to have His
followers make a fetich of Holy Land. The de
feat of the Crusaders, who would have made a
superstitious use of the Holy Sepulchre, was a gain
to the cause of Christ; for His is a spiritual practice,
not a sentimental enthusiasm. The worship of
relics and the veneration of holy places approaches
idolatry. My own belief is that the present oblitera
tion of Biblical places, and the difficulties of identi
fication, are Divinely ordered, lest the minds of His
people should cling too much to " the mountain that
might be touched," rather than to " the mountain
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coming down from God out of heaven." Sacred
places are wont to be full of pious figments and re
ligious inventions, rather than of holy memories and
devout inspirations. Even the brazen serpent, an un
doubted relic of divine grace, became a snare unto
Israel at length; they "did bum incense to it;"
wherefore Hezekiah wisely " brake it-in pieces and
called it Nehushtan, a piece of brass." Moreover,
since the world-wide gospel has come, every soil is
Holy Land. " Woman, believe me, the hour com-
eth, when ye shall neither in this mountain nor yet
at Jerusalem, worship the Father. . . . But
the hour cometh, and now is, when the true
worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and
in truth; for the Father seeketh such to worship
Him." There will always be a value attached to
the Holy City, but only as it leads to a City still
holier, whose builder and maker is God. The one
" answereth to the Jerusalem which now is, and is
in bondage with her children. But Jerusalem,
which is above, is free, which is the mother of us
all."

XIV
MY FARTHEST EAST
ON the north side of a bold promontory, flank
ing the Bay of St. George, lies the city of
Beyrout, leaning upon a mountain, dip
ping her foot in the sea, olive crowned, vine em
bowered, pulsing with the life of caravan and loco
motive, no mean city, but marching to her destiny
a hundred and ten thousand strong. Beyrout is the
Athens of Syria, and she owes more to The Ameri
can Board of Foreign Missions than the Greek city
did to Pericles. Sixteen journals are printed here
in Arabic alone, four hospitals are maintained, and
above twenty extensive educational institutions.
All these came out of, or were suggested by, a little
vine planted by the American Board eighty years
ago. The early years of our missionaries witnessed a
long struggle against intolerance, pestilence, wars,
poverty and banishment. After a two years' exile
in Malta, our little force returned to Beyrout. A
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small rowboat came out to meet them. It contained
five persons, the entire Protestant population of the
Turkish Empire. That five is now seventy-five
thousand. Here the Board opened the first school for girls
in the Empire of the Sultan. Here they made that
elegant and finished translation of the Bible into
Arabic, already passed through thirty-two editions,
which goes into all parts of the globe, spanning a
hundred and twenty degrees of longitude. For Ara
bic is the sacred language of a hundred and eighty
millions of people. Here one sees the typesetter at
work on Arabic, guiding his hands wittingly, for the
line has to be pointed above, below, and on both sides
of the letter. It was a nice problem to solve, how to
introduce those vowel points after the consonants
were set up, but a Yankee solved it; by casting the
type with a slot in each corner for receiving the
vowel mark.
The Syrian Protestant College is located here,
with an attendance of four hundred and thirty-four
students from all parts of Asia Minor, Egypt and
Persia. They have ten fine stone buildings and a
magnificent site overlooking the Mediten-anean,
laid out with terraces and shrubbery, exquisitely
kept, an object-lesson in itself to that population
which cares so little for public appearances.
We attended chapel at four o'clock. The
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faculty of about thirty men, mostly Americans,
sat in a semicircle on the platform, an impos
ing body. The singing by the students was strong,
hearty, and, like Webster's dictionary, of large vol
ume. They are not a singing race, having little to
sing for, and, I was reminded of Mr. Moody's com
ment on his own singing, that he " sang everything
to one tune, and nobody knew the name of that."
The swarthy faces looked strange to me, but when
I saw a young fellow snap a paper pellet at a com
panion's visage, I felt as if I were back in the
sophomore class again.
It was a rare pleasure to enjoy a tour of the col
lege under its genial President, the Rev. Daniel
Bliss, D.D., who showed us all manner of courtesy,
including a delicious luncheon at his residence.
Here, too, we saw representatives of other Chris
tian bodies, Enghsh, Scotch and American, all
working harmoniously in that difficult field, many of
whom we met in the parlors of Dr. Jessup, greatly
enjoying their society and rejoicing in their noble
work. The next morning we made an early start for
Damascus, eighty-six miles distant by narrow-gauge
railway. The road is built upon the plan of the
railway up Mount Washington, with rack and pin
ion, it being impossible to climb those grades without
cogs. The train runs very slowly in places, not faster
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than a funeral walk. As we wound in and out of the
hills and precipices of the Lebanon Mountains, the
changing views were exceedingly grand. Some
said that the Rocky and Colorado mountains had
nothing finer to offer. We found it an inspiring
day, and it was decided that the view of the city and
the sea was alone worth the cost of the joumey.
The mountains were snow covered. At one place
we had the weird experience of entering a cloud.
It was chill as the grave. The highest point
reached was 4,830 feet, about twice the height of
the highest land in Connecticut. Coming down
through the valleys, we saw clear water-courses.
Women were washing on the banks, beating the gar
ments on a stone in lieu of soap. I was reminded of
a similar scene which Onkelos once looked upon in
these parts. Onkelos was a famous Rabbi, author
of the Targum that bears his name. He was pass
ing women at their washing, and ventured to re
prove a certain maid for looking at him, stating with
prunes, prisms and propriety, that a woman should
look upon the ground. Whereupon the maid re
torted, " It is meet for a man to look upon the
ground, for he was made from it; but woman
should look upon man, for she was made from him."
The discomfited Rabbi then washed his hands of the
subject, and retreated behind his targum.
The elevation of body furnished the proper con-
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dition for a fall of spirits, and we improved the oc
casion. The circumstances were these. Our train
stopped for refreshments at a little village called
Mallakah, and it was announced that thirty min
utes would be accorded that function. Another east-
bound train also stopped, and there was much backing
and filling. Being of a sanguine nature and resting
in the printed offlcial assurance, I calmly ate through
eighteen minutes of the menu, then went out de
liberately and inquired for the train to Damascus.
Said the offlcial, " Le train est fini! " " Finished? "
said I. " How can it be finished? One cannot
finish a thirty-minute train in eighteen." He did
not answer my arithmetic, but pointed to the train
disappearing around the curve, and shrugged his
shoulders. There we were, three of us, stranded in
a heathen hamlet! No other train for twenty-four
hours. No baggage and very little self-respect.
However, we pulled ourselves together, thought of
Romans viii : 28, and re-arranged our campaign.
First, we telegraphed for our baggage, which re
appeared the next day without so much as a tooth
brush missing. Then I went out and bargained with
a wily native for a three-horse vehicle. After re
ducing his demands from thirty francs to twenty,
we chartered the chariot and started for Baalbec,
three hours distant, over a fine road.
En route we saw one of the most beautiful sights
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yet observed, a novelty in mid-air. It was a flock
of storks, say a thousand in number, wheeling in
slow and stately circles above, without a quiver of
the wing, a soundless, motionless, aerial march.
The wonder of their locomotion was not so striking
as the dissolving view of their colors, from black to
white, from white again to black. The dark wings
showed for half of the circle against the sky, and
then, as their white breasts and under wings ap
peared, they turned into pure silver. It was like
the metamorphosis of black birds into a snow-cloud
and vice versa. This continued before us in regu
larity and rotation for half an hour, an aviary
eclipse and re-eclipse.
At the end of the long valley we found the cele
brated ruins of Baalbec, the Heliopolis of the
Greeks, once a flourishing seat of sun worship.
They are not as old as many Egyptian temples, but
they have some remarkable properties. Six col
umns of the fifty-four are still standing in one tem
ple and nineteen out of forty-six in another, all
beautifully carved and beautifully harmonious.
One sees here, also, the largest stones ever used
in architecture. In one course are three, measur
ing sixty, sixty-one and sixty-two feet respectively
in length by thirteen in width. How they were ever
quarried, or being quarried were ever moved, or,
conceding both, were ever set up without chipping
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AND OTHEE LEAVES
the edges, are problems in mechanics that are not
solvable in this day. In the adjoining quarry is an
even larger stone, seventy-two feet in length, which
was never detached. My companions were a lady
who had been sent around the world as a missionary
of the W. C. T. U., and a Doctor of Divinity, who
had lost a limb by a Vicksburg shell, royal and ex
perienced travellers both. We had a fire kindled in
the hotel parlor and regaled each other, traveller
fashion, with accounts of our adventures and hair
breadth escapes. Particularly we congratulated
each other on the good fortune of missing that train,
otherwise we should have missed Baalbec. Provi
dence is said to keep a special watch over children,
drunkards and Americans. I believe it.
Damascus, " the pearl of the East," is a city lying
on a plain 2,200 feet above sea level, bounded by
the mountains on one side and by gardens, orchards
and vineyards uncounted on the other. Through
it flows the Abana, a deep snow-water stream, the
life and soul of the city, entering every house and
irrigating three hundred miles of her horticulture;
which, with her companion, the Awaj, or ancient
Pharpar, justified the boast of Naaman, " better than
all the waters of Israel." Damascus bursts upon the
traveller like a vision. They still show the moun
tain perch from which Mahomet looked down upon
the city in rapture, only to refuse to enter it, saying,
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" Man can have but one Paradise, and that must
not be sought on earth." I confess that I felt the
same way, when I first looked down from Town
Hill on the Salisbury Paradise, but, unlike Ma
homet, concluded to take the risk. It must be ad
mitted, however, that Mahomet might have found
that distance lent enchantment to the view, for the
city near-to is not so fascinating. There is a per
ceptible difference between it and Paradise.
We entered the city one brilliant afternoon, and,
after a few moments of repair and refreshment at
our hotel, took a carriage and drove about it. Our
dragoman was a descendant of Mahomet, as his
green turban indicated; he exhibited all the show
places with the pride of a man who had made their
history, as in part he had. He showed the place
where St. Paul was converted, and where he was
let down in a basket by the wall; to some people
they still show the basket, but we looked too skepti
cal, I suppose. He showed us where Naaman had his
house, where Ananias lived, and other interesting
localities, all of them, " important, if true." East-
em guides are as unreliable in their history and'
archaeology as a man generally is in giving his wife
an account of his experience before marriage. How
ever, knowing something of the history ourselves,
we were aware that we were treading places of ex
citement. There was the arch where hundreds of
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AND OTHEE LEAVES
Christians lost their heads in the massacre of 1860,
a grewsome place; there was the street whence the
caravan starts every year for Mecca. One had just
arrived from Bagdad, the camels kneeling in de
licious restfulness after their two months' joumey.
Columns and sculpture here and there bore witness
to the former magnificence of Damascus, when
Noureddin and Saladin made it their capital; when
Tamerlane, also, whom the very Arabs called " the
Wild Beast," massacred and plundered the city.
There, too, was the Via Recta, which our drago,
priding himself on his English, invariably an
nounced as " the Straight called Street." It was
" straight as a string," and seems to have been
named on the principle of " lucus a non lucendo."
Damascus is famous for its bazaars and street
trafflc. The place gave name to "damask," now
applied to linens, but originally to the figured pat
terns in silk so wondrously wrought in this city.
Here was made the world-famous Damascus steel,
which has a peculiar wavy or water-line appearance,
and is noted for its elasticity and edge. We great
ly enjoyed those busy marts with their countless
buyers and sellers. A feature of the streets is the
number of strange cries to attract trade. They do
not call out the thing itself, but invent some strik
ing phrase that is a still better advertisement. The
flower-man will cry, " Here is your chance to make
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a present to your mother-in-law." The water-cress
man shouts, " If any old woman will eat these
cresses, she will he young again before morning."
A characteristic of Damascus, as of other places in
the East, is the sebil, or water philanthropy. A man,
wishing to do a meritorious thing, perhaps in pen
ance or in gratitude, will hire a water-carrier to dis
tribute water to the thirsty, the carrier using the
identical language of Isaiah, " Ho ! every one that
thirsteth, come ye to the waters; yea, come, buy
without money and without price." Few people
can resist the attractions of Damascus bazaars, and
they generally come away with a load of goods.
The rugs are especially captivating, so is the cos-
tumery. We climbed the mosque and saw the city
at its best, just before sunset, exceedingly pictu
resque with its minarets, its domes, its green bor
ders, its quaint walls, its mountain background, and
its myriad associations. It was the home of Abra
ham's steward, Eliezer, the wife finder, the home of
Naaman and his little maid, of the Hadads and
Benhadads of prophecy, the spiritual birth-place of
St. Paul, the city of caliphs and conquerors, of
victims and vanquished, and its wheel is still turn
ing. This city was my farthest east. It lies in 36° 18'
East longitude, which is 110° 18' distant from
New York, and therefore represents a time differ-
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AND OTHEE LEAVES
ence of seven hours and twenty minutes. There
after, I was steadily working toward America, the
direction the star of empire also takes. Our return
to Beyrout was relieved by an interesting incident
at Mallakah. We were accused of trying to " beat
our board," when last passing through, and the
cashier came out in dudgeon to threaten us with the
police. He was too excited to listen to any expla
nation, and when a third party, a friendly Greek,
put in a word of soothing, it was like pouring oil on
troubled fires. He blazed away to the end of his
vocabulary, when he was ably reinforced by his
wife. The latter was a woman, not of words only,
but of deeds, and promptly filched our bundle of
luncheon by way of reprisal. It was more amusing
than provoking, and we kept our faces, our tempers,
and our composure. Waiting until the Oriental
had blown off steam to the limit of the gauge, I took
him in hand coolly, told him how, when, and where
we had paid for our meals, what coins we had given
him, and what change he had returned. A look of
dawning intelligence came into his face, he admit
ted that some of us were honest, but he needed a
scape-goat for his spleen and a cushion for his pride,
so he gave the Doctor of Divinity a withering look
that ought to haunt him till death. He even re
fused his coin, and went off with the air of a man
who had been dealing with pitch. The bundle was
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shot back at us by the woman, who looked as if
she might have put strychnine, ratsbane, and Prus-
sic acid into every sandwich.

XV
ASIA MINOR
WE sailed out of Beyrout harbor on a
French steamer, the " Melbourne," on a
thousand-mile cruise, bound for Constan
tinople. We were in Turkish waters aU the while,
but we thought, not of the Turks, but of the Ionian
colonists, who had made those seas the highways of
art and commerce, and of the Apostles who had in
augurated the great foreign missionary movements
of the church upon their surface. The joumey oc
cupies about five days and is exceedingly pictu
resque and romantic, with historic coasts and lovely
islands constantly in view. But at first we ran out
of sight of land for a full day, so unexpectedly
great are the distances on the Mediterranean. We
put into the port of Vathy on the beautiful isle of
Samos. This is a flourishing isle, having a prince
of its own, and enjoying the unusual privilege of
home rule. It is an island whose name appears
again and again in Greek history; Pythagoras was
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bom here; Poly crates developed the golden age of
Ionic art upon its hills. It has always been cele
brated for its wine, as appears in the oft re-current
line in Byron's Song,
" Pill high the bowl with Samian wine.''
One of my shipmates, cognizant of this fact, sent a
native ashore with a silver coin to procure a bottle
of it. The man has not returned yet.
The following day we spent in the wonderful har
bor of Smyrna. The approach to the city is beau
tiful. It lies at the end of a long, well-sheltered
bay, making a port that could hold the navies of the
world. It is the finest harbor in the Mediterranean.
Back of the terraced city the huge form of Mount
Pagus reared itself. Smyrna is another place equally
renowned for its beauty and history. Its name goes
back into the dawn of history, and has never been
changed. It is remembered as the home of Poly-
carp, the martyr, whose tomb we visited, and as the
seat of one of those Seven Churches of Asia to which
the letters of Revelation were addressed.
It is an active town of near two hundred thou
sand population, already the second city in the Em
pire, and enjoying a larger commerce than Constan
tinople itself. When the much-talked-of railway
to Bagdad, opening up the great grain fields of the
Euphrates, is completed, it bids fair to become the
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Liverpool of Asia. I asked a banker what was the
commercial rate of interest; he said, eight to twelve
per cent. It already has a large caravan traffic and
some railroad connections; say five hundred miles.
Its quay is full of many colored turbans and resounds
with all the dialects of Babel. Its bazaars are crowd
ed, and here one finds to perfection the two great
specialties of its trade, Smyrna figs and Smyrna rugs.
The same energy that shows itself in the trade of
the city appears in its missionary life. I visited
the American High School, conducted by the
American Board. It has grown from little to more,
against odds that would have killed anything but
a missionary plant, has taken in a building here
and a comer there, until it is now a sturdy plant,
vrith all the elements of thrift about it. Not that it
has handsome or even adequate quarters, but it is
absolutely self-supporting. Think of that, the next
time some Philistine undertakes to tell you that
" It costs fifty thousand dollars to convert a heathen,
and then he doesn't stay converted." The laugh is
against the Philistine ! Here is a flourishing kinder
garten, too, supported by The Woman's Board,
and doing a beautiful work. The incidental advan
tage of an American institution like that, in teach
ing order, cleanliness and beautification is incal
culable. The Turk may call the city " Giaour Is-
mir," Infldel Smyrna, but I would rather name it
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after its great martyr, Polycarpia, city of many
fruits. Then we sailed up the coast, passed Tenedos,
where the Greeks retired after making that wooden-
horse play on the Trojans. By the way, the Tro
jans never could have played that horse trick on the
Greeks, anymore than Mr. Weller could have
worked his piano game for getting Mr. Pickwick
out of prison. We passed the Troad, scene of a
petty scrimmage, which would have been forgotten
long since, but for the genius of Homer. There,
too, is the little city, where St. Paul had his vision
of one beckoning from Europe, where also he left
the cloak and parchments, pathetic mention of
which is among the last known words of the great
apostle. The Dardanelles, or ancient Hellespont, lie next
in our pathway. They are from one to four miles
wide, and remind us of the western end of Long
Island Sound. Romance and history have estab
lished themselves on these banks. Hero lived on
one side of the water, we are told, and Leander on
the other. He was a good swimmer and used to
cross over, guided by a torch set by Hero, " a light
in the window for thee." But he tried it once too
often; and when his body was washed ashore the
maid promptly cast herself into the sea, and was
buried in the same grave with her lover. This story
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of love and prowess is regularly repeated to every
child born within sight of the Levant, and never
fails to bring salt water to the surface. Lord Byron
was so affected that, in spite of his lame foot, he tried
the experiment himself, and actually swam the
straits; since which the natives have regarded the
tale as " proven true." Here Xerxes crossed upon
his bridge of boats, and showed his self-command
by having the sea, which had wrecked some of his
pontoons, properly lashed. It is a pleasant sail,
some fifty miles in length, having Europe on the
one side and Asia on the other. Turkish castles ap
pear here and there, also the large city of Gallipolis.
Then comes the Sea of Marmora, a curious little sea,
sandwiched in between the Mediterranean and the
Black Sea. It suddenly widens out after leaving
Gallipolis until the shores are forty miles apart,
when it begins to contract, and at a hundred and ten
miles on we as suddenly strike the Bosphorus. It is
a lovely panorama all the way, the water is calm,
the air balmy, the passengers on deck, eager and
enthusiastic to catch the first glimpse of the City
of the Sultan.

XVI
CONSTANTINOPLE
CONSTANTINOPLE lies on three waters
and on seven hills. Its situation is un
rivalled, whether for strategy, commerce, or
beauty. It is the virtual end of the Mediterranean,
commands the Black Sea, and invites the trade of
three continents. One side of the city is washed by
the Sea of Marmora, the other by the Bosphorus,
while an arm of the latter makes up into the heart
of the city, affording anchorage for twelve hundred
ships. This is called the Golden Horn, partly from
its shape (though Strabo thought it more like a
stag's horn than anything else), and partly from its
cornucopia-like blessing to the city, filling it with
shiploads of the world's treasure. The city looks
queenly from every direction. I thought nothing
could exceed its superb appearance as viewed from
the sea, but the impression was even finer when I be
held it from a hill across the Bosphorus. No other
place has so many large and beautiful mosques,
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whose graceful and sky-piercing minarets are the
characteristic feature of the city. The emblems of
Constantinople have, for ages, been the star and
crescent, and they eminently fit its altitude and po
tency. These emblems have been adopted by the
Sultan himself, but the city is more star-like than
Abdul Hamid, and has a future more expanding
than that of the Turkish Empire.
The old part of Constantinople, called Stamboul,
lies on the Sea of Marmora; it is now the Turkish
quarter and the seat of government. It was set
tled centuries ago by the Greeks. A certain colony
following in the wake of another, were directed by
the oracle to found their city opposite the " City of
the Blind." This direction itself was rather blind,
but it became translucent, when they saw that the
former colony had settled on the Asiatic side of the
Bosphorus, as though blind indeed, to the blessing
of the Golden Horn. This is one more of those
legends whose catalogue includes the wolf story of
Rome, the ox-hide incident of New York, and the-
place-where-the-cow-lay-down tale of Boston.
The colonists called the place Byzantium, after
Byzas, their leader, and thereby hangs the tale of
all .the " Byzantine art " that one is so constantly
meeting in the East. But Constantino wanted a
New Rome, and simply obliterated the old place by
superimposing the glory of the new. So Gon
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stantinople extinguished Byzantium. Here was the
true capital of the world for centuries. It is still
called " New Rome " in the documents of the Or
thodox Eastern Church. It has had its pages writ
in red, like its rival on the Tiber. The sack of Con
stantinople, by the Turks, in 1453, is counted one
of the bloodiest chapters in history. Yet the fall of
the city, like the fall of man, had its compensations;
it scattered its scholars over Europe, it sowed Greek
learning everywhere, and thus it prepared for the
Renaissance and the Reformation. These facts im
part a wealth of interest to the great capital.
The first thing we did by way of exploration was
to climb the Tower of Galata and get a bird's-eye
view of the city. Like all Gaul, it is divided into
three parts, Stamboul on the west, Galata and Pera
on the east, separated by the Golden Horn. Pera
means " the beyond," and is the modem city contain
ing the hotels and embassies. Across the Bosphorus
lies another city, Scutari. The Bosphorus itself
leads the eye towards its mouth, sixteen miles to the
north. It is a beautiful stream, reminding one in
its volume of water of the Niagara River. Jason
sailed down it with the golden fleece. Xenophon
crossed it with his Ten Thousand. It is the outlet
of that foggy sea, the terror of mariners, which the
Greeks termed Euxenos, " good to strangers," for
the reason that it was just the opposite. The gild-
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ing of its name wore off after a while, and it is now
called the Black Sea. Below us the ships of all na
tions lie at anchor, the flags of all countries wave
in air; the war vessels of all ages frown each other
out of countenance. A million people live within
sight of that tower and ten million dogs. I have
not counted the latter, or the former, but the one
is a Turkish estimate, the other is an American.
Now let us go down and stand on the Galata
Bridge. If you stand there long enough, you will
see every nationality on earth cross it. It is a toll
bridge, connecting the old city with the new. Here
comes one of the famous Turkish porters, a perfect
Atlas. He has a saddle on his back to make the
load ride easily, and is bent almost double with his
burden. He lives on vegetables and fruit, but can
carry a cask of wine, a load of hay, a cord of wood,
or anything else that four ordinary men can place on
top of him. Talk about the white man's burden, it
is nothing compared to the Turkish porter's. Over
there to the right is Step Street, which is a veritable
ffight of stairs up the hill. Under the bridge are
darting hundreds of boats, called caiques (kah-
eeks), of which there are said to be 30,000 at hand.
The caique is a long, graceful craft, having no
seats except cushions in the very bottom of the boat,
with an easy gliding motion, extremely pleasant.
At the Stamboul end of the bridge are the ba-
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zaars. They are roofed over, reminding one a little
of Fulton Market, but every kind of product in the
world is to be found there. The standing places are
full of sheep. Some of them are as clean as Mary's
little lamb, many of them tied with ribbons. For
a Mohammedan feast approaches, whereat every
family will have a mutton roast. Here comes the
vender of lemonade. His fountain is a complicated
affair, half glass, half brass, slung over his shoul
der. The bowls are of brass, too, and he holds them
as castanets, making a clatter to attract attention.
When he fills the flowing bowl, he stoops forward
and deftly turns the acetic stream from above his
shoulder into the cup. Mind your foot there! You
are stepping on a dog, on a dozen dogs! They
swarm in every street and lane; black, brown, dingy,
and in all the newest shades of tan. They are of
the real " yaller dog " variety, half wolf, half fox,
the sharpest curs that ever evaded a dog tax. In
deed, they have no tax collector to fear, are given
the freedom of the city, and are the " WLite
Angels " of Constantinople. They have the diges
tion of an alligator, and each night eat the streets
clear of everything, but the cobble-stones. They
have their own wards and spheres of influence. Woe
be to the stray uitlander dog that does not keep his
distance ! He may come out against them one way,
but they make him flee before them seven ways.
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Yet for all they are so many, it is said that hydro
phobia is unknown in the city.
The great feature of Constantinople is the
Mosque of St. Sophia. It is not as imposing a
structure as some other mosques, and the interior is
almost invariably disappointing at first. One won
ders upon what the reputation of the place was ever
made. It is undeniably dingy, and here and there
are plaster and tawdry-looking paint. But wait.
Look at that bold span of arches, that noble dome
a hundred and seven feet in diameter. Remark
those columns, they are from Baalbec, from Ephe-
sus, from Athens. Notice those mosaics, each repre
senting the life-time of an artist. Did you ever see
finer windows? The dome is made of pumice stone,
so as to be as light as possible. The whole effect is
wonderfully airy and graceful. Porphyry, lapis
lazuli, pearl, stones of art, of treasure, of history,
have been massed here. The whole world has been
laid under contribution, until its builder, Constan
tino, cried in ecstasy, " O Solomon, I have sur
passed thee ! "
There are other mosques in Constantinople that
attract admiration. The general features of aU are
the same, namely, a dome or series of domes, slender
spires called minarets, from four to twenty, a lava
tory in the court, the Mecca point within toward
which the face is tumed in prayer, countless mgs
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and as many lamps, huge shields upon the walls, con
taining the signature of Mahomet and extracts from
the Koran, such as "Allah il Allah," " God is God,"
or " Allah mozout," " God is present." Generally
there are a few worshippers within, sitting tailor-
fashion upon the rugs, and occasionally touching
the forehead to the floor. In St. Sophia one feels
a sense of desecration. Originally a Christian
church, it has been transformed for Mohammedan
use by violence. The rugs are all set at an angle
with the lines of the church, in order to conform
to the Mecca point. The arms of the cross on the
heavy bronze doors have been torn off by fanatical
Moslems. One of the pleasures of Constantinople is a visit
to the so-called Sweet Waters of Europe. These
springs lie at the head of the Golden Horn and are
the rendezvous for all the gentry and nobility of
the city, together with its Vanity Fair. Here one
sees gold lace by the acre and Arab horses at their
best. The Turk is a man after Mr. Weller's own
heart, " the worry best judge of a horse you ever
knowed." Their instinct for horse-flesh is unerring.
Here are the strolling players, mountebanks, fakirs,
and catchpenny artists of all ranks. The ladies of
Constantinople are out in force, too, but it is little
one can see of their faces, owing to the universal
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Quite a different entertainment is that of the pub
lic story-teller; one meets him constantly in the
East. He is usually hired by some smoking estab
lishment, the place being crowded with men, to
whom he affords an Arabian entertainment for
a thousand and one nights. He dehvers his tale
amid a cloud of smoke, talking now toward one side
of the room and again toward the other, turn about
being fair play. I heard no applause, and remarked
more contentment than excitement about the per
formance. The Greek bards wrought their hearers
up to ecstasy by reciting the Iliad, and Sheherazade
kept a man spell-bound for two years and a half,
but their successors have no such fortune. In Chi
cago the affair would be voted " slow."
Much more exciting that this was the exhibit of
the Howling Dervishes. These Dervishes are re
garded with extraordinary respect all over the Em
pire. They form practically a secret society, a
Mafia, and woe be to the man who incurs their en
mity! They communicate with each other from
city to city, and hound him with their vengeance
to the end of life. The howling transaction takes
place on certain days and attracts a throng. They
begin by forming a line of men at one end of the
room, who commence to recite in a stiff, insistant
way the undisputed fact, " Allah il Allah." This
they do, first bowing to the left and anon to the
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A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
right. It reminds you of that ancient cry, " Great
is Diana of the Ephesians." As they warm to the
work, the pace increases. It makes the back ache to
look at them! After an hour or more, the breath
being pretty well spent or bowed out of them, they
drop to the syllable " Hu! " which means He, and
is applied to the Deity. This is continued until ex-
haustation is reached, but just before the dead point,
the Holy Man in charge gives a sign and the ma
chinery stops. I felt no particular emotion up to
this point, being perfectly willing that the Howl
ers or anybody else should be happy in their own
way; but when they brought in a row of children,
and the Holy Man prepared to walk on them, I
came near making a " howl " of my own. Indig
nation culminated when they brought in a baby
not six months old for him to stand on. The theory
is, that his feet will press some of his reverence's
virtue into them, and they be immune from sick
ness. The child cried, of course, with what little
breath it had left, whereupon I rushed into the
open air, for in another minute I should have broken
up the meeting.
As a lady had described a ride in a caique as " the
poetry of motion," and Turkish coffee as " the nec
tar of the gods," we resolved to combine the two
superlatives by a trip to Bechiktag. The latter is
a boat station on the Bosphorus, just above the city,
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where a little cafe is to be found on the pier, famous
for its beverage. The proprietor is said to have
monopolized all there is of a particular growth, and
to select each berry by hand; hence the reputation
of his coffee. It certainly was fine; also the ghde of
the caique; also the Bosphorus itself, with its beauti
ful shores, its changing views of the great city and
suburbs, its multifarious shipping and war vessels.
It was sunset, as we returned, and the beginning of
a Mohammedan feast. This was ushered in with
the roar of many guns, reminding us of the Fourth
of July. Now that I am on the Bosphorus, I may
mention meeting a young soldier on a ferry-boat.
He had been to some English school, evidently, and
knew a little English. This accomplishment he
aired with great satisfaction, and with the aim of
practising his vocabulary on me. He was flushed
with liquor, and inclined to familiarity. So I took
him in hand as follows: " My martial friend, why
is your damask cheek suffused with this flush of
shame? " He studied on the subject a while, then
said : " I have just had a lemonade, and am half
dead drunk."
The missionary work of Constantinople is one of
the most interesting features of it. It centres in the
Bible House in Stamboul. Here one sees the prep
aration for sending out Christian literature into all
parts of the Empire, The library of Oriental books
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A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
is extensive ; the force of scholars, some native, some
from America, are actively engaged. The printing-
presses are humming. Turkey has not issued half
a dozen books this century that are of any thought
value, and if the Christians of the country are to be
fed, a literature must be furnished them outside of
the native press. The Turkish censor is very much
alive, and he can see more hidden meanings in a per
fectly harmless paragraph than Sergeant Buzfuz
did in " Chops and tomato sauce."
A missionary is popularly regarded as a man
mounted on a barrel, preaching to a street-corner
audience out of a Bagster Bible. As a matter of
fact, he is a foreman, a superintendent, a campaign
planner. He has from ten to twenty native work
ers under his charge, and keeps them all busy, a
West Pointer over enlisted volunteers. He is a
man of much correspondence and much journey
ing, an educator, an adviser, a preacher, an author.
He operates a great amount of machinery connected
with churches, schools, hospitals and printing-
presses. He is, above all things else, a level-headed
man of affairs, with tact, ingenuity, gumption, en
terprise, and that indefinable quality called by New
Englanders, " faculty," which consists of equal
parts of the art of putting it and the art of letting it
alone. He is hampered by lack of funds, the very
growth of his work keeping him on starvation diet.
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AND OTHEE LEAVES
He is in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in
perils by his own countrymen, who sometimes re
turn and slander him. Withal, he is a man of like
passions with ourselves. Missionaries are sometimes
as much tried by each other as the Pilgrim Mothers
were tried by the Pilgrim Fathers. For which
reason it does them good occasionally to see a fresh
face from America. It warms their heart to have
an American call, give them a hail and be friendly.
The ungodly are not so. I refer to certain eminent
divines who sail into Constantinople, and never go
near the Bible House, ships that pass in the night.
The very sailors, who scrub the decks, ought to pelt
them with holy stones.
However, the missionary has heard the motto,
" Keep sweet and go ahead," It was a Turkish mis
sionary who used to say, " Look on the bright side,
and if there isn't any bright side, polish up the dark
side." He has no pyrotechnics, he sounds no trum
pet before him when he prays, but he is quietly
" doing his duty in that station of life in which it
has pleased God to place him." The same applies
to his wife, who is a missionary raised to the nth
power. He shows us in actual practice the Will
iam Carey principle of attempting great things for
God, of expecting great things from God. He is a
corner-stone man, a sure-nail man, a mustard-seed
man, and the Thirteenth Chapter of First Corin-
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A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
thians made flesh. They may sit in darkness, but
they have seen a great light. They dwell among
a people of unclean lips, but it is theirs by gospel
grace to purify hearts as no fuller on earth can
white them. The call for retreat, for grounding
arms, for hauling down the flag, may come from us,
but never from them, who are bearing the burden
and heat of the day. They are going forth con
quering and to conquer; the Lord their God is with
them, and the shout of a King is among them.
We had the good fortune to see the ceremony
known as the Salamlik. This is the public attend
ance on Friday, the Mohammedan Sabbath, of the
Sultan at his private mosque. He is accompanied
by his court and by ten thousand of his troops.
Throngs of people are there to view and all the em
bassies in glittering array. The latter are privi
leged to issue a certain number of tickets to their
friends, " to assist in the ceremony of the Salamik,"
as the invitation reads. The Sultan is head of the
Moslem faith, and his prayers within the mosque are
uttered in a representative capacity. The time with
in is about twenty minutes. On emerging, he enters
another carriage drawn by four horses and takes the
reins himself, his suite following on foot. We were
there in season, and entered the palace grounds amid
the waving of plumes, the champing of horses and
the flashing of jewels and gold. After a two hours'
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test of patience, the soldiers broke out into a roar
of greeting, and His Majesty appeared. He passed
within a few feet of me so that I had full oppor
tunity to scan his face. He was plainly dressed in
black, with a red fez on his head. His face looked
unpleasant, unwholesome, unhappy and unreHable.
This is the man whom an American writer has
called " plucky," but whose pluck will be remem
bered in history as consisting in sending a sword of
merit to the governor who ordered the massacre of
helpless, unarmed men, women and children.
The Turk does not impress travellers with favor.
He never drinks, but makes up for it in other ways.
He is as regular in his prayers as a summer boarder
at meals, falling upon his knees at any time. Our
boatman on the Lake of Galilee tumed his face
toward Mecca, dropped upon the sand in full view
of all us " infidels," and was not disconcerted in
the least. They carry beads in their hands and are
incessantly fingering them. I asked my dragoman
about it and he said, " It is better for a man to be
thinking about Allah than to be thinking about
you." This I admitted without argument, but
later, when I saw a Mussulman deeply interested in
a street fight without interruption of his bead-work,
I concluded that Orientals must be troubled with the
same complaint as Americans, to wit, wandering of
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A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
What is the future of this Turkish Empire? The
hand of death is certainly upon it. Within a cen
tury their territory in Europe has shrunk from two
hundred and thirty thousand square miles to sixty
thousand. Her European population has dropped
from twenty millions to five. It is a government
that ought to die, a government of suspicion, of es
pionage, of treachery. The last Sultan, it is said,
committed suicide; more probably it was " an as
sisted fate." The present Sultan's brother is called
insane, convenient excuse for confining him in an
asylum. He reigns by intrigue and amid secret
factions. He wrings the life-blood from his people
by the most demoralizing system of taxation on
earth. The tree is taxed whether it is bearing or
not, so that in Syria discouraged and frenzied
farmers have been known to cut down the olive
grove in sheer desperation rather than be taxed into
bankruptcy. The court lives in splendor, the peo
ple strangle with the mailed hand upon the throat.
Yet this is the sovereign whose official title is
" Abdul Hamid, the Beloved Sultan of Sultans,
Emperor of Emperors; the Shadow of God upon
Earth; Brother of the Sun; Dispenser of Crovsms to
Those who sit upon Thrones; Sovereign of Constan
tinople and the great city of Brousa, as well as of
Damascus, which is the Scent of Paradise; King of
Kings, whose Army is the Asylum of Victory; at
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AND OTHEE LEAVES
the Foot of Whose Throne is Justice and the Refuge
of the World." Such is his official name, his real
name is The Sick Man of the East. Yet his sick
ness is discouragingly slow, reminding one of that
sick man of the west, whose wife remarked so
naively, " I do wish the old man would get well or
something." The Sultan is unable to get well, he
might truly repeat the grim jest of George the
Third, " Excuse me for being so long in dying."
He is living to-day upon the jealousies of Europe.
He is detested by all, but is permitted to hold his
property on sufferance, rather than that the Powers
should face the problem of a post mortem division
of his estate. Meanwhile Russia has her sleepless
eye on his lovely capital, and whispers to herself,
" I bide my time."

XVII
THE ISLES OF GREECE
GREECE is enveloped by nature with a robe
of beauty. The traveller is held spell
bound with " the isles of Greece, the isles
of Greece," (a repetition that accentuates their
number and variety), long before he sets foot upon
her shores. They are emeralds and sapphires set
in a jasper sea. Greece is enveloped also with a
robe of artistic glory. Though but half as large as
the State of New York, she occupies, in the eyes of
the civilized world, a space outspanning empires.
Reflections like these crowded upon us, as we sailed
up the lovely Gulf of ^gina, landing at Piraeus,
the port of Athens, originally selected by Themis-
tocles. Athens, " the city of the violet crown," is six
miles away, lying upon a plain out of which rise
several abrupt rocky hills. On either side of the
plain stand up the mountains, not unlike the Berk-
shires around Stoekbridge. The one nearest the
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AND OTHEE LEAVES
city is called Hymettus, famous for its honey. Its
next-door neighbor is Pentelicus, " of the marble
heart." From the head of Pericles, from the hand
of Phidias, from the heart of Pentelicus was created
the Parthenon, a quartette of noble Ps. One of the
rocky heights alluded to rises out of the very heart
of the city; it is the Acropolis, " the High City,"
originally the castle of defence, but subsequently de
veloped into the most famous place of architecture
the world over. Three of its sides are perpendicular,
while the fourth is reinforced by masonry, including
a wonderful flight of marble steps. As the city
grew in power and wealth, the Acropolis came to be
used exclusively for art and worship. Here the
great temples were reared, and, like the capitol at
Hartford, their sculptural beauty is enhanced by
being set upon a hill. Here was erected, also, the
gold and ivory statue of Athena, one of the wonders
of the world, a masterpiece of Phidias, himself the
master of masters. The remains of several grand
structures are still observable. They have been
shattered by earthquake and bombshell, been plun
dered by avarice and hatred, but they still show,
nevertheless, their noble ideal, even as fallen hu
manity reflects the image of God.
Visitors drive to the Acropolis first, they drive to
it last. They visit it by moonlight, when from out
its shadows steal the figures of a wondrous past,
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For great men have leaned against the bases of
those motionless shafts. " Other ages have had
their bright particular stars; the age of Pericles is
the Milky Way of Great Men." From the Acrop
olis one gains also a bird's-eye view of the city.
New Athens lies around Old Athens, as if encom
passing and sheltering her from harm. It reminds
one of the saying, "Yestreen 1 saw the new moon
With the old moon in her arms.''
The Athens of to-day is a town to which the word
" hustling " may be applied. The streets are full
of shops and shoppers. The city is laid out regu
larly in squares, and is handsomely built of marble.
The public buildings are classically beautiful, with
the exception of the Palace, which is a White House
more democratic in appearance than the one at
Washington. The bane of the city is its dust, which
is only partially alleviated by sprinkling. The
town has a thrifty air, in spite of its paper currency
with gold at a premium of sixty-five.
The Athenians of St. Paul's day were inquisitive
and newsy; they are so still, spending much time in
the cafes, either to hear or to tell some new thing.
They are all politicians and throng the public
squares until two A. M., sipping coffee and ham
mering the table with the fist. The minute details
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of the legislature are gone into like the campaigns
of Hannibal. Did the Prime Minister presume to
tack on to the Sundry Civil List the cost of a saddle
for the Chamberlain's boy? If so, it was a " rider,"
and not to be home. " Go to, ye Athenians; let us
rally as at Marathon, and vote it down! "
The Greeks pride themselves on their democracy;
they regard us Americans as being in a promising
way, but hold that for the real Simon-pure, Andrew
Jackson article, one must look to them alone. They
have a king, to be sure, but they go to see him with
trousers in boots, clap him on the back, and call him
" George." They spell elections with a double X,
they are so absorbing. A friend of mine was pres
ent at the last mayoralty contest, and stated that
they had torch-light processions and serenades for
ten nights thereafter. They vote a white ballot for
their candidate, and, following the ancient custom,
a black ballot against every opposing candidate,
with the result that, in a recent city election, each
freeman voted a hundred and ten times. They
vote by means of a white or black bean, and become
so expert in the matter, that " not to know beans,"
is synonymous with dense Boeotian stupidity. The
man who told me all this, once took a prize for truth
fulness during the school year.
The Greeks are natural traders and one sees their
signs all over the East. Their names generally end
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in the syllable " eion " ; we counted a hundred, for
example, in one street and then closed the poll,
Eion appears to be the termination meaning place,
like the Latin " ium," and is resorted to for every
kind of a noun. Hotel is " xenodecheion," that is
" place of receiving strangers." The final n is not
pronounced, and almost every vowel and diphthong
in the language is sounded hke ee in feet. The
Greeks are thrifty. The major part of the real es
tate in Cairo, for instance, is in their hands; so is the
banking business of the Orient. The world has al
ways had a sentimental affection for Greece, of
which Lord Byron's was a conspicuous example.
Subscriptions for Greek Independence were taken
in our colleges seventy years ago, and some of the
cannon procured thereby were cast in Salisbury,
Conn. The reason for this romantic attachment
lies almost wholly in their past. The modem Greeks
are not much different from the rest of us, as Byron
at length discovered; but they are interesting, and
probably worth all the blood and treasure their in
dependence cost.
The land is beautiful in itself, and ever will be.
The Vale of Tempo is regarded as the most beauti
ful in the world. The isle of Corfu seemed to me,
on the whole, the fairest spot my eyes feasted upon
in all my joumey. The hills are always strong and
graceful, with an added charm of historical asso
ciation; the sea gleams everywhere, for the coast of
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Greece is more indented even than the coast of
Maine. The forests around Athens have been sac
rificed too much, so that the rainfall is scanty, and
the limestone shows through the herbage too glar-
mgly. But tree-planting has begun again and some
Order of Foresters ought to do for the country a
work of grace.
One glorious afternoon we sailed in a small boat
through the Straits of Salamis, a few miles only
from the city. Upon the mainland opposite is the
sharp hill recalling so vividly the famous incident,
A king sat on the rocky brow
Which looks o'er sea-bom Salamis;
And ships by thousands lay below.
And men in nations — all were his.
The battle of Salamis was won by faith, the faith
of one man, Themistocles was alone in his opinion
that the Greek fleet was able to cope with the Per
sian crush. He could not gain the consent of the
majority of sea captains, but managed to delay the
retreat, until their fleet was surrounded and battle
was inevitable. There before us was the coast
where the wives and daughters of Athens came out
to view; beneath our keel were the waters that were
once lashed with the fury of oars, or tinged with the
blood of Asia, " making the green one red." There
were the bays where the contestants were jammed in
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A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
one mass or drifted helplessly apart. The Persian
fleet far outnumbered the little Athenian flotilla,
but were inferior to them in oarsmanship and strik
ing power. The battle was a case of the sword-fish
versus the whale, which has but one ending. The
judgment, the courage, the faith of Themistocles
were justified, and all the world wondered. The
only real man on the Persian side was a woman.
The rest fled east, fied west, or leaped into the sea
and enriched the fisheries of Attica. The king,
who was called early in order to enjoy the annihi
lation of his enemies, went to bed without the sight.
But for Athens the day ended gloriously. Then
was their mouth filled with laughter and their
tongue with singing. Did not one chase a thousand,
and two put ten thousand to flight? It was an inci
dent after the order of David and Goliath, whose
very disproportion captivates the world's heart.
Another day we climbed Pentelicus, the moun
tain from which Athens drew her supply of exqui
site marble. It was a hard, stiff climb, involving
twelve miles of effort. More than once I sighed
for the volume in my library entitled, " Helps over
hard places." But the summit, reached at three
o'clock, was rewarding. We looked directly down
upon a famous plain.
The mountains look on Marathon,
And Marathon looks on the sea.
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Here occurred another of those unequal contests,
eleven thousand against a hundred and ten thou
sand, which ended in favor of "the Httle dog
in the fight." The plain of Marathon is not large,
perhaps a mile and a half by five. It is girt by a
lovely circular bay. At the farthest point from the
sea is a little bend where the Athenians waited un
til Miltiades saw the Persian cavalry embark. Off
they sailed, supposing their presence would be un
necessary in such an insignificant skirmish. Then
Miltiades permitted himself a smile, and ordered
the charge. The Persians were driven into a mo
rass, somewhat as Barak drove the hosts of Sisera
into the swamp of the Kishon. The Greeks lost
only one hundred and ninety-two men, who lie
buried in a little moxmd on the plain, but their op
ponents lost so many whole regiments that the place
is called in history " the Persians' grave."
The hills of Greece are full of shrines, temples,
statues — all in ruins. But they are sufficient to at
tract the artists and scholars of all countries. These
battered columns are studied with a care that is
not always given to human life itself. They copied
them in the days of the Caesars, they copy them in
the days of President McKinley and Kaiser Wil
helm. We made a joumey to Corinth by a " Shore
Line " railway, fifty-eight miles from Athens, and
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beautiful all the way. Here on a narrow isthmus,
between two frequented seas, a natural site for a
metropolis, grew up a populous and wealthy city,
which, after a checkered career, had taken on new
life and luxury in St. Paul's day. It was interesting
to look on those mountains and graceful shores, as
through the eyes of the apostle, for they were all
that remained of his day, save the few columns of
a resurrected temple. Here he remained a full
year and a half, the longest period he spent in any
one place, under the Divine assurance, " I have
much people in this city." Here he developed the
pastoral heart, which shows so tenderly in his two
letters to the Corinthian church. They were a most
unpromising lot of church members, according to
our standards, but, nevertheless, they were consid
ered worthy to receive the two masterpieces of the
great apostle, the Thirteenth Chapter of First Co
rinthians and the sublime passage on the Resurrec
tion. A canal has been cut across the isthmus, three
and a half miles long, which saves two hundred and
fifty miles of sea voyage. We crossed it by rail
road, and I was so much interested in it, that I re
solved to walk back and get a snap of the camera at
it. It seemed to me to be about half a mile from the
station, and I allowed three-quarters of an hour for it.
It turned out to be a mile and a half away. In the
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very act of taking it, I was paralyzed to see my train
for Patras just crossing the bridge! I must make
up the return distance in the time it would take the
train to run a mile and a half, plus its wait at the
station. Then I girded up my loins and ran. I
thought of Cushi and Ahimaaz, and of the messen
gers that ran from Thermopylae to Athens, and beat
all four. The heat had expanded the road, but I
made up the difference. Men stopped their work
in the field, and women brought their children to
the dooiTvay to see me run. I hailed an engine in
passing and offered the engineer a king's ransom,
if he would take me to the station, but he preferred
to see me run. I made the last lap just as the
guard's horn tooted. When the local reporter writes
up that run, he can fill a Corinthian column.
All that afternoon we rode by rail along the
southern shore of the Gulf of Corinth. The penin
sula is the most fertile part of Greece. It was beau
tifully green with wheat fields, olive orchards and
vineyards. We saw old Mount Parnassus and many
other famous heights, some of them snow clad. By
night we reached Patras, the second port in the king
dom, but of no special interest artistically. Not far
from here, across the gulf, is Missolonghi, where
Byron breathed his last.
The next day we journeyed on west and south to
Olympia, where the famous games were celebrated
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for a thousand years of history. The Germans have
expended $300,000 here in excavation, and have
unearthed the Temple of Zeus and the race-course.
They are situated at the junction of two small rivers.
The hills border the plain, reminding me of
Cornwall, my neighboring town. But the greatest
find of all was the Hermes of Praxiteles, a statue
of the god playing with a little child held on his
left arm. This sculpture is regarded by many as
the finest work in marble on earth, and it is claimed
that it alone is sufficient compensation for the
money spent in excavation. While it is not one of
the masterpieces of Praxiteles, as described by the
ancients, still it is far and away ahead of all things
modern in stone. A mantle falls from his shoulder,
and the very texture of the folds is so well brought
out that the difference between it and the exquisite
skin is clearly marked. When a photograph was
shown to a great German scholar, he was so illu-
sioned as to exclaim, " What made the photographer
put in that cloth? " The face is very beautiful,
but I was Philistine enough to ask myself, " After
all, does it not lack soul? " Hermes was looking
away from the child, not at him, which was a point
against him at the start. Handsome as he was, he
looked to be fully capable of breaking a woman's
heart, and then of inquiring what was to be had for
dinner. The marble may have been Pentelic; it
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was certainly not angelic. The man who owned that
face may have merited the praise of Absalom,
" from the sole of his foot even to the crown of
his head there was no blemish in him; " but he
never could have uttered the words of one who,
though " his bodily presence was weak," could say,
" Neither count I my life dear unto myself."
The Island of Corfu is " the farthest north " of
Greece, and one of the most beautiful spots in cre
ation. We rounded the picturesque old castle early
one morning and came to anchor off the clean and
sightly town. It was Easter Day. The Greek and
Gregorian calendars have no dealings with each
other, so that the Eastern and Western churches
observe separate days. We had attended an Easter
service in the English church of Athens the previous
Sunday, we now followed it by attending the Greek
Church Easter service to-day! The functionary
ushered us quite up into the chancel, within a yard,
in fact, of a chanting priest blessed with lusty lungs.
There was much monotoning of sentences, much
burning of incense, and more bowing down to holy
bones than I am accustomed to, but I endeavored to
worship with them, and was rewarded, at length,
by hearing the First Chapter of John read aloud in
Greek, which was the most reverential, impressive,
and stillest part of the whole service. The well-
worn Bible was kissed by an eager throng, and
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the communion cup, containing the bread and wine
mixed as a sop, was given to a number, including an
infant, who rebelled with clamor and had to be con
verted by force of arms.
The Empress of Austria built a most beautiful
palace in this isle, reminding one of Coleridge's
lines. In Xenadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree.
It is situated on the mountain side overlooking the
Adriatic, a castle by the sea. Gardens vie with
gardens and bowers with bowers, to make it an
earthly paradise. It is called, " Achilleion," after
the Greek hero. A large fresco in the hall repre
sents the victorious combatant in the act of drag
ging Hector, slain, around the walls of Troy. In
the garden is its counterpart, a statue of the victor
vanquished, of Achilles wounded to death, pluck
ing the poisoned arrow from his heel. Did the Em
press, I wonder, as she surveyed that statue in the
midst of her terraced garden, have suspicion of the
danger that lurked in her own pathway? The di
vinity that doth hedge a king does not keep at bay
the hand of an assassin. The Empress was stricken
in the height of her prosperity, and the iron entered
into her soul. Achilleion is now empty, and strang
ers only enjoy its surpassing loveliness.
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AND OTHEK LEAVES
This was our last glimpse of the isles of Greece,
The garden, the castle, the peak, the mountain, suc
cessively sank into the Adriatic, and the image was
effaced from the eye to be printed upon the memory.
Clime of the unf orgotten brave !
Whose land from plain to mountain cave
Was Freedom's home or Glory's grave.

XVIII
ITALY
ITALY from Brindisi to Naples is a garden.
Everything was in bloom and the fields
looked as fair as art and nature could make
them. " Thy very weeds are beautiful; thy wastes
more rich than other chmes' fertility." The Apen
nines make a noble backbone for the peninsula,
and a grand background for many a frowning castle
and smiling farm. But Italy has an Old Man of the
Sea about the neck, his name is Taxation. Taxes
devour everything, levied in most ingenious ways,
tax following tax. An Italian lady told me that
first they raised the tax on water, then they de
manded that the quantity taken should be increased.
Water falls in Italy, but the tax on water, never!
There is a tax upon the railway ticket, and on top
of that a " sur-tax." " That which the palmer
worm hath left hath the locust eaten; and that
which the locust hath left hath the cankerworm
eaten; and that which the cankerworm hath left
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hath the caterpillar eaten." Italy might be one of
the richest of lands in agriculture, as she is in art,
but her time is not yet.
Naples once more cast her magic spell over us,
Naples that loves her matchless site so well as to be
constantly getting as much as possible of that site
upon her person. Naples is dirty, but gay. They
can live on next to nothing and sing glees over it.
They eat everything that grows on earth, and the
donkeys eat everything that grows beneath the
earth. The stable feed of the city is roots.
The bay shone with all its queenly beauty, when
we steamed down to the rocks of Capri. Capri
forms one of the protecting barriers of the bay. The
diver is on hand ready to bring up coppers cast into
the sea. You need not fear that the money will be
lost; in spite of his tardy start and seeming deliber
ation, he invariably returns, like Peter's fish, with
the coin in his mouth. Capri is beautiful in itself,
but its famous feature is the " Blue Grotto." This
is a cave which is entered at the sea level, and then
only in still water. The entrance is very narrow
and low, so that passengers need to lie down in the
bottom of the boat. But being in, the spectator sees
one of the sights of his life. The water is all blue,
like the pavement of sapphire, " as the body of
heaven in his clearness." It has a phosphorescent
effect, also, so that everything breaking the sur-
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face looks like molten silver seen through blue glass.
Boys are wont to dive for visitors in order to en
hance the effect. One placing the palm beneath
the water reminded us of the title, " Otto of the
Silver Hand." The same is a parable, and teaches
us that all the blues in life may have their silver
lining. We spent the night at Sorrento. It is considered
one of the Edens of earth; flavored with a spice of
Athens; for, while it is a bower of roses set by the
sea, it is also the home of literature and romance.
Here Torquato Tasso was bom, here Lamartine
found his Graziella, here was the scene of " Agnes
of Sorrento," and here Marion Crawford has writ
ten many of his books. It is a rare dehght to sit
out on the cliff, enjoying the scent of the rose, the
murmur of the sea beneath, the stars in the Italian
sky above, and old Vesuvius occasionally belching
his lurid flame, " Earth's great heart in palpitation,
Lava blood in circulation ! "
The day following we drove for flfteen miles to
Pompeii upon a highway built on the edge of the
cliff, protected from its precipice by a low stone
wall. On the right side crags, castles, and courts;
on the left side shrubbery, scenery, the sea; on both
sides inspiration! 152

AND OTHEK LEAVES
A cat may look at a king, and so may an Ameri
can. The King in question was the Sovereign of
Italy. It was a great spectacle. Their Majesties
came to town in order to open an Hygienic Exposi
tion, and all Naples went forth to welcome them.
Humbert is popular in the city, for here he laid his
crown aside, girded himself with a towel and did
wash the hands and feet of the plague-stricken.
Royalty never endears itself so well to its people
as where it illustrates in a practical way the motto
of the Prince of Wales, " Ich dien." My niece,
the wife of an Italian officer, and I drove literally
" from pillar to post," in the vain attempt to get a
stand. At every point we were waived imperiously
away, for O ! it gives a man on a police force or a
head waiter in a busy restaurant such exquisite
pleasure to be " dress'd in a little brief authority."
At length we found a stand near the palace. The
crowd was a great study. It was of all ages and
ranks, all eager, all satisfied, for all felt that there
was enough of the king to go around. We had a
long wait, for kings belong to " the leisure class,"
and must not be hurried. It is not always true, it
seems, that " the King's business requireth haste."
King Umberto and Queen Margherita, at length,
drove by. The king inherits a moustache from his
father that is " fierce as ten furies," but, as a matter
of fact, he is a very mild and humane man. His
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eyes rove from side to side, as if he were on the out
look for an assassin. The queen is noted for her
smile, and bows with a grace that turns the heart of
Italy from brooding over taxes to hurrahing for the
house of Savoy. After a while the royal party re
appeared from the interior, coming out upon the
balcony facing the square. But not for long, mind
you, for royalty knows better than to cheapen it
self. The king business has to many people a great
glamor, but his is not a life to be envied by any
American sovereign.

Since writing the above paragraph in the origi
nal journal, the civilized world has been shocked
by the assassination of the King of Italy. It is a
disgrace to America that the plot was conceived on
American shores. Humbert was a man who de
served better of his generation than a sharpened
knife. Our suspicion as to the reason of his roving
eyes was probably correct; he had a presentiment of
lurking danger and " coming events cast their
shadows before." His reign is over; a new one
has begun. The king is dead; long live the king!

XIX
ROME
WE left old Vesuvius in the act, as one mem
ber of our party expressed it, "' of garg
ling his throat with a swallow of hot
lava," and tumed northward. We entered the
Eternal City one glorious Italian day and immedi
ately drove around it. It is a place of four hundred
thousand people, and is important as being, since
1871, the capital of the kingdom. Its importance
historically, artistically, ecclesiastically, cannot be
measured. For Rome is in a class by itself.
Modern Rome has wide streets in the newer portion,
well paved and electrically lighted. The shops are
extensive and attractive. I do not know of any
place in Europe where general goods are as cheap,
or where beautiful things are so many and varied.
The very business signs are noteworthy for their
artistic quality, usually made of glass with a black
background. The streets are full of traffic and of a
vast throng of sight-seers. We are here in the
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height of the season, and, in addition, it is Holy
Year, when the Pope receives a special visitation of
pilgrims from all over the world. Many a banner
of strange device has been brought here to be
blessed by His Holiness, including some from North
and South America,
The seven hills of Rome are still traceable, but
the wear of ages and the engineering of modem
street-makers have despoiled them of their promi
nence. The yellow Tiber still winds gracefully
through the city, but its volume is greatly dimin
ished, owing to the levelling of forests, and to-day
it looks not larger than the Harlem, not as wide as
the Connecticut. Its hue is muddier than the Mis
sissippi's at St. Louis, being more of a slate color
than yellow. It contains nothing but small boats,
though in the time of Caesar the vessels of the Medi
terranean used to unload at the city wharves. Ma
laria still infests the city, in parts, but has never
invaded the Quirinal Hill, where our hotel is situ
ated. The old and the new blend wonderfully in
Rome, all kinds of old, all kinds of new. The age
of the Sahines and of the Caesars, the age of the
Decline and Fall, the ages of the two hundred and
sixty-three popes, the age of art and literature, and
with them, too, the age of modern Italy and of the
Roman CathoHc Church of our time. You go into
the splendid chapel commemorative of Pius Ninth,
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and you are at once reminded that the arteries of
Rome run into all parts of the world. For upon the
walls are placed tiles bearing name after name of
American cities not fifty years old. Rome is a city
full of reminiscenses, classical, mediaeval, modern.
One issues from its portals, as a traveller ex
pressed it, " feeling as if George Washington and
Benjamin Franklin were boys of yesterday," It
is not my purpose to give an extended account of
Rome, or even of the impression its treasures
stamped upon my mind. The task is beyond the
scope of this modest volume. The bare mention of
places and objects visited, without any comment
on them, fill five pages of my note-book. I mention
a few sample sights and experiences only.
The church of St. Peter's is impressive in the
extreme, although its vastness does not appeal to the
spectator at first; the dimensions are so well propor
tioned that the eye is misled. The great dome is
one hundred and thirty-eight feet across, but one
finds it difficult to believe that it is more than fifty.
The floor space is said to contain eighteen thousand
square yards; the next largest church in the world
having but ten thousand, yet it is cut up so by
massive columns and recesses that it is never
seen in one field of vision. The roof is a mass of
gold and decoration, but contains no such treas
ures in fresco as many other churches. There are
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endless statues and tombs of saints, many of the fig
ures being in violent action and with wrought-up
expressions, lacking entirely the repose of Greek
art. There was much hammering while I was
there, owing to the erection of booths for coming
fetes, which detracted much from the solemnity of
the place. But, as being the central church of
Roman Catholic Christendom, St. Peter's is won
derfully impressive.
A more beautiful interior was that of St. Paul's
Without the Walls, a vast church full of frescoes,
mosaics, and carved work, whose " cohorts were
gleaming with purple and gold." I asked the com
pany what adjective would best describe it, and we
settled upon the word " splendid." Not in the
school-girl sense of the word, but as derived from
the old Roman " splendidus," " sun-shine-like."
The Catacombs were of extraordinary interest,
full of symbols of the Christian faith, the lamb and
the Shepherd, the fish, the loaves and fishes to set
forth the Communion, and, strange to say, the
whale and Jonah, to set forth the Resurrection!
The Forum, also, is full of memories and engages
the deepest attention. It lies in a vale between the
Palatine and Quirinal Hills. Originally it was
marshy, but was subsequently drained. The Sab-
ines dwelt on the Quirinal, the Latins on the Pala
tine, while the territory between became their trad-
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ing place. Here was the scene of the carrying off
of the Sabine women. Afterward this spot became
the meeting place for all Rome. The Senate, the
populace met here, and great pages of history were
enacted under its marbles. One of our party stood
upon the little rostmm where Marc Antony made
his captivating address over the dead body of
Csesar. A companion snapped a picture of him
standing thus on forbidden ground, A guard came
by just as he leaped over the fence and stared hard
and suspiciously at him. But he calmly gazed up
into the sky, as if he were trying to think of a word,
and assumed the expression of St. Cecilia.
" And what shall I more say? for the time would
fail me to tell " of the Vatican treasures, of the
sibyls and angels of Raphael, of the carved stone
and frescoes of Angelo, of the mosaics that combine
infinite patience with matchless skill. O the won
der, the beauty, the stones that are here !
No visit to Rome is complete without seeing its
central figure, the Pope. Leo XIII is the two hun
dred and sixty-third pope of the Roman Catholic
Church, and as such is styled the Bishop of Rome,
Vicar of Christ, Successor of the Prince of Apostles,
Highest Prelate of the Universal Church, Patriarch
of the Occident, Primate of Italy, Metropolitan
Archbishop of the Roman Province, and Sovereign
of the Temporal Dominions of the Holy Roman
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Church. Furthermore, he calls himself, for poht-
ical reasons, " the prisoner of the Vatican," refus
ing to acknowledge the sovereignty of the kingdom
of Italy, and, with dignified consistency, refusing to
touch the stipend accorded him by the government.
The only opportunity open to us for seeing him
was in connection with the reception of a pilgrim
party in St. Peter's. In company with some fifteen
thousand others, we went into the stately interior
of the great church and waited for his arrival. We
all stood up, with the exception of a few dignitaries
who occupied " the seats of the mighty." It was
a two hours' test of patience. At last, however, ex
citement began to kindle in one end of the great
pavement and expectation was on tiptoe. First
came a large number of robed and vested priests,
then an army of banners representing societies from
near and far. Last of all came the Pope himself,
all in white, home upon the shoulders of his ser
vants, on a frame containing a kind of throne. Oc
casionally he half-rose and gave the pontifical bene
diction, by extending the two fingers of his right
hand. The Pope is a very aged man; he had just
celebrated his ninetieth birthday on the 2d of
March, and looked his full age. The old man's
hand trembled visibly on the arm of the throne as
it passed within a few feet of my eyes. His usual
benevolent smile, which is the characteristic of his
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countenance, was lacking, and he looked as if the
occasion demanded and was receiving all his
strength. But no man, however aged, could be in
sensible to the devotion and acclaim that greeted
the pontiff from all parts of the great concourse,
swelling into a roar as he approached nearer. Many
were the cheers of " Viva il Papa ! " " Viva il
Re ! " The enthusiasm was unmistakable and con
tagious, for that venerable figure represented to
many millions the embodiment of heaven's rule up
on earth. The Pope and a Protestant minister dif
fer, and can agree to differ, as to the nature of his
mission in the world; but, apart from the theologi
cal separatrix, I felt myself in sympathy, as a man,
with the respect which his amiable character in
spired. Nor did I detract anything from the loyal
ty, tear-eyed, and broken-voiced loyalty, which he
enjoyed on that occasion; and as Leo the Xlllth
had given me his benediction, I gave him mine in
return.

XX
FLORENCE AND MILAN
FLORENCE is the art-lover's Paradise, as it
is also The Lily of the Arno. The moun
tains hover about it as if to guard a treas
ure, and the yellow Arno picks her way daintily
through it, as if reluctant to glide past a garden of
Eden. History and romance have made their home
here. In the square, where traffic is now so heed
less, a solemn hush once fell upon an awe-stricken
multitude, when Savonarola, the Reformer before
the Reformation, was burned for being so right in
an age that was itself so wrong. In yonder little
chapel Michael Angelo had his nose broken by a
fellow-student in a quarrel, and what was written
on his visage was written. Angelo could make an
angel's face, but could not make a human nose.
There, too, is the Ponte Vecchio, where Tito Me-
lema was represented as leaping into the Arno,
escaping from the Assassins only to fall into the
fateful hands of Baldassarre, the inexorable. " As
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if a man did fiee from a lion, and a bear met him:
or went into the house and leaned his hand on the
wall, and a serpent bit him."
The arts have taken root in Florence as nowhere
else in the world; they fiourish like the green-bay
tree and bear twelve manner of fruits to the pleas- '
ing of nations. In the Pitti Palace, for example, is
a small collection of only five hundred paintings,
no one of which is less than a gem, and some of
which are counted among the Kohinoors and Or-
loffs of art. In the Uffizi Palace are still more.
What a constellation of multifarious genius has con
centrated on this single city! With its fortunes
are linked the names of Dante, Petrarch, Alfieri,
Angelo, Raphael, Andrea del Sarto, " the faultless
painter," Giotto; while in other fields of human
achievement are counted Lorenzo de Medici, Gali
leo, Da Vinci, Macchiavelli, " the star called
Wormwood," and Savonarola, " the angel standing
in the sun."
Milan is the financial capital of Italy and the
most prosperous city in the kingdom. Here in La
Scala many of the great operas have been produced,
backed by the capital necessary for their setting.
Industries as well as banks find their homes in this
northern metropolis. But it is not the vault or the
cogged wheel that makes Milan famous; it is the
chisel. For here is " the poem in stone," the Cathe-
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A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
dral of Milan, the eighth wonder of the world. Its
greatness lies not in its size, though it is second only
to St, Peter's, nor in its general design. There are
other Gothic churches. But it is the bewildering
perfection of its multitudinous details. I passed
into the dim religious light of the great interior,
gauged its vaulted roof and massive columns, looked
upon one after another of its giant windows, whose
stained glass contained, not a picture here and there,
but each of them one hundred and twelve Biblical
scenes by count. Then I climbed the towers and
walked upon the solid stone of the roof. There be
fore me appeared a forest of fiying arches and
curved abutments; spires and pinnacles cut the sky
line like a grove, each one of them a series of as
cending stories, containing countless niches, each
niche sheltering a saint, decreasing in number and
size, as the eye followed it skyward, the intervals
filled with carved lace-work, the whole crowned
with some saintly figure still pointing upward into
the blue. Nor do I expect to see the like of that
wonder till I see the City whose stones begin with
jasper and end with amethyst.
In leaving Italy behind me, I am impelled to say
something on ai't. Many Americans approach the
subject gingerly and with a secret misgiving as to
their really " getting anything out of it." The en
joyment of art does not depend upon, though it is
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doubtless enhanced by, technical training. No
body has to go to college in order to enjoy the sunset
or to find delight in the Sistine Madonna. The ap
preciation of fine things is dependent on a quality
within us that is sometimes called " soul." " What
shall a man give in exchange for his soul?" With
out it, Europe is simply a succession of hotels; with
it, it is a panorama of delights, including the " glory-
that was Greece, the grandeur that was Rome."
People differ as to soul. It was said of Icarus that
he had come down from Olympus after supping
with the Gods, and remembered only the pattern
of the table-cloth. It is the same with some who
have returned from Europe. After Mozart had
seen the mountain, he would seat himself before
his instrument, play an exquisite score and exclaim,
" That is what the mountain said to me! " Another
is no more affected by the mountain than if his
heart were named Cephas, " which is by interpreta
tion a stone." Ruskin thought that there was as
much artistic quality born into the world to-day as
ever, but that human energies were diverted into
other channels by circumstance. On this principle
one might explain the charge pecuharly brought
against Americans, that they are lacking in soul.
I do not believe it is true as to their natural suscepti
bility; but, living as they do where business is para
mount, and art is still a luxury, their hour is not
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A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
yet come. America is not an Undine, who had no
soul : she is a Sleeping Princess. The future chroni
cler will yet describe a magic awakening: and it
will then be said, The Princess rose, the Palace
stirred, " And sixty feet the fountain leapt."
Sometimes the boiling spring of artistic enthus
iasm boils over. I met a bevy of girls in the Vati
can, who raved over the Apollo Belvidere just seen,
and raved in italics. But, to their confusion of
face, it tumed out to be another man! They were
not the only ones who had their ecstasies in the
wrong place. " This is not the tomb of Washing
ton," said the gardener to the lady in tears, " his
tomb is over yonder; this is the ice-house." Some
how to find that it is the ice-house gives one a chill.
If asked what would help a traveller to cultivate
soul, I would venture to mention two things. One
of them is an educated guide. What one needs in
Europe is not a courier or factotum, but a gentle
man of cultivated taste. A dragoman cannot be
that. The one we had in Baalbec spoke several lan
guages, and English fluently. He turned out to be
a rug buyer for a Chicago firm; but knew no more
about history and architecture than a hen does about
dentistry. Although Mr. Cranch contends that
Soul to soul can never teach
What unto itself is taught,
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I doubt it. I believe to a certain extent in the
transmigration of souls, that is, in the power of one
earnest and enthusiastic nature to impart itself to
others. When, in his novitiate, one enters a gallery
it seems to him like Jericho of old, " straitly shut
up." He says with David, " Who will lead me into
the strong city? " Well, Baedeker will do some
thing for you, by virtue of eye-strain and much
study, that is a weariness to the flesh; but a cultured
conductor will do more, will introduce us to more
delights in half an hour than we would find out for
ourselves, " from mom to noon, from noon to dewy
eve, a summer's day."
And now I am going to make bold to mention
another help. And I will do so under the maxim
of " Keep thy heart with all diligence, for out of it
are the issues of life." Such issues as deep feeling,
reverence, nobility of thought, are not produced by
letters of credit in four figures, nor by high-sound
ing hotels, though they are called, as in Naples,
" The Grand Splendid." Outward circumstances
have little to do with " spirits touched to fine is
sues." When a person born and blessed with " a
New England conscience " goes about Italy break
ing the Fourth Commandment as badly as Moses
broke the Ten, gives his religion a vacation from
Sandy Hook to Sandy Hook, he is apt to suffer from
it. A troubled conscience is not a good travelling
companion. It accounts for some of the disappoint-
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A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
ment experienced by certain tourists. But more
than that, in going forth to see the heavenHest, most
inspiring things in the world, it is not sensible to
begin by laying away in a napkin the highest and
most sensitive part of our being, the rehgious nat
ure. This statement, I am aware, comes danger
ously near to preaching, but it is the plain unvar
nished truth ! In fine, I would amend the proverb
of St. Ambrose so as to read for every American
Christian, Do in Rome
As you would at home.

XXI
TRAVELLING ACROSS EUROPE

M

Y flight took me northward still, through
the mountains and lakes of Switzerland.
It is the land of giant heights and gla
ciers; the land, also, of William Tell and liberty.
On that spot he shot the apple, on this he leaped
from the tyrant's boat, where is now reared a me
morial chapel. It is the land, also, of Billy the goat,
and of Silly the kid, both of whom are now dis
porting themselves in a back yard containing fifty
cents worth of grass, upheld by a stone wall worth
five hundred dollars.
The Swiss are great engineers and stone-masons.
They will cut a stone where we would scarcely cut
a stick. Everywhere the posts by the wayside were
of hewn stone. Their roads are models. The Swiss
seem to have heard and adopted Napoleon's dictum,
" Gentlemen, there shall be no Alps." The Alps
do not trouble them at all. They can find a way or
make one, where a chamois would give it up. One
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A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
of their great highways is the St. Gotthard. This
is the same name as Goddard, but the American
branch has never been sainted. The route contains
scores of tunnels, the longest of which is nine miles
in length. It took our train seventeen minutes to
run through it. The tunnel passes under a village
a thousand feet above it, and under a mountain-lake
three thousand feet overhead. It is twenty-six feet
wide, twenty high, and cost twelve million dollars
to build. The most remarkable feature of the
route is the occurrence of spiral tunnels, which run
into the heart of a mountain, turn about and emerge
at the same place only higher. This parable
teaches that it is worth while going a great ways
around for the sake of getting a little nearer heaven.
At five o'clock we rolled into the small but beau
tiful city of Lucerne. It lies on the Lake of the
Four Cantons over against Mount Pilatus, where,
legend asserts, the ex-governor of Judea committed
suicide. On a huge rock in the heart of the city
Thorwaldsen has carved a magnificent lion. He is
represented in the article of death, a spear protrud
ing from his side. It is a memorial of the Swiss
Guard, who, while heroically defending their trust,
were killed to a man, at the storming of the Tuile-
ries in 1792. The town is well built and has a
thrifty air. The very trolley cars are works of art,
being handsomely tinted in white and blue. As to
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AND OTHEK LEAVES
Swiss hotels, they are famous the world over for ex
quisite neatness and daintiness of fare. Every
traveller in Switzerland is like Kubla Khan,
"For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise."
However, this very rarity emphasizes a general
experience in European travel that needs to be re
membered. The way through the Continent is no
primrose path of dalliance. As a rule, trains do not
run on schedule time, compartments are frequently
full before you approach, and are constantly pre
senting that arithmetical poser, " Ten into eight
you can't." Baggage, or " bagages," as they call
it, is continually losing itself more effectually than
the " Babes in the Wood." Landlords, like the
King in Hamlet, " can smile and smile, and be a
villain." Guides are very wont to exhibit a camel
of promise to a gnat of performance. Consequently,
philosophy is to the average traveller a more useful
article than an umbrella in Scotland. No tourist
should ever be, as the Greek professor would say,
" anarthrous, that is, without the article." As an in
stance of " the real article," I met a jolly English
man on top of a stage-coach.
" How are you doing to-day? " inquired his
friend. " First-rate," responded His Heartiness.
" Thought I saw you limping this morning."
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A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
" Yes, you did. Got a blister on my right foot
this morning; but got another one on my left this
afternoon; so now 1 am all right."
Nevertheless, there is never sufficient philosophy
in a party to go around. It is noticeable that a man
may be a Ph.D., and yet not have philosophy enough
to eat a cold meal without heat. On the other
hand, I have known a man to be cheated in get
ting change for a coin (which always tries the mettle
of a man), cheated out of haM a shilhng, mind you,
and, instead of grumbling, he would " sing a song
of sixpence." Dickens might call it " the carol
philosophy." I met, once, a Doctor of Divinity,
who had travelled from Land's End to the jumping-
off place. His grumbling made everybody miser
able who came within the sphere of his influence,
while his very smile was enough to turn the milk
of human kindness into bonnyclabber. In con
trast with His Reverence, I saw a young wo
man on the English Channel, the sea running
high, the wind half a gale, her digestion in active
rebellion; but she tied her hat upon her head with a
double-bow knot, faced the elements like Storm
King, and held her position on deck like the Guards
at Waterloo.
The next day after Lucerne I took a still longer
flight of twenty hours northwesterly, bade good-by
to the peaks of Switzerland, crossed the frontier,
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AND OTHEE LEAVES
where I was searched for brandy and diamonds,
passed Belfort, the strongest of French strongholds,
sped over fields of knee-high grain and through
orchards all a-bloom, and finally entered the great
French capital, that had challenged all the world
to " come on," promising to each comer a fair show.

XXII
PARIS THE GAY AND THE FAIR
PARIS the modern Babylon! The Athens of
to-day! The city of gayety and tragedy,
that draws all the world to itself for amuse
ment, that leads all other places in the number of its
suicides. It is the city of the cafe and the boule
vard, of the perfect shrug and the perfect fit. La
Parisienne can beat the world in dress; no one
knows how, only that, like Anne of Shottery, " she
hath a way." The Paris man knows how to extract
the maximum quantum of pleasure out of the mini
mum quid of coin. It is a city " infinitely more
picturesque than London," wrote Hawthorne.
" Here I am caught again in this great gilded net,"
wrote De Amicis. It is a city that has always cast
a spell over my countrymen, so that the proverb has
come to be stated, " Good Americans, when they
die, go to Paris."
It was my fortune to spend ten days' in the heart
of the city, in a quiet hotel within an enclosed
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AND OTHEE LEAVES
court, near the Madeleine, and there steep myself
in the hfe of the great capital. " Seeing life," has
rather a shady meaning in these days, but I saw it,
though I neither waded through the sewers of the
city's vice on the one hand, nor dined with the Presi
dent on the other. I saw it as a looker-on in Ven
ice, not as an inmate of French homes.
That last word furnishes my point of departure.
In the French language, " there's no place like
home." Certainly this is eminently true of Paris.
The Parisian's home is the street. His sofa is the
cab and omnibus; his dining-room the cafe. If you
wish to find your friend Monsieur Crapaud, do not
think of knocking him up where he gets his mail,
at 26^ Street of the Armed Man, but drop in at The
Black Cat, or The Horn of Gold, and you will find
him. He is burning incense of nicotine before a
paper shrine called Le Petit Journal. He is sip
ping anon a steaming cup of the national drink,
which is fianked by three rhomboids of beet sugar.
About him are his neighbors, often with wives and
children. They are talking politics, art, business,
gossip, with tongues geared to 95, talking with eye
brows, hands and shoulders. It has been remarked
that a French woman has seventeen different ways
of saying " No " ; but she has more ways than that
of saying anything whatever with her dorsal, cervi
cal, and sterno-cleido-mastoid muscles. The cafe is
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A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
brilliantly lighted, and resplendent with gilt and
brass. Most likely your French friend is seated on
the sidewalk in front of the cafe, and is enjoying
the moving spectacle in the boulevard before him.
The boulevard is the characteristic of the city.
It is a broad avenue, generally lined vrith trees.
Originally we are told, it meanf a " bulwark "
street, or one laid out upon the site of levelled forti
fications. It is now applied to any avenue, laid out,
as it were, under martial law, without consultation
of private right, but only of pubhc good. The
Third Napoleon had much to do vrith the making of
these great arteries. He would spread a map of
Paris before him, draw a line with his pen from
point to point, and say, " Let there be a boulevard,"
and a boulevard was. The result is that Paris is
sected and intersected with broad highways. You
can go from somewhere to anywhere, without de
scribing two legs of a triangle. The city, in conse
quence, is light, airy and cheerful. The odd bits of
land, left by streets cut at all angles, have been made
into parks and parquettes. There are in Paris
countless play spots, no plague spots. The city has
no slums. Even in the workman's quarter there is
no Whitechapel. Paris can let New York have
" Five Points," and beat her badly then.
One of the best ways to see Paris is to ride on
the top of an omnibus. You go up by a winding
stair and pay three cents for the privilege. The
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pace is not rapid, but you see everything, hear every
thing, more than your note-book will begin to hold.
You will see the irrepressible gayety of the nation.
When Dora sang to David Copperfield her French
Ballads, the prevailing impression left on the young
man's mind was, " Whatever was the matter, we
ought always to dance Ta-ra-la! Ta-ra-la! " That
is precisely the way their spirit impresses the travel
ler to-day. They dance in the street; they are live
ly in their journeying; a French picnic is a carni
val of good spirits. Per contra, they are as extra
vagantly depressed in their grief or grievance. The
Frenchman is never regretful, he is " desolated " ;
he does not feel tired, " he can no more." His
remedy for the crisis is not " grit," it is suicide.
This is said to be the gist of a large class of French
novels: "Ion, I adore her !"
" Naroisse, I idolize her ! "
" Ha, then we are rivals ?"
" Yes, but still friends 1 "
"Aye, friends tiU death."
"Let us tell her."
They tell her.
She says :
" Let us all die 1 "
They buy six centimes worth of charcoal.
They ignite it.
They inhale it.
They all die.
Vive Vamour ! 177

A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
Paris is the city of the red flag and of the white
lie. The latter is never thought of as a sin; it is a
politeness. " Why mention a disagreeable truth?
Better keep it out of sight with your family skele
tons and poor relations." Such is French logic.
Saxon readers of Victor Hugo, who has drawn some
of the master characters of the world's literature,
are nevertheless astonished to find that his heroes
are all untruthful, and the white lie is made to con
tribute, as it were, a jewel to their crown. Bishop
Myriel is a model of kindness and devotion, but
when he takes a divine compassion on Valjean, pur-
loiner of his silver candlesticks, he simply lies to the
arresting officer, in order to save him. Valjean in
the fifth book heroically places a hot iron on his arm,
rather than betray Cosette's fortune; but, on his
escape, does not hesitate to account for it by a lie.
One is conscious of this national tendency all the
while in Paris, not that it is any worse than Eng
lish bluntness or American sordidness, but it is
there. But O! they are pohte! You may make
more blunders in conversation than Burgoyne did
in his invasion, find it harder to get out of your
sentence than Captain Rose to get out of Libby
Prison; but they will tell you with a smooth face
that your French is charmant and your accent par-
fait. The white lie may leave a stain on the French
man's heart, but it does occasionally leave a good
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AND OTHEK LEAVES
The French are witty. Gallic salt is next best
to Attic salt. They never need to have the point
explained to them. A graduate of the Conserva
toire told me that a French audience is very respon
sive, that one who has ever played or sang before
them is hke a tiger who has once tasted human
blood, never satisfied with any other thereafter.
The French have developed conversation, too, to
its limit. The result is that French conversation is
difficult to a foreigner, being full of idioms. French
scientific writing, on the other hand, is exceedingly
clear and simple. The reverse is true of the Ger
man, whose conversation is easy, but whose meta
physical vmting is a compound of haze and maze,
of Catacombs and Gordian Knots.
With the art and architecture of Paris I am not
now to deal. Any one can duplicate my mornings
in the Louvre or afternoons in the Bastille and
other monuments of history, by consulting Bae
deker or by foUovring the Hare (Augustus, J. C),
in his Walks in Paris.
The peculiar feature of this year of grace (1900)
in Paris was The Fair. It was to be the fin-de-siecle
cap-sheaf, the pull-all-together of the French na
tion. Newspapers and parties agreed to bury the
hatchet until it was over. It was to be the crowning
feature of French glory, for which the nation made
ready by modestly appropriating sixty-five per
cent, of the entire space. Paris bonded itself for
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A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
its financing, and removed mountains for its enlarge
ment. At least, the city tore down and moved away
whole blocks to make room for the display. It was
to be the sixteenth exposition of the century, the
last, the best. Our own government appropriated
$1,200,000; and I judge that Germany and Russia
appropriated as much more. The city had the pres
tige of great previous successes. It lay near the
great art centres of Europe, and tributary to dense
centres of population. Nevertheless, though the
vast undertaking will not be written down a failure,
it cannot be written down a popular success. When
I saw it, the daily attendance was under a hundred
thousand at eleven cents a ticket; when I saw the
White City, the attendance hovered around half a
million at fifty cents a head.
In point of display, the goods gathered and ar
ticles set forth, the Exposition of 1900 certainly
surpassed all that had gone before. It was a reve
lation of unsuspected manufacture to me, indeed,
that Russia should bear the palm in pianos and
musical instruments, that Germany should crowd
America for first place in electrical apphances. But
mere bulk of catalogue does not impress the mind.
If one can see only a hundred thousand things in a
given time, it makes no difference after that
whether the list includes five millions or ten.
While the specialist undoubtedly noted a great ad-
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AND OTHER LEAVES
vance in his field in the exhibit of 1900 over that
of 1893, 1 doubt if the tout ensemble impressed the
general observer in any such degree as Chicago,
The space itself was far less appropriate. It
was a narrow ribbon of ground along the banks
of the Seine, with irregular enlargements here and
there. There were but few imposing buildings, as
compared with the White City's many. There
was no opportunity for landscape gardening, for
lawn and shrubbery, for that magniflcent Court
of Honor; above all, there was no majestic Lake
Michigan, flanking the creation of man with the
creation of God, The Street of Nations had a
huddled appearance; the United States' Building
was within a fishing pole's length of its neighbor.
The architecture did not impress itself upon eye
and memory as did that splendid collection at Chi
cago. The White City has estabhshed a record
which the world will be long in breaking.
Several factors contributed to make the Exposi
tion fiag. A protracted strike set the building back
a half year. This incompleteness checked the in
flux of visitors at the start, and thereby the Fair
lost its best advertisement. The visitor who goes
home and tells the neighborhood about it makes
ten men go where but one went before. The
African and China wars also distracted public
attention, most people being incapable of attend-
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A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
ing to but one sensation at a time. Then it was
" bad politics " to offend Great Britain at this junc
ture. Usually the British are great sight-seers, but
it was considered bad form this year to accept hos
pitality from a nation that had caricatured Her Ma
jesty the Queen. Further, the Exposition had to
pay the penalty of the Dreyfus incident. The Jew
is no more popular in other countries than in France,
but justice is justice the world over, and the want of
it is resented by all races. Finally, the Exposition
was, above all events I have ever experienced, a
" pleasure exertion." One could not go about from
place to place without vexatious delays and constant
expense. The Seine boats were the only real con
venience. The Moving Platform was more like a
toy than an aid, and circumscribed a very limited
circle, half of which was outside the grounds. Mr.
Weller once remarked, " No charge for sitting
down, as the king said after blowing his ministers
up." This may have been a pleasantry in London,
but it was no joke in Paris. Sitting down was ex
pensive in the French Exposition. Mr. Twain ex
postulates with " That Awful German Language,"
because in it " resting is regarded as doing some
thing." But in Paris it is worse than that, resting
is paying something. If you sank upon a chair (few
in number and far between), a woman promptly
presented a bill; the sum was trifling, but the irrita-
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tion was great. The chair business being a " con
cession," nothing was allowed to interfere with it.
There was not an edge, nor a balustrade, nor a soft
board anywhere on that ground, whereon a tired
visitor could lean. He had to keep moving on ever
lastingly, reminding himself of the dove, who
" found no rest for the sole of her foot." The re
sult was that three or four ordeals were enough for
the average strength. In my opinion, ten thousand
free seats would have added ten million more
visitors. Howbeit, confessing its imperfections in an im
perfect world, the Exposition was none the less a
great event. If the Londoner was not there, the
Berliner was. Germany is making a great push for
the world's markets, and uses the international ex
positions to extend her trade. She is out for busi
ness; she is there for ideas; she gets both. The Rus
sian was there, too, holding his own surprisingly in
the march of civilization. The American was there,
also, with all his enterprise, printing a large daily
paper with cables and telegrams, giving it away
as a souvenir, and all for the sake of advertisement
only. It was an American who, being given a space
among trees that could not be deported, built a
house around them, encasing the trunks as pillars,
the foliage appearing over the glass roof, a " House
of the Forest of Lebanon," a wonderful exhibit in
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A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
itself of the triumph of ingenuity over circum
stances. In the field of mechanics he was easily
first, and, as in the yacht race, " There is no sec
ond, Your Majesty." Above all, France was there,
with all her five wits and ten fingers, showing her
skill matchless, her taste faultless, her fabrics count
less. Of individual features of the Fair some will
mention the Eiffel Tower, the beautiful Alexander
Bridge, the styhsh Dame representing the City of
Paris, and her Gallic Cock making a pun upon the
national name. Old Paris was a great attraction,
and the fine arts were a wonderful display, wherein
lay an agreeable surprise, the creditable exhibit of
American painting. But, as these and other items,
are more usually referred to, I will mention an ex
hibit in the City of Paris Building that was re
markable in its own way. Readers of Les Mise-
rables will remember a chapter entitled " The Earth
Impoverished by the Sea." It begins in the true
Hugonian style as follows:
"Paris casts twenty-five millions of francs
annually into the sea 
How so and in what way ?
By day and night.
For what object ?
For no object.
With what thought ?
Without thinking.
What to do ? 184

AND OTHEE LEAVES
Nothing.By means of what organ ?
Its sewers."
Hugo then goes on to give a wonderful history
of that great under-world, and makes it the scene
of his most striking chapter. Now in respect to this
feature of the older city, the modem Parisian might
use his own proverb, " Nous avons change tout cela."
In the Paris Building was a notable model of the
sewer system and of its chemical disposal, down to
the distribution of its product among blooming
fields. It showed how the refuse of the city makes
a revenue for it, showed the transformation of
wealth from waste, of beauty from ashes, of verdure
from ordure, of the Garden of Eden from the Valley
of Hinnom.
If asked to name the most impressive object in
Paris, I should not mention the Venus de Milo, nor
the Salon Carre, " the most beautiful room in the
world," nor the Bastille, nor the graves of Abelard
and Heloise, I should unhesitatinglyname the Tomb
of Napoleon. There the French voice is hushed,
the soldier of the legion and the little child are alike
awed. It is not, I think, because his name is asso
ciated with the great days of a great people, not be
cause the Napoleonic spell is still unbroken, not be
cause the Frenchman has to look through the mist
of Sedan to see the glory of Jena. It is mainly due,
I believe, to an irresistible appeal to the universal
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A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
heart that is felt there, a touch of nature that makes
the whole world kin. He lies there in a majestic sar
cophagus, surrounded by his marshals. A simple
inscription from his will is carved upon it, and in
that single sentence, that " Napoleonic legend," is
found the secret of the peculiar impressiveness.
The beholder is conscious of a thought passing
through his mind, something like this: " Here lies
the man who wrote his name above kings; the iron
man; who made a highway through forts and bat
tle-fields unto all the capitals of Europe; carpeted
that highway with captured flags and trampled con
stitutions; but when he came to the end of ambition,
he found his heart turning to his own home and to
his own neighbors." Like the Shunammite of old,
who would not be spoken for to the king nor to the
captain of the host ; " I dwell among mine own
people." There is no happiness higher than to be
among those who love you. In the " Napoleonic
legend," cut above the tomb, one hears both the
note of the Shunammite and of John Howard
Payne,

"JE DESIRE QUE MBS CENDRES REPOSENT
SUR LES BORDS DE LA SEINE AU MILIEU
DE CE PEUPLE FRANCAIS QUE J'AI TANT AIME.'^

XXIII
ENGLAND
THE twenty-three miles of turbulent water
that separates England from the Continent,
form the most important space on the map
of the globe. But for that little interval, there
would have been no distinct nationality, no Eng
lish language and character, no United States of
America. England would have been a Denmark;
her history the " history of a province." Salt-water
has been the preservative of the British island.
It is a great relief to get away from a situation
where your Italian tongue is dependent largely up
on your American " cheek," where your French is
" after the scole of Stratford-atte-Bowe," and where
your polite, but impatient foreigner looks as if ready
to say, with the Irish judge to the prisoner, " We
want nothing from you but silence, and very little
of that." Yes, a traveller landing in England feels
very much like a dumb man restored to speech. On
this account, when an American comes into the
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A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
neighborhood of Greenwich, he takes an observa
tion; it is a linguistic one. He observes that no
body ever assumes such liberties with the Eng
lish tongue as the English do, beginning vrith the
word English itself, which they spell with an E and
pronounce with an I. London is Lunnon, Chelten
ham is Oheltnum, Magdalen is Maudlin, Chol-
mondeley is Chumlcy; while if you ask a Londoner
to spell " maroon," he will say that it contains " a
hem and a hay and a hare, two hoes and a hen."
Many Britons have dispensed with the words good
and bad; in common parlance, a fine play is a
" blooming " play, its opposite is a " bloody " play.
Extravagance and superlatives are not confined to
America, I saw extensively advertised a certain
" Millennium flour," and in classic Oxford, I noted
this euphuism, " Even as the sun dazzles the eye,
SO do the merits of Belton's tires astound the imagi
nation," Englishmen's voices are throaty, sound as
if their collars were too tight; but the ladies' voices
are distinct and flute-like.
Another observation an American soon makes is,
that he is no longer in a republic. He is where one
class differs from another class in glory. Not that
Britons are generally restive under it. " All Eng
lishmen love a lord," is a proverb. No building
can be dedicated, no banquet properly digested,
unless " his lordship " is in the chief place. In just
188

AND OTHEE LEAVES
one spot, however, the yoke chafes. It is in relig
ion. The Dissenters find it hard to be patronized;
they have to go softly before the Estabhshment.
Robert Browning, with some misgiving, felt it to
be his duty to acknowledge to Elizabeth Barrett
that he belonged to the Congregationalists. The
feehng toward Dissent is constantly showing itself
in odd ways. In one of Baring-Gould's stories, two
lovers had a coolness, during whose continuance the
girl attended chapel and was converted, whereupon
the squire adds, " The week after there came a
quack female dentist to Tavistock, and I went and
had one of my back teeth out. . . . I let her
understand that if she chose to be revived by Chapel-
ites, I'd have my teeth drawn by quacks. I'd stand
none of her nonsense." But, on the whole. Dissent
is stronger for being without State patronage; the
" Non-conformist conscience " is increasingly a fac
tor in British politics; the day when rural Eng
land was humorously said to be composed of
" hierarchy and squirearchy " is passing; and to-day
many devout Churchmen are ready to welcome the
inevitable coming of disestabhshment and the plac
ing of the great Church of England on the same
footing as their nobly independent off-spring, the
Protestant Episcopal Church of America,
The most pleasing feature of the class system in
England is royalty. Liberals vie with Conserva-
189

A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
tives in voting generous bounties to the seed-royal,
and all ranks show them enthusiastic loyalty. The
Queen is universally beloved. I overheard a wash
erwoman in the streets of Cambridge say, after the
relief of Mafeking, " Well, the Queen, dear lady,
will be so glad to hear this! " It touched me, to
think that this humble woman's first thought was
for the heart of her Sovereign. The Prince of
Wales is very popular, enjoying the full sense of
that left-handed compliment, " With all thy faults
I love thee still." The Princess is more than popu
lar; she creates enthusiasm. At an exhibit I saw,
made by a " lightning artist " in London, the pro
file of that fair Danish face was instantly recog
nized and greeted with hand and voice. They like
to talk and read about the royal family. The
" Court Circular," containing their doings, is religi
ously scanned every day. An Oxford man in
formed me at length and with fervor on the subject,
stating, among other things, that the proper address
for the Prince was " Sir," and for the Queen, " Ma
dam." It is related that two little girls, while
playing in a park, unexpectedly met Her Majesty,
and, being ignorant of court etiquette, fell back on
Scriptural knowledge, saying, " O Queen, live for
ever!" This greatly pleased and amused Her Ma
jesty. They are fond of pet names in the royal
family. The Duke of Fife is called " Macduff,"
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AND OTHEE LEAVES
the Duchess, being very retiring, is called " Her
Royal Shyness," the little Prince Edward of York
is known as " the New Boy," the Princess Patricia
of Connaught, born on St. Patrick's day, is affec
tionately called " Paddy." The Prince and Prin
cess of Wales are in constant demand for fairs, ba
zaars, dedications and other pubhc functions. A
fair held for the English soldiers was in progress,
while I was in London, which event was made a so
ciety success by the presence, contributions, and
liberal purchases of the Princess. The Prince is a
neat and effective public speaker; the Princess is a
winsome soul. A pleasant illustration of this is
told of her. She was attending a dairy exhibit, and
remarked to the manager, " I have always heard
that the best butter comes from Denmark. Is it
true ? " The manager hesitated a moment, then
said, " No, your Highness, Denmark sends us the
best princesses, but the best butter comes from Dev
onshire." This is perhaps a case where the Psalm
ist would say, " his words were smoother than but
ter."

Addendum. — While this book is in the press, the
Queen has passed from the Kingdom of Eng
land to the Kingdom of Heaven, and I cannot for
bear to lay my tribute on her honored tomb. From
the moment when they told the child of ten years
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A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
old the forecast of her life, and she held up her
little hand to say, " I will be good! " she has justi
fied the promise. A Sovereign of England reigns,
not rules; her sphere is limited, but " She hath done
what she could." She has worn victoriously the
triple crown of woman, vrife and sovereign, " the
queenliest of women and the womanliest of queens."

XXIV
CATHEDRALS AND UNIVERSITIES
CATHEDRAL means a "place for sitting
down," and is applied originally to the
bishop's bench or throne. That which
made a church into a cathedral was not its size
(there are many churches in England larger than
the cathedral in Oxford), but the episcopal resi
dence. It is all a part of the ecclesiastical idea
which makes everything centre about His Grace,
the Bishop. According to their vocabulary a bishop
is " wedded to his see," a relation symbolized by
the bishop's ring; if he die, the see is said to be
" widowed." The difference between Old Eng
land and New England seems to be this, they speak
of their minister as married to his charge, vrith us
he is merely engaged. But to return to the cathe
dral, it is like the person of David ; " goodly to look
to," it is like the king's daughter, " all glorious
within." There is something wonderfully inspir
ing in those forms of grace and beauty wrought out
in the intractable stone, or in those interiors of wood
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A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
and stained glass, like the appearance of a rainbow
seen through an oak.
Whether the cathedral accomplishes its function
of incitement to worship, is not clear. I attended a
service at Winchester one beautiful Friday morn
ing. A vested choir of forty sang and counter-sang
in antiphonal beauty. A brilliantly robed ecclesiast
read the Psalms in a tone that is heard neither in
heaven above nor in earth beneath. He was escort
ed to the lectern and back again to his seat by a
vested figure armed with a holy mace, possibly to
prevent people from mobbing him en route for
speaking to us in that tone of voice. We had collects
sung and collects intoned, accompanied by a mag
nificent organ, the whole service enclosed behind
screens of exquisitely carved wood, a wonder of
music and beauty. Now, how many did that ma
jestic service draw in its train, think you? The an
swer reminds one of the fisherman's response to the
query, " How many have you caught? " " Well,
if I get the one I'm after and one more, I shall have
two." Besides the sexton, there were just two of us.
Probably that was an exceptional day, and doubt
less the cathedral has upon occasions its thousands.
In any wise, we all admit that the cathedral has a
mission of its own, and that the mere association of
so magnificent an edifice with the worship of God
is uplifting to all parts of the religious life.
194

AND OTHEE LEAVES
Of the several cathedrals that I saw, Peterboro',
Ely, Winchester, St. Paul's, Oxford, SaHsbury, the
noblest far was the last. It is " the most perfect
monument of mediaeval Christianity in England."
It is not blackened by smoke as is St. Paul's. Sal
isbury meets the usual condition of the English
cathedral in being situated in a small town. It is
not one of the attractions of the place ; it makes the
place. Two facts stamp themselves upon the be
holder at once. The first is the spire, not alone for
its height, the tallest in England, but for its incom
parable grace. It is the finger of the church point
ing toward the home of the soul. The other striking
feature of Salisbury Cathedral is " The Close," the
green lawn with tree-girt paths. In some cases you
cannot " walk round about Zion;" there is no room
anywhere to get a good view of the Regensburger
Dom, for example. Cologne Cathedral, too, is grie
vously encroached upon by shops and alleys. But
Salisbury allows you a perfect perspective. You
can see it across billowy lawns or through interlac
ing trees, that duplicate its Gothic arches. You
can watch its shadows steal over the sward, and at
every angle contrast its gray sky-line with the fleecy
cloud. That Close is ever the " haven of religious
calm " in the midst of a workaday world.
Every reader of " Tom Brown " longs to see
something of English school and 'Varsity life.
195

A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
Eton, Harrow, and Winchester are the three great
schools, the last two of which I saw. Harrow,
half an hour's ride from London, is set upon a hill,
with glorious views of English landscape around it.
Here I first saw the English schoolboy with shining
morning face. He was dressed like hundreds of his
companions in the " Eton jacket " and white straw
hat. The dress is not obligatory, but he is in the
land where it is easier to storm a masked battery
than to fly in the face of a precedent. Their ath
letic fields are exceedingly attractive. They are
elaborately fitted and are calculated to induce every
kind of exertion, the boy earning his happiness by
the sweat of his brow. The buildings are not re
markable and the school owes much of its popular
ity to its athletic standing, especially to its contests
with Eton. For the annual Eton-Harrow cricket
match, Britons will tell you, is absorbing enough
to make the sun stand still in Surrey, and the moon
go not down in Middlesex, till the struggle is over.
Winchester is in the extreme south of England,
a beautiful and historic old town. The school build
ings are more venerable than in Harrow, while the
near-by cathedral adds a dignity and charm of its
own. The boys have stamped their wit upon the
premises; the lavatory is called "Moab," and the
place for shoe-blacking " Edom," in allusion to the
Psalmist's expression, " Moab is my wash-pot; over
196

AND OTHEK LEAVES
Edom will I cast out my shoe." The boy at Win
chester may go into the cathedral, and see there
stone after stone commemorative of former school
boys, who wrote their names high in the history of
their country, in army life, in Parliament, in lit
erature. He realizes that these men once kept the
bridge with Horatius, as he is doing in the same
Latin form now, or kept the wicket in the field, as
himself and companions to-day. The silent influ
ences of such traditions irresistibly strengthen within
the boy that Nelsonian conviction, " England ex
pects every man to do his duty." That alone, in
the making of character, is worth more than the
prizes of scholarship or the treasures of boyish af
fection. The most English thing in England is the 'Varsity.
All England annually divides upon the light blue
of Cambridge and the dark blue of Oxford. There
is a flavor about each place that cannot be described
nor analyzed. One detects the separate ingredi
ents of antiquity, architecture, history, literature,
scholarship and personality. Brain and brawn and
breeding are thrown into the mortar; muscle and
mathematics are intermingled. They show you
rooms where poets, statesmen and national giants
grew to their strength. There is the spot where Wes
ley smote the rock and waters gushed out, " waters
to swim in," the millions of Methodism. Yonder
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A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
is the room where Grey learned how to use adjectives
in a country grave-yard. To see all those places
set in the exquisite beauty of muUioned windows
and carved stone, or bordered with ivy and velvet
turf, or laved by the waters of the Cam and Isis that
go softly, is to add a rare pleasure to deep feeling.
Each university has its peculiar charm. On the
one hand, nothing can exceed the " Backs " or
lawns behind the colleges bordering the Cam; on
the other. High Street, Oxford, is fine enough
to be called " the most beautiful street in Europe."
The common type of college in each university
is that of a large building enclosing a court, called
the " quad," with a chapel and a dining-hall. The
students are arrayed in cap and gown when on aca
demic duty, going to lectures or attending chapel.
They are powerful executives with the national
weapons, the knife and fork, or with the twin relics
of the wooden age, the bat and oar. I did not see
the bumping races, being in advance of " Eights
Week," by a fortnight, but I saw cricket in full
swing. To my hotel, the Mitre, came the best
known man in England. His name was not the
Marquis of Salisbury, nor Sir Thomas Lipton, but
Dr. W. R. Grace, the greatest cricketer of all time.
Other men have run their thousands, but Grace his
tens of thousands. Englishmen drop their voices
in awe, when they speak of " W. R.," as he is fa-
198

AND OTHEE LEAVES
miliarly called. A national testimonial of £15,000
was tendered him a few years ago, contributed by all
cricket clubs in the realm, partly because of his
matchless prowess and partly because of the high
character he had given to the national game. He is
a tall man, with a powerful frame, a Saul in Israel,
a collegian's idol. He had brought up an eleven
from London to play the University. I went over
to see it during parts of two days; but, try as I would,
I could develop no enthusiasm. It is not a spec
tators' game. There is more " ginger " in one in
ning of Yale baseball than in three weeks of Ox
ford cricket.

XXV
ENGLISH SIGHTS AND INSIGHTS
THE faces of Englishmen are calmer than
ours. This is not attributable to easier cir
cumstances, for hfe is more strenuous in
the Mother Country; but is rightly ascribed, I
think, 'to their climate. The sun does not smite
them by day nor the moon by night. The wind is
tempered to the shorn lamb, and to the lamb's
owner. The " garish light of day," is not so garish
with them, and the squint, the wrinkle and the
crow's feet are lacking accordingly. This fact of
calmness may have something to do with the charge
of " English reserve," but in point of fact, said
reserve, like the report of Mark Twain's death, " is
greatly exaggerated." That reserve I saw broken
in pieces like a potter's vessel. When the relief of
Mafeking was announced, England plunged into a
delirium of joy. In Cambridge a mammoth bon
fire was prepared with architectural skill. It was
placed in Midsummer Park, built as high as a two-
200

AND OTHEE LEAVES ;
story house, garlanded and inscribed with mottoes
of joy. In Oxford troops of students paraded the
streets, countermarched by troops of girls. Whole
sale kissing was resorted to, and seemed to give relief
to the public mind! There were countless encount
ers between embracer and embraced, osculation and
interosculation by the shipload and the fishing
smack. Britons are passionate lovers of their island-home,
and with reason. The green lanes of old England
are of the kind from which there is no turning.
Linnaeus fell upon his knees when he beheld the
gorse in blossom, and there is even greater occasion
for thanksgiving when one beholds the hawthorn
in bloom. Then the proverb of " homely as a hedge
fence " becomes a proverb of " Solomon in all his
glory." England is more of a Florida than Ameri
ca, and the national flower, the rose, is a revelation
of splendor. The War of the Roses is over, but the
triumph of the roses will never cease to be.
England is a land of lovely homes, of countless
parks, of great wealth expended on a small area,
of picturesque ruins beautified by that rare old
plant, the ivy green. Ruskin, speaking of America,
declared that he could not live in a country that
had no castles. But there
The splendor falls on castle walls.
And snowy summits old in story.
SOL

A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
We must concede them this. America has nothing
to compare with Warwick Castle, either for beauty
or romantic charm. At the gate we can still seem
to hear, " Up drawbridge, grooms ! What, warder,
ho ! Let the port-cullis fall ! " On the lake we can
still see the swan " float double, swan and shadow."
The very footman seems to have stepped out of an
age " When Knighthood was in Flower." He
greatly appreciated my enjoyment of the Warwick
spell, and, letting down a chain, put up by the fam
ily to guard a certain room, remarked, " What the
eye does not see the heart need not grieve at. Go
over this bar and look at that view." The which
I paid for; for this is the land of the pheasant, the
fox, and the fee.
The traveller through England is constantly and
delightfully reminded of numberless allusions in
English literature and history. You say to your
self in Oxford, Here is where Pendennis disported
himself like a prince till his credit gave out; and
there is where Tom Brown's boat bumped little
Oriel " in the Gut." Elsewhere you say. There is
old Major Pendennis himself, going down to Lord
Steyne's country house ; and here is the very inn, the
Hop Pole of Tewkesbury, where Mr. Pickwick
drove in on his way to Birmingham with Mr.
Sawyer and Sam Weller on top of the chaise.
There is Tennyson's brook, as it bickers down the
202

AND OTHEE LEAVES
valley, and there is Wordworth's primrose by the
river's brim. There are " The Fens," where the
Saxons made their last unsuccessful stand against
their foes, and there is Lant Street in the Borough,
where Mr. Bob Sawyer made his last unsuccessful
stand against Mrs. Raddle.
I am aware that the foolish affectation of anglo-
maniacs has produced a reaction in some minds
against the Mother Country, and the example of
certain self-expatriated Americans has added to it.
But not to admire Old England for her true glories
and Divinely wrought beauty would be sinning
against sense and sensibility. An era of good feel
ing between the two nations has grown up in our
day. Long may it last! We have seen hands
clasped across the sea, and, though the Atlantic does
its best to saturate and weaken Anglo-Saxon ties,
it is, at length, demonstrated beyond a peradventure
that blood is thicker than water. In view of all the
noble history and native loveliness of that little isle,
I could paraphrase the sentiment of Lord Chatham,
and say, " If I were an Englishman, as I am an
American, I would never lay down my allegiance,
never, never, never! "

XXVI
THE HOME OF SHAKESPEARE
IN the heart of England Hes Stratford, the
Mecca of all Enghsh-speaking races. Ameri
cans are glad to learn that they furnish a
larger number of pilgrims to his shrine than the
home nation. They note the memorial fountain in
the public square, the gift of a noble-hearted Ameri
can, Mr. George W. Childs, and remark, with pride
that the American window in Holy Trinity Church
is the finest of all. The traveller on arrival is not
in any doubt of his being in Shakespeare's town.
Relics and pictures of the Swan of Avon are every
where exposed for sale, and even the sign of " The
Shakespeare Stables " meets the eye. The Me
morial Building on the bank of the Avon contains
all known editions of his works, including some in
Arabic and Hindustanee. Many places of inciden
tal interest abound, like the house where John Har
vard was born, founder of Harvard University.
But the four chief places of interest are those of
the poet's birth, courtship, residence and burial.
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AND OTHEK LEAVES
Shakespeare's birthplace, on Henley Street, has
been kept in repair, and, thanks to a good constitu
tion, is still very much as it was on that day when
they came to John Shakespeare and said, " There is
a man-child born into the world." It is plumb with
the street line, but has a rare old garden beside
and back of it, which is appropriately filled with
flowers mentioned in his works. Among them are
Ophelia's offerings, " There's rosemary, that's for
remembrance : . . . and there is pansies, that's
for thoughts." The house passed from owner to
owner for three hundred years, until Mr. P. T. Bar-
num, in 1847, characteristically proposed to buy it
and transport it to America. This roused the Brit
ish spirit, and the premises are now national prop
erty. The walls are covered with signatures, some
of which are familiar, as Edmund Kean, Charles
Dickens, Wm. M. Thackeray, and W. Scott. A
part of the interior is used for a museum of Shakes-
peareana. Among them I noted a " Booke of the
Hundred Merry Tales," alluded to in Act 2, of
" Much Ado About Nothing," and was moved to
transcribe the following extract:
" (^nof^er axman f^ete twftg ijf ftneefs^ ftf ge
mft0 of tequie, t»^fe i?e co^ree of ^et ^efiftn^e iat
on ge 6ere in ge c^gtc^e. $o tw^ome ft ijounge ntft
cam ftn^ spftfte iwuf ^ ^et in 0er ere ae f ^oug^e it ^ai
205

A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
fien for 00 m mafer cocerneing ge funerftff, (^oiwe fie
if ^e ejpa&i of no 0ttcpe mftf er fiuf onefg t»oij)B^ ^er
gf ^e mgg^f fie ^er 0u0fiftnie fo i»5om0^e ftn0i»erei
ftn^ 0fte^ f ^U0, ^er, fie ntg frouf ^e 3 ftm 0or8 gf
ge come 00 fftf e, for 3 ftm Bpt'b aft reig, for 3 t»a0
mft^e ttfife gegfer iftg fo ftnof^er mftn."
Anne Hathaway's cottage is reached by a lovely
walk across green fields. It is a vine-clad cottage,
indeed, with an old-fashioned garden in front, from
which the little maid plucked me bachelor's but
tons and pinks. There is the very settle by the
chimney-corner where Will and Anne watched the
fire and told each other's fortunes in " the hollow
down by the flare." Without is the garden seat
where " In such a night
Did young Lorenzo swear he loved her well.
Stealing her soul with many vows of faith."
The house is still kept by some descendant or con
nection of the Hathaways, and on asking her when
the rush of visitors came, she answered, " From
Whissuntide to the first of Hoctober, sir."
Shakespeare's life in Stratford, after he was six
or seven, was mainly spent in the " New Place."
On one side of it is the Guildhall, or school, where
the hoy got his " small Latin and less Greek;" op
posite is The Falcon Inn, where he often " set the
206

AND OTHER LEAVES
table in a roar." In New Place he wrote his later
plays and spent his happiest years. The house sur
vived to 1757, when its owner, the Rev. Francis
Gastrell, insensible to its value, and annoyed by
visitors, pulled it down! Thus made he himself a
third with the man who fired the temple of Ephesus
and the one who destroyed the library of Alexan
dria. He is the best hated man of modem times.
But the grounds are still laid out as Shakespeare
left them, the grandson of his famous mulberry
tree still blooms, and the foundations of the house
are carefully boxed and exposed to view. One can
still ramble thoughtfully in the enclosure, thinking
of that other garden, the Eden of great minds,
" Within that circle none durst walk but he."
Holy Trinity it a beautiful old church, behind
which flows the Avon. It is elm-bordered and ivy-
clad. Within the chancel, indicative of the esteem
in which the Bard was held, are placed the mortal
remains of the immortal man. The curse that he
pronounced upon the mover of his bones has been
respected. Beneath the brass, within the stone,
he waits the resurrection day. A bust on the wall
above exhibits the grave and reverent mien of the
poet, the man of hazel eyes and auburn hair, the
unforgetable face. Shakespeare died, old in deeds,
not years; in actions, not in figures on a dial. A
207

A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
few months before his decease he drafted his own
will, and made therein his confession of faith,
" 3 comment mg 0ouf info f^e ^ftn^0 of (E»o^ mg
Creftfor, Roping, ftn^ ft00ure^fg fiefieuing, f^oug^
f 9e onfg merif 0 of ^tem C^tiei mg ^fttjiour, fo fie
mft^e pftrfftfter of fife eDerfft0fing,"

XXVII
HOMEWARD BOUND
THE beginning and ending of certain great
affairs are water-marked. The Exodus was
marked by the Red Sea and the Jordan,
the Spanish War by Manila Bay and Santiago.
As to life itself, " trailing clouds of glory do we
come," and " eras ingens iterabimus aequor," do
we go. So is it with a foreign tour. The first and
last impression left on the mind is oceanic. It is
not easily washed away. The Atlantic may disturb
the body; it composes the mind. It is the one
thing needful to give our European ideas the right
perspective; they suffer a sea change and fall into
order. Of " the multitudinous seas," I may not vmte.
Who can bring back the ocean and compress it in
a drop of ink? Of sea-life itself the voyager enjoys
volumes. The games on deck, the music in the
cabin, the resources of the library are all entertain
ing. Conversation with the mate may draw out an
209

A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
account of his shipwreck on the North Pacific, his
boat picked up, its companion boat never heard
from. He tells you how, on the last voyage, the St.
Paul shipped a sea, carrying overboard a Swedish
lady, who was never so much as sighted again.
The great liner cannot be backed in a moment, and
would run six miles by its own momentum alone,
after the engines were stopped. Sea stories at first-
hands are wonderfully vivid.
Fellow-travellers furnish each other with great
entertainment. There is always a man aboard who
walks the deck like the one Thackeray saw going
down the Strand, and accosted with the inquiry,
" Excuse me, sir, but are you anybody in paiticu-
lar? " There is the fault-finder, complaining of the
arrangements (who does not live half so well at
home), to whom you are tempted to tell the land
lord's story, " A hundred and ten men have wiped
on that towel, and you are the first one to complain."
There is the woman who is travelling with a dog;
some persons achieve discomfort, and some have
discomfort thrust upon them; a woman with a dog
does both. In the next depth of desperation is the
person travelling with a small boy, deeply repentant
now, and coming back a month earlier than planned.
It reminds you of Mr. Lincoln's explanation, on re
turning from church before it was out, having Thad
in his arms, " I entered this colt, but he kicked
210

AND OTHEE LEAVES
around so, I had to withdraw him." Then there is
the "summer girl," heaven bless her! No ship
can expect any luck without her. There is a young
man, too, in her company, a diplomatist, trying to
arrange a secret treaty with her on the basis of in
cluding his name in " the most favored nation
clause." There is ever the selfish man, who, all
over Europe, has proved ingenious in ways of slip
ping ahead of his proper place in line, or of ousting
people entitled to seats on top by climbing up some
other way. But, in the long run, my friend, say
the run from Southampton to New York, " Be sure
your sin will find you out." After a while he dis
covers that nobody laughs at his jokes, he becomes
acquainted with the cold shoulder, and the last state
of that man is worse than the first. There is, also,
Mark, the son of Tapley, " coming out strong " on
rainy days, or when people have low spirits on the
high seas. Humor has a gteat market on ship
board, for, according to Dr. Johnson, " A ship is a
prison with the additional chance of your being
drowned," And not on ship-board only; Mr. Beech-
er observed that to be without a sense of humor
through life is " like travelling in a wagon without
springs." It always adds to " the gayety of na
tions," and needs no lexicon to be understood in all
languages. You may see a shipload of people of all
dialects and religions hugely enjoy some humo-
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A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
rous incident and be drawn together by it. There is
the affable man, too, who behoves that many
a " poky " meal can be poked into a blaze, and that
dyspeptic conditions of travel are best treated by
the pepsin of agreeable conversation. All these and
many other types make up the census of that float
ing island, a ship at sea. It is a little world by it
self, for the time being, strangely drawn together
as no other experience in life can equal.
" One port, methought.
Alike they sought :
One purpose held, where'er they fare :
0 bounding breeze,
O rushing seas.
At last, at last, unite them there ! "
On shipboard one has time to enumerate the
fruits of travel. For one thing, he has had a great
Sabbatic, is rested and is refreshed. He has made
a better bargain than Shylock, having gained by
his outlay anywhere from four to twenty pounds
of flesh. He has made ten friends, which add more
to his happiness than deposits in ten banks. He
has seen a great deal, and, as it is said, one learns
eighty times as much from the sense of sight as
from all other senses combined, he has had accord
ingly a great education. He has a peddler's pack of
souvenirs, too, which will remind him of happy
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AND OTHEE LEAVES
days, adorn his home, and help make conversation
for all time to come with monosyllabic visitors. If
he be a minister, he has a large stock of illustrations
beginning with, " When I was abroad in 1900,"
which will eventually make many of his people
wish that he would go abroad again. While some
travellers' anecdotes may be, like Mrs. Leo Hunter's
Ode, " all point," others remind one of that vote
of thanks after the lecture, " to which we have so
ably hstened." There are other fruits of travel pe
culiar to individuals, and cherished by them for
life; but there is one fruit more valuable than all
others, which is common to everybody, which affects
all classes, and both sexes — it is the increase of patri
otism. The feeling of national pride may often be ill-
founded. It is sometimes a weakness that can easily
be satirized. The most cogent reason with all of us
for being an American is that given by the man who
was asked why he was a bachelor, "Because Iwasbom
so." But " The Return of the Native," the native
American from a European tour, is accompanied
with a deep-seated conviction that his lines are cast
in pleasant places, with a realization of his country's
worth, and vrith a love for her that many waters
cannot quench. America itself is an unfailing topic
of conversation on homeward voyages. It is no
longer a blind faith that is in him, a pagan admira-
213

A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
tion that makes him say, " My country right or
wrong;" it is a discriminating affection that he car
ries with him past Sandy Hook. He knows that
Europe surpasses America in many things, in good
roads, in management of cities, in plentiful holi
days, and popular methods of driving dull care
away, in a generally larger outlook upon the world
(especially in England), in a superior sense of
beauty, and a wider diffusion of art. On the other
hand, he realizes that America is in advance cf all
nations in the respect paid womanhood, in the oppor
tunity it gives to religion by its absolute sepa
ration from the State, in the freedom of the indi
vidual, who does not have to be vised, endorsed, or
passported from city to city, or expected to give an
account of himself hke a man out of prison on a
conditional pardon. The American does not live
where " the balance of power " makes impossible
the balance of the treasury sheet. The armies of
Europe impoverish the land, reminding him of that
picture of the four men, the one above the other.
On top a king, with the legend, " I reign for all;"
the second, a priest with the legend, " I pray for
all;" the third, a soldier, " I fight for all;" at the
bottom a workman with the label, " I pay for all."
The American thinks of these things abroad; thinks
by contrast of a land that contains the most news
papers, the most schools, the most hospitals, the most
314

AND OTHER LEAVES
churches of all lands; thinks of the buoyancy and
enterprise of his own nation, facing its golden age,
as Madame DeStael called her, " L'Avenir du
Monde," the Future of the World; and so, after see
ing how the other half lives, returns to his own hemi
sphere, with the ejaculation of Webster, " Thank
God, I, too, am an American! "
Meanwhile the St. Paul is profiting daily by her
vis a tergo, the twin propellers. Every noon the
bulletin-board is scanned, and the long southwester
ly line is made longer upon the chart.
The run from Cherbourg, whence the distance is
computed, to Sandy Hook, tabulates as follows :

To noon of

Hours, min.

Knots.

Knots per hour.

May 27 

19.0534.4824.46 34.39
34.43 24.43 18.00

377473 493466482485 365

19.75

May 38 

19.07

May 29 

19.86

May 30 

18.90

May 31 

19.51

June 1 

19.55

June 2 (6 a.m.) 

20.27

Total, 3,140 knots; 6 days, 16 hours, 43 minutes;
an average of 19.60 knots for the voyage; or 22.54
land miles per hour.
At length there comes a delirious moment when
the engine ceases her throbbing, and his own heart
makes up for it in additional beats. He sees behind
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A LEAVE OF ABSENCE
him the Atlantic halted by the forts at the Narrows,
and there are her proud waves stayed. He sees be
fore him the majestic Hudson coming down to the
Harlem with her tremendous majority. He sees
the picturesque sky-line of Manhattan Island, and
the moving life of that busy, roomy, cheery bay.
But, best of all, he sees from many a height en sea
and land the Star Spangled Banner. Always a
beautiful emblem in itself, it speaks to him of a land
that is fairer than day, of grand mountains and noble
rivers — ^his own! It speaks to him of great pages
in his country's history, of heroic sacrifice, of pain
borne in secret, of counting not the life dear unto
oneself. " For every star in that field of blue,
And for every stripe of crimson hue.
Ten thousand of the brave and true
Have lain them down and died."
Many an eye has danced to see that banner in
the sky, his own among them, but never does it
appear so radiant above, never are his eyes so jubi
lant, so misty beneath as when, gazing on those bil
lowy folds, the banner welcomes him with the
matchless name of
"HOME!"

YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

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