IT is to be regretted that some one has not the leisure and the genius for it would require both—to study and to sketch the more peculiar of the travellers who journey during a season in the Orient, to photograph their impressions, and to unravel the motives that have set them wandering. There was at our hotel a countryman whose observations on the East pleased me mightily. I inferred, correctly, from his slow and deliberate manner of speech, that he was from the great West. A gentleman spare in figure and sallow in complexion, you might have mistaken him for a "member" from Tennessee or Illinois. What you specially admired in him was his entire sincerity, and his imperviousness to all the glamour, historical or romantic, which interested parties, like poets and historians, have sought to throw over the Orient. A heap of refuse in the street or an improvident dependant on Allah, in rags, was just as offensive to him in Damascus as it would be in Big Lickopolis. He carried his scales with him; he put into one balance his county-seat and into the other the entire Eastern civilization, and the Orient kicked the beam,—and it was with a mighty, though secret joy that you saw it.

It was not indeed for his own pleasure that he had left the familiar cronies of his own town and come into foreign and uncomfortable parts; you could see that he would much prefer to be again among the "directors" and "stockholders" and operators, exchanging the dry chips of gossip about stocks and rates; but, being a man of "means," he had yielded to the imperious pressure of our modern society which, insists on travel, and to the natural desire of his family to see the world. Europe had not pleased him, although it was interesting for an old country, and there were a few places, the Grand Hotel in Paris for instance, where one feels a little at home. Buildings, cathedrals? Yes, some of them were very fine, but there was nothing in Europe to equal or approach the Capitol in Washington. And galleries; my wife likes them, and my daughter,—I suppose I have walked through miles and miles of them. It may have been in the nature of a confidential confession, that he was dragged into the East, though he made no concealment of his repugnance to being here. But when he had crossed the Mediterranean, Europe had attractions for him which he had never imagined while he was in it. If he had been left to himself he would have fled back from Cairo as if it were infested with plague; he had gone no farther up the Nile; that miserable hole, Cairo, was sufficient for him.

"They talk," he was saying, speaking with that deliberate pause and emphasis upon every word which characterizes the conversation of his section of the country,—"they talk about the climate of Egypt; it is all a humbug. Cairo is the most disagreeable city in the world, no sun, nothing but dust and wind. I give you my word that we had only one pleasant day in a week; cold,—you can't get warm in the hotel; the only decent day we had in Egypt was at Suez. Fruit? What do you get? Some pretend to like those dry dates. The oranges are so sour you can't eat them, except the Jaffa, which are all peel. Yes, the pyramids are big piles of stone, but when you come to architecture, what is there in Cairo to compare to the Tuileries? The mosque of Mohammed Ali is a fine building; it suits me better than the mosque at Jerusalem. But what a city to live in!"

The farther our friend journeyed in the Orient, the deeper became his disgust. It was extreme in Jerusalem; but it had a pathetic tone of resignation in Damascus; hope was dead within him. The day after we had visited the private houses, some one asked him at table if he was not pleased with Damascus.

"Damascus!" he repeated, "Damascus is the most God-forsaken place I have ever been in. There is nothing to eat, and nothing to see. I had heard about the bazaars of Damascus; my daughter must see the bazaars of Damascus. There is nothing in them; I have been from one end of them to the other,—it is a mess of rubbish. I suppose you were hauled through what they call the private houses? There is a good deal of marble and a good deal of show, but there is n't a house in Damascus that a respectable American would live in; there is n't one he could be comfortable in. The old mosque is an interesting place: I like the mosque, and I have been there a couple of times, and should n't mind going again; but I've had enough of Damascus, I don't intend to go out doors again until my family are ready to leave."

All these intense dislikes of the Western observer were warmly combated by the ladies present, who found Damascus almost a paradise, and were glowing with enthusiasm over every place and incident of their journey. Having delivered his opinion, our friend let the conversation run on without interference, as it ranged all over Palestine. He sat in silence, as if he were patiently enduring anew the martyrdom of his pleasure-trip, until at length, obeying a seeming necessity of relieving his feelings, he leaned forward and addressed the lady next but one to him, measuring every word with judicial slowness,—

"Madame—I—hate—the—name—of Palestine—and Jud鎍—and—the Jordan—and—Damascus—and—Jeru-salem."

It is always refreshing in travel to meet a candid man who is not hindered by any weight of historic consciousness from expressing his opinions; and without exactly knowing why I felt under great obligations to this gentleman,—for gentleman he certainly was, even to an old-fashioned courtesy that shamed the best breeding of the Arabs. And after this wholesale sweep of the Oriental board, I experienced a new pleasure in going about and picking up the fragments of romance and sentiment that one might still admire.

There was another pilgrim at Damascus to whom Palestine was larger than all the world besides, and who magnified its relation to the rest of the earth as much as our more widely travelled friend belittled it. In a waste but damp spot outside the Bab-el-Hadid an incongruous Cook's Party had pitched its tents,—a camp which swarmed during the day with itinerant merchants and beggars, and at night was the favorite resort of the most dissolute dogs of Damascus. In knowing this party one had an opportunity to observe the various motives that bring people to the Holy Land; there were a divinity student, a college professor, a well-known publisher, some indomitable English ladies, some London cockneys, and a group of young men who made a lark of the pilgrimage, and saw no more significance in the tour than in a jaunt to the Derby or a sail to Margate. I was told that the guide-book most read and disputed over by this party was the graphic itinerary of Mark Twain. The pilgrim to whom I refer, however, scarcely needed any guide in the Holy Land. He was, by his own representation, an illiterate shoemaker from the South of England; of schooling he had never enjoyed a day, nor of education, except such as sprung from his "conversion," which happened in his twentieth year. At that age he joined the "Primitive Methodists," and became, without abandoning his bench, an occasional exhorter and field-preacher; his study, to which he gave every moment not demanded by his trade, was the Bible. To exhorting he added the labor on Sunday of teaching, and for nearly forty years, without interruption, he had taken charge of a Sunday-school class. He was very poor, and the incessant labor of six days in the week hardly sufficed to the support of himself and his wife, and the family that began to fill his humble lodging. Nevertheless, at the very time of his conversion he was seized with an intense longing to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. This desire strengthened the more he read the Bible and became interested in the scenes of its prophecies and miracles. He resolved to go; yet to undertake so expensive a journey at the time was impossible, nor could his family spare his daily labor. But, early in his married life, he came to a notable resolution, and that was to lay by something every year, no matter how insignificant the sum, as a fund for his pilgrimage. And he trusted if his life were spared long enough he should be able to see with his own eyes the Promised Land; if that might be granted him, his object in life would be attained, and he should be willing to depart in peace.

Filled with this sole idea he labored at his trade without relaxation, and gave his Sundays and evenings to a most diligent study of the Bible; and at length extended his reading to other books, commentaries and travels, which bore upon his favorite object. Years passed by; his Palestine fund accumulated more slowly than his information about that land, but he was never discouraged; he lost at one time a considerable sum by misplaced confidence in a comrade, but, nothing disheartened, he set to work to hammer out what would replace it. Of course such industry and singleness of purpose were not without result; his business prospered and his fund increased; but with his success new duties opened; his children must be educated, for he was determined that they should have a better chance in England than their father had been given. The expenses of their education and his contributions to the maintenance of the worship of his society interfered sadly with his pilgrimage, and more than thirty years passed before he saw himself in possession of the sum that he could spare for the purchase of a Cook's ticket to ............