Since the days of the ancient Canaanites Palestine has been often invaded. The composite life of the towns we have already noted. The history of Palestine shows how composite the life of the whole land has become. Its central position among the nations is known to every one. To the south, shut off by but a strip of desert, are Egypt and Africa; to the east lie Arabia, Persia, and the farther Asiatic continent; easily accessible on the north are Asia Minor, Turkey, and Russia; while ships almost daily arrive which unite it on the west with Europe and America. Yet one day’s ride along any of its chief highways will do more to show the traveller what that central position practically means, than all his study of it in books and on maps. For in one day’s ride he may meet Kurds, Circassians, Arabs, Syrians, Turks, Cypriotes, Greeks, Russians, Egyptians, Nubians, Austrians, French, Germans, English, and Americans. In a mission school in Damascus were found some little dark-eyed Syrian children speaking English with an unmistakable Australian accent. They had been born and brought up in Queensland.

It is in Hauran that this mixture of races is most forcibly thrust upon one’s notice. In the villages south of Damascus, the crowd which gathers round the tents is sure to contain several smiling negroes, some of{86} them branded on the cheeks; Circassians, with sickle-shaped nose and thin lips, sharp-featured and small-limbed men with an untamable expression on their bitter faces; Arabs, darker of complexion, and more languid of eye; and Turkish soldiers, thin and smallpox bitten. There are to be found the Jew, sneering complacently at the inferior world; the fanatical Moslem, who will break the water-bottle your lips have touched; the Druse, who objects to coffee and tobacco, and to whom you hesitate to say “Good morning,” lest he may have conscientious scruples about that; and the cross-bred ruffian, who has no scruples about anything. Everything helps to strengthen the impression. In Damascus it seems always to be Sunday with one or other portion of the population, and a different set of shutters are up each day for nearly half the week. The railway, it............