ite the same as ours. It was some time before
we discovered why, and then we found out that the long flapping ears
hung down, while the ears of our sheep are small and upright. It is a
most difficult thing to remember how an animal's ears grow. Nine people
out of ten, on being told to draw a pig, will give him small, pointed,
upright ears, instead of making the flaps fall over!

The rest of the flock of sheep quietly followed the shepherd who carried
the hurt one, for in the East sheep are used to being led, instead of
being driven by a dog, as in Britain, and that is why so often we hear
in the Bible of the sheep being led. Jesus took almost all His parables
from natural things around Him--the cornfields, the lilies growing, the
sparrows, and the vineyards.

[Illustration: A MAN CARRYING A SHEEP ON HIS SHOULDERS.]

We have been steadily rising for long past, now we mount a steeper bit
of rising ground and suddenly there comes into view a tiny valley from
which the hills rise again, and on the opposite slope, spread out before
us, is Nazareth. We pull up and look at it in silence. The little,
flat-roofed, white houses are dotted about among gardens and trees, and
resemble the square white dice one throws out of a box. Very much as it
appears to us now must this little hill-village have looked to Jesus
when He lived here, except that the slopes of the hills were more
cultivated, and there were more houses. Jesus came here as a small child
and lived here until He was thirty. _You_ know, of course, every tree
and hole and stream and almost every stone and bird's nest about your
own home in the country; you will never get to know any other place so
well again in your life, for when one is grown up one can't climb trees
and dabble in streams and build huts and root about in the earth. Jesus
was just a natural boy; He grew to know all the byways between the
little gardens, all the trees which bore figs or pomegranates or olives
or oranges, and He climbed the hills around with other lads when He had
a holiday--no other place would ever be to Him what Nazareth was.

[Illustration: NAZARETH.]

One or two tall buildings stand out prominently, these are the churches,
and they, of course, were not there in His time. None of the houses can
be the same after nineteen hundred years, but many of them are probably
exactly like those that existed then.

As we go down toward the village at a foot's pace we see grave,
brown-faced, br