accomplished young ladies from the _Cork_ then gave us a skirt dance,
which happily closed a very exciting day. I went to bed in my cell. It
was a fine, moonlight night, and a three-cornered contest soon started
between donkeys braying, jackals howling and dogs barking; but we were
very tired, and they made no more impression on us than would Raff's
_Cavatina_ played on the violin with a mute.

We were up early next morning and off for the Jordan and the Dead Sea.
We stopped to look at and drink of Elisha's Fountain, a fine, copious
spring forming a large stream. Near it I talked with several German
officers who were making excavations for some German savants. They had
got down to where the old buildings had been, and were pleased with their
prospects. They were nice fellows, and very hospitable--strangers in a
strange land usually are.

Next we came to Gilgal, and then to the Jordan. I crossed it in a canoe
for sixpence--not that I had any business on the other side, but just to
say that I did it, and to make some kind of a voyage for once without
tips to the stewards on the passage. The river is about one hundred and
thirty-seven miles long and falls three thousand feet on its way to the
Dead Sea. They do a large bottling business at places on the banks,
where the natives bottle the water and sell it to visitors for baptismal
purposes all over the world.

Lower down is the Dead Sea; it is forty-seven miles long, nine miles
wide, and thirteen hundred feet deep. Its surface is thirteen hundred
feet below sea level; this and the shelter of the hills makes the country
very hot in this valley. The Dead Sea water contains five times as much
salt as the ocean. Six and a half million tons of water flow into it
from the Jordan daily, which amount is evaporated, as the sea has no
outlet. No living thing can exist in it, and the bathers who try to swim
rise to the surface like corks.

We returned to Jerusalem the way we had come, meeting a train of eighty
camels on the way, which some one called the "oriental express." After
staying a couple of days at Jerusalem, we returned to the _Cork_, which
was waiting for us at Joppa. The natives had not "moved" Simon the
tanner's house again and we saw it once more.

We sailed for Alexandria and reached it next day. Alexandria is now a
big, modern town and has a great history behind it, too long for any
repetition here. Not long ago, before "Charley" Beresford, the po