any more
of Count Festetic's attentions.

Later, I got on very familiar terms with an old gentleman, whom I
took to be the head gardener, and walked him all about the gardens,
slipping my arm into his without invitation, yet without demur on
his part, and by and by was confused again when I found that he was
not a gardener at all, but the Lord High Admiral of Russia! I
almost made up my mind that I would never call on an Emperor again.

Like all Mediterranean excursionists, those first pilgrims were
insatiable collectors of curios, costumes, and all manner of outlandish
things. Dan Slote had the stateroom hung and piled with such gleanings.
At Constantinople his room-mate writes:

I thought Dan had got the state-room pretty full of rubbish at last,
but awhile ago his dragoman arrived with a brand-new ghastly
tombstone of the Oriental pattern, with his name handsomely carved
and gilted on it in Turkish characters. That fellow will buy a
Circassian slave next.

It was Church, Denny, Jack, Davis, Dan, Moult, and Mark Twain who
made the "long trip" through Syria from Beirut to Jerusalem with their
elaborate camping outfit and decrepit nags "Jericho," "Baalbec," and
the rest. It was better camping than that Humboldt journey of six years
before, though the horses were not so dissimilar, and altogether it was
a hard, nerve-racking experience, climbing the arid hills of Palestine
in that torrid summer heat. Nobody makes that trip in summer-time now.
Tourists hurry out of Syria before the first of April, and they do not
go back before November. One brief quotation from Mark Twain's book
gives us an idea of what that early party of pilgrims had to undergo:

We left Damascus at noon and rode across the plain a couple of
hours, and then the party stopped a while in the shade of some fig-
trees to give me a chance to rest. It was the hottest day we had
seen yet--the sun-flames shot down like the shafts of fire that
stream out before a blow-pipe; the rays seemed to fall in a deluge
on the head and pass downward like rain from a roof. I imagined I
could distinguish between the floods of rays. I thought I could
tell when each flood struck my head, when it reached my shoulders,
and when the next one came. It was terrible.

He had been ill with cholera at Damascus, a light attack; but any attack
of that dread disease is serious enough. He tells of