of the basin, forming dark chasms or light sunny
valleys. Near Tiberias these banks are rocky, and ancient
sepulchres open in them, with their doors toward the water. They
selected grand spots, as did the Egyptians of old, for burial
places, as if they designed that when the voice of God should reach
the sleepers, they should walk forth and open their eyes on scenes
of glorious beauty. On the east, the wild and desolate mountains
contrast finely with the deep blue lake; and toward the north,
sublime and majestic, Hermon looks down on the sea, lifting his
white crown to heaven with the pride of a hill that has seen the
departing footsteps of a hundred generations. On the north-east
shore of the sea was a single tree, and this is the only tree of any
size visible from the water of the lake, except a few lonely palms
in the city of Tiberias, and by its solitary position attracts more
attention than would a forest. The whole appearance of the scene is
precisely what we would expect and desire the scenery of Genessaret
to be, grand beauty, but quiet calm. The very mountains are calm."

It is an ingeniously written description, and well calculated to deceive.
But if the paint and the ribbons and the flowers be stripped from it, a
skeleton will be found beneath.

So stripped, there remains a lake six miles wide and neutral in color;
with steep green banks, unrelieved by shrubbery; at one end bare,
unsightly rocks, with (almost invisible) holes in them of no consequence
to the picture; eastward, "wild and desolate mountains;" (low, desolate
hills, he should have said;) in the north, a mountain called Hermon, with
snow on it; peculiarity of the picture, "calmness;" its prominent
feature, one tree.

No ingenuity could make such a picture beautiful--to one's actual vision.

I claim the right to correct misstatements, and have so corrected the
color of the water in the above recapitulation. The waters of Genessaret
are of an exceedingly mild blue, even from a high elevation and a
distance of five miles. Close at hand (the witness was sailing on the
lake,) it is hardly proper to call them blue at all, much less "deep"
blue. I wish to state, also, not as a correction, but as matter of
opinion, that Mount Hermon is not a striking or picturesque mountain by
any means, being too near the height of its immediate neighbors to be so.
That is all. I