ous, lecture-giving asperity with which ordinary fathers too
often season their ordinary epistles, that he was in raptures with
his newly-found correspondent.

"I would not miss seeing you for worlds," wrote Sir Lionel; "and
although I have been ordered to Constantinople with all the
_immediate haste_ which your civil-service grandees always use
in addressing us military slaves, it shall go hard with me but I
will steal a fortnight from them in order to pass it with you at
Jerusalem. I suppose I shall scarce know you, or you me; but when
you see an old gentleman in a military frock, with a bald head, a
hook nose, and a rather short allowance of teeth, you may then be
sure that you look upon your father. However, I will be at Z----'s
Hotel--I believe they honour the caravansary with that name--as soon
as possible after the 14th."

His uncle had at any rate been quite wrong in predicting that his
father would keep out of his way. So far was this from being the
case, that Sir Lionel was going to put himself to considerable
inconvenience to meet him. It might be, and no doubt was the case,
that Mr. Bertram the merchant had put together a great deal more
money than Colonel Bertram the soldier; but the putting together
of money was no virtue in George's eyes; and if Sir Lionel had not
remitted a portion of his pay as regularly as he perhaps should have
done, that should not now be counted as a vice. It may perhaps be
surmised that had George Bertram suffered much in consequence of his
father's negligence in remitting, he might have been disposed to look
at the matter in a different light.

He had brought but one servant with him, a dragoman whom he had
picked up at Malta, and with him he started on his ride from the city
of oranges. Oranges grow plentifully enough in Spain, in Malta, in
Egypt, in Jamaica, and other places, but within five miles of Jaffa
nothing else is grown--if we except the hedges of prickly pear which
divide the gardens. Orange garden succeeds to orange garden till one
finds oneself on the broad open desert that leads away to Jerusalem.

There is something enticing to an Englishman in the idea of riding
off through the desert with a pistol girt about his waist, a
portmanteau strapped on one horse before him, and an only attendant
seated on another behind him. There is a _soupcon_ of danger in the
journey just sufficient to give it excitement; and then it is so
un-English, oriental, and inconvenient; s