er Saturday issue the miraculous flames, was a thing to
be achieved by moderate patience. His close contiguity to Candiotes
and Copts, to Armenians and Abyssinians was not agreeable to our
hero, for the contiguity was very close, and Christians of these
nations are not very cleanly. But this was nothing to the task of
entering the sanctum sanctorum. To this there is but one aperture,
and that is but four feet high; men entering it go in head foremost,
and those retreating come out in the other direction; and as it is
impossible that two should pass, and as two or three are always
trying to come out, and ten or twelve equally anxious to get in, the
struggle to an Englishman is disagreeably warm, though to an Oriental
it is probably matter of interesting excitement.

But for his dragoman, Bertram would never have succeeded. He,
however, so pulled and hauled these anxious devotees, so thrust in
those who endeavoured to come out, and clawed back those who strove
to get in, that the passage became for a moment clear, and our hero,
having bent low his head, found himself standing with his hand on the
marble slab of the tomb.

Those who were there around him seemed to be the outcasts of the
world, exactly those whom he would have objected to meet, unarmed, on
the roads of Greece or among the hills of Armenia; cut-throat-looking
wretches, with close-shaven heads, dirty beards, and angry eyes; men
clothed in skins, or huge skin-like-looking cloaks, filthy, foul,
alive with vermin, reeking with garlic,--abominable to an Englishman.
There was about them a certain dignity of demeanour, a natural
aptitude to carry themselves with ease, and even a not impure taste
for colour among their dirt. But these Christians of the Russian
Church hardly appeared to him to be brothers of his own creed.

But he did put his hand on the slab of the tomb; and as he did so,
two young Greeks, brothers by blood--Greeks by their creed, though of
what actual nation Bertram was quite unable say--pressed their lips
vehemently to the marble. They were dirty, shorn about the head,
dangerous looking, and skin-clothed, as we have described; men very
low in the scale of humanity when compared with their fellow-pilgrim;
but, nevertheless, they were to him at that moment objects of envy.
They believed: so much at any rate was clear to him. By whatever code
of morals they might be able to govern their lives, whether by any,
or as, alas! might be too likely, by n