scovered. Around her feet the gently sloping
hillside was a mass of flowers, blood red anemones, spotted tulips and
blue star blossoms. In the winter, with the bare gray stones scattered
about in confusion, this place was dreary as poverty itself. But now
the wealth of beauty that lay over it suggested the joy of the Passover
to the whole world.

It was while picking golden narcissus in her lily valley, Mary's heart
was gladdened by the sudden outburst of a nightingale in a thicket
close at hand. Careful watching was rewarded by a sight, not only of
the singer but of a nest with three little ones in it. While she yet
peeped at the nestlings, a man appeared with an ax. He was looking for
boughs with which to thatch his booth and his eye was on the
nightingale's home. Taking the nest from its hiding-place Mary tucked
it under her veil, wrapped her lily stems in wet leaves and started
away. A moment later a stroke of the ax felled the bush that had
housed the birds. Looking back Mary saw the mother bird fluttering
wildly about over the cast-off pile of leaves. "Knowing not her little
ones are safe she suffers pain," she said to herself.

She had not gone far along the roadway when she came upon the tent of a
Bedouin. A woman holding an infant on one arm had just stepped out.
She looked about anxiously until her eye caught sight of a goat grazing
at no great distance. By its broken tether the goat had made its
escape. The milk and cheese of the family depended on the goat. In no
spoken word could Mary converse with the woman, but she understood, and
holding out her arms for the child, pointed toward the goat. The
swarthy woman nodded, placed the little brown baby in the arms of the
unknown friend, and hurried after the goat.

Sitting on a flat stone behind the tent, Mary, who had for the moment
removed from her bosom the veil in which she had wrapped the nestlings
and was quieting their calls for their mother by fitting her warm palm
close over them, was suddenly startled by what seemed to be an infinite
throb, a passion unspeakable and mysterious. She did not know that the
mouth of a sucking child is a vortex in which the interplay of
universal forces starts into vibration a thousand generations of
instinctive motherhood. Nor did the little brown baby know aught of
this. Moved by the first impulse of Nature which makes every mother a
universal mother, the instinct of self-preservation had turned the fac