berless anemones. Wide acres of young wheat and barley
glistened in the light, as the wind-waves rippled through their short,
silken blades. There were few trees, except now and then an
olive-orchard or a round-topped carob with its withered pods.

[Illustration: The Tall Tower of the Forty Martyrs at Ramleh.]

The highlands of Judea lay stretched out along the eastern horizon, a
line of azure and amethystine heights, changing colour and seeming
almost to breathe and move as the cloud shadows fleeted over them, and
reaching away northward and southward as far as eye could see. Rugged
and treeless, save for a clump of oaks or terebinths planted here or
there around some Mohammedan saint's tomb, they would have seemed
forbidding but that their slopes were clothed with the tender herbage of
spring, their outlines varied with deep valleys and blue gorges, and all
their mighty bulwarks jewelled right royally with the opalescence of
sunset.

In a hollow of the green plain to the left we could see the white houses
and the yellow church tower of Lydda, the supposed burial-place of Saint
George of Cappadocia, who killed the dragon and became the patron saint
of England. On a conical hill to the right shone the tents of the Scotch
explorer who is excavating the ancient city of Gezer, which was the
dowry of Pharaoh's daughter when she married King Solomon. City, did I
say? At least four cities are packed one upon another in that grassy
mound, the oldest going back to the flint age; and yet if you should
examine their site and measure their ruins, you would feel sure that
none of them could ever have amounted to anything more than what we
should call a poor little town.

It came upon us gently but irresistibly that afternoon, as we rode
easily across the land of the Philistines in a few hours, that we had
never really read the Old Testament as it ought to be read,--as a book
written in an Oriental atmosphere, filled with the glamour, the imagery,
the magniloquence of the East. Unconsciously we had been reading it as
if it were a collection of documents produced in Heidelberg, Germany, or
in Boston, Massachusetts: precise, literal, scientific.

We had been imagining the Philistines as a mighty nation, and their land
as a vast territory filled with splendid cities and ruled by powerful
monarchs. We had been trying to understand and interpret the stories of
their conflict with Israel as if they had been written by a Western
war-c