i in the Uffizi at Florence,--and the joy of
coming motherhood in these two women's hearts spoke from each to each
like a bell and its echo. Would the birth of Jesus, the character of
Jesus, have been possible unless there had been the virginal and
expectant soul of such a woman as Mary, ready to welcome His coming with
her song? "My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in
God my Saviour." Does not the advent of a higher manhood always wait for
the hope and longing of a nobler womanhood?

The chiming of the bells of St. John floats faintly and silverly across
the valley as we leave the shelter of the wayside rest-house and mount
for the last stage of our upward journey. The road ascends steeply.
Nestled in the ravine to our left is the grizzled and dilapidated
village of Lifta, a town with an evil reputation.

"These people sold all their land," says George the dragoman, "twenty
years ago, sold all the fields, gardens, olive-groves. Now they are
dirty and lazy in that village,--all thieves!"

Over the crest of the hill the red-tiled roofs of the first houses of
Jerusalem are beginning to appear. They are houses of mercy, it seems:
one an asylum for the insane, the other a home for the aged poor.
Passing them, we come upon schools and hospital buildings and other
evidences of the charity of the Rothschilds toward their own people. All
around us are villas and consulates, and rows of freshly built houses
for Jewish colonists.

This is not at all the way that we had imagined to ourselves the first
sight of the Holy City. All here is half-European, unromantic, not very
picturesque. It may not be "the New Jerusalem," but it is certainly a
modern Jerusalem. Here, in these comfortably commonplace dwellings, is
almost half the present population of the city; and rows of new houses
are rising on every side.

But look down the southward-sloping road. There is the sight that you
have imagined and longed to see: the brown battlements, the white-washed
houses, the flat roofs, the slender minarets, the many-coloured domes of
the ancient city of David, and Solomon, and Hezekiah, and Herod, and
Omar, and Godfrey, and Saladin,--but never of Christ. That great black
dome is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The one beyond it is the
Mosque of Omar. Those golden bulbs and pinnacles beyond the city are the
Greek Church of Saint Mary Magdalen on the side of the Mount of Olives;
and on the top of the lofty ridge rises