n to his friends. Some gifts are too precious to be received in
any other way than this." And in my heart I knew that she was right.

Riding through the narrow streets of the town, which is inhabited almost
entirely by Christians, we noted the tranquil good looks of the women, a
distinct type, rather short of stature, round-faced, placid and kind of
aspect. Not a few of them had blue eyes. They wore dark-blue skirts,
dark-red jackets, and a white veil over their heads, but not over their
faces. Under the veil the married women wore a peculiar cap of stiff,
embroidered black cloth, about six inches high, and across the front of
this cap was strung their dowry of gold or silver coins. Such a dress,
no doubt, was worn by the Virgin Mary, and such tranquil, friendly
looks, I think, were hers, but touched with a rarer light of beauty
shining from a secret source within.

A crowd of little boys and girls just released from school for their
recess shouted and laughed and chased one another, pausing for a moment
in round-eyed wonder when I pointed my camera at them. Donkeys and
camels and sheep made our passage through the town slow, and gave us
occasion to look to our horses' footing. At one corner a great white sow
ran out of an alley-way, followed by a twinkling litter of pink pigs. In
the market-place we left our horses in the shadow of the monastery wall
and entered, by a low door, the lofty, bare Church of the Nativity.

The long rows of immense marble pillars had some faded remains of
painting on them. There were a few battered fragments of mosaic in the
clerestory, dimly glittering. But the general effect of the whitewashed
walls, the ancient brown beams and rafters of the roof, the large, empty
space, was one of extreme simplicity.

When we came into the choir and apse we found ourselves in the midst of
complexity. The ownership of the different altars with their gilt
ornaments, of the swinging lamps, of the separate doorways of the Greeks
and the Armenians and the Latins, was bewildering. Dark, winding steps,
slippery with the drippings from many candles, led us down into the
Grotto of the Nativity. It was a cavern perhaps forty feet long and ten
feet wide, lit by thirty pendent lamps (Greek, Armenian and Latin):
marble floor and walls hung with draperies; a silver star in the
pavement before the altar to mark the spot where Christ was born; a
marble manger in the corner to mark the cradle in which Christ was laid;