od personal right to know. In a single instant of time, a long
drawn panorama of sights and scenes in the Holy Land flashed through my
memory--town and grove, desert, camp, and caravan clattering after each
other and disappearing, leaping me with a little of the surprised and
dizzy feeling which I have experienced at sundry times when a long
express train has overtaken me at some quiet curve and gone whizzing,
car by car, around the corner and out of sight. In that prolific instant
I saw again all the country from the Sea of Galilee and Nazareth clear
to Jerusalem, and thence over the hills of Judea and through the Vale of
Sharon to Joppa, down by the ocean. Leaving out unimportant stretches
of country and details of incident, I saw and experienced the following
described matters and things. Immediately three years fell away from my
age, and a vanished time was restored to me September, 1867. It was
a flaming Oriental day--this one that had come up out of the past and
brought along its actors, its stage-properties, and scenic effects--and
our party had just ridden through the squalid hive of human vermin which
still holds the ancient Biblical name of Endor; I was bringing up the
rear on my grave four-dollar steed, who was about beginning to compose
himself for his usual noon nap. My! only fifteen minutes before how the
black, mangy, nine-tenths naked, ten-tenths filthy, ignorant, bigoted,
besotted, hungry, lazy, malignant, screeching, crowding, struggling,
wailing, begging, cursing, hateful spawn of the original Witch had
swarmed out of the caves in the rocks and the holes and crevices in the
earth, and blocked our horses' way, besieged us, threw themselves in
the animals' path, clung to their manes, saddle-furniture, and tails,
asking, beseeching, demanding "bucksheesh! bucksheesh! BUCKSHEESH!" We
had rained small copper Turkish coins among them, as fugitives fling
coats and hats to pursuing wolves, and then had spurred our way through
as they stopped to scramble for the largess. I was fervently thankful
when we had gotten well up on the desolate hillside and outstripped them
and left them jawing and gesticulating in the rear. What a tempest had
seemingly gone roaring and crashing by me and left its dull thunders
pulsing in my ears!

I was in the rear, as I was saying. Our pack-mules and Arabs were far
ahead, and Dan, Jack, Moult, Davis, Denny, Church, and Birch (these
names will do as well as any to represent the boys)