here Martha served." Next day we
returned to Jerusalem with olive branches, palms and wild flowers,
scattering blossoms as we walked. On Saturday evening and in the
morning of Palm Sunday we filled the churches with our branches. Two
aged pilgrims who had died were buried on Palm Sunday. They lay in
open coffins in church dressed in the shrouds they had worn at Jordan,
covered with olive branches and little blue wild flowers (Jacob's
ladder), which the pilgrims had picked for them at Bethany. On their
faces was perfect peace. The pilgrims thought them happy to die in the
Holy Land and be buried there.

The crown of the pilgrimage was Holy Week. By Palm Sunday all the
pilgrims were back in Jerusalem from their little pilgrimages to
Nazareth, Jericho, and Jordan. The hostelries were crowded. Fully five
hundred men and women slept in the hall in which I was accommodated.
All night long the sound of prayer and hymn never died away. At dawn
each day a beggar pilgrim sanctified our benches with incense which he
burned in an old tin can. By day we visited the shrines of Jerusalem,
the Virgin's tomb, the Mount of Olives, the Praetorium, Pilate's
house, the dungeon where Jesus was put in the stocks. We saw the
washing of the feet on Holy Thursday; we walked down the steep and
narrow way where Christ carried the cross and stumbled, kissed
the place where Saint Veronica held out the cloth which took the
miraculous likeness. We examined our souls before Good Friday; we went
to the special yearly Holy Communion now invested with a strange
and awful solemnity. There was the prostration before the Cross at
Golgotha on Good Friday, the receiving of the Sacred Fire, symbol of
the Resurrection, on Holy Saturday, and then the night of the year and
the Great Morning. It seemed when we all kissed one another on Easter
Morning that we had outlived everything--our own life, our own death;
we were in heaven. In symbolic act we had attained unto bliss. The
procession had marched round the church to the supreme emotional
moment. We had all stood on the highest holy place on earth and looked
out for a moment upon Paradise. We had caught the gleam of the Sun of
another universe.

What happens in the pilgrim's soul on Easter Night is something which
you and I and all of us know; if not in our own minds and in the
domain of letters and words, at least in the heart where music speaks.
To those who have not themselves attained unto Jerusalem and the