"Studying it all, Daisy?"
"Papa, I am never tired of studying."
"This is a wonderful place."
"Papa, you know little about it yet. Old Jericho was up
there."
"You speak as if I had gone to school in 'old Jericho,' " said
my father, laughing. "I have the vaguest idea, Daisy, that
such a city existed. That is all."
"Sit down, papa, while breakfast is getting ready, and let me
mend your knowledge."
So we read the story there, on the stone by the spring. Mr.
Dinwiddie joined us; and it was presently decided that we
should spend the morning in examining the ground in our
neighbourhood and the old sites of what had passed away. So
after breakfast we sat out upon a walk over the territory of
old Jericho.
"But it is strange," said papa, "if the city was here, that
there are no architectural remains to testify as much."
"We rarely find them, sir, but in connection with Roman or
Saracenic work. Shapeless mounds, and broken pottery, as you
have it here, are all that generally mark our Palestine
ruins."
"But Herod?" said papa. "He was a builder."
"Herod's Jericho was a mile and a half away, to the east. And
moreover, if anything had been remaining here that could be
made of use, the Saracens or Crusaders would have pulled it to
pieces to help make their sugar mills up yonder, or their
aqueducts."
"There is no sugar cane here now?"
"Not a trace of it. Nor a palm tree; though Jericho was a city
of palms; nor a root of the balsam, though great gain was
derived to Judea in ancient times from the balsam gardens
here."
We mounted our horses and rode down to the site of Herod's
Jericho, on the banks of the little stream that issues from
the gorge of the Wady Kelt. How lovely, and how desolate, it
was. The stream overhung with trees and bordered with
oleanders and shrubs of which I have forgotten the names, and
crossed by old arches still; and around, the desolate tokens
of what once was. Foundation lines, and ruined aqueducts. Mr.
Dinwiddie made us remark the pavement of the road leading up
to the Kelt, the old road to Jerusalem, the road by which
Jesus went when the blind men called him, and over which,
somewhere on its way, stretched the sycamore tree into which
Zaccheus climbed. Ah how barren and empty the way looked now!
- with Him no longer here. For a moment, so looked my own path
before me, - the dusty, hot road; the desolate pass; the
barren mountain top. It was only a freak of fancy; I do not
know what brought it. I had not felt so a moment before, and I
did not a moment after.
"Where His feet lead now, the green pastures are not wanting,
-" Mr. Dinwiddie said; I suppose reading my look.