dangerous looks. They were of the sort that one does not like to meet out of handcuffs-a kind of half Bedoueen, having none of the good qualities of either citizen or savage. The people of the Jericho district, upon which we are about entering, are of the vilest to be found in Palestine-lazy vagrants who are utterly demoralized. In such we see that climate helps to make man's nature. These people live in the locality where stood Sodom and Gomorrah, “Cities of the Plain." All the evils characterizing those suppressed cities still survive among the inhabitants of their former neighbourhood. They are in appearance twice as darklooking as the Bethlehemites, but the heat of this valley would bake and blacken any one.

Two of these ill-looking vagrants, carrying long guns, now join our sheik, and march by his side. We appeal to Elias as to the meaning of it. After due rumination he digests our question, and from his stomach slowly come—

"Guards for the tents to-night, to assist the sheik!" "Are three armed guards required?"

"Yes! Jericho bad place! all bad people!"

The day's trouble had been enough, and no need for this dismal prospect of the night. The unalterable character of everything in the East was well illustrated in this instance, as it is in a dozen others daily. It is all here now the same as it was two thousand years ago, when "a certain man went down to Jericho, and fell among thieves." One of our inquiring friends hazards a query

Elias, can you show us at Jericho where the Good Samaritan got into trouble?"

"Good Samaritan, sir?"

"Yes, the man you read of in the New Testament in connexion with Jericho and thieves!"

"New Testament, sir?"

"Go to-Jericho! Go on!"

And this man was to be our guide to holy places, and to have food and lodging and seven and sixpence a day! We get to the end of the hills and ravines at last, and come

B b

out upon a wide stony plain, having some scattered and dried-up tufts of coarse grass about. A large mud-coloured grasshopper is occasionally to be seen here. We shake up Elias on the subject, and he says, after the usual consideration, "locusts!"

This is, then, the insect of which we read such mysterious and terrible things in the first and second chapters of that entomological book of Joel. "The land is a garden of Eden before them, and behind them a desolate wilderness-yea, and nothing shall escape them!" Reading thus, the desolation hereabout is accounted for. Nothing has escaped them, and

they keep around to see that nothing shall. "The sound of their wings is as the sound of chariots-of many horses running to battle. . . . On the tops of the mountains shall they leap. . . . They shall run like mighty men, and climb the wall like men of war!"

These locusts are the edible insects upon whose ancestors John the Baptist fed when here, and not upon the beans of the carob or locust-tree, as we have heard expounded. That tree did not grow in Syria. Its locality at that time was confined to its native South-western America, a country not then opened to visitors from Judea. They neither had everything, nor, as an American poet has remarked, did they know everything," down in Judee."

The "wild honey" that helped out John's repast was obtained from the caves and clefts in the rocks around, as it is similarly found in India. Where the bees could have got it from hereabout is another and an insoluble query. Nature, to protect these terrible locusts, has coated them of the colour of the dried-up earth on which they hop. Beneath that covering, however, are all the colours of the rainbow, and wings that the butterflies cannot excel. To uncover one is like to taking a homespun cloak from off a ball-room belle. The Arabs dry them, rub their remains into powder, and bake them as cakes. As they are-similarly to the grasshopperas clean feeders as sheep, there is no reason against their edibility. I put one of them into the tin goggle-box and

The Brook Cherith.

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stamp a hole in it for ventilation. If it has lived on the nothingness seen hereabout it can live just as well on the emptiness there, as indeed it appears to do.

The sheik faces about now to point out a larger view of the Dead Sea, and to tell us, through Elias, that we are now on the spot where one Sir Fred. Henniker, who attempted this journey unprotected, was robbed and half murdered. That was only told us to make us proud of our escort, but we learnt afterwards that it was quite true. The men whom we have passed on the way looked indeed capable of murder or of anything else short of washing them'selves.

It is now six p.m., and we have been twelve hours in the saddle, allowing thereout the time spent at Bethlehem. It had been, by badness of road and oppressive heat, altogether too much for those accustomed only to eight hours' labour. We know, however, on Shakespeare's authority, that "The labour we delight in physics pain." It had physicked us, at all events, and there was yet much pain left about. When those who had stuck to the saddle all the journey tried their legs again, it was comical to notice how they waddled.

A few stunted bushes are to be seen ahead, and we become aware of the delicious music of bubbling water. It is soon in sight-a glorious rushing stream, crystally clear, that comes cascade-like, leaping and dancing over a shallow stony bed. To our eyes, bleared with heat and inhospitable stones and rocks, it was a heavenly prospect. Our half-dumb oracle tells us what it is

"The Brook Cherith, Elijah's brook!"

The mules have crossed it, never staying to drink, as is their fashion, but no whip or knocking of the fire-shovel stirrups to their sides could get the horses over it, and they rushed into it before we could dismount. As it seemed likely that they would never cease drinking, and we could wait no longer, we got off and joined them, the water, reaching not quite to our knees, cooling our feet. We subsequently put our half-baked heads into it, and had great ideas of