The hostelry at Jericho--called Beth Elisha, in honor of the prophet whose miraculous cruse of salt once healed the spring hard by, which now supplied the town with delightful water--was a long, low building, rambling, and diverse as the various generations which had successively built upon it. During the night all its rooms and ingles had been crowded with pilgrims from up the Jordan and beyond it. Early in the morning, long before the sun had looked over the beetling cliffs of Moab, the multitude poured forth into the court-yard. They were clad in gay garments of many colors, and were not unlike the variously plumed doves which came out of their adjacent cotes, and filled the air with their flapping wings and querulous cooing. The shed that enclosed the opposite side of the yard discharged a more turbulent crowd of horses and camels, asses and mules, which were kicking and rumping one another in the attempt to get their noses into the great stone trough that stood in the centre of the court. The crisp air resounded with the unedifying matins of mingled grunts, neighs, and brays, which were far from being reduced to harmony by the shouts of the drivers. It was easier for the host to seem ubiquitous than it was for him to command in himself such a variety of tempers as the occasion required. He must placate those who grumbled at their reckoning; hasten his laggard servants; adjudicate the quarrels of guests over the uncertain ownership of bits of harness; must smile, yet frown; beam knowingly, yet knit his brows in simulated perplexity; be patient, yet keep the sharpest eye and quickest tongue; and shift all these aspects in such rapid succession that they seemed to be simultaneous. We may forgive this prince of innkeepers if for a moment he did not maintain to perfection his manifold part. Such was the moment when a servant announced to him that Rabbi Shimeal, the most noted man in the synagogue at Jericho, would speak with him at the gate. "A pretty time of day for him to come! I'll warrant he has been up all night owling it over some verse of the law. Or he wants a gift for the synagogue. Tell him his affairs must wait until I can get this holy crowd off for the Temple," was Solomon Ben Eli's petulant response. The servant soon returned with the statement that the Rabbi Shimeal must have his assistance in providing a beast to convey to Jerusalem no less a personage than Ezra, the Great Scribe, who was a guest at the rabbi's house, and whose animal had given out under the terrible heat of the previous day, as he had journeyed through the villages of the Jordan plain, pursuing his holy work of inspecting the copies of the Law used in the newly established synagogues. Solomon Ben Eli was shocked at this news, as if an angel's wing had brushed his face. "Heaven forgive me!" said he, making low obeisance before his servant, in obliviousness to the fact that that son of Gibeon was not the great man of God himself.