Before, however, quitting this subject of the Bakoosh, I may refer to one very special attraction that held us to the place, namely, an agricultural undertaking in its neighbourhood. A friend, of whom I hope to speak more in another time and place, superintended for me the rebuilding of an ancient Biblical village that lay a heap and a desolation, and cleared out its spring of water, which, by being choked up with rubbish, made its way unseen under ground, it thus became nearly as copious as that alongside of Solomon's Pools. I gathered people into the village, vineyards were planted, crops were sown and reaped there, taxes were paid to the government; and the vicinity, which previously had been notorious for robberies on the Hebron road, became perfectly secure. On one of my visits, a list was presented to me of ninety-eight inhabitants, where a year and a half before there was not one. Homesteads were rebuilt; the people possessed horned cattle and flocks of sheep and goats, as well as beehives. I saw women grinding at the mill, and at one of the doors a cat and a kitten. All was going on prosperously. Purer pleasure have I never experienced than when, in riding over occasionally with our children, we saw the threshing of wheat and barley in progress, and heard the women singing, or the little children shouting at their games. Sixty cows used to be driven at noon to drink at the spring. We returned to Jerusalem on the 21st of October, and on the 28th of November that village was again a mass of ruin--the houses demolished--the people dispersed--their newly-sown corn and the vineyards ploughed over--the fine spring of water choked up once more--and my Australian trees planted there torn up by the roots. All this was allowed to be done within nine miles of Jerusalem, to gratify persons engaged in an intrigue which ended in deeds far worse than this. Our village was _Faghoor_, and had been one of the ancient towns of the tribe of Judah. Its place in the Bible is Joshua xv., where it is found in the Greek Septuagint together with Tekoah, Etham, and Bethlehem, all noted places--neither of which is contained in the Hebrew text, and therefore not in the English translation. It seems difficult to account for this; but it may possibly be that neither of these towns were ever in the Hebrew of that chapter, that they were not well known at the time of the original Hebrew being written; but that when the translation of the Septuagint was made, the writers knew by other means, though living in Egypt, that Tekoah, Etham, Bethlehem, and Faghoor had been for a long period famous within the tribe of Judah, and therefore they filled up what seemed to them a deficiency in the register. APPENDIX. A.--Page 32.