It came about in a very simple way. The Dominican in question--a dear, venerable man--had visited the Holy Land shortly before I met him, and took great pleasure in telling me his experiences in the East. Seeing that I was greatly interested in his narrative he gave me a large history of the Bible. It was not such a book, I have often since thought, as the average boy would have cared to read. But the good priest could not have selected a work that would have given me more pleasure--certainly not one that would have benefited me more deeply or influenced more profoundly all my subsequent reading and study. It was, too, I must add, the first book I ever had in my hands outside of my elementary school readers. But how I prized that book! And how I read it again and again, and always with ever-increasing interest and delight! I do not know how often I read it carefully from cover to cover, but I do know that there is only one other volume that I have read more frequently, and that, after the Bible, is my favorite of all books--_The Divina Commedia_. How often I have had reason to be grateful to the good old Dominican who unconsciously directed my studies in such wise as to afford me life-long pleasure and profit! As a consequence of the repeated reading of the book which he placed in my hands I became familiar with the history of the cradle of our race long before I had entered my teens, and I felt quite well acquainted with Nineveh and Babylon when Athens and Rome were yet to me but little more than mere names without significance. And, although as I grew older, I became interested in many other subjects, I never lost my early love of sacred history or of the history and geography of the Near East. For no matter how occupied I might be, I always contrived to find time to continue the studies which had such a fascination for me in my early boyhood. To the student of Assyrian or Babylonian history, nothing is more impressive than the first view of one of those stupendous mounds which are so frequent along the valleys of the Tigris and the Euphrates and in the vast plain between Bagdad and Abu Sharein. But the impression is greatly intensified when the place visited is associated with the happiest days of one’s youth and when one may again dream the dreams that once afforded such exquisite pleasure and such delightful visions of long-departed glory and magnificence. This was my experience when I first set foot on the soil that covers the superb structures which, in my early boyhood, I had so frequently pictured in fancy that it almost seemed that I had really wandered through their sculpture-adorned halls and had been an actual spectator of the gorgeous processions which they had so frequently witnessed when Nineveh was at the zenith of her power and greatness.