Haifa, March 31.—From Khisfin, the ruins of which I described in my last letter, I struck off in a westerly direction under the guidance of the sheik who had been my host the night before, and who, now that he was convinced that I had nothing to do with tax-gathering, and was only possessed by what must have seemed to him an insane desire to find old stones and make pictures of them, took an evident pleasure in ministering to such a harmless form of insanity; in fact he became quite a bore on the subject. As he was naturally unable to appreciate any distinction between one old stone and another, he was constantly making me ride out of my way to look at some weather-beaten piece of basalt which had a fancied resemblance to a wild animal; or to a mound, the ruins on which belonged to a village that had been deserted within the last twenty years. Still I never could afford to treat his assurances with indifference, as there was always the possibility, until I satisfied myself to the contrary, that the stones to which he was guiding me might possess interest; and indeed on one occasion they did, for they turned out to be the ruins of a Roman town, where a few fragments of columns and capitals still remained to bear testimony to the particular civilization to which they belonged, and which, although they did not present any striking architectural features—indeed, the remains were somewhat insignificant—it was always a satisfaction to have been the first to discover. The name of these ruins was Esfera.