There came a day, however, when their peaceful solitude was rudely disturbed. In 1238 the Saracens came upon them unexpectedly, and massacred them all, not leaving one to tell the bloody tale. There seems to be no record of the actual number who fell victims upon this occasion, but they must have been very numerous, as the Monastery of St. Brocard had become a refuge for monks from all parts of Palestine, who fled hither to escape the persecution to which they were being subjected in other parts of the country. Not content with putting them to death, the Saracens dragged their bodies down to the Spring of Elijah, and flung them into the square reservoir there, which I have already described. According to the pious chronicler of this tragic event, the spring immediately refused to flow, and when the Christians of Acre, hearing the news, came to bury their coreligionists, they found it dry. When they had completed their melancholy task, they prayed that the water might commence to run once more, which it immediately did, and has never ceased since. The result of this tragedy was the practical expulsion of the order of the Carmelites from Palestine. The Monastery of St. Brocard, after its short-lived existence, fell into ruins, and more than four hundred years elapsed before the order once more secured a footing on Mount Carmel, and built a monastery upon it at the end of the promontory, which served as a hospital for the French soldiers during Napoleon's occupation of this part of the country. His hurried evacuation of Palestine involved the destruction of the monastery and the massacre of all the wounded, to whose memory a monument has since been erected in the garden attached to the present edifice. But there can be no doubt that both for picturesqueness and historical association the old ruin of the Monastery of Saint Brocard, which altogether escapes the attention of the tourist and the pilgrim, is far more interesting than the modern monastery, which is not fifty years old, and which is about two miles distant from this old site. On the top of the hill above the ruins of the Monastery of St. Brocard is a plateau, called the Garden of Elijah, or the field of melons, which is abundantly strewn with geodes, or fragments of calcareous stone, having all the shape and appearance in many cases of petrified fruit, the crystallization of the centres when they are split open having confirmed this idea, thus doubtless giving rise to the legend that Elijah on one occasion, passing through the gardens which were once situated here, asked the proprietor for some fruit. He replied, not wishing to comply with the request, that they were stones, on which the prophet, apparently in a fit of temper, said, “Well, stones let them remain,” and stones they have remained ever since. I found some curious specimens so like small melons that one can well understand how this fable may have originated among an ignorant population.