We spent a month in the cedar grove, and never had a dull day. At dawn we could look out of the tent to where the green branches framed a charming bit of blue, distant sea. After breakfast the studious man would climb up into his favorite fork and ensconce himself there with pen and ink and paper and books and cushions. The adventurous man would scramble up to the topmost bough of some lofty tree and stretch out on its soft twigs for a sun-bath. The lazy man would curl up against a comfortable root, to smoke and dream away the morning hours. Sketching and photographing and mountain climbs were interspersed with unsuccessful hunting expeditions and aimless conversations with Maronite priests who had come up to visit their little rustic chapel in the grove. After supper came the camp-fire, with its cozy sparkle and its friendly confidences and the black background of the forest all around. Then, by eight o’clock at the latest, we snuggled into our blankets and, in the crisp, balsam-scented air, slept the clock around. Sometimes the full moon shone so brightly that the whole mountain would take on a soft silver glow, against which colors could be distinguished almost as well as by day. Now and then there would be a cold, foggy morning; but the trees kept out the mists and, although a solid wall of white surrounded us, within the grove it was clear and dry and homelike. The shelter, the support, the background, the inspiration of all the camp life, were the great, solemn trees. After a while you come to love them, or rather to reverence them. They are so large, so old; they have such marked individuality. The cedars are regal rather than beautiful. Rough and knotted and few in number, at first sight they are a little disappointing; but, like the mountains around them, they become more impressive day by day. These thousand-year-old trees seem to stand aloof from the hurry and bustle of the twentieth century, as though they were absorbed in thoughts of earlier, and perhaps wiser, days. After you have lived for a time beneath their shade, their solemn magnificence begins to quiet your spirit; and when the glorious moonlight floods the mountain and casts black shadows down the deep gorges that drop away to the distant sea, it is easy to behold in the witching light the picture that these ancient trees saw in the long ago. Dark groves of cedars nestle once more in the valleys and sweep over the mountaintops in great waves of green; a stronger peasantry speaks a different tongue in the fields below that are brighter and the orchards that are heavier with fruit; and from the depths of the moon-painted forest there comes the ring of ten thousand axes that are hewing down the choicest trunks for the Temple of the Lord.