What a departure! The Governor of Jaffa and his suite, the Capugi Bachi and his officers, Mr. Catafago (carried off on his way from Acre), Malim Musa (who had just arrived), Damiani, the doctor, Beaudin, the dragomans, the interpreters, the cooks! An escort of a hundred dark-faced Hawarys horsemen. Lady Hester, in a palanquin of crimson velvet drawn by two white mules, preceded by her mare and her donkeys, saddled and ready for her to mount, if she showed the desire to do so. The army of camels vanishing beneath the picks, the mattocks, the spades, the wheelbarrows, the ropes with which they were laden; the crowd of water-carriers and torch-bearers. The twenty sumptuous tents given by Soliman, one particularly of magnificent dimensions, of a green colour, ornamented by chimeras and yellow stars, double like the calix and the corolla of a flower turned upside down, attracted the attention of all. It was the tent which the Princess of Wales will render famous and which was to play an important part at the time of that scandalous trial of 1820, in which George IV--very far, however, from having a stainless private life!--will have the impudence to come to parade all these stories of the alcove and to make march past all that rabble of hired witnesses: Swiss, Germans, Italians particularly, for the simple pleasure of being disembarrassed of his wife! Three messengers galloped in advance of the caravan. The inhabitants of the villages were turned out to leave the place for her. The Moslem governors bent under the will of a woman in a fanatical country. Ah! truly she was able to cry, five years later, in recalling this journey: "The wife of that poor King (George IV) came to Syria to pass as an obscure Englishwoman, while Lady Hester played there the part which the Princess of Wales ought never to have abandoned!" The green and blue tents rose amongst the stones and took by assault the ruins of Ascalon. They were extremely comfortable, and nowhere in Syria had the doctor found better fare. On April 3,1815, the hundred peasants who had been requisitioned in the environs began the work of excavation to the south of the mosque. The first blows of the mattock brought to light earthenware and fragments of a column of no interest. On the 4th, the picks met with a resistance, and a magnificent statue of mutilated marble was gently drawn out. It was the body of a warrior of colossal dimensions, measuring six feet nine inches from shoulder to heel, and of a very beautiful shape. The doctor will conjecture that it belonged to the Herodean epoch, and the head of Medusa which ornamented the chest induced him to think that he was in the presence of a deified king. The next day cisterns were discovered. Finally, on the 8th, great excitement! Two stone angels cemented by four columns of grey granite were unearthed. Surely the treasure was within! Labour in vain, hopes deceived; they were empty, completely empty!