That was the interesting thing to him. Out here under the shadow of an obelisk four thousand years old, on the spot where Joseph was married to Asenath; where Plato philosophized and where Moses played; within plain sight of the Pyramids and near enough almost to hear the whisper of the Sphinx, he cared nothing for them. He was a live boy, and he wanted live things. Therefore the pitchers, catchers, and shortstops of the great American diamond were worth more to him than all the stories of history and all the mummies of the museums. CHAPTER III THE CITY OF JONAH I have come up out of the land of Egypt, out of the Israelitish “house of bondage,” and am to-day on the edge of the Promised Land. I am at Jaffa, the ancient Joppa, and the port for the Holy City. When Jacob went down from the highlands of Samaria to the Land of Goshen to meet Joseph, his journey took several weeks. I made the trip in the opposite direction by land and sea in less than a day. I took the express train at Cairo and in four hours was landed at Port Said, at the mouth of the Suez Canal, where I got a steamer which brought me to Jaffa. The whole way was through the lands of the Bible. We struck the canal at Ismailia, about midway of the Isthmus of Suez, and thence rode northward along its banks to Port Said. Our steamer was crowded with pilgrims from Russia, Egypt, and north Africa. There were many Americans, French, and Germans travelling first class, and hundreds of Syrians and Egyptians going steerage. The Russian pilgrims were particularly interesting to me. Old men and old women, with honest faces full of intelligence and goodness, they held their religious services all over the third-class portion of the ship, and I spent two hours watching them as one after another they turned their faces toward the Holy City and prayed, crossing themselves, and now and then getting down upon their knees and bumping their heads against the deck in their worship. They were curiously dressed and many of them wore long fur coats. Some had high fur hats and looked as if they had just stepped out of one of Tolstoi’s novels. I was especially impressed with the strength of character shown in their faces and with their magnificent physique. If all of Russia’s millions are of the same mould as those who make the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, they will some day prove to the world that there is in them as good stuff as ever made history or built up a civilization. The women, with their strong, motherly faces made heroic by toil and privation, were equally as striking as the men. They were better looking than any other peasant women I have ever seen, and the old saying of the Greeks came to me as I looked at them: “If strong be the frame of the mother, her sons shall make laws for the people.”