The famous Berlin-to-Bagdad scheme is not the only evidence of the German Kaiser’s desire to gobble up as much of the Near East as possible. I use the word “gobble” advisedly. According to the Century Dictionary, it means “to swallow in large pieces, to swallow hastily, to seize upon with greed, and to appropriate graspingly.” And that aptly describes the German methods. I have seen German _Kultur_ at work all during this trip. In the richest parts of Palestine I saw their flourishing colonies. At Jerusalem I saw the great German church built under the very shadow of the Holy Sepulchre, their huge church on Mount Zion beyond the Tower of David, and the enormous limestone hospice erected in honour of Kaiserin Augusta on a commanding slope of the Mount of Olives. It is said that the money with which the site was bought and some of that used in the building was a silver wedding present to the Empress. It was known that she greatly loved Palestine, and her friends planned this memorial as a silver wedding gift. The hospice is several hundred feet above Jerusalem, and standing upon its roof on a bright day one can look across the hills of Judea and see the silvery thread of the Jordan and the shining Dead Sea with the blue mountains of Moab beyond. The Kaiser was no respecter of persons, either living or dead. The site of his big church was purchased by him of Sultan Abdul Hamid when he visited him in Constantinople. He went there on his way to the Holy Land, and while hobnobbing with the Sultan got him to sell him this tract for twenty-four thousand dollars. The land, however, was not large enough, so the Germans by a clever trick purchased for sixteen thousand dollars the American cemetery which adjoined the original tract. The Emperor of Germany when he made his trip through the Holy Land created as great a sensation as Theodore Roosevelt when he cavorted through Europe. Kaiser Wilhelm and his empress started in at Beirut and crossed the mountains of Lebanon to Baalbek and Damascus. They then returned to Beirut and took ship down the coast, past Tyre and Sidon, to the Bay of Acre. Here horses were waiting for them and they rode down around the slopes of Mount Carmel, over the plains of Sharon to Jaffa, and thence up the hills of Judea to Jerusalem. There were about a thousand in the party, and it required one thousand two hundred and fifty mules and horses to carry them and their baggage. The Emperor himself had a staff of one hundred and twenty, who ate at his own tables, and there were in addition one hundred and forty naval and military officers. The Empress also had her ladies-in-waiting with her. One hundred and seventy-five high Turks and officials were supplied by the Sultan as a special escort. The Emperor’s tour was so arranged that he had four camps. He slept in a different camp every night and had a new one for each meal.