Nazareth lies in a basin among hills, from the rim of which can be seen to the southward the historic plain of Esdraelon, and eastward the Jordan valley and the hills of Gilead, and westward the Mediterranean. On great roads, north and south of the town's girdle of hills, passed to and fro the many-coloured traffic between Egypt and Mesopotamia and the Orient. Traders, pilgrims, Herods--"the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them" (Matt. 6:8)--all within reach, and travelling no faster as a rule than the camel cared to go--they formed a panorama of life for a thoughtful and imaginative boy. More than one allusion to king's clothes comes in his recorded teaching (Matt. 6:29, 11:8), and it was here that he saw them--and noticed them and remembered. One is struck with the amount of that unconscious assimilation of experience which we find in his words, and which is in itself an index to his nature. We are not expressly told that he sought the sights that the road afforded; but it would be hard to believe that a bright, quick boy, with genius in him, with poetry in him, with feeling for the real and for life, never went down on to that road, never walked alongside of the caravans and took note of the strange people "from the east and from the west, from the north and from the south" (Luke 13:29)--Nubians, Egyptians, Romans, Gauls, Britons, and Orientals.[8] In the one anecdote that survives of his boyhood, we find men "astonished at his understanding" (Luke 2:47), his gift for putting questions, and his comments on the answers; and all life through he had a genius for friendship. When we consider how Jesus handles Nature and her wilder children in his parables, another point attracts attention. Men vary a great deal in this. To take two of the Old Testament prophets, we find a marked difference here between Ezekiel and Jeremiah. Ezekiel "puts forth a riddle and speaks a parable" about an eagle--a frankly heraldic eagle, that plants a tree-top in a city of merchants (Ezek. 17:2-5). Jeremiah is obviously country-bred. He might have been surprised, if he had been told how often he illustrates his thought from bird and beast and country life--and always with a certain life-like precision and a perfectly clear sympathy. In the Gospels we find again the same faithfulness to living nature, another country-bred boy with the same love for bird and beast and the wild, open countryside. The Earth And common face of Nature spake to me Rememberable things.[9]