In succeeding generations fancy decorated the story with many legends, but although these are often innocent, and even poetic beyond the ordinary mark of the apocryphal Gospel narratives, they are all avoided in this conception. Here no legend is taken for authority. The attempt is to put together the detached links of the story, and I rely only upon my personal knowledge of the country and climate, acquired by many years of residence throughout all its seasons, to understand how the sorrows of that night would be intensified by the angry elements. The looking back upon a home from which a family is driven by oppression has ever been regarded as a motive for compassion, and to this calamity the Holy Family had to submit. The heights to the south of “Beit Jala”――by some writers recognised as Rama――give an extended view, the mountains of Moab far away to the east, and the Dead Sea below, the great plain of Philistia down in the west. A storm thence seen produces the impression of sublime purpose. The lightning gathers beyond the great hollow which includes Jericho and the lost Sodom and Gomorrah, and then wavers, as the fingers of a mighty player upon the keys of a musical instrument, collecting the errant forces of the air, and tremulous with dancing flame in the south over the extending table-land it seems to linger as though searching the plain of Philistia for its special mark, and there darts down in fury; but the sword which was to pierce the breast of the mother, “blessed withal above all women,” was of man’s forging. According to our order of events the noisy elements would not have endured long, for soon the peaceful snow followed falling with its wandering flakes. It would be then that the cry would sound, which St. Matthew quotes Jeremiah to describe, “In Rama was there a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted because they are not.” We are not debarred from thinking that the mother suffered some of her pain in the wonder natural to humanity, that the powers of evil should be able thus to prevail over the pure and the righteous.