By the river Jordan, on the banks of the Dead Sea, on the Plains of Boaz, wherever we went, my mother was preoccupied and withdrawn. She seemed to be living over the earthly life of her Master and those who had known and walked with him in these places. “Christ has been here!” she murmured to herself over and over again, and seemed to think of little else. One of the pictures of Jerusalem that rises before me is of the Via Dolorosa, where a poor madman walked each day, dressed in white, crowned with thorns, carrying a heavy wooden cross. She had some talk with this man, who had been a sailor. His story was strange and disjointed. He spoke of a terrible storm at sea when he was at the vessel’s helm. He was smitten by the sword of the Lord that came out of the sky and leveled him to the deck. After that his life work was clear; he must walk the holy streets of Jerusalem, for “Where the carcass is, there will the eagles be gathered together.” We went to a church service in the little town of Bethlehem. Here my mother made friends with a well-known archeologist whose name I have forgotten, who told her he believed this to be the place where Jesus was born. He said that the inn where Mary and Joseph rested was the khan of the town, which in the natural order would remain unchanged for centuries. He saw no reason for doubting that when the Empress Helena came out to Palestine to find and preserve the holy places, this khan was exactly as it had been at the time of the nativity. My mother was distressed to find a guard of Mohammedan soldiers at the Holy Sepulchre. “These Moslems are here to keep you Christians from killing each other!” an acquaintance said to her rather brutally. “Riots are frequent, especially at Easter, when the church is crowded with pilgrims of every nationality.” On the afternoon when we visited the Garden of Gethsemane, she was more silent than usual. “Would you mind if I sang a hymn?” She raised her sweet voice and sang the hymn beginning: Go to dark Gethsemane. We lingered under the garden’s immemorial olives and cedars. The Franciscan who was our guide gave her a handful of flowers,--the flowers I found the other day in the envelope marked “Gethsemane.” From Jaffa we sailed for Beirut, skirting the storied African coast. A fellow passenger, an old sea captain, electrified us one morning by exclaiming, as carelessly as he might have said, “Yonder’s Nantucket Light”, “Tyre’s thereabouts--place where the purple dye came from--not much to see there now!” Of Cyprus, I remember only the thrill of the great names,--Paphos, birthplace and shrine of Aphrodite, and Salamis. The steamer made some stay at Smyrna, where we were entertained by Christy Evangelides, who could not do enough for my mother. As a boy he had escaped from a Turkish massacre and been carried to New York on an American vessel. Here my grandfather Ward had befriended him.