Outside Palestine, too, was much that the uncircumcised knew not of. He passed through Cairo without hearing of the copy of the law of Moses, written by the hand of Esdras the scribe; though, indeed, no man might see it, not even, incredible as it may sound, if he offered the keeper thereof silver (partly because the holy volume had by now been stolen, and lost, with the thief, at sea). And Damascus Hebrew and Frank might equally remember as the city where fresh fruit was never lacking, but only the former remembered that hard by Esdras himself lay buried, any more than the merchant who reached Baghdad heard that there rested Ananias, Mizael, and Azarias, and also, with the river flowing over his head, Daniel, of glorious memory,—unless the merchant wished to catch some of the great fish which swam thereabouts, for fishing was prohibited at that spot lest harm might befall the greatest fish of all, Zelach by name, who had abided there since Daniel's own time and was fed from the royal table. And if any of the twentieth-century uncircumcised hesitate to believe that so much could be satisfactorily identified, the twentieth-century Hebrew may answer that there are other tests of identification than those of the "research" that has achieved such wonders at Stratford-on-Avon and that tradition can be traced back, unvarying even in trifles, for centuries. He might go on to point out that Christian tradition might well be more stable. It is curious how much that is mentioned by fifteenth-century Christians is habitually omitted by those who came after. That the taking of Rhodes by the Turks should cause the disappearance of the basin in which Christ washed his apostles' feet is intelligible; but why, e. g., should the table disappear from Bethany at which the disciples were sitting when the Holy Ghost descended? And why should it have dropped out of remembrance that the torrent of Cedron had been bridged with stone by St. Helen to replace the wooden one from which the wood for the Cross had been taken and over which the Queen of Sheba had refused to walk, saying in a spirit of prophecy, that the Saviour of the world was to die on it? It seems as though there had occurred a diminishment of devotion resulting in the concentration of what devotion remained on fewer objects; or else a widening of interests diverting the attention from minor objects. Sometimes, of course, transference took place; which may, or may not, account for one traveller being shown the pillar of salt which had once been Lot's wife at a monastery near Trapani in Sicily in 1639, whereas in 1613 Coryat was told that she existed on the farther side of "Lake Asphaltitis with her child in her arms and a pretty dog, also in salt, by her." Still, no doubt Giovanni Battista and the warden did their best, and the latter was willing, in addition, to confer knighthood of the Holy Sepulchre on all and sundry, with no questions asked as to lineage, not