The traveller brought back with him a duly attested document bearing the seal of the Holy Sepulchre (a cross potence and crosslets), furnished to Gulielmus Nelson by the prior of the Latin convent in Jerusalem, in his quality of guardian of the Holy Sepulchre, attesting that he had in an edifying spirit visited the sacred places around the Holy City; and had indeed conformed to the requirements of a devout pilgrim to an extent which, if literally true, would have been in strange antagonism to all his early training. For the veracious prior of the Convent of St. Salvator certifies over his official seal that the aforesaid Gulielmus Nelson had not only visited the principal sanctuaries, but that “with great devotion he had heard mass in them all”! A more genuine reminiscence of travel, with which the pilgrim surprised his friends, was the novel feature of a fine black beard, the imposing effect of which probably had its share in the opinion formed by the Syrian peasants that he was a learned leech. Commenting long after on the reputed virtues of some much-vaunted pills, he said they were no doubt as efficacious as those he used to make in Palestine. The villagers flocked to his tent, importuning him and his companions for medicine. With much gravity he distributed among them the pills he had fashioned out of the spare breakfast loaf; and, with the faith of the recipients in his prescriptions, supplemented as they doubtless were in cases of actual suffering by a liberal _backshish_, he had no doubt that he effected as many cures as some of the patent-medicine vendors. As to the black beard, the custom in that respect has so entirely changed since then that it is difficult for the present generation to realize the astonishment which the strange appendage excited. To some grave elders it almost appeared as if he had literally cast in his lot with the followers of the false prophet. The idea of even a moustache as the possible appendage of a civilian first dawned on the English mind when Prince Albert set the fashion in society. But this innovation was viewed with suspicion among all sober denizens of the mart. As to the wearing of a beard, it would have been sufficient to ruin the credit of the most reputable trader. There is a report in “The Dial,” from the pen of Emerson, of a grand convention of enthusiasts held at Boston a few years before. “If,” says he, “the assembly was disorderly, it was picturesque. Mad men, mad women, _men with beards_, Dunkers, Muggeltonians, Come-outers!”--and so the enumeration of the eccentric medley proceeds. The beard, as is obvious, was an innovation beyond all tolerance. But the art of photography, in its earlier form of ambrotype, was in vogue. The traveller accordingly had his portrait taken in his Eastern dress, with moustache, beard, and long pipe. Some time after, when showing to a friend the relics he had brought from the East, he produced along with