The Destruction of Tyre.

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of the old harbor may be traced.

Bits of very old sculptures

are found built into the houses and lying about the town, and coins and engraved stones of the time of Alexander the Great are occasionally dug up. The most interesting thing to me was the still impressive ruin of the old Christian Cathedral, built in the fourth century and consecrated by a sermon of Eusebius, which is still preserved in his works. In this church the remains of Frederick Barbarossa were laid, and long before that the vastly more sacred ashes of the great Origen. I surveyed the walls at the two ends of the church, and measured the curve of the noble arches, which are distinctly preserved for perhaps fifteen feet of their spring on either side, with a vivid realization of the long-hushed voices which had so many ages ago been caught up and echoed by these stones. Roof, side-walls, floor, every thing is gone but the foundation and parts of the two end walls. But enormous broken columns of red granite lie in the cellar, and one double pillar of twenty-six feet long, an enormous monolith of ten feet thickness, worthy of Egypt, if, indeed, Syria does not outdo Egypt in great stones.

We thought over the twenty-seventh chapter of Ezekiel, which so boldly and eloquently predicted the ruin of this proud city, which had already in the prophet's days become a synonym for luxury, prosperity, and worldliness. The bookmakers all would have us believe that the prophecies in regard to the destruction of these cities that bordered on their sacred land were verified with a most literal fidelity, and that every line of them had a special application and specific fulfillment. The real truth is that the destruction of all great cities is certain, if only time enough is given, and that a thousand years might usually be trusted to blot out the foundations of any town, or to build them over with a new city. A few cities retain their names after thrice as long a period, but

they retain nothing else. Damascus, the oldest city in the world, is a city a dozen times rebuilt and very often destroyed. Tyre has been destroyed and rebuilt and revived at least five times. To which of its destructions are the words of Ezekiel to be applied? The noble indignation of the prophet, venting his solemn sense of the destruction that waits on all the pride of this world upon prosperous Tyre, would have been just as carefully fulfilled if applied to any other seacoast city which had reached prosperity. It is of the providential nature of civilizations, as the world changes its wants and starts new types of life on fresh soils, to decay, and no virtue or piety will save them from this fate ultimately. It is as certain as death for every man. The great thing for communities to reflect upon is the temporal and short-lived character of their proudest works and their mightiest power, and the importance of using their span to leave a noble legacy of experience and a grand heritage of truth and worth behind them on which their posterity may build better for the race. Tyre and Sidon were great and noble communities for their age, and they rocked in their narrow cradles-these small and choked-up-harbors-the commerce which at length occupies all oceans with its mighty wings. They deserved, doubtless, the warnings, reproofs, and threatenings they received from the holy men who prophesied their downfall, but it certainly required no miraculous vision to announce for them the certainty of a catastrophe which is universal, and sooner or later falls on all great nations and great cities.

We walked over the neck of the isthmus made by the army of Alexander the Great to reach the walls of the city which he besieged for seven months, and finally took only by completing that herculean job. His work has remained; he joined Tyre permanently to the main-land. There are no Christian remains here except the ruins of the old church.

Expensiveness of Dying.

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About five miles from the city a sarcophagus is pointed out as the tomb of Hiram, king of Tyre, and friend of Solomon. But it seems an improbable tradition, history saying nothing about any such monument. A tradition which produces no

effect upon historic records for a thousand years after its origin, can hardly be expected three thousand years afterward to claim our faith. I could not muster confidence enough in this tradition even to ride over to the ruin, which is said to be well-preserved, considering its pretended age. We looked into the Latin church in Tyre, a very humble building, but the cathedral of an archbishop. I asked my guide what supported him, for the town was very poor. "The people,” he replied, “and he gets full as much as he ought." The truth is that, by the customs of the country, all church ceremonies are made very binding and very burdensome, but none so much so as burial, which is a sure enough necessity to make it a certain source of revenue. Families often ruin themselves by the hospitality and the church fees connected with the funerals of their kindred. They will usually go all lengths and mortgage their earnings for future years to meet the tyrannical expectation of a great feast to all comers at the house, with many church services, all to be paid for, when the great sorrow of the loss of father, mother, or child is upon them. We must not forget that follies of custom not very unlike this prevailed in New England only a generation ago, and that in New York the costliness of burial is one of the sources of peculiar oppression to the humbler classes of a respectable character. Near the door of this church was a list of about sixty saints, and under the list a little bag of sixty paper counters. The devout people took at a venture one counter from the bag, and looking at the list for the number and name corresponding to it, made their prayers that day to that saint as by special direction.

NEAR ACRE, Syria, February 2.

We woke to find the day very fair, and sending off our baggage-mules an hour in advance, did not get into the saddle until 9 A.M. The storm leaves its consequences in a very high sea, which, upon this rocky coast, gives us the most magnificent effects. The coast is very much broken and worn away, and reefs and rocks a hundred or two rods from the shore seem to indicate that it extended out considerably beyond its present line within historic time. Against these reefs the sea breaks as gloriously as I have ever seen it. The spray dashes fifty feet into the air, and the boom of the shock is as the snort of great steam-engines. Between Tyre and Acre the promontories are bolder and the coast more precipitous. When the trail (for it is nothing better) can not follow the beach, or skirt along the edge of the plain, it climbs by the rudest and most difficult stairs the rocky promontories, and we are obliged to dismount and follow our horses a half-mile at a time. The path lies often on a rocky shelf directly over the precipice, and is not without its terrors. Three miles on our way brought us to four pools or artificial reservoirs, the largest perhaps fifty feet long and thirty broad (it is octagonal), and raised twenty feet from the ground. The walls are at least eight feet thick, of solid stone. It seems supplied from natural springs, which drain the mountains, and here meet a ledge of solid rock which compels them to rise to the level of the rock surface to find their way to the sea, a half-mile off. This fortunate circumstance was turned to excellent account by the builders of these pools, which are thought to be as old as Solomon's time. They are still flowing with their ancient copiousness; but where are the people? where is the city they supplied with water? A fine stone aqueduct, of which, I think, fourteen arches remain, once led these waters to Tyre; and others distributed

them over the neighboring fields, which must for many months in the year have depended upon them for their fruitfulness. What so precious as an unfailing fountain in a land where two months is about the limit of the rainy season, and for the rest of the year a shower is an unusual and unexpected thing? We lunched at a ruin (a fountain also) which is named after Alexander the Great, but which has nothing but its name to connect it with him. There appears to have been a fortress here, judging by the size of some of the stones, but the ruin is too far gone to tell any story of itself.

At 4 P.M. we reached by a rocky path the summit of the promontory which terminates the bold ridge that bounds off Phoenicia from the Holy Land, and got our first glimpse of Palestine. The afternoon was very bright, and the wind had lulled, so that on the broad, green plain, fifteen miles long and five or six broad, which lies between this ridge and Carmel, nothing but peace and modest beauty seemed to rest.

The view of Hermon, with its heavy snows, we had left behind us in crossing this ridge. It lay fifty miles inward—a grand object, especially when we turned from the snowy ridges of the stormy waves and looked at the snows of Hermon, peaceful as her dews. But snow, except just one glimpse of it in the north-east, did not enter into our new landscape; but rather spring green, and blossoming fruit-trees, and groves of lemon; while nine stone villages, in the midst of plantations, gave an almost New England look to this gentle prospect. True, there is no thrift in it, and these villages, as you approach them, are gloomy, filthy, and repulsive. The farming is all shiftless and primitive in its tools and methods; the ploughs are one shade better than the Egyptian, which are inconceivably wretched. But, with the evening light upon these hills and athwart this broad level, with the Mediterranean breaking upon the western shore, I am willing to accept