solid. From the weather-beaten appearance of the stones, they seem to have been in position from great antiquity; but whether they were altars, or monuments over tombs, or served some more practical purpose, I leave for those skilled in such matters to decide. The huge mill stones are numerous, and are to be found, sometimes far removed from any ruin, in the most remote valleys. The lower one usually measures from eight to ten feet in diameter, with a raised rim round the circumference, eight or ten inches high, and a square hole in the centre: they are about two feet six inches thick, but they are often hewn out of the living rock, as well as the basin for the receptacle of the oil below them. Then there are rock-cut reservoirs: the largest I have seen was about one hundred feet by forty-five, and fifteen in depth; but it was half filled with vegetation, and was originally much deeper. And there are traplike and deceptive cisterns, the mouths of which are about the size of a coal-hole in the pavement of a London street; but when there is a bush instead of a lid over it, a false step may land you in a circular pit perhaps twenty feet deep, of a demijohn shape, and with smooth sides, from which escape would be hopeless. It was into such a pit probably that Joseph was let down by his brothers. These cisterns are very numerous at some of the ruins, and prove how dependent the population were upon rain-water, and how glad they must have been when Elijah saw the cloud from this very mountain, after a three years' drought, which indicated a rainfall. My two summers' experience of Carmel, however, would lead me to conclude that clouds are the rule, and entirely cloudless skies the exception. Whether it is owing to the high Nile at this time of year, as has been suggested, or to whatever cause, the fact remains, that the midsummer heats are remarkably tempered by the cloudy skies. Although rain never falls between April and October, there are many mornings so damp and cloudy in the middle of summer, that in any other country one would certainly predict a rainy day; and although the sun soon drives the damp feeling away, the cloudy sky remains more or less all the day. This, combined with a strong, fresh sea-breeze, always keeps the temperature cool. In Esfia last summer, the thermometer on the hottest days only reached 81° in the vault, and at night it generally fell to 70° in the tent. Here at Dahlieh it is a little hotter, ranging sometimes in the day to 85°, but only occasionally. As the altitude of our camp at Esfia was seventeen hundred and fifty feet, not only did we enjoy a most agreeable climate, but a magnificent view of a very different kind, however, from that at Dahlieh. There it was panoramic. Immediately at our feet, scarcely a mile off as the crow flies, was the plain of the Kishon, with that stream winding through it, and issuing from the plain of Esdraelon, over which we also looked by the narrow valley formed by the approach of the low wooded hills of Galilee to the base of Carmel. Sitting at our tent-door, we could see the bay and city of Acre, and the seacoast as far as the ladder of Tyre. The irregular outline of the mountains of northern Galilee, the highest reaching an elevation of four thou sand feet, limited our view in that direction. To the north-east we faced Hermon, with its snowy crest. Nazareth, about twelve miles off, seemed almost at our feet; beyond it was rounded Tabor, the plain of Jezreel, with the villages of Endor and Nain, and Mount Gilboa, with the mountains of Gilead plainly visible in the distance. To the south we looked over the hills of Samaria, and on a clear day could make out the outline of the ruins of Cesarea on the margin of the sea, which bounded our horizon in that direction. Then our cui While, however, enjoying an almost unrivalled prospect and a cool climate, our residence upon this exposed mountain-top was not without its désagrémens. As often as not it blew a gale of wind, generally from the south west, and I sometimes feared that our whole fragile construction would be blown clean down the Wady Shomariyeh, eighteen hundred feet, into the plain below. This was a rocky gorge, on the edge of which our camp was situ ated, so precipitous that there was not even a goat-path down it. sine left much to be desired. The cook, in his windy brushwood shed, and without even a table to cook on, struggled manfully with dust-clouds and prowling dogs, performing wonders on a couple of little iron tripods, on which he built charcoal fires; but as he generally cooked enough for the whole day at one time, the seven o'clock dinner was merely the twelve o'clock breakfast, sodden and warmed up, with a great deal more dust in it. Our apartments were so breezy that only large sta ble lanterns could stand the racket: and they are bad to read by - indeed they are not good to eat by, but the less we saw of our food under the circumstances the bet ter. Fortunately we often had partridges, supposed to have fled from that town, and as he was known to be a friend of mine, was suspected of being in hiding in my fect Esfia; for two days we were put into quarantine, and prohibited from going to Haifa, and I had some trouble in convincing the police that I knew nothing whatever of the refugee in question. to vary the stews of chicken and mutton, and plenty of leben or sour milk, tasting very strongly of goat. The flavor of goat is an acquired taste. Then we were tent. This conjecture was enough to inrather short of water. All of this necessary of life had to be carried nearly a mile up a steep rocky path: two donkeys were perpetually employed on this service. There was a spring nearer, called "the spring of the leeches." Unwarned When I expressed to the natives of by the name, I once watered my horse Esfia my intention of building at their there, and for some days afterwards was village, the proposal was received with occupied extracting leeches from under his acclamation. My presence, they said, tongue and the recesses of his throat. I would be a protection against the thieving pulled out eleven altogether, so the spring propensities of the inhabitants of Tireh was not misnamed. I thought of trying-a Moslem village in the plain, with a to use it for bathing purposes, but was notoriously bad reputation who were so afraid the ladies might object, even though daring in their depredations that they the alternative involved a certain economy would come in broad daylight into the in tubbing arrangements, which did not vineyards of the Esfiotes and carry off comport with our usual habits. We also their grapes under their eyes, without the had nightly visits from jackals, which latter venturing to make any resistance. sometimes had the boldness to poke their That they had not suffered that summer noses into our bedrooms in the dead of from any of these predatory incursions night, causing our small dog to burst into the villagers attributed, rightly or wrongly, frantic fits of barking, and producing gen. to my presence. Under these circumeral consternation and wakefulness. Now stances they declared, in the first flush of and then a scorpion was found under a their enthusiasm, that they would present pillow or in a shoe. But these were little me with a building-site. This I declined, incidents which gave an interest and pi- preferring rather to pay a small sum for quancy to existence unknown in civilized the land. In my innocence I took their life. I merely mention them to show why, offer for a bona fide one; and it was only in order that they should not become when I came to make them what I be monotonous, we determined not to sub- lieved was a reasonable proposal, that I ject ourselves to them another year, but discovered they had been indulging in to build something more substantial than complimentary figures of speech, and that our mat-shed. There was, by the way, they demanded one hundred and fifty naone especial inconvenience, a recurrence poleons for a piece of ground which was of which was, it was to be hoped, not to certainly not worth above twenty. Albe anticipated, and this resulted from the though they came down in their price one visitation of cholera in Egypt. When it hundred napoleons at a bound, they had was reported that some cases had oc- shown the cloven foot in too marked a curred in Beyrout, a panic was produced manner for me to choose them as neigh. in Haifa. A cordon was put round the bors. It would be no satisfaction to me, town, some six or eight families of the I remarked, to protect from the thieves richer native inhabitants flying from it, of Tireh as big a set of thieves after anand taking refuge in Esfia. All postal other fashion, and I declined having any communication by land and sea was thing more to do with them. It must, in stopped. For two months we were with-justice to the Druses, be remarked, that out news of the outside world - even the telegraph was forbidden to perform its functions, lest news should be conveyed of the spread of the disease which should increase the panic. The consequence was, that the wildest rumors were afloat of the daily mortality in Beyrout, which had never exceeded two doubtful cases in all; and the scare was only thereby increased, till it culminated in a visit to my camp by the police in search of a Haifiote who had been in Beyrout at the moment when these deaths occurred, who was this part of the village did not belong to them, and that the chief offender in the matter was the head of the Christian community there. It was about the middle of last winter, when I was beginning with some perplexity to revolve in my mind summer schemes for avoiding the heat of Haifa, that I one day received a visit from a venerable old man with a grey beard and a dignified bearing, who announced himself as the kiatib or spiritual sheikh of the Druses of Dahlieh. His story was a pitiful one. The term of the annual draft of conscripts | great saving of money to use them. Most for the Turkish army had arrived, and his only remaining son, the husband of a very beautiful young woman whom I remembered having seen, was to be carried off as a soldier. The old mother, and the young wife, who had a baby, were in despair. One son, they said, had been taken under the conscription ten years before, had deserted to his co-religionists in the Hauran, and had been lost to the family forever; and now its last prop was to be snatched from it, unless fifty Turkish pounds were forthcoming to purchase a substitute. The object of the old sheikh's visit was to borrow this amount from me. It occurred to me that if, on inspection, Dahlieh suited as a summer resort, I might kill two birds with one stone, by helping the sheikh out of his difficulties and obtaining a site for a house. I had already visited the place and been struck with its beauty, but I had not looked on it as a possible residence, and I now lost no time in riding up on a tour of inspection. The result was in every respect satisfactory; for it so happened that, besides the sheikh being the owner of a good vineyard, the best situation in the village for a house belonged to him. We therefore had no difficulty in coming to an arrangement to our mutual satisfaction, whereby he saved his son from the army, and I became a landed proprietor in of those I took were undrafted stones. And are they not as well preserved in the walls of my house as lying on the barren hilltop? I was in hopes of finding some with devices or inscriptions. Many of those which have been procured from here by the villagers of Dahlieh, and built by them into the walls of their houses, are thus decorated; but I was not so fortunate. There is a handsome sarcophagus, some fragments of columns and stone basins, however, which I have my eye upon, and which at some future period I may succeed in transporting to my new abode. Meantime, curiously enough, I had no sooner begun to dig the foundations of the house, than I struck those of one of a period long gone by. I found, when I got two feet below the surface of the ground, that I could put the whole back wall upon a solid basis of hewn masses of stone, which were so appropri ately placed that they might have been put there to order. I also came upon great quantities of tesseræ, and hoped to find a tesselated pavement also ready for immediate use. In this I was disappointed; but I came upon a good stone floor, in which was cut a groove about three inches deep and two wide, the object of which did not at first occur to me. Loath to cover it with any cement, it now forms, in all its original rudeness, the floor of a back passage. Near this the workmen came upon I now found I had no time to lose if the a dozen or more iron rings, from two to house was to be built before the hot three inches in diameter, attached to nails weather. Fortunately there were exten- about eight inches long, which had been sive ruins of an ancient town a mile off; clinched at the opposite end. These were and here was an unlimited supply of found about three feet below the surface, stones which had been cut for me by the and were, of course, heavily rusted. I Romans, or possibly an anterior race. think it is likely that they may have been The name of this place is Dubil. It is used for fastening horses. At any rate, I situated on a hill about two hundred feet have passed some of them through the higher than Dahlieh, from which it is sep-fire, and find them excellent as stable arated by a valley terraced with orchards rings. The others I have kept as curiosand gardens; and upon comparing it with the numerous other remains of ancient towns which I have visited, I have little doubt that in old times it was the principal city of Carmel, though it has not, so far as I am aware, been identified with any known historical place. It has served as a quarry for the surrounding country for so long, that all its best stones have long since been carried off —indeed I felt myself somewhat guilty in following the general example. But in the absence of any law for the preservation of ancient monuments, it is difficult to be the only person in the country who respects them, the more especially when it involves a Dahlieh. ities. Besides this, we came upon a large fragment of a carved cornice, which I had carefully put on one side, and which, to my intense disgust, the workmen, by mistake, squared into a building stone; also half a stone basin, a copper coin of the time of Constantine, and a great quantity of broken glass and pottery. In moving a stone wall for a new terrace, I found one of those curious huge rollers mentioned in the Survey of the Palestine Exploration Fund, and which seem peculiar to Carmel-at least I am not aware of their having been found elsewhere in Palestine. There are some twenty of them scattered over the ruins of Dubil, and almost the same number at a ruin about | cave. Into this I descended with a light, two miles from Dahlieh, called Khurbet and found myself in a circular underSemakha, where are also to be found the ground chamber one hundred feet in cirremains of one of the eleven Jewish syna- cumference, the roof supported by a rude gogues of old date which have been as yet column of the living rock. Loose stones discovered in the Holy Land. I unearthed now cover the floor to a depth of two feet; my roller, which now decorates what I but when they are cleared away, it will hope some day to call a lawn. It meas- give a height to the roof of about eight ures eight feet long, two feet six inches in feet, which can easily be increased if necdiameter at the centre, but tapers to two essary. It had a second small opening feet at one end, and has four parallel rows under a rock at the opposite side, and of grooves. Each groove is about a foot near it what appeared to be a blocked-up long and two inches deep; they are a foot passage. This I had cleared out, and apart. found that it led to a second smaller cav. ern very much choked with stones. A dozen yards lower down I found the entrance under a rock to a third cave, which, I suspect, communicates with the other two. They do not appear to have been used as tombs, though the rocks have been hewn in places, especially at the entrances. In their immediate neighbor. hood the field is strewn with tessera and fragments of pottery and glass, and the natives tell me that if I dig, I shall find remains. This has produced a disagreeable conflict of sentiment in my mind. Regarded from a purely practical point of view, I think it will pay better to plant this field out in vines than to excavate in it. On the other hand, I feel I have already done a heathenish thing in building a house on the top of the foundations of one of the Byzantine period, without examining them thoroughly. From the relics I found, my predecessor must have been a man of wealth and position, or he never would have used such elaborate wineglasses; and it may be that I am living now on the top of something interesting. But had I, as I was sorely tempted to do when I found the carved cornice, gone on digging, I should have turned the site of my future house into a pit, broken my contract with the builder, and had no place to come to this summer - all which would have involved great loss and inconvenience, on the chance of contributing my mite to the existing collections of Palestine antiquities. I console myself, therefore, by the reflection that these remains are relatively modern, and that the chance of there being a trilingual stone with an inscription which may throw light on the earlier religions of mankind buried under my bedroom is exceedingly remote. Rather than spend my substance in seeking for it, I will convert what the ancients have left me to practical purposes. There is a hole two feet deep and two feet square hewn out of the solid rock near where I propose to build a It has been conjectured that these rollers form some part of an olive-pressing machinery; but I have failed in imagination to construct a machine in which they could be employed though it is evident, from the remains of the olive-mills at Dubil, that it was a great centre of an olive oil industry. There are some prostrate stones there ten feet long, which were evidently uprights, and which are perforated with holes and carved with slots and grooves, showing that they formed part of a massive mechanism connected with the huge circular millstones in their immediate vicinity; and in some instances the rollers above described are near these. But the most fortunate discovery and this was not made till the house was built - was an ancient cistern, which luckily did not happen to be in the middle of the sitting-room, but just outside the back wall, exactly where I should probably have had to build one. The use of the groove in the stone floor of the back passage was now evident. It was to conduct the water into this cistern, which had an opening, eighteen inches square, into the solid rock, and swelled out below into the shape of a bottle fifteen feet deep and eight feet in diameter. As the rock from which it is hewn is very hard, the ancients have saved me from 20 to 30£ in providing me with this reservoir, which I am enlarging, and shall have to cement, as the old cement, though still adhering to the sides in many places, has of course become useless. It was full of earth and débris to the brim; and in clearing it out I got much fine mould, besides a great quantity of broken pottery, and some stems and fragments of glass vases, the rims of which were turned over and lined with silver - unfortunately none of them perfect. In front of the house, about twenty yards from the verandah, I observed a figtree growing out of a suspicious-looking hole, and on clearing away some brambles, perceived that it led down into a stable, which I will turn into a horsetrough. These caves shall become cellars; the modern wines of Carmel shall be stored away in its old tombs, the bottles packed neatly into loculi or stacked away in kokim, and the various vintages allowed to mature in the sepulchres of a bygone race. I will put hogsheads into the caverns once occupied by hermits; the grottos of ascetics shall become storehouses for the ruddy juice that maketh glad the heart of man; and the irony of fate shall, through my instrumentality, work its revenge upon the haunts of these misguided anchorites. As for the evidences of luxury that I come across, they only aggravate me. When I think of my Byzantine predecessor seated beneath marble porticos, drinking out of the most exquisitely shaped flagons of delicate blue glass, golden and silver tipped, his eye ranging over the same view that mine does the same, and yet so different, with its hanging forests and terraced vineyards, its columned temples, its teeming population and compare the mud-built village, ruined terraces, naked hills, and unpeopled valleys, with all this vanished luxury and beauty, I don't want to find anything that reminds me of the contrast. The future, not the past, seems to claim our energies and resources. When every man, free from the tyranny of the unjust judge or the extortionate tax-gatherer, can sit in peace and happiness under his own vine and his own fig-tree, it will be time enough to begin to excavate under them. Meanwhile, be mine the task, however feebly, to labor for the restoration of this land to its former condition of fruitfulness and abundance. From Blackwood's Magazine. DOROTHY: AN INTERLUDE. "Man Of his own happiness is artisan." On one side a white glaring road, upon which the sun, early as it yet was, shone burning down; on the other, a narrow path by a sweet-scented bean-field, the morning dew still sparkling on the delicate blossoms, and between the two a tall dividing hedgerow, crowned with honeysuckle and wild roses. A man sauntering slowly along the dusty road paused involuntarily as the sound of a voice disturbed his reverie. So close was it, that he looked up as if almost expecting to see the speaker, but way. Silence, broken then by something like a cry of despair. "Elise, Elise! I have not brought my purse! Have you? No, don't shake your head, feel in your pocket." "Mademoiselle, there is not the slight est use; I have no money with me. But there is plenty of time; have I not just told mademoiselle so? We will go back to the convent." "Oh, is there indeed? Well, I will go, but not you. I can run much more quickly. You walk slowly on towards the station, and I will return." Almost involuntarily the man, at the first sound of the discussion, had put his hand in his pocket and drawn forth his purse- - vague ideas floating through his mind; but as the young voice told its plan, and repeated, "You are sure, Elise, sure that there is plenty of time," he took out his watch, and from it glanced to the small station, that a sudden dip in the road disclosed to view beneath them — then backwards towards the white building, that he knew to be the convent of the Sacré Cœur. "If her feet are as young as her voice," he thought, "she will do it easily." And so thinking, sighed, perhaps almost unconsciously envying her her youth, and feeling hardly used, that his own should have slipped by; missing, in the swift retrospective glance, the brilliant gleams of color that had lightened his path at times, and which made the surrounding blackness so much blacker; failing en tirely to acknowledge the justice of the law of compensation, the justice of that law which gives us everything for which we are willing to pay. A few steps more brought him to the stile, which served as the narrow means of communication between the road and |