A Ride across Palestine

 Circumstances took me to the Holy Land without a companion, and compelled me to visit Bethany, the Mount of Olives, and the Church of the Sepulchre alone.  I acknowledge myself to be a gregarious animal, or, perhaps, rather one of those which nature has intended to go in pairs.  At any rate I dislike solitude, and especially travelling solitude, and was, therefore, rather sad at heart as I sat one night at Z—’s hotel, in Jerusalem, thinking over my proposed wanderings for the next few days.  Early on the following morning I intended to start, of course on horseback, for the Dead Sea, the banks of Jordan, Jericho, and those mountains of the wilderness through which it is supposed that Our Saviour wandered for the forty days when the devil tempted him.