BOYS OF THE BIBLE. 277

“You understand? Then let it go at that. But it then
and there seemed to me as the most beauteous thought, the
most entirely pathetic thing on all this earth, to feel that
through eighteen hundred years there still echoed the sound
of Mary’s loom and the stroke of the carpenter’s hammer!

“And I thought if I could teach the toiling world that
Mary still leans to hear the loom, that Christ is still in some
sort a carpenter, I might, maybe, bridge over the awful gulf
of infidelity and lead the world to redemption.

“But even if I could teach each laborer the dignity of
his labor, show him how God worked at a trade, how the
echo of the hammer is still heard—if I could only teach one
poor, broken-hearted old woman, bending to her toil, that Mary
toiled the same way, why that would be glory—glory enough
and enough of good.”

Only a poet could tell such a sweet, pathetic story, and
draw from it so gracious a lesson.

One of the best views of the city is to be had from the
Campanile of the Church of the Annunciation. In the dis-
tance is the brow of the hill to which Jesus was led by the
enraged multitude who attempted to throw him from it. A
modern house in the foreground brings to mind the time
when they uncovered the roof and let down the bed whereon
the sick of the palsy lay. This must be very much the
same kind of house as that historical one at Capernaum.
There is the peculiar roof, and there are the outside stairs
leading to the roof. The Eastern householder makes his roof
serve for more than a protection from the weather. It is
the piazza, the quiet place of the dweller, and sometimes it
becomes his summer residence. As a rule it is not very
heavy or very strong. Rafters are thrown across from wall
to wall, say a yard apart; then the whole space is covered