as in times of joy, was to me not only amazing, but appalling. Not being as yet aware of their inward fire and intensity of feeling, held in check by a strong bulwark of calm calculation, as an unreconstructed Syrian I felt prone to doubt whether they had any emotions to speak of.

It is not my purpose here to undertake a comparative critical study of these opposing traits, but to state that, for good or evil, the Oriental is preëminently a man who craves sympathy, yearns openly and noisily for companionship, and seeks help and support outside himself. Whatever disadvantages this trait may involve, it has been the one supreme qualification that has made the Oriental the religious teacher of the whole world. It was his childlike dependence on God that gave birth to the twenty-third and fifty-first Psalms, and made the Lord's Prayer the universal petition of Christendom. It was also this dependence on companionship, human and divine, which inspired the great commandments, 'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and thy neighbor as thyself.'

Now it is in the light of this fundamental Oriental trait that we must view Christ's utterances at the Last Supper and in Gethsemane. The record tells us that while at the Supper he said to his disciples, 'With desire I have desired to eat this passover with you before I suffer,' — or, as the marginal note has it, 'I have heartily desired,' and so forth, which brings it nearer the original text. Again, 'He was troubled in spirit, and testified and said, 'Verily, verily, I say unto you, that one of you shall betray me.' 'This is my body.. This is my blood... Do this in remembrance of me.' We must seek the proper setting for these utterances, not merely in the upper room in Zion, but in the deepest tendencies of the Oriental mind.

And the climax is reached in the dark hour of Gethsemane, the hour of intense suffering, imploring need, and ultimate triumph in Jesus' surrender to the Father's will. How true to that demonstrative Oriental nature is the scriptural record, 'And being in an agony he prayed more earnestly: and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground.'

The faithful and touching realism of the record here is an example of the childlike responsiveness of the Syrian nature to feelings of sorrow, no less striking than the experience itself. It seems to me that if an Anglo-Saxon teacher in similar circumstances had ever allowed himself to agonize and to sweat 'as it were great drops of blood,' his chronicler in describing the scene would have safeguarded the dignity of his race by simply saying that the distressed teacher was 'visibly affected'!

The darkness deepened and the Master 'took with him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, and began to be sorrowful and very heavy. Then saith he unto them, "My soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even unto death; tarry ye here, and watch with me." Three times did the Great Teacher utter that matchless prayer, whose spirit of fear as well as of trust vindicates the doctrine of the humanity of God and the divinity of man as exemplified in the person of Christ: 'O, my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt!'

The sharp contrast between the Semitic and the Anglo-Saxon temperament has led some unfriendly critics of Christ to state very complacently and confidently that he 'simply broke down when the critical hour came.' In this assertion I find a very pronounced misapprehension of the facts. If my knowledge of the traits of my own race is to be relied on, then in trying to meet this assertion I feel that I am entitled

to the consideration of one who speaks with something resembling authority.

The simple fact is that while in Gethsemane, as indeed everywhere else throughout his ministry, Jesus was not in the position of one trying to "play the hero." His companions were his intimate earthly friends and his gracious heavenly Father, and to them he spoke as an Oriental would speak to those dear to him, just as he felt, with not a shadow of show or sham. His words were not those of weakness and despair, but of confidence and affection. The love of his friends and the love of his Father in heaven were his to draw upon in his hour of trial, with

not the slightest artificial reserve. How much better and happier this world would be if we all dealt with one another and with God in the warm, simple, and pure love of Christ!

As the life and words of Christ amply testify, the vision of the Oriental has been to teach mankind not science, logic, or jurisprudence, but a simple, loving, childlike faith in God. Therefore, before we can fully know our Master as the cosmopolitan Christ, we must first know him as the Syrian Christ.

I

THE science of archæology has always been under a cloud. It has been considered a pastime for the rich, a speculative something, offering a field only to him who can put a simon-pure archæologist in either pocket, and start for Mycenae or the Pyramids. But it is a mistake to look upon it thus, as if it were only a form of relaxation for a wholesale druggist who has been ordered south. There is a kind of archaology in which even the humblest may indulge, no shovels, no dispensa-. tions from inimical governments, neither holes nor sand-fleas; and yet as full of specimens and speculation as the other, and to the full as interesting to readers of the Sunday supplements.

There are, of course, preliminary steps. You have to warm up. But that may be cleverly enough done, with no real physical discomfort. Do but keep dropping out, in casual talk, hints of the Triassic period, and monoliths and palæolithic wastes, and you will soon find yourself in shape. If possible see Stonehenge or Avebury, and while you browse about there, overturn a lichencovered stone or two. You are almost certain to find the claw-marks of a prehistoric turkey on the other side of it. A few such finds will greatly hearten you and ripen you for Dartmoor.

We caught the fever in a little place called Glastonbury, in the West Country. My good Porthos and I were walking English bicyles all over that region, now and then hopping on and going on

a few hundred yards, getting a puncture, stopping, borrowing a basin of water, inflating and submerging the inner tube for bubbles, and finally clapping on a rubber patch. The younger generation in America knows nothing of all this, for over here the bicycle is not extant any more. An archeologist would be attracted to it. But it takes more than a generation for anything to become palæolithic in Devon.

Four miles short of Glastonbury we came to a flat rim. We located a thorn, part of a safety-pin, and a bit of broken quartz here and there about the tire; and while Porthos was blowing into the tube and listening for expirations, I went off to borrow a basin of water. In pursuit of this basin, I broke through a blackthorn hedge. And there was the archæologist.

He was a short man in gray clothes, with a lavender tie, and he radiated an earnestness which would kill skepticism at a hundred yards. I had faith in him even before I saw the box. It was a common soap-box with a slit big enough to insert a bicycle wheel. A sign said that if you put in sixpence, and breathed a prayer for the Taunton Museum, you could go on to the diggings.

The archæologist had seen me put in my sixpence, evidently; for he leaned rather guiltily in the door of his new hut. 'Sorry, old chap,' he said, 'there is n't much to see, you know; not really. Of course, a little later

I looked into the hut. 'What I want,' I said, 'is a basin of water. Flat tire. Ah, here's just the caper.'

There was a basin on the floor, like a special miracle; and nothing but a rotten piece of wood floating in it.

'I'll just chuck this out,' I said; and I had almost done it, when the archæ ologist gave out a wail which I have reason to believe is frequent with him in his native haunt.

'My dear fellah-really-priceless treasure- 55 B.C.I could n't think!’

Even then I could n't understand that I had happened on a real archaologist. It's one thing to look at a jawbone in a museum under a dusty glass; and quite another to be right in at the resurrection, so to speak. There was certainly a hole or excavation there, — a black rectangle about twelve feet by six, and six deep. I looked into it. A row of men were picking away delicately at the black soil with peculiar trowels. Everything seemed somehow unusual and special, from the excavation right down to the archæologist himself. You might have been deaf and dumb, or he might have been deaf and dumb, and yet you would have felt all through you that he was n't digging a cistern. The wild light in his eye, or the shape of the trowels, might have warned you that this was n't the entrance to a new subway. I was enchanted; and I left Porthos to play in the road all alone with his inflated rubber circle.

'But look here,' I said, 'what is this -ah-fragment in the basin?'

'It's the stake-end of a hut-pole,' said the archæologist. "This was a lake village, you see; the tides flowed clear down here from Bristol in those days; and they could only build their huts on these knolls.'

"Then these must have been islands,' I ventured.

"They were islands,' said the archaologist with rising significance.

"Then they must have used boats,' I cried, in a wild fever of surmise.

'Canoes,' shrieked the archæologist. 'Dugouts. We've traced 'em into that cornfield, and we can't dig there. There's tombs there, too; burial urns. Sure of it. The story of a past age. But the fool will grow corn there.'

'Corn!' I gave out a thunderclap of comment.

The frantic archaeologist was drawn toward me by the heartiness of my contempt for corn. He quieted himself with an effort.

"They were planting corn in the Roman amphitheatre at Dorchester till a few years back,' he said. 'Mr. Hawke finally rooted it up, and got down to the chalk-bottom of the arena. He dug two dead gladiators out of the south side of the parapet. They were in a sitting posture, and one of them measured seven inches from jaw-bone to jaw-bone. The teeth were all there, except the bicuspids. Come in and talk with Mr. Hawke.'

We bolted into the shack, which was of new unpainted matched boards, against which these recovered relics looked more antiquarian than ever. If you put a good old New England grindstone down on that floor, and were specially careful with it, you would instantly suggest a period before Adam. There were stones of every description in there: long flat smooth ones, for rubbing skins; fat round dented ones for moulds; and little polished ones for playing games-probably checkers. If some one should go and salt down an old checker-board in that hole in the night, it would relieve those fellows mightily. They would know it was checkers then. Mr. Hawke was in a side room, absorbed in trying to select a pot from a boxful of burnt-clay shards, which would have made fifty pots. But now certainly, if Mr. Hawke could reconstruct a pot, he could do what all the king's horses and all the king's men could n't do. He washed each piece clean, examined the jagged edge of it, and then another jagged edge, and then another jagged edge. Still, this was the Mr. Hawke who had bade defiance to the cornfield in the Roman ring at Dorchester, and as each edge was washed clean, I kept fancying that his bright blue eye had detected

VOL. 117-NO. 3

something complementary about it. My heart thumped at the bare possibility of a pot. He drew another piece from the heap, and cried aloud with pleasure.

'A design,' he said. 'Could anything be more delicate, more perfect?'

I leaned over his shoulder. I have heard that simplicity is at the heart of architecture. If it is also at the heart of design, then this design was perfect. It consisted of two parallel lines, which had obviously once gone clear round the pot.

'Shade of Euclid!' I breathed in my excitement.

'And we turn up something like this every day,' said the second archæologist tumultuously.

'What a life!' I exclaimed reverently. 'I sometimes fear the stimulus is too great,' said Mr. Hawke. 'Once in so often I have to steal away to South Devon to rest. But even there I have the temptation of Dartmoor.'

He was assailed on every hand. It was as bad as if these stone men were actually at him with their bludgeons.

'What of Dartmoor?' I inquired.

'A great palæolithic waste,' he returned. 'Sacred circles, pounds, stone avenues, necropolises, I believe, if we could get down to them. Dartmoor. Ah, it's too much. The treasury is too rich. But the restrictions of the Duchy would drive me frantic. It's owned by the Duchess of Cornwall.'

He did n't want to say that she was not an excellent lady; no Englishman would; but he hurried off the topic. 'See here.'

He lifted an urn nearly whole, containing some black matter in the bottom. 'We have every reason to believe,' he announced, 'that this was bread.'

'Baked a little too brown?' I suggested.

He thwarted my forefinger.