another, then we reached spots of greater luxuriance and freshness, and a deeper valley in which vegetation held undisputed sway. I next came to virgin thickets of Persian poplars and of willows interlacing their branches, thus affording impervious dens for the wild boar, the wolf, and the hyena. At length I reached a more formidable embankment, fringed with a more luxuriant selvage of fine trees. Ere I mounted half way up the barrier, I saw that the opposite mud bank was much more distant than those we had passed, and the certain conviction was expressed by me in the Scottish aphorism, "Long looked for comes at last.”

And certainly there was now before me the sacred Jordan hastening its copious floods in vain to sweeten and vivify a sea of bitterness and of death. It was a magnificent river, rapid, broad, deep, and altogether dangerous looking. When my feeling of piety and amazement subsided, I looked again more particularly to the stream. I noticed that it was of a whity-brown colour, muddy, and murderous - like in its heavy swell and whirling eddies. The river seemed to be about the breadth of the Tiber at Rome, but far deeper, and containing a much greater volume of water. Were I to be very particular at a guess, I would say it seemed to be about forty or fifty yards broad, and ten or fifteen feet deep; but it was the rapidity with which the majestic torrent seemed to flow, and strange to me on so level a flat, which struck my heart with awe. Both banks were overhung by the richest foliage of shrubs and fine tall trees feathered down to the water's edge. When on the top of the bank I noticed my position as being directly opposite to Jericho, and therefore as near as could be supposed to the place where the river was passed under Joshua; yet I could