THE long narrow strip of country on the east shore of the Mediterranean, which in a manner was the centre of the ancient world, has in all ages been a land of pilgrimage. For five hundred miles it stretches from the deserts of Sinai to the rugged Taurus, and its width, shut in between the Syrian deserts and the sea, is rarely more than fifty miles. It can never be quite the same to us as other lands, bound up as it is with our earliest memories, with the Bible and the story of the faith; and it is to the credit of our native land that we have been the first to gather that complete account of the country, of its ancient remains, and of its present inhabitants, which (if we except India) does not exist in equal exactness for any other Eastern land.