MARK TWAIN

Imagine Christ's 30 years of life in the slow village of
Nazareth.

If Mark Twain had not been previously fa-
miliar with Bible history he was to become rea-
sonably familiar with it now. He had bought a
little Bible at Constantinople, and he read it
diligently. That he was deeply impressed is cer-
tain—his writing shows that, and in a way which
perhaps he did not at the moment realize. Some-
thing of the stately simplicity of the King James
version crept into his style, and remained there.
If, as has been said, Mark Twain "wrote the
purest English of any modern writer," the rea-
son for it, in some measure at least, is to be found
here.

Sept. 21. Left Nazareth and its chalk hills at 7,30 and
galloped across the Plain of Esdraelon to Endor, the
rustiest of all of them, almost—a few nasty mud cabins—
many caves and holes in the hill from which the fierce,
ragged, dirty inhabitants swarmed. Pop. 250.

The Witch's Caw

Has a fig tree before it and a spring within. Endor is a
fit place for a witch. Camel dung on the roofs and caked
against the houses to dry.

Nain

An hour further—still small towns. Little moss over
spot once occupied by the widow's house. Graveyard—
very old and ratty—exists yet, and place shown where
corpse was passing through city wall when Christ resur-
rected it.

City of Jezreel

On the hill where Ahab, King of Judah, lived in splen-

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