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the goal. This unseen but very real presence of sympathetic spectators is grand and energizing.

We have about us the same magnetic influences for our inspiration. We are compassed about with a great cloud of witnesses. Those who have already run the race have ascended on high, have poured into the galleries of heaven, and there from their lofty seats they are encircling this earth round and round, like a very cloud of glory, and they are looking down upon us here below to see how we are running. Not only Orpheus and Homer and the others whom Socrates anticipated meeting, but Moses and Paul, Augustine and Chrysostom, Aquinas and Luther, Knox and Wesley, Washington and Lincoln, Timothy Dwight and Mark Hopkins, Eliphalet Nott and James McCosh, Bushnell and Beecher, Jonathan Edwards and Phillips Brooks, all the good and great of every age and clime, hovering above us, should stimulate us to nobler and more efficient living. We do not see them, for our eyes are holden. But if we could have the vision of the prophet's servant, we doubtless would see all about us, as he did about him, horses and chariots of fire, we would see the celestial "ten thousand times ten thousand" encircling us like an enveloping, tremulous cloud. The very atmosphere about us is quivering and pulsating with their spiritual presence, and this should be our inspiration to run with patience our race, our Marathon, till it is finished with joy, amid heavenly plaudits.

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In leaving what has been called by Milton "The Eye of Greece, Mother of Arts and Eloquence, we take Byron's lines addressed to the "Maid of Athens," the last line of which is in Greek, the English for it being "My life, I love

thee," and what the poet said to fair maiden we apply to the Athenian city herself:

"Though I fly to Istambol.

Athens holds my heart and soul:

Can I cease to love thee? No,

Ζωή μου, σᾶς ἀγαπῶ.”

CHAPTER III

ROUND ABOUT CAIRO

SIGNS AND WONDERS UPON PHARAOH.

ONTINUING our travels, we cross the sea from Europe

CON

to Africa, from Greece to Egypt. The voyage has made more than one feel like the literary Oliver Wendell Holmes, who under similar circumstances became a contributor to the Atlantic, only in this case the contribution is to the Mediterranean, and the contribution is followed by no benediction. The blessing is rather on the man, who never suffers from sea-sickness. We are bound for a country, over which the English since the world war have had exclusive control with no least semblance any longer of a Turkish suzerainty, and from which the British in the exigencies of the late mighty conflict built a railroad over the very desert to the Holy Land, and conducted thither along the whole route refreshing water in American piping, and one can now travel by train from Cairo to Jerusalem and thence to Constantinople.

Dr. John H. Finley, college president and educator, has called attention to a widely-prevailing Arab legend, that when the Nile flowed into Palestine, then would the Turk be dispossessed of that land. This was supposed to mean, Never. But the figurative expression became an accomplished fact, when in General Allenby's Palestinian campaign

he conducted Egypt's waters, after they had been filtered, in a twelve-inch pipe for a distance of 150 miles clear to the region of which the New Testament speaks when describing the journey of the Ethiopian eunuch returning to queen Candace in Ethiopia, where he served as treasurer of the realm. The evangelist Phillip received the command, "Arise, and go toward the south unto that way that goeth down from Jerusalemn unto Gaza; the same is desert. To that identical locality Egypt's river proceeded northward in an irrigating stream under military guidance, till Isaiah's prophecy was fulfilled, "In the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the desert." We can almost hear the distinguished convert "of great authority" saying again, "Behold, here is water, what doth hinder me to be baptized?" And the fable has proved to be no fiction at all but the real truth, as the Nile veritably has poured into Palestine, from which also has been expelled the Turk. He was routed and driven forth, when Allenby entered a victor into Jerusalem, and swept on northward over the valley of Esdraelon, over the field of Armageddon, till his triumphant march, that seemed almost miraculous, included Damascus and even Aleppo beyond. It was by "the glowing sand" becoming "a pool" under skilful engineering, that the invading army was sustained, and the desert has been made to rejoice and blossom as the rose, not only metaphorically but actually, in the vast improvement that has come, and is increasingly to come, over the Holy Land, which has been redeemed from a Turkish oppression of long centuries to be again under the benign rule of a Christian civilization. The traveller upon his first entrance into the land of the Nile is reminded of this beneficent change that has occurred in the marvelous developments of our day.

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