felt a strange awe as they entered the Grotto of the Nativity. They fell upon their knees before the altar; they bowed their heads in prayer; they kissed the sacred spot marked by the silver star, while tears fell upon the pavement; and as they lifted their eyes to heaven, and their lips moved silently, it seemed as if their thoughts were floating upward with the cloud of incense, and that they were responding to the prayers offered, according to the Greek and Latin rituals — pro vivis et defunctis — for the living and the dead.
So much was I interested in the associations of this ancient church — the oldest perhaps in the Christian world — that after I had been over it and under it and around it, and gone away, I came back again to spend another hour, and to renew the impressions of the place. As I walked up the aisle a second time, a monk in the coarse dark brown robe of the Franciscan Order, with a rope round his waist, recognizing me as a stranger, and perhaps divining the country from which I came, addressed me in English. He was an Irish monk, and had lived in America! He was very polite, and invited me into the Convent, taking me to the refectory and offering me refreshment, and up on the roof, which commands a beautiful view down into the valley and over the surrounding hills; from which we returned to the church, and to the grotto under it, and to the study of Jerome, where he spent the last thirty years of his life translating the Bible, and where was witnessed the scene of his Last Communion, which has been immortalized in the great painting of Domenichino. As we passed from place to place, we were deep in conversation about the sacred localities, in which I soon discovered the intense jealousy of the different Christian sects of the East. This church is walled in by three Convents — Greek, Latin, and Armenian — which are not planted against its sides to
