suggested by the place. Standing in the Grotto of the Nativity, how could one help trying to recall the scene witnessed here nearly nineteen centuries ago, before which the Magi knelt, and before which the Christian world is still kneeling? It is but a familiar domestic scene, a young mother with her first-born child in her arms. There are no surroundings of circumstance to give it pomp and splendor. It is not a royal birth, announced to an expectant kingdom by the waving of banners over a great capital. The fact that a child was born probably did not produce the slightest stir even in the inn. It was but a Hebrew woman, humble in appearance and attire as the subterranean chamber in which she had taken refuge, and perhaps with not a single attendant but Joseph, not even a nurse to perform the commonest offices for one who with her own hands "wrapped her child in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger." How insignificant was such an event! How little was there in that poor young mother to distinguish her from the thousands of the daughters of Israel!
And yet, such are the strange mutations of time, that no one of woman born, excepting only the son whom she herself bore, ever had such a name and place in history. How little she thought — lowly in heart as in life — of the homage that was to await her in future generations! As she lay here in this Grotto, on her bed of stone, she may have heard over her head the tramp of Roman soldiers, or of the crowd that had flocked to be enrolled at the bidding of Cæsar. Rome and Cæsar! The very words struck awe into the heart of a Hebrew, man or woman, as they suggested images of greatness and power. Little could one so poor dream that in the lapse of centuries her own humble name would be heard in the streets of Rome; that temples would rise to her, more numerous
