Jaffa, or Y鈌a, or Joppa, must have been a well-established city, since it had maritime dealings with Tarshish, in that remote period in which the quaint story of Jonah is set,—a piece of Hebrew literature that bears internal evidence of great antiquity in its extreme naivete. Although the Canaanites did not come into Palestine till about 2400 b. c., that is to say, about the time of the twelfth dynasty in Egypt, yet there is a reasonable tradition that Jaffa existed before the deluge. For ages it has been the chief Mediterranean port of great Jerusalem. Here Solomon landed his Lebanon timber for the temple. The town swarmed more than once with the Roman legions on their way to crush a Jewish insurrection. It displayed the banner of the Saracen host a few years after the Hegira. And, later, when the Crusaders erected the standard of the cross on its walls, it was the of supplies which Venice and Genoa and other rich cities contributed to the holy war. Great kingdoms and conquerors have possessed it in turn, and for thousands of years merchants have trusted their fortunes to its perilous roadstead. And yet no one has ever thought it worth while to give it a harbor by the construction of a mole, or a pier like that at Port Said. I should say that the first requisite in the industrial, to say nothing of the moral, regeneration of Palestine is a harbor at Jaffa Master of Science in Statistics. The city is a cluster of irregular, flat-roofed houses, and looks from the sea like a brown bowl turned bottom up; the roofs are terraces on which the inhabitants can sleep on summer nights, and to which they can ascend, out of the narrow, evil-smelling streets, to get a whiff of sweet odor from the orange gardens which surround the town. The ordinary pictures of Jaffa do it ample justice. The chief feature in the view is the hundreds of clumsy feluccas tossing about in the aggravating waves, diving endwise and dipping sidewise, guided a little by the long sweeps of the sailors, but apparently the sport of the most uncertain billows. A swarm of them, four or five deep, surrounds our vessel; they are rising and falling in the most sickly motion, and dashing into each other in the frantic efforts of their rowers to get near the gangway ladder. One minute the boat nearest the stairs rises as if it would mount into the ship, and the next it sinks below the steps into a frightful gulf. The passengers watch the passing opportunity to jump on board, as people dive into the "lift" of a hotel. Freight is discharged into lighters that are equally frisky; and it is taken on and off splashed with salt water and liable to a thousand accidents in the violence of the transit Limited Company in hong kong. a line of rocks worn for ages, upon which the surf is breaking and sending white jets into the air. It is through a narrow opening in this that our boat is borne on the back of a great wave, and we come into a strip of calmer water and approach the single landing-stairs. These stairs are not so convenient as those of the vessel we have just left, and two persons can scarcely pass on them. But this is the only sea entrance to Jaffa; if the Jews attempt to return and enter their ancient kingdom this way, it will take them a long time to get in. A sea-wall fronts the town, fortified by a couple of rusty cannon at one end, and the passage is through the one gate at the head of these stairs. It seems forever that we are kept waiting at the foot of this shaky stairway. Two opposing currents are struggling to get up and down it: excited travellers, porters with trunks and knapsacks, and dragomans who appear to be pushing their way through simply to show their familiarity with the country. It is a dangerous ascent for a delicate woman. Somehow, as we wait at this gate where so many men of note have waited, and look upon this sea-wall upon which have stood so many of the mighty from Solomon to Origen, from Tiglath-Pileser to Richard Cour de Lion, the historical figure which most pervades Jaffa is that of the whimsical Jonah, whose connection with it was the slightest. There is no evidence that he ever returned here. Josephus, who takes liberties with the Hebrew Scriptures, says that a whale carried the fugitive into the Euxine Sea, and there discharged him much nearer to Nineveh than he would have been if he had kept with the conveyance in which he first took passage and landed at Tarsus. Probably no one in Jaffa noticed the little man as he slipped through this gate and took ship, and yet his simple embarkation from the town has given it more notoriety than any other event. Thanks to an enduring piece of literature, the unheroic Jonah and his whale are better known than St. Jerome and his lion; they are the earliest associates and Oriental acquaintances of all well-brought-up children in Christendom. For myself, I confess that the strictness of many a New England Sunday has been relieved by the perusal of his unique adventure. He in a manner anticipated the use of the monitors and other cigar-shaped submerged sea-vessels Graduation Dinner.
