The Consul at Jerusalem tells us that 156 Americans from
the State of Maine have arrived in Palestine, and taken up their resi- dence near Jaffa (Joppa), led apparently by millennial views. They are mostly labourers, farmers, handicraftsmen, &c., bringing with them their own wooden houses, tools, implements, &c. If the colony survives and multiplies,—and many of the same sort have failed,—it will probably not see the Millennium, but will throw a curious and, to most men's minds, a rather anomalous energy into the affairs of Palestine. We shall have the Mount of Olives laid out in villa residences, a popular watering-place,—" Elijah Springs" perhaps—under Mount Carmel, and a Capernaum and Nazareth Junction Railway. What would the desecration of the Saracen occupation be to that? It is curious, and in some degree painful, to realize how the mind shrinks from seeing what we call, and rightly call, " progress," touch the ground sacred to greater than any human memories.
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