beggars are a disgrace to any country; and your hungry fleas and flies are more numerous, if possible, than they were in the times of the Biblical patriarchs."

From Egypt he went to Joppa and Jerusalem, visiting also the Dead Sea, the River Jordan, Bethlehem, and other places of interest in the Holy Land. Dr. Dunn, while entranced, assured Mr. Peebles that if they would prepare themselves by bathing, fasting, and spiritual harmony, ancient spirits living in Jesus' time would be present in a séance held in their room on Mount Zion. A full description of this séance he has not yet given the world. He was requested not to do so by the spirits there assembled. Suffice it to say that the apostles and some of the disciples of the Nazarene purported to be present, and Dr. Peebles questioned them upon many theological subjects that have so long disturbed the religious world. This visit to Jerusalem and interview with ancient spirits, and the Jewish Rabbis that he there met, made a very deep impression upon his mind, and helped to confirm irrevocably confirm him in the general truthfulness of the historic records relating to Jesus of Nazareth.

"Jerusalem! I would have seen

Thy precipices steep;

The trees of palm that overhang
Thy gorges dark and deep.
Around thy hills the spirits throng
Of all thy murdered seers;
And voices that went up from it
Are ringing in my ears."

There has been much misunderstanding among Spiritualists about Mr. Peebles's use of the word "Christian," many charging him with being a Christian in the narrow theological sense. Let us hear his own definition:

"Melchizedec was the peace-king of Salem, the baptized of Christ; in a word, a Christian. This Christ-spirit or Christprinciple it truly without father or mother, without descent,

having neither beginning of days nor end of life, a continually abiding spirit priest. There were Christians in those prehistoric days, Christians in golden ages past, Christians long before the Old Testament patriarchs traversed the plains of Shinar, and Christians who spoke the mellifluous Sanscrit. Many of the most genuine and self-sacrificing Christians on earth to-day are Brahmins and Buddhists, because afire with the Christ-spirit of pure, and unselfish love.

Leaving Palestine, he shipped from Joppa to Trieste, Austria, and reached London by way of Italy and France. His sojourn in England was this time rather short. As he had become much exhausted with his protracted travels in those hot oriental countries, he felt it fitting to return without unnecessary delay to his own home. But he experienced a great joy to be dropped down once more in London; to mingle again with the English-speaking people, to walk familiar streets, clasp cordial hands, and hear voices of friendship.

Summing up his experiences, Mr. Peebles writes of this. year-and-a-half's pilgrimage:

"It seems hardly possible that I have seen the black aborigines of Australia, and the tatooed Maoris of New Zealand; that I have witnessed the Hindus burning their dead, and the Persians praying in their fire-temples; that I have gazed on the frowning peak of Mt. Sinai, and stood upon the summit of Cheops; that I have conversed upon antiquity and religious subjects with Chinamen in Canton, Brahmins in Bengal, Parsees in Bombay, Arabs in Arabia, descendants of pyramidbuilders in Cairo, and learned rabbis in Jerusalem; that I have seen Greece in her shattered splendor, Albania with its castled crags, the Cyclades with their mantling traditions, and the Alps impearled and capped in crystal. . . . It is difficult to realize that I have been in Bethlehem, walked in the garden of Gethsemane, stood upon Mount Olives, bathed in the Jordan, breathed the air that fanned the face of Jesus when weary from travel under the burning skies of Palestine, looked upon the same hills and valleys clothed in Syrian

spring-time with imperial lilies, and had the same images daguerreotyped on my brain that impressed the sensitive soul of the Man of Sorrows, the Teacher sent from God."

"Breathes there the man with soul so dead,

Who never to himself hath said,

'This is my own, my native land.'

Whose heart hath ne'er within him burned,
As home his footsteps he hath turned
From wandering on a foreign strand."

XXXVIII

OTHER TRAVELS AND LITERARY LABORS

"When I sitting heard the astronomer when

He lectured with much applause in the lecture room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wandered off by myself,
In the mystical, moist night-air, and from time to time,
Looked up in perfect silence at the stars."

- Whitman.

Having arrived home from his extensive travels, Mr. Peebles set to work lecturing Sundays, and preparing a volume, which, in 1874 appeared in a book of five hundred pages, entitled "Travels Around the World," a volume which has been extensively read in Australia, South Africa and England, as well as in our own country. It never becomes tedious, for it is pervaded with that warm glow and racy vividness that characterizes all of Mr. Peebles's published works. He relates his observations on mankind as he found them, in widely different degrees of development, and everything is looked at from such a strong individualistic standpoint that we get graphic delineations quite unlike anything we generally meet with in books of travel. Indeed, he makes the reader feel as though he had taken up temporarily his abode with the people he is reading about. We travel in company and behold with him the strongly contrasted lights and shadows which surround the outgoing and incoming peoples of the world. Old themes, new scenes, famous countries, and mysterious rites have thrown around them an interest entirely new, which renders them peculiarly instructive and entertaining, even to the most scholarly and well-read men.

The year at home with his wife and family soon fcd, occupied as it was by continuous platform work, writing the

"Travels," work in his garden, and producing numerous long communications to periodicals and Magazines.

Late in the autumn of 1874, Mr. Peebles was again in Louisiana, where he spent two months as a Spiritualist teacher. He delivered a lecture before the Literary Association, on the merits of which and other lectures delivered by him, he was soon after elected a corresponding member and fellow of the Louisiana "Academy of Sciences."

From thence he proceeded to Vera Cruz, the principal port on the Gulf of Mexico. Calling upon the United States Consul, he was warned against going into the interior of the country, because of the prospects of a civil war. This did not deter him; he passed from Vera Cruz to Orizaba, from here across a spur of the Caribbean Mountains to the old City of Mexico. While there, the civil war broke out, resulting in the overthrow of the then-existing Government, and the placing of General Diaz, called the Mexican Dictator, in power. General Diaz is truly a native potentate, being a descendant of the Aztec Indians.

Mr. Peebles visited the noted localities in the vicinity of Mexico, paid great attention to the old pyramids and ancient mounds that are found in that country and others further to the south. By examining the relics stored away in the Mexican Museum, relating to the Aztecs and Toltecs, he satisfied himself from studying these symbols, that 2,500 and 3,000 years ago there were commercial or maritime relations between that country and Tyre, Phoenicia, Egypt, and the East. He saw the winged god, the sarcophagi, the immortal lamp, the Phallic emblems, and other symbols, showing the origin and relations of the ancient religions of both the East and the West. From Mexico he went to Yucatan, and securing an Indian guide, visited the ruins of Uxmal, Palenque, and other dust-buried cities. His letters to the press describing these ruins were deeply interesting, and extracts from them went the rounds of many American journals.

Mr. Peebles's love for antiquity and ethnological subjects had led him many years ago to study the origin of races, and