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It is, I believe, an element in the controversy about the cave at Bethlehem traditionally connected with the Nativity that the sceptics doubt whether any beasts of burden could have entered a stable that has to be reached by such steps. And indeed to any one in a modern city like London or Liverpool it may well appear odd, like a cab-horse climbing a ladder.

"Many," wrote Franklin, "still retained an affection for Egypt, the land of their nativity, and whenever they felt any inconvenience or hardship, though the natural and unavoidable effect of their change of situation, exclaimed against their leaders as the authors of their trouble, and were not only for returning into Egypt, but for stoning their deliverers.... Many of the chiefs thought the new Constitution might be injurious to their particular interests, that the profitable places would be engrossed by the families and friends of Moses and Aaron, and others, equally well born, excluded."

The sire, however, had outlived his fortunes, and, late in life, had been compelled to abandon the place of his nativity an adventurer, struggling against a proud stomach, and a thousand embarrassments and to bury himself in the less known, but more secure and economical regions of Tennessee.

M'Gregor, "for a man living in the United Kingdom, to consider, before he determines on expatriation, whether he can, by industry and integrity, obtain a tolerably comfortable livelihood in the country of his nativity; whether, in order to secure to his family the certain means of subsistence, he can willingly part with his friends, and leave scenes that must have been dear to his heart from childhood; and whether, in order to attain to independence, he can reconcile himself to suffer the inconveniency of a sea voyage, and the fatigue of removing with his family from the port where he disembarks in America, to the spot of ground in the forest on which he may fix for the theatre of his future operations; whether he can reconcile himself for two or three years, to endure many privations to which he had hitherto been unaccustomed, and to the hard labour of levelling and burning the forest, and raising crops from a soil with natural obstructions, which require much industry to remove.

He culled carefully a bit of basilick and offered it to her. "For its fragrance, signora!" It was the next day. Having carefully placed on the drawing-room table his knotty stick, his pipe, and his antique carpet-bag, Choulette bowed to Madame Martin, who was reading at the window. He was going to Assisi. He wore a sheepskin coat, and resembled the old shepherds in pictures of the Nativity.

Many portraits by Lavinia Fontana are in the private collections of Italian families for whom they were painted. In the Gallery of Bologna there is a night-scene, the "Nativity of the Virgin," by her, and in the Escorial is a Madonna lifting a veil to regard the sleeping Jesus, while SS. Joseph and John stand near by.

Conscious that the great bond of union to her former companions was sev- ered, that the disdain of others would be insup- portable, she determined to leave the few friends she possessed, and seek an asylum among strangers. Her offspring came unwelcomed, and before its nativity numbered weeks, it passed from earth, ascending to a purer and better life.

Nine feet in front of the altar step a wall has been thrown across the church in a manner similar to that in the church of the Nativity at Bethlehem. This wall, also those of the church, of which several courses remain, and the interior of the apse, show that the building was originally painted, and some of the figures and designs can still be traced.

Of the verses which he wrote at Cambridge the most important was his splendid ode On the Morning of Christ's Nativity. At Horton he wrote, among other things, the companion pieces, L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, of a kind quite new in English, giving to the landscape an expression in harmony with the two contrasted moods.

In a word, my man thus accoutred, looked upon himself as great as Don Quixote, when that celebrated champion went to combat the windmill. I next gave him a very particular description of the territories of Europe, and in a particular manner of Old England, the place of my nativity.