began to draw up and pinch and tear loose--it was awful--but I never

heard him sing. Finally I said, This is a fraud--that is what it is, it

is a fraud--and if I had had any sense I might have known a cursed

mud-turtle couldn't sing. And then I said, I don't wish to be hard on

this fellow, and I will just give him ten minutes to commence; ten

minutes--and then if he don't, down goes his building. But he didn't

commence, you know. I had staid there all that time, thinking may be he

might, pretty soon, because he kept on raising his head up and letting

it down, and drawing the skin over his eyes for a minute and then

opening them out again, as if he was trying to study up something to

sing, but just as the ten minutes were up and I was all beat out and

blistered, he laid his blamed head down on a knot and went fast asleep."

"It was a little hard, after you had waited so long."

"I should think so. I said, Well, if you won't sing, you shan't sleep,

any way; and if you fellows had let me alone I would have made him shin

out of Galilee quicker than any turtle ever did yet. But it isn't any

matter now--let it go. The skin is all off the back of my neck."

About ten in the morning we halted at Joseph's Pit. This is a ruined

Khan of the Middle Ages, in one of whose side courts is a great walled

and arched pit with water in it, and this pit, one tradition says, is the

one Joseph's brethren cast him into. A more authentic tradition, aided

by the geography of the country, places the pit in Dothan, some two days'

journey from here. However, since there are many who believe in this

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The Innocents Abroad