One of the finest tracts of land in western Palestine is to be found in the northwestern slopes of the range commonly known as the hills of Samaria. The more I travel over this country and examine its agricultural resources the more convinced do I feel that it only needs the introduction of capital and enterprise to make it again, as it was of old, as productive, in proportion to its area, as any of the most favored regions of the earth's surface. It so happens that the roads which lead the tourist to the spots which specially attract him pass through its least fertile and most forbidding districts, but even these could be made to blossom as the rose with an ordinary expenditure of labor and capital, while the greater part of the country, especially of Galilee, which lies out of the beaten track, astonishes you with its capabilities in respect of soil and other natural advantages. Here, for instance, at this wealthy village of Nusser El Fahen, we find ourselves in the centre of a rich but sparsely settled district only waiting to be settled up. With an elevation of one thousand five hundred feet above the sea, from which it is distant about sixteen miles, and of which it commands a full view, it enjoys a cool and salubrious climate all the year round.

The romantic valleys by which the village is surrounded are thickly planted with olive groves, which contain over a hundred thousand trees and are a great source of revenue. While too far from the village for the protection of any crop, the hillsides and summits are clothed with a dense undergrowth of scrub oak, terebinth and other shrubs, which are only prevented from becoming forest trees by the charcoal burners, but their quick growth testifies to the richness of the soil. To the north the range extends for fifteen miles to the base of Carmel. The woodland disappears, and is succeeded by rolling chalk downs, affording magnificent pasturage and good arable land, for it is well watered; and from its temperate and healthy climate is called the "breezy land".

The villages here are small, few and far between, and there is room for a large population, but the most tempting land of all is the tract between Nusser El Fahen and the sea, where the oak trees which are scattered over the pastures and corn fields attain a large growth and the country presents the appearance of an immense park. From an artistic point of view, the woods and the farm lands are so combined as to form the most perfectly diversified scenery, just where the rolling hills slope gently down into the plain of Sharon. It was across this country that our road lay to Caesarea, which was our objective point, first through the thick copse of the upper valleys, and so out upon the park-like uplands, where the-whole population was out in the fields gathering the crops, which strings of camels were conveying to the village threshing floors. Here and there was a money-lender from Acre or Beyrout squatting under an umbrella to see that the peasantry did not rob him of his share. This is a busy time with these gentry, who are the bloodsuckers of the Fellahin, to whom they advance money at exorbitant rates of interest, while the latter, in revenge, resort to every conceivable device to conceal from them tin- real extent of the crop and to make the proportion coming to them as small as possible. - A correspondent of Salt Lake Contributor.