The brown Franciscans and the white Dominicans would alone give some colour to a memory of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem; and there are other examples and effects which are less easily imagined in the West.

Thus as I look down the street, I see coming out from under an archway a woman wearing a high white head-dress very like those we have all seen in a hundred pictures of tournaments or hunting parties, or the Canterbury Pilgrimage or the Court of Louis XI.

She is as white as a woman of the North; and it is not, I think, entirely fanciful to trace a certain freedom and dignity in her movement, which is quite different at least from the shuffling walk of the shrouded Moslem women.
She is a woman of Bethlehem, where a tradition, it is said, still claims as a heroic heritage the blood of the Latin knights of the cross.
This is, of course, but one aspect of the city; but it is one which may be early noted, yet one which is generally neglected.
As I have said, I had expected many things of Jerusalem, but I had not expected this.

I had expected to be disappointed with it as a place utterly profaned and fallen below its mission.
I had expected to be awed by it; indeed I had expected to be frightened of it, as a place dedicated and even doomed by its mission.
But I had never fancied that it would be possible to be fond of it; as one might be fond of a little walled town among the orchards of Normandy or the hop-fields of Kent.
And just then there happened a coincidence that was also something like a catastrophe.

I was idly watching, as it moved down the narrow street to one of the dark doorways, the head-dress, like a tower of white drapery, belonging to the Christian woman from the place where Christ was born.