It is an ingeniously written description, and well calculated to deceive.
But if the paint and the ribbons and the flowers be stripped from it, a
skeleton will be found beneath.

So stripped, there remains a lake six miles wide and neutral in color;
with steep green banks, unrelieved by shrubbery; at one end bare,
unsightly rocks, with (almost invisible) holes in them of no consequence
to the picture; eastward, "wild and desolate mountains;" (low, desolate
hills, he should have said;) in the north, a mountain called Hermon, with
snow on it; peculiarity of the picture, "calmness;" its prominent
feature, one tree.

No ingenuity could make such a picture beautiful--to one's actual vision.

I claim the right to correct misstatements, and have so corrected the
color of the water in the above recapitulation. The waters of Genessaret
are of an exceedingly mild blue, even from a high elevation and a
distance of five miles. Close at hand (the witness was sailing on the
lake,) it is hardly proper to call them blue at all, much less "deep"
blue. I wish to state, also, not as a correction, but as matter of
opinion, that Mount Hermon is not a striking or picturesque mountain by
any means, being too near the height of its immediate neighbors to be so.
That is all. I do not object to the witness dragging a mountain
forty-five miles to help the scenery under consideration, because it is
entirely proper to do it, and besides, the picture needs it.

"C. W. E.," (of "Life in the Holy Land,") deposes as follows:--

"A beautiful sea lies unbosomed among the Galilean hills, in the