Here is a hill the color of ash, looking down on us with somber rocks over which a handful of houses is scattered, like embers whose glow is about to leave them — that is Bethlehem!

This modest hill, lost among thousands of hills, would never have dreamed of fame had not fate singled it out, on one of December's bitter nights twenty centuries ago, with a unique event that raised it to the summits of glory.

One day in that distant age it occurs to the Roman governor of Palestine — that haughty man with his passion for counting — to take a census of the children of Israel. How easily orders and decrees are issued, yet how far they are from being carried out with the same ease! The people set forth,

one and all, making for their birthplaces, their tongues busy with curses: had they not learned of the authorities that such an administrative step is always the forerunner of tax collection?

Here is the inn of Bethlehem all but bursting with its guests when there comes knocking at its door a man from Nazareth, and with him a woman on a donkey. What can the innkeeper do but place what courtesy and kindness he can muster at their service? On the morrow someone comes to inform the innkeeper that the two Nazarenes passed the night in a stable, and that the woman, upon the fodder trough, gave birth to a boy... He shrugged his shoulders, unconcerned, and went back to his pack-sad-dles... Yet had he known that that night would be a turning point in the course of the days, and that from that moment onward events would be dated according to a trifling incident — the birth of a child in a cattle manger — had the innkeeper known all this, astonishment would have seized him — utter astonishment.

Palestine is to this day the oasis of the nomads: on the tops of the hills the black tents of the Bedouin look out, standing fast against the winds; and in an air where the bleating of sheep and goats mingles with the camels', the children sleep with the bare earth for their bed.

On the night of the Nativity a band of shepherds had pitched their tents close by Bethlehem when the angel of the Lord woke them and sent them forth