Mark Twain On Biblical Geography

- When I was a boy I somehow got the impression that the river Jordán was four thousand miles long and thirty-five miles wide. It is only ninety miles long, and so crooked that a man does not know whioh side of it he is on half the time. In going ninety miles it does not get over more than flfty miles of ground. It is not any wider than Broadway in New York. There is the Sea of Galilee and this Dead Sea - neither of them twenty miles long or thirteen wide. And yet when I was in Sunday-sohool I thought they were sixty thousand rnilea in diameter. Travel and experience mar grandest piotures and rob us of the most cherished traditions of our boyhood. Well, let them go. I have already seen the Empire of King Solomon diminish to the size of the State of Pennsylvania. I suppose I can bear the reduction of the seas and the river.