text:  But as travellers and poets have of late left few mountains or molehills unsung in Palestine we prefer extracting a picturesque account of a venerable abbess who threw the light of Christian goodness over that benighted land about a century ago and must have impressed the heathens in the neighbourhood with an exalted notion of the virtues of a nunnery:-- "Hendia was a Maronite girl possessing extraordinary personal charms who in 1755 first brought herself into notice by her pretended piety and attention to her religious duties till at last she was by this simple and credulous people considered almost in the light of a saint or prophetess