and I presented it one day.  In a few minutes Mr. Ahmed and I were led into the large room where the Patriarch was seated in his robe and peculiar cap.  Meeting a dignitary of the Armenian Church was a new experience to me.  I shook hands with him; Mr. Ahmed made some signs and sat down.  In the course of our limited conversation he said rather slowly:  “I am very old.”  Replying to a question, he informed me that his age was eighty years.  I was on the point of leaving, but he hindered me, and an attendant soon came in with some small glasses of wine and a little dish of candy.  The Patriarch drank a glass of wine, and I took a piece of the candy, as also did Mr. Ahmed, and then we took our leave.

The eleventh day of October, which was Tuesday, was occupied with a trip to Hebron, described in another chapter devoted to the side trips I made from Jerusalem, but the next day was spent in looking around the Holy City.  Early in the morning the Mamilla Pool, probably the “upper pool” of 2 Kings 18:17, was seen.  One author gives the dimensions of this pool as follows:  Length, two hundred and ninety-one feet; breadth, one hundred and ninety-two feet; depth, nineteen feet.  It is filled with water in the rainy season, but was empty when I saw it.  Entering the city by the Jaffa gate, I walked along David and Christian Streets, and was shown the Pool of Hezekiah, which is surrounded by houses, and was supplied from the Mamilla Pool.

The next place visited was that interesting old building, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, where our Lord is supposed to have been buried in Joseph’s new tomb.  Jerusalem has many things of great interest, but some few things are of special interest.  The Temple Area and Calvary are of this class.  I am sure my readers will want to know something of each, and I shall here write of the latter.  No doubt the spot where Jesus was crucified and the grave in which he was buried were both well known to the brethren up to the destruction of the city in the year seventy.  Before this awful calamity the Christians made their escape, and when they returned they “would hardly recognize the fallen city as the one they had left; the heel of the destroyer had stamped out all semblance of its former glory.  For sixty years it lay in ruins so complete that it is doubtful if there was a single house that could be used as a residence; during these years its history is a blank.”  There is no mention of the returned Christians seeking out the site of either the crucifixion or burial, and between A.D. 120 and A.D. 136 Hadrian reconstructed the city, changing it to a considerable extent, and naming it Aelia Capitolina.  This would tend to make the location of Calvary more difficult.  Hadrian built a temple to Venus, probably on the spot now occupied by the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and Eusebius, writing about A.D. 325, speaks of Constantine’s church built on the site of this temple.  It is claimed that Hadrian’s heathen temple was erected to desecrate the place of Christ’s entombment, and that Constantine’s church, being erected on the site of the temple, and regarded as the place called Calvary, fixes this as the true site; but whether the church and temple were on the same site or not, the present church stands where the one built by Constantine stood, and is regarded by the mass of believers as the true location.