I saw the burial of a pilgrim.  He was a Greek, miserably poor, and very old; he had just crawled into the Holy City, and had reached at once the goal of his pious journey and the end of his sufferings upon earth.  There was no coffin nor wrapper, and as I looked full upon the face of the dead I saw how deeply it was rutted with the ruts of age and misery.  The priest, strong and portly, fresh, fat, and alive with the life of the animal kingdom, unpaid, or ill paid for his work, would scarcely deign to mutter out his forms, but hurried over the words with shocking haste.  Presently he called out impatiently, “Yalla!  Goor!” (Come! look sharp!), and then the dead Greek was seized.  His limbs yielded inertly to the rude men that handled them, and down he went into his grave, so roughly bundled in that his neck was twisted by the fall, so twisted, that if the sharp malady of life were still upon him the old man would have shrieked and groaned, and the lines of his face would have quivered with pain.  The lines of his face were not moved, and the old man lay still and heedless, so well cured of that tedious life-ache, that nothing could hurt him now.  His clay was itself again—­ cool, firm, and tough.  The pilgrim had found great rest.  I threw the accustomed handful of the holy soil upon his patient face, and then, and in less than a minute, the earth closed coldly round him.

I did not say “alas!” (nobody ever does that I know of, though the word is so frequently written).  I thought the old man had got rather well out of the scrape of being alive, and poor.

The destruction of the mere buildings in such a place as Jerusalem would not involve the permanent dispersion of the inhabitants, for the rocky neighbourhood in which the town is situate abounds in caves, which would give an easy refuge to the people until they gained an opportunity of rebuilding their dwellings; therefore I could not help looking upon the Jews of Jerusalem as being in some sort the representatives, if not the actual descendants, of the rascals who crucified our Saviour.  Supposing this to be the case, I felt that there would be some interest in knowing how the events of the Gospel history were regarded by the Israelites of modern Jerusalem.  The result of my inquiry upon this subject was, so far as it went, entirely favourable to the truth of Christianity.  I understood that the performance of the miracles was not doubted by any of the Jews in the place.  All of them concurred in attributing the works of our Lord to the influence of magic, but they were divided as to the species of enchantment from which the power proceeded.  The great mass of the Jewish people believe, I fancy, that the miracles had been wrought by aid of the powers of darkness, but many, and those the more enlightened, would call Jesus “the good Magician.”  To Europeans repudiating the notion of all magic, good or bad, the opinion of the Jews as to the agency by which the miracles were worked is a matter of no importance; but the circumstance of their admitting that those miracles were in fact performed, is certainly curious, and perhaps not quite immaterial.