also that on the Day of Atonement this place used to be the scene of a festival so peculiar and so unlike any other part of Jewish custom that we are tempted to believe that it was an innovation of the later Hellenising faction. The daughters of Jerusalem were encouraged to come out to meet the youths who were celebrating the newly-acquired purification from sin, with palms in their hands and songs and dances. Twice a year this festival of maidens took place, and the contrast to the stern precepts of the Talmudic doctors, who discountenanced any gaiety in which women took part, forbade a student to speak to or look at any woman but his wife, and even counselled that the less he talked to her the better, is certainly suggestive of foreign origin for the feast of Motza.

Passing by this little oasis in the hills, which has thus from time immemorial been the site of festal excursions from the capital, we began the long ascent which led, not, as we hoped, to Jerusalem, but to the edge of the plateau on the opposite side of which the city stands. The road, afterwards so familiar to me, seemed longer when the distance was unknown than when every way-mark was recognised as showing nearer approach to the end of the journey; and we did not halt to admire, as I often did afterwards, the fine view from the brow of the hill.

From that brow the great valley is seen winding southwards, and the high rounded ascent to Kŭstŭl bars out the view of the plain. Northwards the conical point of Neby Samwîl, crowned with its minaret, is a conspicuous object, and in the evening when the long shadows steal up the rugged hillsides, and the western slopes are ruddy in the setting sun, the breadth and grandeur of the colouring of the wild shapeless mountains is extremely striking, and grows upon one every time the scene opens before one’s eyes.

The first approach to Jerusalem from the west is decidedly disappointing. From the east, north, and south, the aged walls, the mosque, and Holy Sepulchre, come into view at some distance, and the scene is striking; but from the west the city is approached within less than a quarter of a mile before it is seen. The first object is the huge Russian cathedral outside the town, built in 1864. The white walls and heavy leaden roofs in the Neobyzantine style block out ancient Jerusalem. Standing on the approximate site of the old tower of Psephinus, the Russian Hospice commands the whole town, and is thought by many to be in a position designedly of military strength.

When, however, these ugly modern buildings are passed, together with the many white stone villas, country residences of Europeans or rich Jews, which form “New Jerusalem,” the traveller at length comes in view of a long grey battlemented wall, a tower, the dark trees of the Armenian convent garden, and behind all the pale blue line of the Moab hills. He enters between groups of tawny, groaning camels, and black donkeys loaded with firewood, under a dark archway, and forcing a path through a noisy bright-coloured crowd of peasantry, under the shadow of the great Tower of David he alights at a German hotel within the walls of Jerusalem.