I do not remember having ever seen a more handsome and engaging face; and I experienced a thrill of pleasure at the mere fact of sitting beside him and seeing the smile, which was evidently habitual to those features, play around the limpid brown eyes. The voice too is one of great sweetness, and the manner a quiet dignity with strength behind. The footmen and the daïs and the antechamber were soon forgotten in this presence--forms necessary to little men and perhaps useful to their superiors, though they are always kicking them off when they are not stumbling among their folds. Happily the temperament of His Holiness is averse to all baubles; the cross of diamonds was absent from his conical cowl, and his black silk robe, upon which fell a beard which was not yet white, was unrelieved by the star of his Russian order. These ornaments are strangely out of place on such a figure, and their formulas out of keeping with this character. I was closely questioned upon all the incidents of our climb on Ararat; nor was it doubted that we had reached the summit. In the old days such a pretension would have been met with a smile. Then we passed to his sojourn in England, and I asked his opinion of Mr. Gladstone, with whom he had enjoyed some intercourse. He had been impressed, like so many others, with the theological cast of that supple mind. The face contracted when we came to speak of his life in the Turkish provinces; and he laid stress upon the terrible reality of the sufferings of the Armenian inhabitants. All the struggles and hopes and anguish of his strenuous days and sleepless nights seemed to rise in the mind and choke the voice. Then he sank back, with a sigh which seemed to regret them. "I have come," he said, "to the land of Forgetfulness."--And from the quadrangle came the sound of a slowly-moving Russian anthem, and the measured step of a detachment of Russian soldiers.