Like all travelers we visited the city’s chief lion--the great reservoir which, as Pliny informs us, won for Edessa the name Callirhoe--the city of the beautiful well--spring--_Callirhoen a fonte nominatam_. From the earliest days to the present, this reservoir has been held in great veneration. In pagan times it was consecrated to the goddess Athagartis. To-day it is known as the Pool of Abraham. The large number of fish with which it is always filled are sacred in the eyes of the Mohammedans, who consider it a very meritorious act to supply them with nourishment. The groups that are sometimes gathered around this pool feeding the sacred fish seem quite as preoccupied as the crowds that so generously distribute their supplies of grain to the pampered pigeons of San Marco, Venice. The only ecclesiastics in Urfa to-day to devote themselves to the work of the Church which St. Ephrem and his associates served so well, whose convent was our home during our visit to their famous city, are the Capuchins. It is now more than two and a half centuries since these zealous sons of St. Francis inaugurated their missionary labors in Mesopotamia and the adjoining countries, and these have been centuries of trial and sacrifice and persecution which would have forced less heroic men to abandon an undertaking that often seemed impossible. Everywhere they were confronted by the fanaticism of Mohammedanism, which was naturally suspicious, and the jealousy of schism and heresy which were quick to take umbrage at whatever was calculated in any way to affect their age-long belief and practices. During hundreds of years the torch of the faith which St. Ephrem had preached had been extinct in the broad region which the Capuchins had chosen for the field of their missionary activity. And during an almost equally long period, all vestige of union between the churches of Mesopotamia and those of the adjacent regions had completely disappeared.