Haifa, July 10.—Next to Jerusalem, the city most highly venerated by the Jews in Palestine is Safed. I had occasion to visit it a few weeks ago on my way to a colony of Russian and Roumanian Jews which has been established in the neighbourhood. Perched on the summit of a mountain nearly three thousand feet high, it is one of the most picturesquely situated towns in the country; and there is a tradition to the effect that it was alluded to by Christ as “the city that is set on a hill, and cannot be hid,” when he preached the Sermon on the Mount, the mount being supposed to be one of the Horns of Hattin, a remarkably shaped hill. The whole of this district is indeed full of romantic scenery. It is a country of wild gorges and huge precipices, which escape the attention of the traveller following the beaten routes, and to most of them associations are attached, investing them with an interest beyond that of a mere scenic character. There is, for instance, the Wady Hammam, where the bluffs are about twelve hundred feet high, perforated with caves, communicating with each other by passages concealed in the rock, once the abode of bands of robbers who lived like eagles in their eyries. Looking up at these holes in the cliff some seven or eight hundred feet above me, I tried to picture the terrible battle which was once fought in mid-air between the denizens of these caves and the soldiers whom Herod let down the face of the cliff in baskets to attack them. The desperate nature of the struggle, as the soldiers strove to make good their foothold on the edge of the caves, and the frenzy with which the robbers, who had no loophole of escape, must have defended themselves as they endeavoured to hurl their assailants from their baskets, suggested a scene which was quite in keeping with the gloomy character of the surroundings. Some of the more accessible of these caves have been occupied at a later period by hermits, and they may have been utilized for military purposes at the time of the crusades, but they have never been thoroughly explored.