church were unavailing; perhaps it may be buried under the ruins of the Convent. In the Tomb of Mary, at the extremity of the western arm of the cross, there is a doorway closed with masonry, which cannot be seen from the outside, because of the accumulation of earth. In 1858 a Greek monk was working in a plot of land on the western bank of the Kidron Valley, at no great distance from the tomb, and found a cistern, very long from east to west, hollowed out in the rock, its walls being covered with a strong cement. When I heard of this I went to examine it, and by striking the walls inferred the existence of two openings, one on the east, the other on the west. Perhaps they communicated with the subterranean passage; and the reason why they are in these positions, may be that the cistern was made by widening the passage which was already on the spot. I trust that the architect in charge of the restoration at S. Ann's Church may be able to discover these subterranean passages. I do not describe the insignificant remains of the Convent of Benedictine nuns, because they possess nothing of interest. Not a capital nor a shaft of a column is to be found among the shapeless fragments of ruins, which reveal nothing of their former splendour, nay, not so much as whether they could have been ever beautiful. The Church of the Magdalene (called _Maïmonieh_ by the Arabs) is situated to the north-west of the Church of S. Ann, and to the south-east of Herod's Gate. According to tradition it stands on the site of the house of Simon the Pharisee, where the penitent sinner washed the Saviour's feet with tears, and wiped them with the hairs of her head. S. Luke[500] does not mention the place at which this circumstance occurred. The three other Evangelists[501] state that it happened at Bethany, so that I cannot admit the truth of the tradition without denying that of the Bible; consequently I consider the church as only dedicated to the memory of the penitent Magdalene. All that now remains of this building is the porch, part of the choir, and the side walls, which are left standing at irregular heights above the ground; everything else is a heap of ruins, overgrown with creeping plants; and in the middle a potter carries on his craft of making pipes, water-pots, and the like. It is commonly said to be the property of the Greek Convent, but I am not certain whether this is true. I removed the rubbish from the interior to search for the remains of pillars, in the hope of being able to ascertain the plan of the building; but my labours were fruitless, and I must therefore refer my reader to M. de Vogüé's work[502], only observing that the Church of the Magdalene does not (as he asserts) belong to the same class of churches as that of S. Ann, for the former is a rectangle in plan, the latter a trapezium. For the rest I highly appreciate the labour he has bestowed upon the subject; but, as I have not been fortunate enough to verify his discoveries in my