Seated here upon the site of King David’s palace, I see the whole city spread out beneath me. What a curious place it is! In my tours of the world I have found no spot so full of strange sights and picturesque characters, so different in most particulars from every other town of the world. Aside from its wonderfully interesting historical associations, Jerusalem has a character of its own. It looks more like a great honeycomb than a city. The houses are piled one above the other in all sorts of irregularities. If you would take a half-section of land and scatter over it gigantic packing boxes just as you find them in a down-town alley, you might get some idea of Jerusalem as it looks to me from Mount Zion. These houses have no chimneys and their stone roofs are almost flat. Many of the roofs have in the centre little domes that remind me of beehives. If the town were on a level these domes would look like the haycocks in a meadow at harvest time. The wood used in the construction of Jerusalem would not last an American family a winter. Yellow limestone is the sole building material. The roofs, walls, and floors of these thousands of houses are of this cold, yellowish-white rock. Even in the Bishop’s mansion, which is one of the finest in the city, I step out of my bed on to a stone floor and walk to my breakfast down stone steps and through stone halls. Now look at the streets with me. They are narrow and winding and some are built over, so that going through them is like passing through tunnels or subterranean caves. Indeed, Jerusalem is a city of cave dwellers. Many of the stores and houses are little more than holes in the rocks. I visited a native inn yesterday right in the heart of the town. It consisted of a series of vaulted chambers which looked much like caves. In one cave were four donkeys, two camels, and a party of Bedouins. In another were a dozen Jews from Samaria, and in a third were some men and camels who had just come from beyond the Jordan. The only sign of modern times was an English lamp burning American kerosene oil. Through my guide I chatted with the keeper of the stable, or inn, as it was called, and he told me that his charge for feeding and washing a donkey or a horse was five cents a day. Jerusalem of to-day is founded upon the remains of the Jerusalems of the past, and the excavations have unearthed houses and temples far below the streets of the present. The original floor and court of the house in which Pontius Pilate examined the Christ is much lower than the level of the present city, and mosaics and marbles, including carvings of various kinds and Greek and Roman capitals and columns, are frequently uncovered in digging the foundations for new buildings.