ever felt in any thing earthly before. I could not
believe that the three holes in the top of the rock were the actual ones
the crosses stood in, but I felt satisfied that those crosses had stood
so near the place now occupied by them, that the few feet of possible
difference were a matter of no consequence.

When one stands where the Saviour was crucified, he finds it all he can
do to keep it strictly before his mind that Christ was not crucified in a
Catholic Church. He must remind himself every now and then that the
great event transpired in the open air, and not in a gloomy,
candle-lighted cell in a little corner of a vast church, up-stairs
--a small cell all bejeweled and bespangled with flashy ornamentation,
in execrable taste.

Under a marble altar like a table, is a circular hole in the marble
floor, corresponding with the one just under it in which the true Cross
stood. The first thing every one does is to kneel down and take a candle
and examine this hole. He does this strange prospecting with an amount
of gravity that can never be estimated or appreciated by a man who has
not seen the operation. Then he holds his candle before a richly
engraved picture of the Saviour, done on a messy slab of gold, and
wonderfully rayed and starred with diamonds, which hangs above the hole
within the altar, and his solemnity changes to lively admiration. He
rises and faces the finely wrought figures of the Saviour and the
malefactors uplifted upon their crosses behind the altar, and bright with
a metallic lustre of many colors. He turns next to the figures close to
them of the Virgin and Mary Magdalen; next to the rift in the living rock
made by the earthquake at the time of the Crucifixion, and an extension
of which he had seen before in the wall of one of the grottoes below; he
looks next at the show-case with a figure of the Virgin in it, and is
amazed at the princely fortune in precious gems and jewelry that hangs so
thickly about the form as to hide it like a garment almost. All about
the apartment the gaudy trappings of the Greek Church offend the eye and
keep the mind on the rack to remember that this is the Place of the
Crucifixion--Golgotha--the Mount of Calvary. And the last thing he looks
at is that which was also the first--the place where the true Cross
stood. That will chain him to the spot and compel him to look once more,
and once again, after he has satisfied all curiosity and lost all
interest con