Apostle, which for convenience required an entire seat; then, speaking thoughtfully:

"It isn't worth while to notice the remarks of a person who looks like that. Why, he's all malformed. He'll probably explode before we reach Ephesus."

I felt sorry for the Apostle, and was going over to sit with him, only there wasn't room, and just then somebody noticed a camel train-the first we have seen-huge creatures heavily loaded and plodding along on the old highway. This made a diversion. Then there was another camel train, and another. Then came a string of donkeys-all laden with the wares of the East going to Smyrna. The lagging Oriental day was awake; the old road was still alive, after all.

Like the first "Innocents," we had brought a carload or so of donkeys-four-legged donkeys—from Smyrna, and I think they were the same ones, from their looks. They were aged and patchy, and they filled the bill in other ways. They wrung our hearts. with their sad, patient faces and their decrepitude, and they exasperated us with their indifference to our desires.

I suppose excursion parties look pretty much alike, and that the Quaker City pilgrims forty-two years ago looked a good deal like ours as we strung away down the valley toward the ancient city. I hope they did not look any worse than ours. To see long-legged men and stout ladies perched on the backs of those tiny asses, in rickety saddles that feel as if they would slip (and do slip if one is not careful), may be diverting enough, but it is not pretty. If the donkey stays in

the middle of the narrow, worn pathway, it is very well; but if he goes to experimenting and wandering off over the rocks, then look out. You can't steer him with the single remnant of rope on his halter (he has no bridle), and he pitches a good deal when he gets off his course. Being a tall person, I was closed up like a grasshopper, and felt fearfully top-heavy. Laura, age fourteen, kept behind me-commenting on my appearance and praying for my overthrow.

It was a good way to the ruins-the main ruinsthough in reality there were ruins everywhere: old mosques, gray with age and half-buried in the soila thousand years old, but young compared with the more ancient city; crumbling Roman aqueducts leading away to the mountains-old even before the mosques were built, but still new when Ephesus was already hoary with antiquity; broken columns sticking everywhere out of the weeds and grass-scarred, crumbling, and moss-grown, though still not of that first, far, unrecorded period.

But by-and-by we came to mighty walls of stonehuge abutments rising from the marshy plain-and these were really old. The Phoenicians may have laid them in some far-off time, but tradition goes still farther back and declares they were laid by giantsthe one-eyed kind, the Cyclops-when all this marsh was sea. These huge abutments were piers in that ancient day. A blue harbor washed them, and the merchant ships of mighty Ephesus lay alongside and loaded for every port.

That was a long time ago. Nobody can say when these stone piers were built, but Diana and Apollo

were both born in Ephesus, and there was probably a city here even then. What we know is that by the beginning of the Christian era Ephesus was a metropolis with a temple so amazing, a theatre so vast and a library so beautiful that we stand amid the desolation to-day, helplessly trying to reconstruct the proportions of a community which could require these things; could build them and then vanish utterly, leaving not a living trace behind.

For nobody to-day lives in Ephesus-not a soul. A wandering shepherd may build his camp-fire here, or an Arab who is tilling a bit of ground; but his home will be in Ayasaluk, several miles away, not here. Once the greatest port of trade in western Asia, Ephesus is voiceless and vacant now, except when a party like ours comes to disturb its solitude and trample among its forlorn glories.

There is no lack of knowledge concerning certain of the structures here-the more recent ones, we may call them, though they were built two thousand years. ago. There are descriptions everywhere, and some of them are as cleanly cut to-day as they were when the tool left them. This library was built in honor of Augustus Cæsar and Livia, and it must have been. a veritable marble vision. Here in its corners the old students sat and pored over books and precious documents that filled these crumbling recesses and the long-vanished shelves. St. Paul doubtless came here to study during the three years of his residence, and before him St. John, for he wrote his gospel in Ephesus, and would be likely to seek out the place of books. And Mary would walk with him to the door

sometimes, I think, and Mary of Magdala, for these three passed their final days in Ephesus, and would be drawn close together by their sacred bond.

The great theatre where St. Paul battled with the wild beasts stands just across the way. It seated twenty-five thousand, and its stone benches stretch. upward to the sky. The steep marble flight that carries you from tier to tier is there to-day exactly as when troops of fair ladies and handsome beaux climbed up and still up to find their places from which to look down on the play or the gladiatorial combat or the massacre of the Christians in the arena below.

These old theatres were built in a semicircle dug out of the mountain-side, so that the seats were solid against the ground and rose one above the other with the slope of the hill, which gave everybody a good view. There were no columns to interfere with one's vision, for there was no roof to be supported, except, perhaps, over the stage, but the top seats were so remote from the arena and the proscenium that the players must have seemed miniatures. Yet even above these there was still mountain-side, and little boys who could not get money for an entrance fee or carry water to the animals for a ticket sat up in that far perch, no doubt, and looked down and shouted at the show.

Laura and I, who, as usual, had dropped behind the party, climbed far up among the seats and tried to imagine we had come to the afternoon performance— had come early, not to miss any of it. But it was difficult, even when we shut our eyes. Weeds and grass grew everywhere in the crevices; dandelions

bloomed and briers tangled where sat the beaux and belles of twenty centuries ago. Just here at our feet the mobs of Demetrius the silversmith gathered, crying, "Great is Diana of the Ephesians!" because the religion of St. Paul was spoiling their trade for miniature temples. Down there in the arena Paul did battle with the beasts, very likely as punishment. This is the spot-these are the very benches-but we cannot see the picture: we cannot wake the tread of the vanished years.

Behind the arena are the columns that support the stage, and back of these are the dressing-rooms, their marble walls as solid and perfect to-day as when the ancient players dallied and gossiped there. At one end is a dark, cave-like place where we thought the wild beasts might have been kept. I stood at the entrance and Laura made my picture, but she complained that I did not look fierce enough for her pur

pose.

On another slope of the hill a smaller theatre, the Odeon, has recently been uncovered. A A gem of beauty it was, and much of its wonder is still preserved. Here the singers of a forgotten time gave forth their melody to a group of music-lovers, gathered in this close circle of seats that not a note or shading might be lost.

We passed around this dainty playhouse, across a little wheat-field that some peasant has planted against its very walls, on up the hill, scrambling along steep declivities over its brow, and, behold! we came out high above the great theatre on the other side, and all the plain and slopes of the old city, with