of course they are a third wider and a third higher than a street car.  Perhaps two railway freight cars of the largest pattern, placed end to end, might better represent their size.  In combined length these three stones stretch nearly two hundred feet; they are thirteen feet square; two of them are sixty-four feet long each, and the third is sixty-nine.  They are built into the massive wall some twenty feet above the ground.  They are there, but how they got there is the question.  I have seen the hull of a steamboat that was smaller than one of those stones.  All these great walls are as exact and shapely as the flimsy things we build of bricks in these days.  A race of gods or of giants must have inhabited Baalbec many a century ago.  Men like the men of our day could hardly rear such temples as these.

We went to the quarry from whence the stones of Baalbec were taken.  It was about a quarter of a mile off, and down hill.  In a great pit lay the mate of the largest stone in the ruins.  It lay there just as the giants of that old forgotten time had left it when they were called hence—­just as they had left it, to remain for thousands of years, an eloquent rebuke unto such as are prone to think slightingly of the men who lived before them.  This enormous block lies there, squared and ready for the builders’ hands—­a solid mass fourteen feet by seventeen, and but a few inches less than seventy feet long!  Two buggies could be driven abreast of each other, on its surface, from one end of it to the other, and leave room enough for a man or two to walk on either side.

One might swear that all the John Smiths and George Wilkinsons, and all the other pitiful nobodies between Kingdom Come and Baalbec would inscribe their poor little names upon the walls of Baalbec’s magnificent ruins, and would add the town, the county and the State they came from —­and swearing thus, be infallibly correct.  It is a pity some great ruin does not fall in and flatten out some of these reptiles, and scare their kind out of ever giving their names to fame upon any walls or monuments again, forever.

Properly, with the sorry relics we bestrode, it was a three days’ journey to Damascus.  It was necessary that we should do it in less than two.  It was necessary because our three pilgrims would not travel on the Sabbath day.  We were all perfectly willing to keep the Sabbath day, but there are times when to keep the letter of a sacred law whose spirit is righteous, becomes a sin, and this was a case in point.  We pleaded for the tired, ill-treated horses, and tried to show that their faithful service deserved kindness in return, and their hard lot compassion.  But when did ever self-righteousness know the sentiment of pity?  What were a few long hours added to the hardships of some over-taxed brutes when weighed against the peril of those human souls?  It was not the most promising party to travel with and hope to gain a higher veneration for religion through the