It was a wonderful city, this Ephesus.  Go where you will about these broad plains, you find the most exquisitely sculptured marble fragments scattered thick among the dust and weeds; and protruding from the ground, or lying prone upon it, are beautiful fluted columns of porphyry and all precious marbles; and at every step you find elegantly carved capitals and massive bases, and polished tablets engraved with Greek inscriptions.  It is a world of precious relics, a wilderness of marred and mutilated gems.  And yet what are these things to the wonders that lie buried here under the ground?  At Constantinople, at Pisa, in the cities of Spain, are great mosques and cathedrals, whose grandest columns came from the temples and palaces of Ephesus, and yet one has only to scratch the ground here to match them.  We shall never know what magnificence is, until this imperial city is laid bare to the sun.

The finest piece of sculpture we have yet seen and the one that impressed us most, (for we do not know much about art and can not easily work up ourselves into ecstasies over it,) is one that lies in this old theatre of Ephesus which St. Paul’s riot has made so celebrated.  It is only the headless body of a man, clad in a coat of mail, with a Medusa head upon the breast-plate, but we feel persuaded that such dignity and such majesty were never thrown into a form of stone before.

What builders they were, these men of antiquity!  The massive arches of some of these ruins rest upon piers that are fifteen feet square and built entirely of solid blocks of marble, some of which are as large as a Saratoga trunk, and some the size of a boarding-house sofa.  They are not shells or shafts of stone filled inside with rubbish, but the whole pier is a mass of solid masonry.  Vast arches, that may have been the gates of the city, are built in the same way.  They have braved the storms and sieges of three thousand years, and have been shaken by many an earthquake, but still they stand.  When they dig alongside of them, they find ranges of ponderous masonry that are as perfect in every detail as they were the day those old Cyclopian giants finished them.  An English Company is going to excavate Ephesus—­and then!

And now am I reminded of—­

The legend of the seven sleepers.

In the Mount of Pion, yonder, is the Cave of the Seven Sleepers.  Once upon a time, about fifteen hundred years ago, seven young men lived near each other in Ephesus, who belonged to the despised sect of the Christians.  It came to pass that the good King Maximilianus, (I am telling this story for nice little boys and girls,) it came to pass, I say, that the good King Maximilianus fell to persecuting the Christians, and as time rolled on he made it very warm for them.  So the seven young men said one to the other, let us get up and travel.  And they got up and traveled.  They tarried not to bid their fathers and mothers