all the world, the tattling dragomans are every where disclosing the subject they are discussing, and the conference at Babec is no more secret than the news of a public coffee-house. [Illustration: T. Allom. W. J. Cook. THE RUINS OF EPHESUS. THE CASTLE OF AIASALUK ON THE DISTANCE. ASIA MINOR.] This city is not only celebrated in profane history, which ascribes its foundation to the Amazons, but is rendered interesting to mankind, for being commemorated in the Sacred Scriptures by many important recollections. When Christianity began to expand itself in Asia, seven churches were founded, eminently distinguished among the early Christians, as fountains, whence the light of the gospel should flow upon a benighted world. The first and chief of these was the great city of Ephesus. When St. John in his Apocalypse addresses these seven churches, the first he named was that of Ephesus. To the professors of Christianity there, he gives a high character, intimating the reformation which the infant gospel had already effected among the Gentiles. “I know thy works, and thy labour, and thy patience, and how thou canst not bear those that are evil.” To this church, St. Paul addressed his epistle when in bonds at Rome, to guard them against that false doctrine that was even then beginning to taint the purity of the gospel. This city he visited in his travels, and adds the testimony of sacred history to that of profane, to the estimation in which the great heathen temple was held; and from this city he took his final departure at that affecting moment, when they kneeled down, and prayed on the sea-shore, “and wept sore for the words which he spake−-that they should see his face no more.” This city once had a bishop, the angel of the church, Timothy, the beloved disciple of St. John; and tradition reports that it was honoured with the last days of both these great men, and of the Mother of our Lord.