“I could not go to bed, and as I was anxious to leave Ephesus as soon as possible, I thought I would employ my time in going through poor MacPherson’s few possessions. As he said, there was nothing private. I sat downstairs in the sitting-room we had shared, with his tin box open on the table before me, shiny black, and the inside of the lid painted sky-blue. It was pitifully empty. His will was in a long envelope, a will making provision for his wife, and bequeathing the remainder of his income to an archæological society; there was also a codicil directing that his Ephesian fragments were to go, as he had told me, to the British Museum. The box also contained a diary, recording, not his life, but his discoveries; and a few letters from men of science. For the rest, there were his books, his clothes, his wrist-watch, his plaid rug, and a little loose cash in Turkish coins. And that was all. There was absolutely nothing else. Not a photograph, not a seal, not even a bunch of keys. Nothing private! I should think not, indeed. “I sat there staring at the bleak little collection when Marco came in to say that he had returned with the layer-out. I went into the passage, and there I found our old negro post-woman, grinning as usual in her magenta wrapper; it seemed that she combined several village functions in her own person. I felt an instinctive horror at the thought of those black hands pawing poor MacPherson, but the thing was unavoidable, so I took her upstairs to where he lay in a repose that appeared to me enviable after the brief but terrible suffering he had undergone, and left her there, bending over him, the softer parts of her huge body quivering as usual under her mashlak. I went downstairs again, and stood outside to breathe the clean, cool air; the sky hung over me swarming with stars; I tried not to think of the old negress exercising her revolting profession on MacPherson’s body. “Next day two men in baggy trousers and red sashes came up to the house carrying the hastily-made coffin. Then we set out, Marco, myself, and the two men with the coffin and MacPherson inside it. Providentially there were no tourists that day at Ephesus. Marco and I had been hard at work all the morning digging the grave, and as I drove my pick I reflected that this was, humanly speaking, the last time I should ever break up the flinty ground of Ephesus. After ten years! With regard to myself and my future, I dared not think; my present preoccupation was to have finished with MacPherson and his widow.