"They also conducted me inside the wall--of the curious temple, in which they said, the banished inhabitants were accustomed to celebrate the mystic rites of an unhallowed worship. They particularly pointed out to me certain features of the building, which having been the peculiar objects of a former superstitious regard, they had as a matter of duty sedulously defiled and defaced. The reputed site of certain shrines they had thus particularly noticed, and various sheltered chambers, in one of which was a deep well, constructed, they believed, with a dreadful design. Besides these, they led me to see a large and deep chiseled marble vase or basin, supported upon twelve oxen, also of marble, and of the size of life, of which they told some romantic stories. They said the deluded persons, most of whom were emigrants from a great distance, believed their Deity countenanced their reception here for a baptism of regeneration, as proxies for whomsoever they held in warm affection in the countries from which they had come. That here parents 'went into the water' for their lost children, children for their parents, widows for their spouses, and young persons for their lovers. That thus the great vase came to be for them associated with all dear and distant memories, and was therefore the object, of all others, in the building, to which they attached the greatest degree of idolatrous affection. On this account the victors had so diligently desecrated it as to render the apartment in which it was contained too noisome to abide in. They permitted me also to ascend into the steeple to see where it had been lightning struck on the Sabbath before, and to look out east and south on wasted farms like those I had seen near the city, extending till they were lost in the distance. Here in the face of pure day, close to the scar of divine wrath left by the thunderbolt, were fragments of food, cruses of liquor, and broken drinking vessels, with a bass drum and a steamboat signal bell, of which I afterwards learned the use with pain.