“He longed to overthrow the hideous black figure which stood in her rightful place. Yet he knew that to be impossible. It would take the strength of many men to throw down an idol so huge and massive. Suddenly an idea came. He could not shatter, but he might _burn_ the image! With this thought, he ran towards the mass of lights in front of it, scattering and upsetting them right and left at the feet of the wooden figure. Behind it, supported on golden pillars, there was a gallery, and, without a second’s pause, Dinocrates rushed like a boy up the marble stairs that led to it, and, standing now high above the head of the figure, he snatched the little white statue from his cloak, and held it aloft. “‘_This_ is Diana of the Ephesians!’ he cried aloud, and his voice echoed and re-echoed through the aisles and colonnades of the temple. Before the last sound of it died away, a terrific clap of thunder shook the temple. Frightened voices were heard on every side, and suddenly, from every direction, priests in gorgeous robes came rushing towards the idol. Dinocrates caught one glimpse of them as they snatched the burning lamps from the feet of the figure, and then everything went dark. [Illustration: ‘THIS IS DIANA OF THE EPHESIANS’] “In another moment, how he could not tell, he found himself in the open air, listening to a murmur which sounded like the soft rustling of leaves overhead. Slowly he opened his eyes, and looked round him in amazement. The great temple had vanished. He was lying under trees in a little glade, and there before him stood a simple altar of stones piled together, and behind it, in the hollow of a tree, he saw a little figure roughly carved. And then, with a cry of wonder, he _remembered_. “This was the first altar to Diana, and here, as a tiny boy, he had laid poppies upon it! Scarcely had he seized that memory, when the altar melted away before his eyes, and out of the mist round the place where it had stood emerged a small temple. He remembered that, too. In another life he had planned it, and seen it built. He remembered the columns he had invented—those pillars of a new shape called later the _Ionic_ columns. For a moment the temple stood there in the glade, gleaming in moonlight, and then _it_ too disappeared.... In its place, rising out of the earthlike smoke which gradually took shape, was formed at last another, this time a mighty temple, covering the whole of what had once been the glade. He had built this one, also—in yet another life—hundreds of years later! And, as he gazed at its rows of shining columns, he saw that they were like the columns of the first small temple. To the building now before him—again hundreds of years later—he had come back as a little boy on the day when his hair was cut off by the priest. How well he recalled it! How well he remembered looking at the pillars with some faint memory stirring in his mind, yet with no idea that long, long before he had built them....