Travellers who have merely visited the classic scenes of Greece and Italy, or at the best have "browsed about" the ruinous sites of Tyre and Carthage, must have a mortifying sense of the newness of such recent settlements, in reading of Mr. Porter's journey through Bashan, and sojourn in Bozrah, Salcah, Edrei, and the other cities of the Rephaim. As Chicago is to Athens, so is Athens to these mighty and wonderful cities of doom and eld, which are marvellous, not alone for their antiquity, (so remote that one looks into it dizzily and doubtfully, as a depth into which it is not wholly safe to peer,) but also for the perfection in which they stand and have stood amid the desolation of unnumbered ages. A Cockney clergyman travelling through Eastern Syria, with his Ezekiel in his hand, arrives at nightfall before the gates of a town which was a flourishing metropolis in the days of Moses, and takes up his lodging in a house built by some newly-married giant, say five or six thousand years ago. It is in perfect repair, "the walls are sound, the roofs unbroken, the doors and even window-shutters"--being of solid basalt monoliths, incapable of decay or destruction--"are in their places." In the town whose dumb streets no foot but the Bedouin's has trodden for centuries and centuries, there are hundreds of such houses as this; and in a province not larger than Rhode Island there are a hundred such towns. According to Mr. Porter, the language of Scripture, which the strongest powers of deglutition have sometimes rejected as that of Eastern hyperbole, is literally verified at every step in the land of Bashan. The facts, he says, would not stand the arithmetic of Bishop Colenso for an instant; yet from the summit of the castle of Salcah (capital of his late gigantic Majesty, King Og) he counted thirty utterly deserted and perfectly habitable towns; so that he finds no difficulty in believing the bulletin of Jair in which the Israelite general declares he took in the province of Argob sixty great cities "fenced with high walls, gates, and bars, besides unwalled towns a great many." Nor is the fulfilment of prophecy in regard to this kingdom, populous and prosperous beyond any other known to history, less literal or less startling. "Thus saith the Lord God of Israel: They shall eat their bread with carefulness, and drink their water with astonishment, that her land may be desolate from all that is therein, because of the violence of all that dwell therein. And the cities that are inhabited shall be laid waste, and the land shall be desolate."