To-day the peasants are working all over these ruins. Here they are planting grain, and there, cleaning the fields, is a gang of a dozen girls working under a turbaned man in baggy trousers. Here women are digging; farther on a man drives a camel harnessed to a one-handled plough. The only town near Ephesus is Ayasoluk, which has but a few hundred inhabitants. It has, perhaps, a dozen small stores, a railroad station, and a hotel. While at the station I saw a white, fat lamb awaiting shipment. It was tied to the platform, and a card fastened to one horn bore the name of the commission merchant in Smyrna to whom it was consigned. Just opposite the hotel are seven tall columns which once supported the great aqueduct which supplied Ephesus with water. Each of these has now a stork’s nest on its top, and the great birds may be seen any day standing there. I am told that they come here only for the winter, and that they leave every spring for Holland, or perhaps for some other far-away part of the world, every one of them carrying a baby. Before coming to Ephesus I spent a day in Smyrna, whither I shall return to go on to Constantinople and Greece. Smyrna is the largest city in Asia Minor, and has about the same position in the modern world that Ephesus once had. The chief port of this part of the Levant, it does a big business in shipping wool, wine, grapes, olives, and figs. It has a foreign trade of about fifty million dollars a year, and steamers from all parts of the Mediterranean come to its docks. The city lies at one end of the Gulf of Smyrna, which is thirty-four miles long and surrounded by lofty silver-gray mountains some of them a mile high. Its harbour is excellent, and the town has many modern buildings. Because of its importance in the trade of Asia Minor, Smyrna is a centre of political and commercial interests and the scene of fierce competition among the various nationalities. Among its people there are more Greeks than Turks. While travelling in Syria I saw many openings for American goods. The farming there is after the methods of centuries ago, and our ploughs, reapers, and other agricultural machines might be sold. I understand that the more progressive of the native landlords are ready to buy. One man, who owns more than a thousand acres of rich grainland on the high plateau between the two ranges of the Lebanon Mountains, has offered 75 per cent. of the profits to any American company that will cultivate it for two or three years, and will bring in American machinery. The landlord also agrees, upon the termination of the lease, to pay for the machinery at the regular price.