I felt sorry for the Apostle, and was going over to sit with him, only there wasn't room, and just then somebody noticed a camel train--the first we have seen--huge creatures heavily loaded and plodding along on the old highway. This made a diversion. Then there was another camel train, and another. Then came a string of donkeys--all laden with the wares of the East going to Smyrna. The lagging Oriental day was awake; the old road was still alive, after all. Like the first "Innocents," we had brought a carload or so of donkeys--four-legged donkeys--from Smyrna, and I think they were the same ones, from their looks. They were aged and patchy, and they filled the bill in other ways. They wrung our hearts with their sad, patient faces and their decrepitude, and they exasperated us with their indifference to our desires. I suppose excursion parties look pretty much alike, and that the _Quaker City_ pilgrims forty-two years ago looked a good deal like ours as we strung away down the valley toward the ancient city. I hope they did not look any worse than ours. To see long-legged men and stout ladies perched on the backs of those tiny asses, in rickety saddles that feel as if they would slip (and do slip if one is not careful), may be diverting enough, but it is not pretty. If the donkey stays in the middle of the narrow, worn pathway, it is very well; but if he goes to experimenting and wandering off over the rocks, then look out. You can't steer him with the single remnant of rope on his halter (he has no bridle), and he pitches a good deal when he gets off his course. Being a tall person, I was closed up like a grasshopper, and felt fearfully top-heavy. Laura, age fourteen, kept behind me--commenting on my appearance and praying for my overthrow. It was a good way to the ruins--the main ruins--though in reality there were ruins everywhere: old mosques, gray with age and half-buried in the soil--a thousand years old, but young compared with the more ancient city; crumbling Roman aqueducts leading away to the mountains--old even before the mosques were built, but still new when Ephesus was already hoary with antiquity; broken columns sticking everywhere out of the weeds and grass--scarred, crumbling, and moss-grown, though still not of that first, far, unrecorded period. But by-and-by we came to mighty walls of stone--huge abutments rising from the marshy plain--and these were really old. The Phoenicians may have laid them in some far-off time, but tradition goes still farther back and declares they were laid by giants--the one-eyed kind, the Cyclops--when all this marsh was sea. These huge abutments were piers in that ancient day. A blue harbor washed them, and the merchant ships of mighty Ephesus lay alongside and loaded for every port.