We passed around this dainty playhouse, across a little wheat-field that some peasant has planted against its very walls, on up the hill, scrambling along steep declivities over its brow, and, behold! we came out high above the great theatre on the other side, and all the plain and slopes of the old city, with its white fragments and its poor ruined harbor, lay at our feet. Earthquakes shook the city down and filled up the splendid harbor. If the harbor had been spared the city would have been rebuilt. Instead, the harbor is a marsh, the city a memory. From where we stood we could survey the sweep of the vanished city. We could look across into the library and the market-place and follow a marble road--its white blocks worn smooth by a million treading feet--where it stretched away toward the sea. And once more we tried to conjure the vision of the past--to close our eyes and reproduce the vanished day. And once more we failed. We could glimpse a picture, we could construct a city, but it was never quite that city--never quite in that place. Our harbor with its white sails and thronging wharves was never quite that harbor--our crowded streets were never quite those streets. Here were just ruins--always ruins--they could never have been anything but ruins. Perhaps our imaginations were not in good working order. We descended again into the great theatre, for it fascinated us, nearly breaking our necks where vines and briers tangled, pausing every other minute to rest and consider and dream. Pawing over a heap of rubbish--odd bits of carving, inscriptions, and the like--the place is a treasure-trove of such things--I found a little marble torso of a female figure. Head and arms and the lower part of the body all gone, but what remained was exquisite beyond words--a gem, even though rubbish, in Ephesus. Now, of course, the reader is an honest person. He would have said, as I did: "No, it does not matter, rubbish or no rubbish, it is not mine. It belongs to the government-- I cannot steal. Besides, there is Laura, age fourteen: I cannot set her a bad example. Also, there are the police. No, my conscience is perfect; I cannot do it." I know the reader would have reflected thus, and so did I, as stated. Then I found I could crowd it into my inside coat-pocket, and that by cramming my handkerchief carefully on top of it, it did not distress me so much, especially when I gave it a little support with my forearm, to make it swing in a natural way. But when I remembered that the _Quaker City_ pilgrims had been searched on leaving Ephesus, my conscience began to harass me again, though not enough as yet to make me disgorge.