It was another religion that brought ruin here--early Christianity--presently followed by early Mohammedanism--each burning with vandalic zeal. It was the good Emperor Constantine that first upset the Roman gods and their temples. Then Theodosius came along and pulled down the great structures, and out of the pieces built a church that was an architectural failure. Then all the early Christians in the neighborhood took a hand in pulling down and overturning; hacking away at the heathen sculpture and tracery--climbing high up the walls to scar and disfigure--to obliterate anything resembling a face. Then pretty soon the early Mohammedans came along and carried on the good work, and now and then an earthquake took a hand, until by-and-by the place became the ghastly storm of destruction it appears to-day. I was ill when I saw Baalbec. My flesh was burning and my pulse throbbing with fever. Perhaps my vision was distorted and the nightmare seemed worse than it really is, but as I stood in that field of mutilation and disorder, gazing along its wrecked and insulted glory, and through tumbling arch and ruined door caught vistas of fertile and snow-capped hill, I seemed to see a vision of what it had been in the day of its perfection. Also, I felt an itch to meet one or two of those early enthusiasts--some night in a back alley when they were not looking for me and I had a piece of scantling--I felt a sick man's craving, as it were, to undertake a little damage and disfiguration on my own account. Oh, well, it's all in the eternal story. Religions established these temples; religions pulled them down. The followers of one faith have always regarded as heathen those which preceded them. There lies a long time ahead. Will the next religion restore Baalbec or complete its desolation? Some little Syrian girls beset Laura on the way back to the hotel and tried to sell her some bead embroidery which it seems they make in a mission-school established here by the English. One of them--a little brown madonna of about ten--could speak English quite well. Laura asked her name. "Name Mary," she said. "But that's an English name." She trotted along silently, thinking; then said: "No, Syria--Mary Syria name." Sure enough, we had forgotten. The first Mary had indeed been Syrian, and I imagined her, now, a child--brown, barefoot and beautiful, like this Mary, with the same pathetic eyes. Laura--young, fair-skinned and pink-cheeked--was a marvel to these children. They followed her to the door, and when she could not buy all their stock in trade they insisted on making her presents, and one of them--little Mary--begged to be taken to America.