end, might better represent their size. In combined length these three
stones stretch nearly two hundred feet; they are thirteen feet square;
two of them are sixty-four feet long each, and the third is sixty-nine.
They are built into the massive wall some twenty feet above the ground.
They are there, but how they got there is the question. I have seen the
hull of a steamboat that was smaller than one of those stones. All these
great walls are as exact and shapely as the flimsy things we build of
bricks in these days. A race of gods or of giants must have inhabited
Baalbec many a century ago. Men like the men of our day could hardly
rear such temples as these.

We went to the quarry from whence the stones of Baalbec were taken. It
was about a quarter of a mile off, and down hill. In a great pit lay the
mate of the largest stone in the ruins. It lay there just as the giants
of that old forgotten time had left it when they were called hence--just
as they had left it, to remain for thousands of years, an eloquent rebuke
unto such as are prone to think slightingly of the men who lived before
them. This enormous block lies there, squared and ready for the
builders' hands--a solid mass fourteen feet by seventeen, and but a few
inches less than seventy feet long! Two buggies could be driven abreast
of each other, on its surface, from one end of it to the other, and leave
room enough for a man or two to walk on either side.

One might swear that all the John Smiths and George Wilkinsons, and all
the other pitiful nobodies between Kingdom Come and Baalbec would
inscribe their poor little names upon the walls of Baalbec's magnificent
ruins, and would add the town, the county and the State they came from
--and swearing thus, be infallibly correct. It is a pity some great ruin
does not fall in and flatten out some of these reptiles, and scare their
kind out of ever giving their names to fame upon any walls or monuments
again, forever.

Properly, with the sorry relics we bestrode, it was a three days' journey
to Damascus. It was necessary that we should do it in less than two.
It was necessary because our three pilgrims would not travel on the
Sabbath day. We were all perfectly willing to keep the Sabbath day, but
there are times when to keep the letter of a sacred law whose spirit is
righteous, becomes a sin, and this was a case in point. We pleaded for
the tired, ill-treated horses, and tried to show that their faith