thousand. The semicircle of seats is still
unbroken; the arrangements of the stage, the stairways, the entries of
the building can all be easily traced.

There were gay times in the city when these two theatres were filled
with people. What comedies of Plautus or Terence or Aristophanes or
Menander; what tragedies of Seneca, or of the seven dramatists of
Alexandria who were called the "Pleias," were presented here?

Look up along those lofty tiers of seats in the pale, clear starlight.
Can you see no shadowy figures sitting there, hear no light whisper of
ghostly laughter, no thin ripple of clapping hands? What flash of wit
amuses them, what nobly tragic word or action stirs them to applause?
What problem of their own life, what reflection of their own heart, does
the stage reveal to them? We shall never know. The play at Gerasa is
ended.

_A PSALM AMONG THE RUINS_

_The lizard rested on the rock while I sat among the ruins;
And the pride of man was like a vision of the night._

_Lo, the lords of the city have disappeared into darkness;
The ancient wilderness hath swallowed up all their work._

_There is nothing left of the city but a heap of fragments;
The bones of a carcass that a wild beast hath devoured._

_Behold the desert waiteth hungrily for man's dwellings;
Surely the tide of desolation returneth upon his toil._

_All that he hath painfully lifted up is shaken down in a moment;
The memory of his glory is buried beneath the billows of sand._

_Then a voice said, Look again upon the ruins;
These broken arches have taught generations to build._

_Moreover the name of this city shall be remembered;
Here a poor man spoke a word that shall not die._

_This is the glory that is stronger than the desert;
For God hath given eternity to the thought of man._

IX

THE MOUNTAINS OF SAMARIA

I

JORDAN FERRY

Look down from these tranquil heights of Jebel Osha, above the noiseful,
squalid little city of Es Salt, and you see what Moses saw when he
climbed Mount Pisgah and looked upon the Promised Land which he was
never to enter.

"Could we but climb where Moses stood,
And view the landscape o'er,
Not Jordan's stream, nor death's cold flood,
Should fright us from the shore."

Pisgah was probably a few miles south of the place where we are now
standing, but the main features of the view are the same. These broad
mo