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thunder and lightning, broke forth and continued with dire fury for two
or three hours. It was a thing unprecedented in Smyrna at that time of
the year, and scared some of the most skeptical. The streets ran rivers
and the hotel floor was flooded with water. The dinner had to be
suspended. When the storm finished and left every body drenched through
and through, and melancholy and half-drowned, the ascensionists came
down
from the mountain as dry as so many charity-sermons! They had been
looking down upon the fearful storm going on below, and really believed
that their proposed destruction of the world was proving a grand success.
A railway here in Asia--in the dreamy realm of the Orient--in the fabled
land of the Arabian Nights--is a strange thing to think of. And yet they
have one already, and are building another. The present one is well
built and well conducted, by an English Company, but is not doing an
immense amount of business. The first year it carried a good many
passengers, but its freight list only comprised eight hundred pounds of
figs!
It runs almost to the very gates of Ephesus--a town great in all ages of
the world--a city familiar to readers of the Bible, and one which was as
old as the very hills when the disciples of Christ preached in its
streets. It dates back to the shadowy ages of tradition, and was the
birthplace of gods renowned in Grecian mythology. The idea of a
locomotive tearing through such a place as this, and waking the phantoms
of its old days of romance out of their dreams of dead and gone
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