t would be an
insolent violence to call breakers) come in; we saw the mountains
slope their tawny and golden manes caressingly downward to the waters,
where the islands were dozing yet; and landward, on the left, we saw
Vesuvius, with his brown mantle of ashes drawn close about his throat,
reclining on the plain, and smoking a bland and thoughtful morning
pipe, of which the silver fumes curled lightly, lightly upward in the
sunrise.

We dismounted at the station, walked a few rods eastward through a
little cotton-field, and found ourselves at the door of Hotel Diomed,
where we took breakfast for a number of sesterces which I am sure
it would have made an ancient Pompeian stir in his urn to think of
paying. But in Italy one learns the chief Italian virtue, patience,
and we paid our account with the utmost good nature. There was
compensation in store for us, and the guide whom we found at the gate
leading up the little hill to Pompeii inclined the disturbed balance
in favor of our happiness. He was a Roman, spoke Italian that Beatrice
might have addressed to Dante, and was numbered Twenty-six. I suppose
it is known that the present Italian Government forbids people to
be pillaged in any way on its premises, and that the property of the
State is no longer the traffic of custodians and their pitiless
race. At Pompeii each person pays two francs for admission, and is
rigorously forbidden by recurrent sign-boards to offer money to the
guides. Ventisei (as we shall call him) himself pointed out one of
these notices in English, and did his duty faithfully without asking
or receiving fees in money. He was a soldier, like all the other
guides, and was a most intelligent, obliging fellow, with a
self-respect and dignity worthy of one of our own volunteer soldiers.

Ventisei took us up the winding slope, and led us out of this living
world through the Sea-gate of Pompeii back into the dead past--the
past which, with all its sensuous beauty and grace, and all its
intellectual power, I am not sorry to have dead, and for the most
part, buried. Our feet had hardly trodden the lava flagging of the
narrow streets when we came in sight of the laborers who were exhuming
the inanimate city. They were few in number, not perhaps a score, and
they worked tediously, with baskets to carry away the earth from the
excavation, boys and girls carrying the baskets, and several athletic
old women plying picks, while an overseer sat in a chair near b