y, and
smoked, and directed their exertions.

They dig down about eight or ten feet, uncovering the walls and
pillars of the houses, and the mason, who is at hand, places little
iron rivets in the stucco to prevent its fall where it is weak, while
an artist attends to wash and clean the frescos as fast as they are
exposed. The soil through which the excavation first passes is not
of great depth; the ashes which fell damp with scalding rain, in the
second eruption, are perhaps five feet thick; the rest is of that
porous stone which descended in small fragments during the first
eruption. A depth of at least two feet in this stone is always left
untouched by the laborers till the day when the chief superintendent
of the work comes out from Naples to see the last layers removed;
and it is then that the beautiful mosaic pavements of the houses are
uncovered, and the interesting and valuable objects are nearly always
found.

The wonder was, seeing how slowly the work proceeded, not that
two thirds of Pompeii were yet buried, but that one third had been
exhumed. We left these hopeless toilers, and went down-town into the
Forum, stepping aside on the way to look into one of the Pompeian
Courts of Common Pleas.

II.

Now Pompeii is, in truth, so full of marvel and surprise, that it
would be unreasonable to express disappointment with Pompeii in
fiction. And yet I cannot help it. An exuberant carelessness of phrase
in most writers and talkers who describe it had led me to expect much
more than it was possible to find there. In my Pompeii I confess that
the houses had no roofs--in fact, the rafters which sustained the
tiles being burnt, how could the roofs help falling in? But otherwise
my Pompeii was a very complete affair: the walls all rose to their
full height; doorways and arches were perfect; the columns were all
unbroken and upright; putting roofs on my Pompeii, you might have
lived in it very comfortably. The real Pompeii is different. It is
seldom that any wall is unbroken; most columns are fragmentary; and
though the ground-plans are always distinct, very few rooms in the
city are perfect in form, and the whole is much more ruinous than I
thought.

But this ruin once granted, and the idle disappointment at its
greatness overcome, there is endless material for study, instruction,
and delight. It is the revelation of another life, and the utterance
of the past is here more perfect than anywhere else in the world.