where they had last been seen, and fell
herself into an opening of the earth there. The outcry raised by these
unfortunates brought a number of men to their aid, and in digging to
get them out, an old marble stairway was discovered. This was about
twenty-five years ago. A certain gentleman named Monga owned the land,
and he immediately began to make excavations. He was a rich man, but
considered rather whimsical (if my peasant represented the opinion
of his neighbors), and as the excavation ate a great deal of money
(_mangiava molti soldi_), his sons discontinued the work after his
death, and nothing has been done for some time, now. The peasant
in charge was not a person of imaginative mind, though he said the
theatre (supposed to have been built in the time of Augustus)
was completed two thousand years before Christ. He had a purely
conventional admiration of the work, which he expressed at regular
intervals, by stopping short in his course, waving both hands over the
ruins, and crying in a sepulchral voice, "_Qual' opera_!" However,
as he took us faithfully into every part of it, there is no reason to
complain of him.

We crossed three or four streets, and entered at several different
gates, in order to see the uncovered parts of the work, which could
have been but a small proportion of the whole. The excavation has been
carried down thirty and forty feet below the foundations of the modern
houses, revealing the stone seats of the auditorium, the corridors
beneath them, and the canals and other apparatus for naval shows, as
in the great Amphitheatre. These works are even more stupendous than
those of the Amphitheatre, for in many cases they are not constructed,
but hewn out of the living rock, so that in this light the theatre is
a gigantic sculpture. Below all are cut channels to collect and carry
off the water of the springs in which the rock abounds. The depth of
one of these channels near the Jesuit convent must be fifty feet below
the present surface. Only in one place does the ancient edifice rise
near the top of the ground, and there is uncovered the arched front
of what was once a family-box at the theatre, with the owner's name
graven upon the arch. Many poor little houses have of course been
demolished to carry on the excavations, and to the walls that joined
them cling memorials of the simple life that once inhabited them. To
one of the buildings hung a melancholy fire-place left blackened with
smoke, and