it could not be bought in
New York for half a franc the bottle, if at all; at thrice that sum in
Naples it was not a third as good.

If there had been anything to do after lunch except go to the train, we
could not have done it, we were so spent with our two hours' walk
through Pompeii, though the gray day had been rather invigorating.
Certainly it was not so exhausting as that white-hot day forty-three
years before when I had broiled over the same ground under the blazing
sun of a Pompeian November. Yet the difference in the muscles and
emotions of twenty-seven as against those of seventy told in favor of
the white-hot day; and, besides that, in the time that had elapsed a
much greater burden of antiquity had been added to the city than had
accumulated in its history between the year 79 and the year 1864. During
most of those centuries Pompeii had been dreamlessly sleeping under its
ashes, but in the ensuing less than half a century it had wakefully,
however unwillingly, witnessed such events as the failure of secession
and the abolition of slavery, the unification of Italy and Germany, the
fall of the Second Empire, the liberation of Cuba, and the acquisition
of the Philippines, the exile of Richard Croker, the destruction of the
Boer Republic, the rise and spread of the trusts, the purification of
municipal politics, the invention of wireless telegraphy, and the
general adoption of automobiling. These things, and others like them,
had perhaps not aged Pompeii so much as they had aged me, but their
subjective effect was the same, and upon the whole I was not altogether
sorry to have added scarcely a new impression of the place to those I
had been carrying for more than a generation. Quantitatively there were
plenty of new impressions to be had; impressions of more roofs, gardens,
columns, houses, temples, walls, frescos; but qualitatively the Greater
Pompeii was now not different from the lesser which I remembered so
well.

This, at least, was what I said to myself on the ground and afterward in
the National Museum at Naples, where most of the precious Pompeian
things, new and old, are heaped up. They still make but a poor show
there beside the treasures of Herculaneum, where the excavation of a few
streets and houses has yielded costlier and lovelier things than all the
lengths and breadths of Pompeii. But not for this would I turn against
Pompeii at the last moment, as it were, though my second visit had not
aesth