into a
strange place. Always a strange place, however often the guide-books
beat their iterations upon it, a place that leaps at imagination,
peering into other days through the mists that lie between, and blinds
it with a rush of light--the place where they have gathered together
what was left of the dead Pompeiians and their world. There they lay
before us for our wonderment as they ran, and tripped, and struggled,
and fell in the night of that day when they and the gods together were
overwhelmed, and they died as they thought in the end of time. And
through an open door Vesuvius sent up its eternal gentle woolly curl
again the daylight sky, and vineyards throve, and birds sang, and we,
who had survived the gods, came curious to look. The figures lay in
glass cases, and Dicky remarked, with unusual seriousness, that it was
like a dead-house.

"Except," said poppa, "that in this mortuary there isn't ever going to
be anybody who can identify the remains. When you come to think of
it--that's kind of hard."

"No chance of Christian burial once you get into a museum," said Dick
with solicitude.

"I should like," remarked Mrs. Portheris, polishing her _pince nez_ to
get a better view of a mother and daughter lying on their faces. "I
should like to see the clergyman who would attempt it. These people were
heathen, and richly deserved their fate. Richly!"

Momma looked at her husband's Aunt Caroline with indignant scorn. "Do
you really think so?" she asked, but we could all see that her words
were a very inadequate expression for her emotions. Mrs. Portheris drew
all the guns of her orthodoxy into line for battle. "I am surprised----"
she began, and then the Senator politely but firmly interfered.

"Ladies," he said, "'_De mortuis nisi bonum_,' which is to say it isn't
customary to slang corpses, especially, as you may say, in their
presence. I guess we can all be thankful, anyhow, that heathen nowadays
have got a cooler earth to live on," and that for the moment was the end
of it, but momma still gazed commiseratingly at the figures, with a
suspicious tendency to look for her handkerchief.

"It's too terrible," she said. "We can actually see their _features_."

"Don't let them get on your nerves, Augusta," suggested poppa.

"I won't if I can help it. But when you see their clothes and their hair
and realise----"

"It happened over eighteen hundred years ago, my dear, and most of them
got away."

"That didn't mak