at seems
incredible. One of its great halls, a hundred yards by thirty in area,
and thirty yards high, was converted by Michael Angelo into a church. Of
the remainder, part is used as a monastery, part as barracks, and part
as an orphanage, a poor-house, and an asylum for the blind, and much is
in ruins. At Pompeii is a public bath in perfect preservation, with the
niches for the clothing, soaps, and unguents of the bathers, and even
the _strigils_, or bronze instruments for scraping the skin--the same
after eighteen hundred years as though used but yesterday. By these
means we are able to reconstruct the outward circumstances of that old
Roman life, almost as though we had shared its busy movement.

As Ligurius Rufus drew aside the heavy matting of the doorway of the
Therm[ae], of Caracalla, which then, as now, kept out the summer heat from
the buildings of Rome, a busy scene burst upon his view. A great hall,
lighted by openings in the roof, was filled with gay groups of patrician
Romans, sauntering, chatting, laughing, exchanging news, betting on the
next races, and settling bets on the last. As the modern clubman goes to
his club to see the papers and learn the current gossip, so all the
idlers in Rome came to the baths as to a social exchange, to learn the
latest bit of court scandal or public news.

"Ho, Calphurnius!" said Rufus, to the now sobered son of the city
Prefect; "what's in the wind to-day? You know all the mischief that's
going."

"Sorry I cannot maintain my reputation then. Things are dull as an old
_strigil_. Oh, by the way," and he beckoned them into a recess behind a
porphyry pillar, "there is going to be a precious row up at the palace.
I tell you in confidence. The old vixen, Fausta, has got a new spite
against the Empress Valeria, whom all the people of the palace love. The
termagant is not fit to carry water for her bath. She has found some
mare's nest of a Christian plot,--by the way you are mixed up in it,
friend Isidorus. I would advise you to have a care. In the fight of
Pagan against Christian, I fear Valeria will get the worst of it, _dii
avertant_."

"The palace walls are not glass," laughed Isidorus, "nor have you a
Dionysius' ear. How know you all this?"

"As if the Roman Prefect did not know what goes on, that he thinks worth
knowing, in every house in Rome! He has eyes and ears in his pay
everywhere; and when honest Juba, or Tubal, come with their secret
intelligence, they are n