Three days after that deed a relative,
who had neglected me in life, died and left me wealth--wealth, at least,
to me! Wealth greater than that for which I had----My ambition died in
remorse!"

Houseman passed away in his own bed. But he had to be buried secretly in
the dead of night, for, ten years after Eugene Aram had died on the
scaffold, the hatred of the world survived for his accomplice. Rowland
Lester did not live long after Madeline's death. But when Walter
returned from a period of honourable service with the great Frederick of
Prussia, it was with no merely cousinly welcome that Ellinor received
him.

* * * * *

The Last Days of Pompeii

"The Last Days of Pompeii," the most popular of Lytton's
historical romances, was begun and almost completed at Naples
in the winter of 1832-3, and was first published in 1834. The
period dealt with is that of 79 A.D., during the short reign
of Titus, when Rome was at its zenith and the picturesque
Campanian city a kind of Rome-by-the-Sea. Lytton wrote the
novel some thirty years before the excavations of Pompeii had
been systematically begun; but his pictures of the life, the
luxuries, the pastimes and the gaiety of the half-Grecian
colony, its worship of Isis, its trade with Alexandria, and
the early struggles of Christianity with heathen superstition
are exceptionally vivid. The creation of Nydia, the blind
flower-girl, was suggested by the casual remark of an
acquaintance that at the time of the destruction of Pompeii
the sightless would have found the easiest deliverance.

_I.--The Athenian's Love Story_

Within the narrow compass of the walls of Pompeii was contained a
specimen of every gift which luxury offered to power. In its minute but
glittering shops, its tiny palaces, its baths, its forum, its theatre,
its circus--in the energy yet corruption, in the refinement yet the
vice, of its people, you beheld a model of the whole Roman Empire. It
was a toy, a plaything, a show-box, in which the gods seemed pleased to
keep the representation of the great monarchy of earth, and which they
afterwards hid from time, to give to the wonder of posterity--the moral
of the maxim, that under the sun there is nothing new.

Crowded in the glassy bay were vessels of commerce and gilded galleys
for the pleasures of the rich citizens. The boats of the fishermen