bare-footed peasant-girls carry to the cars at a little distance. A
railroad has been built expressly to carry away the earth. The cars
are drawn by mules. The girls prefer carrying their baskets on their
heads. The men have to dig carefully, for there is no knowing when
they may come across some rare and valuable work of art.

The excavations are conducted in this manner. Among the trees, and in
the cultivated fields there can be traced little hillocks, which are
pretty regular in form and size. These indicate the blocks of houses
in the buried city, and, of course, the streets run between them.
After the land is bought from the owners, these streets are carefully
marked out, the vines are cleared away, the trees cut down, and the
digging out of these streets is commenced from the top. The work is
carried on pretty steadily at present, but it is only within the last
few years that it has been conducted with any degree of enterprise and
skill.

[Illustration: A CLEARED STREET IN POMPEII.]

Let us leave this rubbish, and go into a street that has already been
cleared. The first thing you will observe is that it is very narrow.
It is evidently not intended for a fashionable drive. But few of the
streets are any wider than this one. The greatest width of a street in
Pompeii is seven yards, and some are only two and a half yards,
sidewalks and all. The middle of the street is paved with blocks of
lava. The sidewalks are raised, and it is evident the owners of the
houses were allowed to put any pavement they pleased in front of
their dwellings. In one place you will see handsome stone flags the
next pavement may be nothing but soil beaten down, while the next will
be costly marble.

The upper stories of the houses are in ruins. It is probable,
therefore, that they were built of wood, while the lower stories,
being of stone, still remain. They had few windows on the street, as
the Pompeiians preferred that these should look out on an inner square
or court. To the right of the picture is a small monument, and in the
left-hand corner is a fountain, or rather the stone slabs that once
enclosed a fountain.

As we walk slowly up the solitary street, we think of the busy,
restless feet that trod these very stones eighteen hundred years ago.
Our minds go back to the year of our Lord 79, when there was high
carnival in the little city of Pompeii, with its thirty thousand
people, when the town was filled with strangers who had c