columns, are some subterranean apartments, in one of which was
discovered a well more than eighty feet deep and still supplied with
fresh water; almost the only instance of the kind at Pompeii. The
beautiful statuette of Silenus, already described, was found in this
house. Here also was made the rare discovery of the skeletons of two
horses, with the remains of a _biga_.

This description might be extended, but it would be tedious to repeat
details of smaller and less interesting houses, the features of which
present in general much uniformity; and we shall therefore conclude
this account of the more recent discoveries with a notice of a group
of bodies found in this neighborhood, the forms of which have been
preserved to us through the ingenuity of Signor Fiorelli.

It has already been remarked that the showers of _lapillo_, or pumice
stone, by which Pompeii was overwhelmed and buried, were followed by
streams of a thick, tenacious mud, which flowing over the deposit of
_lapillo_, and filling up all the crannies and interstices into which
that substance had not been able to penetrate, completed the
destruction of the city. The objects over which this mud flowed were
enveloped in it as in a plaster mould, and where these objects
happened to be human bodies, their decay left a cavity in which their
forms were as accurately preserved and rendered as in the mould
prepared for the casting of a bronze statue. Such cavities had often
been observed. In some of them remnants of charred wood, accompanied
with bronze or other ornaments, showed that the object inclosed had
been a piece of furniture; while in others, the remains of bones and
of articles of apparel evinced but too plainly that the hollow had
been the living grave which had swallowed up some unfortunate human
being. In a happy moment the idea occurred to Signor Fiorelli of
filling up these cavities with liquid plaster, and thus obtaining a
cast of the objects which had been inclosed in them. The experiment
was first made in a small street leading from the Via del Balcone
Pensile towards the Forum. The bodies here found were on the _lapillo_
at a height of about fifteen feet from the level of the ground.

"Among the first casts thus obtained were those of four human beings.
They are now preserved in a room at Pompeii, and more ghastly and
painful, yet deeply interesting and touching objects, it is difficult
to conceive. We have death itself moulded and cast--the ver