N OF CHARLES III., OF MURAT,
AND OF FERDINAND.--THE EXCAVATIONS AS THEY NOW ARE.--SIGNOR
FIORELLI.--APPEARANCE OF THE RUINS.--WHAT IS AND WHAT IS NOT FOUND
THERE.

A railroad runs from Naples to Pompeii. Are you alone? The trip occupies
one hour, and you have just time enough to read what follows, pausing
once in a while to glance at Vesuvius and the sea; the clear, bright
waters hemmed in by the gentle curve of the promontories; a bluish coast
that approaches and becomes green; a green coast that withdraws into the
distance and becomes blue; Castellamare looming up, and Naples receding.
All these lines and colors existed too at the time when Pompeii was
destroyed: the island of Prochyta, the cities of Baiae, of Bauli, of
Neapolis, and of Surrentum bore the names that they retain. Portici was
called Herculaneum; Torre dell'Annunziata was called Oplontes;
Castellamare, Stabiae; Misenum and Minerva designated the two extremities
of the gulf. However, Vesuvius was not what it has become; fertile and
wooded almost to the summit, covered with orchards and vines, it must
have resembled the picturesque heights of Monte San Angelo, toward which
we are rolling. The summit alone, honeycombed with caverns and covered
with black stones, betrayed to the learned a volcano "long extinct." It
was to blaze out again, however, in a terrible eruption; and, since
then, it has constantly flamed and smoked, menacing the ruins it has
made and the new cities that brave it, calmly reposing at its feet.

What do you expect to find at Pompeii? At a distance, its antiquity
seems enormous, and the word "ruins" awakens colossal conceptions in the
excited fancy of the traveller. But, be not self-deceived; that is the
first rule in knocking about over the world. Pompeii was a small city of
only thirty thousand souls; something like what Geneva was thirty years
ago. Like Geneva, too, it was marvellously situated--in the depth of a
picturesque valley between mountains shutting in the horizon on one
side, at a few steps from the sea and from a streamlet, once a river,
which plunges into it--and by its charming site attracted personages of
distinction, although it was peopled chiefly with merchants and others
in easy circumstances; shrewd, prudent folk, and probably honest and
clever enough, as well. The etymologists, after having exhausted, in
their lexicons, all the words that chime in sound with Pompeii, have, at
length, agreed in der