made shops of the lower corridors of the old arena, and it is friends and neighbors with the modern life about it, as such things usually are in Italy.  Fortunately for the stranger, the Piazza Bra flanks it on one hand, and across this it has a magnificent approach.  It is not less happy in being little known to sentiment, and the traveller who visits it by moonlight, has a full sense of grandeur and pathos, without any of the sheepishness attending homage to that battered old coquette, the Coliseum, which so many emotional people have sighed over, kissing and afterwards telling.

But he who would know the innocent charm of a ruin as yet almost wholly uncourted by travel, must go to the Roman theatre in Verona.  It is not a favorite of the hand-books; and we were decided to see it chiefly by a visit to the Museum, where, besides an admirable gallery of paintings, there is a most interesting collection of antiques in bronze and marble found in excavating the theatre.  The ancient edifice had been completely buried, and a quarter of the town was built over it, as Portici is built over Herculaneum, and on the very top stood a Jesuit convent.  One day, some children, playing in the garden of one of the shabby houses, suddenly vanished from sight.  Their mother ran like one mad (I am telling the story in the words of the peasant who related it to me) to the spot where they had last been seen, and fell herself into an opening of the earth there.  The outcry raised by these unfortunates brought a number of men to their aid, and in digging to get them out, an old marble stairway was discovered.  This was about twenty-five years ago.  A certain gentleman named Monga owned the land, and he immediately began to make excavations.  He was a rich man, but considered rather whimsical (if my peasant represented the opinion of his neighbors), and as the excavation ate a great deal of money (mangiava molti soldi), his sons discontinued the work after his death, and nothing has been done for some time, now.  The peasant in charge was not a person of imaginative mind, though he said the theatre (supposed to have been built in the time of Augustus) was completed two thousand years before Christ.  He had a purely conventional admiration of the work, which he expressed at regular intervals, by stopping short in his course, waving both hands over the ruins, and crying in a sepulchral voice, “Qual’ opera!” However, as he took us faithfully into every part of it, there is no reason to complain of him.

We crossed three or four streets, and entered at several different gates, in order to see the uncovered parts of the work, which could have been but a small proportion of the whole.  The excavation has been carried down thirty and forty feet below the foundations of the modern houses, revealing the stone seats of the auditorium, the corridors beneath them, and the canals and other apparatus for naval shows, as in the great Amphitheatre.  These works are even more stupendous