The colors of this fresco of the Judgment of Paris are still so fresh and bright, that it photographs very well, but there are other frescos wherein there is more visible perfection of line, but in which the colors are so dim that they can only be reproduced by drawings.  One of these is the Wounded Adonis cared for by Venus and the Loves; in which the story is treated with a playful pathos wonderfully charming.  The fair boy leans in the languor of his hurt toward Venus, who sits utterly disconsolate beside him, while the Cupids busy themselves with such slight surgical offices as Cupids may render:  one prepares a linen bandage for the wound, another wraps it round the leg of Adonis, another supports one of his heavy arms, another finds his own emotions too much for him and pauses to weep.  It is a pity that the colors of this beautiful fresco are grown so dim, and a greater pity that most of the other frescos in Pompeii must share its fate, and fade away.  The hues are vivid when the walls are first uncovered, and the ashes washed from the pictures, but then the malice of the elements begins anew, and rain and sun draw the life out of tints which the volcano failed to obliterate.  In nearly all cases they could be preserved by throwing a roof above the walls, and it is a wonder that the Government does not take this slight trouble to save them.

Among the frescos which told no story but their own, we were most pleased with one in a delicately painted little bed-chamber.  This represented an alarmed and furtive man, whom we at once pronounced The Belated Husband, opening a door with a night-latch.  Nothing could have been better than this miserable wretch’s cowardly haste and cautious noiselessness in applying his key; apprehension sat upon his brow, confusion dwelt in his guilty eye.  He had been out till two o’clock in the morning, electioneering for Pansa, the friend of the people ("Pansa, and Roman gladiators,” “Pansa, and Christians to the Beasts,” was the platform), and he had left his placens uxor at home alone with the children, and now within this door that placens uxor awaited him!

V.

You have read, no doubt, of their discovering, a year or two since, in making an excavation in a Pompeian street, the molds of four human bodies, three women and a man, who fell down, blind and writhing, in the storm of fire eighteen hundred years ago; whose shape the settling and hardening ashes took; whose flesh wasted away, and whose bones lay there in the hollow of the matrix till the cunning of this time found them, and, pouring liquid plaster round the skeletons, clothed them with human form again, and drew them forth into the world once more.  There are many things in Pompeii which bring back the gay life of the city, but nothing which so vividly reports the terrible manner of her death as these effigies of the creatures that actually shared it.  The man