in the last struggle has thrown himself upon his back and taken his doom sturdily—­there is a sublime calm in his rigid figure.  The women lie upon their faces, their limbs tossed and distorted, their drapery tangled and heaped about them, and in every fibre you see how hard they died.  One presses her face into her handkerchief to draw one last breath unmixed with scalding steam; another’s arms are wildly thrown abroad to clutch at help; another’s hand is appealingly raised, and on her slight fingers you see the silver hoops with which her poor dead vanity adorned them.

The guide takes you aside from the street into the house where they lie, and a dreadful shadow drops upon your heart as you enter their presence.  Without, the hell-storm seems to fall again, and the whole sunny plain to be darkened with its ruin, and the city to send up the tumult of her despair.

What is there left in Pompeii to speak of after this?  The long street of tombs outside the walls?  Those that died before the city’s burial seem to have scarcely a claim to the solemnity of death.

Shall we go see Diomed’s Villa, and walk through the freedman’s long underground vaults, where his friends thought to be safe, and were smothered in heaps?  The garden-ground grows wild among its broken columns with weeds and poplar saplings; in one of the corridors they sell photographs, on which, if you please, Ventisei has his bottle, or drink-money.  So we escape from the doom of the calamity, and so, at last, the severely forbidden buonamano is paid.  A dog may die many deaths besides choking with butter.

We return slowly through the city, where we have spent the whole day, from nine till four o’clock.  We linger on the way, imploring Ventisei if there is not something to be seen in this or that house; we make our weariness an excuse for sitting down, and cannot rend ourselves from the bliss of being in Pompeii.

At last we leave its gates, and swear each other to come again many times while in Naples, and never go again.

Perhaps it was as well.  You cannot repeat great happiness.

IX.

A HALF-HOUR AT HERCULANEUM.

I.

The road from Naples to Herculaneum is, in fact, one long street; it hardly ceases to be city in Naples till it is town at Portici, and in the interval it is suburb, running between palatial lines of villas, which all have their names ambitiously painted over their doors.  Great part of the distance this street is bordered by the bay, and, as far as this is the case, it is picturesque, as every thing is belonging to marine life in Italy.  Sea-faring people go lounging up and down among the fishermen’s boats drawn up on the shore, and among the fishermen’s wives making nets, while the fishermen’s children play and clamber everywhere, and over all flap and flutter the clothes hung on poles to dry.  In