We had to wait twenty minutes for the other party, on account of their British objection to anybody’s dust.  Even Mr. Mafferton looked quelled when they arrived, and Isabel quite abject, while Mrs. Portheris wore that air of justification which no circumstance could impair, which was particularly her own.  She would not sit down.  “It gives these people a claim on you,” she said.  “I did not come here to run up an hotel bill, but to see Pompeii.  Pompeii I demand to see.”  The players on the flute and mandolin looked at Mrs. Portheris consideringly and then strolled away, and the guide, with a sorrowful glance at the landlady, put on his hat.  “I can explain you everything,” he said with an inflection that placed the responsibility for remaining in ignorance upon our own heads, but Mrs. Portheris waved him away with her fan.  “No,” she said.  “I beg that this man shall not be allowed to inflict himself upon our party.  I particularly desire to form my own impression of the historic city, that city that did so much for the reputation of Sir Henry Bulwer Lytton.  Besides, these people mount up ridiculously, and with servants at home on half wages, and Consols in the state they are, one is really compelled to economise.”

[Illustration:  “I’m not a crowned head!”]

It was difficult to protest against Mrs. Portheris’s regulations, and impossible to contravene them, so I have nothing to report of that guide but his card, which bore the name “Antonio Plicco,” and his memory, which is a blank.

There was an ascent, and Mrs. Portheris mounted it proudly.  I pointed out to poppa half-way up that his esteemed relative hadn’t turned a hair, but he was inclined to be incredulous; said you couldn’t tell what was going on in the Department of the Interior.  The Senator often uses a political reference to carry him over a delicate allusion.  Flowering shrubs and bushes lined the path we climbed, silent in the sunshine, dustily decorative, and at the top the turning of a key let us into a strange place.  Always a strange place, however often the guide-books beat their iterations upon it, a place that leaps at imagination, peering into other days through the mists that lie between, and blinds it with a rush of light—­the place where they have gathered together what was left of the dead Pompeiians and their world.  There they lay before us for our wonderment as they ran, and tripped, and struggled, and fell in the night of that day when they and the gods together were overwhelmed, and they died as they thought in the end of time.  And through an open door Vesuvius sent up its eternal gentle woolly curl again the daylight sky, and vineyards throve, and birds sang, and we, who had survived the gods, came curious to look.  The figures lay in glass cases, and Dicky remarked, with unusual seriousness, that it was like a dead-house.

“Except,” said poppa, “that in this mortuary there isn’t ever going to be anybody who can identify the remains.  When you come to think of it—­that’s kind of hard.”