“No chance of Christian burial once you get into a museum,” said Dick with solicitude.

“I should like,” remarked Mrs. Portheris, polishing her pince nez to get a better view of a mother and daughter lying on their faces.  “I should like to see the clergyman who would attempt it.  These people were heathen, and richly deserved their fate.  Richly!”

Momma looked at her husband’s Aunt Caroline with indignant scorn.  “Do you really think so?” she asked, but we could all see that her words were a very inadequate expression for her emotions.  Mrs. Portheris drew all the guns of her orthodoxy into line for battle.  “I am surprised——­” she began, and then the Senator politely but firmly interfered.

“Ladies,” he said, “‘De mortuis nisi bonum,’ which is to say it isn’t customary to slang corpses, especially, as you may say, in their presence.  I guess we can all be thankful, anyhow, that heathen nowadays have got a cooler earth to live on,” and that for the moment was the end of it, but momma still gazed commiseratingly at the figures, with a suspicious tendency to look for her handkerchief.

“It’s too terrible,” she said.  “We can actually see their features.”

“Don’t let them get on your nerves, Augusta,” suggested poppa.

“I won’t if I can help it.  But when you see their clothes and their hair and realise——­”

“It happened over eighteen hundred years ago, my dear, and most of them got away.”

“That didn’t make it any better for those who are now before us,” and momma used her handkerchief threateningly, though it was only in connection with her nose.

“Well now, Augusta, I hate to destroy an illusion like that, because they’re not to be bought with money, but since you’re determined to work yourself up over these unfortunates, I’ve got to expose them to you.  They’re not the genuine remains you take them for.  They’re mere worthless imitations.”

“Alexander,” said momma suspiciously, “you never hesitate to tamper with the truth if you think it will make me any more comfortable.  I don’t believe you.”

“All right,” returned the Senator; “when we get home you ask Bramley.  It was Bramley that put me on to it.  Whenever one of those Pompeii fellows dropped, the ashes kind of caked over him, and in the course of time there was a hole where he had been.  See?  And what you’re looking at is just a collection of those holes filled up with composition and then dug out.  Mere holes!”

“The illusion is dreadfully perfect,” sighed momma.  “Fancy dying like a baked potato in hot ashes!  Somehow, Alexander, I don’t seem able to get over it,” and momma gazed with distressed fascination at the grim form of the negro porter.

“We’ve got no proper grounds for coming to that conclusion either,” replied poppa firmly.  “Just as likely they were suffocated by the gas that came up out of the ground.”