after a few moments’ inspection could doubt the genuineness of the painting.  It is difficult to describe it, for it is altogether unlike anything to be seen elsewhere in Egyptian or Assyrian, in Greek or Roman tombs.  On the right side of the door the upper half of the wall was panelled off by a band of colour, and represented one scene or picture.  In the centre was a large horse, that reminded me of a child’s wooden toy-horse, such as one sees at a country fair.  Its legs were unnaturally long and thin; and the slenderness of its barrel was utterly disproportioned to the breadth of its chest.  It was coloured in the most curious fashion:  the head, hind-quarters, and near-leg being black; the tail and mane and off-legs yellow; and the rest of the body red, with round yellow spots.  It was led by a tall groom; a diminutive youth was mounted upon its back; and a proud, dignified-looking personage, having a double-headed axe or hammer on his shoulder, strode in front.  These human figures were all naked, and painted of a deep-red colour.  In the same picture I noticed two strange-looking nondescript animals, very rudely drawn, and party-coloured like the horse.  One probably represented a cat without a tail, like the Manx breed, half-lying upon the back of the horse, and laying its paw on the shoulder of the youth mounted before it; and the other looked like a dog, with open mouth, apparently barking with all his might, running among the feet of the horse.  Interspersed with these figures were most uncouth drawings of flowers, growing up from the ground, and forming fantastic wreaths round the picture, all party-coloured in the same way as the animals.

This extraordinary fresco seemed like the scene which presented itself to the apostle, when one of the seals of the Apocalyptic book was opened.  I wished that I had beside me some authoritative interpreter who could read for me “this mystic handwriting on the wall.”  It has been suggested that the silent scene before me represented the passage of a soul to the world of the dead.  The lean and starved-looking horse symbolised death; and its red and yellow spots indicated corruption.  It may have been the ghost of the horse that was burned with the body of his dead master; for we know that the tribes, from which the Etruscans were supposed to be descended, if not the Etruscans themselves, not only burned their dead, but offered along with them the wives, slaves, horses, and other property of the dead upon their funeral pyre.  The horse in this remarkable fresco may therefore have been the death-horse, which is well-known in Eastern and European folklore.  The diminutive figure which it carried on its back was the soul of the dead person buried in this tomb; and its small size and the fact of its being on horseback might have been suggested by the thought of the long way it had to go, and its last appearance to the mortal eyes that had anxiously watched it from the extreme verge of this world as it vanished in the dim distance