After a shower, the rain water descended, little by little, into the gutters, and from the latter, by holes still visible, into a subterranean conduit that carried it outside of the city.  One of these conduits is still open in the Street of Stabiae, not far from the temple of Isis.

As to the general aspect of these ancient thoroughfares, it would seem dull enough, were we to represent the scene to our fancy with the houses closed, the windows gone, the dwellings with merely a naked wall for a front, and receiving air and light only from the two courts.  But it was not so, as everything goes to prove.  In the first place, the shops looked out on the street and were, indeed almost entirely open, like our own, offering to the gaze of the passers-by a broad counter, leaving only a small space free to the left or the right to let the vendors pass in and out.  In these counters, which were usually covered with a marble slab, were hollowed the cavities wherein the grocers and liquor-dealers kept their eatables and drinkables.  Behind the counters and along the walls were stone shelves, upon which the stock was put away.  Festoons of edibles hung displayed from pillar to pillar; stuffs, probably, adorned the fronts, and the customers, who made their purchases from the sidewalk, must have everywhere formed noisy and very animated groups.  The native of the south gesticulates a great deal, likes to chaffer, discusses with vehemence, and speaks loudly and quickly with a glib tongue and a sonorous voice.  Just take a look at him in the lower quarters of Naples, which, in more than one point of view, recall the narrow streets of Pompeii.

These shops are now dismantled.  Nothing of them remains but the empty counters, and here and there the grooves in which the doors slid to and fro.  These doors themselves were but a number of shutters fitting into each other.  But the paintings or carvings which still exist upon some side pillars are old signs that inform us what was sold on the adjoining counter.  Thus, a goat in terra cotta indicated a milk-depot; a mill turned by an ass showed where there was a miller’s establishment; two men, walking one ahead of the other and each carrying one end of a stick, to the middle of which an amphora is suspended, betray the neighborhood of a wine-merchant.  Upon other pillars are marked other articles not so readily understood,—­here an anchor, there a ship, and in another place a checker-board.  Did they understand the game of Palamedes at Pompeii?  A shop near the Thermae, or public warm baths, is adorned on its front with a representation of a gladiatorial combat.  The author of the painting thought something of his work, which he protected with this inscription:  “Abiat (habeat) Venerem Pompeianam iradam (iratam) qui hoc laeserit! (May he who injures this picture have the wrath of the Pompeian Venus upon him!)”