We could still recognize the troughs that served for the manipulation of the bread, and the oven, the arch of which is intact, with the cavity that retained the ashes, the vase for water to besprinkle the crust and make it shiny, and, finally, the triple-flued pipe that carried off the smoke—­an excellent system revealed by the Pompeian excavations and successfully imitated since then.  The bake-oven opened upon two small rooms by two apertures.  The loaves went in at one of these in dough, and came out at the other, baked.  The whole thing is in such a perfect state of preservation that one might be tempted to employ these old bricks, that have not been used for eighteen centuries, for the same purpose.  The very loaves have survived.  In the bakery of which I speak several were found with the stamps upon them, siligo grani (wheat flour), or e cicera (of bean flour)—­a wise precaution against the bad faith of the dealers.  Still more recently, in the latest excavations, Signor Fiorelli came across an oven so hermetically sealed that there was not a particle of ashes in it, and there were eighty-one loaves, a little sad, to be sure, but whole, hard, and black, found in the order in which they had been placed on the 23d of November, 79.  Enchanted with this windfall, Fiorelli himself climbed into the oven and took out the precious relics with his own hands.  Most of the loaves weigh about a pound; the heaviest twelve hundred and four grains.  They are round, depressed in the centre, raised on the edges, and divided into eight lobes.  Loaves are still made in Sicily exactly like them.  Professor de Luca weighed and analyzed them minutely, and gave the result in a letter addressed to the French Academy of Sciences.  Let us now imagine all these salesrooms, all these shops, open and stocked with goods, and then the display, the purchasers, the passers-by, the bustle and noise peculiar to the south, and the street will no longer seem so dead.  Let us add that the doors of the houses were closed only in the evening; the promenaders and loungers could then peep, as they went along, into every alley, and make merry at the bright adornments of the atrium.  Nor is this all.  The upper stories, although now crumbled to dust, were in communication with the street.  Windows opened discreetly, which must, here and there, have been the framework of some brown head and countenance anxious to see and to be seen.  The latest excavations have revealed the existence of hanging covered balconies, long exterior corridors, pierced with casements, frequently depicted in the paintings.  There the fair Pompeian could have taken her station in order to participate in the life outside.  The good housewife of those times, like her counterpart in our day, could there have held out her basket to the street-merchant who went wandering about with his portable shop; and more than one handsome girl may at the same post have carried her fingers to her lips, there to cull (the ancient custom) the kiss that she flung to the young Pompeian concealed down yonder in the corner of the wall.  Thus re-peopled, the old-time street, narrow as it is, was gayer than our own thoroughfares; and the brightly-painted houses, the variegated walls, the monuments, and the fountains, gave vivid animation to a picture too dazzling for our gaze.