“The ground, then, being bought and the vegetation removed, work begins.  The earth at the summit of the hill is taken off and carried away on a railroad, which descends from the middle of Pompeii by a slope that saves all expense of machinery and fuel, to a considerable distance beyond the amphitheatre and the city.  In this way, the most serious question of all, to wit, that of clearing away the dirt, is solved.  Formerly, the ruins were covered in with it, and subsequently it was heaped up in a huge hillock, but now it helps to construct the very railroad that carries it away, and will, one day, tip it into the sea.

“Nothing can present a livelier scene than the excavation of these ruins.  Men diligently dig away at the earth, and bevies of young girls run to and fro without cessation, with baskets in their hands.  These are sprightly peasant damsels collected from the adjacent villages most of them accustomed to working in factories that have closed or curtailed operations owing to the invasion of English tissues and the rise of cotton.  No one would have dreamed that free trade and the war in America would have supplied female hands to work at the ruins of Pompeii.  But all things are linked together now in this great world of ours, vast as it is.  These girls then run backward and forward, filling their baskets with soil, ashes, and lapillo, hoisting them on their heads, by the help of the men, with a single quick, sharp motion, and thereupon setting off again, in groups that incessantly replace each other, toward the railway, passing and repassing their returning companions.  Very picturesque in their ragged gowns of brilliant colors, they walk swiftly with lengthy strides, their long skirts defining the movements of their naked limbs and fluttering in the wind behind them, while their arms, with gestures like those of classic urn-bearers, sustain the heavy load that rests upon their heads without making them even stoop.  All this is not out of keeping with the monuments that gradually appear above the surface as the rubbish is removed.  Did not the sight of foreign visitors here and there disturb the harmony of the scene, one might readily ask himself, in the midst of this Virgilian landscape, amid these festooning vines, in full view of the smoking Vesuvius, and beneath that antique sky, whether all those young girls who come and go are not the slaves of Pansa, the aedile, or of the duumvir Holconius.”

[Illustration:  The Rubbish Trucks Going up Empty.]

We have just glanced over the history of Pompeii before and after its destruction.  Let us now enter the city.  But a word of caution before we start.  Do not expect to find houses or monuments still erect and roofed in like the Pantheon at Rome and the square building at Nismes, or you will be sadly disappointed.  Rather picture to yourself a small city of low buildings and narrow streets that had been completely burned down in a single night.  You have come to look