supported anything; these temples yawning wide on all sides, without pediment or portico; this silent loneliness; this look of desolation, distress, and nakedness, which looked like ruins on the morrow of some great fire,—­all were enough to wring one’s heart.  But there was still more:  there were the skeletons found at every step in this voyage of discovery in the midst of the dead, betraying the anguish and the terror of that last dreadful hour.  Six hundred,—­perhaps more,—­have already been found, each one illustrating some poignant episode of the immense catastrophe in which they were smitten down!

[Illustration:  Bodies of Pompeians cast in the Ashes.]

Recently, in a small street, under heaps of rubbish, the men working on the excavations perceived an empty space, at the bottom of which were some bones.  They at once called Signor Fiorelli, who had a bright idea.  He caused some plaster to be mixed, and poured it immediately into the hollow, and the same operation was renewed at other points where he thought he saw other similar bones.  Afterward, the crust of pumice-stone and hardened ashes which had enveloped, as it were, in a scabbard, this something that they were trying to discover, was carefully lifted off.  When these materials had been removed, there appeared four dead bodies.

Any one can see them now, in the museum at Naples; nothing could be more striking than the spectacle.  They are not statues, but corpses, moulded by Vesuvius; the skeletons are still there, in those casings of plaster which reproduce what time would have destroyed, and what the damp ashes have preserved,—­the clothing and the flesh, I might almost say the life.  The bones peep through here and there, in certain places which the plaster did not reach.  Nowhere else is there anything like this to be seen.  The Egyptian mummies are naked, blackened, hideous; they no longer have anything in common with us; they are laid out for their eternal sleep in the consecrated attitude.  But the exhumed Pompeians are human beings whom one sees in the agonies of death.

One of these bodies is that of a woman near whom were picked up ninety-one pieces of coin, two silver urns, and some keys and jewels.  She was endeavoring to escape, taking with her these precious articles, when she fell down in the narrow street.  You still see her lying on her left side; her head-dress can very readily be made out, as also can the texture of her clothing and two silver rings which she still has on her finger; one of her hands is broken, and you see the cellular structure of the bone; her left arm is lifted and distorted; her delicate hand is so tightly clenched that you would say the nails penetrate the flesh; her whole body appears swollen and contracted; the legs only, which are very slender, remain extended.  One feels that she struggled a long time in horrible agony; her whole attitude is that of anguish, not of death.