at it on the day after the conflagration.  The upper stories have disappeared, and the ceilings have fallen in.  Everything that was of wood, planks, and beams, is in ashes; all is uncovered, and no roofs are to be seen.  In these structures, which in other days were either private dwellings or public edifices, you now can everywhere walk under the open sky.  Were a shower to come on, you would not know where to seek shelter.  It is as though you were in a city in progress of building, with only the first stories as yet completed, but without the flooring for the second.  Here is a house:  nothing remains of it but the lower walls, with nothing resting on them.  At a distance you would suppose it to be a collection of screens set up for parlor theatricals.  Here is a public square:  you will now see in it only bottom platforms, supports that hold up nothing, shafts of columns without galleries, pedestals without statues, mute blocks of stone, space and emptiness.  I will lead you into more than one temple.  You will see there only an eminence of masonry, side and end walls, but no front, no portico.  Where is art?  Where is the presiding deity of the place?  The ruins of your stable would not be more naked a thousand years hence.  Stones on all sides, tufa, bricks, lava, here and there some slabs of marble and travertine, then traces of destruction—­paintings defaced, pavements disjointed and full of gaps and cracks—­and then marks of spoliation, for all the precious objects found were carried off to the museum at Naples, and I can show you now nothing but the places where once stood the Faun, the statue of Narcissus, the mosaic of Arbelles and the famous blue vase.  Such is the Pompeii that awaits the traveller who comes thither expecting to find another Paris, or, at least, ruins arranged in the Parisian style, like the tower of St. Jacques, for instance.

[Illustration:  Clearing out a Narrow Street in Pompeii.]

You will say, perhaps, good reader, that I disenchant you; on the contrary, I prevent your disenchantment.  Do not prepare the way for your own disappointment by unreasonable expectations or by ill-founded notions; this is all that I ask of your judgment.  Do not come hither to look for the relics of Roman grandeur.  Other impressions await you at Pompeii.  What you are about to see is an entire city, or at all events the third of an ancient city, remote, detached from every modern town, and forming in itself something isolated and complete which you will find nowhere else.  Here is no Capitol rebuilt; no Pantheon consecrated now to the God of Christianity; no Acropolis surmounting a Danish or Bavarian city; no Maison Carree (as at Nismes) transformed to a gallery of paintings and forming one of the adornments of a modern Boulevard.  At Pompeii everything is antique and eighteen centuries old; first the sky, then the landscape, the seashore, and then the work of man, devastated undoubtedly, but not transformed, by time.  The streets are