It was in the year 1592 that an architect named Fontana, in cutting an aqueduct which was to convey the waters of the Sarno to Torre dell’ Annunziata, discovered the foundations of the Temple of Isis, which stood near the walls on the inner or land side of the ancient city.  It was at first supposed that he had dug into an isolated villa of some rich Roman; and it was not until 1748 that prying archaeologists hit on the truth and induced the Government to send a chain gang of convicts to dig away the accumulations of earth and tufa.  But if it had been a modern Italian city that was buried, no such mistake in preliminary diagnosis could have occurred.  Anybody would have known it instantly by the smell.  I do not vouch for the dates—­I copied them out of the guidebook; but my experience with Italian cities qualifies me to speak with authority regarding the other matter.

Afoot we entered Pompeii by the restored Marine Gate.  Our first step within the walls was at the Museum, a comparatively modern building, but containing a fairly complete assortment of the relics that from time to time have been disinterred in various quarters of the city.  Here are wall cabinets filled with tools, ornaments, utensils, jewelry, furniture—­all the small things that fulfilled everyday functions in the first century of the Christian era.  Here is a kit of surgical implements, and some of the implements might well belong to a modern hospital.  There are foodstuffs —­grains and fruits; wines and oil; loaves of bread baked in 79 A. D. and left in the abandoned ovens; and a cheese that is still in a fair state of preservation.  It had been buried seventeen hundred years when they found it; and if only it had been permitted to remain buried a few years longer it would have been sufficiently ripe to satisfy a Bavarian, I think.

Grimmer exhibits are displayed in cases stretched along the center of the main hall—­models of dead bodies discovered in the ruins and perfectly restored by pouring a bronze composition into the molds that were left in the hardened pumice after the flesh of these victims had turned to dust and their bones had crumbled to powder.  Huddled together are the forms of a mother and a babe; and you see how, with her last conscious thought, the mother tried to cover her baby’s face from the killing rain of dust and blistering ashes.  And there is the shape of a man who wrapped his face in a veil to keep out the fumes, and died so.  The veil is there, reproduced with a fidelity no sculptor could duplicate, and through its folds you may behold the agony that made his jaw to sag and his eyes to pop from their sockets.

Nearby is a dog, which in its last spasms of pain and fright curled up worm fashion, and buried its nose in its forepaws and kicked out with its crooked hind legs.  Plainly dogs do not change their emotional natures with the passage of years.  A dog died in Pompeii in 79 A. D. after exactly the same fashion that a dog might die to-day in the pound at Pittsburgh.