closed, the windows gone, the dwellings with merely a naked wall for a
front, and receiving air and light only from the two courts. But it was
not so, as everything goes to prove. In the first place, the shops
looked out on the street and were, indeed almost entirely open, like our
own, offering to the gaze of the passers-by a broad counter, leaving
only a small space free to the left or the right to let the vendors pass
in and out. In these counters, which were usually covered with a marble
slab, were hollowed the cavities wherein the grocers and liquor-dealers
kept their eatables and drinkables. Behind the counters and along the
walls were stone shelves, upon which the stock was put away. Festoons
of edibles hung displayed from pillar to pillar; stuffs, probably,
adorned the fronts, and the customers, who made their purchases from the
sidewalk, must have everywhere formed noisy and very animated groups.
The native of the south gesticulates a great deal, likes to chaffer,
discusses with vehemence, and speaks loudly and quickly with a glib
tongue and a sonorous voice. Just take a look at him in the lower
quarters of Naples, which, in more than one point of view, recall the
narrow streets of Pompeii.

These shops are now dismantled. Nothing of them remains but the empty
counters, and here and there the grooves in which the doors slid to and
fro. These doors themselves were but a number of shutters fitting into
each other. But the paintings or carvings which still exist upon some
side pillars are old signs that inform us what was sold on the adjoining
counter. Thus, a goat in terra cotta indicated a milk-depot; a mill
turned by an ass showed where there was a miller's establishment; two
men, walking one ahead of the other and each carrying one end of a
stick, to the middle of which an amphora is suspended, betray the
neighborhood of a wine-merchant. Upon other pillars are marked other
articles not so readily understood,--here an anchor, there a ship, and