the Italian fruiterers' in New York, and will keep buying when once you
know how good they are. In Naples they sell them by the slice in the
street, the fruiterer carrying a board on his head with the slices
arranged in an upright coronal like the rich, barbaric head-dress of
some savage prince.

Our train was slow and our car was foul, but nothing could keep us from
arriving at Pompeii in very good spirits. The entrance to the dead city
is gardened about with a cemeterial prettiness of evergreens; but, after
you have bought your ticket and been assigned your guide, you pass
through this decorative zone and find yourself in the first of streets
where the past makes no such terms with the present. If some of the
houses of an ampler plan had little spaces beyond the atrium planted
with such flowers as probably grew there two thousand years ago, and
stuck round with tiny figurines, it was to the advantage of the people's
fancy; but it did not appeal so much to the imagination as the mould and
moss, and the small, weedy network that covered the ground in the
roofless chambers and temples and basilicas, where the broken columns
and walls started from the floors which this unmeditated verdure painted
in the favorite hue of ruin.

Most of the places I re-entered through my recollection of them, but to
this subjective experience there was added that of seeing much newer and
vaster things than I remembered. That sad population of the victims of
the disaster, restored to the semhlance of life, or perhaps rather of
death, in plaster casts taken from the moulds their decay had left in
the hardening ashes, had much increased in the melancholy museum where
one visits them the first thing within the city gates. But their effect
was not cumulative; there were more writhing women and more contorted
men; but they did not make their tragedy more evident than it had been