elbows, wrists, hands, ankles, and feet.

III.

In Naples everywhere one is surprised by the great number of English
names which appear on business houses, but it was entirely bewildering
to read a bill affixed to the gate of one of the villas on this road:
"This Desirable Property for Sale." I should scarcely have cared to
buy that desirable property, though the neighborhood seemed to be a
favorite summer resort, and there were villas, as I said, nearly the
whole way to Portici. Those which stood with their gardens toward the
bay would have been tolerable, no doubt, if they could have kept their
windows shut to the vile street before their doors; but the houses
opposite could have had no escape from its stench and noisomeness. It
was absolutely the filthiest street I have seen anywhere outside of
New York, excepting only that little street which, in Herculaneum,
leads from the theatre to the House of Argo.

This pleasant avenue has a stream of turbid water in its centre,
bordered by begging children, and is either fouler or cleaner for the
water, but I shall never know which. It is at a depth of some fifty or
sixty feet below the elevation on which the present city of Portici is
built, and is part of the excavation made long ago to reach the plain
on which Herculaneum stands, buried under its half-score of successive
layers of lava, and ashes, and Portici. We had the aid of all the
virtuous poverty and leisure of the modern town--there was a vast
deal of both, we found--in our search for the staircase by which you
descend to the classic plain, and it proved a discovery involving the
outlay of all the copper coin about us, while the sight of the famous
theatre of Herculaneum was much more expensive than it would have been
had we come there in the old time to see a play of Plautus or Terence.

As for the theatre, "the large and highly ornamented theatre" of which
I read, only a little while ago, in an encyclopedia, we found it, by
the light of our candles, a series of gloomy hollows, of the general
complexion of coal-bins and potato-cellars. It was never perfectly
dug out of the lava, and, as is known, it was filled up in the last
century, together with other excavations, when they endangered the
foundations of worthless Portici overhead. (I am amused to find myself
so hot upon the poor property-holders of Portici. I suppose I should
not myself, even for the cause of antiquity and the knowledge of
classic civiliza