might take their places again
in the balustraded tribunes above the great entrance at either end of
the arena, and scarcely see that they were changed. Nay, the victims
and the gladiators might return to the cells below the seats of the
people, and not know they had left them for a day; the wild beasts
might leap into the arena from dens as secure and strong as when first
built. The ruin within seems only to begin with the aqueduct, which
was used to flood the arena for the naval shows, but which is now
choked with the dust of ages. Without, however, is plain enough the
doom which is written against all the work of human hands, and which,
unknown of the builders, is among the memorable things placed in the
corner-stone of every edifice. Of the outer wall that rose high over
the highest seats of the amphitheatre, and encircled it with stately
corridors, giving it vaster amplitude and grace, the earthquake of six
centuries ago spared only a fragment that now threatens above one of
the narrow Veronese streets. Blacksmiths, wagon-makers, and workers
in clangorous metals have made shops of the lower corridors of the old
arena, and it is friends and neighbors with the modern life about it,
as such things usually are in Italy. Fortunately for the stranger, the
Piazza Bra flanks it on one hand, and across this it has a magnificent
approach. It is not less happy in being little known to sentiment, and
the traveller who visits it by moonlight, has a full sense of grandeur
and pathos, without any of the sheepishness attending homage to that
battered old coquette, the Coliseum, which so many emotional people
have sighed over, kissing and afterwards telling.

But he who would know the innocent charm of a ruin as yet almost
wholly uncourted by travel, must go to the Roman theatre in Verona.
It is not a favorite of the hand-books; and we were decided to see it
chiefly by a visit to the Museum, where, besides an admirable gallery
of paintings, there is a most interesting collection of antiques in
bronze and marble found in excavating the theatre. The ancient edifice
had been completely buried, and a quarter of the town was built over
it, as Portici is built over Herculaneum, and on the very top stood a
Jesuit convent. One day, some children, playing in the garden of one
of the shabby houses, suddenly vanished from sight. Their mother ran
like one mad (I am telling the story in the words of the peasant who
related it to me) to the spot