nd lamp stands and wine jars and
kitchen pots and pans and spoons and glass vases and silver cups and
gold hairpins and jewelry and ivory combs and bronze strigils and
mirrors and several statues of bronze and marble. But where they
had hoped to find thousands of precious things they have found only
hundreds. Many pedestals are empty of their statues. Here and there the
very paintings have been cut from the walls. Those are the pictures we
should most like to see. How beautiful could they have been?

"Evidently men came back soon after the eruption," say the excavators.
"The tops of their ruined houses must have stood up above the ashes.
They dug down and rescued their most precious things. We have even found
broken places in walls where we think men dug tunnels from one house to
another. That is why the temple and market place have so few statues.
That is why we find so little jewelry and money and dishes. But we have
enough. The city is our treasure."

One rich find they did make, however. There was a pleasant farmhouse out
of town on the slope of Vesuvius. Evidently the man who owned it had
a vineyard and an olive grove and grain fields. For there are olive
presses and wine presses and a great court full of vats for making wine
and a floor for threshing wheat and a mill for grinding flour and a
stable and a wide courtyard that must have held many carts. And there
are bathrooms and many pleasant rooms besides. In the room with the wine
presses was a stone cistern for storing the fresh grape juice. Here
the excavators found a treasure and a mystery. In this cistern lay the
skeleton of a man. With him were a thousand pieces of gold money, some
gold jewelry, and a wonderful dinner set of silver dishes. There are a
hundred and three pieces--plates, platters, cups, bowls. And every one
has beaten up from it beautiful designs of flowers and people. An artist
must have made them, and a rich man must have bought them. How did they
come here in this farmhouse? They must have been meant for a nobleman's
table. Had some thief stolen them and hidden here, only to be caught
by the volcano? Did some rich lady of the city have this farm for her
country place? And had she sent her treasure here to escape when the
volcano burst forth? At any rate here it lay for eighteen hundred years.
And now it is in a museum in Paris, far from its old owner's home.

In this buried city we find the houses in which men lived, the pictures
they love