and ages, and will never care for the trifles and follies
of life any more for ever--"Owing to circumstances, etc., etc., there
will not be any performance to-night." Close down the curtain. Put out
the lights.

And so I turned away and went through shop after shop and store after
store, far down the long street of the merchants, and called for the
wares of Rome and the East, but the tradesmen were gone, the marts were
silent, and nothing was left but the broken jars all set in cement of
cinders and ashes: the wine and the oil that once had filled them were
gone with their owners.

In a bake-shop was a mill for grinding the grain, and the furnaces for
baking the bread: and they say that here, in the same furnaces, the
exhumers of Pompeii found nice, well baked loaves which the baker had not
found time to remove from the ovens the last time he left his shop,
because circumstances compelled him to leave in such a hurry.

In one house (the only building in Pompeii which no woman is now allowed
to enter,) were the small rooms and short beds of solid masonry, just as
they were in the old times, and on the walls were pictures which looked
almost as fresh as if they were painted yesterday, but which no pen could
have the hardihood to describe; and here and there were Latin
inscriptions--obscene scintillations of wit, scratched by hands that
possibly were uplifted to Heaven for succor in the midst of a driving
storm of fire before the night was done.

In one of the principal streets was a ponderous stone tank, and a
water-spout that supplied it, and where the tired, heated toilers from the
Campagna used to rest their right hands when they bent over to put their
lips to the spout, the thick stone was worn down to a broad groove an
inch or two deep. Think of the countless thousands of hands that had
pressed that spot in the ages that are gone, to so reduce a stone that
is as hard as iron!

They had a great public bulletin board in Pompeii--a place where
announcements for gladiatorial combats, elections, and such things, were
posted--not on perishable paper, but carved in enduring stone. One lady,
who, I take it, was rich and well brought up, advertised a dwelling or so
to rent, with baths and all the modern improvements, and several hundred
shops, stipulating that the dwellings should not be put to immoral
purposes. You can find out who lived in many a house in Pompeii by the
carved stone door-plates affixed to them: an