k 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 loved, the food they ate, the jewels they wore, the cups they drank
from. But what of the people themselves? Were they real men and women?
How did they look? Did they all escape? Not all, for many skeletons have
been found here and there through the city--in the market place, in the
streets, in the houses. And sometimes the excavators have found still
stranger, sadder things. Often as a man has been digging in the
hard-packed ashes, his spade has struck into a hole. Then he has called
the chief excavator.

"Let us see what it is," the excavator has said, "Perhaps it will be
something interesting."

So they have mixed plaster and poured it into the hole. They have given
it a little time to harden and then have dug away the ashes from around
it. In