newspaper that he had before him. The news from Rome,--the
intrigues of the German diplomats, the possibility that Italy might
enter the war,--were absorbing his entire attention.

Afterwards on the solitary streets the sailor found everywhere the same
preoccupation. His footsteps resounded in the sunlight as though
treading the depths of the hollow tombs. The moment he stopped, silence
again enveloped him,--"A silence of two thousand years," thought
Ferragut to himself, and in the midst of this primeval silence sounded
far-away voices in the violence of a sharp discussion. They were the
guardians and the employees of the excavations who, lacking work, were
gesticulating and insulting each other in these strongholds twenty
centuries old so profoundly isolated from patriotic enthusiasm or fear
of the horrors of war.

Ferragut, map in hand, passed among these groups without annoyance from
insistent guides. For two hours he fancied himself an inhabitant of
ancient Pompeii who had remained alone in the city on a holiday devoted
to the rural divinities. His glance could reach to the very end of the
straight streets without encountering persons or things recalling
modern times.

Pompeii appeared to him smaller than ever in this solitude,--an
intersection of narrow roads with high sidewalks paved with polygonal
blocks of blue lava. In its interstices Spring was forming green grass
plots dotted with flowers. Carriages,--of whose owners not even the
dust was left,--had with their deep wheels opened up ridges in the
pavement more than a thousand years ago. In every crossway was a public
fountain with a grotesque mask which had spouted water through its
mouth.

Certain red letters on the walls were announcements of elections to be
held in the beginning of that era,--candidates for aedile or duumvir
who were recommended to the Pompeiian voters. Some doors showed above,
the _phallus_ for conjuring the evil eyes; others, a pair of serpents
intertwined, emblem of family life. In the corners of the alleyways, a
Latin verse engraved on the walls asked the passerby to observe the
laws of sanitation, and there still could be seen on the stuccoed walls
caricatures and scribbling, handiwork of the little street gamins of
Caesar's day.

The houses were lightly constructed upon floors cracked by minor
earthquakes before the arrival of the final catastrophe. The lower
floors were of bricks or concrete and the others, of wood, had been
d