ngelo burst into a peal of laughter.

Upon this Uncle Moses began to moralize about the corrupt morals
of the Italian race, and went on to speak of tyranny, priestcraft,
slavery, aristocracy, monarchy, primogeniture, brigandage, and ten
thousand other things.

And the carriage rolled back to Naples.

CHAPTER XX.

_The Glories of Naples.--The Museum.--The Curiosities.--How they
unroll the charred Manuscripts exhumed from Herculaneum and
Pompeii.--On to Rome.--Capua.--The Tomb of Cicero.--Terracina.--The
Pontine Marshes.--The Appii Forum._

The party remained in Naples some time longer, and had much to see.
There was the Royal Museum, filled with the treasures of antique
art, filled also with what was to them far more interesting--the
numerous articles exhumed from Herculaneum and Pompeii. Here were
jewels, ornaments, pictures, statues, carvings, kitchen utensils,
weights, measures, toilet requisites, surgical instruments, arms,
armor, tripods, braziers, and a thousand other articles, the
accompaniments of that busy life which had been so abruptly stopped.
All these articles spoke of something connected with an extinct
civilization, and told, too, of human life, with all its hopes,
fears, joys, and sorrows. Some spoke of disease and pain, others
of festivity and joy; these of peace, those of war; here were the
emblems of religion, there the symbols of literature.

Among all these, nothing was more interesting than the manuscript
scrolls which had been found in the libraries of the better houses.
These looked like anything rather than manuscripts. They had all
been burned to a cinder, and looked like sticks of charcoal. But
on the first discovery of these they had been carefully preserved,
and efforts had been made to unroll them. These efforts at first
were baffled; but at last, by patience, and also by skill, a method
was found out by which the thing might be done. The manuscripts
were formed of Egyptian papyrus--a substance which, in its original
condition, is about as fragile as our modern paper; the sheets were
rolled around a stick, and were not over eight inches in width,
and about sixteen feet in length. The stick, the ornaments, and
the cases had perished, but the papyrus remained. Its nature was
about the same as the nature of a scroll of paper manuscript would
be after passing through the fire. Each thin filament, as it was
unrolled, would crumble into dust. Now, this crumbling was arrested
by p