donkey. We saw the elite of the city elegantly
dressed in the latest fashion promenading in the shopping districts; but
on the sidewalks of the tenement district we saw slovenly barefooted
women washing clothes, cooking maccaroni, scrubbing children in a tub,
and combing children's hair with fine combs, regardless of our curious
gaze. Here, too, we saw boys, apparently eight or ten years of age,
playing in the streets with no other clothing than a shirt reaching to
the knees, and women peddlers of mineral water dressed in ragged red
blouses and blue skirts, who, with disordered hair and stockingless,
slipshod feet, shuffled by pushing hand-carts filled with earthen jugs.

[Illustration: PEASANT GIRLS THEIR BURDENS BEAR.]

On the avenues street peddlers besought us to purchase canes, matches,
coral beads, and souvenirs cut out of lava, but asked prices four or
five times their actual value. On the narrow streets dealers in cooked
viands for the home trade did an active business at low prices, but did
not think it worth while to offer us the hot potatoes, maccaroni, fried
fish, and stewed meats which they prepared on little sidewalk stoves.

[Illustration: AMALFI, WHERE THE WAVES AND MOUNTAINS MEET.]

The trip from Naples to Pompeii was made by rail in less than an hour.
At the gates of the enclosure we each paid an admission fee of two lire,
or forty cents, and official guides were assigned to conduct the party
through the streets of the excavated city.

"About one hundred and fifty years ago," explained the guide, "a farmer
ploughed up some objects of art in this locality. The government,
hearing of the discovery, ordered investigation to be made. Removal of
the soil disclosed a house and furniture and articles of value. The
excavations, carried on irregularly for a century, then continued
regularly but slowly for the past fifty years and still in progress,
revealed the ancient city that had been smothered in ashes and buried
from sight for eighteen hundred years. The wooden roofs, crushed in by
the weight above them, had crumbled into dust, but the walls and
columns, the altars and statues, the fountains and baths, the paved
streets and mosaic pavements, and the frescoes on the walls had been
preserved by the covering of ashes, and were in almost as good condition
as when deserted by the terror-stricken inhabitants. All articles of
value, as soon as found by the excavators, were carried away to the
museums and car