hese lines, had he added to his enumeration the wine-shops
and the custom-house. The latter establishment was not omitted by the
ancients, and could not be forgotten in our diminutive but highly
commercial city. Thus, the place has been discovered where the collector
awaited the passage of the vehicles that came in from the country and
the neighboring villages. Absolutely nothing else remains to be seen in
this spacious mosaic-paved hall. Scales, steelyards, and a quantity of
stone or metal weights were found there, marked with inscriptions
sometimes quite curious; such, for example, as the following: _Eme et
habbebis_, with a _b_ too many, a redundancy very frequent in the Naples
dialect. This is equivalent, in English, to: Buy and you will have. One
of the sets of scales bears an inscription stating that it had been
verified or authorized at the Capitol under such consuls and such
emperors--the hand of Rome!

Besides the custom-house, this approach to the city contained abundance
of stables, coach-houses, taverns, bath-houses, low drinking-shops, and
other disreputable concerns. Even the dwellings in the same quarter have
a suspicious look. You follow a long street and you have before you the
gate of Herculaneum and the walls.

These walls are visible; they still hold firm. Unquestionably, they
could not resist our modern cannon, for if the ancients built better
than we do, we destroy better than they did; this is one thing that must
in justice be conceded to us. Nevertheless, we cannot but admire those
masses of _peperino_, the points of which ascend obliquely and hold
together without mortar. Originally as ancient as the city, these
ramparts were destroyed to some extent by Sylla and repaired in _opus
incertum_, that is to say, in small stones of every shape and of various
dimensions, fitted to one another without order or regularity in the
layers, as though they had been put in just as they came. The old
structure dated probably from the time of Pompeian autonomy--the Oscans
had a hand in them. The surrounding wall, at the foot of which there
were no ditches, would have formed an oval line of nearly two miles had
it not been interrupted, on the side of the mountains and the sea,
between the ports of Stabiae and of Herculaneum. These ramparts consisted
of two walls--the scarp and counterscarp,--between which ran a terraced
platform; the exterior wall, slightly sloping, was defended by
embrasures between which the a