I am after, but your
fish, and why do you flee from me?"--all, all must succumb, at last,
sooner or later, were it to be after the hundredth victory, in this same
arena, where once an attendant employed in the theatre used to come, in
the costume of Mercury, to touch them with a red-hot iron to make sure
that they were dead. If they moved, they were at once dispatched; if
they remained icy-cold and motionless, a slave harpooned them with a
hook, and dragged them through the mire of sand and blood to the narrow
corridor, the _porta libitinensis_,--the portal of death,--whence they
were flung into the spoliarium, so that their arms and clothing, at
least, might be saved. Such were the games of the amphitheatre.

[Footnote K: M. Campfleury has reproduced this design in his very
curious book on _Antique Caricature_.]

IX.

THE ERUPTION.

THE DELUGE OF ASHES.--THE DELUGE OF FIRE.--THE FLIGHT OF THE
POMPEIANS.--THE PREOCCUPATIONS OF THE POMPEIAN WOMEN.--THE VICTIMS:
THE FAMILY OF DIOMED; THE SENTINEL; THE WOMAN WALLED UP IN A TOMB;
THE PRIEST OF ISIS; THE LOVERS CLINGING TOGETHER, ETC.--THE
SKELETONS.--THE DEAD BODIES MOULDED BY VESUVIUS.

It was during one of these festivals, on the 23d of November, 79, that
the terrible eruption which overwhelmed the city burst forth. The
testimony of the ancients, the ruins of Pompeii, the layers upon layers
of ashes and scoriae that covered it, the skeletons surprised in
attitudes of agony or death, all concur to tell us of the catastrophe.
The imagination can add nothing to it: the picture is there before our
eyes; we are present at the scene; we behold it. Seated in the
amphitheatre, we take to flight at the first convulsions, at the first
lurid flashes which announce the conflagration and the crumbling of the
mountain. The ground is shaken repeatedly; and something like a
whirlwind of dust, that grows thicker and thicker, has gone rushing and
spinning across the heavens. For some days past there has been talk of
gigantic forms, which, sometimes on the mountain and sometimes in the
plain, swept through the air; they are up again now, and rear themselves
to their whole height in the eddies of smoke, from amid which is heard a
strange sound, a fearful moaning followed by claps of thunder that crash
down, peal on peal. Night, too, has come on--a night of horror; enormous
flames kindle the darkness like the blaze of a furnace. People scream,
out in th