othing continually, so as not to be suffocated. These ashes went, it
is said, as far as Africa, or, at all events, to Rome, where they filled
the atmosphere and hid the light of day, so that even the Romans said:
"The world is overturned; the sun is falling on the earth to bury itself
in night, or the earth is rushing up to the sun to be consumed in his
eternal fires." "At length," writes Pliny, "the light returned
gradually, and the star that sheds it reappeared, but pallid as in an
eclipse. The whole scene around us was transformed; the ashes, like a
heavy snow, covered everything."

This vast shroud was not lifted until in the last century, and the
excavations have narrated the catastrophe with an eloquence which even
Pliny himself, notwithstanding the resources of his style and the
authority of his testimony, could not attain. The terrible exterminator
was caught, as it were, in the very act, amid the ruins he had made.
These roofless houses, with the height of one story only remaining and
leaving their walls open to the sun; these colonnades that no longer
supported anything; these temples yawning wide on all sides, without
pediment or portico; this silent loneliness; this look of desolation,
distress, and nakedness, which looked like ruins on the morrow of some
great fire,--all were enough to wring one's heart. But there was still
more: there were the skeletons found at every step in this voyage of
discovery in the midst of the dead, betraying the anguish and the terror
of that last dreadful hour. Six hundred,--perhaps more,--have already
been found, each one illustrating some poignant episode of the
immense catastrophe in which they were smitten down!

[Illustration: Bodies of Pompeians cast in the Ashes.]

Recently, in a small street, under heaps of rubbish, the men working on
the excavations perceived an empty space, at the bottom of which were
some bones. They at once called Signor Fiorelli, who had a bright idea.
He caused some plaster to be mixed, and poured it immediately into the
hollow, and the same operation was renewed at other points where he
thought he saw other similar bones. Afterward, the crust of pumice-stone
and hardened ashes which had enveloped, as it were, in a scabbard, this
something that they were trying to discover, was carefully lifted off.
When these materials had been removed, there appeared four dead bodies.

Any one can see them now, in the museum at Naples; nothing could be more
s