o perfection in the last century, was earnestly
pursued under Murat. The work was started in many places at once, and
the laborers, advancing one after the other, penetrating and cutting the
hill, followed the line of the streets, which they cleared little by
little before them. In following the streets on the ground-level, the
declivity of ashes and pumice-stone which obstructed them was attacked
below, and thence resulted many regrettable accidents. The whole upper
part of the houses, commencing with the roofs, fell in among the
rubbish, along with a thousand fragile articles, which were broken and
lost without there being any means of determining the point from which
they had been hurled down. In order to obviate this inconvenience,
Signor Fiorelli has started a third system. He does not follow the
streets by the ground-level, but he marks them out over the hillocks,
and thus traces among the trees and cultivated grounds wide squares
indicating the subterranean, islets. No one is ignorant of the fact that
these islets--_isole, insulae_ in the modern as well as in the ancient
language of Italy--indicate blocks of buildings. The islet traced,
Signor Fiorelli repurchases the land which had been sold by King
Ferdinand I. and gives up the trees found upon it.[A]

"The ground, then, being bought and the vegetation removed, work begins.
The earth at the summit of the hill is taken off and carried away on a
railroad, which descends from the middle of Pompeii by a slope that
saves all expense of machinery and fuel, to a considerable distance
beyond the amphitheatre and the city. In this way, the most serious
question of all, to wit, that of clearing away the dirt, is solved.
Formerly, the ruins were covered in with it, and subsequently it was
heaped up in a huge hillock, but now it helps to construct the very
railroad that carries it away, and will, one day, tip it into the sea.

"Nothing can present a livelier scene than the excavation of these
ruins. Men diligently dig away at the earth, and bevies of young girls
run to and fro without cessation, with baskets in their hands. These
are sprightly peasant damsels collected from the adjacent villages most
of them accustomed to working in factories that have closed or curtailed
operations owing to the invasion of English tissues and the rise of
cotton. No one would have dreamed that free trade and the war in America
would have supplied female hands to work at the ruins of Pompei