cent manner, and to drink warm water without
risk."... Le Sage, who wrote the foregoing sentence, was not accurately
informed. The liquors sold at the Pompeian bathing-houses were very
strong, and, in more than one place where the points of the amphorae
rested, they have left yellow marks on the pavement. Vinegar has been
detected in most of these drinks. In the tavern of Fortunata, the marble
of the counter is still stained with the traces of the ancient goblets.

Bakeries were not lacking in Pompeii. The most complete one is in the
Street of Herculaneum, where it fills a whole house, the inner court of
which is occupied with four mills. Nothing could be more crude and
elementary than those mills. Imagine two huge blocks of stone
representing two cones, of which the upper one is overset upon the
other, giving every mill the appearance of an hour-glass. The lower
stone remained motionless, and the other revolved by means of an
apparatus kept in motion by a man or a donkey. The grain was crushed
between the two stones in the old patriarchal style. The poor ass
condemned to do this work must have been a very patient animal; but what
shall we say of the slaves often called in to fill his place? For those
poor wretches it was usually a punishment, as their eyes were put out
and then they were sent to the mill. This was the menace held over their
heads when they misbehaved. For others it was a very simple piece of
service which more than one man of mind performed--Plautus, they say,
and Terence. To some again, it was, at a later period, a method of
paying for their vices; when the millers lacked hands they established
bathing-houses around their mills, and the passers-by who were caught in
the trap had to work the machinery.

Let us hasten to add that the work of the mill which we visited was not
performed by a Christian, as they would say at Naples, but by a mule,
whose bones were found in a neighboring room, most likely a stable, the
racks and troughs of which were elevated about two and a half feet above
the floor. In a closet near by, the watering trough is still visible.
Then again, religion, which everywhere entered into the ancient manners
and customs of Italy, as it does into the new, reveals itself in the
paintings of the _pistrinum_; we there see the sacrifices to Fornax, the
patroness of ovens and the saint of kitchens.

But let us return to our mills. Mills driven by the wind were unknown to
the ancients, and w