ater-mills did not exist in Pompeii, owing to the
lack of running water. Hence these mills put in motion by manual
labor--the old system employed away back in the days of Homer. On the
other hand, the institution of complete baking as a trade, with all its
dependent processes, did not date so far back. The primitive Romans made
their bread in their own houses. Rome was already nearly five hundred
years old when the first bakers established stationary mills, to which
the proprietors sent their grain, as they still do in the Neapolitan
provinces; in return they got loaves of bread; that is to say, their
material ground, kneaded, and baked. The Pompeian establishment that we
visited was one of these complete bakeries.

[Illustration: Discoveries of Loaves of Bread baked 1800 years ago in a
Baker's Oven.]

We could still recognize the troughs that served for the manipulation of
the bread, and the oven, the arch of which is intact, with the cavity
that retained the ashes, the vase for water to besprinkle the crust and
make it shiny, and, finally, the triple-flued pipe that carried off the
smoke--an excellent system revealed by the Pompeian excavations and
successfully imitated since then. The bake-oven opened upon two small
rooms by two apertures. The loaves went in at one of these in dough, and
came out at the other, baked. The whole thing is in such a perfect state
of preservation that one might be tempted to employ these old bricks,
that have not been used for eighteen centuries, for the same purpose.
The very loaves have survived. In the bakery of which I speak several
were found with the stamps upon them, _siligo grani_ (wheat flour), or
_e cicera_ (of bean flour)--a wise precaution against the bad faith of
the dealers. Still more recently, in the latest excavations, Signor
Fiorelli came across an oven so hermetically sealed that there was not a
particle of ashes in it, and there were eighty-one loaves, a little sad,
to be sure, but whole, hard, and black, found in the order in which they
had been placed on the 23d of November, 79. Enchanted with this
windfall, Fiorelli himself climbed into the oven and took out the
precious relics with his own hands. Most of the loaves weigh about a
pound; the heaviest twelve hundred and four grains. They are round,
depressed in the centre, raised on the edges, and divided into eight
lobes. Loaves are still made in Sicily exactly like them. Professor de
Luca weighed and analyzed them