come off, the names of candidates for legislative office who were never
to sit. There is nothing like this elsewhere.

"The value of Pompeii to those classic students who would understand,
not the speech only, but the life and the every-day habits, of the
ancient world, is too high for reckoning. Its inestimable evidence may
be seen in the fact that any high-school boy can draw the plan of a
Roman house, while ripest scholars hesitate on the very threshold of
a Greek dwelling. This is because no Hellenic Pompeii has yet been
discovered, but thanks to the silent city close to the beautiful Bay of
Naples, the Latin house is known from ostium to porticus, from the front
door to the back garden wall.

STREETS AND HOUSES OF POMPEII

"The streets of Pompeii must have had a charm unapproached by those
of any city now in existence. The stores, indeed, were wretched little
dens. Two or three of them commonly occupied the front of a house on
either side of the entrance, the ostium; but when the door lay open, as
was usually the case, a passerby could look into the atrium, prettily
decorated and hung with rich stuffs. The sunshine entered through an
aperture in the roof, and shone on the waters of the impluvium, the
mosaic floor, the altar of the household gods and the flowers around the
fountain.

"As the life of the Pompeiians was all outdoors, their pretty homes
stood open always. There was indeed a curtain betwixt the atrium and the
peristyle, but it was drawn only when the master gave a banquet. Thus a
wayfarer in the street could see, beyond the hall described and its
busy servants, the white columns of the peristyle, with creepers trained
about them, flowers all around, and jets of water playing through pipes
which are still in place. In many cases the garden itself could be
observed between the pillars of the further gallery, and rich paintings
on the wall beyond that.

"But how far removed those little palaces of Pompeii were from our
notion of well-being is scarcely to be understood by one who has not
seen them. It is a question strange in all points of view where the
family slept in the houses, nearly all of which had no second story. In
the most graceful villas the three to five sleeping chambers round the
atrium and four round the peristyle were rather ornamental cupboards
than aught else. One did not differ from another, and if these were
devoted to the household the slaves, male and female, must have slep