Upon this Uncle Moses began to moralize about the corrupt morals of the Italian race, and went on to speak of tyranny, priestcraft, slavery, aristocracy, monarchy, primogeniture, brigandage, and ten thousand other things. And the carriage rolled back to Naples. CHAPTER XX. _The Glories of Naples.--The Museum.--The Curiosities.--How they unroll the charred Manuscripts exhumed from Herculaneum and Pompeii.--On to Rome.--Capua.--The Tomb of Cicero.--Terracina.--The Pontine Marshes.--The Appii Forum._ The party remained in Naples some time longer, and had much to see. There was the Royal Museum, filled with the treasures of antique art, filled also with what was to them far more interesting--the numerous articles exhumed from Herculaneum and Pompeii. Here were jewels, ornaments, pictures, statues, carvings, kitchen utensils, weights, measures, toilet requisites, surgical instruments, arms, armor, tripods, braziers, and a thousand other articles, the accompaniments of that busy life which had been so abruptly stopped. All these articles spoke of something connected with an extinct civilization, and told, too, of human life, with all its hopes, fears, joys, and sorrows. Some spoke of disease and pain, others of festivity and joy; these of peace, those of war; here were the emblems of religion, there the symbols of literature. Among all these, nothing was more interesting than the manuscript scrolls which had been found in the libraries of the better houses. These looked like anything rather than manuscripts. They had all been burned to a cinder, and looked like sticks of charcoal. But on the first discovery of these they had been carefully preserved, and efforts had been made to unroll them. These efforts at first were baffled; but at last, by patience, and also by skill, a method was found out by which the thing might be done. The manuscripts were formed of Egyptian papyrus--a substance which, in its original condition, is about as fragile as our modern paper; the sheets were rolled around a stick, and were not over eight inches in width, and about sixteen feet in length. The stick, the ornaments, and the cases had perished, but the papyrus remained. Its nature was about the same as the nature of a scroll of paper manuscript would be after passing through the fire. Each thin filament, as it was unrolled, would crumble into dust. Now, this crumbling was arrested by putting over it a coating of tough, gelatinous substance, over which a sheet of muslin was placed, the gelatinous substance acting also upon the charred sheet in such a way as to detach it from the rest of the scroll. In this way it was unrolled slowly and carefully, two inches at a time, and on being unrolled a facsimile copy was at once made. Of course there was no attempt to preserve the manuscripts; they were, too perishable; and after a short exposure, just long enough to admit of a copy being made, they shrank up and crumbled away.