The remainder of the day brings to our hero all sorts of remarkable discoveries and facts, which he neglects to fit together. In the wall of the portico where Gradiva disappeared, he notices to-day a narrow cleft, which is, however, wide enough to afford passage to an unusually slender figure. He recognizes the fact that Zoë-Gradiva does not need to sink into the ground here, an idea which is so senseless that he is now ashamed of the discarded belief, but that she uses this route to go back to her tomb. A faint shadow seems to him to dissolve at the end of the Street of Tombs, before the so-called Villa of Diomede. Dizzy, as on the previous day, and occupied with the same problem, he wanders now about Pompeii, wondering of what physical nature Zoë-Gradiva may be and whether one might feel anything if one touched her hand. A peculiar impulse urges him to undertake this experiment, and yet an equally great timidity in connection with the idea restrains him. On a hot, sunny slope he meets an older man who, from his equipment, must be a zoologist or a botanist, and seems to be busy catching things. The latter turns to him and says: “Are you interested in _Faraglionensis_? I should hardly have supposed it, but it seems thoroughly probable that they are found, not only in the _Faraglioni_ of Capri, but also dwell permanently on the mainland. The method suggested by my colleague, Eimer, is really good; I have already used it often with the best of success. Please remain quite still.” (_G._ p. 74.) The speaker stops talking then, and holds a little snare, made of a long grass-blade, before a narrow crevice, from which the blue, chatoyant, little head of a lizard peeps. Hanold leaves the lizard-hunter with the critical thought that it is hardly credible what foolishly remarkable purposes can cause people to make the long trip to Pompeii, in which criticism he does not, of course, include himself and his intention of seeking foot-prints of Gradiva in the ashes of Pompeii. The gentleman’s face, moreover, seems familiar to him, as if he has noticed it casually in one of the two hotels; the man’s manner of addressing him has also sounded as if directed at an acquaintance. As he continues his wandering, a side street leads him to a house not previously discovered by him; this proves to be the “Albergo del Sole.” The hotel-keeper, who is not busy, avails himself of the opportunity to recommend highly his house and the excavated treasures in it. He asserts that he was present when there were found near the Forum the young lovers who, on realizing their inevitable destruction, had clasped each other in firm embrace and thus awaited death. Hanold has already heard of that before, and shrugged his shoulders over it, as a fabulous invention of some especially imaginative narrator, but to-day the words of the hotel-keeper awaken in him credulity, which soon stretches itself more when the former brings forth a metal brooch encrusted with green