objects of charity; and that you have been only encouraging their inhuman masters in their iniquitous gains. But at length you are in the city, and you hope now to be at peace. No. You are accompanied all through it by a soldier, who tells you plainly, by his looks and by his manner of watching you, that he believes you only want an opportunity to turn thief and steal some of the relics; and he expects too to be paid for his strict attentions. And you will find a dozen official showmen there, expecting to be paid, and they would not be satisfied if you were to spend a fortune in presents to them. And no matter how liberal you may have been, when you go away you leave behind you faces, looking at least, as if they thought you mean. The rogues! how indignant you feel at them! And this is the strongest feeling which you carry away with you, and it ever afterwards is associated in your mind with Pompeii. Yes, this is a plain account of a visit to Pompeii. How greatly obliged, then, are the public, to those writers who enable them to travel without the vexations of travel; and to grow sentimental or to grow wise, without growing--hungry; for I will warrant to every man by the time he gets from Pompeii to Naples, not only a good covering of dust, but a famous appetite. And yet, I suppose the reader is scolding because I have not already set him down quietly among the ruins of Balbec, forgetting that we ourselves had yet a walk of two miles through the hot sun before we could reach them. These ruins of Balbec, which stand here without a history and without a name, are indeed worthy of all the admiration that has been bestowed upon them. They are at one side of the present village or town of Balbec, a miserable place of a few hundred hovels, and in no wise diverting the attention from them as we approach: its squalid appearance, perhaps, heightens their effect. They rise high above all other objects, so as to be conspicuous at a great distance; and as we approach, our wonder and admiration are mingled with sadness to think that such magnificent edifices should have been so mutilated by the hand of violence and of time; and yet this sadness increases our interest in them. Our attention was first directed to the most perfect of the temples; but, as we entered at the wrong end of the structures, and soon got our ideas confused amid the masses of ruins, I believe the reader would rather be excused from accompanying us; so I will first state their appearance in ancient times, when there was great regularity and symmetry in them, and then describe them as they are at present.