Relics and historic records give us an ideal of the past. How correct is the ideal may be inferred from the fact that no two antiquarians have the same conception of a Druid temple. With all the details of Scripture and Josephus, we have not an exact model of the temple. Inhabited ruins change with their possessors: those uninhabited decay in the war of elements. But Pompeii was, so to speak, hermetically sealed, in the height of its prosperity, preserved from Goths and Vandals, and is laid before us to-day as it stood over eighteen centuries ago, allowing us to see how sudden was the storm that burst upon it long years ago. The paintings are “undimmed by the leaden touch of time; household furniture left in the confusion of use; articles, even of intrinsic value, abandoned in the hurry of escape, yet safe from the robber, or scattered about from the trembling hand which could not pause or stoop for its most valuable possessions; and in some instances the bones of the inhabitants, bearing sad testimony to the suddenness and completeness of the calamity that overwhelmed them.” “There are the very ruts which were made by the wheels of chariots, flying, perhaps, from the impending ruin; there are water-pipes, in the cavities of which, sealed by the hand of time, the splashing fluid can still be heard; there are rude and grotesque inscriptions, scratched by some loiterer on the stucco, and as fresh as when they excited the mirth of the passer-by; there are egg-shells, bones of fish and chickens, and other fragments of a repast of which skeletons lying near were partaking when the catastrophe overwhelmed them; there is fuel ready to be supplied to furnaces for heating the baths; there are the stains left upon the counters of drinking shops by wet glasses; there are the vials of the apothecary, still containing the fluids he was wont to dispense; there are ovens in which loaves of bread, carbonized, but otherwise perfect, may yet be seen; there are vases with olives still swimming in oil, the fruit retaining its flavor, and the oil [Illustration: DESTRUCTION OF POMPEII.] burning readily when submitted to the flame; there are shelves, on which are piled stores of raisins, figs and chestnuts; there are amphorae containing the rare wine for which Campania was so famous.” Here you saw a new altar of white marble, wondrously beautiful, just from the hands of the sculptor; “an enclosure was building all round; the mortar just dashed against the side of the wall was but half spread out; you saw the long, sliding stroke of the trowel about to return and obliterate its own track; but it never returned; the hand of the workman was suddenly arrested, and the whole looks so fresh and new that you would almost swear that the mason had only gone to his dinner, and about to come back immediately to smooth the roughness.”