The plans of nearly all the houses in the city are alike: the entrance-room next the door; the parlor or drawing-room next that; then the _impluvium_, or unroofed space in the middle of the house, where the rains were caught and drained into the cistern, and where the household used to come to wash itself, primitively, as at a pump; the little garden, with its painted columns, behind the _impluvium_, and, at last, the dining-room. * * * * * After referring to the frescos on the walls that have remained for nearly two thousand years and the wonder of the art by which they were produced, Mr. Howells thus continues: Of course the houses of the rich were adorned by men of talent; but it is surprising to see the community of thought and feeling in all this work, whether it be from cunninger or clumsier hands. The subjects are nearly always chosen from the fables of the gods, and they are in illustration of the poets, Homer and the rest. To suit that soft, luxurious life which people led in Pompeii, the themes are commonly amorous, and sometimes not too chaste: there is much of Bacchus and Ariadne, much of Venus and Adonis, and Diana bathes a good deal with her nymphs,――not to mention frequent representations of the toilet of that beautiful monster which the lascivious art of the time loved to depict. One of the most pleasing of all the scenes is that in one of the houses, of the Judgment of Paris, in which the shepherd sits upon a bank in an attitude of ineffable and flattered importance, with one leg carelessly crossing the other, and both hands resting lightly on his shepherd’s crook, while the goddesses before him await his sentence. Naturally, the painter has done his best for the victress in this rivalry, and you see “Idalian Aphrodite beautiful,” as she should be, but with a warm and piquant spice of girlish resentment in her attitude, that Paris should pause for an instant, which is altogether delicious. “And I beheld great Here’s angry eyes.” Awful eyes! How did the painter make them? The wonder of all these pagan frescos is the mystery of the eyes,――still, beautiful, unhuman. You cannot believe that it is wrong for those tranquil-eyed men and women to do evil, they look so calm and so unconscious in it all; and in the presence of the celestials, as they bend upon you those eternal orbs, in whose regard you are but a part of space, you feel that here art has achieved the unearthly. I know of no words in literature which give a _sense_ (nothing gives the idea) of the _stare_ of these gods, except that magnificent line of Kingsley’s, describing the advance over the sea toward Andromeda of the oblivious and unsympathizing Nereids. They floated slowly up and their eyes “Stared on her, silent and still, like the eyes in the house of the idols.” * * * * * VENETIAN VAGABONDS.¹