There are in this room paintings of grotesque design upon a yellow ground, but they are much damaged and scarcely visible. The pavement is of white marble laid in mosaic. The room in its general arrangement resembles the hot bath of the men; it has a labrum in the laconicum, and a hot bath contiguous to the furnace. The hollow pavement and the flues in the walls are almost entirely destroyed; and of the labrum, the foot, in the middle of which was a piece of the leaden conduit that introduced the water, alone remains. On the right of the entrance into these women's baths is a wall of stone of great thickness and in a good style of masonry. These baths are so well arranged, with so prudent an economy of room and convenient distribution of their parts, and are adorned with such appropriate elegance, as to show clearly the intellect and resources of an excellent architect. At the same time some errors of the grossest kind have been committed, such as would be inexcusable in the most ignorant workman; as, for instance, the symmetry of parts has been neglected where the parts correspond; a pilaster is cut off by a door which passes through the middle of it; and other mistakes occur which might have been avoided without difficulty. This strange mixture of good and bad taste, of skill and carelessness, is not very easily accounted for, but it is of constant recurrence in Pompeii. [Illustration: ANCIENT BATH-ROOM. (_As discovered_).] Vitruvius recommends the selecting a situation for baths defended from the north and northwest winds, and forming windows opposite the south, or if the nature of the ground would not permit this, at least towards the south, because the hours of bathing used by the ancients being from after mid-day till evening, those who bathed could, by those windows, have the advantage of the rays and of the heat of the declining sun. For this reason the Pompeian baths hitherto described have the greater part of their windows turned to the south, and are constructed in a low part of the city, where the adjoining buildings served as a protection to them from the inconvenience of the northwest winds.