one may drink and wash one's face at once! Who has not seen the street urchins gnawing at a slice of crimson melon, while the water streams out from among the black seeds, and does in truth make streaks of cleanliness at least upon their faces; for not the widest mouth can catch all the dripping juice. In this ancient street one is at the heart of Naples. This strong pulse of life, this eager, abounding vitality has throbbed along this thoroughfare for more ages than one can count; and the sight on which we look to-day, the seething crowd, the straight house-fronts, the long street dropping to the east, is different in no essential from that which has been seen by every ruler of the city--Spaniard, Angevin, or Norman, yes, even by Greek and Roman governors--from days when the fires of Vesuvius were a forgotten terror, and the streets of Pompeii surged with just such another crowd as this. It is here, in this most ancient Strada Tribunali, that the traveller should pause before he visits the old buried cities. Here and here only will he learn to comprehend how they were peopled; and only when he carries with him in the eyes of memory the aspect of the cellars and the shops, the crowded side streets and the pandemonium of noise, will he succeed in discovering at Pompeii more than a heap of ruins, out of which the interest dies quickly because his imagination has not gained materials out of which to reconstruct the living city. Neapolis, the old Greek city, was similar to Pompeii both in size and construction. Its situation, too, was not dissimilar. It stood near the sea, yet did not touch it, having a clear space of open ground between its strand and walls, perhaps because the sea was an open gateway into every town which stood upon it, though the nature of the ground partly dictated the arrangement. There is no building, even in the Strada Tribunali, which was standing when Pompeii was a city. The oldest left is near the point at which we entered the street--to be exact, it is at the angle of the Strada Tribunali and the Vico di Francesco del Giudice--a tall brick campanile of graceful outline which, in the confusion of the narrow street, one might most easily pass unobserved. That is the only portion still remaining of the church built by Bishop Pomponio, between the years 514 and 532; and not only is it almost, if not quite the most ancient building now extant in Naples, but it was the first of Neapolitan churches known to have been dedicated to the Virgin, and it is thus especially sacred in the eyes of the citizens.