The public buildings at Pompeii are numerous and striking, but cannot be properly described without drawings. At the door of the theatre was found one of the tickets of ivory, with the number of the box marked upon it. On the walls of the houses may still be seen the theatrical announcements, such as with us are pasted up at the corners of the streets. Those at Pompeii are written with a brush on a ground of stucco, and were washed off as often as the bill was changed. The last one stood a little longer than the writer expected. Pliny tells us the people were in the theatre when the eruption broke out. It is impossible to specify half the curious and interesting objects to be seen here without writing a volume. Temples, theatres, amphitheatres, porticoes, fountains, arches, tombs, and the private dwellings of thousands of men, who appear to have left them but yesterday, all make a strange and most exciting impression on the feelings. You almost expect the owners of the houses to step back and ask your business there. It is curious to observe that the objects which, in their own day, were the most trivial and unimportant, are now precisely those which are beheld with the greatest interest. We cannot pass without curious attention the cart-ruts in the streets, or the charcoal scrawlings made by idle boys upon the walls, or the names of Mr. A, B, and C, who lived in this, that, and the other house. There is a place where a mason was at work, putting on mortar; he had just laid on a trowel-full, and was drawing a stroke to smooth it down, when the alarm of the eruption was given, and he left his work and ran. There stand the stone and mortar to this day, with the mark of the unfinished stroke! He would have made all smooth in one second more--but 1700 years have passed, and it is not done yet. An hundred volumes written on the uncertainty of human purpose could not make the fact half so striking as this little incident! CHAPTER XX. _Journey towards Rome.--Vineyards.--The olive season.--Beautiful scene at Mola di Gaeta.--A shepherd among the mountains.--The robbers of Fondi.--The Pontine marshes.--Velletri.--The nightingale.--First sight of Rome._