The idea, like so many of My Lady's ideas, proved to be an inspiration. The managing--the difficulty of managing--the strange asses hastily impressed, entertained the empty heads to whom the very antiquities were interesting seen in this lazy manner, and afforded pleasant food for jest. To those who were minded to see, everything Pompejan presented itself now with an added interest. For once the impluvia--the shallow marble ponds set in the centre of the sloping courts--had their complement of water, and all the ingenious devices for conveying the coveted moisture from every surface of the house to the pond in the centre, were at work. We clattered a little along a street, when we heard My Lady's clear full voice call out to stop, and those who would to dismount. The Admiral, for all his one arm, was off his ass before any one else, and helping My Lady to dismount, and enter a house of a better kind, which by the traces of mould still left could not have been so long unearthed. The statues of little Amoretti were still on a little marble island in the centre of the pool, and there were a pair of marble shafts with the heads and shoulders of satyrs standing in the court. My Lady hurried us into a sequence of small chambers, no larger than the chambers made in the thickness of the walls of ancient English castles, which were painted in bright colours with borders of flowers, and had groups of animals masking as human beings for their centres. A grasshopper driving a kind of buggy with a parrot for his steed was very quaint: I had not thought that the Romans knew of parrots. When My Lady had called Pepino to throw a bucket of water over the designs and freshen them up, their brilliance was startling. Nor were they true frescoes, as we now know the art in England, for I rubbed my finger against them whilst they were wet, but could get no stain. "You will soon be able to see them better," said the Queen--who went round the excavations with the eye of a purchaser, who had had a residue thrown in--"for I am going to have those pictures of the ancients sawn off the walls and carried to my palace." "They were better here," said the Admiral boldly, when My Lady interpreted. She repeated his remark to Her Majesty, who said,-- "Tut! tut! A few storms such as we have had to-day, and a summer or two of the sandy breath of the sirocco, and where would they be?" Then occurred a lively little dialogue, interpreted, with improvements, no doubt, by her Ladyship. "If it were in England I make bold to think that we should roof them in with glass." "You English are made of money." "A nation need not be made of money to have this whole city roofed in with glass, as it is given back to the daylight; and these would be the finest museums in the world. The Romans were the chief race worth considering in the ancient world, and here we have the actual houses in which they lived, with the ashes still in the braziers and the bread in the bins."