"I think we must give you Pompeji as your dowry when the King has that patent of nobility drawn out which he wishes to have the honour of conferring upon you; and then you can put it all under one hall roof, Admiral." "You are too good, Your Majesty, but I should feel like a fish out of water with an estate on a continent. I am an islander, and islands are in the keeping of fleets." "You are running away, Admiral, for the first time," said the Queen, laughing good-naturedly; "but if you won't take the city, the city must come to Portici. One cannot make these expeditions out here every day--why, it has been at the peril of our lives," she added, suddenly remembering the hail--"but in the palace one can be surrounded all day long with these oldest paintings in the world. And sawing them off does not hurt them: why, the ancients did it themselves! When Herculaneum was dug out we found in one chamber the pictures ready sawn off for a removal. It was put off by the eruption for a couple of thousand years, but we carried out the wishes of the former owners." "Oh, Your Majesty!" said the Admiral. And this is how we cavalcaded round Pompeji. Nor did we confine ourselves to the streets: we rode into the temples, up to the very altars; and in one of them--the temple, I think, of some Egyptian god--speaking through the interpretation of My Lady, the Director called the Admiral's attention to a secret passage perforated in two places, observing that it was in that passage, and through its openings, that the concealed priests of the goddess were wont to pronounce the oracles to be delivered to a credulous multitude. He was going to add to this valuable piece of information other particulars, perhaps equally interesting, when the Prince Caracciolo stopped his progress sourly by telling him he need be at no further trouble, since he was sure that the milord Inglese would not believe one word of the story: the gentleman was too great an admirer of antiquity to be persuaded that his friends, the ancients, would be capable of upholding fraud in their worship. "I, for my part," he added, "am convinced that all the oracles we read of in history were contrived by similar tricks of imposition." And then this strange man, who in his own religion was profoundly superstitious, changed of a sudden, and would have us believe that these oracles were by direct inspiration of Satan, the arch-fiend of mankind, who, before the establishment of the Catholic faith, was absolute lord and master of the human race.