"Marvellously interesting I found it, and the good Queen had a fresh house excavated on purpose for me to see how the things looked when they were found. It was a fine house--one of the best in the city. The frescoes on the walls were equal to most which they have peeled off and carried to Portici. There was a very handsome white marble fountain; there were some fair statuettes and stelæ (whatever are these last for? I had the name from Emma); but the very things I most wished to see were absent--the ruins of a meal on a table, and skeletons in the position in which they were overtaken in the storm. Any articles of household furniture, which Emma says were mostly of bronze, and therefore would not have been consumed, I should have desired to see in the places where they were being used when the end came. But this house might have been the ruins of part of the Pope's Museum at Rome! "However, I must confess that the chief interest of the day to me was watching that wonderful woman as she led the way through all these marvels of antiquity, her beautiful face beaming with intelligence and consideration for us; and she was no dry-as-dust, for, in the midst of a disquisition, she would find time to say to me--'Nelson, I had this shepherdess hat out from England: tell me, am I not too old for it?' she all the while looking like a girl in the freshness of her teens. All through the day she heaped delicious favours upon unworthy me. It was only perhaps a hand caressingly laid on my shoulder when I was to look at something; or thrust through my arm and let to rest on it when there was an unusually trying walk from excavation to excavation; or a drawing in of skirts to make room for me at her side when a party of us, headed by Emma and the Queen, sat down to the second breakfast with our legs in the deepest fountain we could find. It was dry, and perhaps two feet deep; and I daresay we cut a comical figure enough, looking as if the table and our legs had gone through the floor and left us squatting round a hole. It was Emma's idea. "Then there was a storm, which drove us for refuge into the custode's quarters. Emma was sorely frighted. We were alone, huddled up in a narrow passage. She was so prostrated, and near fainting, that I had to strive to win her with the gentlest caresses to prevent her from succumbing; but when she came to, the storm beginning to abate, she was not angry, but suffered me most graciously. Then we had the drive to Resina. I was driving her _caless_, and she let herself rest against me in sheer weariness after the agitation of the afternoon, but very trustful.