Across the street from the laundry a painted shop front shows the operations of a felter’s establishment, where wool was matted together with a fixative, under repeated manipulation and pressure, until it acquired a consistent texture, like a piece of cloth. Felt was in demand for caps, cloaks, slippers, and blankets (the latter for both man and horse). The shop sign shows workmen at tables holding the carding comb and knives of their trade. In the middle of the picture other men, naked to the waist, are at work at shallow troughs impregnating the wool with the coagulant (Pliny the Elder says it was vinegar) which is being heated by a stove beneath the troughs. To the right, the proprietor--his name was Verecundus--proudly holds up a red-striped finished sample. To the left, Mercury, the patron of tradesmen, is painted emerging from a Tuscan temple with a money bag in his hand (“Hurrah for profit,” says a Pompeian _graffito_). Below is the proprietor’s wife at a table, in spirited conversation with a female customer who is trying on slippers. No literary discussion, primary or secondary, can match the vivid concreteness of this archaeological record. The house (II.v.1–4) of Decimus Octavius Quartio (or Marcus Loreius Tiburtinus--authorities differ about the occupant’s name) belonged to a potter, to judge by a small kiln, with the potter’s stool and samples of his wares, found in a workroom. This is interesting enough, but more interesting still is this tradesman’s taste, as revealed by his house and garden. Hardly a corner of the house is left unfrescoed, and the paintings include two ambitious cycles; nine episodes from the saga of Hercules, and fourteen from the _Iliad_. (The House of the Cryptoporticus [I.vi.2–4] presents twenty-five _Iliad_ episodes from an original 86, badly damaged when the last owner, an obvious Babbitt, turned the cryptoporticus into a wine cellar and made over the dining room for public use.) The potter was besides a connoisseur of gardens; his is the most charming that Pompeii can boast. His _impluvium_--for catching rainwater in the _atrium_ (courtyard or patio)--is double-walled, for flower-boxes; behind the _atrium_ is a formal flower bed, with walks around it on three sides; the chief feature of the sunken back garden (Fig. 8.13), nearly twice the area of the house itself, is a pair of long narrow fish pools, planned perpendicular to each other to form a T, and trellised (Fig. 8.14) so that vines could grow over them. The walls of the pools were painted blue to deepen the color of the water. At one end of the crossbar of the T is the pleasantest _al fresco_ dining alcove imaginable. Statuettes embellish the alcove and the sides of the pool. There is a little shrine in the alcove; another, with a fountain, where the two pools meet; still another, with a fountain in front of it, two-thirds of the way along the upright of the T. Putholes in the garden wall