I say nothing of the skeletons, whose attitudes relate, in a most striking manner, the horrors of the catastrophe and the frantic struggles of the last moment. In fine, for any one who has the faculty of observation, every step is a surprise, a discovery, a confession won concerning the public and private life of the ancients. Although at first sight mute, these blocks of stone, when interrogated, soon speak and confide their secrets to science or to the imagination that catches a meaning with half a word; they tell, little by little, all that they know, and all the strange, mysterious things that took place on these same pavements, under this same sky, in those miraculous times, the most interesting in history, viz.: the eighth century of Rome and the first of the Christian era. [Footnote A: The money accruing from this sale is applied to the Pompeian library mentioned elsewhere.] II. THE FORUM. DIOMED'S INN.--THE NICHE OF MINERVA.--THE APPEARANCE AND THE MONUMENTS OF THE FORUM.--THE ANTIQUE TEMPLE.--THE PAGAN EX-VOTO OFFERINGS.--THE MERCHANTS' CITY EXCHANGE AND THE PETTY EXCHANGE.--THE PANTHEON, OR WAS IT A TEMPLE, A SLAUGHTER-HOUSE, OR A TAVERN?--THE STYLE OF COOKING AND THE FORM OF RELIGION.--THE TEMPLE OF VENUS.--- THE BASILICA.--THE INSCRIPTIONS OF PASSERS-BY UPON THE WALLS.--THE FORUM REBUILT. As you alight at the station, in the first place breakfast at the _popina_ of Diomed. It is a tavern of our own day, which has assumed an antique title to please travellers. You may there drink Falernian wine manufactured by Scala, the Neapolitan chemist, and, should you ask for some _jentaculum_ in the Roman style--_aliquid scitamentorum_, _glandionidum suillam taridum_, _pernonidem_, _sinciput aut omenta porcina_, _aut aliquid ad eum modum_--they will serve you a beefsteak and potatoes. Your strength refreshed, you will scale the sloping hillock of ashes and rubbish that conceals the ruins from your view; you will pay your two francs at the office and you will pass the gate-keeper's turnstile, astonished, as it is, to find itself in such a place. These formalities once concluded you have nothing more that is modern to go through unless it be the companionship of a guide in military uniform who escorts you, in reality to _watch_, you (especially if you belong to the country of Lord Elgin), but not to mulct you in the least. Placards in all the known languages forbid you to offer him so much as an _obolus_. You make your _entrée_, in a word, into the antique life, and you are as free as a Pompeian.