Pompeii.

Auckland Star, Volume XXVI, Issue 265, 14 November 1885, Page 3

Pompeii.

Eighteen hundred years ago, lifo suddenly stopped in the streets of Pompeii. Many of the inhabitants escaped from th 6 showers of ashes and stones which Vesuvius dropped upon the doomed city, but they left behind them hundreds of things which illustrate thefamiliursaying, "There is nothingnews under the sun." Thoseold Pompeians were very modern. They had filding-doors and hot wator urns; thoy put gratings to their windows and made rockeries in their gardens ; their Btecl-yards areoxactly liko those our own cheese dealer uses. Their children had toys liko ours—boars, lions, pigs, cats, dogs—made of clay, and sometimes serving as jugs also. People wrote on walls, and cut their names on seats, just as we do also. They kept birds in cages likewise. They gave tokens at the doir of their places of entertainment—the people in tho gallery had pigeons made of a sort of terra cotta. They put lamps inside of the hollow eyes of the masks that adorned their fountains. They oven mado grottoes of shells -vulgarity itself is ancient. Thoy ate sausages and hung up strings of onions. They had stands for public vehicles, and the schoolmaster used a birch to the dunces. Thoy put stepping-stones across the roads, that the dainty young patricians and the pursy senators might not soil thoir gilded sandals. It was never cold enough for thoir pipes to burst, but they turned their water on and off with taps, and their cookehops had marble counters. They clapped their offenders into the stocks—two gladiators were there for eighteen years. When their crockery was broke they riveted it. At Herculaneum there is a huge wine jar half buried in the earth. It bas been badly broken, but it was so neatly riveted with many rivets that it no doubt held tho wiuo kept aa well as ever. Those rivots have lasted eighteen hundred years. It is a strange thing to think about. What would the housewife have said if some one had told her that her cracked pot would outlast the Roman Empire ?