unrolled; but we believe that thus far no work of any standard author has been found, except a treatise on Nature by Epicurus. Owing to their semi-carbonized condition, the process of unrolling them is extremely tedious and difficult; as every one knows who has visited the department of "Papyri" in the Neapolitan Museum, and seen Antonio Piaggio's ingenious apparatus at work. The room next to the library contains three paintings: Venus and Cupid fishing, Narcissus looking at the reflection of his face in a spring, and Ariadne abandoned on the Isle of Naxos.

In the triclinium, or dining-room, is another picture which treats this myth of Ariadne and the faithless Theseus in a somewhat different style. Here, too, we find a very graceful painting of Leda holding in her hand a broken egg-shell, in which are the three children, Castor, Pollux, and Helen, whom she is showing to her husband and friends. It is a novel and extremely happy rendering of the story. This legend of Leda and the swan Jupiter seems to have been a favorite subject with ancient artists, and in modern times has attracted even the brilliant pencil of Correggio. The arabesque borders which surround the pictures are decorated with figures of female dancers, heroes in battle, and a vigorous delineation of a combat between two centaurs and a lion. The floor is a handsome black and white mosaic of a pool in which swans and fishes are swimming. This apartment derived its name (triclinium) from the couches (va) on three sides of the table, the fourth side being left free for the convenience of the servants. Each couch could accommodate three persons, who reclined resting on the left elbow. It was only in this indolent attitude that the voluptuaries of the Roman Empire could endure the fatigues of dining. To us who sit in upright dignity around the festive board,

it presents a very ludicrous picture to the imagination to think of rows of hungry gourmands lying prone, like wild beasts watching for their prey. In familiar phrase, to lay the cloth was to spread the couch (sternere lectum), and to dine was to plant the elbow. The ordinary Roman dinner-party was not large; the rule was that the guests should be not less than three, the number of the Graces; nor more than nine, the number of the Muses. The tables were made of rare woods, finely carved, and sometimes entirely of precious metals. Table-cloths were unknown. Those who dined used neither knives nor forks, but helped themselves with their fingers; nevertheless, as soups could not be eaten in this primitive way, necessity, the mother of invention, devised spoons. To handle a hot dinner without burning the fingers, required as much dexterity as the juggler displays. in playing with heated pokers. Gentlemen with tender digits and irrepressible appetites wore metallic finger tips, like thimbles, which enabled them to put a finger into the hottest pie with impunity. After each dish they prepared themselves for the next course by dipping their fingers into ewers of water, carried around by servants, and drying them on napkins, each guest bringing his own napkin with him. Wealthy persons are said to have used a very costly kind of asbestos napkin, which, when soiled, they threw into the fire; the fire cleansed it without consuming it. Refined epicures sometimes wiped their hands on the long hair of the cupbearers, a custom that is very common in the Orient, and recalls the office performed by Magdalen to the feet of Jesus. The Romans began the day with an early breakfast of bread, seasoned with salt and eaten with olives, dried grapes or cheese. At noon they took a warm lunch of eggs, fish, etc., together with their favorite beverage, called calda, a sort of punch, composed of water and

wine, seasoned with spices and sweetened with honey. This drink was to the Romans what tea and coffee are to us. The wine in the mixture, being considerably diluted, possessed only very mildly intoxicating properties, so that it could be used quite freely without unpleasant effects; and Cowper's description of a tea-party, where

-"The bubbling and loud-hissing urn Throws up a steamy column, and the cups That cheer but not inebriate wait on each,"

would correspond very well to a caldaparty of Roman ladies nineteen centuries ago. Several calda-urns of bronze have been found at Pompeii. The principal meal (called cœna) was eaten about four o'clock, and lasted several hours. People, like the elder Pliny, who dined only three hours, were considered remarkably frugal and timesaving. In Pompeii there are numerous paintings of feasts, which give considerable information as to the bill of fare. In the center of the table, for example, is a large dish containing four peacocks, so arranged as to form a stately dome with their tails; here and there are lobsters, each holding something in its claws; one has a blue egg, another an oyster, a third a stuffed rat, a fourth has a little basket of grasshoppers, or some similar appetizing delicacy. There are also four plates of fish, several pheasants, hares and squirrels, each holding its head between its paws; besides peaches, melons and other fruits, a variety of vegetables, fantastic forms of pastry, and different kinds of wine. In order to equip the table as magnificently as possible, many articles were provided not because they were agreeable to the palate, but because they added to the splendor and costliness of the banquet. Dishes, too, which would excite in us the most intense disgust were held in high esteem. In one picture, a man is represented as drinking from a cow's horn, pierced at the smaller end so as

to allow a thin stream of wine to flow into the mouth as he holds it up at arm's length- -a method of imbibing still practiced by the common people of Southern Italy. Other cups were fashioned, by the whimsical fancy of the potter, into the head of a pig, a ram, a stag, or some other animal; many of them are of cheap material (clay), but all show by their excellent workmanship that they were made by good artists. One advantage of such a drinking-vessel in the eyes of a veteran tippler would be that, owing to its peculiar shape, it could not stand upright, and when once filled must be emptied before it could be set down again upon the table. Among the Greeks it was not customary to invite women to dinner parties, although the Sybarites did so, and, according to Plutarch, used to send the invitations a year beforehand, in order to give the ladies ample time to dress for the occasion. But among the Romans, women were not only admitted to banquets, as is evident from several Pompeiian paintings, but, if we may believe what contemporary poets say of them, were also especially proud of their feats of drinking; and Shakespeare is true to Roman customs when he makes Cleopatra boast of such triumphs over Antony:

"Ere the ninth hour I drunk him to his bed; Then put my tires and mantles on him, whilst I wore his sword Philippan."

The sleeping apartments in the Pompeiian houses are very diminutive, even in the largest houses, some of them being scarcely larger than a good-sized closet. The bedsteads, or small sofas, were sometimes made of cedar, inlaid with ivory and tortoise shell, with feet of bronze or silver. This frame was strung with girths, on which rested a mattrass of chopped sedges or eiderdown. Of course, such couches were the luxury of the rich; the poor man was glad enough to lie on the pavement, under any shelter. These bed

only the metallic ornaments remaining to show where they stood. Nevertheless, there are paintings at Pompeii which give a very full and accurate idea of them. Great ostentation was shown in the embroidery of the counterpanes, which were usually perfumed with oriental spices. The poet Martial has an epigram in which he ridicules the vanity of a certain Zoilus, who often pretended to be sick so that visitors might have an opportunity to admire the splendor of his purple coverlets, fresh from the looms of Alexandria. But that this weakness did not die out with the ancients is evident from a poem of the English epigrammatist Davies, who tells how, at the time of James the First

"The beau would feign sickness

To show his night-cap fine

And his wrought pillow, overspread with lawn."

We have thus described somewhat in detail one of the smaller private dwellings of Pompeii, and have entered into particulars, because, in such cases, descriptions must be minute in order to convey correct and intelligible information. There are many houses far more spacious than this one, and furnished with greater magnificence; but they are all constructed essentially on the same plan-being built around the atrium and peristyle, the two centers from which they receive their light; whereas the modern house is constructed with direct reference to the street, with which it holds easy communication by means of numerous windows. The Roman house, then, had no broad and lofty façade, like the brown-stone or marble front of a modern building. It did not look into the street, except perhaps from the upper story, but was situated in the center of a block of shops, one or two long and narrow passages serving for ingress and egress. Its beauty was, therefore, wholly interior; it was also

getting only faint echoes of the noises without. The shops which surrounded it were of various kinds, and formed an important source of revenue to the householder. The Moorish houses of Spain and the Brazilian houses in South America seem to be built on much the same plan. The exterior, with its dark windowless walls, gave no hint of the brightness and splendor within-except, perchance, when the doors were open and the hanging tapestries thrown back, and the passer by could catch a glimpse, through the vestibule, of the series of courts, with their columns, fountains, parterres of flowers, mosaic pavements, and frescoes on the walls, all reflecting the light that poured down upon them from the deep blue of a clear Italian sky. The reader can easily imagine the magical effect of such a perspective. But in spite of these rich decorations and embellishments, in comparison with which our finest drawingrooms look tawdry and commonplace, it is to be feared that with our domestic habits we should find even the most palatial residences of Pompeii extremely uncomfortable places to live in. Most of all, we should miss those provisions for individual comfort in the private apartments, for the lack of which no general ostentation and display of wealth and artistic taste in the more public portions of the house could compensate. But the Pompeiians, like the Neapolitans of to-day, were a people of out-door habits, to which they were constantly attracted by a fine climate and by a passion for public affairs and public amusements such as has never been exhibited by any other nation of ancient or modern times. The bright sky, the gossip of the forum, the pleasure of the baths, and the sports of the amphitheater, prevented them from feeling the real meagerness of their homelife.

F

By

LORIDA possesses the fountain of health, if not that of youth, so long and patiently sought by Ponce de Leon. When we read the story of his wanderings, and mark the wonderful virtues he expected to find in the fabled waters of the New World, it seems like a prophecy of what may be seen in Florida. Hither from all parts of the country come the smitten and the afflicted. bathing in the wondrous springs of this flowery land, breathing this balmy air, the wrinkles are smoothed from aged brows, roses come back to the cheeks of the consumptive, the rheumatic lays aside his crutches, and the old promise of the gallant Spanish adventurer is fulfilled-youth is restored; or at least that which constitutes the essential of youth-buoyant feelings, elastic spirits, and strength.

While in this region we were constantly met by the question: "Don't you think Florida will be rapidly settled ?" varied, as we approached home, to this: "Do you think Florida will be rapidly settled ?"

The query forces itself upon the tourist-why the oldest of our States, permanently occupied long before settlements were dreamed of elsewhere, with more than half its territory lying where frosts never come, the whole of it where a freezing day is known but once in a generation, out of the path of hurricanes, which are such a sad drawback to the charms of the tropics, with as large a proportion of productive land as most of the States, a thousand miles of sea-shore, a wide and deep river running through it for hundreds of miles; why with all these advantages, after more than three hundred years of

occupation, Florida never had white inhabitants enough to entitle her to a Representative? With all these advantages of situation, soil and climate, why do her magnificent rivers run through a wilderness, while the comers from over the sea and the discontented of the older States flock to the West?

For some localities a sufficient answer would be found in the presence of the precious metals; but that will not account for the immense emigration to Wisconsin, Northern Michigan and Minnesota. The spirit of injustice constantly at work in fair Florida may furnish a reason why she has not advanced more rapidly in civilization, but it will not solve the problem; for New England, in spite of the poorest soil, most rigorous climate, and deeds of wrong that still call the blush to the cheeks of her children, has never met with any serious interruption in her career, and from her coney-like refuge among the stony rocks she has virtually colonized the whole North and West.

After much reading of the stories of early conquest and attempts to found colonies on these shores, it seems to us, the success of one may be traced to the determination to be self-governing, the failures of the other to dependence upon a far-off monarch, and, later, subjection to a governing class. Let us see if there be anything in the history of the two colonies most remote from each other to warrant this conclusion.

The first occupation of Florida-for the romantic journey of Ponce de Leon and his futile attempt to found a colony, and the ill-starred enterprise of Narvaez (whose historian and almost sole survivor, Cabeça de Vaca, demands for

his narrative a faith that could remove mountains,) could not be called occupation-was by the French; but the feeble torch of Protestantism, kindled on the sands of the River of May, went out amid horrors that now, generations after, while both Spaniard and Huguenot have made their homes in America, chill the blood, and make one thank God from the depths of the heart that, though the spirit of wrong never sleeps, it is to-day so far controlled by other spirits that it does not apply the burning brand to human flesh.

Three hundred years ago, Spain, in the person of one of the cruelest bigots that ever shamed a religion of love, took undisturbed possession of the site of the quaint old town that—after rulership by kings Most Catholic and Christian Defenders of the Faith, Stars and Stripes and Stars and Bars-still looks as if it had been bodily moved from the interior of Spain, as the house of our Lady of Loretto is said to have passed from far Palestine. Slaves were brought from the Antilles by the haughty Adelantado, and thus was introduced a system the beginning of whose extirpation has cost rivers of blood, and treasure enough to have properly educated all the heathen whom the faithful came to convert. When one thinks of the eighty years of unrequited toil upon the fort, whose foundations were cemented by the blood of Ribault, the gallant Admiral of France, and his followers; of the countless wrongs and brutalities visited upon the unoffending children of the soil, he marvels little that the work of Christianizing went on so slowly. Nor can it be wondered at that the red man preferred the simple rites by means of which he held communion with the Great Spirit, to the pompous ceremonial of cruel men, who claimed to be God's children while engaged in the commission of the darkest crimes, and at the same time to hold the keys of that heaven which none could enter with

The people of the little hamlet of St. Augustine drew their support from the fort; the fort, its support from the sovereign across the sea; and when disaster threatened, all took refuge therein. When the supply ships did not come, famine threatened all alike. Of soldiers more than

and priests there were enough, of tillers of the soil none; and so strongly rooted is still the dominant spirit of the old régime, that to-day a bow-shot beyond the ruined wall of the tower one can stand beneath the shade of the primeval forest. When, therefore, as the result of European wars, the flag of St. Jago, with its battlemented castles and lions rampant, gave place to the cross of St. George, there was little but the fort to change hands. The Spaniards removed with their families, the lands were uncultivated, the parent settlements had sent out few or no offshoots, and the work of colonization was to recommence.

More than half a century after these deeds were committed-deeds ever kept in mind by the name of the inlet (Matanzas) that witnessed them—a small number of men and women, in midwinter, with no parade of "drawn swords and gorgeous apparel," no commission to take possession of a continent in the name of king or kaiser, no pretence even of converting heathen, urged solely by the determination to be free to worship, which freedom for them included all they craved, landed in New England, and began a settlement which was never abandoned, and which was never in the possession of any but English-speaking men. They came not hundreds strong, fierce, lawless men, in search of streams that ran in golden sands; they came in families — with the restraining influence of women ever about them; they came to make homes, and though they built forts they had no soldier class. Each man