of the gulf.  However, Vesuvius was not what it has become; fertile and wooded almost to the summit, covered with orchards and vines, it must have resembled the picturesque heights of Monte San Angelo, toward which we are rolling.  The summit alone, honeycombed with caverns and covered with black stones, betrayed to the learned a volcano “long extinct.”  It was to blaze out again, however, in a terrible eruption; and, since then, it has constantly flamed and smoked, menacing the ruins it has made and the new cities that brave it, calmly reposing at its feet.

What do you expect to find at Pompeii?  At a distance, its antiquity seems enormous, and the word “ruins” awakens colossal conceptions in the excited fancy of the traveller.  But, be not self-deceived; that is the first rule in knocking about over the world.  Pompeii was a small city of only thirty thousand souls; something like what Geneva was thirty years ago.  Like Geneva, too, it was marvellously situated—­in the depth of a picturesque valley between mountains shutting in the horizon on one side, at a few steps from the sea and from a streamlet, once a river, which plunges into it—­and by its charming site attracted personages of distinction, although it was peopled chiefly with merchants and others in easy circumstances; shrewd, prudent folk, and probably honest and clever enough, as well.  The etymologists, after having exhausted, in their lexicons, all the words that chime in sound with Pompeii, have, at length, agreed in deriving the name from a Greek verb which signifies to send, to transport, and hence they conclude that many of the Pompeians were engaged in exportation, or perhaps, were emigrants sent from a distance to form a colony.  Yet these opinions are but conjectures, and it is useless to dwell on them.

All that can be positively stated is that the city was the entrepot of the trade of Nola, Nocera, and Atella.  Its port was large enough to receive a naval armament, for it sheltered the fleet of P. Cornelius.  This port, mentioned by certain authors, has led many to believe that the sea washed the walls of Pompeii, and some guides have even thought they could discover the rings that once held the cables of the galleys.  Unfortunately for this idea, at the place which the imagination of some of our contemporaries covered with salt water, there were one day discovered the vestiges of old structures, and it is now conceded that Pompeii, like many other seaside places, had its harbor at a distance.  Our little city made no great noise in history.  Tacitus and Seneca speak of it as celebrated, but the Italians of all periods have been fond of superlatives.  You will find some very old buildings in it, proclaiming an ancient origin, and Oscan inscriptions recalling the antique language of the country.  When the Samnites invaded the whole of Campania, as though to deliver it over more easily to Rome, they probably occupied Pompeii, which figured in the second Samnite