the long rows of stone benches in the dress circle, and looked at the

place for the orchestra, and the ruined stage, and around at the wide

sweep of empty boxes, and thought to myself, "This house won't pay." I

tried to imagine the music in full blast, the leader of the orchestra

beating time, and the "versatile" So-and-So (who had "just returned from

a most successful tour in the provinces to play his last and farewell

engagement of positively six nights only, in Pompeii, previous to his

departure for Herculaneum,") charging around the stage and piling the

agony mountains high--but I could not do it with such a "house" as that;

those empty benches tied my fancy down to dull reality. I said, these

people that ought to be here have been dead, and still, and moldering to

dust for ages and ages, and will never care for the trifles and follies

of life any more for ever--"Owing to circumstances, etc., etc., there

will not be any performance to-night." Close down the curtain. Put out

the lights.

And so I turned away and went through shop after shop and store after

store, far down the long street of the merchants, and called for the

wares of Rome and the East, but the tradesmen were gone, the marts were

silent, and nothing was left but the broken jars all set in cement of

cinders and ashes: the wine and the oil that once had filled them were

gone with their owners.

In a bake-shop was a mill for grinding the grain, and the furnaces for

baking the bread: and they say that here, in the same furnaces, the

exhumers of Pompeii found nice, well baked loaves which the baker had not

377

The Innocents Abroad