heaped up in a huge hillock, but now it helps to construct the very
railroad that carries it away, and will, one day, tip it into the sea.

"Nothing can present a livelier scene than the excavation of these
ruins. Men diligently dig away at the earth, and bevies of young girls
run to and fro without cessation, with baskets in their hands. These
are sprightly peasant damsels collected from the adjacent villages most
of them accustomed to working in factories that have closed or curtailed
operations owing to the invasion of English tissues and the rise of
cotton. No one would have dreamed that free trade and the war in America
would have supplied female hands to work at the ruins of Pompeii. But
all things are linked together now in this great world of ours, vast as
it is. These girls then run backward and forward, filling their baskets
with soil, ashes, and _lapillo_, hoisting them on their heads, by the
help of the men, with a single quick, sharp motion, and thereupon
setting off again, in groups that incessantly replace each other, toward
the railway, passing and repassing their returning companions. Very
picturesque in their ragged gowns of brilliant colors, they walk swiftly
with lengthy strides, their long skirts defining the movements of their
naked limbs and fluttering in the wind behind them, while their arms,
with gestures like those of classic urn-bearers, sustain the heavy load
that rests upon their heads without making them even stoop. All this is
not out of keeping with the monuments that gradually appear above the
surface as the rubbish is removed. Did not the sight of foreign
visitors here and there disturb the harmony of the scene, one might
readily ask himself, in the midst of this Virgilian landscape, amid
these festooning vines, in full view of the smoking Vesuvius, and
beneath that antique sky, whether all those young girls who come and go
are not the slaves of Pansa, the ædile, or of the duumvir Holconius."