Harpers Ferry Free Press

Pompeii. The latest accounts from this celebrated city of former days, state, that the labor has been so incessant in excavating the place, that people may now pass through most of the streets. Mr. Williams, an English traveller, has lately visited these ruins. He entered by the Appian way, through a narrow range of tombs, very well sculptured, on which he could read the names of the dead. They have found near one of the gates of the city, a sentry box with the skeleton of a soldier holding a lamp in his hand. The greater part of the houses and public edifices preserve their ornaments of architecture and painting fresh and entire. The pavements of the streets is worn in many places with the wheels of carriages; and every where the life and activity of the inhabitants seem to have been all at once interrupted. At each step one discovers traces of the industry of a people overwhelmed in the midst of their labor. Here the shop of a blacksmith, with the hammer resting on the anvil; there the shop of a sculptor filled with statues just sketched out, and blocks of marble, the shop of a baker, or a wine merchant, whose drawers contain money--a school, in the midst of which is an elevation destined for the master; a large theatre, a court-house, an amphitheatre 220 feet in length, temples, barracks, whose columns are covered with humorous inscriptions, and the names of soldiers who occupied it, walls, cisterns, public seats, beautiful altars in Mosaic fragments or statues, earthen tubs for carrying water through the streets, prisons and fetters; such are the principal remains of the arts of Italy. The houses of Pompeii are in general very low. Many of them are only 10 feet high. The streets are about 16 feet wide, and the foot walks 3 feet, considerably elevated. The narrower streets are only six feet wide, with side-walks in proportion.