"Ay! Twenty-two years!..." Afterwards when he heard Pompeii spoken of, it always evoked in his memory several strata of images.

"Very beautiful! Very interesting!" And in his mind's eye he saw again the palaces and temples, but as a secondary consideration, like a shrouded background, while in the forefront were four magnificent legs standing forth,--a human colonnade of slender shafts swathed in transparent black silk.
The solitude so long desired for his second visit was now aggressively in evidence.

In this deserted, dead city there were to-day no other sounds than the whirring of insect wings over the plants beginning to clothe themselves with springtime verdure, and the invisible scampering of reptiles under the layers of ivy.
At the gate of Herculaneum, the guardian of the little museum left Ferragut to examine in peace the excavations of the various corpses, petrified Pompeiians of plaster still in the attitudes of terror in which death had surprised them.

He did not abandon his post in order to trouble the captain with his explanations; he scarcely raised his eyes from the newspaper that he had before him.

The news from Rome,--the intrigues of the German diplomats, the possibility that Italy might enter the war,--were absorbing his entire attention.
Afterwards on the solitary streets the sailor found everywhere the same preoccupation.