Jettatura by Theophile Gautier

AT about two o'clock that afternoon, a company of English tourists, in charge of a cicerone, was visiting the ruins of Pompeii. The island tribe, composed of a father, a mother, three tall girls, two small boys, and a cousin, had already traversed with dull, lack-lustre eyes, in which could be read the profound weariness characteristic of the British race, the amphitheatre, the Tragic Theatre, and the Comic Theatre, so quaintly collocated, the military quarter, full of the caricatures sketched by the idle guardsmen, the Forum, destroyed while it was undergoing repairs, the Basilica, the Pantheon, the Temples of Venus and of Jupiter, and the shops which line them. They all followed silently in their "Murray" the prolix explanations of the guide, scarcely casting a look at the pillars, the fragments of statues, the mosaics, the frescoes, and the inscriptions.

They at last reached the Baths, discovered, as the guide pointed out, in 1824. "Here stood the vapour baths; here was the furnace, and there the cooling room." These details, imparted in Neapolitan dialect, mingled with a few English terminations, did not appear to greatly interest the visitors, who had already turned round in order to go out, when Miss Ethelwina, the eldest of the young ladies, a maiden with tow-like fair hair, and a very much freckled complexion, started back, half-shocked, half-frightened, exclaiming: "There's a man!"