SEVENTEEN HUNDRED YEARS IN THE OVEN.

Dunstan Times, Issue 518, 22 March 1872, Page 1 (Supplement)

SEVENTEEN HUNDRED YEARS IN THE OVEN.

One house in Pompeii had evidentlybeen in a of repair when the vol-cano-storm buried it. 1 Painters, and decorators, anb cleaners vVere masters of the situation. The household gods were all in disorder and the family if not out of town must have been undergoing that condition of misery which spring clearings and other like infections inevitably entail. Painters pots and brushes and workmen’s tools were scattered about. Telltale spots ot whitewash starred wall and floor. Such domestic implements as pots and kettles had been bundled up in a corner all by'thom’selves and the cook was nowhere. Dinner, however had not been forgotten. A solitary fit stood simmering (if it ever did simmer) on the stove. And (start not, for it is true) there was a bronzed dish waiting before the oven, and on the dish a suckling pig all ready to be baked. But the oven was already engaged with its lull complement of bread. So the suckling pig had to wait. And it never entered the oven and the loaves were never taken out till after a sojourn of seventeen hundred years ! They had been cooking ever since November 29, a.d. 79. M. Fiorelli has them now in his museum at Pompeii, twenty-o ieof then, rather hard of course, and black, but in a perfect state of preservation.