REMEMBER
Governor Tilden says that John Hanson told him that he heard Web Wagner say that Anna E. Dickinson told him that D.S. Decker heard that there was no doubt that John McLaren said that S.T. Benedict thought Fred. Seward had told Jim Johnson that Cushney had declared to John Fulton that it was generally believed that Harry Hull said, in plain terms, that he heard Al Berry say that his friend, Harriet Beecher Stowe, had said that Fred. Hotchkiss informed her, at Delmonico's, that it was well known all over the country that Fin Helwig had caught Jimmey Farthing in saying that in his opinion it was a matter of fact, of great public interest, that Nate Wells had said Fred. Howell told him that COHEN BROS. would receive, on Thursday, Oct. 28th, the first invoice of LYNN HAVEN OYSTERS, never before sold in Gloversville, and all for 35 cents a quart.
New York, 1875.
When Vesuvius Destroyed Pompeii.
By THE YOUNGER PLINY—79 A.D.
Pliny the Younger—Caius Plinius Cæcilius Secundus—was perhaps, the most cultivated and graceful man of letters of the first century a.d. Literally a man of letters, he left ten books of his "Epistles," which he himself collected—probably even wrote with a view to publication—and their fluent charm still pleases the taste of the reader. One of his letters, written while he was Governor of Bithynia, asks instructions from the Emperor Trajan as to what policy should be pursued against the sect of Christians.
In other epistles he tells two excellent ghost stories. But the two letters which are most vital in their human interest, and which record the most thrilling events, are the two addressed to his friend, the historian Tacitus, concerning the great eruption of Vesuvius on August 24, a.d. 79. Pliny was only seventeen years of age when he witnessed this eruption, which destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum, and in which his uncle, the elder Pliny, author of the celebrated natural history, perished.
Until the year 79 Vesuvius was not suspected of being a volcano. The mountain was covered with vegetation, and the ancient crater was like a circular bowl scooped from the summit. Then came the explosion which buried Pompeii and Herculaneum. Never since has the volcano long remained quiet. The most serious eruptions have been those of 203, 472, 512, 685, 983, 1066, 1631, 1779, 1794, 1822, 1855, 1865, 1872, 1878, 1880, 1895, and 1906.
Pliny's descriptions of the scenes on the slopes of the vengeful volcano—the raining ashes; the fleeing, terrified crowds—are as fresh and vivid to-day as those Roman frescoes which it has been the good fortune of the modern archeologist to uncover after two thousand years of burial beneath the Vesuvian scoriæ.