Great as was Antonio’s fear of ghosts, the bare possibility that Ginevra was actually there in the flesh was a far stronger consideration; and he hastened to test the reality of his fair visitant. Having her properly cared for, he hastened to the vault, where the displaced stone confirmed her story.
A few days later, Antonio boldly applied to the civil authorities to marry the “late Ginevra degli Agolanti,” and backed his application with certificates of the death and burial of the lady! The authorities hearing the facts—and mayhap being romantically disposed—decided that the lady was legally dead, that her relatives, by their own unwilling confession, had persisted in so regarding her; hence, she was no longer bound by any legal tie to the living, father or husband! She was absolutely free!
So Antonio and Ginevra were married, and of course, “lived happily ever after.”
CHAPTER XX.
THE VOLCANO.
“And it bubbles, and seethes, and hisses, and roars,
As when fire is with water commixed and comblending,
And a hell-molten surf thunders wild on its shores,
While a red-tumbling flood from its caverns outpours,
Hurling hills from their place, and the mountains downrending,
So the chaos eternal
Born of fury infernal,
Boils and belches and rumbles, unreined and unending.”
T is an axiom that there are three misstatements in the popular description of a crab: “A fish, of a red color, that runs backward.”
Ques. What is a volcano?
Ans. A volcano is a burning mountain, from the summit of which issue smoke and flames. (Old Geography.)
The writer remembers the surprise he felt when a lad of nine, full of childish confidence in the infallibility of text-book misinformation, on reading in Prescott’s “Conquest in Mexico” that Cortez obtained sulphur to replenish his stock of powder by lowering one of his soldiers into the crater of Popocatepetl. He wondered how so reputable a historian as Prescott had been induced to credit such an extravagant “yarn” on the part of the Spanish chronicler. To his youthful fancy, fired by the teachings of primary geographies, a volcano was a sort of chimney to a titanic iron furnace in full blast; indeed, he would have supposed it safer to descend into an iron furnace than into the crater. He speculated long on the matter, and wondered if fire-proof dresses were known in those days.