While we are waiting on the tender before it starts we see a different set of little boys; one, a delicate, pretty-looking little fellow, about your age, but not nearly so tall or strong, raises his cap and begins in English, "Good-day, Monsieur." His little companions sit around in awe at his knowledge and audacity. His name is Pierre, he tells us, and that badly dressed sturdy little boy with a sullen face is Louis. Pierre tries to make conversation in our own language to entertain us. "Are you to Australie going?" he asks. We tell him we are going first to Egypt. "Monter au chameau!" he cries excitedly, going off into a gabble of French and beseeching us to take him with us as "boy." We tell him that he is too small and that it costs much money. "Have you money—English?" he asks. He is very much interested when we show him half a crown and explain that it is equal to three francs of his own money. Then he catches sight of some English stamps. "Timbres!" he cries, and then, with a great effort, "I college," meaning "I collect." We give him a halfpenny stamp, which he carefully puts away in a battered purse already containing two French pennies. Louis, who has been giving convulsive hitches to his little trousers, which threaten to part company altogether with the upper garment, bursts in eagerly, asking us to give him a penny, adding solemnly: "Ma mère est morte," as if the fact of his mother being dead entitled him to demand it. We explain that it is not polite to ask for money. "Cigarette," he then says promptly. We tell him that in England the law forbids boys under sixteen to smoke, whereat they all shriek with laughter. So we add that Englishmen want to grow up tall strong men, and if they smoke as boys they won't, whereupon they grow grave again and nod their little heads wisely.
The waves are quite wild out in the bay and we have considerable difficulty in jumping on to the slippery step at the foot of the long gangway up the ship's side. Hanging on with a firm grip we struggle upward, and when we reach the top we see the little French boys waving their good-byes to us from the tender, Pierre bowing gracefully, cap in hand, Louis with his disreputable air of being a little ragamuffin and rejoicing in it.
A STREET IN POMPEII.
CHAPTER III
FIERY MOUNTAINS
Do you learn Physical Geography? I did when I was in the schoolroom, but it is quite likely to have been given up now, or perhaps it is called by some other name. It sounds dull, but is not really, at least there was one part of it that interested me immensely, so much so that that particular page was thumbed and dirty with being turned over so many times. This was the page on which volcanoes were described. I never thought I should see a volcano, but the idea of these tempestuous mountains, seething with red-hot fire inside, and ready to vomit forth flames and lava at any time appealed to the imagination. This lava, it seemed, was a kind of thick treacly stuff, resembling pitch, which ran down the mountain-sides boiling hot and carried red ruin in its track. It seems nothing less than idiotic for people to live on the slopes of a volcano where such an awful fate might overtake them at any time, yet they not only did so but still do.
One of the reasons why we came by the Orient line is to see Naples, which stands almost under the shadow of one of the best-known volcanoes in the world—Vesuvius.