To get an idea of what a nuisance the ashes from the crater are to the cities on the plain below, you remember the time you were out in your back yard splitting boxes for kindling wood and my chum and I threw a pail of ashes over the fence, and accidentally it went all over you, about four inches thick. That time you got mad and threw cucumbers at us, when we ran down the alley. Keep that in your mind and you can understand the destruction of Pompeii, when Vesuvius, thousands of years ago, coughed up hot ashes and covered the town 40 feet deep with hot stuff, and killed every living thing, and petrified and preserved the whole business, and made a prairie on top of a town, and everybody eventually forgot that there had ever been a town there, for about 2,000 years. If my chum and I had not run out of ashes we would have buried you so deep in your back yard that you would have been petrified with your hatchet, and when they excavated the premises a thousand years later they would have found your remains and put you in a museum.
Well, a couple of hundred years ago a peasant was sinking a well down in the ashes, and he struck a petrified barroom, with a bartender standing behind the bar in the act of serving some whisky 2,000 years old, and the peasant located a claim there, and the authorities took possession of the prairie and have been digging the town out ever since, looking for more of that 2,000-year-old whisky.
When I told dad about what they were finding at the ruins of Pompeii, and how you were liable to find gold and diamonds and petrified women, he wanted to go and dig in the ashes, as he said it would be more exciting than raking over the dumping grounds in Chicago for tin cans and lumps of coal, and so we hired a hack and went to the buried town, but dad insisted on carrying an umbrella, so if Vesuvius belched any more ashes he could protect himself. Gee, but from what I have seen at that old ruin, a man would need an umbrella made of corrugated iron to keep from being buried.
Well, when we got to Pompeii dad was for going right where they were digging, but I got him to look over the streets and houses that had been uncovered first, and he was paralyzed to think that a town could be covered with ashes all these thousands of years, and then be uncovered and find a town that would compare, in many respects, with cities of the present day, with residences complete with sculpture, paintings and cut marble that would skin Chicago to a finish.
We went through residences that looked as rich as the Vanderbilt houses in New York, baths that you could take a plunge and a swim in, if they had the water, paintings that would take a premium at any horse show to-day, pavements that would shame the pavements of London and Paris, and petrified women that you couldn't tell from a low-necked party in Washington, except that the ashes had eaten the clothes off. I guess most of the people in Pompeii got away when the ashes began to rain down, for they must have seen that it wasn't going to be a light shower, but a deluge, 'cause they never have found many corpses. They must have run to Naples, and maybe they are running yet, and you may see some of them at your grocery, and if you do see anybody covered with ashes, looking for a job, give them some crackers and cheese and charge it to dad, for they must be hungry by this time.
Say, do you know that some of those refugees from Pompeii went off in such a hurry that they left bread baking in the ovens, and meat cooking in the pots? It seems the most wonderful thing to me of anything I ever saw. We went all through the streets and houses and saw ballrooms that beat anything in San Francisco, and when we went into a building occupied by the officers in charge of the excavations, and dad saw a telephone and an electric light, he thought those things had been dug up, too, and he claimed that the men who were receiving millions of dollars in royalties on telephones and electric lights were frauds who were infringing on Pompeii patents 2,000 years old, and he wouldn't believe me when I told him that telephones and electric lights were not dug up; he said then he wouldn't believe anything was dug up, but that the whole thing was a put-up job to rob tourists. But when we got to a locality where the dagoes were digging the ashes away from a house and were uncovering a parlor, where rich things were being discovered, he saw that it was all right.
I suppose I never ought to have played such a thing on dad, but I told him that anybody who saw a thing first when it came out of the ashes could grab it and keep it, and just as I told him a workman threw out a shovel full of ashes, just as you would throw out dirt digging for angle worms, and there was a little silver urn with a lot of coins in it, and you could not hold dad. He grabbed for it, the workman grabbed for it, and they went down together in the ashes, and the man rolled dad over and he was a sight, but the workman got the silver urn, and dad wanted to fight.