VESUVIUS.
NEARLY two thousand years ago there was a mountain, and its name was Vesuvius. From the foot of it to the very top it was almost like a garden.
At the bottom were two great cities, called Herculaneum and Pompeii. The mountain is there now, and near it is the city of Naples in Italy.
One day, when everything was going on in those great cities just as usual, an awful sound was heard like the firing of ten thousand of the biggest cannon; the earth shook as if it was going to pieces, then it grew dark like night. The sky was filled with flying cinders, or something like ashes; the air had a sulphurous smell. All the people wondered. Some ran into the street, some took to the boats and rowed away as fast as possible, some screamed. Children clung to their mothers, hiding their faces in their dresses. Animals broke away and ran furiously, dashing themselves against the rocks or plunging into the sea; the very birds sighed as they swept through the sky.
ERUPTION OF VESUVIUS, 1880.
The mountain—this Vesuvius—was on fire; the fire was spouting from its top in terrific forms. Smoke, such as you have never seen it, leaped as the darkest thunder clouds upward, while melted earth and rock ran down the sides of Vesuvius like a devouring flood. Before it, the gardens fled away. On it came, rushing, foaming, burning. It leaped upon the houses and buried them, whole streets at once. So suddenly it came that few of the people escaped. What a time was that!
Think of a whole city, like Philadelphia, buried ten or twenty feet deep, so that in the place of the grand palaces, stores and temples, nothing was seen but a smoking furnace—red-hot lava!