Not a great while since people began to dig. They dug and dug, and after years of digging there were the streets again and buildings, the merchant selling his goods, babies sleeping in their mamma’s arms, a bride and groom standing up to be married, a funeral procession coming from a house, a miser counting his money, a cruel father beating his child, a loving mother kissing her son, a marriage feast in this house, a dying parent in that. Just as the fierce, quick flood of lava found them, so it buried them, and so they were found after nearly two thousand years!
Since that awful day the volcano, Vesuvius, has been on fire again and again.
L.
AURORA LEIGH.
(English Literature Papers.)
HOW many of my Pansies are acquainted with her? She is “a woman in a book,” and the book was written by a woman of whom you have surely heard—Elizabeth Barrett Browning. I want you to know something about this story book and its author. There are those who think the story is too “grown-up” to interest children; but that is because they do not understand certain kinds of children very well. When I was a little girl of ten, I was very fond of narrative poems, and read some which were judged far above my understanding.
Would you like a picture of Aurora’s room, as she describes it? Listen:
“I had a little chamber in the house
As green as any privet hedge a bird