ries, 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 mere 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.

[Illustration: 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