pumpkins also and melons and chillies, all hanging out to get dried, so
that they look quite decorative with their strange adornments. Suddenly
our attention is called to a broad strip of black earth, in shape like a
river, flowing down the hillside, but made up of huge blocks as if it
had been turned up by a giant ploughshare. This is a lava bed made by
the last great explosion of Vesuvius in 1906, when the lava ran down in
molten streams, tearing its way through the vineyards and sweeping
across the railway lines; at that time two hundred people were killed.
An enterprising firm has run a little railway to the very top of
Vesuvius, and anyone who cares to do so can go by it and peep into the
awful crater at the summit, and a cinematograph operator has recently
been down one thousand feet into the crater to take films for
exhibition. When Vesuvius is in a bad humour and has growled and
grumbled for some days, people are not allowed to go up to the top lest
he vomit forth his fury even while they are there and overwhelm them.

While we are on the way to Pompeii I will tell you something of the
fascinating story.

Many years ago, long before the people on our islands were civilised,
when Britons ran about dressed in skins and floated in wicker-boats
covered by skins, there were intelligent and refined people living all
round the base of Vesuvius; they knew, of course, that the mountain was
a volcano, but there had never been any very terrible explosion that
they could remember, and, anyway, the slopes of the mountain where the
towns stood extended so far from the crater that no one thought it
possible for any great disaster to happen. The two principal towns were
called Herculaneum and Pompeii. The people there dressed in lovely silks
and satins; they had beautifully built houses filled with statues and
pictures: the women wore costly jewellery; they had plenty of
amusements, for they danced and sang and visited each other, and had
stalls at the amphitheatre, and supported candidates at political
elections, and gossiped and drove in chariots, and lived and loved. They
thought, as we all do in our turn, that they knew everything and that no
one could reach so high a pinnacle of civilisation as they had reached.
This was only about fifty years after Christ's death on the cross, and
the Christians were still a comparatively small and despised band.

Well, one day there was a certain amount of uneasiness felt, for a
curio