he
stems of corn and of grass, and so make them stiff and hard, and able to
stand upright--and very probably without the carbonic acid gas, which
comes out of the volcanos, and is taken up by the leaves of plants, and
turned by Madam How's cookery into solid wood--without all these things,
and I suspect without a great many more things which come out of
volcanos--I do not see how this beautiful green world could get on at
all.

Of course, when the lava first cools on the surface of the ground it is
hard enough, and therefore barren enough. But Madam How sets to work
upon it at once, with that delicate little water-spade of hers, which we
call rain, and with that alone, century after century, and age after age,
she digs the lava stream down, atom by atom, and silts it over the
country round in rich manure. So that if Madam How has been a rough and
hasty workwoman in pumping her treasures up out of her mine with her
great steam-pumps, she shows herself delicate and tender and kindly
enough in giving them away afterwards.

Nay, even the fine dust which is sometimes blown out of volcanos is
useful to countries far away. So light it is, that it rises into the sky
and is wafted by the wind across the seas. So, in the year 1783, ashes
from the Skaptar Jokull, in Iceland, were carried over the north of
Scotland, and even into Holland, hundreds of miles to the south.

So, again, when in the year 1812 the volcano of St. Vincent, in the West
India Islands, poured out torrents of lava, after mighty earthquakes
which shook all that part of the world, a strange thing happened (about
which I have often heard from those who saw it) in the island of
Barbados, several hundred miles away. For when the sun rose in the
morning (it was a Sunday morning), the sky remained more dark than any
night, and all the poor negroes crowded terrified out of their houses
into the streets, fancying the end of the world was come. But a learned
man who was there, finding that, though the sun was risen, it was still
pitchy dark, opened his window, and found that it was stuck fast by
something on the ledge outside, and, when he thrust it open, found the
ledge covered deep in soft red dust; and he instantly said, like a wise
man as he was, "The volcano of St. Vincent must have broken out, and
these are the ashes from it." Then he ran down stairs and quieted the
poor negroes, telling them not to be afraid, for the end of the world was
not coming just