a spigot into the bung, turns the thumb piece, and the
pent-up beer comes out foaming and squirting, and there you are.

Instead of beer, Vesuvius is loaded with lava, that runs like molasses,
and when it is cold it is indigestible as a cold buckwheat cake, and you
can make it up into jewelry, that looks like maple sugar and smells like
a fire in a garbage crematory. Besides the lava there are stones as big
as a house that are thrown up by the sea-sickness of the earth, as it
heaves and pants, and then the ashes that come out of the crater at
times would make you think that what they need there is to have a
chimney sweep go down and brush out the flues.

[Illustration: Threw a pail of ashes over the fence 204]

To get an idea of what a nuisance the ashes from the crater are to the
cities on the plain below, you remember the time you were out in your
back yard splitting boxes for kindling wood and my chum and I threw a
pail of ashes over the fence, and accidentally it went all over you,
about four inches thick. That time you got mad and threw cucumbers
at us, when we ran down the alley. Keep that in your mind and you can
understand the destruction of Pompeii, when Vesuvius, thousands of years
ago, coughed up hot ashes and covered the town 40 feet deep with hot
stuff, and killed every living thing, and petrified and preserved the
whole business, and made a prairie on top of a town, and everybody
eventually forgot that there had ever been a town there, for about 2,000
years. If my chum and I had not run out of ashes we would have buried
you so deep in your back yard that you would have been petrified with
your hatchet, and when they excavated the premises a thousand years
later they would have found your remains and put you in a museum.

Well, a couple of hundred years ago a peasant was sinking a well down in
the ashes, and he struck a petrified barroom, with a bartender standing
behind the bar in the act of serving some whisky 2,000 years old, and
the peasant located a claim there, and the authorities took possession
of the prairie and have been digging the town out ever since, looking
for more of that 2,000-year-old whisky.

When I told dad about what they were finding at the ruins of Pompeii,
and how you were liable to find gold and diamonds and petrified women,
he wanted to go and dig in the ashes, as he said it would be more
exciting than raking over the dumping grounds in Chicago for tin cans
and lumps of coal, a