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Volcanic Lake of Fire-Sandwich Islands

fell, produced torrents on the mountain covered in 1713, when, in digging a well, side, which, carrying onwards the fallen a theatre with some statues was disclosed. ashes, overwhelmed everything in their Since then numerous curiosities have been way. Sulphurous vapors filled the air, dug up, wonderfully preserved by the and violent tremblings of the earth were ashes. constant. A city six miles off was speedily The recent exhumation of those towns, rendered uninhabitable, and was de- and the consequent recovery of a series of stroyed by the falling stones; but two remarkable memorials of that antique others Herculaneum and Pompeii - society which previously was but dimly which had already suffered from the seen in the pages of poets and historians, has reflected, as it were, a new and sin-as was the kindling sea; the heights of gular interest on the mountain so fatally Sorrento were tinted with bronze on their associated with their annals. sides, and silver on their brow; nearer, We cannot think of Herculaneum and the city, with the lighthouse on its mole, Pompeii without thinking of Vesuvius, and the pale reflections of its lighted which was at once their destroyer and preserver; suddenly arresting their current history and checking their flow of prosperous life, in order, as it would seem, that later generations might be able to contemplate that history and survey that life in all their original freshness!

Thus it is that Vesuvius has acquired a world-wide fame, to which no mere considerations of height or grandeur could have entitled it.

Vesuvius, as seen from Naples, is a two-headed mountain; the peak to the left is the Somma, that to the right is the volcano itself; they are separated by a deep valley. At the mouth of the valley on the plateau forming quite a natural belvedere, are situated the Hermitage and the Observatory. The first stage of the ascent takes to the former.

The sight is splendid-especially in the evening, when the sun halts for a moment over the island-rocks of Ischia, like a wheel of fire, before it makes haste to sink behind