Of course, you know, having kept a grocery since the war, and having had opportunities to study history, by the pictures on the soap boxes and insurance calendars, that Nero, the Roman tyrant, after Rome was burned, while he fiddled for a dance in a barn, got so accustomed to fire and brimstone that he retired to Naples and touched off Vesuvius, just so he could look at it. But Vesuvius, about 2,000 years ago, got to burning way down in its bowels, and the fire got beyond control, and I suppose now the fire is away down in the center of the earth, and you know when you get down in the earth below the crust, on which we live and raise potatoes, everything is melted, like iron in a foundry, and Vesuvius is the spigot through which the fluid comes to the surface. You see, don't you?
Just imagine that this earth is a barrel of beer, which you can understand better than anything else, and it is being shaken up by being hauled around on wagons and cars, and is straining to get out, then a bartender drives 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.