m,
with chairs and straps, and that sort of thing. They employed some of
them, and, mounting the chairs, they were carried up, while I walked
up by myself at a distance from which I could observe all that was
going on. The girls were quite merry, appeared to be enchanted with
their ride up the cone, enjoyed the novelty of the sensation, and I
heard their lively chatter and their loud peals of ringing laughter,
and longed more than ever to be able to speak to them.

"Now the little girl that I had first seen--the child-angel, you
know--seemed, to my amazement, to be more adventurous than the other.
By her face you would suppose her to be as timid as a dove, and yet on
this occasion she was the one who proposed the ascent, urged on her
companion, and answered all her objections. Of course she could not
have really been so plucky as she seemed. For my part, I believe the
other one had more real pluck of the two, but it was the child-angel's
ignorance that made her so bold. She went up the cone as she would
have gone up stairs, and looked at the smoke as she would have looked
at a rolling cloud.

"At length the bearers stopped, and signified to the girls that they
could not go any further. The girls could not speak Italian, or any
other language apparently than English, and therefore could not very
well make out what the bearers were trying to say, but by their
gestures they might have known that they were warning them against
going any further. One might have supposed that no warning would have
been needed, and that one look upward would have been enough. The top
of the cone rose for upward of a hundred feet above them, its soil
composed of lava blocks and ashes intermingled with sulphur. In this
soil there were a million cracks and crevices, from which sulphurous
smoke was issuing; and the smoke, which was but faint and thin near
where they stood, grew denser farther up, till it intermingled with
the larger volumes that rolled up from the crater.

"Now, as I stood there, I suddenly heard a wild proposal from the
child-angel.

"'Oh, Ethel,' she said, 'I've a great mind to go up--'"

Here Hawbury interrupted his friend:

"What's that? Was that her friend's name?" he asked, with some
animation. "Ethel?--odd, too. Ethel? H'm. Ethel? Brunette, was she?"

"Yes."

"Odd, too; infernally odd. But, pooh! what rot! Just as though there
weren't a thousand Ethels!"

"What's that you're saying about Ethel?" asked Dacres.