f
the crater, black and rocky, perpendicular on all sides, except
the small slope down which they had just descended--a vast and
gloomy circumference. But the most terrific sight lay beneath.

The sides of the crater went sheer down to a great depth enclosing
a black abyss which in the first excitement of the scene the
startled fancy might well imagine extending to the bowels of the
earth from which there came rolling up vast clouds dense black
sulphurous which at times completely encircled them shutting out
every thing from view filling eyes nose mouth with fumes of
brimstone forcing them to hold the tails of their coats or
the skirts it's all the same over their faces so as not to be
altogether suffocated while again after a while a fierce blast
of wind driving downward would hurl the smoke away and dashing it
against the other side of the crater gather it up in dense volumes
of blackest smoke in thick clouds which rolled up the flinty cliffs
and reaching the summit bounded fiercely out into the sky to pass
on and be seen from afar as that dread pennant of Vesuvius which is
the sign and symbol of its mastery over the earth around it and the
inhabitants thereof ever changing and in all its changes watched with
awe by fearful men who read in those changes their own fate now
taking heart as they see it more tenuous in its consistency anon
shuddering as they see it gathering in denser folds and finally
awe-stricken and all overcome as they see the thick black cloud rise
proudly up to heaven in a long straight column at whose upper
termination the colossal pillar spreads itself out and shows to the
startled gaze the dread symbol of the cypress tree the herald of
earthquakes eruptions and--

--There--I flatter myself that in the way of description it would not
be easy to beat the above. I just throw it off as my friend Tit-marsh,
poor fellow, once said, to show what I could do if I tried. I have
decided not to put punctuation marks there, but rather to let each
reader supply them for himself. They are often in the way,
particularly to the writer, when he has to stop in the full flow
of a description and insert them--

But--

We left our friends down in the crater of Vesuvius. Of course they
hurried out as soon as they could, and mounting the treacherous steep
they soon regained the summit, where the guides had stood bawling
piteously all the time.

Then came the descent. It was not over the lava blocks, but in
anot