s she was mounting for the ascent,--everybody, I say, goes up Vesuvius,
and nearly every one writes impressions and descriptions of the
performance. If you believe the tales of travelers, it is an undertaking
of great hazard, an experience of frightful emotions. How unsafe it is,
especially for ladies, I heard twenty times in Naples before I had been
there a day. Why, there was a lady thrown from her horse and nearly
killed, only a week ago; and she still lay ill at the next hotel,
a witness of the truth of the story. I imagined her plunged down a
precipice of lava, or pitched over the lip of the crater, and only
rescued by the devotion of a gallant guide, who threatened to let go
of her if she didn't pay him twenty francs instantly. This story, which
will live and grow for years in this region, a waxing and never-waning
peril of the volcano, I found, subsequently, had the foundation I have
mentioned above. The lady did go to Resina in order to make the
ascent of Vesuvius, mounted a horse there, fell off, being utterly
unhorsewomanly, and hurt herself; but her injury had no more to do with
Vesuvius than it had with the entrance of Victor Emanuel into Naples,
which took place a couple of weeks after. Well, as I was saying, it is
the fashion to write descriptions of Vesuvius; and you might as well
have mine, which I shall give to you in rough outline.

There came a day when the Tramontane ceased to blow down on us the cold
air of the snowy Apennines, and the white cap of Vesuvius, which is, by
the way, worn generally like the caps of the Neapolitans, drifted inland
instead of toward the sea. Warmer weather had come to make the bright
sunshine no longer a mockery. For some days I had been getting the gauge
of the mountain. With its white plume it is a constant quantity in
the landscape: one sees it from every point of view; and we had been
scarcely anywhere that volcanic remains, or signs of such action,--a
thin crust shaking under our feet, as at Solfatara, where blasts of
sulphurous steam drove in our faces,--did not remind us that the whole
ground is uncertain, and undermined by the subterranean fires that have
Vesuvius for a chimney. All the coast of the bay, within recent historic
periods, in different spots at different times, has risen and sunk and
risen again, in simple obedience to the pulsations of the great
fiery monster below. It puffs up or sinks, like the crust of a baking
apple-pie. This region is evidently n