the people of Naples for repudiating their saints Monday,
when Mount Vesuvius was in its most violent mood.

Even with the sun shining high in the heavens the light was a dim
yellow, in the midst of which the few people who remained in the
stricken towns, their clothing, hair and beards covered with ashes,
moved about in the awful stillness of desolation like gray ghosts.

Railway and tramway travel to and from Naples was much hampered by
cinders and ash deposits, and telegraphic communication with the
towns farthest in the danger zone was also for a time interrupted.

The scenic effects varied from hour to hour during the eruptions. At
times in the north the sky was chocolate colored, lowering and heavy,
under which men and women with their hair and clothing covered with
ashes moved above like gray ghosts. Fort San Martino, as it towered
above the town, could only just be seen, while Castel Dell'ovo was
boldly marked in light, seeming like silver against the brown sky.

To the south beyond the smoke zone lay smiling, sunny Posilipo and its
peninsula, while far away glistened the sea a deep blue, on which the
islands seemed to float in the glow of the setting sun. Adding to the
strange picture, one of the French men of war, which arrived in the
bay of Naples was so placed as to be half in the glow and half
obscured by the belt of falling ashes.

From the observatory of Mount Vesuvius, where Director Matteucci
continued his work in behalf of science and humanity, the scene was
one of great impressiveness. To reach the observatory one had to walk
for miles over hardened but hot lava covered with sand until he came
to a point whence nothing could be seen but vast, gray reaches,
sometimes flat and sometimes gathered into huge mounds which took on
semblance of human faces.

Above, the heavens were gray like the earth beneath and seemed just as
hard and immovable. In all this lonely waste there was no sign of life
or vegetation and no sound was heard except the low mutterings of the
volcano. One seemed almost impelled to scream aloud to break the
horrible stillness of a land seemingly forgotten both by God and man.

In many of the towns some of the inhabitants went about hungry and
with throats parched with smoke and dust, seemingly unable to tear
themselves away from the ruins of what so recently were their homes.

The Italian minister of finance suspended the collection of taxes in
the disturbed provinces and milit