y and Causes Trouble.

Naples, Italy.--Siegnor ze Grocerino: I guess that will make you stand
without hitching for a little while. Say, I am getting so full of dead
languages, and foreign palaver, that I shall have to have an operation
on my tongue when I get home before I can speel the United States
language again so you can make head or tail of it. You see, I don't stay
long enough in a country to acquire its language, but I get a few words
into my system, so now my English is so mixed with French words, Italian
garlic and German throat trouble that I cannot understand myself unless
I look in a glass and watch the motions of my lips. Dad has not picked
up a word of any foreign language, and says he should consider himself a
traitor to his country if he tried to talk anything but English. He
did get so he could order a glass of beer by holding up his finger and
saying "ein," but he found later that just holding up his finger
without saying "ein" would bring the beer all the same so he cut out the
language entirely and works his finger until it needs a rest.

When I used to study my geography at the little red schoolhouse, and
look at the picture of the volcano Vesuvius, and read about how it would
throw up red-hot lava, and ashes, and rocks as big as a house, and wipe
out cities, it looked so terrible to me that I was glad when we got
through with the volcano lesson, and got to Greenland's icy mountains,
where there was no danger except being frozen to death, or made sick by
eating blubber sliced off of whales.

Then I never expected to be right on the very top of that volcano,
throwing stones down in the lava, and sailing chips down the streams of
hot stuff, just as I sailed chips on ice water at home-when the streets
were flooded by spring rains. Say, there is no more danger on Vesuvius
than there is in a toboggan slide, or shooting the chutes at home. I
thought we would have to hire dagoes to carry us up to the top, and be
robbed and held up, and may be murdered, but it is just as easy as going
up in the elevator of a skyscraper, and no more terrifying than
sitting on a 50-cent seat in a baseball park at home and witnessing the
"Destruction of Pompeii" by a fireworks display

The crater looks sort of creepy, like a big cauldron kettle boiling soap
on a farm, only it is bigger, and down in the earth's bowels you can
well believe there is trouble, and if you believe in a hell, you can get
it, illustrated proper, bu