The progressive farmer. [volume] (Winston, N.C.) 1886-1904, 1893-10-31

mayor of the suburbs. terraced resi-
dence of billionairedom, gardens, foun-
tanned, statued, collonnaded, the cellar
of that villa filled with bottles of rarest
wine, a few drops of which were found
eighteen hundred years afterward.
Along the streets of the city are men
of might and women of beauty formed
into bronze that many centuries had
no power to bedim. Battle scenes on
walls of color which all time a not
efface. Great city of Pompeii! So
Seneca and Tacitus and Cicero pro-
nounced it.
Stand with me on it's walls this even
ing of August %, A. D. 70. See the
throngs passing up and down IN Tyrlan
purple and girdles arbesque and necks
enchanted with precious stones, proud
official in imposing toga meeting the
slaves carrying trays a clink with COB
lets and a smoking with dellcacles from
paddock and sea, and moralist muslng
over the degradation of the times passes
the profigate doing his best to make
them worse. Hark to the clatter and
rataplan of the hoofs on the streets
paved with blocks of basault. See the
verdured and Powered grounds sloping
into the most beautiful bay of all the
earth-the bay of Naples. Listen to
the rumbling chariots, carrying con
vivial occupants to halls of mirth and
masquerade and carousal. Hear the
loud dash of fountains amid the sculp-
tured water nymphs. Notice the wired,
solemn, far reaching hum and din and
roar of a city at the close of a summer
day. Let Pompeii sleep we'll to night,
for it is the last night of peaceful slum-
Der before she falls into the deep slum-
Der of many long centuries. The morn
ing of the goth of August, A. D. 70, has
arrived, and the day rolls on, and it is
one o'clock in the afternoon: "LOok!'
1 say to you, standing on this wall, as
the sister of Pliny said to him, the Ro-
man essayist and naval commander, on
the day of which speak, as she pointed
him in the direction in which l point
you. There is a peculiar cloud on the
sky-a spotted cloud, now white, nov
back. 1t is Vesuvius in awful and IN
paralleled eruption. Now the smoke
and fire and steam of that black mon
ster throat rise and spread, as, by my
gesture, 1 now describe it. It irises, a
great column of fiery darkness, higher
and higher, and then spreads out like
the branches of a tree with midnights
interwrapped in its foliage, wider and
wider. Now the sun goes out and
showers Of pumice stone and water
from furnaces more than seven times
heated, and ashes in avalanche after
avail 4nche, binding and scalfn~ a.
suffocating. 3o70cu0c1 n-f 'ta 7--
-sad vest. o4ryi4g deeper ana iaeu.r
u nGra-o.0 sepu!"h2I, -Ha. - or"
0af3ro 0r e'nc= aa3 vp"le.. &-'H
a"~..r'rnsuw sna >y8y@j1. Aones
au5e doep, glraIe deep, chin deep,
ashes overhead, Out Of the houses and
temples and theaters and into the
streets and down to the beach fed
many of the frantic, but other, if not
suffocated of the ashes, were scalded
to death by the heated dtluge. And
then came heavier destruction in racks
after rocks, crushing in homes and tenn
pies and theaters. No wonder the sea
receded from the beach as though in
terror, until much of the shipping was
wrecked, and no wonder that, when
they lifted Pliny, the elder, from the
sail cloth on which he was resting I'm
der the agitations of what he had seen,
he suddenly expired. Fol three days
the entombment proceeded. Then the
clouds lifted and the cursing Of that
Apo,lyon of mountains subsidized. For
seventeen hundred years that city of
Pompeii lay buried and without any
thing to show its place of doom. But
after seventeen hundred years of oblit-
Grafton, a workman's spade, digging a
we'll, strikes some antiquities which
lead to the elimination of the city. Now
walk with me through ONE of the
and into some of the houses and
amid the ruins of Basilica, and temple
and amphitheater.
From the moment the guide met us at
the gate on entering Pompeii that day
IN November, 1889, until he left us at
the gate on our departure, the emotion
felt was indescribable for elevation
and solemnity, and sorrow and awe.
Come and see the petrified bodies of
the dead found in the city, and now in
the museums of Italy. About four hun