It was about the middle of the eighteenth century that systematic excavations in the ashes that covered Pompeii began. Since that time the work has been slow, though continuous, and great progress has been made in disinterring the buried city. To-day it is a municipal museum of the Roman Empire as it was 1,800 years ago. The architecture is almost unmarred; the colors of decorated tiles on the walls are still bright; the wheel marks are fresh looking; the picture of domestic life as it was is complete, except for the people who were destroyed or driven from the city. No other place in all the world so completely portrays that period of the past to us as does Pompeii, overwhelmed by Vesuvius, hidden for centuries, and now once more in view to the world to-day. CHAPTER XXVI. MOUNT AETNA AND THE SICILIAN HORRORS. BY TRUMBULL WHITE. =A Volcano with a Record of Twenty-five Centuries--Seventy-eight Recorded Eruptions--Three Hundred Thousand Inhabitants Dwelling on the Slopes of the Mountain and in the Valleys at its Base--Stories of Earthquake Shock and Lava Flows--Tales of Destruction--Described by Ancient and Modern Writers and Eye-Witnesses.= Mount AEtna, one of the most celebrated volcanoes in the world, is situated on the eastern sea-board of Sicily. The ancient poets often alluded to it, and by some it was feigned to be the prison of the giant Euceladus or Typhon, by others the forge of Hephaestus. The flames proceeded from the breath of Euceladus, the thunderous noises of the mountain were his groans, and when he turned upon his side, earthquakes shook the island. Pindar in his first Pythian ode for Hiero of AEtna, winner in the chariot race in 474 B.C., exclaims:--He (Typhon) is fast bound by a pillar of the sky, even by snowy AEtna, nursing the whole year's length her dazzling snow. Whereout pure springs of unapproachable fire are vomited from the inmost depth: in the daytime the lava streams pour forth a lurid rush of smoke, but in the darkness a red rolling flame sweepeth rocks with uproar to the wide, deep sea. AEschylus (525-456 B.C.) speaks also of the "mighty Typhon." Thucydides (471-402 B.C.) alludes in the last lines of his third book to three early eruptions of the mountain. Many other early writers speak of AEtna, among them Theocritus, Virgil, Ovid, Livy, Seneca, Lucan, Strabo, and Lucilius Junior. While the poets on the one hand had invested AEtna with various supernatural attributes, and had made it the prison of a chained giant, and the workshop of a god, Lucretius and others endeavored to show that the eruptions and other phenomena of the mountain could be explained by the ordinary operations of nature.