The spirit proceeded to remind the Chaymas of all the good things he had provided for them; how he had allowed them unlimited use of all things which could be of any possible good to them; how he had even been patient with their thanklessness. Only the colibris or humming-birds, useless to the Chaymas, he had reserved for himself, that he might have pleasure in their beauty and happiness. The story continues: “But the Chaymas’ ears were deafened; Blind their eyes, and could not see, How a blissful Indian’s spirit Lived in every colibri. Lived, forgetting pain and sorrow, Ever fair and ever new, Whirring round the dear old woodland, Feeding on the honeydew. Then one evening roared the earthquake, Monkeys howled, and parrots screamed, And the Guaraons, at morning Gathered here, as men who dreamed. Sunk were gardens, sunk ajoupas, Hut and hammock, man and hound, And above the Chayma village, Boiled with pitch the cursed ground.” The salient points of the evidence being presented, the reader may draw his own conclusions. Perhaps the cities were fired in the manner suggested--perhaps lightning ignited the bitumen. But it is generally supposed that their site lies beneath the sea. After the account given of Vesuvius, the reader will no doubt be surprised to learn that this noted mountain can not rank as more than a respectable fourth-rate volcano. It will require but a brief comparison with others to show that such is the case. By far the largest volcano in Europe, and next to Vesuvius, the most noted, is Mt. Etna, in the island of Sicily. It was well known to the ancients, and appears to have been in eruption from the most remote historic times. Diodorus Siculus records that a violent eruption caused an adjacent district to be deserted by its inhabitants before the Trojan war. Thucydides tells of three eruptions between the colonization of Sicily by the Greeks and the Peloponnesian war--431 B. C. Notwithstanding the great antiquity of the records of this mountain, but little detail is known of its earlier eruptions. The first of which any extended account exists is the great outbreak of 1669. The convulsion began with a tremendous earthquake. Many villages and towns in the adjacent districts were leveled to the earth. In the plain of St. Lio, a fissure six feet wide and twelve miles long and of unknown depth opened from north to south with a terrific, crashing noise, and extended nearly to the top of the mountain. Flashes of intense light poured from it. Five other parallel fissures afterwards opened, one after the other, emitting smoke, and the most horrid bellowings, which were heard to the distance of forty miles. This explains the manner in which dykes or banks of lava are thrown up amid other rocks. The light emitted by these fissures would indicate that they were, to a certain height, filled with glowing lava.