To get an idea of what a nuisance the ashes from the crater are to the cities on the plain below, you remember the time you were out in your back yard splitting boxes for kindling wood and my chum and I threw a pail of ashes over the fence, and accidentally it went all over you, about four inches thick. That time you got mad and threw cucumbers at us, when we ran down the alley. Keep that in your mind and you can understand the destruction of Pompeii, when Vesuvius, thousands of years ago, coughed up hot ashes and covered the town 40 feet deep with hot stuff, and killed every living thing, and petrified and preserved the whole business, and made a prairie on top of a town, and everybody eventually forgot that there had ever been a town there, for about 2,000 years. If my chum and I had not run out of ashes we would have buried you so deep in your back yard that you would have been petrified with your hatchet, and when they excavated the premises a thousand years later they would have found your remains and put you in a museum. Well, a couple of hundred years ago a peasant was sinking a well down in the ashes, and he struck a petrified barroom, with a bartender standing behind the bar in the act of serving some whisky 2,000 years old, and the peasant located a claim there, and the authorities took possession of the prairie and have been digging the town out ever since, looking for more of that 2,000-year-old whisky. When I told dad about what they were finding at the ruins of Pompeii, and how you were liable to find gold and diamonds and petrified women, he wanted to go and dig in the ashes, as he said it would be more exciting than raking over the dumping grounds in Chicago for tin cans and lumps of coal, and so we hired a hack and went to the buried town, but dad insisted on carrying an umbrella, so if Vesuvius belched any more ashes he could protect himself. Gee, but from what I have seen at that old ruin, a man would need an umbrella made of corrugated iron to keep from being buried. [Illustration: Dad insisted on carrying an umbrella 207] Well, when we got to Pompeii dad was for going right where they were digging, but I got him to look over the streets and houses that had been uncovered first, and he was paralyzed to think that a town could be covered with ashes all these thousands of years, and then be uncovered and find a town that would compare, in many respects, with cities of the present day, with residences complete with sculpture, paintings and cut marble that would skin Chicago to a finish.