Here we are on the road of the Croce, going step by step, with the slowness of death, sinking deep in the ashes, and looking in vain for a safer path. We go over it with a sense of immense oppression, not knowing when or whether we will arrive, not knowing if our strength will last until we get there. We meet a cart coming down. The poor horse is already tired. It would take at least three horses to drag a carriage through these roads now made of ashes and stones. The cart driver tells us about the many people who have perished at Ottaiano and shakes his head when we ask him the number. It is large, many people were killed while praying in the Oratorio of San Giuseppe! Crushed under the weight of our sorrow, we resume our walk on the road of the Croce, where so few people have passed before. Only a prince of Casa Savoia, only a daughter of the house of France and the soldiers of Italy, the brave soldiers the good soldiers, have come this way. What time is it when we reach Ottaiano? Who knows? Who knows anything more about the hour, about time, about life, in these last four days? We feel as if we had been walking for centuries in this hard, rough, horrible street: we feel as if we had to stop at every step and rest; at last, we reach the new Pompei, Ottaiano. An untold horror of devastation is around us. The most beautiful as well as the poorest houses have tumbled down under the weight of the cinders and stones, and everywhere you see a precipice of bricks, beams, and rocks: it is the death-like solitude of the places where death has passed. A gentleman from Ottaiano, who has just returned here to give some help, tells us all about the catastrophe. It seems that the cinders have begun to fall thickly during the second night from Saturday to Sunday, and it was then that the people, getting alarmed, have left their houses, the exodus having started about dawn. But in the following morning, the stones have come down thicker and larger, rebounding and accumulating, and, at the remembrance of the horrible scene, and the flight from Ottaiano, poor M. Cola's voice trembles. He however, with the help of his brothers, managed to save his mother, carrying her in his arms to Sarno where she is now, he told us, perfectly safe. It seems that in a few minutes all the panes of the windows were broken, people running away with chairs and tables on their heads, to protect themselves from the rocks, others with folded covers and pillows, shielding their heads, and shoulders. And while they fled on every side, falling down in their haste, wounding their hands and knees under the infernal shower of hissing rocks, the houses at Ottaiano, were tumbling down. Poor baroness Scudieri, while running away, must have heard the crash of her palace, and of the whole manufacture Scudieri falling in ruins, while in the same moment on the other side Ateneo Chierchia, and the house belonging to the brothers Cola, just then remoderned, were falling in a heap. What struck us