We paid our admission fee, and then prepared according to the directions of the guide. We laid aside our coats and vests, removed our collars, neck-ties, and hats, and altogether put ourselves in a condition quite improper in polite society. A boy stood ready to precede us in a costume consisting of a pair of pantaloons and a tin pail. A fresh egg was now shown us, and we examined it to see that it was quite cold and raw. The boy then took the egg and a torch, and went into a tunnel like the one at the Sibyl’s Cave. A blast of hot air met us at the entrance, as though it came from a furnace, and I thought of Nebuchadnezzar and the treat that he used to have for his visitors. On and on we went, and also down and down. Old Virgil was right when he said that the descent was easy, for we went down with the grace of so many oysters entering the mouth of a champagne bottle. Hotter and hotter grew the air, and before we were half way down I remembered some business that I had neglected when I left America. I wanted to go back to look after it, but my friends argued that it would keep a little longer, and I had better go on. So we continued down into the bowels of the mountain, over a slippery pathway and in a temperature as agreeable as that of the stoker’s room on a steamship. We reached the end at last, and the boy stooped to the edge of a pool of water and placed the egg within it. We could see a thin vapor rising from the surface, and readily imagined that it was steam. The boy was careful of his hands, more careful than was necessary, since he might have added to the interest of the occasion by scalding them, and then hiring another boy to take his place. There were plenty of boys outside who could be hired cheap, and if a dozen were killed daily by scalding, or rendered helpless, it would have made no serious diminution of the Italian population. [Sidenote: FACILIS DESCENSUS AVERNI.] We stood there a couple of minutes, and then the boy took the tin pail and scooped up the egg and a quart or two of water. He then started back, and scrambled quite nimbly up the steep and slippery path. It was a difficult ascent to make, and we acknowledged that Virgil’s head was level when he told about the labor required to retrace one’s steps from Avernus. We perspired like a man who has just learned that he is the father of triplets, and by the time we completed the journey, our clothing was pretty thoroughly saturated. The boy was accustomed to it, as the old lady’s eels were to being skinned, and the hide on his shirtless back looked like the outside of a long-used pocket-book. The egg was thoroughly cooked, and the water in the pail was of a scalding temperature, altogether too hot to put one’s hand into. The egg cost us half a franc, and so did the boy: one of us ate the egg with a little salt, but we declined to eat the boy with or without salt, and he did not urge us.