But that was all overgrown with bushes and wild vines, full of boars and deer.

What sign of fire was there in that?
To be sure, also, there was an ugly place below by the sea-shore, called the Phlegraen fields, where smoke and brimstone came out of the ground, and a lake called Avernus over which poisonous gases hung, and which (old stories told) was one of the mouths of the Nether Pit.

But what of that?
It had never harmed any one, and how could it harm them?
So they all lived on, merrily and happily enough, till, in the year A.D.
79 (that was eight years, you know, after the Emperor Titus destroyed Jerusalem), there was stationed in the Bay of Naples a Roman admiral, called Pliny, who was also a very studious and learned man, and author of a famous old book on natural history.

He was staying on shore with his sister; and as he sat in his study she called him out to see a strange cloud which had been hanging for some time over the top of Mount Vesuvius.

It was in shape just like a pine-tree; not, of course, like one of our branching Scotch firs here, but like an Italian stone pine, with a long straight stem and a flat parasol-shaped top.