“Oh, if I could think that!” momma exclaimed with relief.  “But if I find you’ve been deceiving me, Alexander, I’ll never forgive you.  It’s too solemn!”

“You ask Bramley,” I heard the Senator reply.  “And now come and tell me if this loaf of bread somebody baked eighteen hundred and twenty something years ago isn’t exactly the same shape as the Naples bakers are selling right now.”

“Daughter,” said momma as she went, “I hope you are taking copious notes.  This is the wonder of wonders that we behold to-day.”  I said I was, and I wandered over to where Mrs. Portheris examined with Mr. Mafferton an egg that was laid on the last day of Pompeii.  Mrs. Portheris was asking Mr. Mafferton, in her most impressive manner, if it was not too wonderful to have positive proof that fowls laid eggs then just as they do now; and I made a note of that too.  Dicky and Isabel bemoaned the fate of the immortal dog who still bites his flank in the pain extinguished so long ago.  I hardly liked to disturb them, but I heard Dicky say as I passed that he didn’t mind much about the humans, they had their chance, but this poor little old tyke was tied up, and that on the part of Providence was playing it low down.

Then we all stepped out into the empty streets of Pompeii and Mr. Mafferton read to us impressively, from Murray, the younger Pliny’s letter to Tacitus describing its great disaster.  The Senator listened thoughtfully, for Pliny goes into all kinds of interesting details.  “I haven’t much acquaintance with the classics,” said he, as Mr. Mafferton finished, “but it strikes me that the modern New York newspaper was the medium to do that man justice.  It’s the most remarkable case I’ve noticed of a good reporter born before his time.”

“A terrible retribution,” said Mrs. Portheris, looking severely at the Tavern of Phoebus, forever empty of wine-bibbers.  “They worshipped Jupiter, I understand, and other deities even less respectable.  Can we wonder that a volcano was sent to destroy them!  One thing we may be quite sure of—­if the city had only turned from its wickedness and embraced Christianity, this never would have happened.”

Momma compressed her lips and then relaxed them again to say, “I think that idea perfectly ridiculous.”  I scented battle and hung upon the issue, but the Senator for the third time interposed.

“Why no, Augusta,” he said, “I guess that’s a working hypothesis of Aunt Caroline’s.  Here’s Vesuvius smokin’ away ever since just the same, and there’s Naples with a bishop and the relics of Saint Januarius.  You can read in your guide-book that whenever Vesuvius has looked as if he meant business for the past few hundred years, the people of Naples have simply called on the bishop to take out the relics of Saint Januarius and walk ’em round the town; and that’s always been enough for Vesuvius.  Now the Pompeii folks didn’t know a saint or a bishop by sight, and Jupiter, as Aunt Caroline says, was never properly qualified to interfere.  That’s how it was, I presume.  I don’t suppose the people of Naples take much stock in the laws of nature; they don’t have to, with Januarius in a drawer.  And real estate keeps booming right along.”