[128]
[129]

How great the irony of things is! Since last Thursday the fifth of April, when the cinders began to fall from Vesuvius, indeed, while they were having the races at the Campo di Marte, and Naples was gay and merry, for the last eight days our post-offices have shipped more than four thousand wooden boxes. At first all this lot of small and curious boxes, carefully sealed, some registered as samples of no valour, others as postal-parcels, seemed to greatly puzzle the postal officers. After a little the strange mystery was revealed, by opening eight or ten of them, as they were not well closed nor well sealed. These singular little boxes contained ashes from Vesuvius. More than four-thousand boxes of Vesuvian dust have gone and are still going. Irony of things!

These little boxes are sent as a strange and rare thing, to the farthest parts of the world, even to Australia, that the people from every part of the world, may see the Vesuvius ashes fallen over Naples. Till Australia! But especially to England and America: And by investigating the matter it has been seen that nearly all those who had shipped the boxes were foreigners. Which means that all the foreigners passing through here or established in Naples, or who had come here to see the eruption had immediately thought of gathering this dust, put it in little boxes, and send it to their relations, friends, lovers, and flirts. And this has been one of the most interesting points of this sad period: it has been a proof of the coldblood of these foreigners who in a conflagration like this see but the curious side of things. Four-thousand little boxes and perhaps more! And we here, feel sad and oppressed by these cinders burying us! How much better it would have been if the little boxes instead of four thousand had been forty thousand! it might have been the means of lessening this danger.

April 1906.