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tried to carry her away, but she rushed back to the trees and embraced and kissed them singly, calling them her children. When finally she was removed it was found that she had lost her reason.

The exodus of the inhabitants began soon after the first eruption, and a steady line has been slowly traveling in the direction of safety for the last two days. When they started from their homes, the people were loaded with their household treasures, but gradually along the road these have been abandoned.

Many mothers carrying their children or crowded upon little hand-carts are among the fugitives. In numerous cases stalwart peasants carry on their shoulders aged relatives unable to walk, who otherwise would have been obliged to remain awaiting death in their abandoned homes.

Village priests, bearing crucifixes or the statue of the patron saint, accompany the sad procession and encourage the parishioners. The sound of chanted prayers rises above the rumblings of the eruptions and the patter of falling stones and cinders. The stricken people seem to be in dumb despair, hardly conscious of whither they are going, invoking the saints and inquiring tremulously, "What have we done to be visited by this awful scourge?"

Again reverting to one of the copyrighted dispatches in The Times, we read:

The effect of King Victor Emmanuel's presence has been more than had been expected. Nowhere does he show to better advantage than on the field of danger. This is testified to by persons familiar with his conduct in other eruptions and earthquakes, besides millions of soldiers who saw him on Italy's battle-fields, careless of danger if by so doing he could help.

The King stopt all demonstrations in his honor, saying: "Hand-claps are every day's occupation; now is the time for extraordinary deeds." He inspected the relief measures adopted to feed and comfort the refugees, especially the supply of milk for babies, who touched his heart, their mothers holding them out for him to caress.

Linguaglossa has been abandoned by all except a few who refuse to leave. Food is brought to them daily by carabineers or Fascisti. The road leading there is getting more difficult, due to the ashes which are silently and continually falling, rendering the progress of motor cars, horses, or men hazardous.

The condition of the inhabitants that remain behind is full of hardships, because of the ashes and sulfurous fumes in the air, the high temperature due to the nearness of the lava and the fact that no food is left, as all was carried away by the departing refugees. Most of these people live on soldiers' rations, which are carried as often as possible to them.

The priest of a hamlet near Linguaglossa descended to the camp of the artillery troops, near Cerro, and asked to be allowed to take away with him some wine, as he had no more to use in the celebration of mass. The whole garrison returned with him to the hamlet, where mass was celebrated in the Square, in the presence of all, with Etna rumbling in the distance and such thick clouds of dust that army lanterns had to be used to light the improvised altar. The priest, standing on an army car, preached on "The Trial Sent Us by God."

The natives, fleeing for their lives after forsaking their homes, only saw the eruption at a distance. It was left for a newspaper

woman, Helen Augur, correspondent of the New York Herald, to give a close-up description of Mount Etna in action. She "climbed up the volcano for 7,000 feet and witnessed those spasms of Nature in her most furious mood." In the story cabled to The Herald and copyrighted, she declares:

When we left Linguaglossa early in the evening the great fires of the lava-stream were banked and looked like a dying grate fire a mile and a half long. On the terraced hillside hundreds of peasants sat entranced at the wondrous spectacle of a river of fire descending from the volcano's flaming mouth.

There are words to describe an eruption in our vocabulary scaled down to human dimensions, but they do not have the slightest relation to this experience which is so terrific that the mind refuses to believe what the eyes behold. Except for observers attached to Mount Etna, nobody has climbed the volcano during this eruption, and I had to bribe guides to make the ascent.

With an American scientist I started from Randazzo, at the foot of the volcano, at eight in the morning. For four and a half hours we climbed on mule-back through the waste lands created by lava eruption since time immemorial. While the lower slopes are covered with grain and vineyards, as we mounted we found only traces of charcoal-burners amid the desolate wastes, which sometimes cut off our view, but as the path ahead lifted we got even a clearer view of the smoke columns from the volcano.

Near Monte Negro, on the north side of the volcano, we crawled into a stone hut to escape the cold rain. At 8:30 we began to climb afoot, soon reaching the eruptive mouth on the west side of Monte Negro. Here was the inferno itself, where the lava, rushing underground from the core of the volcano, miles above, found its vent. A torrent of liquid fire spurted under more than a dozen of small cones, which had been formed by the constantly thrown up cinders and stones. These cones disgorged great jets, some white columns of steam and black smoke, others sulfurous fumes. One mouth, under which there were constant explosions, hurled blood-red stones a hundred feet in the air.

The lava poured from this final mouth in a spasmodic rhythm, more rapidly than from all the others. I crawled on all-fours across the steaming lava a few yards on to witness this horrible torrent of fire, too flaming and too rapid to describe. The guide whimpered and closed his ears against the titanic puffings, detonations, and eruptions. Then I climbed 1,220 feet up beside the fissure within which the lava stream flowed, sometimes far underground, sometimes at the bottom of the smoke-filled chasms. The hills, all covered with pine woods, have been scorched by the great lumps of molten stuff which fell during the first explosion. Finally I reached Monte Pevillo, where on the west side was a tremendous cañon filled with smoke, through which a burning torrent rushed with the sound of colossal waves.

The smoke and gas volumes from this infernal chasm, thrown up many hundreds of feet, changed with incredible rapidity. Suddenly the wind revealed the whole side of the volcano. The central crater threw off a column of white smoke, thick like a gigantic cauliflower a thousand feet high, and within the fire was raging. Then the crater ejected a heavy column of black smoke.

While I stood aghast at the sight the ground shook beneath me, heavy explosions began in the cañon and cinders and black stones were hurled five hundred feet in the air. Evidently a more savage temper had begun, for the explosions were at the

very edge of the chasm and the ground seemed about to crumple beneath me.

Just at noon came a terrific sound as from the central crater rose a wall of black, dense smoke several thousand feet high. When I regained the erupting mouth below I found the lava stream pumped down from the tormented core of the volcano larger and more rapid. And yet, when in the early evening the members of the party tied their mules and joined the workers coming home from the vineyards, I found that all this gargantuan activity had scarcely pushed forward the front of the lava stream six miles below, near Linguaglossa. The lava was piling up to a greater thickness on the ground already covered.

The discrepancy between the amount of energy produced by the volcano and the slight advance of the lava, on which Miss Augur comments, probably was due to the fact that the molten stream, having gone so far from its source, cooled and solidified, so that it no longer could flow fast. Says the correspondent of The Times.

It advances with a slow, rolling action and can proceed uphill just as easily as downhill. The stream leisurely, almost majestically, approaches any obstruction, creeps up its side, slides over it and submerges it.

The Times correspondent watched the lava overwhelm a house just below Castiglione Station. The house was a modern, solidly built one. The lava advanced like a black tidal wave, washing before it all kinds of débris. When it reached the house it prest solidly against its outer wall, but the wall resisted.

Almost imperceptibly the top of the surface of the lava formed into the shape of a wedge and began creeping up the wall. It smashed through windows and doors and began filling the house, and continued its upward progress until the roof was reached. Suddenly the roof gave way and collapsed under the tremendous weight.

The lava then streamed down into the house until the space within the four walls was completely filled, and it began flowing down the walls on the far side. A few minutes later the house looked like a tower of solid black stone. In half an hour there was only a faint protuberance showing on the surface of the lava.

Lava does not always advance slowly. In fact, during the early days of an eruption it moves forward with the speed of an express-train, a special article in the New York Sun and Globe informs us. For instance,

Lava from Mauna Loa, which is of the same type as Etna's lava, was observed in 1855 to tumble down the mountain at the rate of forty miles an hour. Lava from Vesuvius in 1805 made upward of fifty miles an hour. But in each case the speed was checked progressively as the fiery fluid advanced, thickening like a mess of Scotch porridge.

As it thickens, the crust breaks up into innumerable clinkers, which completely conceal the hellish gruel within and which make a music of their own as the mass lurches ponderously forward.

Its monstrous crest, which may be as high as a threestory house and as wide as the Hudson River, ever topples over in advance of its foot, which is ever retarded by the cooling earth.

Thus it gives a lazy and horrific imitation of a tidal wave, embellished by the smoke of consuming vegetation, the flame of human habitations, the deafening explosion of great steam bubbles and titanic rending of the lava flood's crust.

Of the two great types of lava, the Etna type is called "basic" and the other "acid." The acid type, which is rich in silica, is much thicker and never flows so far afield, but hardens into ropy formations about the parent crater and tends to build up steep cones, whereas the basic kind, which is basaltic in nature, builds mountains of gentle slopes and also flows over the plains.

Its heat is terrific, and yet its crust is such a poor conductor of heat that one may walk or lie upon it without being incommoded by that interior fire. An Italian scientist by means of a platinum electric resistance pyrometer ascertained that lava of Etna at a depth of one foot had a temperature of 1,060 degrees Centigrade-and that's less than half of what it would be in Fahrenheit figures. Yet there are instances in which, while burning up the underbrush of a forest, it carbonizes the tree trunk without killing the leaves.

Paradoxical as it may seem, this very lava which is the chief menace to the 300,000 persons on or near Mount Etna also is their best friend. As The Times notes editorially,

There will be the familiar expressions of wonder that the Sicilians persist in living on the slopes of Etna, tho they and all

of their ancestors from times immemorial have known of the appalling dangers of the site, and again and again through all the ages have suffered, as they used to think, and perhaps as some of them do still, from the struggles of the giant Enceladus to break the prison into which Jupiter chained him.

They live there because between the eruptions life is easier there than elsewhere, the soil more fertile. Human beings can not afford to keep always in mind a peril that is intermittentthat leaves long periods of prosperity under a threat that, for any one generation, may not, probably will not, be

carried out.

It is a peculiarity of volcanic outpourings that, except when they take the form of lava that hardens into stone, on them big crops can be raised. And even the lava soon disintegrates into richness. That is enough to explain why, all over the world, people make their homes on or near mountains that at any moment may overwhelm them with fire, but usually are kind and useful neighbors.

It is no wonder, then, as The Herald points out, that

The slopes of Etna, with an area of more than 400 square miles, support a population more dense than that of any other equal portion of Sicily or Italy. There are sixty-five cities and villages in the area, and the number of inhabitants who obtain an excellent agricultural living from the fertile lava beds totals more than 300,000.

Mount Etna is 100 miles around the base, and the soberest peasants are working in tranquillity on the other side. The people who win their laborious living from the scanty soil of lava hundreds of years old even look with affection on the volcano, soon forgetting the suspended horror above their little stony vineyards.

Like all the world they enjoy the marvelous spectacle of nature's greatest manifestation, believing the peril can never approach them.

All too often, tho, the peril has approached, with the result that records of disastrous eruptions stretch back as far as 476 B. C.. for Mount Etna seems to delight more in being a treacherous and cruel neighbor than in being a kind and useful one. We read in The Herald that

One of the worst catastrophes caused by Etna was in 1669, when the harbor of Catania was partly filled up with a stream of lava and 20,000 persons perished. In 1693 there was an earthquake which did much damage and killed practically as many people. In 1769 Catania was destroyed and 15,000 persons were killed. In 1527 two entire villages were buried and many persons lost their lives.

Still another eruption occurred in 1879, and since then the volcano has been active at intervals of four or five years, tho there have been no regular intervals for serious eruptions. There are records of eleven eruptions previous to the Christian era.

The temper of Mount Etna apparently is becoming more ugly with age. and in recent years volcanic activities have caused panic and considerable destruction, notably in 1910 and 1911. The eruption and earthquake of 1914 destroyed nearly a score of villages, killed nearly 200 people and injured more than 1,000. The loss of life at that time would have been many times greater had it not been for the series of slight earth-shocks which forewarned the people.

Instead of relying on nature to warn the populace, the Italian Government dispatched several airplanes to the scene of the latest eruption. They watched the progress of the lava and relayed information to special signal stations which were established at strategic points. From these observations volcanologists estimated that six new craters have been opened, of which only two are important. The slopes and summit of Etna are studded with hundreds of craters which have been active at one time or another. From The Outlook (New York) we learn that

The cause of such violent volcanic phenomena as those which have just occurred is believed to be vast subsidences of the sea bottom, the passage of large quantities of water into deep earth cavities, great rock displacements because of the action of the water, heat caused by the ensuing pressure, and thus the forming of steam under pressure, and finally the explosion of the steam in its confinement, thus causing the rending of the mountain top or side by fissures and the expulsion of masses of melted rock, ashes and cinders.