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.