Whilst Charles and Henry were one evening walking along the beautiful beach they saw a ship nearing the land. A strong breeze was blowing at the time, and whilst they paused to admire the noble bark, all sails set, ploughing the crested billows, and floating over them like an enormous sea-gull, she came nearer and nearer to the young officers. Another minute the sails were lowered and anchor was cast. A small boat was dispatched from the ship, and made for the beach just where Charles and Henry were standing. They formed a thousand conjectures of the meaning of this movement. When the boat came near the land, a tall young man, dressed in the uniform of the Neapolitan service, leaped on shore and advanced towards the young officers.
A few words of recognition passed. He was a lieutenant in the Neopolitan army, sent with despatches for the commandant of the garrison of Messina to send two or three companies of the newly-enrolled troops to the capital.
On the way to the garrison he informed Charles and Henry that the war was nearly at an end, but there was a great deal of disturbance and sedition in the city of Naples, and that the garrison there had to be doubled. The object in anchoring the ship on the coast was for fear the garrison of Messina might have been surprised and taken by the Carlists. Having assured himself all was safe, he entered the citadel with the young officers, and was presented to the captain, to whom he handed his despatches from headquarters.
The next evening found Henry and Charles, with two hundred men, on board the ship that had anchored on the coast the day before. The The excitement and bustle of departure had silenced for a while all feelings of remorse, and the old passions that reigned in the soul of Charles rose again from their dormant state. Her eye flashed with life and her lips quivered with joy; there was still within her grasp the chance of fame. Ambition fanned the dying embers of decaying hope, and every pious resolve was thrown aside until the course of events would realize or blast her new dream of greatness.
A few days brought them in sight of the beautiful capital of the south of Italy. The modern aphorism, "See Naples and then die," was said in other words in old times, when the Caesars and Senators of the empire enriched its beautiful shores with superb villas. There is not in Europe a bluer sky and, true in its refection of the azure firmament, a bluer sea than around Naples. The coast undulates to the sea in verdant slopes, which in autumn have a rich golden hue from the yellow tinge of the vine-leaf. Its classic fame casts a halo around its charms; its history in the far past, its terrible mountain and periodical convulsions from the burning womb of the earth, render it an object of attraction to all classes.
Charles and Henry were quite alive to the impressions felt by tourists when, whirled along by the panting steam-horse through the luxuriant Campo Flice, they see for the first time the column of murky smoke that rises to the clouds over the terrible Vesuvius. The old mountain was then, as it is now, the terror and the attraction of tourists. The catastrophes it has caused, the cities it has swallowed up in molten ashes, the thunder of its roar when roused from its sleep, and the unhealthy, sulphurous vapors ever vomited from its cone, render it a veritable giant that the human race loves to see at a distance.
Our heroines were already acquainted with the "Light-house of the Mediterranean," and from afar the lofty and ever-blazing, active Etna; hence Vesuvius was not so attractive as a volcano as in the halo of classic lore that hung around it. At a distance the mountain seems to be harmless, the blue outline of the lofty cone terminating in a dense bank of smoke, like stormclouds gathering around the snowy peaks of the distant Apennines; but when the adventurous tourist wishes to approach nearer to its blazing crater, and toils up its torn and blackened sides, he will see in the immense chasms and rents traces of might convulsions. Deep rivers of molten lava that take twenty and thirty years to cool; the quantity of ashes and cinders that could change the whole face of a country and bury five cities in a few hours, must tell of the enormous furnace raging in the bowels of the earth, of which Vesuvius is but its chimney.
Strange, Charles longed to see Vesuvius when but a tender girl in Paris. She little thought the extraordinary course of human events would bring her, not only under the shadow of the terrible mountain itself, but send her through a most thrilling scene on its barren slopes. Let us hasten on to the course of events that rendered the extraordinary life of this girl so romantic.
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