Giovanni and the other by Frances Hodgson Burnett

Author:Frances Hodgson Burnett [Burnett, Frances Hodgson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Klassiker
Publisher: Jazzybee Verlag
Published: 2017-05-17T00:00:00+00:00

ONE WHO LIVED LONG, LONG AGO

It would be very difficult to tell anything at all definite about her. One can only try to imagine what she was like, what she thought, what she did, and how her young life was passed. And imagination, however powerful, can scarcely be relied on to depict to one very clearly and truly the things that happened more than 1800 years ago.

More than 1800 years ago she died in the ancient city of Pompeii, an awful tragic death, which 2000 people shared with her, perishing in the most overwhelming catastrophe the world has ever known. And yet to-day one can pass through the streets she walked about in, standing in the " peristylium " or court of the house which was, perhaps, the one she lived in, and where her favorite flowers grew; and where she amused herself by watching the goldfishes in the little oblong stone-lined pool, which we are told was called the Piscina. One sees, perhaps, her very own little bedroom, where she slept with her playthings about her, as rosy and peaceful as other little girls sleep to-day in their bedrooms in London or New York. And one can stand and look down pityingly at the slender lava and ash-encrusted little form, which was all that the great eruption of Mount Vesuvius on the 24th of August, a.d. 79, left of her childish body. She is lying by her mother, just as she fell when they were trying to escape among the blinding showers of hot ashes, red-hot lapilli, or small fragments of pumice-stone, and the sudden deluge of boiling water, which the great volcano poured forth alternately, and sometimes all at once, and which turned the beautiful day into black night, filled the air with shrieks of terror, and the narrow streets with bewildered, agonized people losing their way and stumbling in the horrible darkness as they were flying for their lives.

Many hundred years she lay in the darkness with the gay, luxurious little city she had lived in, and which the quaking earth had broken into ruins and the burning mountain had covered with shower after shower of lapilli and ashes until it was buried twenty feet deep, no trace of it left to show that it had ever existed.

When one stands in the small museum and looks down at the slender, lava-encrusted frame, which looks more like a curiously rough gray image than anything else, it is difficult to think of it as the body of a real, living young creature, warm and soft, and full of movement and color. And yet she was so — eighteen hundred and eleven years ago.

If she had died as others do, she would have been dust centuries ago, but as it is, she lies in the tiny Pompeii museum, in a glass case, near that other lava-encrusted image which is supposed to have been her mother, and with other like images near her, and one stands and looks at her with

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