Now if you had seen, as I have seen, close round the edges of these lava
streams, and sometimes actually upon them, or upon the great bed of dust
and ashes which have been hurled far and wide out of ancient volcanos,
happy homesteads, rich crops, hemp and flax, and wheat, tobacco, lucerne,
roots, and vineyards laden with white and purple grapes, you would have
begun to suspect that the lava streams were not, after all, such very bad
neighbours. And when I tell you that volcanic soils (as they are
called), that is, soil which has at first been lava or ashes, are
generally the richest soils in the world--that, for instance (as some one
told me the other day), there is soil in the beautiful island of Madeira
so thin that you cannot dig more than two or three inches down without
coming to the solid rock of lava, or what is harder even, obsidian (which
is the black glass which volcanos sometimes make, and which the old
Mexicans used to chip into swords and arrows, because they had no
steel)--and that this soil, thin as it is, is yet so fertile, that in it
used to be grown the grapes of which the famous Madeira wine was
made--when you remember this, and when you remember, too, the Lothians of
Scotland (about which I shall have to say a little to you just now), then
you will perhaps agree with me, that Lady Why has not been so very wrong
in setting Madam How to pour out lava and ashes upon the surface of the
earth.

For see--down below, under the roots of the mountains, Madam How works
continually like a chemist in his laboratory, melting together all the
rocks, which are the bones and leavings of the old worlds. If they
stayed down below there, they would be of no use; while they will be of
use up here in the open air. For, year by year--by the washing of rain
and rivers, and also, I am sorry to say, by the ignorant and foolish
waste of mankind--thousands and millions of tons of good stuff are