The Letters of the Younger Pliny

The cloud over the bay rose in the shape of an umbrella pine, and Pliny, not yet eighteen, stayed behind with his book while his uncle took the ships out toward it and did not come back. That letter, written years later for Tacitus, is the only eyewitness account of Vesuvius anyone left, and it sits in the collection beside a dolphin at Hippo that let a boy ride it, a haunted house with an old man rattling his chains, a room-by-room walk through his seaside villa, and a girl of not quite fourteen whose wedding day was already fixed when she died.