The Hillyars and the Burtons by Henry Kingsley

ONE scarcely likes to look too closely into the volcano of terror and fury which began to heave and gleam in Sir George Hillyar's mind when he read this. The biscuit-like walls of old craters stand up for centuries, heaving beautiful, scornful pinnacles aloft into the blue of heaven; and the grass grows on the old flame-eaten, vitrified rocks, in the holes of which the native cats and copper lizards live and squabble, and say things behind one another's backs; and people have pic-nics there; and lost sheep feed there, and waken strange startling echoes in the dead silence of the summer noon by their solitary bleat; and the eagle comes sometimes and throws his swift passing shadow across the short grass; and all goes on peacefully, until folks notice that a white, round-topped cloud hangs high aloft over the hill, and stays there; and then some one says that the cloud is red at night on the lower edge; and then some fine morning down slides the lip of the old crater, crash, in unutterable ruin, and away comes the great lava stream hissing through the vineyards, and hell is broken loose once more.

So now the bank of loose scorioe, --now, alas! a thing of the past, -- which had been built up by time, by want of temptation, by his love of his wife, by the company of such people as the Oxtons, by desire for the applause of society, round the seething fire which existed in George Hillyar, and which some say--and who is he bold enough to deny it?--is in all of us, had broken down utterly.