thoroughly alarmed. Cries of "Misericordia!
misericordia!" resounded on every side, and every one prophesied another
and a greater shock. These fears were not entirely uncalled for, for at
twenty minutes past nine there was a second, and several more before
daybreak, although none proved to be as severe as the first.

In a short time carriages began to roll by in all directions, bearing
the more timorous to the villages and plantations outside of the city:
the open public squares or _plazas_ filled rapidly with the excited
population, especially when telegram after telegram began to arrive from
La Guayra, Puerto Cabello, Valencia, La Vittoria and the intervening
towns--all having felt the violence of the shock, and anxious lest the
capital might have been destroyed. This proof of the extent of the _onda
seismica_, as the scientists termed it, served to increase the general
alarm. Tents were improvised in the plazas, composed of blankets,
counterpanes, etc., stretched across ropes attached to the trees in the
square, those who had no such appliances at hand remaining all night
upon the public benches or upon more comfortable seats which they caused
to be transported for their accommodation.

The scene in the principal square of Caracas, the Plaza Bolivar--upon
which front the cathedral on the eastern side, the palace of the
archbishop on the southern, the presidential residence (called the _Casa
Amarilla_, or "Yellow House") on the western, and a number of other
public buildings on the northern--was one which under less terrifying
circumstances would have been most imposing, for the archbishop left his
palace and descended by the great stairway into the plaza, accompanied
by a train of his attending priests, to raise the fainting spirits of
the terrified multitude, who, with pallid faces upraised to Heaven or
crouched upon the bare ground in attitudes of supplication, implored
mercy from on high. And inasmuch as calamitous events, such as the
appearance of comets, earthquakes or pestilences, are usually the
signal for great moral reforms, doubtless many a promise of a purer life
was registered in that hour of terror by those self-accused by their
quickened consciences.

The archbishop--who is a young man, devout, fervent and sincere, a very
anchorite in his habits and mode of life, thin, spare of frame, and with
features eloquent with the fire of intellect, morally and physically the
splendid ideal of what a true prie