--deadlier to him than the upas-tree; ordered his little
household band out, and away they filed, one by one, the head of the
family manfully closing the rear....

I was alone--alone with the earthquake.... There was a wood-cellar in
one of the out-houses, access to which was easy and safe. One of my
host's domestics had slipped flint and steel into my hands. In less than
half-an-hour's time, a cheerful fire was crackling before me. I drew
forth an old lumbering arm-chair from the wood-cellar, together with my
provision of fuel. I shrouded myself in the ample folds of one of Don
Marzio's riding-cloaks; I sat with folded arms, my eyes riveted on the
rising blaze, summoning all my spirits round my heart, and bidding it to
bear up. The sun had long set, and the last gleam of a sickly twilight
rapidly faded. A keen, damp, north-east wind swept over the earth; thin,
black, ragged clouds flitted before it, like uneasy ghosts. A stray star
twinkled here and there in the firmament, and the sickle-shaped moon
hung in the west. But the light of those pale luminaries was wan and
fitful. They seemed to be aware of the hopelessness of their struggle,
and to mourn in anticipation of the moment when they should faint in
fight, and unrelieved darkness should lord it over the fields of the
heavens.

The town of Aquila, or the Eagle, as the natives name it, is perched,
eagle-like, on the brow of an abrupt cliff in the bosom of the loftiest
Apennines. Monte Reale, Monte Velino, and the giant of the whole chain,
the "Gran Sasso d'Italia," look down upon it from their exalted thrones.
Within the shelter of that massive armor, the town might well seem
invulnerable to time and man. But now, as I gazed despondingly round,
the very hills everlasting seemed rocking from their foundation, and
their crests nodding to destruction. Which of those mighty peaks was to
open the fire of hell's artillery upon us? Was not Etna once as still
and dark as yonder great rock? and yet it now glares by night with its
ominous beacon, and cities and kingdoms have been swept away at its
base.

Two hours passed away in gloomy meditation. The whole town was a desert.
The camp meeting of the unhoused Aquilani was held somewhere in the
distance: its confused murmur reached me not. Only my neighbors, the
Ursuline nuns, were up and awake. With shrinking delicacy, dreading the
look and touch of the profane even more than the walls of their
prison-house, they had stood