e a raid on their husbands' purses and arrayed
themselves similarly. One man who had suffered considerably and growled
accordingly, was standing at the window when the shocks came, and the
next instant the consul's wife, just out of the bath, fled by with no
other apology for clothing than--a bath-towel! The sufferer rose
superior to the terrors of the earthquake, and said to his wife:

"Now that is something like! Get out your towel my dear!"

The plastering that fell from ceilings in San Francisco that day, would
have covered several acres of ground. For some days afterward, groups of
eyeing and pointing men stood about many a building, looking at long
zig-zag cracks that extended from the eaves to the ground. Four feet of
the tops of three chimneys on one house were broken square off and turned
around in such a way as to completely stop the draft.

A crack a hundred feet long gaped open six inches wide in the middle of
one street and then shut together again with such force, as to ridge up
the meeting earth like a slender grave. A lady sitting in her rocking
and quaking parlor, saw the wall part at the ceiling, open and shut
twice, like a mouth, and then-drop the end of a brick on the floor like a
tooth. She was a woman easily disgusted with foolishness, and she arose
and went out of there. One lady who was coming down stairs was
astonished to see a bronze Hercules lean forward on its pedestal as if to
strike her with its club. They both reached the bottom of the flight at
the same time,--the woman insensible from the fright. Her child, born
some little time afterward, was club-footed. However--on second
thought,--if the reader sees any coincidence in this, he must do it at
his own risk.

The first shock brought down two or three huge organ-pipes in one of the
churches. The minister, with uplifted hands, was just closing the
services. He glanced up, hesitated, and said:

"However, we will omit the benediction!"--and the next instant there was
a vacancy in the atmosphere where he had stood.

After the first shock, an Oakland minister said:

"Keep your seats! There is no better place to die than this"--

And added, after the third:

"But outside is good enough!" He then skipped out at the back door.

Such another destruction of mantel ornaments and toilet bottles as the
earthquake created, San Francisco never saw before. There was hardly a
girl or a matron in the city but suffered losses of th