n fields are overflowing, and harvesters are found with difficulty.
Merchants' sales were never so large nor profits so good. Prices of
everything rule high, with an upward tendency, the demand at the shops
being for articles of good quality. Oriental rugs and diamonds are
conspicuously in evidence. Insurers are paying their losses to some
extent, and many people find themselves in possession of more ready
money than they ever had before. They are rich, though they may have no
house to sleep in. It is a momentary return to the flush times of the
early fifties, though upon a broader and more civilized scale, and
without their uncertainty or their romance.

In view of the facts it seems superfluous to discuss questions regarding
the future of San Francisco. That is to say, such questions as are
propounded by chronic croakers: Will the city be rebuilt? If so, will it
be a city of fine buildings? Will not the fear of earthquakes drive away
capital and confine reconstruction to insignificance?

Let us hasten to assure our friends that the day of doom has not yet
come to this city; that the day of doom never comes to any city for so
slight a cause, or for any cause short of a rain of brimstone and
fire, as in the case of Sodom. Whether of imperial steel or of imperial
shacks; whether calamities come in the form of such temblores as are
here met occasionally in a mild form, or in the far more destructive
form of hurricanes, floods, pestilence, sun--striking, and lightning, so
common at the east and elsewhere, and from which San Francisco is wholly
free, there will here forever be a city, a large, powerful, and wealthy
city.

Every part of the earth is subject at any time to seismic disturbance,
and no one can truthfully say that California is more liable to another
such occurrence than any other part of the United States. Indeed, it
should be less so, the earth's crust here having settled itself, let us
hope, to some centuries of repose. Never before has anything like this
been known on our Pacific seaboard. Never before, so far as history
or tradition or the physical features of the country can show, has
California experienced a serious earthquake shock--that is to say,
one attended by any considerable loss of life or property. Nor was the
earthquake of April last so terrible as it may seem to some. Apart from
the fire there was not so very much of it, and no great damage was done.
The official figures are: 266 killed by fa