rs, streaming out into
the streets, prepared to witness the great religious procession that was
to close the ceremonies of the holy day. Still the declining sun glowed
with unnatural intensity of hue; and the evening breeze swept over the
town in unusually fitful and stormy gusts. The air seemed to be laden
with mysterious melancholy, to sigh with a hidden presage of some awful
calamity to come.

Of a sudden it came. A shudder, a tremor, a quivering shock ran, for
hundreds of miles simultaneously, through Venezuela. A groan, swelling
thunderously and threateningly into a hollow roar, burst from the
tortured earth, and swallowed up in its convulsive rumbling the shrieks
of an entire nation suddenly inwrapt in the shadow and agony of death.
For a moment,--as if a supernatural hand were painfully lifting it from
its inmost core,--the earth rocked and heaved through all Venezuela; and
then, almost before the awful exclamation, _El temblor!_ had time to
burst from the lips of that stricken nation, it bounded from the bonds
that held it, and in a moment was quaking, heaving, sliding, surging,
rolling, in awful semblance to the sea. Great gulfs opened and closed
their jaws, swallowing up and again belching forth dwellings, churches,
human beings, overtaken by instantaneous destruction.

A flash and a roar passed through the earth, and a jagged chasm followed
in its track, creating others in its rapid clash and close. Whole
cities shivered, tottered, reeled, and fell in spreading heaps of
undistinguishable ruin. In one minute and fifteen seconds, twenty
thousand human beings perished in Venezuela; and then the Earthquake of
Caracas ceased.

It was after four o'clock in the afternoon when the first subterranean
shock was felt; and long before five the agonized earth was still. Long
before five, the stupefied survivors stood slowly recovering their
faculties of speech and motion. Long before five, a piteous wail
ascended to heaven from fathers and husbands and wives and mothers,
desolately mourning the dead in the streets of Caracas, La Guayra,
Merida, San Felipe, and Valencia. In this manner the Holy Thursday of
1812 drew toward its close. But the physical disasters consequent upon
the great earthquake were of insignificant import as compared with its
moral effect. Colonist and Spaniard had shared alike in suffering and
death during those dreadful moments; but the superstitious population
readily accepted the interpretation w