d clothing.

So much for Stanford, where all our experiences seem to have been very
similar. Nearly all our chimneys went down, some of them
disintegrating from top to bottom; parlor floors were covered with
bricks; plaster strewed the floors; furniture was everywhere upset and
dislocated; but the wooden dwellings sprang back to their original
position, and in house after house not a window stuck or a door scraped
at top or bottom. Wood architecture was triumphant! Everybody was
excited, but the excitement at first, at any rate, seemed to be almost
joyous. Here at last was a _real_ earthquake after so many years of
harmless waggle! Above all, there was an irresistible desire to talk
about it, and exchange experiences.

Most people slept outdoors for several subsequent nights, partly to be
safer in case of recurrence, but also to work off their emotion, and
get the full unusualness out of the experience. The vocal babble of
early-waking girls and boys from the gardens of the campus, mingling
with the birds' songs and the exquisite weather, was for three or four
days delightful sunrise phenomenon.

Now turn to San Francisco, thirty-five miles distant, from which an
automobile ere long brought us the dire news of a city in ruins, with
fires beginning at various points, and the water-supply interrupted. I
was fortunate enough to board the only train of cars--a very small
one--that got up to the city; fortunate enough also to escape in the
evening by the only train that left it. This gave me and my valiant
feminine escort some four hours of observation. My business is with
"subjective" phenomena exclusively; so I will say nothing of the
material ruin that greeted us on every hand--the daily papers and the
weekly journals have done full justice to that topic. By midday, when
we reached the city, the pall of smoke was vast and the dynamite
detonations had begun, but the troops, the police and the firemen
seemed to have established order, dangerous neighborhoods were roped
off everywhere and picketed, saloons closed, vehicles impressed, and
every one at work who _could_ work.

It was indeed a strange sight to see an entire population in the
streets, busy as ants in an uncovered ant-hill scurrying to save their
eggs and larvae. Every horse, and everything on wheels in the city,
from hucksters' wagons to automobiles, was being loaded with what
effects could be scraped together from houses which the advancing
flame