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Mauritius. Curiously enough, the great earthquake of Lisbon produced no visible effect on land in England, but it jarred and shook all the rivers, lakes, and canals, so that the water in them oscillated violently for some time from no visible external reason. Loch Lomond rose and fell two and a half feet with every wave for five minutes; Coniston Water dashed itself wildly about as if it expected it was going to be made into a reservoir for the supply of still infantile Manchester; and the bargees on the Godalming Canal were only prevented from supposing that a steam-launch had just passed over the course by considerations of historical propriety (highly praiseworthy in men of their profession), owing to the fact that steam-launches themselves had not yet begun their much-objurgated existence. This curious effect is of course due to the greater mobility of liquids, just as a very slight jar which would not visibly affect the substance of the table will make the water in the finger-glasses rise and fall with a slight rhythmical motion. Indeed, it was similarly noticed at the time of the Lisbon catastrophe, that in distant places where no other effect was produced, chandeliers, and even rows of tallow candles hung up in shops, began to swing to and fro slowly, after the fashion of a pendulum, about the time when the earthquake might be expected to have reached their neighbourhood. The fact that they were hanging freely from above made them easily susceptible to the slightest tremor which would not otherwise have been perceptible. Ardent seismologists might improve this hint by practising as much as possible upon the trapeze.

Earthquakes and other similar jars travel at different rates of speed through different substances. Mr. Mallett found that the shock of gunpowder explosions moved fastest through solid granite, where it went at the rate of 1,640 feet a second, and slowest through sand, where it only made 951 feet in the same time. The Visp earthquake of 1855 travelled north to Strasburg with the enormous rapidity of 2,861 feet per second; but southwards towards Turin, influenced no doubt by the bad example of the Italian railways (or else, perhaps, by the nature of the soil), it attained less than half the speed it had shown in going northward. The nature of the materials also has a great deal to do with the amount of damage done by a shock. Port Royal, Jamaica, which was almost all destroyed by the great earthquake of 1692, is the classical example of this modifying influence of soil and underlying geological features. The town is built on a low peninsula of solid

white limestone, joined to the mainland by a long and sultry isthmus of sweltering sand; and a large sandy belt has also gathered all around the central limestone patch, so that only the very core of the old town had its foundations on the solid rock. When the earthquake came, the houses on the limestone merely oscillated violently, but were left standing in the end; whereas the city that was built on the sand fell bodily to pieces at once, owing to the loose inelastic nature of the subsoil. To this day, the terror of the tradition of that great calamity has not yet wholly died away in modern Jamaica; and the visitor who goes to church on his first Sunday in the island notices still with a certain solemn awe and apprehension the ominous addition to the deprecations in the litany, From earthquake, hurricane, and sudden tempest, Good Lord deliver us.' There is a curious monument, by the way, at a place called Green Bay, not far from Port Royal, to a French Huguenot refugee, whose name the epitaph anglicizes, after the custom of the time, into 'Lewis Galdy, Esq.' This M. Galdy was swallowed up by the first gulp of the earthquake, but disgorged again at the second shock, and cast into the sea, where he escaped by swimming to a neighbouring boat. Local tradition declares that this is the only case on record of a man having been thus restored after being once swallowed. Anyhow, M. Galdy lived to the ripe old age of eighty, and survived his little adventure forty-seven years. How tired he must have got of telling the story!

We in England are fortunately all but quite out of it in the matter of earthquakes. Of course, from the very nature of the case, no district in the world is really absolutely safe against such visitations, and an earthquake may drop in even upon us any day unawares. But as the visits of angels are proverbially few and far between, so earthquakes in Great Britain are practically speaking of very rare occurrence; and when they do come, only the very wakefullest people ever notice them at all. To be sure, there is one place in Scotland, Comrie to wit, which always gets a shaking whenever there is any shaking going on about; but then Comrie is believed to stand above a line of dislocation in the rocks composing the top crust of the earth just in that neighbourhood-there is a break or crack there apparently; and the reason for the shaking is not, in all probability, that there are any more earthquakes at that particular spot than elsewhere, but that the break stops the wave short, so to speak, and throws it back, much as when a wave of water (for example) beats against the edge of one's tub if one happens to tilt it or

knock against it. In the earth, as a whole, earthquakes are most frequent, of course, in volcanic regions: everybody knows that they come exceptionally often in the Andes, in Java and Sumatra, in Japan, and in other familiar centres of plutonic action. The great European earthquake belt pretty nearly coincides with the basin of the Mediterranean and its subsidiary seas-the Euxine, Caspian, and Aral; and it is apparently connected with the range of scattered and now rather feeble or dormant volcanoes which begins with Pico in the Azores, runs along through Vesuvius, Stromboli, and Etna, and stretches away as far as the basaltic plateaus of India on the extreme east.

Earthquake weather in the meteorological or climatic sense seems to be mainly connected with such volcanic disturbances. It indicates some change of conditions in the air, some curious upsetting of the ordinary circumstances under which we live, giving rise to very indefinable but perfectly recognisable sensations, not only in man but in the lower animals as well. A sudden feeling of awe seems to come over one for no particular assignable reason; the birds leave off singing; the dogs forget to howl; the black people drop for a moment from their perpetual high monotone of shouting and quarrelling; and in a minute the shock is upon one. Perhaps the vague sense of discomfort may be due to electrical conditions (electricity, as usual, comes in handy, and is much in demand just at present); perhaps it may be owing to mere vapours of sulphur or liberated gases in the air; perhaps it may be pure superstition; but almost everybody who has ever lived in an earthquake country is tolerably certain that he himself always feels it. It is clear at any rate that sundry premonitory signs and tokens do really usher in the advent of a volcanic earthquake. Before the Casamicciola disaster, wells dried up suddenly, subterranean thunder was heard, and slight oscillations of the earth took place as a sort of warning of the coming catastrophe. Strangest and most significant of all, as showing the presence of odd deranging circumstances in the atmosphere, or powerful electrical disturbances, the big clock in the Sala Belliazzi stopped twenty minutes before the actual approach of the earthquake. The hot springs also underwent sudden changes of temperature, another indication of the way in which earthquake weather may be produced. Anybody who has ever lived at Bath, and whose own nerves are worth anything as sensitive meteorological instruments (a state of body by no means to be coveted), must have noticed how often in the trough of the valley by the Pump Room

he experienced on certain sultry summer days, or on close muggy winter mornings, a singular sinking depression, prompting him at once, according to temperament, either to fling himself into the Avon, to take a glass of the waters, or to turn into the club for a brandy and seltzer. That feeling is the nearest possible English equivalent to the peculiar sensation of earthquake weather.

Though earthquakes are now one of the most terrible forms in which the internal energies of the earth usually manifest themselves, it has not always been so, and it may not always be so in future. There have been geological catastrophes in the history of our planet immeasurably more awful than any actual or possible earthquake-catastrophes compared to which even the eruption of Vesuvius that overwhelmed Herculaneum and Pompeii was but a small and unimportant episode. Professor Geikie, following many distinguished American geologists, has shown that the vast basalt plains of Western America, as well as the region about the Giant's Causeway in north-eastern Ireland, have been produced by a peculiar form of volcanic action which he calls fissure-eruptions. In these cases it seems that molten sheets of lava of enormous size poured forth bodily in a vast flood from huge rents in the earth's crust, and overwhelmed many hundred square miles together with their devastating inundation. The lava spreads to a depth of some hundreds of feet, and has rolled around the feet of mountains and filled up their valleys exactly as a flood of water might have done. These terrific massive eruptions' or direct outflows of incandescent molten matter are probably the most frightful cataclysms that have ever visited the face of the earth. Nervous people, however, may console themselves by the consideration that the chances of their being overwhelmed in such an outflow are practically infinitesimal. In all probability, if a man were to have an infinity of lives, one after another, he would have to get killed in a railway accident eight-hundred-and-ninety-two times over, not to mention several hundred thousand natural deaths meanwhile, before he ever once got himself caught in a fissure-eruption. The fear of it may be relegated to the same ingenious people who don't much trouble themselves about the typhoid and the scarlatina germs that are for ever flitting around us, but are terribly afraid every passing comet has a sinister intention of running full tilt at this one particular insignificant little planet. Curiously enough, one never hears of anybody who has abstract fears lest a comet might interfere with the domestic astronomical arrangements of Jupiter and Saturn.

55

THE GIANT'S ROBE.

BY THE AUTHOR OF VICE VERSA.'

'Now does he feel his title

Hang loose upon him, like a giant's robe
Upon a dwarfish thief.'-Macbeth.

CHAPTER XIX.

DOLLY'S DELIVERANCE.

BOUT a week

after the dinner recorded in the last chapter, Mark repaired to the house in Kensington Park Gardens to call as in duty bound, though, as he had not been able to

find out on what

afternoon he would be sure of finding Mrs. Langton at home, he was obliged to leave this to chance. He was admitted however not by the

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stately Champion, but by Colin, who had seen him from the window and hastened to intercept him.

'Mabel's at home, somewhere about,' he said, but will you come in and speak to Dolly first? She's crying awfully about something, and she won't tell me what. Perhaps she'd tell you. And do come, sir, please; it's no fun when she's like that, and she's always doing it now!' For Colin had an unlimited belief, founded as he thought on experience, in the persuasive powers of his former

master.

Mark thought of Mabel's anxiety on the night of the dinner;

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