Chapter LVIII - Page 2

letters miscarried or were not answered.

One day I did not feel vigorous and remained away from the office. The
next day I went down toward noon as usual, and found a note on my desk
which had been there twenty-four hours. It was signed "Marshall"--the
Virginia reporter--and contained a request that I should call at the
hotel and see him and a friend or two that night, as they would sail for
the east in the morning. A postscript added that their errand was a big
mining speculation! I was hardly ever so sick in my life. I abused
myself for leaving Virginia and entrusting to another man a matter I
ought to have attended to myself; I abused myself for remaining away from
the office on the one day of all the year that I should have been there.
And thus berating myself I trotted a mile to the steamer wharf and
arrived just in time to be too late. The ship was in the stream and
under way.

I comforted myself with the thought that may be the speculation would
amount to nothing--poor comfort at best--and then went back to my
slavery, resolved to put up with my thirty-five dollars a week and forget
all about it.

A month afterward I enjoyed my first earthquake. It was one which was
long called the "great" earthquake, and is doubtless so distinguished
till this day. It was just after noon, on a bright October day. I was
coming down Third street. The only objects in motion anywhere in sight
in that thickly built and populous quarter, were a man in a buggy behind
me, and a street car wending slowly up the cross street. Otherwise, all
was solitude and a Sabbath stillness. As I turned the corner, around a
frame house, there was a great rattle and jar, and it occurred to me that
here was an item!--no doubt a fight in that house. Before I could turn
and seek the door, there came a really terrific shock; the ground seemed
to roll under me in waves, interrupted by a violent joggling up and down,
and there was a heavy grinding noise as of brick houses rubbing together.
I fell up against the frame house and hurt my elbow. I knew what it was,
now, and from mere reportorial instinct, nothing else, took out my watch
and noted the time of day; at that moment a third and still severer shock
came, and as I reeled about on the pavement trying to keep my footing,
I saw a sight! The entire front of a tall four-story brick building in
Third street sprung outward like a door and fell sprawling across the
street, raising a dust like a great volume of smoke! And here came the
buggy--overboard went the man, and in less time than I can tell it the
vehicle was distributed in small fragments along three hundred yards of
street.

One could have fancied that somebody had fired a charge of chair-rounds
and rags down the thoroughfare. The street car had stopped, the