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 horses
were rearing and plunging, the passengers were pouring out at both ends,
and one fat man had crashed half way through a glass window on one side
of the car, got wedged fast and was squirming and screaming like an
impaled madman. Every door, of every house, as far as the eye could
reach, was vomiting a stream of human beings; and almost before one could
execute a wink and begin another, there was a massed multitude of people
stretching in endless procession down every street my position commanded.
Never was solemn solitude turned into teeming life quicker.
Of the wonders wrought by “the great earthquake,” these were all that
came under my eye; but the tricks it did, elsewhere, and far and wide
over the town, made toothsome gossip for nine days.
The destruction of property was trifling–the injury to it was wide-
spread and somewhat serious.
The “curiosities” of the earthquake were simply endless. Gentlemen and
ladies who were sick, or were taking a siesta, or had dissipated till a
late hour and were making up lost sleep, thronged into the public streets
in all sorts of queer apparel, and some without any at all. One woman
who had been washing a naked child, ran down the street holding it by the
ankles as if it were a dressed turkey. Prominent citizens who were
supposed to keep the Sabbath strictly, rushed out of saloons in their
shirt-sleeves, with billiard cues in their hands. Dozens of men with
necks swathed in napkins, rushed from barber-shops, lathered to the eyes
or with one cheek clean shaved and the other still bearing a hairy
stubble. Horses broke from stables, and a frightened dog rushed up a
short attic ladder and out on to a roof, and when his scare was over had
not the nerve to go down again the same way he had gone up.
A prominent editor flew down stairs, in the principal hotel, with nothing
on but one brief undergarment–met a chambermaid, and exclaimed:
“Oh, what shall I do! Where shall I go!”
She responded with naive serenity:
“If you have no choice, you might try a clothing-store!”
A certain foreign consul’s lady was the acknowledged leader of fashion,
and every time she appeared in anything new or extraordinary, the ladies
in the vicinity made a raid on their husbands’ purses and arrayed
themselves similarly. One man who had suffered considerably and growled
accordingly, was standing at the window when the shocks came, and the
next instant the consul’s wife, just out of the bath, fled by with no
other apology for clothing than–a bath-towel! The sufferer rose
superior to the terrors of the earthquake, and said to his wife:
“Now that is something like! Get out your towel my dear!”
The plastering that fell from ceilings in San Francisco that day, would
have covered several acres of ground. For some days afterward, groups of
eyeing and pointing men stood about many a building, looking at long zig-
zag cracks that extended from the eaves to the ground. Four feet of the
tops of three chimneys on one house were broken square off and turned
around in such a way as to completely stop the draft.
A crack a hundred feet long gaped open six inches wide in the middle of
one street and then shut together again with such force, as to ridge up
the meeting earth like a slender grave. A lady sitting in her rocking
and quaking parlor, saw the wall part at the ceiling, open and shut
twice, like a mouth, and then-drop the end of a brick on the floor like a
tooth. She was a woman easily disgusted with foolishness, and she arose
and went out of there. One lady who was coming down stairs was
astonished to see a bronze Hercules lean forward on its pedestal as if to
strike her with its club. They both reached the bottom of the flight at