There comes a still, calm morning when you are sitting at your desk, feeling, perhaps a little languid, for the air, though soft and warm, is oppressive, and seems in some odd way to have clogged and muffled your vitality. Your dog crosses the room restlessly, yawns, and changes position, and infects you with his nervousness. If a stranger, you attribute these symptoms to the spring weather; if an old resident you will find yourself in the attitude of expectancy. Suddenly a slight thrill communicates itself to your desk. You turn to the dog, but he sits in another corner looking at you with startled and wishful eyes. If you have never felt this thrill before you dismiss the phenomena at once from your mind; but if you have felt it, you rise quickly for you fear that the worst -- how much worse you dare not think -- is yet to come. A pause, and it comes. The door-bell peals an announcement of the invisible trespasser. There is no mistaking it now, be you stranger or resident. This is the tread which overthrew the Egyptian cities, which stamped a chasm for luckless Lisbon, and leveled Caracas and Manilla. How the windows rattle and the strong beams over your head creak and disjoint. You make your way staggeringly to the door which opens and shuts in your face. As you are wondering how ling this will continue the shaking suddenly ceases. The time has seemed interminable, and yet, if you have been cool enough to take out your watch you will find that ten seconds limits your experience. You flatter yourself you have been cool and collected until you find a piece of plaster like the icing of a plum-cake lying on your desk, and one or two fragments in your pocket, which you cannot account for.
Without entering into any theory of their terrestrial disturbances I think the fact of their having been preceded, accompanied, or followed, usually by some meteorological phenomena, is pretty well established. The morning of the great shock of the 8th October was ushered in with a smart shower of rain before sunrise, quite unusual for the season, as our rains seldom begin before November. The three or four shocks we have felt this spring have been attended with similar peculiarities of temperature and weather; when it is remembered that the evidences in regard to internal convulsions has not been clearly adduced -- that the shocks are not experienced by people walking or standing on the earth's surface -- there seems to be some reason in the theory of electrical superficial storms which has been lately promulgated. I was walking upon the beach on the northern shore of the city, during the shocks of October 8, 1865, and felt neither agitation of the earth or any disturbance of the water, although within a few hundred yards windows were shattered, crockery thrown from shelves, and people shaken from their beds.
The earthquake which visited this coast on the 26th ult., and of which you have probably been informed by telegraph, was, on the whole, a rather good-humored affair. It was more like a hospitable exhibition of California productions to our latest guests, Messrs Van Valkenburgh, Stone, and Burlingame, than anything else, and lacked the peculiar animus and decided malevolence of the shock of October last. That was a trespass with assault and battery intended.
The late shock was felt generally throughout the state, although the interior papers, with provincial jealousy, intimate that it was more severe in San Francisco than elsewhere, and that the metropolis aggrandized even this impartial convulsion as she does everything else. It exhibited the usual phenomena which have become familiar to us without losing their awe-inspiring qualities. There was the premonitory rumble and rattle; the shock in its different manifestations of rolling, bumping, swaying or jolting, and the suceeding hush, broken at last by anxious voices, shuffling feet, barking of dogs, neighing of horses, and crowing of cocks. At such times the streets are filled with people narrowly inspecting the walls and cornices of the houses they have just quitted, or excitedly comparing their experiences. Above all this bustle and confusion the clear blue of a Californian sky, demurely arches, and a bright unclouded sun looks good-humoredly down. Finding, perhaps, that nature does not generally participate in the convulsion, people begin to smile and joke, the color returns to blanched cheeks, business is resumed, and the restless microcosm of life and labor goes on undisturbed until another shock shall disintegrate it.
Familiarity with earthquakes does not beget contempt -- there is surprising freshness and novelty in each new alarm -- and although Californians are not inclined to confess timidity, and although some affect to treat these phenomena in the light of a gigantic, practical joke, it may be noted that for an hour or two after a shock, out-of-door exercise and promenading become fashionable and popular, and the influx of passengers in the streets is remarkably large. An earthquake is the one touch of nature that makes the whole worly kin. The slightest shock is sufficient to overthrow the artificial barriers of society. Mistress and maid faint in each other's arms. "Washoe" in his gilded palace and Pat in his shanty forsake their respective habitations to find safety in the democratic thoroughfare.
In spite of the fears of alarmists, I do not think that the prosperity and future of California is disturbed by these shocks, and I believe that there is more danger to be apprehended from the concealment of facts, or the tacit silence of the public press on this topic, than in the free and open discussion of the subject and speculation for the future. Only weak walls and weaker principles and theories have thus far been overthrown, and earthquakes have been beneficial in so far as they have tested the fealty of Californians to their adopted state. Those who have been most blatant and vulgar in their praises of the country, who have extolled even its faults and imperfections; who have indulged in retrospective longings for a return of "'49 and '50" and their attendant barbarisms as the acme of California prosperity -- the very parvenus of a parvenu civilization -- are now boisterous in their defection and alarming in their prophesies for the future. On the other hand, those who have been generally termed "growlers;" who have exposed the absurdity of extolling the climate and scenery above all others; who have hinted that long dry summers and wet winters are not picturesque; are ready and willing to accept earthquakes, drouths, and inundations as the not-too-exorbitant price that must be paid for a practical, healthy, and labor-saving climate and a fruitful and auriferous soil. Physical disturbances are the least dangers that threaten our prosperity; we have passed through ordeals more serious than the earthquake shock. Ruffinianism, brigandage, chivalry, gambling, scandalous legislation, lynch law, and extravagant speculation have in turn retarded our progress. The pistol and the knife, drunkenness and debauchery, have claimed more victims than ever pestilence, flood or volcanic throe.
The California Reader
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