Mr Flint on Earthquakes on the Mississippi. 263 



The water at first covered the whole country, particularly at 

 the Little Prairie ; and it must have been indeed a scene of 

 horror, in these deep forests, and in the gloom of the darkest 

 nio-ht, and by wading in the water to the middle, to flee from 

 these concussions, wliich were occurring every few hours, with 

 a noise equally terrible to the beasts and birds as to men. The 

 birds themselves lost all power and disposition to fly, and re- 

 treated to the bosoms of men, their fellow-sufferers in this scene 

 of convulsion. A few persons sunk in these chasms, and were 

 providentially extricated. One person died of fright ; one pe- 

 rished miserably on an island, which retained its original level, 

 in the midst of a wide lake created by the earthquake. The 

 hat and clothes of this man were found. A number perished, 

 who sunk with their boats m the river. A bursting of the 

 earth, just below the village of New Madrid, arrested this 

 mighty stream in its course, and caused a reflux of its waves, by 

 which, in a little time, a great number of boats were swept by 

 the ascending current into the mouth of the Bayou, carried out 

 and left upon the dry land, when the accumulating waters of 

 the river had again cleared their current. There were a great 

 number of severe shocks, but two series of concussions were 

 particularly terrible, far more so than the rest. They remark, 

 that the shocks were clearly distinguishable into two classes ; 

 those in which the motion was horizontal, and those in which it 

 was perpendicular. The latter were attended by the explosions 

 and the terrible mixture of noises that preceded and accompa- 

 nied the earthquakes in a louder degree, but were by no means 

 so desolating and destructive as the other. When they were 

 felt, the houses crumbled, the trees waved together, the ground 

 sunk, and all the destructive phenomena were more conspicuous. 

 In the intervals of the earthquakes there was one evening, and 

 that a brilliant and cloudless one, in which the western sky was 

 a continued glare of vivid flashes of lightning, and repeated 

 peals of subterranean thunder seemed to proceed, as the flashes 

 did, from below the horizon. They remark that this night, so 

 conspicuous for subterranean thunder, was the same period in 

 which the fatal earthquakes at Caraccas occurred, and they seem 

 to suppose these flashes and that event parts of the same scene. 



