486 A YEAR OF COSTA RICAN NATURAL HISTORY 



themselves or to get brands to light their torches or cigars. 

 We sat about this fire until daylight. The young mother 

 with her baby in her arms sat in the middle of a high-backed 

 sofa, so that her husband on one side and A. on the other 

 helped to keep her and the child warm. That we were suc- 

 cessful was proved by the little creature's sleeping almost 

 continuously, waking only to be nursed and when a sharper 

 shock than usual made us all jump and so woke him sud- 

 denly. The ground trembled constantly and every now 

 and then came a sharper shock, though none compared with 

 the first in intensity. The night continued cold and windy 

 and alternated between starlight with low clouds and light 

 rains but fortunately we had no hard rain. 



When we had opportunity to think about it, P. and I were 

 very unhappy at the probability that all our collections were 

 ruined and our year's work lost, particularly when some of 

 the younger men who went through our room with lights 

 told us the whole partition was down. Although we had 

 climbed over the debris of this wall in our escape we had, in 

 the darkness, no idea of what we were climbing over. We 

 feared it had crushed the "instrument trunk" where speci- 

 mens and notes were stored, for this trunk had been stand- 

 ing against the brick partition. 



As the gray light of morning came we could see the 

 desolation all about us and a heart-rending sight it was. 

 Literally the whole town was in ruins. There were few 

 places where so much of the walls and roof remained intact 

 as in Weldon's Hotel and the house opposite. Almost 

 everywhere else the walls crumpled in and the roof crashed 

 through, leaving of the house nothing but a heap of shapeless 

 ruins, often with only the faintest hint that it ever had been 

 a house at all. 



The churches were all in ruins. The facade of San Nico- 

 las fell bodily into the church. The facade of San Francisco 



