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footed, that I had no apprehension but from the chance of a severe 

 shock while passing the perilous place. At length I reached the 

 heights of the port ; and looking down, from thence, there appears 

 little difference on the town, excepting the absence of the churches 

 and higher buildings : from a distance, the ruins in the line of the 

 streets fill the eye as well. As I approached nearer, the tents and 

 huts of the wretched fugitives claimed my undivided attention ; and 

 there indeed I saw the calamity in a light it had not hitherto ap- 

 peared in. Rich and poor, young and old, masters and servants, 

 were huddled together in intimacy frightful even here, where the 

 distinction of rank is by no means so broad as in Europe. I can 

 quite understand, now, the effect of great general calamities in de- 

 moralising and loosening the ties of society. The historians of the 

 middle ages tell of the pestilence that drove people forth from the 

 cities to seek shelter in the fields from contagion, and returned them 

 with a worse plague, in the utter corruption of morals into which 

 they had fallen. Nor was "the plague in London" without its 

 share of the moral scourge. " Sweet are the uses of adversity" to 

 individuals and to educated men ; but I fear that whatever cause 

 makes large bodies of men very miserable, makes them also very 

 wicked. 



I rode on in no very cheerful temper to my own house, where I 

 found some persons had taken refuge. It had suffered so little, that 

 I think fourteen tiles off one corner was the extent of the damage ; 

 but the white-wash shaken off the walls, and the loosening of every 

 thing about it, showed that the shock had been severe. I was in 

 hopes, seeing the state of the ranchos of the peasants around, that my 

 poor neighbours had likewise escaped. But poor Maria came to me 

 evidently sick at heart. I asked for little Paul, her son, a fine boy of 

 five years old ; when she burst into tears. He was sleeping in the 

 rancho on his little bed : she had been out at a neighbour's house. 

 She ran home to seek her son : she entered her cottage, — he lay on his 

 bed; but a rafter had been shaken from its place, — it had fallen on his 



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