316 JOURNAL. 



little head, and from the face alone she could not have told it was 

 her own child. And then came another grief: they came to take 

 the body and bury it, — she had not four dollars in the house ; the 

 priests, therefore, as she could not pay the fees, refused to bury it in 

 consecrated ground : and " They have thrown my child into a pit 

 " like a dog, where the horses and the mules will walk over him, 

 " and where a Christian prayer will not reach him !" — All comment 

 on this would be idle ; as were my words of comfort to the sad 

 mother. She only answered, " Ah, Senora ! why were you not here ?" 



Seeing that my house was in a manner untouched, the priests re- 

 solved to make a miracle of it; and accordingly, by daylight on the 

 20th, Nuestra Senora del Pilar was found, in her satin gown, standing 

 close. to my stove, and received numerous offerings for having pro- 

 tected the premises, and I suppose carried off a silver pocket-com- 

 pass and a smelling bottle, the only two things I missed. 



Finding there was little to be done at home this afternoon, I rode 

 on to the port as soon as I had taken some refreshment. The Al- 

 mendral presents a sad spectacle : not a house remains habitable ; 

 all the roofs and walls of the land-side are ruined, those of the sea- 

 side are seriously injured. The tower of the church is a heap of 

 sand, and broken brick, and gilt and painted plaister, and all that is 

 ugly arid painful in a recent ruin : part of the roof still remains, 

 suspended between some of the side buttresses, and its hideous 

 saints and demons only make the devastation appear more horrible. 

 The port itself is in some parts utterly destroyed, in others scarcely 

 injured : here a fort with not a stone left on another ; there a shop 

 whose tiles have scarcely been loosened. The ruined and the un- 

 ruined form alternate lines. It appears that where the veins of 

 granite rock ran under the foundations, the buildings have stood 

 tolerably well ; but wherever any thing was erected on the sand or 

 clay it has been damaged. 



There was not a human being in the town ; so I went on board the 

 English merchant vessel Medway, where Captain White had shel- 



