VALPARAISO. 315 
_ 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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