MEERUN-KA-SERAI. m 
Colonel objected to quitting his regiment, as he was impatient to 
join General Lake, but accepted, with mRny thanks, my offer of 
attaching my guard to him ; they were, in consequence, ordered to 
depart on the morrow, to their great mortification, as they had 
flattered themselves with the hopes of accompanying me to a cele- 
brated fair, held at Mukhunpore in honour of a Mussulmaun saint. 
In the night I was alarmed by a violent motion of my bed, caused, 
as I at the time supposed, by some animal having got under it ; but 
on looking underneath, nothing was there. The motion was suffi- 
ciently violent to make me jump up in bed; nor could I account for 
it till morning, when the sepoy on guard at my tent said, that he 
had been thrown down by the motion of the earth, and almost 
every person had experienced the concussion : it could therefore be 
nothing but an earthquake. It moved, as nearly as I could con- 
jecture, from N. to S. and lasted only a few seconds, at least that 
shock which I felt, and which awoke me. There might have been 
slighter previously. The earthquake was felt from hence to Cal- 
cutta, but seems to have been most violent at Lucknow, where it 
destroyed the major part of the minarets, and cracked the Rome-ka- 
derwasse and the Imaumbarah. Mr. Paul's building in the middle 
of his garden, in which Mr. Salt slept, has eight arched door-ways, 
and every one was cracked in the middle : the waters in the tanks 
overflowed with violence. At Allahabad it stopped the clock at 
seventeen minutes past one, but did no mischief It is impossible 
to trace the progress of the shock, as there seems no difference in the 
time at Meerun-ka-Serai, Lucknow, Allahabad, and Calcutta. 
September i.— At half after four we set off*, and arrived at 
Mukhunpore in little more than two hours and a half, a distance 
