Of course, all the scared Britons at once confided their
sen- sations and those of their wives and children to the Times, which--opened wide its columns to receive them, printing on Wednesday and Thursday fifty-three personal letters, many impersonal reports, and, altogether, seven and a half columns of small type concerning British " seismological" emotions. The prevalent type of intellect amongst them, on finding itself awakened from sleep in a rather startling manner, at once suggested " thieves,"—so truly does the Bible illustration that the day of the Lord shall come upon men " like the thief in the night" hit the weak point in the British imagination,— the dread of losing portable property unawares. Some gen- tlemen plunged honestly beneath the bedclothes; some delayed getting up on the insincere pretence that perhaps " their leg might have been asleep and unwittingly twitched;" some, perhaps, struck a light at once,—but most took time to con- sider. A few children, it appears, date their rather antici- pated appearance on the scene from the earthquake, but most of the phenomena recorded were moral. One gentleman reports that his wife was awakened first, but kept profoundly still till the house and bed were shaken. But while she was thus musing the fire kindled, and at last she spoke with her tongue, " My dear, what is it?" The manly voice answered, without any endearing epithet, "I really cannot imagine what it is, unless it be an earthquake." " The physical effect upon my wife," proceeds the writer (adding in offhand parenthesis, as it strikes him that that lady may read these lines in print " who is really the last person in the world to be alarmed at anything "), " was a violent palpitation of the heart, and on myself that of quickening the circulation and increasing per- ceptibly and pleasantly the heat of the system." A sort of scientific glow, in short, passed through him. After giving these invaluable scientific data, this charming writer thinks the phenomenon may be referred to electrical currents " above the ground, or subterranean, or both;" but would " be happy to know what the wise and learned in such cases have to say upon the facts stated." Probably it would be, that a British interior, moral and physical, suddenly unroofed at midnight even by a phenomenon which adds a " pleasant" stimulus " to the heat of the system," is apt to discover among those white-robed, horizontal forms reluctantly vigilant, one of the foolishest spectacles that human imagination can conceive.
