Cut No. I gives an idea of the confusion that reigned in the two cities of the dead. I had no instrument with which to measure azimuths or amplitudes, but judging by the eye alone, it seemed that the fallen columns pointed all the way from five to seventy degrees from the directions of their sides before their overthrow.

The earthquake was of the typical circularly gyrating form. The displacement of monuments that remained standing is shown in Cut No. 2.

Some of these weigh tons, so that the force required to slide them laterally, against enormous friction, was strong indeed. Granite was ground into fine powder under the bottoms of the displaced shafts. Pure snow white marble angels were thrown into beds of flowers, and one snowy wing was imbedded in a terrace all covered with violets.

Exquisite sculptures, statuary, wreaths in marble, and carved capitals were strewn over hundreds of acres in almost bewildering confusion. Little marble hands holding wreaths, scrolls and tablets were broken off and cast into flowery banks; and one cherub ever so white and pure was resting in a bed of daisies, and the stone eyes looked out on a fringe of lilies. But then there were the living round about the tombs. The half dead made their homes with the dead. Weak and wan girls played with the marble angels and gathered fragments of the statuary. One desolate family found shelter in a beautiful sepulchre, while the sufferers rested their heads on lowly graves.

On Friday night, April 20, an ocean wind blew damp and cold. Dense fog settled down on the two hundred thousand, by midnight an almost icy rain fell upon them in this now memorable night of appalling misery. From all accounts it is believed that eighteen little babies were born in the midst of the tempest. The darkness was like that of Egypt, due to smoke mixed with fog. No lamp or candle relieved the terrible gloom, and babies came into this troubled world.

Let the twenty-one Buddhistic hells be concentrated into one, and let Jonathan Edwards picture it in fiendish glee, or Dante write; and both would fail utterly in any description of this mind- and brain-crushing night of horrors.

I could scarcely study the fallen columns for the suffering on every side.

And then the mighty nation came to the rescue. Food, blankets, tents and guards were distributed by the government. Martial law reigned, and California arose in its majesty and poured hun

dreds of car-loads of provisions into the doomed city. It was a most impressive and pathetic scene, this giving of food to the starving.

THE MARVELOUS PROCESSION.

After delays due to a congestion of the railroad, the writer arrived in San Francisco, fifty-one hours after the first shock. On stepping off the boat at the foot of Market Street, I knew that I was in an earthquake area. The earth was rent in many places. The street railway was bent up and down in sinuous curves and one track was a foot lower than the other. The earth had descended vertically. Square miles of tottering walls, columns and naked frames of structural steel, made up a frightful scene of desolation.

The entire northern half of the city was then burning. The dull thunders of falling walls, the roar of the flames and sharp detonations of dynamite, conspired to make a horrible vision of destruction.

Against a sable canopy, a blackened pall of smoke, the mighty. columns of the Fairmount Hotel on Nob Hill stood out in pure white, a scene of classic beauty. But boiling flames, tumbling palaces, crushing marble, exploding dynamite, burning ships and docks, soon lost attraction for me.

Close at hand was a moving thing of pain, a struggling, toiling, living object, and has history anything to surpass what I gazed upon during four hours?

This most remarkable and new historic object was the interminable procession of escaping thousands of people from the peninsula of San Francisco. Thousands upon thousands were moving slowly and painfully towards the ferry boats leading across the bay to Oakland. A hundred thousand poured into that city, Berkeley and Alameda.

My objective point was the cemetery, four miles away. It took four hours to walk this distance over almost impossible débris. The entire distance was occupied by the long drawn column of frenzied people. Babel was eclipsed, and the confusion of tongues more confounded. An incredible number of languages was heard. The world was represented in varying speech; and the nations, races, types, and kindreds of the earth were in a marvelous review. The

linguist, anthropologist, and mentalist, all students of human nature, had a wonderful opportunity there in the sorrowful way. The people saved their living creatures. Canary birds, parrots, pet rabbits, puppies, squirrels, guinea-pigs, all household pets, were carried by those scarcely strong enough to drag themselves along. This was one of the most pathetic scenes in the ruins. And then the dollies; little girls toiled along with dolls that required their strength to carry. But the living dolls, the babies, suffered in the lime-dust cutting and biting in their tiny eyes. And poor, sobbing mothers struggled over hot bricks, acres of broken window glass, twisted columns, beams and girders of iron; and then the sticky

asphalt pavements contained nails, spikes, bolts, broken glass dishes, crockery, chinaware, and sharp fragments of stones.

But the wilderness of tangled wires was simply unendurable. How they tripped and fell, with their feet enmeshed in inextricable network, loops and knots of twisted wires. And their lungs were filled with corrosive gases and vapors rising from hot basements. I saw enough misery in the four dreadful hours to make one ask, What is human existence for? And then, after passing the struggling thousands, I stepped into beautiful Laurel Hill cemetery and I asked myself the same question again with emphasis.

THE MIGHTY CONVULSION.

I have received letters from every part of the troubled area. Many of these are of great value for they were written by those having passed through upheavals of the solid earth before. They knew what to observe, such as intensity, time, direction, amplitude of oscillation, and vertical lift or depression. From all these accounts, and from studies of seismographic records from the north and south sides of the disturbed region, and from the central portion, and from observations in the cemeteries, it seems that the earthquake was circular, or roughly elliptical. A number of letters tell of thrust, horizontally at first, but changing rapidly into circular motion as noted in swinging lamps.

This now historic convulsion presented in one grand upheaval almost every kind of impulse, motion, activity, and turbulence known in earthquakes. By closely studying this colossal display of force one can become familiar with all kinds, nearly, of earthquake phenomena. The successive impulses were vertical, horizontal, to and fro, circular, gyratory, inclined and undulatory. The strata in the earth below the entire area of disturbance were in the clutch of a twisting, wrenching, distorting monster.

Strain, tension and pressure were tremendous. An example of titanic power is given by an immense chimney in the western part of San Francisco. The entire upper half had been lifted clear from the lower half, turned around about twenty degrees, and gently lowered without injury. These things must have occurred for the bricks where the rupture took place are intact and not ground to powder. The top half weighs hundreds of tons, and if twisted around without being lifted up, whole layers of brick would have been ground into fine dust like the granite bases of the laterally displaced monuments.

Different kinds of phenomena were occurring at the same time