I must have been a very small child when I proudly owned the Little Green Geography Book. There has been no other geography book like it; it was small, and square, and apple-green; it had many and wonderful pictures. Among these pictures, three impressed me most deeply: one of the Maelstrom, where a large vessel was going down over the edge of a terrifying circle like a round Niagara Falls; another of Peruvian Indians pulling up plants by the roots, and collecting quicksilver by the quart, it would appear. The third, and by far the most thrilling and terrifying, was of the Lisbon Earthquake. The ground was opening in every direction in long horrid chasms, and into these chasms were falling churches, houses, men, in dreadful confusion. This picture and that of the Maelstrom had a strange fascination for me; I was forever poring over them, when I should have been learning about the exports of Russia, of which to this day I can give little account. And then--but every one of my readers knows that 'Twas on the terrible Earthquake Day That the Deacon finished the One Hoss Shay. So it really is not surprising that 1755 is an _annus mirabilis_ to me. It is interesting to find that the earthquake came over seas to this country, and created considerable disturbance, though no serious damage was done. November the first was Lisbon's day of doom; it was the eighteenth before the internal commotion reached Massachusetts. Parson Smith alludes to it with characteristic brevity: "A great and terrible earthquake happened." Six words! We can fancy Mrs. Smith rushing to his study, crying out that the chimneys were falling, that Neighbor Wibird's great elm was down; daughter Mary bringing the news that the "Chaney Teapot had fallen from the dresser and was in a hundred pieces." This, I say, we are at liberty to fancy, but Parson Smith will not help us. His next entry is: "Married David Bicknell to Jerusha Vinsen. Lent the Dr. a pail of hair." (No; I don't believe it was his wig; it was probably cattle hair, to use with mortar; but he does not say.) John Adams is kinder to us. His diary begins thus: "We had a very severe shock of an earthquake. It continued near four minutes. I then was at my father's in Braintree, and awoke out of my sleep in the midst of it. The house seemed to rock and reel and crack, as if it would fall in ruins about us. Chimneys were shattered by it within one mile of my father's house." John Adams' diary is as different from that of his future father-in-law as cheese from chalk. No abbreviations here; no dry statistics of birth, death, marriage, as if they were of no human interest. He pours out his rolling periods with evident enjoyment. His son, who edits the diary, says: