[Illustration: THE PANIC AT CASAMICCIOLA.] perfectly still while the surging crowd endeavored to escape. There he sat with his child till morning, when the light enabled him to find his way out of the wreck. The sea shore was a weird spectacle. Lighted up by a pile of blazing drift might be seen scores of naked children, and grown persons in their night clothes, scurrying wildly about. An eye-witness tells of many crazy with fear and grief. All night long the wreck resounded with groans and cries. One woman, whom he heard continually moaning, and crying “My children! my children!” was found at daybreak on the edge of a shattered terrace, and clad only in a chemise. Wondering what he could say by way of consolation, he chanced to observe two little ones playing not far away amid a tottering wreck that threatened at every moment to crush them. They were hers. Further down a woman’s jewelled arm and shoulder protruded from the wreck, while her husband, buried nearly, kept crying “save her, never mind about me.” As a helping hand was reached to her a sudden landslip crushed out the remaining life. A young English lady sat playing a funeral march. An Italian count sprang up, saying, “I cannot stand such music!” Just as he cleared the door the hotel fell in ruins behind him. The young lady was found dead at the piano. For days the work went on, pressed by the energy of the Italian government. All the native police had been killed in the wreck. King Humbert in person visited the scene and had the work pressed as rapidly as possible. There was no more complete wreck of any town than of Lacco Ameno. Of fifteen hundred and ninety-three people but five escaped. At Casamicciola but one house was left intact. Not a few houses in the former place were swallowed up in fissures. Floria was totally destroyed. Yet the largest town on the island, Ischia, with the adjacent villages, was scarcely hurt; and at Naples, on the mainland, the news of the catastrophe was a complete surprise. Yet on the half of the islet that was most severely shaken the earthquake numbered four thousand victims. A greater contrast to the great Valais earthquake could hardly be imagined. Still more recent is the catastrophe of Southern Spain, one of the loveliest regions in the world. This district has several times been shaken; but notably at the time of the Lisbon earthquake, when so much damage was done by shocks and sea-waves at Cadiz; again in 1833, when in the single province of Murcia more than four thousand houses were destroyed, with hundreds of the inhabitants. Again the ground was in a state of constant tremor from November, 1855, to March, 1856.