Earthquakes, it is well known, proceed by action and re-action. The second shock, I was aware, must be imminent. I had just touched the threshold, and stood under the porch, when that curious spasmodic sensation once more stiffened every muscle in my limbs. Presently I felt myself lifted up from the ground. I was now under the portico, and was hurled against the pillar on my right; the rebound again drove me to the post on the opposite side; and after being thus repeatedly tossed and buffeted from right to left like a shuttlecock, I was thrust down, outward, on the ground on my head, with all that bundle of rags, having tumbled head-long the whole range of the four marble steps of entrance. The harm, however, was not so great as the fright; and, thanks to my gallant devotion, the whole party were wrapped and blanketed, till they looked like a party of wild Indians; we stood now on comparatively firm ground, and had leisure to look about us. Don Marzio's garden was open and spacious, being bounded on three sides by the half-crumbling wall of the town. On the fourth side was the house--a good, substantial fabric, but now miserably shaky and rickety. Close by the house was the chapel of the Ursuline convent, and above that its slender spire rose chaste and stainless, "pointing the way to heaven." Any rational being might have deemed himself sufficiently removed from brick and mortar, and, in so far, out of harm's way. Not so Don Marzio. He pointed to the shadow of that spire, which, in the pale wintry sunset, stretched all the way across his garden, and by a strange perversion of judgment, he contended that so far as the shadow extended, there might also the body that cast it reach in its fall, for fall it obviously must; and as the danger was pressing, he deemed it unwise to discuss which of the four cardinal points the tower might feel a leaning toward, whenever, under the impulse of the subterranean scourge, it would "look around and choose its ground." Don Marzio was gifted with animal courage, and even nerve, proportionate to the might of his stalwart frame. But then his was merely a combative spirit. Thews and sinews were of no avail in the case. The garden was no breathing ground for him, and he resolved upon prompt emigration.