The San Francisco earthquake occurred at about five o'clock in the morning on April 18. Rumors of the destruction wrought in the city reached Stanford within a couple of hours and were easily credited, for buildings had been shaken down at Stanford. Miss L. J. Martin, a member of the philosophical department, was thrown into great anxiety about relatives of hers who were in the city, and James offered to accompany her in a search for them, and left Stanford with her by an early morning train. He also promised Mrs. Wm. F. Snow to try to get her news of her husband. Miss Martin found her relatives, and James met Dr. Snow early in the afternoon, and then spent several hours in wandering about the stricken city. He subsequently wrote an account of the disaster, which may be found in "Memories and Studies."[65] _To Miss Frances R. Morse._ STANFORD UNIVERSITY, _Apr. 22, 1906_. DEAREST FANNY,--Three letters from you and nary one from us in all these weeks! Well, I have been heavily burdened, and although disposed to write, have kept postponing; and with Alice--cooking, washing dishes and doing housework, as well as keeping up a large social life--it has been very much the same. All is now over, since the earthquake; I mean that lectures and syllabuses are called off, and no more exams to be held ("ill-wind," etc.), so one can write. We shall get East again as soon as we can manage it, and tell you face to face. We can now pose as experts on Earthquakes--pardon the egotistic form of talking about the latter, but it makes it more real. The last thing Bakewell said to me, while I was leaving Cambridge, was: "I hope they'll treat you to a little bit of an earthquake while you're there. It's a pity you shouldn't have that local experience." Well, when I lay in bed at about half-past five that morning, wide-awake, and the room began to sway, my first thought was, "Here's Bakewell's earthquake, after all"; and when it went crescendo and reached fortissimo in less than half a minute, and the room was shaken like a rat by a terrier, with the most vicious expression you can possibly imagine, it was to my mind absolutely an _entity_ that had been waiting all this time holding back its activity, but at last saying, "Now, _go_ it!" and it was impossible not to conceive it as animated by a will, so vicious was the temper displayed--everything _down_, in the room, that could go down, bureaus, etc., etc., and the shaking so rapid and vehement. All the while no fear, only admiration for the way a wooden house could prove its elasticity, and glee over the vividness of the manner in which such an "abstract idea" as "earthquake" could verify itself into sensible reality. In a couple of minutes everybody was in the street, and then we saw, what I hadn't suspected in my room, the extent of the damage. Wooden houses almost all intact, but every chimney down but one or two, and the higher University buildings largely piles of ruins.