Slight earthquakes are experienced now and then in Palestine. A severer one than usual came in the early morning of March 30, 1903, about ten minutes before one o’clock. On awakening my first thought was that people outside were trying our door and then shaking it violently. Then the movement seemed to possess the whole room, as if some mighty force were rocking it strongly and persistently. The bed was jostled. It was this persistent shaking, with the continual and uniform rattling of the articles on the wash-stand, that soon brought me to my senses with the exclamation, “It’s an earthquake.” Mrs. Grant was first awakened by the shaking bedstead. Her next thought was that the house walls were falling. We both felt a sense of nausea. I rose and lighted the candle. The floor was well sprinkled with fallen whitewash that had cracked off from the plastering. A few bottles were tipped over in the room. At first I said that it lasted a minute, but shortly after I reduced my estimate to ten seconds, and now I suppose that it must have been but a third of that duration. The rattling on our wash-stand was as uniform as if the things were on a railroad-train. It was a weird and unpleasant though tuneful jar. Mrs. Grant ran into the far part of the house, where were the dormitories of the Girls’ School, and found the girls a little excited but not much frightened. Some of the smaller girls wanted to know what made their beds shake so. One girl said that she thought that Jesus had come. After we had been up a while we heard a wall falling in the vineyards to the southwest of us. In the Boys’ School one boy tumbled out of bed. The teacher had taken a strong dose of quinine the night before and accounted thus for the fact that he slept pretty soundly and was awakened only when the flakes of whitewash from the ceiling fell on his face. One or two boys at the Boys’ School and one girl at the Girls’ School slept right through it all. The woman cook at the Boys’ School was much startled and began to cry out and pray, “My Lord, my Lord, there is no other but thee” (Yâ rubby, yâ rubby, mâfîsh ghayrak).[199] Niḳola, the man on the place, who slept in a little house in the yard, went back and forth to his family who lived in the village to assure himself that they were well. One stone in the gable end of the house where he slept was tumbled to the ground. The well-constructed Girls’ Training Home showed cracks, while in the poorly built Boys’ House, the roof, flooring and walls on the long south side were cracked the entire length. Our neighbor Nyland’s house suffered somewhat, so that afterwards he felt it necessary to bind the walls with iron girders, which were run through the house and clamped on the outside walls at the ends. Other effects were noticed in a morning walk through the village. In the western part of the village the damage seemed greater than in the central or eastern. One small house on the east and