Twice had the sun risen over the city of desolation since the dreadful catastrophe of the 1st of November; and the flames yet raged in every part. Nearly twenty thousand persons, it was supposed, had been destroyed by the earthquake; and the greater number of the remaining citizens had quitted the fatal spot, and were encamped in the open fields in the neighbourhood; some with scarcely clothes to cover them, and without food to supply the cravings of hunger. Here all classes and orders of people were promiscuously mingled; respectable citizens reduced to abject poverty by the entire destruction of their property; the hapless virgins dedicated to the service of Heaven, driven from their sanctuaries among the most lawless and abandoned of mankind. Servants and their former masters; ladies, accustomed to gentle nurture, among mechanics, soldiers and porters; the virtuous and the profligate, the rich and the poor, the noble and the beggar, in the same wretched condition. The whole fabric of society was completely disorganised; murders, robberies, and all species of crimes were committed with the most flagrant daring; and naught was heard but groans and cries of distress. Slight shocks still continued to be felt at intervals of every half-hour; famine also had visited them; and, to add to their disasters, the effluvia arising from the vast number of dead bodies which choked up the streets, threatened them with a pestilence; so that hundreds of those who were able had already taken their departure to other towns; and the city would have been completely deserted, had not Sebastiao Joze de Carvalho, now created Prime Minister, exerted his utmost power to prevent so unfortunate an event to the kingdom. It was now that he exhibited, in the greatest degree, that energetic character, and those extraordinary abilities which distinguished him among his countrymen. Having received full powers from the King to act as he judged expedient, both day and night he drove from place to place in his carriage, to observe what was most necessary to be done,--it serving him for his bureau, his couch, and his parlour; the only food he took on the first day being a basin of broth, which the Countess Daun, his wife, brought him with her own hands. His first care was to cut off all communication between the burning part of the city and that which remained entire; for to extinguish the conflagration was beyond his power, or the means of man to accomplish; his next was to despatch messengers into all the surrounding districts, to collect provisions for the houseless inhabitants; and his third was to send round to all the parochial clergy and heads of yet existing convents, to urge them to impress on their congregations and inferiors, as a duty both grateful to Heaven, and called for by man, to bury the dead without delay.