‘A bad earthquake,’ says Mr. Darwin, ‘at once destroys our oldest associations. The earth, the very emblem of solidity, has moved beneath our feet like a thin crust over a fluid. One second of time has created in the mind a strange idea of insecurity, which hours of reflection would not have produced.’ We can no longer trust the soil on which we stand, and feel ourselves completely at the mercy of some unknown destructive power, which at any moment, without forewarning, can destroy our property or our lives. But as first impressions are always the deepest, so habit renders man callous even to the terrors of an ordinary earthquake. In countries where slight shocks are of frequent occurrence, almost every vestige of fear vanishes from the minds of the natives, or of the strangers whom a long residence has familiarised with the phenomenon. On the rainless coast of Peru, thunderstorms and hail are unknown. The thunder of the storm is there replaced by the thunder which accompanies the earthquake. But the frequent repetition of this subterranean tumult, and the general belief that dangerous shocks occur only twice or thrice in the course of a century, produce in Lima so great an indifference towards slighter oscillations of the soil that they hardly attract more attention than a hail-storm in Northern Europe. CHAPTER X. THE GREAT EARTHQUAKE OF LISBON. A dreadful All Saints’ Day—The Victims of a Minute—Report of an Eye- witness—Conflagration—Banditti—Pombal brings Order into Chaos— Intrigues of the Jesuits—Damages caused by the Earthquake in other Places—at Cadiz—in Barbary—Widespread Alarm—Remarks of Goethe on the Earthquake. History exhibits few catastrophes more terrible than that which was caused by the great earthquake which, on November 1, 1755, levelled the town of Lisbon to the dust. On other occasions, such as that of a siege, a famine, or a plague, calamity approaches by degrees, giving its victims time to measure its growth, and preparing them, as it were, to sustain an increasing weight of misery; but here destruction fell upon the devoted city with the rapidity of a flash of lightning. [Illustration: THE EARTHQUAKE AT LISBON IN 1755.]