ntenance in
that awe-stricken group. There was no mistaking his appeal. Yet, one
after another, his menials and laborers returned his gaze with
well-acted perplexity. No one so dull of apprehension as those who will
not understand. My good friends, I was three-and-twenty. I had had my
trials, and could boast of pretty narrow escapes. I may have been
reckless, perhaps, in my day. I smiled dimly, nodded to the old
gentleman, clapped my hands cheerily, and the next moment was once more
where no man in Aquila would at that moment have liked to be for the
world--under a roof. I made a huge armful of cloaks and blankets,
snapped up every rag with all the haste of a marauding party, and moved
toward the door, tottering under the encumbrance. But now the dreadful
crisis was at hand.

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 a