000. The
last severe shock was in January, 1900, when the St. Nicholas Hotel was
badly damaged.

These were the heaviest shocks. On the other hand, light shocks, as
above said, have been frequent. Probably the sensible quakes have
averaged three or four a year. These are usually tremblings lasting from
ten seconds to a minute and just heavy enough to wake light sleepers
or to shake dishes about on the shelves. Tourists and newcomers are
generally alarmed by these phenomena, but old Californians have
learned to take them philosophically. To one is not afraid of them,
the sensation of one of these little tremblers is rather pleasant than
otherwise, and the inhabitants grew so accustomed to them as rarely to
let them disturb their equanimity.

After 1900 the forces beneath the earth seemed to fall asleep. As it
proved, they were only biding their time. The era was at hand when they
were to declare themselves in all their mighty power and fall upon the
devoted city with ruin in their grasp. But all this lay hidden in the
secret casket of time, and the city kept up to its record as one of the
liveliest and in many respects the most reckless and pleasure-loving
on the continent, its people squandering their money with thoughtless
improvidence and enjoying to the full all the good that life held out to
them.

On the 17th of April, 1906, the city was, as usual, gay, careless, busy,
its people attending to business or pleasure with their ordinary vim as
inclination led them, and not a soul dreaming of the horrors that lay in
wait. They were as heedless of coming peril and death as the inhabitants
of Sodom and Gomorrah before the rain of fire from heaven descended upon
their devoted heads. This is not to say that they were doomed by God to
destruction like these "cities of the plains." We should more wisely
say that the forces of ruin within the earth take no heed of persons or
places. They come and go as the conditions of nature demand, and if man
has built one of his cities across their destined track, its doom comes
from its situation, not from the moral state of its inhabitants.

THE GREAT DISASTER OF 1906.

That night the people went, with their wonted equanimity, to their beds,
rich and poor, sick and well alike. Did any of them dream of disaster in
the air? It may be so, for often, as the poet tells us, "Coming events
cast their shadows before." But, forewarned by dreams or not, doubtless
not a soul in the great