A great concourse of people had collected there for safety, as a spot where they would be beyond the reach of falling ruins; but, suddenly, the quay sank with all the people on it, and not one of the dead bodies ever floated to the surface. A great number of boats and small vessels anchored near to it were swallowed up as in a whirlpool. No fragments of these wrecks ever rose to the surface, and the water in the place where the quay had stood is stated in some accounts to be unfathomable; but Whitehurst says he ascertained it to be one hundred fathoms deep.

In this case we must suppose that a certain tract sunk down into the subterranean hollow, which would cause a fault in the strata to the depth of six hundred feet; or we may infer from the entire disappearance of the substances engulfed, that a chasm opened and closed again. Yet, in adopting this latter hypothesis, we must suppose that the upper part of the chasm, to the depth of one hundred fathoms, remained open after the shock. According to the observations made in Lisbon, in 1837, by Mr. Sharpe, the destroying effects of the earthquake were confined to the tertiary strata, and were most violent in blue clay, on which the lower part of the city is constructed. Not a building, he says, on the secondary limestone or the basalt was injured.

The great area over which this Lisbon earthquake extended is very remarkable. The movement was most violent in Portugal, Spain, and the north of Africa; but nearly the whole of Europe, and even the West Indies, felt the shock the same day. A seaport, called St. Ules, twenty miles south of Lisbon, was engulfed. At Algiers and Fez, in Africa, the agitation of the earth was equally violent; and at the distance of eight leagues from Morocco, a village with the inhabitants, to the number of eight or ten thousand persons, together with their cattle, was swallowed up. Soon after, the earth closed again over

them.

The shock was felt at sea on the deck of a ship to the west of Lisbon, and produced very much the same sensation as on dry land. Off St. Lucar, the captain of the

ship "Nancy" felt his vessel so shaken that he thought he had struck the ground; but, on heaving the lead, found a great depth of water. Another ship, forty leagues from St. Vincent, experienced so violent a concussion that the men were thrown a foot and a half perpendicularly from the deck. In Antigua and Barbadoes, as also in Norway, Sweden, Holland, Switzerland, and Italy, tremors and slight oscillations of the ground were felt. The agitation of lakes, rivers, etc., in Great Britain was remarkable. At Loch Lomond, in Scotland, the water, without the least apparent cause, rose against its banks and then subsided below its usual level. The greatest perpendicular height of this swell was two feet four inches.

It is said the movement of the earthquake was undulatory, and that it travelled at the rate of twenty miles a minute. A great wave swept over the coast of Spain, and is said to have been sixty feet high at Cadiz. At Tangiers it rose and fell eighteen times on the coast; at Funchal, in Madeira, it rose full fifteen feet above highwater mark, although the tide, which ebbs and flows there seven feet, was then at half-ebb. At Kinsale, in Ireland, a body of water rushed into the harbour, whirled round several vessels, and poured into the market place.

It was before stated that the sea first retired at Lisbon; and this retreat of the ocean from the shore at the commencement of an earthquake, and its subsequent return in a violent wave, is a common occurrence. In order to account for this phenomenon, Mitchell imagined a subsidence at the bottom of the sea, from the giving away of the roof of some cavity, in consequence of a vacuum pro duced by the condensation of steam. Such condensation, he observes, might be the first effect of the introduction of a large body of water into fissures and cavities already filled with steam, before there had been sufficient time for the heat of the incandescent lava to turn so large a supply of water into steam, which being soon accomplished, causes a greater explosion.

CHARLES DICKENS.

CHARLES DICKENS (A.D. 1812-1870) entered on his prosperous literary career as a newspaper reporter, and in this position published his Sketches of London Life. He was the first to issue works of fiction in monthly numbers with illustrations, and in this form the Pickwick Papers, Nicholas Nickleby, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, etc., appeared. He also published a series of Christmas tales, which have had hitherto a wonderful effect in promoting the due observance of that season in England.

DEATH OF A CLOWN.

THE man of whom I speak was a low pantomime actor, and, like many people of his class, a habitual drunkard. In his better days, before he had become enfeebled by dissipation and emaciated by disease, he had been in the receipt of a good salary, which, if he had been careful and prudent, he might have continued to receive for some years, not many; because these men either die early, or by unnaturally taxing their bodily energies, lose prematurely the powers on which alone they can depend for subsistence. His besetting sin gained so fast on him, however, that it was found impossible to employ him in the situations in which he really was useful to the theatre. The public-house had a fascination for him which he could not resist. Neglected disease and hopeless poverty were as certain to be his portion as death itself, if he persevered in his course; yet he did persevere, and the result may be guessed. He could obtain no employment, and he wanted bread.

When I met him, he was dressed in all the absurdity of a clown's costume. The spectral figures in the “Dance of Death," the most frightful shapes that the ablest painter ever portrayed on canvas, never presented an appearance more ghastly. His bloated body and shrunken legs their deformity enhanced by the fantastic dressthe glassy eyes, contrasting fearfully with the thick white paint with which the face was besmeared; the grotesquelyornamented head, trembling with paralysis, and the long

skinny hands rubbed with white chalk-all gave him a hideous and unnatural appearance. His voice was hollow and tremulous, as he took me aside, and in broken words, recounted a long catalogue of sicknesses and privations, terminating as usual with an urgent request for the loan of a trifling sum of money.

When I called, he was lying on an old bedstead, which turned up during the day. The tattered remains of a checked curtain were drawn round the bedstead to exclude the wind which made its way into the comfortless room through numerous chinks in the door, and blew it to and fro every instant. There was a low cinder fire in a rusty unfixed grate; and an old three-cornered stained table, with some medicine bottles, a broken glass, and a few other domestic articles, was drawn out before it. A little child was sleeping in a bed which had been made for it on the floor, and his wife was sitting by its side. There were a couple of shelves, with a few plates, cups, and saucers; and a pair of stage shoes, and a couple of foils hung beneath them. With the exception of little heaps of rags and bundles which had been thrown into the corners of the room, these were the only things in the apartment.

away.

"Don't let her come near me," said the man with a shudder, as his wife stooped over him. "Drive her I can't bear her near me. I beat her, Jem, I beat her yesterday, and many times before. I have starved her, and the boy too; and now I am weak and helpless, Jem, she'll murder me for it-I know she will. If you'd seen her cry as I have done, you'd know it too. Keep her off." He relaxed his grasp and sunk back exhausted on the pillow.

"You had better stand aside," said I to the poor woman. "You can do him no good; perhaps he will be calmer if he does not see you."

She retired out of the man's sight. He opened his eyes after a few seconds, and looked anxiously around. "Is she gone? I'll tell you what, Jem, she does hurt There's something in her eyes wakes such a dread

me.

ful fear in me, that it drives me mad. All last night, her large staring eyes and pale face were close to mine; wherever I turned, they turned, and whenever I started from sleep, she was looking at me. Jem, she must be an evil spirit. Hush! I know she is. If she had been a woman she would have died long ago. No woman could have borne what she has."

I sat there for upwards of two hours, during which time he tossed about, murmuring exclamations of pain or impatience, restlessly throwing his arms here and there, and tossing constantly from side to side. At length he fell into a state of partial unconsciousness, in which the mind wanders uneasily from scene to scene, and place to place, without the control of reason, but without being able to divest itself of an indescribable sense of suffering.

Four and twenty hours had produced a frightful alteration. The eyes, though deeply sunk and heavy, shone with a lustre frightful to behold. The lips were parched and cracked in many places; the dry hard skin glowed with a burning heat, and there was an almost unearthly air of wild anxiety in the man's face, indicating more strongly the ravages of disease. The fever was at its height.

It is a touching thing to hear the mind reverting to the ordinary occupations of pursuits of health, when the body lies before you weak and helpless; but when these occupations are of a character opposed to anything we associate with grave or solemn ideas, the impression produced is infinitely more powerful. The theatre and the public house were the chief themes of the wretched man's wanderings.

It was evening, he fancied; he had a part to play that night, and it was late; he must leave instantly. Why did they hold him and prevent his going-he should lose his money; he must go. They would not let him! He hid his face in his burning hands and feebly bemoaned his weakness and the cruelty of his persecutors. A short pause, and he shouted out some doggerel rhymes. He rose in bed, drew up his withered limbs, and rolled about in uncouth positions; he was acting in the theatre. A