One day I did not feel vigorous and remained away from the office.  The next day I went down toward noon as usual, and found a note on my desk which had been there twenty-four hours.  It was signed “Marshall”—­the Virginia reporter—­and contained a request that I should call at the hotel and see him and a friend or two that night, as they would sail for the east in the morning.  A postscript added that their errand was a big mining speculation!  I was hardly ever so sick in my life.  I abused myself for leaving Virginia and entrusting to another man a matter I ought to have attended to myself; I abused myself for remaining away from the office on the one day of all the year that I should have been there.  And thus berating myself I trotted a mile to the steamer wharf and arrived just in time to be too late.  The ship was in the stream and under way.

I comforted myself with the thought that may be the speculation would amount to nothing—­poor comfort at best—­and then went back to my slavery, resolved to put up with my thirty-five dollars a week and forget all about it.

A month afterward I enjoyed my first earthquake.  It was one which was long called the “great” earthquake, and is doubtless so distinguished till this day.  It was just after noon, on a bright October day.  I was coming down Third street.  The only objects in motion anywhere in sight in that thickly built and populous quarter, were a man in a buggy behind me, and a street car wending slowly up the cross street.  Otherwise, all was solitude and a Sabbath stillness.  As I turned the corner, around a frame house, there was a great rattle and jar, and it occurred to me that here was an item!—­no doubt a fight in that house.  Before I could turn and seek the door, there came a really terrific shock; the ground seemed to roll under me in waves, interrupted by a violent joggling up and down, and there was a heavy grinding noise as of brick houses rubbing together.  I fell up against the frame house and hurt my elbow.  I knew what it was, now, and from mere reportorial instinct, nothing else, took out my watch and noted the time of day; at that moment a third and still severer shock came, and as I reeled about on the pavement trying to keep my footing, I saw a sight!  The entire front of a tall four-story brick building in Third street sprung outward like a door and fell sprawling across the street, raising a dust like a great volume of smoke!  And here came the buggy—­overboard went the man, and in less time than I can tell it the vehicle was distributed in small fragments along three hundred yards of street.

One could have fancied that somebody had fired a charge of chair-rounds and rags down the thoroughfare.  The street car had stopped, the horses were rearing and plunging, the passengers were pouring out at both ends, and one fat man had crashed half way through a glass window on one side of the car, got wedged fast and was squirming and screaming like an impaled madman.  Every door, of every house, as far as the eye could reach, was vomiting a stream of human beings; and almost before one could execute a wink and begin another, there was a massed multitude of people stretching in endless procession down every street my position commanded.  Never was solemn solitude turned into teeming life quicker.