panic; and there remained the hope that a few tall chimneys up the line
at Tokio would have collapsed. They stood firm, however, and the local
papers, used to this kind of thing, merely spoke of the shock as
'severe.' Earthquakes are demoralising; but they bring out all the
weaknesses of human nature. First is downright dread; the stage
of--'only let me get into the open and I'll reform,' then the impulse to
send news of the most terrible shock of modern times flying east and
west among the cables. (Did not your own hair stand straight on end,
and, therefore, must not everybody else's have done likewise?) Last, as
fallen humanity picks itself together, comes the cry of the mean little
soul: 'What! Was _that_ all? I wasn't frightened from the beginning.'

It is wholesome and tonic to realise the powerlessness of man in the
face of these little accidents. The heir of all the ages, the
annihilator of time and space, who politely doubts the existence of his
Maker, hears the roof-beams crack and strain above him, and scuttles
about like a rabbit in a stoppered warren. If the shock endures for
twenty minutes, the annihilator of time and space must camp out under
the blue and hunt for his dead among the rubbish. Given a violent
convulsion (only just such a slipping of strata as carelessly piled
volumes will accomplish in a book-case) and behold, the heir of all the
ages is stark, raving mad--a brute among the dishevelled hills. Set a
hundred of the world's greatest spirits, men of fixed principles, high
aims, resolute endeavour, enormous experience, and the modesty that
these attributes bring--set them to live through such a catastrophe as
that which wiped out Nagoya last October, and at the end of three days
there would remain few whose souls might be called their own.

So much for yesterday's shock. To-day there has come another; and a most
comprehensive affair it is. It has broken nothing, unless maybe an old