beginning to end nine times running. Neither my nephew nor I could get
any sleep that first night owing to the blatant devotional exercises
of the overwrought negroes.

Both Sir Alexander and Lady Swettenham were really wonderful. He,
though an old man, only allowed himself five hours' sleep, and spent
his days at Headquarters House trying to bring the affairs of the
ruined city into some kind of order, and to start the every-day
machinery of ordinary civilised life again, for there were no shops,
no butchers or bakers, no clothing, no groceries--everything had been
destroyed, and had to be reconstructed. We had noticed the previous
afternoon a very rough newly erected shanty. It was barely finished,
but already jets of steam were puffing from its roof, and a large sign
proclaimed it a steam-bakery. That was the only source of bread-supply
in Kingston. Is it necessary to specify the nationality of a firm so
prompt to rise to an emergency, or to add that the names over the door
were two Scottish ones? Lady Swettenham was equally indefatigable, and
sat on endless committees: for sheltering the destitute, for helping
the homeless with food, money and clothing, for providing for the
widows and orphans.

It was estimated that twelve hundred people lost their lives on that
fatal afternoon of January 14, 1907, though even this pales before the
terrific catastrophe of St. Pierre in Martinique, on May 8, 1902, when
forty thousand people and one of the finest towns in the West Indies
were blotted out of existence in one minute by a fiery blast from the
volcano Mont Pele.

Lady Swettenham was driving into Kingston with Lady Dudley at 2.30
p.m. on the day of the earthquake. Some ten minutes later they felt