Rensselaer Union and Jasper Republican, Volume 8, Number 38, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 June 1876 — A San Francisco Earthquake. [ARTICLE]

A San Francisco Earthquake.

The middle of the broad street was tilled with a crowd of breathless, pallid, death-stricken men, who had lost all sense but the common instinct of animals. There were hysterical men, who laughed loudly without a cause, and talked incessantly of what tliev knew not. There were dumb, paralyzed men, who stood helplessly and hopelessly beneath cornicesand chimneys that toppled over and crushed them. There were automatic men, who, Hying carried with them the work on which they were engaged—one whose hands were full of billsand papers, another who held his ledger under his arm. There were men who rushed from the fear of death into his presence; two were picked up, one who had jumped through a skylight, another who had blindly leaped from a fourth-story window. “ There were brave men who trembled like children; there was one whose life had been spent in scenes of daring and danger, who cowered paralyzed in the corner of the room from which a few inches of plastering had fallen. There were hopeful men who believed that the danger was over, and, having passed, would, by some mysterious law, never recur; there were others who shoojc their heads and said that the next shock would ' be fatal. There were crowds around the dust that arose from fallen chimneys and cornices, around run-a-way horses that had dashed as madly as their drivers against Itonp-posts, around telegraph and newspaper offices, eager to know-the extent of the disaster. Along the remoter avenues and cross streets dwellings were deserted, people sat upon their doorsteps or in chairs upon the side-walks, fearful of the houses they had built with their own hands, and doubtful evenot this blue arch above them that smiled so deceitfully; of those far-reacl.ing fields beyond, which they had cut into lots and bartered and sold, and which now seemed to suddenly rise agftinst them, or slip and wither away from their feet. It seemed sejjutrageometlrattluadull, patient earth, whose homeliness they had adorned and improved, and which, whatever their other fortune or vicissitudes, at least had been their sure inheritance, should have become so faithless. Small wonder that the owner of a little house, which had sunk on the reclaimed water-ffont, stooped in the s'peechless and solemn absurdity of his wrath to shake his clenched_fist in the ’face of the Great Mother. 1 The real damage to life and propcity had been so slight, and in such pronounced contrast to the prevailing terror, that half an hour later only a sense of the ludicrous remained with the greater i masses of .the people.— Bret Harte, inbcribner far June. _ v- - All Paris is-crazy this spring about horses. One correspondent of an English paper says he counted fifty-seven ladies on horseback in a single alley of the Champs Elysees one morning. The rage is for ponies in particular. The chronicler of the Illuttriition thus discourses on the subject!As to ponies, especially if they have Shdrt tails and manes clipped brush fashion (and that gives most of them, by the way, when they lack grace of propfirtions, the general; appearance of boars at bay) people fairly light forthem ; they are all the rage. To-day it is impossible for a man least pretention to fashion to appear unless mounted on a microscopic pony. And the bigger, taller and slimmer the rider, by so much must the pony be smaller and shorter. You ask why; but, good heavens, I ddu’t know! I have been asking a fortnight, and can’t find out.” 1 • ft »it t ; ,<•. The tobacco fly'is also getting in his/ work in bimpson County, Ky. The plants have nearly all been ‘destroyed.