Volume 2 - ElectricCanadian.com

THE ROMANCE OF BANKING 291walls following the roof, killing scores of sleeping people intheir beds. Practically every chimney in the city fell, andeverywhere huge cornices and heavy ornamental pieces werehurled from the tops of skyscrapers to the sidewalks, crumblinglike dry clay, or imbedding themselves in the cement andasphalt. My first instinct was to get out of the building, butwhen I reached for the wall to steady myself, it fell away asif some huge giant had pulled it just out of my reach.Plasterfell from the walls in large pieces, pictures tumbled down, theglass crashing to atoms on the floor. Two windows fell inwardsto add to the wreck, and in thirty seconds what hadbeen fairly tidy bachelor quarters was a mass of broken glass,plaster, window-frames and books. And all this happenedin one half-minute. Any man who lived through those frightfulseconds would havesworn to you on that eventful Wednesdaythat the earth shook for half an hour. Newspapermenand others who were on the streets at the time of theearthquake say the streets and sidewalks seemed to rolltowards them like a ground-swell on the water. The sensationon the street was fearful and sickening the same feeling,only many times intensified, that one has when the expresselevator of a twenty-storey office building starts on itsdownward flight."The moment the hotel settled back on its foundations, Iscrambled out of the mass of debris to find scores of men andwomen racing down the halls in their night-clothes, blood inmany cases running from their feet cut by the broken globesfrom the chandeliers that littered the hallways. Two or threecool-headed men steadied the rest,of the womenbut manystopped only when they had reached the middle of the roadway.There the spectacle was pitiful, but not untinged with theludicrous. From every house and hotel poured a stream ofmen, women and children, in a hundred varieties of nightdress.Some laughed hysterically at the twisted buildings,many cried, and not a few prayed more fervently out in themiddle of the dusty roadway that morning than they had ever