in a very different state; and it is not without satisfaction that I reflect upon the manner in which this belief was justified by subsequent events.
Before I left Mexico, I had an opportunity of ascertaining the exact nature of the sensations excited by an earthquake, and I cannot say that I found them sufficiently agreeable to entertain any wish for their frequent repetition. On the morning of the 14th of January, 1824, we experienced a shock of the most unpleasant kind, which lasted about six seconds: the motion was perpendicular, not horizontal, and the various noises by which it was accompanied, the cracking of the doors, the rattling of the windows, and the melancholy howling of the dogs, who are usually the first to feel and to announce the approach of an earthquake, were well calculated to alarm even the least timid. The first shock, which occurred at four in the morning, was followed by a succession of others, which, though very slight, served to connect it with a second very severe one, which took place at sunrise. Seventeen other vibrations, so slight as to be almost imperceptible to foreigners, were counted during the next twenty-four hours, after which they ceased, nor have I since experienced any thing of the same kind. Earthquakes seldom do any serious injury in Mexico; a church or two is sometimes thrown a little out of the perpendicular, but beyond this their effects have not often extended. The past, indeed, is no security for the future, in a
