Page:Great Neapolitan Earthquake of 1857.djvu/259

Rh of the people, who made a sort of "festa" of the occasion, and but little from actual terror except at the first moment.

From some persons of observation and discretion, I collected, their own perceptions of the phenomena.

A young English lady, residing in Santa Lucia, of much intelligence and observation, was at tea with some friends, sitting round a table whose length was nearly E. and W. by compass. Her attention was first arrested by a transverse movement of the table sliding back and forwards about an inch each way upon the waxed tiles of the floor. This she at first thought arose, from some of those who sat with her, but on casting her eyes upwards, on hearing the floor above creaking, she saw that a lamp suspended from the centre of the ceiling was oscillating also. Earthquake, which she had experienced elsewhere, then occurred to her, and she noticed carefully both the direction in which the lamp swung and the arc of its oscillation. She set the lamp itself again swinging for me, above the same table, in as precisely the same direction and to the same extent as possible. The direction I found to be 8° 0' E. of N. by compass, and the summit of Vesuvius bears 110° E. of N. from the front window of the room (which was on the second floor from the ground). The chord of the arc of vibration was 10$1⁄2$ inches, and the lamp makes thirty double oscillations per minute by the watch; it weighs about 12 lbs.

Her sensation of the shock, was of a small, rapid, recurrent, movement, forward and back, perfectly horizontal, without any undulating motion; then a cessation for two or three minutes (as estimated), and again a renewal of the same motions; after which all was quiet. Rh