Page:Great Neapolitan Earthquake of 1857 Vol 2.djvu/241

180 We must also record that the Royal Attomey-Greneral, D. Gennaro Sanchelli, having employed several of the prisoners in the public service on his own responsibility, exhorting them to diligence and honesty, and promising to recommend them to mercy, bestowed alms on the most distressed, and even remunerated the prison guards, and forty-one of the prisoners soon after received the royal pardon.

Great calamities afford generous hearts an opportunity to relieve their fellow-creatures, and the official journal fails not to record many instances of beneficence, and chiefly the royal bounty exerted in favour of all the communes of this province and Principato Citeriore, which were sufferers in this calamity. The Lucanians must always gratefully remember his Majesty's kindness in sending tents, clothes, and covering, together with engineers, surgeons, nurses, and companies of soldiers, and pioneers, with tools and implements, &c. His Majesty also dispensed thousands in the relief of the distressed, and his noble example was generously followed. It would be an useless repetition of well-known acts, were I to enumerate or praise the charitable actions of home and foreign benefactors, whose names are indelibly engraven in the hearts of the grateful, and recorded in the books of God. To return to our subject: we assert that not only on the night of the 16th December many slight shocks, both vertical and horizontal, were felt in Potenza, and in almost all the other communes, but that they are still of such frequent occurrence, day and night, as to render the enumeration difficult; and it is likely that they will only cease with time, as happened after the celebrated earthquake of Melfi and many others. On this account, and owing to the want of safe houses, a great many families determined to pass the severe winter under sheds and thatched cabins; and as yet there are no attempts at rebuilding, all being employed in propping, or taking down the dangerous parts of every dwelling. It is enough to say that one room on the ground floor, and a shed, form the actual residence of the first authority of the province; another shed serves the Secretary, and the Royal Attorney-General and