Page:Helen Leah Reed - Napoleons young neighbour.djvu/235

Rh first one in St. Helena for a long time. Many feared for their friends in the valleys with the sharp precipices, but fortunately in the end it was shown that there had been no loss of life.

Napoleon was in bed at the time of the shock.

"Ah Mees Betsee," he asked the next morning, "were you frightened by the tremblement de terre? You look pale and quiet."

Betsy admitted that she had had a little fear at the earthquake.

"I thought," said Napoleon, turning to General Bertrand, "that the Conqueror had exploded in the harbor; but the second or third shock showed that it was an earthquake."

The Conqueror was the seventy-four pounder whose arrival Betsy had seen Napoleon observe with great interest.

Betsy, for several nights after the earthquake, was too frightened to go to bed, and in a day or two she was ill with a severe cold, caught while sitting on the veranda. In this case, as always in illness, Napoleon was sympathetic, blaming the climate and adding that the houses ought to have plenty of fireplaces to protect people from sudden changes.