Page:Lesbia Newman - Dalton - 1889.djvu/207

 over to the telegram side, his wife came in again in a flutter.

‘I’ll just trouble you, John. Be so good as to come out on the terrace with me for a moment, and listen to your surf. All I have to say is, that if the surf at Bude is going to take to this sort of thing, I don’t wish to live here any longer.’

Mr Whyte instantly dropped his Daily Twaddler in his arm-chair, and followed his wife and Lesbia to the terrace. There was no mistake. A dull, deep, throbbing boom, that was not at all like the plash and murmur of breakers, but had something peculiarly terrible about it, was filling the air and giving a sensation of making the ground tremble. They could not say whether it came from any particular quarter, or from overhead, or from underneath.

‘The devil!’ exclaimed Mr Whyte, now the most amazed of the party.

‘I hope to goodness it’s not an earthquake,’ said his wife; ‘one is so utterly helpless against an earthquake!’

‘I hope not indeed,’ answered Mr Whyte. ‘I hardly think so—there’s no upheaval or rocking. Still we had better stay where we are for the present, in case a shock should come and shake the house down; and we ought to call the servants out too until the crisis is past.’

The servants had already taken fright, and were coming toward the inmates on the terrace. Many other households along the Cornish coast grouped together out of doors, through fear of the earthquake. Some early excursionists who had mounted Hartland Point, hurried down and went inland, lest a sudden commotion might cause the point to fall bodily on the rocky shore. The lighthouse keeper on Lundy Island, some dozen miles north of Hartland Point, in the chops of the Bristol Channel, ran away clear of his tower and stood expecting it every minute to topple down in ruins.