Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 7.djvu/113

 EARTHQUAKES IN NEW ENGLAND.

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��lasteil about two minutes. It shook down bricks from the chimneys — some ahnost all the heads.

".All that was about the houses trem- bled, beds shook, some cellar walls fell partly down. IJenjamin I'lummer's stone without his door fell into his eel- Jar. Stone walls fell in a hundred places. Most of the people got up in a moment. It came very often all the night after, and it was heard two or three times some daj's and nights ; and the Sabbath day night of the twenty-fourth of December following, between ten and eleven, -it was very loud, as at any time except the first, and twice that night after, but not so loud. The first time it broke out in more than ten places in the town, in the clay lowlands, blowing up the sand, some more, some less. At one place, near Spring Island, it blew out, as it was judged, twenty loads, and when it was cast on the coals in the night, it burned like brimstone."

The following is a copy of a letter written by Henry Sewall, of Newbury, to Judge Sewall, of Boston, and pub- lished at the time in the Bosfon N'ct.us Letter.

"Newbury, Nov. 21, 1727.

Honored Sir: —

Through Ciod's good- ness to us we are all well, and have been preserved at the time of the late great and terrible earthquake. We were sitting by the fire, and about half after ten at night our house shook and trembled as if it would have fallen to pieces. Being affrighted we ran out of doors, when we found the ground did tremble, and we were in great fear of being swallowed up alive ; but God preserved us and did not suffer it to break out till it got forty or fifty rods from the house, where it l)roke the ground in the Common, near a place called Spring Island ; and there is from sixteen to twenty loads of fine sand

��see it. Our house kept shaking about three minutes."

Mr. Brigham ]nits the beginning of this earth(|uake Nov. 8 (which corre- sponds with Oct. 29, old style), and its direction from north-west to south- east.

Rev. Benjamin Colman says : -'The earth opened and threw up man}' cart- loads of fine sand and ashes, mixed with some small remains of sulphur, but so small th:it taking up some of it in my fingers and dropping it into a chafing-dish of l>right coals in a dark place, one in three times the blue flames of the sulphur would plainly arise, and give a small scent, and but a small one."

Dr. Dudley, in his account sent to the Royal Society, says : " Persons of credit do also affirm that just before or at the time of the earth([uake, they perceived flashes of light."

Mr. Brigham doubts the smell of sulphur, yet to me, even apart from the evidence, it seems probable.

" Several springs of water," I (juote from Mr. Brigham, '•' and wells that were never known to be dry or frozen, were sunk down far into the earth, and while some were dried up, others had their temperature so altered as to freeze in moderate weather. Some had their water impro\-ed, but others were made permanently bad. Some farm land was made quagmire, and marshes were dried up."

Mr. Dudley says further, in his ac- count : "A neighbor of mine that had a well thirty-six feet deep, about three days before the earthquake, was sur- prised to find his water that used to be very sweet and limpid, stink to that degree that they could make no use of it, nor scarce bear the house when it was brought in ; and imagining that some carrion had got into the well, he searched to the bottom, but found it clean and good, though the color of the water was turned wheyish and i)ale.

��thrown out where the ground broke

and several days after the water boiled About seven days after the earth(]uake out like a spring, but is now dry and the water began to mend, and in three the ground closed up again. I have days more it returned to its former sent some of the sand that you may sweetness and color."

{To he continued.)

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