parish churches. He was sitting in his counting-house in his night-gown, and the first symptom he heard was a very loud whizzing noise; soon afterwards he found his house shake, and called immediately to his clerks to follow him. They all ran out behind his house, and proceeded as fast as possible to a high ground, where they remained in safety and saw the town falling on every side. After continuing there about forty-eight hours, he ventured to go down into the town, where generally there reigned total silence. Almost every step he took was over a dead body. Among other shocking scenes he saw a woman dead with a child at her breast without its head. He made his way however through the ruins to his own house, which being situated on a rock, he hoped might not have been wholly destroyed; and with the help of eight or ten persons who had escaped like himself and whom he paid highly, cleared away the rubbish sufficiently to get to his strong box in the counting-house, from which he carried away notes to the amount of eighteen thousand pounds. He, however, by the inability of others to fulfil their contracts, lost 40,000l. that day.
Very soon after the first shock, the air, by whirlwinds of smoke and dust from the city falling and taking fire (for the small pans of coals with which they warm themselves soon produced that effect), became entirely dark; and the first sensation of every one was that the end of the world had arrived. The total number of inhabitants of Portugal is about two and a half millions, so that it is less populous than Ireland, where about four millions are now
