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LIFE OF COLONEL MACERONI.

placate their divinity, to whose anger (a painful feeling)they attributed the catastrophe! Friday was named a sacredday, and every 5th of February was promised to be set apart >to acts of “ penance,” and self-torment, supposed to be i

pleasing to the divinity and calculated to mitigate his fury. .

But the most dreadful state, though comparatively short, 'was that of the miserable sufferers, who, buried under the !ruins, with palpitating and doubtful hope, awaited their !deliverance. How did they by turns accuse their relativesof neglect, and then mourn their fate as similar to theirown. When- nature fell at length exhausted by thirst,hunger, and suffocation, and all recollection left them,they all declare that their latest breath was vented incurses on their relatives, and upon all mankind.

Many were rescued from the tombs by their rela-tions, and many, by succeeding shocks of the very earth-quake, which cast them up again from out their prisonhouse.

After that the bodies of all the victims had been recovered,the melancholy fact was proved, that full one fourth of thenumber would have been saved, had prompt means been jfound to disencumber them from their situation. The menwere found to have expired in the act of making desperate jefforts at disengagement. But the women were generally •:in an attitude of despair, their hands extended over their >heads, the fingers convulsively entwined amongst their hair. ,Not so with mothers who perished with their offspring —these all appeared to have been careless as to themselves —devoting all their thoughts to the preservation of the infant.With their bodies extended, and arched above their little ones,they seemed to'hope to save them ; or with arms and handsextended towards the spot where the child was found, itseemed, that although unable to touch it, because of the fewintervening ruins, they had the horrid consciousness of thevicinity. Many signal examples were exhibited of the