Mark Twain's Speeches, Part 1

<p><SPAN name="link2H_4_0076" id="link2H_4_0076"></SPAN></p> <br/> <h2> SAN FRANCISCO EARTHQUAKE </h2> <p>After the address at the Robert Fulton Fund meeting, June 19,<br/> 1906, Mr. Clemens talked to the assembled reporters about the<br/> San Francisco earthquake.<br/></p> <p>I haven&rsquo;t been there since 1868, and that great city of San Francisco has grown up since my day. When I was there she had one hundred and eighteen thousand people, and of this number eighteen thousand were Chinese. I was a reporter on the Virginia City Enterprise in Nevada in 1862, and stayed there, I think, about two years, when I went to San Francisco and got a job as a reporter on The Call. I was there three or four years.</p> <p>I remember one day I was walking down Third Street in San Francisco. It was a sleepy, dull Sunday afternoon, and no one was stirring. Suddenly as I looked up the street about three hundred yards the whole side of a house fell out. The street was full of bricks and mortar. At the same time I was knocked against the side of a house, and stood there stunned for a moment.</p> <p>I thought it was an earthquake. Nobody else had heard anything about it and no one said earthquake to me afterward, but I saw it and I wrote it. Nobody else wrote it, and the house I saw go into the street was the only house in the city that felt it. I&rsquo;ve always wondered if it wasn&rsquo;t a little performance gotten up for my especial entertainment by the nether regions.</p> <div style="break-after:column;"></div><br />