I trust that you will understand me some day.

Meanwhile, I think--I only say I _think_--you know I told you how humble we must be whenever we speak of Lady Why--that we may guess at something like a good reason for the terrible earthquakes in South America.

I do not wish to be hard upon poor people in great affliction: but I cannot help thinking that they have been doing for hundreds of years past something very like what the Bible calls "tempting God"-- staking their property and their lives upon the chances of no earthquakes coming, while they ought to have known that an earthquake might come any day.

They have fulfilled (and little thought I that it would be fulfilled so soon) the parable that I told you once, of the nation of the Do-as-you-likes, who lived careless and happy at the foot of the burning mountain, and would not be warned by the smoke that came out of the top, or by the slag and cinders which lay all about them; till the mountain blew up, and destroyed them miserably.
Then I think that they ought to have expected an earthquake.
Well--it is not for us to judge any one, especially if they live in a part of the world in which we have not been ourselves.

But I think that we know, and that they ought to have known, enough about earthquakes to have been more prudent than they have been for many a year.