On different occasions the destruction caused by earthquakes has been very great.

By the way, the liability of Mexico to these shocks, explains the peculiarity of the building of the houses.

A modern English town with two-or-three-storied houses, with their thin brick walls, would be laid in ruins by a shock which would hardly affect Mexico.

Here, the houses of several storeys have stone walls of such thickness that they resist by sheer strength; and the one-storey mud houses, in the suburbs, are too low to suffer much by being shaken about.

A few days before we arrived here, our friends Pepe and Pancho were playing at billiards in the Lonja,[8] the Merchants' Exchange; and Pepe described to us the feeling of utter astonishment with which he saw his ball, after striking the other, go suddenly off at an absurd angle into a pocket.