Book excerpt: Excerpt from By Earthquake and Fire, or the Checkered Romance of Two Generations Among the crowd of people thronging the station platform at Poughkeepsie, New York, one late June day in the year eighteen-seventy - eight, (the twenty third Of the month, to be very definite) the central group was made up Of ten or a dozen laughing, chat tering girls, with such healthy, happy, intelligent faces and lady-like manners, as to reflect naught but credit upon the alma mater whose senior class pin each of them wore. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.