San Francisco (somewhat doubtfully identified by Macronus as the modern
fishing-village of Gharoo) the disinclination of the insurance companies
to pay their bets had the most momentous consequences.

In the year 1906 San Francisco was totally destroyed by fire. The
conflagration was caused by the friction of a pig scratching itself
against an angle of a wooden building. More than one hundred thousand
persons perished, and the loss of property is estimated by Kobo-Dogarque
at one and a half million _drusoes_. On more than two-thirds of this
enormous sum the insurance companies had laid bets, and the greater part
of it they refused to pay. In justification they pointed out that the deed
performed by the pig was "an act of God," who in the analogous instance of
the express companies had been specifically forbidden to take any action
affecting the interests of parties to a contract, or the result of an
agreed undertaking.

In the ensuing litigation their attorneys cited two notable precedents. A
few years before the San Francisco disaster, another American city had
experienced a similar one through the upsetting of a lamp by the kick of a
cow. In that case, also, the insurance companies had successfully denied
their liability on the ground that the cow, manifestly incited by some
supernatural power, had unlawfully influenced the result of a wager to
which she was not a party. The companies defendant had contended that the
recourse of the property-owners was against, not them, but the owner of
the cow. In his decision sustaining that view and dismissing the case, a
learned judge (afterward president of one of the defendant companies) had
in the legal phraseology of the period pronounced the action of the cow an
obvious and flagrant instance of unwarrantable intervention. Kobo-Dogarque
believes that this decision was afterward reversed by an appellate court
of contrary political complexion and the companies were compelled to