170 NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 
The verb soxzat also seems to imply a bird that is somewhat 
loquacious.* 
We have had a very wet autumn and winter, so as to raise the 
springs to a pitch beyond anything since 1764, which was a 
remarkable year for floods and high waters. The land-springs 
which we call lavants, break out much on the downs of Sussex, 
Hampshire, and Wiltshire. The country people say when the 
favants rise corn will always be dear; meaning that when the 
earth is so glutted with water as to send forth springs on the 
downs and uplands, that the corn-vales must be drowned ; and so 
it has proved for these ten or eleven years past. For land-springs 
have never obtained more since the memory of man than during 
that period; nor has there been known a greater scarcity of all 
sorts of grain, considering the great improvements of modern 
husbandry. Such a run of wet seasons a century or two ago 
would, I am persuaded, have occasioned a famine. Therefore 
pamphlets and newspaper-letters, that talk of combinations, tend 
to inflame and mislead; since we must not expect plenty till 
Providence sends us more favourable seasons. 
The wheat of last year, all round this district, and in the county 
of Rutland, and elsewhere, yields remarkably bad; and our wheat 
on the ground, by the continual late sudden vicissitudes from fierce 
frost to pouring rains, looks poorly ; and the turnips rot very fast. 
I am, &c. 
* “* Nigra velut magnas domini cum divitis edes 
Pervolat, et pennis alta atria lustrat hirundo, 
Pabula parva legens, nidisque loquacibus escas ! 
Et nunc porticibus vacuis, nunc humida circum 
Stagna souat.”” . - . : 
Let. XIX., p. 173 orig edit. 
** As the black swallow near the palace plies: 
O’er empty courts, and under arches flies ; 
Now hawks aloft, now skims along the flord, 
To furnish her loquacious nests with food.’”’ 
Dryp. VirG. x. xii. line 691. 
