NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 237 
when, in the night between the eighth and ninth of that month, a 
considerable part of the great woody hanger at Hawkley was torn 
from its place, and fell down, leaving a high free-stone cliff naked 
and bare, and resembling the steep side of a chalk-pit. It appears 
that this huge fragment, being perhaps sapped and undermined by 
waters, foundered, and was ingulfed, going down in a perpendicular 
direction ; for a gate which stood in the field, on the top of the hill, 
after sinking with its posts for thirty or forty feet, remained in so 
true and upright a position as to open and shut with great exact- 
ness, just as in its first situation. Several oaks also are still 
standing, and in a state of vegetation after taking the same des- 
perate leap. That great part of this prodigious mass was absorbed 
in some gulf below, is plain also from the inclining ground at the 
bottom of the hill, which is free and unincumbered ; but would 
have been buried in heaps of rubbish, had the fragment parted and 
fallen forward. About an hundred yards from the foot of this 
hanging coppice stood a cottage by the side of a lane; and two 
hundred yards lower, on the other side of the lane, was a farm- 
house, in which lived a labourer and his family; and, just by, a 
stout new barn. The cottage was inhabited by an old woman and 
her son, and his wife. These people in the evening, which was 
very dark and tempestuous, observed that the brick floors of their 
kitchens began to heave and part ; and that the walls seemed to 
open, and the roofs to crack: but they all agree that no tremor of 
the ground, indicating an earthquake, was ever felt ; only that the 
wind continued to make a most tremendous roaring in the woods 
and hangers. ‘The miserable inhabitants, not daring to go to bed, 
remained in the utmost solicitude and confusion, expecting every 
moment to be buried under the ruins of their shattered edifices. 
When daylight came they were at leisure to contemplate the 
devastations of the night: they then found that a deep rift, or 
chasm, had opened under their houses, and torn them, as it were, in 
two ; and that one end of the barn had suffered in a similar manner ; 
that a pond near the cottage had undergone a strange reverse, be- 
coming deep at the shallow end, and so vice versa ; that many large 
oaks were removed out of their perpendicular, some thrown down, 
and some fallen into the heads of neighbouring trees ; and that a 
gate was thrust forward, with its hedge, full six feet, so as to require 
_ a new track to be made to it. From the foot of the cliff the general 
course of the ground, which is pasture, inclines in a moderate descent 
for half a mile, and is interspersed with some hillocks, which were 
