WINTER OF 1776. 321 



mals, that the drifts and heaps treacherously betray 

 their footsteps, and prove fatal to numbers of them. 



From the fourteenth, the snow continued to in- 

 crease, and began to stop the road-waggons and 

 coaches, which could no longer keep on their regular 

 stages ; and especially on the western roads, where 

 the fall appears to have been deeper than in the 

 south. The company at Bath, that wanted to attend 

 the Queen's birth-day, were strangely incommoded : 

 many carriages of persons who got, in their way to 

 town from Bath, as far as Marlborough, after strange 

 embarrassments, here met with a ne plus ultra. The 

 ladies fretted, and offered large rewards to labourers 

 if they would shovel them a track to London ; but 

 the relentless heaps of snow were too bulky to be 

 removed ; and so the eighteenth passed over, leaving 

 the company in very uncomfortable circumstances at 

 the Castle and other inns. 



On the twentieth, the sun shone out for the first 

 time since the frost began ; a circumstance, that has 

 been remarked before, much in favour of vegetation. 

 All this time, the cold was not very intense, for the 

 thermometer stood at 29, 28, 25, and thereabout; 

 but on the twenty-first it descended to 20. The 

 birds now began to be in a very pitiable and starving 

 condition. Tamed by the season, sky-larks settled 

 in the streets of towns, because they saw the ground 

 was bare ; rooks frequented dunghills close to houses 

 and crows watched horses as they passed, and greedily 

 devoured what dropped from them ; hares now came 

 into men's gardens, and, scraping away the snow, 

 devoured such plants as they could find. 



On the twenty- second, the author had occasion to 

 go to London, through a sort of Laplandian scene, 

 very wild and grotesque indeed. But the metropolis 

 itself exhibited a still more singular appearance than 

 the country ; for, being bedded deep in snow, the 



