272 NATURAL HISTORY 



every quarter without making any alteration in the air. The 

 sun, at noon, looked as blank as a clouded moon, and shed a 

 rust-coloured ferruginous light on the ground, and floors of 

 rooms; but was particularly lurid and blood-coloured at rising 

 and setting. All the time the heat was so intense that 

 butchers' meat could hardly be eaten on the day after it was 

 killed ; and the flies swarmed so in the lanes and hedges that 

 they rendered the horses half frantic, and riding irksome. 

 The country people began to look with a superstitious awe, at 

 the red, louring aspect of the sun ; and indeed there was 

 reason for the most enlightened person to be apprehensive ; 

 for, all the while, Calabria and part of the isle of Sicily, were 

 torn and convulsed with earthquakes; and about that juncture 

 a volcano sprung out of the sea on the coast of Norway. On 

 this occasion Milton's noble simile of the sun, in his first book 

 of Paradise Lost, frequently occurred to my mind ; and it is 

 indeed particularly applicable, because, towards the end, it 

 alludes to a superstitious kind of dread, with which the minds 

 of men are always impressed by such strange and unusual 

 phenomena. 



" As when the *ww, new risen, 



" Looks through the horizontal, misty air, 



11 Shorn of his beams ; or from behind the moon, 



ft In dim eclipse, disastrous tivilight sheds 



" On half the nations, and with fear of change 



" Perplexes monarchs. " 



LETTER LXVI. 



TO THE SAME. 



WE are very seldom annoyed with thunder-storms ; and it is 

 no less remarkable than true, that those which arise in the 

 south have hardly been known to reach this village ; for 

 before they get over us, they take a direction to the east or to 

 the west, or sometimes divide into two, and go in part to one 

 of those quarters, and in part to the other ; as was truly the 



