448 A FARMER'S YEAR 



But the inhabitants of East Anglia still do little or nothing — or 

 at least nothing concerted. Every man for himself is the cry, and 

 let the sea take the rest. 



Even the December gale, however, so far as violence is concerned, 

 was but a small thing compared to the tempest of last March three 

 years. That frightful storm came up one Sunday afternoon from the 

 nor'-west, and when the full fury of it struck this house, which is an 

 exceedingly solid building, the whole fabric rocked and tottered 

 till I feared lest the great mass of chimneys should fall through 

 the roof. Everywhere trees were going down. They just bowed 

 and vanished. One instant they were standing, the next they 

 were gone. In the worst of the gale I went out and struggled into 

 Bungay. Out of the front gate I dared not go because of the 

 rocking elms, fear of which forced some of the Hood family in the 

 farm which stands by it to take refuge among the cowsheds, so I 

 was obliged to break my way to the road through the lawn fence. 

 The streets of Bungay were an extraordinary sight, being strewn 

 with broken tiles and chimney-pots, much as though the place had 

 been bombarded, and as I walked I saw one woman lifted quite 

 off her legs by the wind and thrown into the middle of the road. 



All of this, however, though our damage was great enough, 

 seemed as nothing to what happened in East Norfolk and in other 

 parts of the county where the soil is light. There the trees fell 

 literally by the ten thousand, and such a sight as thev/oods presented 

 after the hurricane was done with I never before witnessed. In 

 some instances they were perfectly flat — a tangled heap of boughs 

 and timber, and here and there, standing above the debris^ a 

 deep-rooted oak with the top twisted out of it, or a great Scotch 

 fir snapped in two like a carrot. A friend told me that he stood 

 in the middle of a little park and watclied the surrounding woods 

 go down, just as though they were being pressed to the earth by 

 the power of some mighty hand. First the outer trees would fall, 

 then line by line those that stood within till little or nothing was 

 left. And the most curious feature of this marvellous spectacle 

 was that no noise could be heard. Although forests were crashing 



