OF SELBORNE. 393 



meter, made by Adams ; and to pay some attention to 

 it morning and evening; expecting wonderful pheno- 

 mena, in so elevated a region, at two hundred feet 

 or more above my house. But, behold ! on the 10th, 

 at eleven at night, it was down only to 17, and the 

 next morning at 22, when mine was at 10! We 

 were so disturbed at this unexpected reverse of com- 

 parative local cold, that we sent one of my .glasses up, 



thinking that of Mr. must, somehow, be wrongly 



constructed. But, when the instruments came to be 

 confronted, they went exactly together : so that, for 

 one night at least, the cold at Newton was 18 degrees 

 less than at Selborne ; and, through the whole frost, 10 

 or 12 degrees; and, indeed, when we came to observe 

 consequences, we could readily credit this ; for all my 

 laurustines, bays, ilexes, arbutuses, cypresses, and 

 even my Portugal laurels 1 , and (which occasions more 

 regret) my fine sloping laurel hedge, were scorched 

 up ; while, at Newton, the same trees have not lost a 

 leaf! 



We had steady frost on to the 25th, when the ther- 

 mometer in the morning was down to 10 with us, and 

 at Newton only to 21. Strong frost continued till the 

 31st, when some tendency to thaw was observed ; and, 

 by January the 3d, 1785, the thaw was confirmed, and 

 some rain fell. 



A circumstance that I must not omit, because it was 

 new to us, is, that on Friday, December the 10th, being 

 bright sunshine, the air was full of icy spiculcs, floating 

 in all directions, like atoms in a sunbeam let into a 

 dark room. We thought them at first particles of the 

 rime falling from my tall hedges ; but were soon con- 

 vinced to the contrary, by making our observations in 



1 Mr. Miller, in his Gardener's Dictionary, says positively that the 

 Portugal laurels remained untouched in the remarkable frost of 1739-40. 

 So that either that accurate observer was much mistaken, or else the 

 frost of December, 1784, was much more severe and destructive than that 

 in the year abovementioned. 



