194 NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 



places ; for cocks and hens are so dazzled and confounded by the glare 

 of snow that they would soon perish without assistance. The hares 

 also lay sullenly in their seats, and would not move till compelled by 

 hunger; being conscious poor animals that the drifts and heaps 

 treacherously betray their footsteps, and prove fatal to numbers of 

 them. 



From the 14th the snow continued to increase, and began to stop the 

 road wagons, 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 incom- 

 moded : 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 relent- 

 less heaps of snow were too bulky to be removed ; and so the 18th 

 passed over, leaving the company in very uncomfortable circumstances 

 at the Castle and other inns. 



On the 20th 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 ther- 

 mometer stood at 29, 28, 25, and thereabout ; but on the 21st 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 22nd 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 pavement of the streets 

 could not be touched by the wheels or the horses' feet, so that the 

 carriages ran about without the least noise. Such an exemption from 

 din and clatter was strange, but not pleasant ; it seemed to convey an 

 uncomfortable idea of desolation : 



Ipsa silentia tax-rent. " 



On the 27th much snow fell all day, and in the evening the frost 

 became very intense. At South Lambeth, for the four following nights, 

 the thermometer fell to 11, 7, 6, 6; and at Selborne to 7, 6, 10; 

 and on the 31st of January, just before sunrise, with rime on the trees 

 and on the tube of the glass, the quicksilver sunk exactly to zero, 

 being 32 below the freezing point ; but by eleven in the morning, 

 though in the shade, it sprang up to 16^,* a most unusual degree of 



* At Selborne the cold was greater than at any other place that the author could 

 hear of with certainty : though some reported at the time that at a village in Kent 

 the thermometer fell two degrees below zero, viz. thirty-four degrees below the 

 freezing point. 



The thermometer used at Selborne was graduated by Benjamin Martin. 



