NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 199 



inclusive, during which period the wind varied to 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 sprang 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 phaenomena. 



As when the sun, new risen, 



Looks through the horizontal, misty air, 

 Shorn of his beams; or from behind the moon, 

 In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds 

 On half the nations, and with fear of change 

 Perplexes monarchs ." 



LETTEE 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 in two, 

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

 truly the case in summer 1783, when, though the country round was 

 continually harassed with tempests, and often from the south, yet we 

 escaped them all, as appears by my journal of that summer. The only 

 way that I can (at all account for this fact for such it is is that, on 

 that quarter, between us and the sea, there are continual mountains, 

 hill behind hill, such as Nore-hill, the Barnet, Butser-hill, and Ports- 

 down, which somehow divert the storms, and give them a different 

 direction High promontories, and elevated grounds, have always 

 been observed to attract clouds and disarm them of their mischievous 

 contents, which are discharged into the trees and summits as soon as 

 they come in contact with those turbulent meteors ; while the humble 

 vales escape, because they are so far beneath them. 



But, when I say I do not remember a thunder-storm from the south, 

 I do not mean that we never have suffered from thunder-storms at 

 all ; for on June 5th, 1784, the thermometer in the morning being 



