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considerable part of the great woody hanger at HawUey i was 

 torn from it's place, and fell down, leaving a high free-stone clifi 

 naked and bare, and resembling the steep side of a chalk-pit. 

 It appears that this huge fragment, being perhaps sapped and 

 undermined by waters, foundered, and was engulfed, going down 

 in a perpendicular direction ; for a gate which stood in the field, 

 on the top of the hill, after sinking with it's posts for thirty or 

 forty feet, remained in so true and upright a position as to open 

 and shut with great exactness, just as in it's first situation. 

 Several oaks also are still standing, and in a state of vegetation, 

 after taking the same desperate leap. That great part of this 

 prodigious mass was absorbed in some gulf below, is plain also 

 from the inclining ground at the bottom of the hill, which is free 

 and unincumbered; but would have been buried in heaps of 

 rubbish, had the fragment parted and fallen forward. About an 

 hundred yards from the foot of this hanging coppice stood a 

 cottage by the side of a lane ; and two hundred yards lower, on 

 the other side of the lane, was a farm-house, in which lived a 

 labourer and his family; and, just by, a stout new bam. The 

 cottage was inhabited by an old woman and her son, and his wife. 

 These people in the evening, which was very dark and tempestu- 

 ous, observed that the brick floors of their kitchens began to 

 heave and part ; and that the walls seemed to open, and the 

 roofs to crack : but they all agree that no tremor of the ground, 

 indicating an earthquake, was ever felt ; only that the wind con- 

 tinued to make a most tremendous roaring in the woods and 

 hangers. The miserable inhabitants, not daring to go to bed, 

 remained in the utmost solicitude and confusion, expecting every 

 moment to be buried under the ruins of their shattered edifices. 

 When day-light came they were at leisure to contemplate the 

 devastations of the night : they then found that a deep rift, or 

 chasm, had opened under their houses, and torn them, as it 

 were, in two ; and that one end of the barn had suffered in a 

 similar manner ; that a pond near the cottage had undergone a 

 strange reverse, becoming deep at the shallow end, and so vice 

 versa ; that many large oaks were removed out of their perpen- 

 dicular, some thrown down, and some fallen into the heads of 

 neighbouring trees ; and that a gate was thrust forward, with 



1 [Hawkley is about three miles south of Selborne. Hawkley Hanger had once 

 belonged to Gilbert White's father.— (5«//.) Here, as between Hartley Park and 

 Worldham, the freestone is underlain by the clay of the gault, which has prbved 

 an insufficient support.] 



