NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBOENE. 
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 phasnomena. 
" 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 tioilight sheds 
On half the nations, and with/mr oi 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 diff'erent 
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 sufi*ered from thunder-storms at 
all ; for on J une 5th, 17 84, the thermometer in the morning being 
