——— = 
* 
Tv 05> eed Ee . 
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 205 
The months of January and February, in the year 1774, 
were remarkable for great melting snows and vast gusts of 
rain; so that by the end of the latter month the land-springs, 
or lavants, began to prevail, and to be near as high as in the 
memorable winter of 1764. The beginning of March also 
went on in the same tenor; when, in the night between the 
8th and gth of that month, a considerable part of the great 
woody hanger at Hawkley was torn from its place, and fell 
down, leaving a high freestone cliff 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 ingulfed, going down in a perpen- 
dicular direction; for a gate which stood in the field, on the 
top of the hill, after sinking with its 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 its first situation. 
Several oaks 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 unencumbered; but would have been buried in heaps 
of rubbish, had the fragment parted and fallen forward. 
About a 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 farmhouse, in 
which lived a laborer and his family; and, just by, a stout 
new barn. The cottage was inhabited by an old woman and 
her son and his wife. ‘These people in the evening, which 
was very dark and tempestuous, 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 continued to make a most tre- 
mendous roaring in the woods and hangers. ‘The miserable 
