240 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 
perfectly glutted and chilled with water;* and hence dry 
autumns are seldom followed by rigorous winters. 
January 7th.— Snow driving all the day, which was followed 
by frost, sleet, and some snow, till the 12th, when a prodigious 
mass overwhelmed all the works of men, drifting over the tops 
of the gates and filling the hollow lanes. 
On the 14th the writer was obliged to be much abroad; and\ 
thinks he never before or since has encountered such rugged 
Siberian weather. Many of the narrow roads were now filled 
above the tops of the hedges; through which the snow was 
driven into most romantic and grotesque shapes, so striking 
to the imagination as not to be seen without wonder and 
pleasure. The poultry dared not to stir out of their roosting- 
places ; for cocks and hens are so dazzled and confounded by 
the glare of snow that they would soon perish without assist- 
ance. 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 birthday, were strangely incommoded: 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 
laborers if they would shovel them a track to London ; but 
the relentless heaps of snow were too bulky to be removed ; 
1 The autumn preceding January, 1768, was very wet, and particularly 
the month of September, during which there fell at Lyndon, in the county 
of Rutland, six inches and a half of rain. And the terrible long frost in 
1739-40 set in after a rainy season, and when the springs were very 
high. — W. 
