MacMillan's Reading Books Part 28

January 7th.--Snow driving all the day, which was followed by frost, sleet, and some snow, till the twelfth, when a prodigious ma.s.s 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 are now filled above the tops of the hedges; through which the snow was driven in most romantic and grotesque shapes, so striking to the imagination as not to be seen without wonder and pleasure. The poultry dared not stir out of their roosting-places; for c.o.c.ks and hens are so dazzled and confounded by the glare of the snow, that they would soon perish without a.s.sistance. 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-waggons and coaches, which could no longer keep in their regular stages; and especially on the western roads, where the fall appears to have been greater 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 embarra.s.sment, here came to a dead stop. The ladies fretted, and offered large rewards to labourers if they would shovel them a track to London; but the relentless heaps of snow were too bulky to be removed; and so the 18th pa.s.sed over, leaving the company in very uncomfortable circ.u.mstances at the _Castle_ and other inns.

On the 20th, the sun shone out for the first time since the frost began; a circ.u.mstance that has been remarked before, much in favour of vegetation. All this time the cold was not very intense, for the thermometer stood at 29, 28 25 and thereabout; but on the 21st it descended to 20. The birds now began to be in a very pitiable and starving condition. Tamed by the season, sky-larks settled in the streets of towns, because they saw the ground was bare; rooks frequented dung-hills close to houses; hares now came into men's gardens, and sc.r.a.ping away the snow, devoured such plants as they could find.

On the 22nd, the author had occasion to go to London; through a sort of Laplandian scene very wild and grotesque indeed. But the metropolis itself exhibited a still more singular appearance than the country; for, being bedded deep in snow, the pavement could not be touched by the wheels or the horses' feet, so that the carriages ran about without the least noise. Such an exemption from din and clatter was strange, but not pleasant; it seemed to convey an uncomfortable idea of desolation.

On the 27th, much snow fell all day, and in the evening the frost became very intense. At South Lambeth, for the four following nights, the thermometer fell to 11, 7, 0, 6; and at Selborne to 7, 6, 10; and on the 31st of January, just before sunrise, with rime on the trees, and on the tube of the gla.s.s, the quicksilver sunk exactly to zero, being 32 below freezing point; but by eleven in the morning, though in the shade, it sprung up to 16-1/2--a most unusual degree of cold this for the south of England. During these four nights the cold was so penetrating that it occasioned ice in warm and protected chambers; and in the day the wind was so keen that persons of robust const.i.tutions could scarcely endure to face it. The Thames was at once so frozen over, both above and below the bridge, that crowds ran about on the ice. The streets were now strangely enc.u.mbered with snow, which crumbled and trod dusty, mid, turning gray, resembled bay-salt; what had fallen on the roofs was so perfectly dry, that from first to last it lay twenty-six days on the houses in the city--a longer time than had been remembered by the oldest housekeepers living. According to all appearances, we might now have expected the continuance of this rigorous weather for weeks to come, since every night increased in severity; but behold, without any apparent on the 1st of February a thaw took place, and some rain followed before night; making good the observation, that frosts often go off, as it were, at once, without any gradual declension of cold. On the 2nd of February, the thaw persisted; and on the 3rd, swarms of little insects were frisking and sporting in a court-yard at South Lambeth, as if they had felt no frost. Why the juices in the small bodies and smaller limbs of such minute beings are not frozen, is a matter of curious inquiry.

REV. GILBERT WHITE.

[Note: _Rev. Gilbert White_ (1720-1793), author of the 'Natural History of Selborne,' one of the most charming books on natural history in the language.]

A PORTENTOUS SUMMER.

The, summer of the year 1783 was an amazing and portentous one, and full of horrible phenomena; for, besides the alarming meteors and tremendous thunder and storms that affrighted and distressed the different counties of this kingdom, the peculiar haze, or smoky fog, that prevailed for many weeks in this island, and in every part of Europe, and even beyond its limits, was a most extraordinary appearance, unlike anything known within the memory of man. By my journal I find that I had noticed this strange occurrence from June 23 to July 20 inclusive, during which period the wind varied to every quarter, without making any alteration in the air. The sun, at noon, looked as black as a clouded moon, and shed a rust-coloured feruginous 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 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 superst.i.tious awe at the red, lowering 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 n.o.ble 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 superst.i.tious kind of dread with which the minds of men are always impressed by such strange and unusual phenomena:--

"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."

REV. GILBERT WHITE.

A THUNDERSTORM.

On the 5th of June, 1784, the thermometer in the morning being at 64, and at noon at 70, the barometer at 29.6 1/2, and the wind north, I observed a blue mist, smelling strongly of sulphur, hang along our sloping woods, and seeming to indicate that thunder was at hand. I was called in about two in the afternoon, and so missed seeing the gathering of the clouds in the north, which they who were abroad a.s.sured me had something uncommon in its appearance. At about a quarter after two the storm began in the parish of Hartley, moving slowly from north to south; and from thence it came over Norton Farm and so to Grange Farm, both in this parish. It began with vast drops of rain, which were soon succeeded by round hail, and then by convex pieces of ice, which measured three inches in girth. Had it been as extensive as it was violent, and of any continuance (for it was very short), it must have ravaged all the neighbourhood. In the parish of Hartley it did some damage to one farm; but Norton, which lay in the centre of the storm, was greatly injured; as was Grange, which lay next to it. It did but just reach to the middle of the village, where the hail broke my north windows, and all my garden lights and hand-gla.s.ses, and many of my neighbours' windows. The extent of the storm was about two miles in length, and one in breadth. We were just sitting down to dinner; but were soon diverted from our repast by the clattering of tiles and the jingling of gla.s.s. There fell at the same time prodigious torrents of rain on the farm above mentioned, which occasioned a flood as violent as it was sudden, doing great damage to the meadows and fallows by deluging the one and was.h.i.+ng away the soil of the other. The hollow lane towards Alton was so torn and disordered as not to be pa.s.sable till mended, rocks being removed that weighed two hundredweight. Those that saw the effect which the great hail had on the ponds and pools, say that the das.h.i.+ng of the water made an extraordinary appearance, the froth and spray standing up in the air three feet above the surface. The rus.h.i.+ng and roaring of the hail, as it approached, was truly tremendous.

Though the clouds at South Lambeth, near London, were at that juncture thin and light, and no storm was in sight, nor within hearing, yet the air was strongly electric; for the bells of an electric machine at that place rang repeatedly, and fierce sparks were discharged.

REV. GILBERT WHITE.

CHARACTER OF SIR WALTER SCOTT.

About half-past one P.M. on the 21st of September, 1832, Sir Walter Scott breathed his last, in the presence of all his children. It was a beautiful day--so warm, that every window was wide open--and so perfectly still, that the sound of all others most delicious to his ear, the gentle ripple of the Tweed over its pebbles, was distinctly audible as we knelt around the bed, and his eldest son kissed and closed his eyes. No sculptor ever modelled a more majestic image of repose.

It will, I presume, be allowed that no human character, which we have the opportunity of studying with equal minuteness, had fewer faults mixed up in its texture. The grand virtue of fort.i.tude, the basis of all others, was never displayed in higher perfection than in him; and it was, as perhaps true courage always is, combined with an equally admirable spirit of kindness and humanity. His pride, if we must call it so, undebased by the least tincture of mere vanity, was intertwined with a most exquisite charity, and was not inconsistent with true humility.

If ever the principle of kindliness was incarnated in a mere man, it was in him; and real kindliness can never be but modest. In the social relations of life, where men are most effectually tried, no spot can be detected in him. He was a patient, dutiful, reverent son; a generous, compa.s.sionate, tender husband; an honest, careful, and most affectionate father. Never was a more virtuous or a happier fireside than his. The influence of his mighty genius shadowed it imperceptibly; his calm good sense, and his angelic sweetness of heart and temper, regulated and softened a strict but paternal discipline. His children, as they grew up, understood by degrees the high privilege of their birth; but the profoundest sense of his greatness never disturbed their confidence in his goodness. The buoyant play of his spirits made him sit young among the young; parent and son seemed to live in brotherhood together; and the chivalry of his imagination threw a certain air of courteous gallantry into his relations with his daughters, which gave a very peculiar grace to the fondness of their intercourse.

Perhaps the most touching evidence of the lasting tenderness of his early domestic feelings was exhibited to his executors, when they opened his repositories in search of his testament, the evening after his burial. On lifting up his desk we found arranged in careful order a series of little objects, which had obviously been so placed there that his eye might rest on them every morning before he began his tasks.

These were the old-fas.h.i.+oned boxes that had garnished his mother's toilet when he, a sickly child, slept in her dressing-room; the silver taper-stand which the young advocate had bought for her with his first five-guinea fee; a row of small packets inscribed with her hand, and containing the hair of those of her offspring that had died before her; his father's snuff-box and pencil-case; and more things of the like sort, recalling the "old familiar faces." The same feeling was apparent in all the arrangement of his private apartment. Pictures of his father and mother were the only ones in his dressing-room. The clumsy antique cabinets that stood there--things of a very different cla.s.s from the beautiful and costly productions in the public rooms below--had all belonged to the furniture of George's Square. Even his father's rickety was.h.i.+ng-stand, with all its cramped appurtenances, though exceedingly unlike what a man of his very scrupulous habits would have selected in these days, kept its ground. Such a son and parent could hardly fail in any of the other social relations. No man was a firmer or more indefatigable friend. I know not that he ever lost one; and a few with whom, during the energetic middle stage of life, from political differences or other accidental circ.u.mstances, he lived less familiarly, had all gathered round him, and renewed the full warmth of early affection in his later days. There was enough to dignify the connexion in their eyes; but nothing to chill it on either side. The imagination that so completely mastered him when he chose to give her the rein, was kept under most determined control when any of the positive obligations of active life came into question. A high and pure sense of duty presided over whatever he had to do as a citizen and a magistrate; and, as a landlord, he considered his estate as an extension of his hearth.

J. LOCKHART.

MUMPS'S HALL.

There is, or rather I should say there _was_, a little inn, called Mumps's Hall--that is, being interpreted, Beggar's Hotel--near to Gilsland, which had not then attained its present fame as a Spa. It was a hedge alehouse, where the Border farmers of either country often stopped to refresh themselves and their nags, in their way to and from the fairs and trysts in c.u.mberland, and especially those who came from or went to Scotland, through a barren and lonely district, without either road or pathway, emphatically called the Waste of Bewcastle. At the period when the adventure about to be described is supposed to have taken place, there were many instances of attacks by freebooters, on those who travelled through this wild district; and Mumps's Hall had a bad reputation for harbouring the banditti who committed such depredations.

An old and st.u.r.dy yeoman belonging to the Scottish side, by surname an Armstrong or Elliot, but well known by his sobriquet of Fighting Charlie of Liddesdale, and still remembered for the courage he displayed in the frequent frays which took place on the Border fifty or sixty years since, had the following adventure in the Waste, one of many which gave its character to the place:--

Charlie had been at Stagshaw-bank fair, had sold his sheep or cattle, or whatever he had brought to market, and was on his return to Liddesdale.

There were then no country banks where cash could be deposited, and bills received instead, which greatly encouraged robbery in that wild country, as the objects of plunder were usually fraught with gold. The robbers had spies in the fair, by means of whom they generally knew whose purse was best stocked, and who took a lonely and desolate road homeward--those, in short, who were best worth robbing, and likely to be most easily robbed.

All this Charlie knew full well; but he had a pair of excellent pistols, and a dauntless heart. He stopped at Mumps's Hall, notwithstanding the evil character of the place. His horse was accommodated where it might have the necessary rest and feed of corn; and the landlady used all the influence in her power to induce him to stop all night. The landlord was from home, she said, and it was ill pa.s.sing the Waste, as twilight must needs descend on him before he gained the Scottish side, which was reckoned the safest. But fighting Charlie, though he suffered himself to be detained later than was prudent, did not account Mumps's Hall a safe place to quarter in during the night. He tore himself away, therefore, from Meg's good fare and kind words, and mounted his nag, having first examined his pistols, and tried by the ramrod whether the charge remained in them.

He proceeded a mile or two, at a round trot, when, as the Waste stretched black before him, apprehensions began to awaken in his mind, partly arising out of Meg's unusual kindness, which he could not help thinking had rather a suspicious appearance. He therefore resolved to reload his pistols, lest the powder had become damp; but what was his surprise, when he drew the charge, to find neither powder nor ball, while each barrel had been carefully filled with _tow_, up to the s.p.a.ce which the loading had occupied! and, the priming of the weapons being left untouched, nothing but actually drawing and examining the charge could have discovered the inefficiency of his arms till the fatal minute arrived when their services were required. Charlie reloaded his pistols with care and accuracy, having now no doubt that he was to be waylaid and a.s.saulted. He was not far engaged in the Waste, which was then, and is now, traversed only by such routes as are described in the text, when two or three fellows, disguised and variously armed, started from a moss-hag, while, by a glance behind him (for, marching, as the Spaniard says, with his beard on his shoulder, he reconnoitred in every direction), Charlie instantly saw retreat was impossible, as other two stout men appeared behind him at some distance. The Borderer lost not a moment in taking his resolution, and boldly trotted against his enemies in front, who called loudly on him to stand and deliver. Charlie spurred on, and presented his pistol. "A fig for your pistol!" said the foremost robber, whom Charlie to his dying day protested he believed to have been the landlord of Mumps's Hall--"A fig for your pistol! I care not a curse for it."--"Ay, lad," said the deep voice of Fighting Charlie, "but the _tow's out now_". He had no occasion to utter another word; the rogues, surprised at finding a man of redoubted courage well armed, instead of being defenceless, took to the moss in every direction, and he pa.s.sed on his way without further molestation.

SCOTT.