oloured 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 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--."

LETTER LXVI.

We are very seldom annoyed with thunderstorms: 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 different 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 s