it hollow. But, my
faith! a thunderstorm in the country--especially if it be mountainous,
with a few fine Woods and Forests, makes you inevitably think of that
land from whose bourne no traveller returns; and even our town readers
will acknowledge that country thunder much more frequently proves mortal
than the thunder you meet with in cities. In the country, few
thunderstorms are contented to pass over without killing at least one
horse, some milch-kine, half-a-dozen sucking pigs or turkeys, an old
woman or two, perhaps the Minister of the parish, a man about forty,
name unknown, and a nursing mother at the ingle, the child escaping with
singed eyebrows, and a singular black mark on one of its great toes. We
say nothing of the numbers stupified, who awake the day after, as from a
dream, with strange pains in their heads, and not altogether sure about
the names or countenances of the somewhat unaccountable people whom they
see variously employed about the premises, and making themselves pretty
much at home. In towns, not one thunderstorm in fifty that performs an
exploit more magnanimous than knocking down an old wife from a
chimney-top--singeing a pair of worsted stockings that, knit in an
ill-starred hour, when the sun had entered Aries, had been hung out to
dry on a line in the backyard, or garden as it is called--or cutting a
few inches off the tail of an old Whig weathercock that for years had
been pecking the eyes out of all the airts the wind can blaw, greedy of
some still higher preferment.

Our dear deceased author proceeds to tell his Traveller how to eat and
drink; and remarks, "that people are apt to imagine that they may
indulge a little more in high living when on a journey. Travelling
itself, however, acts as a stimulus; therefore less nourishment is
required than in a state of rest. What you might not consider
intemperate at home, may occasion violent irritation, fatal
inflammations, &c., in situations where you are least able to obtain
medical assistance."

All this is very loosely stated, and must be set to rights. If you shut
yourself up for some fifty hours or so in a mail-coach, that keeps
wheeling along at the rate of ten miles an hour, and changes horses in
half a minute, certainly for obvious reasons the less you eat and drink
the better; and perhaps an hourly hundred drops of laudanum, or
equivalent grain of opium, would be advisable, so that the transit from
London to Edinburgh might be perfo