ey 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 superstitious
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 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