a warning voice he bids his family beware. The gallant chanticleer has, at command, his amorous phrases, and his terms of defiance. But the sound by which he is best known is his crowing: by this he has been distinguished in all ages as the countryman's clock or larum-as the watchman that proclaims the divisions of the night. Thus the poet elegantly styles him

"The crested cock, whose clarion sounds

The silent hours."

A neighbouring gentleman, one summer, had lost most of his chickens by a sparrow-hawk, that came gliding down between a fagot pile and the end of his house to the place where the coops stood. The owner, inwardly vexed to see his flock thus diminishing, hung a setting net adroitly between the pile and the house, into which the caitiff dashed, and was entangled. Resentment suggested the law of retaliation; he therefore clipped the hawk's wings, cut off his talons, and, fixing a cork on his bill, threw him down among the brood-hens. Imagination cannot paint the scene that ensued; the expressions that fear, rage, and revenge inspired, were new, or at least such as had been unnoticed before. The exasperated matrons upbraided—they execrated—they insulted--they triumphed. In a word, they never desisted from buffeting their adversary till they had torn him in a hundred pieces.

Why winter-suns so rapidly descend,

And what delays the tardy nights extend.

GENTLEMEN who have outlets might contrive to make ornament subservient to utility; a pleasing eye-trap might also

contribute to promote science; an obelisk in a garden or park might be both an embellishment and an heliotrope.

Any person that is curious, and enjoys the advantage of a good horizon, might, with little trouble, make two heliotropes, the one for the winter, the other for the summer solstice; and these two erections might be constructed with very little expense; for two pieces of timber frame-work, about ten or twelve feet high, and four feet broad at the base, and close lined with plank, would answer the purpose.

The erection for the former should, if possible, be placed within sight of some window in the common sitting parlour; because men, at that dead season of the year, are usually within doors at the close of the day; while that of the latter might be fixed for any given spot in the garden or outlet, whence the owner might contemplate, in a fine summer's evening, the utmost extent that the sun makes to the northward at the season of the longest days. Now nothing would be necessary but to place these two objects with so much exactness, that the westerly limb of the sun, at setting, might but just clear the winter heliotrope to the west of it, on the shortest day, and that the whole disc of the sun, at the longest day, might exactly, at setting, also clear the summer heliotrope to the north of it.

By this simple expedient, it would soon appear that there is no such thing, strictly speaking, as a solstice; for, from the shortest day, the owner would, every clear evening, see the disc advancing, at its setting, to the westward of the object; and, from the longest day, observe the sun retiring backwards every evening, at its setting, towards the object westward, till, in a few nights, it would set quite behind it, and so by degrees to the west of it; for when the sun comes near the summer solstice, the whole disc of it would at first set behind the object: after a time, the northern limb would first appear, and so every night gradually more, till at length the whole diameter would set northward of it for about three nights; but, on the middle night of the three, sensibly more remote than the former or following. When beginning its recess from the summer tropic, it would continue more and more to be hidden every night, till at length it would descend quite behind the object again; and so nightly more and more to the westward.

LETTER LXXXVII.

TO THE SAME.

66

Mugire videbis

Sub pedibus terram, et descendere montibus ornos."

SELBORNE.

WHEN I was boy, I used to read, with astonishment and implicit assent, accounts in Baker's Chronicle of walking hills and travelling mountains. John Philips, in his Cyder, alludes to the credit that was given to such stories, with a delicate but quaint vein of humour, peculiar to the author of the Splendid Shilling:

"I nor advise, nor reprehend, the choice

Of Marcley Hill; the apple no where finds
A kinder mould: yet 'tis unsafe to trust

Deceitful ground: who knows but that, once more.
This mount may journey, and, his present site
Forsaking, to thy neighbour's bounds transfer
Thy goodly plants, affording matter strange
For law debates!"

But, when I came to consider better, I began to suspect that, though our hills may never have journeyed far, yet that the ends of many of them have slipped and fallen away at distant periods, leaving the cliffs bare and abrupt. This seems to have been the case with Nore and Whetham Hills, and especially with the ridge between Harteley Park and Ward-le-ham, where the ground has slid into vast swellings and furrows, and lies still in such romantic confusion as cannot be accounted for from any other cause. strange event, that happened not long since, justifies our suspicions; which, though it befel not within the limits of this parish, yet as it was within the hundred of Selborne, and as the circumstances were singular, may fairly claim a place in a work of this nature.

A

The months of January and February, in the year 1774, were remarkable for great melting snows and vast gluts of