sun, yet now and then comes a winter when
the sun seems to have rolled further away from
us, and left us to drift northward and freeze up
against the pole. That our usual seasons should
ever be interrupted by such death-like trances
of cold is as difficult to explain as if a healthy
man's pulse were every twenty years or so to
almost stop for an hour at a time. Science is
still short-sighted, and has much to learn. Time
will show that these phenomena move also in
orbits, and obey fixed laws. When all our old
weather sayings have been collected, analysed,
codified, and tested by modern experience, we
may hope to see some advance made towards
more certain knowledge, and a great frost will
then perhaps be correctly predicted.

The frost of 1814 began in the usual way.
Long spells of cold gusty weather, then a
sharper and keener rigour in the air, until, one
morning, those who first awoke looked out of
door and. window and saw the streets and fields
shrouded under one vast sheet of snow—
treacherously innocent-looking snow. Snow
crystallised on every bough and twig; the
furrows showed beneath it, only as corpses show
under the pall. There was a glare from it that
lightened the air. It muffled all sounds. Death
stepped silently over it to claim the shepherd
dying on the moor, and the pedlar lost in the
drift, the benighted beggar-man, and the tired
traveller. Like shadows, starvation and famine
followed their grizzly king.

A great frost begins half in mischief, by
hindering work, stopping traffic, and blocking up
coaches; but it ends with deaths in snow and
in the flood, perils, dangers, and disasters.
An old French marquis (let us say Talleyrand,
grandfather of the family of anecdotes)
was once asked to describe the pangs of
rheumatism as compared with those of gout.
"Ma foi," said the old gentleman, with an
ineffable shrug, " you know the rack? eh bien.
Suppose yourself on it; the pulleys work, the
windlass moves, the cords on your wrists and
ankles tighten. They screw you as far as you
can go—all this you can bear, and still live—et
bien, that is the rheumatism. Now encore the
rack. They give you one screw more—et bien,
zat is ze gout." So it is with continuous
cold. The roads harden, the rivers glaze, the
earth becomes iron, the sky steel; the old and
the sick, the luxurious and the delicate, almost
think that they can bear no more. Then comes
another fortnight's frost, and gives them one
screw still. They live, but (those who survive)
how they suffer! for England is not prepared
to brave suddenly, without appliances and without
preparations, the cold of Iceland.

The great frost of 1814 began with trifling
incidents—talked of for the moment, and then
forgotten before the second fall of snow came.
The horse of a postboy on his way to Sydenham
from the twopenny post- office in Gerrard-
street, Soho, slipped on some ice on Dulwich-
common. The nair, frightened by the report
of a gun, darted into the fog, and was seen
no more until the following morning, when it
calmly trotted up to the door of the Sydenham
post-office, soon after daybreak, with the saddle-
bags on his back just as they had been placed
there in London. Before the public had well
digested that accident, it was informed that a
pig had been seen gravely floating down the
Thames, between the bridges, on a large slab of
ice. After repeated squeaks for a pilot, a
waterman became the porcine friend in need,
who gallantly rescued that navigator, and took
him home with all the cordiality possible. On the
17th of January the frost became more stringent,
and the news more alarming. One hundred
bags of letters had failed to arrive, owing to
the blockade of the roads. The mail-coaches
from Glasgow, Portpatrick, and Edinburgh, had
not reached Carlisle. Three days' mails were
due from below Exeter and from Holyhead.

In the mean time, the snowfall in Ireland had
been heavy beyond all precedent for fifty
years. It was slight the first day; but
by the next night the roads were so blocked
that only the Galway mail arrived in Dublin;
and even the mounted postboys were unable to
leave the city. For nearly twenty days, all
communication with the interior was cut off.
At last, a severe frost frittered away the snow,
and, to the delight of all Dublin, one morning
several mail-boys rode into that city. In the
narrow streets the snow was six feet deep. In
Fleet-street a lady was suffocated in a heap of
snow close to her own door.

"The distress in that abode of poverty, the
Liberty," says an Irish paper, " is excessive.
In many streets and lanes the wretched
inhabitants are literally blocked up in their houses,
and in the attempt to go abroad experience
every misery that it is possible to imagine. It is
painful to state that the number of deaths there
have, within the last few days, been greater
than at any other period, unless in the time of the
plague. We are informed that eighty funerals
occurred last Sunday. This unusual mortality
is chiefly to be attributed to the excessive fogs
that have prevailed; while, although not more
severe than what commonly appear in England,
were heavier than any known in Ireland for
many years. The fog was entirely confined to
Dublin, the country around being completely
free." Many families of children were left
orphans. The coffin-makers in Cork-street could
not make shells fast enough, so that the poor
lay unburied for many days before they could
be removed to the hospital-field, where the snow
lay in some places twenty feet deep over ground
that the pick and shovel would hardly excavate.
Outbuildings and stables were crushed
by weight of snow, and roofs forced in.
Some persons were killed by these accidents.
On the last day of December, a temporary
wooden building, containing Knox's Panorama
of Dublin, fell in and buried the picture, which
could not be recovered till the thaw released it
from the avalanche of snow. For two days in
December, the shops in many streets were closed,
as no customers could approach them. On
January 2, however, the city was gladdened by