“I waited,” he replied, “till you asked that question; for information is always best remembered when the want of it is felt. If the particles of moisture in the atmosphere are small, and if they are slowly congealed, they form themselves into flakes of snow, as I have already mentioned; but when the moist vapour rapidly collects into large drops of rain, and when these are suddenly frozen, they become hail.”
“So that in fact,” said I, “hailstones are nothing more than little balls of ice.”
“They are ice, but not common transparent ice,” my uncle said, as he opened the window and picked out a few hailstones from under the snow; “you see that they have an opaque whiteness very different from the appearance of ice. The upper regions of the air are not only always colder, but also less dense than those near the surface of the earth; and the white porous nature of hail is owing to the rarity of the atmosphere where they were congealed. Professor Leslie has proved this by the simple experiment of freezing small quantities of water in the reservoir of an air pump from which the air had been considerably exhausted. Hailstones, however, are not always globular like these; I have seen a shower of irregular lumps of ice of a great size, some of them weighing even three or four ounces, and producing dreadful mischief, killing the lambs and destroying all the crops. Last summer there was a partial hailstorm near London, which broke thirty thousand panes of glass in the green-houses of one nursery-ground.”
I am sorry to add, mamma, that every body says it is going to thaw; and there will be an end of all the amusement I have had to-day in looking at the beautiful feathery flakes as they blew against the windows.
20th.—After dinner this gloomy evening, we had another edition of our story-play. Though very much amused by all I heard, I will only mention two or three little circumstances which may perhaps be interesting to you or Marianne.
The word telescope was whispered to my aunt; and in the course of her story she contrived to introduced the tube through which Prince Ali, in the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, saw his distant friends. She said, she had very little doubt that this must have alluded to some optical instrument, and even that the carpet by which Prince Houssain transported himself through the air was of the nature of a balloon. Both these inventions are generally ascribed to the moderns, but she thinks they must have been formerly known in the East, where, indeed, all knowledge seems to have begun.
Mr. Lumley was so good as to join our circle; and having been given the word elephant, he mentioned a laughable anecdote of a man who took hold of an elephant’s tail lately in the streets of London. The animal was so displeased by this indignity, that he turned suddenly round, and grasping the man with his trunk, placed him against the iron rails where he kept him prisoner for some time. The keeper at last prevailed on the elephant to let the offender go, but not till after he had received some hard squeezes, for which he complained to a magistrate, who of course gave him no redress, as he was the first aggressor.
Mr. L. also told us that a friend of his in India, when riding on an elephant through a rice field, observed that the sagacious creature plucked a considerable quantity of the ears and carried them behind his trunk till the party stopped, when he ate them at leisure.
21st.—The expected thaw arrived—yesterday was odious, half snow, half rain, and everything dirty and dreary. My uncle and Frederick went this afternoon to the poor man’s garden, where you know we saw the carrots raised up by the little icy pillars; but this thaw has made the roads so wet, that I could not possibly go with them.
Frederick tells me that all the fairy colonnades which supported the earth about the carrots are now melted, the earth has fallen down, and the tops of the roots are to be seen, quite bare, but above the ground, and appearing as if they had been half pulled up by hand.