Page:White - The natural history of Selborne, and the naturalist's calendar, 1879.djvu/264

242 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 XLV.

I was a 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."

But, when I came to consider better, I began to suspect that though our hills may never have journeyed far, yet that the ends oi many of them have slipped and fallen away at distant periods,