7th, 1861, was a thing to be forever remembered by those who saw it, as I did, over a wide plain.  The sky suddenly appeared to open and let down whole solid snow-banks at once, which were caught and torn to pieces by the ravenous winds, and the traveller was instantaneously enveloped in a whirling mass far denser than any fog; it was a tornado with snow stirred into it.  Standing in the middle of the road, with houses close on every side, one could see absolutely nothing in any direction, one could hear no sound but the storm.  Every landmark vanished, and it was no more possible to guess the points of the compass than in mid-ocean.  It was easy to conceive of being bewildered and overwhelmed within a rod of one’s own door.  The tempest lasted only an hour; but if it had lasted a week, we should have had such a storm as occurred on the steppes of Kirgheez in Siberia, in 1827, destroying two hundred and eighty thousand five hundred horses, thirty thousand four hundred cattle, a million sheep, and ten thousand camels,—­or as “the thirteen drifty days,” in 1620, which killed nine-tenths of all the sheep in the South of Scotland.  On Eskdale Moor, out of twenty thousand only forty-five were left alive, and the shepherds everywhere built up huge semicircular walls of the dead creatures, to afford shelter to the living, till the gale should end.  But the most remarkable narrative of a snowstorm which I have ever seen was that written by James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, in record of one which took place January 24th, 1790.

James Hogg at this time belonged to a sort of literary society of young shepherds, and had set out, the day previous, to walk twenty miles over the hills to the place of meeting; but so formidable was the look of the sky that he felt anxious for his sheep, and finally turned back again.  There was at that time only a slight fall of snow, in thin flakes which seemed uncertain whether to go up or down; the hills were covered with deep folds of frost-fog, and in the valleys the same fog seemed dark, dense, and as it were crushed together.  An old shepherd, predicting a storm, bade him watch for a sudden opening through this fog, and expect a wind from that quarter; yet when he saw such an opening suddenly form at midnight, (having then reached his own home,) he thought it all a delusion, as the weather had grown milder and a thaw seemed setting in.  He therefore went to bed, and felt no more anxiety for his sheep; yet he lay awake in spite of himself, and at two o’clock he heard the storm begin.  It smote the house suddenly, like a great peal of thunder,—­something utterly unlike any storm he had ever before heard.  On his rising and thrusting his bare arm through a hole in the roof, it seemed precisely as if he had thrust it into a snow-bank, so densely was the air filled with falling and driving particles.  He lay still for an hour, while the house rocked with the tempest, hoping it might prove only a hurricane; but as there was no