This very
morning that I am writing these remarks, November 158, I was
forcibly struck by the appearance of Kensington Gardens, after last
night's gale, which had covered the ground with an extraordinary amount
of dead leaves. They lay in a remarkably uniform layer, of from three to
five inches in depth, except that round each and every tree the ground
was absolutely bare of leaves for a radius of about a yard. The effect
was as though circular discs had been cut out, leaving the edges of the
layer of leaves perfectly sharp and vertical. It would have been a
dangerous mistake to have slept that night at the foot of any one of
those trees.
Again, in selecting a place for bivouac, we must bear in mind that a gale
never blows in level currents, but in all kinds of curls and eddies, as
the driving of a dust-storm, or the vagaries of bits of straw caught up
by the wind, unmistakably show us. Little hillocks or undulations,
combined with the general lay of the ground, are a chief cause of these
eddies; they entirely divert the current of the wind from particular
spots. Such spots should be looked for; they are discovered by watching
the grass or the sand that lies on the ground. If the surface be quiet in
one place, while all around it is agitated by the wind, we shall not be
far wrong in selecting that place for our bed, however unprotected it may
seem in other respects.
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