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The Life of the Fields

by Richard Jefferies · English · Gutenberg #6164 · 427,118 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Life of the Fields

Author: Richard Jefferies


        
Release date: July 1, 2004 [eBook #6164]
                Most recently updated: January 25, 2013

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6164

Credits: Produced by Malcolm Farmer


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LIFE OF THE FIELDS ***




Produced by Malcolm Farmer










THE LIFE OF THE FIELDS


BY RICHARD JEFFERIES




My thanks are due to those editors who have so kindly permitted me to
reprint the following pages:--"The Field-Play" appeared in _Time_;
"Bits of Oak Bark" and "The Pageant of Summer" in _Longman's Magazine_;
"Meadow Thoughts" and "Mind under Water" in _The Graphic_; "Clematis
Lane," "Nature near Brighton," "Sea, Sky, and Down," "January in the
Sussex Woods," and "By the Exe" in _The Standard_; "Notes on Landscape
Painting," in _The Magazine of Art_; "Village Miners," in _The
Gentleman's Magazine_; "Nature and the Gamekeeper," "The Sacrifice to
Trout," "The Hovering of the Kestrel," and "Birds Climbing the Air," in
_The St. James's Gazette_; "Sport and Science," in _The National
Review_; "The Water-Colley," in _The Manchester Guardian_; "Country
Literature," "Sunlight in a London Square," "Venice in the East End,"
"The Pigeons at the British Museum," and "The Plainest City in Europe,"
in _The Pall Mall Gazette_.

                      RICHARD JEFFERIES




CONTENTS



 THE PAGEANT OF SUMMER

 THE FIELD PLAY:
  I.  UPTILL-A-THORN
  II. RURAL DYNAMITE

 BITS OF OAK BARK:
  I.  THE ACORN-GATHERER
  II. THE LEGEND OF A GATEWAY
  III. A ROMAN BROOK

 MEADOW THOUGHTS

 CLEMATIS LANE

 NATURE NEAR BRIGHTON

 SEA, SKY, AND DOWN

 JANUARY IN THE SUSSEX WOODS

 BY THE EXE

 THE WATER-COLLEY

 NOTES ON LANDSCAPE PAINTING

 VILLAGE MINERS

 MIND UNDER WATER

 SPORT AND SCIENCE

 NATURE AND THE GAMEKEEPER

 THE SACRIFICE TO TROUT

 THE HOVERING OF THE KESTREL

 BIRDS CLIMBING THE AIR

 COUNTRY LITERATURE:
  I.  THE AWAKENING.
  II. SCARCITY OF BOOKS
  III. THE VILLAGER'S TASTE IN READING
  IV. PLAN OF DISTRIBUTION

 SUNLIGHT IN A LONDON SQUARE

 VENICE IN THE EAST END.

 THE PIGEONS AT THE BRITISH MUSEUM

 THE PLAINEST CITY IN EUROPE




THE PAGEANT OF SUMMER

I



Green rushes, long and thick, standing up above the edge of the ditch,
told the hour of the year as distinctly as the shadow on the dial the
hour of the day. Green and thick and sappy to the touch, they felt like
summer, soft and elastic, as if full of life, mere rushes though they
were. On the fingers they left a green scent; rushes have a separate
scent of green, so, too, have ferns, very different to that of grass or
leaves. Rising from brown sheaths, the tall stems enlarged a little in
the middle, like classical columns, and heavy with their sap and
freshness, leaned against the hawthorn sprays. From the earth they had
drawn its moisture, and made the ditch dry; some of the sweetness of
the air had entered into their fibres, and the rushes--the common
rushes--were full of beautiful summer. The white pollen of early
grasses growing on the edge was dusted from them each time the hawthorn
boughs were shaken by a thrush. These lower sprays came down in among
the grass, and leaves and grass-blades touched. Smooth round stems of
angelica, big as a gun-barrel, hollow and strong, stood on the slope of
the mound, their tiers of well-balanced branches rising like those of a
tree. Such a sturdy growth pushed back the ranks of hedge parsley in
full white flower, which blocked every avenue and winding bird's-path
of the bank. But the "gix," or wild parsnip, reached already high above
both, and would rear its fluted stalk, joint on joint, till it could
face a man. Trees they were to the lesser birds, not even bending if
perched on; but though so stout, the birds did not place their nests on
or against them. Something in the odour of these umbelliferous plants,
perhaps, is not quite liked; if brushed or bruised they give out a
bitter greenish scent. Under their cover, well shaded and hidden, birds
build, but not against or on the stems, though they will affix their
nests to much less certain supports. With the grasses that overhung the
edge, with the rushes in the ditch itself, and these great plants on
the mound, the whole hedge was wrapped and thickened. No cunning of
glance could see through it; it would have needed a ladder to help any
one look over.

It was between the may and the June roses. The may-bloom had fallen,
and among the hawthorn boughs were the little green bunches that would
feed the redwings in autumn. High up the briars had climbed, straight
and towering while there was a thorn, or an ash sapling, or a
yellow-green willow to uphold them, and then curving over towards the
meadow. The buds were on them, but not yet open; it was between the may
and the rose.

As the wind, wandering over the sea, takes from each wave an invisible
portion, and brings to those on shore the ethereal essence of ocean, so
the air lingering among the woods and hedges--green waves and
billows--became full of fine atoms of summer. Swept from notched
hawthorn leaves, broad-topped oak-leaves, narrow ash sprays and oval
willows; from vast elm cliffs and sharp-taloned brambles under; brushed
from the waving grasses and stiffening corn, the dust of the sunshine
was borne along and breathed. Steeped in flower and pollen to the music
of bees and birds, the stream of the atmosphere became a living thing.
It was life to breathe it, for the air itself was life. The strength of
the earth went up through the leaves into the wind. Fed thus on the
food of the Immortals, the heart opened to the width and depth of the
summer--to the broad horizon afar, down to the minutest creature in the
grass, up to the highest swallow. Winter shows us Matter in its dead
form, like the Primary rocks, like granite and basalt--clear but cold
and frozen crystal. Summer shows us Matter changing into life, sap
rising from the earth through a million tubes, the alchemic power of
light entering the solid oak; and see! it bursts forth in countless
leaves. Living things leap in the grass, living things drift upon the
air, living things are coming forth to breathe in every hawthorn bush.
No longer does the immense weight of Matter--the dead, the
crystallised--press ponderously on the thinking mind. The whole office
of Matter is to feed life--to feed the green rushes, and the roses that
are about to be; to feed the swallows above, and us that wander beneath
them. So much greater is this ween and common rush than all the Alps.

Fanning so swiftly, the wasp's wings are but just visible as he passes;
did he pause, the light would be apparent through their texture. On the
wings of the dragon-fly as he hovers an instant before he darts there
is a prismatic gleam. These wing textures are even more delicate than
the minute filaments on a swallow's quill, more delicate than the
pollen of a flower. They are formed of matter indeed, but how
exquisitely it is resolved into the means and organs of life! Though
not often consciously recognised, perhaps this is the great pleasure of
summer, to watch the earth, the dead particles, resolving themselves
into the living case of life, to see the seed-leaf push aside the clod
and become by degrees the perfumed flower. From the tiny mottled egg
come the wings that by-and-by shall pass the immense sea. It is in this
marvellous transformation of clods and cold matter into living things
that the joy and the hope of summer reside. Every blade of grass, each
leaf, each separate floret and petal, is an inscription speaking of
hope. Consider the grasses and the oaks, the swallows, the sweet blue
butterfly--they are one and all a sign and token showing before our
eyes earth made into life. So that my hope becomes as broad as the
horizon afar, reiterated by every leaf, sung on every bough, reflected
in the gleam of every flower. There is so much for us yet to come, so
much to be gathered, and enjoyed. Not for you and me, now, but for our
race, who will ultimately use this magical secret for their happiness.
Earth holds secrets enough to give them the life of the fabled
Immortals. My heart is fixed firm and stable in the belief that
ultimately the sunshine and the summer, the flowers and the azure sky,
shall become, as it were, interwoven into man's existence. He shall
take from all their beauty and enjoy their glory. Hence it is that a
flower is to me so much more than stalk and petals. When I look in the
glass I see that every line in my face means pessimism; but in spite of
my face--that is my experience--I remain an optimist. Time with an
unsteady hand has etched thin crooked lines, and, deepening the
hollows, has cast the original expression into shadow. Pain and sorrow
flow over us with little ceasing, as the sea-hoofs beat on the beach.
Let us not look at ourselves but onwards, and take strength from the
leaf and the signs of the field. He is indeed despicable who cannot
look onwards to the ideal life of man. Not to do so is to deny our
birthright of mind.

The long grass flowing towards the hedge has reared in a wave against
it. Along the hedge it is higher and greener, and rustles into the very
bushes. There is a mark only now where the footpath was; it passed
close to the hedge, but its place is traceable only as a groove in the
sorrel and seed-tops. Though it has quite filled the path, the grass
there cannot send its tops so high; it has left a winding crease. By
the hedge here stands a moss-grown willow, and its slender branches
extend over the sward. Beyond it is an oak, just apart from the bushes;
then the ground gently rises, and an ancient pollard ash, hollow and
black inside, guards an open gateway like a low tower. The different
tone of green shows that the hedge is there of nut-trees; but one great
hawthorn spreads out in a semicircle, roofing the grass which is yet
more verdant in the still pool (as it were) under it. Next a corner,
more oaks, and a chestnut in bloom. Returning to-this spot an old apple
tree stands right out in the meadow like an island. There seemed just
now the tiniest twinkle of movement by the rushes, but it was lost
among the hedge parsley. Among the grey leaves of the willow there is
another flit of motion; and visible now against the sky there is a
little brown bird, not to be distinguished at the moment from the many
other little brown birds that are known to be about. He got up into the
willow from the hedge parsley somehow, without being seen to climb or
fly. Suddenly he crosses to the tops of the hawthorn and immediately
flings himself up into the air a yard or two, his wings and ruffled
crest making a ragged outline; jerk, jerk, jerk, as if it were with the
utmost difficulty he could keep even at that height. He scolds, and
twitters, and chirps, and all at once sinks like a stone into the hedge
and out of sight as a stone into a pond. It is a whitethroat; his nest
is deep in the parsley and nettles. Presently he will go out to the
island apple tree and back again in a minute or two; the pair of them
are so fond of each other's affectionate company they cannot remain
apart.

Watching the line of the hedge, about every two minutes, either near at
hand or yonder a bird darts out just at the level of the grass, hovers
a second with labouring wings, and returns as swiftly to the cover.
Sometimes it is a flycatcher, sometimes a greenfinch, or chaffinch, now
and then a robin, in one place a shrike, perhaps another is a redstart.
They are fly-fishing all of them, seizing insects from the sorrel tips
and grass, as the kingfisher takes a roach from the water. A blackbird
slips up into the oak and a dove descends in the corner by the chestnut
tree. But these are not visible together, only one at a time and with
intervals. The larger part of the life of the hedge is out of sight.
All the thrush-fledglings, the young blackbirds, and finches are
hidden, most of them on the mound among the ivy, and parsley, and rough
grasses, protected too by a roof of brambles. The nests that still have
eggs are not, like the nests of the early days of April, easily found;
they are deep down in the tangled herbage by the shore of the ditch, or
far inside the thorny thickets which then looked mere bushes, and are
now so broad. Landrails are running in the grass concealed as a man
would be in a wood; they have nests and eggs on the ground for which
you may search in vain till the mowers come.

Up in the corner a fragment of white fur and marks of scratching show
where a doe has been preparing for a litter. Some well-trodden runs
lead from mound to mound; they are sandy near the hedge where the
particles have been carried out adhering to the rabbits' feet and fur.
A crow rises lazily from the upper end of the field, and perches in the
chestnut. His presence, too, was unsuspected. He is there by far too
frequently. At this season the crows are always in the mowing-grass,
searching about, stalking in winding tracks from furrow to furrow,
picking up an egg here and a foolish fledgling that has wandered from
the mound yonder. Very likely there may be a moorhen or two slipping
about under cover of the long grass; thus hidden, they can leave the
shelter of the flags and wander a distance from the brook. So that
beneath the surface of the grass and under the screen of the leaves
there are ten times more birds than are seen.

Besides the singing and calling, there is a peculiar sound which is
only heard in summer. Waiting quietly to discover what birds are about,
I become aware of a sound in the very air. It is not the midsummer hum
which will soon be heard over the heated hay in the valley and over the
cooler hills alike. It is not enough to be called a hum, and does but
just tremble at the extreme edge of hearing. If the branches wave and
rustle they overbear it; the buzz of a passing bee is so much louder it
overcomes all of it that is in the whole field. I cannot, define it,
except by calling the hours of winter to mind--they are silent; you
hear a branch crack or creak as it rubs another in the wood, you hear
the hoar-frost crunch on the grass beneath your feet, but the air is
without sound in itself. The sound of summer is everywhere--in the
passing breeze, in the hedge, in the broad branching trees, in the
grass as it swings; all the myriad particles that together make the
summer are in motion. The sap moves in the trees, the pollen is pushed
out from grass and flower, and yet again these acres and acres of
leaves and square miles of grass blades--for they would cover acres and
square miles if reckoned edge to edge--are drawing their strength from
the atmosphere. Exceedingly minute as these vibrations must be, their
numbers perhaps may give them a volume almost reaching in the aggregate
to the power of the ear. Besides the quivering leaf, the swinging
grass, the fluttering bird's wing, and the thousand oval membranes
which innumerable insects whirl about, a faint resonance seems to come
from the very earth itself. The fervour of the sunbeams descending in a
tidal flood rings on the strung harp of earth. It is this exquisite
undertone, heard and yet unheard, which brings the mind into sweet
accordance with the wonderful instrument of nature.

By the apple tree there is a low bank, where the grass is less tall and
admits the heat direct to the ground; here there are blue
flowers--bluer than the wings of my favourite butterflies--with white
centres--the lovely bird's-eyes, or veronica. The violet and cowslip,
bluebell and rose, are known to thousands; the veronica is overlooked.
The ploughboys know it, and the wayside children, the mower and those
who linger in fields, but few else. Brightly blue and surrounded by
greenest grass, imbedded in and all the more blue for the shadow of the
grass, these growing butterflies' wings draw to themselves the sun.
From this island I look down into the depth of the grasses. Red sorrel
spires--deep drinkers of reddest sun wine--stand the boldest, and in
their numbers threaten the buttercups. To these in the distance they
give the gipsy-gold tint--the reflection of fire on plates of the
precious metal. It will show even on a ring by firelight; blood in the
gold, they say. Gather the open marguerite daisies, and they seem
large--so wide a disc, such fingers of rays; but in the grass their
size is toned by so much green. Clover heads of honey lurk in the
bunches and by the hidden footpath. Like clubs from Polynesia the tips
of the grasses are varied in shape: some tend to a point--the
foxtails--some are hard and cylindrical; others, avoiding the club
shape, put forth the slenderest branches with fruit of seed at the
ends, which tremble as the air goes by. Their stalks are ripening and
becoming of the colour of hay while yet the long blades remain green.

Each kind is repeated a hundred times, the foxtails are succeeded by
foxtails, the narrow blades by narrow blades, but never become
monotonous; sorrel stands by sorrel, daisy flowers by daisy. This bed
of veronica at the foot of the ancient apple has a whole handful of
flowers, and yet they do not weary the eye. Oak follows oak and elm
ranks with elm, but the woodlands are pleasant; however many times
reduplicated, their beauty only increases. So, too, the summer days;
the sun rises on the same grasses and green hedges, there is the same
blue sky, but did we ever have enough of them? No, not in a hundred
years! There seems always a depth, somewhere, unexplored, a thicket
that has not been seen through, a corner full of ferns, a quaint old
hollow tree, which may give us something. Bees go by me as I stand
under the apple, but they pass on for the most part bound on a long
journey, across to the clover fields or up to the thyme lands; only a
few go down into the mowing-grass. The hive bees are the most impatient
of insects; they cannot bear to entangle their wings beating against
grasses or boughs. Not one will enter a hedge. They like an open and
level surface, places cropped by sheep, the sward by the roadside,
fields of clover, where the flower is not deep under grass.




II



It is the patient humble-bee that goes down into the forest of the
mowing-grass. If entangled, the humble-bee climbs up a sorrel stem and
takes wing, without any sign of annoyance. His broad back with tawny
bar buoyantly glides over the golden buttercups. He hums to himself as
he goes, so happy is he. He knows no skep, no cunning work in glass
receives his labour, no artificial saccharine aids him when the beams
of the sun are cold, there is no step to his house that he may alight
in comfort; the way is not made clear for him that he may start
straight for the flowers, nor are any sown for him. He has no shelter
if the storm descends suddenly; he has no dome of twisted straw well
thatched and tiled to retreat to. The butcher-bird, with a beak like a
crooked iron nail, drives him to the ground, and leaves him pierced
with a thorn; but no hail of shot revenges his tortures. The grass
stiffens at nightfall (in autumn), and he must creep where he may, if
possibly he may escape the frost. No one cares for the humble-bee. But
down to the flowering nettle in the mossy-sided ditch, up into the tall
elm, winding in and out and round the branched buttercups, along the
banks of the brook, far inside the deepest wood, away he wanders and
despises nothing. His nest is under the rough grasses and the mosses of
the mound; a mere tunnel beneath the fibres and matted surface. The
hawthorn overhangs it, the fern grows by, red mice rustle past.

It thunders, and the great oak trembles; the heavy rain drops through
the treble roof of oak and hawthorn and fern. Under the arched branches
the lightning plays along, swiftly to and fro, or seems to, like the
swish of a whip, a yellowish-red against the green; a boom! a crackle
as if a tree fell from the sky. The thick grasses are bowed, the white
florets of the wild parsley are beaten down, the rain hurls itself, and
suddenly a fierce blast tears the green oak leaves and whirls them out
into the fields; but the humble-bee's home, under moss and matted
fibres, remains uninjured. His house at the root of the king of trees,
like a cave in the rock, is safe. The storm passes and the sun comes
out, the air is the sweeter and the richer for the rain, like verses
with a rhyme; there will be more honey in the flowers. Humble he is,
but wild; always in the field, the wood; always by the banks and
thickets; always wild and humming to his flowers. Therefore I like the
humble-bee, being, at heart at least, for ever roaming among the
woodlands and the hills and by the brooks. In such quick summer storms
the lightning gives the impression of being far more dangerous than the
zigzag paths traced on the autumn sky. The electric cloud seems almost
level with the ground and the livid flame to rush to and fro beneath
the boughs as the little bats do in the evening.

Caught by such a cloud, I have stayed under thick larches at the edge
of plantations. They are no shelter, but conceal one perfectly. The
wood-pigeons come home to their nest trees; in larches they seem to
have permanent nests, almost like rooks. Kestrels, too, come home to
the wood. Pheasants crow, but not from fear--from defiance, in fear
they scream. The boom startles them, and they instantly defy the sky.
The rabbits quietly feed on out in the field between the thistles and
rushes that so often grow in woodside pastures, quietly hopping to
their favourite places, utterly heedless how heavy the echoes may be in
the hollows of the wooded hills. Till the rain comes they take no heed
whatever, but then make for shelter. Blackbirds often make a good deal
of noise; but the soft turtle-doves coo gently, let the lightning be as
savage as it will. Nothing has the least fear. Man alone, more
senseless than a pigeon, put a god in vapour; and to this day, though
the printing press has set a foot on every threshold, numbers bow the
knee when they hear the roar the timid dove does not heed. So trustful
are the doves, the squirrels, the birds of the branches, and the
creatures of the field. Under their tuition let us rid ourselves of
mental terrors, and face death itself as calmly as they do the livid
lightning; so trustful and so content with their fate, resting in
themselves and unappalled. If but by reason and will I could reach the
godlike calm and courage of what we so thoughtlessly call the timid
turtle-dove, I should lead a nearly perfect life.

The bark of the ancient apple tree under which I have been standing is
shrunken like iron which has been heated and let cool round the rim of
a wheel. For a hundred years the horses have rubbed against it while
feeding in the aftermath. The scales of the bark are gone or smoothed
down and level, so that insects have no hiding-place. There are no
crevices for them, the horsehairs that were caught anywhere have been
carried away by birds for their nests. The trunk is smooth and
columnar, hard as iron. A hundred times the mowing-grass has grown up
around it, the birds have built their nests, the butterflies fluttered
by, and the acorns dropped from the oaks. It is a long, long time,
counted by artificial hours or by the seasons, but it is longer still
in another way. The greenfinch in the hawthorn yonder has been there
since I came out, and all the time has been happily talking to his
love. He has left the hawthorn indeed, but only for a minute or two, to
fetch a few seeds, and comes back each time more full of song-talk than
ever. He notes no slow movement of the oak's shadow on the grass; it is
nothing to him and his lady dear that the sun, as seen from his nest,
is crossing from one great bough of the oak to another. The dew even in
the deepest and most tangled grass has long since been dried, and some
of the flowers that close at noon will shortly fold their petals. The
morning airs, which breathe so sweetly, come less and less frequently
as the heat increases. Vanishing from the sky, the last fragments of
cloud have left an untarnished azure. Many times the bees have returned
to their hives, and thus the index of the day advances. It is nothing
to the green-finches; all their thoughts are in their song-talk. The
sunny moment is to them all in all. So deeply are they rapt in it that
they do not know whether it is a moment or a year. There is no clock
for feeling, for joy, for love.

And with all their motions and stepping from bough to bough, they are
not restless; they have so much time, you see. So, too, the whitethroat
in the wild parsley; so, too, the thrush that just now peered out and
partly fluttered his wings as he stood to look. A butterfly comes and
stays on a leaf--a leaf much warmed by the sun--and shuts his wings. In
a minute he opens them, shuts them again, half wheels round, and
by-and-by--just when he chooses, and not before--floats away. The
flowers open, and remain open for hours, to the sun. Hastelessness is
the only word one can make up to describe it; there is much rest, but
no haste. Each moment, as with the greenfinches, is so full of life
that it seems so long and so sufficient in itself. Not only the days,
but life itself lengthens in summer. I would spread abroad my arms and
gather more of it to me, could I do so.

All the procession of living and growing things passes. The grass
stands up taller and still taller, the sheaths open, and the stalk
arises, the pollen clings till the breeze sweeps it. The bees rush
past, and the resolute wasps; the humble-bees, whose weight swings them
along. About the oaks and maples the brown chafers swarm; and the
fern-owls at dusk, and the blackbirds and jays by day, cannot reduce
their legions while they last. Yellow butterflies, and white, broad red
admirals, and sweet blues; think of the kingdom of flowers which is
theirs! Heavy moths burring at the edge of the copse; green, and red,
and gold flies: gnats, like smoke, around the tree-tops; midges so
thick over the brook, as if you could haul a netful; tiny leaping
creatures in the grass; bronze beetles across the path; blue
dragonflies pondering on cool leaves of water-plantain. Blue jays
flitting, a magpie drooping across from elm to elm; young rooks that
have escaped the hostile shot blundering up into the branches; missel
thrushes leading their fledglings, already strong on the wing, from
field to field. An egg here on the sward dropped by a starling; a red
ladybird creeping, tortoise-like, up a green fern frond. Finches
undulating through the air, shooting themselves with closed wings, and
linnets happy with their young.

Golden dandelion discs--gold and orange--of a hue more beautiful, I
think, than the higher and more visible buttercup. A blackbird,
gleaming, so black is he, splashing in the runlet of water across the
gateway. A ruddy kingfisher swiftly drawing himself as you might draw a
stroke with a pencil, over the surface of the yellow buttercups, and
away above the hedge. Hart's-tongue fern, thick with green, so green as
to be thick with its colour, deep in the ditch under the shady hazel
boughs. White meadow-sweet lifting its tiny florets, and black-flowered
sedges. You must push through the reed grass to find the sword-flags;
the stout willow-herbs will not be trampled down, but resist the foot
like underwood. Pink lychnis flowers behind the withy stoles, and
little black moorhens swim away, as you gather it, after their mother,
who has dived under the water-grass, and broken the smooth surface of
the duckweed. Yellow loosestrife is rising, thick comfrey stands at the
very edge; the sandpipers run where the shore is free from bushes. Back
by the underwood the prickly and repellent brambles will presently
present us with fruit. For the squirrels the nuts are forming, green
beechmast is there--green wedges under the spray; up in the oaks the
small knots, like bark rolled up in a dot, will be acorns. Purple
vetches along the mounds, yellow lotus where the grass is shorter, and
orchis succeeds to orchis. As I write them, so these things come--not
set in gradation, but like the broadcast flowers in the mowing-grass.

Now follows the gorse, and the pink rest-harrow, and the sweet
lady's-bedstraw, set as it were in the midst of a little thorn-bush.
The broad repetition of the yellow clover is not to be written; acre
upon acre, and not one spot of green, as if all the green had been
planed away, leaving only the flowers to which the bees come by the
thousand from far and near. But one white campion stands in the midst
of the lake of yellow. The field is scented as though a hundred hives
of honey had been emptied on it. Along the mound by it the bluebells
are seeding, the hedge has been cut and the ground is strewn with
twigs. Among those seeding bluebells and dry twigs and mosses I think a
titlark has his nest, as he stays all day there and in the oak over.
The pale clear yellow of charlock, sharp and clear, promises the
finches bushels of seed for their young. Under the scarlet of the
poppies the larks run, and then for change of colour soar into the
blue. Creamy honeysuckle on the hedge around the cornfield, buds of
wild rose everywhere, but no sweet petal yet. Yonder, where the wheat
can climb no higher up the slope, are the purple heath-bells, thyme and
flitting stonechats.

The lone barn shut off by acres of barley is noisy with sparrows. It is
their city, and there is a nest in every crevice, almost under every
tile. Sometimes the partridges run between the ricks, and when the bats
come out of the roof, leverets play in the waggon-track. At even a
fern-owl beats by, passing close to the eaves whence the moths issue.
On the narrow waggon-track which descends along a coombe and is worn in
chalk, the heat pours down by day as if an invisible lens in the
atmosphere focussed the sun's rays. Strong woody knapweed endures it,
so does toadflax and pale blue scabious, and wild mignonette. The very
sun of Spain burns and burns and ripens the wheat on the edge of the
coombe, and will only let the spring moisten a yard or two around it;
but there a few rushes have sprung, and in the water itself brooklime
with blue flowers grows so thickly that nothing but a bird could find
space to drink. So down again from this sun of Spain to woody coverts
where the wild hops are blocking every avenue, and green-flowered
bryony would fain climb to the trees; where grey-flecked ivy winds
spirally about the red rugged bark of pines, where burdocks fight for
the footpath, and teazle-heads look over the low hedges. Brake-fern
rises five feet high; in some way woodpeckers are associated with
brake, and there seem more of them where it flourishes. If you count
the depth and strength of its roots in the loamy sand, add the
thickness of its flattened stem, and the width of its branching fronds,
you may say that it comes near to be a little tree. Beneath where the
ponds are bushy mare's-tails grow, and on the moist banks jointed
pewterwort; some of the broad bronze leaves of water-weeds seem to try
and conquer the pond and cover it so firmly that a wagtail may run on
them. A white butterfly follows along the waggon-road, the pheasants
slip away as quietly as the butterfly flies, but a jay screeches loudly
and flutters in high rage to see us. Under an ancient garden wall among
matted bines of trumpet convolvulus, there is a hedge-sparrow's nest
overhung with ivy on which even now the last black berries cling.

There are minute white flowers on the top of the wall, out of reach,
and lichen grows against it dried by the sun till it looks ready to
crumble. By the gateway grows a thick bunch of meadow geranium, soon to
flower; over the gate is the dusty highway road, quiet but dusty,
dotted with the innumerable footmarks of a flock of sheep that has
passed. The sound of their bleating still comes back, and the bees
driven up by their feet have hardly had time to settle again on the
white clover beginning to flower on the short roadside sward. All the
hawthorn leaves and briar and bramble, the honeysuckle, too, is gritty
with the dust that has been scattered upon it. But see--can it be?
Stretch a hand high, quick, and reach it down; the first, the sweetest,
the dearest rose of June. Not yet expected, for the time is between the
may and the roses, least of all here in the hot and dusty highway; but
it is found--the first rose of June.

Straight go the white petals to the heart; straight the mind's glance
goes back to how many other pageants of summer in old times When
perchance the sunny days were even more sunny; when the stilly oaks
were full of mystery, lurking like the Druid's mistletoe in the midst
of their mighty branches. A glamour in the heart came back to it again
from every flower; as the sunshine was reflected from them so the
feeling in the heart returned tenfold. To the dreamy summer haze love
gave a deep enchantment, the colours were fairer, the blue more lovely
in the lucid sky. Each leaf finer, and the gross earth enamelled
beneath the feet. A sweet breath on the air, a soft warm hand in the
touch of the sunshine, a glance in the gleam of the rippled waters, a
whisper in the dance of the shadows. The ethereal haze lifted the heavy
oaks and they were buoyant on the mead, the rugged bark was chastened
and no longer rough, each slender flower beneath them again refined.
There was a presence everywhere though unseen, on the open hills, and
not shut out under the dark pines. Dear were the June roses then
because for another gathered. Yet even dearer now with so many years as
it were upon the petals; all the days that have been before, all the
heart-throbs, all our hopes lie in this opened bud. Let not the eyes
grow dim, look not back but forward; the soul must uphold itself like
the sun. Let us labour to make the heart grow larger as we become
older, as the spreading oak gives more shelter. That we could but take
to the soul some of the greatness and the beauty of the summer!

Still the pageant moves. The song-talk of the finches rises and sinks
like the tinkle of a waterfall. The greenfinches have been by me all
the while. A bullfinch pipes now and then further up the hedge where
the brambles and thorns are thickest. Boldest of birds to look at, he
is always in hiding. The shrill tone of a goldfinch came just now from
the ash branches, but he has gone on. Every four or five minutes a
chaffinch sings close by, and another fills the interval near the
gateway. There are linnets somewhere, but I cannot from the old apple
tree fix their exact place. Thrushes have sung and ceased; they will
begin again in ten minutes. The blackbirds do not cease; the note
tittered by a blackbird in the oak yonder before it can drop is taken
up by a second near the top of the field, and ere it falls is caught by
a third on the left-hand side. From one of the topmost boughs of an elm
there fell the song of a willow warbler for awhile; one of the least of
birds, he often seeks the highest branches of the highest tree.

A yellowhammer has just flown from a bare branch in the gateway, where
he has been perched and singing a full hour. Presently he will commence
again, and as the sun declines will sing him to the horizon, and then
again sing till nearly dusk. The yellowhammer is almost the longest of
all the singers; he sits and sits and has no inclination to move. In
the spring he sings, in the summer he sings, and he continues when the
last sheaves are being carried from the wheat field. The redstart
yonder has given forth a few notes, the whitethroat flings himself into
the air at short intervals and chatters, the shrike calls sharp and
determined, faint but shrill calls descend from the swifts in the air
These descend, but the twittering notes of the swallows do not reach so
far--they are too high to-day. A cuckoo has called by the brook, and
now fainter from a greater distance. That the titlarks are singing I
know, but not within hearing from here; a dove, though, is audible, and
a chiffchaff has twice passed. Afar beyond the oaks at the top of the
field dark specks ascend from time to time, and after moving in wide
circles for awhile descend again to the corn. These must be larks; but
their notes are not powerful enough to reach me, though they would were
it not for the song in the hedges, the hum of innumerable insects, and
the ceaseless "crake, crake" of landrails. There are at least two
landrails in the mowing-grass; one of them just now seemed coming
straight towards the apple tree, and I expected in a minute to see the
grass move, when the bird turned aside and entered the tufts and wild
parsley by the hedge. Thence the call has come without a moment's
pause, "crake, crake," till the thick hedge seems filled with it. Tits
have visited the apple tree over my head, a wren has sung in the
willow, or rather on a dead branch projecting lower down than the leafy
boughs, and a robin across under the elms in the opposite hedge. Elms
are a favourite tree of robins--not the upper branches, but those that
grow down the trunk, and are the first to have leaves in spring.

The yellowhammer is the most persistent individually, but I think the
blackbirds when listened to are the masters of the fields. Before one
can finish another begins, like the summer ripples succeeding behind
each other, so that the melodious sound merely changes its position.
Now here, now in the corner, then across the field, again in the
distant copse, where it seems about to sink, when it rises again almost
at hand. Like a great human artist, the blackbird makes no effort,
being fully conscious that his liquid tone cannot be matched. He utters
a few delicious notes, and carelessly quits the green stage of the oak
till it pleases him to sing again. Without the blackbird, in whose
throat the sweetness of the green fields dwells, the days would be only
partly summer. Without the violet all the bluebells and cowslips could
not make a spring, and without the blackbird even the nightingale would
be but half welcome. It is not yet noon, these songs have been
ceaseless since dawn; this evening, after the yellowhammer has sung the
sun down, when the moon rises and the faint stars appear, still the
cuckoo will call, and the grasshopper lark, the landrail's "crake,
crake" will echo from the mound, a warbler or a blackcap will utter his
notes, and even at the darkest of the summer night the swallows will
hardly sleep in their nests. As the morning sky grows blue, an hour
before the sun, up will rise the larks singing and audible now, the
cuckoo will recommence, and the swallows will start again on their
tireless journey. So that the songs of the summer birds are as
ceaseless as the sound of the waterfall which plays day and night.

I cannot leave it; I must stay under the old tree in the midst of the
long grass, the luxury of the leaves, and the song in the very air. I
seem as if I could feel all the glowing life the sunshine gives and the
south wind calls to being. The endless grass, the endless leaves, the
immense strength of the oak expanding, the unalloyed joy of finch and
blackbird; from all of them I receive a little. Each gives me something
of the pure joy they gather for themselves. In the blackbird's melody
one note is mine; in the dance of the leaf shadows the formed maze is
for me, though the motion is theirs; the flowers with a thousand faces
have collected the kisses of the morning. Feeling with them, I receive
some, at least, of their fulness of life. Never could I have enough;
never stay long enough--whether here or whether lying on the shorter
sward under the sweeping and graceful birches, or on the thyme-scented
hills. Hour after hour, and still not enough. Or walking the footpath
was never long enough, or my strength sufficient to endure till the
mind was weary. The exceeding beauty of the earth, in her splendour of
life, yields a new thought with every petal. The hours when the mind is
absorbed by beauty are the only hours when we really live, so that the
longer we can stay among these things so much the more is snatched from
inevitable Time. Let the shadow advance upon the dial-I can watch it
with equanimity while it is there to be watched. It is only when the
shadow is _not_ there, when the clouds of winter cover it, that the
dial is terrible. The invisible shadow goes on and steals from us. But
now, while I can see the shadow of the tree and watch it slowly gliding
along the surface of the grass, it is mine. These are the only hours
that are not wasted--these hours that absorb the soul and fill it with
beauty. This is real life, and all else is illusion, or mere endurance.
Does this reverie of flowers and waterfall and song form an ideal, a
human ideal, in the mind? It does; much the same ideal that Phidias
sculptured of man and woman filled with a godlike sense of the violet
fields of Greece, beautiful beyond thought, calm as my turtle-dove
before the lurid lightning of the unknown. To be beautiful and to be
calm, without mental fear, is the ideal of nature. If I cannot achieve
it, at least I can think it.




THE FIELD-PLAY

I

UPTILL-A-THORN

 "Save the nightingale alone;
 She, poor bird, as all forlorn,
 Lean'd her breast uptill a thorn."
         --_Passionate Pilgrim._

She pinned her torn dress with a thorn torn from the bushes through
which she had scrambled to the hay-field. The gap from the lane was
narrow, made more narrow by the rapid growth of summer; her rake caught
in an ash-spray, and in releasing it she "ranted" the bosom of her
print dress. So soon as she had got through she dropped her rake on the
hay, searched for a long, nail-like thorn, and thrust it through, for
the good-looking, careless hussy never had any provision of pins about
her. Then, taking a June rose which pricked her finger, she put the
flower by the "rant", or tear, and went to join the rest of the
hay-makers. The blood welled up out of the scratch in the finger more
freely than would have been supposed from so small a place. She put her
lips to it to suck it away, as folk do in all quarters of the earth yet
discovered, being one of those instinctive things which come without
teaching. A red dot of blood stained her soft white cheek, for, in
brushing back her hair with her hand, she forgot the wounded finger.
With red blood on her face, a thorn and a rose in her bosom, and a hurt
on her hand, she reached the chorus of rakers.

The farmer and the sun are the leading actors, and the hay-makers are
the chorus, who bear the burden of the play. Marching, each a step
behind the other, and yet in a row, they presented a slanting front,
and so crossed the field, turning the "wallows." At the hedge she took
her place, the last in the row. There were five men and eight women;
all flouted her. The men teased her for being late again at work; she
said it was so far to come. The women jeered at her for tearing her
dress--she couldn't get through a "thornin'" hedge right. There was
only one thing she could do, and that was to "make a vool of zum
veller" (make a fool of some fellow). Dolly did not take much notice,
except that her nervous temperament showed slight excitement in the
manner she used her rake, now turning the hay quickly, now missing
altogether, then catching the teeth of the rake in the
buttercup-runners. The women did not fail to tell her how awkward she
was. By-and-by Dolly bounced forward, and, with a flush on her cheek,
took the place next to the men. They teased her too, you see, but there
was no spiteful malice in their tongues. There are some natures which,
naturally meek, if much condemned, defy that condemnation, and
willingly give it ground of justification by open guilt. The women
accused her of too free a carriage with the men; she replied by seeking
their company in the broad glare of the summer day. They laughed
loudly, joked, but welcomed her; they chatted with her gaily; they
compelled her to sip from their ale as they paused by the hedge. By
noon there was a high colour on her cheeks; the sun, the exercise, the
badinage had brought it up.

So fair a complexion could not brown even in summer, exposed to the
utmost heat. The beams indeed did heighten the hue of her cheeks a
little, but it did not shade to brown. Her chin and neck were wholly
untanned, white and soft, and the blue veins roamed at their will. Lips
red, a little full perhaps; teeth slightly prominent but white and
gleamy as she smiled. Dark brown hair in no great abundance, always
slipping out of its confinement and straggling, now on her forehead,
and now on her shoulders, like wandering bines of bryony. The softest
of brown eyes under long eyelashes; eyes that seemed to see everything
in its gentlest aspect, that could see no harm anywhere. A ready smile
on the face, and a smile in the form. Her shape yielded so easily at
each movement that it seemed to smile as she walked. Her nose was the
least pleasing feature--not delicate enough to fit with the complexion,
and distinctly upturned, though not offensively. But it was not
noticed; no one saw anything beyond the laughing lips, the laughing
shape, the eyes that melted so near to tears. The torn dress, the
straggling hair, the tattered shoes, the unmended stocking, the straw
hat split, the mingled poverty and carelessness--perhaps rather
dreaminess--disappeared when once you had met the full untroubled gaze
of those beautiful eyes. Untroubled, that is, with any ulterior thought
of evil or cunning; they were as open as the day, the day which you can
make your own for evil or good. So, too, like the day, was she ready to
the making.

No stability; now fast in motion; now slow; now by fits and starts;
washing her face to-day, her hands to-morrow. Never going straight,
even along the road; talking with the waggoner, helping a child to pick
watercress, patting the shepherd's dog, finding a flower, and late
every morning at the hay-field. It was so far to come, she said; no
doubt it was, if these stoppings and doublings were counted in. No
character whatever, no more than the wind; she was like a well-hung
gate swinging to a touch; like water yielding to let a reed sway; like
a singing-flame rising and falling to a word, and even to an altered
tone of voice. A word pushed her this way; a word pushed her that.
Always yielding, sweet, and gentle. Is not this the most seductive of
all characters in women?

Had they left her alone, would it have been any different? Those
bitter, coarse, feminine tongues which gave her the name of evil, and
so led her to openly announce that, as she had the name, she would
carry on the game. That is an old country saying, "Bear the name, carry
the game." If you have the name of a poacher, then poach; you will be
no worse off and you will have the pleasure of the poaching. It is a
serious matter, indeed, to give any one a bad name, more especially a
sensitive, nervous, beautiful girl.

Under the shady oaks at luncheon the men all petted her and flattered
her in their rude way, which, rude as it was, had the advantage of
admitting of no mistake. Two or three more men strolled up from other
fields, luncheon in hand and eating as they came, merely to chat with
her. One was a mower--a powerful fellow, big boned, big everywhere, and
heavy fisted; his chest had been open since four o'clock that morning
to the sun, and was tanned like his face. He took her in his mighty
arms and kissed her before them all; not one dared move, for the weight
of that bone-smashing fist was known. Big Mat drank, as all strong men
do; he fought; beyond that there was nothing against him. He worked
hard, and farmers are only too glad of a man who will work. He was
rather a favourite with the master, and trusted. He kissed her twice,
and then went back to his work of mowing, which needs more strength
than any other country labour--a mower is to a man what a dray-horse is
to a horse.

They lingered long over the luncheon under the shady oaks, with the
great blue tile of the sky overhead, and the sweet scent of hay around
them. They lingered so long, that young Mr. Andrew came to start them
again, and found Dolly's cheeks all aglow. The heat and the laughter
had warmed them; her cheeks burned, in contrast to her white, pure
forehead--for her hat was off--and to the cool shade of the trees. She
lingered yet a little longer chatting with Mr. Andrew--lingered a full
half-hour--and when they parted, she had given him a rose from the
hedge. Young Mr. Andrew was but half a farmer's son; he was destined
for a merchant's office in town; he had been educated for it, and was
only awaiting the promised opening. He was young, but no yokel; too
knowing of town cunning and selfish hardness to entangle himself. Yet
those soft brown eyes, that laughing shape; Andrew was very young and
so was she, and the summer sun burned warm.

The blackbirds whistled the day away, and the swallows sought their
nests under the eaves. The curved moon hung on the sky as the hunter's
horn on the wall. Timid Wat--the hare--came ambling along the lane, and
almost ran against two lovers in a recess of the bushes by an elm.
Andrew, Andrew! these lips are too sweet for you; get you to your
desk--that smiling shape, those shaded, soft brown eyes, let them
alone. Be generous--do not awaken hopes you can never, never fulfil.
The new-mown hay is scented yet more sweetly in the evening--of a
summer's eve it is always too soon to go home.

The blackbirds whistled again, big Mat slew the grass from the rising
to the going down of the sun--moon-daisies, sorrel, and buttercups lay
in rows of swathe as he mowed. I wonder whether the man ever thought,
as he reposed at noontide on a couch of grass under the hedge? Did he
think that those immense muscles, that broad, rough-hewn plank of a
chest of his, those vast bones encased in sinewy limbs--being flesh in
its fulness--ought to have more of this earth than mere common men, and
still more than thin-faced people--mere people, not men--in black
coats? Did he dimly claim the rights of strength in his mind, and
arrogate to himself the prerogatives of arbitrary kings? Who knows what
big processes of reasoning, dim and big, passed through his mind in the
summer days? Did he conclude he had a right to take what others only
asked or worked for?

The sweet scent of the new-mown hay disappeared, the hay became whiter,
the ricks rose higher, and were topped and finished. Hourly the year
grew drier and sultry, as the time of wheat-harvest approached. Sap of
spring had dried away; dry stalk of high summer remained, browned with
heat. Mr. Andrew (in the country the son is always called by his
Christian name, with the prefix Master or Mr.) had been sent for to
London to fill the promised lucrative berth. The reapers were in the
corn--Dolly tying up; big Mat slashing at the yellow stalks. Why the
man worked so hard no one could imagine, unless it was for pure
physical pleasure of using those great muscles. Unless, indeed, a fire,
as it were, was burning in his mind, and drove him to labour to smother
it, as they smother fires by beating them. Dolly was happier than
ever--the gayest of the gay. She sang, she laughed, her white, gleaming
teeth shone in the sunshine; it was as if she had some secret which
enabled her to defy the taunts and cruel, shameless words hurled at
her, like clods of earth, by the other women. Gay she was, as the
brilliant poppies who, having the sun as their own, cared for nothing
else.

Till suddenly, just before the close of harvest, Dolly and Mat were
missing from the field. Of course their absence was slanderously
connected, but there was no known ground for it. Big Mat was found
intoxicated at the tavern, from which he never moved for a fortnight,
spending in one long drain of drink the lump of money his mighty arms
had torn from the sun in the burning hours of work. Dolly was ill at
home; sometimes in her room, sometimes downstairs; but ill, shaky and
weak--ague they called it. There were dark circles round her eyes, her
chin drooped to her breast; she wrapped herself in a shawl in all the
heat. It was some time before even the necessity of working brought her
forth again, and then her manner was hurried and furtive; she would
begin trembling all of a minute, and her eyes filled quickly.

By degrees the autumn advanced, and the rooks followed the ploughman.
Dolly gradually recovered something of her physical buoyancy; her
former light-heartedness never returned. Sometimes an incident would
cause a flash of the old gaiety, only for her to sink back into subdued
quietness. The change was most noticeable in her eyes; soft and tender
still, brown and velvety, there was a deep sadness in them--the longer
she looked at you, the more it was visible. They seemed as if her
spirit had suffered some great wrong; too great for redress, and that
could only be borne in silence.

How beautiful are beautiful eyes! Not from one aspect only, as a
picture is, where the light falls rightly on it--the painter's point of
view--they vary to every and any aspect. The orb rolls to meet the
changing circumstance, and is adjusted to all. But a little inquiry
into the mechanism of the eyes will indicate how wondrously they are
formed. Science has dispelled many illusions, broken many dreams; but
here, in the investigation of the eye, it has added to our marvelling
interest. The eye is still like the work of a magician: it is
physically divine. Besides the liquid flesh which delights the
beholder, there is then the retina, the mysterious nerve which receives
a thousand pictures on one surface and confuses none; and further, the
mystery of the brain, which reproduces them at will, twenty years, yes
threescore years and ten, afterwards. Perhaps of all physical things,
the eye is most beautiful, most divine.

Her eyes were still beautiful, but subdued and full of a great wrong.
What that wrong was became apparent in the course of time. Dolly had to
live with Mat, and, unhappily, not as his wife. Next harvest there was
a child wrapped in a red shawl with her in the field, placed under the
shocks while she worked. Her brother Bill talked and threatened--of
what avail was it? The law gave no redress, and among men in these
things, force is master still. There were none who could meet big Mat
in fight.

Something seemed to burn in Mat like fire. Now he worked, and now he
drank, but the drink which would have killed another did him no injury.
He grew and flourished upon it, more bone, more muscle, more of the
savage nature of original man. But there was something within on fire.
Was he not satisfied even yet? Did he arrogate yet further prerogatives
of kings?--prerogatives which even kings claim no longer. One day,
while in drink, his heavy fist descended--he forgot his might; he did
not check it, like Ulysses in the battle with Irus--and Dolly fell.

When they lifted her up, one eye was gone.

It was utterly put out, organically destroyed; no skill, no money, no
loving care could restore it. The soft, brown velvet, the laugh, the
tear gone for ever. The divine eye was broken--battered as a stone
might be. The exquisite structure which reflected the trees and
flowers, and took to itself the colour of the summer sky, was shapeless.

In the second year, Mr. Andrew came down, and one day met her in the
village. He did not know her. The stoop, the dress which clothed, but
responded to no curve, the sunken breast, and the sightless eye, how
should he recognise these? This ragged, plain, this ugly, repellent
creature--he did not know her. She spoke; Mr. Andrew hastily fumbled in
his pocket, fetched out half-a-crown, gave it, and passed on quickly.
How fortunate that he had not entangled himself!

Meantime, Mat drank and worked harder than ever, and became more
morose, so that no one dared cross him, yet as a worker he was trusted
by the farmer. Whatever it was, the fire in him burned deeper, and to
the very quick. The poppies came and went once more, the harvest moon
rose yellow and ruddy, all the joy of the year proceeded, but Dolly was
like a violet over which a waggon-wheel had rolled. The thorn had gone
deep into her bosom.


II

RURAL DYNAMITE

In the cold North men eat bread of fir-bark; in our own fields the
mouse, if pressed for food in winter, will gnaw the bark of sapling
trees. Frost sharpens the teeth like a file, and hunger is keener than
frost. If any one used to more fertile scenes had walked across the
barren meads Mr. Roberts rented as the summer declined, he would have
said that a living could only be gained from them as the mouse gains it
in frost-time. By sharp-set nibbling and paring; by the keenest
frost-bitten meanness of living; by scraping a little bit here, and
saving another trifle yonder, a farmer might possibly get through the
year. At the end of each year he would be rather worse off than before,
descending a step annually. He must nibble like a frost-driven mouse to
merely exist. So poor was the soil, that the clay came to the surface,
and in wet weather a slip of the foot exposed it--the heel cut through
the veneer of turf into the cold, dead, moist clay. Nothing grew but
rushes. Every time a horse moved over the marshy land his hoof left
deep holes which never again filled up, but remained the year through,
now puddles, full of rain water, and now dry holes. The rain made the
ground a swamp; the sun cracked it as it does paint. Who could pay rent
for such a place?--for rushes, flags, and water.

Yet it was said, with whisper and nod, that the tenant, Mr. Roberts,
was a warm man as warm men go after several years of bad seasons,
falling prices, and troubles of all kinds. For one thing, he hopped,
and it is noted among country folk, that, if a man hops, he generally
accumulates money. Mr. Roberts hopped, or rather dragged his legs from
rheumatics contracted in thirty years' hardest of hard labour on that
thankless farm. Never did any man labour so continually as he, from the
earliest winter dawn when the blackbird, with puffed feathers, still
tried to slumber in the thornbush, but could not for cold, on till the
latest summer eve, after the white barn owl had passed round the fir
copse. Both with his hands, and with his eyes, now working, now
watching, the man ceased not, and such was his dogged pertinacity that,
like the mouse, he won a living. He did more, he saved. At what price?
At the price of a fireless life: I mean without cheer, by denial of
everything which renders human life superior to that of the rabbit in
his burrow. No wife, no children, no niece, or any woman to see to his
comforts; no comfort and no pleasure; a bare house and rheumatism.
Bill, his principal labourer, Dolly's brother, slept with him in the
same bed, master and man, a custom common in old times, long since
generally disused.

Yet Mr. Roberts was not without some humanism, if such a word may be
used; certainly he never gave away a penny, but as certainly he cheated
no man. He was upright in conduct, and not unpleasant in manner. He
could not have been utterly crabbed for this one labourer, Bill, to
stay with him five-and-twenty years. This was the six-and-twentieth
year they had dwelt there together in the gaunt, grey, lonely house,
with woods around them, isolated from the world, and without a hearth.
A hearth is no hearth unless a woman sit by it. This six-and-twentieth
year, the season then just ended, had been the worst of the series;
rain had spoiled the hay, increased the payment of wages by lengthening
the time of hay-making; ruin, he declared, stared him in the face; he
supposed at last he must leave the tenancy. And now the harvest was
done, the ricks thatched with flags from the marsh (to save straw), the
partridges were dispersed, the sportsmen having broken up the coveys,
the black swifts had departed--they built every year in the grey stone
slates on the lonely house--and nothing was left to be done but to tend
the cattle morning and evening, to reflect on the losses, and to talk
ceaselessly of the new terror which hung over the whole district.

It was rick-burning. Probably, gentlemen in London, who "sit at home at
ease," imagine rick-burning a thing of the past, impossible since
insurance robbed the incendiary of his sting, unheard of and extinct.
Nothing of the kind. That it is not general is true, still to this day
it breaks out in places, and rages with vehemence, placing the
countryside under a reign of terror. The thing seems inexplicable, but
it is a fact; the burning of ricks and farm-sheds every now and then,
in certain localities, reaches the dimensions of a public disaster.

One night from the garret window, Mr. Roberts, and Bill, his man,
counted five fires visible at once. One was in full sight, not a mile
distant, two behind the wood, above which rose the red glow, the other
two dimly illumined the horizon on the left like a rising moon. While
they watched in the dark garret the rats scampered behind them, and a
white barn owl floated silently by. They counted up fourteen fires that
had taken place since the beginning of the month, and now there were
five together. Mr. Roberts did not sleep that night. Being so near the
woods and preserves it was part of the understanding that he should not
keep a gun--he took a stout staff, and went out to his hayricks, and
there stayed till daylight. By ten o'clock he was trudging into the
town; his mind had been half-crazed with anxiety for his ricks; he was
not insured, he had never insured, just to save the few shillings it
cost, such was the nibbling by which he lived. He had struggled hard
and kept the secret to himself--of the non-insurance--he foresaw that
if known he should immediately suffer. But at the town the insurance
agent demurred to issue a policy. The losses had been so heavy, there
was no knowing how much farther the loss might extend, for not the
slightest trace of the incendiary had yet been discovered,
notwithstanding the reward offered, and this was a new policy. Had it
been to add to an old one, had Mr. Roberts insured in previous years,
it would have been different. He could not do it on his own
responsibility, he must communicate with the head office; most likely
they would do it, but he must have their authority. By return of post
he should know. Mr. Roberts trudged home again, with the misery of two
more nights confronting him; two more nights of exposure to the chance
of utter ruin. If those ricks were burned, the savings--the nibblings
of his life--were gone. This intense, frost-bitten economy, by which
alone he had been able to prosper, now threatened to overwhelm him with
destruction.

There is nothing that burns so resolutely as a hayrick; nothing that
catches fire so easily. Children are playing with matches; one holds
the ignited match till, it scorches the fingers, and then drops it. The
expiring flame touches three blades of dry grass, of hay fallen from
the rick, these flare immediately; the flame runs along like a train of
gun-powder, rushes up the side of the rick, singeing it as a horse's
coat is singed, takes the straw of the thatch which blackens into a
hole, cuts its way through, the draught lifts it up the slope of the
thatch, and in five minutes the rick is on fire irrecoverably. Unless
beaten out at the first start, it is certain to go on. A spark from a
pipe, dropped from the mouth of a sleeping man, will do it. Once well
alight, and the engines may come at full speed, one five miles, one
eight, two ten; they may pump the pond dry, and lay hose to the distant
brook--it is in vain. The spread of the flames may be arrested, but not
all the water that can be thrown will put out the rick. The outside of
the rick where the water strikes it turns black, and dense smoke
arises, but the inside core continues to burn till the last piece is
charred. All that can be done is to hastily cut away that side of the
rick--if any remains--yet untouched, and carry it bodily away. A
hayrick will burn for hours, one huge mass of concentrated, glowing,
solid fire, not much flame, but glowing coals, so that the farmer may
fully understand, may watch and study and fully comprehend the extent
of his loss. It burns itself from a square to a dome, and the red dome
grows gradually smaller till its lowest layer of ashes strews the
ground. It burns itself as it were in blocks: the rick was really
homogeneous; it looks while aglow as if it had been constructed of
large bricks or blocks of hay. These now blackened blocks dry and
crumble one by one till the dome sinks. Under foot the earth is heated,
so intense is the fire; no one can approach, even on the windward side,
within a pole's length. A widening stream of dense white smoke flows
away upwards, flecked with great sparks, blackening the elms, and
carrying flakes of burning hay over outhouses, sheds, and farmsteads.
Thus from the clouds, as it seems, drops further destruction. Nothing
in the line of the wind is safe. Fine impalpable ashes drift and fall
like rain half a mile away. Sometimes they remain suspended in the air
for hours, and come down presently when the fire is out, like volcanic
dust drifting from the crater. This dust lies soft and silky on the
hand. By the burning rick, the air rushing to the furnace roars aloud,
coming so swiftly as to be cold; on one side intense heat, on the other
cold wind. The pump, pump, swing, swing of the manual engines; the
quick, short pant of the steam fire-engine; the stream and hiss of the
water; shouts and answers; gleaming brass helmets; frightened birds;
crowds of white faces, whose frames are in shadow; a red glow on the
black, wet mud of the empty pond; rosy light on the walls of the
homestead, crossed with vast magnified shadows; windows glistening; men
dragging sail-like tarpaulins and rick cloths to cover the sheds;
constables upright and quiet, but watchful, standing at intervals to
keep order; if by day, the strangest mixture of perfect calm and heated
anxiety, the smoke bluish, the floating flakes visible as black specks,
the flames tawny, pigeons fluttering round, cows grazing in idol-like
indifference to human fears. Ultimately, rows of flattened and roughly
circular layers of blackened ashes, whose traces remain for months.

This is dynamite in the hands of the village ruffian.

This hay, or wheat, or barley, not only represents money; it represents
the work of an entire year, the sunshine of a whole summer; it is the
outcome of man's thought and patient labour, and it is the food of the
helpless cattle. Besides the hay, there often go with it buildings,
implements, waggons, and occasionally horses are suffocated. Once now
and then the farmstead goes.

Now, has not the farmer, even if covered by insurance, good reason to
dread this horrible incendiarism? It is a blow at his moral existence
as well as at his pecuniary interests. Hardened indeed must be that
heart that could look at the old familiar scene, blackened, fire-spilt,
trodden, and blotted, without an inward desolation. Boxes and barrels
of merchandise in warehouses can be replaced, but money does not
replace the growth of nature.

Hence the brutality of it--the blow at a man's heart. His hay, his
wheat, his cattle, are to a farmer part of his life; coin will not
replace them. Nor does the incendiary care if the man himself, his
house, home, and all perish at the same time. It is dynamite in despite
of insurance. The new system of silos--burying the grass when cut at
once in its green state, in artificial caves--may much reduce the risk
of fire if it comes into general use.

These fire invasions almost always come in the form of an epidemic; not
one but three, five, ten, fifteen fires follow in quick succession.
Sometimes they last through an entire winter, though often known to
take place in summer, directly after harvest.

Rarely does detection happen; to this day half these incendiary fires
are never followed by punishment. Yet it is noted that they generally
occur within a certain radius; they are all within six, or seven, or
eight miles, being about the distance that a man or two bent on evil
could compass in the night time. But it is not always night; numerous
fires are started in broad daylight. Stress of winter weather, little
food, and clothing, and less fuel at home have been put forward as
causes of a chill desperation, ending in crime. On the contrary, these
fires frequently occur when labourers' pockets are full, just after
they have received their harvest wages. Bread is not at famine prices;
hard masters are not specially selected for the gratification of spite;
good masters suffer equally. What then is the cause?

There is none but that bitter, bitter feeling which I venture to call
the dynamite disposition, and which is found in every part of the
civilised world; in Germany, Italy, France, and our own mildly ruled
England. A brooding, morose, concentrated hatred of those who possess
any kind of substance or comfort; landlord, farmer, every one. An
unsparing vendetta, a merciless shark-like thirst of destructive
vengeance; a monomania of battering, smashing, crushing, such as seizes
the Lancashire weaver, who kicks his woman's brains out without any
special reason for dislike, mingled with and made more terrible by this
unchangeable hostility to property and those who own it. No creed, no
high moral hopes of the rights of man and social regeneration, no true
sans culottism even, nothing at all but set teeth and inflated
nostrils; blow up, burn, smash, annihilate! A disposition or character
which is not imaginary but a fact, as proved abundantly by the placing
of rails and iron chairs on lines to upset trains, by the dynamite
explosions at Government offices, railway stations, and even at
newspaper offices, the sending of letters filled with explosives,
firing dynamite in trout streams just to destroy the harmless fish; a
character which in the country has hitherto manifested itself in the
burning of ricks and farm buildings. Science is always putting fresh
power into the hands of this class. In cities they have partly awakened
to the power of knowledge; in the country they still use the match. If
any one thinks that there is no danger in England because there are no
deep-seated causes of discontent, such as foreign rule, oppressive
enactments, or conscription, I can assure him that he is wofully
mistaken. This class needs no cause at all; prosperity cannot allay its
hatred, and adversity does not weaken it. It is certainly unwise to the
last degree to provoke this demon, to control which as yet no means
have been found. You cannot arrest the invisible; you cannot pour
Martini-Henry bullets into a phantom. How are you going to capture
people who blow themselves into atoms in order to shatter the frame of
a Czar?

In its dealings with the lower class this generation is certainly far
from wise. Never was the distinction so sharp between the poor--the
sullen poor who stand scornful and desperate at the street corners--and
the well-to-do. The contrast now extends to every one who can afford a
black coat. It is not confined to the millionaire. The contrast is with
every black coat. Those who only see the drawing-room side of society,
those who move, too, in the well-oiled atmosphere of commercial
offices, are quite ignorant of the savage animosity which watches them
to and fro the office or the drawing-room from the street corner.
Question it is if any mediaeval soldiery bursting abroad in Sinigaglia
were so brutal as is the street rough, that blot and hideous product of
modern civilisation. How easy it is to point to the sobriety and the
good sense of the working class and smile in assumed complacency! What
have the sober mass of the working class to do with it? No more than
you or I, or the Rothschilds, or dukes of blood royal. There the thing
is, and it requires no great sagacity to see that the present mode of
dealing with it is a failure and likely to be worse. If you have
gunpowder, you should not put it under hydraulic pressure. You should
not stir it up and hold matches to it to see if it is there. That is
what prosecutions and imprisonments on charges of atheism and so on do.
It is stirring up the powder and trying it with a match.

Nor should you put it under hydraulic pressure, which is now being done
all over the country, under the new laws which force every wretch who
enters a workhouse for a night's shelter to stay there two nights;
under the cold-blooded cruelty which, in the guise of science, takes
the miserable quarter of a pint of ale from the lips of the palsied and
decrepit inmates; which puts the imbecile--even the guiltless
imbecile--on what is practically bread and water. Words fail me to
express the cruelty and inhumanity of this crazed legislation.

Sometimes we see a complacent paragraph in the papers, penned by an
official doubtless, congratulating the public that the number relieved
under the new regulations has dropped from, say, six hundred to a
hundred and fifty. And what, oh blindest of the blind, do you imagine
has become of the remaining four hundred and fifty? Has your precious
folly extinguished them? Are they dead? No, indeed. All over the
country, hydraulic pressure, in the name of science, progress,
temperance, and similar perverted things, is being put on the
gunpowder--or the dynamite, if you like--of society. Every now and then
some individual member of the Army of Wretches turns and becomes the
Devil of modern civilisation. Modern civilisation has put out the
spiritual Devil and produced the Demon of Dynamite. Let me raise a
voice, in pleading for more humane treatment of the poor--the only way,
believe me, by which society can narrow down and confine the operations
of this new Devil. A human being is not a dog, yet is treated worse
than a dog.

Force these human dogs to learn to read with empty stomachs--stomachs
craving for a piece of bread while education is crammed into them. In
manhood, if unfortunate, set them to break stones. If imbecility
supervene give them bread and water. In helpless age give them the cup
of cold water. This is the way to breed dynamite. And then at the other
end of the scale let your Thames Embankment Boulevard be the domain of
the street rough; let your Islington streets be swept by bands of
brutes; let the well dressed be afraid to venture anywhere unless in
the glare of gas and electric light! Manufacture it in one district,
and give it free scope and play in another. Yet never was there an age
in which the mass of society, from the titled to the cottager, was so
full of real and true humanity, so ready to start forward to help, so
imbued with the highest sentiments. The wrong is done in official
circles. No steel-clad baron of Norman days, no ruthless red-stockinged
cardinal, with the Bastile in one hand and the tumbril in the other,
ever ruled with so total an absence of Heart as the modern "official,"
the Tyrants of the nineteenth century; whose rods are hobbies in the
name of science miscalled, in the name of temperance perverted, in the
name of progress backwards, in the name of education without food. It
is time that the common-sense of society at large rose in revolution
against it. Meantime dynamite.

This is a long digression: suppose while you have been reading it that
Mr. Roberts has passed one of the two terrible nights, his faithful
Bill at one end of the rickyard and himself at the other. The second
night they took up their positions in the same manner as soon as it was
dark. There was no moon, and the sky was overcast with those stationary
clouds which often precede a great storm, so that the darkness was
marked, and after they had parted a step or two they lost sight of each
other. Worn with long wakefulness, and hard labour during the day, they
both dropped asleep at their posts. Mr. Roberts awoke from the dead
vacancy of sleep to the sensation of a flash of light crossing his
eyelids, and to catch a glimpse of a man's neck with a red necktie
illuminated by flame like a Rembrandt head in the centre of shadow. He
leaped forward literally yelling--the incendiary he wholly forgot--his
rick! his rick! He beat the side of the rick with his stick, and as it
had but just caught he beat the flame out. Then he dropped senseless on
the ground. Bill, awakened by Roberts' awful yell or shriek of
excitement, started to his feet, heard a man rushing by in the
darkness, and hurled his heavy stick in that direction. By the thud
which followed and a curse, he knew it had hit the object, but not with
sufficient force to bring the scoundrel down. The fellow escaped; Bill
went to his master and lifted him up; how he got Roberts home he did
not know, but it was hours before Roberts could speak. Towards sunrise
he recovered, and would go immediately to assure himself that the ricks
were safe. Then they found a man's hat--Bill's stick had knocked it
off--and by that hat and the red necktie the incendiary was brought to
justice. The hat was big Mat's; he always wore a red necktie.

Big Mat made no defence; he was simply stolidly indifferent to the
whole proceedings. The only statement he made was that he had not fired
four of the ricks, and he did not know who had done so. Example is
contagious; some one had followed the dynamite lead, detection never
took place, but the fires ceased. Mat, of course, went for the longest
period of penal servitude the law allotted. I should say that he did
not himself know why he did it. That intense, brooding moroseness, that
wormwood hatred, does not often understand itself. So much the more
dangerous is it; no argument, no softening influence can reach it.

Faithful Bill, who had served Mr. Roberts almost all his life, and who
probably would have served him till the end, received a money reward
from the insurance office for his share in detecting the incendiary.
This reward ruined him--killed him. Golden sovereigns in his pocket
destroyed him. He went on the drink; he drank, and was enticed to
drink, till in six weeks he died in the infirmary of the workhouse.

Mat being in the convict prison, and Dolly near to another confinement,
she could not support herself; she was driven to the same workhouse in
which her brother had but just died. I am not sure, but believe that
pseudo-science, the Torturer of these days, denied her the least drop
of alcohol during her travail. If it did permit one drop, then was the
Torturer false to his creed. Dolly survived, but utterly broken,
hollow-chested, a workhouse fixture. Still, so long as she could stand
she had to wash in the laundry; weak as she was, they weakened her
still further with steam and heat, and labour. Washing is hard work for
those who enjoy health and vigour. To a girl, broken in heart and body,
it is a slow destroyer. Heat relaxes all the fibres; Dolly's required
bracing. Steam will soften wood and enable the artificer to bend it to
any shape. Dolly's chest became yet more hollow; her cheek-bones
prominent; she bent to the steam. This was the girl who had lingered in
the lane to help the boy pick watercress, to gather a flower, to listen
to a thrush, to bask in the sunshine. Open air and green fields were to
her life itself. Heart miseries are always better borne in the open
air. How just, how truly scientific, to shut her in a steaming
wash-house!

The workhouse was situated in a lovely spot, on the lowest slope of
hills, hills covered afar with woods. Meads at hand, corn-fields
farther away, then green slopes over which broad cloud-shadows glided
slowly. The larks sang in spring, in summer the wheat was golden, in
autumn the distant woods were brown and red and yellow. Had you spent
your youth in those fields, had your little drama of life been enacted
in them, do you not think that you would like at least to gaze out at
them from the windows of your prison? It was observed that the
miserable wretches were always looking out of the windows in this
direction. The windows on that side were accordingly built up and
bricked in that they might not look out.




BITS OF OAK BARK

I

THE ACORN-GATHERER

Black rooks, yellow oak leaves, and a boy asleep at the foot of the
tree. His head was lying on a bulging root close to the stem: his feet
reached to a small sack or bag half full of acorns. In his slumber his
forehead frowned--they were fixed lines, like the grooves in the oak
bark. There was nothing else in his features attractive or repellent:
they were such as might have belonged to a dozen hedge children. The
set angry frown was the only distinguishing mark--like the dents on a
penny made by a hobnail boot, by which it can be known from twenty
otherwise precisely similar. His clothes were little better than
sacking, but clean, tidy, and repaired. Any one would have said, "Poor,
but carefully tended." A kind heart might have put a threepenny-bit in
his clenched little fist, and sighed. But that iron set frown on the
young brow would not have unbent even for the silver. Caw! Caw!

The happiest creatures in the world are the rooks at the acorns. It is
not only the eating of them, but the finding: the fluttering up there
and hopping from branch to branch, the sidling out to the extreme end
of the bough, and the inward chuckling when a friend lets his acorn
drop tip-tap from bough to bough. Amid such plenty they cannot quarrel
or fight, having no cause of battle, but they can boast of success, and
do so to the loudest of their voices. He who has selected a choice one
flies with it as if it were a nugget in his beak, out to some open spot
of ground, followed by a general Caw!

This was going on above while the boy slept below. A thrush looked out
from the hedge, and among the short grass there was still the hum of
bees, constant sun-worshippers as they are. The sunshine gleamed on the
rooks' black feathers overhead, and on the sward sparkled from
hawkweed, some lotus and yellow weed, as from a faint ripple of water.
The oak was near a corner formed by two hedges, and in the angle was a
narrow thorny gap. Presently an old woman, very upright, came through
this gap carrying a faggot on her shoulder and a stout ash stick in her
hand. She was very clean, well dressed for a labouring woman, hard of
feature, but superior in some scarcely defined way to most of her
class. The upright carriage had something to do with it, the firm
mouth, the light blue eyes that looked every one straight in the face.
Possibly these, however, had less effect than her conscious
righteousness. Her religion lifted her above the rest, and I do assure
you that it was perfectly genuine. That hard face and cotton gown would
have gone to the stake.

When she had got through the gap she put the faggot down in it, walked
a short distance out into the field, and came back towards the boy,
keeping him between her and the corner. Caw! said the rooks, Caw! Caw!
Thwack, thwack, bang, went the ash stick on the sleeping boy, heavily
enough to have broken his bones. Like a piece of machinery suddenly let
loose, without a second of dubious awakening and without a cry, he
darted straight for the gap in the corner. There the faggot stopped
him, and before he could tear it away the old woman had him again,
thwack, thwack, and one last stinging slash across his legs as he
doubled past her. Quick as the wind as he rushed he picked up the bag
of acorns and pitched it into the mound, where the acorns rolled down
into a pond and were lost--a good round shilling's worth. Then across
the field without his cap, over the rising ground, and out of sight.
The old woman made no attempt to hold him, knowing from previous
experience that it was useless, and would probably result in her own
overthrow. The faggot, brought a quarter of a mile for the purpose,
enabled her, you see, to get two good chances at him.

A wickeder boy never lived: nothing could be done with the reprobate.
He was her grandson--at least, the son of her daughter, for he was not
legitimate. The man drank, the girl died, as was believed, of sheer
starvation: the granny kept the child, and he was now between ten and
eleven years old. She had done and did her duty, as she understood it.
A prayer-meeting was held in her cottage twice a week, she prayed
herself aloud among them, she was a leading member of the sect. Neither
example, precept, nor the rod could change that boy's heart. In time
perhaps she got to beat him from habit rather than from any particular
anger of the moment, just as she fetched water and filled her kettle,
as one of the ordinary events of the day. Why did not the father
interfere? Because if so he would have had to keep his son: so many
shillings a week the less for ale.

In the garden attached to the cottage there was a small shed with a
padlock, used to store produce or wood in. One morning, after a severe
beating, she drove the boy in there and locked him in the whole day
without food. It was no use, he was as hardened as ever.

A footpath which crossed the field went by the cottage, and every
Sunday those who were walking to church could see the boy in the window
with granny's Bible open before him. There he had to sit, the door
locked, under terror of stick, and study the page. What was the use of
compelling him to do that? He could not read. "No," said the old woman,
"he won't read, but I makes him look at his book."

The thwacking went on for some time, when one day the boy was sent on
an errand two or three miles, and for a wonder started willingly
enough. At night he did not return, nor the next day, nor the next, and
it was as clear as possible that he had run away. No one thought of
tracking his footsteps, or following up the path he had to take, which
passed a railway, brooks, and a canal. He had run away, and he might
stop away: it was beautiful summer weather, and it would do him no harm
to stop out for a week. A dealer who had business in a field by the
canal thought indeed that he saw something in the water, but he did not
want any trouble, nor indeed did he know that some one was missing.
Most likely a dead dog; so he turned his back and went to look again at
the cow he thought of buying. A barge came by, and the steerswoman,
with a pipe in her mouth, saw something roll over and come up under the
rudder: the length of the barge having passed over it. She knew what it
was, but she wanted to reach the wharf and go ashore and have a quart
of ale. No use picking it up, only make a mess on deck, there was no
reward--"Gee-up! Neddy." The barge went on, turning up the mud in the
shallow water, sending ripples washing up to the grassy meadow shores,
while the moorhens hid in the flags till it was gone. In time a
labourer walking on the towing-path saw "it," and fished it out, and
with it a slender ash sapling, with twine and hook, a worm still on it.
This was why the dead boy had gone so willingly, thinking to fish in
the "river," as he called the canal. When his feet slipped and he fell
in, his fishing-line somehow became twisted about his arms and legs,
else most likely he would have scrambled out, as it was not very deep.
This was the end; nor was he even remembered. Does any one sorrow for
the rook, shot, and hung up as a scarecrow? The boy had been talked to,
and held up as a scarecrow all his life: he was dead, and that is all.
As for granny, she felt no twinge: she had done her duty.


II

THE LEGEND OF A GATEWAY

A great beech tree with a white mark some way up the trunk stood in the
mound by a gate which opened into a lane. Strangers coming down the
lane in the dusk often hesitated before they approached this beech. The
white mark looked like a ghostly figure emerging from the dark hedge
and the shadow of the tree. The trunk itself was of the same hue at
that hour as the bushes, so that the whiteness seemed to stand out
unsupported. So perfect was the illusion that even those who knew the
spot well, walking or riding past and not thinking about it, started as
it suddenly came into sight. Ploughboys used to throw flints at it, as
if the sound of the stone striking the tree assured them that it was
really material. Some lichen was apparently the cause of this
whiteness: the great beech indeed was known to be decaying and was
dotted with knot-holes high above. The gate was rather low, so that any
one could lean with arms over the top bar.

At one time a lady used to be very frequently seen just inside the
gate, generally without a hat, for the homestead was close by.
Sometimes a horse, saddled and bridled, but without his rider, was
observed to be fastened to the gate, and country people, being
singularly curious and inquisitive, if they chanced to go by always
peered through every opening in the hedge till they had discerned where
the pair were walking among the cowslips. More often a spaniel betrayed
them, especially in the evening, for while the courting was proceeding
he amused himself digging with his paws at the rabbit-holes in the
mound. The folk returning to their cottages at even smiled and looked
meaningly at each other if they heard a peculiarly long and shrill
whistle, which was known to every one as Luke's signal. Some said that
it was heard every evening: no matter how far Luke had to ride in the
day, his whistle was sure to be heard towards dusk. Luke was a
timber-dealer, or merchant, a calling that generally leads to
substantial profit as wealth is understood in country places. He bought
up likely timber all over the neighbourhood: he had wharves on the
canal, and yards by the little railway station miles away. He often
went up to "Lunnon," but if it was ninety miles, he was sure to be back
in time to whistle. If he was not too busy the whistle used to go twice
a day, for when he started off in the morning, no matter where he had
to go to, that lane was the road to it. The lane led everywhere.


Up in the great beech about eleven o'clock on spring mornings there was
always a wood-pigeon. The wood-pigeon is a contemplative sort of bird,
and pauses now and then during the day to consider over his labours in
filling his crop. He came again about half-past four, but it was at
eleven that his visit to the beech was usually noticed. From the window
in the lady's own room the beech and the gate could be seen, and as
that was often Luke's time she frequently sat upstairs with the window
open listening for the sound of hoofs, or the well-known whistle. She
saw the wood-pigeon on so many occasions that at last she grew to watch
for the bird, and when he went up into the tree, put down her work or
her book and walked out that way. Secure in the top of the great beech,
and conscious that it was spring, when guns are laid aside, the
wood-pigeon took no heed of her. There is nothing so pleasant to stroll
among as cowslips. This mead was full of them, so much so that a little
way in front the surface seemed yellow. They had all short stalks; this
is always the case where these flowers grow very thickly, and the bells
were a pale and somewhat lemon colour. The great cowslips with deep
yellow and marked spots grow by themselves in bunches in corners or on
the banks of brooks. Here a man might have mown acres of cowslips, pale
but sweet. Out of their cups the bees hummed as she walked amongst
them, a closed book in her hand, dreaming. She generally returned with
Luke's spaniel beside her, for whether his master came or not the
knowing dog rarely missed his visit, aware that there was always
something good for him.

One morning she went dreaming on like this through the cowslips, past
the old beech and the gate, and along by the nut-tree hedge. It was
very sunny and warm, and the birds sang with all their might, for there
had been a shower at dawn, which always set their hearts atune. At
least eight or nine of them were singing at once, thrush and blackbird,
cuckoo (afar off), dove, and greenfinch, nightingale, robin and loud
wren, and larks in the sky. But, unlike all other music, though each
had a different voice and the notes crossed and interfered with each
other, yet they did not jangle, but produced the sweetest sounds. The
more of them that sang together, the sweeter the music. It is true they
all had one thought of love at heart, and that perhaps brought about
the concord. She did not expect to see Luke that morning, knowing that
he had to get some felled trees removed from a field, the farmer
wishing them taken away before the mowing-grass grew too high, and as
the spot was ten or twelve miles distant he had to start early. Not
being so much on the alert, she fell deeper perhaps into reverie, which
lasted till she reached the other side of the field, when the spaniel
rushed out of the hedge and leaped up to be noticed, quite startling
her. At the same moment she thought she heard the noise of hoofs in the
lane--it might be Luke--and immediately afterwards there came his long,
shrill, and peculiar whistle from the gate under the beech. She ran as
fast as she could, the spaniel barking beside her, and was at the gate
in two or three minutes, but Luke was not there. Nor was he anywhere in
the lane--she could see up and down it over the low gate. He must have
gone on up to the homestead, not seeing her. At the house, however, she
found they had not seen him. He had not called. A little hurt that he
should have galloped on so hastily, she set about some household
affairs, resolved to think no more of him that morning, and to give him
a frown when he came in the evening. But he did not come in the
evening; it was evident he was detained.

Luke's trees were lying in the long grass beside a copse, and the
object was to get them out of the field, across the adjacent railway,
and to set them down in a lane, on the sward, whence he could send for
them at leisure. The farmer was very anxious to get them out of the
grass, and Luke did his best to oblige him. When Luke arrived at the
spot, having for once ridden straight there, he found that almost all
the work was done, and only one tree remained. This they were getting
up on the timber-carriage, and Luke dismounted and assisted. While it
was on the timber-carriage, he said, as it was the last, they could
take it along to the wharf. The farmer had come down to watch how the
work got on, and with him was his little boy, a child of five or six.
When the boy saw the great tree fixed, he cried to be mounted on it for
a ride, but as it was so rough they persuaded him to ride on one of the
horses instead. As they all approached the gate at the level crossing,
a white gate with the words in long black letters, "To be kept Locked,"
they heard the roar of the morning express and stayed for it to go by.
So soon as the train had passed, the gate was opened and the horses
began to drag the carriage across. As they strained at the heavy
weight, the boy found the motion uncomfortable and cried out, and Luke,
always kind-hearted, went and held him on. Whether it was the shouting
at the team, the cracking of the whip, the rumbling of the wheels, or
what, was never known; but suddenly the farmer, who had crossed the
rail, screamed, "The goods!" Round the curve by the copse, and till
then hidden by it, swept a goods train, scarce thirty yards away. Luke
might have saved himself, but the boy! He snatched the child from the
horse, hurled him--literally hurled him--into the father's arms, and in
the instant was a shapeless mass. The scene is too dreadful for further
description. This miserable accident happened, as the driver of the
goods train afterwards stated, at exactly eight minutes past eleven
o'clock.

It was precisely at that time that Luke's lady, dreaming among the
cowslips, heard the noise of hoofs, and his long, shrill, and peculiar
whistle at the gate beneath the beech. She was certain of the time, for
these reasons: first, she had seen the wood-pigeon go up into the beech
just before she started out; secondly, she remembered nodding to an
aged labourer who came up to the house every morning at that hour for
his ale; thirdly, it would take a person walking slowly eight or ten
minutes to cross that side of the mead; and, fourthly, when she came
back to the house to see if Luke was there, the clock pointed to a
quarter past, and was known to be a little fast. Without a doubt she
had heard the well-known whistle, apparently coming from the gate
beneath the beech exactly at the moment poor Luke was dashed to pieces
twelve miles away.




III

A ROMAN BROOK



The brook has forgotten me, but I have not forgotten the brook. Many
faces have been mirrored since in the flowing water, many feet have
waded in the sandy shallow. I wonder if any one else can see it in a
picture before the eyes as I can, bright, and vivid as trees suddenly
shown at night by a great flash of lightning. All the leaves and
branches and the birds at roost are visible during the flash. It is
barely a second; it seems much longer. Memory, like the lightning,
reveals the pictures in the mind. Every curve, and shore, and shallow
is as familiar now as when I followed the winding stream so often. When
the mowing-grass was at its height, you could not walk far beside the
bank; it grew so thick and strong and full of umbelliferous plants as
to weary the knees. The life as it were of the meadows seemed to crowd
down towards the brook in summer, to reach out and stretch towards the
life-giving water. There the buttercups were taller and closer
together, nails of gold driven so thickly that the true surface was not
visible. Countless rootlets drew up the richness of the earth like
miners in the darkness, throwing their petals of yellow ore broadcast
above them. With their fulness of leaves the hawthorn bushes grow
larger--the trees extend farther--and thus overhung with leaf and
branch, and closely set about by grass and plant, the brook disappeared
only a little way off, and could not have been known from a mound and
hedge. It was lost in the plain of meads--the flowers alone saw its
sparkle.

Hidden in those bushes and tall grasses, high in the trees and low on
the ground, there were the nests of happy birds. In the hawthorns
blackbirds and thrushes built, often overhanging the stream, and the
fledglings fluttered out into the flowery grass. Down among the stalks
of the umbelliferous plants, where the grasses were knotted together,
the nettle-creeper concealed her treasure, having selected a hollow by
the bank so that the scythe should pass over. Up in the pollard ashes
and willows here and there wood-pigeons built. Doves cooed in the
little wooded enclosures where the brook curved almost round upon
itself. If there was a hollow in the oak a pair of starlings chose it,
for there was no advantageous nook that was not seized on. Low beside
the willow stoles the sedge-reedlings built; on the ledges of the
ditches, full of flags, moor-hens made their nests. After the swallows
had coursed long miles over the meads to and fro, they rested on the
tops of the ashes and twittered sweetly. Like the flowers and grass,
the birds were drawn towards the brook. They built by it, they came to
it to drink; in the evening a grasshopper-lark trilled in a hawthorn
bush. By night crossing the footbridge a star sometimes shone in the
water underfoot. At morn and even the peasant girls came down to dip;
their path was worn through the mowing-grass, and there was a flat
stone let into the bank as a step to stand on. Though they were poorly
habited, without one line of form or tint of colour that could please
the eye, there is something in dipping water that is
Greek--Homeric--something that carries the mind home to primitive
times. Always the little children came with them; they too loved the
brook like the grass and birds. They wanted to see the fishes dart away
and hide in the green flags: they flung daisies and buttercups into the
stream to float and catch awhile at the flags, and float again and pass
away, like the friends of our boyhood, out of sight. Where there was
pasture roan cattle came to drink, and horses, restless horses, stood
for hours by the edge under the shade of ash trees. With what joy the
spaniel plunged in, straight from the bank out among the flags--you
could mark his course by seeing their tips bend as he brushed them
swimming. All life loved the brook.

Far down away from roads and hamlets there was a small orchard on the
very bank of the stream, and just before the grass grew too high to
walk through I looked in the enclosure to speak to its owner. He was
busy with his spade at a strip of garden, and grumbled that the hares
would not let it alone, with all that stretch of grass to feed on. Nor
would the rooks; and the moor-hens ran over it, and the water-rats
burrowed; the wood-pigeons would have the peas, and there was no rest
from them all. While he talked and talked, far from the object in hand,
as aged people will, I thought how the apple tree in blossom before us
cared little enough who saw its glory. The branches were in bloom
everywhere, at the top as well as at the side; at the top where no one
could see them but the swallows. They did not grow for human
admiration: that was not their purpose; that is our affair only--we
bring the thought to the tree. On a short branch low down the trunk
there hung the weather-beaten and broken handle of an earthenware
vessel; the old man said it was a jug, one of the old folks' jugs--he
often dug them up. Some were cracked, some nearly perfect; lots of them
had been thrown out to mend the lane. There were some chips among the
heap of weeds yonder. These fragments were the remains of Anglo-Roman
pottery. Coins had been found--half a gallon of them--the children had
had most. He took one from his pocket, dug up that morning; they were
of no value, they would not ring. The labourers tried to get some ale
for them, but could not; no one would take the little brass things.
That was all he knew of the Caesars: the apples were in fine bloom now,
weren't they?

Fifteen centuries before there had been a Roman station at the spot
where the lane crossed the brook. There the centurions rested their
troops after their weary march across the downs, for the lane, now
bramble-grown and full of ruts, was then a Roman road. There were
villas, and baths, and fortifications; these things you may read about
in books. They are lost now in the hedges, under the flowering grass,
in the ash copses, all forgotten in the lane, and along the footpath
where the June roses will bloom after the apple blossom has dropped.
But just where the ancient military way crosses the brook there grow
the finest, the largest, the bluest, and most lovely forget-me-nots
that ever lover gathered for his lady.

The old man, seeing my interest in the fragments of pottery, wished to
show me something of a different kind lately discovered. He led me to a
spot where the brook was deep, and had somewhat undermined the edge. A
horse trying to drink there had pushed a quantity of earth into the
stream, and exposed a human skeleton lying within a few inches of the
water. Then I looked up the stream and remembered the buttercups and
tall grasses, the flowers that crowded down to the edge; I remembered
the nests, and the dove cooing; the girls that came down to dip, the
children that cast their flowers to float away. The wind blew the loose
apple bloom and it fell in showers of painted snow. Sweetly the
greenfinches were calling in the trees: afar the voice of the cuckoo
came over the oaks. By the side of the living water, the water that all
things rejoiced in, near to its gentle sound, and the sparkle of
sunshine on it, had lain this sorrowful thing.




MEADOW THOUGHTS

The old house stood by the silent country road, secluded by many a
long, long mile, and yet again secluded within the great walls of the
garden. Often and often I rambled up to the milestone which stood under
an oak, to look at the chipped inscription low down--"To London, 79
Miles." So far away, you see, that the very inscription was cut at the
foot of the stone, since no one would be likely to want that
information. It was half hidden by docks and nettles, despised and
unnoticed. A broad land this seventy-nine miles--how many meadows and
corn-fields, hedges and woods, in that distance?--wide enough to
seclude any house, to hide it, like an acorn in the grass. Those who
have lived all their lives in remote places do not feel the remoteness.
No one else seemed to be conscious of the breadth that separated the
place from the great centre, but it was, perhaps, that consciousness
which deepened the solitude to me. It made the silence more still; the
shadows of the oaks yet slower in their movement; everything more
earnest. To convey a full impression of the intense concentration of
Nature in the meadows is very difficult--everything is so utterly
oblivious of man's thought and man's heart. The oaks stand--quiet,
still--so still that the lichen loves them. At their feet the grass
grows, and heeds nothing. Among it the squirrels leap, and their little
hearts are as far away from you or me as the very wood of the oaks. The
sunshine settles itself in the valley by the brook, and abides there
whether we come or not. Glance through the gap in the hedge by the oak,
and see how concentrated it is--all of it, every blade of grass, and
leaf, and flower, and living creature, finch or squirrel. It is
mesmerised upon itself. Then I used to feel that it really was
seventy-nine miles to London, and not an hour or two only by rail,
really all those miles. A great, broad province of green furrow and
ploughed furrow between the old house and the city of the world. Such
solace and solitude seventy-nine miles thick cannot be painted; the
trees cannot be placed far enough away in perspective. It is necessary
to stay in it like the oaks to know it.

Lime-tree branches overhung the corner of the garden-wall, whence a
view was easy of the silent and dusty road, till overarching oaks
concealed it. The white dust heated by the sunshine, the green hedges,
and the heavily massed trees, white clouds rolled together in the sky,
a footpath opposite lost in the fields, as you might thrust a stick
into the grass, tender lime leaves caressing the cheek, and silence.
That is, the silence of the fields. If a breeze rustled the boughs, if
a greenfinch called, if the cart-mare in the meadow shook herself,
making the earth and air tremble by her with the convulsion of her
mighty muscles, these were not sounds, they were the silence itself. So
sensitive to it as I was, in its turn it held me firmly, like the
fabled spells of old time. The mere touch of a leaf was a talisman to
bring me under the enchantment, so that I seemed to feel and know all
that was proceeding among the grass-blades and in the bushes. Among the
lime trees along the wall the birds never built, though so close and
sheltered. They built everywhere but there. To the broad coping-stones
of the wall under the lime boughs speckled thrushes came almost hourly,
sometimes to peer out and reconnoitre if it was safe to visit the
garden, sometimes to see if a snail had climbed up the ivy. Then they
dropped quietly down into the long strawberry patch immediately under.
The cover of strawberries is the constant resource of all creeping
things; the thrushes looked round every plant and under every leaf and
runner. One toad always resided there, often two, and as you gathered a
ripe strawberry you might catch sight of his black eye watching you
take the fruit he had saved for you.

Down the road skims an eave-swallow, swift as an arrow, his white back
making the sun-dried dust dull and dingy; he is seeking a pool for
mortar, and will waver to and fro by the brook below till he finds a
convenient place to alight. Thence back to the eave here, where for
forty years he and his ancestors built in safety. Two white butterflies
fluttering round each other rise over the limes, once more up over the
house, and soar on till their white shows no longer against the
illumined air. A grasshopper calls on the sward by the strawberries,
and immediately fillips himself over seven leagues of grass-blades.
Yonder a line of men and women file across the field, seen for a moment
as they pass a gateway, and the hay changes from hay-colour to green
behind them as they turn the under but still sappy side upwards. They
are working hard, but it looks easy, slow, and sunny. Finches fly out
from the hedgerow to the overturned hay. Another butterfly, a brown
one, floats along the dusty road--the only traveller yet. The white
clouds are slowly passing behind the oaks, large puffed clouds, like
deliberate loads of hay, leaving little wisps and flecks behind them
caught in the sky. How pleasant it would be to read in the shadow!
There is a broad shadow on the sward by the strawberries cast by a tall
and fine-grown American crab tree. The very place for a book; and
although I know it is useless, yet I go and fetch one and dispose
myself on the grass.

I can never read in summer out-of-doors. Though in shadow the bright
light fills it, summer shadows are broadest daylight. The page is so
white and hard, the letters so very black, the meaning and drift not
quite intelligible, because neither eye nor mind will dwell upon it.
Human thoughts and imaginings written down are pale and feeble in
bright summer light. The eye wanders away, and rests more lovingly on
greensward and green lime leaves. The mind wanders yet deeper and
farther into the dreamy mystery of the azure sky. Once now and then,
determined to write down that mystery and delicious sense while
actually in it, I have brought out table and ink and paper, and sat
there in the midst of the summer day. Three words, and where is the
thought? Gone. The paper is so obviously paper, the ink so evidently
ink, the pen so stiff; all so inadequate. You want colour, flexibility,
light, sweet low sound--all these to paint it and play it in music, at
the same time you want something that will answer to and record in one
touch the strong throb of life and the thought, or feeling, or whatever
it is that goes out into the earth and sky and space, endless as a beam
of light. The very shade of the pen on the paper tells you how utterly
hopeless it is to express these things. There is the shade and the
brilliant gleaming whiteness; now tell me in plain written words the
simple contrast of the two. Not in twenty pages, for the bright light
shows the paper in its common fibre-ground, coarse aspect, in its
reality, not as a mind-tablet.

The delicacy and beauty of thought or feeling is so extreme that it
cannot be inked in; it is like the green and blue of field and sky, of
veronica flower and grass blade, which in their own existence throw
light and beauty on each other, but in artificial colours repel. Take
the table indoors again, and the book; the thoughts and imaginings of
others are vain, and of your own too deep to be written. For the mind
is filled with the exceeding beauty of these things, and their great
wondrousness and marvel. Never yet have I been able to write what I
felt about the sunlight only. Colour and form and light are as magic to
me. It is a trance. It requires a language of ideas to convey it. It is
ten years since I last reclined on that grass plot, and yet I have been
writing of it as if it was yesterday, and every blade of grass is as
visible and as real to me now as then. They were greener towards the
house, and more brown-tinted on the margin of the strawberry bed,
because towards the house the shadow rested longest. By the
strawberries the fierce sunlight burned them.

The sunlight put out the books I brought into it just as it put out the
fire on the hearth indoors. The tawny flames floating upwards could not
bite the crackling sticks when the full beams came pouring on them.
Such extravagance of light overcame the little fire till it was
screened from the power of the heavens. So here in the shadow of the
American crab tree the light of the sky put out the written pages. For
this beautiful and wonderful light excited a sense of some likewise
beautiful and wonderful truth, some unknown but grand thought hovering
as a swallow above. The swallows hovered and did not alight, but they
were there. An inexpressible thought quivered in the azure overhead; it
could not be fully grasped, but there was a sense and feeling of its
presence. Before that mere sense of its presence the weak and feeble
pages, the small fires of human knowledge, dwindled and lost meaning.
There was something here that was not in the books. In all the
philosophies and searches of mind there was nothing that could be
brought to face it, to say, This is what it intends, this is the
explanation of the dream. The very grass-blades confounded the wisest,
the tender lime leaf put them to shame, the grasshopper derided them,
the sparrow on the wall chirped his scorn. The books were put out,
unless a screen were placed between them and the light of the sky--that
is, an assumption, so as to make an artificial mental darkness. Grant
some assumptions--that is, screen off the light--and in that darkness
everything was easily arranged, this thing here, and that yonder. But
Nature grants no assumptions, and the books were put out. There is
something beyond the philosophies in the light, in the grass-blades,
the leaf, the grasshopper, the sparrow on the wall. Some day the great
and beautiful thought which hovers on the confines of the mind will at
last alight. In that is hope, the whole sky is full of abounding hope.
Something beyond the books, that is consolation.

The little lawn beside the strawberry bed, burned brown there, and
green towards the house shadow, holds how many myriad grass-blades?
Here they are all matted together, long, and dragging each other down.
Part them, and beneath them are still more, overhung and hidden. The
fibres are intertangled, woven in an endless basket-work and chaos of
green and dried threads. A blamable profusion this; a fifth as many
would be enough; altogether a wilful waste here. As for these insects
that spring out of it as I press the grass, a hundredth part of them
would suffice. The American crab tree is a snowy mount in spring; the
flakes of bloom, when they fall, cover the grass with a film--a bushel
of bloom, which the wind takes and scatters afar. The extravagance is
sublime. The two little cherry trees are as wasteful; they throw away
handfuls of flower; but in the meadows the careless, spendthrift ways
of grass and flower and all things are not to be expressed. Seeds by
the hundred million float with absolute indifference on the air. The
oak has a hundred thousand more leaves than necessary, and never hides
a single acorn. Nothing utilitarian--everything on a scale of splendid
waste. Such noble, broadcast, open-armed waste is delicious to behold.
Never was there such a lying proverb as "Enough is as good as a feast."
Give me the feast; give me squandered millions of seeds, luxurious
carpets of petals, green mountains of oak leaves. The greater the
waste, the greater the enjoyment--the nearer the approach to real life.
Casuistry is of no avail; the fact is obvious; Nature flings treasures
abroad, puffs them with open ups along on every breeze, piles up lavish
layers of them in the free open air, packs countless numbers together
in the needles of a fir tree. Prodigality and superfluity are stamped
on everything she does. The ear of wheat returns a hundredfold the
grain from which it grew. The surface of the earth offers to us far
more than we can consume--the grains, the seeds, the fruits, the
animals, the abounding products are beyond the power of all the human
race to devour. They can, too, be multiplied a thousandfold. There is
no natural lack. Whenever there is lack among us it is from artificial
causes, which intelligence should remove.

From the littleness, and meanness, and niggardliness forced upon us by
circumstances, what a relief to turn aside to the exceeding plenty of
Nature! There are no bounds to it, there is no comparison to parallel
it, so great is this generosity. No physical reason exists why every
human being should not have sufficient, at least, of necessities. For
any human being to starve, or even to be in trouble about the procuring
of simple food, appears, indeed, a strange and unaccountable thing,
quite upside down, and contrary to sense, if you do but consider a
moment the enormous profusion the earth throws at our feet. In the slow
process of time, as the human heart grows larger, such provision, I
sincerely trust, will be made that no one need ever feel anxiety about
mere subsistence. Then, too, let there be some imitation of this
open-handed generosity and divine waste. Let the generations to come
feast free of care, like my finches on the seeds of the mowing-grass,
from which no voice drives them. If I could but give away as freely as
the earth does!

The white-backed eave-swallow has returned many, many times from the
shallow drinking-place by the brook to his half-built nest. Sometimes
the pair of them cling to the mortar they have fixed under the eave,
and twitter to each other about the progress of the work. They dive
downwards with such velocity when they quit hold that it seems as if
they must strike the ground, but they shoot up again, over the wall and
the lime trees. A thrush has been to the arbour yonder twenty times; it
is made of crossed laths, and overgrown with "tea-plant," and the nest
is inside the lath-work. A sparrow has visited the rose-tree by the
wall--the buds are covered with aphides. A brown tree-creeper has been
to the limes, then to the cherries, and even to a stout lilac stem. No
matter how small the tree, he tries all that are in his way. The bright
colours of a bullfinch were visible a moment just now, as he passed
across the shadows farther down the garden under the damson trees and
into the bushes. The grasshopper has gone past and along the
garden-path, his voice is not heard now; but there is another coming.
While I have been dreaming, all these and hundreds out in the meadow
have been intensely happy. So concentrated on their little work in the
sunshine, so intent on the tiny egg, on the insect captured on the
grass-tip to be carried to the eager fledglings, so joyful in listening
to the song poured out for them or in pouring it forth, quite oblivious
of all else. It is in this intense concentration that they are so
happy. If they could only live longer!--but a few such seasons for
them--I wish they could live a hundred years just to feast on the seeds
and sing and be utterly happy and oblivious of everything but the
moment they are passing. A black line has rushed up from the espalier
apple yonder to the housetop thirty times at least. The starlings fly
so swiftly and so straight that they seem to leave a black line along
the air. They have a nest in the roof, they are to and fro it and the
meadow the entire day, from dawn till eve. The espalier apple, like a
screen, hides the meadow from me, so that the descending starlings
appear to dive into a space behind it. Sloping downwards the meadow
makes a valley; I cannot see it, but know that it is golden with
buttercups, and that a brook runs in the groove of it.

Afar yonder I can see a summit beyond where the grass swells upwards to
a higher level than this spot. There are bushes and elms whose height
is decreased by distance on the summit, horses in the shadow of the
trees, and a small flock of sheep crowded, as is their wont, in the hot
and sunny gateway. By the side of the summit is a deep green trench, so
it looks from here, in the hill-side: it is really the course of a
streamlet worn deep in the earth. I can see nothing between the top of
the espalier screen and the horses under the elms on the hill. But the
starlings go up and down into the hollow space, which is aglow with
golden buttercups, and, indeed, I am looking over a hundred finches
eagerly searching, sweetly calling, happy as the summer day. A thousand
thousand grasshoppers are leaping, thrushes are labouring, filled with
love and tenderness, doves cooing--there is as much joy as there are
leaves on the hedges. Faster than the starling's flight my mind runs up
to the streamlet in the deep green trench beside the hill.

Pleasant it was to trace it upwards, narrowing at every ascending step,
till the thin stream, thinner than fragile glass, did but merely slip
over the stones. A little less and it could not have run at all, water
could not stretch out to greater tenuity. It smoothed the brown growth
on the stones, stroking it softly. It filled up tiny basins of sand and
ran out at the edges between minute rocks of flint. Beneath it went
under thickest brooklime, blue flowered, and serrated water-parsnips,
lost like many a mighty river for awhile among a forest of leaves.
Higher up masses of bramble and projecting thorn stopped the explorer,
who must wind round the grassy mound. Pausing to look back a moment
there were meads under the hill with the shortest and greenest herbage,
perpetually watered, and without one single buttercup, a strip of pure
green among yellow flowers and yellowing corn. A few hollow oaks on
whose boughs the cuckoos stayed to call, two or three peewits coursing
up and down, larks singing, and for all else silence. Between the wheat
and the grassy mound the path was almost closed, burdocks and brambles
thrust the adventurer outward to brush against the wheat-ears. Upwards
till suddenly it turned, and led by steep notches in the bank, as it
seemed down to the roots of the elm trees. The clump of elms grew right
over a deep and rugged hollow; their branches reached out across it,
roofing in the cave.

Here was the spring, at the foot of a perpendicular rock, moss-grown
low down, and overrun with creeping ivy higher. Green thorn bushes
filled the chinks and made a wall to the well, and the long narrow
hart's-tongue streaked the face of the cliff. Behind the thick thorns
hid the course of the streamlet, in front rose the solid rock, upon the
right hand the sward came to the edge--it shook every now and then as
the horses in the shade of the elms stamped their feet--on the left
hand the ears of wheat peered over the verge. A rocky cell in
concentrated silence of green things. Now and again a finch, a
starling, or a sparrow would come meaning to drink--athirst from the
meadow or the cornfield--and start and almost entangle their wings in
the bushes, so completely astonished that any one should be there. The
spring rises in a hollow under the rock imperceptibly, and without
bubble or sound. The fine sand of the shallow basin is undisturbed--no
tiny water-volcano pushes up a dome of particles. Nor is there any
crevice in the stone, but the basin is always full and always running
over. As it slips from the brim a gleam of sunshine falls through the
boughs and meets it. To this cell I used to come once now and then on a
summer's day, tempted, perhaps, like the finches, by the sweet cool
water, but drawn also by a feeling that could not be analysed.
Stooping, I lifted the water in the hollow of my hand--carefully, lest
the sand might be disturbed--and the sunlight gleamed on it as it
slipped through ray fingers. Alone in the green-roofed cave, alone with
the sunlight and the pure water, there was a sense of something more
than these. The water was more to me than water, and the sun than sun.
The gleaming rays on the water in my palm held me for a moment, the
touch of the water gave me something from itself. A moment, and the
gleam was gone, the water flowing away, but I had had them. Beside the
physical water and physical light I had received from them their
beauty; they had communicated to me this silent mystery. The pure and
beautiful water, the pure, clear, and beautiful light, each had given
me something of their truth.

So many times I came to it, toiling up the long and shadowless bill in
the burning sunshine, often carrying a vessel to take some of it home
with me. There was a brook, indeed but this was different, it was the
spring; it was taken home as a beautiful flower might be brought. It is
not the physical water, it is the sense or feeling that it conveys. Nor
is it the physical sunshine; it is the sense of inexpressible beauty
which it brings with it. Of such I still drink, and hope to do so still
deeper.




CLEMATIS LANE

Wild clematis grew so thickly on one side of the narrow lane that the
hedge seemed made of it. Trailing over the low bushes, the leaves hid
the hawthorn and bramble, so that the hedge was covered with clematis
leaf and flower. The innumerable pale flowers gave out a faint odour,
and coloured the sides of the highway. Rising up the hazel rods and
taller hawthorn, the tendrils hung downwards and suspended the flowers
overhead. Across the field, where a hill rose and was dotted with
bushes--these bushes, too, were concealed by clematis, and though the
flowers were so pale, their numbers tinted the slope. A cropped
nut-tree hedge, again, low, but five or six yards thick, was bound
together by the bines of the same creeping plant, twisting in and out,
and holding it together. No care or art could have led it over the
branches in so graceful a manner; the lane was festooned for the
triumphal progress of the waggons laden with corn. Here and there, on
the dry bank over which the clematis projected like an eave, there
stood tall campanulas, their blue bells as large as the fingerstall of
a foxglove. The slender purple spires of the climbing vetch were lifted
above the low hushes to which it clung; there were ferns deeper in the
hedge, and yellow bedstraw by the gateways. A few blackberries were
ripe, but the clematis seemed to have overcome the brambles, and spoilt
their yield. Nuts, reddened at the tip, were visible on the higher
hazel boughs; they were ripe, but difficult to get at.

Leaving the lane by a waggon track--a gipsy track through a
copse--there were large bunches of pale-red berries hanging from the
wayfaring trees, or wild viburnum, and green and red berries of bryony
wreathed among the branches. The bryony leaves had turned, some were
pale buff already. Among the many berries of autumn those of the
wayfaring tree may be known by their flattened shape, as if the sides
had been pressed in like a flask. The bushes were not high enough for
shadow, and the harvest sun was hot between them. The track led past
the foot of a steep headland of the Downs, which could not be left
without an ascent. Dry and slippery, the short grass gave no hold to
the feet, and it was necessary to step in the holes cut through the
turf for the purpose. Pushed forward from the main line of the Downs,
the buff headland projected into the Weald, as headlands on the
southern side of the range project into the sea. Towards the summit the
brow came out somewhat, and even the rude steps in the turf were not
much assistance in climbing this almost perpendicular wall of sward.
Above the brow the ascent became easy; these brows raised steeper than
the general slope are often found on the higher hills. A circular
entrenchment encloses the summit, but the rampart has much sunk, and is
in places levelled. Here it was pleasant to look back upon the beech
woods at the foot of the great Downs, and far over the endless fields
of the Weald or plain. Thirty fields could be counted in succession,
one after the other, like irregular chess-squares, some corn, some
grass, and these only extended to the first undulation, where the woods
hid the fields behind them. But beyond these, in reality, succeeded
another series of fields to the second undulation, and still a third
series to the farthest undulation visible. Yet farther there was a
faint line of hills, a dark cloud-like bank in the extreme distance. To
the right and to the left were similar views. Reapers were at work in
the wheat below, but already much of the corn had been carried, and the
hum of a threshing engine came up from the ricks. A woodpecker called
loudly in the beech wood; a "wish-wish" in the air overhead was caused
by the swift motion of a wood-pigeon passing from "holt" to "hurst,"
from copse to copse. On the dry short turf of the hill-top even the
shadow of a swallow was visible as he flew but a few yards high.

In a little hollow where the rougher grasses grew longer a blue
butterfly fluttered and could not get out. He was entangled with his
own wings, he could not guide himself between the grass tops; his wings
fluttered and carried him back again. The grass was like a net to him,
and there he fluttered till the wind lifted him out, and gave him the
freedom of the hills. One small green orchis stood in the grass, alone;
the harebells were many. It is curious that, if gathered, in a few
hours (if pressed between paper) they become a deeper blue than when
growing. Another butterfly went over, large and velvety, flying head to
the wind, but unable to make way against it, and so carried sidelong
across the current. From the summit of the hill he drifted out into the
air five hundred feet above the flowers of the plain. Perhaps it was a
peacock; for there was a peacock-butterfly in Clematis Lane. The
harebells swung, and the dry tips of the grass bent to the wind which
came over the hills from the sea, but from which the sun had dried the
sea-moisture, leaving it twice refined--once by the passage above a
hundred miles of wave and foam and again by the grasses and the hills,
which forced the current to a higher level, where the sunbeams dried
it. Twice refined, the air was strong and pure, sweet like the scent of
a flower. If the air at the sea-beach is good, that of the hills above
the sea is at least twice as good, and twice as strengthening. It
possesses all the virtue of the sea air without the moisture which
ultimately loosens the joints, and seems to penetrate to the very
nerves. Those who desire air and quick recovery should go to the hills,
where the wind has a scent of the sunbeams.

In the short time since ascending the slope the definition of the view
has changed. At first it was clear indeed, and no one would have
supposed there was any mist. But now suddenly every hill stands out
sharp and definite; the scattered hawthorn bushes are distinct; the
hills look higher than before. From about the woods an impalpable
bluish mistiness that was there just now has been blown away. The
yellow squares of stubble--just cleared--far below are whiter and look
drier. I think it is the air that tints everything. This fresh stratum
now sweeping over has altered the appearance of the country and given
me a new scene. The invisible air, as if charged with colour, has
spread another tone broadly over the landscape. Omitting no detail, it
has worked out afresh every little bough of the scattered hawthorn
bushes, and made each twig distinct. It is the air that tints
everything.

While I have been thinking, a flock of sheep has stolen quietly into
the space enclosed by the entrenchment. With the iron head of his crook
placed against his breast, and the handle aslant to the ground, the
shepherd leans against it, and looks down upon the reapers. He is a
young man, and has a bright intelligent expression on his features.
Alone with his sheep so many hours, he is glad of some one to talk to,
and points out to me the various places in view. The copses that cover
the slopes of the hills he calls "holts"; there are three or four
within a short distance. His crook is not a Pyecombe crook (for the
best crooks used to be made at Pyecombe, a little Down hamlet), but he
has another, which was made from a Pyecombe pattern. The village
craftsman, whose shepherd's crooks were sought for all along the South
Downs, is no more, and he has left no one able to carry on his work. He
had an apprentice, but the apprentice has taken to another craft, and
cannot make crooks. The Pyecombe crook has a curve or semicircle, and
then opens straight; the straight part starts at a tangent from the
semicircle. How difficult it is to describe so simple a matter as a
shepherd's crook! In some way or other this Pyecombe form is found more
effective for capturing sheep, but it is not so easy to make. The crook
he held in his hand opened with an elongated curve. It appeared very
small beside the ordinary crooks; this, he said, was an advantage, as
it would hold a lamb. Another he showed me had the ordinary hook; this
was bought at Brighton. The curve was too big, and a sheep could get
its leg out; besides which, the iron was soft, and when a sheep was
caught the iron bent and enlarged, and so let the sheep go. The handles
were of hazel: one handle was straight, smooth, and the best in
appearance--but he said it was weak; the other handle, which was
crooked and rough-looking, was twice as strong. They used hazel rods
for handles--ash rods were apt to "fly," i.e. break.

Wages were now fifteen shillings a week. The "farm hands"--elsewhere
labourers--had fifteen shillings a week, and paid one shilling and
sixpence a week for their cottages. The new cottages that had been
built were two shillings and sixpence a week. They liked the old
cottages best, not only because they were cheaper, but because they had
larger gardens attached. It seemed that the men were fairly satisfied
with their earnings; just then, of course, they were receiving much
more for harvest work, such as tying up after the reaping machine at
seven shillings and sixpence per acre. Clothes were the heaviest item
of expenditure, especially where there was a family and the children
were not old enough to earn anything. Except that he said "wid" for
with--"wid" this, instead of with this--he scarcely mispronounced a
word, speaking as distinctly and expressing himself as clearly as any
one could possibly do. The briskness of manner, quick apprehension, and
directness of answer showed a well-trained mind. The Sussex shepherd on
this lonely hill was quite the equal of any man in his rank of life,
and superior in politeness to many who move in more civilised places.
He left me to fetch some wattles, called flakes in other counties; a
stronger sort of hurdles. Most of the reaping is now done by machine,
still there were men cutting wheat by hand at the foot of the hill.
They call their reaphooks swaphooks, or swophooks, and are of opinion
that although the machine answers well and clears the ground quickly
when the corn stands up, if it is beaten down the swaphook is
preferable. The swaphook is the same as the fagging-hook of other
districts. Every hawthorn bush now bears its red berries, or haws;
these are called "hog-hazels." In the west they are called "peggles."
"Sweel" is an odd Sussex word, meaning to singe linen. People who live
towards the hills (which are near the coast) say that places farther
inland are more "uperds "--up the country--up towards Tunbridge, for
instance.

The grasshoppers sang merrily round me as I sat on the sward; the warm
sun and cloudless sky and the dry turf pleased them. Though cloudless,
the wind rendered the warmth pleasant, so that the sunbeams, from which
there was no shade, were not oppressive. The grasshoppers sang, the
wind swept through the grass and swung the harebells, the "drowsy hum"
of the threshing engine rose up from the plain; the low slumberous
melody of harvest time floated in the air. An hour had gone by
imperceptibly before I descended the slope to Clematis Lane. Out in the
stubble where the wheat had just been cut, down amongst the dry short
stalks of straw, were the light-blue petals of the grey field veronica.
Almost the very first of field flowers in the earliest days of spring,
when the rain drives over the furrow, and hail may hap at any time,
here it was blooming again in the midst of the harvest. Two scenes
could scarcely be more dissimilar than the wet and stormy hours of the
early year, and the dry, hot time of harvest; the pale blue veronica,
with one white petal, flourished in both, true and faithful. The gates
beside the lane were not gates at all, but double draw-bars framed
together, so that the gate did not open on a hinge, but had to be drawn
out of the mortices. Looking over one of these grey and lichened
draw-bars in a hazel hedge there were the shocks of wheat standing
within the field, and on them a flock of rooks helping themselves
freely.

Lower in the valley, where there was water, the tall willow-herbs stood
up high as the hedges. On the banks of a pool water-plantains had sent
up stalks a yard high, branched, and each branch bearing its
three-petalled flower. In a copse near the stems of cow-parsnip stood
quite seven feet, drawn up by the willow bushes--these great plants are
some of the largest that grow in the country. Goatsbeard grew by the
wayside; it is like the dandelion, but has dark spots in the centre of
the disc, and the flower shuts at noon. The wild carrots were forming
their "birds' nests"--so soon as the flowering is over the umbel closes
into the shape of a cup or bird's nest. The flower of the wild carrot
is white; it is made up of numerous small separate florets on an umbel,
and in the centre of these tiny florets is a deep crimson one. Getting
down towards the sea and the houses now I found a shrub of henbane by
the dusty road, dusty itself, grey-green, and draggled; I call it a
shrub, though a plant because of its shrub-like look. The flowers were
over--they are a peculiar colour, dark and green veined and red, there
is no exact term for it, but you may know the plant by the leaves,
which, if crushed, smell like those of the black currant. This is one
of the old English medicinal plants still in use. The figs were
ripening fast in an orchard; the fig trees are frequently grown between
apple trees, which shelter them, and some of the fruit was enclosed in
muslin bags to protect it. The fig orchards along the coast suggest
thoughts of Italy and the ancient Roman galleys which crossed the sea
to the Sussex ports. There is a curious statement in a classic author,
to the effect that a letter written by Julius Caesar, when in Britain,
on the Kalends of September, reached Rome on the fourth day before the
Kalends of October, showing how long a letter was being carried from
the South Coast to the centre of Italy, nineteen centuries ago.




NATURE NEAR BRIGHTON

"As wild as a hawk" is a proverbial comparison, but kestrels venture
into the outskirts of Brighton, and even right over the town. Not long
since one was observed hovering above a field which divides part of
Brighton from Hove. The bird had hardly settled himself and obtained
his balance, when three or four rooks who were passing deliberately
changed their course to attack him. Moving with greater swiftness, the
kestrel escaped their angry but clumsy assaults; still they drove him
from the spot, and followed him eastwards over the town till out of
sight--now wheeling round, and now doing their utmost to rise higher
and get the advantage of him. Kestrels appear rather numerous in this
vicinity. Those who have driven round Brighton and Hove must have
noticed the large stables which have been erected for the convenience
of gentlemen residing in streets where stabling at the rear of the
house is impracticable. Early in the year a kestrel began to haunt one
of these large establishments, notwithstanding that it was much
frequented, carriages driving in and out constantly, hunters taken to
and fro, and in despite of the neighbourhood being built over with
villas. There was a piece of waste ground by the building where, on a
little tree, the hawk perched day after clay. Then, beating round, he
hovered over the gardens of the district, often above the public roads
and over a large tennis lawn. His farthest sweep seemed to be to the
Sussex County Cricket field and then back again. Day after day he went
his rounds for weeks together, through the stormy times of the early
months, passing several times a day, almost as regularly as the
postman. He showed no fear, hovering close to the people in the roads
or working in their gardens. All his motions could be observed with
facility--the mode of hovering, which he accomplished easily, whether
there was a gale or a perfect calm; indeed, his ways could be noted as
well as if it had been by the side of the wildest copse. One morning he
perched on a chimney; the house was not occupied, but the next to it
was, and there were builders' workmen engaged on the opposite side of
the road; so that the wild hawk, if unmolested, would soon become
comparatively tame. When the season became less rigorous, and the
breeding time approached, the kestrel was seen no more; having flown
for the copses between the Downs or in the Weald.

The power of hovering is not so wonderful as that of soaring, which the
hawks possess, but which is also exhibited by seagulls. On a March
morning two gulls came up from the sea, and as they neared the Downs
began to soar. It was necessary to fix the gaze on one, as the eyes
cannot follow two soaring birds at once. This gull, having spread his
wings wide, swept up the dean, or valley, with great speed, and,
turning a large circle, rose level with the hill. Round again he came,
rising spirally--a spiral with a diameter varying from a furlong to a
quarter of a mile, sometimes wider--and was now high overhead. Turn
succeeded turn, up, up, and this without a single movement of the
wings, which were held extended and rigid. The edge of the wing on the
outer side was inclined to the horizon--one wing elevated, the other
depressed--as the bird leaned inwards like a train going round a curve.
The plane of the wings glided up the air as, with no apparent
diminution of speed from friction, the bird swiftly ascended. Fourteen
times the bird swept round, never so much as moving his wings, till now
the gaze could no longer distinguish his manner of progress. The white
body was still perceptible, but the wings were indistinct. Up to that
height the gull had not assisted his ascent by flapping, or striking
the air in any way. The original impulse, and some hitherto unexplained
elasticity or property of air, had sufficed to raise him, in apparent
defiance of the retardation of friction, and of the drag of
gravitation. This power of soaring is the most wonderful of the various
problems of flight being accomplished without effort; and yet,
according to our preconceived ideas, there must be force somewhere to
cause motion. There was a moderate air moving at the time, but it must
be remembered that if a wind assists one way it retards the other.
[Footnote: See the paper on "Birds Climbing the Air"] Hawks can
certainly soar in the calmest weather.

One day I saw a weasel cross a road in Hove, close to a terrace of
houses.

It is curious that a seagull can generally be observed opposite the
Aquarium; when there is no seagull elsewhere along the whole Brighton
front there is often one there. Young gulls occasionally alight on the
roof, or are blown there. Once now and then a porpoise may be seen
sunning himself off a groyne; barely dipping himself, and rolling about
at the surface, the water shines like oil as it slips off his back.

The Brighton rooks are house birds, like sparrows, and perch on the
roofs or chimneys--there are generally some on the roof of the Eglise
Reformee Francaise, a church situated in a much-frequented part. It is
amusing to see a black rook perched on a red tile chimney, with the
smoke coming up around him, and darkening with soot his dingy plumage.
They take every scrap thrown out, like sparrows, and peck bones if they
find them. The builders in Brighton appear to have somewhat overshot
the mark, to judge from the number of empty houses, and, indeed, it is
currently reported that it will be five years before the building
speculation recovers itself. Upon these empty houses, the hoardings,
and scaffold-poles, the rooks perch exactly as if they were trees in a
hedgerow, waiting with comic gravity to pounce on anything in the
gardens or on the lawns. They are quite aware when it is Sunday--on
week-days they keep at a fair distance from workmen; on Sundays they
drop down in places where at other times they do not dare to venture,
so that a glove might be thrown out of window among them. In winter and
spring there are rooks everywhere; as summer advances, most leave the
town for the fields.

A marked sign of spring in Brighton is the return of the wheatears;
they suddenly appear in the waste places by the houses in the first few
days of April. Wheatears often run a considerable distance on the sward
very swiftly, usually stopping on some raised spot of the turf.
Meadow-pipits are another spring bird here; any one going up the Dyke
Road in early spring will observe a little brown bird singing in the
air much like a lark, but more feebly. He only rises to a certain
height, and then descends in a slanting direction, singing, to the
ground. The meadow-pipit is, apparently, uncertain where he shall come
down, wandering and irregular on his course. Many of them finish their
song in the gardens of the Convent of the Sacred Heart, which seem to
be a refuge to birds. At least, the thrushes sing there
sweetly--yellowhammers, too--on the high wall. There is another resort
of birds, opposite the Convent, on the Stanford Estate, on which
persons are warned not to shoot or net small birds. A little shrubbery
there in April and May is full of thrushes, blackbirds, and various
finches, happily singing, and busy at their nests. Here the birds sing
both sides of the highway, despite the reproach that Brighton is bare
of trees; they pass from the shrubbery to and from the Convent gardens.

It is to be wished that these notices not to shoot or net small birds
were more frequently seen. Brighton is still a bird-catching centre,
and before the new close season commences acres of ground are covered
with the nets of the bird-catchers. Pity they could not be confined a
little while in the same manner as they confine their miserable
feathery victims (in cages just to fit the bird, say six inches square)
in cells where movement or rest would be alike impossible. Yet
goldfinches are still to be seen close to the town; they are fond of
the seeds which they find wherever there is a waste place, and on the
slopes of unfinished roads. Each unoccupied house, and many occupied,
has its brood of starlings; a starling the other day was taking insects
from the surface of a sheep pond on the hill, flying out to the middle
of the pond and snatching the insects from the water During the long
weeks of rain and stormy weather in the spring of 1883, the Downs
looked dreary indeed; open, unsheltered, the grass so short as scarcely
to be called grass wet and slippery. But a few glimpses of sunshine
soon brought a change. Where the furze bushes had been cut down, the
stems of furze began to shoot, looking at a little distance like moss
on the ground. Among these there were broad violet patches--scentless
violets, nothing to gather, but pleasant to see--colouring the earth.
Presently the gorse flowered, miles of it, and the willow wrens sang
plaintively among it. The brightest bird on the Downs was then the
stonechat. Perched on a dead thistle, his blackest of black heads, the
white streak by his neck, and the brilliance of his colouring
contrasted with the yellow gorse around. In the hedges on the northern
slopes of the Downs, towards the Weald, or plain, the wayfaring tree
grows in large shrubs, blooming among the thorns.

The banks by Brighton in early spring are purple with the flowers of
ground ivy, which flowers with exceptional freedom. One bank, or waste
spot, that was observed was first of all perfectly purple with ground
ivy; by degrees these flowers faded, and the spot became a beautiful
blue with veronica, or bird's-eye; then, again, these disappeared, and
up came the larger daisies on stalks a foot high, whose discs touched
each other from end to end of the bank. Here was a succession of
flowers as if designed, one taking the other's place. Meantime the
trifolium appeared like blood spilt among the grass.

The thin, chalky soil of Sussex is singularly favourable to poppies and
charlock--the one scarlet, the other a sharp yellow; they cover acres.
Wild pansies flowered on the hillside fallows, high up among the wind,
where the notes of the cuckoo came faint from the wood in the Weald
beneath. The wind threw back the ringing notes, but every now and then,
as the breeze ebbed, they came, having travelled a full mile against
the current of air. There is no bird with so powerful a voice as the
cuckoo; his cry can be heard almost as far as a clarion. The wild
pansies were very thick--little yellow petals streaked with black
lines. In a western county the cottagers call them "Loving Idols,"
which may perhaps be a distortion of the name they bore in
Shakespeare's time--"Love in Idleness." It appears as if the rabbits on
the chalk are of a rather greyish hue, perceptibly less sandy in colour
than those living in meadows on low ground. Though Brighton is bare of
trees, there is a large wood at a short distance. It is principally of
beech. In this particular wood there is a singular absence of the jays
which elsewhere make so much noise. Early in the spring there did not
seem a jay in it. They make their appearance in the nesting season and
are then trapped. A thrush's nest with eggs in it having been found, a
little platform of sticks is built before the nest and a trap placed on
it. The jay is so fond of eggs he cannot resist these; he alights on
the platform in front of the nest, and is so captured. The bait of an
egg will generally succeed in drawing a jay to his destruction. A good
deal of poaching goes on about Brighton at Christmas time, when the
coverts are full of game.

The Downs as they trend along the coast now recede and now approach,
now sink in deans, then rise abruptly, topped with copses which, like
Lancing Clump, are visible many miles both at sea and on land. Between
them and the beach there lies a rich alluvial belt, narrow and flat,
much of which appears to have been reclaimed by drainage from the
condition of marsh, and which, in fact, presents a close similitude to
the fens. Here, in the dykes, the aquatic grasses reach a great height,
and the flowering rush grows. It is said that this land is sought after
among agriculturists, and that those who occupy it have escaped better
than the majority from the pressure of bad seasons. Somewhat away from
the present coast-line, where the hills begin--perhaps the sea came as
far inland once--may be found ancient places, still ports, with
histories running back into the mythic period. Passing through such a
place on a sunny day in the earlier part of the year, the extreme quiet
and air of silence were singularly opposite to the restlessness of the
great watering-place near. It was but a few steps out into the wooded
country. Yellow wallflowers grew along the high wall, and flowered
against the sky; swallows flew to and fro the warm space sheltered from
the wind, beneath them. In the lane a blackbird was so occupied among
the arums at the roots of the trees that he did not stir till actually
obliged. Blackbirds and thrushes are fond of searching about where the
arums grow thickest. In the park a clump of tall aspens gleamed like
silk in the sunshine. The calls of moorhens came up from a lake in a
deep valley near, beeches grow down the steep slope to the edge of the
water, and the wind which rippled it drew in a strong draught up the
hill. From that height the glance saw to the bottom of the clear water,
to which the waves and the wind gave a translucent green. The valley
winds northward, curving like a brook, and in the trough a narrow green
band of dark grass follows the windings, a pathlike ribbon as deeply
coloured as a fairy ring, and showing between the slopes of pale turf.
On this side are copses of beech, and on that of fir; the fir copses
are encircled by a loose hedge of box, fading and yellowish, while the
larch tops were filled with sweet and tender green. Like the masts and
yards of a ship, which are gradually hidden as the sails are set, so
these green sails unfurling concealed the tall masts and taper branches
of the fir. Afar the great hills were bare, wind-swept and dry. The
glass-green river wound along the plain, and the sea bloomed blue under
the sun, blue by the distant shore, darkening like a level cloud where
a dim ship marked the horizon. A blue sky requires greensward and green
woods--the sward is pale and the woods are slow; the cuckoo calls for
his leaves.

Farther along the edge of the valley the beeches thicken, and the turf
is covered by the shrunken leaves of last year. Empty hulls of
beechmast crunch under foot, the brown beech leaves have drifted a foot
deep against the trunk of a felled tree. Beech leaves lie at rest in
the cover of furze, sheltered from the wind; suddenly a little cloud of
earth rises like dust as a startled cock pheasant scrambles on his
wings with a scream. A hen follows, and rises steadily in a long-drawn
slanting line till near the tops of the beeches, then rockets sharp up
over the highest branches, and descends in a wide sweeping curve along
the valley. In the glade among the beeches the furze has grown straight
up ten feet high, like, sapling trees, and flowers at the top, golden
bloom on a dry pole. There are more pheasants in the furze, so that,
not to disturb them, it is best to walk round and not enter it. Every
now and then there is a curious, half-finished note among the
trees--yuc, yuc. This great hawthorn has a twisted stem; the wood winds
round itself in a spiral. The bole of a beech in the sunshine h spotted
like a trout by the separate shadows of its first young leaves. Tall
bushes--almost trees--of blackthorn are in full white flower; the dark,
leafless boughs make it appear the whiter. Among the blackthorn several
tits are busy, searching about on the twigs, and pecking into the
petals; calling loudly as they do so. A willow-wren is peering into the
bloom too, but silent for the moment. The blackthorn is much lichened,
the lichen which is built into the domed nest of the long-tailed
titmouse. Yuc--yuc, again. Stalks of spurge, thickening towards the
top, and then surrounded with leaves, and above these dull yellow-green
flowers, grow in shrub-like bunches in more open ground. Among the
shrunken leaves on the turf here and there are the white flowers of the
barren strawberry. A green woodpecker starts from a tree, and can be
watched between the trunks as he flies; his bright colour marks him.
Presently, on rounding some furze, he rises again, this time from the
ground, and goes over the open glade; flying, the green woodpecker
appears a larger bird than would be supposed if seen when still. He has
been among the beeches all the time, and it was his "Yuc, yuc" which we
heard. Where the woodpecker is heard and seen, there the woods are
woods and wild--a sense of wildness accompanies his presence.

Across the valley the straight shadows of firs rise up the slope, all
drawn in the same direction, parallel on the sward. Far in a hollow of
the rounded hill a herd of deer are resting; the plain lies beneath
them, and beyond it the sea. Though they rest in a hollow the green
hill is open above and below them; they do not dread the rifle, but if
they did they would be safe there. Returning again through the woods,
there are some bucks lying on a pleasant sunny slope. Almost too idle
to rise, they arch their backs, and stretch their legs, as much as to
say, Why trouble us? The wind rushes through the trees, and draws from
them strange sounds, now a groan, now almost a shriek, as the boughs
grind against each other and wear the bark away. From a maple a twisted
ivy basket hangs filled with twigs, leaves, and tree dust, big as three
rooks' nests. Only recently a fine white-tailed eagle was soaring over
the woods, he may have followed the line of the sea down from the
Hebrides. Up from the sea comes the wind, drawing swifter between the
beech trunks, resting a little in the sunny glades, On again into the
woods. The glass-green river yonder coloured by the wind runs on
seaward, there are thin masts of ships visible at its mouth miles away,
the wind whistles in their shrouds; beyond the blue by the shore, far,
far distant on the level cloud, the dim ship has sailed along the
horizon. It dries the pale grass, and rustles the restless shrunken
leaves on the ground; it dries the grey lichen on the beech trunks; it
swings the fledglings in the rooks' nests, and carries the ringdove on
a speedier wing. Blackbirds whistle all around, the woods are full of
them; willow-wrens plaintively sing in the trees; other birds call--the
dry wind mingles their notes. It is a hungry wind--it makes a wanderer
as hungry as Robin Hood; it drives him back to the houses, and there by
a doorstep lies a heap of buck's-horns thrown down like an armful of
wood.




SEA, SKY, AND DOWN

In the cloudless January sky the sun at noonday appears high above the
southern horizon, and there is a broad band of sky between it and the
line of the sea. This sense of the sun's elevation is caused by the
level plain of water, which affords no contrast. Inland the hills rise
up, and even at midday the sun in winter does not seem much above their
ridges. But here by the shore the sun hangs high, and does not look as
if he descended so low in his winter curve. There is little wind, and
the wavelets swing gently rather than roll, illumined both in their
hollows and on their crests with a film of silver. Three or four miles
away a vessel at anchor occasionally sways, and at each movement
flashes a bright gleam from her wet side like a mirror. White gulls
hawk to and fro by the strand, darting on floating fragments and rising
again; their plumage is snowy white in the sunshine. Brown nets lie on
the pebbles; brown nets are stretched from the mastheads of the smacks
to the sea-wall; brown and deeply wrinkled sails are hoisted to dry in
the sun and air. The broad red streaks on the smacks' sides stand out
distinctly among the general pitchy hues of gunwales and great coils of
rope. Men in dull yellow tan frocks are busy round about among them,
some mending nets some stooping over a boat turned bottom upwards, upon
which a patch is being placed. It needs at least three or four men to
manage this patch properly. These tan frocks vary from a dull yellow to
a copperish red colour. A golden vane high overhead points to the
westward, and the dolphin, with open mouth, faces the light breeze.

Under the groynes there is shadow as in summer; once and again the sea
runs up and breaks on the beach, and the foam, white as the whitest
milk, hisses as it subsides among the pebbles; it effervesces and
bubbles at the brim of the cup of the sea. Farther along the chalk
cliffs stand up clear and sharp, the green sea beneath, and the blue
sky above them. There is a light and colour everywhere, the least
fragment of colour is brought out, even the worn red tiles washed
smooth by the tides and rolled over and over among the pebbles, the sea
gleams, and there is everything of summer but the heat. Reflected in
the plate-glass windows of the street the sea occupies the shop front,
covering over the golden bracelets and jewellery with a moving picture
of the silvery waves. The day is lengthened by the light, and dark
winter driven away, till, the sun's curve approaching the horizon,
misty vapours begin to thicken in the atmosphere where they had not
been suspected. The tide is out, and for miles the foam runs in on the
level sands, forming a long succession of graceful curves marked with a
white edge.

As the sun sinks, the wet sands are washed with a brownish yellow, the
colour of ripe wheat if it could be supposed liquid. The sunset, which
has begun with pale hues, flushes over a rich violet, soon again
overlaid with orange, and succeeded in its turn by a deep red glow--a
glow which looks the deeper the more it is gazed at, like a petal of
peony. There are no fair faces in the street now, they are all
brunettes, fair complexions and dark skins are alike tinted by the
sunset; they are all swarthy. On the sea a dull redness reaches away
and is lost in the vapour on the horizon; eastwards great vapours,
tinged rosy, stand up high in the sky, and seem to drift inland,
carrying the sunset with them; presently the atmosphere round the
houses is filled with a threatening light, like a great fire reflected
over the housetops. It fades, and there is nothing left but a dark
cloud at the western horizon, tinted blood-red along its upper edge.
Next morning the sun rises, a ball of orange amid streaks of scarlet.

But sometimes the sunset takes other order than this, and after the
orange there appears a rayed scarlet crown, such as one sees on old
coins--rays of scarlet shoot upward from a common centre above where
the sun went down. Sometimes, instead of these brilliant hues, there is
the most delicate shading of pearly greys and nameless silver tints,
such tints as might be imagined were the clouds like feathers, the art
of which is to let the under hue shine through the upper layer of the
plumage. Though not so gaudy or at first so striking, these
pearl-greys, and silvers, and delicate interweaving of tints are really
as wonderful, being graduated and laid on with a touch no camel's hair
can approach. Sometimes, again, the sunset shows a burnished sky, like
the surface of old copper burnt or oxidised--the copper tinted with
rose, or with rose and violet. During the prevalence of the scarlet and
orange hues, the moon, then young, shining at the edge of the sunset,
appeared faintly green and people remarked how curious a green moon
looked on a blue sky, for it was just where the sunset vapour melted
into the upper sky. At the same moment the gas-lamps burned green--rows
and rows of pale green lights. As the sunset faded both the moon and
gas-lamps took their proper hue; hence it appeared as if the change of
colour were due to contrast. The gas-lamps had looked greenish several
evenings before the new moon shone, and in their case there can be no
doubt the tint was contrast merely. One night, some hours after sunset,
and long after the last trace of it had disappeared, the moon was
sailing through light white clouds, which only partly concealed her,
and was surrounded by the ordinary prismatic halo. But outside this
halo there was a green circle, a broad green band, very distinct--a
pale emerald green. Beautiful and interesting as these sunsets have
been, I cannot subscribe to the opinion that they surpass all that have
been observed; for I distinctly remember sunsets equally brilliant, and
some even more so, which occurred not so very long ago. To those who
are in the habit of observing out-of-door phenomena a beautiful sunset
is by no means uncommon.

Sometimes the sea disappears under the haze of the winter's day: it is
fine, but hazy, and from the hills, looking southwards, the sea seems
gone, till, the sun breaking out, two or three horizontal streaks
reflected suddenly reveal its surface. Another time the reflection of
the sun's rays takes the form of a gigantic and exaggerated hour-glass;
by the shore the reflection widens out, narrows as it recedes to a mere
path, and again at the horizon widens and fills a mile or more. Then at
the horizon the lighted sea seems raised above the general level. Rain
is approaching, and then by the beach the sea becomes yellowish, beyond
that green, and a hard blue at the horizon; there is one lovely streak
of green on the right; in front a broad spot of sunlight where the
clouds have parted. The wind sings, and a schooner is working rapidly
out to windward for more room. During changeable weather the sky
between the clouds occasionally takes a pale yellow hue, like that of
the tinted paper used for drawing. This colour is opaque, and evidently
depends upon the presence of thin vapour. It is seen when the wind is
in the act of changing its direction, and the clouds, arrested in their
march, are thrown out of rank. That which was the side becomes the rear
of the cloud, and is banked up by the sudden pressure. Clouds coming in
from the sea are met with a land wind, and so diverted. The effect of
mist on the sea in the dark winter days is to increase distances, so
that a ship at four or five miles appears hull down, and her shadowy
sails move in vapour almost as thick as the canvas. At evening there is
no visible sunset, but presently the whole sky, dull and gloomy, is
suffused with a redness, not more in one part than another, but over
the entire heavens. So in the clouded mornings, a deep red hue fills
the whole dome.

But if the sun rises clear, the rays light up the yellow sand of the
quarries inland, the dark brown ploughed fields, and the black copses
where many a bud is sleeping and waiting for the spring. A haze lies
about the Downs and softens their smooth outline as in summer, if you
can but face the bleak wind which never rests up there. The outline
starts on the left hand fairly distinguished against the sky. As it
sweeps round, it sinks, and is lost in the bluish haze; gradually it
rises again, and is visible on the right, where the woods stand
leafless on the ridge. Or the vapour settles down thicker, and the vast
expanse becomes gloomy in broad day. The formless hills loom round
about, the roads and marks of civilisation seem blotted out, it may be
some absolute desert for aught that appears. An immense hollow filled
with mist lies underneath. Presently the wind drifts the earth-cloud
along, and there by a dark copse are three or four horsemen eagerly
seeking a way through the plantation. They are two miles distant, but
as plainly visible as if you could touch them. By-and-by one finds a
path, and in single file the troop rides into the wood. On the other
side there is a long stretch of open ploughed field, and about the
middle of it little white dots close together, sweeping along as if the
wind drove them. Horsemen are galloping on the turf at the edge of the
arable, which is doubtless heavy going. The troop that has worked
through the wood labours hard to overtake; the vapour follows again,
and horsemen and hounds are lost in the abyss.

On a ridge closer at hand, and above the mist, stand two conical wheat
ricks sharply defined--all that a draughtsman could seize on. Still,
even in winter there is about the hills the charm of outline, and the
uncertain haze produces some of the effects of summer, but it is
impossible to stay and admire, the penetrating wind will permit of
nothing except hard exercise. Looking back now and then, the distant
hollows are sometimes visible and sometimes filled; great curtains of
mist sweep along illumined by the sunlight above them; the woods are
now brown, now dark, and now faintly blue, as the light changes. Over
the range-and down in the valley where the hursts or woods are
situated, surrounded by meads and cornfields, there are other notes of
colour to be found. In the leafless branches of the oak sometimes the
sunshine plays on the bark of the smaller boughs, and causes a sense of
light and colour among them. The slender boughs of the birch, too,
reflect the sunshine as if polished. Beech leaves still adhere to the
lower branches, spots of bright brown among the grey and ash tint of
the underwood. If a woodpecker passes, his green plumage gleams the
more from the absence of the abundant foliage which partly conceals
even him in summer. The light-coloured wood-pigeons show distinctly
against the dark firs; the golden crest of the tiny wren is to be seen
in the furze or bramble.

All broader effects of colour must in winter be looked for in the
atmosphere, as the light changes, as the mist passes, as the north wind
brings down a blackness, or the gust dries up the furrow; as the colour
of the air alters, for it is certain that the air is often full of
colour. To the atmosphere we must look for all broader effects. Specks
of detail may be sometimes discerned, one or two in a walk, as the
white breasts of the lapwings on the dark ploughed ridges; yellow
oat-straw by the farm, still retaining the golden tint of summer; if
fortunate, a blue kingfisher by the brook, and always dew flashing
emerald and ruby.





JANUARY IN THE SUSSEX WOODS

The lost leaves measure our years; they are gone as the days are gone,
and the bare branches silently speak of a new year, slowly advancing to
its buds, its foliage, and fruit. Deciduous trees associate with human
life as this yew never can. Clothed in its yellowish-green needles, its
tarnished green, it knows no hope or sorrow; it is indifferent to
winter, and does not look forward to summer. With their annual loss of
leaves, and renewal, oak and elm and ash and beech seem to stand by us
and to share our thoughts. There is no wind at the edge of the wood,
and the few flakes of snow that fall from the overcast sky flutter as
they drop, now one side higher and then the other, as the leaves did in
the still hours of autumn. The delicacy of the outer boughs of the
great trees visible against the dark background of cloud is as
beautiful in its own way as the massed foliage of summer. Each slender
bough is drawn out to a line; line follows line as shade grows under
the pencil, but each of these lines is separate. Great boles of beech,
heavy timber at the foot, thus end at their summits in the lightest and
most elegant pencilling. Where the birches are tall, sometimes the
number and closeness of these bare sprays causes a thickening almost as
if there were leaves there. The leaves, in fact, when they come,
conceal the finish of the trees; they give colour, but they hide the
beautiful structure under them. Each tree at a distance is recognisable
by its particular lines; the ash, for instance, grows with its own
marked curve.

Some flakes of snow have remained on this bough of spruce, pure white
on dull green. Sparingly dispersed, the snow can be seen falling far
ahead between the trunks; indeed, the white dots appear to increase the
distance the eye can penetrate; it sees farther because there is
something to catch the glance. Nothing seems left for food in the woods
for bird or animal. Some ivy berries and black privet berries remain, a
few haws may be found; for the rest, it is gone; the squirrels have had
the nuts, the acorns were taken by the jays, rooks, and pheasants.
Bushels of acorns, too, were collected by hand as food for the fallow
deer in the park. A great fieldfare rises, like a lesser pigeon;
fieldfares often haunt the verge of woods, while the redwing thrushes
go out into the meadows. It can scarcely be doubted that both these
birds come over to escape the keener cold of the winters in Norway, or
that the same cause drives the blackbirds hither. In spring we listen
to Norwegian songs--the blackbird and the thrush that please us so
much, if not themselves of Scandinavian birth, have had a Scandinavian
origin. Any one walking about woods like these in January can
understand how, where there are large flocks of birds, they must find
the pressure of numbers through the insufficiency of food. They go then
to seek a warmer climate and more to eat; more particularly probably
for sustenance.

The original and simple theory that the majority of birds migrate for
food or warmth is not overthrown by modern observations. That appears
to be the primary impulse, though others may be traced or reasonably
imagined. To suppose, as has been put forward, that birds are endowed
with a migratory instinct for the express purpose of keeping down their
numbers, in order, that is, that they may perish in crossing the sea,
is really too absurd for serious consideration. If that were the end in
view, it would be most easily obtained by keeping them at home, where
snow would speedily starve them. On the contrary, it will appear to any
one who walks about woods and fields that migration is essential to the
preservation of these creatures. By migration, in fact, the species is
kept in existence, and room is found for life. Apart from the necessity
of food, movement and change is one of the most powerful agencies in
renewing health. This we see in our own experience; the condition of
the air is especially important, and it is well within reasonable
supposition that some birds and animals may wish to avoid certain
states of atmosphere. There is, too, the question of moulting and
change of plumage, and the possibility that this physiological event
may influence the removal to a different climate. Birds migrate
principally for food and warmth; secondly, on account of the pressure
of numbers (for in good seasons they increase very fast); thirdly, for
the sake of health; fourthly, for sexual reasons; fifthly, from the
operation of a kind of prehistoric memory; sixthly, from choice. One or
other of these causes will explain almost every case of migration.

Birds are lively and intellectual, imaginative and affectionate
creatures, and all their movements are not dictated by mere necessity.
They love the hedge and bush where they were born, they return to the
same tree, or the same spot under the eave. On the other hand, they
like to roam about the fields and woods, and some of them travel long
distances during the day. When the pleasurable cares of the nest are
concluded, it is possible that they may in some cases cross the sea
solely for the solace of change. Variety of food is itself a great
pleasure. By prehistoric memory is meant the unconscious influence of
ancient habit impressed upon the race in times when the conformation of
land and sea and the conditions of life were different. No space is
left for a mysterious agency; migration is purely natural, and acts for
the general preservation. Try to put yourself in a bird's place, and
you will see that migration is very natural indeed. If at some future
period of the world's history men should acquire the art of flying,
there can be no doubt that migration would become the custom, and whole
nations would change their localities. Man has, indeed, been always a
migratory animal. History is little beyond the record of migrations,
how one race moved on and overcame the race in front of it. In ancient
days lots were cast as to who should migrate, and those chosen by this
conscription left their homes that the rest remaining might have room
and food. Checking the attempted migration of the Helvetii was the
beginning of Caesar's exploits. What men do only at intervals birds do
frequently, having greater freedom of movement.

Who can doubt that the wild fowl come south because the north is frozen
over? The Laplander and the reindeer migrate together; the Tartars
migrate all the year through, crossing the steppes in winding and
devious but fixed paths, paths settled for each family, and kept
without a map, though invisible to strangers. It is only necessary to
watch the common sparrow. In spring his merry chirp and his few notes
of song are heard on the roof or in the garden; here he spends his time
till the broods are reared and the corn is ripe. Immediately he
migrates into the fields. By degrees he is joined by those left behind
to rear second broods, and at last the stubble is crowded with
sparrows, such flocks no one would believe possible unless they had
seen them. He has migrated for food, for his food changes with the
season, being mainly insects in spring, and grain and seeds in autumn.
Something may, I venture to think, in some cases of migration, be
fairly attributed to the influence of a desire for change, a desire
springing from physiological promptings for the preservation of health.
I am personally subject twice a year to the migratory impulse. I feel
it in spring and autumn, say about March, when the leaves begin to
appear, and again as the corn is carried, and most strongly as the
fields are left in stubble. I have felt it every year since boyhood,
often so powerfully as to be quite unable to resist it. Go I must, and
go I do, somewhere; if I do not I am soon unwell. The general idea of
direction is southerly, both spring and autumn; no doubt the reason is
because this is a northern country.

Some little green stays on the mounds where the rabbits creep and
nibble the grasses. Cinquefoil remains green though faded, and wild
parsley the freshest looking of all; plantain leaves are found under
shelter of brambles, and the dumb nettles, though the old stalks are
dead, have living leaves at the ground. Grey-veined ivy trails along,
here and there is a frond of hart's-tongue fern, though withered at the
tip, and greenish grey lichen grows on the exposed stumps of trees.
These together give a green tint to the mound, which is not so utterly
devoid of colour as the season of the year might indicate. Where they
fail, brown brake fern fills the spaces between the brambles; and in a
moist spot the bunches of rushes are composed half of dry stalks, and
half of green. Stems of willow-herb, four feet high, still stand, and
tiny long-tailed tits perch sideways on them. Above, on the bank,
another species of willow-herb has died down to a short stalk, from
which springs a living branch, and at its end is one pink flower. A
dandelion is opening on the same sheltered bank; farther on the gorse
is sprinkled with golden spots of bloom. A flock of greenfinches starts
from the bushes, and their colour shows against the ruddy wands of the
osier-bed over which they fly. The path winds round the edge of the
wood, where a waggon track goes up the hill; it is deeply grooved at
the foot of the hill. These tracks wear deeply into the chalk just
where the ascent begins. The chalk adheres to the shoes like mortar,
and for some time after one has left it each footstep leaves a white
mark on the turf. On the ridge the low trees and bushes have an outline
like the flame of a candle in a draught--the wind has blown them till
they have grown fixed in that shape. In an oak across the ploughed
field a flock of wood-pigeons have settled; on the furrows there are
chaffinches, and larks rise and float a few yards farther away. The
snow has ceased, and though there is no wind on the surface, the clouds
high above have opened somewhat, not sufficient for the sun to shine,
but to prolong the already closing afternoon a few minutes. If the sun
shines to-morrow morning the lark will soar and sing, though it is
January, and the quick note of the chaffinch will be heard as he
perches on the little branches projecting from the trunks of trees
below the great boughs. Thrushes sing every mild day in December and
January, entirely irrespective of the season, also before rain.

A curious instance of a starling having a young brood at this time of
the year, recently recorded, seems to suggest that birds are not really
deceived by the passing mildness of a few days, but are obliged to
prepare nests, finding themselves in a condition to require them. The
cause, in short, is physiological, and not the folly of the bird. This
starling had had two previous broods, one in October, and now again in
December-January. The starling was not, therefore, deceived by the
chance of mild weather; her own bodily condition led her to the nest,
and had she been a robin or thrush she would have built one instead of
resorting to a cranny. It is certain that individuals among birds and
animals do occasionally breed at later periods than is usual for the
generality of their species. Exceptionally prolific individuals among
birds continue to breed into the winter. They are not egregiously
deceived any more than we are by a mild interval; the nesting is caused
by their individual temperament.

The daylight has lingered on longer than expected, but now the gloom of
the short January evening is settling down fast in the wood. The silent
and motionless trees rise out of a mysterious shadow, which fills up
the spaces between their trunks. Only above, where their delicate outer
branches are shown against the dark sky, is there any separation
between them. Somewhere in the deep shadow of the underwood a blackbird
calls "ching, ching" before he finally settles himself to roost. In the
yew the lesser birds are already quiet, sheltered by the evergreen
spray; they have also sought the ivy-grown trunks. "Twit, twit," sounds
high overhead as one or two belated little creatures, scarcely visible,
pass quickly for the cover of the furze on the hill. The short January
evening is of but a few minutes' duration; just now it was only dusky,
and already the interior of the wood is impenetrable to the glance.
There rises a loud though distant clamour of rooks and daws, who have
restlessly moved in their roost-trees. Darkness is almost on them, yet
they cannot quite settle. The cawing and dawing rises to a pitch, and
then declines; the wood is silent, and it is suddenly night.




BY THE EXE

The whortleberry bushes are almost as thick as the heather in places on
the steep, rocky hills that overlook the Exe. Feeding on these berries
when half ripe is said to make the heath poults thin (they are acid),
so that a good crop of whortleberries is not advantageous to the black
game. Deep in the hollow the Exe winds and bends, finding a crooked way
among the ruddy rocks. Sometimes an almost inaccessible precipice rises
on one shore, covered with firs and ferns, which no one can gather;
while on the other is a narrow but verdant strip of mead. Coming down
in flood from the moors the Exe will not wait to run round its curves,
but rushes across the intervening corner, and leaves behind, as it
subsides, a mass of stones, flat as slates or scales, destroying the
grass. But the fly-fisherman seeks the spot because the water is swift
at the angle of the stream and broken by a ledge of rock. He can throw
up stream--the line falls soft as silk on the slow eddy below the rock,
and the fly is drawn gently towards him across the current. When a
natural fly approaches the surface of running water, and flutters along
just above it, it encounters a light air, which flows in the same
direction as the stream. Facing this surface breeze, the fly cannot
progress straight up the river, but is carried sideways across it. This
motion the artificial fly imitates; a trout takes it, and is landed on
the stones. He is not half a pound, yet in the sunshine has all the
beauty of a larger fish. Spots of cochineal and gold dust, finely mixed
together, dot his sides; they are not red nor yellow exactly, as if
gold dust were mixed with some bright red. A line is drawn along his
glistening greenish side, and across this there are faintly marked
lozenges of darker colour, so that in swimming past he would appear
barred. There are dark spots on the head between the eyes, the tail at
its lower and upper edges is pinkish; his gills are bright scarlet.
Proportioned and exquisitely shaped, he looks like a living arrow,
formed to shoot through the water. The delicate little creature is
finished in every detail, painted to the utmost minutiae, and carries a
wonderful store of force, enabling him to easily surmount the rapids.

Exe and Earle are twin streams, parted only by a ridge of heather-grown
moor. The Earle rises near a place called Simons' Bath, about which
there is a legend recalling the fate of Captain Webb. There is a pool
at Simons' Bath, in which is a small whirlpool. The stream running in
does not seem of much strength; but the eddy is sufficient to carry a
dog down. By report the eddy is said to be unfathomable. A long time
since a man named Simons thought he could swim through the whirlpool,
much as Captain Webb thought he could float down the rapids of Niagara;
only in this case Simons relied on the insignificant character of the
eddy. He made the attempt, was sucked down and drowned, and hence the
spot has been since known as Simons' Bath. So runs the tradition in the
neighbourhood, varied in details by different narrators, but not so
apocryphal, perhaps, as the story of the two giants, or demons, who
amused themselves one day throwing stones, to see which could throw
farthest. Their stones were huge boulders; the first pitched his pebble
across the Bristol Channel into Wales; the second's foot slipped, and
his boulder dropped on Exmoor, where it is known as White Stones to
this day. The antiquarians refer Simons' Bath to one Sigmund, but the
country-side tradition declares it was named from a man who was
drowned. Exe and Earle presently mingle their streams by pleasant oak
woods.

At the edge of one of these woods the trench, in the early summer, was
filled with ferns, so that, instead of thorns and brambles, the wood
was fenced with their green fronds. Among these ferns were some
buttercups, at least so they looked in passing; but a slight difference
of appearance induced me to stop, and on getting across the trench the
buttercups were found to be yellow Welsh poppies. The petals are larger
than those of the buttercup, and a paler yellow, without the metallic
burnish of the ranunculus. In the centre is the seed vessel, somewhat
like an urn; indeed, the yellow poppy resembles the scarlet field
poppy, though smaller in width of petal and much more local in habitat.
So concealed were the stalks by the ferns that the flowers appeared to
grow on their fronds. On the mounds grew corn marigolds, so brilliantly
yellow that they seemed to shine in the sunlight, and on a wall
moth-mullein flowered high above the foxgloves.

It was curious to hear the labouring people say, "There's the guckoo,"
when the cuckoo cried. They said he called "guckoo"; so cuckoo sounded
to their ears. There are numbers of birds of prey in the oak woods
which everywhere grow on the slopes of the Exmoor hills. The keeper who
wishes to destroy a whole brood of jays (which take the eggs of game)
waits till the young birds are fledged. He then catches one, or wounds
it, and, hiding himself in the bushes, pinches it till the bird cries
"scaac, scaac." At the sound the old birds come, and are shot as they
approach. The fledglings could, of course, be easily destroyed; the
object is to get at the wary old jays, and prevent their returning next
year. Now and then a buzzard is shot, and if it be only wounded the
gunner conceals himself and pinches it till it calls, when the bird's
partner presently appears, and is also killed. Stoats are plentiful.
They have their young in burrows, or in holes and crevices among the
stones, which are found in quantities in the woods. As any one passes
such a heap of stones the young stoats peep from the crevices and cry
"yac, yac," like barking, and so betray their presence. Three or four
traps are set in a circle round the spot, baited with pieces of rabbit,
in which the old stoats are soon caught. The young stoats in a day or
two, not being fed, come out of the stones, and are shot, or knocked on
the head. The woods are always on the sheltered slopes of the hills,
the moors on the summits are bare of trees; yet it would seem that
trees once grew there, trunks of oak being occasionally dug up from the
peat. Both the peaty turf and the heather are used for fuel; the
heather is pulled up, the turf cut with a particular kind of spade,
heart-shaped and pointed, not unlike the traditional spade used by the
gravedigger in "Hamlet," but with a very long curved handle.

Vipers are sometimes encountered among the heather where it is sandy. A
viper will sometimes wind itself round the stem of a thorn bush, and
thus, turning its head in every direction, defy a dog. Whichever side
the dog approaches, the viper turns its venomous head. Dogs frequently
kill them, and are sometimes bitten, generally in the face, when the
dog's head swells in a few minutes to twice its natural size. Salad oil
is the remedy relied on, and seldom known to fail. The effect of anger
on the common snake is marked. The skin, if the creature is annoyed,
becomes bristly and colder; sometimes there is a strong snake-like
smell emitted. It is singular that the goat-sucker, or fern owl, often
stuffed when shot and preserved in glass cases, does not keep; the bird
looks draggled and falling to pieces. So many of them are like this.
Some of the labouring people who work by the numerous streamlets say
that the wagtail dives, goes right under water like a diver now and
then--a circumstance I have not noticed myself. There is a custom of
serving up water-cress with roast fowl; it is also sometimes boiled
like a garden vegetable. Sometimes a man will take cider with his
tea--a cup of tea one side and a mug of cider on the other. The German
bands, who wander even into these extreme parts of the country, always
ask for cider, which they say reminds them of their own wines at
home--like hock, or Rhenish. Though the junction of Earle and Exe is a
long way from the sea (as the Exe winds), salmon come far up above that
to the moors. Salmon-fishing is preserved, but poachers take them at
night with gaffs. There are water-bailiffs, who keep a good look-out,
or think they do, but occasionally find heads of salmon nailed to their
doors in derision. The missel-thrush is called the "holm-screech." The
missel-thrushes, I know, have a difficulty to defend their young
against crows; but last spring I found a jackdaw endeavouring to get at
a missel-thrush's nest. The old birds were screeching loudly, and
trying to drive the jackdaw away. The chaffinch appears to be called
"woodfinch," at least the chaffinch answered nearest to the bird
described to me as a "woodfinch." In another county it is called the
piefinch.

One summer evening I was under a wood by the Exe. The sun had set, and
from over the wooded hill above bars of golden and rosy cloud stretched
out across the sky. The rooks came slowly home to roost, disappearing
over the wood, and at the same time the herons approached in exactly
the opposite direction, flying from Devon into Somerset, and starting
out to feed as the rooks returned home. The first heron sailed on
steadily at a great height, uttering a loud "caak, caak" at intervals.
In a few minutes a second followed, and "caak, caak" sounded again over
the river valley. The third was flying at a less height, and as he came
into sight over the line of the wood he suddenly wheeled round, and,
holding his immense wings extended, dived as a rook will downwards
through the air. He twisted from side to side like a coin partly spun
round by the finger and thumb, as he came down, rushing through the air
head first. The sound of his great vanes pressing and dividing the air
was plainly audible. He looked unable to manage his descent; but at the
right moment he recovered his balance, and rose a little up into a tree
on the summit, drawing his long legs into the branches behind him. The
fourth heron fetched a wide circle, and so descended into the wood; two
more passed on over the valley--altogether six herons in about a
quarter of an hour. They intended, no doubt, to wait in the trees till
it was dusky, and then to go down and fish in the river. Herons are
called cranes, and heronies are craneries. A determined sportsman, who
used to eat every heron he could shoot in revenge for their ravages
among the trout, at last became suspicious, and examining one, found in
it the remains of a rat and of a toad, after which he did not eat any
more. Another sportsman found a heron in the very act of gulping down a
good-sized trout, which stuck in the gullet. He shot the heron and got
the trout, which was not at all injured, only marked on each side where
the beak had cut it. The fish was cooked and eaten.

This summer evening the bars of golden and rosy cloud gradually lost
their bright colour, but retained some purple in the vapour for a long
time. If the red sunset clouds turn black, the country people say it
will rain; if any other colour, it will be fine. The path from the
river led beside the now dusky moor, and the curlew's weird whistle
came out of the increasing darkness. Wild as the curlew is in early
summer (when there are young birds), he will fly up within a short
distance of the wayfarer, whistling, and alight on the burnt, barren
surface of the moor. There he stalks to and fro, grey and upright. He
looks a large bird so close. His head nods at each step, and every now
and then his long bill, curved like a sabre, takes something from the
ground. But he is not feeding, he is watching you. He utters his
strange, crying whistle from time to time, which draws your attention
from the young birds.

By these rivers of the west otters are still numerous, and are
regularly hunted. Besides haunting the rivers, they ascend the brooks,
and even the smallest streamlets, and are often killed a long way from
the larger waters.

There are three things to be chiefly noticed in the otter--first, the
great width of the upper nostril; secondly, the length and sharpness of
the hold-fast teeth; and, thirdly, the sturdiness and roundness of the
chest or barrel, expressive of singular strength. The upper nostril is
so broad that when the mouth is open the lower jaw appears but a third
of its width--a mere narrow streak of jaw, dotted, however, with the
sharpest teeth. This distension of the upper jaw and narrowness of the
lower gives the impression of relentless ferocity. His teeth are
somewhat cat-like, and so is his manner of biting. He forces his teeth
to meet through whatever he takes hold of, but then immediately repeats
the bite somewhere else, not holding what he has, but snapping again
and again like a cat, so that his bite is considered even worse than
that of the badger. Now and then, in the excitement of the hunt, a man
will put his hand into the hole occupied by the otter to draw him out.
If the huntsman sees this there is some hard language used, for if the
otter chance to catch the hand, he might so crush and mangle it that it
would be useless for life. Nothing annoys the huntsman more than
anything of this kind.

The otter's short legs are deceptive; it does not look as if a creature
so low down could be very serious to encounter or difficult to kill.
His short legs are, in fact, an addition to his strength, which is
perhaps greater than that of any other animal of proportionate size. He
weighs nearly as heavy as a fox, and is even as hard to kill fairly.
Unless speared, or knocked heavily on the head, the otter-hounds can
rarely kill him in the water; when driven to land at last or to a
shallow he is often rather crushed and pressed to death than anything
else, and the skin sometimes has not got a single toothmark in it. Not
a single hound has succeeded in biting through, but there is a
different story to tell on the other side. A terrier has his jaw loose
and it has to be bound up, such a crushing bite has he had. There are
torn shoulders, necks, and limbs, and specks of blood on the nostrils
and coats of the other hounds. A full-grown otter fights like a lion in
the water; if he gets in a hole under the bank where it is hollow,
called a "hover," he has to be thrust out with a pole. He dives under
the path of his enemies as they yelp in the water, and as he goes
attacks one from beneath, seizes him by the leg, and drags him down,
and almost drowns him before he will let go. The air he is compelled to
emit from his lungs as he travels across to another retreat shows his
course on the surface, and by the bubbles he is tracked as he goes deep
below.

He tries up the stream, and finds at the place where a ledge of rocks
crosses it eight or ten men armed with long staves standing waiting for
him. If there was but one deep place at the side of the ledge of rocks
he could beat them still and slip by, but the water is low for want of
rain, and he is unable to do so. He turns and tries at the sides of the
river lower down. Behind matted roots, and under the bank, with a rocky
fragment at one side, he faces his pursuers. The hounds are snapped at
as they approach in front. He cannot be struck with a staff from above
because the bank covers him. Some one must wade across and strike him
with a pole till he moves, or carry a terrier or two and pitch them in
the hole, half above and half under water. Next he tries the other
bank, then baffles all by doubling, till some one spies his nostril as
he comes up to breathe. The rocky hill at hand resounds with the cries
of the hounds, the sharp bark of the terriers, the orders of the
huntsman, and the shouts of the others. There are ladies in the mead by
the river's edge watching the hunt. Met in every direction, the otter
swims down stream; there are no rocks there, he knows, but as he comes
he finds a net stretched across. He cannot go down the river for the
net, nor up it for the guarded ledge of rocks; he is enclosed in a pool
without a chance of escape from it, and all he can do is to prolong the
unequal contest to the last moment. Now he visits his former holes or
"hovers," to be again found out; now he rests behind rocky fragments,
now dives and doubles or eludes all for a minute by some turn. So long
as his wind endures or he is not wounded he can stop in the water, and
so long as he is in the water he can live. But by degrees he is
encircled; some wade in and cut off his course; hounds stop him one way
and men the other, till, finally forced to land or to the shallow, he
is slain. His webbed feet are cut off and given as trophies to the
ladies who are present. The skin varies in colour--sometimes a deep
brown, sometimes fawn.

The otter is far wilder than the fox; for the fox a home is found and
covers are kept for him, even though he makes free with the pheasants;
but the otter has no home except the river and the rocky fastnesses
beside it. No creature could be more absolutely wild, depending solely
upon his own exertions for existence. Of olden time he was believed to
be able to scent the fish in the water at a considerable distance, as a
hound scents a fox, and to go straight to them. If he gets among a
number he will kill many more than he needs. For this reason he has
been driven by degrees from most of the rivers in the south where he
used to be found, but still exists in Somerset and Devon. Not even in
otter-hunting does he get the same fair play as the fox. No one strikes
a fox or puts a net across his course. That, however, is necessary, but
it is time that a strong protest was made against the extermination of
the otter in rivers like the Thames, where he is treated as a venomous
cobra might be on land; The truth is the otter is a most interesting
animal and worth preservation, even at the cost of what he eats. There
is a great difference between keeping the number of otters down by
otter-hunting within reasonable limits and utterly exterminating them.
Hunting the otter in Somerset is one thing, exterminating them in the
Thames another, and I cannot but feel a sense of deep regret when I
hear of fresh efforts towards this end. In the home counties, and,
indeed, in many other counties, the list of wild creatures is already
short enough, and is gradually decreasing, and the loss of the otter
would be serious. This animal is one of the few perfectly wild
creatures that have survive

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