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The Open Air

by Richard Jefferies · English · Gutenberg #6981 · 432,055 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Open Air

Author: Richard Jefferies


        
Release date: November 1, 2004 [eBook #6981]
                Most recently updated: January 25, 2013

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6981

Credits: Produced by Malcolm Farmer, Juliet Sutherland, Tom Allen,
        Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE OPEN AIR ***




Produced by Malcolm Farmer, Juliet Sutherland, Tom Allen,
Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team











THE OPEN AIR



RICHARD JEFFERIES





NOTE

For permission to collect these papers my thanks are due to the Editors
of the following publications: _The Standard_, _English Illustrated
Magazine_, _Longman's Magazine_, _St. James's Gazette_, _Chambers's
Journal_, _Manchester Guardian_, _Good Words_, and _Pall Mall Gazette_.
                        R.J.





CONTENTS


SAINT GUIDO

GOLDEN-BROWN

WILD FLOWERS

SUNNY BRIGHTON

THE PINE WOOD

NATURE ON THE ROOF

ONE OF THE NEW VOTERS

THE MODERN THAMES

THE SINGLE-BARREL GUN

THE HAUNT OF THE HARE

THE BATHING SEASON

UNDER THE ACORNS

DOWNS

FOREST

BEAUTY IN THE COUNTRY

OUT OF DOORS IN FEBRUARY

HAUNTS OF THE LAPWING

OUTSIDE LONDON

ON THE LONDON ROAD

RED ROOFS OF LONDON

A WET NIGHT IN LONDON




SAINT GUIDO


St. Guido ran out at the garden gate into a sandy lane, and down the
lane till he came to a grassy bank. He caught hold of the bunches of
grass and so pulled himself up. There was a footpath on the top which
went straight in between fir-trees, and as he ran along they stood on
each side of him like green walls. They were very near together, and
even at the top the space between them was so narrow that the sky
seemed to come down, and the clouds to be sailing but just over them,
as if they would catch and tear in the fir-trees. The path was so
little used that it had grown green, and as he ran he knocked dead
branches out of his way. Just as he was getting tired of running he
reached the end of the path, and came out into a wheat-field. The wheat
did not grow very closely, and the spaces were filled with azure
corn-flowers. St. Guido thought he was safe away now, so he stopped to
look.

Those thoughts and feelings which are not sharply defined but have a
haze of distance and beauty about them are always the dearest. His name
was not really Guido, but those who loved him had called him so in
order to try and express their hearts about him. For they thought if a
great painter could be a little boy, then he would be something like
this one. They were not very learned in the history of painters: they
had heard of Raphael, but Raphael was too elevated, too much of the
sky, and of Titian, but Titian was fond of feminine loveliness, and in
the end somebody said Guido was a dreamy name, as if it belonged to one
who was full of faith. Those golden curls shaking about his head as he
ran and filling the air with radiance round his brow, looked like a
Nimbus or circlet of glory. So they called him St. Guido, and a very,
very wild saint he was.

St. Guido stopped in the cornfield, and looked all round. There were
the fir-trees behind him--a thick wall of green--hedges on the right
and the left, and the wheat sloped down towards an ash-copse in the
hollow. No one was in the field, only the fir-trees, the green hedges,
the yellow wheat, and the sun overhead, Guido kept quite still, because
he expected that in a minute the magic would begin, and something would
speak to him. His cheeks which had been flushed with running grew less
hot, but I cannot tell you the exact colour they were, for his skin was
so white and clear, it would not tan under the sun, yet being always
out of doors it had taken the faintest tint of golden brown mixed with
rosiness. His blue eyes which had been wide open, as they always were
when full of mischief, became softer, and his long eyelashes drooped
over them. But as the magic did not begin, Guido walked on slowly into
the wheat, which rose nearly to his head, though it was not yet so tall
as it would be before the reapers came. He did not break any of the
stalks, or bend them down and step on them; he passed between them, and
they yielded on either side. The wheat-ears were pale gold, having only
just left off their green, and they surrounded him on all sides as if
he were bathing.

A butterfly painted a velvety red with white spots came floating along
the surface of the corn, and played round his cap, which was a little
higher, and was so tinted by the sun that the butterfly was inclined to
settle on it. Guido put up his hand to catch the butterfly, forgetting
his secret in his desire to touch it. The butterfly was too quick--with
a snap of his wings disdainfully mocking the idea of catching him, away
he went. Guido nearly stepped on a humble-bee--buzz-zz!--the bee was so
alarmed he actually crept up Guido's knickers to the knee, and even
then knocked himself against a wheat-ear when he started to fly. Guido
kept quite still while the humble-bee was on his knee, knowing that he
should not be stung if he did not move. He knew, too, that humble-bees
have stings though people often say they have not, and the reason
people think they do not possess them is because humble-bees are so
good-natured and never sting unless they are very much provoked.

Next he picked a corn buttercup; the flowers were much smaller than the
great buttercups which grew in the meadows, and these were not golden
but coloured like brass. His foot caught in a creeper, and he nearly
tumbled--it was a bine of bindweed which went twisting round and round
two stalks of wheat in a spiral, binding them together as if some one
had wound string about them. There was one ear of wheat which had black
specks on it, and another which had so much black that the grains
seemed changed and gone leaving nothing but blackness. He touched it
and it stained his hands like a dark powder, and then he saw that it
was not perfectly black as charcoal is, it was a little red. Something
was burning up the corn there just as if fire had been set to the ears.
Guido went on and found another place where there was hardly any wheat
at all, and those stalks that grew were so short they only came above
his knee. The wheat-ears were thin and small, and looked as if there
was nothing but chaff. But this place being open was full of flowers,
such lovely azure cornflowers which the people call bluebottles.

Guido took two; they were curious flowers with knobs surrounded with
little blue flowers like a lady's bonnet. They were a beautiful blue,
not like any other blue, not like the violets in the garden, or the sky
over the trees, or the geranium in the grass, or the bird's-eyes by the
path. He loved them and held them tight in his hand, and went on,
leaving the red pimpernel wide open to the dry air behind him, but the
May-weed was everywhere. The May-weed had white flowers like a
moon-daisy, but not so large, and leaves like moss. He could not walk
without stepping on these mossy tufts, though he did not want to hurt
them. So he stooped and stroked the moss-like leaves and said, "I do
not want to hurt you, but you grow so thick I cannot help it." In a
minute afterwards as he was walking he heard a quick rush, and saw the
wheat-ears sway this way and that as if a puff of wind had struck them.

Guido stood still and his eyes opened very wide, he had forgotten to
cut a stick to fight with: he watched the wheat-ears sway, and could
see them move for some distance, and he did not know what it was.
Perhaps it was a wild boar or a yellow lion, or some creature no one
had ever seen; he would not go back, but he wished he had cut a nice
stick. Just then a swallow swooped down and came flying over the wheat
so close that Guido almost felt the flutter of his wings, and as he
passed he whispered to Guido that it was only a hare. "Then why did he
run away?" said Guido; "I should not have hurt him." But the swallow
had gone up high into the sky again, and did not hear him. All the time
Guido was descending the slope, for little feet always go down the hill
as water does, and when he looked back he found that he had left the
fir-trees so far behind he was in the middle of the field. If any one
had looked they could hardly have seen him, and if he had taken his cap
off they could not have done so because the yellow curls would be so
much the same colour as the yellow corn. He stooped to see how nicely
he could hide himself, then he knelt, and in a minute sat down, so that
the wheat rose up high above him.

Another humble-bee went over along the tips of the wheat--burr-rr--as
he passed; then a scarlet fly, and next a bright yellow wasp who was
telling a friend flying behind him that he knew where there was such a
capital piece of wood to bite up into tiny pieces and make into paper
for the nest in the thatch, but his friend wanted to go to the house
because there was a pear quite ripe there on the wall. Next came a
moth, and after the moth a golden fly, and three gnats, and a mouse ran
along the dry ground with a curious sniffling rustle close to Guido. A
shrill cry came down out of the air, and looking up he saw two swifts
turning circles, and as they passed each other they shrieked--their
voices were so shrill they shrieked. They were only saying that in a
month their little swifts in the slates would be able to fly. While he
sat so quiet on the ground and hidden by the wheat, he heard a cuckoo
such a long way off it sounded like a watch when it is covered up.
"Cuckoo" did not come full and distinct--it was such a tiny little
"cuckoo" caught in the hollow of Guido's ear. The cuckoo must have been
a mile away.

Suddenly he thought something went over, and yet he did not see
it--perhaps it was the shadow--and he looked up and saw a large bird
not very far up, not farther than he could fling, or shoot his arrows,
and the bird was fluttering his wings, but did not move away farther,
as if he had been tied in the air. Guido knew it was a hawk, and the
hawk was staying there to see if there was a mouse or a little bird in
the wheat. After a minute the hawk stopped fluttering and lifted his
wings together as a butterfly does when he shuts his, and down the hawk
came, straight into the corn. "Go away!" shouted Guido jumping up, and
flinging his cap, and the hawk, dreadfully frightened and terribly
cross, checked himself and rose again with an angry rush. So the mouse
escaped, but Guido could not find his cap for some time. Then he went
on, and still the ground sloping sent him down the hill till he came
close to the copse.

Some sparrows came out from the copse, and he stopped and saw one of
them perch on a stalk of wheat, with one foot above the other sideways,
so that he could pick at the ear and get the corn. Guido watched the
sparrow clear the ear, then he moved, and the sparrows flew back to the
copse, where they chattered at him for disturbing them. There was a
ditch between the corn and the copse, and a streamlet; he picked up a
stone and threw it in, and the splash frightened a rabbit, who slipped
over the bank and into a hole. The boughs of an oak reached out across
to the corn, and made so pleasant a shade that Guido, who was very hot
from walking in the sun, sat down on the bank of the streamlet with his
feet dangling over it, and watched the floating grass sway slowly as
the water ran. Gently he leaned back till his back rested on the
sloping ground--he raised one knee, and left the other foot over the
verge where the tip of the tallest rushes touched it. Before he had
been there a minute he remembered the secret which a fern had taught
him.

First, if he wanted to know anything, or to hear a story, or what the
grass was saying, or the oak-leaves singing, he must be careful not to
interfere as he had done just now with the butterfly by trying to catch
him. Fortunately, that butterfly was a nice butterfly, and very
kindhearted, but sometimes, if you interfered with one thing, it would
tell another thing, and they would all know in a moment, and stop
talking, and never say a word. Once, while they were all talking
pleasantly, Guido caught a fly in his hand, he felt his hand tickle as
the fly stepped on it, and he shut up his little fist so quickly he
caught the fly in the hollow between the palm and his fingers. The fly
went buzz, and rushed to get out, but Guido laughed, so the fly buzzed
again, and just told the grass, and the grass told the bushes, and
everything knew in a moment, and Guido never heard another word all
that day. Yet sometimes now they all knew something about him, they
would go on talking. You see, they all rather petted and spoiled him.
Next, if Guido did not hear them conversing, the fern said he must
touch a little piece of grass and put it against his cheek, or a leaf,
and kiss it, and say, "Leaf, leaf, tell them I am here."

Now, while he was lying down, and the tip of the rushes touched his
foot, he remembered this, so he moved the rush with his foot and said,
"Rush, rush, tell them I am here." Immediately there came a little
wind, and the wheat swung to and fro, the oak-leaves rustled, the
rushes bowed, and the shadows slipped forwards and back again. Then it
was still, and the nearest wheat-ear to Guido nodded his head, and said
in a very low tone, "Guido, dear, just this minute I do not feel very
happy, although the sunshine is so warm, because I have been thinking,
for we have been in one or other of these fields of your papa's a
thousand years this very year. Every year we have been sown, and
weeded, and reaped, and garnered. Every year the sun has ripened us and
the rain made us grow; every year for a thousand years."

"What did you see all that time?" said Guido.

"The swallows came," said the Wheat, "and flew over us, and sang a
little sweet song, and then they went up into the chimneys and built
their nests."

"At my house?" said Guido.

"Oh, no, dear, the house I was then thinking of is gone, like a leaf
withered and lost. But we have not forgotten any of the songs they sang
us, nor have the swallows that you see to-day--one of them spoke to you
just now--forgotten what we said to their ancestors. Then the
blackbirds came out in us and ate the creeping creatures, so that they
should not hurt us, and went up into the oaks and whistled such
beautiful sweet low whistles. Not in those oaks, dear, where the
blackbirds whistle to-day; even the very oaks have gone, though they
were so strong that one of them defied the lightning, and lived years
and years after it struck him. One of the very oldest of the old oaks
in the copse, dear, is his grandchild. If you go into the copse you
will find an oak which has only one branch; he is so old, he has only
that branch left. He sprang up from an acorn dropped from an oak that
grew from an acorn dropped from the oak the lightning struck. So that
is three oak lives, Guido dear, back to the time I was thinking of just
now. And that oak under whose shadow you are now lying is the fourth of
them, and he is quite young, though he is so big.

"A jay sowed the acorn from which he grew up; the jay was in the oak
with one branch, and some one frightened him, and as he flew he dropped
the acorn which he had in his bill just there, and now you are lying in
the shadow of the tree. So you see, it is a very long time ago, when
the blackbirds came and whistled up in those oaks I was thinking of,
and that was why I was not very happy."

"But you have heard the blackbirds whistling ever since?" said Guido;
"and there was such a big black one up in our cherry tree this morning,
and I shot my arrow at him and very nearly hit him. Besides, there is a
blackbird whistling now--you listen. There, he's somewhere in the
copse. Why can't you listen to him, and be happy now?"

"I will be happy, dear, as you are here, but still it is a long, long
time, and then I think, after I am dead, and there is more wheat in my
place, the blackbirds will go on whistling for another thousand years
after me. For of course I did not hear them all that time ago myself,
dear, but the wheat which was before me heard them and told me. They
told me, too, and I know it is true, that the cuckoo came and called
all day till the moon shone at night, and began again in the morning
before the dew had sparkled in the sunrise. The dew dries very soon on
wheat, Guido dear, because wheat is so dry; first the sunrise makes the
tips of the wheat ever so faintly rosy, then it grows yellow, then as
the heat increases it becomes white at noon, and golden in the
afternoon, and white again under the moonlight. Besides which wide
shadows come over from the clouds, and a wind always follows the shadow
and waves us, and every time we sway to and fro that alters our colour.
A rough wind gives us one tint, and heavy rain another, and we look
different on a cloudy day to what we do on a sunny one. All these
colours changed on us when the blackbird was whistling in the oak the
lightning struck, the fourth one backwards from me; and it makes me sad
to think that after four more oaks have gone, the same colours will
come on the wheat that will grow then. It is thinking about those past
colours, and songs, and leaves, and of the colours and the sunshine,
and the songs, and the leaves that will come in the future that makes
to-day so much. It makes to-day a thousand years long backwards, and a
thousand years long forwards, and makes the sun so warm, and the air so
sweet, and the butterflies so lovely, and the hum of the bees, and
everything so delicious. We cannot have enough of it."

"No, that we cannot," said Guido. "Go on, you talk so nice and low. I
feel sleepy and jolly. Talk away, old Wheat."

"Let me see," said the Wheat. "Once on a time while the men were
knocking us out of the ear on a floor with flails, which are sticks
with little hinges--"

"As if I did not know what a flail was!" said Guido. "I hit old John
with the flail, and Ma gave him a shilling not to be cross."

"While they were knocking us with the hard sticks," the Wheat went on,
"we heard them talking about a king who was shot with an arrow like
yours in the forest--it slipped from a tree, and went into him instead
of into the deer. And long before that the men came up the river--the
stream in the ditch there runs into the river--in rowing ships--how you
would like one to play in, Guido! For they were not like the ships now
which are machines, they were rowing ships--men's ships--and came right
up into the land ever so far, all along the river up to the place where
the stream in the ditch runs in; just where your papa took you in the
punt, and you got the waterlilies, the white ones."

"And wetted my sleeve right up my arm--oh, I know! I can row you, old
Wheat; I can row as well as my papa can."

"But since the rowing ships came, the ploughs have turned up this
ground a thousand times," said the Wheat; "and each time the furrows
smelt sweeter, and this year they smelt sweetest of all. The horses
have such glossy coats, and such fine manes, and they are so strong and
beautiful. They drew the ploughs along and made the ground give up its
sweetness and savour, and while they were doing it, the spiders in the
copse spun their silk along from the ashpoles, and the mist in the
morning weighed down their threads. It was so delicious to come out of
the clods as we pushed our green leaves up and felt the rain, and the
wind, and the warm sun. Then a little bird came in the copse and
called, 'Sip-sip, sip, sip, sip,' such a sweet low song, and the larks
ran along the ground in between us, and there were bluebells in the
copse, and anemones; till by-and-by the sun made us yellow, and the
blue flowers that you have in your hand came out. I cannot tell you how
many there have been of these flowers since the oak was struck by the
lightning, in all the thousand years there must have been altogether--I
cannot tell you how many."

"Why didn't I pick them all?" said Guido.

"Do you know," said the Wheat, "we have thought so much more, and felt
so much more, since your people took us, and ploughed for us, and sowed
us, and reaped us. We are not like the same wheat we used to be before
your people touched us, when we grew wild, and there were huge great
things in the woods and marshes which I will not tell you about lest
you should be frightened. Since we have felt your hands, and you have
touched us, we have felt so much more. Perhaps that was why I was not
very happy till you came, for I was thinking quite as much about your
people as about us, and how all the flowers of all those thousand
years, and all the songs, and the sunny days were gone, and all the
people were gone too, who had heard the blackbirds whistle in the oak
the lightning struck. And those that are alive now--there will be
cuckoos calling, and the eggs in the thrushes' nests, and blackbirds
whistling, and blue cornflowers, a thousand years after every one of
them is gone.

"So that is why it is so sweet this minute, and why I want you, and
your people, dear, to be happy now and to have all these things, and to
agree so as not to be so anxious and careworn, but to come out with us,
or sit by us, and listen to the blackbirds, and hear the wind rustle
us, and be happy. Oh, I wish I could make them happy, and do away with
all their care and anxiety, and give you all heaps and heaps of
flowers! Don't go away, darling, do you lie still, and I will talk and
sing to you, and you can pick some more flowers when you get up. There
is a beautiful shadow there, and I heard the streamlet say that he
would sing a little to you; he is not very big, he cannot sing very
loud. By-and-by, I know, the sun will make us as dry as dry, and
darker, and then the reapers will come while the spiders are spinning
their silk again--this time it will come floating in the blue air, for
the air seems blue if you look up.

"It is a great joy to your people, dear, when the reaping time arrives:
the harvest is a great joy to you when the thistledown comes rolling
along in the wind. So that I shall be happy even when the reapers cut
me down, because I know it is for you, and your people, my love. The
strong men will come to us gladly, and the women, and the little
children will sit in the shade and gather great white trumpets of
convolvulus, and come to tell their mothers how they saw the young
partridges in the next field. But there is one thing we do not like,
and that is, all the labour and the misery. Why cannot your people have
us without so much labour, and why are so many of you unhappy? Why
cannot they be all happy with us as you are, dear? For hundreds and
hundreds of years now the wheat every year has been sorrowful for your
people, and I think we get more sorrowful every year about it, because
as I was telling you just now the flowers go, and the swallows go, the
old, old oaks go, and that oak will go, under the shade of which you
are lying, Guido; and if your people do not gather the flowers now, and
watch the swallows, and listen to the blackbirds whistling, as you are
listening now while I talk, then Guido, my love, they will never pick
any flowers, nor hear any birds' songs. They think they will, they
think that when they have toiled, and worked a long time, almost all
their lives, then they will come to the flowers, and the birds, and be
joyful in the sunshine. But no, it will not be so, for then they will
be old themselves, and their ears dull, and their eyes dim, so that the
birds will sound a great distance off, and the flowers will not seem
bright.

"Of course, we know that the greatest part of your people cannot help
themselves, and must labour on like the reapers till their ears are
full of the dust of age. That only makes us more sorrowful, and anxious
that things should be different. I do not suppose we should think about
them had we not been in man's hand so long that now we have got to feel
with man. Every year makes it more pitiful because then there are more
flowers gone, and added to the vast numbers of those gone before, and
never gathered or looked at, though they could have given so much
pleasure. And all the work and labour, and thinking, and reading and
learning that your people do ends in nothing--not even one flower. We
cannot understand why it should be so. There are thousands of
wheat-ears in this field, more than you would know how to write down
with your pencil, though you have learned your tables, sir. Yet all of
us thinking, and talking, cannot understand why it is when we consider
how clever your people are, and how they bring ploughs, and
steam-engines, and put up wires along the roads to tell you things when
you are miles away, and sometimes we are sown where we can hear the
hum, hum, all day of the children learning in the school. The
butterflies flutter over us, and the sun shines, and the doves are
very, very happy at their nest, but the children go on hum, hum inside
this house, and learn, learn. So we suppose you must be very clever,
and yet you cannot manage this. All your work is wasted, and you labour
in vain--you dare not leave it a minute.

"If you left it a minute it would all be gone; it does not mount up and
make a store, so that all of you could sit by it and be happy. Directly
you leave off you are hungry, and thirsty, and miserable like the
beggars that tramp along the dusty road here. All the thousand years of
labour since this field was first ploughed have not stored up anything
for you. It would not matter about the work so much if you were only
happy; the bees work every year, but they are happy; the doves build a
nest every year, but they are very, very happy. We think it must be
because you do not come out to us and be with us, and think more as we
do. It is not because your people have not got plenty to eat and
drink--you have as much as the bees. Why just look at us! Look at the
wheat that grows all over the world; all the figures that were ever
written in pencil could not tell how much, it is such an immense
quantity. Yet your people starve and die of hunger every now and then,
and we have seen the wretched beggars tramping along the road. We have
known of times when there was a great pile of us, almost a hill piled
up, it was not in this country, it was in another warmer country, and
yet no one dared to touch it--they died at the bottom of the hill of
wheat. The earth is full of skeletons of people who have died of
hunger. They are dying now this minute in your big cities, with nothing
but stones all round them, stone walls and stone streets; not jolly
stones like those you threw in the water, dear--hard, unkind stones
that make them cold and let them die, while we are growing here,
millions of us, in the sunshine with the butterflies floating over us.
This makes us unhappy; I was very unhappy this morning till you came
running over and played with us.

"It is not because there is not enough: it is because your people are
so short-sighted, so jealous and selfish, and so curiously infatuated
with things that are not so good as your old toys which you have flung
away and forgotten. And you teach the children hum, hum, all day to
care about such silly things, and to work for them and to look to them
as the object of their lives. It is because you do not share us among
you without price or difference; because you do not share the great
earth among you fairly, without spite and jealousy and avarice; because
you will not agree; you silly, foolish people to let all the flowers
wither for a thousand years while you keep each other at a distance,
instead of agreeing and sharing them! Is there something in you--as
there is poison in the nightshade, you know it, dear, your papa told
you not to touch it--is there a sort of poison in your people that
works them up into a hatred of one another? Why, then, do you not agree
and have all things, all the great earth can give you, just as we have
the sunshine and the rain? How happy your people could be if they would
only agree! But you go on teaching even the little children to follow
the same silly objects, hum, hum, hum, all the day, and they will grow
up to hate each other, and to try which can get the most round
things--you have one in your pocket."

"Sixpence," said Guido. "It's quite a new one."

"And other things quite as silly," the Wheat continued. "All the time
the flowers are flowering, but they will go, even the oaks will go. We
think the reason you do not all have plenty, and why you do not do only
just a little work, and why you die of hunger if you leave off, and why
so many of you are unhappy in body and mind, and all the misery is
because you have not got a spirit like the wheat, like us; you will not
agree, and you will not share, and you will hate each other, and you
will be so avaricious, and you will _not_ touch the flowers, or go into
the sunshine (you would rather half of you died among the hard stones
first), and you will teach your children hum, hum, to follow in some
foolish course that has caused you all this unhappiness a thousand
years, and you will _not_ have a spirit like us, and feel like us. Till
you have a spirit like us, and feel like us, you will never, never be
happy. Lie still, dear; the shadow of the oak is broad and will not
move from you for a long time yet."

"But perhaps Paul will come up to my house, and Percy and Morna."

"Look up in the oak very quietly, don't move, just open your eyes and
look," said the Wheat, who was very cunning. Guido looked and saw a
lovely little bird climbing up a branch. It was chequered, black and
white, like a very small magpie, only without such a long tail, and it
had a spot of red about its neck. It was a pied woodpecker, not the
large green woodpecker, but another kind. Guido saw it go round the
branch, and then some way up, and round again till it came to a place
that pleased it, and then the woodpecker struck the bark with its bill,
tap-tap. The sound was quite loud, ever so much more noise than such a
tiny bill seemed able to make. Tap-tap! If Guido had not been still so
that the bird had come close he would never have found it among the
leaves. Tap-tap! After it had picked out all the insects there, the
woodpecker flew away over the ashpoles of the copse.

"I should just like to stroke him," said Guido. "If I climbed up into
the oak perhaps he would come again, and I could catch him."

"No," said the Wheat, "he only comes once a day,"

"Then tell me stories," said Guido, imperiously.

"I will if I can," said the Wheat. "Once upon a time, when the oak the
lightning struck was still living, and when the wheat was green in this
very field, a man came staggering out of the wood, and walked out into
it. He had an iron helmet on, and he was wounded, and his blood stained
the green wheat red as he walked. He tried to get to the streamlet,
which was wider then, Guido dear, to drink, for he knew it was there,
but he could not reach it. He fell down and died in the green wheat,
dear, for he was very much hurt with a sharp spear, but more so with
hunger and thirst."

"I am so sorry," said Guido; "and now I look at you, why you are all
thirsty and dry, you nice old Wheat, and the ground is as dry as dry
under you; I will get you something to drink."

And down he scrambled into the ditch, setting his foot firm on a root,
for though he was so young, he knew how to get down to the water
without wetting his feet, or falling in, and how to climb up a tree,
and everything jolly. Guido dipped his hand in the streamlet, and flung
the water over the wheat, five or six good sprinklings till the drops
hung on the wheat-ears. Then he said, "Now you are better."

"Yes, dear, thank you, my love," said the Wheat, who was very pleased,
though of course the water was not enough to wet its roots. Still it
was pleasant, like a very little shower. Guido lay down on his chest
this time, with his elbows on the ground, propping his head up, and as
he now faced the wheat he could see in between the stalks.

"Lie still," said the Wheat, "the corncrake is not very far off, he has
come up here since your papa told the mowers to mow the meadow, and
very likely if you stay quiet you will see him. If you do not
understand all I say, never mind, dear; the sunshine is warm, but not
too warm in the shade, and we all love you, and want you to be as happy
as ever you can be."

"It is jolly to be quite hidden like this," said Guido. "No one could
find me; if Paul were to look all day he would never find me; even Papa
could not find me. Now go on and tell me stories."

"Ever so many times, when the oak the lightning struck was young," said
the Wheat, "great stags used to come out of the wood and feed on the
green wheat; it was early in the morning when they came. Such great
stags, and so proud, and yet so timid, the least thing made them go
bound, bound, bound."

"Oh, I know!" said Guido; "I saw some jump over the fence in the
forest--I am going there again soon. If I take my bow I will shoot one!"

"But there are no deer here now," said the Wheat; "they have been gone
a long, long time; though I think your papa has one of their antlers,"

"Now, how did you know that?" said Guido; "you have never been to our
house, and you cannot see in from here because the fir copse is in the
way; how do you find out these things?"

"Oh!" said the Wheat, laughing, "we have lots of ways of finding out
things. Don't you remember the swallow that swooped down and told you
not to be frightened at the hare? The swallow has his nest at your
house, and he often flies by your windows and looks in, and he told me.
The birds tell us lots of things, and all about what is over the sea."

"But that is not a story," said Guido.

"Once upon a time," said the Wheat, "when the oak the lightning struck
was alive, your papa's papa's papa, ever so much farther back than
that, had all the fields round here, all that you can see from Acre
Hill. And do you know it happened that in time every one of them was
lost or sold, and your family, Guido dear, were homeless--no house, no
garden or orchard, and no dogs or guns, or anything jolly. One day the
papa that was then came along the road with _his_ little Guido, and
they were beggars, dear, and had no place to sleep, and they slept all
night in the wheat in this very field close to where the hawthorn bush
grows now--where you picked the May flowers, you know, my love. They
slept there all the summer night, and the fern owls flew to and fro,
and the bats and crickets chirped, and the stars shone faintly, as if
they were made pale by the heat. The poor papa never had a house, but
that little Guido lived to grow up a great man, and he worked so hard,
and he was so clever, and every one loved him, which was the best of
all things. He bought this very field and then another, and another,
and got such a lot of the old fields back again, and the goldfinches
sang for joy, and so did the larks and the thrushes, because they said
what a kind man he was. Then his son got some more of them, till at
last your papa bought ever so many more. But we often talk about the
little boy who slept in the wheat in this field, which was his father's
father's field. If only the wheat then could have helped him, and been
kind to him, you may be sure it would. We love you so much we like to
see the very crumbs left by the men who do the hoeing when they eat
their crusts; we wish they could have more to eat, but we like to see
their crumbs, which you know are made of wheat, so that we have done
them some good at least."

"That's not a story," said Guido.

"There's a gold coin here somewhere," said the Wheat, "such a pretty
one, it would make a capital button for your jacket, dear, or for your
mamma; that is all any sort of money is good for; I wish all the coins
were made into buttons for little Guido."

"Where is it?" said Guido.

"I can't exactly tell where it is," said the Wheat. "It was very near
me once, and I thought the next thunder's rain would wash it down into
the streamlet--it has been here ever so long, it came here first just
after the oak the lightning split died. And it has been rolled about by
the ploughs ever since, and no one has ever seen it; I thought it must
go into the ditch at last, but when the men came to hoe one of them
knocked it back, and then another kicked it along--it was covered with
earth--and then, one day, a rook came and split the clod open with his
bill, and pushed the pieces first one side and then the other, and the
coin went one way, but I did not see; I must ask a humble-bee, or a
mouse, or a mole, or some one who knows more about it. It is very thin,
so that if the rook's bill had struck it, his strong bill would have
made a dint in it, and there is, I think, a ship marked on it."

"Oh, I must have it! A ship! Ask a humble-bee directly; be quick!"

Bang! There was a loud report, a gun had gone off in the copse.

"That's my papa," shouted Guido. "I'm sure that was my papa's gun!" Up
he jumped, and getting down the ditch, stepped across the water, and,
seizing a hazel-bough to help himself, climbed up the bank. At the top
he slipped through the fence by the oak and so into the copse. He was
in such a hurry he did not mind the thistles or the boughs that whipped
him as they sprang back, he scrambled through, meeting the vapour of
the gunpowder and the smell of sulphur. In a minute he found a green
path, and in the path was his papa, who had just shot a cruel crow. The
crow had been eating the birds' eggs, and picking the little birds to
pieces.



GOLDEN-BROWN


Three fruit-pickers--women--were the first people I met near the
village (in Kent). They were clad in "rags and jags," and the face of
the eldest was in "jags" also. It was torn and scarred by time and
weather; wrinkled, and in a manner twisted like the fantastic turns of
a gnarled tree-trunk, hollow and decayed. Through these jags and
tearings of weather, wind, and work, the nakedness of the
countenance--the barren framework--was visible; the cheekbones like
knuckles, the chin of brown stoneware, the upper-lip smooth, and
without the short groove which should appear between lip and nostrils.
Black shadows dwelt in the hollows of the cheeks and temples, and there
was a blackness about the eyes. This blackness gathers in the faces of
the old who have been much exposed to the sun, the fibres of the skin
are scorched and half-charred, like a stick thrust in the fire, and
withdrawn before the flames seize it. Beside her were two young women,
both in the freshness of youth and health. Their faces glowed with a
golden-brown, and so great is the effect of colour that their plain
features were transfigured. The sunlight under their faces made them
beautiful. The summer light had been absorbed by the skin and now shone
forth from it again; as certain substances exposed to the day absorb
light and emit a phosphorescent gleam in the darkness of night, so the
sunlight had been drank up by the surface of the skin, and emanated
from it.

Hour after hour in the gardens and orchards they worked in the full
beams of the sun, gathering fruit for the London market, resting at
midday in the shade of the elms in the corner. Even then they were in
the sunshine--even in the shade, for the air carries it, or its
influence, as it carries the perfumes of flowers. The heated air
undulates over the field in waves which are visible at a distance; near
at hand they are not seen, but roll in endless ripples through the
shadows of the trees, bringing with them the actinic power of the sun.
Not actinic--alchemic--some intangible mysterious power which cannot be
supplied in any other form but the sun's rays. It reddens the cherry,
it gilds the apple, it colours the rose, it ripens the wheat, it
touches a woman's face with the golden-brown of ripe life--ripe as a
plum. There is no other hue so beautiful as this human sunshine tint.

The great painters knew it--Rubens, for instance; perhaps he saw it on
the faces of the women who gathered fruit or laboured at the harvest in
the Low Countries centuries since. He could never have seen it in a
city of these northern climes, that is certain. Nothing in nature that
I know, except the human face, ever attains this colour. Nothing like
it is ever seen in the sky, either at dawn or sunset; the dawn is often
golden, often scarlet, or purple and gold; the sunset crimson, flaming
bright, or delicately grey and scarlet; lovely colours all of them, but
not like this. Nor is there any flower comparable to it, nor any gem.
It is purely human, and it is only found on the human face which has
felt the sunshine continually. There must, too, I suppose, be a
disposition towards it, a peculiar and exceptional condition of the
fibres which build up the skin; for of the numbers who work out of
doors, very, very few possess it; they become brown, red, or tanned,
sometimes of a parchment hue--they do not get this colour.

These two women from the fruit gardens had the golden-brown in their
faces, and their plain features were transfigured. They were walking in
the dusty road; there was as background a high, dusty hawthorn hedge
which had lost the freshness of spring and was browned by the work of
caterpillars; they were in rags and jags, their shoes had split, and
their feet looked twice as wide in consequence. Their hands were black;
not grimy, but absolutely black, and neither hands nor necks ever knew
water, I am sure. There was not the least shape to their garments;
their dresses simply hung down in straight ungraceful lines; there was
no colour of ribbon or flower, to light up the dinginess. But they had
the golden-brown in their faces, and they were beautiful.

The feet, as they walked, were set firm on the ground, and the body
advanced with measured, deliberate, yet lazy and confident grace;
shoulders thrown back--square, but not over-square (as those who have
been drilled); hips swelling at the side in lines like the full bust,
though longer drawn; busts well filled and shapely, despite the rags
and jags and the washed-out gaudiness of the shawl. There was that in
their cheeks that all the wealth of London could not purchase--a superb
health in their carriage princesses could not obtain. It came, then,
from the air and sunlight, and still more, from some alchemy unknown to
the physician or the physiologist, some faculty exercised by the body,
happily endowed with a special power of extracting the utmost richness
and benefit from the rudest elements. Thrice blessed and fortunate,
beautiful golden-brown in their cheeks, superb health in their gait,
they walked as the immortals on earth.

As they passed they regarded me with bitter envy, jealousy, and hatred
written in their eyes; they cursed me in their hearts. I verily
believe--so unmistakably hostile were their glances--that had
opportunity been given, in the dead of night and far from help, they
would gladly have taken me unawares with some blow of stone or club,
and, having rendered me senseless, would have robbed me, and considered
it a righteous act. Not that there was any blood-thirstiness or
exceptional evil in their nature more than in that of the
thousand-and-one toilers that are met on the highway, but simply
because they worked--such hard work of hands and stooping backs, and I
was idle, for all they knew. Because they were going from one field of
labour to another field of labour, and I walked slowly and did no
visible work. My dress showed no stain, the weather had not battered
it; there was no rent, no rags and jags. At an hour when they were
merely changing one place of work for another place of work, to them it
appeared that I had found idleness indoors wearisome and had just come
forth to exchange it for another idleness. They saw no end to their
labour; they had worked from childhood, and could see no possible end
to labour until limbs failed or life closed. Why should they be like
this? Why should I do nothing? They were as good as I was, and they
hated me. Their indignant glances spoke it as plain as words, and far
more distinctly than I can write it. You cannot read it with such
feeling as I received their looks.

Beautiful golden-brown, superb health, what would I not give for these?
To be the thrice-blessed and chosen of nature, what inestimable
fortune! To be indifferent to any circumstances--to be quite
thoughtless as to draughts and chills, careless of heat, indifferent to
the character of dinners, able to do well on hard, dry bread, capable
of sleeping in the open under a rick, or some slight structure of a
hurdle, propped on a few sticks and roughly thatched with straw, and to
sleep sound as an oak, and wake strong as an oak in the morning-gods,
what a glorious life! I envied them; they fancied I looked askance at
their rags and jags. I envied them, and considered their health and hue
ideal. I envied them that unwearied step, that firm uprightness, and
measured yet lazy gait, but most of all the power which they possessed,
though they did not exercise it intentionally, of being always in the
sunlight, the air, and abroad upon the earth. If so they chose, and
without stress or strain, they could see the sunrise, they could be
with him as it were--unwearied and without distress--the livelong day;
they could stay on while the moon rose over the corn, and till the
silent stars at silent midnight shone in the cool summer night, and on
and on till the cock crew and the faint dawn appeared. The whole time
in the open air, resting at mid-day under the elms with the ripple of
heat flowing through the shadow; at midnight between the ripe corn and
the hawthorn hedge on the white wild camomile and the poppy pale in the
duskiness, with face upturned to the thoughtful heaven.

Consider the glory of it, the life above this life to be obtained from
constant presence with the sunlight and the stars. I thought of them
all day, and envied them (as they envied me), and in the evening I
found them again. It was growing dark, and the shadow took away
something of the coarseness of the group outside one of the village
"pothouses." Green foliage overhung them and the men with whom they
were drinking; the white pipes, the blue smoke, the flash of a match,
the red sign which had so often swung to and fro in the gales now still
in the summer eve, the rude seats and blocks, the reaping-hooks bound
about the edge with hay, the white dogs creeping from knee to knee,
some such touches gave an interest to the scene. But a quarrel had
begun; the men swore, but the women did worse. It is impossible to give
a hint of the language they used, especially the elder of the three
whose hollow face was blackened by time and exposure. The two
golden-brown girls were so heavily intoxicated they could but stagger
to and fro and mouth and gesticulate, and one held a quart from which,
as she moved, she spilled the ale.



WILD FLOWERS


A fir-tree is not a flower, and yet it is associated in my mind with
primroses. There was a narrow lane leading into a wood, where I used to
go almost every day in the early months of the year, and at one corner
it was overlooked by three spruce firs. The rugged lane there began to
ascend the hill, and I paused a moment to look back. Immediately the
high fir-trees guided the eye upwards, and from their tops to the deep
azure of the March sky over, but a step from the tree to the heavens.
So it has ever been to me, by day or by night, summer or winter,
beneath trees the heart feels nearer to that depth of life the far sky
means. The rest of spirit found only in beauty, ideal and pure, comes
there because the distance seems within touch of thought. To the heaven
thought can reach lifted by the strong arms of the oak, carried up by
the ascent of the flame-shaped fir. Round the spruce top the blue was
deepened, concentrated by the fixed point; the memory of that spot, as
it were, of the sky is still fresh--I can see it distinctly--still
beautiful and full of meaning. It is painted in bright colour in my
mind, colour thrice laid, and indelible; as one passes a shrine and
bows the head to the Madonna, so I recall the picture and stoop in
spirit to the aspiration it yet arouses. For there is no saint like the
sky, sunlight shining from its face.

The fir-tree flowered thus before the primroses--the first of all to
give me a bloom, beyond reach but visible, while even the hawthorn buds
hesitated to open. Primroses were late there, a high district and thin
soil; you could read of them as found elsewhere in January; they rarely
came much before March, and but sparingly then. On the warm red sand
(red, at least, to look at, but green by geological courtesy, I think)
of Sussex, round about Hurst of the Pierre-points, primroses are seen
soon after the year has turned. In the lanes about that curious old
mansion, with its windows reaching from floor to roof, that stands at
the base of Wolstanbury Hill, they grow early, and ferns linger in
sheltered overhung banks. The South Down range, like a great wall,
shuts off the sea, and has a different climate on either hand; south by
the sea--hard, harsh, flowerless, almost grassless, bitter, and cold;
on the north side, just over the hill--warm, soft, with primroses and
fern, willows budding and birds already busy. It is a double England
there, two countries side by side.

On a summer's day Wolstanbury Hill is an island in sunshine; you may
lie on the grassy rampart, high up in the most delicate air--Grecian
air, pellucid--alone, among the butterflies and humming bees at the
thyme, alone and isolated; endless masses of hills on three sides,
endless weald or valley on the fourth; all warmly lit with sunshine,
deep under liquid sunshine like the sands under the liquid sea, no
harshness of man-made sound to break the insulation amid nature, on an
island in a far Pacific of sunshine. Some people would hesitate to walk
down the staircase cut in the turf to the beech-trees beneath; the
woods look so small beneath, so far down and steep, and no handrail.
Many go to the Dyke, but none to Wolstanbury Hill. To come over the
range reminds one of what travellers say of coming over the Alps into
Italy; from harsh sea-slopes, made dry with salt as they sow salt on
razed cities that naught may grow, to warm plains rich in all things,
and with great hills as pictures hung on a wall to gaze at. Where there
are beech-trees the land is always beautiful; beech-trees at the foot
of this hill, beech-trees at Arundel in that lovely park which the Duke
of Norfolk, to his glory, leaves open to all the world, and where the
anemones flourish in unusual size and number; beech-trees in
Marlborough Forest; beech-trees at the summit to which the lane leads
that was spoken of just now. Beech and beautiful scenery go together.

But the primroses by that lane did not appear till late; they covered
the banks under the thousand thousand ash-poles; foxes slipped along
there frequently, whose friends in scarlet coats could not endure the
pale flowers, for they might chink their spurs homewards. In one meadow
near primroses were thicker than the grass, with gorse interspersed,
and the rabbits that came out fed among flowers. The primroses last on
to the celandines and cowslips, through the time of the bluebells, past
the violets--one dies but passes on the life to another, one sets light
to the next, till the ruddy oaks and singing cuckoos call up the tall
mowing grass to fringe summer.

Before I had any conscious thought it was a delight to me to find wild
flowers, just to see them. It was a pleasure to gather them and to take
them home; a pleasure to show them to others--to keep them as long as
they would live, to decorate the room with them, to arrange them
carelessly with grasses, green sprays, tree-bloom--large branches of
chestnut snapped off, and set by a picture perhaps. Without conscious
thought of seasons and the advancing hours to light on the white wild
violet, the meadow orchis, the blue veronica, the blue meadow
cranesbill; feeling the warmth and delight of the increasing sun-rays,
but not recognising whence or why it was joy. All the world is young to
a boy, and thought has not entered into it; even the old men with grey
hair do not seem old; different but not aged, the idea of age has not
been mastered. A boy has to frown and study, and then does not grasp
what long years mean. The various hues of the petals pleased without
any knowledge of colour-contrasts, no note even of colour except that
it was bright, and the mind was made happy without consideration of
those ideals and hopes afterwards associated with the azure sky above
the fir-tree. A fresh footpath, a fresh flower, a fresh delight. The
reeds, the grasses, the rushes--unknown and new things at every
step--something always to find; no barren spot anywhere, or sameness.
Every day the grass painted anew, and its green seen for the first
time; not the old green, but a novel hue and spectacle, like the first
view of the sea.

If we had never before looked upon the earth, but suddenly came to it
man or woman grown, set down in the midst of a summer mead, would it
not seem to us a radiant vision? The hues, the shapes, the song and
life of birds, above all the sunlight, the breath of heaven, resting on
it; the mind would be filled with its glory, unable to grasp it, hardly
believing that such things could be mere matter and no more. Like a
dream of some spirit-land it would appear, scarce fit to be touched
lest it should fall to pieces, too beautiful to be long watched lest it
should fade away. So it seemed to me as a boy, sweet and new like this
each morning; and even now, after the years that have passed, and the
lines they have worn in the forehead, the summer mead shines as bright
and fresh as when my foot first touched the grass. It has another
meaning now; the sunshine and the flowers speak differently, for a
heart that has once known sorrow reads behind the page, and sees
sadness in joy. But the freshness is still there, the dew washes the
colours before dawn. Unconscious happiness in finding wild
flowers--unconscious and unquestioning, and therefore unbounded.

I used to stand by the mower and follow the scythe sweeping down
thousands of the broad-flowered daisies, the knotted knapweeds, the
blue scabious, the yellow rattles, sweeping so close and true that
nothing escaped; and, yet although I had seen so many hundreds of each,
although I had lifted armfuls day after day, still they were fresh.
They never lost their newness, and even now each time I gather a wild
flower it feels a new thing. The greenfinches came to the fallen swathe
so near to us they seemed to have no fear; but I remember the
yellowhammers most, whose colour, like that of the wild flowers and the
sky, has never faded from my memory. The greenfinches sank into the
fallen swathe, the loose grass gave under their weight and let them
bathe in flowers.

One yellowhammer sat on a branch of ash the livelong morning, still
singing in the sun; his bright head, his clean bright yellow, gaudy as
Spain, was drawn like a brush charged heavily with colour across the
retina, painting it deeply, for there on the eye's memory it endures,
though that was boyhood and this is manhood, still unchanged. The
field--Stewart's Mash--the very tree, young ash timber, the branch
projecting over the sward, I could make a map of them. Sometimes I
think sun-painted colours are brighter to me than to many, and more
strongly affect the nerves of the eye. Straw going by the road on a
dusky winter's day seems so pleasantly golden, the sheaves lying aslant
at the top, and these bundles of yellow tubes thrown up against the
dark ivy on the opposite wall. Tiles, red burned, or orange coated, the
sea sometimes cleanly definite, the shadows of trees in a thin wood
where there is room for shadows to form and fall; some such shadows are
sharper than light, and have a faint blue tint. Not only in summer but
in cold winter, and not only romantic things but plain matter-of-fact
things, as a waggon freshly painted red beside the wright's shop, stand
out as if wet with colour and delicately pencilled at the edges. It
must be out of doors; nothing indoors looks like this.

Pictures are very dull and gloomy to it, and very contrasted colours
like those the French use are necessary to fix the attention. Their
dashes of pink and scarlet bring the faint shadow of the sun into the
room. As for our painters, their works are hung behind a curtain, and
we have to peer patiently through the dusk of evening to see what they
mean. Out-of-door colours do not need to be gaudy--a mere dull stake of
wood thrust in the ground often stands out sharper than the pink
flashes of the French studio; a faggot; the outline of a leaf; low
tints without reflecting power strike the eye as a bell the ear. To me
they are intensely clear, and the clearer the greater the pleasure. It
is often too great, for it takes me away from solid pursuits merely to
receive the impression, as water is still to reflect the trees. To me
it is very painful when illness blots the definition of outdoor things,
so wearisome not to see them rightly, and more oppressive than actual
pain. I feel as if I was struggling to wake up with dim, half-opened
lids and heavy mind. This one yellowhammer still sits on the ash branch
in Stewart's Mash over the sward, singing in the sun, his feathers
freshly wet with colour, the same sun-song, and will sing to me so long
as the heart shall beat.

The first conscious thought about wild flowers was to find out their
names--the first conscious pleasure,--and then I began to see so many
that I had not previously noticed. Once you wish to identify them there
is nothing escapes, down to the little white chickweed of the path and
the moss of the wall. I put my hand on the bridge across the brook to
lean over and look down into the water. Are there any fish? The bricks
of the pier are covered with green, like a wall-painting to the surface
of the stream, mosses along the lines of the mortar, and among the moss
little plants--what are these? In the dry sunlit lane I look up to the
top of the great wall about some domain, where the green figs look over
upright on their stalks; there are dry plants on the coping--what are
these? Some growing thus, high in the air, on stone, and in the chinks
of the tower, suspended in dry air and sunshine; some low down under
the arch of the bridge over the brook, out of sight utterly, unless you
stoop by the brink of the water and project yourself forward to examine
under. The kingfisher sees them as he shoots through the barrel of the
culvert. There the sun direct never shines upon them, but the sunlight
thrown up by the ripples runs all day in bright bars along the vault of
the arch, playing on them. The stream arranges the sand in the shallow
in bars, minute fixed undulations; the stream arranges the sunshine in
successive flashes, undulating as if the sun, drowsy in the heat, were
idly closing and unclosing his eyelids for sleep.

Plants everywhere, hiding behind every tree, under the leaves, in the
shady places, behind the dry furrows of the field; they are only just
behind something, hidden openly. The instant you look for them they
multiply a hundredfold; if you sit on the beach and begin to count the
pebbles by you, their number instantly increases to infinity by virtue
of that conscious act.

The bird's-foot lotus was the first. The boy must have seen it, must
have trodden on it in the bare woodland pastures, certainly run about
on it, with wet naked feet from the bathing; but the boy was not
conscious of it. This was the first, when the desire came to identify
and to know, fixing upon it by means of a pale and feeble picture. In
the largest pasture there were different soils and climates; it was so
large it seemed a little country of itself then--the more so because
the ground rose and fell, making a ridge to divide the view and enlarge
by uncertainty. The high sandy soil on the ridge where the rabbits had
their warren; the rocky soil of the quarry; the long grass by the elms
where the rooks built, under whose nests there were vast unpalatable
mushrooms--the true mushrooms with salmon gills grew nearer the warren;
the slope towards the nut-tree hedge and spring. Several climates in
one field: the wintry ridge over which leaves were always driving in
all four seasons of the year; the level sunny plain and fallen cromlech
still tall enough for a gnomon and to cast its shadow in the treeless
drought; the moist, warm, grassy depression; the lotus-grown slope,
warm and dry.

If you have been living in one house in the country for some time, and
then go on a visit to another, though hardly half a mile distant, you
will find a change in the air, the feeling, and tone of the place. It
is close by, but it is not the same. To discover these minute
differences, which make one locality healthy and home happy, and the
next adjoining unhealthy, the Chinese have invented the science of
Feng-shui, spying about with cabalistic mystery, casting the horoscope
of an acre. There is something in all superstitions; they are often the
foundation of science. Superstition having made the discovery, science
composes a lecture on the reason why, and claims the credit.
Bird's-foot lotus means a fortunate spot, dry, warm--so far as soil is
concerned. If you were going to live out of doors, you might safely
build your kibitka where you found it. Wandering with the pictured
flower-book, just purchased, over the windy ridge where last year's
skeleton leaves, blown out from the alder copse below, came on with
grasshopper motion--lifted and laid down by the wind, lifted and laid
down--I sat on the sward of the sheltered slope, and instantly
recognised the orange-red claws of the flower beside me. That was the
first; and this very morning, I dread to consider how many years
afterwards, I found a plant on a wall which I do not know. I shall have
to trace out its genealogy and emblazon its shield. So many years and
still only at the beginning--the beginning, too, of the beginning--for
as yet I have not thought of the garden or conservatory flowers (which
are wild flowers somewhere), or of the tropics, or the prairies.

The great stone of the fallen cromlech, crouching down afar off in the
plain behind me, cast its shadow in the sunny morn as it had done, so
many summers, for centuries--for thousands of years: worn white by the
endless sunbeams--the ceaseless flood of light--the sunbeams of
centuries, the impalpable beams polishing and grinding like rushing
water: silent, yet witnessing of the Past; shadowing the Present on the
dial of the field: a mere dull stone; but what is it the mind will not
employ to express to itself its own thoughts?

There was a hollow near in which hundreds of skeleton leaves had
settled, a stage on their journey from the alder copse, so thick as to
cover the thin grass, and at the side of the hollow a wasp's nest had
been torn out by a badger. On the soft and spreading sand thrown out
from his burrow the print of his foot looked as large as an elephant
might make. The wild animals of our fields are so small that the
badger's foot seemed foreign in its size, calling up thought of the
great game of distant forests. He was a bold badger to make his burrow
there in the open warren, unprotected by park walls or preserve laws,
where every one might see who chose. I never saw him by daylight: that
they do get about in daytime is, however, certain, for one was shot in
Surrey recently by sportsmen; they say he weighed forty pounds.

In the mind all things are written in pictures--there is no
alphabetical combination of letters and words; all things are pictures
and symbols. The bird's-foot lotus is the picture to me of sunshine and
summer, and of that summer in the heart which is known only in youth,
and then not alone. No words could write that feeling: the bird's-foot
lotus writes it.

When the efforts to photograph began, the difficulty was to fix the
scene thrown by the lens upon the plate. There the view appeared
perfect to the least of details, worked out by the sun, and made as
complete in miniature as that he shone upon in nature. But it faded
like the shadows as the summer sun declines. Have you watched them in
the fields among the flowers?--the deep strong mark of the noonday
shadow of a tree such as the pen makes drawn heavily on the paper;
gradually it loses its darkness and becomes paler and thinner at the
edge as it lengthens and spreads, till shadow and grass mingle
together. Image after image faded from the plates, no more to be fixed
than the reflection in water of the trees by the shore. Memory, like
the sun, paints to me bright pictures of the golden summer time of
lotus; I can see them, but how shall I fix them for you? By no process
can that be accomplished. It is like a story that cannot be told
because he who knows it is tongue-tied and dumb. Motions of hands,
wavings and gestures, rudely convey the framework, but the finish is
not there.

To-day, and day after day, fresh pictures are coloured instantaneously
in the retina as bright and perfect in detail and hue. This very power
is often, I think, the cause of pain to me. To see so clearly is to
value so highly and to feel too deeply. The smallest of the pencilled
branches of the bare ash-tree drawn distinctly against the winter sky,
waving lines one within the other, yet following and partly parallel,
reproducing in the curve of the twig the curve of the great trunk; is
it not a pleasure to trace each to its ending? The raindrops as they
slide from leaf to leaf in June, the balmy shower that reperfumes each
wild flower and green thing, drops lit with the sun, and falling to the
chorus of the refreshed birds; is not this beautiful to see? On the
grasses tall and heavy the purplish blue pollen, a shimmering dust,
sown broadcast over the ripening meadow from July's warm hand--the
bluish pollen, the lilac pollen of the grasses, a delicate mist of blue
floating on the surface, has always been an especial delight to me.
Finches shake it from the stalks as they rise. No day, no hour of
summer, no step but brings new mazes--there is no word to express
design without plan, and these designs of flower and leaf and colours
of the sun cannot be reduced to set order. The eye is for ever drawn
onward and finds no end. To see these always so sharply, wet and fresh,
is almost too much sometimes for the wearied yet insatiate eye. I am
obliged to turn away--to shut my eyes and say I will not see, I will
not observe; I will concentrate my mind on my own little path of life,
and steadily gaze downwards. In vain. Who can do so? who can care alone
for his or her petty trifles of existence, that has once entered
amongst the wild flowers? How shall I shut out the sun? Shall I deny
the constellations of the night? They are there; the Mystery is for
ever about us--the question, the hope, the aspiration cannot be put
out. So that it is almost a pain not to be able to cease observing and
tracing the untraceable maze of beauty.

Blue veronica was the next identified, sometimes called germander
speedwell, sometimes bird's-eye, whose leaves are so plain and petals
so blue. Many names increase the trouble of identification, and
confusion is made certain by the use of various systems of
classification. The flower itself I knew, its name I could not be sure
of--not even from the illustration, which was incorrectly coloured; the
central white spot of the flower was reddish in the plate. This
incorrect colouring spoils much of the flower-picturing done; pictures
of flowers and birds are rarely accurate unless hand-painted. Any one
else, however, would have been quite satisfied that the identification
was right. I was too desirous to be correct, too conscientious, and
thus a summer went by with little progress. If you really wish to
identify with certainty, and have no botanist friend and no _magnum
opus_ of Sowerby to refer to, it is very difficult indeed to be quite
sure. There was no Sowerby, no Bentham, no botanist friend--no one even
to give the common country names; for it is a curious fact that the
country people of the time rarely know the names put down as the
vernacular for flowers in the books.

No one there could tell me the name of the marsh-marigold which grew
thickly in the water-meadows--"A sort of big buttercup," that was all
they knew. Commonest of common plants is the "sauce alone"--in every
hedge, on every bank, the whitish-green leaf is found--yet _I_ could
not make certain of it. If some one tells you a plant, you know it at
once and never forget it, but to learn it from a book is another
matter; it does not at once take root in the mind, it has to be seen
several times before you are satisfied--you waver in your convictions.
The leaves were described as large and heart-shaped, and to remain
green (at the ground) through the winter; but the colour of the flower
was omitted, though it was stated that the petals of the hedge-mustard
were yellow. The plant that seemed to me to be probably "sauce alone"
had leaves somewhat heart-shaped, but so confusing is _partial_
description that I began to think I had hit on "ramsons" instead of
"sauce alone," especially as ramsons was said to be a very common
plant. So it is in some counties, but, as I afterwards found, there was
not a plant of ramsons, or garlic, throughout the whole of that
district. When, some years afterwards, I saw a white-flowered plant
with leaves like the lily of the valley, smelling of garlic, in the
woods of Somerset, I recognised It immediately. The plants that are
really common--common everywhere--are not numerous, and if you are
studying you must be careful to understand that word locally. My "sauce
alone" identification was right; to be right and not certain is still
unsatisfactory.

There shone on the banks white stars among the grass. Petals delicately
white in a whorl of rays--light that had started radiating from a
centre and become fixed--shining among the flowerless green. The
slender stem had grown so fast it had drawn its own root partly out of
the ground, and when I tried to gather it, flower, stem and root came
away together. The wheat was springing, the soft air full of the growth
and moisture, blackbirds whistling, wood-pigeons nesting, young
oak-leaves out; a sense of swelling, sunny fulness in the atmosphere.
The plain road was made beautiful by the advanced boughs that overhung
and cast their shadows on the dust--boughs of ash-green, shadows that
lay still, listening to the nightingale. A place of enchantment in the
mornings where was felt the power of some subtle influence working
behind bough and grass and bird-song. The orange-golden dandelion in
the sward was deeply laden with colour brought to it anew again and
again by the ships of the flowers, the humble-bees--to their quays they
come, unlading priceless essences of sweet odours brought from the East
over the green seas of wheat, unlading priceless colours on the broad
dandelion disks, bartering these things for honey and pollen. Slowly
tacking aslant, the pollen ship hums in the south wind. The little
brown wren finds her way through the great thicket of hawthorn. How
does she know her path, hidden by a thousand thousand leaves? Tangled
and crushed together by their own growth, a crown of thorns hangs over
the thrush's nest; thorns for the mother, hope for the young. Is there
a crown of thorns over your heart? A spike has gone deep enough into
mine. The stile looks farther away because boughs have pushed forward
and made it smaller. The willow scarce holds the sap that tightens the
bark and would burst it if it did not enlarge to the pressure.

Two things can go through the solid oak; the lightning of the clouds
that rends the iron timber, the lightning of the spring--the
electricity of the sunbeams forcing him to stretch forth and lengthen
his arms with joy. Bathed in buttercups to the dewlap, the roan cows
standing in the golden lake watched the hours with calm frontlet;
watched the light descending, the meadows filling, with knowledge of
long months of succulent clover. On their broad brows the year falls
gently; their great, beautiful eyes, which need but a tear or a smile
to make them human,--without these, such eyes, so large and full, seem
above human life, eyes of the immortals enduring without passion,--in
these eyes, as a mirror, nature is reflected.

I came every day to walk slowly up and down the plain road, by the
starry flowers under the ash-green boughs; ash is the coolest, softest
green. The bees went drifting over by my head; as they cleared the
hedges they passed by my ears, the wind singing in their shrill wings.
White tent-walls of cloud--a warm white, being full to overflowing of
sunshine--stretched across from ash-top to ash-top, a cloud-canvas
roof, a tent-palace of the delicious air. For of all things there is
none so sweet as sweet air--one great flower it is, drawn round about,
over, and enclosing, like Aphrodite's arms; as if the dome of the sky
were a bell-flower drooping down over us, and the magical essence of it
filling all the room of the earth. Sweetest of all things is
wild-flower air. Full of their ideal the starry flowers strained
upwards on the bank, striving to keep above the rude grasses that
pushed by them; genius has ever had such a struggle. The plain road was
made beautiful by the many thoughts it gave. I came every morning to
stay by the starlit bank.

A friend said, "Why do you go the same road every day? Why not have a
change and walk somewhere else sometimes? Why keep on up and down the
same place?" I could not answer; till then it had not occurred to me
that I did always go one way; as for the reason of it I could not tell;
I continued in my old mind while the summers went away. Not till years
afterwards was I able to see why I went the same round and did not care
for change. I do not want change: I want the same old and loved things,
the same wild-flowers, the same trees and soft ash-green; the
turtle-doves, the blackbirds, the coloured yellowhammer sing, sing,
singing so long as there is light to cast a shadow on the dial, for
such is the measure of his song, and I want them in the same place. Let
me find them morning after morning, the starry-white petals radiating,
striving upwards to their ideal. Let me see the idle shadows resting on
the white dust; let me hear the humble-bees, and stay to look down on
the rich dandelion disk. Let me see the very thistles opening their
great crowns--I should miss the thistles; the reed-grasses hiding the
moorhen; the bryony bine, at first crudely ambitious and lifted by
force of youthful sap straight above the hedgerow to sink of its own
weight presently and progress with crafty tendrils; swifts shot through
the air with outstretched wings like crescent-headed shaftless arrows
darted from the clouds; the chaffinch with a feather in her bill; all
the living staircase of the spring, step by step, upwards to the great
gallery of the summer--let me watch the same succession year by year.

Why, I knew the very dates of them all--the reddening elm, the arum,
the hawthorn leaf, the celandine, the may; the yellow iris of the
waters, the heath of the hillside. The time of the nightingale--the
place to hear the first note; onwards to the drooping fern and the time
of the redwing--the place of his first note, so welcome to the
sportsman as the acorn ripens and the pheasant, come to the age of
manhood, feeds himself; onwards to the shadowless days--the long
shadowless winter, for in winter it is the shadows we miss as much as
the light. They lie over the summer sward, design upon design, dark
lace on green and gold; they glorify the sunlight: they repose on the
distant hills like gods upon Olympus; without shadow, what even is the
sun? At the foot of the great cliffs by the sea you may know this, it
is dry glare; mighty ocean is dearer as the shadows of the clouds sweep
over as they sweep over the green corn. Past the shadowless winter,
when it is all shade, and therefore no shadow; onwards to the first
coltsfoot and on to the seed-time again; I knew the dates of all of
them. I did not want change; I wanted the same flowers to return on the
same day, the titlark to rise soaring from the same oak to fetch down
love with a song from heaven to his mate on the nest beneath. No
change, no new thing; if I found a fresh wild-flower in a fresh place,
still it wove at once into the old garland. In vain, the very next year
was different even in the same place--_that_ had been a year of rain,
and the flag flowers were wonderful to see; _this_ was a dry year, and
the flags not half the height, the gold of the flower not so deep; next
year the fatal billhook came and swept away a slow-grown hedge that had
given me crab-blossom in cuckoo-time and hazelnuts in harvest. Never
again the same, even in the same place.

A little feather droops downwards to the ground--a swallow's feather
fuller of miracle than the Pentateuch--how shall that feather be placed
again in the breast where it grew? Nothing twice. Time changes the
places that knew us, and if we go back in after years, still even then
it is not the old spot; the gate swings differently, new thatch has
been put on the old gables, the road has been widened, and the sward
the driven sheep lingered on is gone. Who dares to think then? For
faces fade as flowers, and there is no consolation. So now I am sure I
was right in always walking the same way by the starry flowers striving
upwards on a slender ancestry of stem; I would follow the plain old
road to-day if I could. Let change be far from me; that irresistible
change must come is bitter indeed. Give me the old road, the same
flowers--they were only stitchwort--the old succession of days and
garland, ever weaving into it fresh wild-flowers from far and near.
Fetch them from distant mountains, discover them on decaying walls, in
unsuspected corners; though never seen before, still they are the same:
there has been a place in the heart waiting for them.



SUNNY BRIGHTON


Some of the old streets opening out of the King's Road look very
pleasant on a sunny day. They ran to the north, so that the sun over
the sea shines nearly straight up them, and at the farther end, where
the houses close in on higher ground, the deep blue sky descends to the
rooftrees. The old red tiles, the red chimneys, the green jalousies,
give some colour; and beneath there are shadowy corners and archways.
They are not too wide to whisper across, for it is curious that to be
interesting a street must be narrow, and the pavements are but two or
three bricks broad. These pavements are not for the advantage of foot
passengers; they are merely to prevent cart-wheels from grating against
the houses. There is nothing ancient or carved in these streets, they
are but moderately old, yet turning from the illuminated sea it is
pleasant to glance up them as you pass, in their stillness and shadow,
lying outside the inconsiderate throng walking to and fro, and
contrasting in their irregularity with the set facades of the front.
Opposite, across the King's Road, the mastheads of the fishing boats on
the beach just rise above the rails of the cliff, tipped with
fluttering pennants, or fish-shaped vanes changing to the wind. They
have a pulley at the end of a curved piece of iron for hauling up the
lantern to the top of the mast when trawling; this thin curve, with a
dot at the extremity surmounting the straight and rigid mast, suits the
artist's pencil. The gold-plate shop--there is a bust of Psyche in the
doorway--often attracts the eye in passing; gold and silver plate in
large masses is striking, and it is a very good place to stand a minute
and watch the passers-by.

It is a Piccadilly crowd by the sea-exactly the same style of people
you meet in Piccadilly, but freer in dress, and particularly in hats.
All fashionable Brighton parades the King's Road twice a day, morning
and afternoon, always on the side of the shops. The route is up and
down the King's Road as far as Preston Street, back again and up East
Street. Riding and driving Brighton extends its Rotten Row sometimes to
Third Avenue, Hove. These well-dressed and leading people never look at
the sea. Watching by the gold-plate shop you will not observe a single
glance in the direction of the sea, beautiful as it is, gleaming under
the sunlight. They do not take the slightest interest in sea, or sun,
or sky, or the fresh breeze calling white horses from the deep. Their
pursuits are purely "social," and neither ladies nor gentlemen ever go
on the beach or lie where the surge comes to the feet. The beach is
ignored; it is almost, perhaps quite vulgar; or rather it is entirely
outside the pale. No one rows, very few sail; the sea is not "the
thing" in Brighton, which is the least nautical of seaside places.
There is more talk of horses.

The wind coming up the cliff seems to bring with it whole armfuls of
sunshine, and to throw the warmth and light against you as you linger.
The walls and glass reflect the light and push back the wind in puffs
and eddies; the awning flutters; light and wind spring upwards from the
pavement; the sky is richly blue against the parapets overhead; there
are houses on one side, but on the other open space and sea, and dim
clouds in the extreme distance. The atmosphere is full of light, and
gives a sense of liveliness! every atom of it is in motion. How
delicate are the fore legs of these thoroughbred horses passing! Small
and slender, the hoof, as the limb rises, seems to hang by a thread,
yet there is strength and speed in those sinews. Strength is often
associated with size, with the mighty flank, the round barrel, the
great shoulder. But I marvel more at the manner in which that strength
is conveyed through these slender sinews; the huge brawn and breadth of
flesh all depend upon these little cords. It is at these junctions that
the wonder of life is most evident. The succession of well-shaped
horses, overtaking and passing, crossing, meeting, their high-raised
heads and action increase the impression of pleasant movement. Quick
wheels, sometimes a tandem, or a painted coach, towering over the
line,--so rolls the procession of busy pleasure. There is colour in hat
and bonnet, feathers, flowers, and mantles, not brilliant but rapidly
changing, and in that sense bright. Faces on which the sun shines and
the wind blows whether cared for or not, and lit up thereby; faces seen
for a moment and immediately followed by others as interesting; a
flowing gallery of portraits; all life, life! Waiting unobserved under
the awning, occasionally, too, I hear voices as the throng goes by on
the pavement--pleasant tones of people chatting and the human sunshine
of laughter. The atmosphere is full of movement, full of light, and
life streams to and fro.

Yonder, over the road, a row of fishermen lean against the rails of the
cliff, some with their backs to the sea, some facing it. "The cliff" is
rather a misnomer, it is more like a sea-wall in height. This row of
stout men in blue jerseys, or copper-hued tan frocks, seems to be
always there, always waiting for the tide--or nothing. Each has his
particular position; one, shorter than the rest, leans with his elbows
backwards on the low rail; another hangs over and looks down at the
site of the fish market; an older man stands upright, and from long
habit looks steadily out to sea. They have their hands in their
pockets; they appear fat and jolly, as round as the curves of their
smacks drawn up on the beach beneath them. They are of such that "sleep
o' nights;" no anxious ambition disturbs their placidity. No man in
this world knows how to absolutely do--nothing, like a fisherman.
Sometimes he turns round, sometimes he does not, that is all. The sun
shines, the breeze comes up the cliff, far away a French fishing lugger
is busy enough. The boats on the beach are idle, and swarms of boys are
climbing over them, swinging on a rope from the bowsprit, or playing at
marbles under the cliff. Bigger boys collect under the lee of a smack,
and do nothing cheerfully. The fashionable throng hastens to and fro,
but the row leaning against the railings do not stir.

Doleful tales they have to tell any one who inquires about the fishing.
There have been "no herrings" these two years. One man went out with
his smack, and after working for hours returned with _one sole_. I can
never get this one sole out of my mind when I see the row by the rails.
While the fisherman was telling me this woeful story, I fancied I heard
voices from a crowd of the bigger boys collected under a smack, voices
that said, "Ho! ho! Go on! you're kidding the man!" Is there much
"kidding" in this business of fish? Another man told me (but he was not
a smack proprietor) that L50, L70, or L80 was a common night's catch.
Some people say that the smacks never put to sea until the men have
spent every shilling they have got, and are obliged to sail. If truth
lies at the bottom of a well, it is the well of a fishing boat, for
there is nothing so hard to get at as the truth about fish. At the time
when society was pluming itself on the capital results attained by the
Fisheries Exhibition in London, and gentlemen described in the papers
how they had been to market and purchased cod at sixpence a pound, one
shilling and eightpence a pound was the price in the Brighton
fishmongers' shops, close to the sea. Not the least effect was produced
in Brighton; fish remains at precisely the same price as before all
this ridiculous trumpeting. But while the fishmongers charge twopence
each for fresh herrings, the old women bring them to the door at
sixteen a shilling. The poor who live in the old part of Brighton, near
the markets, use great quantities of the smaller and cheaper fish, and
their children weary of the taste to such a degree that when the girls
go out to service they ask to be excused from eating it.

The fishermen say they can often find a better market by sending their
fish to Paris; much of the fish caught off Brighton goes there. It is
fifty miles to London, and 250 to Paris; how then can this be? Fish
somehow slip through ordinary rules, being slimy of surface; the maxims
of the writers on demand and supply are quite ignored, and there is no
groping to the bottom of this well of truth.

Just at the corner of some of the old streets that come down to the
King's Road one or two old fishermen often stand. The front one props
himself against the very edge of the buildings, and peers round into
the broad sunlit thoroughfare; his brown copper frock makes a distinct
patch of colour at the edge of the house. There is nothing in common
between him and the moving throng: he is quite separate and belongs to
another race; he has come down from the shadow of the old street, and
his copper-hued frock might have come out of the last century.

The fishing-boats and the fishing, the nets, and all the fishing work
are a great ornament to Brighton. They are real; there is something
about them that forms a link with the facts of the sea, with the forces
of the tides and winds, and the sunlight gleaming on the white crests
of the waves. They speak to thoughts lurking in the mind; they float
between life and death as with a billow on either hand; their anchors
go down to the roots of existence. This is real work, real labour of
man, to draw forth food from the deep as the plough draws it from the
earth. It is in utter contrast to the artificial work--the feathers,
the jewellery, the writing at desks of the town. The writings of a
thousand clerks, the busy factory work, the trimmings and feathers, and
counter attendance do not touch the real. They are all artificial. For
food you must still go to the earth and to the sea, as in primeval
days. Where would your thousand clerks, your trimmers, and
counter-salesmen be without a loaf of bread, without meat, without
fish? The old brown sails and the nets, the anchors and tarry ropes, go
straight to nature. You do not care for nature now? Well! all I can say
is, you will have to go to nature one day--when you die: you will find
nature very real then. I rede you to recognise the sunlight and the
sea, the flowers and woods _now_.

I like to go down on the beach among the fishing-boats, and to recline
on the shingle by a smack when the wind comes gently from the west, and
the low wave breaks but a few yards from my feet. I like the occasional
passing scent of pitch: they are melting it close by. I confess I like
tar: one's hands smell nice after touching ropes. It is more like home
down on the beach here; the men are doing something real, sometimes
there is the clink of a hammer; behind me there is a screen of brown
net, in which rents are being repaired; a big rope yonder stretches as
the horse goes round, and the heavy smack is drawn slowly up over the
pebbles. The full curves of the rounded bows beside me are pleasant to
the eye, as any curve is that recalls those of woman. Mastheads stand
up against the sky, and a loose rope swings as the breeze strikes it; a
veer of the wind brings a puff of smoke from the funnel of a cabin,
where some one is cooking, but it is not disagreeable, like smoke from
a house chimney-pot; another veer carries it away again,--depend upon
it the simplest thing cooked there is nice. Shingle rattles as it is
shovelled up for ballast--the sound of labour makes me more comfortably
lazy. They are not in a hurry, nor "chivy" over their work either; the
tides rise and fall slowly, and they work in correspondence. No
infernal fidget and fuss. Wonder how long it would take me to pitch a
pebble so as to lodge on the top of that large brown pebble there? I
try, once now and then.

Far out over the sea there is a peculiar bank of clouds. I was always
fond of watching clouds; these do not move much. In my pocket-book I
see I have several notes about these peculiar sea-clouds. They form a
band not far above the horizon, not very thick but elongated laterally.
The upper edge is curled or wavy, not so heavily as what is called
mountainous, not in the least threatening; this edge is white. The body
of the vapour is a little darker, either because thicker, or because
the light is reflected at a different angle. But it is the lower edge
which is singular: in direct contrast with the curled or wavy edge
above, the under edge is perfectly straight and parallel to the line of
the horizon. It looks as if the level of the sea made this under line.
This bank moves very slowly--scarcely perceptibly--but in course of
hours rises, and as it rises spreads, when the extremities break off in
detached pieces, and these gradually vanish. Sometimes when travelling
I have pointed out the direction of the sea, feeling sure it was there,
and not far off, though invisible, on account of the appearance of the
clouds, whose under edge was cut across so straight. When this peculiar
bank appears at Brighton it is an almost certain sign of continued fine
weather, and I have noticed the same thing elsewhere; once particularly
it remained fine after this appearance despite every threat the sky
could offer of a storm. All the threats came to nothing for three
weeks, not even thunder and lightning could break it up,--"deceitful
flashes," as the Arabs say; for, like the sons of the desert, just then
the farmers longed for rain on their parched fields. To me, while on
the beach among the boats, the value of these clouds lies in their
slowness of movement, and consequent effect in soothing the mind.
Outside the hurry and drive of life a rest comes through the calm of
nature. As the swell of the sea carries up the pebbles, and arranges
the largest farthest inland, where they accumulate and stay unmoved, so
the drifting of the clouds, and the touch of the wind, the sound of the
surge, arrange the molecules of the mind in still layers. It is then
that a dream fills it, and a dream is sometimes better than the best
reality. Laugh at the idea of dreaming where there is an odour of tar
if you like, but you see it is outside intolerable civilisation. It is
a hundred miles from the King's Road, though but just under it.

There is a scheme on foot for planking over the ocean, beginning at the
bottom of West Street. An immense central pier is proposed, which would
occupy the only available site for beaching the smacks. If carried out,
the whole fishing industry must leave Brighton,--to the fishermen the
injury would be beyond compensation, and the aspect of Brighton itself
would be destroyed. Brighton ought to rise in revolt against it.

All Brighton chimney-pots are put on with giant cement, in order to
bear the strain of the tremendous winds rushing up from the sea. Heavy
as the gales are, they seldom do much mischief to the roofs, such as
are recorded inland. On the King's Road a plate-glass window is now and
then blown in, so that on hurricane days the shutters are generally
half shut. It is said that the wind gets between the iron shutters and
the plate glass and shakes the windows loose. The heaviest waves roll
in by the West Pier, and at the bottom of East Street. Both sides of
the West Pier are washed by larger waves than can be seen all along the
coast from the Quarter Deck. Great rollers come in at the concrete
groyne at the foot of East Street. Exposed as the coast is, the waves
do not convey so intense an idea of wildness, confusion, and power as
they do at Dover. To see waves in their full vigour go to the Admiralty
Pier and watch the seas broken by the granite wall. Windy Brighton has
not an inch of shelter anywhere in a gale, and the salt rain driven by
the wind penetrates the thickest coat. The windiest spot is at the
corner of Second Avenue, Hove; the wind just there is almost enough to
choke those who face it. Double windows--Russian fashion--are common
all along the sea-front, and are needed.

After a gale, when the wind changes, as it usually does, it is pleasant
to see the ships work in to the verge of the shore. The sea is turbid
and yellow with sand beaten up by the recent billows,--this yellowness
extends outwards to a certain line, and is there succeeded by the green
of clearer water. Beyond this again the surface looks dark, as if still
half angry, and clouds hang over it, both to retire from the strife. As
bees come out of their hives when the rain ceases and the sun shines,
so the vessels which have been lying-to in harbour, or under shelter of
promontories, are now eagerly making their way down Channel, and, in
order to get as long a tack and as much advantage as possible, they are
brought to the edge of the shallow water. Sometimes fifteen or twenty
or more stand in; all sizes from the ketch to the three-master. The
wind is not strong, but that peculiar drawing breeze which seems to
pull a ship along as if with a tow-rope. The brig stands straight for
the beach, with all sail set; she heels a little, not much; she
scarcely heaves to the swell, and is not checked by meeting waves; she
comes almost to the yellow line of turbid water, when round she goes,
and you can see the sails shiver as the breeze touches them on both
surfaces for a moment. Then again she shows her stern and away she
glides, while another approaches: and all day long they pass. There is
always something shadowy, not exactly unreal, but shadowy about a ship;
it seems to carry a romance, and the imagination fashions a story to
the swelling sails.

The bright light of Brighton brings all things into clear relief,
giving them an edge and outline; as steel burns with a flame like wood
in oxygen, so the minute particles of iron in the atmosphere seem to
burn and glow in the sunbeams, and a twofold illumination fills the
air. Coming back to the place after a journey this brilliant light is
very striking, and most new visitors notice it. Even a room with a
northern aspect is full of light, too strong for some eyes, till
accustomed to it. I am a great believer in light--sunlight--and of my
free will never let it be shut out with curtains. Light is essential to
life, like air; life is thought; light is as fresh air to the mind.
Brilliant sunshine is reflected from the houses and fills the streets.
The walls of the houses are clean and less discoloured by the deposit
of carbon than usual in most towns, so that the reflection is stronger
from these white surfaces. Shadow there is none in summer, for the
shadows are lit up by diffusion. Something in the atmosphere throws
light down into shaded places as if from a mirror. Waves beat
ceaselessly on the beach, and the undulations of light flow
continuously forwards into the remotest corners. Pure air, free from
suspended matter, lets the light pass freely, and perhaps this absence
of suspended material is the reason that the heat is not so oppressive
as would be supposed considering the glare. Certainly it is not so hot
as London; on going up to town on a July or August day it seems much
hotter there, so much so that one pants for air. Conversely in winter,
London appears much colder, the thick dark atmosphere seems to increase
the bitterness of the easterly winds, and returning to Brighton is
entering a warmer because clearer air. Many complain of the brilliance
of the light; they say the glare is overpowering, but the eyes soon
become acclimatised. This glare is one of the great recommendations of
Brighton; the strong light is evidently one of the causes of its
healthfulness to those who need change. There is no such glowing light
elsewhere along the south coast; these things are very local.

A demand has been made for trees, to plant the streets and turn them
into boulevards for shade, than which nothing could be more foolish. It
is the dryness of the place that gives it its character. After a storm,
after heavy rain for days, in an hour the pavements are not only dry
but clean; no dirt, sticky and greasy, remains. The only dirt in
Brighton, for three-fourths of the year, is that made by the
water-carts. Too much water is used, and a good clean road covered with
mud an inch thick in August; but this is not the fault of Brighton--it
is the lack of observation on the part of the Cadi who ought to have
noticed the wretched condition of ladies' boots when compelled to cross
these miry promenades. Trees are not wanted in Brighton; it is the
peculiar glory of Brighton to be treeless. Trees are the cause of damp,
they suck down moisture, and fill a circle round them with humidity.
Places full of trees are very trying in spring and autumn even to
robust people, much more so to convalescents and delicate persons. Have
nothing to do with trees, if Brighton is to retain its value. Glowing
light, dry, clear, and clean air, general dryness--these are the
qualities that rendered Brighton a sanatorium; light and glow without
oppressive moist heat; in winter a clear cold. Most terrible of all to
bear is cold when the atmosphere is saturated with water. If any reply
that trees have no leaves in winter and so do not condense moisture, I
at once deny the conclusion; they have no leaves, but they condense
moisture nevertheless. This is effected by the minute twigs, thousands
of twigs and little branches, on which the mists condense, and distil
in drops. Under a large tree, in winter, there is often a perfect
shower, enough to require an umbrella, and it lasts for hours.
Eastbourne is a pleasant place, but visit Eastbourne, which is proud of
its trees, in October, and feel the damp fallen leaves under your feet,
and you would prefer no trees.

Let nothing check the descent of those glorious beams of sunlight which
fall at Brighton. Watch the pebbles on the beach; the foam runs up and
wets them, almost before it can slip back the sunshine has dried them
again. So they are alternately wetted and dried. Bitter sea and glowing
light, bright clear air, dry as dry,--that describes the place. Spain
is the country of sunlight, burning sunlight; Brighton is a Spanish
town in England, a Seville. Very bright colours can be worn in summer
because of this powerful light; the brightest are scarcely noticed, for
they seem to be in concert with the sunshine. Is it difficult to paint
in so strong a light? Pictures in summer look dull and out of tune when
this Seville sun is shining. Artificial colours of the palette cannot
live in it. As a race we do not seem to care much for colour or art--I
mean in the common things of daily life--else a great deal of colour
might be effectively used in Brighton in decorating houses and
woodwork. Much more colour might be put in the windows, brighter
flowers and curtains; more, too, inside the rooms; the sober hues of
London furniture and carpets are not in accord with Brighton light.
Gold and ruby and blue, the blue of transparent glass, or purple, might
be introduced, and the romance of colour freely indulged. At high tide
of summer Spanish mantillas, Spanish fans, would not be out of place in
the open air. No tint is too bright--scarlet, cardinal, anything the
imagination fancies; the brightest parasol is a matter of course.
Stand, for instance, by the West Pier, on the Esplanade, looking east
on a full-lit August day. The sea is blue, streaked with green, and is
stilled with heat; the low undulations can scarcely rise and fall for
somnolence. The distant cliffs are white; the houses yellowish-white;
the sky blue, more blue than fabled Italy. Light pours down, and the
bitter salt sea wets the pebbles; to look at them makes the mouth dry,
in the unconscious recollection of the saltness and bitterness. The
flags droop, the sails of the fishing-boats hang idle; the land and the
sea are conquered by the great light of the sun.

Some people become famous by being always in one attitude. Meet them
when you will, they have invariably got an arm--the same arm--crossed
over the breast, and the hand thrust in between the buttons of the coat
to support it. Morning, noon, or evening, in the street, the carriage,
sitting, reading the paper, always the same attitude; thus they achieve
social distinction; it takes the place of a medal or the red ribbon.
What is a general or a famous orator compared to a man always in the
same attitude? Simply nobody, nobody knows him, everybody knows the
mono-attitude man. Some people make their mark by invariably wearing
the same short pilot coat. Doubtless it has been many times renewed,
still it is the same coat. In winter it is thick, in summer thin, but
identical in cut and colour. Some people sit at the same window of the
reading-room at the same hour every day, all the year round. This is
the way to become marked and famous; winning a battle is nothing to it.
When it was arranged that a military band should play on the Brunswick
Lawns, it became the fashion to stop carriages in the road and listen
to it. Frequently there were carriages four deep, while the gale blew
the music out to sea and no one heard a note. Still they sat content.

There are more handsome women in Brighton than anywhere else in the
world. They are so common that gradually the standard of taste in the
mind rises, and good-looking women who would be admired in other places
pass by without notice. Where all the flowers are roses, you do not see
a rose. They are all plump, not to say fat, which would be rude; very
plump, and have the glow and bloom of youth upon the cheeks. They do
not suffer from "pernicious anaemia," that evil bloodlessness which
London physicians are not unfrequently called upon to cure, when the
cheeks are white as paper and have to be rosied with minute doses of
arsenic. They extract their arsenic from the air. The way they step and
the carriage of the form show how full they are of life and spirits.
Sarah Bernhardt will not come to Brighton if she can help it, lest she
should lose that high art angularity and slipperiness of shape which
suits her _role_. Dresses seem always to fit well, because people
somehow expand to them. It is pleasant to see the girls walk, because
the limbs do not drag, the feet are lifted gaily and with ease.
Horse-exercise adds a deeper glow to the face; they ride up on the
Downs first, out of pure cunning, for the air there is certain to
impart a freshness to the features like dew on a flower, and then
return and walk their horses to and fro the King's Road, certain of
admiration. However often these tricks are played, they are always
successful. Those philanthropic folk who want to reform women's dress,
and call upon the world to observe how the present style contracts the
chest, and forces the organs of the body out of place (what a queer
expression it seems, "organs"!) have not a chance in Brighton. Girls
lace tight and "go in" for the tip of the fashion, yet they bloom and
flourish as green bay trees, and do not find their skirts any obstacle
in walking or tennis. The horse-riding that goes on is a thing to be
chronicled; they are always on horseback, and you may depend upon it
that it is better for them than all the gymnastic exercises ever
invented. The liability to strain, and even serious internal injury,
which is incurred in gymnastic exercises, ought to induce sensible
people to be extremely careful how they permit their daughters to
sacrifice themselves on this scientific altar. Buy them horses to ride,
if you want them to enjoy good health and sound constitutions. Nothing
like horses for women. Send the professors to Suakim, and put the girls
on horseback. Whether Brighton grows handsome girls, or whether they
flock there drawn by instinct, or become lovely by staying there, is an
inquiry too difficult to pursue.

There they are, one at least in every group, and you have to walk, as
the Spaniards say, with your beard over your shoulder, continually
looking back at those who have passed. The only antidote known is to
get married before you visit the place, and doubts have been expressed
as to its efficacy. In the south-coast Seville there is nothing done
but heart-breaking; it is so common it is like hammering flints for
road mending; nobody cares if your heart is in pieces. They break
hearts on horseback, and while walking, playing tennis,
shopping--actually at shopping, not to mention parties of every kind.
No one knows where the next danger will be encountered--at the very
next corner perhaps. Feminine garments have an irresistible flutter in
the sea-breeze; feathers have a beckoning motion. No one can be
altogether good in Brighton, and that is the great charm of it. The
language of the eyes is cultivated to a marvellous degree; as we say of
dogs, they quite talk with their eyes. Even when you do not chance to
meet an exceptional beauty, still the plainer women are not plain like
the plain women in other places. The average is higher among them, and
they are not so irredeemably uninteresting. The flash of an eye, the
shape of a shoulder, the colour of the hair--something or other
pleases. Women without a single good feature are often good-looking in
New Seville because of an indescribable style or manner. They catch the
charm of the good-looking by living among them, so that if any young
lady desires to acquire the art of attraction she has only to take
train and join them. Delighted with our protectorate of Paphos, Venus
has lately decided to reside on these shores, Every morning the girls'
schools go for their constitutional walks; there seem no end of these
schools--the place has a garrison of girls, and the same thing is
noticeable in their ranks. Too young to have developed actual
loveliness, some in each band distinctly promise future success. After
long residence the people become accustomed to good looks, and do not
see anything especial around them, but on going away for a few days
soon miss these pleasant faces.

In reconstructing Brighton station, one thing was omitted--a balcony
from which to view the arrival and departure of the trains in summer
and autumn. The scene is as lively and interesting as the stage when a
good play is proceeding. So many happy expectant faces, often very
beautiful; such a mingling of colours, and succession of different
figures; now a brunette, now golden hair: it is a stage, only it is
real. The bustle, which is not the careworn anxious haste of business;
the rushing to and fro; the greetings of friends; the smiles; the
shifting of the groups, some coming, and some going--plump and
rosy,--it is really charming. One has a fancy dog, another a
bright-bound novel; very many have cavaliers; and look at the piles of
luggage! What dresses, what changes and elegance concealed
therein!--conjurors' trunks out of which wonders will spring. Can
anything look jollier than a cab overgrown with luggage, like huge
barnacles, just starting away with its freight? One can imagine such a
fund of enjoyment on its way in that cab. This happy throng seems to
express something that delights the heart. I often used to walk up to
the station just to see it, and left feeling better.



THE PINE WOOD


There was a humming in the tops of the young pines as if a swarm of
bees were busy at the green cones. They were not visible through the
thick needles, and on listening longer it seemed as if the sound was
not exactly the note of the bee--a slightly different pitch, and the
hum was different, while bees have a habit of working close together.
Where there is one bee there are usually five or six, and the hum is
that of a group; here there only appeared one or two insects to a pine.
Nor was the buzz like that of the humble-bee, for every now and then
one came along low down, flying between the stems, and his note was
much deeper. By-and-by, crossing to the edge of the plantation, where
the boughs could be examined, being within reach, I found it was wasps.
A yellow wasp wandered over the blue-green needles till he found a pair
with a drop of liquid like dew between them. There he fastened himself
and sucked at it; you could see the drop gradually drying up till it
was gone. The largest of these drops were generally between two
needles--those of the Scotch fir or pine grow in pairs--but there were
smaller drops on the outside of other needles. In searching for this
exuding turpentine the wasps filled the whole plantation with the sound
of their wings. There must have been many thousands of them. They
caused no inconvenience to any one walking in the copse, because they
were high overhead.

Watching these wasps I found two cocoons of pale yellow silk on a
branch of larch, and by them a green spider. He was quite green--two
shades, lightest on the back, but little lighter than the green larch
bough. An ant had climbed up a pine and over to the extreme end of a
bough; she seemed slow and stupefied in her motions, as if she had
drunken of the turpentine and had lost her intelligence. The soft cones
of the larch could be easily cut down the centre with a penknife,
showing the structure of the cone and the seeds inside each scale. It
is for these seeds that birds frequent the fir copses, shearing off the
scales with their beaks. One larch cone had still the tuft at the
top--a pineapple in miniature. The loudest sound in the wood was the
humming in the trees; there was no wind, no sunshine; a summer day,
still and shadowy, under large clouds high up. To this low humming the
sense of hearing soon became accustomed, and it served but to render
the silence deeper. In time, as I sat waiting and listening, there came
the faintest far-off song of a bird away in the trees; the merest thin
upstroke of sound, slight in structure, the echo of the strong spring
singing. This was the summer repetition, dying away. A willow-wren
still remembered his love, and whispered about it to the silent fir
tops, as in after days we turn over the pages of letters, withered as
leaves, and sigh. So gentle, so low, so tender a song the willow-wren
sang that it could scarce be known as the voice of a bird, but was like
that of some yet more delicate creature with the heart of a woman.

A butterfly with folded wings clung to a stalk of grass; upon the under
side of his wing thus exposed there were buff spots, and dark dots and
streaks drawn on the finest ground of pearl-grey, through which there
came a tint of blue; there was a blue, too, shut up between the wings,
visible at the edges. The spots, and dots, and streaks were not exactly
the same on each wing; at first sight they appeared similar, but, on
comparing one with the other, differences could be traced. The pattern
was not mechanical; it was hand-painted by Nature, and the painter's
eye and fingers varied in their work.

How fond Nature is of spot-markings!--the wings of butterflies, the
feathers of birds, the surface of eggs, the leaves and petals of plants
are constantly spotted; so, too, fish--as trout. From the wing of the
butterfly I looked involuntarily at the foxglove I had just gathered;
inside, the bells were thickly spotted--dots and dustings that might
have been transferred to a butterfly's wing. The spotted meadow-orchis;
the brown dots on the cowslips; brown, black, greenish, reddish dots
and spots and dustings on the eggs of the finches, the whitethroats,
and so many others--some of the spots seem as if they had been splashed
on and had run into short streaks, some mottled, some gathered together
at the end; all spots, dots, dustings of minute specks, mottlings, and
irregular markings. The histories, the stories, the library of
knowledge contained in those signs! It was thought a wonderful thing
when at last the strange inscriptions of Assyria were read, made of
nail-headed characters whose sound was lost; it was thought a triumph
when the yet older hieroglyphics of Egypt were compelled to give up
their messages, and the world hoped that we should know the secrets of
life. That hope was disappointed; there was nothing in the records but
superstition and useless ritual. But here we go back to the beginning;
the antiquity of Egypt is nothing to the age of these signs--they date
from unfathomable time. In them the sun has written his commands, and
the wind inscribed deep thought. They were before superstition began;
they were composed in the old, old world, when the Immortals walked on
earth. They have been handed down thousands upon thousands of years to
tell us that to-day we are still in the presence of the heavenly
visitants, if only we will give up the soul to these pure influences.
The language in which they are written has no alphabet, and cannot be
reduced to order. It can only be understood by the heart and spirit.
Look down into this foxglove bell and you will know that; look long and
lovingly at this blue butterfly's underwing, and a feeling will rise to
your consciousness.

Some time passed, but the butterfly did not move; a touch presently
disturbed him, and flutter, flutter went his blue wings, only for a few
seconds, to another grass-stalk, and so on from grass-stalk to
grass-stalk as compelled, a yard flight at most. He would not go
farther; he settled as if it had been night. There was no sunshine, and
under the clouds he had no animation. A swallow went by singing in the
air, and as he flew his forked tail was shut, and but one streak of
feathers drawn past. Though but young trees, there was a coating of
fallen needles under the firs an inch thick, and beneath it the dry
earth touched warm. A fern here and there came up through it, the
palest of pale green, quite a different colour to the same species
growing in the hedges away from the copse. A yellow fungus, streaked
with scarlet as if blood had soaked into it, stood at the foot of a
tree occasionally. Black fungi, dry, shrivelled, and dead, lay fallen
about, detached from the places where they had grown, and crumbling if
handled. Still more silent after sunset, the wood was utterly quiet;
the swallows no longer passed twittering, the willow-wren was gone,
there was no hum or rustle; the wood was as silent as a shadow.

But before the darkness a song and an answer arose in a tree, one bird
singing a few notes and another replying side by side. Two goldfinches
sat on the cross of a larch-fir and sang, looking towards the west,
where the light lingered. High up, the larch-fir boughs with the top
shoot form a cross; on this one goldfinch sat, the other was
immediately beneath. At even the birds often turn to the west as they
sing.

Next morning the August sun shone, and the wood was all a-hum with
insects. The wasps were working at the pine boughs high overhead; the
bees by dozens were crowding to the bramble flowers; swarming on them,
they seemed so delighted; humble-bees went wandering among the ferns in
the copse and in the ditches--they sometimes alight on fern--and
calling at every purple heath-blossom, at the purple knapweeds, purple
thistles, and broad handfuls of yellow-weed flowers. Wasp-like flies
barred with yellow suspended themselves in the air between the
pine-trunks like hawks hovering, and suddenly shot themselves a yard
forward or to one side, as if the rapid vibration of their wings while
hovering had accumulated force which drove them as if discharged from a
cross-bow. The sun had set all things in motion.

There was a hum under the oak by the hedge, a hum in the pine wood, a
humming among the heath and the dry grass which heat had browned. The
air was alive and merry with sound, so that the day seemed quite
different and twice as pleasant. Three blue butterflies fluttered in
one flowery corner, the warmth gave them vigour; two had a silvery
edging to their wings, one was brown and blue. The nuts reddening at
the tips appeared ripening like apples in the sunshine. This corner is
a favourite with wild bees and butterflies; if the sun shines they are
sure to be found there at the heath-bloom and tall yellow-weed, and
among the dry seeding bennets or grass-stalks. All things, even
butterflies, are local in their habits. Far up on the hillside the blue
green of the pines beneath shone in the sun--a burnished colour; the
high hillside is covered with heath and heather. Where there are open
places a small species of gorse, scarcely six inches high, is in bloom,
the yellow blossom on the extremity of the stalk.

Some of these gorse plants seemed to have a different flower growing at
the side of the stem, instead of at the extremity. These florets were
cream-coloured, so that it looked like a new species of gorse. On
gathering it to examine the thick-set florets, if was found that a
slender runner or creeper had been torn up with it. Like a thread the
creeper had wound itself round and round the furze, buried in and
hidden by the prickles, and it was this creeper that bore the white or
cream-florets. It was tied round as tightly as thread could be, so that
the florets seemed to start from the stem, deceiving the eye at first.
In some places this parasite plant had grown up the heath and strangled
it, so that the tips turned brown and died. The runners extended in
every direction across the ground, like those of strawberries. One
creeper had climbed up a bennet, or seeding grass-stalk, binding the
stalk and a blade of the grass together, and flowering there. On the
ground there were patches of grey lichen; many of the pillar-like stems
were crowned with a red top. Under a small boulder stone there was an
ants' nest. These boulders, or, as they are called locally, "bowlers,"
were scattered about the heath. Many of the lesser stones were spotted
with dark dots of lichen, not unlike a toad.

Thoughtlessly turning over a boulder about nine inches square, lo!
there was subject enough for thinking underneath it--a subject that has
been thought about many thousand years; for this piece of rock had
formed the roof of an ants' nest. The stone had sunk three inches deep
into the dry soil of sand and peaty mould, and in the floor of the hole
the ants had worked out their excavations, which resembled an outline
map. The largest excavation was like England; at the top, or north,
they had left a narrow bridge, an eighth of an inch wide, under which
to pass into Scotland, and from Scotland again another narrow arch led
to the Orkney Islands; these last, however, were dug in the
perpendicular side of the hole. In the corners of these excavations
tunnels ran deeper into the ground, and the ants immediately began
hurrying their treasures, the eggs, down into these cellars. At one
angle a tunnel went beneath the heath into further excavations beneath
a second boulder stone. Without, a fern grew, and the dead dry stems of
heather crossed each other.

This discovery led to the turning over of another boulder stone not far
off, and under it there appeared a much more extensive and complete
series of galleries, bridges, cellars and tunnels. In these the whole
life-history of the ant was exposed at a single glance, as if one had
taken off the roofs of a city. One cell contained a dust-like deposit,
another a collection resembling the dust, but now elongated and a
little greenish; a third treasury, much larger, was piled up with
yellowish grains about the size of wheat, each with a black dot on the
top, and looking like minute hop-pockets. Besides these, there was a
pure white substance in a corridor, which the irritated ants seemed
particularly anxious to remove out of sight, and quickly carried away.
Among the ants rushing about there were several with wings; one took
flight; one was seized by a wingless ant and dragged down into a
cellar, as if to prevent its taking wing. A helpless green fly was in
the midst, and round the outside galleries there crept a creature like
a spider, seeming to try to hide itself. If the nest had been formed
under glass, it could not have been more open to view. The stone was
carefully replaced.

Below the pine wood on the slope of the hill a plough was already at
work, the crop of peas having been harvested. The four horses came up
the slope, and at the ridge swept round in a fine curve to go back and
open a fresh furrow. As soon as they faced down-hill they paused, well
aware of what had to be done, and the ploughman in a manner knocked his
plough to pieces, putting it together again the opposite way, that the
earth he was about to cut with the share might fall on what he had just
turned. With a piece of iron he hammered the edge of the share, to set
it, for the hard ground had bent the edge, and it did not cut properly.
I said his team looked light; they were not so heavily built as the
cart-horses used in many places. No, he said, they did not want heavy
horses. "Dese yer thick-boned hosses be more clutter-headed over the
clots," as he expressed it, _i.e._ more clumsy or thick-headed over the
clods. He preferred comparatively light cart-horses to step well. In
the heat of the sun the furze-pods kept popping and bursting open; they
are often as full of insects as seeds, which come creeping out. A green
and black lady-bird--exactly like a tortoise--flew on to my hand. Again
on the heath, and the grasshoppers rose at every step, sometimes three
or four springing in as many directions. They were winged, and as soon
as they were up spread their vanes and floated forwards. As the force
of the original hop decreased, the wind took their wings and turned
them aside from the straight course before they fell. Down the dusty
road, inches deep in sand, comes a sulphur butterfly, rushing as quick
as if hastening to a butterfly-fair. If only rare, how valued he would
be! His colour is so evident and visible; he fills the road, being
brighter than all, and for the moment is more than the trees and
flowers.

Coming so suddenly over the hedge into the road close to me, he
startled me as if I had been awakened from a dream--I had been thinking
it was August, and woke to find it February--for the sulphur butterfly
is the February pleasure. Between the dark storms and wintry rains
there is a warm sunny interval of a week in February. Away one goes for
a walk, and presently there appears a bright yellow spot among the
furze, dancing along like a flower let loose. It is a sulphur
butterfly, who thus comes before the earliest chiffchaff--before the
watch begins for the first swallow. I call it the February pleasure, as
each month has its delight. So associated as this butterfly is with
early spring, to see it again after months of leaf and flower--after
June and July--with the wheat in shock and the scent of harvest in the
land, is startling. The summer, then, is a dream! It is still winter;
but no, here are the trees in leaf, the nuts reddening, the hum of
bees, and dry summer dust on the high wiry grass. The sulphur butterfly
comes twice; there is a second brood; but there are some facts that are
always new and surprising, however well known. I may say again, if only
rare, how this butterfly would be prized! Along the hedgerow there are
several spiders' webs. In the centre they are drawn inwards, forming a
funnel, which goes back a few inches into the hedge, and at the bottom
of this the spider waits. If you look down the funnel you see his claws
at the bottom, ready to run up and seize a fly.

Sitting in the garden after a walk, it is pleasant to watch the
eave-swallows feeding their young on the wing. The young bird follows
the old one; then they face each other and stay a moment in the air,
while the insect food is transferred from beak to beak; with a loud
note they part. There was a constant warfare between the eave-swallows
and the sparrows frequenting a house where I was staying during the
early part of the summer. The sparrows strove their utmost to get
possession of the nests the swallows built, and there was no peace
between them It is common enough for one or two swallows' nests to be
attacked in this way, but here every nest along the eaves was fought
for, and the sparrows succeeded in conquering many of them. The
driven-out swallows after a while began to build again, and I noticed
that more than a pair seemed to work at the same nest. One nest was
worked at by four swallows; often all four came together and twittered
at it.



NATURE ON THE ROOF


Increased activity on the housetop marks the approach of spring and
summer exactly as in the woods and hedges, for the roof has its
migrants, its semi-migrants, and its residents. When the first
dandelion is opening on a sheltered bank, and the pale-blue field
veronica flowers in the waste corner, the whistle of the starling comes
from his favourite ledge. Day by day it is heard more and more, till,
when the first green spray appears on the hawthorn, he visits the roof
continually. Besides the roof-tree and the chimney-pot, he has his own
special place, sometimes under an eave, sometimes between two gables;
and as I sit writing, I can see a pair who have a ledge which slightly
projects from the wall between the eaves and the highest window. This
was made by the builder for an ornament; but my two starlings consider
it their own particular possession. They alight with a sort of
half-scream half-whistle just over the window, flap their wings, and
whistle again, run along the ledge to a spot where there is a gable,
and with another note, rise up and enter an aperture between the slates
and the wall. There their nest will be in a little time, and busy
indeed they will be when the young require to be fed, to and fro the
fields and the gable the whole day through; the busiest and the most
useful of birds, for they destroy thousands upon thousands of insects,
and if farmers were wise they would never have one shot, no matter how
the thatch was pulled about.

My pair of starlings were frequently at this ledge last autumn, very
late in autumn, and I suspect they had a winter brood there. The
starling does rear a brood sometimes in the midst of the winter,
contrary as that may seem to our general ideas of natural history. They
may be called roof-residents, as they visit it all the year round; they
nest in the roof, rearing two and sometimes three broods; and use it as
their club and place of meeting. Towards July the young starlings and
those that have for the time at least finished nesting, flock together,
and pass the day in the fields, returning now and then to their old
home. These flocks gradually increase; the starling is so prolific that
the flocks become immense, till in the latter part of the autumn in
southern fields it is common to see a great elm-tree black with them,
from the highest bough downwards, and the noise of their chattering can
be heard a long distance. They roost in firs or in osier-beds. But in
the blackest days of winter, when frost binds the ground hard as iron,
the starlings return to the roof almost every day; they do not whistle
much, but have a peculiar chuckling whistle at the instant of
alighting. In very hard weather, especially snow, the starlings find it
difficult to obtain a living, and at such times will come to the
premises at the rear, and at farmhouses where cattle are in the yards,
search about among them for insects.

The whole history of the starling is interesting, but I must here only
mention it as a roof-bird. They are very handsome in their full
plumage, which gleams bronze and green among the darker shades; quick
in their motions, and full of spirit; loaded to the muzzle with energy,
and never still. I hope none of those who are so good as to read what I
have written will ever keep a starling in a cage; the cruelty is
extreme. As for shooting pigeons at a trap, it is mercy in comparison.

Even before the starling whistles much, the sparrows begin to chirp: in
the dead of winter they are silent; but so soon as the warmer winds
blow, if only for a day, they begin to chirp. In January this year I
used to listen to the sparrows chirping, the starlings whistling, and
the chaffinches' "chink, chink" about eight o'clock, or earlier, in the
morning: the first two on the roof; the latter, which is not a
roof-bird, in some garden shrubs. As the spring advances, the sparrows
sing--it is a short song, it is true, but still it is singing--perched
at the edge of a sunny wall. There is not a place about the house where
they will not build--under the eaves, on the roof, anywhere where there
is a projection or shelter, deep in the thatch, under the tiles, in old
eave-swallows' nest. The last place I noticed as a favourite one in
towns is on the half-bricks left projecting in perpendicular rows at
the sides of unfinished houses, Half a dozen nests may be counted at
the side of a house on these bricks; and like the starlings, they rear
several broods, and some are nesting late in the autumn. By degrees as
the summer advances they leave the houses for the corn, and gather in
vast flocks, rivalling those of the starlings. At this time they desert
the roofs, except those who still have nesting duties. In winter and in
the beginning of the new year, they gradually return; migration thus
goes on under the eyes of those who care to notice it. In London, some
who fed sparrows on the roof found that rooks also came for the crumbs
placed out. I sometimes see a sparrow chasing a rook, as if angry, and
trying to drive it away over the roofs where I live, the thief does not
retaliate, but, like a thief, flees from the scene of his guilt. This
is not only in the breeding season, when the rook steals eggs, but in
winter. Town residents are apt to despise the sparrow, seeing him
always black; but in the country the sparrows are as clean as a pink;
and in themselves they are the most animated, clever little creatures.

They are easily tamed. The Parisians are fond of taming them. At a
certain hour in the Tuilleries Gardens, you may see a man perfectly
surrounded with a crowd of sparrows--some perching on his shoulder;
some fluttering in the air immediately before his face; some on the
ground like a tribe of followers; and others on the marble seats. He
jerks a crumb of bread into the air--a sparrow dexterously seizes it as
he would a flying insect; he puts a crumb between his lips--a sparrow
takes it out and feeds from his mouth. Meantime they keep up a constant
chirping; those that are satisfied still stay by and adjust their
feathers. He walks on, giving a little chirp with his mouth, and they
follow him along the path--a cloud about his shoulders, and the rest
flying from shrub to shrub, perching, and then following again. They
are all perfectly clean--a contrast to the London Sparrow. I came
across one of these sparrow-tamers by chance, and was much amused at
the scene, which, to any one not acquainted with birds, appears
marvellous; but it is really as simple as possible, and you can repeat
it for yourself if you have patience, for they are so sharp they soon
understand you. They seem to play at nest-making before they really
begin; taking up straws in their beaks, and carrying them half-way to
the roof, then letting the straws float away; and the same with stray
feathers, Neither of these, starlings nor sparrows, seem to like the
dark. Under the roof, between it and the first ceiling, there is a
large open space; if the slates or tiles are kept in good order, very
little light enters, and this space is nearly dark in daylight. Even if
chinks admit a beam of light, it is not enough; they seldom enter or
fly about there, though quite accessible to them. But if the roof is in
bad order, and this space light, they enter freely. Though nesting in
holes, yet they like light. The swallows could easily go in and make
nests upon the beams, but they will not, unless the place is well lit.
They do not like darkness in the daytime.

The swallows bring us the sunbeams on their wings from Africa to fill
the fields with flowers. From the time of the arrival of the first
swallow the flowers take heart; the few and scanty plants that had
braved the earlier cold are succeeded by a constantly enlarging list,
till the banks and lanes are full of them. The chimney-swallow is
usually the forerunner of the three house-swallows; and perhaps no fact
in natural history has been so much studied as the migration of these
tender birds. The commonest things are always the most interesting. In
summer there is no bird so common everywhere as the swallow, and for
that reason many overlook it, though they rush to see a "white
elephant." But the deepest thinkers have spent hours and hours in
considering the problem of the swallow--its migrations, its flight, its
habits; great poets have loved it; great artists and art-writers have
curiously studied it. The idea that it is necessary to seek the
wilderness or the thickest woods for nature is a total mistake; nature
it, at home, on the roof, close to every one. Eave-swallows, or
house-martins (easily distinguished by the white bar across the tail),
build sometimes in the shelter of the porches of old houses.

As you go in or out, the swallows visiting or leaving their nests fly
so closely as almost to brush the face. Swallow means porch-bird, and
for centuries and centuries their nests have been placed in the closest
proximity to man. They might be called man's birds, so attached are
they to the human race. I think the greatest ornament a house can have
is the nest of an eave-swallow under the eaves--far superior to the
most elaborate carving, colouring, or arrangement the architect can
devise. There is no ornament like the swallow's nest; the home of a
messenger between man and the blue heavens, between us and the
sunlight, and all the promise of the sky. The joy of life, the highest
and tenderest feelings, thoughts that soar on the swallow's wings, come
to the round nest under the roof. Not only to-day, not only the hopes
of future years, but all the past dwells there. Year after year the
generations and descent of the swallow have been associated with our
homes, and all the events of successive lives have taken place under
their guardianship. The swallow is the genius of good to a house. Let
its nest, then, stay; to me it seems the extremity of barbarism, or
rather stupidity, to knock it down. I wish I could induce them to build
under the eaves of this house; I would if I could discover some means
of communicating with them.

It is a peculiarity of the swallow that you cannot make it afraid of
you; just the reverse of other birds. The swallow does not understand
being repulsed, but comes back again. Even knocking the nest down will
not drive it away, until the stupid process has been repeated several
years. The robin must be coaxed; the sparrow is suspicious, and though
easy to tame, quick to notice the least alarming movement. The swallow
will not be driven away. He has not the slightest fear of man; he flies
to his nest close to the window, under the low eave, or on the beams in
the out-houses, no matter if you are looking on or not. Bold as the
starlings are, they will seldom do this. But in the swallow the
instinct of suspicion is reversed, an instinct of confidence occupies
its place. In addition to the eave-swallow, to which I have chiefly
alluded, and the chimney-swallow, there is the swift, also a roof-bird,
and making its nest in the slates of houses in the midst of towns.
These three are migrants in the fullest sense, and come to our houses
over thousands of miles of land and sea.

Robins frequently visit the roof for insects, especially when it is
thatched; so do wrens; and the latter, after they have peered along,
have a habit of perching at the extreme angle of a gable, or the
extreme edge of a corner, and uttering their song. Finches occasionally
fly up to the roofs of country-houses if shrubberies are near, also in
pursuit of insects; but they are not truly roof-birds. Wagtails perch
on roofs; they often have their nests in the ivy, or creepers trained
against walls; they are quite at borne, and are frequently seen on the
ridges of farmhouses. Tits of several species, particularly the great
titmouse and the blue tit, come to thatch for insects, both in summer
and winter. In some districts where they are common, it is not unusual
to see a goatsucker or fern-owl hawk along close to the eaves in the
dusk of the evening for moths. The white owl is a roof-bird (though not
often of the house), building inside the roof, and sitting there all
day in some shaded corner. They do sometimes take up their residence in
the roofs of outhouses attached to dwellings, but not often nowadays,
though still residing in the roofs of old castles. Jackdaws, again, are
roof-birds, building in the roofs of towers. Bats live in roofs, and
hang there wrapped up in their membranous wings till the evening calls
them forth. They are residents in the full sense, remaining all the
year round, though principally seen in the warmer months; but they are
there in the colder, hidden away, and if the temperature rises, will
venture out and hawk to and fro in the midst of the winter. Tame
pigeons and doves hardly come into this paper, but still it is their
habit to use roofs as tree-tops. Rats and mice creep through the
crevices of roofs, and in old country-houses hold a sort of nightly
carnival, racing to and fro under the roof. Weasels sometimes follow
them indoors and up to their roof strongholds.

When the first warm days of spring sunshine strike against the southern
side of the chimney, sparrows perch there and enjoy it; and again in
autumn, when the general warmth of the atmosphere is declining, they
still find a little pleasant heat there. They make use of the radiation
of heat, as the gardener does who trains his fruit-trees to a wall.
Before the autumn has thinned the leaves, the swallows gather on the
highest ridge of the roof in a row and twitter to each other; they know
the time is approaching when they must depart for another climate. In
winter, many birds seek the thatched roofs to roost. Wrens, tits, and
even blackbirds roost in the holes left by sparrows or starlings.

Every crevice is the home of insects, or used by them for the deposit
of their eggs--under the tiles or slates, where mortar has dropped out
between the bricks, in the holes of thatch, and on the straws. The
number of insects that frequent a large roof must be very great--all
the robins, wrens, bats, and so on, can scarcely affect them; nor the
spiders, though these, too, are numerous. Then there are the moths, and
those creeping creatures that work out of sight, boring their way
through the rafters and beams. Sometimes a sparrow may be seen clinging
to the bare wall of the house; tits do the same thing. It is surprising
how they manage to hold on. They are taking insects from the apertures
of the mortar. Where the slates slope to the south, the sunshine soon
heats them, and passing butterflies alight on the warm surface, and
spread out their wings, as if hovering over the heat. Flies are
attracted in crowds sometimes to heated slates and tiles, and wasps
will occasionally pause there. Wasps are addicted to haunting houses,
and, in the autumn, feed on the flies. Floating germs carried by the
air must necessarily lodge in numbers against roofs; so do dust and
invisible particles; and together, these make the rain-water collected
in water-butts after a storm turbid and dark; and it soon becomes full
of living organisms.

Lichen and moss grow on the mortar wherever it has become slightly
disintegrated; and if any mould, however minute, by any means
accumulates between the slates, there, too, they spring up, and even on
the slates themselves. Tiles are often coloured yellow by such growths.
On some old roofs, which have decayed, and upon which detritus has
accumulated, wallflowers may be found; and the house-leek takes
capricious root where it fancies. The stonecrop is the finest of
roof-plants, sometimes forming a broad patch of brilliant yellow. Birds
carry up seeds and grains, and these germinate in moist thatch.
Groundsel, for instance, and stray stalks of wheat, thin and drooping
for lack of soil, are sometimes seen there, besides grasses. Ivy is
familiar as a roof-creeper. Some ferns and the pennywort will grow on
the wall close to the roof. A correspondent tells me that in Wales he
found a cottage perfectly roofed with fern--it grew so thickly as to
conceal the roof. Had a painter put this in a picture, many would have
exclaimed: "How fanciful! He must have made it up; it could never have
grown like that!" Not long after receiving my correspondent's kind
letter, I chanced to find a roof near London upon which the same fern
was growing in lines along the tiles. It grew plentifully, but was not
in so flourishing a condition as that found in Wales. Painters are
sometimes accused of calling upon their imagination when they are
really depicting fact, for the ways of nature vary very much in
different localities, and that which may seem impossible in one place
is common enough in another.

Where will not ferns grow? We saw one attached to the under-side of a
glass coal-hole cover; its green could be seen through the thick glass
on which people stepped daily.

Recently, much attention has been paid to the dust which is found on
roofs and ledges at great heights. This meteoric dust, as it is called,
consists of minute particles of iron, which are thought to fall from
the highest part of the atmosphere, or possibly to be attracted to the
earth from space. Lightning usually strikes the roof. The whole subject
of lightning-conductors has been re-opened of late years, there being
reason to think that mistakes have been made in the manner of their
erection. The reason English roofs are high-pitched is not only because
of the rain, that it may shoot off quickly, but on account of snow.
Once now and then there comes a snow-year, and those who live in houses
with flat surfaces anywhere on the roof soon discover how inconvenient
they are. The snow is sure to find its way through, damaging ceilings,
and doing other mischief. Sometimes, in fine summer weather, people
remark how pleasant it would be if the roof were flat, so that it could
be used as a terrace, as it is in warmer climates. But the fact is, the
English roof, although now merely copied and repeated without a thought
of the reason of its shape, grew up from experience of severe winters.
Of old, great care and ingenuity--what we should now call artistic
skill--were employed in contracting the roof. It was not only pleasant
to the eye with its gables, but the woodwork was wonderfully well done.
Such roofs may still be seen on ancient mansions, having endured for
centuries. They are splendid pieces of workmanship, and seen from afar
among foliage, are admired by every one who has the least taste.
Draughtsmen and painters value them highly. No matter whether
reproduced on a large canvas or in a little woodcut, their proportions
please. The roof is much neglected in modern houses; it is either
conventional, or it is full indeed of gables, but gables that do not
agree, as it were, with each other--that are obviously put there on
purpose to look artistic, and fail altogether. Now, the ancient roofs
were true works of art, consistent, and yet each varied to its
particular circumstances, and each impressed with the individuality of
the place and of the designer. The finest old roofs were built of oak
or chestnut; the beams are black with age, and, in that condition, oak
is scarcely distinguishable from chestnut.

So the roof has its natural history, its science, and art; it has its
seasons, its migrants and residents, of whom a housetop calendar might
be made. The fine old roofs which have just been mentioned are often
associated with historic events and the rise of families; and the
roof-tree, like the hearth, has a range of proverbs or sayings and
ancient lore to itself. More than one great monarch has been slain by a
tile thrown from the housetop, and numerous other incidents have
occurred in connection with it. The most interesting is the story of
the Grecian mother who, with her infant, was on the roof, when, in a
moment of inattention, the child crept to the edge, and was balanced on
the very verge. To call to it, to touch it, would have insured its
destruction; but the mother, without a second's thought, bared her
breast, and the child eagerly turning to it, was saved!



ONE OF THE NEW VOTERS


I

If any one were to get up about half-past five on an August morning and
look out of an eastern window in the country, he would see the distant
trees almost hidden by a white mist. The tops of the larger groups of
elms would appear above it, and by these the line of the hedgerows
could be traced. Tier after tier they stretch along, rising by degrees
on a gentle slope, the space between filled with haze. Whether there
were corn-fields or meadows under this white cloud he could not tell--a
cloud that might have come down from the sky, leaving it a clear azure.
This morning haze means intense heat in the day. It is hot already,
very hot, for the sun is shining with all his strength, and if you wish
the house to be cool it is time to set the sunblinds.

Roger, the reaper, had slept all night in the cowhouse, lying on the
raised platform of narrow planks put up for cleanliness when the cattle
were there. He had set the wooden window wide open and left the door
ajar when he came stumbling in overnight, long after the late swallows
had settled in their nests in the beams, and the bats had wearied of
moth catching. One of the swallows twittered a little, as much as to
say to his mate, "my love, it is only a reaper, we need not be afraid,"
and all was silence and darkness. Roger did not so much as take off his
boots, but flung himself on the boards crash, curled himself up
hedgehog fashion with some old sacks, and immediately began to breathe
heavily. He had no difficulty in sleeping, first because his muscles
had been tried to the utmost, and next because his skin was full to the
brim, not of jolly "good ale and old" but of the very smallest and
poorest of wish-washy beer. In his own words, it "blowed him up till he
very nigh bust." Now the great authorities on dyspepsia, so eagerly
studied by the wealthy folk whose stomachs are deranged, tell us that a
very little flatulence will make the heart beat irregularly and cause
the most distressing symptoms.

Roger had swallowed at least a gallon of a liquid chemically designed,
one might say, on purpose to utterly upset the internal economy.
Harvest beer is probably the vilest drink in the world. The men say it
is made by pouring muddy water into empty casks returned sour from use,
and then brushing them round and round inside with a besom. This liquid
leaves a stickiness on the tongue and a harsh feeling at the back of
the mouth which soon turns to thirst, so that having once drunk a pint
the drinker must go on drinking. The peculiar dryness caused by this
beer is not like any other throat drought--worse than dust, or heat, or
thirst from work; there is no satisfying it. With it there go down the
germs of fermentation, a sour, yeasty, and, as it were, secondary
fermentation; not that kind which is necessary to make beer, but the
kind that unmakes and spoils beer. It is beer rotting and decomposing
in the stomach. Violent diarrhoea often follows, and then the
exhaustion thus caused induces the men to drink more in order to regain
the strength necessary to do their work. The great heat of the sun and
the heat of hard labour, the strain and perspiration, of course try the
body and weaken the digestion. To distend the stomach with half a
gallon of this liquor, expressly compounded to ferment, is about the
most murderous thing a man could do--murderous because it exposes him
to the risk of sunstroke. So vile a drink there is not elsewhere in the
world; arrack, and potato-spirit, and all the other killing extracts of
the distiller are not equal to it. Upon this abominable mess the golden
harvest of English fields is gathered in.

Some people have in consequence endeavoured to induce the harvesters to
accept a money payment in place of beer, and to a certain extent
successfully. Even then, however, they must drink something. Many
manage on weak tea after a fashion, but not so well as the abstainers
would have us think. Others have brewed for their men a miserable stuff
in buckets, an infusion of oatmeal, and got a few to drink it; but
English labourers will never drink oatmeal-water unless they are paid
to do it. If they are paid extra beer-money and oatmeal water is made
for them gratis, some will, of course, imbibe it, especially if they
see that thereby they may obtain little favours from their employer by
yielding to his fad. By drinking the crotchet perhaps they may get a
present now and then-food for themselves, cast-off clothes for their
families, and so on. For it is a remarkable feature of human natural
history, the desire to proselytise. The spectacle of John Bull--jovial
John Bull--offering his men a bucket of oatmeal liquor is not a
pleasant one. Such a John Bull ought to be ashamed of himself.

The truth is the English farmer's man was and is, and will be, a
drinker of beer. Neither tea, nor oatmeal, nor vinegar and water
(coolly recommended by indoor folk) will do for him. His natural
constitution rebels against such "peevish" drink. In winter he wants
beer against the cold and the frosty rime and the heavy raw mist that
hangs about the hollows; in spring and autumn against the rain, and in
summer to support him under the pressure of additional work and
prolonged hours. Those who really wish well to the labourer cannot do
better than see that he really has beer to drink--real beer, genuine
brew of malt and hops, a moderate quantity of which will supply force
to his thews and sinews, and will not intoxicate or injure. If by
giving him a small money payment in lieu of such large quantities you
can induce him to be content with a little, so much the better. If an
employer followed that plan, and at the same time once or twice a day
sent out a moderate supply of genuine beer as a gift to his men, he
would do them all the good in the world, and at the same time obtain
for himself their goodwill and hearty assistance, that hearty work
which is worth so much.

Roger breathed heavily in his sleep in the cowhouse, because the vile
stuff he had taken puffed him up and obstructed nature. The tongue in
his open mouth became parched and cracked, swollen and dry; he slept
indeed, but he did not rest; he groaned heavily at times and rolled
aside. Once he awoke choking--he could not swallow, his tongue was so
dry and large; he sat up, swore, and again lay down. The rats in the
sties had already discovered that a man slept in the cowhouse, a place
they rarely visited, as there was nothing there to eat; how they found
it out no one knows. They are clever creatures, the despised rats. They
came across in the night and looked under his bed, supposing that he
might have eaten his bread-and-cheese for supper there, and that
fragments might have dropped between the boards. There were none. They
mounted the boards and sniffed round him; they would have stolen the
food from his very pocket if it had been there. Nor could they find a
bundle in a handkerchief, which they would have gnawn through speedily.
Not a scrap of food was there to be smelt at, so they left him. Roger
had indeed gone supperless, as usual; his supper he had swilled and not
eaten. His own fault; he should have exercised self-control. Well, I
don't know; let us consider further before we judge.

In houses the difficulty often is to get the servants up in the
morning; one cannot wake, and the rest sleep too sound--much the same
thing; yet they have clocks and alarums. The reapers are never behind.
Roger got off his planks, shook himself, went outside the shed, and
tightened his shoelaces in the bright light. His rough hair he just
pushed back from his forehead, and that was his toilet. His dry throat
sent him to the pump, but he did not swallow much of the water--he
washed his mouth out, and that was enough; and so without breakfast he
went to his work. Looking down from the stile on the high ground there
seemed to be a white cloud resting on the valley, through which the
tops of the high trees penetrated; the hedgerows beneath were
concealed, and their course could only be traced by the upper branches
of the elms. Under this cloud the wheat-fields were blotted out; there
seemed neither corn nor grass, work for man nor food for animal; there
could be nothing doing there surely. In the stillness of the August
morning, without song of bird, the sun, shining brilliantly high above
the mist, seemed to be the only living thing, to possess the whole and
reign above absolute peace. It is a curious sight to see the early
harvest morn--all hushed under the burning sun, a morn that you know is
full of life and meaning, yet quiet as if man's foot had never trodden
the land. Only the sun is there, rolling on his endless way.

Roger's head was bound with brass, but had it not been he would not
have observed anything in the aspect of the earth. Had a brazen band
been drawn firmly round his forehead it could not have felt more
stupefied. His eyes blinked in the sunlight; every now and then he
stopped to save himself from staggering; he was not in a condition to
think. It would have mattered not at all if his head had been clear;
earth, sky, and sun were nothing to him; he knew the footpath, and saw
that the day would be fine and hot, and that was sufficient for him,
because his eyes had never been opened.

The reaper had risen early to his labour, but the birds had preceded
him hours. Before the sun was up the swallows had left their beams in
the cowshed and twittered out into the air. The rooks and wood-pigeons
and doves had gone to the corn, the blackbird to the stream, the finch
to the hedgerow, the bees to the heath on the hills, the humble-bees to
the clover in the plain. Butterflies rose from the flowers by the
footpath, and fluttered before him to and fro and round and back again
to the place whence they had been driven. Goldfinches tasting the first
thistledown rose from the corner where the thistles grew thickly. A
hundred sparrows came rushing up into the hedge, suddenly filling the
boughs with brown fruit; they chirped and quarrelled in their talk, and
rushed away again back to the corn as he stepped nearer. The boughs
were stripped of their winged brown berries as quickly as they had
grown. Starlings ran before the cows feeding in the aftermath, so close
to their mouths as to seem in danger of being licked up by their broad
tongues. All creatures, from the tiniest insect upward, were in reality
busy under that curtain of white-heat haze. It looked so still, so
quiet, from afar; entering it and passing among the fields, all that
lived was found busy at its long day's work. Roger did not interest
himself in these things, in the wasps that left the gate as he
approached--they were making _papier-mache_ from the wood of the top
bar,--in the bright poppies brushing against his drab unpolished boots,
in the hue of the wheat or the white convolvulus; they were nothing to
him.

Why should they be? His life was work without skill or thought, the
work of the horse, of the crane that lifts stones and timber. His food
was rough, his drink rougher, his lodging dry planks. His books
were--none; his picture-gallery a coloured print at the alehouse--a
dog, dead, by a barrel, "Trust is dead! Bad Pay killed him." Of thought
he thought nothing; of hope his idea was a shilling a week more wages;
of any future for himself of comfort such as even a good cottage can
give--of any future whatever--he had no more conception than the horse
in the shafts of the waggon. A human animal simply in all this, yet if
you reckoned upon him as simply an animal--as has been done these
centuries--you would now be mistaken. But why should he note the colour
of the butterfly, the bright light of the sun, the hue of the wheat?
This loveliness gave him no cheese for breakfast; of beauty in itself,
for itself, he had no idea. How should he? To many of us the
harvest--the summer--is a time of joy in light and colour; to him it
was a time for adding yet another crust of hardness to the thick skin
of his hands.

Though the haze looked like a mist it was perfectly dry; the wheat was
as dry as noon; not a speck of dew, and pimpernels wide open for a
burning day. The reaping-machine began to rattle as he came up, and
work was ready for him. At breakfast-time his fellows lent him a
quarter of a loaf, some young onions, and a drink from their tea. He
ate little, and the tea slipped from his hot tongue like water from the
bars of a grate; his tongue was like the heated iron the housemaid
tries before using it on the linen. As the reaping-machine went about
the gradually decreasing square of corn, narrowing it by a broad band
each time, the wheat fell flat on the short stubble. Roger stooped,
and, gathering sufficient together, took a few straws, knotted them to
another handful as you might tie two pieces of string, and twisted the
band round the sheaf. He worked stooping to gather the wheat, bending
to tie it in sheaves; stooping, bending--stooping, bending,--and so
across the field. Upon his head and back the fiery sun poured down the
ceaseless and increasing heat of the August day. His face grew red, his
neck black; the drought of the dry ground rose up and entered his mouth
and nostrils, a warm air seemed to rise from the earth and fill his
chest. His body ached from the ferment of the vile beer, his back ached
with stooping, his forehead was bound tight with a brazen band. They
brought some beer at last; it was like the spring in the desert to him.
The vicious liquor--"a hair of the dog that bit him"--sank down his
throat grateful and refreshing to his disordered palate as if he had
drunk the very shadow of green boughs. Good ale would have seemed
nauseous to him at that moment, his taste and stomach destroyed by so
many gallons of this. He was "pulled together," and worked easier; the
slow hours went on, and it was luncheon. He could have borrowed more
food, but he was content instead with a screw of tobacco for his pipe
and his allowance of beer.

They sat in the corner of the field. There were no trees for shade;
they had been cut down as injurious to corn, but there were a few maple
bushes and thin ash sprays, which seemed better than the open. The
bushes cast no shade at all, the sun being so nearly overhead, but they
formed a kind of enclosure, an open-air home, for men seldom sit down
if they can help it on the bare and level plain; they go to the bushes,
to the corner, or even to some hollow. It is not really any advantage;
it is habit; or shall we not rather say that it is nature? Brought back
as it were in the open field to the primitive conditions of life, they
resumed the same instincts that controlled man in the ages past.
Ancient man sought the shelter of trees and banks, of caves and
hollows, and so the labourers under somewhat the same conditions came
to the corner where the bushes grew. There they left their coats and
slung up their luncheon-bundles to the branches; there the children
played and took charge of the infants; there the women had their hearth
and hung their kettle over a fire of sticks.


II


In August the unclouded sun, when there is no wind, shines as fervently
in the harvest-field as in Spain. It is doubtful if the Spanish people
feel the heat so much as our reapers; they have their siesta; their
habits have become attuned to the sun, and it is no special strain upon
them. In India our troops are carefully looked after in the hot
weather, and everything made as easy for them as possible; without care
and special clothing and coverings for the head they could not long
endure. The English simoon of heat drops suddenly on the heads of the
harvesters and finds them entirely unprepared; they have not so much as
a cooling drink ready; they face it, as it were, unarmed. The sun
spares not; It is fire from morn till night. Afar in the town the
sun-blinds are up, there is a tent on the lawn in the shade, people
drink claret-cup and use ice; ice has never been seen in the
harvest-field. Indoors they say they are melting lying on a sofa in a
darkened room, made dusky to keep out the heat. The fire falls straight
from the sky on the heads of the harvesters--men, women, and
children--and the white-hot light beats up again from the dry straw and
the hard ground.

The tender flowers endure; the wide petal of the poppy, which withers
between the fingers, lies afloat on the air as the lilies on water,
afloat and open to the weight of the heat. The red pimpernel looks
straight up at the sky from the early morning till its hour of closing
in the afternoon. Pale blue speedwell does not fade; the pale blue
stands the warmth equally with the scarlet. Far in the thick wheat the
streaked convolvulus winds up the stalks, and is not smothered for want
of air though wrapped and circled with corn. Beautiful though they are,
they are bloodless, not sensitive; we have given to them our feelings,
they do not share our pain or pleasure. Heat has gone into the hollow
stalks of the wheat and down the yellow tubes to the roots, drying them
in the earth. Heat has dried the leaves upon the hedge, and they touch
rough--dusty rough, as books touch that have been lying unused; the
plants on the bank are drying up and turning white. Heat has gone down
into the cracks of the ground; the bar of the stile is so dry and
powdery in the crevices that if a reaper chanced to drop a match on it
there would seem risk of fire. The still atmosphere is laden with heat,
and does not move in the corner of the field between the bushes.

Roger the reaper smoked out his tobacco; the children played round and
watched for scraps of food; the women complained of the heat; the men
said nothing. It is seldom that a labourer grumbles much at the
weather, except as interfering with his work. Let the heat increase, so
it would only keep fine. The fire in the sky meant money. Work went on
again; Roger had now to go to another field to pitch--that is, help to
load the waggon; as a young man, that was one of the jobs allotted to
him. This was the reverse. Instead of stooping he had now to strain
himself upright and lift sheaves over his head. His stomach empty of
everything but small ale did not like this any more than his back had
liked the other; but those who work for bare food must not question
their employment. Heavily the day drove on; there was more beer, and
again more beer, because it was desired to clear some fields that
evening. Monotonously pitching the sheaves, Roger laboured by the
waggon till the last had been loaded--till the moon was shining. His
brazen forehead was unbound now; in spite of the beer the work and the
perspiration had driven off the aching. He was weary but well. Nor had
he been dull during the day; he had talked and joked--cumbrously in
labourers' fashion--with his fellows. His aches, his empty stomach, his
labour, and the heat had not overcome the vitality of his spirits.
There was life enough left for a little rough play as the group
gathered together and passed out through the gateway. Life enough left
in him to go with the rest to the alehouse; and what else, oh moralist,
would you have done in his place? This, remember, is not a fancy sketch
of rural poetry; this is the reaper's real existence.

He had been in the harvest-field fourteen hours, exposed to the intense
heat, not even shielded by a pith helmet; he had worked the day through
with thew and sinew; he had had for food a little dry bread and a few
onions, for drink a little weak tea and a great deal of small beer. The
moon was now shining in the sky, still bright with sunset colours.
Fourteen hours of sun and labour and hard fare! Now tell him what to
do. To go straight to his plank-bed in the cowhouse; to eat a little
more dry bread, borrow some cheese or greasy bacon, munch it alone, and
sit musing till sleep came--he who had nothing to muse about. I think
it would need a very clever man indeed to invent something for him to
do, some way for him to spend his evening. Read! To recommend a man to
read after fourteen hours' burning sun is indeed a mockery; darn his
stockings would be better. There really is nothing whatsoever that the
cleverest and most benevolent person could suggest. Before any
benevolent or well-meaning suggestions could be effective the preceding
circumstances must be changed--the hours and conditions of labour,
everything; and can that be done? The world has been working these
thousands of years, and still it is the same; with our engines, our
electric light, our printing press, still the coarse labour of the
mine, the quarry, the field has to be carried out by human hands. While
that is so, it is useless to recommend the weary reaper to read. For a
man is not a horse: the horse's day's work is over; taken to his stable
he is content, his mind goes no deeper than the bottom of his manger,
and so long as his nose does not feel the wood, so long as it is met by
corn and hay, he will endure happily. But Roger the reaper is not a
horse.

Just as his body needed food and drink, so did his mind require
recreation, and that chiefly consists of conversation. The drinking and
the smoking are in truth but the attributes of the labourer's
public-house evening. It is conversation that draws him thither, just
as it draws men with money in their pockets to the club and the houses
of their friends. Any one can drink or smoke alone; it needs several
for conversation, for company. You pass a public-house--the reaper's
house--in the summer evening. You see a number of men grouped about
trestle-tables out of doors, and others sitting at the open window;
there is an odour of tobacco, a chink of glasses and mugs. You can
smell the tobacco and see the ale; you cannot see the indefinite power
which holds men there--the magnetism of company and conversation.
_Their_ conversation, not _your_ conversation; not the last book, the
last play; not saloon conversation; but theirs--talk in which neither
you nor any one of your condition could really join. To us there would
seem nothing at all in that conversation, vapid and subjectless; to
them it means much. We have not been through the same circumstances:
our day has been differently spent, and the same words have therefore a
varying value. Certain it is, that it is conversation that takes men to
the public-house. Had Roger been a horse he would have hastened to
borrow some food, and, having eaten that, would have cast himself at
once upon his rude bed. Not being an animal, though his life and work
were animal, he went with his friends to talk. Let none unjustly
condemn him as a blackguard for that--no, not even though they had seen
him at ten o'clock unsteadily walking to his shed, and guiding himself
occasionally with his hands to save himself from stumbling. He
blundered against the door, and the noise set the swallows on the beams
twittering. He reached his bedstead, and sat down and tried to unlace
his boots, but could not. He threw himself upon the sacks and fell
asleep. Such was one twenty-four hours of harvest-time.

The next and the next, for weeks, were almost exactly similar; now a
little less beer, now a little more; now tying up, now pitching, now
cutting a small field or corner with a fagging-hook. Once now and then
there was a great supper at the farm. Once he fell out with another
fellow, and they had a fight; Roger, however, had had so much ale, and
his opponent so much whisky, that their blows were soft and helpless.
They both fell--that is, they stumbled,--they were picked up, there was
some more beer, and it was settled. One afternoon Roger became suddenly
giddy, and was so ill that he did no more work that day, and very
little on the following. It was something like a sunstroke, but
fortunately a slight attack; on the third day he resumed his place.
Continued labour in the sun, little food and much drink, stomach
derangement, in short, accounted for his illness. Though he resumed his
place and worked on, he was not so well afterwards; the work was more
of an effort to him, and his face lost its fulness, and became drawn
and pointed. Still he laboured, and would not miss an hour, for harvest
was coming to an end, and the extra wages would soon cease. For the
first week or so of haymaking or reaping the men usually get drunk,
delighted with the prospect before them, they then settle down fairly
well. Towards the end they struggle hard to recover lost time and the
money spent in ale.

As the last week approached, Roger went up into the village and ordered
the shoemaker to make him a good pair of boots. He paid partly for them
then, and the rest next pay-day. This was a tremendous effort. The
labourer usually pays a shilling at a time, but Roger mistrusted
himself. Harvest was practically over, and after all the labour and the
long hours, the exposure to the sun and the rude lodging, he found he
should scarcely have thirty shillings. With the utmost ordinary care he
could have saved a good lump of money. He was a single man, and his
actual keep cost but little. Many married labourers, who had been
forced by hard necessity to economy, contrived to put by enough to buy
clothes for their families. The single man, with every advantage,
hardly had thirty shillings, and even then it showed extraordinary
prudence on his part to go and purchase a pair of boots for the winter.
Very few in his place would have been as thoughtful as that; they would
have got boots somehow in the end, but not beforehand. This life of
animal labour does not grow the spirit of economy. Not only in farming,
but in navvy work, in the rougher work of factories and mines, the same
fact is evident. The man who labours with thew and sinew at horse
labour--crane labour--not for himself, but for others, is not the man
who saves. If he worked for his own hand possibly he might, no matter
how rough his labour and fare; not while working for another. Roger
reached his distant home among the meadows at last, with one golden
half-sovereign in his pocket. That and his new pair of boots, not yet
finished, represented the golden harvest to him. He lodged with his
parents when at home; he was so far fortunate that he had a bed to go
to; therefore in the estimation of his class he was not badly off. But
if we consider his position as regards his own life we must recognise
that he was very badly off indeed, so much precious time and the
strength of his youth having been wasted.

Often it is stated that the harvest wages recoup the labourer for the
low weekly receipts of the year, and if the money be put down in
figures with pen and ink it is so. But in actual fact the pen-and-ink
figures do not represent the true case; these extra figures have been
paid for, and gold may be bought too dear. Roger had paid heavily for
his half-sovereign and his boots; his pinched face did not look as if
he had benefited greatly. His cautious old father, rendered frugal by
forty years of labour, had done fairly well; the young man not at all.
The old man, having a cottage, in a measure worked for his own hand.
The young man, with none but himself to think of, scattered his money
to the winds. Is money earned with such expenditure of force worth the
having? Look at the arm of a woman labouring in the
harvest-field--thin, muscular, sinewy, black almost, it tells of
continual strain. After much of this she becomes pulled out of shape,
the neck loses its roundness and shows the sinews, the chest flattens.
In time the women find the strain of it tell severely. I am not trying
to make out a case of special hardship, being aware that both men,
women, and children work as hard and perhaps suffer more in cities; I
am simply describing the realities of rural life behind the scenes. The
golden harvest is the first scene: the golden wheat, glorious under the
summer sun. Bright poppies flower in its depths, and convolvulus climbs
the stalks. Butterflies float slowly over the yellow surface as they
might over a lake of colour. To linger by it, to visit it day by day,
at even to watch the sunset by it, and see it pale under the changing
light, is a delight to the thoughtful mind. There is so much in the
wheat, there are books of meditation in it, it is dear to the heart.
Behind these beautiful aspects comes the reality of human labour--hours
upon hours of heat and strain; there comes the reality of a rude life,
and in the end little enough of gain. The wheat is beautiful, but human
life is labour.



THE MODERN THAMES


I

The wild red deer can never again come down to drink at the Thames in
the dusk of the evening as once they did. While modern civilisation
endures, the larger fauna must necessarily be confined to parks or
restrained to well-marked districts; but for that very reason the
lesser creatures of the wood, the field, and the river should receive
the more protection. If this applies to the secluded country, far from
the stir of cities, still more does it apply to the neighbourhood of
London. From a sportsman's point of view, or from that of a naturalist,
the state of the river is one of chaos. There is no order. The Thames
appears free even from the usual rules which are in force upon every
highway. A man may not fire a gun within a certain distance of a road
under a penalty--a law enacted for the safety of passengers, who were
formerly endangered by persons shooting small birds along the hedges
bordering roads. Nor may he shoot at all, not so much as fire off a
pistol (as recently publicly proclaimed by the Metropolitan police to
restrain the use of revolvers), without a licence. But on the river
people do as they choose, and there does not seem to be any law at
all--or at least there is no authority to enforce it, if it exists.
Shooting from boats and from the towing-path is carried on in utter
defiance of the licensing law, of the game law (as applicable to wild
fowl), and of the safety of persons who may be passing. The moorhens
are shot, the kingfishers have been nearly exterminated or driven away
from some parts, the once common black-headed bunting is comparatively
scarce in the more frequented reaches, and if there is nothing else to
shoot at, then the swallows are slaughtered. Some have even taken to
shooting at the rooks in the trees or fields by the river with
small-bore rifles--a most dangerous thing to do. The result is that the
osier-beds on the eyots and by the backwaters--the copses of the
river--are almost devoid of life. A few moorhens creep under the
aquatic grasses and conceal themselves beneath the bushes, water-voles
hide among the flags, but the once extensive host of waterfowl and
river life has been reduced to the smallest limits. Water-fowl cannot
breed because they are shot on the nest, or their eggs taken. As for
rarer birds, of course they have not the slightest chance. The fish
have fared better because they have received the benefit of close
seasons, enforced with more or less vigilance all along the river. They
are also protected by regulations making it illegal to capture them
except in a sportsmanlike manner; snatching, for instance, is unlawful.
Riverside proprietors preserve some reaches, piscatorial societies
preserve others, and the complaint indeed is that the rights of the
public have been encroached upon. The too exclusive preservation of
fish is in a measure responsible for the destruction of water-fowl,
which are cleared off preserved places in order that they may not help
themselves to fry or spawn. On the other hand, the societies may claim
to have saved parts of the river from being entirely deprived of fish,
for it is not long since it appeared as if the stream would be quite
cleared out. Large quantities of fish have also been placed in the
river taken from ponds and bodily transported to the Thames. So that
upon the whole the fish have been well looked after of recent years.

The more striking of the aquatic plants--such as white
water-lilies--have been much diminished in quantity by the constant
plucking, and injury is said to have been done by careless navigation.
In things of this kind a few persons can do a great deal of damage. Two
or three men with guns, and indifferent to the interests of sport or
natural history, at work every day, can clear a long stretch of river
of waterfowl, by scaring if not by actually killing them. Imagine three
or four such gentry allowed to wander at will in a large game
preserve--in a week they would totally destroy it as a preserve. The
river, after all, is but a narrow band as it were, and is easily
commanded by a gun. So, too, with fish poachers; a very few men with
nets can quickly empty a good piece of water: and flowers like
water-lilies, which grow only in certain spots, are soon pulled or
spoiled. This aspect of the matter--the immense mischief which can be
effected by a very few persons--should be carefully borne in mind in
framing any regulations. For the mischief done on the river is really
the work of a small number, a mere fraction of the thousands of all
classes who frequent it. Not one in a thousand probably perpetrates any
intentional damage to fish, fowl, or flowers.

As the river above all things is, and ought to be, a place of
recreation, care must be particularly taken that in restraining these
practices the enjoyment of the many be not interfered with. The
rational pleasure of 999 people ought not to be checked because the
last of the thousand acts as a blackguard. This point, too, bears upon
the question of steam-launches. A launch can pass as softly and quietly
as a skiff floating with the stream. And there is a good deal to be
said on the other side, for the puntsmen stick themselves very often in
the way of every one else; and if you analyse fishing for minnows from
a punt you will not find it a noble sport. A river like the Thames,
belonging as it does--or as it ought--to a city like London, should be
managed from the very broadest standpoint. There should be pleasure for
all, and there certainly is no real difficulty in arranging matters to
that end. The Thames should be like a great aquarium, in which a
certain balance of life has to be kept up. When aquaria first came into
favour such things as snails and weeds were excluded as eyesores and
injurious. But it was soon discovered that the despised snails and
weeds were absolutely necessary; an aquarium could not be maintained in
health without them, and now the most perfect aquarium is the one in
which the natural state is most completely copied. On the same
principle it is evident that too exclusive preservation must be
injurious to the true interests of the river. Fish enthusiasts, for
instance, desire the extinction of water-fowl--there is not a single
aquatic bird which they do not accuse of damage to fry, spawn, or
full-grown fish; no, not one, from the heron down to the tiny grebe.
They are nearly as bitter against animals, the poor water-vole (or
water-rat) even is denounced and shot. Any one who chooses may watch
the water-rat feeding on aquatic vegetation; never mind, shoot him
because he's there. There is no other reason. Bitterest, harshest, most
envenomed of all is the outcry and hunt directed against the otter. It
is as if the otter were a wolf--as if he were as injurious as the
mighty boar whom Meleager and his companions chased in the days of dim
antiquity. What, then, has the otter done? Has he ravaged the fields?
does he threaten the homesteads? is he at Temple Bar? are we to run, as
the old song says, from the Dragon? The fact is, the ravages attributed
to the otter are of a local character. They are chiefly committed in
those places where fish are more or less confined. If you keep sheep
close together in a pen the wolf who leaps the hurdles can kill the
flock if he chooses. In narrow waters, and where fish are maintained in
quantities out of proportion to extent, an otter can work doleful woe.
That is to say, those who want too many fish are those who give the
otter his opportunity.

In a great river like the Thames a few otters cannot do much or lasting
injury except in particular places. The truth is, that the otter is an
ornament to the river, and more worthy of preservation than any other
creature. He is the last and largest of the wild creatures who once
roamed so freely in the forests which enclosed Londinium, that fort in
the woods and marshes--marshes which to this day, though drained and
built over, enwrap the nineteenth-century city in thick mists. The red
deer are gone, the boar is gone, the wolf necessarily destroyed--the
red deer can never again drink at the Thames in the dusk of the evening
while our civilisation endures. The otter alone remains--the wildest,
the most thoroughly self-supporting of all living things left--a living
link going back to the days of Cassivelaunus. London ought to take the
greatest interest in the otters of its river. The shameless way in
which every otter that dares to show itself is shot, trapped, beaten to
death, and literally battered out of existence, should rouse the
indignation of every sportsman and every lover of nature. The late Rev.
John Russell, who, it will be admitted, was a true sportsman, walked
three thousand miles to see an otter. That was a different spirit, was
it not?

That is the spirit in which the otter in the Thames should be regarded.
Those who offer money rewards for killing Thames otters ought to be
looked on as those who would offer rewards for poisoning foxes in
Leicestershire, I suppose we shall not see the ospreys again; but I
should like to. Again, on the other side of the boundary, in the tidal
waters, the same sort of ravenous destruction is carried on against
everything that ventures up. A short time ago a porpoise came up to
Mortlake; now, just think, a porpoise up from the great sea--that sea
to which Londoners rush with such joy--past Gravesend, past Greenwich,
past the Tower, under London Bridge, past Westminster and the Houses of
Parliament, right up to Mortlake. It is really a wonderful thing that a
denizen of the sea, so large and interesting as a porpoise, should come
right through the vast City of London. In an aquarium, people would go
to see it and admire it, and take their children to see it. What
happened? Some one hastened out in a boat, armed with a gun or a rifle,
and occupied himself with shooting at it. He did not succeed in killing
it, but it was wounded. Some difference here to the spirit of John
Russell. If I may be permitted to express an opinion, I think that
there is not a single creature, from the sand-marten and the
black-headed bunting to the broad-winged heron, from the water-vole to
the otter, from the minnow on one side of the tidal boundary to the
porpoise on the other--big and little, beasts and birds (of prey or
not)--that should not be encouraged and protected on this beautiful
river, morally the property of the greatest city in the world.


II

I looked forward to living by the river with delight, anticipating the
long rows I should have past the green eyots and the old houses
red-tiled among the trees. I should pause below the weir and listen to
the pleasant roar, and watch the fisherman cast again and again with
the "transcendent patience" of genius by which alone the Thames trout
is captured. Twisting the end of a willow bough round my wrist I could
moor myself and rest at ease, though the current roared under the
skiff, fresh from the waterfall. A thousand thousand bubbles rising to
the surface would whiten the stream--a thousand thousand succeeded by
another thousand thousand--and still flowing, no multiple could express
the endless number. That which flows continually by some sympathy is
acceptable to the mind, as if thereby it realised its own existence
without an end. Swallows would skim the water to and fro as yachts
tack, the sandpiper would run along the strand, a black-headed bunting
would perch upon the willow; perhaps, as the man of genius fishing and
myself made no noise, a kingfisher might come, and we might see him
take his prey.

Or I might quit hold of the osier, and, entering a shallow backwater,
disturb shoals of roach playing where the water was transparent to the
bottom, after their wont. Winding in and out like an Indian in his
canoe, perhaps traces of an otter might be found--his kitchen
modding--and in the sedges moorhens and wildfowl would hide from me.
From its banks I should gather many a flower and notice many a plant,
there would be, too, the beautiful water-lily. Or I should row on up
the great stream by meadows full of golden buttercups, past fields
crimson with trifolium or green with young wheat. Handsome sailing
craft would come down spanking before the breeze, laden with bright
girls--laughter on board, and love the golden fleece of their argosy.

I should converse with the ancient men of the ferries, and listen to
their river lore; they would show me the mark to which the stream rose
in the famous year of floods. On again to the cool hostelry whose sign
was reflected in the water, where there would be a draught of fine ale
for the heated and thirsty sculler. On again till steeple or tower
rising over the trees marked my journey's end for the day, some old
town where, after rest and refreshment, there would be a ruin or a
timbered house to look at, where I should meet folk full of former days
and quaint tales of yore. Thus to journey on from place to place would
be the great charm of the river--travelling by water, not merely
sculling to and fro, but really travelling. Upon a lake I could but row
across and back again, and however lovely the scenery might be, still
it would always be the same. But the Thames, upon the river I could
really travel, day after day, from Teddington Lock upwards to Windsor,
to Oxford, on to quiet Lechlade, or even farther deep into the meadows
by Cricklade. Every hour there would be something interesting, all the
freshwater life to study, the very barges would amuse me, and at last
there would be the delicious ease of floating home carried by the
stream, repassing all that had pleased before.

The time came. I lived by the river, not far from its widest reaches,
before the stream meets its tide. I went to the eyot for a boat, and my
difficulties began. The crowd of boats lashed to each other in strings
ready for the hirer disconcerted me. There were so many I could not
choose; the whole together looked like a broad raft. Others were hauled
on the shore. Over on the eyot, a little island, there were more boats,
boats launched, boats being launched, boats being carried by gentlemen
in coloured flannels as carefully as mothers handle their youngest
infants, boats covered in canvas mummy-cases, and dim boats under
roofs, their sharp prows projecting like crocodiles' snouts. Tricksy
outriggers, ready to upset on narrow keel, were held firmly for the
sculler to step daintily into his place. A strong eight shot by up the
stream, the men all pulling together as if they had been one animal. A
strong sculler shot by down the stream, his giant arms bare and the
muscles visible as they rose, knotting and unknotting with the stroke.
Every one on the bank and eyot stopped to watch him--they knew him, he
was training. How could an amateur venture out and make an exhibition
of himself after such splendid rowing! Still it was noticeable that
plenty of amateurs did venture out, till the waterway was almost
concealed--boated over instead of bridged--and how they managed to
escape locking their oars together, I could not understand.

I looked again at the boats. Some were outriggers. I could not get into
an outrigger after seeing the great sculler. The rest were one and all
after the same pattern, _i.e._ with the stern cushioned and prepared
for a lady. Some were larger, and could carry three or four ladies, but
they were all intended for the same purpose. If the sculler went out in
such a boat by himself he must either sit too forward and so depress
the stem and dig himself, as it were, into the water at each stroke, or
he must sit too much to the rear and depress the stern, and row with
the stem lifted up, sniffing the air. The whole crowd of boats on hire
were exactly the same; in short, they were built for woman and not for
man, for lovely woman to recline, parasol in one hand and tiller ropes
in the other, while man--inferior man--pulled and pulled and pulled as
an ox yoked to the plough. They could only be balanced by man and
woman, that was the only way they could be trimmed on an even keel;
they were like scales, in which the weight on one side must be
counterpoised by a weight in the other. They were dead against
bachelors. They belonged to woman, and she was absolute mistress of the
river.

As I looked, the boats ground together a little, chafing, laughing at
me, making game of me, asking distinctly what business a man had there
without at least one companion in petticoats? My courage ebbed, and it
was in a feeble voice that I inquired whether there was no such thing
as a little skiff a fellow might paddle about in? No, nothing of the
kind; would a canoe do? Somehow a canoe would not do. I never took
kindly to canoes, excepting always the Canadian birch-bark pattern;
evidently there was no boat for me. There was no place on the great
river for an indolent, dreamy particle like myself, apt to drift up
into nooks, and to spend much time absorbing those pleasures which
enter by the exquisite sensitiveness of the eye--colour, and shade, and
form, and the cadence of glittering ripple and moving leaf. You must be
prepared to pull and push, and struggle for your existence on the
river, as in the vast city hard by men push and crush for money. You
must assert yourself, and insist upon having your share of the
waterway; you must be perfectly convinced that yours is the very best
style of rowing to be seen; every one ought to get out of your way. You
must consult your own convenience only, and drive right into other
people's boats, forcing them up into the willows, or against the
islands. Never slip along the shore, or into quiet backwaters; always
select the more frequented parts, not because you want to go there, but
to make your presence known, and go amongst the crowd; and if a few
sculls get broken, it only proves how very inferior and how very clumsy
other people are. If you see another boat coming down stream, in the
centre of the river with a broad space on either side for others to
pass, at once head your own boat straight at her, and take possession
of the way. Or, better still, never look ahead, but pull straight on,
and let things happen as they may. Annoy everybody, and you are sure to
be right, and to be respected; splash the ladies as you pass with a
dexterous flip of the scull, and soak their summer costumes; it is
capital sport, and they look so sulky--or is it contemptuous?

There was no such thing as a skiff in which one could quietly paddle
about, or gently make way--mile after mile--up the beautiful stream.
The boating throng grew thicker, and my courage less and less, till I
desperately resorted to the ferry--at all events, I could be rowed over
in the ferry-boat, that would be something; I should be on the water,
after a fashion--and the ferryman would know a good deal. The burly
ferryman cared nothing at all about the river, and merely answered
"Yes," or "No;" he was full of the Derby and Sandown; didn't know about
the fishing; supposed there were fish; didn't see 'em, nor eat 'em;
want a punt? No. So he landed me, desolate and hopeless, on the
opposite bank, and I began to understand how the souls felt after
Charon had got them over. They could not have been more unhappy than I
was on the towing-path, as the ferryboat receded and left me watching
the continuous succession of boats passing up and down the river.

By-and-by an immense black hulk came drifting round the bend--an empty
barge--almost broadside across the stream, for the current at the curve
naturally carried it out from the shore. This huge helpless monster
occupied the whole river, and had no idea where it was going, for it
had no fins or sweeps to guide its course, and the rudder could only
induce it to submit itself lengthways to the stream after the lapse of
some time. The fairway of the river was entirely taken up by this
irresponsible Frankenstein of the Thames, which some one had started,
but which now did as it liked. Some of the small craft got up into the
willows and waited; some seemed to narrowly escape being crushed
against a wall on the opposite bank. The bright white sails of a yacht
shook and quivered as its steersman tried all he knew to coax his
vessel an inch more into the wind out of the monster's path. In vain!
He had to drop down the stream, and lose what it had taken him half an
hour's skill to gain. What a pleasing monster to meet in the narrow
arches of a bridge! The man in charge leaned on the tiller, and
placidly gazed at the wild efforts of some unskilful oarsmen to escape
collision. In fact, the monster had charge of the man, and did as it
liked with him.

Down the river they drifted together, Frankenstein swinging round and
thrusting his blunt nose first this way and then that; down the river,
blocking up the narrow passage by the eyot; stopping the traffic at the
lock; out at last into the tidal stream, there to begin a fresh life of
annoyance, and finally to endanger the good speed of many a fine
three-master and ocean steamer off the docks. The Thames barge knows no
law. No judge, no jury, no Palace of Justice, no Chancery, no appeal to
the Lords has any terror for the monster barge. It drifts by the Houses
of Parliament with no more respect than it shows for the lodge of the
lock-keeper. It drifts by Royal Windsor and cares not. The guns of the
Tower are of no account. There is nothing in the world so utterly free
as this monster.

Often have I asked myself if the bargee at the tiller, now sucking at
his short black pipe, now munching onions and cheese (the little onions
he pitches on the lawns by the river side, there to take root and
flourish)--if this amiable man has any notion of his own incomparable
position. Just some inkling of the irony of the situation must, I
fancy, now and then dimly dawn within his grimy brow. To see all these
gentlemen shoved on one side; to be lying in the way of a splendid
Australian clipper; to stop an incoming vessel, impatient for her
berth; to swing, and sway, and roll as he goes; to bump the big ships,
and force the little ones aside; to slip, and slide, and glide with the
tide, ripples dancing under the prow, and be master of the world-famed
Thames from source to mouth, is not this a joy for ever? Liberty is
beyond price; now no one is really free unless he can crush his
neighbour's interest underfoot, like a horse-roller going over a daisy.
Bargee is free, and the ashes of his pipe are worth a king's ransom.

Imagine a great van loaded at the East-end of London with the heaviest
merchandise, with bags of iron nails, shot, leaden sheets in rolls, and
pig iron; imagine four strong horses--dray-horses--harnessed thereto.
Then let the waggoner mount behind in a seat comfortably contrived for
him facing the rear, and settle himself down happily among his sacks,
light his pipe, and fold his hands untroubled with any worry of reins.
Away they go through the crowded city, by the Bank of England, and
across into Cheapside, cabs darting this way, carriages that, omnibuses
forced up into side-streets, foot traffic suspended till the monster
has passed; up Fleet-street, clearing the road in front of them--right
through the stream of lawyers always rushing to and fro the Temple and
the New Law Courts, along the Strand, and finally in triumph into
Rotten Row at five o'clock on a June afternoon. See how they scatter!
see how they run! The Row is swept clear from end to end--beauty,
fashion, rank,--what are such trifles of an hour? The monster vans
grind them all to powder. What such a waggoner might do on land, bargee
does on the river.

Of olden time the silver Thames was the chosen mode of travel of
Royalty--the highest in the land were rowed from palace to city, or
city to palace, between its sunlit banks. Noblemen had their special
oarsmen, and were in like manner conveyed, and could any other mode of
journeying be equally pleasant? The coal-barge has bumped them all out
of the way.

No man dares send forth the commonest cart unless in proper charge, and
if the horse is not under control a fine is promptly administered. The
coal-barge rolls and turns and drifts as chance and the varying current
please. How huge must be the rent in the meshes of the law to let so
large a fish go through! But in truth there is no law about it, and to
this day no man can confidently affirm that he knows to whom the river
belongs. These curious anomalies are part and parcel of our political
system, and as I watched the black monster slowly go by with the stream
it occurred to me that grimy bargee, with his short pipe and hi

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