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Field and Hedgerow: Being the Last Essays of Richard Jefferies

by Richard Jefferies · English · Gutenberg #7030 · 591,244 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Field and Hedgerow: Being the Last Essays of Richard Jefferies

Author: Richard Jefferies


        
Release date: December 1, 2004 [eBook #7030]
                Most recently updated: January 25, 2013

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7030

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


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FIELD AND HEDGEROW: BEING THE LAST ESSAYS OF RICHARD JEFFERIES ***




Produced by Malcolm Farmer, Juliet Sutherland, Charles
Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading team











   FIELD AND HEDGEROW

         BEING

    THE LAST ESSAYS

          OF

   RICHARD JEFFERIES

_COLLECTED BY HIS WIDOW_






PREFACE.



For permission to reprint my husband's latest Essays my sincere thanks
are due to the Editors of the following publications:--

  _The Fortnightly Review._
  _Manchester Guardian._
  _Pall Mall Gazette_.
  _Standard._
  _English Illustrated Magazine._
  _Longman's Magazine._
  _St. James's Gazette._.
  _Art Journal._
  _Chambers's Journal._
  _Magazine of Art._
  _Century Illustrated Magazine._

           J.J.




CONTENTS.



HOURS OF SPRING

NATURE AND BOOKS

THE JULY GRASS

WINDS OF HEAVEN

THE COUNTRY SUNDAY

THE COUNTRY-SIDE: SUSSEX

SWALLOW-TIME

BUCKHURST PARK

HOUSE-MARTINS

AMONG THE NUTS

WALKS IN THE WHEAT-FIELDS

JUST BEFORE WINTER

LOCALITY AND NATURE

COUNTRY PLACES

FIELD WORDS AND WAYS

COTTAGE IDEAS

APRIL GOSSIP

SOME APRIL INSECTS

THE TIME OF YEAR

MIXED DAYS OF MAY AND DECEMBER

THE MAKERS OF SUMMER

STEAM ON COUNTRY ROADS

FIELD SPORTS IN ART: THE MAMMOTH HUNTER

BIRDS' NESTS

NATURE IN THE LOUVRE

SUMMER IN SOMERSET

AN ENGLISH DEER-PARK

MY OLD VILLAGE

MY CHAFFINCH




HOURS OF SPRING.



It is sweet on awaking in the early morn to listen to the small bird
singing on the tree. No sound of voice or flute is like to the bird's
song; there is something in it distinct and separate from all other
notes. The throat of woman gives forth a more perfect music, and the
organ is the glory of man's soul. The bird upon the tree utters the
meaning of the wind--a voice of the grass and wild flower, words of the
green leaf; they speak through that slender tone. Sweetness of dew and
rifts of sunshine, the dark hawthorn touched with breadths of open bud,
the odour of the air, the colour of the daffodil--all that is delicious
and beloved of spring-time are expressed in his song. Genius is nature,
and his lay, like the sap in the bough from which he sings, rises without
thought. Nor is it necessary that it should be a song; a few short notes
in the sharp spring morning are sufficient to stir the heart. But
yesterday the least of them all came to a bough by my window, and in his
call I heard the sweet-briar wind rushing over the young grass. Refulgent
fall the golden rays of the sun; a minute only, the clouds cover him and
the hedge is dark. The bloom of the gorse is shut like a book; but it is
there--a few hours of warmth and the covers will fall open. The meadow is
bare, but in a little while the heart-shaped celandine leaves will come
in their accustomed place. On the pollard willows the long wands are
yellow-ruddy in the passing gleam of sunshine, the first colour of spring
appears in their bark. The delicious wind rushes among them and they bow
and rise; it touches the top of the dark pine that looks in the sun the
same now as in summer; it lifts and swings the arching trail of bramble;
it dries and crumbles the earth in its fingers; the hedge-sparrow's
feathers are fluttered as he sings on the bush.

I wonder to myself how they can all get on without me--how they manage,
bird and flower, without me to keep the calendar for them. For I noted it
so carefully and lovingly, day by day, the seed-leaves on the mounds in
the sheltered places that come so early, the pushing up of the young
grass, the succulent dandelion, the coltsfoot on the heavy, thick clods,
the trodden chickweed despised at the foot of the gate-post, so common
and small, and yet so dear to me. Every blade of grass was mine, as
though I had planted it separately. They were all my pets, as the roses
the lover of his garden tends so faithfully. All the grasses of the
meadow were my pets, I loved them all; and perhaps that was why I never
had a 'pet,' never cultivated a flower, never kept a caged bird, or any
creature. Why keep pets when every wild free hawk that passed overhead in
the air was mine? I joyed in his swift, careless flight, in the throw of
his pinions, in his rush over the elms and miles of woodland; it was
happiness to see his unchecked life. What more beautiful than the sweep
and curve of his going through the azure sky? These were my pets, and all
the grass. Under the wind it seemed to dry and become grey, and the
starlings running to and fro on the surface that did not sink now stood
high above it and were larger. The dust that drifted along blessed it and
it grew. Day by day a change; always a note to make. The moss drying on
the tree trunks, dog's-mercury stirring under the ash-poles, bird's-claw
buds of beech lengthening; books upon books to be filled with these
things. I cannot think how they manage without me.

To-day through the window-pane I see a lark high up against the grey
cloud, and hear his song. I cannot walk about and arrange with the buds
and gorse-bloom; how does he know it is the time for him to sing? Without
my book and pencil and observing eye, how does he understand that the
hour has come? To sing high in the air, to chase his mate over the low
stone wall of the ploughed field, to battle with his high-crested rival,
to balance himself on his trembling wings outspread a few yards above the
earth, and utter that sweet little loving kiss, as it were, of song--oh,
happy, happy days! So beautiful to watch as if he were my own, and I felt
it all! It is years since I went out amongst them in the old fields, and
saw them in the green corn; they must be dead, dear little things, by
now. Without me to tell him, how does this lark to-day that I hear
through the window know it is his hour?

The green hawthorn buds prophesy on the hedge; the reed pushes up in the
moist earth like a spear thrust through a shield; the eggs of the
starling are laid in the knot-hole of the pollard elm--common eggs, but
within each a speck that is not to be found in the cut diamond of two
hundred carats--the dot of protoplasm, the atom of life. There was one
row of pollards where they always began laying first. With a big stick in
his beak the rook is blown aside like a loose feather in the wind; he
knows his building-time from the fathers of his house--hereditary
knowledge handed down in settled course: but the stray things of the
hedge, how do they know? The great blackbird has planted his nest by the
ash-stole, open to every one's view, without a bough to conceal it and
not a leaf on the ash--nothing but the moss on the lower end of the
branches. He does not seek cunningly for concealment. I think of the
drift of time, and I see the apple bloom coming and the blue veronica in
the grass. A thousand thousand buds and leaves and flowers and blades of
grass, things to note day by day, increasing so rapidly that no pencil
can put them down and no book hold them, not even to number them--and how
to write the thoughts they give? All these without me--how can they
manage without me?

For they were so much to me, I had come to feel that I was as much in
return to them. The old, old error: I love the earth, therefore the earth
loves me--I am her child--I am Man, the favoured of all creatures. I am
the centre, and all for me was made.

In time past, strong of foot, I walked gaily up the noble hill that leads
to Beachy Head from Eastbourne, joying greatly in the sun and the wind.
Every step crumbled up numbers of minute grey shells, empty and dry, that
crunched under foot like hoar-frost or fragile beads. They were very
pretty; it was a shame to crush them--such vases as no king's pottery
could make. They lay by millions in the depths of the sward, and I
thought as I broke them unwillingly that each of these had once been a
house of life. A living creature dwelt in each and felt the joy of
existence, and was to itself all in all--as if the great sun over the
hill shone for it, and the width of the earth under was for it, and the
grass and plants put on purpose for it. They were dead, the whole race of
them, and these their skeletons were as dust under my feet. Nature sets
no value upon life neither of minute hill-snail nor of human being.

I thought myself so much to the earliest leaf and the first meadow
orchis--so important that I should note the first zee-zee of the
titlark--that I should pronounce it summer, because now the oaks were
green; I must not miss a day nor an hour in the fields lest something
should escape me. How beautiful the droop of the great brome-grass by the
wood! But to-day I have to listen to the lark's song--not out of doors
with him, but through the window-pane, and the bullfinch carries the
rootlet fibre to his nest without me. They manage without me very well;
they know their times and seasons--not only the civilised rooks, with
their libraries of knowledge in their old nests of reference, but the
stray things of the hedge and the chiffchaff from over sea in the ash
wood. They go on without me. Orchis flower and cowslip--I cannot number
them all--I hear, as it were, the patter of their feet--flower and bud
and the beautiful clouds that go over, with the sweet rush of rain and
burst of sun glory among the leafy trees. They go on, and I am no more
than the least of the empty shells that strewed the sward of the hill.
Nature sets no value upon life, neither of mine nor of the larks that
sang years ago. The earth is all in all to me, but I am nothing to the
earth: it is bitter to know this before you are dead. These delicious
violets are sweet for themselves; they were not shaped and coloured and
gifted with that exquisite proportion and adjustment of odour and hue for
me. High up against the grey cloud I hear the lark through the window
singing, and each note falls into my heart like a knife.

Now this to me speaks as the roll of thunder that cannot be denied--you
must hear it; and how can you shut your ears to what this lark sings,
this violet tells, this little grey shell writes in the curl of its
spire? The bitter truth that human life is no more to the universe than
that of the unnoticed hill-snail in the grass should make us think more
and more highly of ourselves as human--as men--living things that think.
We must look to ourselves to help ourselves. We must think ourselves into
an earthly immortality. By day and by night, by years and by centuries,
still striving, studying, searching to find that which shall enable us to
live a fuller life upon the earth--to have a wider grasp upon its violets
and loveliness, a deeper draught of the sweet-briar wind. Because my
heart beats feebly to-day, my trickling pulse scarcely notating the
passing of the time, so much the more do I hope that those to come in
future years may see wider and enjoy fuller than I have done; and so much
the more gladly would I do all that I could to enlarge the life that
shall be then. There is no hope on the old lines--they are dead, like the
empty shells; from the sweet delicious violets think out fresh petals of
thought and colours, as it were, of soul.

Never was such a worshipper of earth. The commonest pebble, dusty and
marked with the stain of the ground, seems to me so wonderful; my mind
works round it till it becomes the sun and centre of a system of thought
and feeling. Sometimes moving aside the tufts of grass with careless
fingers while resting on the sward, I found these little pebble-stones
loose in the crumbly earth among the rootlets. Then, brought out from the
shadow, the sunlight shone and glistened on the particles of sand that
adhered to it. Particles adhered to my skin--thousands of years between
finger and thumb, these atoms of quartz, and sunlight shining all that
time, and flowers blooming and life glowing in all, myriads of living
things, from the cold still limpet on the rock to the burning, throbbing
heart of man. Sometimes I found them among the sand of the heath, the sea
of golden brown surging up yellow billows six feet high about me, where
the dry lizard hid, or basked, of kin, too, to old time. Or the rush of
the sea wave brought them to me, wet and gleaming, up from the depths of
what unknown Past? where they nestled in the root crevices of trees
forgotten before Egypt. The living mind opposite the dead pebble--did you
ever consider the strange and wonderful problem there? Only the thickness
of the skin of the hand between them. The chief use of matter is to
demonstrate to us the existence of the soul. The pebble-stone tells me I
am a soul because I am not that that touches the nerves of my hand. We
are distinctly two, utterly separate, and shall never come together. The
little pebble and the great sun overhead--millions of miles away: yet is
the great sun no more distinct and apart than this which I can touch.
Dull-surfaced matter, like a polished mirror, reflects back thought to
thought's self within.

I listened to the sweet-briar wind this morning; but for weeks and weeks
the stark black oaks stood straight out of the snow as masts of ships
with furled sails frozen and ice-bound in the haven of the deep valley.
Each was visible to the foot, set in the white slope, made individual in
the wood by the brilliance of the background. Never was such a long
winter. For fully two months they stood in the snow in black armour of
iron bark unshaken, the front rank of the forest army that would not
yield to the northern invader. Snow in broad flakes, snow in semi-flakes,
snow raining down in frozen specks, whirling and twisting in fury, ice
raining in small shot of frost, howling, sleeting, groaning; the ground
like iron, the sky black and faintly yellow--brutal colours of
despotism--heaven striking with clenched fist. When at last the general
surface cleared, still there remained the trenches and traverses of the
enemy, his ramparts drifted high, and his roads marked with snow. The
black firs on the ridge stood out against the frozen clouds, still and
hard; the slopes of leafless larches seemed withered and brown; the
distant plain far down gloomy with the same dull yellowish blackness. At
a height of seven hundred feet the air was sharp as a scythe--a rude
barbarian giant wind knocking at the walls of the house with a vast club,
so that we crept sideways even to the windows to look out upon the world.
There was everything to repel--the cold, the frost, the hardness, the
snow, dark sky and ground, leaflessness; the very furze chilled and all
benumbed. Yet the forest was still beautiful. There was no day that we
did not, all of us, glance out at it and admire it, and say something
about it. Harder and harder grew the frost, yet still the forest-clad
hills possessed a something that drew the mind open to their largeness
and grandeur. Earth is always beautiful--always. Without colour, or leaf,
or sunshine, or song of bird and flutter of butterfly's wing; without
anything sensuous, without advantage or gilding of summer--the power is
ever there. Or shall we not say that the desire of the mind is ever
there, and _will_ satisfy itself, in a measure at least, even with the
barren wild? The heart from the moment of its first beat instinctively
longs for the beautiful; the means we possess to gratify it are
limited--we are always trying to find the statue in the rude block. Out
of the vast block of the earth the mind endeavours to carve itself
loveliness, nobility, and grandeur. We strive for the right and the true:
it is circumstance that thrusts wrong upon us.

One morning a labouring man came to the door with a spade, and asked if
he could dig the garden, or try to, at the risk of breaking the tool in
the ground. He was starving; he had had no work for two months; it was
just six months, he said, since the first frost started the winter.
Nature and the earth and the gods did not trouble about _him_, you see;
he might grub the rock-frost ground with his hands if he chose--the
yellowish black sky did not care. Nothing for man! The only good he found
was in his fellow-men; they fed him after a fashion--still they fed him.
There was no good in anything else. Another aged man came once a week
regularly; white as the snow through which he walked. In summer he
worked; since the winter began he had had no employment, but supported
himself by going round to the farms in rotation. They all gave him a
trifle--bread and cheese, a penny, a slice of meat--something; and so he
lived, and slept the whole of that time in outhouses wherever he could.
He had no home of any kind. Why did he not go into the workhouse? 'I be
afeared if I goes in there they'll put me with the rough uns, and very
likely I should get some of my clothes stole.' Rather than go into the
workhouse he would totter round in the face of the blasts that might
cover his weak old limbs with drift. There was a sense of dignity and
manhood left still; his clothes were worn, but clean and decent; he was
no companion of rogues; the snow and frost, the straw of the outhouses,
was better than that. He was struggling against age, against nature,
against circumstance; the entire weight of society, law, and order
pressed upon him to force him to lose his self-respect and liberty. He
would rather risk his life in the snowdrift. Nature, earth, and the gods
did not help him; sun and stars, where were they? He knocked at the doors
of the farms and found good in man only--not in Law or Order, but in
individual man alone.

The bitter north wind drives even the wild fieldfare to the berries in
the garden hedge; so it drives stray human creatures to the door. A third
came--an old gipsy woman--still stout and hearty, with green fresh brooms
to sell. We bought some brooms--one of them was left on the kitchen
floor, and the tame rabbit nibbled it; it proved to be heather. The true
broom is as green and succulent in appearance in January as June. She
would see the 'missis.' 'Bless you, my good lady, it be weather, bean't
it? I hopes you'll never know what it be to want, my good lady. Ah, well,
you looks good-tempered if you don't want to buy nothing. Do you see if
you can't find me an old body, now, for my girl--now do'ee try; she's
confined in a tent on the common--nothing but one of our tents, my good
lady--that's true--and she's doing jest about well' (with briskness and
an air of triumph), 'that she is! She's got twins, you see, my lady, but
she's all right, and as well as can be. She wants to get up; and she says
to me, "Mother, do'ee try and get me a body; 'tis hard to lie here abed
and be well enough to get up, and be obliged to stay here because I've
got nothing but a bedgown." For you see, my good lady, we managed pretty
well with the first baby; but the second bothered us, and we cut up all
the bits of things we could find, and there she ain't got nothing to put
on. Do'ee see if 'ee can't find her an old body.' The common is an open
piece of furze and heath at the verge of the forest; and here, in a tent
just large enough to creep in, the gipsy woman had borne twins in the
midst of the snow and frost. They could not make a fire of the heath and
gorse even if they cut it, the snow and whirling winds would not permit.
The old gipsy said if they had little food they could not do without
fire, and they were compelled to get coke and coal somehow--apologising
for such a luxury. There was no whining--not a bit of it; they were
evidently quite contented and happy, and the old woman proud of her
daughter's hardihood. By-and-by the husband came round with straw
beehives to sell, and cane to mend chairs--a strong, respectable-looking
man. Of all the north wind drove to the door, the outcasts were the best
off--much better off than the cottager who was willing to break his spade
to earn a shilling; much better off than the white-haired labourer, whose
strength was spent, and who had not even a friend to watch with him in
the dark hours of the winter evening--not even a fire to rest by. The
gipsy nearest to the earth was the best off in every way; yet not even
for primitive man and woman did the winds cease. Broad flakes of snow
drifted up against the low tent, beneath which the babes were nestling to
the breast. Not even for the babes did the snow cease or the keen wind
rest; the very fire could scarcely struggle against it. Snow-rain and
ice-rain; frost-formed snow-granules, driven along like shot, stinging
and rattling against the tent-cloth, hissing in the fire; roar and groan
of the great wind among the oaks of the forest. No kindness to man, from
birth-hour to ending; neither earth, sky, nor gods care for him, innocent
at the mother's breast. Nothing good to man but man. Let man, then, leave
his gods and lift up his ideal beyond them.

Something grey and spotted and puffy, not unlike a toad, moved about
under the gorse of the garden hedge one morning, half hidden by the
stalks of old grasses. By-and-by it hopped out--the last thrush, so
distended with puffed feathers against the frost as to be almost
shapeless. He searched about hopelessly round the stones and in the
nooks, all hard and frostbound; there was the shell of a snail, dry and
whitened and empty, as was apparent enough even at a distance. His keen
eye must have told him that it was empty; yet such was his hunger and
despair that he took it and dashed it to pieces against a stone. Like a
human being, his imagination was stronger than his experience; he tried
to persuade himself that there might be something there; hoping against
hope. Mind, you see, working in the bird's brain, and overlooking facts.
A mere mechanism would have left the empty and useless shell
untouched--would have accepted facts at once, however bitter, just as the
balance on the heaviest side declines immediately, obeying the fact of an
extra grain of weight. The bird's brain was not mechanical, and therefore
he was not wholly mastered by experience. It was a purely human
action--just what we do ourselves. Next he came across to the door to see
if a stray berry still remained on a creeper. He saw me at the window,
and he came to the window--right to it--and stopped and looked full at me
some minutes, within touch almost, saying as plainly as could be said, 'I
am starving--help me.' I never before knew a thrush make so unmistakable
an appeal for assistance, or deliberately approach so near (unless
previously encouraged). We tried to feed him, but we fear little of the
food reached him. The wonder of the incident was that a thrush should
still be left--there had not been one in the garden for two months.
Berries all gone, ground hard and foodless, streams frozen, snow lying
for weeks, frost stealing away the vital heat--ingenuity could not devise
a more terrible scene of torture to the birds. Neither for the thrushes
nor for the new-born infants in the tent did the onslaught of the winter
slacken. No pity in earth or heaven. This one thrush did, indeed, by some
exceptional fortune, survive; but where were the family of thrushes that
had sung so sweetly in the rainy autumn? Where were the blackbirds?

Looking down from the stilts of seven hundred feet into the deep coombe
of black oaks standing in the white snow, day by day, built round about
with the rugged mound of the hills, doubly locked with the key of
frost--it seemed to me to take on itself the actuality of the ancient
faith of the Magi. How the seeds of all living things--the germs--of bird
and animal, man and insect, tree and herb, of the whole earth--were
gathered together into a four-square rampart, and there laid to sleep in
safety, shielded by a spell-bound fortification against the coming flood,
not of water, but of frost and snow! With snow and frost and winter the
earth was overcome, and the world perished, stricken dumb and dead, swept
clean and utterly destroyed--a winter of the gods, the silence of snow
and universal death. All that had been passed away, and the earth was
depopulated. Death triumphed. But under the snow, behind the charmed
rampart, slept the living germs. Down in the deep coombe, where the dark
oaks stood out individually in the whiteness of the snow, fortified round
about with immovable hills, there was the actual presentment of
Zoroaster's sacred story. Locked in sleep lay bud and germ--the
butterflies of next summer were there somewhere, under the snow. The
earth was swept of its inhabitants, but the seeds of life were not dead.
Near by were the tents of the gipsies--an Eastern race, whose forefathers
perhaps had seen that very Magian worship of the Light; and in those
tents birth had already taken place. Under the Night of winter--under the
power of dark Ahriman, the evil spirit of Destruction--lay bud and germ
in bondage, waiting for the coming of Ormuzd, the Sun of Light and
Summer. Beneath the snow, and in the frozen crevices of the trees, in the
chinks of the earth, sealed up by the signet of frost, were the seeds of
the life that would replenish the air in time to come. The buzzing crowds
of summer were still under the snow.

This forest land is marked by the myriads of insects that roam about it
in the days of sunshine. Of all the million million heathbells--multiply
them again by a million million more--that purple the acres of rolling
hills, mile upon mile, there is not one that is not daily visited by
these flying creatures. Countless and incalculable hosts of the
yellow-barred hover-flies come to them; the heath and common, the moor
and forest, the hedgerow and copse, are full of insects. They rise under
foot, they rise from the spray brushed by your arm as you pass, they
settle down in front of you--a rain of insects, a coloured shower. Legion
is a little word for the butterflies; the dry pastures among the woods
are brown with meadow-brown; blues and coppers float in endless
succession; all the nations of Xerxes' army were but a handful to these.
In their millions they have perished; but somewhere, coiled up, as it
were, and sealed under the snow, there must have been the mothers and
germs of the equally vast crowds that will fill the atmosphere this year.
The great bumble-bee that shall be mother of hundreds, the yellow wasp
that shall be mother of thousands, were hidden there somewhere. The food
of the migrant birds that are coming from over sea was there dormant
under the snow. Many nations have a tradition of a former world destroyed
by a deluge of water, from the East to the West, from Greece to Mexico,
where the tail of a comet was said to have caused the flood; but in the
strange characters of the Zend is the legend of an ark (as it were)
prepared against the snow. It may be that it is the dim memory of a
glacial epoch. In this deep coombe, amid the dark oaks and snow, was the
fable of Zoroaster. For the coming of Ormuzd, the Light and Life Bringer,
the leaf slept folded, the butterfly was hidden, the germ concealed,
while the sun swept upwards towards Aries.

There is nothing so wearying as a long frost--the endless monotony, which
makes one think that the very fault we usually find with our climate--its
changeableness--is in reality its best quality. Rain, mist,
gales--anything; give us anything but weary, weary frost. But having once
fixed its mind, the weather will not listen to the usual signs of
alteration.

The larks sang at last high up against the grey cloud over the
frost-bound earth. They could not wait longer; love was strong in their
little hearts--stronger than the winter. After a while the
hedge-sparrows, too, began to sing on the top of the gorse-hedge about
the garden. By-and-by a chaffinch boldly raised his voice, ending with
the old story, 'Sweet, will you, will you kiss--me--dear?' Then there
came a hoar-frost, and the earth, which had been black, became white, as
its evaporated vapours began to gather and drops of rain to fall. Even
then the obstinate weather refused to quite yield, wrapping its cloak, as
it were, around it in bitter enmity. But in a day or two white clouds lit
up with sunshine appeared drifting over from the southward, and that was
the end. The old pensioner came to the door for his bread and cheese:
'The wind's in the south' he said, 'and I hopes she'll stay there' Five
dull yellow spots on the hedge--gorse bloom--that had remained unchanged
for so many weeks, took a fresh colour and became golden. By the constant
passing of the waggons and carts along the road that had been so silent
it was evident that the busy time of spring was here. There would be
rough weather, doubtless, now and again, but it would not again be
winter.

Dark patches of cloud--spots of ink on the sky, the 'messengers'--go
drifting by; and after them will follow the water-carriers, harnessed to
the south and west winds, drilling the long rows of rain like seed into
the earth. After a time there will be a rainbow. Through the bars of my
prison I can see the catkins thick and sallow-grey on the willows across
the field, visible even at that distance; so great the change in a few
days, the hand of spring grows firm and takes a strong grasp of the
hedges. My prison bars are but a sixteenth of an inch thick; I could snap
them with a fillip--only the window-pane, to me as impenetrable as the
twenty-foot wall of the Tower of London. A cart has just gone past
bearing a strange load among the carts of spring; they are talking of
poling the hops. In it there sat an old man, with the fixed stare, the
animal-like eye, of extreme age; he is over ninety. About him there were
some few chairs and articles of furniture, and he was propped against a
bed. He was being moved--literally carted--to another house, not home,
and he said he could not go without his bed; he had slept on it for
seventy-three years. Last Sunday his son--himself old--was carted to the
churchyard, as is the country custom, in an open van; to-day the father,
still living, goes to what will be to him a strange land. His home is
broken up--he will potter no more with maize for the chicken; the gorse
hedges will become solid walls of golden bloom, but there will never
again be a spring for him. It is very hard, is it not, at ninety? It is
not the tyranny of any one that has done it; it is the tyranny of
circumstance, the lot of man. The song of the Greeks is full of sorrow;
man was to them the creature of grief, yet theirs was the land of violets
and pellucid air. This has been a land of frost and snow, and here too,
it is the same. A stranger, I see, is already digging the old man's
garden.

How happy the trees must be to hear the song of birds again in their
branches! After the silence and the leaflessness, to have the birds back
once more and to feel them busy at the nest-building; how glad to give
them the moss and fibres and the crutch of the boughs to build in!
Pleasant it is now to watch the sunlit clouds sailing onwards; it is like
sitting by the sea. There is voyaging to and fro of birds; the strong
wood-pigeon goes over--a long course in the air, from hill to distant
copse; a blackbird starts from an ash, and, now inclining this way and
now that, traverses the meadows to the thick corner hedge; finches go by,
and the air is full of larks that sing without ceasing. The touch of the
wind, the moisture of the dew, the sun-stained raindrop, have in them the
magic force of life--a marvellous something that was not there before.
Under it the narrow blade of grass comes up freshly green between the old
white fibres the rook pulled; the sycamore bud swells and opens, and
takes the eye instantly in the still dark wood; the starlings go to the
hollow pollards; the lambs leap in the mead. You never know what a day
may bring forth--what new thing will come next. Yesterday I saw the
ploughman and his team, and the earth gleam smoothed behind the share;
to-day a butterfly has gone past; the farm-folk are bringing home the
fagots from the hedgerows; to-morrow there will be a merry, merry note in
the ash copse, the chiffchaffs' ringing call to arms, to arms, ye leaves!
By-and-by a bennet, a bloom of the grass; in time to come the furrow, as
it were, shall open, and the great buttercup of the waters will show a
broad palm of gold. You never know what will come to the net of the eye
next--a bud, a flower, a nest, a curled fern, or whether it will be in
the woodland or by the meadow path, at the water's side or on the dead
dry heap of fagots. There is no settled succession, no fixed and formal
order--always the unexpected; and you cannot say, 'I will go and find
this or that.' The sowing of life in the spring time is not in the set
straight line of the drill, nor shall you find wild flowers by a foot
measure. There are great woods without a lily of the valley; the
nightingale does not sing everywhere. Nature has no arrangement, no plan,
nothing judicious even; the walnut trees bring forth their tender buds,
and the frost burns them--they have no mosaic of time to fit in, like a
Roman tesselated pavement; nature is like a child, who will sing and
shout though you may be never so deeply pondering in the study, and does
not wait for the hour that suits your mind. You do not know what you may
find each day; perhaps you may only pick up a fallen feather, but it is
beautiful, every filament. Always beautiful! everything beautiful! And
are these things new--the ploughman and his team, the lark's song the
green leaf? Can they be new? Surely they have been of old time! They are,
indeed, new--the only things that are so; the rest is old and grey, and a
weariness.




NATURE AND BOOKS.



What is the colour of the dandelion? There are many dandelions: that
which I mean flowers in May, when the meadow-grass has started and the
hares are busy by daylight. That which flowers very early in the year has
a thickness of hue, and is not interesting; in autumn the dandelions
quite change their colour and are pale. The right dandelion for this
question is the one that comes about May with a very broad disc, and in
such quantities as often to cover a whole meadow. I used to admire them
very much in the fields by Surbiton (strong clay soil), and also on the
towing-path of the Thames where the sward is very broad, opposite Long
Ditton; indeed, I have often walked up that towing-path on a beautiful
sunny morning, when all was quiet except the nightingales in the Palace
hedge, on purpose to admire them. I dare say they are all gone now for
evermore; still, it is a pleasure to look back on anything beautiful.
What colour is this dandelion? It is not yellow, nor orange, nor gold;
put a sovereign on it and see the difference. They say the gipsies call
it the Queen's great hairy dog-flower--a number of words to one stalk;
and so, to get a colour to it, you may call it the yellow-gold-orange
plant. In the winter, on the black mud under a dark, dripping tree, I
found a piece of orange peel, lately dropped--a bright red orange speck
in the middle of the blackness. It looked very beautiful, and instantly
recalled to my mind the great dandelion discs in the sunshine of summer.
Yet certainly they are not red-orange. Perhaps, if ten people answered
this question, they would each give different answers. Again, a bright
day or a cloudy, the presence of a slight haze, or the juxtaposition of
other colours, alters it very much; for the dandelion is not a glazed
colour, like the buttercup, but sensitive. It is like a sponge, and adds
to its own hue that which is passing, sucking it up.

The shadows of the trees in the wood, why are they blue? Ought they not
to be dark? Is it really blue, or an illusion? And what is their colour
when you see the shadow of a tall trunk aslant in the air like a leaning
pillar? The fallen brown leaves wet with dew have a different brown from
those that are dry, and the upper surface of the green growing leaf is
different from the under surface. The yellow butterfly, if you meet one
in October, has so toned down his spring yellow that you might fancy him
a pale green leaf floating along the road. There is a shining, quivering,
gleaming; there is a changing, fluttering, shifting; there is a mixing,
weaving--varnished wings, translucent wings, wings with dots and veins,
all playing over the purple heath; a very tangle of many-toned lights and
hues. Then come the apples: if you look upon them from an upper window,
so as to glance along the level plane of the fruit, delicate streaks of
scarlet, like those that lie parallel to the eastern horizon before
sunrise; golden tints under bronze, and apple-green, and some that the
wasps have hollowed, more glowingly beautiful than the rest; sober leaves
and black and white swallows: to see it you must be high up, as if the
apples were strewn on a sward of foliage. So have I gone in three steps
from May dandelion to September apple; an immense space measured by
things beautiful, so filled that ten folio volumes could not hold the
description of them, and I have left out the meadows, the brooks, and
hills. Often in writing about these things I have felt very earnestly my
own incompetence to give the least idea of their brilliancy and
many-sided colours. My gamut was so very limited in its terms, and would
not give a note to one in a thousand of those I saw. At last I said, I
will have more words; I will have more terms; I will have a book on
colour, and I will find and use the right technical name for each one of
these lovely tints. I was told that the very best book was by Chevreul,
which had tinted illustrations, chromatic scales, and all that could be
desired.

Quite true, all of it; but for me it contained nothing. There was a good
deal about assorted wools, but nothing about leaves; nothing by which I
could tell you the difference between the light scarlet of one poppy and
the deep purple-scarlet of another species. The dandelion remained
unexplained; as for the innumerable other flowers, and wings, and
sky-colours, they were not even approached. The book, in short, dealt
with the artificial and not with nature. Next I went to science--works on
optics, such a mass of them. Some I had read in old time, and turned to
again; some I read for the first time, some translated from the German,
and so on. It appeared that, experimenting with physical colour, tangible
paint, they had found out that red, yellow, and blue were the three
primary colours; and then, experimenting with light itself, with colours
not tangible, they found out that red, green, and violet were the three
primary colours; but neither of these would do for the dandelion. Once
upon a time I had taken an interest in spectrum analysis, and the theory
of the polarisation of light was fairly familiar; any number of books,
but not what I wanted to know. Next the idea occurred to me of buying all
the colours used in painting, and tinting as many pieces of paper a
separate hue, and so comparing these with petals, and wings, and grass,
and trifolium. This did not answer at all; my unskilful hands made a very
poor wash, and the yellow paper set by a yellow petal did not agree, the
scientific reason of which I cannot enter into now. Secondly, the names
attached to many of these paints are unfamiliar to general readers; it is
doubtful if bistre, Leitch's blue, oxide of chromium, and so on, would
convey an idea. They might as well be Greek symbols: no use to attempt to
describe hues of heath or hill in that way. These, too, are only distinct
colours. What was to be done with all the shades and tones? Still there
remained the language of the studio; without doubt a master of painting
could be found who would quickly supply the technical term of anything I
liked to show him; but again no use, because it would be technical. And a
still more insurmountable difficulty occurs: in so far as I have looked
at pictures, it seems as if the artists had met with the same obstacle in
paints as I have in words--that is to say, a deficiency. Either painting
is incompetent to express the extreme beauty of nature, or in some way
the canons of art forbid the attempt. Therefore I had to turn back, throw
down my books with a bang, and get me to a bit of fallen timber in the
open air to meditate.

Would it be possible to build up a fresh system of colour language by
means of natural objects? Could we say pine-wood green, larch green,
spruce green, wasp yellow, humble-bee amber? And there are fungi that
have marked tints, but the Latin names of these agarics are not pleasant.
Butterfly blue--but there are several varieties; and this plan is
interfered with by two things: first, that almost every single item of
nature, however minute, has got a distinctly different colour, so that
the dictionary of tints would be immense; and next, so very few would
know the object itself that the colour attached to it would have no
meaning. The power of language has been gradually enlarging for a great
length of time, and I venture to say that the English language at the
present time can express more, and is more subtle, flexible, and, at the
same time, vigorous, than any of which we possess a record. When people
talk to me about studying Sanscrit, or Greek, or Latin, or German, or,
still more absurd, French, I feel as if I could fell them with a mallet
happily. Study the English, and you will find everything there, I reply.
With such a language I fully anticipate, in years to come, a great
development in the power of expressing thoughts and feelings which are
now thoughts and feelings only. How many have said of the sea, 'It makes
me feel something I cannot say'! Hence it is clear there exists in the
intellect a layer, if I may so call it, of thought yet dumb--chambers
within the mind which require the key of new words to unlock. Whenever
that is done a fresh impetus is given to human progress. There are a
million books, and yet with all their aid I cannot tell you the colour of
the May dandelion. There are three greens at this moment in my mind: that
of the leaf of the flower-de-luce, that of the yellow iris leaf, and that
of the bayonet-like leaf of the common flag. With admission to a million
books, how am I to tell you the difference between these tints? So many,
many books, and such a very, very little bit of nature in them! Though we
have been so many thousand years upon the earth we do not seem to have
done any more as yet than walk along beaten footpaths, and sometimes
really it would seem as if there were something in the minds of many men
quite artificial, quite distinct from the sun and trees and
hills--altogether house people, whose gods must be set in four-cornered
buildings. There is nothing in books that touches my dandelion.

It grows, ah yes, it grows! How does it grow? Builds itself up somehow of
sugar and starch, and turns mud into bright colour and dead earth into
food for bees, and some day perhaps for you, and knows when to shut its
petals, and how to construct the brown seeds to float with the wind, and
how to please the children, and how to puzzle me. Ingenious dandelion! If
you find out that its correct botanical name is _Leontodon taraxacum_ or
_Leontodon dens-leonis_, that will bring it into botany; and there is a
place called Dandelion Castle in Kent, and a bell with the inscription--

 John de Dandelion with his great dog
 Brought over this bell on a mill cog

--which is about as relevant as the mere words _Leontodon taraxacum_.
Botany is the knowledge of plants according to the accepted definition;
naturally, therefore, when I began to think I would like to know a little
more of flowers than could be learned by seeing them in the fields, I
went to botany. Nothing could be more simple. You buy a book which first
of all tells you how to recognise them, how to classify them; next
instructs you in their uses, medical or economical; next tells you about
the folk-lore and curious associations; next enters into a lucid
explanation of the physiology of the plant and its relation to other
creatures; and finally, and most important, supplies you with the ethical
feeling, the ideal aspiration to be identified with each particular
flower. One moderately thick volume would probably suffice for such a
modest round as this.

Lo! now the labour of Hercules when he set about bringing up Cerberus
from below, and all the work done by Apollo in the years when he ground
corn, are but a little matter compared with the attempt to master botany.
Great minds have been at it these two thousand years, and yet we are
still only nibbling at the edge of the leaf, as the ploughboys bite the
young hawthorn in spring. The mere classification--all plant-lore was a
vast chaos till there came the man of Sweden, the great Linnaeus, till
the sexes were recognised, and everything was ruled out and set in place
again. A wonderful man! I think it would be true to say it was Linnaeus
who set the world on its present twist of thinking, and levered our
mental globe a little more perpendicular to the ecliptic. He actually
gathered the dandelion and took it to bits like a scientific child; he
touched nature with his fingers instead of sitting looking out of
window--perhaps the first man who had ever done so for seventeen hundred
years or so, since superstition blighted the progress of pagan Rome. The
work he did! But no one reads Linnaeus now; the folios, indeed, might
moulder to dust without loss, because his spirit has got into the minds
of men, and the text is of little consequence. The best book he wrote to
read now is the delightful 'Tour in Lapland,' with its quaint pen-and-ink
sketches, so realistically vivid, as if the thing sketched had been
banged on the paper and so left its impress. I have read it three times,
and I still cherish the old yellow pages; it is the best botanical book,
written by the greatest of botanists, specially sent on a botanical
expedition, and it contains nothing about botany. It tells you about the
canoes, and the hard cheese, and the Laplander's warehouse on top of a
pole, like a pigeon-house; and the innocent way in which the maiden
helped the traveller in his bath, and how the aged men ran so fast that
the devil could not catch them; and, best of all, because it gives a
smack in the face to modern pseudo-scientific medical cant about hygiene,
showing how the Laplanders break every 'law,' human and 'divine',
ventilation, bath, and diet--all the trash--and therefore enjoy the most
excellent health, and live to a great old age. Still I have not succeeded
in describing the immense labour there was in learning to distinguish
plants on the Linnaean system. Then comes in order of time the natural
system, the geographical distribution; then there is the geological
relationship, so to say, to Pliocene plants, natural selection and
evolution. Of that let us say nothing; let sleeping dogs lie, and
evolution is a very weary dog. Most charming, however, will be found the
later studies of naturalists on the interdependence of flowers and
insects; there is another work the dandelion has got to do--endless,
endless botany! Where did the plants come from at first? Did they come
creeping up out of the sea at the edge of the estuaries, and gradually
run their roots into the ground, and so make green the earth? Did Man
come out of the sea, as the Greeks thought? There are so many ideas in
plants. Flora, with a full lap, scattering knowledge and flowers
together; everything good and sweet seems to come out of flowers, up to
the very highest thoughts of the soul, and we carry them daily to the
very threshold of the other world. Next you may try the microscope and
its literature, and find the crystals in the rhubarb.

I remember taking sly glances when I was a very little boy at an old
Culpepper's Herbal, heavily bound in leather and curiously illustrated.
It was so deliciously wicked to read about the poisons; and I thought
perhaps it was a book like that, only in papyrus rolls, that was used by
the sorceress who got ready the poisoned mushrooms in old Rome. Youth's
ideas are so imaginative, and bring together things that are so widely
separated. Conscience told me I had no business to read about poisons;
but there was a fearful fascination in hemlock, and I recollect tasting a
little bit--it was very nasty. At this day, nevertheless, if any one
wishes to begin a pleasant, interesting, unscientific acquaintance with
English plants, he would do very well indeed to get a good copy of
Culpepper. Grey hairs had insisted in showing themselves in my beard
when, all those weary years afterwards, I thought I would like to buy the
still older Englishman, Gerard, who had no Linnaeus to guide him, who
walked about our English lanes centuries ago. What wonderful scenes he
must have viewed when they were all a tangle of wild flowers, and plants
that are now scarce were common, and the old ploughs, and the curious
customs, and the wild red-deer--it would make a good picture, it really
would, Gerard studying English orchids! Such a volume!--hundreds of
pages, yellow of course, close type, and marvellously well printed. The
minute care they must have taken in those early days of printing to get
up such a book--a wonderful volume both in bodily shape and contents.
Just then the only copy I could hear of was much damaged. The cunning old
bookseller said he could make it up; but I have no fancy for patched
books, they are not genuine; I would rather have them deficient; and the
price was rather long, and so I went Gerardless. Of folk-lore and
medicinal use and history and associations here you have hints. The
bottom of the sack is not yet; there are the monographs, years of study
expended upon one species of plant growing in one locality, perhaps; some
made up into thick books and some into broad quarto pamphlets, with most
beautiful plates, that, if you were to see them, would tempt you to cut
them out and steal them, all sunk and lost like dead ships under the
sand: piles of monographs. There are warehouses in London that are choked
to the beams of the roof with them, and every fresh exploration furnishes
another shelf-load. The source of the Nile was unknown a very few years
ago, and now, I have no doubt, there are dozens of monographs on the
flowers that flourish there. Indeed, there is not a thing that grows that
may not furnish a monograph. The author spends perhaps twenty years in
collecting his material, during which time he must of course come across
a great variety of amusing information, and then he spends another ten
years writing out a fair copy of his labours. Then he thinks it does not
quite do in that form, so he snips a paragraph out of the beginning and
puts it at the end; next he shifts some more matter from the middle to
the preface; then he thinks it over. It seems to him that it is too big,
it wants condensation. The scientific world will say he has made too much
of it; it ought to read very slight, and present the facts while
concealing the labour. So he sets about removing the superfluous--leaves
out all the personal observations, and all the little adventures he has
met with in his investigations; and so, having got it down to the dry
bones and stones thereof and omitted all the mortar that stuck them
together, he sends for the engraver, and the next three years are
occupied in working up the illustrations. About this time some new
discovery is made by a foreign observer, which necessitates a complete
revision of the subject; and so having shifted the contents of the book
about hither and thither till he does not know which is the end and which
is the beginning, he pitches the much-mutilated copy into a drawer and
turns the key. Farewell, no more of this; his declining days shall be
spent in peace. A few months afterwards a work is announced in Leipsic
which 'really trenches on my favourite subject, and really after spending
a lifetime I can't stand it.' By this time his handwriting has become so
shaky he can hardly read it himself, so he sends in despair for a lady
who works a type-writer, and with infinite patience she makes a clean
manuscript of the muddled mass. To the press at last, and the proofs come
rapidly. Such a relief! How joyfully easy a thing is when you set about
it! but by-and-by this won't do. Sub-section A ought to be in a
foot-note, family B is doubtful; and so the corrections grow and run over
the margin in a thin treble hand, till they approach the bulk of the
original book--a good profit for the printer; and so after about forty
years the monograph is published--the work of a life is accomplished.
Fifty copies are sent round to as many public libraries and learned
societies, and the rest of the impression lies on the shelves till dust
and time and spiders' webs have buried it. Splendid work in it too.
Looked back upon from to-day with the key of modern thought, these
monographs often contain a whole chest of treasure. And still there are
the periodicals, a century of magazines and journals and reviews and
notices that have been coming out these hundred years and dropping to the
ground like dead leaves unnoticed. And then there are the art
works--books about shape and colour and ornament, and a naturalist lately
has been trying to see how the leaves of one tree look fitted on the
boughs of another. Boundless is the wealth of Flora's lap; the ingenuity
of man has been weaving wreaths out of it for ages, and still the bottom
of the sack is not yet. Nor have we got much news of the dandelion. For I
sit on the thrown timber under the trees and meditate, and I want
something more: I want the soul of the flowers.

The bee and the butterfly take their pollen and their honey, and the
strange moths so curiously coloured, like the curious colouring of the
owls, come to them by night, and they turn towards the sun and live their
little day, and their petals fall, and where is the soul when the body
decays? I want the inner meaning and the understanding of the wild
flowers in the meadow. Why are they? What end? What purpose? The plant
knows, and sees, and feels; where is its mind when the petal falls?
Absorbed in the universal dynamic force, or what? They make no shadow of
pretence, these beautiful flowers, of being beautiful for my sake, of
bearing honey for me; in short, there does not seem to be any kind of
relationship between us, and yet--as I said just now--language does not
express the dumb feelings of the mind any more than the flower can speak.
I want to know the soul of the flowers, but the word soul does not in the
smallest degree convey the meaning of my wish. It is quite inadequate; I
must hope that you will grasp the drift of my meaning. All these
life-laboured monographs, these classifications, works of Linnaeus, and
our own classic Darwin, microscope, physiology, and the flower has not
given us its message yet. There are a million books; there are no books:
all the books have to be written. What a field! A whole million of books
have got to be written. In this sense there are hardly a dozen of them
done, and these mere primers. The thoughts of man are like the
foraminifera, those minute shells which build up the solid chalk hills
and lay the level plain of endless sand; so minute that, save with a
powerful lens, you would never imagine the dust on your fingers to be
more than dust. The thoughts of man are like these: each to him seems
great in his day, but the ages roll, and they shrink till they become
triturated dust, and you might, as it were, put a thousand on your
thumb-nail. They are not shapeless dust for all that; they are organic,
and they build and weld and grow together, till in the passage of time
they will make a new earth and a new life. So I think I may say there are
no books; the books are yet to be written.

Let us get a little alchemy out of the dandelions. They were not precise,
the Arabian sages, with their flowing robes and handwriting; there was a
large margin to their manuscripts, much imagination. Therein they failed,
judged by the monograph standard, but gave a subtle food for the mind.
Some of this I would fain see now inspiring the works and words of our
great men of science and thought--a little alchemy. A great change is
slowly going forward all over the printing-press world, I mean wherever
men print books and papers. The Chinese are perhaps outside that world at
present, and the other Asian races; the myriads, too, of the great
southern islands and of Africa. The change is steadily, however,
proceeding wherever the printing-press is used. Nor Pope, nor Kaiser, nor
Czar, nor Sultan, nor fanatic monk, nor muezzin, shouting in vain from
his minaret, nor, most fanatic of all, the fanatic shouting in vain in
London, can keep it out--all powerless against a bit of printed paper.
Bits of printed paper that listen to no command, to which none can say,
'Stand back; thou shalt not enter.' They rise on the summer whirlwinds
from the very dust of the road, and float over the highest walls; they
fall on the well-kept lawns--monastery, prison, palace--there is no
fortress against a bit of printed paper. They penetrate where even
Danae's gold cannot go. Our Darwins, our Lyalls, Herschels, Faradays--all
the immense army of those that go down to nature with considering
eye--are steadfastly undermining and obliterating the superstitious past,
literally burying it under endless loads of accumulated facts; and the
printing-presses, like so many Argos, take these facts on their voyage
round the world. Over go temples, and minarets, and churches, or rather
there they stay, the hollow shells, like the snail shells which thrushes
have picked clean; there they stay like Karnac, where there is no more
incense, like the stone circles on our own hills, where there are no more
human sacrifices. Thus men's minds all over the printing-press world are
unlearning the falsehoods that have bound them down so long; they are
unlearning, the first step to learn. They are going down to nature and
taking up the clods with their own hands, and so coming to have touch of
that which is real. As yet we are in the fact stage; by-and-by we shall
come to the alchemy, and get the honey for the inner mind and soul. I
found, therefore, from the dandelion that there were no books, and it
came upon me, believe me, as a great surprise, for I had lived quite
certain that I was surrounded with them. It is nothing but unlearning, I
find now; five thousand books to unlearn.

Then to unlearn the first ideas of history, of science, of social
institutions, to unlearn one's own life and purpose; to unlearn the old
mode of thought and way of arriving at things; to take off peel after
peel, and so get by degrees slowly towards the truth--thus writing, as it
were, a sort of floating book in the mind, almost remaking the soul. It
seems as if the chief value of books is to give us something to unlearn.
Sometimes I feel indignant at the false views that were instilled into me
in early days, and then again I see that that very indignation gives me a
moral life. I hope in the days to come future thinkers will unlearn us,
and find ideas infinitely better. How marvellous it seems that there
should be found communities furnished with the printing-press and fully
convinced they are more intelligent than ants, and yet deliberately
refusing by a solid 'popular' vote to accept free libraries! They look
with scorn on the mediaeval times, when volumes were chained in the
college library or to the desk at church. Ignorant times those! A good
thing it would be if only three books were chained to a desk, open and
free in every parish throughout the kingdom now. So might the wish to
unlearn be at last started in the inert mind of the mass. Almost the only
books left to me to read, and not to unlearn very much, are my first
books--the graven classics of Greece and Rome, cut with a stylus so
deeply into the tablet they cannot be erased. Little of the monograph or
of classification, no bushel baskets full of facts, no minute dissection
of nature, no attempt to find the soul under the scalpel. Thoughts which
do not exactly deal with nature direct in a mechanical way, as the
chemist labels all his gums and spices and earths in small boxes--I
wonder if anybody at Athens ever made a collection of the coleoptera? Yet
in some way they had got the spirit of the earth and sea, the soul of the
sun. This never dies; this I wish not to unlearn; this is ever fresh and
beautiful as a summer morning:--

           Such the golden crocus,
  Fair flower of early spring; the gopher white,
  And fragrant thyme, and all the unsown beauty
  Which in moist grounds the verdant meadows bear;
  The ox-eye, the sweet-smelling flower of love,
  The chalca, and the much-sung hyacinth,
  And the low-growing violet, to which
  Dark Proserpine a darker hue has given.

They come nearest to our own violets and cowslips--the unsown beauty of
our meadows--to the hawthorn leaf and the high pinewood. I can forget all
else that I have read, but it is difficult to forget these even when I
will. I read them in English. I had the usual Latin and Greek
instruction, but I read them in English deliberately. For the inflexion
of the vowel I care nothing; I prize the idea. Scholars may regard me
with scorn. I reply with equal scorn. I say that a great classic thought
is greater to an English mind in English words than in any other form,
and therein fits best to this our life and day. I read them in English
first, and intend to do so to the end. I do not know what set me on these
books, but I began them when about eighteen. The first of all was
Diogenes Laertius's 'Lives of the Philosophers.' It was a happy choice;
my good genius, I suppose, for you see I was already fairly well read in
modern science, and these old Greek philosophies set me thinking
backwards, unwinding and unlearning, and getting at that eidolon which is
not to be found in the mechanical heavens of this age. I still read him.
I still find new things, quite new, because they are so very, very old,
and quite true; and with his help I seem in a measure to look back upon
our thoughts now as if I had projected myself a thousand years forward in
space. An imperfect book, say the critics. I do not know about that; his
short paragraphs and chapters in their imperfect state convey more
freshness to the mind than the thick, laboured volumes in which modern
scholarship professes to describe ancient philosophy. I prefer the
imperfect original records. Neither can I read the ponderous volumes of
modern history, which are nothing but words. I prefer the incomplete and
shattered chronicles themselves, where the swords shine and the armour
rings, and all is life though but a broken frieze. Next came Plato (it
took me a long time to read Plato, and I have had to unlearn much of him)
and Xenophon. Socrates' dialectic method taught me how to write, or
rather how to put ideas in sequence. Sophocles, too; and last, that
wonderful encyclopaedia of curious things, Athenaeus. So that I found,
when the idea of the hundred best books came out, that between seventy
and eighty of them had been my companions almost from boyhood, those
lacking to complete the number being chiefly ecclesiastical or
Continental. Indeed, some years before the hundred books were talked of,
the idea had occurred to me of making up a catalogue of books that could
be bought for ten pounds. In an article in the 'Pall Mall Gazette' on
'The Pigeons at the British Museum' I said,' It seems as if all the books
in the world--really books--can be bought for 10_l_. Man's whole thought
is purchasable at that small price--for the value of a watch, of a good
dog.' The idea of making a 10_l_. catalogue was in my mind--I did make a
rough pencil one--and I still think that a 10_l_. library is worth the
notice of the publishing world. My rough list did not contain a hundred.
These old books of nature and nature's mind ought to be chained up, free
for every man to read in every parish. These are the only books I do not
wish to unlearn, one item only excepted, which I shall not here discuss.
It is curious, too, that the Greek philosophers, in the more rigid sense
of science, anticipated most of the drift of modern thought. Two chapters
in Aristotle might almost be printed without change as summaries of our
present natural science. For the facts of nature, of course, neither one
hundred books nor a 10_l_. library would be worth mentioning; say five
thousand, and having read those, then go to Kew, and spend a year
studying the specimens of wood only stored there, such a little slice
after all of the whole. You will then believe what I have advanced, that
there are no books as yet; they have got to be written; and if we pursue
the idea a little further, and consider that these are all about the
crude clods of life--for I often feel what a very crude and clumsy clod I
am--only of the earth, a minute speck among one hundred millions of
stars, how shall we write what is _there_? It is only to be written by
the mind or soul, and that is why I strive so much to find what I have
called the alchemy of nature. Let us not be too entirely mechanical,
Baconian, and experimental only; let us let the soul hope and dream and
float on these oceans of accumulated facts, and feel still greater
aspiration than it has ever known since first a flint was chipped before
the glaciers. Man's mind is the most important fact with which we are yet
acquainted. Let us not turn then against it and deny its existence with
too many brazen instruments, but remember these are but a means, and that
the vast lens of the Californian refractor is but glass--it is the
infinite speck upon which the ray of light will fall that is the one
great fact of the universe. By the mind, without instruments, the Greeks
anticipated almost all our thoughts; by-and-by, having raised ourselves
up upon these huge mounds of facts, we shall begin to see still greater
things; to do so we must look not at the mound under foot, but at the
starry horizon.




THE JULY GRASS.



A July fly went sideways over the long grass. His wings made a burr about
him like a net, beating so fast they wrapped him round with a cloud.
Every now and then, as he flew over the trees of grass, a taller one than
common stopped him, and there he clung, and then the eye had time to see
the scarlet spots--the loveliest colour--on his wings. The wind swung the
bennet and loosened his hold, and away he went again over the grasses,
and not one jot did he care if they were _Poa_ or _Festuca_, or _Bromus_
or _Hordeum_, or any other name. Names were nothing to him; all he had to
do was to whirl his scarlet spots about in the brilliant sun, rest when
he liked, and go on again. I wonder whether it is a joy to have bright
scarlet spots, and to be clad in the purple and gold of life; is the
colour felt by the creature that wears it? The rose, restful of a dewy
morn before the sunbeams have topped the garden wall, must feel a joy in
its own fragrance, and know the exquisite hue of its stained petals. The
rose sleeps in its beauty.

The fly whirls his scarlet-spotted wings about and splashes himself with
sunlight, like the children on the sands. He thinks not of the grass and
sun; he does not heed them at all--and that is why he is so happy-any
more than the barefoot children ask why the sea is there, or why it does
not quite dry up when it ebbs. He is unconscious; he lives without
thinking about living; and if the sunshine were a hundred hours long,
still it would not be long enough. No, never enough of sun and sliding
shadows that come like a hand over the table to lovingly reach our
shoulder, never enough of the grass that smells sweet as a flower, not if
we could live years and years equal in number to the tides that have
ebbed and flowed counting backwards four years to every day and night,
backward still till we found out which came first, the night or the day.
The scarlet-dotted fly knows nothing of the names of the grasses that
grow here where the sward nears the sea, and thinking of him I have
decided not to wilfully seek to learn any more of their names either. My
big grass book I have left at home, and the dust is settling on the gold
of the binding. I have picked a handful this morning of which I know
nothing. I will sit here on the turf and the scarlet-dotted flies shall
pass over me, as if I too were but a grass. I will not think, I will be
unconscious, I will live.

Listen! that was the low sound of a summer wavelet striking the uncovered
rock over there beneath in the green sea. All things that are beautiful
are found by chance, like everything that is good. Here by me is a
praying-rug, just wide enough to kneel on, of the richest gold inwoven
with crimson. All the Sultans of the East never had such beauty as that
to kneel on. It is, indeed, too beautiful to kneel on, for the life in
these golden flowers must not be broken down even for that purpose. They
must not be defaced, not a stem bent; it is more reverent not to kneel on
them, for this carpet prays itself I will sit by it and let it pray for
me. It is so common, the bird's-foot lotus, it grows everywhere; yet if I
purposely searched for days I should not have found a plot like this, so
rich, so golden, so glowing with sunshine. You might pass by it in one
stride, yet it is worthy to be thought of for a week and remembered for a
year. Slender grasses, branched round about with slenderer boughs, each
tipped with pollen and rising in tiers cone-shaped--too delicate to grow
tall--cluster at the base of the mound. They dare not grow tall or the
wind would snap them. A great grass, stout and thick, rises three feet by
the hedge, with a head another foot nearly, very green and strong and
bold, lifting itself right up to you; you must say, 'What a fine grass!'
Grasses whose awns succeed each other alternately; grasses whose tops
seem flattened; others drooping over the shorter blades beneath; some
that you can only find by parting the heavier growth around them;
hundreds and hundreds, thousands and thousands. The kingly poppies on the
dry summit of the mound take no heed of these, the populace, their
subjects so numerous they cannot be numbered. A barren race they are, the
proud poppies, lords of the July field, taking no deep root, but raising
up a brilliant blazon of scarlet heraldry out of nothing. They are
useless, they are bitter, they are allied to sleep and poison and
everlasting night; yet they are forgiven because they are not
commonplace. Nothing, no abundance of them, can ever make the poppies
commonplace. There is genius in them, the genius of colour, and they are
saved. Even when they take the room of the corn we must admire them. The
mighty multitude of nations, the millions and millions of the grass
stretching away in intertangled ranks, through pasture and mead from
shore to shore, have no kinship with these their lords. The ruler is
always a foreigner. From England to China the native born is no king; the
poppies are the Normans of the field. One of these on the mound is very
beautiful, a width of petal, a clear silkiness of colour three shades
higher than the rest--it is almost dark with scarlet. I wish I could do
something more than gaze at all this scarlet and gold and crimson and
green, something more than see it, not exactly to drink it or inhale it,
but in some way to make it part of me that I might live it.

The July grasses must be looked for in corners and out-of-the-way places,
and not in the broad acres--the scythe has taken them there. By the
wayside on the banks of the lane, near the gateway--look, too, in
uninteresting places behind incomplete buildings on the mounds cast up
from abandoned foundations where speculation has been and gone. There
weeds that would not have found resting-place elsewhere grow unchecked,
and uncommon species and unusually large growths appear. Like everything
else that is looked for, they are found under unlikely conditions. At the
back of ponds, just inside the enclosure of woods, angles of corn-fields,
old quarries, that is where to find grasses, or by the sea in the
brackish marsh. Some of the finest of them grow by the mere road-side;
you may look for others up the lanes in the deep ruts, look too inside
the hollow trees by the stream. In a morning you may easily garner
together a great sheaf of this harvest. Cut the larger stems aslant, like
the reeds imitated deep in old green glass. You must consider as you
gather them the height and slenderness of the stems, the droop and degree
of curve, the shape and colour of the panicle, the dusting of the pollen,
the motion and sway in the wind. The sheaf you may take home with you,
but the wind that was among it stays without.




WINDS OF HEAVEN.



The window rattled, the gate swung; a leaf rose, and the kitten chased
it, 'whoo-oo'--the faintest sound in the keyhole. I looked up, and saw
the feathers on a sparrow's breast ruffled for an instant. It was quiet
for some time; after a while it came again with heavier purpose. The
folded shutters shook; the latch of the kitchen door rattled as if some
one were lifting it and dropped it; indefinite noises came from upstairs:
there was a hand in the house moving everything. Another pause. The
kitten was curled up on the window-ledge outside in the sunshine, just as
the sleek cats curled up in the warmth at Thebes of old Egypt five or six
thousand years ago; the sparrow was happy at the rose tree; a bee was
happy on a broad dandelion disc. 'Soo-hoo!'--a low whistle came through
the chink; a handful of rain was flung at the window; a great shadow
rushed up the valley and strode the house in an instant as you would get
over a stile. I put down my book and buttoned my coat. Soo-hoo! the wind
was here and the cloud--soo-hoo! drawing out longer and more plaintive in
the thin mouthpiece of the chink. The cloud had no more rain in it, but
it shut out the sun; and all that afternoon and all that night the low
plaint of the wind continued in sorrowful hopelessness, and little sounds
ran about the floors and round the rooms.

Still soo-hoo all the next day and sunlessness, turning the mind, through
work and conversation, to pensive notes. At even the edge of the cloud
lifted over the forest hill westwards, and a yellow glow, the great
beacon fire of the sun, burned out, a conflagration at the verge of the
world. In the night, awaking gently as one who is whispered to--listen!
Ah! all the orchestra is at work--the keyhole, the chink, and the
chimney; whoo-hooing in the keyhole, whistling shrill whew-w-w! in the
chink, moaning long and deep in the chimney. Over in the field the row of
pines was sighing; the wind lingered and clung to the close foliage, and
each needle of the million million leaflets drew its tongue across the
organ blast. A countless multitude of sighs made one continued distant
undertone to the wild roar of the gable close at hand. Something seemed
to be running with innumerable centipede feet over the mouth of the
chimney, for the long deep moan, as I listened, resolved itself into a
quick succession of touches, just as you might play with your
finger-tips, fifty times a second tattooing on the hollow table. In the
midst of the clangour the hearing settled down to the sighing of the
pines, which drew the mind towards it, and soothed the senses to sleep.

Towards dawn, awake again--another change: the battering-ram at work now
against the walls. Swinging back, the solid thickness of the wind came
forward--crush! as the iron-shod ram's head hanging from its chains
rushed to the tower. Crush! It sucked back again as if there had been a
vacuum--a moment's silence, and crush! Blow after blow--the floor heaved;
the walls were ready to come together--alternate sucking back and heavy
billowy advance. Crush! crush! Blow after blow, heave and batter and
hoist, as if it would tear the house up by the roots. Forty miles that
battering-ram wind had travelled without so much as a bough to check it
till it struck the house on the hill. Thud! thud! as if it were iron and
not air. I looked from the window, and the bright morning star was
shining--the sky was full of the wind and the star. As light came, the
thud, thud sunk away, and nothing remained but the whoo-hoo-hoo of the
keyhole and the moan of the chimney. These did not leave us; for four
days and nights the whoo-hoo-hoo-whoo never ceased a moment. Whoo-hoo!
whoo! and this is the wind on the hill indoors.

Out of doors, sometimes in the morning, deep in the valley, over the
tree-tops of the forest, there stays a vapour, lit up within by sunlight.
A glory hovers over the oaks--a cloud of light hundreds of feet thick,
the air made visible by surcharge and heaviness of sunbeams, pressed
together till you can see them in themselves and not reflected. The cloud
slants down the sloping wood, till in a moment it is gone, and the beams
are now focussed in the depth of the narrow valley. The mirror has been
tilted, and the glow has shifted; in a moment more it has vanished into
space, and the dream has gone from the wood. In the arms of the wind,
vast bundles of mist are borne against the hill; they widen and slip, and
lengthen, drawing out; the wind works quickly with moist colours ready
and a wide brush laying broadly. Colour comes up in the wind; the thin
mist disappears, drunk up in the grass and trees, and the air is full of
blue behind the vapour. Blue sky at the far horizon--rich deep blue
overhead--a dark-brown blue deep yonder in the gorge among the trees. I
feel a sense of blue colour as I face the strong breeze; the vibration
and blow of its force answer to that hue, the sound of the swinging
branches and the rush--rush in the grass is azure in its note; it is
wind-blue, not the night-blue, or heaven-blue, a colour of air. To see
the colour of air it needs great space like this--a vastness of concavity
and hollow--an equal caldron of valley and plain under, to the dome of
the sky over, for no vessel of earth and sky is too large for the
air-colour to fill. Thirty, forty, and more miles of eye-sweep, and
beyond that the limitless expanse over the sea--the thought of the eye
knows no butt, shooting on with stellar penetration into the unknown. In
a small space there seems a vacuum, and nothing between you and the hedge
opposite, or even across the valley; in a great space the void is filled,
and the wind touches the sight like a thing tangible. The air becomes
itself a cloud, and is coloured--recognised as a thing suspended;
something real exists between you and the horizon. Now full of sun, and
now of shade, the air-cloud rests in the expanse.

It is summer, and the wind-birds top the furze; the bright stonechat,
velvet-black and red and white, sits on the highest spray of the gorse,
as if he were painted there. He is always in the wind on the hill, from
the hail of April to August's dry glow. All the mile-long slope of the
hill under me is purple-clad with heath down to the tree-filled gorge
where the green boughs seem to join the purple. The corn-fields and the
pastures of the plain--count them one by one till the hedges and squares
close together and cannot be separated. The surface of the earth melts
away as if the eyes insensibly shut and grew dreamy in gazing, as the
soft clouds melt and lose their outline at the horizon. But dwelling
there, the glance slowly finds and fills out something that interposes
its existence between us and the further space. Too shadowy for the
substance of a cloud, too delicate for outline against the sky, fainter
than haze, something of which the eye has consciousness, but cannot put
into a word to itself. Something is there. It is the air-cloud adhering
like a summer garment to the great downs by the sea. I cannot see the
substance of the hills nor their exact curve along the sky; all I can see
is the air that has thickened and taken to itself form about them. The
atmosphere has collected as the shadow collects in the distant corner of
a room--it is the shadow of the summer wind. At times it is so soft, so
little more than the air at hand, that I almost fancy I can look through
the solid boundary. There is no cloud so faint; the great hills are but a
thought at the horizon; I _think_ them there rather than see them; if I
were not thinking of them, I should scarce know there was even a haze,
with so dainty a hand does the atmosphere throw its covering over the
massy downs. Riding or passing quickly perhaps you would not observe
them; but stay among the heathbells, and the sketch appears in the south.
Up from the sea over the corn-fields, through the green boughs of the
forest, along the slope, comes a breath of wind, of honey-sweetened air,
made more delicate by the fanning of a thousand wings.

The labour of the wind: the cymbals of the aspen clashing, from the
lowest to the highest bough, each leaf twirling first forwards and then
backwards and swinging to and fro, a double motion. Each lifts a little
and falls back like a pendulum, twisting on itself; and as it rises and
sinks, strikes its fellow-leaf. Striking the side of the dark pines, the
wind changes their colour and turns them paler. The oak leaves slide one
over the other, hand above hand, laying shadow upon shadow upon the white
road. In the vast net of the wide elm-tops the drifting shadow of the
cloud which the wind brings is caught for a moment. Pushing aside the
stiff ranks of the wheat with both arms, the air reaches the sun-parched
earth. It walks among the mowing-grass like a farmer feeling the crop
with his hand one side, and opening it with his walking-stick the other.
It rolls the wavelets carelessly as marbles to the shore; the red cattle
redden the pool and stand in their own colour. The green caterpillar
swings as he spins his thread and lengthens his cable to the tide of air,
descending from the tree; before he can slip it the whitethroat takes
him. With a thrust the wind hurls the swift fifty miles faster on his
way; it ruffles back the black velvet of the mole peeping forth from his
burrow. Apple bloom and crab-apple bloom have been blown long since
athwart the furrows over the orchard wall; May petals and June roses
scattered; the pollen and the seeds of the meadow-grasses thrown on the
threshing-floor of earth in basketfuls. Thistle down and dandelion down,
the brown down of the goat's-beard; by-and-by the keys of the sycamores
twirling aslant--the wind carries them all on its back, gossamer web and
great heron's vanes--the same weight to the wind; the drops of the
waterfall blown aside sprinkle the bright green ferns. The voice of the
cuckoo in his season travels on the zephyr, and the note comes to the
most distant hill, and deep into the deepest wood.

The light and fire of summer are made beautiful by the air, without whose
breath the glorious summer were all spoiled. Thick are the hawthorn
leaves, many deep on the spray; and beneath them there is a twisted and
intertangled winding in and out of boughs, such as no curious ironwork of
ancient artist could equal; through the leaves and metal-work of boughs
the soft west wind wanders at its ease. Wild wasp and tutored bee sing
sideways on their course as the breeze fills their vanes; with broad
coloured sails boomed out, the butterfly drifts alee. Beside a brown
coated stone in the shadowed stream a brown trout watches for the puffs
that slay the May-flies. Their ephemeral wings were made for a more
exquisite life; they endure but one sun; they bear not the touch of the
water; they die like a dream dropping into the river. To the amethyst in
the deep ditch the wind comes; no petal so hidden under green it cannot
find; to the blue hill-flower up by the sky; it lifts the guilty head of
the passionate poppy that has sinned in the sun for love. Sweet is the
rain the wind brings to the wallflower browned in the heat, a-dry on the
crumbling stone. Pleasant the sunbeams to the marigold when the wind has
carried the rain away and his sun-disc glows on the bank. Acres of
perfume come on the wind from the black and white of the bean-field; the
firs fill the air by the copse with perfume. I know nothing to which the
wind has not some happy use. Is there a grain of dust so small the wind
shall not find it out? Ground in the mill-wheel of the centuries, the
iron of the distant mountain floats like gossamer, and is drunk up as dew
by leaf and living lung. A thousand miles of cloud go by from morn till
night, passing overhead without a sound; the immense packs, a mile
square, succeed to each other, side by side, laid parallel, book-shape,
coming up from the horizon and widening as they approach. From morn till
night the silent footfalls of the ponderous vapours travel overhead, no
sound, no creaking of the wheels and rattling of the chains; it is calm
at the earth, but the wind labours without an effort above, with such
case, with such power. Grey smoke hangs on the hill-side where the
couch-heaps are piled, a cumulus of smoke; the wind comes, and it draws
its length along like the genii from the earthen pot; there leaps up a
great red flame shaking its head; it shines in the bright sunlight; you
can see it across the valley.

A perfect summer day with a strong south wind; a cloudless blue sky blown
pale, a summer sun blown cool, deep draughts of refreshing air to man and
horse, clear definition of red-tile roof and conical oast, perfect colour
of soft ash-green trees. In the evening, fourteen black swifts rushing
together through the upper atmosphere with shrill cries, sometimes aside
and on the tip of one wing, with a whirl descending, a black trail, to
the tiled ridge they dwell in. Fine weather after this.

A swooning August day, with a hot east wind, from which there is no
escape, which gives no air to the chest--you breathe and are not
satisfied with the inspiration; it does not fill; there is no life in the
killed atmosphere. It is a vacuum of heat, and yet the strong hot wind
bends the trees, and the tall firs wrestle with it as they did with
Sinis, the Pine-bender, bowed down and rebounding as if they would whirl
their cones away like a catapult. Masses of air are moving by, and yet
there is none to breathe. No escape in the shadow of hedge or wood, or in
the darkened room; darkness excludes the heat that comes with light, but
the heat of the oven-wind cannot be shut out. Some monstrous dragon of
the Chinese sky pants his fiery breath upon us, and the brown grass
stalks threaten to catch flame in the field. The grain of wheat that was
full of juice dries hard in the ears, and water is no more good for
thirst. There is not a cloud in the sky; but at night there is heavy
rain, and the flowers are beaten down. There is a thunder-wind that blows
at intervals when great clouds are visibly gathering over the hayfield.
It is almost a calm; but from time to time a breath comes, and a low
mournful cry sounds in the hollow farmhouse--the windows and doors are
open, and the men and women have gone out to make hasty help in the hay
ere the storm--a mournful cry in the hollow house, as unhappy a note as
if it were soaked February.

In April, six miles away in the valley, a vast cloud came down with
swan-shot of hail, black as blackest smoke, overwhelming house and wood,
all gone and mixed with the sky; and behind the mass there followed a
white cloud, sunlit, dragging along the ground like a cumulus fallen to
the earth. At sunset the sky cleared, and under the glowing rim of the
sun a golden wind drove the host of vapour before it, scattering it to
the right and left. Large pieces caught and tore themselves in the trees
of the forest, and one curved fragment hurled from the ridge fell in the
narrow coombe, lit up as it came down with golden sunset rays, standing
out bright against the shadowed wood. Down it came slowly as it were with
outstretched arms, both to fall, carrying the coloured light of the sky
to the very surface of the earth.




THE COUNTRY SUNDAY.



Roses bloomed on every bush, and some of the great hawthorns up which the
briars had climbed seemed all flowers. The white and pink-white petals of
the June roses adhered all over them, almost as if they had been
artificially gummed or papered on so as to hide the leaves. Such a
profusion of wild-rose bloom is rarely seen. On the Sunday morning, as on
a week-day morning, they were entirely unnoticed, and might be said in
their turn to take no heed of the sanctified character of the day. With a
rush like a sudden thought the white-barred eave-swallows came down the
arid road and rose again into the air as easily as a man dives into the
water. Dark specks beneath the white summer clouds, the swifts, the black
albatross of our skies, moved on their unwearied wings. Like the
albatross that floats over the ocean and sleeps on the wing, the swift's
scimitar-like pinions are careless of repose. Once now and then they came
down to earth, not, as might be supposed, to the mansion or the church
tower, but to the low tiled roof of an ancient cottage which they fancied
for their home. Kings sometimes affect to mix with their subjects; these
birds that aspire to the extreme height of the air frequently nest in the
roof of a despised tenement, inhabited by an old woman who never sees
them. The corn was green and tall, the hops looked well, the foxglove was
stirring, the delicious atmosphere of summer, sun-laden and scented,
filled the deep valleys; a morning of the richest beauty and deepest
repose. All things reposed but man, and man is so busy with his vulgar
aims that it quite dawns upon many people as a wonderful surprise how
still nature is on a Sunday morning. Nature is absolutely still every day
of the week, and proceeds with the most absolute indifference to days and
dates.

The sharp metallic clangour of a bell went bang, bang, bang, from one
roof; not far distant a harsher and deeper note--some Tartar-like bell of
universal uproar--hammered away. At intervals came the distant chimes of
three distinct village churches--ding dong, dong ding, pango, frango,
jango--very much jango--bang, clatter, clash--a humming vibration and
dreadful stir. The country world was up in arms, I was about to say--I
mean in chimney-pot hat and pomade, _en route_ to its various creeds,
some to one bell, some to another, some to ding dong, and some to dong
ding; but the most of them directed their steps towards a silent chapel.
This great building, plain beyond plainness, stood beside a fir copse,
from which in the summer morning there floated an exquisite fragrance of
pine. If all the angles of the architects could have been put together,
nothing could have been designed more utterly opposite to the graceful
curve of the fir tree than this red-bricked crass building. Bethel Chapel
combined everything that could be imagined contrary to the spirit of
nature, which undulates. The largest erection of the kind, it was
evidently meant for a large congregation.

Of all the people in this country there are none so devout as the
cottagers in the lanes and hamlets. They are as uncompromising as the
sectaries who smashed the images and trampled on the pride of kings in
the days of Charles I. The translation of the Bible cut off Charles I.'s
head by letting loose such a flood of iron-fisted controversy, and to any
one who has read the pamphlets of those days the resemblance is
constantly suggested. John Bunyan wrote about the Pilgrim. To this chapel
there came every Sunday morning a man and his wife, ten miles on foot
from their cottage home in a distant village. The hottest summer day or
the coldest winter Sunday made no difference; they tramped through dust,
and they tramped through slush and mire; they were pilgrims every week. A
grimly real religion, as concrete and as much a fact as a stone wall; a
sort of horse's faith going along the furrow unquestioning. In their own
village there were many chapels, and at least one church, but these did
not suffice. The doctrine at Bethel was the one saving doctrine, and
there they went. There were dozens who came from lesser distances quite
as regularly, the men in their black coats and high hats, big fellows
that did not look ungainly till they dressed themselves up; women as red
as turkey-cocks, panting and puffing; crowds of children making the road
odorous with the smell of pomade; the boys with their hair too long
behind; the girls with vile white stockings, all out of drawing, and
without a touch that could be construed into a national costume--the
cheap shoddy shop in the country lane. All with an expression of Sunday
goodness: 'To-day we are good, we are going to chapel, and we mean to
stay till the very last word. We have got our wives and families with us,
and woe be to any of them if they dare to look for a bird's nest! This is
business.' Besides the foot people there come plenty in traps and
pony-carriages, and some on horseback, for a certain class of farmers
belong to the same persuasion, and there are well-to-do people in the
crowd. It is the cast of mind that makes the worshipper, not the worldly
position.

It is written, but perhaps it is not true, that in old times--not very
old times--the parish clergyman had a legal right, by which every person
in the parish was compelled to appear once on a Sunday in the church.
Those who did not come were fined a shilling.

Now look at the Shillings this Sunday morning flowing of their own
freewill along the crooked lanes, and over the stiles, and through the
hops, and down the hill to the chapel which can offer no bribe and can
impose no fine.

Old women--wonder 'tis how they live on nothing a day--still manage to
keep a decent black dress and come to chapel with a penny in their
pockets in spite of their age and infirmities. The nearest innkeeper,
himself a most godly man, has work enough to do to receive the horses and
traps and pony-carriages and stow them away before service begins, when
he will stride from the stable to the pew. Then begins the hollow and
flute-like modulation of a pitch-pipe within the great building. One of
the members of the congregation who is a musician is setting the ears of
the people to the tune of the hymn that is about to be given forth. The
verse is read, and then rises the full swell of hundreds of voices; and
while they sing let us think what a strange thing the old pitch-pipe--no
organ, no harmonium--what a strange thing the whole scene is, with its
Cromwellian air in the midst of the modern fields.

This is a picture, and not a disputation: as to what they teach or preach
inside Bethel, it is nothing to me; this paper has not the slightest
theological bias.

You may tell when the service is nearly over by the stray boys who steal
out and round the walls to throw stones at the sparrows in the roads;
they need a little relaxation; nature gets even into Bethel. By-and-by
out come some bigger lads and tie two long hop-poles together with which
to poke down the swallows' nests under the chapel eaves. The Book inside,
of which they almost make an idol, seemed to think the life of a
sparrow--and possibly of a swallow--was of value; still it is good fun to
see the callow young come down flop on the hard ground.

When the church doors are thrown open by the noiseless vergers, and
patchouli and macassar, and the overpowering, rich smell of silks and
satins rushes out in a volume of heated air, in a few minutes the whole
place is vacant. Bethel is not deserted in this manner. All those who
have come from a distance have brought with them their dinner in a black
bag or basket, and quietly settle themselves down to take their dinner in
the chapel. This practice is not confined to the pilgrims who have walked
a long way; very many of those who live the other side of the village
shut up their cottages, bring their provisions, and spend the whole day
at their devotions. Now the old woman spends her Sunday penny. At the
back of the chapel there is a large room where a person is employed to
boil the kettle and supply cups of tea at a halfpenny each. Here the old
lady makes herself very comfortable, and waits till service begins again.
Halfpenny a cup would not, of course, pay the cost of the materials, but
these are found by some earnest member of the body, some farmer or
tradesman's wife, who feels it a good deed to solace the weary
worshippers. There is something in this primitive hospitality, in this
eating their dinners in the temple, and general communion of humanity,
which to a philosopher seems very admirable. It seems better than incense
and scarlet robes, unlit candles behind the altar, and vacancy. Not long
since a bishop addressed a circular to the clergy of his diocese,
lamenting in solemn tones the unhappy position of the labourer in the
village churches. The bishop had observed with regret, with very great
regret, that the labourer seemed in the background. He sat in the back
seats behind the columns, and near the door where he could hardly hear,
and where he had none of the comfort of the stove in winter. The bishop
feared his position was cold and comfortless, that he did not feel
himself to be a member of the Church, that he was outside the pale of its
society. He exhorted the country clergy to bring the labourer forward and
make him more comfortable, to put him in a better seat among the rest,
where he would feel himself to be really one of the congregation.

To those who have sat in country churches this circular read as a piece
of most refined sarcasm, so bitter because of its truth. Where had been
the clerical eye all these years that Hodge had sat and coughed in the
draughts by the door? Was it merely a coincidence that the clerical eye
was opened just at the moment when Hodge became a voter?

At Bethel Chapel between the services the cottagers, the farmers, and the
tradesmen break their bread together, and converse, and actually seem to
recognise one another; they do not turn their backs the instant the organ
ceases and return each to his house in proud isolation. There is no
dining together, no friendly cup of tea at the parish church. This Bethel
is, you see, the church of the poor people, most emphatically _their_
church. If the word church means not a building, but a society, then this
is the true country church. It is the society of all those who, for want
of a better expression, I may term the humble-minded, those who have no
aristocratic or exclusive tastes, very simple in their reading and
studies even if well-to-do, and simple in their daily habits, rising
early and retiring early, and plebeian in their dinner-hour. It is a
peculiar cast of mind that I am trying to describe--a natural frame of
mind; these are 'chapel people'--perhaps a phrase will convey the meaning
better than explanation. This is _their_ church, and whatever the
theology may be there is undoubtedly a very strong bond of union among
them.

Not only the old women with their Sunday pennies, but great numbers
beside, young and old of both sexes, take their cup of tea, for these
people take tea with every meal, dinner and supper as well as breakfast
and five o'clock, and if they don't feel well they will rise at two in
the morning to get a cup of tea. They are as Russian as the Russians in
this particular; they have cheese on the table, too, at every meal. The
pastor has, meantime, been entertained with a good dinner at some house
adjacent, where he goes every Sunday; by-and-by the flute begins to tune
again, the hymns resound, and the labour of the day is resumed. Somewhere
about four o'clock the summer-dusty roads are full again of the returning
pilgrims, and the crowd gradually sinks away by footpath and stile. The
black albatross is still wheeling in the upper atmosphere, the
white-barred swallow rushes along the road and dives upwards, the
unwearied roses are still opened to the sun's rays, and calm, indifferent
Nature has pursued her quiet course without heed of pitch-pipe or organ,
or bell or chalice. Perhaps if you chance to be resting by a gate you may
hear one of the cottage women telling her children to let the ants alone
and not tease them, for 'thaay be God's creeturs.' Or possibly the pastor
himself may be overheard discoursing to a bullet-headed woman, with one
finger on the palm of his other hand, 'That's their serpentine way;
that's their subtlety; that's their casuistry; which arguments you may
imagine to refer, as your fancy pleases, to the village curate, or the
tonsured priest of the monastery over the hill. For the tonsured priest,
and the monastery, and the nunnery, and the mass, and the Virgin Mary,
have grown to be a very great power indeed in English lanes. Between the
Roman missal and the chapel hymn-book, the country curate with his good
old-fashioned litany is ground very small indeed, and grows less and less
between these millstones till he approaches the vanishing-point. The
Roman has the broad acres, his patrons have given him the land; the
chapel has the common people, and the farmers are banding together not to
pay tithes. So that his whole soul may well go forth in the apostrophe,
'Good Lord, deliver us!'

There is no man so feasted as the chapel pastor. His tall and yet rotund
body and his broad red face might easily be mistaken for the outward man
of a sturdy farmer, and he likes his pipe and glass. He dines every
Sunday, and at least once a week besides, at the house of one of his
stoutest upholders. It is said that at such a dinner, after a large
plateful of black currant pudding, finding there was still some juice
left, he lifted the plate to his mouth and carefully licked it all round;
the hostess hastened to offer a spoon, but he declined, thinking that was
much the best way to gather up the essence of the fruit. So simple were
his manners, he needed no spoon; and, indeed, if we look back, the
apostles managed without forks, and put their fingers in the dish. After
dinner the cognac bottle is produced, and the pastor fills his tumbler
half full of spirit, and but lightly dashes it with water. It is cognac
and not brandy, for your chapel minister thinks it an affront if anything
more common than the best French liquor is put before him; he likes it
strong, and with it his long clay pipe. Very frequently another minister,
sometimes two or three, come in at the same time, and take the same
dinner, and afterwards form a genial circle with cognac and tobacco, when
the room speedily becomes full of smoke and the bottle of brandy soon
disappears. In these family parties there is not the least approach to
over-conviviality; it is merely the custom, no one thinks anything of a
glass and a pipe; it is perfectly innocent; it is not a local thing, but
common and understood. The consumption of brandy and tobacco and the good
things of dinner, tea, and supper (for the party generally sit out the
three meals), must in a month cost the host a good deal of money, but all
things are cheerfully borne for the good of the church. Never were men
feasted with such honest good-will as these pastors; and if a budding
Paul or Silas happens to come along who has scarce yet passed his
ordination, the youthful divine may stay a week if he likes, and lick the
platter clean. In fact, so constant is this hospitality, that in certain
houses it is impossible to pay a visit at any time of the year without
finding one of these young brothers reposing amid the fat of the land,
and doubtless indulging in pleasant spiritual communion with the
daughters of the mansion. Something in this system of household ministers
of religion reminds one of the welcome and reverence said to be extended
in the East to the priests, who take up their residence indefinitely, and
are treated as visible incarnations of the Deity whose appetites it is
meritorious to satisfy. Indeed, these young men, who have perhaps been
trained as missionaries, often discourse of Buddha with a very long and
unctuous 'Boo.'

The ancient Roman censor who tried by laws and persuasions to induce the
inhabitants of Rome to marry, yet could not succeed in inducing them to
submit to what they considered a sacrifice for the benefit of the state,
would have been delighted with the marrying tendencies of the chapel
people. A venerable old gentleman--a great pillar of the body--after the
decease of his first wife married her sister, and again, upon her
removal, married his cook. Another great prop--elderly indeed, but still
upright and iron-grey, a most powerfully made man, who always spoke as if
his words were indeed law--rule-of-thumb law--has married three sisters
in succession, and has had offspring by all. Their exact degrees of
consanguinity I cannot tell you, or whether they call each other brothers
and sisters, or cousins. This is certain, however, that whether such
marriages be legal or not, they are as such regarded and as such accepted
in every sense by the society to which these gentlemen belong. Another
gentleman now has his fourth wife, and he, too, is a most strenuous
believer, and not his bitterest enemy can rake up the smallest accusation
against his character. He, too, is a strong and upright man, fully
capable of another wife if time should chance to bring it about. Now, the
odd part of it is that, having married four times, and each time in the
same village, where all the families are more or less connected, he is
more or less related to every single individual in the parish. First,
there are his own blood relations and his wives' blood relations, and
then there are their relations' relations, and next his sons and
daughters have married and introduced a fresh roll, and I really do not
think either he or anybody else knows exactly where the list ends. This
is nothing uncommon. Though clans and tribes no longer settle under their
respective chiefs in villages, the families of the same name and blood
still present a very close representation of the clan system. They have
all the tribal relationship without any of its feeling. Instead of
forming a strong body and helping each other, these people seemed to
detest one another, and to lose no opportunity of snatching some little
advantage or telling some scandalous tale. In fact, this in-and-in
breeding seems one of the curses of village life, and a cause of
stagnation and narrowness of mind. This marrying and giving in marriage
is not singular to well-to-do leaders of chapel society, but goes on with
equal fervour among the lower members. The cottage girls and cottage boys
marry the instant they get a chance, and it is not at all uncommon to
find comparatively young labourers who have had two wives. There is
nothing in this to reproach: it is a peculiarity of the cast of mind
which I am endeavouring to describe--a cast of mind perhaps not much
marked by sentimentality. Something in this practice reminds one of the
Mormons. Certainly the wives are not taken together, but they are sealed
as fast as circumstances permit. Something in it has a Mormonite aspect
to an observer, and perhaps the existence of this cast of mind may assist
in explaining the inexplicable growth of that strange religion. Doubtless
they would repudiate the suggestion with loud outcries and indignation,
for people are always most vigorous in denouncing themselves
unconsciously. These numerous wives (who are quite willing), the marrying
of sisters, the primitive gatherings at the chapel, so like the religious
camps of the Far West, the general relationship, have a distinct flavour
of Salt Lake. Add to this the immense working power of these pluralist
giants, for you will generally find that the well-to-do chapeller with
his third wife, or more, is a man who has raised himself from very much
nothing to very much something. By sheer force of labour and push he has
lifted himself head and shoulders above the village--a career, too,
conspicuous by strict integrity. Did he live in a London suburb he would
be pointed out to the rising generation by anxious fathers as the very
model for them to follow. The village ought to be proud of them, but the
village secretly and aside hates them, being practical commentaries on
the general sloth and stupidity. This energy of work, too, is like the
saints of Utah, who have made an oasis and a garden where was a desert.
After labouring from morning till night they like the sound of a feminine
voice and the warmth of a feminine welcome in the back parlour of rest.

This four times married elder--what work, what a pyramid of work, his
life represents! The young labourer left with his mother and brothers and
sisters to keep, learning carpentering, and bettering his wages--learning
mason-work, picking up the way to manage machinery, inspiring men with
confidence, and beginning to get the leverage of borrowed money, getting
a good name at the bank, managing a little farm, contracting for
building, contracting for hauling--onwards to a larger farm, larger
buildings, big contracts in rising towns, somehow or other grinding money
out of everything by force of will, bending everything to his purpose by
stubborn sinew, always truthful, straightforward, and genuine. Consider
what immense labour this represent! I do not think many such men can be
found, rude and unlettered, yet naturally gentleman-like, to work their
way in the world without the aid of the Lombard Street financiers; in
village life, remember, where all is stagnant and dull--no golden
openings such as occur near great towns. On work-days still wearing the
same old hat--I wonder what material it was originally?--tough leather
probably--its fibres soaked with mortar, its shine replaced by lime, its
shape dented by bricks, its rotundity flattened by timber, stuck about
with cow's hair--for a milker leans his head against the animal--sodden
with rain, and still the same old hat. The same old hat, that Teniers
might have introduced, a regular daub of a hat: pity it is that it will
never be painted. On Sundays the high silk hat, the glossy black coat of
the elder, but there are no gloves to be got on such hands as those; they
are too big and too real ever to be got into the artificiality of kid.
Everything grew under those hands; if there was a rabbit-hutch in the
back yard it became a shed, and a stable sprang up by the shed, and a
sawpit out of the stable, and a workshop beyond the sawpit, and cottages
to let beyond that; next a market garden and a brick-kiln, and a
hop-oast, and a few acres of freehold meadow, and by-and-by some villas;
all increasing and multiplying, and leading to enterprises in distant,
places--such a mighty generation after generation of solid things! A most
earnest and conscientious chapel man, welcoming the budding Paul and
Silas, steadily feeding the resident apostle, furnishing him with garden
produce and a side of bacon when the pig was killed, arranging a vicarage
for him at a next-to-nothing rent; lending him horse and trap, providing
innumerable bottles of three-star brandy for these men of God, and
continual pipes for the prophets; supplying the chapel fund with credit
in time of monetary difficulty--the very right arm and defender of the
faith.

Let the drama shift a year in one sentence in true dramatic way, and now
imagine the elder and his family proceeding down the road as the Bethel
congregation gather. As he approaches they all ostentatiously turn their
backs. One or two of the other elders walk inside; being men of some
education, they soften down the appearance of their resentment by getting
out of the way. Groups of cottage people, on the contrary, rather come
nearer the road, and seem to want to make their sentiments coarsely
visible. Such is the way with that layer of society; they put everything
so very very crudely; they do not understand a gentle intimation, they
express their displeasure in the rudest manner, without any consciousness
that gruffness and brutality of manner degrades the righteous beneath the
level of the wicked who is accused. The women make remarks to each other.
Many of them had been visitors at the elder's house, yet now they will
not so much as say good morning to his wife and family; their children
look over the wall with stolid stare. Farther down the road the elder
meets the pastor on his road to chapel. The elder looks the pastor
straight in the face; the pastor shuffles his eyes over the hedge; it is
difficult to quite forget the good dinners, the bottles, and the pipes.
The elder goes on, and he and his family are picked up by a conveyance at
the cross-ways and carried to a place of worship in a distant village.
This is only a specimen, this is only the Sunday, but the same process
goes on all the week. The elder's house, that was once the resort of half
the people in the village, is now deserted; no one looks in in passing;
the farmers do not stop as they come back from market to tell how much
they have lost by their corn, or to lament that So-and-so is going to
grub his hops--bad times; the women do not come over of an afternoon with
news of births and rumours of marriages. One family, once intimate
friends, sent over to say that they liked the elder very much, but they
could not call while he was on such terms with their 'dear pastor.' Two
or three of the ministers who came by invitation to preach in the chapel,
and who had been friendly, did indeed call once, but were speedily given
to understand by the leading members of the congregation that dinners and
sleeping accommodation had been provided elsewhere, and they must not do
so again. The ministers, being entirely in the power of the
congregations, had to obey. In short, the elder and his family were
excommunicated, spiritually boycotted, interdicted, and cut off from
social intercourse; without any of the magical ceremonies of the Vatican,
they were as effectually excommunicated as if the whole seventy cardinals
and the Pope in person had pronounced the dread sentence. In a great town
perhaps such a thing would not be so marked or so much felt; in a little
village where everybody knows everybody, where there are no strangers,
and where you must perforce come in contact constantly with persons you
have known for years, it is a very annoying process indeed. There are no
streets of shops to give a choice of butchers and bakers, no competition
of tea merchants and cheesemongers, so that if one man shows a dislike to
serving you, you can go on to the next and get better attention. 'Take it
or go without it' is village law; no such thing as independence; you must
walk or drive into the nearest town, five miles away perhaps, if you wish
to avoid a sour face on the other side of the counter. No one will
volunteer the smallest service for the excommunicant of the chapel;
nothing could more vividly illustrate the command to 'love one another.'
No one can imagine the isolation of a house in a country place
interdicted like this. If the other inhabitants could find any possible
excuse for not doing anything they were asked they would not do it--not
for money: they were out of what was wanted, or they had promised it, or
they couldn't find it, or they were too busy, and so all through the
whole course of daily life.

Now the most remarkable part of this bitter persecution was the fact that
the elder had lent money to almost all the principal members of the
congregation. The bold speculator had never been appealed to in vain by
any one in difficulty. Some had had a hundred, some fifty, some twenty,
some ten--farmers whose corn had been a loss instead of a profit, whose
hops had sold for less than the cost of picking them, little tradesmen
who had a bill to meet, handicraft men who could not pay the men who
worked side by side with them, cottagers who needed an outhouse built,
and others who lacked the means to pay for a funeral. There seemed no one
to whom he had not lent money for some purpose, besides the use of his
name as security. Fortune had given to him, and he had given as freely to
others, so that it was indeed a bitter trial to the heart:--

  Blow, blow, thou winter wind,
  Thou art not so unkind
    As man's ingratitude.
  Thy tooth is not so keen,
  Because thou art not seen,
    Although thy breath be rude.

In his stern pride he did not condescend to put in motion any revenge
against these petty poltroons, but went on his way with absolute
indifference to all outward seeming. His family, who were perhaps more
nearly touched in the affairs of daily life than he was, consoled
themselves with the old country proverb, 'Ah, well, we shall live till we
die, if the pigs don't eat us, and then we shall go acorning'--a clear
survival of the belief in transmigration, for he who is eaten by a pig
becomes a pig, and goeth forth with swine to eat acorns.

There had been some very strong language and straightforward observations
at the chapel meetings, the private vestry of the managers; the elder
being one of the founders, and his name on the deed could not be
excluded--gall and wormwood--without his signature nothing could be done.
Bitterer still, the chapel was heavily in debt to him. Had he chosen, in
American phrase, he could have 'shut up the shebang in mighty sudden
time.' The elder was tall; the elder was strong; the elder was grim; the
elder was a man who could rule hundreds of the roughest labourers; the
elder was a man who would have his say, and said it like throwing down a
hod full of bricks. With the irresistible logic of figures and documents
he demonstrated the pastor to be a liar, and told him so to his face.
With the same engines he proved that two or three of the other managers
were hypocrites, and told them so. Neither could pastor nor managers
refute it, but stood like sheep. Then he told them what he had done for
the chapel and for its minister, and no one could deny him. Indeed, the
minister had been heard to weakly confess that the elder had once been a
good friend to him. Perhaps his partisans, as is often the case, had
taken up the pastor's cause with more violence than he himself desired,
and by their vehemence had driven him into a position which he himself
would have avoided. Most likely he would have made peace himself; but the
blot on all chapel systems of government is that the minister is but the
mouthpiece of his congregation. Having thrown down his load of bricks
thump, the elder stalked out with his memoranda and with his cheque-book,
leaving them to face the spectre of bankruptcy. At least once a week the
elder, out of sheer British determination to claim his rights, stepped
into the chapel rooms with his private key, just to walk round. They put
another lock which his key did not fit, but he heaved the door open with
a crowbar, and their case must have been feeble indeed when they could
not even bring an action for trespass against him.

The historian knoweth not all things, and how this schism arose is hidden
from view. Very likely, indeed, it may have arisen out of the very
foundation of the chapel itself, such buildings and land being usually
held in some manner by a body of managers or trustees--a sort of
committee, in fact--a condition which may easily afford opportunities for
endless wrangling. In this particular the Established Church has a great
advantage, the land and building being dedicated 'for ever,' so that no
dispute is possible. Tales there were of some little feminine
disagreement having arisen between the wives of the two men, magnified
with the assistance of a variety of tabbies, a sort of thing by no means
impossible among two hundred relations. Such affairs often spring from a
grain of mustard seed, and by-and-by involve all the fowls of the air
that roost in the branches. Idle tales circulated of a discussion among
the ministers (visitors) which happened one evening over the pipes and
three-star bottles, when the elder, taking down a celebrated volume of
sermons, pointed out a passage almost word for word identical with what
the pastor had said in his sermon on the previous Sunday--a curious
instance of parallel inspiration. Unkind people afterwards spread the
gloss that the elder had accused the minister of plagiarism. Mere
fiction, no doubt. After a thing has happened people can generally find
twenty causes. The excommunication, however, was real enough, and ten
times more effectual because the sentence was pronounced not by the
pastor but by the congregation.

Still nothing disturbed the dignity of the elder. He worked away as
usual, always with tools in his hands. He would tear away with a plane at
a window-frame or a coffin-lid, and tell the listener his wrongs, and how
he had been scorned and insulted by people whom he had helped for years,
and how they had reversed the teaching of the gospel in their bearing
towards him--heavier blows and longer shavings--as if there were no such
thing as true religion. And, indeed, he would say, in his business
transactions, he had over and over again found that men who were not
'professors'--_i.e._ who did not claim to be 'saved'--were more truthful
and more to be depended on in their engagements than those who constantly
talked of righteousness. For all that--with a tremendous shaving--for all
that, the gospel was true.

So he planed and hammered, and got a large contract on a building estate
near a great town, busy as busy, where it was necessary to have a tramway
and a locomotive, or 'dirt-engine,' to drag the trucks with the earth
from the excavations. This engine was a source of never-failing amusement
to the steady, quiet farmers whose domains were being invaded; very
observant people, but not pushing. One day a part of the engine was tied
up with string; another day it was blowing off steam like a volcano, the
boiler nearly empty and getting red-hot, while the men rushed to fetch
water with a couple of buckets; finally, the funnel rusted off and a
wooden one was put up--a merry joke! But while they laughed the
contractor pushed ahead in Yankee style, using any and every expedient,
and making money while they sighed over the slow plough. They must have
everything perfect, else they could do nothing; he could do much with
very imperfect materials. He would make a cucumber frame out of a church
window, or a church window out of a cucumber frame. One of the residents
on the new building estate found his cupboard doors numbered on the
panels two, six, eight, in gilt figures inside, and in fact they were
made of pew doors which the contractor had got out of some old church he
had ransacked and turned topsy-turvy to the order of the vicar. He would
have run up a new Salt Lake City cheap, or built a new Rome at five per
cent. in a few days.

Meantime, at the little village, various incidents occurred; the sternly
virtuous cottagers, for one thing, had collected from their scattered
homes and held a 'Horn Fair.' Some erring barmaid at the inn, accused of
too lavish a use of smiles, too much kindness--most likely a jealous tale
only--aroused their righteous ire. With shawm and timbrel and ram's-horn
trumpet--_i.e._ with cow's horns, poker and tongs, and tea-trays--the
indignant and high-toned population collected night after night by the
tavern, and made such fearful uproar that the poor girl, really quite
innocent, had to leave her situation. Nothing could be more charitable,
more truly righteous, after the model of the Man who would not even so
much as _say_ a harsh word to the woman taken in adultery. One poor man
shut up his house and went away with his wife and family, and not being
heard of for a little while these backbiters told each other that he had
not paid his rent, that his furniture was only on loan, and not a single
instalment had been met; he owed the butcher half a crown, the baker
discovered there was one and twopence on his book, the tavern could show
a score, everybody knew the wretch was a drunkard and beat his wife, and
many knew his wife was no better than she should be. Nothing was too base
to be laid to the charge of the scoundrel who had run away. At the end of
a few weeks the wretch and his family returned, looking very healthy and
well supplied with money, having been picking in a distant hop-garden. It
was common for people to shut their houses and do this at that season of
the year, but their blind malice was too eager to remember this. Another
person by continually dunning a poor debtor to pay him half a sovereign
had driven him to commit suicide! So ran their bitter tongues. Backbiting
is the curse of village life, and seems to keep people by its effects
upon the mind far more effectually in the grip of poverty than the
lowness of wages. They become so saturated with littleness that they
cannot attempt anything, and have no enterprise. To transplant them to
the freer atmosphere of a great city, or of the Far West, is the only
means of cure. At this particular village they were exceptionally given
to backbiting, perhaps because everybody was more than usually related to
everybody; they hated each other and vilified each other with pre-eminent
energy. The poorest man, half starving, would hardly do a job for a
farmer because--because--because he did not know why, except that nothing
was too bad to be said of him; the poorest washerwoman with hungry
children would not go and do a day's work for Mrs. So-and-so, because
'she beant nobody, she beant no better than we; beant a-going to work for
her.' This malice was not directed towards strangers, against whom it is
natural to heave half a brick, but against their own old neighbours. They
tore each other to pieces, they were perfect cannibals with the tongue,
perfect Lestrigonians. They never said 'good morning' to an equal, or
lifted their hats to a lady; a jerk of the head, say about half an inch
from the perpendicular, was their utmost greeting; their manners were
about as pleasant as those of cattle might be could they be dressed like
human beings. True, Bethel was of modern date, but they had had resident
vicars for centuries; and where had they been, and where was the
humanising tendency of much-vaunted Christianity? Could not three
centuries soften a little village? I will do something for them if I can,
for the credit of the race at large; they shall not be without an excuse
if I can help it. Perhaps it was because there were no resident squires,
perhaps because a good many of them had little plots of land; still they
were Lestrigonians, and no doubt the row between the elder and the pastor
was really due to this malice and uncharitableness. How curious it seems
to a philosopher that so much religion should be accompanied by such
bitter ill-feeling!--true religion, too, for these Lestrigonians were
most seriously in earnest in their chapelling. Yet no doubt they fomented
the row, for the pastor himself was much too clever a man to proceed to
such extremities. By nature he was a fluent speaker, rising to eloquence
as eloquence is understood among that kind of audience. He carried them
with him, quite swept them away. They came to hear him from miles round
about; there were plenty of other chapels, but no one like the man at
Bethel. Once they came they always came. Who can name a country clergyman
with university training who can do this? The man at Bethel also
possessed a natural talent of personally impressing and gaining the
good-will of every person with whom he came in contact; it was
astonishing with what tenacity people clung to him, so that there must
have been something exceptional in his character. His origin was of the
humblest; he was drawn from the same class as the apostles, as the great
Fisherman, and the great Tentmaker, a man of manual labour lifted
entirely by his wit to be a very great power indeed in the community
where he was stationed.

Too much credit must not be put upon cottagers' tales: one day they are
all so bitter, hanging would not be sufficient, and you would suppose
they were going to show a lifelong enmity; in a week or two it is all
forgotten, and next month they are taking tea together. Those who know
them best say you should never believe anything a cottager tells you.
There is sure to be exaggeration, or they tell you half the story, and
they catch up the wildest rumour and repeat it as unquestioned truth. No
doubt after a while all this sound and fury signifying nothing will blow
off, and there will be a reconciliation; the pastor and the elder will be
bosom friends, all the congregation will be calling, and eating and
drinking; there will be pipes and three-star bottles, and the elect will
be made perfect. If the fourth wife disappears in time there will be a
fifth, and Christian Mormonism will flourish exceedingly. Very likely the
furious fall-out is over before now; there is no stability in this
peculiar cast, the chapel mind.

Another curious reflection suggests itself to any one who has seen the
fervour of Bethel. Within an easy walk of each other there are eight
chapels and three churches and the Salvation Army barracks; a thinly
populated country district, too; no squires, the farmers all depressed
and ruined, the cottagers howling about starvation wages. One would have
thought all of them together could hardly maintain a single spiritual
teacher. All this for chapel and church; but no cottage hospital, either
for accidents or diseases. If any one fell ill he had to be content with
the workhouse doctor; if they required anything else they must go to the
clergyman and get a letter of introduction or some kind of certificate
for a London hospital, or any infirmary to which he happened to
subscribe. The chapellers made no bones about utilising the clergyman in
this way; they considered it their right; as he was the parish clergyman,
it was his place to supply them with such certificates. There was no
provision for the aged labourer or his wife when strength failed--nothing
for them but parish relief. There was no library. There was no institute
for the teaching of science, or for lectures disseminating the knowledge
of the nineteenth century. Every now and then the children died from
drinking bad water--ditch water; the women took tea, the men took beer,
the children drank water. Good water abounded, but then there was the
trouble and expense of digging wells; individuals could not do it, the
community did not care. Does it not seem strange? All this fervour and
building of temples and rattling of the Salvation Army drum and loud
demands for the New Jerusalem, and not a single effort for physical
well-being or mental training!

While these pranks are played at Bethel let us glance a moment in another
direction down the same green country lane on the same bright summer day.
Let it be late in the afternoon of the Sunday, the swifts still wheeling,
the roses still blooming, blue-winged jays slipping in and out of the
beech trees. These hazel lanes were once the scene of Puritan marchings
to and fro, of Fifth Monarchy men who likened the Seven-hilled City to
the Beast; furious men with musket and pike, whose horses' hoofs had
defaced the mosaic pavements of cathedral. These hazel lanes, lovely
nut-tree boughs, with 'many an oak that grew thereby,' have been the
scene of historic events down from the days of St. Dunstan. In the quiet
of the Sunday afternoon, when the clashing of the bells was stilled,
there walked in the shade of the oaks a young priest and a lady. His
well-shaped form seemed the better shown by his flowing cassock; his
handsome face was refined by its air of late devotion. The lady, dressed
in the highest style of aristocratic fashion, that is to say with grace,
was evidently a member of good society. A little picture certainly: only
two figures, no pronounced action, no tragedy, yet what a meaning in that
cassock! It spoke of confession, of ritual, of transubstantiation, of all
the great historic romance of Rome ecclesiastical. The great romance of
Rome: its holy footsteps of St. Peter, its aerial dome of Michael Angelo,
its Vatican of ancient manuscripts, of beauteous statue and chariot--the
great romance of Rome, its Borgia, its dungeons and flames of the
Inquisition. A picture of two figures only, but consider the background.
Consider the thousands of broad English acres that now support great
monasteries and convents in quiet country places where one could scarce
expect to find a barn. The buildings are there; that is a solid fact,
take what view you like of them, or take none at all. There are men about
country roads with shaven crown and cassock whose dark Continental faces
have an unmistakable stamp of priesthood; faces that might be pictured
with those of the monks of old Spain. Women in long black cloaks, black
hoods and white coif, women with long black rosaries hanging from the
girdle, go to and fro among the wheat and the clover. One rubs one's
eyes. Are these the days of Friar Laurence and Juliet? Shall we meet the
mitred abbot with his sumpter mule? Shall we meet the mailed knights? In
some places whole villages belong to English monks, and there is not a
man or woman in them who is not a Catholic; there are even small country
towns which by dint of time, money, and territorial influence have been
re-absorbed, and are now as completely Catholic as they were before Henry
VIII. In these half-village half-towns you may chance on a busy market
day to come across a great building abutting on the street, and may
listen to the organ and the chant; there is incense and gorgeous
ceremony, the golden tinkle of the altar-bell. Bow your head, it is the
host; cross yourself, it is the mass. The butcher and the dealer are busy
with the sheep, but it is a saint's day. By-and-by no doubt we shall have
a village Lourdes at home, and miracles and pilgrimages and offerings and
shrines: the village will be right glad to see the pilgrims, if only they
come from the West End and have money in the purse. The village would be
very glad indeed of a miracle to bring it a shower of gold.




THE COUNTRY-SIDE: SUSSEX.


I

On the wall of an old barn by the great doors there still remains a
narrow strip of notice-board, much battered and weather-beaten: 'Beware
of steel ----' can be read, the rest has been broken off, but no doubt it
was 'traps.' 'Beware of steel traps,' a caution to thieves--a
reminiscence of those old days which many of our present writers and
leaders of opinion seem to think never existed. When the strong labourer
could hardly earn 7_s_. a week, when in some parishes scarcely half the
population got work at all, living, in the most literal sense, on the
parish, when bread was dear and the loaf was really life itself, then
that stern inscription had meaning enough. The granaries were full, the
people half starved. The wheat was threshed by the flail in full view of
the wretched, who could gaze through the broad doors at the golden grain;
the sparrows helped themselves, men dare not. At night men tried to steal
the corn, and had to be prevented by steel traps, like rats. To-day wheat
is so cheap, it scarcely pays to carry it to market. Some farmers have it
ground, and sell the flour direct to the consumer; some have used it for
feeding purposes--actually for hogs. The contrast is extraordinary.
Better let the hogs eat the corn than that man should starve. To-day the
sparrows are just as busy as ever of old, chatter, chirp around the old
barn, while the threshing machine hums, and every now and then lowers its
voice in a long-drawn descending groan of seemingly deep agony. Up it
rises again as the sheaves are cast in--hum, hum, hum; the note rises and
resounds and fills the yard up to the roof of the barn and the highest
tops of the ricks as a flood fills a pool, and overflowing, rushes abroad
over the fields, past the red hop-oast, past the copse of yellowing
larches, onwards to the hills. An inarticulate music--a chant telling of
the sunlit hours that have gone and the shadows that floated under the
clouds over the beautiful wheat. No more shall the tall stems wave in the
wind or listen to the bees seeking the clover-fields. The lark that sang
above the green corn, the partridge that sheltered among the yellow
stalks, the list of living things delighting in it--all have departed.
The joyous life of the wheat is ended--not in vain, for now the grain
becomes the life of man, and in that object yet more glorified. Outwards
the chant extending, reaches the hollows of the valley, rolling over the
shortened stubble, where the plough already begins the first verse of a
new time. A pleasant sound to listen to, the hum of the threshing, the
beating of the engine, the rustle of the straw, the shuffle shuffle of
the machine, the voices of the men, the occupation and bustle in the
autumn afternoon! I listened to it sitting in the hop-oast, whose tower,
like a castle turret, overlooks and domineers the yard. In the loft the
resounding hum whirled around, beating and rebounding from the walls, and
forcing its way out again through the narrow window. The edge, as it
were, of a sunbeam lit up the rude chamber crossed with unhewn beams and
roofed above with unconcealed tiles, whose fastening pegs were visible. A
great heap of golden scales lay in one corner, the hops fresh from the
drying. Up to his waist in a pocket let through the floor a huge giant of
a man trod the hops down in the sack, turning round and round, and now
his wide shoulders and now his red cheeks succeeded. The music twirled
him about as a leaf by the wind. Without the rich blue autumn sky; within
the fragrant odour of hops, the hum of the threshing circling round like
the buzz of an immense bee. As the hum of insects high in the atmosphere
of midsummer suits and fits to the roses and the full green meads, so the
hum of the threshing suits to the yellowing leaf and drowsy air of
autumn. The iteration of hum and monotone soothes, and means so much more
in its inarticulation than the adjusted chords and tune of written music.
Laughing, the children romped round the ricks; they love the threshing
and flock to it, they watch the fly-wheel rotating, they look in at the
furnace door when the engine-driver stokes his fire, they gaze
wonderingly at the gauge, and long to turn the brass taps; then with a
shout they rush to chase the unhappy mice dislodged from the corn. The
mice hide themselves in the petticoats of the women working at the
'sheening,' and the cottager when she goes home in the evening calls her
cat and shakes them out of her skirts. By a blue waggon the farmer stands
leaning on his staff. He is an invalid, and his staff, or rather pole, is
as tall as himself; he holds it athwart, one end touching the ground
beyond his left foot, the other near his right shoulder. His right hand
grasps it rather high, and his left down by his hip, so that the pole
forms a line across his body. In this way he is steadied and supported
and his whole weight relieved, much more so than it would be with an
ordinary walking-stick or with one in each hand. When he walks he keeps
putting the staff, which he calls a bat, in front, and so poles himself
along. There is an invalid boy in the yard, who walks with a similar
stick. The farmer is talking with a friend who has looked in from the
lane in passing, and carries a two-spean spud, or Canterbury hoe, with
points instead of a broad blade. They are saying that it is a 'pretty
day,' 'pretty weather'--it is always 'pretty' with them, instead of fine.
Pretty weather for the hopping; and so that leads on to climbing up into
the loft and handling the golden scales. The man with the hoe dips his
brown fist in the heap and gathers up a handful, noting as he does so how
the crisp, brittle, leaf-life substance of the hops crackles, and yet
does not exactly break in his palm. They must be dry, yet not too dry to
go to powder. They cling a little to the fingers, adhering to the skin,
sticky. He looks for rust and finds none, and pronounces it a good
sample. 'But there beant nothen' now like they old Grapes used to be,' he
concludes. The pair have not long gone down the narrow stairs when a
waggon stops outside in the lane, and up comes the carter to speak with
the 'drier'--the giant trampling round in the pocket--and to see how the
hops 'be getting on.' In five minutes another waggoner looks in, then a
couple of ploughboys, next a higgler passing by; no one walks or rides or
drives past the hop-kiln without calling to see how things are going on.
The carters cannot stay long, but the boys linger, eagerly waiting a
chance to help the 'drier,' even if only to reach him his handkerchief
from the nail. Round and round in the pocket brings out the perspiration,
and the dust of the hops gets into the air-passages and thickens on the
skin of his face. One of the lads has to push the hops towards him with a
rake. 'Don't you step on 'em too much, that'll break 'em.' On the light
breeze that comes now and then a little chaff floats in at the open
window from the threshing. A crooked sort of face appears in the doorway,
the body has halted halfway up--a semi-gipsy face--and the fellow thrusts
a basket before him on the floor. 'Want any herrings?' 'No, thankie--no,'
cries the giant. 'Not to-day, measter; thusty enough without they.'
Herrings are regularly carried round in hop-time to all the gardens, and
there is a great sale for them among the pickers. By degrees the 'drier'
rises higher in the pocket, coming up, as it were, through the floor
first his shoulders, then his body, and now his knees are visible. This
is the ancient way of filling a hop pocket; a machine is used now in
large kilns, but here, where there is only one cone, indicative of a
small garden, the old method is followed.

The steps on which I sit lead up to the door of the cone. Inside, the
green hops lie on the horsehair carpet, and the fumes of the sulphur
burning underneath come up through them. A vapour hangs about the surface
of the hops; looking upwards, the diminishing cone rises hollow to the
cowl, where a piece of blue sky can be seen. Round the cone a strip of
thin lathing is coiled on a spiral; could any one stand on these steps
and draw the inside of the cone? Could perspective be so managed as to
give the idea of the diminishing hollow and spiral? the side opposite
would not be so difficult, but the bit this side, overhead and almost
perpendicular, and so greatly foreshortened, how with that? It would be
necessary to make the spectator of the drawing feel as if this side of
the cone rose up from behind his head; as if his head were just inside
the cone. Would not this be as curious a bit of study as any that could
be found in the interior of old Continental churches, which people go so
many miles to see? Our own land is so full of interest. There are
pictures by the oldest Master everywhere in our own country, by the very
Master of the masters, by Time, whose crooked signature lies in the
corner of the shadowy farmhouse hearth.

Beneath the loft, on the ground-floor, I found the giant's couch. The bed
of a cart had been taken off its wheels, forming a very good bedstead,
dry and sheltered on three sides. On the fourth the sleeper's feet were
towards the charcoal fire. Opening the furnace door, he could sit there
and watch the blue and green tongues of sulphur flame curl round about
and above the glowing charcoal, the fumes rising to the hops on the
horsehair high over. The 'hoppers' in the garden used to bring their
kettles and pots to boil, till the practice grew too frequent, and was
stopped, because the constant opening of the furnace wasted the heat. The
sulphur comes in casks. A sulphur cask sawn down the middle, with a bit
left by the head for cover, is often used by the hoppers as a cradle.
Another favourite cradle is made from a trug basket, the handle cut off.
It is then like half a large eggshell, with cross pieces underneath to
prevent it from canting aside. This cradle is set on the bare ground in
the garden; when they move one woman takes hold of one end and a second
of the other, and thus carry the infant. If you ask them, they will find
you a 'hop-dog,' a handsome green caterpillar marked with black velvet
stripes and downy bands between. Their labour usually ends early in the
afternoon.

The giant at the kiln must watch and bide his time the night through till
the hops are ready to be withdrawn from the cone. He is alone. Deep
shadows gather round the farmstead and the ricks, and there is not a
sound, nothing but the rustle of a leaf falling from the hollow oak by
the gateway. But at midnight, just as the drier is drawing the hops, a
thunderstorm bursts, and the blue lightning lights up the red cone
without, blue as the sulphur flames creeping over the charcoal within. It
is lonely work for him in the storm. By day he has many little things to
do between the greater labours, to make the pockets (or sacks) by sewing
the sackcloth, or to mark the name of the farmer and the date with
stencil plates. For sewing up the mouth of the pocket when filled there
is a peculiar kind of string used; you may see it hanging up in any of
the country 'stores;' they are not shops, but stores of miscellaneous
articles. He must be careful not to fill his pockets too full of hops,
not to tread them too closely, else the sharp folk in the market will
suspect that unfair means have been resorted to to increase the weight,
and will cut the pocket all to pieces to see if it contains a few bricks.
Nor must it be too light; that will not do.

In this district, far from the great historic hop-fields of Kent, the
hops are really grown in gardens, little pieces often not more than half
an acre or even less in extent. Capricious as a woman, hops will only
flourish here and there; they have the strongest likes and dislikes, and
experience alone finds out what will suit them. These gardens are always
on a slope, if possible in the angle of a field and under shelter of a
copse, for the wind is the terror, and a great gale breaks them to
pieces; the bines are bruised, bunches torn off, and poles laid
prostrate. The gardens being so small, from five to forty acres in a
farm, of course but few pickers are required, and the hop-picking becomes
a 'close' business, entirely confined to home families, to the cottagers
working on the farm and their immediate friends. Instead of a scarcity of
labour, it is a matter of privilege to get a bin allotted to you. There
are no rough folk down from Bermondsey or Mile End way. All staid,
stay-at-home, labouring people--no riots; a little romping no doubt on
the sly, else the maids would not enjoy the season so much as they do.
But there are none of those wild hordes which collect about the greater
fields of Kent. Farmers' wives and daughters and many very respectable
girls go out to hopping, not so much for the money as the pleasant
out-of-door employment, which has an astonishing effect on the health.
Pale cheeks begin to glow again in the hop-fields. Children who have
suffered from whooping-cough are often sent out with the hop-pickers;
they play about on the bare ground in the most careless manner, and yet
recover. Air and hops are wonderful restoratives. After passing an
afternoon with the drier in the kiln, seated close to a great heap of
hops and inhaling the odour, I was in a condition of agreeable excitement
all the evening. My mind was full of fancy, imagination, flowing with
ideas; a sense of lightness and joyousness lifted me up. I wanted music,
and felt full of laughter. Like the half-fabled haschish, the golden
bloom of the hops had entered the nervous system; intoxication without
wine, without injurious after-effect, dream intoxication; they were wine
for the nerves. If hops only grew in the Far East we should think wonders
of so powerful a plant. At hop-picking a girl can earn about 10_s_. a
week, so that it is not such a highly paid employment as might be
supposed from the talk there is about it. The advantages are sideways, so
to say; a whole family can work at the same time, and the sum-total
becomes considerable. Hopping happily comes on just after corn harvest,
so that the labourers get two harvest-times. The farmers find it an
expensive crop. It costs 50_l_. or 60_l_. to pick a very small garden,
and if the Egyptian plague of insects has prevailed the price at market
will not repay the expenditure. The people talk much of a possible duty
on foreign hops. The hop farmer should have a lady-bird on his seal ring
for his sign and token, for the lady-bird is his great friend. Lady-birds
(and their larvae) destroy myriads of the aphides which cause rust, and a
flight of lady-birds should be welcomed as much as a flight of locusts is
execrated in other countries.


II.

One of the hop-picking women told me how she went to church and the
parson preached such a curious sermon, all about our 'innerds' (inwards,
insides), and how many 'boanes' we had, and by-and-by 'he told us that we
were the only beasts who had the use of our hands.' Years since at
village schools the girls used to swallow pins; first one would do it,
then another, presently half the school were taking pins. Ignorant of
physiology! Yet they did not seem to suffer; the pins did not penetrate
the pleura or lodge in the processes. Now Anatomy climbs into the pulpit
and shakes a bony fist at the congregation. That is the humerus of it, as
Corporal Nym might say. At the late election--the cow election--the
candidates were Brown, Conservative, and Stiggins, Liberal. The day after
the polling a farm labourer was asked how he filled up his voting paper.
'Oh,' said he full of the promised cow, 'I doan't care for that there
Brown chap, he bean't no good; zo I jest put a cross agen he, and voted
for Stiggins.' The dream of life was accomplished, the labourer had a
vote, and--irony--he voted exactly opposite to his intent.

Too-whoo! ooo!--the sound of a horn,--the hunt was up; but this was not
the hunting season. Looking out of the kiln door I saw a boy running at
full speed down the lane with a small drain-pipe tucked under his arm. He
stopped, put the pipe to his mouth, and blew a blast on this 'dread
horn,' then jumped through a gap in the hedge and disappeared. They were
playing fox and hounds; who but a boy would have thought of using a
drain-pipe for a horn? It gave a good note, too. In and about the kiln I
learned that if you smash a frog with a stone, no matter how hard you hit
him, he cannot die till sunset. You must be careful not to put on any new
article of clothing for the first time on a Saturday, or some severe
punishment will ensue. One person put on his new boots on a Saturday, and
on Monday broke his arm. Some still believe in herbs, and gather
wood-betony for herb tea, or eat dandelion leaves between slices of dry
toast. There is an old man living in one of the villages who has reached
the age of a hundred and sixty years, and still goes hop-picking. Ever so
many people had seen him, and knew all about him; an undoubted fact, a
public fact; but I could not trace him to his lair. His exact whereabouts
could not be fixed. I live in hopes of finding him in some obscure 'Hole'
yet (many little hamlets are 'Holes,' as Froghole, Foxhole). What an
exhibit for London! Did he realise his own value, he would soon come
forth. I joke, but the existence of this antique person is firmly
believed in. Sparrows are called 'spadgers.' The cat wandering about got
caught in the rat-clams--_i.e._ a gin. Another cat was the miller's
favourite at the windmill, a well-fed, happy, purring pussy, fond of the
floury miller--he as white as snow, she as black as a coal. One day pussy
was ingeniously examining the machinery, when the wind suddenly rose, the
sails revolved, and she was ground up, fulfilling the ogre's
threat--'I'll grind his bones to make my bread.' This was not so sad as
the fate of the innkeeper's cow. You have read the 'Arabian Nights'--that
book of wisdom, for in truth the stories are no stories; they are the
records of ancient experience, the experience of a thousand years, and
some of them are as true and as deeply to be pondered on as anything in
the holiest books the world reverences. You remember the Three Calenders,
each of whom lost an eye--struck out in the most arbitrary and cruel
fashion. The innkeeper had a cow, a very pretty, quiet cow, but in time
it came about that her left horn, turning inwards, grew in such a manner
that it threatened to force the point into her head. To remedy this the
top of the horn was sawn off and a brass knob fastened on the tip, as is
the custom. The cow passed the summer in the meadows with the rest, till
by-and-by it was found that she had gone blind in the left eye. It
happened in this way: the rays of the sun heated the brass knob and so
destroyed the sight. Unable to call attention to its suffering, the poor
creature was compelled to endure, and could not escape. Now the Three
Calenders could speak, and had the advantage of human intelligence, and
yet each lost an eye, and they were as helpless in the hands of fate as
this poor animal.

Down in one of the hamlets there was a forge to which all the workpeople
who wanted any tools sharpened carried their instruments, the smith being
able to put a better edge on. Other blacksmiths or carpenters, if they
required a particularly good edge for some purpose, came to him. This art
he had acquired from his grandfather as a sort of heirloom or secret. The
grandfather while at work used to trouble and puzzle himself how to get a
very sharp edge, and at length one night he dreamed how to do it. From
that time he became prosperous. If a celebrated sonata was revealed in a
dream, why not the way to sharpen a chisel?

When he was tired the drier said he was 'dreggy.' They were talking of
the lambs, and how that dry season they had scarcely any sweetbreads. The
sweetbreads were so scanty, the butchers did not even offer them for
sale; the lambs had fed on dry food. In seasons when there was plenty of
grass and green food they had good large sweetbreads, white as milk. The
character of the food does thus under some circumstances really alter the
condition of an organ. The sweetbread is the pancreas; now a deficient
pancreatic action is supposed to play a great part in consumption and
other wasting diseases. Have we here, then, an indication that when the
pancreas may be suspected plenty of succulent food and plenty of liquid
are nature's remedies? We looked over at the pigs in the sty. They were
rooting about in a mess of garbage. 'Oh, what dirty things pigs are!'
said a lady. 'Yes, ma'am; they're rightly named,' said he. Some
scientific gentleman in the district had a large telescope with which he
made frequent observations, and at times would let a labouring man look
at the moon. 'Ah,' said our friend, shaking his head in a solemn,
impressive way, 'my brother, he see through it; he see great rocks and
seas up there. He say he never want to see through it no more. He wish he
never looked through him at all.' The poor man was dreadfully frightened
at what he had seen in the moon. At first I laughed at the story and the
odd idea of a huge, great fellow being alarmed at a glance through a
telescope. Since then, however, on reflection, it seems to me perfectly
natural. He was illiterate; he had never read of astronomy; to him it was
really like a sudden peep into another world, for the instrument was
exceptionally powerful, and the view of the sunlight on the peaks and the
shadows in the valleys must have been extraordinary to him. There was
nothing to laugh at; the incident shows what a great and wonderful thing
it is that rocks and mountains should be whirled along over our heads.
The idea has become familiarised to us by reading, but the fact is none
the less marvellous. This man saw the fact first, before he had the idea,
and he had sufficient imagination to realise it. At the village post
office they ask for 'Letterhead, please, sir,' instead of a stamp, for it
is characteristic of the cottager that whatever words he uses must be
different from those employed by other people. Stamp is as familiar to
him as to you, yet he prefers to say 'letterhead'--because he does. There
are many curious old houses, some of them timbered, still standing in
these parts. The immense hearths which were once necessary for burning
wood are now occupied with 'duck's-nest' grates, so called from the bars
forming a sort of nest. In one of the hamlets the women touched their
hats to us.

Not far from the hop-kiln I found a place where charcoal-burning was
carried on. The brown charcoal-burner, upright as a bolt, walked slowly
round the smouldering heap, and wherever flame seemed inclined to break
out cast damp ashes upon the spot. Six or seven water-butts stood in a
row for his use. To windward he had built a fence of flakes, or wattles
as they are called here, well worked in with brushwood, to break the
force of the draught along the hill-side, which would have caused too
fierce a fire. At one side stood his hut of poles meeting in a cone,
wrapped round with rough canvas. Besides his rake and shovel and a short
ladder, he showed me a tool like an immense gridiron, bent half double,
and fitted to a handle in the same way as a spade. This was for sifting
charcoal when burned, and separating the small from the larger pieces.
Every now and then a puff of smoke rose from the heap and drifted along;
it has a peculiar odour, a dense, thick smell of smothered wood coal, to
me not disagreeable, but to some people so annoying that they have been
known to leave their houses and abandon a locality where charcoal-burning
was practised. Dim memories of old days come crowding round me, invisible
to him, to me visible and alive, of the kings, great hunters, who met
with the charcoal-burners in the vast forests of mediaeval days, of the
noble knights and dames whom the rude charcoal-burners guided to their
castles through trackless wastes, and all the romance of old. Scarcely is
there a tale of knightly adventure that does not in some way or other
mention these men, whose occupation fixed them in the wildernesses which
of yore stretched between cultivated places. I looked at the modern
charcoal-burner with interest. He was brown, good-looking, upright, and
distinctly superior in general style to the common run of working men. He
spoke without broad accent and used correct language; he was well
educated and up to the age. He knew his own mind, and had an independent
expression; a very civil, intelligent, and straightforward man. No rude
charcoal-burner of old days this. We stood close to the highway road; a
gentleman's house was within stone's throw; the spot, like the man, was
altogether the reverse of what we read in ancient story. Yet such is the
force of association that I could not even now divest myself of those dim
memories and living dreams of old; there seemed as it were the clank of
armour, a rustic of pennons in the leaves; it would have been quite
natural to hold bow and arrow in the hand. The man was modern, but his
office was ancient. The descent was unbroken. The charcoal-burner traced
back to the Norman Conquest. That very spot where we stood, now
surrounded with meadows and near dwellings, scarcely thirty years since
had formed part of one of the largest of the old forests. It was forest
land. Woods away on the slope still remained to witness to traditions. As
the charcoal-burner worked beside the modern highway, so his trade had
come down and was still practised in the midst of modern trades, in these
times of sea-coal and steam. He told me that he and his brothers were
maintained by charcoal-burning the year through, and, it appeared, in a
very comfortable position. They only burned a small quantity here; they
moved about from place to place in the woods, according as the timber was
thrown. They often stopped for weeks in the woods, watching the fires all
night. A great part of the work was done in the winter, beginning in
October--after the hop-picking. Now resting in his lonely hut, now
walking round and tending the smoking heap, the charcoal-burner watched
out the long winter nights while the stars drifted over the leafless
trees, till the grey dawn came with hoar-frost. He liked his office, but
owned that the winter nights were very long. Starlight and frost and slow
time are the same now as when the red deer and the wild boar dwelt in the
forest. Much of the charcoal was prepared for hop-drying, large
quantities being used for that purpose. At one time a considerable amount
was rebaked for patent fuel, and the last use to which it had been put
was in carrying out some process with Australian meat. It was still
necessary in several trades. Goldsmiths used charcoal for soldering. They
preferred the charcoal made from the thick bark of the butts of birch
trees. At the foot or butt of the birch the bark grows very thick, in
contrast to the rind higher, which is thinner than on other trees. Lord
Sheffield's mansion at Fletching was the last great house he knew that
was entirely warmed with charcoal, nothing else being burnt. Charcoal was
still used in houses for heating plates. But the principal demand seemed
to be for hop-drying purposes--the charcoal burned in the kiln where I
had been resting was made on the spot. This heap he was now burning was
all of birch poles, and would be four days and four nights completing. On
the fourth morning it was drawn, and about seventy sacks were filled, the
charcoal being roughly sorted.

The ancient forest land is still wild enough, there is no seeming end to
the heath and fern on the ridges or to the woods in the valleys. These
moor-like stretches bear a resemblance to parts of Exmoor. The oaks that
once reached from here to the sea-shore were burned to smelt the iron in
the days when Sussex was the great iron land. For charcoal the vast
forests were cut down; it seems strange to think that cannon were once
cast--the cannon that won India for us--where now the hops grow and the
plough travels slowly, so opposite as they are to the roaring furnace and
the ringing hammer. Burned and blasted by the heat, the ground where the
furnaces were still retains the marks of the fire. But to-day there is
silence; the sunshine lights up the purple heather and the already
yellowing fern; the tall and beautiful larches stand graceful in the
stillness. Their lines always flow in pleasant curves; they need no wind
to bend them into loveliness of form: so quiet and deserted is the place
that the wide highway road is green with vegetation, and the impression
of our wheels is the only trace upon them. Looking up, the road--up the
hill--it appears green almost from side to side. It is well made and
firm, and fit for any traffic; but a growth of minute weeds has sprung
up, and upon these our wheels leave their marks. Of roads that have
become grass--grown in war--desolated countries we have all read, but
this is our own unscathed England.

The nature of the ancient forest, its quiet and untrodden silence,
adheres to the site. Far down in the valley there is more stirring, and
the way is well pulverised. In the hollow there is an open space, backed
by the old beech trees of the park, dotted with ashes, and in the midst a
farmhouse partly timbered. Here by the road-side they point out to you a
low mound, at the very edge of the road, which could easily be passed
unnoticed as a mere heap of scrapings overgrown with weeds and thistles.
On looking closer it appears more regularly shaped; it is indeed a grave.
Of old time an unfortunate woman committed suicide, and according to the
barbarous law of those days her body was buried at the cross-roads and a
stake driven through it. That was the end so far as the brutal law of the
land went. But the road-menders, with better hearts, from that day to
this have always kept up the mound. However beautiful the day, however
beautiful the beech trees and the ashes that stand apart, there is always
a melancholy feeling in passing the place. This thistle-grown mound
saddens the whole; it is impossible to forget it; it lies, as it were,
under everything, under the beeches, the sunlit sward and fern. The mark
of death is there. The dogs and the driven cattle tread the spot; a human
being has passed into dust. The circumstance of the mound having been
kept up so many years bears curious testimony to the force of tradition.
Many writers altogether deny the value of tradition. Dr. Schliemann's
spade, however, found Troy. Perhaps tradition is like the fool of the
saying, and is sometimes right.




SWALLOW-TIME



The cave-swallows have come at last with the midsummer-time, and the hay
and white clover and warm winds that breathe hotly, like one that has
been running uphill. With the paler hawkweeds, whose edges are so
delicately trimmed and cut and balanced, almost as if made by cleft human
fingers to human design, whose globes of down are like geometrical
circles built up of facets, instead of by one revolution of the
compasses. With foxglove, and dragon-fly, and yellowing wheat; with green
cones of fir, and boom of distant thunder, and all things that say, 'It
is summer.' Not many of them even now, sometimes only two in the air
together, sometimes three or four, and one day eight, the very greatest
number--a mere handful, for these cave-swallows at such times should
crowd the sky. The white bars across their backs should be seen gliding
beside the dark fir copse a quarter of a mile away. They should be seen
everywhere, over the house, and to and fro the eaves, where half last
year's nest remains; over the meadows and high up in the blue ether.
White breasts should gleam in the azure height, appearing and
disappearing as they climb or sink, and wheel and slide through those
long boomerang-like flights that suddenly take them a hundred yards
aside. They should crowd the sky together with the ruddy-throated
chimney-swallows, and the great swifts; but though it is hay-time and the
apples are set, yet eight eave-swallows is the largest number I have
counted in one afternoon. They did not come at all in the spring. After
the heavy winter cleared away, the delicate willow-wrens soon sang in the
tops of the beautiful green larches, the nightingale came, and the
cuckoo, the chimney-swallow, the doves softly cooing as the oaks came
into leaf, and the black swifts. Up to May 26 there were no eave-swallows
at the Sussex hill-side where these notes were taken; that is more than a
month later than the date of their usual arrival, which would be about
the middle of April. After this they gradually came back. The
chimney-swallows were not so late, but even they are not so numerous as
usual. The swifts seem to have come more in their accustomed numbers.
Now, the swallows are, of all others, the summer birds. As well suppose
the trees without leaves as the summer air without swallows. Ever since
of old time the Greeks went round from house to house in spring singing
the swallow song, these birds have been looked upon as the friends of
man, and almost as the very givers of the sunshine.

  The swallow's come, winging
   His way to us here;
  Fair hours is he bringing,
   And a happy new year!

They had a song for everything, the mill song, the reapers' song, just as
in Somerset, the apple country, they still have a cider song, or perhaps,
rather, an orchard song. Such rhymes might well be chanted about the hay
and the wheat, or at the coming of the green leaf, or the yellowing of
the acorns, when the cawing of the rooks is incessant, a kind of autumn
festival. It seems so natural that the events of the year should be met
with a song. But somehow a very hard and unobservant spirit has got
abroad into our rural life, and people do not note things as the old folk
did. They do not mark the coming of the swallows, nor any of the dates
that make the woodland almanack. It is a pity that there should be such
indifference--that the harsh ways of the modern town should press so
heavily on the country. This summer, too, there seems a marked absence of
bees, butterflies, and other insects in the fields. One bee will come
along, calling at every head of white clover. By-and-by you may see one
more calling at the heathbells, and nothing else, as in each journey they
visit only the flower with which they began. Then there will be quite an
interval before a third bee is seen, and a fourth may be found dead
perhaps on the path, besides which you may not notice any more. For a
whole hour you may not observe a humble-bee, and the wasp-like
hover-flies, that are generally past all thought of counting, are
scarcely seen. A blue butterfly we found in the dust of the road, without
the spirit to fly, and lifted him into a field to let him have a chance
of life; a few tortoiseshells, and so on--even the white butterflies are
quite uncommon, the whites that used to drift along like snowflakes.
Where are they all? Did the snow kill them? Is there any connection
between the absence of insects and the absence of swallows? If so, how
did the swallows know beforehand, without coming, that there were no
insects for them? Yet the midsummer hum, the deep humming sound in the
atmosphere above, has been loud and persistent over the hayfields, so
that there must have been the usual myriads of the insects that cause
this sound. While I was thinking in this way a swallow alighted on the
turf, picked up a small white moth from among the short grass, and went
off with it. In gloomy overcast weather the swallows at the sea-side
frequently alight on the pebbles of the beach to pick up the insects
which will not rise and fly. Some beaches and sandbanks are much
frequented by insects, and black clouds of them sometimes come drifting
along, striking the face like small hail.

When swallows fly low, just skimming the ground, it is supposed to be a
sign of rain. During the frequent intervals of heavy, overcast weather
which have marked this summer, they might have been observed flying low
for a week together without a spot of rain falling. Chilly air drives
insects downwards, and, indeed, paralyses a great many of them
altogether. It is a fall of temperature, and not wet, that makes the
swallows chase their prey low down. Insects are not much afraid of rain
if it is warm and soft, so that in the midst of showers, if there is
sunshine too, you may see the swallows high in the atmosphere. It is when
they fly low, but just missing the grass, that their wonderful powers of
flight appear. In the air above there are no obstacles, and if you shoot
an arrow it travels to the end of its journey without let or hindrance;
there are no streets there to turn corners, no narrow lanes, no trees or
hedges. When the shallow comes down to the earth his path is no longer
that of the immortals, his way is as the way of men, constantly
obstructed, and made a thousandfold more difficult by the velocity of his
passage. Imagine shooting an arrow from the strongest bow in such a
manner that it might travel about seven inches above the ground--how far
would it go before it would strike a tall buttercup, a wiry bennet, or
stick into a slight rise of the turf? You must imagine it given the power
to rise over hedges, to make short angles about buildings, slip between
the trunks of trees, to avoid moving objects, as men or animals, not to
come in contact with other animated arrows, and by some mysterious
instinct to know what is or what is not out of sight on the other side of
the wall. I was sitting on a log in the narrowest of narrow lanes, a
hedge at the back, in front thick fir trees, whose boughs touched the
ground, almost within reach, the lane being nothing more than a broader
footpath. It was one of those overcast days when the shelter of the hedge
and the furze was pleasant in July. Suddenly a swallow slid by me as it
seemed underneath my very hands, so close to the ground that he almost
travelled in the rut, the least movement on my part would have stopped
him. Almost before I could lift my head he had reached the end of the
lane and rose over the gate into the road--not a moments pause before he
made that leap over the gate to see if there was a waggon or not in the
way; a waggon-load of hay would have blocked the road entirely. How did
he know that a man or a horse would not step into his course at the
instant he topped the bar?

A swallow never hesitates, never looks before he leaps, threads all day
the eyes of needles, and goes on from half-past two in the morning till
ten at night, without so much as disturbing a feather. He is the
perfection of a machine for falling. His round nest is under the eaves,
he throws himself out of window and begins to fall, and keeps on fall,
fall, for twenty hours together. His head is bullet-shaped, his neck
short, his body all thickened up to the shoulders, tailing out to the
merest streak of feather. His form is like a plummet--he is not unlike
the heavily weighted minnow used in trolling for pike. Before the bend of
the firmly elastic rod, the leaded minnow slides out through the air,
running true and sinking without splash into the water. It is
proportioned and weighted so that its flight, which is a long fall, may
be smooth, and perfectly under control. If wings could be put to the
minnow, it would somewhat resemble the swallow. For the swallow is made
to fall, and his wings to catch him, and by resisting his descent these
outstretched planes lift him again into the sky. He does not fall
perpendicularly, the angle of his fall is prolonged and very low, and the
swifter he goes the more nearly it approximates to the horizontal. I
think he goes swifter when flying just over the ground than when lounging
in the easy hammock of the atmosphere. My swallow that came down the
lane, in twenty yards opened his wings twenty times and checked his fall,
almost grazing the earth, and imperceptibly rose a little, like a flat
stone thrown by a boy which suddenly runs up into the air at the end of
its flight. He made no blow with his wings; they were simply put out to
collect the air in the hollow of their curves, and so prolong his fall.
Falling from morn till night, he throws himself on his way, a machine for
turning gravity into a motive force. He fits to the circumstances of his
flight as water fits to the circumstances of the vessel into which it is
poured. No thought, no stop, no rest. If a waggon had been in the way,
still he would have got left or right through the very eye of the needle.
If a man had been passing, the rush of his wings would not have disturbed
the light smoke from his cigar. Farther up the lane there are two
gateways opposite without gates. Through these swallows are continually
dashing, and I have often felt when coming up the lane as if I must step
on them, and half checked myself. I might as well try to step on
lightning. A swallow came over the sharp ridge of a slate roof and met a
slight current of wind which blew against that side of the shed and rose
up it. The bird remained there suspended with outstretched wings, resting
on the up-current as if the air had been solid, for some moments. He rode
there at anchor in the air. So buoyant is the swallow that it is no more
to him to fly than it is to the fish to swim; and, indeed, I think that a
trout in a swift mountain stream needs much greater strength to hold
himself in the rapid day and night without rest. The friction of the
water is constant against him, and he never folds his fins and sleeps.
The more I think the more I am convinced that the buoyancy of the air is
very far greater than science admits, and under certain conditions it is
superior to water as a supporting medium. Swift and mobile as is the
swallow's wing, how much swifter and how much more mobile must be his
eye! This rapid and ever-changing course is not followed for pleasure as
if it were a mazy dance. The whole time as he floats, and glides, and
wheels, his eye is intent on insects so small as to be invisible to us at
a very short distance. These he gathers in the air, he sees what we
cannot see, his eyes are to our eyes as his wings are to our limbs. If
still further we were to consider the flow of the nerve force between the
eye, the mind, and the wing, we should be face to face with problems
which quite upset the ordinary ideas of matter as a solid thing. How is
it that dull matter becomes thus inexpressibly sensitive? Is not the
swallow's eye a miracle? Then his heart, for he sings as he flies; he
makes love and converses, and all as he rushes along--his hopes, his
fears, his little store of knowledge, and his wonderful journey by-and-by
to Africa. Remember, he carries his life in his wings as we should say in
our hands, for if by chance he should strike a solid object, his great
speed renders the collision certain death. It stuns him, and if he
recovers from that his beak is usually broken so that he must starve.
Happily such accidents are rare. The great rapidity of a bird's heart
beating so fast seems to render it peculiarly susceptible to death from
shock. Great fright will sometimes kill a bird, as for instance, when
they have wandered inside a room, and been thoughtlessly held in some
one's hand. Without visible injury, the heart, after beating excessively
violently, almost as rapidly slows, the nictitating membrane is drawn
over the eyes, the head falls to one side, and the bird becomes lifeless
from nervous exhaustion. The beautiful swallows, be tender to them, for
they symbol all that is best in nature and all that is best in our
hearts.




BUCKHURST PARK.



An old beech tree had been broken off about five feet from the ground,
and becoming hollow within, was filled with the decay of its own
substance. In this wood-sorrel had taken root, and flower and leaf
covered the space within, white flower and green leaf flourishing on old
age. The wood-sorrel leaf, the triune leaf, is perhaps more lovely even
than the flower, like a more delicately shaped clover of a tenderer
green, and it lasts far on into the autumn. When the violet leaves are no
more looked for, when the cowslips have gone, and the bluebells have left
nothing behind them but their nodding seed-cases, still the wood-sorrel
leaf stays on the mound, in shape and colour the same, and as pleasantly
acid to the taste now under the ripening nuts as in May. At its coming it
is folded almost like a. green flower; at Midsummer, when you are
gathering ferns, you find its trefoil deep under the boughs; it grows,
too, in the crevices of the rock over the spring. The whortleberry
leaves, that were green as the myrtle when the wood-sorrel was in bloom,
have faded somewhat now that their berries are ripening. Another beech
has gone over, and lies at full length, a shattered tube, as it were, of
timber; for it is so rotten within, and so hollow and bored, it is little
else than bark. Others that stand are tubes on end, with rounded
knot-holes, loved by the birds, that let air and moisture into the very
heart of the wood. They are hardly safe in a strong wind. Others again,
very large and much shorter, have sent up four trunks from one root, a
little like a banyan, quadruple trees built for centuries, throwing
abroad a vast roof of foliage, whose green in the midst of summer is made
brown by sacks and sacks of beech nuts. These are the trees to camp by,
and that are chosen by painters. The bark of the beech is itself a panel
to study, spotted with velvet moss brown-green, made grey with
close-grown lichen, stained with its own hues of growth, and toned by
time. To these add bright sunlight and leaf shadow, the sudden lowering
of tint as a cloud passes, the different aspects of the day and the
evening, and the changes of rain and dry weather. You may look at the
bark of a beech twenty times and always find it different. After crossing
Virgil's Bridge in the deep coombe at the bottom of Marden Hill these
great beeches begin, true woodland trees, and somehow more forest-like
than the hundreds and hundreds of acres of fir trees that are called
forest. There is another spirit among the beech trees; they look like
deer and memories of old English life.

The wood cooper follows his trade in a rude shed, splitting poles and
making hoops the year through, in warm summer and iron-clad winter. His
shed is always pitched at the edge of a great woodland district. Where
the road has worn in deeply the roots of the beeches hang over, twisted
in and out like a giant matting, a kind of cave under them. Dark yew
trees and holly trees stand here and there; a yew is completely barked on
one side, stripped clean. If you look close you will see scores in the
wood as if made with a great nail. Those who know Exmoor will recognise
these signs in a moment; it is a fraying-post where the stags rubbed the
velvet from their horns last summer. There are herds of red deer in the
park. At one time there were said to be almost as many as run free and
wild over the expanse of Exmoor. They mark the trees very much,
especially those with the softer bark. Wire fencing has been put round
many of the hollies to protect them. A stag occasionally leaps the
boundary and forages among the farmers' corn, or visits a garden, and
then the owner can form some idea of what must have been the difficulties
of agriculture in mediaeval days. Deer more than double the interest of a
park. A park without deer is like a wall without pictures. However well
proportioned the room, something is lacking if the walls be blank.
However noble the oaks and wide the sweep of sward, there is something
wanting if antlers do not rise above the fern. The pictures that the deer
make are moving and alive; they dissolve and re-form in a distant frame
of tree and brake. Lately the herd has been somewhat thinned, having
become too numerous. One slope is bare of grass, a patch of yellow sand,
which if looked at intently from a distance seems presently to be all
alive like mites in cheese, so thick are the rabbits in the warren. Under
a little house, as it were, built over a stream is a chalybeate fountain
with virtues like those of Tunbridge Wells.

The park is open to visitors--here comes a gay four-in-hand heavily
loaded sweeping by on its road to that summer town. There is much
ironstone in the soil round about. At the edge of the park stands an old
farmhouse of timber and red tile, with red oast-house beside it, built
with those gables which our ancestors seemed to think made such excellent
rooms within. Our modern architects try to make their rooms
mathematically square, a series of brick boxes, one on the other like
pigeon-holes in a bureau, with flat ceilings and right angles in the
corners, and are said to go through a profound education before they can
produce these wonderful specimens of art. If our old English folk could
not get an arched roof, then they loved to have it pointed, with polished
timber beams in which the eye rested as in looking upwards through a
tree. Their rooms they liked of many shapes, and not at right angles in
the corners, nor all on the same dead level of flooring. You had to go up
a step into one, and down a step into another, and along a winding
passage into a third, so that each part of the house had its
individuality. To these houses life fitted itself and grew to them; they
were not mere walls, but became part of existence. A man's house was not
only his castle, a man's house was himself. He could not tear himself
away from his house, it was like tearing up the shrieking mandrake by the
root, almost death itself. Now we walk in and out of our brick boxes
unconcerned whether we live in this villa or that, here or yonder. Dark
beams inlaid in the walls support the gables; heavier timber, placed
horizontally, forms, as it were, the foundation of the first floor. This
horizontal beam has warped a little in the course of time, the alternate
heat and cold of summers and winters that make centuries. Up to this beam
the lower wall is built of brick set to the curve of the timber, from
which circumstance it would appear to be a modern insertion. The beam, we
may be sure, was straight originally, and the bricks have been fitted to
the curve which it subsequently took. Time, no doubt, ate away the lower
work of wood, and necessitated the insertion of new materials. The slight
curve of the great beam adds, I think, to the interest of the old place,
for it is a curve that has grown and was not premeditated; it has grown
like the bough of a tree, not from any set human design. This, too, is
the character of the house. It is not large, nor overburdened with
gables, not ornamental, nor what is called striking, in any way, but
simply an old English house, genuine and true. The warm sunlight falls on
the old red tiles, the dark beams look the darker for the glow of light,
the shapely cone of the hop-oast rises at the end; there are swallows and
flowers, and ricks and horses, and so it is beautiful because it is
natural and honest. It is the simplicity that makes it so touching, like
the words of an old ballad. Now at Mayfield there is a timber house which
is something of a show place, and people go to see it, and which
certainly has many more lines in its curves and woodwork, but yet did not
appeal to me, because it seemed too purposely ornamental. A house
designed to look well, even age has not taken from it its artificiality.
Neither is there any cone nor cart-horses about. Why, even a tall
chanticleer makes a home look homely. I do like to see a tall proud
chanticleer strutting in the yard and barely giving way as I advance,
almost ready to do battle with a stranger like a mastiff. So I prefer the
simple old home by Buckhurst Park.

The beeches and oaks become fewer as the ground rises, there are wide
spaces of bracken and little woods or copses, every one of which is
called a 'shaw.' Then come the firs, whose crowded spires, each touching
each, succeed for miles, and cover the hill-side with a solid mass of
green. They seem so close together, so thickened and matted, impenetrable
to footsteps, like a mound of earth rather than woods, a solid block of
wood; but there are ways that wind through and space between the taller
trunks when you come near. The odour of firs is variable; sometimes it
fills the air, sometimes it is absent altogether, and doubtless depends
upon certain conditions of the atmosphere. A very small pinch of the
fresh shoot is pleasant to taste; these shoots, eaten constantly, were
once considered to cure chest disease, and to this day science endeavours
by various forms of inhalations from fir products to check that malady.
Common rural experience, as with the cow-pox, has often laid the basis of
medical treatment. Certain it is that it is extremely pleasant and
grateful to breathe the sweet fragrance of the fir deep in the woods,
listening to the soft caressing sound of the wind that passes high
overhead. The willow-wren sings, but his voice and that of the wind seem
to give emphasis to the holy and meditative silence. The mystery of
nature and life hover about the columned temple of the forest. The secret
is always behind a tree, as of old time it was always behind the pillar
of the temple. Still higher, and as the firs cease, and shower and
sunshine, wind and dew, can reach the ground unchecked, comes the tufted
heath and branched heather of the moorland top. A thousand acres of
purple heath sloping southwards to the sun, deep valleys of dark heather;
further slopes beyond of purple, more valleys of heather--the heath shows
more in the sunlight, and heather darkens the shadow of the hollows--and
so on and on, mile after mile, till the heath-bells seem to end in the
sunset. Round and beyond is the immense plain of the air---you feel how
limitless the air is at this height, for there is nothing to measure it
by. Past the weald lie the South Downs, but they form no boundary, the
plain of the air goes over them to the sea and space.

This wild tract of Ashdown Forest bears much resemblance to Exmoor; you
may walk, or you may ride, for hours and meet no one; and if black game
were to start up it would not surprise you in the least. There seems room
enough to chase the red stag from Buckhurst Park with horn and hound
till, mayhap, he ended in the sea at Pevensey. Buckhurst Park is the
centre of this immense manor. Of old time the deer did run wild, and were
hunted till the pale was broken in the great Civil War. The 'Forest' is
still in every one's mouth--'on the Forest,' 'by the Forest,' 'in' it, or
'over' it, everything comes from the 'Forest,' even stone to mend the
roads, or 'through the Forest,' as up from Brighton. People say this farm
used to be forest, or this garden or this house was the first built on
the forest. The enclosures are small, and look as if they had been hewn
out of wood or stubbed out of heather, and there are numbers of small
owners or settlers. Here and there a house stands, as it seems, alone in
the world on the Forest ridge, thousands of acres of heather around, the
deep weald underneath--as at Duddleswell, a look-out, as it were, over
the earth. Forest Row, where they say the courtiers had their booths in
ancient hunting days; Forest Fold, Boar's-head Street, Greenwood
Gate--all have a forest sound; and what prettier name could there be than
Sweet-Haws? Greybirchet Wood, again; Mossbarn, Highbroom, and so on.
Outlying woods in every direction are fragments of the forest, you cannot
get away from it; and look over whatever gate you will, there is always a
view. In the vale, if you look over a gate you only see that field and
nothing beyond; the view is bounded by the opposite hedge. Here there is
always a deep coombe, or the top of a wood underneath, or a rising slope,
or a distant ridge crowned with red-tiled farmstead, red-coned
oast-house, and tall spruce firs. Or far away, miles and miles, the
fields of the weald pushed close together by distance till in a surface
no larger than the floor of a room there are six or seven farms and a
village. Clouds drift over; it is a wonderful observatory for cloud
studies; they seem so close, the light is so strong, and there is nothing
to check the sight as far as its powers will reach. Clouds come up no
wider than a pasture-field, but in length stretching out to the very
horizon, dividing the blue sky into two halves; but then every day has
its different clouds--the fleets of heaven that are always sailing on and
know no haven.




HOUSE-MARTINS.



Of five houses, a stable, and chapel wall, much frequented by martins,
the aspects were as follows:--House No. 1, nests on the north side, south
side, and east, both the south and east very warm; No. 2, on the south
and east walls--these walls met in an angle, and as it were enclosed the
sunbeams, making it very heated sometimes; No. 3, on the south and west
walls, the warmest sides of the building; No. 4, all along under the
southern eaves, a very warm wall; No. 5, also under the southern eaves,
and not elsewhere. The stable fronted south; there were nests front and
back, north and south; the chapel eave that was frequented faced towards
the west. In the case of several other houses the nests were on the sunny
side; but I am not so well acquainted with the localities. So far as my
observation goes, I think the house-martin--with all the swallow
tribe--prefers warmth, and, if possible, chooses the sunny side of a
building. A consideration, however, that weighs much with this bird is
the character of the take-off; he likes a space immediately in front of
his nest, free of trees or other obstructions, so that when rushing out
from his little doorway he may not strike against anything. For ages it
has also been remarked that the house-martin likes the proximity of man,
and will build by choice in or over a porch or doorway, whether of house
or stable, or over a window--somewhere where man is about. It is curious
that in this country, so subject to cold and cold winds, so many houses
are built to face north or east, and this fact often compels the
house-martin to build that side, the back of a house being frequently
obstructed. In the case of house No. 1 there was a clear take-off on the
north side, also with the stable. Houses are generally built to face the
road, quite irrespective of the aspect, which custom is the origin of
many cheerless dwellings. I think that house-martin fledglings and eggs
are capable of enduring the utmost heat of our English summer, and the
nests found deserted were abandoned for some other reason. More likely
that the deficiency of insect food caused by the inclement weather
weakened the parent. Sometimes these harmless and useful birds are
cruelly shot. I have never seen a nest injured by heats; on the contrary,
I should imagine that heat would cause the mortar to cohere more firmly,
and that damp would be much more likely to make it unsafe. At house No. 2
the heat in the angle of the two walls was scarcely bearable on a July
day. If a nest were taken down and put in an oven I should doubt if it
would crack. In nature, however, everything depends on locality. The
roads in that locality were mended with flint, and the mortar from
puddles appeared to make good cement. Possibly in some districts there
may be no lime or silicon, and the mortar the birds use may be less
adherent. The more one studies nature the more one becomes convinced that
it is an error to suppose things proceed by a regular rule always
applicable everywhere. All creatures change their habits with
circumstances; consequently no observation can be accepted as final.




AMONG THE NUTS.



The nuts are ripening once more, and it is almost the time to go
a-gipsying--the summer passes like the shadow of a cloud which strikes
the edge of the yellow wheat and comes over and is gone; it does not give
you time to rub out a single ear of corn. Before it is possible to gather
the harvest of thought and observation the summer has passed, and we must
bind the hastily stitched book with the crimson leaves of autumn. Under
these very hazel boughs only yesterday, _i.e._ in May, looking for
cuckoo-sorrel, as the wood-sorrel is called, there rolled down a brown
last year's nut from among the moss of the bank. In the side of this
little brown nut, at its thicker end, a round hole had been made with a
sharp tool which had left the marks of its chiselling. Through this hole
the kernel had been extracted by the skilful mouse. Two more nuts were
found on the same bank, bored by the same carpenter. The holes looked as
if he had turned the nut round and round as he gnawed. Unless the nut had
shrunk, the hole was not large enough to pull the kernel out all at once;
it must have been eaten little by little in many mouthfuls. The same
amount of nibbling would have sawn a circle round the nut, and so,
dividing the shell in two, would have let the kernel out bodily--a plan
more to our fancy; but the mouse is a nibbler, and he preferred to
nibble, nibble, nibble. Hard by one afternoon, as the cows were lazily
swishing their tails coming home to milking, and the shadow of the thick
hedge had already caused the anemones in the grass to close their petals,
there was a slight rustling sound. Out into the cool grass by some
cowslips there came a small dark head. It was an adder, verily a snake in
the grass and flowers. His quick eye--you know the proverb, 'If his ear
were as quick as his eye, No man should pass him by'--caught sight of us
immediately, and he turned back. The hedge was hollow there, and the
mound grown over with close-laid, narrow-leaved ivy. The viper did not
sink in these leaves, but slid with a rustling sound fully exposed above
them. His grey length and the chain of black diamond spots down his back,
his flat head with deadly tooth, did not harmonise as the green snake
does with leaf and grass. He was too marked, too prominent--a venomous
foreign thing, fit for tropic sands and nothing English or native to our
wilds. He seemed like a reptile that had escaped from the glass case of
some collection.

The green snake or grass snake, with yellow-marked head, fits in
perfectly with the floating herbage of the watery places he frequents.
The eye soon grows accustomed to his curves, till he is no more startling
than a frog among the water-crowfoot you are about to gather. To the
adder the mind never becomes habituated; he ever remains repellent. This
adder was close to a house and cowshed, and, indeed, they seem to like to
be near cows. Since then a large silvery slowworm was killed just
there--a great pity, for they are perfectly harmless. We saw, too, a very
large lizard under the heath. Three little effets (efts) ran into one
hole on the bank yesterday. Some of the men in spring went off into the
woods to 'flawing,' _i.e._ to barking the oak which is thrown in May--the
bark is often used now for decoration, like the Spanish cork bark. Some
were talking already of the 'grit' work and looking forward to it, that
is, to mowing and haymaking, which mean better wages. The farmers were
grumbling that their oats were cuckoo oats, not sown till the cuckoo
cried, and not likely to come to much. So, indeed, it fell out, for the
oats looked very thin and spindly when the nuts turned rosy again. At
work hoeing among the 'kelk' or 'kilk,' the bright yellow charlock, the
labourers stood up as the cuckoo flew over singing, and blew cuckoo back
to him in their hollow fists. This is a trick they have, something like
whistling in the fist, and so naturally done as to deceive any one. The
children had been round with the May garland, which takes the place of
the May-pole, and is carried slung on a stick, and covered with a white
cloth, between two little girls. The cloth is to keep the dust and sun
from spoiling the flowers--the rich golden kingcups and the pale anemones
trained about two hoops, one within the other. They take the cloth off to
show you the garland, and surely you must pay them a penny for thought of
old England. Yet there are some who would like to spoil this innocent
festival. I have heard of some wealthy people living in a village who do
their utmost to break up the old custom by giving presents of money to
all the poor children who will go to school on that day instead of
a-Maying. A very pitiful thing truly! Give them the money, and let them
go a-Maying as well. The same bribe they repeat at Christmas to stay the
boys from going round mumming. It is in spring that the folk make most
use of herbs, such as herb tea of gorse bloom. One cottage wife exclaimed
that she had no patience with women so ignorant they did not know how to
use herbs, as wood-sage or wood-betony. Most of the gardens have a few
plants of the milky-veined holy thistle--good, they say, against
inflammations, and in which they have much faith. Soon after the May
garlands the meadow orchis comes up, which is called 'dead men's hands,'
and after that the 'ram's-horn' orchis, which has a twisted petal; and in
the evening the bat, which they call flittermou

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