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The Naturalist on the Thames

by C. J. Cornish · English · Gutenberg #8682 · 385,460 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Naturalist on the Thames

Author: C. J. Cornish


        
Release date: August 1, 2005 [eBook #8682]
                Most recently updated: April 8, 2014

Language: English

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[Illustration: FOX FLUSHING PHEASANTS. _From a drawing by Lancelot
Speed._]


THE NATURALIST ON THE THAMES

BY

C.J. CORNISH, F.Z.S.






PREFACE

Having spent the greater part of my outdoor life in the Thames Valley, in
the enjoyment of the varied interests of its natural history and sport, I
have for many years hoped to publish the observations contained in the
following chapters. They have been written at different intervals of time,
but always with a view to publication in the form of a commentary on the
natural history and character of the valley as a whole, from the upper
waters to the mouth. For permission to use those which have been
previously printed I have to thank the editors and proprietors of the
_Spectator_, _Country Life_, and the _Badminton Magazine_.

C.J. CORNISH.

ORFORD HOUSE,
CHISWICK MALL.






CONTENTS


THE THAMES AT SINODUN HILL

THE FILLING OF THE THAMES

THE SHELLS OF THE THAMES

THE ANTIQUITY OF RIVER PLANTS

INSECTS OF THE THAMES

"THE CHAVENDER OR CHUB"

THE WORLD'S FIRST BUTTERFLIES

BUTTERFLY SLEEP

CRAYFISH AND TROUT

FOUNTAINS AND SPRINGS

BIRD MIGRATION DOWN THE THAMES

WITTENHAM WOOD

SPORT AT WITTENHAM

SPORT AT WITTENHAM (_continued_)

A FEBRUARY FOX HUNT

EWELME--A HISTORICAL RELIC

EEL-TRAPS

SHEEP, PLAIN AND COLOURED

SOME RESULTS OF WILD-BIRD PROTECTION

OSIERS AND WATER-CRESS

FOG AND DEW PONDS

POISONOUS PLANTS

ANCIENT THAMES MILLS

THE BIRDS THAT STAY

ANCIENT HEDGES

THE ENGLISH MOCKING BIRD

FLOWERS OF THE GRASS FIELDS

RIVERSIDE GARDENING

COTTAGES AND CAMPING OUT

NETTING STAGS IN RICHMOND PARK

RICHMOND OLD DEER PARK

FISH IN THE LONDON RIVER

CHISWICK EYOT

CHISWICK FISHERMEN

BIRDS ON THAMES RESERVOIRS

THE CARRION CROW

LONDON'S BURIED ELEPHANTS

SWANS, BLACK AND WHITE

CANVEY ISLAND

THE LONDON THAMES AS A WATERWAY

THE THAMES AS A NATIONAL TRUST






LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


A FOX FLUSHING PHEASANTS

WILD DUCK

A FULL THAMES

SHELLS OF THE THAMES

A FLOWERY BANK

BURR REED AND FLOWERING RUSH

A MONSTER CHUB

BUTTERFLIES AT REST

A TROUT

OTTERS

A WATERHEN ON HER NEST

A DABCHICK

A BADGER

FOX AND CUB

EWELME POOL

A NIGHTJAR AND YOUNG ONE

A REED-BUNTING

PEELING OSIERS

BOTLEY MILL

EEL BUCKS

ORCHIS

WATER VIOLET AND WILD IRIS

A NETTED STAG

BREAM AND ROACH

A GRAMPUS AT CHISWICK

SMELTS

THE LOBSTER SMACK INN, CANVEY ISLAND

THE STEPPING-STONES AT BENFLEET

HAULING THE NETS FOR WHITEBAIT

FISHING BOATS AT LEIGH






THE NATURALIST ON THE THAMES




THE THAMES AT SINODUN HILL


Fresh water is almost the oldest thing on earth. While the rocks have been
melted, the sea growing salter, and the birds and beasts perfecting
themselves or degenerating, the fresh water has been always the same,
without change or shadow of turning. So we find in it creatures which are
inconceivably old, still living, which, if they did not belong to other
worlds than ours, date from a time when the world was other than it is
now; and the fresh-water plants, equally prehistoric, on which these
creatures feed. Protected by this constant element the geographical range
of these animals and plants is as remarkable as their high antiquity.
There are in lake Tanganyika or the rivers of Japan exactly the same kinds
of shells as in the Thames, and the sedges and reeds of the Isis are found
from Cricklade to Kamschatka and beyond Bering Sea to the upper waters of
the Mackenzie and the Mississippi. The Thames, our longest fresh-water
river, and its containing valley form the largest natural feature in this
country. They are an organic whole, in which the river and its tributaries
support a vast and separate life of animals and plants, and modify that of
the hills and valleys by their course. Civil law has recognised the Thames
system as a separate area, and given to it a special government, that of
the Conservators, whose control now extends from the Nore to the remotest
springs in the hamlets in its watershed; and natural law did so long
before, when the valley became one of the migration routes of certain
southward-flying birds. Its course is of such remote antiquity that there
are those who hold that its bed may twice have been sunk beneath the sea,
and twice risen again above the face of the waters.[1] It has ever been a
masterful stream holding its own against the inner forces of the earth;
for where the chalk hills rose, silently, invisibly, in the long line from
the vale of White Horse to the Chilterns the river seems to have worn them
down as they rose at the crossing point at Pangbourne, and kept them
under, so that there was no barring of the Thames, and no subsequent
splitting of the barrier with gorges, cliffs, and falls. Its clear waters
pass from the oolite of the Cotswolds, by the blue lias and its fossils,
the sandstone rock at Clifton Hampden, the gravels of Wittenham, the great
chalk range of the downs, the greensand, the Reading Beds, to the
geological pie of the London Basin, and the beds of drifts and brick earth
in which lie bedded the frames and fragments of its prehistoric beasts. In
and beside its valley are great woods, parks, downs, springs, ancient
mills and fortresses, palaces and villages, and such homes of prehistoric
man as Sinodun Hill and the hut remains at Northfield. It has 151 miles of
fresh water and 77 of tideway, and is almost the only river in England in
which there are islands, the famous eyots, the lowest and largest of which
at Chiswick touches the London boundary.

After leaving Oxford the writer has lived for many years opposite this
typical and almost unspoilt reach of the London river, and for a
considerable time shot over the estate on the upper Thames of which
Sinodun Hill is the hub and centre. This fine outlier of the chalk, with
its twin mount Harp Hill, dominates not only the whole of the Thames
valley at its feet, but the two cross vales of the Thame and the Ock. On
the bank opposite the Thame joins the Isis, and from thence flows on the
THAMES. Weeks and months spent there at all seasons of the year gave even
better opportunities for becoming acquainted with the life of the Upper
Thames, than the London river did of learning what the tidal stream really
is and may become. Fish, fowl and foxes, rare Thames flowers and shy
Thames chub, butterflies, eel-traps, fountains and springs, river shells
and water insects, are all parts of the "natural commodities" of the
district. There is no better and more representative part of the river
than this. Close by is Nuneham, one of the finest of Thames-side parks,
and behind that the remains of wild Oxfordshire show in Thame Lane and
Clifton Heath. How many centuries look down from the stronghold on Sinodun
Hill, reckoning centuries by human occupation, no one knows or will know.
There stands the fortress of some forgotten race, and below it the double
rampart of a Roman camp, running from Thame to Isis. Beyond is Dorchester,
the abbey of the oldest see in Wessex, and the Abbey Mill. The feet of the
hills are clothed by Wittenham Wood, and above the wood stretches the
weir, and round to the west, on another great loop of the river, is Long
Wittenham and its lovely backwater. Even in winter, when the snow is
falling like bags of flour, and the river is chinking with ice, there is
plenty to see and learn, or in the floods, when the water roars through
the lifted hatches and the rush of the river throbs across the misty
flats, and the weeds and sedges smell rank as the stream stews them in its
mash-tub in the pool below the weir.

[1] Phillips, "Geology of Oxford and of the Valley of the Thames."




THE FILLING OF THE THAMES


In the late autumn of 1893, one of the driest years ever known, I went to
the weir pool above the wood, and found the shepherd fishing. The river
was lower than had ever been known or seen, and on the hills round the
"dowsers" had been called in with their divining rods to find the vanished
waters.

"Thee've got no water in 'ee, and if 'ee don't fill'ee avore New Year,
'ee'll be no more good for a stree-um"! Thus briefly, to Father Thames,
the shepherd of Sinodun Hill. He had pitched his float into the pool below
the weir--the pool which lies in the broad, flat fields, with scarce a
house in sight but the lockman's cottage--and for the first time on a
Saturday's fishing he saw his bait go clear to the bottom instead of being
lost to view instantly in the boiling water of the weir-pool. He could
even see the broken piles and masses of concrete which the river in its
days of strength had torn up and scattered on the bottom, and among them
the shoals of fat river fish eyeing his worm as critically as his master
would a sample of most inferior oats. Yet the pool was beautiful to look
upon. Where the water had sunk the rushes had grown taller than ever, and
covered the little sandbanks left by the ebbing river with a forest of
green and of red gold, where the frost had laid its finger on them. In the
back eddies and shallows the dying lily leaves covered the surface with
scales of red and copper, and all along the banks teazles and frogbits,
and brown and green reeds, and sedges of bronze and russet, made a screen,
through which the black and white moorhens popped in and out, while the
water-rats, now almost losing the aquatic habit, and becoming pedestrian,
sat peeling rushes with their teeth, and eyeing the shepherd on the weir.
Even the birds seemed to have voted that the river was never going to fill
again, for a colony of sandpipers, instead of continuing their migration
to the coast, had taken up their quarters on the little spits of mud and
shingle now fringing the weir-pool, and were flitting from point to point,
and making believe it was a bit of Pagham Harbour or Porchester Creek. On
every sunny morning monster spiders ran out from the holes and angles of
the weir-frame, and spun webs across and across the straddling iron legs
below the footbridge, right down to the lowered surface of the water,
which had so sunk that each spider had at least four feet more of web than
he could have reckoned upon before and waxed fat on the produce of the
added superficies of enmeshed and immolated flies. So things went on
almost till New Year's Eve. The flats of the Upper Thames, where the
floods get out up the ditches and tributaries, and the wild duck gather on
the shallow "splashes" and are stalked with the stalking-horse as of old,
were as dry as Richmond Park, and sounded hollow to the foot, instead of
wheezing like a sponge. The herons could not find a meal on a hundred
acres of meadow, which even a frog found too dry for him, and the little
brooks and land-springs which came down through them to the big river were
as low as in June, as clear as a Hampshire chalk stream, and as full of
the submerged life of plants. Instead of dying with the dying year at the
inrush of cold water brought by autumn rains, all the cresses, and
tresses, and stars, and tangles, and laced sprays of the miniature growth
of the springs and running brooks were as bright as malachite, though
embedded in a double line of dead white shivering sedge. And thus the
shortest day went by, and still the fields lay dry, and the river shrank,
and the fish were off the feed; and though murky vapours hung over the
river and the flats and shut out the sun, the long-expected rains fell not
until the last week's end of the year. Then at last signs and tokens began
by which the knowing ones prophesied that there was something the matter
with the weather. The sheep fed as if they were not to have another bite
for a week, and bleated without ceasing, strange birds flew across the sky
in hurrying flocks, and in all the country houses and farmers' halls the
old-fashioned barometers, with their dials almost as big as our eight-day
clocks and pointers as long as a knitting-needle, began to fall, or rather
to go backwards, further than was ever recorded. And whereas it is, and
always has been, a fact well known to the owners of these barometers that
if they are tapped violently in the centre of their mahogany stomachs the
needle will jerk a little in the direction of recovery, and is thereby
believed to exercise a controlling influence in the direction of better
weather, the more the barometers were tapped and thumped the more the
needle edged backwards, till in some cases it went down till it pointed to
the ivory star at the very bottom of the dial, and then struck work and
stuck there.

[Illustration: WILD DUCK. _From a photograph by Charles Reid._]

[Illustration: A FULL THAMES. _From a photograph by Taunt & Co._]

That night the storm began. To connoisseurs in weather in the
meteorological sense it was a joy and an ensample, for it was a perfect
cyclonic storm, exactly the right shape, with all its little dotted lines
of "isobars" running in ovals one inside another. From another point of
view it was the storm of an hour spread over two days, so that there was
plenty of time to see and remember the normal ways of cyclones, which may
be briefly described as first a flush of heat whether in summer or winter,
then a furious wind, then hurrying clouds and much rain, with changes of
wind, then more clouds and more rain, then a "clearing shower" with most
rain, then a furling and brailing-up of the rain clouds, splashes of blue
in the sky, with nets of scud crossing them, sudden gleams of sun, sudden
cold, and perhaps a hail shower, and then piercing cold and sunlight. All
which things happened, but took a long time about it. The storm began in
the night, and howled through the dark. The rain came with the morning;
but it was the "clearing shower," which lasted ten hours, which caused the
filling of the Thames. The wind still blew in furious gusts, but the rain
was almost too heavy to be moved. The sky was one dark, sombre cloud, and
from this the rain poured in slanting lines like pencils of water. But
across this blanket of cloud came darker, lower, and wetter clouds, even
more surcharged with water, from which the deluge poured till the earth
was white like glass with the spraying drops. Out in the fields it was
impossible to see through the rain; but as the end of the column of cloud
began to break and widen the water could be seen in the act of passing
from the land to the river. On the fallows and under the fences all the
surface earth was beaten down or swept away. All seeds which had sunk
naturally below the surface were laid bare. Hundreds of sprouting horse
chestnuts, of sprouting acorns beneath the trees, thousands of grains of
fallen wheat and barley, of beans, and other seeds of the farm were
uncovered as if by a spade.

Down every furrow, drain, watercourse, ditch, runnel, and watercut, the
turbid waters were hurrying, all with one common flow, all with increasing
speed, to the Thames. The sound of waters filled the air, dropping,
poppling, splashing, trickling, dripping from leaves to earth, falling
from bank to rills below, gurgling under gate-paths, lapping against the
tree-trunks and little ridge piles in the brooks, and at last sweeping
with a hushed content into the bosom of Thames. And the river himself was
good for something more than a "stree-um." He was bank-full and sweeping
on, taking to himself on this side and on that the tributes of his
children, from which the waters poured so fast that they came in almost
clear, and the mingled waters in the river were scarcely clouded in their
flow. The lock-men rose by night and looked at the climbing flood, and
wakened their wives and children, and raised in haste hatch after hatch of
the weirs, and threw open locks and gates. Windsor Weir broke, but the
wires flashed the news on, and the river's course was open, and after the
greatest rain-storm and the lowest barometer known for thirty years, the
Thames was not in flood, but only brimful; and once more a "river of
waters."




THE SHELLS OF THE THAMES


Of the thousands who boat on the Thames during the summer few know or
notice the beauty of the river shells. They are among the most delicate
objects of natural ornament and design in this country. Exquisite pattern,
graceful shapes, and in some cases lovely tints of colour adorn them.
Nature has for once relaxed in their favour her rigid rules, by which she
turns out things of this kind not only alike in shape, but with identical
colour and ornament. Among humming-birds, for instance, each bird is like
the other, literally to a feather. The lustre on each ruby throat or
amethyst wing shines in the same light with the same prismatic divisions.
But even in the London river, if you go and seek among the pebbles above
Hammersmith Bridge when the river is low, you may find a score of
_neretina_ shells not one of which is coloured like the rest or
ornamented with exactly the same pattern, yet each is fit to bejewel the
coronet of some Titania of the waters. A number of these tiny shells,
gathered from below the bridge, lie before the writer, set on black satin
to display the hues. They look at a little distance like a series of mixed
Venetian beads, but of more elegant form. From whichever side they are
seen, the curves are the perfection of flowing line. The colouring and
ornament of each is a marvel and delight. Some are black, with white spots
arranged in lines following the curves, and with the top of the blunt
spiral white. These "black-and-white marble" patterns are followed by a
whole series in which purple takes the place of black, and the spots are
modified into scales. Then comes a row of rose-coloured shells, some with
white lance-heads, or scales, others with alternate bands of white scales
and white dots. Some are polished, others dull, some rosy pink, others
almost crimson. Some are marked with cream and purple like the juice of
black currants with cream in it. In some the scale pattern changes to a
chequer, some are white with purple zig-zags. And lastly come a whole
series in pale olive, and olive and cream, in which the general colour is
that of a blackcap's egg, and the pattern made by alternate spots of olive
and bands of cream. If these little gems of beauty come out of the London
river, what may we not expect in the upper waters of the silver Thames?[1]
A search in the right places in its course will show. But these
_neretinae_ are everywhere up to the source of the river, for they
feed on all kinds of decaying substances. If the pearl is the result of a
disease or injury, the beauty of the _neretina_ is a product or
transformation from foul things to fair ones.

As the Thames is itself the product and union of all its vassal streams,
an "incarnation" of all the rest, so in its bed it holds all the shells
collected from all its tributaries. Different tribes of shells live in
different waters. Some love the "full-fed river winding slow," some the
swift and crystal chalk-stream. Some only flourish just over the spots
where the springs come bubbling up from the inner cisterns of earth, and
breathe, as it were, the freshness of these untainted waters; others love
the rich, fat mud, others the sides of wearings and piles, others the
river-jungles where the course is choked with weeds. But come what may, or
flourish where they please, the empty shells are in time rolled down from
trout-stream and chalk-stream, fountain and rill, mill-pool and ditch,
cress-bed and water-cut, from the springs of the Cotswolds, the Chilterns,
the downs, from the valleys of Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Surrey,
Gloucester, Oxford, and Essex, into the Thames. Once there the river makes
shell collections on its own account, sorting them out from everything
else except a bed of fine sand and gravel, in which they lie like birds'
eggs in bran in a boy's cabinet, ready for who will to pick them up or
sift them out of it. These shell collections are made in the time of
winter floods, though how they are made or why the shells should all
remain together, while sticks, stones, and other rubbish are carried away,
it is impossible to say. They are laid on smooth points of land round
which the waters flow in shallow ripples. Across the river it is always
deep, swift, and dark, though the sandbanks come in places near the
surface, and in the shallows grow water-crowfoot, with waving green hair
under water, and white stems above it. The clean and shining sand shelves
down to the water's edge, and continues below the surface. Here are living
shells, or shells with living fish in them. In the bright water lie
hundreds of the shells of the fresh-water mussels, the bearers of pearls
sometimes, and always lined with that of which pearls are made, the
lustrous nacre. The mealy masses of dry sand beyond the river's lip are
stuffed with these mussel shells. They lie all ways up, endways, sideways,
on their faces, on their backs. The pearl lining shines through the sand,
and the mussels gleam like silver spoons under the water. They crack and
crunch beneath your feet as you step across to search the mass for the
smaller and rarer shells. Many of those in the water contain living
mussels, yellow-looking fat molluscs, greatly beloved of otters, who eat
them as sauce with the chub or bream they catch, and leave the broken
shells of the one by the half-picked bones of the other. There was a
popular song which had for chorus the question, "Did you ever see an
oyster walk upstairs?" These mussels _walk_, and are said to be
"tolerably active" by a great authority on their habits. They have one
foot, on which they travel in search of feeding ground, and leave a
visible track across the mud. There are three or four kinds, two of which
sometimes hold small pearls, while a third is the pearl-bearer proper.
_Unio pictorum_ is the scientific name of one, because the shells
were once the cups in which the old Dutch painters kept their colours, and
are still used to hold ground gold and silver for illuminating. The
pearl-bearing mussel is longer than the other kinds, flatter and darker,
and the lining of mother-of-pearl is equal to half the total thickness of
the shell.[2]

[Illustration: SHELLS OF THE THAMES. _From a photograph by E. Seeley_]

Though not so striking from their size and pearly lustre, there are many
shells on the Thames sandbanks not less interesting and in large numbers.
Among these are multitudes of tiny fresh-water cockle shells of all sizes,
from that of a grain of mustard seed to the size of a walnut, flat, curled
shells like small ammonites, fresh-water snail shells of all sizes, river
limpets, _neretinae_, and other and rounder bivalve shells allied to
the cockles. The so-called "snails" are really quite different from each
other, some, the _paludinas_, being large, thick-striped shells,
while the _limnaeas_ are thin, more delicately made, some with fine,
pointed spiral tops, and others in which the top seems to have been
absorbed in the lower stories. There are eight varieties of these
_limnaeas_ alone, and six more elegant shells of much the same
appearance, but of a different race.

The minute elegance of many of these shells is very striking. Tiny
_physas_ and _succineas_, no larger than shot, live among big
_paludinas_ as large as a garden snail, while all sizes of the larger
varieties are found, from microscopic atoms to the perfect adult. Being
water shells, and not such common objects as land shells, these have no
popular names. The river limpets are called _ancylus fluviatilis_.
Some are no larger than a yew berry, and are shaped like a Phrygian cap;
but they "stick" with proper limpet-like tenacity. On the stems of
water-lilies, on piles, on weeds and roots in any shallow streams, but
always on the under side of the leaves, are the limpets of the Thames. The
small ammonite-like shells are called _planorbis_, and like most of
the others, belong also to the upper tertiary fossils. They feed on the
decaying leaves of the iris and other water plants, and from the number of
divisions on the shell are believed to live for sometimes twenty years. Of
the many varieties, one, the largest, the horn-coloured _planorbis_,
emits a purple dye. Two centuries ago Lister made several experiments in
the hope that he might succeed in fixing this dye, as the Tyrians did that
of the murex, but in vain. There are eleven varieties of this creature
alone. It is easier to find the shells than to discover the living
creature in the river. For many the deep, full river is not a suitable
home; they only come there as the water does, from the tributary streams.
Far up in some rill in the chalk, from the bed of which the water bubbles
up and keeps the stones and gravel bright, whole beds of little
pea-cockles may be found, lying in masses side by side, like seeds sown in
the water-garden of a nymph.

[1] I have a series of _neretina_ shells from the Philippines, much
larger in size and brown in colour, in which many of the same kinds of
ornament occur.

[2] A fresh-water mussel shell from North America in my possession is
coloured green, and so marked and crimped as to resemble exactly a patch
of water-weed, such as grows on stones and piles.




THE ANTIQUITY OF RIVER PLANTS


In the still gossamer weather of late October, when the webs lie sheeted
on the flat green meadows and spools of the air-spiders' silk float over
the waters, the birds and fish and insects and flowers of the best of
England's rivers show themselves for the last time in that golden autumn
sun, and make their bow to the audience before retiring for the year. All
the living things become for a few brief hours happy and careless,
drinking to the full the last drops of the mere joy of life before the
advent of winter and rough weather. The bank flowers still show blossom
among the seed-heads, and though the thick round rushes have turned to
russet, the forget-me-not is still in flower; and though the water-lilies
have all gone to the bottom again, and the swallows no longer skim over
the surface, the river seems as rich in life as ever; and the birds and
fish, unfrightened by the boat traffic, are tamer and more visible.

[Illustration: A FLOWERY BANK NEAR COOKHAM. _From a photograph by E.
Seeley_.]

The things in the waters and growing out of the waters are very, very old.
The mountains have been burnt with fire; lava grown solid has turned to
earth again and grows vines; chalk was once sea-shells; but the clouds and
the rivers have altered not their substance. Also, so far as this planet
goes, many of the water plants are world-encircling, growing just as they
do here in the rivers of Siberia, in China, in Canada, and almost up to
the Arctic Circle. The creatures which lived on these prehistoric plants
live on them now, and in exactly the same parts of the stream. The same
shells lie next the banks in the shallows as lie next the bank of the
prehistoric river of two million years ago whose bed is cut through at
Hordwell Cliffs on the Solent. The same shells lie next them in the deeper
water, and the sedges and rushes are as "prehistoric" as any plant can
well be. In the clay at Hordwell, which was once the mud of the river, lie
sedges, pressed and dried as if in the leaves of a book, almost exactly
similar in colour, which is kept, and in shape, which is uninjured, to
those which fringe the banks of the Thames to-day. These fresh-water
plants show their hoary antiquity by the fashion of their generation. Most
of them are mono-cotyledonous--with a single seed-lobe, like those of the
early world. There is nothing quite as old among the Thames fishes as the
mud fishes, the lineal descendants of the earliest of their race. But the
same water creatures were feeding on the same plants perhaps when the
Thames first flowed as a river.

[Illustration: BURR REED AND FLOWERING RUSH. _From photographs by E.
Seeley._]

The sedge fringe in the shallows, the "haunt of coot and tern" elsewhere,
and of hosts of moorhens and dabchicks on the now protected river, is
mainly composed of the giant rush, smooth and round, which the water-rats
cut down and peel to eat the pith. These great rushes, sometimes ten feet
high, _die_ every year like the sickliest flowers, and break and are
washed away. Few people have ever tried to reckon the number of kinds of
sedges and reeds by the river, and it would be difficult to do so. There
are forty-six kinds of sedge (_carex_), or if the _Scirpus_ tribe be
added, sixty-one, found in our islands. They are not all water plants, for
the sand-sedge with its creeping roots grows on the sandhills, and some of
the rarest are found on mountain-tops. But the river sedges and grasses,
with long creeping roots of the same kind, have played a great part in the
making of flat meadows and in the reclamation of marshes, stopping the
water-borne mud as the sand-sedge stops the blowing sand. They have done
much in this way on the Upper Thames, though not on the lower reaches of
the river. The "sweet sedge," so called--the smell is rather sickly to
most tastes--is now found on the Thames near Dorchester, and between
Kingston and Teddington among other places, though it was once thought
only to flourish on the Norfolk and Fen rivers. It is not a sedge at all,
but related to the common arum, and its flower, like the top joints of the
little finger, represents the "lords and ladies" of the hedges. So the
burr reed, among the prettiest of all the upright plants growing out of
the water, is not a reed, but a reed mace. Its bright green stems and
leaves, and spiky balls, are found in every suitable river from Berkshire
to the Amur, and in North America almost to the Arctic Circle. In the same
way the yellow water villarsia, which though formerly only common near
Oxford, has greatly increased on the Thames until its yellow stars are
found as low as the Cardinal's Well at Hampton Court, extends across the
rivers of Europe and Asia as far as China. The cosmopolitan ways of these
water plants are easily explained. They live almost outside competition.
They have not to take their chance with every new comer, for ninety-nine
out of a hundred stranger seeds are quietly drowned in the embosoming
stream. The water itself keeps its temperature steadily, and only changes
slowly and in no great degree, and then, when the plants are in their
winter sleep the stream may well say that "men may come and men may go,
but I go on for ever." The same is very largely true of the things which
live in the brook.

Many of the flowers are not quite what their names imply. The true lilies
are among the oldest of plants. But "water-lilies" are not lilies. They
have been placed in order between the barberry and the poppy, because the
seed-head of a water-lily is like the poppy fruit. The villarsia, which
looks like a water-lily, is not related at all, while the buck-bean is not
a bean, but akin to the gentians. Water-violet might be more properly
called water-primrose, for it is closely related to the primrose, though
its colour is certainly violet, and not pale yellow. By this time all the
bladderworts have disappeared under water. In June in a pool near the
inflow of the Thames at Day's Lock, opposite Dorchester, the fine leafless
yellow spikes of flower were standing out of the water like orchids, while
the bladders with their trapdoors were employed in catching and devouring
small tadpoles. There is something quietly horrible about these
carnivorous plants. Their bladders are far too small to take one in whole,
but catch the unhappy infant tadpoles by their tails and hold them till
they die from exhaustion.

The bank flora of the Thames is nearly all the same from Oxford to Hampton
Court, made up of some score of very fine and striking flowers that grow
from foot to crest on the wall of light marl that forms the bank.
Constantly refreshed by the adjacent water, they flower and seed, seed and
flower, and are haunted by bees and butterflies till the November frosts.
The most decorative of all are the spikes of purple loose-strife. In
autumn when most of the flowers are dead the tip of the leaf at the heads
of the spikes turns as crimson as a flower. The other red flowers are the
valerian, in masses of squashed strawberry, and the fig-wort, tall,
square-stemmed, and set with small carmine knots of flower. In autumn
these become brown seed crockets, and are most decorative. The fourth tall
flower is the flea-bane, and the fifth the great willow-herb. The lesser
plants are the small willow-herbs, whose late blossoms are almost carmine,
the water-mints, with mauve-grey flowers, and the comfrey, both purple and
white. The dewberry, a blue-coloured more luscious bramble fruit, and tiny
wild roses, grow on the marl-face also. At its foot are the two most
beautiful flowers, though not the most effective, the small yellow
snapdragon, or toad-flax, and the forget-me-not. This blue of the
forget-me-nots is as peculiar as it is beautiful. It is not a common blue
by any means, any more than the azure of the chalk-blue butterflies is
common among other insects. Colour is a very constant feature in certain
groups of flowers. One of these includes the forget-me-nots, the borage,
the alkanet, and the viper's bugloss, which keep up this blue as a family
heirloom. Others of the tribe, like the comfrey, have it not, but those
which possess it keep it pure.

The willows at this time are ready to shed their leaves at the slightest
touch of frost. Yet these leaves are covered with the warts made by the
saw-flies to deposit their eggs in. The male saw-fly of this species and
some others is scarcely ever seen, though the female is so common. The
creature _stings_ the leaf, dropping into the wound a portion of
formic acid, and then lays its egg. The stung leaf swells, and makes the
protecting gall. It is difficult to say when "fly," in the fisherman's use
of the term as the adult insect food of fish, may not appear on the water.
Moths are out on snowy nights, as every collector knows, and on any mild
winter day flies and gnats are seen by streams. In the warm, sunny days of
late September, numbers of some species of ephemerae were seen on the
sedges and willows, with black bodies and gauzy wings, which the dace and
bleak were swallowing eagerly, in quite summer fashion. The water is now
unusually clear, and as the fish come to sun themselves in the shallows
every shoal can be seen.

Among the typical Thames-valley flowers, all of which would be the better
for protection, are the very rare soldier orchis (_Orchis Militaris_)
and the monkey orchis (_Orchis Simia_), the water-snowflake, the
_hottonia_, or water-violet, the water-villarsia, more elegant even
than the water-lilies, the flowering rush, with a crown of bright
rose-pink flowers. The two orchids named are very interesting plants. Of
the monkey orchis Mr. Claridge Druce says in his "Flora of Oxfordshire"
that it has become exceedingly scarce, not so much from the depredations
of collectors, but from the fondness of rabbits for it and the changes
brought about by agriculture. The soldier orchis is very rare indeed; both
are only found in a few woods in the Thames valley, and possibly in Kent.
The bladderworts fade instantly, and are not much interfered with, and
though the fritillaries are picked for market, the roots are not dug up
because that would injure the meadow turf in which they grow, and business
objections would be raised.




INSECTS OF THE THAMES


Except among the select few, generally either enthusiastic boys or London
mechanics of an inquiring mind, who keep fresh-water aquariums and
replenish them from ponds and brooks at "weekends," few persons outside
the fancy either see or know much of the water insects,[1] or are aware,
when floating on a summer day under the willows in a Thames backwater, of
the near presence of thousands of aquatic creatures, swift, carnivorous,
and pursuing, or feeding greedily on the plants in the water garden that
floats below the boat, or weaving nests, tending eggs, or undergoing the
most astonishing transitions of form and activity, on or below the
surface. Many of them are perhaps better equipped for encountering all the
chances of existence than any other creatures. They can swim, dive, and
run below water, live on dry land, or fly in the air, and many are so
hardy as to be almost proof against any degree of cold. The great
carnivorous water-beetle, the dytiscus, after catching and eating other
creatures all day, with two-minute intervals to come up, poke the tips of
its wings out of the water and jam some air against its spiracles, before
descending once more to its subaqueous hunting-grounds, will rise by night
from the surface of the Thames, lift again those horny wing-cases, unfold
a broad and beautiful pair of gauzy wings, and whirl off on a visit of
love and adventure to some distant pond, on to which it descends like a
bullet from the air above. When people are sitting in a greenhouse at
night with no lamp lighted, talking or smoking, they sometimes hear a
smash as if a pebble had been dropped on the glass from above. It is a
dytiscus beetle, whose compound eyes have mistaken the shine of the glass
in the moonlight for the gleam of a pond. At night some of the whirligig
beetles, the shiny, bean-like creatures seen whirling in incessant circles
in corners by the bank, make a quite audible and almost musical sound upon
the water. The activity of many of the water insects is astonishing.
Besides keeping in almost incessant motion, those which spend most of
their time below water have generally to come up constantly to breathe.
Such are the water-bugs, water-scorpions and stick insects, which, though
slender as rushes, and with limbs like hairs, can catch and kill the fry
of the smaller fishes. Most of these are like divers, who have to provide
themselves with air to breathe, and work at double speed in addition.

If a group of whirligig beetles is disturbed, the whole party will dive
like dabchicks, rising to the surface again when they feel the need for
breathing-air again. The diving-bell spiders, which do not often frequent
the main Thames stream, though they are commonly found in the ditches near
it, gather air to use just as a soldier might draw water and dispose it
about his person in water-bottles. They do this in two ways, one of which
is characteristic of many of the creatures which live both in and out of
the water as the spider does. The tail of the spider is covered with
black, velvety hair. Putting its tail out of the water, it collects much
air in the interstices of the velvet. It then descends, when all this air,
drawn down beneath the surface, collects into a single bubble, covering
its tail and breathing holes like a coat of quicksilver. This supply the
spider uses up when at work below, until it dwindles to a single speck,
when it once more ascends and collects a fresh store. The writer has seen
one of these spiders spin so many webs across the stems of water plants in
a limited space that not only the small water-shrimps and larvae, but even
a young fish were entangled. The other and more artistic means of
gathering air employed by the spider is to catch a bubble on the surface
and swim down below with it. The bubble is then let go into a bell woven
under some plant, into which many other bubbles have been drawn. In this
diving-bell the eggs are laid and the young hatched, under the constant
watch of the old spider. Few people care to take the trouble to gaze for
any time into a shallow, still piece of water, in which the bottom is
plainly discernible, and a crop of water-weeds makes a wall on either side
of some central "well." If they do find some such pond near the Thames
banks or a shallow backwater, they may see after a few minutes much that
is new and suggestive of strange activities. Everything will be quiet and
motionless at first, for water beasts are very suspicious of movement
above them, and all sham dead, or lie quite still, and are strangely
invisible. On the other hand, they have none of the power of remaining
motionless for half-an-hour like land animals. Soon what look like sticks,
but are caddis larva, begin to creep on the bottom. Then more brown
objects, larvae of dragon-flies and water-beetles, detach themselves from
the stems of the plants and cruise up and down seeking what they may
devour. Other creatures feeding and swimming among or beneath the plants
crawl out on to the upper surface, and the water-beetles come up to
breathe, or to play upon the surface. One of the largest of these is a
very fine _black_ beetle, a vegetable-feeding creature. It is most
interesting to see two of them--they generally live in pairs--browsing on
one of the fern-like plants of the Thames. This plant has leaves like fern
blades, each having in turn its own small spikelets. The big beetles work
along the leaf like a cow in a cabbage yard, biting off, chewing, and
swallowing each in succession, and leaving the stem perfectly bare.
Sometimes it looks as if the two beetles were eating for a match, like the
beef-eating contests held in country public-houses, in which the winner
once boasted that he won easily "afore he came to vinegar."

The number of carnivorous creatures found in the water seems out of all
proportion to the usual order of Nature. But this is perhaps because the
minute, almost invisible creatures, or entomostraca, of which the rivers
and ponds are full, and which are the main food of the smaller water
carnivora, live mainly on decaying vegetable substance, which is
practically converted and condensed into microscopical animals before
these become in turn the food of others. It is as if all trees and grass
on land were first eaten by locusts or white ants, and the locusts and
white ants were then eaten by semi-carnivorous cows and sheep, which were
in turn eaten by true carnivora. The water-weeds, both when living and
decaying, are eaten by the entomostraca, the entomostraca are eaten by the
larvae of insects, the perfect insects are eaten by the fish, and the fish
are eaten by men, otters, and birds. Thus we eat the products of the water
plants at four removes in a fish; while we eat that of the grass or
turnips only in a secondary form in beef or mutton.

The water-shrimp is a very common crustacean in the small Thames
tributaries, and valuable as fish food. It has a very rare subterranean
cousin known as the _well shrimp_. A lady in the Isle of Wight, who in a
moment of energy went to the pump to get some water to put flowers in,
actually pumped up one of these subterranean shrimps into a glass bowl.
The well was eighty feet deep. The shrimp was absolutely white, and
probably blind.

Flesh-eating insects are fairly common on land; wasps will actually raid a
butcher's shop, and carry off little red bits of meat, besides killing and
eating flies, spiders, and larvae. Dragon-flies are the hawks of the
insect world, and slay and devour wholesale, when in the air as well as
when they are larvae on the water, though few persons actually witness
their attacks on other creatures, owing to the swiftness of their flight.
Some centipedes will attack other creatures with the ferocity of a
bulldog. An encounter between one of the smaller centipedes and a worm is
like a fight between a ferret and a snake, so frantic is the writhing of
the worm, so determined the hold which the hard and shiny centipede
maintains with its hooked jaws. But the ferocity and destroying appetite
of some of the water creatures would be appalling were it not for their
small size. The desire of killing and devouring appears in the most
unexpected quarters, among creatures which no one would suspect of such
intentions. Of two kinds of water snail found in the Thames, and among the
commonest molluscs, one is a vegetable feeder. It is found living on water
plants, the snails being of all sizes, from that of a mustard seed to a
walnut. The other will feed not only on dead animal substances, but on
living creatures, and is equipped with sharp teeth, which work like a saw.
One of these kept in an aquarium fastened on to and slowly devoured a
small frog confined in the same vessel. The large dytiscus beetle is the
great enemy of small fish. If the salmon is ever restored to the Thames
these creatures will be among the worst enemies of the fry, though in
swift rivers they are not plentiful. Frank Buckland states that in
Hollymount Pond they killed two thousand young salmon. One of these was
put into a bowl with a dytiscus beetle, which, "pouncing upon him like a
hawk upon an unsuspecting lark, drove its scythe-like horny jaws right
into the back of the poor little fish. The little salmon, a plucky fellow,
fought hard for his life, and swam round and round, up and down, hither
and thither, trying to escape from this terrible murderer; but it was no
use, he could not free himself from his grip; and while the poor little
wretch was giving the last few flutterings of his tail, the water-beetle
proceeded coolly to peck out his left eye, and to devour it at once." The
larva not only of the carnivorous dytiscus but also of the
vegetable-feeding water-beetle are ferocious and carnivorous, and deadly
enemies of young fish and ova.

[1] In mentioning some of the Thames _insecta_ I have also noticed some of
the _mollusca_ and _crustacea_. It is a pity these have not some common
names. One cannot write easily of "pulmonate gasteropods."




"THE CHAVENDER OR CHUB"


  "Now when you've caught your chavender,
    (Your chavender or chub)
  You hie you to your pavender,
    (Your pavender or pub),
  And there you lie in lavender,
    (Sweet lavender or lub)."

  _Mr. Punch._


I went into the Plough Inn at Long Wittenham in mid-November to arrange
about sending some game to London. The landlord, after inquiring about our
shooting luck, went out and came back into the parlour, saying, "Now, sir,
will you look at my sport?" He carried on a tray two large chub weighing
about 2-1/2 lbs. each, which he had caught in the river just behind the
house. Their colour, olive and silver, scarlet, and grey, was simply
splendid. Laid on the table with one or two hares and cock pheasants and a
few brace of partridges they made a fine sporting group in still life--a
regular Thames Valley yield of fish and fowl. The landlord is a quiet
enthusiast in this Thames fishing. It is a pleasure to watch him at work,
whether being rowed down on a hot summer day by one of his men, and
casting a long line under the willows for chub, or hauling out big perch
or barbel. All his tackle is exquisitely kept, as well kept as the
yeoman's arrows and bow in the Canterbury Tales. His baits are arranged on
the hook as neatly as a good cook sends up a boned quail. He gets all his
worms from Nottingham. I notice that among anglers the man who gets his
worms from Nottingham is as much a connoisseur as the man who imported his
own wine used to be among dinner-givers.

Drifting against a willow bush one day, the branches of which came right
down over the water like a crinoline, I saw inside, and under the
branches, a number of fair-sized chub of about 1 lb. or 1-1/2 lbs. It
struck me that they felt themselves absolutely safe there, and that if in
any way I could get a bait over them they might take it. The entry under
which I find this chronicled is August 24th. Next morning when the sun was
hot I got a stiff rod and caught a few grasshoppers. Overnight I had cut
out a bough or two at the back of the willow bush, and there was just a
chance that I might be able to poke my rod in and drop the grasshopper on
the water. After that I must trust to the strength of the gut, for the
fish would be unplayable. It was almost like fishing in a faggot-stack.
Peering through the willow leaves I could just see down into the water
where a patch of sunlight about a yard square struck the surface. Under
this skylight I saw the backs of several chub pass as they cruised slowly
up and down. I twisted the last two feet of my line round the rod-top,
poked this into the bush with infinite bother and pluckings at my line
between the rings, and managed to drop the hopper on to the little bit of
sunny water. What a commotion there was. The chub thought they were all in
a sanctuary and that no one was looking. I could see six or seven of them,
evidently all cronies and old acquaintances, the sort of fish that have
known one another for years and would call each other by their Christian
names. They were as cocky and consequential as possible, cruising up and
down with an air, and staring at each other and out through the screen of
leaves between them and the river, and every now and then taking something
off a leaf and spitting it out again in a very independent
connoisseur-like way. The moment the grasshopper fell there was a regular
rush to the place, very different from what their behaviour would have
been outside the bush. There was a hustle and jostle to look at it, and
then to get it. They almost fought one another to get a place. Flop!
Splash! Wallop! "My grasshopper, I think." "I saw it first." "Where are
you shoving to?" "O--oh--what is the matter with William?" I called him
William because he had a mark like a W on his back. But he was hooked fast
and flopping, and held quite tight by a very strong hook and gut, like a
bull with a ring and a pole fastened to his nose. I got him out too--not a
big fish, but about 1-1/2 lbs.

This showed pretty clearly that where chub can be fished for "silently,
invisibly," they can still be caught, even though steam launches or
row-boats are passing every ten minutes. This was mid-August; my next
venture nearly realised the highest ambitions of a chub-fisher. It also
showed the sad limitations of mere instinctive fishing aptitudes in the
human being as contrasted with the mental and bodily resources of a fish
with a deplorably low facial angle and a very poor _morale_. There
was just one place on the river where it seemed possible to remain unseen
yet to be able to drop a bait over a chub. A willow tree had fallen, and
smashed through a willow _bush_. Its head stuck out like a feather
brush in front and made a good screen. On either side were the boughs of
the bush, high, but not too high to get a rod over them, if I walked along
the horizontal stem of the tree. It was only a small tree, and a most
unpleasant platform. But I had caught a most appetising young frog, rather
larger than a domino, which I fastened to the hook, and after much
manoeuvring I dropped this where I knew some large chub lay. As the tree
had only been blown down a day before, I was certain that they had never
been fished for at that spot.

[Illustration: A MONSTER CHUB. _From a drawing by Lancelot Speed._]

I was right; hardly had the frog touched the water when I saw a monster
chub rise like a dark salamander out of the depths. Slowly he rose and
eyed the frog, moving his white lips as if the very sight imparted a gusto
to the natural excellence of young frogs. I nearly dropped from the tree
stem from sheer suspense, when he made up his mind, put on steam, and took
it! He was fast in a minute, and kindly rushed out into the river, where I
played him. Then I wound in my line and hauled him up till his head and
mouth were out of the water. As there was an impenetrable screen of bushes
between him and me I laid the rod down, trusting to the tackle, and ran
round to where close by was a farm punt, made fast. It had been used
during harvest time, and was full of what in the classics they call the
"implements of Ceres." All of these that do not seem made to cut your leg
off are designed to run into and spike you. Besides scythes and reap
hooks, there were iron rakes (sharp end upwards), wooden rakes,
pitchforks, and garden forks, and the difficulty was to move in the punt
without getting cut or spiked. The last users of the punt had also taken
peculiar care to fasten it up. It was anchored by a grapnel, and by an
iron pin on a chain, the pin eighteen inches long and driven hard into the
bank. In a desperate hurry I hauled up the grapnel, did a regular Sandow
feat in pulling up the iron peg, seized a punt pole apparently weighted
with lead, but made out of an ash sapling, and started the punt. It would
not move. I found there was another mooring, so picking my way among the
scythes, spikes, rakes, &c., I hauled this in. It was most infernally
heavy, and turned out to be a cast-iron wheel of a steam plough or other
farming implement. Then I was under weigh, and got round to the fish. It
was still there. I could see its expressionless eye (about as big as a
sixpence) out of the water and its mouth wide open, when I remembered I
had forgotten the landing-net in my hurry. Then came the period of mental
aberration common to the amateur. The fish was certainly 4 lbs. in weight,
yet I tried to get him in with my hands. Of course he gave one big flop,
slipped out, and disappeared--the biggest chub I ever shall not catch.




THE WORLD'S FIRST BUTTERFLIES


Thames plants must strike every one as belonging to an ancient order of
life. But the vast clouds of winged _ephemeridae_ that dance over its
waters when there is a rise of "May-fly" in early summer look to be not
only the creatures of a day, but of our day. In the astonishing wave and
rush of life seen at such times, when from every plant and pool winged
creatures are ascending to float in air, it is difficult to picture the
silence and stillness of a world where there were no birds, or hum of
bees, and no signs of the other insects which exceed the other population
of the earth by unnumbered myriads of millions; yet the insects, even the
same identical species which dance over the Thames to-day, are among the
very oldest of living things, just as its plants and its shells are. Rocks
and slate are not ideal butterfly cases; and if the fragile limbs of the
beetle and grasshopper of the successive prehistoric worlds had perished
beyond the power of identification, no one could have felt surprise. But
such has been the industry of modern naturalists--to give the widest name
to those who have devoted their time to the search for, and description
of, fossil insects--that the remains of thousands of species have been
identified, and the time of their appearance upon the earth approximately
fixed. The latest contributor to this elegant branch of the study of
fossils is Mr. Herbert Goss.[1] Perhaps the most interesting of his
conclusions is the antiquity, not only of the existing orders of insects,
but even of their particular families and genera, as compared with
vertebrate animals. It is astonishing to find not only crickets and
beetles existing at periods enormously earlier than the appearance of
birds or fish, but that they conformed in type to the families in which
they are classed to-day. Though they become fewer and fewer as they are
tracked back up the river of time, there are not found in the earliest
fossil-bearing rocks any connecting links or earlier and simpler forms of
insect life, or a clue to the common ancestor of insects, spiders, and
shrimps, which naturalists would dearly like to discover. There is a
baffling completeness about these creatures. When in the lias period, for
instance, the vertebrates were huge saurian reptiles and flying lizards,
and scarcely any of our existing classes of fish had come into existence,
the beetles, cockroaches, crickets, and white ants were there, with all
the distinguishing characteristics of the existing families as they were
settled by Linnaeus.

The first insect known to have existed, a creature of such vast antiquity
that it deserves all the respect which the parvenu man can summon and
offer to it, was--a cockroach. This, the father of all black-beetles,
probably walked the earth in solitary magnificence when not only kitchens,
but even kitchen-middens were undreamt of, possibly millions of years
before Neolithic man had even a back cave to offer with the remains of
last night's supper for the cockroach of the period to enjoy. His
discovery established the fact that in the Silurian period there were
insects, though, as the only piece of his remains found was a wing, there
has been room for dispute as to the exact species. Mr. Goss in his preface
to the second edition of his book notes that what is probably a still
older insect has been found in the lower Silurian in Sweden. This was not
a cockroach, but apparently something worse. If the Latin name,
_Protocimex Silurius_, be literally translated, it means the original
Silurian bug. It was a fair conjecture that insects appeared about the
same time as land plants first grew on the earth. As almost all the
species either feed on some vegetable substances in growth or decay, or
else live upon other insects, some such provision of food was necessary
for them. Remains of such plants were discovered in the Silurian rocks. In
the Devonian formations, which contain the next oldest set of fossil
insects, numbers of conifers and ferns are found. Yet even then the only
vertebrate animals seem to have been fish. The insects still had the land
all to themselves. Of one of these Devonian insects the base of a wing was
the only part preserved in the rock. From this it was possible to tell the
order to which the creature belonged. It was one of the
_Neuroptera_--insects with wings in which the veins run straight down the
wing, sometimes joined by cross branches at right angles. Some of the
modern kinds are very beautiful four-winged flies, with bright colours on
their wings like butterflies. Others are ant-lions or caddis-flies. The
curve of the fragment of wing also suggested its probable size when
unbroken. It was perhaps two inches long. As there are little horny rings
round the wing base like those which crickets have, on which they rub
their legs and so "chirp," it is also quite likely that this insect of
hoary antiquity did the same, and enlivened the silence of Devonian fern
groves with a prehistoric hum. It is quite in keeping with modern ideas
that in that age of fishes one of the most remarkable insects should have
been a kind of May-fly, "a large species of _Ephemerina_, which must have
measured five inches in expanse of wings." Thus our Thames May-flies had
gigantic prehistoric ancestors, which appeared on earth, possibly with
their present associates the caddis flies, at an enormously remote age.

So far no butterfly had yet appeared on earth, though the
_Ephemerinae_ might dance over the still lagoons and swamps. In the
coal-forest period, and the age of trees and rank vegetation, insects of
many kinds seem to have multiplied, even though the most beautiful of all
were not yet launched in air. In England the first beetle wandered on to
the stage of life--the oldest British insect fossil known. It was
discovered in the ironstone of Coalbrookdale, and was a kind of weevil.
Another creature found in the same ironstone was a cricket. It is quite in
keeping with the forest and tree surroundings of the time that white ants
should have abounded to eat up the decayed and dead wood. Strictly
speaking, black-beetles are not beetles at all. But they are a very good
imitation. As some hundreds of families of _Paltaeoblattidae_, which
may be translated as "old original cockroaches," and _Blattidae_, or
cockroaches _pur sang_, pervaded these forests, and the doyen of all
Swiss fossil animals is one of these, the "state of the streets" in a coal
forest may be imagined when there were no bird police to keep the insects
in order. Thus the end of the Palaeozoic world--a very poor world at
best--was fairly well stocked with insects, though the moths, bees, and
butterflies had yet to come. Then came the sunrise of a new time--mammals,
any number of reptiles, possibly some birds, and an insect life more
teeming than any we now know. The "insect limestone" attests these
multitudes. Beetles, of which the scarabs were a numerous family,
increased vastly, and the oldest known dragon-fly and supposed ancestor of
those which hawk over the Oxford river, left his skeleton, or what
represents a dragon-fly's skeleton, among some two thousand other
specimens of fossil insects, in the Swiss Alps. It was then that the first
bird and the first butterfly appeared. The bird was the famous
Archaeopteryx, found in the Solenhofen slate, and the first butterfly, to
use an Irishism, was a moth, a sphinx moth, apparently about the size of
the Convolvulus sphinx moth. This stone-embedded relic of the moth that
sucked the juices of the plants of the Mesozoic world, incalculable ages
before the time even of the gigantic mammals, is preserved in the Teyler
Museum at Haarlem. When the new era of the Eocene period developed modern
forms of plants, their rapid growth was accompanied by a great increase in
the number of insects. Those which, like the moths, had only made their
first venture on earth, now appeared in greater numbers. Near Aix, in
Provence, five butterflies and two moths were found in some beds of marl
and gypsum long celebrated for their fossils, and with the fossil
butterflies were, in every case but one, fossil remains of the plants
which had served its larvae as food. Thus the May-flies and beetles are
perhaps older than the Thames shells, and older than the prehistoric
plants on which the river molluscs feed.

[1] Secretary of the Entomological Society, and an accomplished botanist.
The work is entitled "The Geological Antiquity of Insects," and published
by Gurney and Jackson, London.




BUTTERFLY SLEEP


Fond as the butterflies are of the light and sun, they dearly love their
beds. Like most fashionable people who do nothing, they stay there very
late. But their unwillingness to get up in the morning is equalled by
their equal desire to leave the world and its pleasures early and be
asleep in good time. They are the first of all our creatures to seek
repose. An August day has about fifteen hours of light, and for that time
the sun shines for twelve hours at least; but the butterflies weary of sun
and flowers, colour and light, so early that by six o'clock, even on warm
days, many of them have retired for the night. I climbed Sinodun Hill, on
a cold, windy afternoon, and found that hundreds of butterflies were all
falling asleep at five o'clock. Their dormitory was in the tall,
colourless grass, with dead seed-heads, that fringes the tracks over the
hills, or the lanes that cross the hollows. Common blues were there in
numbers, and small heath butterflies almost as many. The former, each and
every one of them, arrange themselves to look like part of the seed-spike
that caps the grass-stem. Then the use and purpose of the parti-coloured
grey and yellow under-colouring of their wings is seen. The butterfly
invariably goes to sleep head downwards, its eyes looking straight down
the stem of the grass. It folds and contracts its wings to the utmost,
partly, perhaps, to wrap its body from the cold. But the effect is to
reduce its size and shape to a narrow ridge, making an acute angle with
the grass-stem, hardly distinguishable in shape and colour from the
seed-heads on thousands of other stems around.[1] The butterfly also
sleeps on the top of the stem, which increases its likeness to the natural
finial of the grass. In the morning, when the sunbeams warm them, all
these grey-pied sleepers on the grass-tops open their wings, and the
colourless bennets are starred with a thousand living flowers of purest
azure. Side by side with the "blues" sleep the common "small heaths." They
use the grass-stems for beds, but less carefully, and with no such obvious
solicitude to compose their limbs in harmony with the lines of the plant.
They also sleep with their heads downwards, but the body is allowed to
droop sideways from the stem like a leaf. This, with their light
colouring, makes them far more conspicuous than the blues. Moreover, as
grass has no leaves shaped in any way like the sleeping butterfly, the
contrast of shape attracts notice. Can it be that the blues, whose
brilliant colouring by day makes them conspicuous to every enemy, have
learnt caution, while the brown heaths, less exposed to risk, are less
careful of concealment? Be it noticed that moths and butterflies go to
sleep in different attitudes. Moths fold their wings back upon their
bodies, covering the lower wing, which is usually bright in colour, with
the upper wing. They fold their antennas back on the line of their wings.
Butterflies raise the wings above their bodies and lay them back to back,
putting their antennae between them if they move them at all. On these
same dry grasses of the hills, another of the most brilliant insects of
this country may often be seen sleeping in swarms--the carmine and green
burnet moth. But it is a sluggish creature, which often seems scarcely
awake in the day, and its surrender to the dominion of sleep excites less
surprise than the deep slumber of the active and vivacious butterflies.
The "heaths" and "blues" should perhaps be regarded as the gipsies of the
butterfly world, because they sleep in the open. They are even worse off
than the nomads, because, like that regiment sleeping in the open which
the War Office lately refused to grant field allowance to on the ground
that they were "not under canvas," they do not possess even a temporary
roof. What we may call the "garden butterflies," especially the red
admirals, often do seek a roof, going into barns, sheds, churches,
verandahs, and even houses to sleep. There, too, they sometimes wake up in
winter from their long hibernating sleep, and remind us of summer days
gone by as they flicker on the sun-warmed panes. Mrs. Brightwen
established the fact that they sometimes have fixed homes to which they
return. Two butterflies, one a brimstone, the other, so far as the writer
remembers, a red admiral, regularly came for admission to the house. One
was killed by a rain-storm when the window was shut; the other hibernated
in the house. Probably it was as a sleeping-place and bedroom that the
butterflies made it their home. There is a parallel instance, mentioned by
a Dutch naturalist quoted by Mr. Kirby, when a butterfly came night after
night to sleep on a particular spot in the roof of a verandah in the
Eastern Archipelago. In the East the sun itself is so regular and so rapid
in rising and setting that the sleeping hours of insects and birds are far
more regular than in temperate lands, with their shifting periods of light
and darkness. Our twilight, that season that the tropics know not, has
produced a curious race of moths, or rather, a curious habit confined to
certain kinds. They are the creatures neither of day nor of night, but of
twilight. They awake as twilight begins, go about their business and enjoy
a brief and crepuscular activity, and go to sleep as soon as darkness
settles on the world. At the first glimmer of the dawn they awaken again
to fly till sunrise, when they hurry off like the fairies, and sleep till
twilight falls again.

[Illustration: BUTTERFLIES AT REST. _From photographs by R.B. Lodge._]

At the time of writing a border of bright flowers runs in straight
perspective from the window opposite, with a rose arcade by the border,
and a yew hedge behind that. The shafts of the morning sun fly straight
down to the flowers, and every blossom of hollyhock, sunflower, campanula,
and convolvulus, and the scarlet ranks of the geraniums, are standing at
"attention" to welcome this morning inspection by the ruler and
commander-in-chief of all the world of flowers. The inspecting officers,
rather late as inspecting officers are wont to be, are overhauling and
examining the flowers. These inspectors, also roused by the sun, are the
butterflies and bees. Splendid red admirals are flying up, and alighting
on the sunflowers, or hovering over the pink masses of valerian. Peacock
butterflies, "eyed" like Emperors' robes, open and shut their wings upon
the petals; large tortoiseshells are flitting from flower to flower;
mouse-coloured humming-bird moths are poising before the red lips of the
geraniums; and a stream of common white butterflies is crossing the lawn
to the flowers at the rate of twenty a minute. They all come from the same
direction, across a cornfield and meadow, behind which lies a wood. The
bees came first, as they are fairly early risers; the butterflies later,
some of them very late, and evidently not really ready for parade, for
they are sitting on the flowers stretching, brushing themselves, and
cleaning their boots--or feet. The fact is that the butterflies, late
though it is, are only just out of bed. You might look all the evening to
find the place where these particular butterflies sleep, and not discover
it, unless some of them have taken a fancy to the verandah or the inside
of a dwelling-room in the house. But each and every one of them has been
asleep in a place it has chosen, and it is probable that some, the red
admirals, for instance, will go back to that place to sleep at evening.

As there are hundreds of moths that fly by night and sleep by day at
seasons when there are perhaps only twenty species of butterflies flying
by day and sleeping by night, it is strange that the sleeping moths are
not more often found. Some kinds are often disturbed, and are seen. But
the great majority are sleeping on the bark of trees, in hedges, in the
crevices of pines, oaks and elms, and other rough-skinned timber, and we
see them not. Some prefer damp nights with a drizzle of rain to fly in,
not the weather which we should choose as inviting us to leave repose. Few
like moonlight nights; darkness is their idea of a "fine day" in which to
get up and enjoy life, many, like the dreams in Virgil's Hades, being all
day high among the leaves of lofty trees, whence they descend at the
summons of night, the--

                       "Filmy shapes
  That haunt the dusk, with ermine capes,
  And woolly breasts, and beaded eyes,"

The connection between character and bedtime which grew up from
association when human life was less complex than now has some counterpart
in the world of butterflies and insects. The industrious bees go to bed
much earlier than the roving wasps. The latter, which have been out
stealing fruit and meat, and foraging on their own individual account,
"knock in" at all hours till dark, and may sometimes be seen in a state of
disgraceful intoxication, hardly able to find the way in at their own
front door. The bees are all asleep by then in their communal dormitory.

It would not be human if some belief had not arisen that the insects that
fly by night imitate human thieves and rob those which toil by day. There
has always been a tradition that the death's-head moth, the largest of all
our moths, does this, and that it creeps into the hives and robs the bees,
which are said to be terrified by a squeaking noise made by the gigantic
moth, which to a bee must appear as the roc did to its victims. It is said
that the bees will close up the sides of the entrance to the hive with
wax, so as to make it too small for the moth to creep in. Probably this is
a fable, due to the pirate badge which the moth bears on its head. But it
is certainly fond of sweet things, and as it is often caught in empty
sugar-barrels, it is quite possible that it does come to the hive-door at
night and alarm the inmates in its search for honey.

[1] In the illustration it was impossible to photograph butterflies
actually sleeping. They show their attitude, but not the degree to which
the wings are flattened into a very acute angle.




CRAYFISH AND TROUT


About the middle of August, when walking by one of the locks on a disused
canal in the Ock Valley, I saw a man engaged in a very artistic mode of
catching crayfish. The lock was very old, and the brickwork above water
covered with pennywort and crane's-bill growing where the mortar had
rotted at the joints. In these same joints below water the crayfish had
made holes or homes of some sort, and were sitting at the doors with their
claws and feelers just outside, waiting, like Mr. Micawber, for something
to turn up. To meet their views the crayfish catcher had cut a long willow
withe. From the tapering tip of this he had cut the wood, leaving the
bark, which had been carefully slit and the woody tip extracted from it.
This pendant of bark he had made into a running noose, and leaning over
the bank he worked it over the crayfish's claws and then snared them. It
was a neat adaptation of local means to an end; for if you think of it,
string would not have answered, because it would not remain rigid, and
wire would be too stiff for the job.

Crayfish catching, until lately one of the minor fisheries of the Thames,
is now a vanished industry. Ten years ago the banks of the river from
Staines to the upper waters at Cricklade were honeycombed with crayfish
holes, like sandmartins' nests in a railway cutting. These holes were
generally not more than eighteen inches below the normal water line of the
river. In winter when the stream was full fresh holes were dug higher up
the bank. In summer when the water fell these were deserted. The result
was that there were many times more holes than crayfish, and that for
hundreds of miles along the Thames and its tributaries these burrows made
a perforated border of about three feet deep. The almost complete
destruction of the crayfish was due to a disease, which first appeared
near Staines, and worked its way up the Thames, with as much method as
enteric fever worked its way down the Nile in the Egyptian Campaign after
Omdurman. The epidemic is well known in France, where a larger kind of
crayfish is reared artificially in ponds, and serves as the material for
_bisque d'ecrevisses_, and as the most elegant scarlet garnish for
cold and hot dishes of fish in Paris restaurants; but it was new to recent
experience of the Thames. Perhaps that is why its effects were so
disastrous. The neat little fresh-water lobsters turned almost as red as
if they had been boiled, crawled out of their holes, and died. Under some
of the most closely perforated banks they lay like a red fringe along the
riverside under the water. Near Oxford, and up the Cherwell, Windrush, and
other streams they were, before the pestilence, so numerous that making
crayfish pots was as much a local industry as making eel-pots, the smaller
withes, not much larger than a thick straw, being used for this purpose.
Most cottages near the river had one or two of these pots, which were
baited on summer nights and laid in the bottom of the stream near the
crayfish holes. It must be supposed that they only use them by day, and
come out by night, just as lobsters do, to roam about and seek food on a
larger scale than that which they seize as it floats past their holes by
day. That time of more or less enforced idleness the crayfish used to
spend in looking out of their holes with their claws hanging just over the
edge ready to seize and haul in anything nice that floated by. Their
appetite by night was such that no form of animal food came amiss to them.
The "pots" were baited with most unpleasant dainties, but nasty as these
were they were not so unsavoury as the food which the crayfish found for
themselves and thoroughly enjoyed, such as dead water-rats and dead fish,
worms, snails, and larvae. They were always hungry, and one of the
simplest ways of catching them was to push into their holes a gloved
finger, which the creature always seized with its claw and tried to drag
further in. The crayfish, who, like the lobster, looked on it as a point
of honour never to let go, was then jerked out into a basket. They rather
liked the neighbourhood of towns and villages because plenty of dirty
refuse was thrown into the water. In the canalised stream which runs into
Oxford city itself there were numbers, which not only burrowed in the
bank, but made homes in all the chinks of stone and brick river walls, and
sides of locks, and in the wood of the weiring, where they sat ensconced
as snugly as crickets round a brick farmhouse kitchen fireplace. They were
regularly caught by the families of the riverine population of boatmen,
bargees, and waterside labourers, and sold in the Oxford market. A dish of
crayfish, as scarlet as coral, was not unfrequently seen at a College
luncheon. Possibly the recovery from the epidemic may be rapid, and the
small boys of Medley and Mill Street may earn their sixpence a dozen as
delightfully as they used to. Young crayfish, when hatched from the egg,
are almost exactly like their parents. The female nurses and protects
them, carrying them attached to its underside in clinging crowds. They
grow very fast, and this makes it necessary for the youthful crayfish to
"moult" or shed their shells eight times in their first twelvemonth of
life, as the shell is rigid and does not grow with the body. The constant
secretion of the lime necessary to make these shells is so exhausting to
the youthful crayfish that only a small number ever grow up. In America,
where a large freshwater crayfish nearly a foot long is found, its
burrowing habits are a serious nuisance, especially in the dykes of the
Mississippi. In those streams from which these interesting little
creatures have entirely disappeared it might be worth while to introduce
the large Continental crayfish. As it is bred artificially, there would be
no difficulty in obtaining a supply, and it would be a useful substitute
for the small native kind.

Sea crayfish, which grow to a very large size, are not much esteemed in
this country. They are not so well flavoured as their cousin the lobster.
But as river crayfish of a superior kind can be cultivated, and are reared
for the table abroad, it might be worth while to pay some attention to
what has been done in the United States to replenish by artificial
breeding the stock of lobsters now somewhat depleted by the great
"canning" industry. The method of obtaining the young lobsters is
different from that employed to rear trout from ova. The female lobsters
carry all their eggs fastened to hair-fringed fans or "swimmerets" under
their tails, the eggs being glued to these hairs by a kind of gum which
instantly hardens when it touches the water. For some ten months the
female lobster carries the eggs in this way, aerating them all the time
with the movement of the swimmerets. When they are caught in the
lobster-pots in the months of June and July, the eggs are taken to the
hatchery, and the ova are detached. As they are already fertilised, they
are put into hatching jars, where in due course they become young
lobsters, or rather lobster larvae, for the lobster does not start in life
quite so much developed as does the infant crayfish. It is about one-third
of an inch long, has no large claws, and swims naturally on the surface of
the water, instead of lurking at the bottom as it does when it has come to
lobster's estate. It seems to be compelled to rise to the surface, for
sunlight, or any bright illumination, always brings swarms of lobsterlings
to the top of the jars in which they are hatched. In the sea this impulse
towards the light stands them in good stead, for in the surface-waters
they find themselves surrounded by the countless atoms of animal life, or
potential life, the eggs and young of smaller sea beasts. The young
lobster is furiously hungry and voracious, because, like the young
crayfish, it has to change not only its shell but the lining of its
stomach five times in eighteen days. Unfortunately, in the hatching jars
there is no such store of natural food as in the sea. The result is that
the young lobsters have to eat each other, which they do with a cheerful
mind, if they are not at once liberated. When they have reached their
fifth month they go to the bottom and "settle down" in the literal sense
to the serious life of lobsters.

[Illustration: A TROUT. _From a photograph by Charles Reid._]

I believe no one ever saw trout spawning in the Thames, though there are
plenty of shallows where they might do so. Consequently the Thames trout
must be regarded as a fish which was born in the tributaries and descended
into the big river, and as the mouths of these trout-holding tributaries,
such as the Kennet at Reading, the Pang, the lower Colne, and others,
become surrounded with houses and the trout no longer haunt the
_embouchure_, so the tendency is for fewer trout to get into the
Thames. Still, places like the Windrush, the Evenlode, and the other upper
tributaries hold rather more trout than they did, as they are better
looked after; and the Fairford Colne is still a beautiful trout stream.
For some reason, however, the Thames trout do not seem fond of the upper
waters, where if found they seem to keep entirely in the highly aerated
parts by the weirs, but mainly haunt the lower ones from Windsor
downwards, and one was recently caught in the tidal waters below the
bridge. It is very difficult to see why there are so few above Oxford, or
from Abingdon to Reading. It is not because they are caught, for very few
are caught. A friend of mine who had lived on the river near Clifton
Hampden for some eight years, could only remember eight trout being caught
in that time. I thought I was going to have one once. I was fishing for
chub with a bumble bee, and a great spotted trout rose to it in a way
which made me hope I was going to have a trophy to boast of for life. But
he "rose short," and I saw him no more. I believe _all_ the brooks
which rise in the chalk hills of the Thames Valley have trout in them. One
runs under the railway line at Steventon. A resident there had quite a
number of tamed trout in the conduit which took the stream under the line,
and used to feed them with worms as a show. At the head waters of the
Lockinge brook, close to the springs, I saw the trout spawning on New
Year's Day. The big fish had wriggled up into the very shallowest water,
and were lying with their back fins and tails out, I suppose from some
instinct either that this water is the most highly aerated, or because
floods do less harm on a shallow, or for both reasons combined. At Long
Wittenham, though I never saw a trout in the river (they are, however,
taken there), Admiral Clutterbuck recently had a fine old stew pond in the
picturesque old grounds of the Manor House cleaned out, and stocked it
with rainbow trout. They did well and grew fast, and so far as I know,
none died. The water was not suited for their breeding, but the fish were
very ornamental, and rose freely to the fly.




FOUNTAINS AND SPRINGS


Is it true that our fountains and springs of sweet water are about to
perish? A writer in _Country Life_ says "Yes," that in parts of the
Southern counties the hidden cisterns of the springs are now sucked dry,
and that the engineers employed to bring the waters from these natural
sources to the village or the farm lament that where formerly streams
gushed out unbidden, they are now at pains to raise the needed water by
all the resources of modern machinery. When the old fountains fail new
sources are eagerly sought, and where science fails the diviner's art is
called in to aid. At the Agricultural Show the water-diviner sits
installed, surrounded by votive tablets picturing the springs discovered
by his magic art; and County Councils quarrel with the auditors of local
expenditure over sums paid for the successful employment of his mysterious
gift.

It is not strange that the springs of England should still suggest a faint
echo of Nature-worship. If rivers have their gods, fountains and springs
have ever been held to be the home of divinities, beings who were by right
of birth gods, even though, owing to circumstances, they did not move
exactly in their circle. _Procul a Jove, procul a fulgure_ may have
been the thought ascribed by Greek fancy to the gracious beings who made
their home by the springs, for whether in ancient Greece or in our Western
island, they breathe the sense of peace, security, and quiet, and to them
all living things, animal and human, come by instinct to enjoy the sense
of refreshment and repose. A spring is always old and always new. It is
ever in movement, yet constant, seldom greater and seldom less, in the
case of most natural upspringing waters, syphoned from the deep cisterns
of earth. Absolutely material, with no mystery in its origin, it impresses
the fancy as a thing unaccountable, like the source of life embodied,
something self-engendered. It has pulses, throbbing like the ebb and flow
of blood. Its dancing bubbles, rising and bursting, image emotion. It is
the only water always clear and sparkling. Streams gather mud, springs
dispel it. They come pure from the depths, and never suffer the earth to
gather where they leap from ground. They are the brightest and the
cleanest things in Nature. From all time the polluter of a spring has been
held accursed.

One of the sources of the Thames was a real spring, rising from the earth
in a meadow, until the level of the subterranean water was reduced.

These suddenly uprising springs are not common in our country, and need
seeking. Our poets, who borrowed from the classics all their epithets for
natural _fountains_, wrongly applied them to our modest springs
welling gently from the bosom of the earth. The springs of old Greece and
Italy gushed spouting from the rocks or flowed like the fountains of
Tivoli in falling sheets over dripping shoots of stone. Even a Greek of
to-day never speaks of a "spring," because he seldom sees one. "Fountain"
is the word used for all waters flowing from the earth, and the difference
of words corresponds to a difference of fact. The springs of his land
_are_ fountains, waters gushing from the rock or flowing from caverns
and channels in the hills. The fountains of Greece flow down from above,
and do not bubble up from below. These are the waters that tell their
presence by sound, and have been the natural models of all the drinking
fountains ever built,--jets that, spouting in a rainbow curve, hollow out
basins below them, cut in the marble floor, cool cisterns ever running
over, at which demi-gods watered their horses, and the white feet of the
nymphs were seen dancing at sundown.

A tributary of the Severn, near Bisley, in the Cotswolds, bursts from a
real fountain pouring from a hollow face of stone. But fountains in this
sense are rare in England, though among the Welsh hills and the Yorkshire
dales they may be seen springing full grown from the sides of the glens or
"scarrs," and cutting basins and steps in marble or slate. But in the
South the gentle springs take their place, silent, retiring, seldom found,
except by chance, or by the local tradition which always attaches to the
more important of our English natural wells. These it is the ambition of
misdirected zeal to enclose in walls of stone, and to furnish with steps
and conduits. If the old goddess Tan was once worshipped as the deity of
the spring, it has usually undergone conversion by the early monks and
changed its title to "St. Anne's Well," or been assigned to St. Catherine
or some other of the holy sisterhood of saints.[1] But there are hundreds
of tiny springs in Britain still left as Nature made them, and not yet
settled in trust on any of the modern successors to the water rights of
classic nymphs and Celtic goddesses. He who discovers for himself one of
these springs will visit it each time he passes near. Some are in the
woods, known only to the birds and beasts which live in them, and come
daily to drink the pure, untainted waters. Wood springs are among the most
beautiful of all, for they have a setting of tall timber, and their
margins are never trampled by cattle, or the natural play of their waters
disturbed to draw for the beasts of the farm. In the wood below Sinodun
Hill there rises an everlasting spring. There may be seen how great an
area of land it takes to make and keep one tiny spring. All the waters
which gather in the millions of tons of chalk on Sinodun rise and flow out
in the wood in the one pool, not larger than the circle of a wheel. It is
always full, with the water throbbing up clear from the invisible vents
below, and tiny white water-shells floating and falling in the basin, set
round with liverwort and moss, and watering a bed of teazles in the wood
below. Children drink from it, and pluck wild strawberries by its banks,
and the pheasant and the fox come there to quench their thirst. An
unexpected but not uncommon site of such springs is close to the margin of
streams, which themselves are fed, not mainly by springs, but from the
surface waters. [2] Wherever high ground slopes down to a stream, and ends
in a rising bank at some distance from the river, there a true spring
often rises, with an existence wholly apart from that of the river close
by, into which its surplus of waters flows. Such springs have their
special flora, their own "phenomena," and their own little set of effects
on their liliput landscape. In the centre the waters well up, absolutely
pure, and only discoloured when a more impatient earth-throb drives up a
column of cloudy sand or earth. The spreading circles broaden outwards,
and make their little marsh, planted with water-grass and forget-me-nots
and blue bog-bean, and in the spring with butterburs. Outside, on the
firmer but still moist soil the creeping jenny mats the ground; and the
succulent grasses which attract the cattle to tread the marsh into a muddy
paste. At the foot of the larger chalk downs the springs sometimes break
out in different fashion, a modest imitation of classical fountains. The
chalky soil breaks down, and from its sides the water often spouts in
jets, as may be seen in Betterton glen, above Lockinge House, and in many
other heads of the chalk brooks.

Springs of this kind are the natural outflowing of the water-bearing
strata, where they lie upon others not pervious. But the upflowing springs
are often fed by the accumulations of a great area of country, coming to
the surface like water from the orifice of a syphon, and flowing
permanently neither in greater nor less volume with constant force. If
these cease to run the inference is that the old conditions are seriously
disturbed. This has happened so frequently of late that local authorities
would do well to schedule lists of the larger springs and request the
owners or occupiers of the land to inform them from time to time whether
there is a decrease in the flow. Stored water is almost as valuable as
earth in a cycle of deficient rainfall, and the loss of any of our
fountains and springs is a local misfortune not easily remedied.

[1] "Well deckings" are still common festivals in the North. Quite lately
a Scotch loch was dragged with nets to catch a kelpie, and the bottom
sowed with lime. The Church early forbade well worship.

[2] There is one such just above Marston Ferry, near Oxford, on the
Cherwell, and two in a field below Ardington, near Lockinge.




BIRD MIGRATION DOWN THE THAMES


On September 16, 1896, after a period of very stormy wet weather, I saw a
great migration of swallows down the Thames. It was a dark, dripping
evening, and the thick osier bed on Chiswick Eyot was covered with wet
leaf. Between five and six o'clock immense flights of swallows and martins
suddenly appeared above the eyot, arriving, not in hundreds, but in
thousands and tens of thousands. The air was thick with them, and their
numbers increased from minute to minute. Part drifted above, in clouds,
twisting round like soot in a smoke-wreath. Thousands kept sweeping just
over the tops of the willows, skimming so thickly that the sky-line was
almost blotted out for the height of from three to four feet. The quarter
from which these armies of swallows came was at first undiscoverable. They
might have been hatched, like gnats, from the river.

In time I discovered whence they came. They were literally "dropping from
the sky." The flocks were travelling at a height at which they were quite
invisible in the cloudy air, and from minute to minute they kept dropping
down into sight, and so perpendicularly to the very surface of the river
or of the eyot. One of these flocks dropped from the invisible regions to
the lawn on the river bank on which I stood. Without exaggeration I may
say that I saw them fall from the sky, for I was looking upwards, and saw
them when first visible as descending specks. The plunge was perpendicular
till within ten yards of the ground. Soon the high-flying crowds of birds
drew down, and swept for a few minutes low over the willows, from end to
end of the eyot, with a sound like the rush of water in a hydraulic pipe.
Then by a common impulse the whole mass settled down from end to end of
the island, upon the osiers. Those in the centre of the eyot were black
with swallows--like the black blight on beans.

Next morning, at 6.30 a.m., every swallow was gone. In half an hour's
watching not a bird was seen. Whether they went on during the night, or
started at dawn, I know not. Probably the latter, for Gilbert White once
found a heath covered with such a flock of migrating swallows, which did
not leave till the sun dispelled the mists.

The migration routes of birds follow river valleys, when these are
conveniently in line with the course they wish to take. There is far more
food along a river than elsewhere, and this is a consideration, for most
birds, in spite of the wonderful stories of thousand-mile flights, prefer
to rest and feed when making long migrations, and also those short shifts
of locality which temporary hard weather causes. A friend just back from
Khartoum tells me that he saw the storks descending from vast heights to
rest at night on the Nile sandbanks, and saw their departing flight early
in the morning, these birds being in flocks of hundreds and thousands.

By watching the river carefully for many years I have noticed that it is a
regular migration route for several species besides swallows. The first to
begin the "trek" down the river are the early broods of water-wagtails,
both yellow and pied. They turn up in small flocks so early in the summer
that one might almost doubt if they could fly well enough to take care of
themselves. On June 26th last summer nearly forty were flying about in the
evening, and went across to roost on the eyot. Later numbers of blackbirds
arrive, also moving down the river. Sand-martins, when beginning the
migration, travel down the Thames in small flocks, and sleep each night in
different osier beds. How many stages they make when "going easy" down the
river no one knows. But I have seen the flocks come along just before
dusk, straight down stream, and then dropping into an osier bed.

In the second week of September there is usually an immense migration of
house-martins and swallows down the river. I have already described what I
once saw on a migration night on Chiswick Eyot. Sometimes they go on past
London, and find themselves near Thames mouth with no osier beds or
shelter of any kind. Then they settle on ships. I was told that one
morning the craft lying in Hole Haven off Canvey Island were covered with
swallows, all too numb to move, but that when the sun came out the greater
number flew away towards the sea. The same thing happened on the windmill
at Cley, in Norfolk, a famous starting and alighting place for birds.
Moorhens evidently migrate up or down the river in spring and autumn, and
occasionally dabchicks; otherwise their sudden appearance and
disappearance on the eyot could not be accounted for. Snipe follow the
Thames up the valley. Formerly Chiswick Eyot was their first alighting
place when east winds were blowing, after the fatigue of crossing London;
and persons still living used to go out and shoot them. A friend of mine,
whose family has resided in Chiswick for several generations, used to go
down the outside of the eyot and kill snipe, and also kill teal and duck
in the stream which runs from Chiswick House into the river. Another
friend broke a young pointer to partridges on the market garden between
Barnes Bridge and Chiswick.

Probably a number of the warblers also use the river as a migration road,
though I only notice them in spring. But as I am never here in early
September possibly many pass without being noticed. Also they are silent
in autumn, whereas in spring they sing, a little, but enough to show that
they are there.

Among the birds of this kind which pass up the river, but of which only a
few pairs stay to breed on the eyot, are whitethroats, blackcaps,
chiff-chaffs, and, I believe, nightingales. One beautiful early morning in
spring I could not believe my ears, but I heard a nightingale in a bush by
the side of the garden overhanging the river. It sang for about an hour,
"practising" as nightingales do. Another person in a house near also heard
it, and was equally astonished. It probably passed on, for next day it was
inaudible.

In hard weather a migration of a different kind takes place down the river
towards the sea. These birds are recruited from the ranks of the birds
that stay, with some foreign winter visitors also. They pass down the
river feeding on the mud and among the stones at ebb tide. Among those I
have seen are flocks of starlings and scattered birds, mainly redwings,
thrushes, blackbirds, and occasionally robins. Sandpipers also migrate up
the Thames in spring, and down it in autumn.




WITTENHAM WOOD


In Wittenham Wood, which in our time was not spoiled, from a naturalist's
point of view, by too much trapping or shooting the enemies of game,
though there was plenty of wild game in it, the balance of nature was
quite undisturbed. Of course we never shot a hawk or an owl, and I think
the most important item of vermin killed was two cats, which were hung up
as an awful instance of what we could do if we liked.

[Illustration: OTTERS. _From a photograph by J. S. Bond_.]

[Illustration: WATERHEN ON HER NEST. _From a photograph by R. B. Lodge_.]

In such large isolated woods, the wild life of the ordinary countryside
exists under conditions somewhat differing from those found even in
estates where the natural cover of woodland is broken up into copses and
plantations. Birds and beasts, and even vegetation, are found in an
intermediate stage between the wholly artificial life on cultivated land
and the natural life in true forest districts like the New Forest or
Exmoor. Most of these woods are cut bare, so far as the underwood extends,
once in every seven years. But the cutting is always limited to a seventh
of the wood. This leaves the ground covered with seven stages of growth,
the large trees remaining unfelled. With the exception of this annual
disturbance of a seventh of the area, and a few days' hunting and
shooting, limited by the difficulty of beating such extensive tracts of
cover, the wood remains undisturbed for the twelve months, and all wild
animals are naturally tempted to make it a permanent home.

As I have said, the wood stands on the banks of the Thames, below the old
fortress of Sinodun Hill, and opposite to the junction of the River Thame.
All the British land carnivora except the martin cat and the wild cat are
found in it. The writer recently saw the skin of a cat which had reverted
to the exact size, colouring, and length of fur of the wild species,
killed in the well-known Bagley Wood, an area of similar character, but of
much greater extent, at a few miles distance in the direction of Oxford. A
polecat was domiciled in Wittenham Wood as lately as August, 1898. Though
this animal is reported to be very scarce in many counties, there is
little doubt that in such woods it is far commoner than is generally
believed. Being mainly a night-hunting animal it escapes notice. But in
the quiet of the wood it lays aside its caution, and hunts boldly in the
daytime. The cries of a young pheasant in distress, running through some
thick bramble patches and clumps of hazel, suggested that some carnivorous
animal was near, and on stepping into the thicket a large polecat was seen
galloping through the brushwood. Its great size showed that it was a male,
and the colour of its fur was to all appearance not the rich brown common
to the polecat and the polecat cross in the ferret, but a glossy black.
This, according to Mr. W.E. de Winton, perhaps the best authority on the
British _mustelidae_, is the normal tint of the male polecat's fur in
summer. "By the 1st of June," he writes, "the fur is entirely changed in
both sexes. The female, or 'Jill,' changes her entire coat directly she
has young; at the end of April or the beginning of May. The male, or
'Hob,' changes his more leisurely throughout the month of May. He is then
known locally as the black ferret, and has a beautiful purplish black
coat. As in all _mustelidae_ the male is half as big again as the
female." Stoats and weasels are of course attracted to the woods, where,
abandoning their habit of methodical hedgerow hunting, they range at
large, killing the rabbits in the open wood, and hunting them through the
different squares into which the ground is divided with as much
perseverance as a hound. They may be seen engaged in this occupation,
during which they show little or no fear of man. They will stop when
crossing a ride to pick up the scent of the hunted rabbit, and after
following it into the next square, run back to have another look at the
man they noticed as they went by, with an impudence peculiar to their
race. The foxes have selected one of the prettiest tracts of the wood for
their breeding-earth. It is dug in a gentle hollow, and at a height of
some forty feet above the Thames. From it the cubs have beaten a regular
path to the riverside, where they amuse themselves by catching frogs and
young water-voles. The parent foxes do not, as a rule, kill much game in
the wood itself, except when the cubs are young. They leave it early in
the evening and prowl round the outsides, over the hill, and round the
Celtic camp above, and beat the river-bank for a great distance up and
down stream, catching water-hens and rats. At sunrise they return to the
wood, and, as a rule, go to earth. The cubs, on the other hand, never
leave it until disturbed by the hounds cub-hunting in September. Otters,
which travel up and down the river, and occasionally lie in the osier-bed
which joins the wood, complete the list of predatory quadrupeds which
haunt it. With the exception of the first, the wild cat, and the last, the
otter, they constitute its normal population, and as long as the stock of
rabbits and hares is maintained, they may remain there as long as the wood
lasts.

Numerically, the rabbits are more than equal to the total of other
species, whether bird or beast.[1] In dry seasons, they swarm in the
lighter tracts of the wood, and burrow in every part of it. These
wood-rabbits differ in their way of life from those in the open warren
outside. Their burrows are less intricate, and not massed together in
numbers as in the open. On the other hand, the whole rabbit population of
the one hundred acres seems to keep in touch, and occasionally moves in
large bodies from one part of the area to another. During one spring and
early summer the first broods of young rabbits burrowed tunnels under the
wire-netting which encircled the boundary for many hundred yards, and went
into a large field of barley adjoining. This they half destroyed. By the
middle of August it was found that, instead of the barley being full of
rabbits, it was deserted. They had all returned to the wood, and were in
their turn bringing up young families. One colony deserted the wood
altogether, and formed a separate warren some hundreds of yards away on a
steep hillside. On the eastern boundary the river is a complete check to
their migration. Except in the great frosts, when the Thames is frozen, no
rabbit ever troubles to cross it. Hares do so frequently when coursed, and
occasionally when under no pressure of danger. After harvest, when the
last barley-fields are cut, the wood is full of hares. They resort to it
from all quarters for shelter, and do not emerge in any number until after
the fall of the leaf. During the months of August, September, and October
these hares, which during the spring and winter lie out in the most open
parts of the hills above, lead the life of woodland animals. In place of
lying still in a form throughout the day, they move and feed. At all hours
they may be heard fidgeting about in the underwood and "creeping" in the
regularly used paths in the thick cover. When disturbed they never go at
speed, but, confident in the shelter of the wood, hop and canter in
circles, without leaving cover. In the evening they come out into the
rides, and thence travel out into the clover layers, returning, like the
foxes, early in the morning. A badger was found dead in the wood the first
year I rented it. This I much regretted, for though it had probably been
shot coming out of a cornfield next the wood, the badger is quite
harmless, and most useful to the fox hunter, for he _cleans out the
earths_. Mr. E. Dunn, late master of the Old Berkshire, tells me that
they are of great service in this way, as they _dig_ and enlarge the
earths, and so prevent the taint of mange clinging to the sides if a mangy
fox has lain in them.

[Illustration: DABCHICK. _From a photograph by R.B. Lodge._]

[Illustration: BADGER. _From a photograph by J.S. Bond._]

Lying between the river and the hills, this wood holds nearly every
species of the larger woodland and riverine birds common to southern
England. The hobby breeds there yearly. The wild pheasant, crow,
sparrow-hawk, kestrel, magpie, jay, ringdove, brown owl, water-hen (on the
river-bounded side), in summer the cuckoo and turtle-dove, are all found
there, and, with the exception of the pigeons and kestrels, which seek
their food at a distance during the day, they seldom leave the shelter of
its trees. One other species frequents the more open parts of the cover in
yearly greater numbers; this is the common grey partridge. The wood has an
increasing attraction for them. They nest in it, fly to it at once for
shelter when disturbed, lie in the thick copses during the heat of the
day, and roost there at night. Several covies may be seen on the wing in a
few minutes if the stubbles outside are disturbed in the evening, flying
to the wood. There they alight, and run like pheasants, refusing to rise
if followed. It is said that in the most thickly planted parts of
Hampshire the partridge is becoming a woodland bird, like the ruffed
grouse of North America. All that it needs to learn is how to perch in a
tree, an art which the red-legged partridge possesses. The birds, unlike
the foxes, hares, and rabbits, avoid the centre of the wood. Only the owls
and wood-pigeons haunt the interior. All the other species live upon the
edge. They dislike the darkness, and draw towards the sun. The jays keep
mainly to one corner by the river. The sparrow-hawks have also their
favourite corner. The wild pheasants lead a life in curious contrast to
that of the tame birds in the preserves. Like their ancestors in China and
the Caucasus, they prefer the osier-beds and reeds by the river to the
higher and drier ground. But in common with all the other birds of the
wood, with the exception of the brown owls, they move round the wood
daily, _following the sun_. In the early morning they are on the
eastern margin to meet the sunrise. At noon they move round to the south,
and in the evening are on the stubbles to the west. Where the pheasants
are there will the other birds be found, in an unconscious search for
light. It is the shelter and safety of the big wood, and not the presence
of crowded vegetation, that attracts them. They seek the wood, not from
choice, but because it is a city of refuge.

[1] These observations were made some years ago. I believe it has been
found necessary to kill down the rabbits since.




SPORT AT WITTENHAM


There is always some rivalry about shooting different woods on adjacent
properties, and the villages near always take a certain interest in the
results. Visiting our nearest riverside inn to order luncheon for our own
shoot that week, I found about a dozen labourers in the front room, with a
high settle before the fire to keep the draught out, sitting in a fine
mixed odour of burning wood, beer, and pipes. Sport was the pervading
topic, for a popular resident had been shooting his wood, and many of the
men had been beating for him, and had their usual half-crown to spend.
They were all talking over the day at the top of their voices; it had been
a very good one. The wood is quite isolated and not more than forty acres.
All round it is the property of one of the Oxford Colleges, which retains
the sporting rights over about fifteen hundred acres. This is exercised by
one of their senior fellows under some arrangement which works perfectly
well so far as I can see. I asked our keeper, who always calls him "The
Doctor," whether he was a medicine doctor or a doctor of divinity. He
inclined to think he was the latter, as he belonged to college shooting.
This way of putting it struck me as odd, but he was right. Any way, he
looked a very pleasant figure in his long shooting coat and old-fashioned
Bedford cords. There is also a college keeper, who is an institution in
the village. The day's sport in "the Captain's wood" had been a success.
Forty hares had been shot, or just one per acre, as well as a number of
rabbits and wild pheasants. The hares were being sent round the village in
very generous fashion, and a dozen lay on a bench in a back room.

Our own day was also a satisfactory one. Rabbits were unusually numerous,
and many squares had to be beaten twice. The gross total of the two days
was only something over three hundred head; but it was all wild game, and
shot in very pretty surroundings. With the beaters were the keeper, who is
also head woodman, and two assistant woodmen. These three men cut the
whole of the hundred acres down in the course of seven years. Putting
their lives at something over three score and ten, they will, as they
began before they were twenty-one, have cut the wood down about eight
times in the course of their existence. The beaters are entirely recruited
from the staff of this very large and well-managed farm. They have beaten
the woods so often that they know exactly what to do, when properly
generalled. Our landlord was one of the guns, and his son, who does not
shoot, but knows the wood thoroughly, kindly took command of the men, and
kept things going at best pace through the day. Anything prettier than the
entrance to the wood would be hard to find. A long meadow slopes steeply
to the Thames, with an old church and the remains of a manor house at one
end and the wood at the other. Below the house is a roaring weir, and
opposite the abbey of Dorchester across the flats. Our little campaign
gave an added interest to the scene. The bulk of the men were going round
behind the hills to drive these "kopjes" into the wood. The guns and one
or two ladies, and some small boys bearing burdens were walking up the
middle ride. Below was the silver Thames in best autumn livery, for the
leaf was not yet off the willows, though the reed-beds were bright russet.
The sky was blue, the sun bright, and the sound of the weir came gaily up
through the trees. All the wood-paths were bright with moss, the air
still, and an endless shower of leaves from the oaks was falling over the
whole hundred acres. There were just enough wild pheasants in the wood to
make a variety in the rabbit-shooting. Hares were unexpectedly numerous,
and we lined up on the side of the wood furthest from the river for a hare
drive. The whole hillside is without a hedge. Watching the long slope it
is a pretty and exciting sport to see the coveys of partridges, of which
there are sometimes a number on the hill, rise, fly down and pitch again,
and then rise once more and come fifty miles an hour over your head into
the wood.

The hares are generally very wild, getting up while the folds of the
ground are still between them and the beaters. As they seldom come
straight into the wood it is amusing to guess which particular gun they
will make for. Most of them slipped in at a safe distance, only to be
picked up in the wood later. A few birds were shot, and the cover now held
some forty partridges, though they are very wild in the low slop, and
seldom leave more than one or two stragglers behind when the wood is
beaten. The rabbit-shooting in the cover is difficult unless firing at
"creepers" from the cover in front is indulged in. The rides are often
very narrow, and the rabbits cross like lightning. Shooting "creepers" is
also highly dangerous if there are many guns, or if the men are near. They
do not seem to mind; indeed, I have known them shout out exhortations for
us to fire, when only screened by a row of thistles. One thing I have
learnt by shooting this big wood. The hares, and late in the season the
rabbits, move at least one square ahead of the beaters. If a single gun is
kept well forward, choosing his own place and taking turnabout with the
others, the bag--if it is wished to kill down the ground game--will be
considerably increased. One object when shooting this wood is to get the
ground beaten quickly; if there are twenty squares to be beaten, and five
minutes are wasted at each, it means a loss of one hour forty minutes. The
guns consequently go best pace to their places forward after each beat.
What with running at a jog-trot down the rides, shooting hard when in
place, and then getting on quickly to the next stand, often along spongy
or clayey rides on a nice, warm, moist November day, this is by no means
the armchair work which people are fond of calling wood shooting. The
variety of scenery in the wood added much to the charm. Sometimes we were
in the narrow rides covered with short turf and almost arched over by the
tall hazels; sometimes we were in low slop or walking through last year's
cuttings, shooting at impossible rabbits. There we had an occasional rise
of those most difficult of all birds to kill, partridge in cover, killing
both French and English birds; or a cock pheasant would rise and hustle
forward, an agreement having been made to leave these till properly beaten
up later in the day. Two very pretty corners were perhaps the most
enjoyable parts of the sport. By the river was a flat reed- and
rush-covered corner, with a ring of oaks round, the Thames at the bottom,
and some tall chestnut-trees on the outside. As the men advanced we had a
regular rise of wild pheasants, rocketing up from the reeds in every
direction high over the oaks and chestnuts. A fox helped the fun by
trotting up and down in the reeds uncertain which way to go, and flushing
the birds as he did so. Then the rushes were walked out and the rabbits
sent darting in every direction. After this we hardly found a bird or
rabbit in that corner during the season.

That year the wood gave constant sport, far better than in the later
years. There were three times as many rabbits, as well as hares and
pheasants.

One day in January we shot it during a fall of fine, dry snow. As the day
went on the ground grew white, and our coats whiter. At luncheon the men
were quite prepared for the emergency, or rather had prepared for it the
day before when the frost began. They had a bonfire of brambles a dozen
feet high, and faggots ready as seats, one set for us on one side of the
fire, another for themselves on the other. The roaring blaze of the fire
warmed us through and through, and by the end of luncheon our coats, which
had been powdered with snow, were grey with wood ash descending. During
this day a fox hung round us during the whole shoot. I think he must have
been picking up and burying or hiding wounded rabbits, for every now and
then he would come out into the ride, carefully smell the various places
where rabbits had crossed, and then, selecting one, would go off like a
retriever into the cover.




SPORT AT WITTENHAM (_continued_)


A month later Mr. Harcourt was shooting his woods at Nuneham. There are
more than four hundred acres of woods round this most beautiful park, all
of them giving ideal English estate scenery. The oaks of the park are like
those at Richmond, but there is not much fern except in the covers.
Nuneham is the best natural pheasant preserve in the Thames Valley, except
Wytham, Lord Abingdon's place, above Oxford. The woods lie roughly in a
ring round the park, in which the pheasants sun themselves. Outside these
woods are arable fields with quantities of feed, and all along the front
lies the river, which the pheasants do not often cross. The most striking
sport at Nuneham is the driving of the island by the lock cottage. Every
one who has been at Oxford has rowed down to have tea under the lovely
hanging woods by the old lock. Few see it later in the year when the
island opposite is covered with masses of silver-white clematis and
thousands of red berries of the wild rose and thorn. In the late autumn
mornings, when the mists are floating among the tall trees on the hill and
the sunbeams just striking down through the vapours as they top the wood
from the east, it is one of the prettiest sights on the Thames. In
November or early December, when the woods are shot, numbers of pheasants
are always found on the island. It holds a pool, in which and on the river
are usually a number of wild ducks. Shooting from the river itself is now
forbidden, and these and the half-wild duck have multiplied. The beaters,
in white smocks, all cross the old rustic bridge like a procession of
white-robed monks, and drive this island, and wild ducks and pheasants
come out high over the river, making for the top of the hill. The shooting
is fast and difficult, and the scene as the guns fire from the stations
all along the bank is most picturesque.

Shooting with a neighbour on some land adjoining Nuneham, my attention was
drawn to the very elegant appearance of all the gates and rails adjacent
to the road. As the ground was always beautifully farmed and in good
order, the condition of the gates did not surprise me. There was, however,
a story attached to their smartness. A seller of quack medicines had sent
out advertisers with most objectionable little bills, which he had posted
on every gate adjoining the roads. My entertainer, who was the occupier of
the land, had brought an action against the medicine man for defacing his
gates, which was only compromised by the delinquent undertaking to paint
every gate. He demurred at first to painting the railings too, but in the
end had to do this also.

The stalking-horse is still part of the sporting equipment of some old
Thames-valley farmhouses, but not in this neighbourhood. Only one wet
season fell to my lot, and then, though I often saw bodies of duck, I had
no opportunity of getting near them. A neighbour anchored a punt under a
hedge on the line which he believed the duck would take at dusk, and
killed several. Hard frosts send large bodies of duck to the river; they
come as soon as ever the large private lakes, like those at Blenheim,
Wootton, and Eynsham are frozen, and lie in small flocks all along the
river. Water-hens are so numerous on the river now, owing to their
preservation by the Conservancy, that any small covers of osier near are
full of them. They make extremely pretty old-fashioned shooting when
beaten up by a spaniel from the sedge and osier cover. I once turned out a
dozen water-hens, a brown owl, a woodcock, and a water-rail from one
little withe patch. When shooting the wood we always had one or two
water-hens in the bag, and sometimes a chance at a duck flying overhead
from the river. Only once were there many woodcocks in the cover. There
must have been at least five, and all were missed. At last, as we were
finishing the beat, one of the guns, who was young and keen, went off
after the last-missed cock along the river bank. As we were loading up the
game at the wood gate we heard a single shot. Then he appeared in the ride
with the cock. Both he and his excellent old spaniel received warm
congratulations. For my own part I was never tired of by-days in the wood
in my first season. The best sport was starting rabbits from under the
rows of fresh-felled ash and hazel poles, which the woodman called drills.
They are about five feet high and seven feet through. The rabbits get
under them in numbers, and sit there all day. We had an old retriever who
was an expert at finding them. The next process was for the gun to clamber
on to the top and stand knee-deep on the springing faggots, while a
woodman on each side poked the rabbit out with a pole. He might bolt any
way, and was under the next drill in a trice, so the shooting was quick. I
bagged twelve one afternoon in this cheerful manner. Another great
ambition of our lives was to get the better of the hill partridges. There
were plenty of them, but they always dived into the wood, and were lost
for the day. Only once did we score off them. We drove about sixty from
the hills into the wood. There they were seen running along the rides like
guinea fowls, but by placing a gun at the corner of the wood, and beating
towards him, we killed nine brace.




A FEBRUARY FOX HUNT


When the Yeomanry left the hunting field for South Africa, and
"registered" horses were commandeered by Government, fox hunting in
counties where it is not the main business of life might be supposed to
languish. As a matter of fact, it did not; and if the fields were smaller
than usual, and a good many familiar faces missing, the master very
properly felt that as he had his pack and there were plenty of foxes, he
might as well employ the one and hunt the other, and keep up the spirits
of the county by good, sound sport and plenty of it. Masters who take this
view, and there are very few who do not, are public benefactors and
shining examples; for it is not only the men who hunt who benefit vastly
by the change and exhilaration which hunting brings in its train. The
whole countryside enjoys a wholesome tonic by the frequent visits of the
hounds, and the well-equipped company with them. Nothing cheers up the
village, or cures the influenza, or brings oblivion of war news, or puts
every one into conceit with themselves, so quickly, or leaves such a glow
of sound satisfaction behind it. It would be odd if it did not,
considering the amount of time, money, and trouble spent before the pack
trots up to the green before the old grey church at eleven on a February
morning. Wittenham Wood lies on the very edge of the Old Berkshire
country, and as the river blocks all one side of it is naturally not one
of the favourite meets. But at the time of writing, early in February a
meet was duly advertised, and punctually to time the hounds were there.
Some people seem to think that modern fox-hunting is not so thorough as it
was in the past. We know better, and without imitating Mr. Jack Spraggon,
or reminding every one present of that "two thousand five
hundred--twenty-five 'undred--pounds a year" which Lord Scamperdale did or
did not spend on his pack, are very well aware of what our master and the
servants and the hounds had done that morning. The meet is on the edge of
his country, sixteen miles from his house, and he has ridden over all the
way, rising before the sun has got through more than the outside layer of
the mists. There is no special honour and glory awaiting him in return.
The cover to be drawn is surrounded for miles by deep and holding land now
soaked with rain. A run of any distinction is most improbable. On the
other hand, there will be plenty of hunting of a certain kind, and the
chance of seeing it, for the wood is overlooked by lofty hills. Therefore,
though the meet is small, the neighbourhood as a body expect to see plenty
of the hounds, and turn up expectant, the farmers on their cobs, the young
ladies on ponies and in dog-carts, and all the village who can be spared
for an hour on foot, while the small boys regard each other with rapturous
grins, and practise "holloaing" to improve their lung-power when the fox
breaks. When the hounds appear--they have come nearly as far from the
kennels as the master has from home--they are covered with road mud from
foot to head. The gritty splashes have changed all the white and tan to
grey, and made the black badger-pied. While some roll on the grass and
push themselves along sideways to get clean, and others attempt the
impossible task of licking the mud off their legs and feet, the older
hounds, who are less self-conscious, poke their heads into the hands and
against the chests of their ready-made friends, the village children, who
rush in while the master and the field and lookers-on are exchanging
courtesies, and embrace all the pack whom they can reach. Meantime the
"assets" for the day's sport, the material complement on which this
present assembly must rely for its day's hunting, lie in the cover and its
contents. A hundred acres of wood, in all stages of growth, from the high
thickets which the woodmen were felling yesterday, to the teazle and
stump-studded slope which they cut last year, with the deep river below
and the swelling hills above, is the cover.

[Illustration: FOX AND CUB. _From photographs by Charles Reid_.]

What the master would like would be that it should hold but one fox, that
that fox should get away over the hills and on to the downs beyond as
quickly as possible, and that he should never come back, but be killed
three parishes away. But no one believes in such luck; and the local
lookers-on do not in the least desire it. They want to see "a day's
hunting" in the wood, and a fox to every half-dozen hounds. As a fact
there are five foxes, not one, in the wood; and, passing from the general
to the particular, we may explain how they came there. The heavy rains of
the end of January filled all the drains, in which many foxes lie, so full
of water that they abandoned them in sheer disgust, and took to the warm
lying of the wood. Among these was a most attractive vixen, whose society
kept the rest from leaving when the weather improved; consequently, the
wood seemed full of foxes, none of which were disposed to leave it. When
the pack trotted up to the main ride, and the huntsman's ringing voice
sent them crashing into the four-years' growth by the river, a brace were
lying snug and dry in the old ash-stumps. One slipped into the river at
once and quietly swam to the opposite bank, while the other crept all
along the outside hedge and curled up in the corner waiting on events. The
vixen slipped into a badger earth under an old oak and stayed there, and a
couple more dog-foxes moved on into four acres of low slop, brambles,
shoots, and blackthorns, where they were winded by half the pack, while
the other half were running the first fox up the fence. The crash and
music of the hounds re-echoed from the trees and the enfolding hills
above, the shrieking of the jays as they flit protesting from tree to
tree, the hearty ring of the huntsman's voice cheering his hounds--surely
all this should send each fox flying out over the fields beyond! But a fox
has no nerves. He keeps his head with the coolness of a Red Indian, and a
"slimness" all his own. The first fox doubles back along his tracks,
crosses the big ride, twenty yards lower, just as that part of the pack
which is hunting him flings on up the fence, and waits again till he hears
them break out where he first stopped. From outside, where the field are
waiting on a knoll which gives a downward view into the rolling acres of
the wood, the rest of the pack are seen forcing another fox upwards
towards the hills. The sight is as pretty as our woods can show. Down
below the red coats of the master and huntsman move up the rides, and the
heads and sterns of the broad line of hounds, now all clean and bright
after brushing through the wood, rise and fall, appear and vanish, as they
leap over or thrust through the low slop and brambles. In front, where a
goyle runs up to a hollow of the hill, the ground has been cleared of
wood, and the forest of tall teazle-tops is full of goldfinches, flying
from seed-head to seed-head, too tame to mind the noise or care for
anything but their breakfast. Yet even they gather and fly before the
approaching tumult. Hares come hurrying out, and dash over the smooth
hillside; magpies rise, poise themselves, slue round, and dive backwards
into the wood; and then circumspect, lopping easily and lightly along, a
fox crosses through the teazles, and slips down to a drain in the hollow;
and see! another fox behind him, along the same path, and on the same
errand, for each trots up to a covered drain, looks at it, and finding it
stopped, pauses a second to think, and takes his resolve. One slips back
into the wood, the other canters to the fence, rising the hill, looks out,
whisks his brush and is off--across the turf, over the fifty-acre field of
growing wheat, and away to the back of the hills. Half the pack are
running the first fox, who has slipped back to the river, but with the
other half every one gets clear off, and does his best over the awful
ground. The mud explodes like shells as the hoofs crush into it, but
somehow every one is across and away, and on to the green road and a line
of sainfoin much sooner than could be expected. The fox can be seen
crossing the back of the hill, looking big and red, and full of running;
but after twenty-five minutes over all sorts of ground, from medium bad to
"downright cruel," for the soaking rains have made a very pudding even of
the pasture, the fox is run into and killed close to the Thames. No one
need be sorry for him, for he had lived by theft and violence for the past
two years, and was duly eaten himself by his natural enemies. Then back to
the wood again, where the rest of the pack had been whipped off their fox,
and were waiting dolefully to begin again, by which time the other foxes,
of which two elected to stay, had resolved that come what might, they
would stick to the wood, of which they knew every inch by heart; and by
keeping under the river bank, sneaking under layers of felled brushwood,
dodging along drains, and other devices, postponed their fate for two
hours, when one was "chopped" and one broke away and was run till dark.
This is not the kind of thing that keeps hunting alive, but it is the kind
of day which occurs in most ordinary counties in February, and at which no
one greatly grumbles. But if a slow woodland day is unattractive, the man
who hunts in a modest way from London and wishes to be sure of a run has
no lack of choice. Try, for instance, a day on the South Downs, five miles
from the sea, on the vast uplands and among the furze-covered bottoms
behind Beachy Head, when the snow-clouds are rolling in from the Channel
and dusting the summits of the downs with white. There is at least the
certainty of foxes, and of a gallop over the highest and soundest land in
the South, and even "February fill-dike" cannot make the going heavy.




EWELME--A HISTORICAL RELIC


At the head of one of the smaller Thames tributaries, a few miles from the
river, lies Ewelme, the ancient Aquelma, so called from the springing
waters which rise there. There are trout in the brook and excellent
water-cresses higher up, which are cultivated scientifically. Also there
was a political row in Gladstonian days over an appointment to the living.
But the real interest of this exceptionally beautiful Thames-valley
village is that it is a survival, almost unchanged, of a "model village"
made in the time of the Plantagenets. As such it deserves a place in any
history, even a "natural" history, which deals with the river.

The village lies at the foot of the Chiltern Hills, not far from
Dorchester. The persons who made it a model village just before the Wars
of the Roses were William de la Pole, the first Duke of Suffolk, and his
Duchess, Alice, the grandchild of Geoffrey Chaucer. The Duke, as every one
knows, was for years the leading spirit in England during the early part
of the reign of Henry VI., whose marriage with Margaret of Anjou he
arranged in the hope of putting an end to the disastrous war with France.
His murder in mid-Channel--when his relentless enemies followed him out to
sea, took him from the ship in which he was going into exile, and beheaded
him on the thwarts of an open boat--was the forerunner of the most ghastly
chapters of blood and vengeance in civil feud ever known in this country.
But the grace and dignity of his home life in his palace at Ewelme, with
his Duchess to help him, are less well known, though the evidences of it
remain little altered at the present day.

[Illustration: EWELME POOL. _From a photograph by Taunt & Co_.]

Of course there was a village there long before the Duke of Suffolk became
possessed of it. It was such a perfect site that if any place in the
country round were inhabited, Ewelme would have been first choice. The
flow of water is one of the most striking natural features and amenities
of the place. It is a natural spring, coming out from the chalk of the
Chilterns, and forming immediately a lovely natural pool, under high,
tree-grown banks. This is still exactly as it was in the ancient days. No
water company has robbed it, and besides "The King's Pool," which is the
old name of the water, there are overflowing streams in every direction,
now used in careful irrigation for the growth of watercress, one of the
prettiest of all forms of minor farming. Fertile land, shelter from gales
by the overhanging hill, great trees, and abundance of ever-flowing water,
are the natural commodities of the place. It was of some importance very
early, for it gave its name to a Hundred. This hundred contains among
other places Chalgrove, where Hampden received his death-wound. Ewelme
belonged to the Chaucer family. The last male heir was Thomas, son of
Geoffrey Chaucer the poet, who left an only daughter Alice, destined to
become the greatest lady of her time. She married first the celebrated
Earl of Salisbury, who was killed by a cannon-shot while inspecting the
defences of Orleans during the siege which Joan of Arc raised. William de
la Pole, then Earl of Suffolk, was appointed commander of the English
forces in the Earl of Salisbury's place, and not only succeeded to his
office, but also married his Countess, who now became Countess of Suffolk.
It was long before either the Earl or his Countess could revisit Ewelme,
where the Earl must have had some property before his marriage, for his
elder brother, Earl Michael, was buried at the public expense in the
church of Ewelme after his death at Agincourt. For seventeen years the
Earl never left the war in France; but when Henry VI. was grown up he
arranged the marriage with Margaret of Anjou, and did his best to promote
peace. At this time Suffolk was the most powerful subject in the kingdom.
He was made a Marquis, and finally a Duke, and his Duchess was granted the
livery of the Garter. In 1424 they built a palace at Ewelme, and in due
course rebuilt the church, founded a "hospital for thirteen poor men and
two priests," and added to this a school. Palace, church, hospital, and
school were all of the same period of architecture, and that the very best
of its kind. Thus in the fifteenth century Ewelme was eminently a "one
man" place, like most of the model villages of to-day. The palace was
moated, and used as a prison as late as the Civil War. Margaret of Anjou
was kept there in a kind of honourable confinement for a short time, for
long after the Duke's murder the Duchess was in favour once more, in the
triumph of the Yorkists, and Margaret, who had been her Queen and
patroness, was given to her keeping as a prisoner both in her palace and
later at Wallingford Castle. Henry VIII. spent his third honeymoon there,
with Jane Seymour, and Prince Rupert lived in it during the Civil War.
Later, only the banqueting hall remained, which was converted into a manor
house.

But if the palace is gone, the church remains as evidence of the
magnificence of the Duke's ideas on the subject of a village place of
worship. He seems to have shared the apprehension felt by the Duke in
Disraeli's novel "Tancred," that he might be accused of "under-building
his position." In design it is very like another large church at Wingfield
in Suffolk, where his hereditary possessions lay, and where he was buried
after his murder, his body having been given to his widow. The same
architect possibly supervised both, but of the two Ewelme Church is the
finer. The interior is especially splendid, for in it are the tombs of the
Chaucers, and the magnificent sepulchre of the Duchess herself, on which
her emaciated figure lies wrapped in her shroud. This tomb of the Duchess
Alice is one of the finest monuments of the kind in England. The other
relic of the prosperity of Ewelme under the De la Poles is the hospital
and school they founded. "God's House" is the name now given to it, and it
is kept in good repair and used as an almshouse. The inner court is
surrounded by cloisters, and the whole is in exactly the same condition as
when it was built. The higher parts, constructed of brick, were the
quarters of the priest and schoolmaster. The ruin and subsequent murder of
the Duke, who adorned and beautified this model village in the early
fifteenth century, took place in 1450. Nearly all France was lost, and in
the hopes of conciliating the enemy, Maine and Anjou were given up by
Suffolk's advice. He was accused of "selling" the provinces, and a number
of vague but damaging charges were drawn up against him on evidence which
would not be listened to now in any court or Parliament, except perhaps in
a French State trial. Suffolk drew up a petition to the king, which shows
among other things the drain which the French wars made on the lives and
fortunes of the English nobles. After referring to the "odious and
horrible language that runneth through the land almost in every common
mouth, sounding to my highest charge and most heaviest slander," he
reminded the King that his father had died in the siege of Harfleur, and
his eldest brother at Agincourt; that two other brothers were killed at
the battle of Jargeau, where he himself had been taken prisoner and had to
pay L20,000 ransom; that while his fourth brother was hostage for him he
died in the enemy's hands; and that he had borne arms for the King's
father and himself "thirty-four winters," and had "abided in the war in
France seventeen years without ever seeing this land." The King's favour
secured that he should be banished instead of losing his head, for a State
trial was never anything better than a judicial murder. The following is
the letter written by an eye-witness to Sir John Paston, describing what
then happened: "In the sight of all his men he was drawn out of the great
ship into the boat, and there was an axe and a stock. And one of the
lewdest men of the ship bade him lay down his head and he should be fairly
ferd (dealt) with, and die on a sword. And he took a rusty sword and smote
off his head with half-a-dozen strokes, and took away his gown of russet
and his doublet of velvet mailed, and laid his body on the sands of Dover;
and some say his head was set on a pole by it, and his men sit on the land
by great circumstance and pray." The writer says, "I have so washed this
bill with sorrowful tears that uneths ye shall not read it." The Countess
survived his fall and lived to be great and powerful once more. Her son
became the brother-in-law of sovereigns, and her grandchildren were
princes and princesses.




EEL-TRAPS


Fish and flour go together as bye-products of nearly all our large rivers.
The combination comes about thus: Wherever there is a water-mill, a mill
cut is made to take the water to it. The larger the river, the bigger and
deeper the mill cut and dam, unless the mill is built across an arm of the
stream itself. This mill-dam, as every trout-fisher knows, holds the
biggest fish, and where there are no trout, or few trout, it will be full
of big fish, while in the pool below there are perhaps as many more. Of
all the food fishes of our rivers the eel is really far the most
important. He flourishes everywhere, in the smallest pools and brooks as
well as in the largest rivers, and grows up to a weight of 9 lb. or 10
lb., and sometimes, though rarely, more. His price indicates his worth,
and never falls below 10d. per lb. Consequently he is valuable as well as
plentiful, and the millers know this well. On nearly all rivers the
millers have eel-traps, some of the ancient sort being "bucks," made of
withes, and worked by expensive, old-fashioned machinery like the mill
gear. Another and most paying dodge of the machine-made order is worked in
the mill itself, and makes an annexe to the mill-wheel.

I once spent an agreeable hour watching the making of barley meal and the
catching of eels, literally side by side. It was sufficiently good fun to
make me put my gun away for the afternoon, and give up a couple of hours'
walk, with the chance of a duck, to watch the mill and eel-traps working.

They were both in a perfect old-world bye-end of the Thames Valley, in the
meads at the back of the forgotten but perfect abbey of the third order at
Dorchester, under the tall east window of which the River Thame was
running bank full, fringed with giant poplars, from which the rooks were
flying to look at their last year's nests in the abbey trees.

The mill was, as might be supposed, the Abbey Mill; but on driving up the
lane I was surprised to see how good and large was the miller's house, a
fine dwelling of red and grey brick; and what a length of frontage the old
mill showed, built of wood, as most of them are, but with two sets of
stones, and space for two wheels. Only one was at work, and that was
grinding barley-meal--meal from nasty, foreign barley full of dirt; but
the miller had English barley-meal too, soft as velvet and sweet as a
new-baked loaf. Stalactites of finest meal dust hung from every nail, peg,
cobweb, and rope end on the walls, fine meal strewed the floor, coarse
meal poured from the polished shoots, to which the sacks hung by bright
steel hooks, and on both floors ancient grindstones stood like monuments
of past work and energy, while below and beside all this dust and floury
dryness roared the flooded waters of the dam and the beating floats of the
wheel. "Have you any eels?" I asked. "Come and see," said the miller.

He stopped his wheel, unbolted the door, and we looked up the mill dam,
two hundred yards long, straight as a line, embanked by double rows of
ancient yews, the banks made and the trees planted by the monks five
hundred years ago. Then we stepped into the wheel-house, where the water,
all yellow and foaming, was pouring into two compartments set with iron
gratings below, on which it rose and foamed. Seizing a long pole with
prongs like walrus teeth, the miller felt below the water on the bars.
"Here's one, anyway," he said, and by a dexterous haul scooped up a
monster eel on to the floor. In a box which he hauled from the dam he had
more, some of 5-lb. weight, which had come down with the flood--an easy
and profitable fishery, for the eels can lie in the trap till he hauls
them out, and sell well summer and winter. It pays as well as a poultry
yard. Once he took a 9-lb. fish; 2-1/2 lb. to 4 lb. are common.

The eel-trap on the old Thames mill stream is imitated in other places
where there is no mill. Thus at Mottisfont Abbey on the Test an old mill
stream is used to work an hydraulic ram, and also to supply eels for the
house; the water is diverted into the eel-trap, and the fish taken at any
time. Another dodge for taking eels, which is not in the nature of what is
called a "fixed engine," is the movable eel-trap or "grig wheel." It is
like a crayfish basket, and is in fact the same thing, only rather larger.
They can be obtained from that old river hand, Mr. Bambridge, at Eton,
weighted, stoppered, and ready for use, for 7s. 6d. each, and unweighted
for 5s. They are neat wicker-work tunnels, with the usual contrivance at
the mouth to make the entrance of the eels agreeable and their exit
impossible. The "sporting" side of these traps is that a good deal of
judgment is needed to set them in the right places in a river. Many people
think that eels like carrion and favour mud. Mr. Bambridge says his
experience is different, and his "advice to those about to fish" with this
kind of eel-trap is suggestive of new ideas about eels. He says that "for
bait nothing can beat about a dozen and a-half of small or medium live
gudgeon, failing these large minnows, small dace, roach, loach, &c.,
though in some streams about a dozen good bright large lob worms, threaded
on a copper wire and suspended inside, are very effective, and should
always be given a trial. Offal I have tried but found useless, eels being
a cleaner feeding fish than many are aware of; and feeding principally in
gravelly, weedy parts, the basket should be well tucked up under a long
flowing weed, as it is to these places they go for food, such as the
ground fish, loach, miller's thumb, crayfish, shrimps, mussels, &c. When I
worked a fishery near here, I made it a rule after setting the basket to
well scratch the soil in front of the entrance with the boathook I used
for lowering them, and firmly believe their curiosity was excited by the
disturbed gravel. Choose water from four feet to six feet deep, and see
basket lays flat. Every morning when picked up, lay them on the bank, pick
out all weed and rubbish, and brush them over with a bass broom, keeping
them out of water till setting again at dusk."

Eel-bucks, of which few perfect sets now remain, are the fixed engines so
often seen on the Thames, and are a costly and rather striking
contrivance, adding greatly to the picturesqueness of parts of the river.
They are very ancient, and date from days when the "eel-run" was one of
the annual events of river life. The eels went down in millions to the
sea, and the elvers came up in such tens of millions that they made a
black margin to the river on either side by the bank, where they swam
because the current was there weakest. The large eels were taken, and are
still taken, on their downward journey in autumn. It is then that the
Thames fills, and at the first big rush of water the eels begin to descend
to reach the mud and sands at the Thames mouth, where they spawn. They
always travel by night, and it is then that the heavy eel-bucks are
lowered. Often hundredweights are taken in a night, all of good size, one
of the largest of which there is any record being one of 15 lb., taken in
the Kennet near Newbury. In the "grig-wheels" they are taken as small as 3
oz. or 4 oz.; but in the bucks they rarely weigh less than 1 lb. The
darkest nights are the most favourable. Moonlight stops them, and they do
not like still weather. The upward migration of eels goes on from February
till May on the Thames, but the regular "eel-fare" of the young grigs do
not assume any great size till May, when as many as 1,800, about three
inches long, were seen to pass a given point in one minute. So say the
records. But who could have counted them so fast?

A few recent developments of the eel trade elsewhere show how valuable
this may be. Quite lately the Danes discovered that the Lim-fiord and some
other shallow Broads on the West Danish Coast were a huge preserve of
eels. They began trawling there steadily, and have established a large and
lucrative trade in them. On the Bann, in Ireland, eel catching is still
done in a large way, and the fish shipped to London. But the most ancient
and yet most modern of eel fisheries is on the Adriatic, at Comacchio,
where lagoons 140 miles in circumference are stocked with eels, and eel
breeding and exporting are carried out on a large scale. Even as early as
the sixteenth century the Popes used to derive an income of L12,000 from
this source.




SHEEP, PLAIN AND COLOURED


In the Thames Valley there are two very distinguished breeds of sheep--the
Cotswolds at the head of the watershed, and the Oxford Downs, near
Wallingford. Wallingford lamb is supposed to be the best in the market.
There are also the Berkshire Downs sheep, but these are, I think, more
obviously cross-bred, or else of the Hampshire breed. The Cotswold sheep
are probably a very old breed. They are evidently the original of the
woolly "baa-lamb" of the nursery, with long, fleecy wool. The Oxford Downs
are a short-woolled sheep. One of the flocks of this breed has been
improved by selection, mainly in regard to fecundity, to such an extent
that I believe twins are the normal proportion among the lambs. The
shepherds, as elsewhere on the large down farms, form a race apart. They
are not always on the best of terms with the ordinary farm labourers, I
notice. "The shepherd be a working against I," is a complaint I sometimes
hear. The real reason is that the shepherd thinks, above all things, of
his flock, and of finding them _food_. The feud between the keeper of
sheep and the raiser of crops dates from the days of Cain and Abel.

I heard lately from a gentleman who very frequently occupies the
honourable position of judge or steward at the leading agricultural shows,
that it is proposed that in future no sheep sent to shows are to be
allowed to have their coats rouged, and the judges are in future to make
their decisions uninfluenced by the beauties of cosmetics. This decision
comes as a great blow to the skilled hands in the business of the
"improver," who, by long experience and a nice knowledge of the weaknesses
of judges, had brought the art of "making up" pedigree sheep of any
particular breed to something very nearly approaching the ideal of
perfection. Their wool was clipped so artistically as to resemble a bed of
moss, and this being elegantly tinted with rouge or saffron, the sheep
assumed the hue of the pink or primrose, according to taste and fancy. The
reason for the demand which now requires that the champions of the flock
shall be shown "plain" and not coloured is not too technical to appeal to
the general public. Those who know the acute anxiety with which the
exhibitors of prize animals, from fancy mice to shorthorns, watch them
"coming on" as the hour for the show approaches, will treat tenderly, even
if they cannot condone, the little weaknesses into which the uses of rouge
and saffron led them. When a Southdown which ought to have a contour
smooth and rounded as a pear still showed aggravating little pits and
hollows where there ought to be none, nothing was easier than to postpone
clipping those undesirable hollows till the moment before the show, or if
there were bumps where there should be no bumps, to shave the wool down
close over them. Left to Nature, the newly-clipped wool would show a
different tint from the rest of the fleece; but the rouge or saffron then
applied made all things even, to the eye, and the judges to find out
whether the animals were "level" or not had to feel them all over. Feeling
every six inches of some two hundred sheep's backs is very tiring work; so
the judges have struck against rouge, and there is an end of it.

One night, some years ago, an extraordinary thing happened on both lines
of downs by the Thames, near Reading, and also along the Chilterns. Most
of the flocks over a very large area took a panic and burst from their
folds, and next morning thousands of sheep were wandering all over the
hills. I feel certain that there must have been an earthquake shock that
night. Nothing else could have accounted for such a wide and general
stampede. The last authenticated earthquake shock in the South Midlands
took place hereabouts in 1775, and was noted at Lord Macclesfield's Castle
of Shirbourne, where the water in the moat was seen to rise against the
wall of one of the towers.[1]

Are our domestic sheep, except for their highly artificial development of
wool, really very different from their wild ancestors, the active and
flat-coated animals which still feed on the stony mountain-tops? The ways
of sheep, not only in this country but abroad, show that a part at least
of their wild nature is still strong in them; and if type photographs of
all the representative domestic animals of our time, had been possible a
few centuries ago, it may be that even in this country the shape of the
animal would be found to have been far nearer to the sheep of St. Kilda
and of the wild breeds than it is to-day.

In one of the old Cloth Halls of Norfolk are two fine reliefs in plaster,
one showing the _Argo_, bringing the golden fleece, the other a flock
of sheep of the day, with a saint in Bishop's mitre and robes preaching to
them. The shepherd, in a smock, is spinning wool with a distaff; and the
sheep feeding around him, though carefully modelled, are quite unlike any
of the modern breeds. Many of the domestic sheep of hot countries are more
slender and less woolly than the wild sheep of the mountains. The
black-and-white Somali sheep, for instance, are as smooth as a pointer
dog.

But it is in temperament and habits that the close connection between the
wild and tame breeds is most clearly shown. The _excessive_
domestication of the flocks of Southern England has killed all interest in
them even among those who live in the country, and are keen and
sympathetic observers of the ways of every other creature in the fields.
The beauty of the lambs attracts attention, and the prettiness of the
scene when they and their mothers are placed in some sheltered orchard
among the wild daffodils and primroses, or in an early meadow by the
brook, makes people wonder why they are so stupid when grown up. But the
fact is that when not penned up by hurdles and moved from square to square
over a whole farm, so that each inch of food may be devoured, each member
of the flock can think for itself, and would, in less artificial
surroundings, make for itself a creditable name for independence and
intelligence. All sheep have retained this distinguishing habit of their
ancestors, that they are by nature migratory, and share with nearly all
migrant animals a capacity for thought and organisation, and a knowledge
of localities. Wild sheep are migratory because they live by preference on
the rocky and stony parts of hills just below the snow-line. This is why
the tame sheep do so well on the moors of Scotland and mountains of
Switzerland. But as the snow-line descends each winter far below their
summer feeding haunts, wild sheep either migrate to the lower slopes of
the mountains, or, like the deer of the Rockies, move off altogether to
great distances. Every winter, for instance, the lower valleys of
Yellowstone Park are filled with deer and antelope from the distant
mountains. So the tame flocks of Greece, Thrace, Spain, and even Scotland
are migratory. In Scotland their transport is modernised, and they travel
regularly by steamer from the islands to winter in the Lowlands, and by
train from the Highlands. Two years ago a flock of migratory sheep from
Ayrshire came for early spring feeding to Hyde Park, and were there shorn,
with their Highland collies looking on. In the "old countries" and the
non-progressive East of Europe the migration of the flocks is on a vaster
and far more romantic scale. In Spain there are some ten millions of
migratory sheep, which every year travel as much as two hundred miles from
the plains to the "delectable mountains," where the shepherds feed them
till the snows descend. These sheep are known as _transhumanies_ and
their march, resting places, and behaviour are regulated by ancient and
special laws and tribunals dating from the fourteenth century. At certain
times no one is allowed to travel on the same route as the sheep, which
have a right to graze on all open and common land on the way, and for
which a road ninety yards wide must be left on all enclosed and private
property. The shepherds lead the flocks, the sheep follow, and the flock
is accompanied by mules carrying provisions, and large dogs which act as
guards against the wolves. The Merino sheep travel four hundred miles to
the mountains, and the total time spent on the migration there and back is
fourteen weeks. In Thrace the migration of the flocks is to the northern
ranges of Mount Rhodope. The sheep are said to be no less alert than the
Pomak shepherds, obeying a signal to assemble at any moment given by the
shepherd's horn. The dogs are ferocious in the extreme, as the enemies of
sheep in these parts are more commonly men than wild beasts, and the
gentle shepherd, who has, since the Russo-Turkish War, exchanged his long
gun for a Winchester rifle, shoots at sight and asks no questions.

The more nearly domestic sheep can approach the life of the primitive
stock, the more intelligent their way of life becomes. The cleverest sheep
live on the hills, and the stupidest on the plains. In Wales, for
instance, if a new tenant takes over the flock of an outgoing tenant, the
latter is by law allowed a higher price if the flock is one which knows
the boundaries and paths on the hills. On the plains of Argentina, as Mr.
Hudson tells us, the lambs are born so stupid that they will run after a
puff-ball rolling before the wind, mistaking it for their mother.

[1] This was a tremor of the great earthquake at Lisbon.




SOME RESULTS OF WILD-BIRD PROTECTION


Among the happiest results of the modern feeling about birds is the
conversion of the whole of the Thames above the tideway into a "protected
area." This was not done by an order of the Secretary of State, who, by
existing law, would have had to make orders for each bit of the river in
different counties, and often, where it divides counties, would have been
obliged to deal separately with each bank. The Thames Conservancy used
their powers, and summarily put a stop to shooting on the river throughout
their whole jurisdiction. The effect of this was not seen all at once; but
little by little the waterfowl began to return, the kingfishers to
increase, and all the birds along the banks grew tamer. Then the County
Councils of Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, and Berkshire forbade the
killing of owls and kingfishers, and this practically made the river and
its banks a sanctuary.

The water-hen are so numerous that at Nuneham Lock they run into the
cottages, and at other locks the men complain they eat all their winter
cabbages. As many as forty at a time have been counted on the meadows. Mr.
Harcourt has also established a wild-duck colony on and about the island
at Nuneham. The island has a pond in the centre, with sedges and ancient
willows and tall trees round. There the really wild ducks join the
home-bred ones in winter. Lower down, the scene on late summer days is
almost like a poultry-yard, with waterfowl and wild pigeons substituted
for ducks and chickens. Young water-hens of all sizes pipe and flutter in
the reeds, and feed on the bank within a few feet of those rowing or
fishing, and their only enemies are the cats, which, attracted by their
numbers, leave the cottages for the river and stalk them, while the old
water-hens in vain try to get their too tame young safe on to the water
again.

Though kingfishers have increased fast they are less in evidence, being
naturally shy after years of persecution. In summer they keep mainly at
the back of the willows, away from the river, so long as the latter is
crowded with boats.

It was not till November, 1899, that I saw the kingfishers at play, as I
had long hoped to do, in such numbers as to make a real feature on the
river. It was a brilliant, warm, sunny morning, such as sometimes comes in
early winter, and I went down before breakfast to Clifton Bridge. There
the shrill cry of the kingfishers was heard on all sides, and I counted
seven, chasing each other over the water, darting in swift flight round
and round the pool, and perching on the cam-shedding in a row to rest.
Presently two flew up and hovered together, like kestrels, over the
stream. One suddenly plunged, came up with a fish, and flying to the
other, which was still hovering, put the fish into its beak. After this
pretty gift and acceptance both flew to the willows, where, let us hope,
they shared their breakfast.

In a row down the river extending over ten miles I saw more than twenty
kingfishers, most of them flying out, as is their custom, on the side of
the willows and osiers averse from the river, but some being quite content
to remain on their perches from which they fish, while the boat slipped
down in midstream. As they sit absolutely motionless, and the reddish
breast, and not the brilliant back, is turned to the water, it needs quick
eyes to see these watchers by the stream.

The total prohibition of shooting on the water or banks is also producing
the usual effect on the other birds and beasts. They are rapidly becoming
tame, and the oarsman has the singular pleasure of floating down among all
kinds of birds which do not regard him as an enemy. Young swallows sit
fearlessly on the dead willow boughs to be fed by their parents; the
reed-buntings and sedge-warblers scarcely move when the oar dips near the
sedge on which they sit; wood-pigeons sit on the margin and drink where
the pebble-banks or cattle-ways touch the water; and the water-rats will
scarcely stop their business of peeling rushes to eat the pith, even if a
boatload of children passes by.

[Illustration: NIGHTJAR AND YOUNG ONE. _From a photograph by R.B. Lodge_.]

[Illustration: REED BUNTING. _From a photograph by R.B. Lodge_.]

The return of the birds, and especially of wild fowl, to the London river
is the result partly of the same causes which have restored the fish to
its waters; partly, also, of measures affecting a wider area, but carried
out with far less physical difficulty. Their presence is evidence that the
tidal Thames now yields them a stock of food so abundant as to tempt birds
like the heron, the water-hen, and the kingfisher back to their old
haunts. It shows, secondly, that the by-laws for the protection of birds
passed by the counties of London, Surrey, and Middlesex, and by the Thames
Conservancy (which was the pioneer in this direction by forbidding
shooting on the river), are so far effective that the stock is rapidly
increasing; and, lastly, that the birds are preserved and left in peace to
a great extent on the London river itself. The following are the most
marked instances of this return of river fowl which have come under the
writer's notice; but in every case there have been preliminary advances on
the part of the birds, which show that what is now recorded is only one
step further in the general tendency to resume their old habits, or even
to go beyond their former limits of place and time in resorting to the
river. The herons from Richmond Park have extended their usual nightly
fishing ground, which formerly ended at Kew Bridge, four miles further
down the river, almost to Hammersmith Bridge, and in place of coming late
at night, under cover of darkness, have made a practice of flying down at
dusk, and pitching on the edge of Chiswick Eyot.[1] Their regular
appearance led to various inquiries as to the nature of the "big birds
like geese" which flew down the river and made a noise in the evening,
questions which were answered, in one case, by the appearance of one of
the birds as it swung round in the air opposite a terrace of houses, and
dropped in the stream to fish, not twenty yards from the road. As the
heron is naturally among the shyest of all waterside birds, and seeks
solitude above all things, these visits show that the quantity of fish in
the lower river must be great, and also that the London herons, now never
shot at, are losing their inbred dislike of houses and humanity. Their
footprints have been found on the mud opposite a creek in Hammersmith,
round which is one of the most crowded quarters of the poorer folk of West
London. The birds had been fishing within ten yards of the houses, which
at this point are largely inhabited by organ-grinders and vendors of
ice-creams, callings which do not promote quiet and solitude in the
immediate neighbourhood. In the evening and early morning a few wild ducks
accompany the herons as low as the reach above Hammersmith Bridge, and
single ducks have been seen even at midday flying overhead. At sunrise one
Midsummer Day I saw a sheldrake (probably an escaped bird) flying down the
river, looking very splendid in its black, white, and red plumage, in the
bright light of the morning. It haunted the reach for some days, and was
not shot. Among other visitors to this part of the river and its island
during spring were a curlew, which fed for some time on the eyot during
the early morning, and a pair of pheasants, one of which, an old-fashioned
English cock bird, was subsequently captured unhurt. A flock of sandpipers
remained there for some weeks, and during the summer numbers of
sedge-warblers have nested on and around the eyot; the cuckoo has been a
regular visitor to the osier-bed in the early morning, probably with a
view to laying its eggs in the sedge-warblers' nests. As a set-off to
these early visits of the cuckoo, a nightjar has hunted round the islet
for moths, both at dusk and during the night, when its note may often be
heard. This is a fairly long list of interesting birds revisiting a
portion of the river which the London boundary crosses. At a distance of
less than half a mile, on some ornamental water near the river, an even
more unexpected increase of the bird population has been noted. A pair of
kingfishers nested and reared their brood in an old gravel-pit, while
several nests of young dabchicks hatched by the pool.[2] There also during
the spring a pair of tufted ducks appeared, and remained for some days
before going on their journey to their breeding haunts. One lamentable
event in the bird life of the Thames deserves mention. A pair of swans
ventured to nest within a few hundred feet of the London boundary. The
hen, a very shy young bird, laid three eggs on Chiswick Eyot, and the
pair, being supplied with material, diligently built up their nest day by
day until it was above the tide level. They sat for five weeks, the cock
bird keeping anxious guard day and night, while the hen would probably
have died of starvation unless fed by kindly neighbours, for the river
affords very little food for a swan, and this required far longer time to
find than the bird was willing to spare from her nest. This was then
robbed in the night, and the cock bird maltreated in defending it. The
return of fish and fowl to the London Thames shows by the best of tests
that the efforts of the Thames Conservancy to preserve the amenities of
the river, of the Sewage Committee of the County Council to maintain its
purity, or rather to render it less impure at its mouth, and of the
adjacent County Authorities to protect bird life, are all yielding good
results, and justify the courage with which such an apparently hopeless
task was undertaken. To the Conservancy I would offer one or two
suggestions, which County Councillors might also consider. The river is
the only large _natural_ feature still left in the area of London and
Greater London. Now that it contains water in place of sewage, there is a
guarantee that its main element as a natural amenity in a great city will
be maintained, and as it becomes purer, so will the facilities which it
offers for boating, fishing, and bathing increase. But it should not be
_embanked_ beyond the present limit at Putney. Stone walls are not a
thing of beauty, and a natural river-bank is. At present, from Putney to
Richmond the greater part of the Thames flows between natural boundaries.
If these can be maintained, the growth of willows, sedge, hemlock, reeds,
water ranunculus, and many other fine and luxuriant plants affords insect
food for the fish and shelter for the birds, besides giving to the river
its natural floral border. If this is replaced by stone banks the birds
and the fish will move elsewhere.

[1] Mr. J.E. Vincent tells me that in 1902 the herons were heard as far
down the river as Chelsea.

[2] In the beautiful grounds of Chiswick House, where the present
occupier, Dr. T. Tuke, carefully preserves all wild birds.




OSIERS AND WATER-CRESS


Osiers, the shoots of which are cut yearly for making baskets, crates,
lobster-pots, and eel-traps are a form of crop of which not nearly as much
is made in the Thames Valley as their profitable return warrants. Properly
managed they nearly always pay well, and, in addition, they are very
ornamental, and for the whole of the summer, autumn, and winter are one of
the very best forms of covert for game. They are commonly seen near
rivers, especially in parts where the ground is flooded in winter. But
osiers may be grown anywhere on good ground, and are a rapid and paying
crop, giving very little trouble, though they need some attention even on
the banks of tidal rivers. It is estimated that in the whole of Great
Britain there are only between 7,000 and 8,000 acres of osier beds, but
these average three tons of rods per acre, and the value of the crop when
harvested is often at least L15 per acre gross return. As fruit
cultivation is immensely increasing in England, there is a corresponding
increase in the demand for baskets to put the fruit in. This is the main
reason why osiers, unlike most farm crops, keep up their price. Immense
quantities are now imported from Belgium, France, and Germany because our
own crop is not nearly sufficient.[1] They do not require a wet soil or to
be near water: all that the willow roots need is that the land shall be
good and not too dry or sandy. Stagnant, boggy ground does not suit them
at all, though they will grow well in light loam. Many species of osier
are of most brilliant colouring in winter and early spring. In some the
rods are golden yellow; in others the bark is almost scarlet with a bright
polish, and the osier bed forms a brilliant object from December to
February, just before the rods are cut. The kind of willow grown varies
from the slender, tough withes used in making small baskets and eel-traps,
to the large, fast-growing rods suited for making crates for heavy goods.
The planter must find out for which kind there is the readiest market in
the neighbourhood, and then get his land ready. It needs thorough clearing
and trenching to the depth of from twenty to thirty inches. The young
osiers should then be put in. These should be taken from a nursery in
which they have been "schooled" for one year, as in that case they will
produce a crop fit to cut one year earlier than if the cuttings have been
put at once in the new osier-bed. The cuttings when transferred to the bed
should be put in twelve inches apart in the rows, and these rows made at
two feet distance from each other. They will need hoeing to keep the
ground clear, which will cost Ll to L2 per acre for the first two years,
and this should be done before the middle of June. When the osiers are
well started they grow so densely that they kill out the weeds themselves.
The rate of growth even on ordinary field-land is astonishing; they will
add eighteen inches in a week. February and March are the months for
planting, and March also sees the osier harvest when the time comes to cut
them. In the fens the harvesting of the rods begins earlier, but this
depends usually on the season, the object being to cut them before the sap
begins to rise. Osiers particularly invite the attention of those who are
desirous of planting coverts for game. They are a paying crop, and a quick
crop, giving cover sooner and of better quality than almost any other form
of underwood, and are also very ornamental. It is true that they are cut
yearly, but this is not till the shooting season is over. Meantime there
is no covert which pheasants like so much as osier-beds, especially if
they are near water.

On Chiswick Eyot, which is entirely planted with osiers, there are
standing at the time of writing six stacks of bundles set upright. Each
stack contains about fifty bundles of the finest rods, nine feet high.
Thus the eyot yields at least three hundred bundles. This osier-bed is cut
quite early in the year, usually in January, and by February all the fresh
rods are planted. Before being peeled the osiers are stood upright in
water for a month, and some begin to bud again. This is to make the sap
run up, I presume, by which means the bark comes off more readily. I
believe that the Chiswick osiers, being of the largest size, are used for
making crates, and that they are cut early because there is no need to
peel them.

Water-cress growing is an increasing business in the Thames Valley, where
the head of every little brook or river in the chalk is used for this
purpose. This is good both for business in general and for the fish, for
water-cress causes the accumulation of a vast quantity of fish food in
various forms.

The artificial culture of water-cress is comparatively modern, and a
remarkably pretty side-industry of the country.

Formerly, the cress gatherer was usually a gipsy, or "vagrom man," who
wandered up to the springs and by the head waters of brooks at dawn, and
took his cresses as the mushroom-gatherer takes mushrooms--by dint of
early rising and trespass.

[Illustration: PEELING OSIERS. _From a photograph by Taunt & Co_.]

The places where water-cress grows naturally are usually singularly
attractive. The plant grows best where springs actually bubble from the
ground, either where the waters break out on the lower sides of the chalk
downs, or in some limestone-begotten stream where springs rise, sometimes
for a distance of one or two miles, bubbling and swelling in the very bed
of the brook. There, among dead reeds and flags, the pale green cresses
appear very early in the spring, for the water is always warmer which
rises from the bosom of the earth. Trout and wild duck haunt the same
spots, and one often sees, stuck on a board in the stream, a notice
warning off the poor water-cress gatherer, who was supposed to poach the
fish.

The happy-go-lucky cress gathering is now a thing of the past, and there
are few rural industries more skilfully and profitably conducted. I knew a
farmer who, having lost all his capital on a large farm on the downs, took
as a last resource to growing the humble "creases" by the springs below.
He has now made money once more, and been able to take and cultivate
another farm nearly as large as that he worked before, while the area of
his water-cress beds still grows.

Wherever a chalk stream, however small, breaks out of the hills, it is
usual to let it to a water-cress grower. He widens the channels, and year
by year every square foot of the upper waters is planted with cress. Each
year, too, new and larger beds are added below, and the cresses creep down
the stream. When they encroach on good spawning ground this is very bad
for trout; but the beds are pretty enough, forming successive flats, on
different levels, of vivid green.

The scene on the Water-cress Farm shows the complete metamorphosis
undergone by what was once a swift running brook when once the new culture
is taken in hand. When left to Nature, the little chalk stream might truly
have said, in the words of the poem--

  "I murmur under moon and stars
   In brambly wildernesses,
  I linger by my shingly bars,
   I loiter round my cresses."

Now all the brambles and shingle are gone, and the stream is condemned to
"loiter round its cresses," and to do nothing else. The water must not be
more than six inches deep, and it must not flow too fast. To secure these
conditions little dams, some made of earth and some of boards, are built
from side to side of the brook. The water thus appears to descend in a
series of steps, each communicating with the next by earthen pipes,
through which the water spouts. When a fresh bed of cresses is to be
planted, which is done usually towards the end of summer, a sluice is
opened, and only an inch or so of water left. On this cuttings from the
cress are strewn, which soon take root, and make a bed fit for gathering
by next spring.

From February to April the cresses are at their best. Their flavour is
good, their leaves crisp, and they come at a time when no outdoor salad
can be grown. As the beds are set close to the fresh springs, they are
seldom frozen. Hence, in very hard weather all the birds flock to the
cress-beds, where they find running water and a certain quantity of food.
If the beds do freeze, the cress is destroyed, and the loss is very
serious.

Gathering cresses is a very pleasant job in summer, but in early spring
one of the most cheerless occupations conceivable short of gathering
Iceland moss. The men wear waterproof boots, reaching up the thighs, and
thick stockings inside these. But the water is icy cold. The cress plants
are then not tall, as they are later, but short and bushy. They need
careful picking, too, in order not to injure the second crop. Then the
cold and dripping cresses have to be trimmed, tied into bundles, and
packed. When "dressed" they are laid in strong, flat hampers, called
"flats," the lids of which are squeezed down tight on to them. The edges
are then cut neatly with a sharp knife, and the baskets placed in running
water, until the carts are ready to drive them to the station. Not London
only but the great towns of the North consume the cress grown in the South
of England. A great part of that grown in the springs which break out
under the Berkshire Downs goes to Manchester.

One basket holds about two hundred large bunches. From each of these a
dozen of the small bunches retailed at a penny each can be made; and every
square rod of the cress-bed yields two baskets at a cutting.

In one of the East London suburbs, near to the reservoirs of a water
company, it has been found worth while to create an artificial spring, by
making an arrangement with the waterworks for a constant supply. This
flows from a stand-pipe and irrigates the cress-beds, which produce good
cresses, though not of such fine flavour as those grown in natural spring
water and upon a chalk soil.

[1] Fishermen in the Isle of Wight send all the way to the Midlands to get
the little scarlet withes required for making lobster-pots.




FOG AND DEW PONDS


The cycle of dry seasons seems to be indefinitely prolonged. During the
period, now lasting since 1893, in which we have had practically no wet
summers, and many very hot ones, a very curious phenomenon has been
remarked upon the high and dry chalk downs. The dew ponds, so called
because they are believed to be fed by dew and vapours, and not by rain,
have kept their water, while the deeper ponds in the valleys have often
failed. The shepherds on the downs are careful observers of these ponds,
because if they run dry they have to take their sheep to a distance or
draw water for them from very deep wells. They maintain that there are on
the downs some dew ponds which have never been known to run dry. Others
which do run dry do so because the bottom is injured by driving sheep into
them and so perforating the bed when the water is shallow, and not from
the failure of the invisible means of supply. There seem to be two sources
whence these ponds draw water, the dew and the fogs. Summer fogs are very
common at night on the high downs, though people who go to bed and get up
at normal hours do not know of them. These fogs are so wet that a man
riding up on to the hills at 4 a.m. may find his clothes wringing wet, and
every tree dripping water, just as during the first week of last November
in London many trees distilled pools of water from the fog, as if it had
been pouring with rain. Such was the case on July 4th, 1901. The fogs will
draw up the hollows towards the ponds, and hang densely round them. Fog
and dew may or may not come together; but generally there is a heavy dew
deposit on the grass when a fog lies on the hills. After such fogs, though
rain may not have fallen for a month, and there is no water channel or
spring near the dew pond, the water in it rises prodigiously. Every
shepherd knows this, but the actual measurements of this contribution of
the vapour-laden air have not often been taken. Yet the subject is an
interesting one, and of real importance to all dwellers on high hills,
especially those which, like the South Downs, are near the sea, and
attract great masses of fog and vapour-laden cloud, but contain few
springs on the high rolls of the hills.

The following are some notes of the rise in a dew pond caused by winter
fogs on the Berkshire Downs. They were recorded by the Rev. J.G. Cornish
at Lockinge, in Berkshire, and taken at his suggestion by a shepherd[1] in
a simple and ingenious way. Whenever he thought that a heavy dew or fog
was to be expected (and the shepherds are rarely wrong as weather
prophets) he notched a stick, and drove it into the pond overnight, so
that the notch was level with the surface. Next morning he pulled it up,
marked how high the water had risen above the notch, and nicked it again
for measurement. On January 18th, after a night of fog, the water rose
1-1/2 in.; on the next day, after another fog, 2 in.; and on January 24th,
1 in. Five nights of winter fog gave a total rise of 8 ins.--a vast weight
of water even in a pond of moderate area. Five days of heavy spring dew in
April and May, with no fog, gave a total rise in the same pond of 3-1/2
ins., the dews, though one was very heavy, giving less water than the
fogs, one of which even in May caused the water to rise 1-1/2 ins.[2] The
shepherds say that it is always well to have one or two trees hanging over
the pond, for that these distil the water from the fog. This is certainly
the case. The drops may be heard raining on to the surface in heavy mists.
During the first October mists of 1891 the pavement under certain trees
was as wet as if it had been raining, while elsewhere the dust lay like
powder. The water was still dripping from these trees at 7 a.m. Under the
plane-trees the fallen leaves were as wet from distilled moisture as if
they had been dipped in water; yet the ground beyond the spread of the
tree was dry. The writer tried a simple experiment in this distilling
power of trees. At sundown, two vessels were placed, one under a small
cherry-tree in full leaf, the other on some stone flags. Heavy dew was
falling and condensing on all vegetation, and on some other objects, with
the curious capriciousness which the dewfall seems to show. The leaves of
some trees were already wet. In the morning the vessel under the tree, and
that in the open, both held a considerable quantity of water, that on the
stone caught from dew and condensation, that under the tree mainly from
what had dripped from the leaves, which clearly intercepted the direct
fall of dew. But the vessel under the tree held just twice as much water
as that in the open, the surplus being almost entirely derived from drops
precipitated from the leaves. Mr. Sanderson, the manager of the
elephant-catching establishment of the Indian Government, noted that in
heavy dews in the jungle the water condensed by the leaves could be heard
falling like a heavy shower of rain.

Gilbert White, who noticed everything, and lived near a chalk hill, makes
some shrewd conjectures, both about the dew ponds and the part which trees
play in distilling water from fog, though he does not form the practical
conclusion, which we think is a safe one, that the most fog-distilling
trees should be discovered and planted to help to supply the water in
these air-tapping reservoirs. "To a thinking mind," he writes, "few
phenomena are more strange than the state of little ponds on the summits
of the chalk hills, many of which are never dry in the most trying
droughts of summer. On _chalk_ hills, I say, because in many rocky
and gravelly soils springs usually break out pretty high on the sides of
elevated grounds and mountains; but no persons acquainted with chalky
districts will allow that they ever saw springs in such a soil but in
valleys and bottoms, since the waters of so pervious a stratum as chalk
all lie on one dead level, as well-diggers have assured me again and
again. Now we have many such little round ponds in this district, and one
in particular on our sheep-down, three hundred feet above my house, and
containing perhaps not more than two or three hundred hogsheads of water;
yet it is never known to fail, though it affords drink for three or four
hundred sheep, and for at least twenty head of large cattle beside. This
pond, it is true, is overhung with two moderate beeches, that doubtless at
times afford it much supply. But then we have others as small, which,
without the aid of trees, and in spite of evaporation from sun and wind
and perpetual consumption by cattle, yet constantly contain a moderate
share of water, without overflowing in the winter, as they would do if
supplied by springs. By my Journal of May, 1775, it appears that 'the
small and even the considerable ponds in the vales are now dried up, but
the small ponds on the very tops of the hills are but little affected.'
Can this difference be accounted for by evaporation alone, which is
certainly more prevalent in the bottoms? Or, rather, have not these
elevated pools _some unnoticed recruits, which in the night time
counterbalance the waste of the day?_" These unnoticed recruits, though
it is now certain that they come in the form of those swimming vapours
from which little moisture seems to fall, are enlisted by means still not
certainly known. The common explanation was that the cool surface of the
water condensed the dew, just as the surface of a glass of iced water
condenses moisture. The ponds are always made artificially in the first
instance, and puddled with clay and chalk.

In the notes to a recent edition of "White's Selborne," edited by
Professor L.C. Miall, F.R.S., and Mr. W. Warde Fowler, a considerable
amount of information on dew ponds is appended to the passage quoted
above, but the source of supply still remains obscure. The best dew ponds
seem to be on the Sussex Downs, where far more fog and cooling cloud
accumulates than on the more inland chalk ranges, because of the nearness
of the sea. Near Inkpen Beacon, in Hampshire, there is a dew pond at a
height of nine hundred feet, which is never dry, though it waters a large
flock of sheep.[3] Dew ponds are often found where there are no other
sources of supply, such as the wash coming from a road. Probably if the
site for one had to be selected, it should be where the mists gather most
thickly and the heaviest dews are shed, local knowledge only possessed by
a few shepherds. I have driven up _through_ rain on to the top of the
downs, and found there that no rain was falling, but mists lying in the
hollows like smoke. Mr. Clement Reid, F.R.S., has added to the "Selborne"
notes his own experiences of the best sites for dew ponds. They should, he
thinks, be sheltered on the south-west by an overhanging tree. In those he
is acquainted with the tree is often only a stunted, ivy-covered thorn or
oak, or a bush of holly, or else the southern bank is high enough to give
shadow. "When one of these ponds is examined in the middle of a hot
summer's day," he adds, "it would appear that the few inches of water in
it could only last a week. But in early morning, or towards evening, or
whenever a sea-mist drifts in, there is a continuous drip from the smooth
leaves of the overhanging tree. There appears also to be a considerable
amount of condensation on the surface of the water itself, though the
roads may be quite dry and dusty. In fact, whenever there is dew on the
grass the pond is receiving moisture."

Though this is evidently the case, no one has explained how it comes about
that the pond surface receives so very much more moisture than the grass.
The heaviest dew or fog would not deposit an inch, or even two inches, of
water over an area of grass equal to that of the pond. None of the current
theories of dew deposits quite explain this very interesting question. Two
lines of inquiry seem to be suggested, which might be pursued side by
side. These are the quantities distilled or condensed on the ponds, and
the means by which it is done; and secondly, the kind of tree which, in
Gilbert White's phrase, forms the best "alembic" for distilling water from
fog at all times of the year. It seems certain that the tree is an
important piece of machinery in aid of such ponds, though many remain well
supplied without one.

[1] Thomas Elliot, who for some twenty years was shepherd and general
manager for one of my father's tenants at Childrey.

[2] Full details of the cost and method of making dew ponds, as well as
other information about them, are contained in the prize essay of the late
Rev. J. Clutterbuck, Rector of Long Wittenham, in the Journal of the Royal
Agricultural Society. Vol. I., Sec.S. Part 2.

[3] In the Isle of Wight, on Brightstone Downs, about 400 feet above the
sea, is a dew pond with a _concrete_ bottom, which has never run dry
for thirty years.




POISONOUS PLANTS


A friend informs me that he has found a quantity of woad growing on the
Chilterns above the Thame, enough to stain blue a whole tribe of ancient
Britons, and also that on a wall by the roadside between Reading and
Pangbourne he discovered several plants of the deadly nightshade, or
"dwale." This word is said to be derived from Old French _deuil_,
mourning; but its present form looks very English. The only cases of plant
poisoning now common among grown-up people are those caused by mistaking
fungi for mushrooms, or by making rash experiments in cooking the former,
of which Gerard quaintly says: "Beware of licking honey among the thorns,
lest the sweetness of the one do not countervail the sharpness and
pricking of the other." But with such a list of toxic plants as our flora
can show there is always danger from certain species whose properties are
quite unknown to ordinary mortals. Are they equally unknown to the
herbalists and that mysterious trade-union of country-women and collectors
of herbs by the roadside who deal with them? Probably the trade in poisons
not used for serious purposes, but for what used in some parts of England
to be called "giving a dose," a punishment for unfaithful, unkind, or
drunken husbands, still exists as it did some forty years ago. The
collectors of medicinal plants cut from the roadside and rubbish heaps,
plants whose "operations" for good are quite well known, and have been
handed down by tradition for centuries, cannot be absolutely ignorant of
the other side of the picture, the toxic properties which other plants, or
sometimes even the same plants, contain. Foxglove, for instance, from
which _digitalis_ used as a medicine is extracted, is a good example
of these kill-or-cure plants. Every portion of the plant is poisonous,
leaves, flowers, stalks, and berries. It affects the heart, and though
useful in cases in which the pulsations are abnormal, its symptoms when
taken by persons in ordinary health are those of heart failure. Thus
foxglove is not only a dangerous but a "subtle" poison.

Among other plants which may cause serious mischief, but are seldom
suspected, are such harmless-looking flowers as the meadowsweet,
herb-paris, the common fool's-parsley, found growing in quantities in the
gardens of unlet houses and neglected ground which has been in
cultivation, mezereon, columbine, and laburnum. Meadowsweet has the
following set against its name: "A few years since two young men went from
London to one of the Southern counties on a holiday excursion, on the last
day of which they gathered two very large sheafs of meadowsweet to bring
home with them. These they placed in their bedroom at the village inn
where they had to put up. In the course of the night they were taken
violently ill, and the doctor who was called in stated that they were
suffering from the poisonous prussic-acid fumes of the meadowsweet
flowers, which he said almost overpowered him when he came into the room.
The flowers were at once removed, and the young men, treated with suitable
restoratives, were by next morning sufficiently recovered to undertake the
journey home." [1] Without knowing what the young men had had for supper,
it seems perhaps rather hasty to blame the meadowsweet. But the other
flowers mentioned above have a bad record. To take them in order.
Herb-paris, which grows in woods and shady places, with four even-sized
leaves in a star at the top of the stem, all growing out opposite each
other, bears a large, green solitary flower, and a bluish-black berry
later. All parts of the plant are poisonous, the berries especially.
Fool's-parsley, an unpleasantly smelling, very common plant, which leaves
its odour on the hand if the seeds are squeezed or drawn through it, is
said to cause numbers of deaths by being mistaken for common parsley and
cooked. In the case of poisoning by this plant, it is recommended that
milk should be given, the body sponged with vinegar, and mustard poultices
put on the sufferer's legs. It is reckoned that one plant produced six
thousand and eighty seeds--an unpleasant degree of fecundity for a
poisonous weed. Columbine, which is a wild plant with blue or white
flowers, as well as a domesticated one, has a toxic principle like that of
the monkshood, more especially in the seeds; and the pretty red berries of
the mezereon are responsible for the deaths or illness of children nearly
every autumn. They are like cherries, and easily picked from the low
bushes on which they grow. A dozen are said to be enough to cause death,
though this must probably depend on the state of the eater's health. The
laburnum, with its golden rain, is potentially a kind of upas tree. The
writer has only known of two deaths of children caused by eating the beans
in the green pods, but it is said to be a frequent cause of death every
year on the Continent, where, possibly, children are less naturally
careful about poisonous plants than those in England, to whom risks of
this kind are usually and properly made part of the "black list" of the
nursery-book of "Don'ts." The seeds will even poison poultry, if they pick
them up after they have dropped from the pod. Laburnum is of comparatively
recent introduction into Britain, or it would probably earlier have been
accorded a place among the severely poisonous plants, dreaded by all.

Of these the deadly nightshade and hemlock are the best known in story,
while the yew is most dangerous because far more common. In one case the
Rector of a Berkshire village was made very ill by eating honey which had
been partly gathered from yew flowers. Green hellebore and monkshood are
also classed in the list of the ranker poisons. Deadly nightshade is
rather a rare plant, yet it may be seen often enough on the sides of woods
where there are old walls. It is poisonous throughout. The flowers are
large, single, purple bells, and the berries black and shiny like a black
cherry. It is said of this dangerous plant that the roots are computed to
be five times more poisonous than the berries, that human beings have been
found more susceptible to it than animals, and carnivorous animals more so
than others. Children suffer more in proportion to the quantity of poison
taken than do adults. But cases of nightshade poisoning are very rare,
though two were reported some three years ago. Possibly the berries often
fail to ripen, and so are less attractive in appearance. The poisonous
hemlocks are two, one of which, the common hemlock, is said to have been
the plant from which the Athenians prepared their poison for executing
citizens condemned to death; and the other, the water-hemlock, or cowbane,
is particularly deadly when eaten by cattle, to which it is fatal in a
very few hours. Another plant, used for preparing poison in India, which
produces a drug used by some tribes of Thugs for procuring the death of
their victims, datura or stramonium, has now found a place amongst our
wild flowers. It has an English name, thorn-apple, and is said to have
been naturalised by the gipsies, who used the seeds as a medicine and
narcotic, and carried them about with them in their wanderings. Like
henbane, it is often seen on rubbish-heaps and in old brickfields. The
leaf is very handsome, and the flower white and trumpet-shaped. Both this
plant and the henbane retain their poisonous properties even when dried in
hay, and stalled cows have been known to be poisoned by fodder containing
a mixture of the latter plant.

Cattle have a delicate sense of smell which warns them of the danger of
most poisonous English herbs, though apparently this warning odour is
absent from the plants which kill so many horses when the grass grows on
the South African veld, and also from our English yew. Yew was anciently
employed as a poison in Europe, much as is the curari to-day in Central
America. Dr. W.T. Fernie, the author of "Herbal Simples Approved for
Modern Use," says that its juice is a rapidly fatal poison, that it was
used for poisoning arrows, and that the symptoms correspond in a very
remarkable way with those which follow the bites of venomous snakes. It is
believed that in India there is a poison which produces the same effect.
An Indian Rajah once desired that a notice should be put in a well-known
paper that he did not intend to raise his rents on his accession to the
estates. The proprietor of the paper asked him his reasons for wishing for
such an advertisement. The Rajah said that his grandfather had raised the
rents, and had died of snake-bite; that his father had done the same, and
had also died of snake-bite; and that he concluded that there was some
connection of cause and effect. The notice was inserted, and this Rajah
did not die of snake-bite, or rather of the poison which simulates it.

[1] "Farm and Home" Year Book for 1902.




ANCIENT THAMES MILLS


Almost the greatest loss to country scenery is the decay of the ancient
windmills and water-mills. The first has robbed the hilltops of a most
picturesque feature, while in the valleys and little glens the roaring,
creaking, dripping wheel sounds no longer, except in favoured spots where
it still pays to grind the corn in the old way. The old town and city
mills often survived longer than the country ones, and those on the Thames
longer than those on smaller rivers. The corn and barley which was taken

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