"Go, beautiful and gentle dove!
But whither wilt thou go?
For though the clouds tide high above.
How sad and waste is all below.
"The dove flies on.
In lonely flight
She flies from dawn to dark;
And now, amidst the gloom of night,
Comes weary to the ark.
`Oh! let me in,' she seems to say,
`For long and lone has been my way;
Oh! once more, gentle mistress, let me rest
And dry my dripping plumage on thy breast.'"
Rev W. Bowles.
There is a kind of semi-wildness about our back lawn that a great many
people profess to admire. It stretches downwards from my indoor study,
from where the French windows open on to the trellised verandah, which
in this sweet month of June, as I write, is all a smother of roses. The
walk winds downwards well to one side, and not far from a massive hedge,
but this hedge is hidden from view for the most part by a ragged row of
trees. The Portuguese laurel, tasselled with charming white bloom at
present, but otherwise an immense globe of green (you might swing a
hammock inside it and no one know you were there), comes first; then
tall, dark-needled Austrian pines, their branches trailing on the grass,
with hazels, lilacs, and elders, the latter now in bloom. The lawn
proper has it pretty much to itself, with the exception of the
flower-beds, the rose-standards, and a sprinkling of youthful pines, and
it is bounded on the other side by a tall privet hedge--that, too, is
all bedecked in bloom. On the other ride of this hedge the view is shut
in to some extent by tapering cypress trees, elms, and oaks, but here
and there you catch glimpses of the hills and the lovely country beyond.
Along this hedge, at present, wallflowers, and scarlet and white and
pink-belled foxgloves are blooming.
If you go along the winding pathway, past the bonnie nook--where is now
the grave of my dear old favourite Newfoundland [the well-known
champion, Theodore Nero]--and if you obstinately refuse to be coaxed by
a forward wee side-path into a cool, green grotto, canopied with ivy and
lilacs, you will land--nowhere you would imagine at first, but on
pushing boughs aside you find a gate, which, supposing you had the key,
would lead you out into open country, with the valley of the Thames,
stretching from west to east, about a mile distant, and the grand old
wooded hills, blue with the softening mist of distance, beyond that.
But the lower part of the lawn near that hidden gate is bounded by a
bank of glorious foliage--rhododendrons, syringas, trailing roses, and
hero-laurels in front, with ash, laburnum, and tall holly trees behind.
It may not be right to allow brambles to creep through this bank; nor
raspberries, with their drooping cane-work; nor blue-eyed, creeping
belladonna; but I like it. I dearly love to see things where you least
expect them; to find roses peeping through hedgerows, strawberries
building their nests at the foot of gooseberry clumps, and clusters of
yellow or red luscious raspberries peeping out from the midst of
rhododendron banks, as if fairy fingers were holding them up to view.
I'm not sure that the grass on this pet lawn of mine, is always kept so
cleanly shaven as some folks might wish, but for my own part I like it
snowed over with daisies and white clover; and, what is more to the
point, the birds and the bees like it. Indeed, the lawn is little more
than a vast outdoor aviary--it is a bird-haunted lawn. There is a
rough, shallow bath under a tree at the end of it, and here the
blackbirds, thrushes, and starlings come to splash early in the morning,
and stare up at my window as I dress, as coolly as if they had not been
all up in the orchard trees breakfasting off the red-heart cherries. I
have come now, after a lapse of four years, to believe that those
cherries belong to the birds and not to me, just as a considerable
number of pounds of the greengages belong to the wasps.
The nightingales hop around the lawn all day, but they do not bathe, and
they do not sing now; they devour terribly long earthworms instead. In
the sweet spring-time, in the days of their wooing, they did nothing but
sing, and they never slept. Now all is changed, and they do little else
save sleep and eat.
There are wild pigeons build here, though it is close to two roads, and
I see turtle-doves on the lawn every day.
"Did you commence the study of natural history at an early age, Gordon?"
said Frank to me one evening, as we all sat together on this lawn.
"In a practical kind of a way, yes, Frank," I replied, "and if I live
for the next ten thousand years I may make some considerable progress in
this study. _Ars longa vita brevia est_, Frank."
"True; and now," he continued, "spin us a yarn or two about some of the
pets you have had."
"Well, Frank," I replied, "as you ask me in that off-hand way, you must
be content to take my reminiscences in an off-hand way, too."
"We will," said Frank; "won't we, Ida?"
Ida nodded.
"Given a pen and put in a corner, Frank, I can tell a story as well as
my neighbours, but the _extempore_ business floors me. I'm shy, Frank,
shy. Another cup of tea, Dot--thank you--ahem!"
------------------------------------------------------------------------