It is an open glade in the middle of a pine-wood. Not all green and
level is this glade, with trees standing round in a circle, like the
clearings in forests of the Far West, which I used to read of in the
novels of Cooper and that so bewitched me when a boy. No, for judging
from the rough and rutty pathway that leads up to it, and from the
numerous banks and hillocks in it, there can be no doubt that, in far
distant days of the past, gravel must have been dug and carted hence.
The wood itself--glade and all--stands on a hill. At any time of the
day I have but to ascend one of these furze-clad banks to catch a view
the beauty of which can hardly be surpassed by any other scene in bonnie
Berkshire. It is warm to-day--'tis the 1st of August--and there lies a
greyish-purple haze over all the landscape, that tones and softens it.
The nearer trees, just beyond the field down there where the sheep are
feeding, the stately ashes, the spreading elms and planes, and the
towering poplars, stand out green and clear in the sunshine; but the
hills beyond the valley of the Thames and the trees along its banks have
a blotted, blurred, and unfinished look about them, but are very
charming to behold nevertheless, all the more in that, here and there,
you catch glimpses of the silvery river itself, reflecting the glorious
sunshine.
Down yonder is the road that leads past my pine-wood. You could not
help noticing that it is very beautiful. It is a road of yellow gravel,
bounded on each side, first by broad grassy banks on which rich white
clover blooms and yellow celandines are conspicuous, and next by a wild
indescribable tangle of a hedge. It had been originally blackthorn, but
has been so cut back that many other bushes and weeds far less easily
offended have asserted their independence, and tower over it or swamp
it. Yes, but, taken as a whole, it must be confessed they swamp it in
beauty. Yonder are patches of dark-leaved nettles, yonder clumps of
orange-brown seedling docks, side by side with lofty spreading pink-eyed
iron-weed. Yonder is a canopy of that marvellous creeper the white
briony: very small are their little greenish-white flowerets, but what a
show their myriads make, and the clusters of its berries, green and
crimson, rival in beauty those of the blue-petalled woody nightshade
that are growing there as well. High over the hedgerow stands the
yellow tansy and the wild parsley, while in it, under it, and scattered
hero and there are the crimson glow of field poppies, the orange gleam
of leopard's bane, and starry lights from ox-eyed daisies.
The banks or hillocks in my woodland study--among which you may wander
as in a labyrinth, lose your way, and finally perhaps, much to your
surprise, find yourself back again at the very place whence you
started--are clothed with tall furze-bushes; their yellow blossoms have
faded and fallen, and downy seed-pods that crackle in the sunshine, as
they split and scatter their seeds, have taken their place, but the
beauty of these blossoms is hardly missed, for over and through the
dark-green furze the brambles creep and trail, dotting them over with
clusters of pink-white bloom.
If you went close to these trailing brambles, you would find that each
cluster of bloom had a bee or two at work on it. There are plenty of
the bees of commerce there, dressed in homespun garb of unassuming grey
or brown, quite suitable for the work they have to do--make honey for
the humble cottagers that dwell in the village nestling among the trees
down yonder. But besides these, there are great gaudy bees that go
droning from blossom to blossom, clad in velvet, with stripes of orange,
white, or red, each arrayed in his own tartan, one might say, each
belonging to his own clan or ilk. Here is a great towering thistle--
emblem of Scotland, pride of her sons. How beautiful the broad
mauve-coloured, thorn-protected flowers are, and on each of them is one
of the aforesaid big tartan bees, and on some there are two revelling in
the nectar there distilled! Now _do_ those Scottish thistles exude a
kind of whisky, I wonder, or rather a kind of Athole brose [a mixture of
honey and whisky]. Whether they do or not, one thing must be patent to
the eyes of all observers--those tartan bees do positively become
intoxicated on those Scottish thistle-tops; from other flowers they
gather honey in quite a business sort of a way, but once they alight
upon the thistle they are down for the day. They soon become so drowsy
that they don't care to move, and if you go near them they hold up their
forelegs and shako them at you in a deprecating sort of a way.
"For goodness' sake," they seem to say, "don't come here to disturb us;
go away and look after your business, if you happen to have any, only
don't come here."
If you are an early bird, you may find some of those bees asleep on the
thistle-tops at six o'clock in the morning, the down on their backs all
bedraggled, and dew on their wings, evidence enough that they have not
been home at all, and mean to make another day of it.
Shrub-like oaks, stunted willows, and dark-berried elders also grow on
the banks among the furze and the bramble, and here and there a patch of
purple heath.
Between the little hills the ground is level, but carpeted over with
grass and moss, and a profusion of dwarfed wild flowers of every tint
and colour under the sun.
The wood itself is of fir and larch pine, with here and there a gigantic
and widely spreading oak. There are dark spruce thickets too, much
frequented by wood-pigeons--I can hear their mournful croodling now--and
there are darker thickets still, where the brown owl sits blinking and
nodding all day long, till gloaming and starlight send him out, with the
bat, to see after supper.
It is under the shadow of a splendid oak-tree, which overhangs a portion
of my glade, that I mostly write, and under it my little tent is
pitched, the shelter of which I only court when a shower comes on,
being, like every other wild creature, a thorough believer in the
benefits of a life spent in the fresh open air.
Yonder hangs a hammock in which, when tired, I may lounge with a book,
or, soothed by the sweet breath of the pine-trees, and lulled by the
whisper of wind and leaf, sleep.
But when work is done, hammock, tent and all are packed upon or behind
my tricycle, which, like a patient steed, stands there waiting to bear
me to my home in the valley.
My woodland study is fully five-hundred feet above the level of the sea,
and yet it is easy to see from the size, shape and surface of the
pebbles all around me, that this glade was once upon a time a portion of
the ocean's bed; that glass-green waves once rippled over those banks
where the furze now grows; that congers and flat fish once wriggled over
the gravel where those thistles are blooming; and that thorny-backed
crabs used to lie perdu in the holes where dormice now sleep in winter.
I pick up one of those pebbles and throw it--well, just in yonder among
the whins; where the stone has alighted a wild old fox has a den, and
she has cubs too in spring-time; so I am not the only wild creature that
frequents these solitudes. Oh no; for apart from the birds, who all
know me, and do pretty much as they please, there are mice and moles in
the grass, and high aloft orange-brown squirrels that leap from tree to
tree, besides rabbits in dozens that scurry around the hillocks and play
at hide-and-seek. At this very moment up on yonder bank sits a hare;
his ears are very much pricked, and he is looking towards me, but as he
is chewing something, in a reflective kind of way, he cannot be very
much alarmed. And only last evening I saw a large hedgehog trotting
across my glade, dragging behind him a long green snake, a proof,
methinks, that innocent hoggie is fond of something more solid than
black beetles and juicy slugs as a change of diet.
With the exception of an occasional keeper, wandering in pursuit of
game, no human being ever disturbs the sanctity of my woodland study;
and no sound falls on my ears, except the distant roar of a passing
train, the song of linnets, and croodle of turtle-dove and cushat.
Sometimes, in blackberry season, far down in yonder copse, I can hear
the laughing voices of children at work among the brambles. Just under
a furze-bush, not five yards from the spot where I am now reclining, a
pheasant some time ago brought forth a brood of young. She never used
to move when I went close to her, only looked up in my face, as much as
to say, "I don't think you are likely to disturb me, but I mean to stick
to my nest whatever happens."
There is something new to be seen and studied in this woodland haunt of
mine all the year through. What a wondrous volume is this book of
Nature! I honestly declare that if I thought I had any chance of living
for, say a couple of thousands of years, I would go in for the study of
natural history in downright earnest, and at the end of even that time,
I daresay, I should feel just as ignorant as I do now.
But I don't come to my woodland study to laze, be assured; a good deal
of honest work is done in this sylvan retreat, as many a London editor
can testify. Only, there are half-hours on some days when a drowsy,
dreamy sensation steals over me, and I pitch my pen away and lie on the
moss and chew the white ends of rushes, and think.
It is, say, a beautiful day in mid-July. There are wondrous clouds up
yonder, piled mass on mass, with rifts of bright blue between, through
which the sun shines whenever he gets a chance. There is a strip of
sunshine, even now, glittering on those feathery seedling grasses, and
varnishing them as it were. It is gone, and a deal of beauty goes with
it.
It is close and sultry and silent, and with half-shut eyes I take to
studying the liliputians that alight with fairy feet on my manuscript,
or creep and crawl across it.
Here is a gnat--the _Culm communis_--a vast deal too _communis_ in these
wilds, especially at eventide, but my hands have long ago been rendered
proof against their bites _a la Pasteur_. This is a new-born _culex_;
he hardly knows what the world is all about yet. But how fragile his
limbs, how delicate his wings! These last are apt to get out of order,
a breath of wind may do damage, a raindrop were fatal. This gnat has
lost a leg, but that does not seem to interfere in the least degree with
his enjoyment of life. He is a philosopher, five legs are fun enough;
so away he flies.
Here are some small spiders--crimson ones. There are other tiny ones,
too tiny yet to build a web, so they stalk for wee unwary flies.
Here comes a great mother spider, quite a Jumbo among the others; she
walks quickly across the sheet, but, strange to say, half a dozen
pin-head young ones are clinging to her, and now and then she drops one,
and it quite unconcernedly goes to work to make its own living. Fancy
human parents getting rid of their offspring in this way! No such luck,
many will add.
Skipjacks go jumping about on my paper, clicking like little watches;
the very clowns of insect-life are these. _Elateridae_ is the long name
they go by in history.
Here is a little scoundrel no bigger than the dot of the letter "i," but
when I touch him with the point of a blade of grass, hey! presto! he has
jumped high in air and clean over twenty lines of my ruled
foolscap--_i.e._, more than a hundred times the length of himself. How
I envy him the ability and agility to jump so!
Here is a wee _Anobium_, as big as a comma; he can't jump, but he knows
his way about, and when I touch him he shams dead. He has a big
brother, called the death-watch, and he does the same.
But here comes a bigger jumper, and here another; one is yellow and the
other brown. In a day or two the yellow one will be as dark as the
other. They are _Aphrophorae_. They were born in a spittle, for so the
country folks term the frothy morsels of secretion we see clinging to
such herbs as sour-dock. Let them hop; I am not going to take their
lives on this lovely day, albeit they do much harm to my garden crops.
But here is a bigger arrival, a _Saltatorial gryllide_, a lovely large
sea-green grasshopper; his immense ornamental hinder legs put you in
mind of steam propellers. He is on my blotting-paper, watching me with
his brown wise-looking eyes, ready for a leap at a moment's notice. I
lift my hand to brush a gnat from my ear: whirr! he is off again and out
of sight. He doesn't care where he flies to, and when he does spring
away into infinity he can't have the slightest notion where he will
land. What a happy-go-lucky kind of life! What a merry one! He toils
not, neither does he spin; he travels where and when he pleases; there
is food for him wherever he goes, and nothing to pay for it. A short
life, you say? There is no one can prove that, for one hour may seem as
long to him as a year to you or to me. To be sure a bird may bolt him,
but then he dies in the sunshine and it is all over in a moment.
Here is a tiny elongated _Coleopterite_ who, as soon as he alights for a
rest, folds away his wings under his tippet (elytra). He does not bite
them off as some silly she-ants do. For as soon as the sun blinks out
again this insect will unfold his wings and be off once more, and he may
perhaps alight in some human being's eye before evening and be drowned
in a tear.
There are some of an allied species, but so very _very_ tiny that when
they get on to my manuscript while I am writing, they are as bewildered
as I have been before now on an Arctic ice-field. Perhaps they get a
kind of snow-blind. At all events they feel their way about, and if
they chance to come to a word I have just written, they dare not cross
it for fear of getting drowned--every stroke of my pen is to one of
these wee mites a blue rolling river of ink. So they've got to walk
round.
Here is a new-born _Aphis_ (green-fly). It is still green. It has not
been bronzed yet, and its wings are the most delicate gauze. It does
not seem to know a bit what to do, or where to go, or what it has been
put into the world for, any more than a human philosopher.
This wee thing takes advantage of a glint of sunshine and essays to fly,
but a puff of wind catches him, and, as "the wind bloweth where it
listeth," he has to go with it. He will be blown away and away,
thousands and thousands of midges' miles away. He will never come back
to this part of the wood, never see any of his relations--if he has
any--again. Away and away, to the back of the north wind perhaps; he
may be swallowed by a bat or a sand-marten; he may be impaled on a thorn
or drowned in a dewdrop, or alight on the top of a pond and get gobbled
up by a minnow; but, on the other hand, he may be blown safe and sound
to some far-off land beyond the Thames, settle down, get married, and
live happy for ever afterwards.
Clack--clack--clack--clack! A great wild pigeon has alighted on the
pine-tree above me. I have been so quiet, she does not know I am here.
I cough, and click--clack--click go her wings, and off she flies
sideways, making a noise for all the world like the sound of that
whirling toy children call "a thunder-spell."
But she has knocked down a cone. It is still green, but somehow the
sight of it takes me far away north to bonnie Scotland, and I am
roaming, a boy once more, on a wild moorland, where grow, here and
there, tiny pine-trees--seedlings, that owe their habitat, if not
existence, to the rooks, who have carried cones like these from the
forests. Like Byron, "I rove a young Highlander o'er the dark heath."
"I arise with the dawn, with my dog as my guide,
From mountain to mountain I'm bounding along,
I am breasting the billows of Dee's rushing tide,
And hear at a distance the Highlander's song."
I close my eyes, and it all comes back, that wild and desolate but
dearly-loved scene; the banks where lizards bask; the "pots" and the
ponds in that broad moor, where teal-ducks swim, and near which the
laughing snipe has her nest; I hear the wild whistle of the whaup or
curlew, and the checker of the stone-hatch in the cairn. I am wading
among crimson heath and purple heather, where the crowberry and
cranberry grow in patches of green. And now I have wandered away to the
deep, dark forest itself; and near to a kelpie's pool, by the banks of a
stream, I lay me down to rest. There are myriads of bees in the
lime-trees above, through which the sunshine shimmers, lighting up the
leaves to a tenderer green, but the bees begin to talk, and the
murmuring stream begins to sing, and presently I find myself in
Elfin-land, in the very midst of a fairy revel.
The "Midsummer Night's Dream" is a masterpiece of art, but nothing to
this. _That_ was a mere phantasy; _this_ is a reality. This is--
"Pa! papa!"
I start up. I am still in my woodland study. But a sweet young face is
bending over me, and tender eyes are looking into mine.
"Pa, dear, how sound you have been asleep! Do you know it is nearly
sunset?"
"Have I? Is it?" I reply, smiling. "I thought, Ida, you were queen of
Elfin-land."
It is my tiny daughter who has come toddling up to the wood to seek for
me.
Three minutes after this, we are tooling down the hill homewards, and
Ida--my own little queen of the elves--is seated on the cycle beside me.