Moorland Idylls

I.

THE NIGHT-JAR.

WE sat late on the verandah last night, listening to the low trilling

croon of the night-jar. It was a balmy evening, one of the few this

summer; the sunset was lingering over the heather-clad moors, and the

lonely bird sat perched on one bough of the wind-swept pine-tree by

Martin’s Corner, calling pathetically to his mate with that deep

passionate cry of his. I know not why, but the voice of the night-jar

seems to me fuller of unspoken poetry than that of any more musical and

articulate songster. Away down in the valley a nightingale was pouring

his full throat among the oak-brush; but we hardly heeded him. Up on the

open moorland, in the twilight solitude, that grey bird of dusk sat

keening and sobbing his monotonous love-plaint; and it moved us more

than all the nightingale’s gamut. I think it must be because we feel

instinctively he is in terrible earnest. Those profound catches in the

throat are the very note of true love; they have in them something of

high human passion. And we could see the bird himself, too, on his

half-leafless perch, craning his neck as he crooned, and looking eagerly

for his lady-love. It was a delicious moment. We murmured as we sat

George Meredith’s lines—

“Lovely are the curves of the white owl sweeping

Wavy in the dusk lit by one large star.

Lone on the fir-branch, his rattle-note unvaried,

Brooding o’er the gloom, spins the brown eve-jar.”

We were fortunate indeed in our _mise-en-scène_; for the poet’s picture

had realized itself before us. And, as usual, art had reacted upon

nature. The cry, that was so beautiful and romantic in itself, gained an

added touch of beauty and romance from the great word-painter’s

exquisite images.

Perhaps, too, some part of the charm in the night-jar and his kind may

be due to the sense that here at least we stand face to face with a

genuine relic of the older, the wilder, and the freer England. He is a

bird of the night, of the heather and the bracken, of the unbroken

waste, of the unpeopled solitude. When man invades his high home, he

moves afield before the intruder. Here on the great moors we hear him

nightly in summer; but only when no other sound assails the ear, save

the boom of the cockchafer, and the myriad hum of the flies and moths of

dusk among the heather. He belongs, in fact, to that elder fauna which

inhabited England before the whirr of wheels and the snort of steam

drove the wild things far from us. The perky sparrow can accommodate

himself without an effort to the bustle of towns, and can dispute for

grains of corn under the horses’ hoofs in Cheapside; the rook can follow

close the ploughman’s heels, in search of worms turned up by the share

in the furrows; but the night-jar lives aloof among the solitary

fern-wastes, and flies amain before the intrusion of our boisterous

humanity.

“Fern-owls” the country people hereabouts call them; and very owl-like

indeed they are in outer appearance, with their soft mottled plumage,

all brown and grey and melting white, as is the wont of nocturnal or

crepuscular creatures. But they are not owls at all by descent, for all

that, being in reality big fly-hunting cousins of the swifts and the

humming-birds. All birds that hawk after insects on the wing have a wide

gaping mouth; the house martins have it, and the swallows, and the

swifts; but in the night-jar this width of gape is pushed to a singular

and almost grotesque extreme, though not of course beyond the limit laid

by the needs and habits of the animal. It is the enormous mouth, fringed

with its strange line of coarse bristles along the beak, that has gained

for our night-jar its common European name of goatsucker. And indeed, if

you watch close on southern upland farms, among the Apennines or the

Atlas, you will see the night-jars at twilight hovering close by the

udders of the goats and cattle as they lie stretched in the meadows. But

they are not milking them, as the Italian peasant firmly believes; it is

as friends and allies that they come, not as enemies. Peer hard through

the gloom, on a moonlit evening, and you can make out at last that

nocturnal flies are annoying the beasts, and that as fast as they gather

the night-jar snaps them up, while the cattle seem to recognize this

friendly office by never whisking their tails so long as the bird

attends to them. It is a mutual convenience, an early form of that

consorting for purposes of common advantage which reaches at last its

highest development in the nest of ants, with their associated beetles

and their cow-like aphides.

Here in England, our night-jar is but a summer migrant, a visitor to the

moors while insects abound; and we listen for him eagerly in warm May

weather. He comes to us from South Africa, where he winters among the

Zulus, or, rather, escapes the chill of winter altogether in the

opposite hemisphere. For he must have insects, flying insects on the

wing, and plenty of them. We welcome his first churring among the pines

and bracken as a sign of summer; for he is a prudent bird, and seldom

makes a mistake, knowing the marks of the weather well, like Mr. Robert

Scott, and delaying his arrival till insects have hatched out in

sufficient numbers from the cocoons over the heather-clad uplands. You

see him but rarely, for he loves the dusk, and, though far from a timid

bird, he usually alights on the ground, hardly perching on a tree, I

think, except to utter his love-call. When he does perch, it is always

lengthwise to the bough, not crosswise, as is the fashion with most

other birds; he seems afraid of falling; and then, this position also

assorts better with his passionate attitude of craning expectancy as he

leans forward on the branch to summon his helpmate. If you disturb him

from the ground, he rises with flapping wings in an awkward and noisy

way, bringing his pinions together above his body, somewhat after the

lapwing’s fashion; but when he hawks on the open after flies, with his

big mouth agape, his long arcs of flight are equable, swift, and

graceful. Night-jars are fearless beasts; they rear their young in the

open, without pretence or concealment. The two veined and marbled eggs

are laid boldly in some hard patch among the brake and gorse, on the

bare ground, without a nest of any sort; and though they are beautifully

coloured when you come to examine them in detail, they so closely

imitate the soil and the dry heath around in general effect, that you

may easily pass them by, even when you have marked their approximate

place by disturbing the sitting mother. Few British birds, indeed, show

higher and closer adaptation to special conditions than our dreamy

night-jars, essential insect-hawkers of the dusk on open and treeless

uplands. Their large and mysterious eyes, their gaping mouths, their

straining fringe of bristles, their delicate owl-like plumage, their

swift and silent flight, their agile movements, their eerie cry, their

curious love-sick nature—all mark them out as marvellously modified

nocturnal variants on the general type of the swifts and trogons. They

are, in fact, specialized descendants of the same primitive ancestral

form, whose bodies and souls have undergone weird and beautiful changes

in adaptation to a wild and poetical life in the shades of dusk on the

unpeopled moorlands. For birds of twilight have always passionate cries

and passionate natures; not accident alone has given us the

whip-poor-will and the nightingale.

II.

PROPHETIC AUTUMN.

THE year used once to begin in March. That was simple and natural—to

let it start on its course with the first warmer breath of returning

spring. It begins now in January—which has nothing to recommend it. I

am not sure that Nature does not show us it really begins on the first

of October.

“October!” you cry, “when all is changing and dying! when trees shed

their leaves, when creepers crimson, when summer singers desert our

woods, when flowers grow scanty in field or hedgerow! What promise then

of spring? What glad signs of a beginning?”

Even so things look at a superficial glance. Autumn, you would think, is

the season of decay, of death, of dissolution, the end of all things,

without hope or symbol of rejuvenescence. Yet look a little closer as

you walk along the lanes, between the golden bracken, more glorious as

it fades, and you will soon see that the cycle of the year’s life begins

much more truly in October than at any other date in the shifting

twelvemonth you can easily fix for it. Then the round of one year’s

history draws to a beautiful close, while the round of another’s is well

on the way to its newest avatar.

Gaze hard at the alders by the side of this little brook in the valley,

for example, or at the silvery-barked birches here on the wind-swept

moorland. They have dropped their shivering leaves, all wan yellow on

the ground, and the naked twigs now stand silhouetted delicately in

Nature’s etching against the pale grey-blue background. But what are

those dainty little pendulous cylinders, brown and beaded with the mist,

that hang in tiny clusters half-unnoticed on the branches? Those? Why,

can’t you guess? They are next April’s catkins. Pick them off, and open

one, and you will find inside it the wee yellowish-green stamens,

already distinctly formed, and rich with the raw material of future

golden pollen. The birch and the alder toiled, like La Fontaine’s ant,

through all the sunny summer, and laid by in their tissues the living

stuff from which to produce next spring’s fluffy catkins. But that they

may lose no time when April comes round again, and may take advantage of

the first sunshiny day with a fine breeze blowing for the dispersal of

their pollen, they just form the hanging masses of tiny flowers

beforehand, in the previous autumn, keep them waiting in stock, so to

speak, through the depth of winter, and unfold them at once with the

earliest hint of genial April weather. Observe, though, how tightly the

flowerets are wrapped in the close-fitting scales, overlapping like

Italian tiles, to protect their tender tissues from the frost and snow;

and how cleverly they are rolled up in their snug small cradles. As soon

as spring breathes warm on them, however, the close valves will unfold,

the short stamens will lengthen into hanging tassels, and the pollen

will shake itself free on the friendly breezes, to be wafted on their

wings to the sensitive surface of the female flowers.

Look, again, at the knobs which line the wand-like stems and boughs of

the willows. Do you know what they are? Buds, you say. Yes, leaves for

next spring, ready-made in advance, and curled up in embryo, awaiting

the summer. If you unfold them carefully with a needle and pocket-lens,

you will find each miniature leaf is fully formed beforehand: the spring

has even now begun by anticipation; it only waits for the sun to unfold

and realize itself. Or see, once more, the big sticky buds on the twigs

of the horse-chestnut, how tightly and well they protect the new leaves;

and notice at the same time the quaint horseshoe scar, with marks as of

nails, left where the old leaves have just now fallen off, the nails

being, in point of fact, the relics of the vascular bundles. Death, says

the old proverb, is the gate of life. “Le roi est mort; vive le roi!” No

sooner is one summer fairly over than another summer begins to be, under

the eyes of the observer.

To those among us who shrink with dread from the Stygian gloom of

English winter, there is something most consoling in this cheerful idea

of Prophetic Autumn—this sense that winter is but a temporary sleep,

during which the life already formed and well on its way to flower and

foliage just holds its breath awhile in expectation of warmer weather.

Nay, more, the fresh young life of the new year has even begun in part

to show itself already. Autumn, not spring, is the real season of

seedlings. Cast your eyes on the bank by the roadside yonder, and what

do you see? The ground is green with tiny baby plants of prickly

cleavers and ivy-leaved veronica. The seeds fall from the mother-plant

on the soil in August, sprout and germinate with the September rains,

and have formed a thick carpet of spring-like verdure by the middle of

October. That is the common way with most of our wild annuals. Unlike so

many pampered garden flowers, but like “fall” wheat in cold climates,

they sow themselves in autumn, come up boldly at once, straggle somehow

through the winter, of course with enormous losses, and are ready by

spring to welcome the first rays of returning sunshine.

Even the animals in like manner are busy with their domestic

preparations for next summer. The foundress wasps, already fertilized by

the autumn brood of drones, are retiring with their internal store of

eggs to warm winter quarters, ready to lay and rear them in the earliest

May weather. The dormouse is on the look-out for a snug hiding-place in

the hazels. The caterpillars are spinning cocoons or encasing themselves

in iridescent chrysalis shells, from which to emerge in April as

full-fledged moths or gay cabbage butterflies. Everything is preparing

for next summer’s idyll. Winter is but a sleep, if even that; thank

Heaven, I see in autumn the “promise and potency” of all that makes June

sweet or April vocal.

III.

OUR WINGED HOUSE-FELLOWS.

WE have been sitting this afternoon in the Big Drawing-room, enjoying

the view from its extensive windows. It is a spacious apartment for so

small a house—about three acres large, with windows that open all round

over miles of moorland. The carpet has a groundwork of fallen

pine-needles and green grass and bracken, irregularly threaded with a

tiny pattern of brocaded flowers—yellow tormentil, white bedstraw,

golden stonecrop, red sheep-sorrel; while by way of roof the room is

covered by a fretted ceiling of interlacing fir-branches, through which

one can catch at frequent intervals deep glimpses of a high and bright

blue dome that overarches with its vast curve the entire Big

Drawing-room. No finer throne-hall has any earthly king; it is quite

good enough for ourselves and our visitors.

But as we leaned back in our easy-chairs—spring seats of brake, backed

with a bole of red pine-bark—we gazed upward overhead through the gaps

in the boughs, and saw our winged house-fellows, the black-and-white

martins, sweeping round in long curves after flies in the sunshine. It

was immensely picturesque for the martins and ourselves; how the flies

regard the question I forbear to inquire at the present juncture. We had

lamb chops for lunch; let him that is without sin amongst us—for

example, the editor of the _Vegetarian Times_—cast the first stone at

the house-martins. For myself, I am too conscious of carnivorous and

other sinful tastes to cast stones at anybody. We are all human, say I,

or at any rate vertebrate; let us agree to take things with vertebrate

toleration.

The house-martins abide under the same roof with ourselves; literally

under the same roof, for their tiny mud nests cling close beneath the

eaves of our two spare bedrooms, familiarly known as the Maiden’s Bower

and the Prophet’s Chamber—the last because it is most often inhabited

by our friend the curate, and furnished, after the scriptural precedent,

with “a bed, and a table, and a stool, and a candlestick”—“Every luxury

that wealth can afford,” said the Shunammite lady. “Under _our_ roof,”

we say, when we speak of it; but the house-martins think otherwise.

“Goodness gracious,” I heard one of them twitter amazed to his wife the

day we moved in for the first time to our newly-built cottage, “how

terribly inconvenient! Here are some of those great nasty creatures,

that walk so awkwardly erect, come to live in _our_ house without so

much as asking us. How they’ll frighten the children!” For to tell you

the truth, they were here before us. They came while the builders were

still occupied in giving those “finishing touches” which are never

finished; and they regarded our arrival as an unwarrantable intrusion. I

could tell it from the aggrieved tone in which they chirped and

chattered: “Gross infringement of the liberty of the subject;” “In

England, every martin’s nest is called his castle;” “Was it for this our

fathers fought and bled at Agincourt against the intrusive

sparrows?”—and so forth _ad infinitum_. But after a day or two, they

cooled down and established a _modus vivendi_, the terms of the

concordat being that we mutually agreed to live and let live, they under

the eaves, and we in the interior. Since then, this arrangement has been

so honourably carried out on both sides by the high contracting parties,

that the martins allow us to stand close under them on the garden

terrace, and watch while they bring flies in their mouths to their

callow young, which poke out their gaping mouths at the nest door to

receive them. They know us individually, and return with punctuality and

despatch to their accustomed home each summer. But when strangers stand

by, I notice that, though the parent birds dart back to the nest with a

mouthful of flies, they do not dare to enter it or to feed their young;

they turn hurriedly on the wing, three inches from the door, with a

disappointed twitter, a sharp cheep of disgust, and won’t return to

their crying chicks, which strain their wide mouths and crane their

necks to be fed, till the foreign element has been eliminated from the

party.

For myself, I will admit, I just love the house-martins. They may be

given to eating flies; but what of that? The skylark himself—Shelley’s

skylark, Meredith’s skylark—affects a diet of worms, and nobody thinks

one penny the worse of him. Even Juliet, I don’t doubt, ate lamb chops

like the rest of us. Indeed, it happened to me a few mornings since,

during some very hot weather, to be positively grateful for these

insectivorous tastes on the part of our feathered fellow-citizens. We

were sitting on the verandah, much tried by a plague of flies; it was

clear that “the blood of an Englishman” attracted whole swarms of midges

and other unwelcome visitors. As soon as the house-martins became aware

of this fact, they drew nearer and nearer to us in their long curves of

flight, swooping down upon the insects attracted by our presence before

they had time to arrive at the verandah. We sat quite still, taking no

notice of the friendly birds’ manœuvres; till after a while they

mustered up courage to come close to our faces, flying so low and

approaching us so boldly, that we might almost have put out our hands

and caught them. I am aware, of course, that the martins merely regarded

us from the selfish point of view, as fine bait for midges; while we in

return were glad to accept their services as vicarious flycatchers. But

on what else are most human societies founded save such mutual

advantage? And do we not often feel real friendship for those who serve

us for hire well and faithfully? In the midst of so much general

distrust of man, I accept with gratitude the confidence of the

house-martins.

All members of the British swallow-kind are amply represented in and

about our three acres. The common swallows breed under the thatched

eaves of the ruined shed in the Frying Pan, and hawk all day over the

shallow trout-stream that bickers down its middle. You can tell them on

the wing by their very forked tail. It is, I think, in part a

distinguishing mark by which they recognize their own kind, and

discriminate it from the martins; for the outer-tail feathers are

particularly long and noticeable in the male birds, whence I take them

to be of the nature of attractive ornaments. At the beginning of the

breeding season, too, the males assume a beautiful pinky blush on the

lighter parts of the plumage, which may specially be observed as they

turn flashing for a moment in bright April sunshine. The sand-martins,

again, the engineers of their race, have excavated their long tunnelled

nests in the crumbling yellow cliff that flanks the cutting on the high

road opposite; I love to see them fly in with unerring aim at the narrow

mouth as they return all agog from their aërial hunting expeditions on

cool summer evenings. They are the smallest and dingiest of our

swallows; they have no sheeny blue-black plumage like their handsome

cousins, but are pale brown above, and dirty white below. The

house-martin, last of all, can be recognized at once upon the wing by

his conspicuous belt of pure white plumage, almost dazzling in its

brilliancy, which stretches in a band across the lower half of his back;

as he pirouettes on the wing, this badge of his kind gleams for a moment

against the sky, and then fades as if by magic. His shorter tail

scarcely shows forked at a distance, but when you watch him at close

quarters, it is delightful to observe how he broadens or narrows it as

he flies, to steady and steer himself. In order fully to appreciate this

point, however, you must have the quick keen eye of the born observer.

As for the pure black swifts—those canonical birds that haunt the

village steeple—they are not swallows at all, but dark and long-winged

northern representatives of the humming-birds and trogons. All these

alike are summer migrants in England, for they can but come to us when

insects on the wing are cheap and plentiful.

IV.

A NEIGHBOURLY GOSSIP.

I LOVE gossip. For my own part, I can never see the point of the

objections which some people raise against talking over the concerns of

your neighbours’ families. They are always so interesting. I like to

know all about them. I like to pry into their most intimate secrets. I

like to find out what they do with themselves all day long; and what

they have to eat for dinner; and how they make their living; and where

or in whose company they spend their evenings. I like to watch where

they build their homes, and how many eggs they lay, and how they hatch

them out, and what becomes of the fledgelings. I like to spy out where

others hibernate in the woods, and what store of nuts and fruits they

have laid by to provide against the Christmas scarcity. _You_ may think

this sort of Paul Pry interest in the affairs of your fellow-creatures

is undignified and unphilosophic; but I confess, to me it appears only

neighbourly.

For example, there are my friends the missel-thrushes, who have just

lately returned for the winter months to their commodious quarters in

the hanger below me. A week or two since I noticed them flying home to

the woods and parks in their thousands. They have been spending the

summer months as usual on their moors in Norway; but food having lately

begun to fail them on the fjelds, they are coming back now in great

straggling flocks to their English residences. For, unlike the

song-thrush, who is one of their closest and most distinguished

relations, they stay with us in the winter only, and move north again

betimes in late spring, as soon as their broods are reared and

whortleberries are getting plentiful in the northern moorlands.

Questions of commissariat, indeed, have most to do with the migrations

of birds; it is not weather, as weather, but the condition of the

food-supply that mainly regulates their periodical movements. Now, the

missel-thrush is almost entirely vegetarian in his habits; whereas his

cousin, the song-thrush, subsists for the most part on a regimen of

worms and other miscellaneous unsavoury animals. Hence it follows, of

course, that the missel-thrush must needs go where berries are in

season; he follows them closely across the face of Europe, from province

to province. He cannot stand great cold, however, and often freezes to

death in severe winters; which is another reason why he comes south for

warmth when Norwegian hills rise white with snow, and fjords are blocked

with ice, and crystal-frosted pine-trees glisten in the sun with

innumerable diamonds. Family parties of missel-thrushes may be seen in

our fields the whole winter through; but they are timid and wary, and

fly off in a body at the faintest suspicion of coming danger. You can

tell them as they rise on the wing by the conspicuous white patch under

the pinions, which seems, like the rabbit’s tail, to act as a

danger-signal to the rest of the household. No sooner does one of them

scent a stranger afar off than he rises silently, and the others,

alarmed by his contagious fear, rise after him one by one in a

picturesque line, somewhat as one often sees in the case of wild-fowl.

In February and March your missel-thrush begins to build in the

hawthorns and apple-trees; and the moment his nestlings are strong

enough of wing to buffet the strong winds of the German Ocean, the whole

family flits north again to its Norwegian estate for the cloudberry

season. The nests, however, though built somewhat overtly on bare and

leafless boughs, are most difficult to find; for the cunning little

architects, knowing well they will get no protection from a canopy of

foliage, conceal their homes adroitly with an outer coat of woven moss

and lichen, which so harmonizes with the grey and lichen-covered

branches around them as to make them almost indistinguishable. The eggs

are stone-grey, daintily spotted and blotched with round blobs of brown

ochre.

But by far the most interesting point about the missel-thrush is that

curious connection between the bird and the mistletoe which was observed

so long since even by our prehistoric ancestors as to have given the

species its vernacular name in all European languages. _Turdus

viscivorus_—the mistletoe-eating thrush—is Linnæus’s scientific Latin

title for the creature, and he well deserves it. He is almost or

altogether the only bird that will eat the mistletoe berries, and on him

accordingly the mistletoe depends for the dispersal of its seeds and the

propagation of its mystic parasitic seedlings. The berries themselves

are very “viscid,” as we say—the word itself being derived from the

Latin name of mistletoe—and the seeds cling close, as if gummed or

glued, to the bird’s beak and feet in a disagreeable fashion. So, to get

rid of them, he alights on an apple-tree or a poplar, which are his

favourite perches, betakes him at once to an angle of a bough, and rubs

off the annoying and sticky objects in the fork of the branches. There

they fasten themselves and germinate. Now, this arrangement exactly

suits the mistletoe, for apple and poplar are just the two trees best

adapted for its depredations, while a fork in a bough is the one likely

place where it has a chance of rooting itself. A great many unobservant

people imagine to-day that mistletoe grows chiefly on oaks, because they

have heard about the sanctity of oak-grown mistletoes in the eyes of the

Druids. The real fact is, as you may learn for yourself if you will

_look_ at nature instead of merely reading about it at second or third

hand, that mistletoe on an oak-tree is extremely rare; the Druids prized

it because they thought it the life or soul of the oak, which was the

sacred tree of Celtic mythology. I notice, indeed, that missel-thrushes

very seldom perch on oaks; and even when they do by chance dislodge a

stray seed of mistletoe on one, it has difficulty in fixing its young

suckers on the alien bark, and draining the tree’s nutritious juices.

The truth is, the mistletoe and the missel-thrush are developed for one

another; they have struck up an alliance from time immemorial on terms

of mutual service and accommodation.

V.

A RABBIT OF THE WORLD.

A LITERARY Lady, sentimental as was the wont of literary ladies before

the incarnation of the New Woman, went once to call on a Great Poet, who

pervaded these regions. But the Great Poet was coy, says the legend, and

listened not to the voice of the Literary Lady, charmed she never so

wisely. He refused to be drawn by her cunning blandishments, but smoked

on in peace, glaring gruffly from his chimney corner. So at last the

Great Poet’s wife, feeling that the situation grew slightly strained,

endeavoured to create a diversion by saying, “My dear, won’t you take

Mrs. Gusherville to see the garden?” The Great Poet, thus checkmated,

rose unwillingly from his seat, and strode three paces ahead through the

shrubbery paths, followed, _longo intervallo_, by the panting Mrs.

Gusherville. Never a word did he say as he paced the lawn with his heavy

tread; but at last, as he approached one garden border, he turned

towards his visitor. Speech trembled on his lips; Mrs. Gusherville leant

forward to catch the immortal accents. The Poet spoke. “D——mn those

rabbits!” he said; and then relapsed into silence. That was all Mrs.

Gusherville got out of her interview.

I am reminded of this episode, which if not true to fact is at any rate

true to human nature, by the short sharp barking of Fan, my neighbour’s

spaniel, resounding from the heather in the direction of the Frying Pan.

Each bark is an eager impatient snap, and its burden is—“Rabbits!” Now,

I sympathize with every living thing that breathes; yet if it were not

for a constitutional objection to unnecessary vigour of language, I

could almost back Fan, and echo the Great Poet’s indignant exclamation.

For whatever we try to plant among the heather, by way of beautifying

our small patch of moorland (as who should paint the lily or gild

refined gold), those unscrupulous rodents immediately proceed to treat

as their private property. Not one of our white brooms has survived

their attacks; and the way they have devoured our periwinkles and our

St. John’s wort is a credit to their appetites, and a testimonial to the

magnificent air of this healthy neighbourhood. The lad who attends to my

garden (we call it a garden by courtesy, not to hurt its feelings) is

always saying to me, “Let me set a trap for ’em, sir.” But grave as

their misdemeanours are, I can’t bear to trap them. I remember that

after all they were the earliest inhabitants. They dwelt here before me;

and when I plumped down my cottage in the midst of their moor, I

seriously interfered with their domestic economy. “There’s a horrid

house built,” said the mother rabbit: “I suspect a dog will follow, and

perhaps a gun too.” “Never mind,” said the father, who was a rabbit of

the world; “they’ll more than make it up to us, I predict, by planting

green-stuff, which is a deal juicier, after all, than gorse or bracken.”

And, indeed, I feel I owe a duty to these earlier inhabitants; I love

their fellowship, and do what I can to encourage their uninterrupted

residence. The night-jar still perches nightly on one accustomed branch

of the big lone fir-tree; the cuckoo comes and calls to us from the

clump of stunted pines by the dining-room window; the merry brown hares

dart obliquely across the ill-grown green patch of tennis-lawn; and the

baby bunnies themselves, all unconscious of their misdemeanours against

the growing shrubs, brush their faces before our eyes with their tiny

grey paws as we sit upon the terrace. My neighbour has a shot at them

with gun and dog; and even as I write, I can hear the _ping, ping_ of

his murderous cartridges and the quick cries of Fan in the adjoining

plot of moor; but for myself I refrain. I would rather have the

gambolling of such innocent fellow-creatures on my patch of grass in the

dusk of evening than all the rhododendrons and azaleas and cypresses the

florist can palm upon me.

And how pretty they are, those harmless little malefactors! How they

frolic across the sward with tiny irregular jumps, like a sportive

kitten, only ten times more guileless—no tinge of bloodthirstiness in

their liquid eye, no stealthy cruelty in their honest grey faces! Your

rabbit is a decent and inoffensive vegetarian. Besides, its mode of life

sorts well with the uplands; it never disfigures nature, but

accommodates itself to the environment like a good working evolutionist.

When we first thought of building here, a clever Girton girl, whom we

met at the little inn, held up her hands in horror. “Why _build_ on

Hartmoor at all? Why not simply burrow?” And the rabbits burrow. The

hilltop is just honey-combed with their underground palaces. There they

lurk for the most part during the heat of the day, and come out at night

to feed on the furze-bushes that protect and conceal the mouths of their

burrows. Indeed, the very shape of the furze-bush, as we ordinarily know

it, depends on the constant activity of the hungry and greedy bunnies.

Naturally, gorse, if left to itself, would grow feathery from the soil

upward, without any gaunt stretch of naked stem at its base; but the

rabbits eat off the growing shoots just as high as they can reach by

standing tip-toe on their hind feet; so that the resulting shape is a

product, so to speak, of rabbit into gorse-bush. Where the soil is light

and sandy, as here, burrowing is universal; but on cold wet moors, the

rabbits avoid the chance of rheumatism by constructing long tunnels

above ground instead, through matted galleries of heather and herbage.

Cowardice is the principal defence of the rabbit, as of all other

unarmed rodents. At the first alarm, he flies headlong to his burrow.

What swiftness of foot does for the open-nesting hare, that swiftness of

retreat does for his underground cousin. Natural selection in such a

case favours the most cowardly; for to be brave is to court immediate

extinction. That is why rabbits have the noticeable patch of white under

their tails—their scuts, as sportsmen very aptly call them. At first

sight you would suppose such a conspicuous white mark must be a source

of danger. In reality it has been evolved as a patent safety-signal. For

while the rabbits crouch and feed, unseen in the grey grass, they are

very little conspicuous; but the moment one of them spies any cause of

alarm, off it scampers to its hole; and, raising the danger-signal as it

goes, it warns the whole warren, all whose members scuttle after it

apace without waiting to inquire into the nature of the panic. The mouth

of the burrow runs quite straight just at first, so that the retreating

bunny can dash into it at full speed without checking his pace; but at a

convenient point, a few feet in, it begins to bend and divaricate,

besides branching and subdividing as a precaution against weasels and

other vermin enemies. It has also at least two entrances and exits, like

a room at the theatre, in case of pursuit; and it is cunningly

engineered against the chance of intrusion. But the nursing-chamber,

where the timid wee mother hides her naked and shapeless young, is quite

differently contrived with but a single mouth, and is fitted up with

every internal luxury. The good parent lines it with soft fur pulled

from her own warm coat, and goes stealthily by night to suckle her

little ones. When she comes away, she plasters up the entrance with

earth to conceal it as well as she can from prying enemies; and there

the baby rabbits remain alone in the dark till her next visit. Three or

four such broods are produced each year, for your rabbit is indeed an

uxorious creature.

VI.

THE ADDER’S SIESTA.

TWO “hedgers and tiners,” demolishing a bank of earth at Turner’s Corner

as I walked along the Headley Road this morning, came, to their great

surprise and no little horror, on a coiled and twisted colony of

hibernating adders. I paused in my stroll for ten minutes to watch the

unearthing. It was a curious sight; the lithe and sinuous creatures,

recognizable at once as genuine vipers by the zigzag pattern of dark

diamond-shaped spots down their glossy green backs, lay curled and

entwined with one another in snaky amity, fast asleep past waking, and

completely filling up, as with a living mass of inextricable knots, the

curves and crannies of the underground hole where they had taken refuge.

They were there, of course, for their little winter siesta, which

occupies them for a trifle of six months at a sitting. I pleaded hard

for their lives with the men, explaining most earnestly that they would

do much more good than harm, from the point of view of those whose talk

is of beeves, and who regard standing corn as the one really sacred

object in this beautiful universe. But I need hardly say my special

pleading proved of no avail; the hedgers chopped them up fine before my

eyes with their murderous spades, on the familiar antique principle of

“larning them to be adders.” Poor helpless creatures, expiating thus

unaware the _delicta majorum_! They would have killed more mice in a

week than the men could catch in a summer; but they were snakes for all

that, and your rustic hates and shrinks from snakes, _et dona ferentes_.

The adder’s siesta is just as much a part of his fixed yearly cycle as

the fall of the leaf is to the tree, or migration towards warmer lands

is to the swallow or house-martin. Snakes can’t migrate; because, of

course, they’ve got no wings to migrate with; and being chilly

creatures, evolving little animal heat of their own from their sluggish

circulation, and warmed by the sun alone into spasmodic activity, they

are compelled to bury themselves in holes in the ground, where they lie

close to all others of their species that they can find, so as to

utilize in common, by mutual aid, whatever trifle of bodily warmth they

possess between them. Indeed, a snake, like a tree, can only be said

really to live for half its lifetime; the other half these Persephones

of the north spend underground in the torpid condition. The heart almost

entirely ceases to beat; the lungs cease to act; sensation is suspended;

and the animal dozes away his time unconsciously till the summer warmth

of the surface soil begins once more to revive him. Then he ventures

forth timorously from his hole on some bright May morning, to see how

things are progressing in the upper world; and meeting, peradventure,

some belated shrew-mouse or some early spring chicken, makes a dash at

it at once with what life he has left in him, strikes it with his

poison-fang, and, swallowing it whole, straightway regains fresh fuel

for the battle of existence.

Adders were always friends of mine. They are numerous hereabouts, on our

heathy uplands; and for my own part, I do my best to protect and

preserve them. For we have not so many wild creatures left in England

that we can afford to despise any lingering element of our native fauna.

Besides, they do next to no practical harm; occasionally, indeed, they

may spring at a dog who provokes their otherwise placid and meditative

tempers by treading on them in the heather; and they will still more

rarely make a dash at a man who incautiously handles them; but as a rule

they are timid and rather sluggish creatures, much more likely to take

fright and flee when discovered than to turn and rend one. I come across

them frequently on basking paths among the heath in summer; they lie

sunning themselves on the warm sand; but when I endeavour to rouse them

to resistance by poking at them with my stick, they refuse, as a rule,

to show fight, and after a few minutes of hesitation and lazy reluctance

to move, they retire in high displeasure to their home among the

bracken. Never once have I known them try actively to resent my

intentional intrusion on their post-prandial reflections.

We have but two kinds of snakes, all told, in England, popular prejudice

to the contrary notwithstanding. One of them is the harmless and pretty

ring-snake, easily distinguished by the absence of the rhomboidal zigzag

markings; the other, who may as easily be recognized by their presence,

is the venomous adder, known also under his frequent alias as the viper,

and often supposed to be two distinct creatures. In reality, one reptile

doubles the parts, as an actor would say, being but a single snake under

two disguises. The adder is remarkable for bringing forth its young

alive, instead of hatching them out of eggs, like most typical serpents;

and the very name _viper_ is short for _vivipara_. As for the

blind-worm, or slow-worm, who is also one animal masquerading under two

aliases, he must not be considered a snake at all, being a legless

lizard, who tries deceptively to pass himself off in serpent’s clothing.

Nay, he is not even, strictly speaking, legless, for he has rudimentary

limbs, with bones to match, though they never quite succeed in pushing

themselves through the scaly integument. He is a lizard, in short,

arrested on his road to complete serpenthood. Neither the ring-snake nor

the blind-worm is in the slightest degree dangerous; but when in doubt

as to whether a particular crawling animal is an adder or otherwise, it

would be safer to give him—and yourself—the benefit of the doubt, by

abstaining from handling him. The poison-fangs of the viper are two in

number, set in the upper jaw; they are hollow, perforated, and erectile

at will by the muscles of the animal. Their poison is secreted by a

gland at the back, which communicates through a tube with the canal in

the fang; and it is not really so very venomous. But if you provoke an

adder overmuch, and he sees a chance of remonstrating with you, I do not

deny that he will throw back his smooth head, erect his angry fangs,

dart quickly forward, and express his disagreement by inflicting a bite

upon the offender’s trousers. In this he acts much as you and I would do

if he were a man and we were adders. Put yourself in his place, and you

will think less ill of him.

VII.

A FLIGHT OF QUAILS.

IT is one of the wonders and delights of the moorland that here alone

Nature pays the first call, instead of demurely waiting to be called

upon. Near great towns she is coy; and even in the fields that abut on

villages, she shows but a few familiar aspects; while aloof on the open

heath she reveals herself unreservedly, like a beautiful woman to her

chosen lover. She exhibits all her moods and bares all her secrets. This

afternoon, late, we were lounging on the low window-seat by the lattice

that gives upon the purple spur of hillside, when suddenly a strange din

as of half-human voices aroused our attention. “Look, look!” Elsie

cried, seizing my arm in her excitement. And, indeed, the vision was a

marvellous and a lovely one. From the lonely pine-tree that tops the

long spur above the Golden Glen, a ceaseless stream of brown birds

seemed to flow and disengage itself. It was a living cataract. By dozens

and hundreds they poured down from their crowded perch; and the more of

them poured down, the more there were left of them. What a miracle of

packing! They must have hustled and jostled one another as thick on the

boughs as swarming bees that cling in a cluster round their virgin

queen; while as for the ground beneath, it seethed and swelled like an

ant-heap. For several minutes the pack rose from its camp, and fluttered

and flowed down the steep side of the moor toward Wednesday Bottom,

flying low in a serried mass, yet never seeming to be finished. They

reminded me of those cunning long processions at the play, when soldiers

and village maidens stream in relays from behind the wings, and

disappear up the stage, and keep moving eternally. Only that is clever

illusion, and this was reality.

“Lonely,” people say! “No life on the hilltop!” Why, here was more life

at a single glance than you can see in a whole long week in Piccadilly;

an army on the march, making the heather vocal with the “wet-my-feet,

wet-my-feet” of ten thousand voices!

But you must live in the uplands to enjoy these episodes. Nature won’t

bring them home to you in the populous valleys. A modest maid, she is

chary of her charms; you must woo her to see them. She seldom comes

half-way to meet you. But if you dwell by choice for her sake in her

chosen haunts, your devotion touches her: she will show you life

enough—rare life little dreamt of by those who tramp the dead flags of

cities, where no beast moves save the draggled cab-horse. For you, the

curlew will stalk the boggy hollows; for you, the banded badger will

creep stealthily from his earth and disport himself at dusk among his

frolicsome cublets; for you, the dappled adder will sun his zigzag

spots, and dart his tremulous tongue, all shivering and quivering; for

you, the turbulent quail will darken the ground in spring, or spread

cloud-like over the sky on cloudless summer evenings.

And what poetry, too, in their sudden entrance on the scene, dropped

down from heaven, one would think, as on Israel in the wilderness! Small

wonder the marvel-loving Hebrew annalist took those multitudinous birds

for the subject of a miracle. But yesterday, perhaps, they were

fattening their plump crops among the vine-shoots of Capri, the lush

young vine-shoots with their pellucid pink tendrils; and to-day, here

they are among the dry English heather, as quick and eager of eye as by

Neapolitan fig-orchards. Swift of flight and patient of wing, they will

surmount the Apennines and overtop the Alps in a single night; leave

Milan in its plain and Lucerne by its lake when the afterglow lights up

the snow on the Jungfrau; speed unseen in the twilight over Burgundy or

the Rhineland; cross the English Channel in the first grey dawn; and sup

off fat slugs before twelve hours are past, when the shadows grow deep

in the lanes of Surrey. Watt and Stephenson have enabled us poor

crawling men to do with pain and discomfort, at great expense, in the

chamber of torture described with grim humour as a _train de luxe_, what

these merry brown birds, the least of the partridge tribe, can effect on

their own stout wings in rather less time, without turning a feather. If

you watch them at the end of their short European tour from Rome to

England at a burst, you will find them as playful and as bickering at

its close as if they had just gone out for an evening constitutional.

Quails are the younger brothers of the partridge group; but, unlike most

of their kind, they are gregarious and migratory. They spend their

winters in the south, as is the wont of fashionable invalids, and come

northward with the spring, in quest of cooler quarters. Myriads of them

cross the Mediterranean from Africa with the early sciroccos, and

descend upon Calabria and the Bay of Naples in those miraculous flights

which Browning has immortalized in “The Englishman in Italy.”

Quail-netting is then a common industry of the country about Sorrento

and Amalfi; thousands of the pretty little gray-and-buff birds are sent

to market daily, with their necks wrung, and their beautiful banded

heads, “specked with white over brown like a great spider’s back,” all

dead and draggled. Many of the flocks stop on during the season among

the vineyards in Italy; but other and more adventurous hordes, tired of

southern slugs and fat southern beetles, wing their way still further

north, to Germany, Scandinavia, England, and Scotland. At one time they

were far from uncommon visitors in our southern counties; but brick and

mortar have disgusted them, and their calls are nowadays liker to

angels’ visits than in the eighteenth century. Yet a few still loiter

through the winter in Devonshire or Kerry; while in summer they still

reach to the Orkneys, Shetland, and the Outer Hebrides.

Beautiful as quails are, both to look upon and to eat, they are not

personally amiable or admirable creatures. Their character is full of

those piquant antitheses which seventeenth-century satire delighted to

discover in the human subject. They are gregarious, but unsociable; fond

of company, yet notoriously pugnacious; abandoned polygamists, with

frequent lapses into the strictest monogamy; fighters destitute of the

sense of honour; faithless spouses, but devoted, affectionate, and

careful mothers. I fancy, too, they must have a wonderful instinct in

the matter of commissariat, increased, no doubt, by ages of strategical

evolution: for it can be by no means easy to find supplies for so large

an army on the march; yet quails seem always so to time their arrival at

each temporary stopping-place as exactly to fall in with some glut in

the insect-market. Only a few days before they came here, for example,

not a beetle was to be seen upon the parched-up heath; but day before

yesterday it rained insects, so to speak; and last night one could

hardly take a step down the Long Valley without crushing small beetles

underfoot, against one’s will, by the dozen. The quails must somehow

have got wind of the fact that there was corn in Egypt, be it by scent,

or scouts, or some mysterious instinct; and here they are to-night,

swarming up in their thousands, to enter into possession of their

ancestral heritage. You should see them wage war on the helpless

longicorn! I hope they will nest here, as it is amusing to watch them.

Each little Turk of a husband keeps a perfect harem of demure brown

hens, looking slily askance from the corners of their eyes, and watches

over them close by with all the jealousy of a Mahmoud or a Sultan

Soleyman. The rival who tries to poach on his lordship’s preserves has,

indeed, a hard time of it; he will retire, well pecked, from his rash

encounter. Quails, in fact, are still in the Mohammedan stage of social

evolution, while our more advanced and enlightened English partridges

have attained already to a civilized and Western domestic economy.

VIII.

IN LEAFLESS WOODS.

YES: these bare boughs, I take it, are not all pure loss. They have

their consolations; they have their artistic and intellectual value.

They show us, after all, the true inwardness of the tree; they enable us

to realize, as none could otherwise do, the infinite diversity of

architecture and ground-plan in the design and execution of the forest

denizens. While dense masses of foliage clothe and obscure the boughs

with their gay greenery we can gain but a rough idea of the underlying

structure. But just as a Leonardo or a Luca Signorelli must needs pry

beneath skin and muscle to discover the actual framework and bony

supports of the body, so the lover of the trees desires from time to

time to catch some glimpse of the very limbs and joints of oak or

maple—to get rid of the green covering in favour of the naked

underlying reality. So only can one enjoy the delicate lissom twigs of

the silver birch, etched in tender grey against the hard blue sky; so

only can one observe the forked upright branches of the Lombardy poplar,

like natural candelabra, in striking contrast with the long hanging

boughs of the weeping-willow, divided and subdivided into pendulous

twigs, and losing themselves at last in fine spray of living threads,

like a wind-driven cataract. Every kind of forest-dweller has thus its

own special beauty of architectural plan; and every one of them can be

realized in all its naked grace and variety of outline only when

relieved of the glorious green weight that so richly concealed it.

And bare boughs are instructive, too, as well as beautiful. They suggest

to one the endless vicissitudes and cataclysms in the history of growth;

they show us how the knotted trunk acquires its final form, and by what

course of evolution branch added to branch builds up at last the whole

noble shape of the buttressed beech or the spreading horse-chestnut.

Take, for example, our dear old friend the ash. In summer you can hardly

discern through a canopy of green the outline of his bent boughs, curved

downwards by their own weight of heavy feathery foliage, each leaf a

little branch with numerous spreading leaflets. But when autumn comes,

and the heavy leaves drop off one by one, you get revealed at once the

peculiar beauty of his mode of growth—that delicious combination of

angular and curved form which makes the ash the acknowledged king of the

winter woodland. All the branches dip gracefully in a long arch towards

the end, and then rise again with an abrupt curve; this hooked type of

terminal bough being so distinctive and so well marked an ashy feature

that you can tell an ash by it afar off in its wintry nakedness as you

whirl by in a train at a mile’s distance, especially if it happens to be

silhouetted against the sky on a bare ridge or hilltop. The growth of

the oak, on the other hand, so gnarled and irregular, is quite equally

characteristic; while the disposition of the buds soon reveals the fact

that this very irregularity itself owes its origin in the last resort to

a survival of the fittest among many abortive branches. For the oak

tries, as it were, to grow symmetrically like a conifer; but frost and

wind play such havoc with its delicate young shoots that it never

succeeds in realizing its ideal, but grows habitually distorted against

its will by external agencies.

Nor does our winter leave us wholly leafless. Even in England we have a

fair sprinkling of native-born evergreens. And I really don’t know that

I would wish them more frequent; for nothing can be more monotonous,

more sickly sweet, than the unvarying green of tropical forests; while

the grateful contrast of drooping birch twigs or big-budded bare oak

branches with the dark and sombre verdure of our northern Scotch firs,

is in itself one of the chief charms of English winter. During the

Tertiary period, indeed, our English woods were full of large-leaved

evergreens of the southern types—camphors and cinnamons, and

rhododendrons and liquidambars; but with the coming on of the Great Ice

Age those lush southern forms were driven southward for ever, leaving us

only the Scotch fir, the yew, and the juniper, with a few broader-leaved

kinds of shiny evergreen, of which holly, ivy, and box are the most

familiar examples. These, with the exotic laurels and aucubas, the

daphnes and the laurustinuses, are quite enough to diversify pleasantly

our northern scenery. Then our recent acquisitions of exotic conifers,

like the Douglas pines, the sequoias, and the beautiful glaucous firs,

“the greenest of things blue, the bluest of things green,” which now

abound in plantations, have done much to redeem the surviving reproach

of the glacial epoch.

Not that any of these plants are really evergreen in the stricter sense

that most people imagine. All our foliage alike is, strictly speaking,

annual, and all alike deciduous; but while oaks and beeches shed their

dead leaves in our climate in autumn, pines, firs, and hollies retain

theirs on the tree till the succeeding spring, and then let them drop

quietly off, unperceived amid the pale glory of the fresh green foliage.

The larch is a well-known example of a conifer which behaves in this

respect like the oak or the birch; while its ally, the spruce-fir, keeps

on the dead or dying leaves through the winter months, and then shuffles

them off unobtrusively as the new foliage develops. The evergreens get

the advantage of utilizing any stray scrap of winter sunshine; but then

they have to protect their living green material with a thick coat of

glazed outer cells; the deciduous trees, on the other hand, withdraw all

the living protoplasm in autumn into the live layer of the bark, drop

the dead skeletons of the leaves on the ground, and utilize the

protoplasm afresh for the formation of young leaves when spring comes

round once more in due season. Nothing is lost; everything is

economized, hoarded, and finally used up again.

IX.

A BUTTERFLY EPISODE.

HE was an airy, fairy orange-tip. He had just emerged from the

chrysalis, and stood poised for a moment, like a hesitating Psyche, on

the flat-topped blossoming branches of a big white cow-parsnip. For the

most part, he sat there, irresolute, plimming his untried wings, and

half opening them tentatively from time to time, as if wondering to

himself how the dickens they got there. And well might he wonder; for

remember, he was bred a common green caterpillar. Never till this moment

did it dawn across his mind that such a motion as flight could exist in

the universe. So there he sat still, uncertain what strange change had

come over him unawares. Six well-formed legs, in place of the creeping

suckers on which he crawled in his youth; and what could these thin vans

mean—these light and airy vans, that moved so dubiously on his soft

woolly shoulders?

While his wings remained erect and closed, the under surface alone

showed; and that was chequered green and white, like the flowers he sat

upon. Indeed, so exactly did groundwork and insect harmonize with one

another in hue and markings, that even a quick eye might easily have

passed my orange-tip by unnoticed, were it not for the quivering

movement of those uncertain wings, whose opening and shutting betrayed

him, as I passed, to my scrutinizing survey. And this in itself was odd.

For “How did he know,” thought I—“he who till lately was but a small

green grub, feeding on the lush leaves and stems of cresses—that he

ought now to make straight, on his emergence from the chrysalis, for

this white-flowered cow-parsnip; which, indeed, is the favourite

perching-place of all his race, and which effectually conceals him from

the prying eyes of birds that fain would prey upon him, yet of whose

very existence he, a crawling caterpillar, was till this moment

ignorant? Surely that shows in his small brain some curious pre-existent

picture, as it were, of this unknown cow-parsnip—a picture which

enabled him to recognize it offhand when seen, and to steer for it at

once with unerring instinct.”

As I watched, the timid creature, feeling his wings at last, made up his

tiny mind to spread those untried vans, and venture into the unknown on

the undreamt-of pinions. So he opened them wide, and displayed himself

in his glory as a full-fledged orange-tip. His colours were still quite

fresh, his feathery scales unspoiled by rain, or wind, or enemies. I

gazed at him in delight, with sympathetic joy for his pure joy of

living, as he unfolded those white wings, with their brilliant orange

badge and their fringe of dark purple. For a second or two he darted off

in the brilliant sunshine, rejoicing; he seemed to learn, as he went, to

recall of a sudden some dim but recurring ancestral memory. All at once,

as he fluttered somewhat doubtfully in mid-air, he caught sight from

afar of a female brimstone. “Will he chase her?” I thought to myself;

though, indeed, I knew well, had I chosen to recollect it, that

inherited instinct is far too strong in these little creatures to admit

for a moment such egregious errors. Our great Bashaw just glanced at her

with unobservant eye; no gleam of recognition lighted up the tiny face.

He passed on without one word; not a curve of the feeble flight; not a

divergent pirouette of the orange-tipped pinions. Then a Clouded Yellow

floated past, pursued by two rivals of her own swift-winged race. They

are the fleetest of our butterflies. My orange-tip just glanced at them

as who should say, “Strange that insects of taste should put up with

such colouring. Why, she’s almost pure white. I wouldn’t look twice at

her.” The words had scarcely thrilled through his fatuous little brain

when up loomed from windward a small yellowish butterfly, not wholly

unlike himself: green and white underneath, fringed with black above,

but without the orange spot which made my lord so attractive. In a

second I recognized her: it was a female orange-tip—a virgin female.

But, quicker far than myself, her natural master had seen her and known

her instinctively as the mate predestined for him. Hi, presto! as I

looked, all the world was one maze; the pretty things were at once in

the thick of their courtship.

And what a courtship that was! How dainty! how ethereal! He, rising on

the breeze and displaying with pride his beautiful orange tips; she,

coquetting and curvetting, dancing coyly through the air, now pretending

to fly away, now affecting disdain, now returning to his side, now

darting off on light wings just as he thought he had captivated that

capricious small heart of hers. So they continued for ten minutes their

dainty aërial minuet; and when last I caught sight of them they were

still circling undecided above the sprays of wild rose in the hedgerow

by the valley.

A familiar country sight. And yet, great heavens, what a miracle! For

bethink you that that orange-tip was born and bred a small

green-and-white caterpillar. He did not know, as you and I do, that his

father and mother were orange-tip butterflies. He never saw or knew

them. They were dead and gone before he emerged from the egg; and when

he came out into the world, he met none of his own kind, save, it may

be, some other small green-and-white caterpillars. His sole business in

life was to gorge himself with cresses. At last, one fine day, when he

had eaten his soul’s fill, some inner impulse seized him. He began to

transform himself, half unconsciously to his own mind, into a

boat-shaped chrysalis. There he lay as in a mummy-case, melting slowly

away into organic pulp, and growing again by degrees into a full-formed

butterfly. All his organs changed; strange legs and wings budded out on

him incontinently. Yet even when he emerged once more from the

mummy-case, he had no intuitive knowledge of himself as a male

orange-tip. Still less had he any distinct conception of the female of

his species. But, as he floated about on his untried wings, he took no

notice at all of any other butterflies, till the moment a mate of his

own appeared upon the scene, and then he instantly and unerringly

recognized her. The sole explanation of this marvel, it seems to me,

lies in the fact that his nervous system has in it by inheritance a form

or mould—if I may be allowed so material a metaphor—into which the

image of his own kind and of his own mate falls and fits exactly. The

moment that mould is completely filled and satisfied, the creature that

fills it he loves as instinctively as Miranda loved Ferdinand, the first

human being she had ever beheld save her father, Prospero.

And what is thus true of the butterfly is true, I believe, _mutatis

mutandis_, of all of us. On the human brain there is impressed by

anticipation a blank form or model of the human face and the human

figure. Our central type of human beauty is thus found for us by nature

and ancestral experience: the nearer a man and a woman approach to that

central type, the more beautiful, on the average, other things equal, do

normal judges consider them. I do not doubt, of course, that many other

and more general elements come in to complete the developed concept.

White teeth, rosy cheeks, bright eyes, delicate curves, have of

themselves a certain intrinsic and universal æsthetic value as colour

and lustre, as shape and softness. But dainty pink is not so beautiful

on the nose as on the cheeks or lips; nor are curves as desirable in the

lines of the spine as in the external contour. Indeed, even expression

itself has its stereotyped value; for a baby in arms will smile

responsive to a smile from its nurse, and will cry at a frown,

independently of experience.

X.

THE FROZEN POND.

THE pond on the moor is frozen over. What an epoch in the history of all

its inhabitants! For they are not mostly long-lived creatures, these

pond-dwellers; a summer forms an appreciable part of their short

existence. Theirs is but a precarious life at the best of times; they

have always to steer close between the Scylla of drought and the

Charybdis of freezing. Half their days are spent in enforced seclusion.

In the summer the pond, which is their universe, is apt to dry up and

fail them; in winter it stands its even chance of freezing solid and

entombing them. To meet these two extreme contingencies, all the world

of the pond has had to accommodate itself to the possible chances of its

fickle environment. The newts, for example, come here to breed every

spring. They must needs do so, indeed, because their young have gills

like a salmon or a herring, and can only breathe in their earlier stages

the diffuse oxygen held in suspension in water. Newts, in fact, start in

life as fish, but develop, half-way through, into lizard-like animals

with lungs and legs, because of the annual drying up of their native

waters. All higher life, indeed, was originally aquatic; it is only just

because ponds dry up in summer that the ancestors of beasts and birds

and reptiles ever ventured on dry land, at first for a brief excursion,

and afterwards for a permanence. We are all in the last resort the

descendants of amphibians. There are two kinds of newt in this pond,

each with its own peculiar plan for meeting the difficulty of winter

quarters. The great crested newt, who is the most confirmed

water-haunter of the two, retires to the mud at the bottom of the pond

in late autumn, and there lies torpid as long as the frost lasts,

returning to the surface to breathe when the weather improves again. But

the smaller newt, a more adventurous soul, goes ashore in summer, when

the pond dries up, and stops there for the winter, lurking in long grass

at the bottoms of ditches, or hiding in caves and damp vaults or

cellars.

There are no fish in the pond, of course, because it is not permanent;

it dries up in August. But there are frogs and tadpoles by the thousand

in due season; and, what is odder still, the frogs are there now, though

you cannot see them. Indeed, frogs and newts are merely slight

variations on the fishy type, evolved to meet this very want and to fill

this very place in the economy of nature: practically speaking, they are

fish which turn at last into terrestrial reptiles. During the earlier

spring days, when the ponds are full, the parents lay their spawn among

the sunk leaves of water-weeds; and soon the tadpoles emerge from their

jelly-like eggs, and swarm at the edge in a seething black mass of

bustling and jostling life. Then, as the pond gets low, and breathing

becomes difficult, they proceed by degrees to drop their gills, and

develop the rudimentary swim-bladder into a pair of true lungs. Soon

four weak little legs with sprawling fingers bud out at their sides;

and, hi, presto! they hop or crawl ashore as full-fledged air-breathers.

At this point grave differences appear between them. The newts retain

their tails through life, but the more advanced frogs drop or absorb

theirs, and assume the shape of thorough-going land animals. In winter,

however, the frogs return once more to the pond, and bury themselves in

the oozy mud at the bottom, often huddled together in close-packed

groups, for warmth and company. At first sight you might think they

would be warmer on dry land; but this is not so, for they have little

animal heat of their own, being cold-blooded creatures, and they would

therefore get frozen whenever the surface temperature fell below

freezing-point. But the pond seldom or never freezes solid; in other

words, the degree of cold at the bottom never goes down to freezing; and

so the frogs are comparatively safe in the mud of the bed. If you dig in

the ooze in winter, you may turn up whole spadefuls of frogs and great

crested newts in certain cosy corners, lying torpid and half dead, but

waiting patiently for the returning sun of spring to warm them. So that

even the frozen pond has a great deal more life in it than the casual

townsman would at first imagine.

As for the snails and beetles, and other small fry of the pond, they

mostly retire, like their enemies the frogs, to the depths for

protection. The summer is their life; winter to them is merely a time to

be dozed through and tided over. Many of the shorter-lived kinds,

indeed, die out altogether at the first touch of autumn, leaving only

their eggs or their pupæ to represent them through the cold season. In

these cases, therefore, we might almost say that the species, not the

individual, lies dormant through the winter. It ceases to exist

altogether for the time, and is only vouched for by the eggs or spawn,

so that each generation knows nothing by sight of the generation that

preceded it.

But when spring comes round again, there is a sudden waking up into

spasmodic activity on the part of the pond and all its inhabitants. The

season has set in, and life is to the fore again. The greater newt, in

imitation of the poet’s wanton lapwing, “gets himself another crest,”

and adorns his breast with brilliant spots of crimson and orange. The

mating proceeds apace; frogs pair and spawn; the water swarms once more

with layer upon layer of wriggling black tadpoles. Now the great

pond-snail floats at the top, and lays its oblong bunch of transparent

eggs; now the water-crowfoot flowers; the diver beetles disport

themselves amain; strange long-legged beasts that walk the water like

insect Blondins, begin to stalk the surface on their living stilts; and

dancing little “whirligigs,” who skim the pond, coquette and pirouette

in interlacing circles. All nature is alive. Winter is forgotten; eating

and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, are the order of the day

in pond and hedgerow. Then the crested newt proceeds to devour his

smaller relative, and the tadpole to elbow his neighbour out of

existence; and all goes merrily as wedding bells in the world of the

pond—till winter comes again.

XI.

THE GNARLED PINE-TREE.

MORE than once in these papers I have mentioned, as I passed, the

wind-swept and weather-beaten Scotch fir on which the night-jar perches,

and which forms such a conspicuous object in the wide moorland view from

our drawing-room windows. I love that Scotch fir, for its very

irregularity and rude wildness of growth; a Carlyle among trees, it

seems to me to breathe forth the essential spirit of these bold free

uplands. Not that any one would call it beautiful who has framed his

ideas of beauty on the neatness and trimness of park-like English

scenery; it has nothing in common with the well-grown and low-feathering

Douglas pines which the nursery gardener plants out as “specimen trees”

on the smooth velvety sward of some lawn in the lowlands. No, no; my

Scotch fir is gnarled and broken-boughed, a great gaunt soldier, scarred

from many an encounter with fierce wintry winds, and holding its own

even now, every January that passes, by dint of hard struggling against

enormous odds with obstinate endurance. Life, for it, is a battle. And I

love it for its scars, its toughness, its audacity. It has chosen for

its post the highest summit of the ridge, where north-east and

south-west alternately assault it; and it meets their assaults with

undiminished courage, begotten of long familiarity with fire and flood,

with lightning and tempest.

Has it never occurred to you how such a tree must grow? what attacks it

must endure, what assaults of the evil one it must continually fight

against? Its whole long life is one endless tale of manful struggle and

dear-bought victory. What survives of it now in its prime—for it is

still a young tree, as trees go on our upland—is at best but a maimed

and mutilated relic. From its babyhood upward it has suffered, like man,

an eternal martyrdom. It began life as a winged seed, blown about by the

boisterous wind which shook it rudely adrift from the sheltering cone of

its mountain-cradled mother. Many a sister seed floated lightly with the

breeze to warm nooks in the valley, where the tree that sprang from it

now grows tall and straight, and equally developed on every side into a

noble Scotch fir of symmetrical dimensions. But adventures are to the

adventurous; you and I, my tree, know it. You were caught in its fierce

hands by some mighty sou’wester, that whirled you violently over the

hilltop till you reached the very summit of the long straight spur; and

there, where it dropped you, you fell and rooted in a wind-swept home on

a wind-swept upland. Your growth was slow. For many and many a season

your green sprouting top was browsed down by wandering cattle or gnawing

rabbits; you had some thirty rings of annual growth, I take it, in your

stunted rootstock, just below the level of the soil, before you could

push yourself up three inches towards the free and open air of heaven.

Year after year, as you strove to rise, those ever-present assailants

cropped you close and stunted you; yet still you persevered, and

nathless so endured, till, in one lucky season, you made just enough

growth, under the sun’s warm rays, to overtop and outwit their continual

aggression. Then, for a while, you grew apace; you put forth lush green

buds, and you looked like a sturdy young tree indeed, with branches

sprouting from each side, when, with infinite pains, you had reached to

the height of a man’s shoulder.

But your course was still chequered. Life is hard on the hilltops. You

had to stand stress and strain of wind and weather. Like every other

tree on our open moor, I notice you are savagely blown from the

south-west; for the south-west wind here is by far our most violent and

dangerous enemy, blowing great guns at times up the narrow funnel-shaped

valleys, and so much more to be dreaded than the bitter north-east,

which is elsewhere so inhospitable. “Blown from the south-west,” we say

as a matter of course in our bald human language; and so indeed it

seems. I suppose most casual spectators who look upon you now really

believe it is the direct blowing of the wind that so distorts and twists

you. You and I know better. We know that each spring, as the sap rises

in your veins, you put forth afresh lush green sprouts symmetrically

from the buds at your growing points; and that if these sprouts were

permitted to develop equally and evenly in every direction, you would

have grown from the first as normally and formally as a spruce-fir or a

puzzle-monkey. But not for us are such joys. We must grow as the

tempests and the hail-storms permit us. Soon after you have begun each

year to put forth your tender green shoots comes a frost—a nipping

frost—whirled along on the wide wings of some angry sou’wester. We,

your human neighbours, lie abed in our snug cottage, and tremble at the

groaning and shivering of our beams, and silently wonder in the dark

amid the noise how much of our red-tiled roof will remain over us by

morning. (Five pounds’ worth of tiles went off, I recollect, in last

Thursday week’s tempest.) But you, on your open hilltop, feel the fierce

cold wind blow through and through you; till all the buds on your

south-western face are chilled and killed; while even the others, more

sheltered on the leeward side, have got nipped and checked, so that they

develop irregularly. It is this lawless checking of growth in your

budding and sprouting stage that really “blows you on one side,” as we

roughly state it. Only on your sheltered half do you ever properly

realize the ground-plan of your nature. Your growth is the resultant of

the incident energies. And that, after all, is the case with most of us;

especially with the stormy petrels of our human menagerie.

Yet even to you, too, have come the consolations of love. “Not we

alone,” says the poet, “have yearnings hymeneal.” Late developed on your

cold spur, checked and gnarled as you grew, there came to you yet a day

when your branches burgeoned forth into tender pink cones, with dainty

soft ovules, all athirst for pollen; while on your budding shoots grew

thick rings of rich stamens, that flung their golden powder adrift on

the air with a lavish profusion right strange in so slenderly endowed an

economy. But it is always so in nature. These gnarled hard lives, as

people think them, are gilded brightest by the glow and fire of love;

these poorest of earth’s children are made richest at last in the

holiest and best of her manifold blessings. It was nothing to you, I

know, my tree, that the fire which swept over the heath some five years

since charred all your lower branches and killed half your live bark;

you had courage to resist and heart to prevail; and though those poor

burnt boughs are dead and gone for all time, you still put forth smiling

bundles of green needles above quite as bravely as ever. It was nothing

to you that the great storm of last autumn rent one huge branch in

twain, and tore off a dozen lesser arms from your bleeding trunk in a

wild outburst of fury. The night-jar now sits and croons to you every

evening in the afterglow from those self-same stumps; and struggling

sheaths of young buds push through on the blown boughs that just escaped

with their lives the fury of the tempest. No wonder the Eastern fancy

sees curled dragons in the storms that so rend and assail us; but we

like them, you and I, for the sake of the breadth, the height, the air,

the space, the freedom. What matters it to us though fire rage and wind

blow, so long as they leave us our love in peace, and permit us to

spread our sheltering shade over our strong young saplings? The hilltops

are free: the hilltops are open: from their peaks we can catch betimes

some crimson glimpses of the sunrise and the morning.

So, now, my Scotch fir, gnarled and broken on the ridge, you know how I

love you, and why I sympathize with you.

XII.

IVY IN THE COPSE.

SEE what a beautiful creeping spray of ivy—dark green, with russet

veins—from the ground beneath the copse here! How close it keeps to the

earth! how exquisitely the leaves fit in with one another, like a living

mosaic! That is why the ivy-leaf is shaped as we know it, with

re-entrant angles, very abrupt and deep-lobed. The plant, as a whole,

crawls snake-like over the ground in shady spots, or climbs up the face

of stony cliffs, or mantles walls and ruins, or clambers boldly over the

trunks of trees—which last, though its most conspicuous, is not by any

means its commonest or most natural situation. It is a haunter of the

shade; therefore it wants to utilize to the uttermost every inch of

space and every ray of sunlight. So it clings close to the soil or to

its upright support, and lays its leaves out flat, each occupying its

own chosen spot of earth without encroaching on its neighbour’s demesne,

and none ever standing in the light of another. That shows one at once

the secret reason for the angular foliage: it is exactly adapted to the

ivy’s habitat. All plants which grow in the same way, half trailing,

half climbing, have leaves of similar shape. Three well-known examples,

each bearing witness to the resemblance in their very names, are the

ivy-leaved veronica, the ivy-leaved campanula, and the ivy-leaved

toad-flax. Or look once more at the pretty climbing ivy-leaved geranium

or pelargonium, so commonly grown in windows. Contrast all these angular

leaves of prostrate creepers with the heart-shaped or arrow-headed

foliage of the upright twining or tendril-making climbers, such as

convolvulus, black bindweed, black bryony, and bittersweet, and you will

recognize at once how different modes of life almost necessarily beget

different types of leaf-arrangement.

Nay, more. If you watch the ivy itself in its various stages, you will

see how the self-same plant adapts its different parts from time to time

to every variation in the surrounding conditions. Here in the copse,

left to itself, as nature made it, it spreads vaguely along the ground

at first with its lower branches, developing small leaves as it goes,

narrow-lobed and angular, which are pressed flat against the soil in

such a way as to utilize all possible air and sunshine. They cover the

ground without mutual interference. And they are evergreen, too, so as

to make the best of the scanty light that struggles through the trees in

early spring and late autumn, while the oaks and ashes are all bare and

leafless. But the main stem, prying about, soon finds out for itself

some upright bank or trunk, up which it climbs, adhering to its host by

the aid of its innumerable short root-like excrescences. Here its

foliage assumes still the same type as on the ground, but is not quite

so closely appressed to the support, nor yet so sharply angular. The

mode of the mosaic, too, has altered a little to suit the altered

circumstances; the leaves now stand out more freely from the stem, yet

in such a way as not to interfere with or overshadow each other.

By-and-by, however, the ivy, as it grows, reaches the top of the bank,

or some convenient flowering place on the friendly trunk; and then it

begins to send up quite different blossoming branches. These rise

straight into the air, without support on any side; unlike the creeping

stems, they are stout enough and strong enough to stand alone—to bear

their own weight and that of the prospective flowers and berries.

Besides, they wish to be seen from all sides at once, so as to attract

from far and near a whole circle of amicable birds and insects. And now

observe that on these upright flowering branches the shape of the leaves

changes entirely, so that you would hardly recognize them at first sight

for ivy. They stand round the branch on all sides equally, and therefore

have no longer any need to fit in and dovetail with one another. Each

leaf is now somewhat oval in form, though sharply pointed; there are no

more lobes or angles; and the outline as a whole is far fuller and

usually unbroken. Yet they still avoid standing in one another’s light,

and are so arranged in spirals round the stem as to interfere as little

as possible with one another’s freehold.

The little yellowish-green flowers which top these branches appear in

late autumn. They are not particularly conspicuous, and their petals are

insignificant; yet they distil abundant honey on a disk in the centre,

and they breathe forth a curious half-putrescent scent, which seems

highly attractive to many carrion flies and other foul feeders. Hence

you will find that butterflies seldom or never visit them; but they are

frequented and fertilized by hundreds of smaller insects, for whose sake

the copious honey is stored on the open disk, where it is easily

accessible to even the stumpiest proboscis. Ivy, in short, is a

democratic flower: it lays by no rich store of secret nectar in hidden

recesses, like the honeysuckle or the nasturtium, where none but the

Norman-nosed aristocrats of the insect world can reach it; it is all for

the common plebs. “A fair field and no favour” is the motto it acts

upon. When the berries have been thus fertilized, they lie by over

winter, slowly ripening and swelling, to blacken at last in the

succeeding summer. The ripe fruit is then eaten by birds, such as

hawfinches and certain of the thrush tribe, which disperse the hard

nut-like seeds undigested. Black or dark blue are rare colours for

flowers, but common for fruits; partly perhaps because birds are less

fond of bright reds and yellows than the æsthetic insects; but partly

also because such dusky hues are readily seen on a tree or bush against

the snows of winter, the grey brown of late autumn, or the delicate wan

green of early spring foliage.

XIII.

A DESPERATE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE.

ALAS, alas! most of the pretty white foxgloves we planted out by the

boggy hollow just below the tennis-lawn have come to nothing. The

heather and bracken of the moor have outgrown them and throttled them.

They made a hard fight for life, in their petty Thermopylæ—one or two

of them, indeed, are still battling with inexhaustible courage against

the countless hordes of sturdy natives that choke and overshadow them;

but die they must in the end, unless I step in betimes as earthly

providence to thin out the furze and enrich the niggard soil for the

struggling strangers. They remind me of the Pilgrim Fathers in

Massachusetts. Foxgloves, you know, cannot compete with ling or Scotch

heather on its native heath. They are denizens of a deeper and richer

mould, growing generally on fat wayside banks or in the ditches by

hedgerows—always the wealthiest and most luxuriantly manured of any

wild places, because there birds perch, and wild animals take refuge,

and snails and beetles die, and robins perish, that hedgerow weeds may

batten on their decaying bodies. The hedge, in point of fact, is the

main shelter and asylum for beasties great and small in our workaday

England. There the hedgehog skulks, and the field-mouse hides, and the

sparrow builds her nest, and the slow-worm suns himself; there the

rabbit burrows, and the thrush sits mocking, and the dormouse dreams,

and the lizard lies in wait for the dancing midges. All the waste

richness of the field finds its rest at last by the roots of the

whitethorn, to reappear in due time as red campion and herb-robert, as

faint-scented may and tall military spikes of purple foxglove.

But when you sow or transplant these lush herbs of the hedgerow on to

the bare and open heath, they come into competition at once with other

and far hardier upland bushes. The plants of the moor are indeed unlike

such pampered odalisques of the deep banks and rich lowlands. Stern

children of the heights, their stems are hard and wiry, their leaves

small and dry; their flowers feel like tissue-paper; their growing

shoots have none of that luxuriant tenderness, that translucent

delicacy, which characterizes the long sprays of hedgerow dog-rose and

hedgerow bramble. All is arid and parsimonious, as in some Highland

cottage. Our daintily bred foxgloves, decayed gentlewomen, stunted and

dwarfed in that inhospitable soil, can scarce find nutriment in the

thirsty sand to send up a feeble parody of their purple spikes; in long

droughts they droop and fail for lack of a drop of water. You must make

a deep pocket of garden mould in the midst of the heath if you want them

to thrive; and even then, unless you keep constantly cutting down the

heather and gorse about them, they are overtopped and outlived by the

native vegetation.

To dwellers in towns, that mere phrase, “the struggle for life among

plants,” seems a quaint exaggeration. They cannot believe that creatures

so rooted and so passive as plants can struggle at all for anything. The

pitched battles of the animals they can understand, because they can see

the kestrel swooping down upon the linnet, the weasel scenting the spoor

of the rabbit to his burrow. But the pitched battle of the plants sounds

to them but a violent metaphor, a poetical trick of language, a notion

falsely pressed into the service of the naturalist by some mistaken

analogy. In reality, those few of us who have fully read ourselves into

the confidence and intimacy of the beautiful green things, know well

that nowhere on earth is the struggle for life so real, so intense, so

continuous, so merciless as among the herbs and flowers. Every weed in

the meadows, every creeper in the woodland, is battling for its own hand

each day and all day long against a crushing competition. It is battling

for food and drink, for air and sunlight, for a place to stand in, for a

right to existence. Its rivals around are striving hard with their roots

to deprive it of its fair share of water and of manure; are striving

hard with their leaves to forestall it in access to carbonic acid and

sunshine; are striving hard with their flowers to entice away the

friendly bee and the fertilizing beetle; are striving hard with their

winged or protected seeds to anticipate the vacant spots on which it

fain would cast its own feeble offspring. A struggle for the

_Hinterland_ goes on without ceasing. The very fact that plants can

hardly move at all from the spot where they grow makes the competition

in the end all the fiercer. They are perpetually intriguing among stones

and crannies to insinuate their roots here, and to get beforehand on

their rivals with their seedlings there; they fight for drops of water

after summer showers, like the victims shut up in the Black Hole of

Calcutta; they spread their leaves close in rosettes along the ground,

so as to monopolize space and kill down competition; they press upward

toward the sun so as to catch the first glance of the bountiful rays,

and to grasp before their neighbours at every floating speck of carbonic

acid.

This is no poetic fancy. It is sober and literal biological truth. The

green fields around us are one vast field of battle. And you can realize

it at once if you only think what we mean by a flower-garden. We want to

induce peonies and hollyhocks and geraniums and roses to smile around

our houses, and what do we do for them? We “make a bed,” as we say; in

other words, we begin by clearing away all the stouter and

better-adapted native competitors. Go, dock and thistle; go, grass and

nettle! We will have pansies here, and sweet-peas, and gilly-flowers! So

we root them all up, turn and break the stiff clods, put in rich

leaf-mould, manure it from the farmyard, and plant at measured distances

the components of our nosegay. Tall white garden lilies take the place

of knotweed; the larkspur mocks the sky where the dandelion spread

before its golden constellations. Yet even so, we have not permanently

secured our end. Original sin reappears as ragwort and hawkweed. Every

day or two we must go round and “weed the beds,” as we say; the very

familiarity of phrase and act blinds our minds to the truth that what we

are really doing is to limit the struggle, to check the competition. We

pull up here a shepherd’s-purse and there a chickweed, that the Iceland

poppies may have room to raise their black-capped buds, and that the

groundsel may not steal all the light and air from our shrinking

nemophilas. Relax your care for a week or two, and what then do you

find? The goosefoots and couch-grasses have lived down the mignonette;

the russet docks are overshadowing your white Japanese anemones. Abandon

the garden for a year, and the native vegetation has avenged itself on

the intruders in a war of extermination. The thistles have cut off the

lilies-of-the-valley, as Israel cut off the Canaanites; not a spike

remains of your sky-blue monkshood before the purple standard of the

victorious burdocks. Here and there, it is true, some hardy perennial,

some stout iris or sweet-william, armed with its sword-shaped foliage,

will continue the unequal strife for a miserable year or two of

guerrilla warfare, like Hereward Wake in the Isle of Ely; but sooner or

later the stronger will win, and your garden will become a mere nursery

of weeds, whose flying thistle-down will invade and usurp the

neighbouring meadows.

Plants, in point of fact, have more needs than animals; therefore,

perforce, they struggle harder. The beasts require but food and drink;

the herbs require from the soil water and nitrogenous matter for their

roots; they require from the air, carbon, which is their true solid

food, for their leaves; they need sunlight, which is the motive power,

for their growth and assimilation; insects to fertilize them, birds or

breezes to disperse their seeds. For all these they struggle ceaselessly

among themselves; and the struggle is all the deadlier because it is

carried on at such very close quarters.

XIV.

COLTSFOOT FLOWERS.

DOWN by the streamlet in the Frying Pan, in the heavy clay soil of the

bank, I see this morning the flower-scapes of the coltsfoot are lifting

betimes their curious bent heads. Two days more, and they will star the

bare earth with their golden blossoms. That is a sure sign that winter

is over, the labourers will tell you, weatherwise in their ancestral

lore; and, indeed, the coltsfoot is a prudent and a wary herb, which I

have seldom known go wrong in its calculation of probabilities. It makes

its own weather forecast, independently of the Meteorological Office,

and it backs its opinion. As long as it thinks frost is likely to recur,

it “lies low,” like Br’er Rabbit; but as soon as it feels pretty

confident the worst is past, and no more hard weather will come to nip

it in the bud, it boldly sends up its leafless flower-stem, looking more

like a shoot of asparagus than anything else, with which most people are

familiar. I have never seen it make a serious mistake, even in the

sunniest and most treacherous English spring weather.

Who gave it its wisdom?—to parody Mr. Swinburne. How did it come so

well to time itself as the earliest among our conspicuous spring

flowers? Well, coltsfoot is a composite, belonging to the same minor

group as the common ragworts—its very leaf, indeed, being a good deal

like some of the larger ragworts in type, especially those handsome

exotics of the race, so much cultivated in greenhouses under the name of

cinerarias. But living in cold northern climates, on the banks of

streams, in deep clay soil, where it spreads most vigorously, it has

learned by experience to accommodate itself to its environment. It did

so, in fact, many thousand years before Mr. Herbert Spencer taught poor

recent humanity that latter-day catchword. Growing in thickset places,

by running water, where its own large leaves and those of its neighbours

would overshadow and hide its dainty blossoms in the height of summer,

it has acquired the odd trick of sending them up naked, on the naked

clay, in very early spring, when they court and easily attract the

attention of the first spring insects to visit and fertilize them. In

order to do this it must lay by material the summer before, and that

material the prudent plants bury deep out of harm’s way, in their

creeping underground rootstock. Owing to the dampness and chilliness of

the clay, which suits its constitution best, coltsfoot hides its

rootstock exceptionally deep in the earth, and this precaution affords

it, on the whole, a safe protection alike against cold and against

burrowing enemies. As long as the frozen earth remains chilly

underneath, the buds make no stir; but as soon as the subsoil begins to

rise in temperature to a very modest point the flower-heads grow apace

from the buried material, exactly as hyacinths do from a bulb when

placed in water in a slightly warm atmosphere. And such a raising of

temperature in the subsoil is one of the surest signs that winter has

spent itself.

The flower-stem of coltsfoot rises bare and leafless, save for a few

small scales, such as one sees on asparagus; but it is thickly covered

with a warm cottony wool, to keep out winter, and the buds are bent down

so as to protect them at once from chill and from injury. Each stem

terminates in a single pretty fluffy yellow flower-head, composed of

innumerable golden florets of two kinds—those of the ray very narrow

and ragged, giving the entire head its characteristic tasselled

appearance; while those of the central disk are much larger, and

bell-shaped. The entire blossom looks like a dandelion at first sight to

a careless observer; but when you come to examine it closely, it is a

far more dignified and beautiful flower. The tone of its yellow is

richer, yet mellower, and its fluffy little ray-florets have a

Japanesque charm in their flowing looseness.

So long as the flowers continue to bloom, you see no leaves; whence it

comes about that many people know well the blossoms of coltsfoot in

spring, and the foliage in summer, without having the faintest idea that

they belong to one another. But if you keep your eye on the place where

the yellow stars arose, after the flowers have withered and the white

heads have blown away in copious flights, their wee feathery fruitlets,

you will see by-and-by some big broad angular leaves, very thick and

noticeable, rising high into the air from the same buried rootstock in

the self-same position. Few leaves are more remarkable, with their

heart-shaped bases and their obtrusive angles; while the under side is

thickly covered throughout with a cottony wool, loose, white, and

abundant. They are big, because they overtop the other leaves about, and

so gain free access to the air and sunshine. They have elbow-room to

spread in. Their business (like that of all leaves) is to catch and eat

carbonic acid, which the sunlight assimilates for them. For this reason

they are green above, with a transparent skin, which skin forms a

water-layer for absorbing the gas and conducting it to the living green

tissue beneath, where it is duly digested and assimilated. But why the

cotton below? Well, the upper and under surfaces of leaves perform in

nature quite different functions. The upper side, which is thick and

firm, eats carbonic acid and receives the incident sunlight to digest

it; but the under side, which is looser and spongier, gives off vapour

of water—transpires, as we say—by innumerable little mouths, which are

its outward breathing-pores. Now, these pores must not be allowed to get

clogged with dew; so in wet meadows and by river-banks, where everything

reeks with dew from sunset till late in the succeeding morning, almost

all the plants protect the breathing-pores on their under side by such

an unwettable felt of thickly matted cotton. Meadow-sweet is a familiar

English example, and so is a close relation of our coltsfoot, the

butterbur.

XV.

A HEATHER EPISODE.

I FLUNG myself on the heath outside the house just now, with my friend

the Editor. He edits a London literary journal, and disbelieves in

everything. He is critical and sceptical. When he inherits glory (as he

surely must do in time, for his is the noblest and purest and best of

souls at bottom, in spite of its gruffness), I believe he will gaze

about him at the golden floor and the walls of chrysoprase, and murmur

to himself, “Humph! Not all it’s cracked up to be!” Yet he is as tender

as a woman, and as simple as a child; though he has found out the fact

that the world is hollow, and that the human doll is stuffed with

sawdust.

We lay beside a clump of tall flaming rose-bay—fire-weed, as they call

it over yonder in America. There, in the great woodlands, on whose lap I

was nursed, a wandering child of the primeval forest, you may see whole

vast sheets of that flamboyant willow-herb covering the ground for miles

on bare glades in the pinewood. Most visitors fancy it gets its common

American name from its blaze of colour; and, indeed, it often spreads

like a sea of flame over acres and acres of hillside together. But the

prosaic backwoodsman gave it its beautiful title for a more practical

reason: because it grows apace wherever a forest fire has killed out and

laid waste the native vegetation. Like most of the willow-herbs, it has

a floating seed winged with cottony threads, which waft it through the

air on pinions of gossamer; and thus it alights on the newly burnt soil,

and springs up amain after the first cool shower. Within twelve months

it has almost obliterated the signs of devastation on the ground under

foot; only the great charred stems and gaunt blackened branches rise

above its smiling mass of green leaves and bright blossoms, to tell anew

the half-forgotten tale of ruin and disaster.

Here in England the rose-bay is a less frequent denizen, for it loves

the wilds, and feels most at home in deep rich meadow bottoms unoccupied

by tillage. Now, in Britain these conditions do not often occur since

the Norman conquest; still, I have seen vast sheets of its tall pink

pyramids of bloom at John Evelyn’s Wootton; while even up here, on our

heathery uplands, it fights hard for life among the gorse and bracken.

Its beautiful spikes of irregular flowers, wide open below and tapering

at the top into tiny knobs of bud, are among the loveliest elements in

the natural flora of my poor three acres.

We were lying beside them, then, out of the eye of the sun, under the

shadow of one bare and weather-beaten pine-tree, when talk fell by

chance on the small brown lizards that skulk among the sandy soil of our

hilltop. I said, and I believe, that the lizard population of the

British Isles must outnumber the human by many, many millions. For every

sandy heath is just a London of lizards. They pullulate in the ling like

slum-children in Whitechapel. They were about us, I remarked, as thick

as Hyde Park demonstrators; only, instead of demonstrating, they prefer

to lie low and conceal their identity. The policeman hawks and the owls

on night duty have taught them that wisdom—stern Draconian officers of

nature’s executive, who know no gentler punishment than the death

penalty for the slightest misdemeanour.

The Editor smiled that sceptical smile which is the terror of young

contributors of Notes on Novels. He rejected the lizards like unsuitable

copy. He didn’t believe in them. He doubted there were any on the heath

at all. He had walked over square miles of English moorland, but never a

lizard had he seen, out of all their millions. Imagination, he observed,

was an invaluable property to poets and naturalists. It was part of

their stock-in-trade. He didn’t seek to deprive them of it. As Falstaff

says, a man may surely labour at his vocation.

I was put on my mettle. For once in my life, I did a rash thing; I

ventured to prophesy. “If you wish,” I cried, “I’ll catch a lizard, and

show you.” The Editor’s face was a study to behold. Phil May would have

paid him ten guineas for the copyright. “As you like,” he answered

grimly. “Produce your lizards.”

Fortune favours the brave. But I confess I trembled. Never before had I

bragged; and now I wondered whether Fortune or Nemesis would carry it.

’Twas two to one on Nemesis. Yet the gods, as Swinburne tells us in “Les

Noyades,” are sometimes kindly. We lay still on the heather—still as

mice—and waited. Presently, to my great and unexpected joy, a sound as

of life!—a rustling among the bilberry bushes! One sharp brown head,

and then another, with beady black eyes as keen as a beagle’s, peeped

forth from the miniature jungle of brake and cross-leaved heath in the

bank beside us. I raised my lids, and looked mutely at the Editor. He

followed my glance, and saw the tiny lithe creatures glide slowly from

their covert, and crawl with heads held slyly on one side, and then on

the other, into the open patch, on which we lay like statues. How they

listened and looked! How they raised their quaint small heads, on the

alert against the first faint breath of danger! I sat still as a mouse

again, holding my breath in suspense, and waiting anxiously for

developments. Then a miracle happened. Miracles _do_ happen now and

again, as once at Bolsena, to convince the sceptical. My hand lay

motionless on the ground at my side. I would not have moved it just then

for a sovereign. One wee brown lizard, gazing cautiously around, crept

over it with sly care, and, finding it all right, walked up my sleeve as

far as the elbow. I checked my heart and watched him. Never in my life

before had such a thing happened to me—but I did not say so to the

sceptical Editor; on the contrary, I looked as totally unconcerned as if

I had been accustomed to lizards taking tours on me daily from my

childhood upward. “Are you convinced?” I asked, with a bland smile of

triumph. Even the Editor admitted, with a grudging sniff, that seeing is

believing.

And, indeed, there _are_ dozens of lizards to the square yard in

England, though I never before knew one of them to assail me of its own

accord. I have caught them a hundred times by force or fraud among the

heaths and sand-pits. The commonest sort hereabouts is the dingy brown

viviparous lizard, which lays no eggs, but brings forth its young alive,

and tends them like a mother. It is an agile, wee thing, that creeps

from its hole or nest during the noontide hours, and basks lazily in the

sun in search of insects. But let a fly come near it, and quick as

lightning it turns its tiny head, darts upon him like fate, and crunches

him up between those sharp small teeth with the ferocity of a crocodile.

We have sand-lizards, too, a far timider and wilder species; they bite

your hand when caught, and refuse to live in captivity at the bottom of

a flowerpot like their viviparous cousins. These pretty wee reptiles are

often delicately spotted or banded with green; they lay a dozen leathery

eggs in a hole in the sand, where the sun hatches out the poor abandoned

little orphans without the aid of their unnatural mother. Still, they

are much daintier in their colouring than the more domestic brown kind;

and, after all, in a lizard I demand beauty rather than advanced moral

qualities. I may be wrong; but such is my opinion. It is all very well

to be ethical at Exeter Hall; but too sensitive a conscience is surely

out of place in the struggle for life on the open moorland.

XVI.

THE CHRYSALIS YEAR.

IN warm spots under hedges, I see, the first spring insects now begin to

appear, timidly and tentatively, from the shelter of their cocoons. Some

few of them, indeed, like the lady-birds, the wasps, and the

bumble-bees, have struggled through the winter in the winged or perfect

form, having hibernated among warm moss or under the bark of trees in

favoured situations. These adventurous kinds passed through their larval

and pupal stages last year, and a tithe of them live on with difficulty

through the winter frosts, to become the mothers and founders of fresh

insect communities as April comes round again. But by far the greater

number eat and grow as grubs or caterpillars through the summer months,

and when autumn approaches turn into cocoons or chrysalides, to lie by

for the winter in a snug retreat, well wrapped up in a warm silky or

woollen coverlet, and protected underground from snow or hoarfrost. As

soon as cold weather approaches, these prudent insects retire from

public life, cease from active pursuits, melt themselves up into a sort

of organic pulp, lose almost every distinguishable organ or feature, and

remain dormant, in a state of indefinite protoplasm, which gradually

takes shape again as moth, beetle, or butterfly. Mummies we sometimes

call them, but they are not even mummies, for they lose almost entirely

their form and limbs; they tide over the winter for the most part in an

all but structureless mass, which yet encloses the potentiality of

rebuilding in due course the shape and members of the ancestral insect.

Slowly new limbs grow out within the protecting chrysalis case, wings

bud from the side, and the grub or caterpillar changes by degrees into

the totally unlike image of the beetle or butterfly. As soon as warmer

weather sets in, the winged forms emerge with the first sunny day from

their broken shell. I have seen nettle-butterflies abroad in a spell of

genial warmth in the last week of January; a brimstone has been tempted

forth to seek his lady-love on St. Valentine’s Day; and fritillaries are

abundant in early March sunshine. Lesser insects, whose names are

enshrined in scientific Latin alone, often emerge from their mummy-cases

even earlier than these familiar and conspicuous lepidoptera.

The moment they peep forth, lo and behold! they find the plant world,

for its part, ready decked to greet them. The very same morning that

sees the first butterfly and the first bee on the wing, sees also the

first crocus opening wide its shining cup in the full sun to woo them.

The brimstone is no sooner out than the coltsfoot and the celandine and

the bulbous buttercup spread their gold to allure him. And has it ever

struck you that the plants, no less than the animals, pass through the

winter period in the chrysalis condition? This is no mere figurative

flower of speech; it is the scientific statement of a real and profound

analogy. During the summer months the leaves of the crocus, the tulip,

and the hyacinth have been eating and laying by, exactly as the

caterpillar did, to provide material for next year’s flowering season.

When winter blows cold, the leaves die down—the plant, as it were,

retires underground into its bulb, like the caterpillar into the cocoon,

and there remains, formless and organless, a mere pupa-like potentiality

of future buds and blossoms. But when warm weather recurs, the bulb once

more begins to germinate: it takes fresh form as a vigorous flower-head.

Observe, too, that the flowering stem, like the winged stage of the

insect, is the sexual epoch of the plant, an avatar told off, as the

butterfly by the caterpillar, to produce the seeds which are the eggs of

the species. In each case a certain definite period of time is passed in

laying by material, in eating and storing only; then comes a quiescent

epoch of rest and rebuilding; and this again is followed by a mature

stage of marriage and reproduction. Notice, too, in either instance,

that the reproductive stage is more beautifully formed and more

attractively coloured than the mere accumulative and storing mechanism.

What is thus true of the crocus and of the butterfly is true, to a great

extent, of all plants and animals in temperate or cold climates. They

enter every winter into a chrysalis stage, from which in early spring

they emerge once more, still more beautiful than before, freshly adorned

for the mating and nesting period. Trees lose their leaves, and withdraw

their protoplasmic and starchy material in a shapeless mass into the

permanent tissues; but they hold it there, ready to manufacture it once

more into bright green foliage and tasselled catkins, into blushing

apple-blossoms, or tall spikes of horse-chestnut flower, or pink bloom

of elms, with the first spring sunshine. Squirrels hibernate; moles

sleep away the dead of winter; frogs retire to the depths of ponds;

slugs bury themselves in the soil; dormice doze in well-lined crannies

among the boles of hazels. Many species only tide over the cold weather,

indeed, in the most potential form, as eggs or seeds; they are annuals,

like the poppy or the aphides of roses. In such cases the whole race is

represented for some months by its germs alone: one generation never

sees or knows the existence of another. In other instances, somewhat

higher, the species survives as pupa or as bulb, adult, no doubt, though

in a relatively formless or indefinite shape, yet ready to come forth

full-fledged and perfect at the first faint breath of returning summer.

Still other kinds, again, struggle through as mature and fully formed

insects, or birds, or mammals, and as evergreen trees or shrubs, though

they live for the most part a life of low grade, and on accumulated

materials. Nature is almost dormant in our zone through the winter

months; life is then one vast and varied chrysalis.

XVII.

A SUMMER STROLL.