MY friend the Poet and I walk the world together on somewhat different

principles. It is a fixed belief of his that illusion is far more

beautiful than reality. He likes to see the distant hills through some

dim veil of mist; he likes to believe the skylark feeds on dew and

sunshine, and he is revolted when I explain to him, in spite of Shelley,

the actual staples of its unromantic diet. To him, it seems, everything

loses just half its beauty when he knows all about it. Analysis, he

says, is destructive of pleasure. Only in an imagined and unrealized

world can he find the pure elements that delight his fancy.

But to me the actual world as it stands is beautiful. I love to descry

the very contour of the hills; I love to watch from afar the

saucer-shaped combes on the flanks of the South Downs, when the

afternoon light floods and bathes them in its glory. Illusion to my mind

is less lovely than reality. Nothing on earth seems more beautiful than

Truth. I love to catch her face behind the clouds that conceal her.

And now it is the plain unvarnished Truth I am going to give you in this

Moorland Idyll. I am going to tell you just what we saw to-day, without

one episode or incident save what really occurred to us. I could not

make that stroll more exquisite than I found it, if I tried till

Doomsday. It was an idyll of real life. May many more so come to me!

We strayed together—the Poet, Elsie, Lucy, and myself—across the moor

to Highfield, in search of strawberries. Highfield lies some two miles

off, at the beginning of the valley; a lost old-world farm, in a dell of

the moors, with a market-garden. You poor Londoners, when you go to buy

strawberries, go to buy them prosaically at a commercial fruiterer’s in

a noisy street; but we moorlanders go with our basket in our hands to

some lonely grange across the heather-clad upland. The first part of our

walk lay high over the ridge, where the heath was burnt in the Jubilee

year by the great fire; you can still plainly mark the point up to which

the flames made a clear sweep of the heather, and the point where they

left off, held in check by the beaters. For heather is really a

forest-tree of some fifty years’ growth; and the waste where the fire

raged is still covered to this day with a shorter crop of young seedling

gorse and ling and whortleberry, while the older vegetation unburnt

beyond rises tall and bush-like. The blasted part, too, shows by far the

finest and deepest purple of any; not because the flowers are really

bigger or thicker, but because where the plants are still short the

Tyrian purple of the Scotch heather is seen to greatest advantage;

whereas, when they rise higher, the Scotch heather is overtopped by the

bushier and coarser and taller-growing ling, with its somewhat insipid

pale pink blossoms. The Poet thinks the fire makes the heath burn

brighter. I think myself it keeps the ling lower.

Anyhow, that spur is one blaze of glory. Not a spot on the moor flares

so splendid a purple. We passed through it, single file, by the narrow

footpath, where the ling rises knee-high on either side, and the little

brown lizards dart wildly to their holes at first sound of a footfall.

Along the ridge, past the broom-bushes, now hanging with silvery pods,

we continued on the path till we reached the white beam-tree. There the

trail diverges a little suddenly to the left; a cock-pheasant broke with

a shrill cry on the wing; his whirr as he rose startled the shallow

valley. A wood-pigeon, alarmed at his alarm, flapped afield from the

pinewood; the low cooing of his fellows from the larches beyond died

away at the sound of his warning signal. Then we turned into the middle

trail, where it dips towards the lowland.

All at once Elsie started, and gave a little cry—“A fox! a fox!” And,

sure enough, there was one. He ran on before us, with his red brush

depressed, fifty yards or more along the path on the open. Seldom have I

caught a longer or clearer view of him unhunted in England. We were but

ten yards behind, and had fairly surprised him. However, he took his

discovery like a gentleman, and instead of skulking away to right or

left, where the heath rose high, he ran on along the open, so as to give

us a fine stare at him. Lucy, who is a visitor, unused to country ways,

save as townsfolk know them, had never seen a live fox in the wild state

before, and the incident charmed her. He was so lithe and red, and he

ran so well, with his sharp head held low, and with the wild air of his

species.

By the chestnut plantation, where a grassy little lane dips close

between the trees, cropped and cut for hop-poles, we began to descend in

real earnest to the valley. A rabbit just dashed across the sward on the

slope of path; his twinkling white tail scarce betrayed him for a

moment. Two hawks hovered above, but held off for fear of us. Rustlings

in the fallen foliage beneath the sapling chestnuts to right and left

gave sign of other rabbits, unseen, but scurrying burrow-ward. As we

reached the open we disturbed a young covey of nursling partridges. Most

of them disappeared after their prudent mother before we could catch a

glimpse of them; but one poor little chick, belated and terrified,

darted with its tiny half-naked wings erect in an agony of alarm in the

opposite direction. It found covert in the chestnuts, its tiny heart

throbbing. Alas, that it should have conceived at so early an age so

justly unfavourable an idea of humanity!

Beyond the plantation we turned aside into a field, and oh! such a

field! Have I words to picture it? It had been sown for grass; but no

grass was there. “Bad season,” says the farmer. “Thank Heaven for these

slovenly farms,” says the botanist. Blue cornflowers grew in it, thick

as stars in heaven; and huge spikes of viper’s bugloss as tall as a

man’s waist and more lovely than a turquoise. Who shall describe their

hue, their form, their fashion? A great spotted stem, like a lizard’s

skin, green flecked with russet brown, and uncanny to look upon; on

either side, long twisted spirals of red-and-blue blossoms, each curled

like a scorpion’s tail, very strange and lurid. The individual blossom

is bright blue, when fully opened, with crimson stamens; the buds are

deep red; the dead flowers dry violet. Altogether, a most weird and

witch-like plant. I think one might use it with great advantage for

incantations and sorcery. The Poet decided to try its effect next time

he would rid himself of a discarded lady-love. We plucked great armfuls,

and carried them along with us as far as Highfield. Other flowers were

there, too, of less poetic interest—bright yellow corn-marigolds, and

scented white campion; scarlet poppies by the score, with waving

panicles of not a few tall grasses. We gathered of them all, and they

stand before me now, gladdening my eyes as I write, in the coarse red

pots of plain Hampshire earthenware.

They had no strawberries left, after all, at Highfield. We had our walk

for nothing—if that be nothing! So we used the empty basket to carry

back our trophies. But, returning by the lane, we filled our vacant arms

once more with foxgloves; and the fox himself crossed our path for a

second again at the self-same turning, without seeking to reclaim them.

Even the Poet admitted we had saved one day from Time’s devouring maw.

And that’s how we live, up here in the moorland.

XVIII.

A MOORLAND FIRE.

THE frosts of last winter—that terrible, pitiless winter—killed down

two-thirds of the gorse in England; and now that summer has come again,

the dry brown branches stand bare and leafless in mute accusation in

every moor and common in the country. Only an exceptionally hardy bush

here and there puts forth, in a straggling and tentative fashion, a few

timid shoots, or struggles ineffectually into feeble bloom on a

protected bough or so. The bumble-bees wander about, disconsolate, like

the hungry sheep in “Lycidas,” and are not fed; thousands and thousands

of them have died this spring from so unexpected a failure of their

staple food-stuff. Honey and pollen have been quoted for the bees at

starvation prices. We have natural selection here on a large scale in

actual action before our very eyes: only the hardiest furze-bushes have

this year survived the bitter frost; only the busiest, strongest, and

most enterprising bumble-bees are now surviving the serious loss of

their accustomed provender. Even heather has suffered much, which is a

surprising fact, for heather belongs to a high sub-arctic type, that

spreads in both its familiar British forms far north into Scotland,

Scandinavia, and even Russia; while gorse, a shrub of much more southern

and western nature, is rare in the Highlands, unknown in Norway or

Sweden, and, in its smaller form, at least, incapable of enduring the

severe winters of Germany to the east of the Rhine.

As a consequence of this dryness and deadness of the gorse, and to some

extent of the heather-tops, heath fires have raged this spring in

England with a fierceness and commonness I have never seen equalled.

Every year, of course, especially about Eastertide, when furze and

heather are normally at their driest, owing to the winter sleep, heath

fires are frequent enough in times of drought on all sandy moorlands;

but, as a rule, they cease altogether for the year when the gorse begins

to burgeon and the heath to send up its long green summer shoots. As the

sap mounts in the plants, and the spiky leaves grow green, the amount of

moisture in stem and branches suffices to preserve the commons and moors

from the danger of burning. This summer, however, the dead dry

gorse-bushes catch a spark like tinder; and in the district where I

live, among pines and heather, we have been nightly surrounded for many

weeks by constant heath fires. Sometimes, perhaps, they are kindled of

malice prepense, or out of pure boyish mischief; more often, however, I

fancy they are due to mere human carelessness in flinging down a match

among the arid fuel. A bicyclist’s cigarette thrown lightly by the

roadside, a labourer’s pipe turned out casually upon the footpath—any

such small thing is enough to set it going; and once lighted, the flames

spread before the wind with astonishing rapidity, licking up with their

fiery tongues whole leagues of dry gorse, and leaping with frantic glee

and in crackling haste from bough to bough of the pines and hollies.

It is a strange sight, indeed, to see at night one of these lurid

deluges, sweeping onward irresistibly, amid clouds of smoke and loud

snapping of boughs, on its work of devastation. Terrible as it all is,

it is yet beautiful while it lasts: the red sibilant flames, the fierce

glare on the sky, the beaters beating it down on its leeward edge with

branches of pine-trees, and silhouetted in black against the bright glow

of the fire, all unite to make up a weird and intensely impressive

picture. But to the beasts and birds whose home is on the moor, it is a

cataclysm inexpressible, appalling, unthinkable. Lizards run before the

advancing phalanx of flames in trembling terror till it catches them by

the hundred, and calcines them as they run into fine white ashes; rats

squeal from their holes in the bank with piteous screams of agony, as

they are slowly roasted alive by the remorseless inundation; rabbits

wait in silence in their stifling burrows, and are burned without one

sound, for, true to their instincts, they prefer to meet death in their

own scorching homes, rather than expose themselves to the dogs who

follow every fire, and pounce with mad joy on hapless creatures that run

for dear life from its devouring onslaught.

Next day—ah! next day—the area over which the flames have swept is

pitiful to behold: blackened soil, charred bushes, naked boughs of burnt

fir-trees. Among them, one morning, I saw a poor belated squirrel,

exposed on the open, and picking his way painfully over the smoking

ground. Beneath his paws the loose black peat still smouldered sullenly.

With dazed and doubtful steps, like a stupefied thing, he picked his way

among the burning tufts. He had lost his mate, no doubt—his mate, and

his little ones. The whole world he knew had been blotted out and

effaced in one wild half-hour of indescribable terrors. Now he walked

gingerly on tip-toe over the burning soil, as you and I might walk over

the ashes of Mayfair if a fissure eruption had spread hot sheets of lava

above the site of London. Just such a catastrophe to my squirrel was

that awful night’s work. He was stunned and mazed by it. I thought,

indeed, for a time, he was half dead and roasted, till a dog ran after

him; then, quick as lightning, he darted up a charred tree, and looked

down from the bare boughs upon his baffled pursuer. But none of the

usual sly triumph was there in his look; the manifold experiences of

that deadly night had killed all slyness and all archness out of him for

ever. He wandered like a ghost among the blackened branches; his

universe was gone; his life was blasted. I never saw a more pathetic

sight, nor one that brought home to me in sadder colours the

ruthlessness of nature.

XIX.

THE ARCADIAN DONKEY.

ON the slope by the mountain-ashes, where the ridge curves downward into

the combe with the plantation of young larch-trees, I met Peter

Rashleigh leading his donkey—_Arcades ambo_. “Jenny looks fat enough,

Peter,” I said with a nod as I passed on the narrow footpath; “and yet

there isn’t much grass up here for her to feed upon.” “Lard bless your

soul, sir,” Peter answered with an expansive smile, “grass ain’t what

she wants. It don’t noways agree with her. She’s all the better with

bracken and furzen-tops. Furzen-tops is good, like mobled queen.” And I

believe he was right, too. Jenny’s ancestors from all time have been

unaccustomed to rich meadow-feeding, and when their descendants nowadays

are turned out into a field of clover they overeat themselves at once,

and suffer agonies of mind from the unexpected repletion.

All the dwellers on our moor, in like manner, are poor relations, so to

speak, as the donkey is to the horse. They are losers in the struggle

for life, yet not quite hopeless losers; creatures that have adapted

themselves to the worst positions, which more favoured and successful

races could not endure for a moment. The naked Fuegian picks up a living

somehow among snow and ice on barren rocks, where a well-clad European

would starve and freeze, finding nothing to subsist upon. Just so on the

moor; heather, furze, and bracken eke out a precarious livelihood on the

sandy soil, where grasses and garden flowers die out at once, unless we

artificially enrich the earth for them with leaf-mould from the bottoms

and good manure from the farmyards.

More than that, you may take it as a general rule that where grass will

grow there is no chance for heather. Not that the heather doesn’t like

rich soil, and flourish in it amazingly—when it can get it. If you sow

it in garden borders, and keep it well weeded, it will thrive apace, as

it never throve in its poor native loam, among the stones and rubble.

But the weeding is the secret of its success under such conditions. It

isn’t that the heather won’t grow in rich soil, any more than that

beggars can’t live on pheasant; but grasses and dandelions, daisies and

clovers, can easily give it points in such spots, and beat it. In a very

few weeks you will find the lowland plants have grown tall and lush,

while the poor distanced heather has been overtopped and crowded out by

its sturdier competitors. That is the reason why waterside irises, or

Alpine gentians, will grow in garden beds under quite different

circumstances from those under which we find them in the state of

nature; the whole secret lies in the fact that we restrict competition.

Cultivation means merely digging out the native herbs, and keeping them

out, once ousted, in favour of other plants which we choose to protect

against all their rivals. In rich lowland soils the grasses and other

soft succulent herbs outgrow such tough shrubs as ling and Scotch

heather. But in the poverty-stricken loam of the uplands, the grasses

and garden weeds find no food to batten upon; and there the heather, to

the manner born, gets at last a fair field and no favour. It is adapted

to the moors, as the camel is to the desert; both have been driven to

accommodate themselves to a wretched and thirsty environment; but both

have made a virtue of necessity, and risen to the occasion with

commendable ingenuity.

Everything about the heather shows long-continued adaptation to arid

conditions. Its stems are wiry; its leaves are small, very dry,

uninviting as foodstuffs, curled under at the edge, and so arranged in

every way as to defy evaporation. Rain sinks so rapidly through the

sandy soil the plant inhabits that it does its best to economize every

drop, just as we human inhabitants of the moorland economize it by

constructing big tanks for the storage of the rain-water that falls on

our roof-trees. Warping winds sweep ever across the wold with parching

effect; so the heather makes its foliage small, square, and thickly

covered by a hard epidermis, as a protection against undue or excessive

dryness. It aims at being drought-proof. Its purple bells, in like

manner, instead of being soft and fleshy, as is the case with the

corollas of meadow-blossoms like the corn-poppy, or woodland flowers

like the wild hyacinth, are hard and dry, so as to waste no water;

dainty waxen petals, like those of the dog-rose or the cherry-blossom,

would wilt and wither at once before the harsh, dry blasts that career

unchecked over the open moorland. Yet the heather-bells, though quite

dead and papery to the touch, are brilliantly coloured to attract the

upland bees, and form such wide patches of purple and pink as you can

nowhere match among the largely wind-fertilized herbage of the too

grass-green water-meadows. Upland conditions, indeed, always produce

rich flowers. The most beautiful flora in Europe is that of the Alps,

just below the snow-line; it has been developed by the stray Alpine

moths and butterflies. Larger masses of colour are needed to attract

these free-flying insects than serve to catch the eyes of the more

business-like and regular bees who go their rounds in lowland districts.

Is not the donkey himself a product of somewhat similar conditions?

Oriental in his origin, he seems to be merely the modern representative

of those ancestral horses which did not succeed in the struggle for

existence. Every intermediate stage has now been discovered between the

true horses, with their flowing tails and silky coats, and the true

donkeys, with their tufted tails and shaggy hair, the middle terms being

chiefly found in the northern plains of Asia. Now, our horses, I take

it, are the descendants of those original horse-and-donkey-like

creatures which took to the grassy meadows, and so waxed fat, and

kicked, and developed exceedingly; while our donkeys, I imagine, are the

poor, patient offspring of those less lucky brothers or cousins which

were pushed by degrees into the deserts and arid hills, and there grew

accustomed to a very sparse diet of the essentially prickly and thorny

shrubs which always inhabit such spots, just as gorse and heather

inhabit our British uplands. That is why the donkey thrives so

excellently to this day on thistles and nettle-tops: they represent the

ancestral food of his kind for many generations. Certainly, at the

present time, wherever we find horses wild it is in broad, grass-clad

plains, or steppes, or pampas; wherever we find donkeys, or donkey-like

animals, wild, it is among desert or half-desert rocks, and on arid

hillsides. It would seem as though the horse was in the last resort a

donkey grown big and strong by dint of good living and free space to

roam over; while the donkey, on the other hand, is in the last resort a

horse grown small and ill-proportioned through want of good food and

insufficient elbow-room. It is noteworthy that in small islands, like

the Shetlands, small breeds of horses are developed in adaptation to the

environment; though, the food being still good pasture in a well-watered

country, they retain in most respects their horse-like aspect. But a

vengeance o’ Jenny’s case! I have wandered far afield from Peter

Rashleigh’s donkey, to have got so soon into evolutionary biology!

XX.

A LIFE-AND-DEATH STRUGGLE.

IT isn’t often a man can stand at his own drawing-room window and be the

interested spectator at a combat of wild beasts, where one antagonist

not only conquers, but also fairly devours the other! Yet such Roman

sport I have just this moment been unlucky enough to witness. Unlucky

enough, I say, because the victor did not first kill and then eat his

victim, as any combatant with a spark of chivalry in his nature would

have done, but slowly chewed him up alive before my eyes, with no more

consideration for the feelings of the vanquished than if the unfortunate

creature had been a vegetable. I don’t mean to pretend it was tiger

_versus_ cobra. The assailant was a thrush, the defender an earthworm.

Now, thrushes, we all know, are sweet songsters when they have dined.

Has not George Meredith hymned them, as Shelley the skylark? But if you

want to see the poetry taken clean out of a thrush, just watch him as he

catches and devours an earthworm! The poor unsuspicious annelid, feeling

the joy of spring stir in his sluggish veins, comes to the surface for a

moment in search of those fallen leaves which form the staple of his

blameless vegetarian diet. No mole shakes the earth; the sod is fresh

and moist; here seems a propitious moment for an above-ground excursion.

So the earthworm pokes out his head and peers around him inquiringly;

peers, I venture to say, blind beast though he be, because his method of

feeling his way and exploring by touch is so human and inquisitive. But

embodied Fate is on the watch, silent, keen-eyed, immovable; and no

sooner does that slimy soul poke his nose above the ground than the

thrush is upon him, quick and deadly as lightning. In one second the

creature feels himself seized by one of his scaly rings, held fast in an

iron vice, and slowly chewed piecemeal with the utmost deliberation. He

wriggles and squirms, but all in vain; the thrush munches calmly on, now

with this side of his bill, now that, drawing the worm ring by ring from

the soil to which he desperately clings, and enjoying him as he goes

with most evident gusto.

Both are intruders here. When first we came to our hilltop there were no

thrushes and no earthworms, no house-martins and no sparrows. But the

building of one simple red-tiled cottage set up endless changes in the

fauna and flora. A whole revolution was inaugurated over a realm of

three acres. The house-martins were the first to come; they settled in

before us. Ancestral instinct has taught them to know well that where a

house is built there will be eaves to nest under, and people will

inhabit it, who throw about meat and fruit, which attract the flies; and

flies are the natural diet of house-martins. The sparrows came next; but

the thrushes loitered longer. And the manner of their coming was after

this fashion—

The powers that be had decided on a tennis-lawn. Previously nothing but

heather and gorse spread over the hilltop; that is the native vegetation

of this light sandstone upland. But in order to have tennis you must

needs have a sward; so, much against the grain, we grubbed up wild heath

enough to make a court, and sowed it for a tennis-lawn. Grass cannot

grow, however, on such poor light soil as suits heather best, so we

imported a few cartloads of mould and manure from a farm in the valley.

With the mould came worms, who, finding a fair field, began to be

fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth with laudable rapidity.

Few or no earthworms live in the shallow sand of the open moor; and,

though a mole or two can just eke out a precarious living here and there

in the softer and grassier hollows—I see their mounds every day as I

cross the common—worms are not nearly abundant enough to tempt the

epicurean and greedy thrushes from the shelter of the valley. For the

mole, you see, goes out hunting underground on the trail of the

earthworm; but the thrush must needs depend upon the few stray

stragglers which come to the surface morning and evening.

No sooner had worms begun to make castings on the lawn, however, than

some Columbus thrush discovered a new world was opened to him. He and

his mate took formal possession of the patch of green, which they hold

as their own, using it regularly as a private hunting-ground. Every

other tennis-lawn in the neighbourhood similarly supports its pair of

thrushes, as (according to the poet) every rood of ground in England

once “maintained its man.” One of our neighbours has three lawns,

terraced off in steps, and each has been annexed by a particular thrush

family, which holds it stoutly against all comers. It is a curious sight

in spring, when the nestlings are young, to see the parent birds going

carefully over the ground—surveying it in squares, as it were—the cock

a little in front, the hen hopping after him at some distance on one

side, and making sure that not an inch of the superficial area remains

unhunted. They eat many snails, too, breaking the shells against big

stones; and they hunt for slugs now and then in the moist ditch by the

roadway. While the nestlings are unfledged the industry of the elder

birds is ceaseless; for they lay in early spring, and have to rear their

young while food is still far from cheap or abundant. And, oh! but it is

a gruesome sight to see them teaching the young idea of their kind how

to tackle a worm—how to drag him from his burrow, ring after ring, as

he struggles, to chop him up and mangle him till resistance and escape

are absolutely hopeless, and then to devour him piecemeal. But in autumn

the fierce heart of the carnivore softens; worms being then scarce, he

condescends to berries.

XXI.

THE SHRIKE’S LARDER.

YES; there is no denying it—this is a shrike’s larder! The poor small

beasts impaled here must have been hung upon thorns by that cruelest of

executioners. The hoard belongs, I think, to a red-backed shrike, whom I

have seen more than once flitting through the trees of this copse on the

hillside; for the great grey shrike has gone long since—he comes to us

only as a winter visitor in the hardest seasons—while woodchats and

smaller grey shrike hardly occur at all in this out-of-the-way district.

Indeed, the red-backed bird is the only true-born Briton of the entire

family; he alone nests and rears his young here regularly.

Butcher-birds, the gamekeepers call them, and well they deserve the

title; for they catch and spit alive on the thorns of their larder all

the bumble-bees and beetles, all the field-mice and robins they can

swoop down upon and surprise from their bosky ambush. Cruel and ruthless

birds, they seize whatever they can hold; but, instead of killing and

eating their prey at once, they keep it deliberately alive as long as

possible, on the stout thorn of a sloe-tree. Look at that poor

shrew-mouse, for example, wriggling feebly on his stake, which the

cunning bird has so managed to intertwine among the twigs as to make

escape impossible; he must have been hanging there in torture for a week

by his look, but the shrike will not eat him till the last possible

moment, unless so minded. And that poor lizard, again, with his

wonderful tenacity of life; he may have been impaled for a fortnight,

yet the skin on his ribs still rises and falls with a faint breathing

action. More merciful than nature, we will put him out of his pain;

though, after all, what good have we done by it? The shrike will catch

another to replace him.

We talk of beautiful instincts and beautiful adaptations, so I suppose

we may also talk of hateful ones; and this instinct of the shrike’s is

decidedly hateful. Yet such conduct is the rule in the world of animals:

each species thinks only of its own comfort and pleasure; none takes the

slightest heed of the pains of others. As Tennyson put it long ago—

“Nature is one with rapine, a harm no preacher can heal;

The mayfly is torn by the swallow, the sparrow spear’d by the

shrike,

And the whole little wood where I sit is a world of plunder and

prey.”

Assuredly no creature is worse in this respect than our red-backed

butcher-bird. Yet he is a handsome wretch, for all that, especially in

his beautiful and delicate spring plumage, when he first returns to us

from his African winter quarters—chestnut and reddish brown above,

melting into dainty grey-blue about the head and neck, not unrelieved by

bold patches of pure black and pure white on the tail and forehead.

Moreover, strange to say, he is an accomplished musician. But there is

an ugly look about him, none the less, for all his fine song and all his

fine feathers. He has a cruel, falcon-like expression of face; and any

one who has ever seen him engaged in calmly spiking a harvest-mouse or a

frog on a thick spine of blackthorn, without the faintest regard to his

helpless victim’s writhing, cannot fail to recognize the evil element in

his eye, whenever he gives one the rare chance of viewing him.

Old-fashioned ornithologists used to think the shrikes were related to

the birds of prey; and, indeed, they do somewhat resemble the smaller

hawks in external features. But the likeness is purely superficial and

adaptive—curved bill, strong talons, hard bristles on the beak, the

keen eye of the hunter: it is the kind of similarity that must always

exist among animals whose mode of life is closely similar. We know

nowadays that structure depends upon habit, not habit upon structure. If

you take to earning your living by rapine, you will acquire certain

traits of strength and keenness inevitable in predatory forms; and that

is why the shrikes, which are related by descent to the wrens and

thrushes, have grown to resemble in external conformation the

sparrowhawks and kestrels.

On the rare occasions when you do catch sight of a shrike, he is usually

seated, half in ambush, on some perch in a tall hawthorn, or even openly

on the telegraph-wires that cross a patch of likely hunting country.

There he peers about and watches with his keen hazel eyes till mouse,

frog, or lizard, bee, beetle, or dragon-fly, stirs in the meadow beneath

him. Then, swift as thought, he swoops down upon his quarry from his

invisible seat, not hovering and casting a telltale shadow like the

hawk, but waiting his chance unseen under cover of the thicket. His

favourite food, indeed, consists of bees and other soft-bodied insects;

these he generally eats at once, returning forthwith to his perch and

his peering. But if he catches any bigger prey, such as a frog, a

field-mouse, a tomtit, or a partridge chick, he flies off with it to the

larder, and there spears the wretched victim on a stout sharp spine, to

devour it at his leisure. Even beetles and dragon-flies he will

sometimes keep in stock, especially if his appetite is assuaged for the

moment. Nevertheless, the butcher-bird is in the main an insect-eater;

he is commonest on warm sandy soils, like that of these Surrey moors,

where bumble-bees and cockchafers abound, and enable him to make an easy

living. Indeed, all beasts and birds are mostly regulated in their

distribution by the abundance or scarcity of their food or prey. Shrikes

have, doubtless, no native objection to cold thick clay, as such; but

bees being rare on moist soils, and field-mice or lizards still rarer,

the shrike learns to avoid damp, chilly bottoms as herbivores avoid a

dry desert country.

XXII.

NESTS AND NO NESTS.

STROLLING across the moor in the sunshine to-day, past the lonely pine

where the night-jar sits crooning to his lady-love in the twilight, I

came suddenly across his grey mate herself, and saw her flutter up

sleepily in dazed surprise from the bare ground where she was sitting.

As she flapped her mottled wings and sailed slowly away, like a blinking

owl disturbed in the daytime, I noticed that I had lighted unawares upon

her nest, or rather, her eggs, for she lays them on the open, without

bed of any sort. I left them untouched, for I am no collector. A few

minutes later, I came abreast of the low cliff where the sand-martins

have established their twittering colony. The soft yellow sandstone that

forms the cutting is honey-combed with their tunnels; and as I leaned on

my stick and looked, I saw the busy brown birds gliding in and out, with

their long curved flight, and carrying back mouthfuls of gnats and

mayflies to their fledgelings in the burrows. It was beautiful to watch

them swooping in great arcs over the gorse and bracken, and then darting

straight, with unerring accuracy, to the mouth of their tunnels. They

alight at the very door with all the skill of born pilots, never missing

or overshooting the mark by one inch, but steering upon it so truly that

they look as though failure or miscalculation were impossible.

These two little episodes coming together set me thinking; ’tis a bad

habit one indulges in when one walks too much alone in the open. In

towns one doesn’t think, because the shop-windows, and the horses, and

the noise, and the people, and the omnibuses distract one; but in the

country, one gives way a great deal too readily to what Plato calls the

“divine disease” of thinking. I began to philosophize. How curious, I

said to myself, that we have but five kinds of bird in England that hawk

on the wing after insects in the open; and of all those five, not one

builds a proper respectable nest, woven of twigs and straws, like a

sparrow or a robin! Every one of them has some peculiar little fancy of

his own—goes in for some individual freak of originality. The

night-jar, which is the simplest and earliest in type of the group, lays

its eggs on the bare ground, and rises superior in its Spartan

simplicity to such petty luxuries as beds and bedding. The swift, that

ecclesiologically-minded bird, which loves the chief seats in the

synagogue, the highest pinnacles of tower or steeple, gums together a

soft nest of floating thistle-down and feathers, by means of a sticky

secretion from its own mouth, distilled in the last resort from the

juices of insects. The swallow and the house-martin, again, make domed

mud huts, and line them inside with soft floating material. Finally, the

sand-martin excavates with its bill the soft sandstone of cliffs or

roadside cuttings, and strews a bed within for its callow young of

cotton-grass and dandelion parachutes.

Why this curious variety among themselves, and this equally curious

divergence from the common practice of bird-kind in general? Clearly,

thought I, it must bear some definite relation to the habits and manners

of the birds which exhibit it. Let me think what it means. Aha, aha,

eureka! I have found it! The insect-hawking birds are not a natural

group; by descent they have nothing at all to do with one another.

Closely as the swift resembles the swallow in form, in flight, in shape

of bill, in habits and manners, we now know that the swift is a

specialized woodpecker, while the swallow and the martins are

specialized sparrows. (I use both words, _bien entendu_, in quite their

widest and most Pickwickian evolutionary acceptation.) The swift and the

night-jar belong to one great family of birds; the swallow, the

house-martin, and the sand-martin to another. The likeness in form and

in mode of flight has been brought about by similarity in their style of

living. Two different birds of two different types both took, ages

since, to hawking after flies and midges in the open air. Each group was

thus compelled to acquire long and powerful wings, a light and airy

body, a good steering tail, a wide gape of mouth, and a rapid curved

flight, so as to swoop down upon and catch its petty prey unsuspected.

So, in the long run, the two types which hawk most in the open, the

swifts and the swallows, have grown so like that only by minute

anatomical differences can we refer the remoter ancestry of one species

to the woodpeckers and humming-birds, and the remoter ancestry of the

other to the tits and sparrows.

How does their manner of life affect their mode of nesting, however?

Indirectly, in this way. Birds that live largely off seeds and fruits

and hard-shelled beetles, have hard short beaks to grind their food

with, and sit much in thickets, scrub, or hedgerows. But birds that hawk

on the wing after small soft flies must have wide soft bills, and a

gaping mouth; they can hardly perch at all on trees or bushes, and their

feet are too weak to be of much use for walking. Indeed, if a swift once

alights on the ground, he can scarcely get up again, so difficult is it

for the long wings to work in a narrow space, and so slight a power of

jumping have the feeble little legs. Hence it follows that birds of the

hedgerow type can readily build nests of twigs and straws, which they

gather as they perch, or seek on the ground; and they are enabled to

weave them with their hard bills and active feet; while birds of the

hawking type cannot pick up sticks or gather straws on the ground, and

have beaks quite unadapted for dealing with such intractable materials.

The consequence is they have been compelled to find out each some new

plan for itself, and to build their nest out of such stray material as

their habits permit them.

The night-jar, a stranded nocturnal bird of early type, with very few

modern improvements and additions, solves the problem in the easiest and

rudest way by simply going without a nest at all, and laying her eggs

unprotected in the open. Nocturnal creatures, indeed, are, to a great

extent, the losers in the struggle for existence; they always retain

many early and uncivilized ways, if I may speak metaphorically. They are

the analogues of the street arabs who sleep in Trafalgar Square under

shelter of a newspaper. The sand-martin, an earlier type than the

swallow or the house-martin, burrows in sandstone cliffs, which are

pre-human features, though man’s roads and railways have largely

extended his field of enterprise. But the house-martin and the swallow,

later and far more civilized developments, have learned to take

advantage of our barns and houses; they nest under the eaves; and being

largely water-haunters, skimming lightly over the surface of ponds and

lakes, they have naturally taken advantage of the mud at the edges as a

convenient building material. Last of all, the soaring swift, the most

absolutely aërial type of the entire group, unable to alight on the

ground at all, has acquired the habit of catching cottony seeds, and

thistle-down, and floating feathers in his mouth as he flies, and

gumming them together into a mucilaginous nest with his own saliva. The

Oriental sea-swifts have no chance of finding even such flying materials

among their caves and cliffs, and they have consequently been driven

into erecting nests entirely of their own inspissated saliva, without

any basis of down or feathers. These are the famous edible birds’-nests

of the Chinese; they look like gelatine, and they make excellent soup,

somewhat thick and gummy.

XXIII.

THE CROUCH OAK.

THE old Crouch Oak on Walford Green is one of the sights of Surrey. It

raises its gnarled and hollow trunk in the centre of the Ploy-Field, an

ancient common meadow, and though decayed in its heart, is reckoned

still among the principal bounds of Ringmer Forest. Its girth at the

height of a man’s arms is over twenty feet. Beneath its spreading

branches stands an upright stone of immemorial antiquity, which only the

righteous wrath of a local archæologist succeeded in preserving a few

years since from the modern desecration of a Jubilee inscription. This

close combination of sacred tree and sacred stone is frequent and

significant; it occurs all the world over, from Britain to the New

Hebrides; it is found in India, in Syria, in Germany, in Ceylon, in

civilized Rome, in barbaric New Guinea. Wherever the sacred tree spreads

its brooding circle of welcome shade, there under its huge boughs the

sacred stone bears witness to antique or still surviving rites of human

sacrifice.

It is this, indeed, that gives our British Gospel Oaks their unique

interest amid the public monuments of England. Alone among the temples

of our old heathen faith they have outlived the overwhelming deluge of

Christianity. In the south of Europe we have still the Parthenon and the

columns of Pæstum to testify boldly to the older creeds. In the north,

where temples made with hands were rarer, where art had not learned to

raise such colossal piles as Karnak or Denderah, the sacred oak alone

remains to us now as a lingering memorial of the cult of our ancestors.

Even these, too, have been Christianized, in accordance with Gregory’s

well-known advice to Augustine. The holy sites of the ancient faiths,

said the wise Pope, in his epistle, were still to be respected; but the

demons who inhabited them were to be exorcised by the use of Christian

symbols, and the temples were to be sanctified to Christian worship. In

accordance with this policy, a figure of the cross was marked upon the

bark of the old sacred tree in Walford Ploy-Field, which thus became

known as the Crouch or Cross Oak; for the Latin _crux_ came first into

our language under the truer English form of _crouch_, and only assumed

its later pronunciation of _cross_ under northern influences. Similar

Christianization of holy oaks, shire oaks, boundary oaks, Druid oaks,

and other heathen temples or heathen termini, went on all over England;

so that what were once Thunor’s trees and Woden’s trees, or still

earlier, the sacred haunts of native Celtic deities, became in the end

those “Gospel Oaks,” under which, at the annual beating of the bounds,

the priest stopped with his acolytes to read a few verses of St. Luke or

St. Matthew. Sometimes, indeed, hardly more than the memory of some

particular episode in the history of the sacred tree now survives, as at

Addlestone, near Chertsey, where there is also a crouch oak, chiefly

famous at present from a local tradition that Wickliffe once preached

under its canopy of branches. But the older holy and even phallic virtue

of this sacred trunk is proved by the fact that decoctions of its bark

taken internally, after a well-known and almost world-wide fashion, are

still considered by the girls of the village to operate as a love-charm.

The history of these ancient trees, so far as we can reconstruct it from

the piecemeal evidence, is picturesque and singular. Originally, I

believe, they were planted as saplings over the barrow or tumulus of

some barbaric chieftain; not a few of them, indeed—like the King’s Oak

at Tilford, near Farnham—still retain some title which recalls their

royal or funereal origin. The sacred stone, which in every case seems

once to have stood under their dense shade, was doubtless at first the

standing-stone or gravestone of the buried chief; though later it

probably served as an unhewn altar for the village sacrifices, like that

offering of the lamb which till recent years was still torn to pieces on

an anniversary festival in the Ploy-Field at Holne, in Devonshire. Every

year, in point of fact, the people of each village used once to

perambulate their bounds, as at the Roman Terminalia, and offer up at

each holy tree and each terminus stone, which formed the main landmarks,

a human sacrifice. The victims were usually boys—most probably captives

from neighbouring tribes or villages; failing that, they were “bought

with a price” within the tribe itself from their unnatural parents.

Traces of these customs survive all the world over, while the practice

itself is closely bound up with the worship of Terminus and other

boundary spirits. In later and milder days, however, though the habit of

beating the bounds survived, the incidents that accompanied it were

considerably mitigated. The ceremony at first was essentially an

exorcism, or driving of evil spirits beyond the village limits; and the

boys seem to have been slaughtered as boundary guardians, in order that

their ghosts might protect and maintain the local frontier. They were

also scourged before being put to death, after a common superstition, so

that their tears might act as a sympathetic rain-charm. But in later

Christian days it began to be felt that to read the Gospels under the

sacred oak of the boundary would sufficiently drive away all evil

influences; and though the boys were still beaten at each terminus as a

rain-charm, the meaning of the incident was so wholly forgotten that it

was commonly interpreted as a means of impressing the boundaries on

their memories—a foolish gloss of the usual fatuous eighteenth-century

rationalizing type. Thus the Gospel Oak at Cheriton is now only

remembered as the tree under which the Gospel was read at the

perambulation of the bounds; the Crouch Oak at Addlestone has sunk into

a prosaic legal boundary-mark of Windsor Forest; and the Twelve Apostles

at Burley, near Ringwood, now reduced to five, have been finally

Christianized out of all recognition, so that I cannot even

conjecturally reconstruct their original dedication to some ancient

Celtic or Teutonic deities.

XXIV.

A SPOTTED ORCHIS.

LIKE Mr. Chamberlain, I too am an orchid-grower. I own three acres

(without a cow) on a heather-clad hilltop, and no small proportion of

that landed estate is “down under orchids.” Not that I mean to say the

species I cultivate, or rather allow to grow wild, on my wild little

plot would excite the envy of the magnate of Highbury. They are nothing

more than common English spotted orchids, springing free and spontaneous

among the gorse and heather. But, oh! how beautiful they are! how much

more beautiful than the dendrobiums and cattleyas, the flowering spiders

and blossoming lizards of the rich man’s hothouse! How proudly they

raise their tall spikes of pale bloom, true sultanas of the moorland!

how daintily they woo the big burly bumble bees! how gracefully they

bend their nodding heads before the bold south-west that careers across

the country! They seem to me always such great regal flowers, yet simple

with the simplicity of the untrodden upland.

Take a spike and look at it close; or, better still, grub it up by the

roots with the point of your umbrella, and examine it all through from

its foundation upward. It springs from two tubers, not unlike a pair of

new potatoes to look at, but deeply divided below into finger-like

processes. Those divisions it was that gave the plant its quaint old

English title of “dead men’s fingers”—for, indeed, there is something

clammy and corpse-like about the feel of the tubers; while that “coarser

name” to which Shakespeare alludes in passing, is due to their general

shape, and is still enshrined in the Greek word “orchid” which everybody

now applies to them without thinking for a moment of its unsavoury

meaning. But the two tubers are not of the same age. One is old and

wilted; the other is young and fresh, and, as the advertisements say,

“still growing.” The first is last year’s reserve-fund for this year’s

flowering stem; the second is this year’s storehouse of food for next

year’s blossom. Thus each season depends for its flowers upon the

previous year’s income; the leaves, which are the mouths and stomachs of

the plants, lay by material in due season; and the spike of bells

proceeds from the tubers or consolidated reserve-fund as soon as the

summer is sufficiently advanced for the process of flowering. Few plants

with handsome heads or trusses of bloom, indeed, can afford to produce

them upon the current season’s income; therefore you will find that most

large-flowered forms, like lilies, tulips, hyacinths, and daffodils, if

they wish to blossom early in the year, depend for their food-supply

upon a bulb or tuber of last season’s making. Only in the orchids,

however, do you find this curious device of a pair of tubers at once

side by side, one being filled and fed, while the other is being slowly

devoured and depleted. By the end of the season the new tuber is rich

and full to bursting, while the old one is withered, flaccid, and empty.

From the tuber, in early spring, start the pretty lance-shaped

leaves—green, dappled with leopard spots of some deep brown pigment.

The use and meaning of these beautiful spots on the glossy green foliage

no one has yet deciphered; it remains as one of the ten thousand

insoluble mysteries of plant existence. That is always so in life. We

tell what we know; but what we know not, who shall count it or number

it? Yet the flowers, after all, are the true centre of interest in the

English orchid. Thirty of them in a spike, pale lilac or white, all

starred and brocaded with strange flecks of purple, they rank among the

most marvellous of our native flowers in shape and structure. The long

spur at the back is the factory and reservoir for the abundant honey.

The face of the blossom consists of a broad and showy lip, the flaunting

advertisement to bee or butterfly of the sweets within; it is flanked by

two slender spreading wings, above which a third sepal arches over the

helmet-like petals. Beneath this hood, or dome, in the centre of the

column, the club-shaped pollen-masses lie half concealed in two pockets,

or pouches—dainty little purses, as it were, like fairy wallets—slit

open in front for the bee’s convenience. The base of the pollen-masses

is sticky or gummy; and they are so arranged, of set purpose, in their

pouches, that the moment the bee’s head touches them, they cling to it

automatically, by their gummy end, and are carried off without his

knowledge or consent to the next flower he visits. But if you want to

see exactly how this pretty little drama of plant life is enacted, you

need not wait, as I have often done, silent on the heath for half an

hour together, till some blustering bumble bee bustles in, all

importance. It suffices for demonstration just to pick a spike and

insert into the mouth of the honey-spur a stem of grass, which does duty

for the bee’s head and proboscis, when straightway “the figures will

act,” as they say on the penny-in-the-slot machines, and the

pollen-masses will gum themselves by automatic action to the imaginary

insect.

The reason for this curious and highly advanced device is that orchids

are among the plants most absolutely specialized for

insect-fertilization. Most species of orchid, in fact, can never set

their seeds at all without the intervention of these flying “marriage

priests,” as Darwin quaintly called them. If left to themselves, the

flowers must wither on their virgin thorn unwed, and no seed be set in

the twisted ovary. But when the bee goes to them in search of honey, the

pollen-masses gum themselves to the front of his head, though just at

first they point upward and inward. Then, after a short time, as he

flies through the air, they contract in drying, and so point forward, in

the direction in which he will enter the next flower he visits. This

brings the pollen directly into contact with the sensitive cushion or

pad of the ovary in the flower so visited, and thus results in the

desired cross-fertilization. For the ovary, too, is gummy, to make the

pollen stick to it.

A roundabout way, you think, to arrive, after all, at so simple a

conclusion? Well, that is the habit of Nature. And again, bethink you,

good, easy-going human being, how great are the difficulties she has to

contend with, especially in the case of the plant creation. Put yourself

in the orchid’s place, and you will see the reason. For remember how

absolutely fixed and limited are plants, each rooted to the soil in a

single small spot, each tied by strict conditions of rock, and

water-supply, and air, and wind, and sun, and climate, from which none

can escape, try they all their hardest. The opposite sides of a road are

to them as the two poles, one with a sunny and southward-looking bank,

the other with a cold and forbidding northern aspect; so that what

flourishes apace on the first would shiver and die of chill winds on the

second. Remember, too, that, save in the mildest degree, plants have no

power of spontaneous or independent movement; they cannot stir from

their birthplace, were it but for a single inch, nor move their own

limbs save as the wind may sway them. Creatures thus narrowly and

inevitably bound down must needs take advantage of the power of movement

in all other kinds, wherever it will benefit them. Hence the use plants

make of insects as common carriers of pollen; the use they make of birds

as dispersers of seeds; the use they make of natural agencies, such as

wind or stream, to waft winged thistle-down, to carry the parachutes of

the dandelion and the willow, or to float the male blossoms of such

water-weeds as vallisneria. Behold! I show you a mystery. The secret of

the whole thing is that plants, being fixed themselves, must needs

employ birds and insects as their Pickford vans—must rely on wind or

stream for such casual services as wind or stream can easily afford

them. Only in a few species can they effect anything like active

movement for themselves, as one sees in the rooting runners of

strawberries, or the wandering tubers of certain vagrant orchids, which

spread far afield from last season’s nesting-place. These are clever

devices for securing fresh virgin soil—“rotation of crops,” as the

farmers put it.

XXV.

THE ROOT OF THE MATTER.

EVERY Girton girl (_vice_ Macaulay’s schoolboy, retired from

overwork)—every Girton girl knows that a well-conducted British oak

“spreads its roots as far and wide through the soil beneath as it rears

its boughs above toward the air of heaven.” Every Girton girl is

probably also of opinion that the British oak does this mainly or solely

in order to fix itself by firm anchors in the soil—to withstand the

battling winds and the constant pull of hostile gravitation. But what

every Girton girl does not, perhaps, quite so confidently know is

this—that, on the whole, the tips of the roots and the tips of the

branches correspond roughly in situation with one another, so that if

you were to unearth and expose the entire tree you would find it

composed of two tolerably similar domes or hemispheres—one erect and

aërial, and one inverted and earth-bound, each occupying approximately

equal areas, and each circumscribed by fairly equal circles.

Why should this be so? It is clear enough, of course, that in order to

fasten a big tree firmly in the ground, it must have numerous large and

strong foundations. But wherefore this approximate equality in the areas

occupied by roots and frondage? The answer is, because every large tree

forms a sort of umbrella, a domed roof or catchment basin for the rain

that falls upon it; and it has always its own peculiar and admirably

adapted arrangement for conducting all the water it intercepts to

certain special spots or drinking-places in the ground, where it sets

the roots, and especially the rootlets, or absorbent terminals, intended

to soak that water up and convey it to the branches. If you stand under

an oak-tree during a summer shower—a mode of passive scientific

observation for which nature has afforded quite ample opportunities

during the last few weeks—you will notice at once that the round mass

of its foliage acts exactly like a huge umbrella, and conducts all the

rain that falls upon its surface outward and downward towards the

circumference of the circle. The drops that alight upon the central and

tallest part of the tree are shed by the veined and channelled leaves

till they fall off the tips on to the layer immediately below and

outside them; this layer again conveys them to the next in order, and so

on, till at last a little gathering stream drips from the ends of the

lowest and longest outward-pointing boughs on to the soil beneath them.

The ground in the centre remains perfectly dry, while a circle at the

circumference is hollowed into a sort of irregular trench, or rude round

of tiny pits, by the continuous dripping of the collected gutters.

Now, of course, the plant wants to utilize to the utmost all the rain it

thus intercepts. It would be quite too silly of it to produce rootlets

and absorbent terminals in the dry central space covered by the dense

umbrella of foliage. But all around the circumference, and especially at

the spots just under the runnels, where the water drops from the ends of

the boughs, exactly as it drops from the rib-points of the

silk-and-steel umbrella, the tree develops numerous minute rootlets,

which suck up the rain as fast as it falls, and convey it by fixed pipes

to the leaves and growing-points. Every tree and every large herb is

thus a regular and well-organized catchment-basin, with its own mains

and services; and it utilizes its water-supply by a cunningly adapted

system of sucking rootlets, all placed at the exact spots where they

will most surely absorb the amount of water that in each case runs down

to them. So much is this true that in transplanting trees foresters and

nurserymen know well you must lop the roots and the branches so as to

cover equal superficial areas, or else the water will not fall on the

parts best adapted to receive it; for, just as the lopped branches put

forth new leaves and twigs at the point of section, so do the lopped

roots put forth new rootlets and absorbent hairs at the place where they

are now most urgently needed.

Not every kind of plant, however, manages its water-supply on the

self-same system. There are dodges and devices. For herbs with leaves

that spring from the rootstock alone, for example, without any visible

above-ground stem, two main plans have been very widely adopted. One

plan is that invented by plants like rhubarb, which have channelled

leaves with grooved leaf-stalks, conducting all the water that falls

upon their surface centrally towards the root. This is the centripetal

type. Such plants resemble rather a funnel than an umbrella. They have

always a straight tap-root, like a carrot; and this tap-root gives off

numerous short rootlets on every side, which absorb all the water as it

trickles down along the tapering surface of the inverted cone. The other

plan—the centrifugal type—is adopted by certain plants with

heart-shaped or arrow-shaped leaves, which have round leaf-stalks. In

these cases the individual leaves point outward and downward, and the

water drips from them not inward towards the centre, but outward towards

the circumference. Their principle is rather umbrella-like than

funnel-like. To meet this catchment system they have no long and

descending tap-root, but just a short knobby root, which gives off long

fibres radially in every direction; and these fibres terminate in knots

or groups of absorbent rootlets exactly beneath the points where each

leaf drips—the knobs or tags of the umbrella, to carry out our

convenient metaphor. Examination of other and more complex plants

reveals always the action of the same general law; each species has a

peculiar catchment system of its own, more or less complicated, by means

of which, directly or indirectly, all the water that falls upon its

foliage is finally conducted to certain specified spots or

drinking-places; and at those specified spots the plant provides

beforehand an elaborate system of absorbent organs, exactly sufficient

to suck up and utilize the average amount of water it expects to obtain

and store at each of them. If London were a plant, now——But hush! I am

silent. A gathering frown on the reader’s brow warns me in time to steer

clear of such human and political analogies.

XXVI.

THE DEVIL’S PUNCHBOWL.

ON Sunday the boys came home for their half-term holiday, so we strolled

in the morning into the Devil’s Punchbowl. That is the name of the

basin-shaped valley that lies behind the house—a deep circular glen,

scooped out in a softer portion of the sandstone mass that forms the

moor by rain and denudation. Thor owned it, I doubt not, long before it

was claimed by its present possessor, for the parish is Thursley; and

some Celtic god, whose name is only known to Professor Rhys, may have

used it as his drinking-cup long before the Norseman brought his Thor,

or the Saxon his Thunor, into the Surrey uplands. But the devil is now

the heir-general and residuary legatee of all heathen gods deceased, be

they late or early; he has come into titular ownership of their entire

property. A steep path leads zigzag down the side of the escarpment into

the bowl-shaped hollow; at its bottom a tiny stream oozes out in a

spring as limpid as Bandusia. Water lies in the rock, indeed, at about

two hundred and fifty feet below the surface of the moor, to which depth

we have, accordingly, to sink our wells on the hilltop; and it is at

about the same level that the springs gush forth which form the

headwaters of our local rivers.

When we came upon the brook, as good luck would have it, a couple of

farm labourers, in their workaday clothes, regardless of the Sabbath,

lay at full length upon the bank, engaged in the picturesque, if not

strictly legal, occupation of tickling trout. The boys were, of course,

delighted; they had never seen the operation performed before, and were

charmed at its almost mesmeric magic. At first the men, seeing

gentlefolk approach, regarded us with disfavour, as their natural

enemies, no doubt in league with the preserving landlord; but as soon as

they discovered we were “the right sort,” in full sympathy with the fine

old poaching proclivities of the upland population, they returned

forthwith to their tickling with a zest, and landed a couple of trout,

not to mention a crayfish, before the very eyes of the delighted

schoolboys.

Tickling trout is an ancient and honourable form of sport, which admits

of much skill and address in the tickler. The fish lurk quietly under

overhanging banks, where an undermined green sod impends the tiny

stream; and the operator passes his hand gently over their sides once or

twice till he has established confidence; then, taking advantage of the

friendship thus formed, he suddenly closes his hand and whips the

astonished victim unawares out of the water. It has been urged by

anglers (who are interested parties) that such conduct contains an

element of treachery; but all is fair in love and war, of which last our

contest with the wild creatures of nature is but a minor variety; and I

cannot see that it matters much, ethically, whether you land your trout

on the bank under pretence of titillating his sense of touch, or

treacherously hook him by false show of supplying him with a dainty

dinner. Indeed, all the trout I have interviewed on the subject are

unanimously of opinion that, if you must be caught and eaten at all,

they had rather be caught by a gentle pressure of the naked hand than

have their mouths and feelings cruelly lacerated by a barbed hook

disguised as a mayfly. Which reminds me of the charming French apologue

of the farmer who called his turkeys together in order to ask them with

what sauce they would prefer to be eaten. “Please, your Excellency,”

said the turkeys, “we don’t want to be eaten at all.” “My friends,” said

the farmer, “you wander from the question.”

It is curious, though, to see how this mere thread of water supports a

whole isolated colony of its own, composed of many dozen kinds of fish,

insects, and crustaceans, who know no more of other members of their

race than the people on a small Pacific island knew of the human family

before Captain Cook burst upon them from the blue, with the blessings of

Christianity, rum, and extermination. These trout, for example, are a

group apart; they are always small, even when adult, because there is

little food for them, and the stream is little. In big rivers, where

there is space to turn, and provisions are plentiful, a successful trout

of the self-same species runs to five or six pounds, while the very near

variety which frequents great lakes not infrequently grows to forty-five

or fifty. But here, in this upland rill, an ounce or two is the limit.

They live mostly in pairs, like well-conducted fish, one couple to each

pool or overhung basin; yet, strange to say, if one is tickled or

otherwise enticed away, the widowed survivor seems always to have found

a mate before three hours are over. I know most of them personally, and

love to watch their habits and manners. They are brilliantly speckled

here, because the water is clear and the bottom pebbly; for the spots on

trout depend on the bed, and come out brighter and more ornamental by

far during the breeding season. This is still more conspicuously the

case with the æsthetic stickleback, the dandy of the fresh waters; he

puts on the most exquisite iridescent hues when he goes a-courting, and

exhibits himself to his mate more gorgeously clad than Solomon in all

his glory. Unfortunately, the colours are very fugacious, for they die

away at once when he is taken out of the water; but while they last,

they outshine in brilliancy the humming-bird or the butterfly. Both

species are great and determined fighters, as always happens with

brilliantly decorated birds, fishes, reptiles, and insects. None but the

brave deserve the fair; and bravery and æsthetic taste seem to go

together. Indeed, the courageous little trout will face and drive away a

murderous pike who menaces his home, while stickleback will engage one

another in such sanguinary fights for the possession of their mates that

only the Kilkenny cats can be named in the same day with them.

The other inhabitants of the tiny brook are far more numerous than you

would imagine. Miller’s-thumbs poke their big black heads out of holes

in the clay bank at every quiet corner. Crayfish hide among the weeds or

dart between the sedges. Stone-loach flit down stream like rapid shadows

when you lift the bigger pebbles, under which they lie skulking. As for

caddis-worms and water-spiders and the larvæ of dragon-flies, they are

there by the hundred; while the full-blown insects—living flashes of

light, as Tennyson calls them—poise their metallic blue bodies for a

second over the ragged-robins that grow in the boggy hollows, and then

dart away like lightning to the willow-herb in the distance. It is a

world apart, this wee world of the streamlet; it has its own joys, its

own fears, its own tragedies. The big solemn cows, with their placid

great eyes, come down to drink at it unheeding, and blunder over the

bank, and slide their cloven hoofs to the bottom through the clay,

unaware that they have crushed a dozen maimed lives, and spread terror

like an earthquake over fifty small fishes. But the trout and the

loaches stand with tremulous fins beating the water meanwhile ten yards

below, and aghast at the cataclysm that has altered for ever their

native reach. Not for fully twenty minutes do they recover heart enough

to sneak up stream once more to their ruined bank, and survey with

strange eyes the havoc in their homesteads.

XXVII.

THE LARK IN AUTUMN.

MEN are out on the ridge hard by catching larks with mirrors. Catching

skylarks for table! Just think of the sacrilege! Listen! As I write I

can hear the dear birds carolling loud even now in the divine sunshine;

singing gaily at heaven’s gate, as they sang for Shakespeare; pouring

their full hearts, in their joy, as they poured them forth for Shelley!

And these London jailbirds, slouching figures in short jackets and

round-brimmed hats, have come down from their slums to our free Surrey

moors, to catch and kill them! How I hope they will fail! To the lover

of nature, in spite of the proverb; a bird in the bush is worth two in

the hand—or, indeed, two thousand.

At this moment, to tell you true, our meadows and pastures are just

thronged with skylarks. We have always dozens of them, proclaiming their

gladness every sunshiny day in rich cataracts of music. But within the

last few days the dozens have turned into scores and hundreds, for it is

the time of the great influx of Continental larks over sea into England.

There is a difference, too, though a slight one, between our true home

birds and the hungry refugees who flock here for food and warmth in

winter. Our native and resident skylark is the smaller bird of the two,

and more russet in colour; the migrants who join him in our winter

fields are both larger and darker. Their ashy isabelline plumage, cold

grey granite in hue, has less of a generous rufous tinge to relieve it

than in the true-born Briton. Such minor differences, indeed, between

local races of allied type occur often in nature; they are the first

beginnings out of which new kinds may in time be developed by natural

selection. For instance, each important river of Britain has its own

breed of salmon, to be recognized at sight—so they say—by the

experienced fly-fisher. Thus, again, in the matter of skylarks, our

English type differs slightly in shape and hue from the

Continental—just about as much as your John Bull differs from a

Frenchman, or a German. As we approach the Mediterranean, a still paler

and lighter form begins to take the place of the northern bird, and has

been honoured (without due reason, I should think) with a separate Latin

name, as a distinct species. It stands to our own ruddy-brown English

skylark in something the same relation as the Moor or the Syrian stands

to the Western European. This pale form, once more, straggles through

Anatolia and across Central Asia; but merges in the Himalayas, Japan,

and China into a russet mountain type, which is also regarded by

systematic naturalists as a distinct species. The truth is, however,

when you take any large area of the world together, it is impossible to

draw distinct lines anywhere between one animal or plant and another.

Kind melts into kind for the most part by imperceptible stages.

Even in the dreariest months our skylark still sings to us, at rarer

intervals, on bright frosty mornings. He hovers over the grass when it

sparkles and scintillates with crystal filigree. His music it is that so

endears him to all of us. He is busy at work now, I see, in the stubble

of the corn-fields, where, a useful ally of the agricultural interest,

he picks out the seeds of black bindweed and corn-poppy—not unmixed, it

is true, with occasional grains of wheat or barley. But he does far more

good than harm, for all that. Natives and foreigners live amicably side

by side, though they do not breed together; for the immigrants, mindful

of their Baltic homes, go off again in early spring, leaving the smaller

British birds to mate and nest and keep up the true blue blood of the

Britannic skylark. While hard weather lasts, the families flock together

in large mixed bodies, for mutual protection, I suppose, or else for

love of companionship; but at the beginning of March they separate and

pair, and during this tremulous season of love and courtship their song

falls from the clouds still blither and louder and more constant than

ever. It showers down upon us with lavish profusion. The male birds rise

emulously, singing as they go, and displaying with pride their powers of

song and flight before their mates and their rivals. Often they join

battle at their giddy height for some coveted mate, and fight it out in

the sky; she sits demure below on the dewy grass meanwhile, watching

their deeds of prowess, listening to their bursting hearts, and ready to

bestow herself, like ladies at a tournament, on the lover who proves

himself the stoutest and the worthiest. For we must always remember that

those liquid notes which thrill our souls on glad spring mornings have

been acquired by the bird, not for our human delight, but as a charm for

the ears of his own love-sick partner. For her he modulates his swelling

throat; for her he showers down that fountain spray of melody. Time was

when birds had no such musical skill, no such art of courtship; and

traces still remain to us in many lands of that more primitive period.

Just as man is most advanced, most civilized, most modern in Europe, so

birds are most advanced, most developed, most musical of voice in the

eastern continent. And just as primitive races linger on in South

Africa, Polynesia, the Andaman Islands, to give us some pregnant hint of

our own early ancestry, so more antique and less evolved types of bird

linger on in South America and Australia, to show us some relics of the

primitive winged fauna in the days before the sense of song was

developed. South American species, belonging to the same great group of

perchers as our own sweetest songsters—the nightingale, the thrush, the

skylark, the linnet—are not only voiceless, but do not even possess the

necessary organs for producing song. European and Asiatic birds, in

other words, acquired their singing habits at a later period than the

one at which their ancestors parted company for good with their South

American relatives. Indeed, it is pleasant for the evolutionist to think

that the whole course of the world’s evolution has been in one constant

stream towards beauty and sweetness—towards lovelier plumage, daintier

spots and dapplings, more graceful antlers, more waving crests, diviner

song, intenser colour and scent of flowers. The subtlest perfumes belong

to the newest types and families of blossom; the mellowest notes belong

to the newest types and families of birds; the highest beauty belongs to

the newest and most spiritual races of civilized humanity. The world,

thank God! grows ever more lovely, more pure, more harmonious.

XXVIII.

THE SQUIRREL’S HARVEST.

NOW is the squirrel’s harvest. Beech-mast and acorns are now in season.

I was sitting this morning close to the smooth grey-mottled trunk of an

immemorial beech at Waggoner’s Wells when—pat-a-pat, pat—a noise hard

by, as of hurrying and scurrying feet, attracted my attention. So loud

it was, one might have almost said a troop of skirmishers from Aldershot

at double-quick through the woodland, save that it came from overhead;

and overhead skirmishing, from “the nations’ airy navies, grappling in

the central blue,” is happily as yet a thing of the poet’s prophetic

imagination. I looked up into the tree, and there, to my surprise and

delight, lo! half a dozen merry squirrels, all foraging together after

the rich beech-mast, which forms the larger part of their winters

provender. Even as I watched, one of the pretty harvesters descended the

trunk nimbly with his sharp small claws, and approached unawares within

a few feet of the spot where I was sitting. No sooner did he see me,

however, than he gave me one sharp glance from his keen black eyes,

perpended for a second whether to trust me or not, and then, this way

and that dividing the swift mind, came quickly at the end to the safe

conclusion that men were bad lots, even when they pretend to be playing

the observant philosopher. So up the smooth bark he darted, quick as

thought, finding his foothold by magic, as is the wont of his race, all

ignorant of Newton’s troublesome theory of gravitation. Then, when he

knew himself well out of reach and secure from pursuit, he turned and

laughed back at me with those beady black eyes of his, in merry mood, as

who should say, “Ah, great clumsy creature, _you_ can’t follow me here!

Don’t you wish you had a gun? Wouldn’t you like to catch me?”

This quaint quality of roguishness, so sadly rare in northern animals,

the squirrel possesses, with not a few other monkey-like peculiarities.

Such mental traits seem, indeed, to spring direct from the wild life of

the woodland. The freedom which the squirrel enjoys in his native

trees—the power he possesses of evading pursuit by darting along the

small twigs at the end of a bough—gives him a sense of triumph over dog

or man which often results in a positive habit of nothing less than

conscious mockery. The opossum and the monkeys, equally tree-haunting

beasts, have acquired from similar causes the same delight in insulting

and ridiculing their baffled enemies. Very monkey-like, too, is the

squirrel’s pretty way of holding an acorn between his two fore-paws to

feed himself; while in general intelligence and sense of humour he

hardly at all falls short of his southern competitor. The woods are

everywhere great developers of intelligence: all the cleverest beasts

and birds, including parrots and toucans, are almost without exception

confirmed tree-dwellers.

I notice, too, that the squirrels are just now doubly preparing for

winter; not only are they prudently stocking their larders, but they are

also putting on their light suits for the season. For squirrels, even in

England, still retain to some extent the ancestral habit, acquired, no

doubt, during the great Ice Age, of changing their coats for a lighter

one during the snowy months. In Lapland and Siberia, indeed, the local

squirrels imitate the ptarmigan and the ermine by turning grey in

winter; in Britain, they have lost that habit as a regular climatic

change, but the fur, nevertheless, gets interspersed in places with a

number of whitish hairs as the cold season approaches. It is a trick of

atavism. Your squirrel sleeps away the worst months in his cosy nest,

with his bushy tail wrapped like a blanket or a martial cloak around

him. Thus, that pretty adjunct serves a double purpose: in summer

squirrels employ it as a balance, like the rope-dancer’s pole; in winter

they use it as a convenient coverlet. Now and then, in February, if a

warm day turns up, they wake from their doze for a short spell, and

visit one of the granaries where their nuts are stored. But, like

prudent beasts that they are, they never lay by their treasure in their

own nests, because their too frequent going and coming while hoarding

nuts might attract attention, and so betray them unawares to the too

observant stoat or the inquisitive weasel. They even take the precaution

to spread their investments widely, so to speak, by garnering nuts and

acorns in several holes at once among the trees that surround their own

family residence.

When spring returns the squirrel emerges, a sadder and decidedly a

thinner beast. But there are now no nuts, no seeds, no grains; so he

takes, against his will, to the young bark and tender shoots of the

trees around him. About the same time, too, the squirrel’s fancy lightly

turns to thoughts of love; the young of last year’s brood begin to mate

themselves. And a pretty sight the mating is, indeed. I was strolling

one day through the Nower at Dorking—a lightly wooded park—when I saw

by chance one of the daintiest little idylls of real life I have ever

yet been lucky enough to witness. A tiny female squirrel emerged all at

once from a hole in an oak-tree, hotly pursued close behind by two

ardent suitors. Round and round the trunk they ran, now up, now down,

all regardless of my presence; the little lady once and again pretending

to let one or other of her wooers overtake her, then pausing and looking

back at him with her roguish black eyes, and finally darting away with

true feminine coquetry just as he thought he had caught her. Ha, ha! the

wooing o’t! I stood and watched the pretty little comedy for full twenty

minutes; and all the time it was as clear as crystal for which of her

two admirers that arrant little flirt had the greater inclination. Not

that she ever let him see it himself too plainly; she sometimes

encouraged him awhile, and sometimes his rival. She was coy, she was

forward, she was bewitching, she was cold; she employed every art known

to female wiles—in one word, she was a woman. I wished those who doubt

the reality of selective preferences in the lower animals could have

been there to see. It was a sweet little courtship. At last the tiny

coquette made her choice quite plain; and then the discomfited suitor

went on his way, crestfallen, while his successful rival, too overtly

triumphant, and rejoicing in his luck, gazed after him and jeered at

him.

I am happy to add, however, that squirrels, once mated, are models of

propriety in their domestic relations. They are strictly monogamous;

they pair for life; and they constantly inhabit the same dwelling. That

last is surely a pitch of respectability to which not even the blameless

London clerk who “always comes home to tea” has as yet attained. _He_

has been known to flit on quarter-days.

XXIX.

A DRAINED FISHPOND.

I CALLED in at my neighbour Major Warren Pauncefote’s this afternoon,

and found he was just engaged in draining the fishpond by his garden. He

is going to deepen it and to puddle the bottom, so as to make it fit for

his boys to swim in. Meanwhile he has transferred all the larger carp to

a stone trough in the back yard, where I saw at once there was not half

enough water for them. I’m sure he didn’t mean to be cruel, for he is

the humanest soldier that ever spitted Fuzzy-wuzzy in the Soudan on his

sword; but all the same, to any one who understands the prime needs of

fish-life, the condition of those poor carp was most sad to look at. As

every one knows, they breathe the oxygen dissolved in water; and as

hundreds of them were confined in this Black Hole of Calcutta, the

amount at their disposal was, of course, quite inadequate. Some of the

poor things were dead or dying, turning on their lustreless sides in the

pathetically helpless way of suffocating fish; the others kept coming up

every now and then to the surface, gasping for breath, and gulping down

great open-jawed mouthfuls of air, to relieve their misery. No doubt the

oxygen they thus swallow enters the body-cavity, and slightly assists

them in aërating the blood, though much of it, also, may pass in the

ordinary way through the gills, which are the regular and normal

respiratory organs. It is always interesting to me, however, to watch

fish when they come up thus to drink air at the surface, as goldfish

often do when thoughtlessly confined in too small a glass basin; for in

this instinctive act, as modern biologists now generally allow, we have

the first faint beginnings of the evolution of lungs and the habit of

air-breathing. Nay, more, terrestrial life itself, as a whole, depends

in the last resort upon just such first feeble gaspings and gulpings.

For lungs are nothing more, anatomically speaking, than developed

swim-bladders, connected by a definite passage with the external air,

and provided with a more or less perfect muscular mechanism for inhaling

and expelling it.

In most fish, and in all the rudest types, the swim-bladder is merely a

float or balloon, which can be filled with air, and compressed or

expanded, so as to make the animal rise or sink at pleasure. But many

fish exist in tropical ponds and shallow swamps to whom what has

happened artificially to the carp in my friend’s ornamental water

happens naturally every dry season; the marshy sheets in which they live

evaporate altogether, and they are therefore compelled to lie dormant in

the mud without food or drink for many weeks at a time. Under these

peculiar circumstances, their air-bladder has gradually developed into a

true lung; and, what is odder still, we possess in various countries

distinct specimens at all the intermediate stages from air-bladder to

lung in proportion as the ponds which they haunt become dry for longer

or shorter periods. The bow-fin of the United States, for example, lives

in turbid waters which do not quite dry up, but it has acquired the

habit of rising to the surface every now and then, and gulping in large

mouthfuls of air, which enter its swim-bladder. It does so most

frequently when the water is foul, and there has been little

rainfall—in other words, when there is a scarcity of oxygen.

Accordingly, its air-bladder—though not yet a true lung—is spongy and

cellular in structure, being adapted for aërating the blood that passes

through it. The mud-fish of Queensland, again, to take a further stage,

is a six-foot-long fish which inhabits loaded streams, where its gills

do not suffice it for proper respiration; it has therefore altered its

swim-bladder into a rudimentary lung, more advanced than the bow-fin’s,

and full of air-cells, richly supplied with blood-vessels, but

consisting still of a single cavity. Nevertheless, even this imperfect

lung enables the mud-fish to stroll away from its native streams at

night, and wander at large on dry land by means of fins which are almost

legs, and which act like the sprawling limbs of certain southern

lizards. In that unnatural environment it browses on green leaves, and

otherwise behaves in a most unfishlike manner. Finally, to complete our

rough survey, the African lepidosiren makes its home in waters which dry

up completely during the hot season; and it therefore hibernates (or

rather, æstivates) for months together in a cocoon of hard mud, where it

breathes at its ease by means of true lungs, completely divided into

lateral halves, and approaching in structure those of an air-breathing

reptile.

This interesting series of living evolutionary fossils—links that are

not missing—is completed for us in some ways by the frogs and toads,

which recapitulate, as it were, in their own lifetime just such an

ancestral developmental history. Each of them begins life as essentially

a fish—that is to say, as a tadpole breathing oxygen dissolved in

water, by means of gills, and possessed of no limbs for terrestrial

locomotion; he ends it as essentially a full-grown land-reptile,

breathing atmospheric air by means of lungs, having discarded his now

needless fin-fringed tail, and possessed of jumping legs of great

muscular power. And the metamorphosis he thus undergoes answers exactly

to just such a drying-up of the ponds that bore him. In early spring,

when the temporary puddles are full of water, the parent frogs lay their

spawn by hundreds in the ancestral element; and soon the little black

tadpoles—true fish of a primitive type in all but name—swarm forth and

swim in seething masses in the momentary medium. But as the sun begins

to dry up the water in their dwelling-place they lose their fins and

gills, pass from fish to amphibians, and shortly hop ashore, provided

with four legs and a pair of lungs specially adapted for direct

air-breathing. There we have a marvellous piece of evolutionary magic

still going on every day before our eyes, which would sound incredible

to us if a man of science reported it for the first time from Central

Africa or New Guinea. The frog, in short, shows us successively in his

own person the self-same stages of development which the various

mud-fish preserve for us in distant regions, as types of distinct and

unrelated species.

XXX.

AN INTERVIEW WITH A COCK-SPARROW.

“BELIEVE me,” said the sparrow, “it _pays_ to be civilized.”

“You seem to have found it so,” I answered. “You and the rook, I take

it, are just the two of our birds which have lost nothing and gained

much by man’s presence in our island.”

“I believe you,” said the sparrow, cocking his head on one side. He

seemed ill to recognize the solemnity of being interviewed, which to the

human subject is like having your photograph taken, combined with a

compound visit to the dentist. “We are a dominant race, you see; that’s

just where it is. We have adapted ourselves to the environment. Birds

like jays and hawfinches, now, are too shy and retiring: as civilization

advances, they retreat and skulk and can’t march with the age; but we

and the rooks, we take advantage of every increase of human population

to redouble our numbers. As fast as cultivation grows, we grow; man

exists to provide us with food and shelter.”

“Then you think your race has increased, and is still increasing?” I

asked.

“Not a doubt of it, my dear sir. We have multiplied enormously. Before

the age of tillage, we were probably a small and unimportant group, no

more conspicuous or remarkable in any way than the wretched little

siskins, or the grasshopper-warblers. But as cultivation develops, we

develop, if you will excuse my Latin, _pari passu_. (Oh, yes, I know

Latin well, because a near cousin of mine is the _Passer Italiæ_.)

However, as I was going to say when you interrupted me with a question,

we have spread about everywhere that grain will grow in Europe. That’s

because we are bold, courageous birds, not afraid of every passing

object we see, like the bluethroats and the creepers; while at the same

time we are cautious, quick, eager, and wary, and get out of the way of

danger at a moment’s notice. My own opinion is that even in Europe we

must have been a mere handful of birds before cultivation spread, and

that since that time we have pushed ourselves by our energy and

enterprise into a leading position. About great cities alone, we may be

reckoned by our myriads; and then, just look at our colonial expansion!”

“You have emigrated largely, I believe,” I said, “to America and the

Colonies?”

“Bless my soul, yes; we have followed European civilization almost

everywhere. We allow mankind to go ahead of us for a few years, just to

prepare the way, and get our corn and oats into working order; and then

we gain a foothold in the newly acquired lands, and naturally oust the

uncivilized natives. We have annexed America, and are killing out

inferior types in many other regions. What do I mean by inferior types?

Why, non-sparrows, of course; such lower grades, don’t you know, as

Australians and New Zealanders.”

“Excuse my asking a delicate question, but do you do much damage, from

the farmer’s point of view, to the crops and the gardens? You see, we

men have a narrow-minded way of regarding these things from a somewhat

restricted human standpoint.”

The sparrow gazed at me hard out of the corner of his eye. “Well, I

don’t want it put in print,” he said confidentially, “for farmers are

_so_ unreasonable; but I will admit that at certain times of the year we

_do_ pick up a good many seeds out of fields and gardens. But then,

consider how many insects we help to eat up. Why, I lived for a week

last year upon aphides—what the farmers call bean-bugs. We must be

philosophical, my dear sir; we _must_ be philosophical. There’s a

give-and-take in these affairs, you may depend upon it.”

He ruffled his neck as he spoke, and I observed it was marked by a

conspicuous black band I had never before noticed.

“That’s a pretty cravat of yours,” I interposed, just to change the

subject.

“Yes, it _is_ pretty,” he admitted, swelling himself out a bit as he

said it. “Our women don’t have them, you know, nor the young ones

either. This beautiful decoration is the peculiar glory and special

distinction of the adult cock-sparrow.” And anything cockier than he

looked at that moment it would be hard to imagine.

It occurred to me as he spoke that I had seldom seen a slenderer form of

masculine adornment on which to pride one’s self, till I suddenly

recollected that a black moustache on a human face must be as relatively

inconspicuous to any other species; and I have never noticed that the

possessors of well-grown black moustaches under-rated their importance.

“You have a large family, I believe,” I remarked, as he chirped to his

mate cheerily.

“Oh, several of them,” he answered with a nonchalant air; “sometimes as

many as three yearly. We are a dominant race, you know, and we don’t

always trouble to build our own nests; we just drive out a house-martin,

or take possession of a sand-martin’s burrow in a cutting. Arbitrary,

did you say? Oh, well, you see, we are sparrows; and, of course, we can

make a much better use of them. Poor devils of martins, they have to go

elsewhere, and house themselves as best they may—the survivors, that is

to say, for a good many of them get killed and torn to pieces in the

process of readjustment. They’re such savages, you see; we’re _obligea_

to be sharp with them. Why, I’ve known a horde of house-martins fight in

defence of their wretched mud hovels till we were compelled to

exterminate them. Well, I’m off now; ta-ta! Mind you send me a copy of

your paper with this interview. And oh, by the way, if you describe my

wife, just make the most you can of that pale streak over her eye, will

you? It is all she has to be proud of, poor thing. She’s not as

distinguished-looking as I am, of course; but let her down gently,

please; do let her down gently.”

XXXI.

THE GREEN WOODPECKER.

WE live so closely and familiarly with nature on the isolated hilltop,

where my cottage is perched, that we often behold from our own

drawing-room windows pretty rural sights, which seem intensely strange

to more town-bred visitors. A little while since, for example, I was

amused at reading in an evening newspaper a lament by a really

well-informed and observant naturalist on the difficulty of actually

seeing the night-jar, or fern-owl, alight upon a tree, and stand, as is

his wont, lengthwise, not transversely to the branch that bears him.

Now, from our little bay lattice that doubting Thomas might see the

weird bird nightly, not twenty yards off, the whole summer through,

crooning its passionate song, full in view of our house, from a gnarled

old fir-tree. So again this morning, at breakfast, we raised our eyes

from the buttered eggs and coffee, and they fell at once on a big green

woodpecker, creeping upward, after his fashion, along a russet-brown

pine-trunk, not fifteen feet from the place at table where we were

quietly sitting. One could make out with the naked eye the dark

olive-green of his back, relieved by the brilliant crimson patch on his

gleaming crown. For several minutes he stood there, clambering slowly up

the tree, though we rose from our seats and approached quite close to

the open window to examine him. When he turned his head, and listened

intently after his tapping, with that characteristic air of philosophic

inquiry which marks his species, the paler green of his under parts

flashed for a second upon us; and when at last, having satisfied himself

there was nothing astir under the bark of the stunted pine, he flew away

to the next clump, we caught the glint of his wings and the red cap on

his head in motion through the air with extraordinary distinctness.

The yaffle, as we call our red-headed friend in these parts, is one of

the largest and handsomest of our woodland wild birds. About a foot in

length, by the actual measurement, “from the end of his beak to the tip

of his tail,” he hardly impresses one at first sight with a sense of his

full size, because of his extreme concinnity and neatness of plumage. A

practical bird, he is built rather for use than for vain gaudy display;

for, though his colour is fine, and evidently produced by many ages of

æsthetic selection, he yet sedulously avoids all crests and top-knots,

all bunches and bundles of decorative feathers protruding from his body,

which would interfere with his solid and business-like pursuit of

wood-burrowing insects. How well-built and how cunningly evolved he is,

after all, for his special purpose! His feet are so divided into

opposite pairs of toes—one couple pointing forward and the other

backward—that he can easily climb even the smooth-barked beech-tree, by

digging his sharp claws into any chance inequality in its level surface.

He alights head upward, and moves on a perpendicular plane as surely and

mysteriously as a lizard. Nothing seems to puzzle him; the straightest

trunk becomes as a drawing-room floor to his clinging talons. But in his

climbing he is also aided not a little by his stiff and starched tail,

whose feathers are so curiously rigid, like a porcupine’s quills, that

they enable him to hold on and support himself behind with automatic

security. Long ancestral habit has made it in him “a property of

easiness.” A practised acrobat from the egg, he thinks nothing of such

antics; and when he wishes to descend he just lets himself drop a

little, like a sailor on a rope, sliding down head uppermost, and

stopping himself when he wishes by means of his claws and tail, as the

sailor stops himself by tightening his bent fingers and clinging legs

round the cable he is descending.

But, best of all, I love to watch him tapping after insects. How wise he

looks then! how intent! how philosophic! When he suspects a grub, he

hammers awhile at the bark; after which he holds his head most quaintly

on one side with a quiet gravity that always reminds me of John Stuart

Mill listening, all alert, to an opponent’s argument, and ready to

pounce upon him. If a grub stirs responsive to the _tap, tap, tap_ of

his inquiring bill—if his delicate ear detects a cavity, as a doctor

detects a weak spot in a lung with his prying stethoscope—in a second

our bird has drilled a hole with that powerful augur, his wedge-shaped

beak, has darted out his long and extensile tongue, and has extracted

the insect by means of its barbed and bristled tip. The whole of this

mechanism, indeed, is one of the most beautiful examples I know of

structures begotten by long functional use, and perfected by the action

of natural selection. It is not only that the bill is a most admirable

and efficient boring instrument; it is not only that the tongue is

capable of rapid and lightning-like protrusion; but further still, the

barbs at its ends are all directed backward, like the points of a

harpoon, while the very same muscles which produce the instantaneous

forward movement of the tongue press at the same time automatically on

two large salivary glands, which pour forth in response a thick and

sticky secretion, not unlike bird-lime. The insect, once spotted, has

thus no chance of escape; he is caught and devoured before he can say

“Jack Robinson” in his own dialect.

But though the green woodpecker is so exceedingly practical and sensible

a bird, built all for use and very little for show, he is not wholly

devoid of those external adornments which are the result of generations

of æsthetic preference. Dominant types always show these peculiarities.

His ground-tone of green, indeed, serves, no doubt, a mainly protective

function, by enabling him to escape notice among the leaves of the

woodland; and even on a tree-trunk he readily assimilates with the tone

of the background; but his brilliant crimson cap is a genuine piece of

decorative adornment, which owes its origin, no doubt, to the selective

preferences of his female ancestors for endless generations.

XXXII.

THE HAREBELL.

FEW English flowers are better known than the harebell; yet I wonder

what proportion of all those who love it well in its summer beauty would

be able to account for its botanical name of Round-leaved Campanula.

“Round-leaved!” most people would say; “why, its leaves are slender and

narrow and grass-like.” And so they are, indeed, in the later state in

which you pick in July the graceful pensile blossoms. But the flowering

stage of every plant is, after all, but its momentary reproductive

period; it represents, so to speak, the golden prime of the full-grown

individual. Before that stage is attained, the plant itself has to grow

and prepare for flowering; it has to pass through its adolescence and

its formative epoch. Now, the harebell is a herb whose two ages of life

are singularly different; if you saw it in its green youth, when it is

devoting itself wholly to feeding and storage, you would never imagine

it was the self-same plant as that whose tall and very slender stem

supports in later life the scattered group of drooping blue bell-flowers

with which you are familiar.

Here on the dry sandbank, beside the path that runs obliquely across the

moor, I see half a dozen harebell-worts in the first, or caterpillar,

stage of their existence. The metaphor is less violent by far than you

would at first imagine, for in its earlier days the harebell, like the

caterpillar, does nothing but eat and lay by for the future; while in

its second or flowering stage it does nothing but put forth its tender

blue blossoms, which answer to the butterfly both in their attractive

beauty and in the fact that they serve to produce the seeds (which are

the analogues of eggs) for the coming generation. In the purely

preparatory, or hard-eating, stage, the harebell has no stem or branches

to speak of; it consists of a rosette of large orb-like leaves, often

heart-shaped towards the stalk, and pressed close to the ground in a

spreading circle. Each such rosette springs in April from a buried

rootstock, which, in loose loamy soil, like that of these Surrey moors,

is often intricate; it burrows in and out with strange instinct among

the dry sand and stones, in search of such rare moisture as it can

manage to find for itself. But though water is scarce, access to light

and air is easy; so the large round leaves, lying close on the bare

ground, get sunshine in abundance, and feed to their hearts’ content

upon their proper food—the carbon in the atmosphere—while vegetation

around is still low and backward. In this stage they may be compared to

the rosettes of London-pride, which are similarly clustered, but which

do not die down as the flower-stem advances.

About June, however, the harebell plant has eaten and drunk enough to

venture upon leaving its caterpillar stage behind, and sending up the

loose cluster of waving blue flowers which represent its butterfly. In

order to do this, and overtop the tall grasses which have sprouted

meanwhile, it withdraws the whole of the living green-stuff from its

heart-shaped root-leaves, and uses up the active material they contain

in building its flower-stem. Thus, as the stem lengthens, and the buds

begin to swell, the lower leaves die away altogether; only a few quite

dissimilar and very narrow blades on the ascending branches now

represent the original foliage. After the flowers have set, even these

last disappear, or dry up on the stem, their living material being

withdrawn in turn to supply food for the developing seeds. This may seem

odd at first, but it is a common incident in many life-histories of

plants and animals. As a rule, indeed, the butterfly or winged stage of

most insect lives is wholly devoted to a marriage flight; and there are

several winged insects which never feed at all in the perfect state;

they use themselves up in the formation of eggs, and then die of

inanition.

Most of the sister campanulas, like Canterbury bells, are stiff and

coarse and hairy plants, without grace or elegance; but that is because

they haunt woods and copses, or overgrown hedgerows, where they are

sheltered from the wind, and enabled to grow large and rampant. The

harebell, on the contrary—the oread of its race—is a denizen of the

open, wind-swept uplands; it loves the moors and heaths, the bare hilly

pastures; and it has learnt in consequence to bend lightly before the

breeze, springing up again as those invisible feet pass on, which gives

it its familiar slenderness and elegance. The hanging domes of the

flowers are entered from below by bumble-bees, which are strong enough

to push aside the fringed and close-set teeth that edge the base of the

stamens, put there on purpose to baffle less useful honey-thieving

visitors. Equally strange is the egg-shaped capsule which, later on,

contains the seeds; it opens by five short clefts near the top. The

actual reason for this arrangement is itself a somewhat odd one. The

seeds can only drop out through the pores or clefts when a high wind

blows and sways the waving stem violently. At such times the little

grains get carried by the breeze to considerable distances; and this

serves not only to disseminate the kind, but also to carry the majority

of the seeds to unoccupied spots, where rotation of crops can thus be

secured by letting the young plants sprout at a distance from the soil

exhausted by their mother. Similar devices for securing rotation are

common in nature; they often occur in species like this, whose seeds

seem at first sight wholly unprovided with wings, or floats, or other

means of locomotion.

XXXIII.

THE UNTAMABLE SHREW.

BY the hedgerow in the garden my terrier, Freckle, has just come across

two pugnacious shrews, engaged in one of their sanguinary battles. The

high belligerent parties are not exactly formidable to outsiders, it is

true, being not quite three inches long apiece from snout to haunches,

not counting an inch and a half of tail, oddly square in outline, to

finish off their appearance. Yet they are savage fighters, for all that,

in their intertribal quarrels. When shrew meets shrew, then comes the

tug of war. It very seldom happens that they do not join battle, and the

victor in the fray usually kills and eats his discomfited rival. So

fierce a heart in so small a body is rare, but the shrew knows not what

fear means. This particular pair of combatants were so automatically

intent on the fortunes of war that Freckle was upon them and

investigating their nature with her inquisitive nose before they even

woke up to the fact of her presence.

Most people seem to confuse shrews with mice; but, indeed, our small

combatants are widely different creatures from those timid little

beasts; they belong to a wholly different group of mammals. Mice are

rodents, descendants of the same common ancestor with the rats and

dormice, and not remotely related to the squirrels and the rabbits.

Shrews, on the other hand, are insectivores, first cousins of the moles,

the hedgehogs, and the desmans. Externally, it is true, they resemble

considerably the mice and voles; but those who have followed the course

of recent natural history must be aware by this time that “appearances

are deceitful.” If an animal looks very much like something else, the

chances are that it is altogether different. This is particularly the

case with the insectivores and the marsupials, each of which great

groups has independently developed a series of forms absurdly like the

mice, the squirrels, the porcupines, and the jerboas, because each fills

approximately the same place in nature. For example, small mammals which

creep about among grass and matted herbage are likely to assume a

mouse-like shape. This has happened among rodents in the case of the

mice and field-voles, among insectivores in the case of the shrews, and

among Australian marsupials in the case of the pouched kangaroo-mice.

Our English shrew is a pretty little creature of this common type, with

thick soft fur like a mouse’s, only a trifle redder, and so mousey in

shape that it is seldom discriminated from the true mice, save by

naturalists and gamekeepers. Even externally, however, it differs much

from mice in its long pointed snout—a marked insectivorous feature—as

well as in its square and abruptly cut-off tail, where the mouse’s is

rounded, tapering, and slender. When you come to the teeth and internal

anatomy, however, the creature is an insectivore, displaying at once

quite a separate character.

Mice, as everybody knows, feed mainly on seeds and grains, though they

are fairly omnivorous, and do not despise either bees or beetles. But

the shrew, less promiscuous, eschews all vegetable foods; he makes his

diet entirely of insects, worms, and slugs, of which he devours an

incredible number. Hence he haunts for the most part dry fields and

gardens, where such prey is abundant. His preference is also for a soft

sandy or light loamy soil, in which he can burrow with ease with the

muzzle alone, for his slender feet are ill adapted for digging through

hard earth or clay. A relative of the mole, he makes long runs, like his

cousin, through the soft surface-soil in search of insects; but, unlike

the mole again, he has preserved his small, keen eyes intact, and lives,

on the whole, as much above ground as beneath it. Yet his cousinship

stands him in small stead with his big purblind relation; for moles

catch and eat shrews in considerable numbers. This is not to be wondered

at, perhaps, when one reflects that the unnatural shrews also eat one

another. Cannibalism, indeed, is an unamiable trait common to man and

the insectivores. Weasels, owls, and cats are also great shrew-killers;

though, strange to say, the shrew, when killed, is by no means always

eaten. I put this down in the main to the powerful scent-glands, which

run along the side of the body, or occur at the root of the tail, in

most species of shrew, and which secrete a very strong and odorous

liquid. This liquid, I fancy, is partly protective, partly attractive to

the opposite sex. It would seem to be distasteful to outsiders, but not

unpleasant to insectivores themselves, for cats will kill a shrew from

pure love of sport, or by mistake for a mouse, but will seldom or never

eat it, whereas shrews themselves and moles have no such prejudice.

Owls, also, eat shrews, in spite of their flavour. I believe such

sexually attractive scents almost always coexist with the pugnacious

temperament. All musky-perfumed animals fight savagely with one another

for possession of their females, as do also those with marked frills or

top-knots.

Shrews, though comparatively seldom seen by incurious eyes, abound by

myriads in most parts of England. Every summer they increase sevenfold;

but as autumn approaches, and food grows scarce, they die off in their

thousands from cold and hunger, as I gather. So many of them then strew

the footpaths in sandy districts that country people have a quaint

superstition about them; they say a shrew cannot cross a church-path

without dying instantly. What constitutes a church-path is somebody

having once gone to church along it. The truth is, dead shrews abound

equally in the grass and thickets; but, of course, only those are seen

which happen to die in the open. This is but one out of many hundred odd

superstitions about the shrew, which may be regarded, indeed, as the

most wizard-like animal now left in England.