sign of rain. During the frequent intervals of heavy, overcast weather
which have marked this summer, they might have been observed flying low
for a week together without a spot of rain falling. Chilly air drives
insects downwards, and, indeed, paralyses a great many of them
altogether. It is a fall of temperature, and not wet, that makes the
swallows chase their prey low down. Insects are not much afraid of rain
if it is warm and soft, so that in the midst of showers, if there is
sunshine too, you may see the swallows high in the atmosphere. It is when
they fly low, but just missing the grass, that their wonderful powers of
flight appear. In the air above there are no obstacles, and if you shoot
an arrow it travels to the end of its journey without let or hindrance;
there are no streets there to turn corners, no narrow lanes, no trees or
hedges. When the shallow comes down to the earth his path is no longer
that of the immortals, his way is as the way of men, constantly
obstructed, and made a thousandfold more difficult by the velocity of his
passage. Imagine shooting an arrow from the strongest bow in such a
manner that it might travel about seven inches above the ground--how far
would it go before it would strike a tall buttercup, a wiry bennet, or
stick into a slight rise of the turf? You must imagine it given the power
to rise over hedges, to make short angles about buildings, slip between
the trunks of trees, to avoid moving objects, as men or animals, not to
come in contact with other animated arrows, and by some mysterious
instinct to know what is or what is not out of sight on the other side of
the wall. I was sitting on a log in the narrowest of narrow lanes, a
hedge at the back, in front thick fir trees, whose boughs touched the
ground, almost within reach, the lane being nothing more than a broader
footpath. It was one of those overcast days when the shelter of the hedge
and the furze was pleasant in July. Suddenly a swallow slid by me as it
seemed underneath my very hands, so close to the ground that he almost
travelled in the rut, the least movement on my part would have stopped
him. Almost before I could lift my head he had reached the end of the
lane and rose over the gate into the road--not a moments pause before he
made that leap over the gate to see if there was a waggon or not in the
way; a waggon-load of hay would have blocked the road entirely. How did
he know that a man or a horse would not step into his course at the
instant he topped the bar?
A swallow never hesitates, never looks before he leaps, threads all day
the eyes of needles, and goes on from half-past two in the morning till
ten at night, without so much as disturbing a feather. He is the
perfection of a machine for falling. His round nest is under the eaves,
he throws himself out of window and begins to fall, and keeps on fall,
fall, for twenty hours together. His head is bullet-shaped, his neck
short, his body all thickened up to the shoulders, tailing out to the
merest streak of feather. His form is like a plummet--he is not unlike
the heavily weighted minnow used in trolling for pike. Before the bend of
the firmly elastic rod, the leaded minnow slides out through the air,
running true and sinking without splash into the water. It is
proportioned and weighted so that its flight, which is a long fall, may
be smooth, and perfectly under control. If wings could be put to the
minnow, it would somewhat resemble the swallow. For the swallow is made
to fall, and his wings to catch him, and by resisting his descent these
outstretched planes lift him again into the sky. He does not fall
perpendicularly, the angle of his fall is prolonged and very low, and the
swifter he goes the more nearly it approximates to the horizontal. I
think he goes swifter when flying just over the ground than when lounging
in the easy hammock of the atmosphere. My swallow that came down the
lane, in twenty yards opened his wings twenty times and checked his fall,
almost grazing the earth, and imperceptibly rose a little, like a flat
stone thrown by a boy which suddenly runs up into the air at the end of
its flight. He made no blow with his wings; they were simply put out to
collect the air in the hollow of their curves, and so prolong his fall.
Falling from morn till night, he throws himself on his way, a machine for
turning gravity into a motive force. He fits to the circumstances of his
flight as water fits to the circumstances of the vessel into which it is
poured. No thought, no stop, no rest. If a waggon had been in the way,
still he would have got left or right through the very eye of the needle.
If a man had been passing, the rush of his wings would not have disturbed
the light smoke from his cigar. Farther up the lane there are two
gateways opposite without gates. Through these swallows are continually
dashing, and I have often felt when coming up the lane as if I must step
on them, and half checked myself. I might as well try to step on
lightning. A swallow came over the sharp ridge of a slate roof and met a
slight current of wind which blew against that side of the shed and rose
up it. The bird remained there suspended with outstretched wings, resting
on the up-current as if the air had been solid, for some moments. He rode
there at anchor in the air. So buoyant is the swallow that it is no more
to him to fly than it is to the fish to swim; and, indeed, I think that a
trout in a swift mountain stream needs much greater strength to hold
himself in the rapid day and night without rest. The friction of the
water is constant against him, and he never folds his fins and sleeps.
The more I think the more I am convinced that the buoyancy of the air is
very far greater than science admits, and under certain conditions it is
superior to water as a supporting medium. Swift and mobile as is the
swallow's wing, how much swifter and how much more mobile must be his
eye! This rapid and ever-changing course is not followed for pleasure as
if it were a mazy dance. The whole time as he floats, and glides, and
wheels, his eye is intent on insects so small as to be invisible to us at
a very short distance. These he gathers in the air, he sees what we
cannot see, his eyes are to our eyes as his wings are to our limbs. If
still further we were to consider the flow of the nerve force between the
eye, the mind, and the wing, we should be face to face with problems
which quite upset the ordinary ideas of matter as a solid thing. How is
it that dull matter becomes thus inexpressibly sensitive? Is not the
swallow's eye a miracle? Then his heart, for he sings as he flies; he
makes love and converses, and all as he rushes along--his hopes, his
fears, his little store of knowledge, and his wonderful journey by-and-by
to Africa. Remember, he carries his life in his wings as we should say in
our hands, for if by chance he should strike a solid object, his great
speed renders the collision certain death. It stuns him, and if he
recovers from that his beak is usually broken so that he must starve.
Happily such accidents are rare. The great rapidity of a bird's heart
beating so fast seems to render it peculiarly susceptible to death from
shock. Great fright will sometimes kill a bird, as for instance, when
they have wandered inside a room, and been thoughtlessly held in some
one's hand. Without visible injury, the heart, after beating excessively
violently, almost as rapidly slows, the nictitating membrane is drawn
over the eyes, the head falls to one side, and the bird becomes lifeless
from nervous exhaustion. The beautiful swallows, be tender to them, for
they symbol all that is best in nature and all that is best in our
hearts.
BUCKHURST PARK.
An old beech tree had been broken off about five feet from the ground,
and becoming hollow within, was filled with the decay of its own
substance. In this wood-sorrel had taken root, and flower and leaf
covered the space within, white flower and green leaf flourishing on old
age. The wood-sorrel leaf, the triune leaf, is perhaps more lovely even
than the flower, like a more delicately shaped clover of a tenderer
green, and it lasts far on into the autumn. When the violet leaves are no
more looked for, when the cowslips have gone, and the bluebells have left
nothing behind them but their nodding seed-cases, still the wood-sorrel
leaf stays on the mound, in shape and colour the same, and as pleasantly
acid to the taste now under the ripening nuts as in May. At its coming it
is folded almost like a. green flower; at Midsummer, when you are
gathering ferns, you find its trefoil deep under the boughs; it grows,
too, in the crevices of the rock over the spring. The whortleberry
leaves, that were green as the myrtle when the wood-sorrel was in bloom,
have faded somewhat now that their berries are ripening. Another beech
has gone over, and lies at full length, a shattered tube, as it were, of
timber; for it is so rotten within, and so hollow and bored, it is little
else than bark. Others that stand are tubes on end, with rounded
knot-holes, loved by the birds, that let air and moisture into the very
heart of the wood. They are hardly safe in a strong wind. Others again,
very large and much shorter, have sent up four trunks from one root, a
little like a banyan, quadruple trees built for centuries, throwing
abroad a vast roof of foliage, whose green in the midst of summer is made
brown by sacks and sacks of beech nuts. These are the trees to camp by,
and that are chosen by painters. The bark of the beech is itself a panel
to study, spotted with velvet moss brown-green, made grey with
close-grown lichen, stained with its own hues of growth, and toned by
time. To these add bright sunlight and leaf shadow, the sudden lowering
of tint as a cloud passes, the different aspects of the day and the
evening, and the changes of rain and dry weather. You may look at the
bark of a beech twenty times and always find it different. After crossing
Virgil's Bridge in the deep coombe at the bottom of Marden Hill these
great beeches begin, true woodland trees, and somehow more forest-like
than the hundreds and hundreds of acres of fir trees that are called
forest. There is another spirit among the beech trees; they look like
deer and memories of old English life.
The wood cooper follows his trade in a rude shed, splitting poles and
making hoops the year through, in warm summer and iron-clad winter. His
shed is always pitched at the edge of a great woodland district. Where
the road has worn in deeply the roots of the beeches hang over, twisted
in and out like a giant matting, a kind of cave under them. Dark yew
trees and holly trees stand here and there; a yew is completely barked on
one side, stripped clean. If you look close you will see scores in the
wood as if made with a great nail. Those who know Exmoor will recognise
these signs in a moment; it is a fraying-post where the stags rubbed the
velvet from their horns last summer. There are herds of red deer in the
park. At one time there were said to be almost as many as run free and
wild over the expanse of Exmoor. They mark the trees very much,
especially those with the softer bark. Wire fencing has been put round
many of the hollies to protect them. A stag occasionally leaps the
boundary and forages among the farmers' corn, or visits a garden, and
then the owner can form some idea of what must have been the difficulties
of agriculture in mediaeval days. Deer more than double the interest of a
park. A park without deer is like a wall without pictures. However well
proportioned the room, something is lacking if the walls be blank.
However noble the oaks and wide the sweep of sward, there is something
wanting if antlers do not rise above the fern. The pictures that the deer
make are moving and alive; they dissolve and re-form in a distant frame
of tree and brake. Lately the herd has been somewhat thinned, having
become too numerous. One slope is bare of grass, a patch of yellow sand,
which if looked at intently from a distance seems presently to be all
alive like mites in cheese, so thick are the rabbits in the warren. Under
a little house, as it were, built over a stream is a chalybeate fountain
with virtues like those of Tunbridge Wells.
The park is open to visitors--here comes a gay four-in-hand heavily
loaded sweeping by on its road to that summer town. There is much
ironstone in the soil round about. At the edge of the park stands an old
farmhouse of timber and red tile, with red oast-house beside it, built
with those gables which our ancestors seemed to think made such excellent
rooms within. Our modern architects try to make their rooms
mathematically square, a series of brick boxes, one on the other like
pigeon-holes in a bureau, with flat ceilings and right angles in the
corners, and are said to go through a profound education before they can
produce these wonderful specimens of art. If our old English folk could
not get an arched roof, then they loved to have it pointed, with polished
timber beams in which the eye rested as in looking upwards through a
tree. Their rooms they liked of many shapes, and not at right angles in
the corners, nor all on the same dead level of flooring. You had to go up
a step into one, and down a step into another, and along a winding
passage into a third, so that each part of the house had its
individuality. To these houses life fitted itself and grew to them; they
were not mere walls, but became part of existence. A man's house was not
only his castle, a man's house was himself. He could not tear himself
away from his house, it was like tearing up the shrieking mandrake by the
root, almost death itself. Now we walk in and out of our brick boxes
unconcerned whether we live in this villa or that, here or yonder. Dark
beams inlaid in the walls support the gables; heavier timber, placed
horizontally, forms, as it were, the foundation of the first floor. This
horizontal beam has warped a little in the course of time, the alternate
heat and cold of summers and winters that make centuries. Up to this beam
the lower wall is built of brick set to the curve of the timber, from
which circumstance it would appear to be a modern insertion. The beam, we
may be sure, was straight originally, and the bricks have been fitted to
the curve which it subsequently took. Time, no doubt, ate away the lower
work of wood, and necessitated the insertion of new materials. The slight
curve of the great beam adds, I think, to the interest of the old place,
for it is a curve that has grown and was not premeditated; it has grown
like the bough of a tree, not from any set human design. This, too, is
the character of the house. It is not large, nor overburdened with
gables, not ornamental, nor what is called striking, in any way, but
simply an old English house, genuine and true. The warm sunlight falls on
the old red tiles, the dark beams look the darker for the glow of light,
the shapely cone of the hop-oast rises at the end; there are swallows and
flowers, and ricks and horses, and so it is beautiful because it is
natural and honest. It is the simplicity that makes it so touching, like
the words of an old ballad. Now at Mayfield there is a timber house which
is something of a show place, and people go to see it, and which
certainly has many more lines in its curves and woodwork, but yet did not
appeal to me, because it seemed too purposely ornamental. A house
designed to look well, even age has not taken from it its artificiality.
Neither is there any cone nor cart-horses about. Why, even a tall
chanticleer makes a home look homely. I do like to see a tall proud
chanticleer strutting in the yard and barely giving way as I advance,
almost ready to do battle with a stranger like a mastiff. So I prefer the
simple old home by Buckhurst Park.
The beeches and oaks become fewer as the ground rises, there are wide
spaces of bracken and little woods or copses, every one of which is
called a 'shaw.' Then come the firs, whose crowded spires, each touching
each, succeed for miles, and cover the hill-side with a solid mass of
green. They seem so close together, so thickened and matted, impenetrable
to footsteps, like a mound of earth rather than woods, a solid block of
wood; but there are ways that wind through and space between the taller
trunks when you come near. The odour of firs is variable; sometimes it
fills the air, sometimes it is absent altogether, and doubtless depends
upon certain conditions of the atmosphere. A very small pinch of the
fresh shoot is pleasant to taste; these shoots, eaten constantly, were
once considered to cure chest disease, and to this day science endeavours
by various forms of inhalations from fir products to check that malady.
Common rural experience, as with the cow-pox, has often laid the basis of
medical treatment. Certain it is that it is extremely pleasant and
grateful to breathe the sweet fragrance of the fir deep in the woods,
listening to the soft caressing sound of the wind that passes high
overhead. The willow-wren sings, but his voice and that of the wind seem
to give emphasis to the holy and meditative silence. The mystery of
nature and life hover about the columned temple of the forest. The secret
is always behind a tree, as of old time it was always behind the pillar
of the temple. Still higher, and as the firs cease, and shower and
sunshine, wind and dew, can reach the ground unchecked, comes the tufted
heath and branched heather of the moorland top. A thousand acres of
purple heath sloping southwards to the sun, deep valleys of dark heather;
further slopes beyond of purple, more valleys of heather--the heath shows
more in the sunlight, and heather darkens the shadow of the hollows--and
so on and on, mile after mile, till the heath-bells seem to end in the
sunset. Round and beyond is the immense plain of the air---you feel how
limitless the air is at this height, for there is nothing to measure it
by. Past the weald lie the South Downs, but they form no boundary, the
plain of the air goes over them to the sea and space.
This wild tract of Ashdown Forest bears much resemblance to Exmoor; you
may walk, or you may ride, for hours and meet no one; and if black game
were to start up it would not surprise you in the least. There seems room
enough to chase the red stag from Buckhurst Park with horn and hound
till, mayhap, he ended in the sea at Pevensey. Buckhurst Park is the
centre of this immense manor. Of old time the deer did run wild, and were
hunted till the pale was broken in the great Civil War. The 'Forest' is
still in every one's mouth--'on the Forest,' 'by the Forest,' 'in' it, or
'over' it, everything comes from the 'Forest,' even stone to mend the
roads, or 'through the Forest,' as up from Brighton. People say this farm
used to be forest, or this garden or this house was the first built on
the forest. The enclosures are small, and look as if they had been hewn
out of wood or stubbed out of heather, and there are numbers of small
owners or settlers. Here and there a house stands, as it seems, alone in
the world on the Forest ridge, thousands of acres of heather around, the
deep weald underneath--as at Duddleswell, a look-out, as it were, over
the earth. Forest Row, where they say the courtiers had their booths in
ancient hunting days; Forest Fold, Boar's-head Street, Greenwood
Gate--all have a forest sound; and what prettier name could there be than
Sweet-Haws? Greybirchet Wood, again; Mossbarn, Highbroom, and so on.
Outlying woods in every direction are fragments of the forest, you cannot
get away from it; and look over whatever gate you will, there is always a
view. In the vale, if you look over a gate you only see that field and
nothing beyond; the view is bounded by the opposite hedge. Here there is
always a deep coombe, or the top of a wood underneath, or a rising slope,
or a distant ridge crowned with red-tiled farmstead, red-coned
oast-house, and tall spruce firs. Or far away, miles and miles, the
fields of the weald pushed close together by distance till in a surface
no larger than the floor of a room there are six or seven farms and a
village. Clouds drift over; it is a wonderful observatory for cloud
studies; they seem so close, the light is so strong, and there is nothing
to check the sight as far as its powers will reach. Clouds come up no
wider than a pasture-field, but in length stretching out to the very
horizon, dividing the blue sky into two halves; but then every day has
its different clouds--the fleets of heaven that are always sailing on and
know no haven.
HOUSE-MARTINS.
Of five houses, a stable, and chapel wall, much frequented by martins,
the aspects were as follows:--House No. 1, nests on the north side, south
side, and east, both the south and east very warm; No. 2, on the south
and east walls--these walls met in an angle, and as it were enclosed the
sunbeams, making it very heated sometimes; No. 3, on the south and west
walls, the warmest sides of the building; No. 4, all along under the
southern eaves, a very warm wall; No. 5, also under the southern eaves,
and not elsewhere. The stable fronted south; there were nests front and
back, north and south; the chapel eave that was frequented faced towards
the west. In the case of several other houses the nests were on the sunny
side; but I am not so well acquainted with the localities. So far as my
observation goes, I think the house-martin--with all the swallow
tribe--prefers warmth, and, if possible, chooses the sunny side of a
building. A consideration, however, that weighs much with this bird is
the character of the take-off; he likes a space immediately in front of
his nest, free of trees or other obstructions, so that when rushing out
from his little doorway he may not strike against anything. For ages it
has also been remarked that the house-martin likes the proximity of man,
and will build by choice in or over a porch or doorway, whether of house
or stable, or over a window--somewhere where man is about. It is curious
that in this country, so subject to cold and cold winds, so many houses
are built to face north or east, and this fact often compels the
house-martin to build that side, the back of a house being frequently
obstructed. In the case of house No. 1 there was a clear take-off on the
north side, also with the stable. Houses are generally built to face the
road, quite irrespective of the aspect, which custom is the origin of
many cheerless dwellings. I think that house-martin fledglings and eggs
are capable of enduring the utmost heat of our English summer, and the
nests found deserted were abandoned for some other reason. More likely
that the deficiency of insect food caused by the inclement weather
weakened the parent. Sometimes these harmless and useful birds are
cruelly shot. I have never seen a nest injured by heats; on the contrary,
I should imagine that heat would cause the mortar to cohere more firmly,
and that damp would be much more likely to make it unsafe. At house No. 2
the heat in the angle of the two walls was scarcely bearable on a July
day. If a nest were taken down and put in an oven I should doubt if it
would crack. In nature, however, everything depends on locality. The
roads in that locality were mended with flint, and the mortar from
puddles appeared to make good cement. Possibly in some districts there
may be no lime or silicon, and the mortar the birds use may be less
adherent. The more one studies nature the more one becomes convinced that
it is an error to suppose things proceed by a regular rule always
applicable everywhere. All creatures change their habits with
circumstances; consequently no observation can be accepted as final.
AMONG THE NUTS.
The nuts are ripening once more, and it is almost the time to go
a-gipsying--the summer passes like the shadow of a cloud which strikes
the edge of the yellow wheat and comes over and is gone; it does not give
you time to rub out a single ear of corn. Before it is possible to gather
the harvest of thought and observation the summer has passed, and we must
bind the hastily stitched book with the crimson leaves of autumn. Under
these very hazel boughs only yesterday, _i.e._ in May, looking for
cuckoo-sorrel, as the wood-sorrel is called, there rolled down a brown
last year's nut from among the moss of the bank. In the side of this
little brown nut, at its thicker end, a round hole had been made with a
sharp tool which had left the marks of its chiselling. Through this hole
the kernel had been extracted by the skilful mouse. Two more nuts were
found on the same bank, bored by the same carpenter. The holes looked as
if he had turned the nut round and round as he gnawed. Unless the nut had
shrunk, the hole was not large enough to pull the kernel out all at once;
it must have been eaten little by little in many mouthfuls. The same
amount of nibbling would have sawn a circle round the nut, and so,
dividing the shell in two, would have let the kernel out bodily--a plan
more to our fancy; but the mouse is a nibbler, and he preferred to
nibble, nibble, nibble. Hard by one afternoon, as the cows were lazily
swishing their tails coming home to milking, and the shadow of the thick
hedge had already caused the anemones in the grass to close their petals,
there was a slight rustling sound. Out into the cool grass by some
cowslips there came a small dark head. It was an adder, verily a snake in
the grass and flowers. His quick eye--you know the proverb, 'If his ear
were as quick as his eye, No man should pass him by'--caught sight of us
immediately, and he turned back. The hedge was hollow there, and the
mound grown over with close-laid, narrow-leaved ivy. The viper did not
sink in these leaves, but slid with a rustling sound fully exposed above
them. His grey length and the chain of black diamond spots down his back,
his flat head with deadly tooth, did not harmonise as the green snake
does with leaf and grass. He was too marked, too prominent--a venomous
foreign thing, fit for tropic sands and nothing English or native to our
wilds. He seemed like a reptile that had escaped from the glass case of
some collection.