come, and the happy note of the cuckoo, the wild rose of midsummer, and
the golden wheat of August. It is the same beautiful old country always
new. Neither the iron engine nor the wooden plough alter it one iota, and
the love of it rises as constantly in our hearts as the coming of the
leaves. The wheat as it is moved from field to field, like a quarto
folded four times, gives us in the mere rotation of crops a fresh garden
every year. You have scented the bean-field and seen the slender heads of
barley droop. The useful products of the field are themselves beautiful;
the sainfoin, the blue lucerne, the blood-red trifolium, the clear yellow
of the mustard, give more definite colours, and all these are the merely
useful, and, in that sense, the plainest of growths. There are, then, the
poppies, whose wild brilliance in July days is not surpassed by any hue
of Spain. Wild charlock--a clear yellow--pink pimpernels, pink-streaked
convolvulus, great white convolvulus, double-yellow toadflax, blue
borage, broad rays of blue chicory, tall corn-cockles, azure
corn-flowers, the great mallow, almost a bush, purple knapweed--I will
make no further catalogue, but there are pages more of flowers, great and
small, that grow at the edge of the plough, from the coltsfoot that
starts out of the clumsy clod in spring to the white clematis. Of the
broad surface of the golden wheat and its glory I have already spoken,
yet these flower-encircled acres, these beautiful fields of peaceful
wheat, are the battle-fields of life. For these fertile acres the Romans
built their cities and those villas whose mosaics and hypocausts are
exposed by the plough, and formed straight roads like the radii of a
wheel or the threads of a geometrical spider's web. Thus like the spider
the legions from their centre marched direct and quickly conquered. Next
the Saxons, next the monk-slaying Danes, next the Normans in
chain-mail--one, two, three heavy blows--came to grasp these golden
acres. Dearly the Normans loved them; they gripped them firmly and
registered them in 'Domesday Book.' They let not a hide escape them; they
gripped also the mills that ground the corn. Do you think such blood
would have been shed for barren wastes? No, it was to possess these
harvest-laden fields. The wheat-fields are the battle-fields of the
world. If not so openly invaded as of old time, the struggle between
nations is still one for the ownership or for the control of corn. When
Italy became a vineyard and could no more feed the armies, slowly power
slipped away and the great empire of Rome split into many pieces. It has
long been foreseen that if ever England is occupied with a great war the
question of our corn supply, so largely derived from abroad, will become
a weighty matter. Happy for us that we have wheat-growing colonies! As
persons, each of us, in our voluntary or involuntary struggle for money,
is really striving for those little grains of wheat that lie so lightly
in the palm of the hand. Corn is coin and coin is corn, and whether it be
a labourer in the field, who no sooner receives his weekly wage than he
exchanges it for bread, or whether it be the financier in Lombard Street
who loans millions, the object is really the same--wheat. All ends in the
same: iron mines, coal mines, factories, furnaces, the counter, the
desk--no one can live on iron, or coal, or cotton--the object is really
sacks of wheat. Therefore to the eye of the mind they are not sacks of
wheat, but filled to the brim, like those in the magic caves of the
'Arabian Nights,' with gold.
JUST BEFORE WINTER.
A rich tint of russet deepened on the forest top, and seemed to sink day
by day deeper into the foliage like a stain; riper and riper it grew, as
an apple colours. Broad acres these of the last crop, the crop of leaves;
a thousand thousand quarters, the broad earth will be their barn. A warm
red lies on the hill-side above the woods, as if the red dawn stayed
there through the day; it is the heath and heather seeds; and higher
still, a pale yellow fills the larches. The whole of the great hill glows
with colour under the short hours of the October sun; and overhead, where
the pine-cones hang, the sky is of the deepest azure. The conflagration
of the woods burning luminously crowds into those short hours a
brilliance the slow summer does not know.
The frosts and mists and battering rains that follow in quick succession
after the equinox, the chill winds that creep about the fields, have
ceased a little while, and there is a pleasant sound in the fir trees.
Everything is not gone yet. In the lanes that lead down to the 'shaws' in
the dells, the 'gills,' as these wooded depths are called, buckler ferns,
green, fresh, and elegantly fashioned, remain under the shelter of the
hazel-lined banks. From the tops of the ash wands, where the linnets so
lately sang, coming up from the stubble, the darkened leaves have been
blown, and their much-divided branches stand bare like outstretched
fingers. Black-spotted sycamore leaves are down, but the moss grows thick
and deeply green; and the trumpets of the lichen seem to be larger, now
they are moist, than when they were dry under the summer heat. Here is
herb Robert in flower--its leaves are scarlet; a leaf of St. John's-wort,
too, has become scarlet; the bramble leaves are many shades of crimson;
one plant of tormentil has turned yellow. Furze bushes, grown taller
since the spring, bear a second bloom, but not perhaps so golden as the
first. It is the true furze, and not the lesser gorse; it is covered with
half-opened buds; and it is clear, if the short hours of sun would but
lengthen, the whole gorse hedge would become aglow again. Our trees, too,
that roll up their buds so tightly, like a dragoon's cloak, would open
them again at Christmas; and the sticky horse-chestnut would send forth
its long ears of leaves for New Year's Day. They would all come out in
leaf again if we had but a little more sun; they are quite ready for a
second summer.
Brown lie the acorns, yellow where they were fixed in their cups; two of
these cups seem almost as large as the great acorns from abroad. A red
dead-nettle, a mauve thistle, white and pink bramble flowers, a white
strawberry, a little yellow tormentil, a broad yellow dandelion, narrow
hawkweeds, and blue scabious, are all in flower in the lane. Others are
scattered on the mounds and in the meads adjoining, where may be
collected some heath still in bloom, prunella, hypericum, white yarrow,
some heads of red clover, some beautiful buttercups, three bits of blue
veronica, wild chamomile, tall yellowwood, pink centaury, succory, dock
cress, daisies, fleabane, knapweed, and delicate blue harebells. Two York
roses flower on the hedge: altogether, twenty-six flowers, a large
bouquet for October 19, gathered, too, in a hilly country.
Besides these, note the broad hedge-parsley leaves, tunnelled by
leaf-miners; bright masses of haws gleaming in the sun; scarlet hips;
great brown cones fallen from the spruce firs; black heart-shaped
bindweed leaves here, and buff bryony leaves yonder; green and scarlet
berries of white bryony hanging thickly on bines from which the leaves
have withered; and bunches of grass, half yellow and half green, along
the mound. Now that the leaves have been brushed from the beech saplings
you may see how the leading stem rises in a curious wavy line; some of
the leaves lie at the foot, washed in white dew, that stays in the shade
all day; the wetness of the dew makes the brownish red of the leaf show
clear and bright. One leaf falls in the stillness of the air slowly, as
if let down by a cord of gossamer gently, and not as a stone falls--fate
delayed to the last. A moth adheres to a bough, his wings half open, like
a short brown cloak flung over his shoulders. Pointed leaves, some
drooping, some horizontal, some fluttering slightly, still stay on the
tall willow wands, like bannerets on the knights' lances, much torn in
the late battle of the winds. There is a shower from a clear sky under
the trees in the forest; brown acorns rattling as they fall, and rich
coloured Spanish chestnuts thumping the sward, and sometimes striking you
as you pass under; they lie on the ground in pocketfuls. Specks of
brilliant scarlet dot the grass like some bright berries blown from the
bushes; but on stooping to pick them, they are found to be the heads of a
fungus. Near by lies a black magpie's feather, spotted with round dots of
white.
At the edge of the trees stands an old timbered farmstead, whose gables
and dark lines of wood have not been painted in the memory of man, dull
and weather-beaten, but very homely; and by it rises the delicate cone of
a new oast-house, the tiles on which are of the brightest red. Lines of
bluish smoke ascend from among the bracken of the wild open ground, where
a tribe of gipsies have pitched their camp. Three of the vans are
time-stained and travel-worn, with dull red roofs; the fourth is brightly
picked out with fresh yellow paint, and stands a marked object at the
side. Orange-red beeches rise beyond them on the slope; two hoop-tents,
or kibitkas, just large enough to creep into, are near the fires, where
the women are cooking the gipsy's _bouillon_, that savoury stew of all
things good: vegetables, meat, and scraps, and savouries, collected as it
were in the stock-pot from twenty miles round. Hodge, the stay-at-home,
sturdy carter, eats bread and cheese and poor bacon sometimes; he looks
with true British scorn on all scraps and soups, and stock-pots and
_bouillons_--not for him, not he; he would rather munch dry bread and
cheese for every meal all the year round, though he could get bits as
easy as the other and without begging. The gipsy is a cook. The man with
a gold ring in his ear; the woman with a silver ring on her finger,
coarse black snaky hair like a horse's mane; the boy with naked olive
feet; dark eyes all of them, and an Oriental, sidelong look, and a
strange inflection of tone that turns our common English words into a
foreign language--there they camp in the fern, in the sun, their Eastern
donkeys of Syria scattered round them, their children rolling about like
foals in the grass, a bit out of the distant Orient under our Western
oaks.
It is the nature of the oak to be still, it is the nature of the hawk to
roam with the wind. The Anglo-Saxon labourer remains in his cottage
generation after generation, ploughing the same fields; the express train
may rush by, but he feels no wish to rush with it; he scarcely turns to
look at it; all the note he takes is that it marks the time to 'knock
off' and ride the horses home. And if hard want at last forces him away,
and he emigrates, he would as soon jog to the port in a waggon, a week on
the road, as go by steam; as soon voyage in a sailing ship as by the
swift Cunarder. The swart gipsy, like the hawk, for ever travels on, but,
like the hawk, that seems to have no road, and yet returns to the same
trees, so he, winding in circles of which we civilised people do not
understand the map, comes, in his own times and seasons, home to the same
waste spot, and cooks his savoury _bouillon_ by the same beech. They have
camped here for so many years that it is impossible to trace when they
did not; it is wild still, like themselves. Nor has their nature changed
any more than the nature of the trees.
The gipsy loves the crescent moon, the evening star, the clatter of the
fern-owl, the beetle's hum. He was born on the earth in the tent, and he
has lived like a species of human wild animal ever since. Of his own free
will he will have nothing to do with rites or litanies: he may perhaps be
married in a place of worship--to make it legal, that is all. At the end,
were it not for the law, he would for choice be buried beneath the
'fireplace' of their children's children. He will not dance to the pipe
ecclesiastic, sound it who may--Churchman, Dissenter, priest, or laic.
Like the trees, he is simply indifferent. All the great wave of teaching
and text and tracts and missions and the produce of the printing-press
has made no impression upon his race any more than upon the red deer that
roam in the forest behind his camp. The negroes have their fetich, every
nation its idols; the gipsy alone has none--not even a superstitious
observance; they have no idolatry of the Past, neither have they the
exalted thought of the Present, It is very strange that it should be so
at this the height of our civilisation, and you might go many thousand
miles and search from Africa to Australia before you would find another
people without a Deity. That can only be seen under an English sky, under
English oaks and beeches.
Are they the oldest race on earth? and have they worn out all the gods?
Have they worn out all the hopes and fears of the human heart in tens of
thousands of years, and do they merely live, acquiescent to fate? For
some have thought to trace in the older races an apathy as with the
Chinese, a religion of moral maxims and some few joss-house
superstitions, which they themselves full well know to be nought,
worshipping their ancestors, but with no vital living force, like that
which drove Mohammed's bands to zealous fury, like that which sent our
own Puritans over the sea in the _Mayflower_. No living faith. So old, so
very, very old, older than the Chinese, older than the Copts of Egypt,
older than the Aztecs; back to those dim Sanskrit times that seem like
the clouds on the far horizon of human experience, where space and chaos
begin to take shape, though but of vapour. So old, they went through
civilisation ten thousand years since; they have worn it all out, even
hope in the future; they merely live acquiescent to fate, like the red
deer. The crescent moon, the evening star, the clatter of the fern-owl,
the red embers of the wood fire, the pungent smoke blown round about by
the occasional puffs of wind, the shadowy trees, the sound of the horses
cropping the grass, the night that steals on till the stubbles alone are
light among the fields--the gipsy sleeps in his tent on mother earth; it
is, you see, primeval man with primeval nature. One thing he gains at
least--an iron health, an untiring foot, women whose haunches bear any
burden, children whose naked feet are not afraid of the dew.
By sharp contrast, the Anglo-Saxon labourer who lives in the cottage
close by and works at the old timbered farmstead is profoundly religious.
The gipsies return from their rambling soon after the end of hop-picking,
and hold a kind of informal fair on the village green with cockshies,
swings, and all the clumsy games that extract money from clumsy hands. It
is almost the only time of the year when the labouring people have any
cash; their weekly wages are mortgaged beforehand; the hop-picking money
comes in a lump, and they have something to spend. Hundreds of pounds are
paid to meet the tally or account kept by the pickers, the old word tally
still surviving, and this has to be charmed out of their pockets. Besides
the gipsies' fair, the little shopkeepers in the villages send out
circulars to the most outlying cottage announcing the annual sale at an
immense sacrifice; anything to get the hop-pickers' cash; and the packmen
come round, too, with jewelry and lace and finery. The village by the
forest has been haunted by the gipsies for a century; its population in
the last thirty years has much increased, and it is very curious to
observe how the gipsy element has impregnated the place. Not only are the
names gipsy, the faces are gipsy; the black coarse hair, high
cheek-bones, and peculiar forehead linger; even many of the shopkeepers
have a distinct trace, and others that do not show it so much are known
to be nevertheless related.
Until land became so valuable--it is now again declining--these forest
grounds of heath and bracken were free to all comers, and great numbers
of squatters built huts and inclosed pieces of land. They cleared away
the gorse and heath and grubbed the fir-tree stumps, and found, after a
while, that the apparently barren sand could grow a good sward. No one
would think anything could flourish on such an arid sand, exposed at a
great height on the open hill to the cutting winds. Contrary, however, to
appearances, fair crops, and sometimes two crops of hay are yielded, and
there is always a good bite for cattle. These squatters consequently came
to keep cows, sometimes one and sometimes two--anticipating the three
acres and a cow; and it is very odd to hear the women at the hop-picking
telling each other they are going to churn to-night. They have, in fact,
little dairies. Such are the better class of squatters. But others there
are who have shown no industry, half-gipsies, who do anything but
work--tramp, beg, or poach; sturdy fellows, stalking round with
toy-brooms for sale, with all the blackguardism of both races. They keep
just within the law; they do not steal or commit burglary; but decency,
order, and society they set utterly at defiance. For instance, a
gentleman pleased with the splendid view built a large mansion in one
spot, never noticing that the entrance was opposite a row of cottages, or
rather thinking no evil of it. The result was that neither his wife nor
visitors could go in or out without being grossly insulted, without rhyme
or reason, merely for the sake of blackguardism. Now, the pure gipsy in
his tent or the Anglo-Saxon labourer would not do this; it was the
half-breed. The original owner was driven from his premises; and they are
said to have changed hands several times since from the same cause. All
over the parish this half-breed element shows its presence by the
extraordinary and unusual coarseness of manner. The true English rustic
is always civil, however rough, and will not offend you with anything
unspeakable, so that at first it is quite bewildering to meet with such
behaviour in the midst of green lanes. This is the explanation--the gipsy
taint. Instead of the growing population obliterating the gipsy, the
gipsy has saturated the English folk.
When people saw the red man driven from the prairies and backwoods of
America, and whole states as large as Germany without a single Indian
left, much was written on the extermination of the aborigines by the
stronger Saxon. As the generations lengthen, the facts appear to wear
another aspect. From the intermarriage of the lower orders with the
Indian squaws the Indian blood has got into the Saxon veins, and now the
cry is that the red man is exterminating the Saxon, so greatly has he
leavened the population. The typical Yankee face, as drawn in _Punch_, is
indeed the red Indian profile with a white skin and a chimney-pot hat.
Upon a small scale the same thing has happened in this village by the
forest; the gipsy half-breed has stained the native blood. Perhaps races
like the Jew and gipsy, so often quoted as instances of the permanency of
type, really owe that apparent fixidity to their power of mingling with
other nations. They are kept alive as races by mixing; otherwise one of
two things would happen--the Jew and the gipsy must have died out, or
else have supplanted all the races of the globe. Had the Jews been so
fixed a type, by this time their offspring would have been more numerous
than the Chinese. The reverse, however, is the case; and therefore we may
suppose they must have become extinct, had it not been for fresh supplies
of Saxon, Teuton, Spanish, and Italian blood. It is, in fact, the
inter-marriages that have kept the falsely so-called pure races of these
human parasites alive. The mixing is continually going on. The gipsies
who still stay in their tents, however, look askance upon those who
desert them for the roof. Two gipsy women, thorough-bred, came into a
village shop and bought a variety of groceries, ending with a pound of
biscuits and a Guy Fawkes mask for a boy. They were clad in dirty jackets
and hats, draggle-tails, unkempt and unwashed, with orange and red
kerchiefs round their necks (the gipsy colours). Happening to look out of
window, they saw a young servant girl with a perambulator on the opposite
side of the 'street;' she was tidy and decently dressed, looking after
her mistress's children in civilised fashion; but they recognised her as
a deserter from tribe, and blazed with contempt. 'Don't _she_ look a
figure!' exclaimed these dirty creatures.
The short hours shorten, and the leaf-crop is gathered to the great barn
of the earth; the oaks alone, more tenacious, retain their leaves, that
have now become a colour like new leather. It is too brown for buff--it
is more like fresh harness. The berries are red on the holly bushes and
holly trees that grow, whole copses of them, on the forest slopes--'the
Great Rough;' the half-wild sheep have polished the stems of these holly
trees till they shine, by rubbing their fleeces against them. The farmers
have been drying their damp wheat in the oast-houses over charcoal fires,
and wages are lowered, and men discharged. Vast loads of brambles and
thorns, dead firs, useless hop-poles and hop-bines, and gorse are drawn
together for the great bonfire on the green. The 5th of November bonfires
are still vital institutions, and from the top of the hill you may see
them burning in all directions, as if an enemy had set fire to the
hamlets.
LOCALITY AND NATURE.
By the side of the rivers of Exmoor there grows a great leaf, so large it
almost calls to mind those tropical leaves of which umbrellas and even
tents are made. This is of a rounder shape than those of the palm, it is
an elephant's ear among the foliage. The sweet river slips on with a
murmuring song, for these are the rivers of the poets, and talk in verse
for ever. Purple-tinted stones are strewn about the shallows flat like
tiles, and out among the grass and the white orchis of the meadow. The
floods carried them there and left them dry in the sun. Among these grows
a thick bunch of mimulus or monkey-plant, well known in gardens, here
flourishing alone beside the stream. These two plants greatly interested
me: the last because it had long been a favourite in an old garden and I
had not before seen it growing wild; the other because though I knew its
large leaf by repute, this was the first time I had come upon it. Now
that little spot in the bend of the river by means of these two plants is
firmly impressed in my memory, and is a joy to me whenever I think of it.
The sunshine, the song of the water, the pleasant green grass, the white
orchis, and the purplish stones were thereby rendered permanent to me.
Such is the wonderful power of plants. To any one who takes a delight in
wild flowers some spot or other of the earth is always becoming
consecrated.
There is, however, something curious about this butterbur. It is related
to the coltsfoot of the arable fields, and the coltsfoot sends up a stalk
without a leaf, and flowers before any green appears. So, too, the
butterbur of the river flowers before its great leaf comes. Nothing is
really common either, for everything is so local that you may spend
years, and in fact a lifetime, in a district and never see a flower
plentiful enough in another. Just where I am staying now the pennywort
grows on every wall attached to the mortar between the cobbles. In some
places you may search the roads in vain for this little plant, which has
this merit, that its rounded leaf presents a fresh green in February. It
does not die away, it appears as green as spring, and pieces of the wall
are ornamented with it as thickly as the iron-headed nails in old doors.
One plant grows out of the hard stem of a hawthorn tree, as if it were a
parasite like the mistletoe; probably there is some crack which the plant
itself has hidden. If every plant and every flower were found in all
places the charm of locality would not exist. Everything varies, and that
gives the interest. These purplish stones, where they lie in the water,
seem to have a kind of growth upon them--small knobs on the surface. On
examination each small roughness or knob will be found composed of a
number of very minute fragments of stone. It is a sort of cell, probably
built by a species of caddis. There was hardly a stone in the rivers that
was not dotted with these little habitations, so that it seemed difficult
to overlook them; but upon showing one to a mighty hunter to know the
local name, he declared he had never noticed it before, and added that he
did not care for such little things. It is of such little things that
great nature is made.