millionaires. But this the countryman cannot see. Not him alone either;
the dislike to little profits is a national characteristic, well marked
in the farmer, and indeed in all classes. I, too, must be humble, and
acknowledge that I have frequently detected the same folly in myself, so
let it not be supposed for an instant that I set up as a censor; I do but
delineate. Work for the cottager must be work to please him; and to
please him it must be the regular sort to which he is accustomed, which
he did beside his father as a boy, which _his_ father did, and _his_
father before him; the same old plough or grub-axe, the same milking, the
same identical mowing, if possible in the same field. He does not care
for any new-fangled jobs: he does not recognise them, they have no _locus
standi_--they are not established. Yet he is most anxious for work, and
works well, and is indeed the best labourer in the world. But it is the
national character. To understand a nation you must go to the cottager.
The well-to-do are educated, they have travelled, if not in their ideas,
they are more or less cosmopolitan. In the cottager the character stands
out in the coarsest relief; in the cottager you get to 'bed-rock,' as the
Americans say; there's the foundation. Character runs upwards, not
downwards. It is not the nature of the aristocrat that permeates the
cottager, but the nature of the cottager that permeates the aristocrat.
The best of us are polished cottagers. Scratch deep enough, and you come
to that; so that to know a people, go to the cottage, and not to the
mansion. The labouring man cannot quickly alter his ways. Can the
manufacturer? All alike try to go in the same old groove, till disaster
visits their persistence. It is English human nature.
APRIL GOSSIP
The old woman tried to let the cuckoo out of the basket at Heathfield
fair as usual on the 14th; but there seems to have been a hitch with the
lid, for he was not heard immediately about the country. Just before that
two little boys were getting over a gate from a hop-garden, with handfuls
of Lent lilies--a beautiful colour under the dark sky. They grow wild
round the margin of the hop garden, showing against the bare dark loam;
gloomy cloud over and gloomy earth under. 'Sell me a bunch?' 'No, no,
can't do that; we wants these yer for granmer.' 'Well, get me a bunch
presently, and I will give you twopence for it.' 'I dunno. We sends the
bunches we finds up to Aunt Polly in Lunnon, and they sends us back
sixpence for every bunch.' So the wild flowers go to Lunnon from all
parts of the country, bushels and bushels of them. Nearly two hundred
miles away in Somerset a friend writes that he has been obliged to put up
notice-boards to stay the people from tearing up his violets and
primroses, not only gathering them but making the flowery banks waste;
and notice-boards have proved no safeguard. The worst is that the roots
are taken, so that years will be required to repair the loss. Birds are
uncertain husbandmen, and sow seeds as fancy leads their wings. Do the
violets get sown by ants? Sir John Lubbock says they carry violet seeds
into their nests.
The lads, who still pelt the frogs in the ponds, just as they always did,
in spite of so much schooling, call them chollies. Pheasants are often
called peacocks. Bush-harrows, which are at work in the meadows at this
time of year, are drudges or dredges. One sunny morning I noticed the
broken handle of a jug on the bank of the road by the garden. What
interested me was the fine shining glaze of this common piece of red
earthenware. And how had the potter made that peculiar marking under the
surface of the glaze? I touched it with my stick, when the pot-handle
drew itself out of loop shape and slowly disappeared under some dead
furze, showing the blunt tail of a blindworm. I have heard people say
that the red ones are venomous, but the grey harmless. The red are
spiteful, and if you see them in the road you should always kill them. It
is curious that in places where blindworms are often seen their innocuous
nature should not be generally known. They are even called adders
sometimes. At the farm below, the rooks have been down and destroyed the
tender chickens not long hatched; they do not eat the whole of the
chicken, but disembowel it for food. Rooks are very wide feeders,
especially at nesting-time. They are suspected of being partial to the
young of partridge and pheasant, as well as to the eggs.
Looking down upon the treetops of the forest from a height, there seemed
to come from day to day a hoariness in the boughs, a greyish hue,
distinct from the blackness of winter. This thickened till the eye could
not see into the wood; until then the trunks had been visible, but they
were now shut out. The buds were coming; and presently the surface of the
treetops took a dark reddish-brown tint. The larches lifted their
branches, which had drooped, curving upwards as a man raises his arms
above his shoulders, and the slender boughs became set with green buds.
At a distance the corn is easily distinguished from the meadows beside it
by the different shade of green; grass is a deep green, corn appears
paler and yet brighter--perhaps the long winter has given it the least
touch of yellow. Daisies are up at last--very late indeed. Big
humble-bees, grey striped, enter the garden and drone round the banks,
searching everywhere for a fit hole in which to begin the nest. It is
pleasant to hear them; after the dreary silence the old familiar burr-rr
is very welcome. Spotted orchis leaves are up, and the palm-willow bears
its yellow pollen. Happily, the wild anemones will not bear the journey
to London, they wither too soon; else they would probably be torn up like
the violets. Neither is there any demand for the white barren strawberry
blossom, or the purplish ground-ivy among the finely marked fern moss.
The rain falls; and in the copses of the valley, deep and moist, where
grey lichen droops from the boughs, the thrushes sing all day--so
delighted are they to have the earth soft again, and so busy with the
nesting. At four o'clock in the morning the larks begin to sing: they
will be half an hour earlier next month, adjusting their time nicely by
the rising of the sun. They sing on till after the lamps are lit in the
evening. Far back in the snow-time a pair of wagtails used to come
several times a day close to the windows, their black markings showing up
singularly well against the snow on the ground. They seemed to have just
arrived. But now the weather is open and food plentiful they have left
us. The wagtails appear to be the first of the migrant birds to return,
long before the hail of April rattles against the windows and leaps up in
the short grass. Out in the hop-gardens the poles are placed ready for
setting, in conical heaps--at a distance resembling the tents of an army.
Never were the labouring men so glad to see the spring, for never have so
many of them been out of work or for longer periods. Yet, curiously
enough, even if out of work and suffering, every sort of job will not
suit them. One applicant for work was offered hop-pole shaving at 3_s_. a
hundred--said to be a fair price; but the work did not please him, and he
would not do it. On the other hand, a girl sent out 'to service' turned
her back on domestic duties, ran away from her mistress, and joined her
father and brother in the woods where they were shaving hop-poles. There
she worked with them all the winter--the roughest of rough
winters--preferring the wild freedom of the snow-clad woods, with hard
food, to the indoor employment. No mistress there in the snow: one woman
does not like another over her. A man stood idling at the cross-roads in
the village for weeks, hands in pockets, waiting for work. Some one took
pity on him, and said he could come and dig up an acre of grassland to
make a market garden; 15_s_. a week was the offer, with spade found, and
not long hours. 'Thank you, sir; I'll go and look at it,' said the
labourer. He went; and presently returned to say that he did not care
about it. In some way or other it did not fall in with his notions of
what work for him ought to be. I do not believe he was a bad sort of
fellow at all; but still there it is. No one can explain these things. A
distinct line, as it were, separates the cottager, his ways and thoughts,
from others. In a cottage with which I am acquainted an infant recently
died. The body was kept in the parents' bedroom close to their bed, day
and night, until burial. This is the custom. The cottage wife thinks that
not to have the body of her child by her bed would be most
unfeeling--most cruel to lay it by itself in a cold room away from her.
SOME APRIL INSECTS.
A black humble-bee came to the white hyacinths in the garden on the sunny
April morning when the yellow tulip opened, and as she alighted on the
flower there hovered a few inches in the rear an eager attendant, not
quite so large, more grey, and hovering with the shrillest vibration
close at hand. The black bee went round the other side of a bunch of
hyacinths, and was hidden in the bell of a purple one. At thus
temporarily losing sight of her, the follower, one might say, flew into a
state of extreme excitement, and spun round and round in the air till he
caught sight of her again and resumed his steady hovering. Then she went
to the next bunch of hyacinths; he followed her, when, with a furious,
shrill cry of swiftly beating wings, a second lover darted down, and then
the two followed the lady in black velvet--buzz, buzz, buzz, pointing
like hounds stationary in the air--buzz, buzz--while she without a
moment's thought of them worked at the honey. By-and-by one rushed at
her--a too eager caress, for she lost her balance and fell out of the
flower on to the ground. Up she got and pursued him for a few angry
circles, and then settled to work again. Presently the rivals darted at
each other and whirled about, and in the midst of the battle off went the
lady in velvet to another part of the garden, and the combatants
immediately rushed after her. Every morning that the tulip opened its
great yellow bell, these black humble-bees came, almost always followed
by one lover, sometimes, as on the first occasion, by two. A bright row
of polyanthus and oxlips seemed to be the haunt of the male bees. There
they waited, some on the leaves and some on the dry clods heated by the
sun, in ambush till a dark lady should come. The yellow tulip was a
perfect weather-meter; if there was the least bit of harshness in the
air, the least relic of the east wind, it remained folded. Sunshine alone
was not sufficient to tempt it, but the instant there was any softness in
the atmosphere open came the bell, and as if by a magic key all the bees
and humble-bees of the place were unlocked, and forth they came with
joyous note--not to visit the tulip, which is said to be a fatal cup of
poison to them.
Any one delicate would do well to have a few such flowers in spring under
observation, and to go out of doors or stop in according to their
indications. I think there were four species of wild bee at these early
flowers, including the great bombus and the small prosopis with
orange-yellow head. It is difficult to scientifically identify small
insects hastily flitting without capturing them, which I object to doing,
for I dislike to interfere with their harmless liberty. They have all
been named and classified, and I consider it a great cruelty to destroy
them again without special purpose. The pleasure is to see them alive and
busy with their works, and not to keep them in a cabinet. These wild
bees, particularly the smaller ones, greatly resented my watching them,
just the same as birds do. If I walked by they took no heed; if I stopped
or stooped to get a better view they were off instantly. Without doubt
they see you, and have some idea of the meaning of your various motions.
The wild bees are a constant source of interest, much more so than the
hive bee, which is so extremely regular in its ways. With an explosion
almost like a little bomb shot out of a flower; with an immense hum,
almost startling, boom! the great bombus hurls himself up in the air from
under foot; well named--boom--bombus. Is it correct or is it only a
generalisation, that insects like ants and hive bees, who live in great
and well-organised societies, are more free from the attacks of parasites
than the comparatively solitary wild bees? Ants are, indeed, troubled
with some parasites, but these do not seem to multiply very greatly, and
do not seriously injure the populousness of the nest. They have enemies
which seize them, but an enemy is not a parasite. On the other hand, too,
they have mastered a variety of insects, and use them for their
delectation and profit. Hive bees are likewise fairly free from
parasites, unless, indeed, their so-called dysentery is caused by some
minute microbe. These epidemics, however, are rare. Take it altogether,
the hive bee appears comparatively free of parasites. Enemies they have,
but that is another matter.
Have these highly civilised insects arrived in some manner at a solution
of the parasite problem? Have they begun where human civilisation may be
said to have ended, with a diligent study of parasitic life? All our
scientific men are now earnestly engaged in the study of bacteria,
microbes, mycelium, and yeast, infinitesimally minute fungi of every
description, while meantime the bacillus is eating away the lives of a
heavy percentage of our population. Ants live in communities which might
be likened to a hundred Londons dotted about England, so are their nests
in a meadow, or, still more striking, on a heath. Their immense crowds,
the population of China to an acre, do not breed disease. Every ant out
of that enormous multitude may calculate on a certain average duration of
life, setting aside risks from battle, birds, and such enemies. Microbes
are unlikely to destroy her. Now this is a very extraordinary
circumstance. In some manner the ants have found out a way of
accommodating themselves to the facts of their existence; they have
fitted themselves in with nature and reached a species of millennium. Are
they then more intelligent than man? We have certainly not succeeded in
doing this yet; they are very far ahead of us. Are their eyes, divided
into a thousand facets, a thousand times more powerful than our most
powerful microscopes, and can they see spores, germs, microbes, or
bacilli where our strongest lenses find nothing? I have some doubts as to
whether ants are really shut out of many flowers by hairs pointing
downwards in a fringe and similar contrivances. The ant has a singularly
powerful pair of mandibles: put one between your shirt and skin and try;
the nip you will get will astonish you. With these they can shear off the
legs or even the head of another ant in battle. I cannot see, therefore,
why, if they wished, they could not nip off this fringe of hairs, or even
sever the stem of the plant. Evidently they do not wish, and possibly
they have reasons for avoiding some plants and flowers, which besides
honey may contain spores--just as they certainly contain certain larvae,
which attach themselves to the bodies of bees.
Possibly we may yet use the ants or some other clever insects to find out
the origin of the fatal parasite which devours the consumptive. Some
reason exists for imagining that this parasite has something to do with
the flora, for phthisis ceases at a certain altitude, and it is very well
known that the floras have a marked line of demarcation. Up to a certain
height certain flowers will grow, but not beyond, just as if you had run
a separating ditch round the mountain. With the flora the insects cease;
whether the germ comes from the vegetation or from the insect that
frequents the vegetation does not seem known. Still it would be worth
while to make a careful examination of the plant and insect life just at
the verge of the line of division. The bacillus may spring from a spore
starting from a plant or starting from an insect. Most of England had an
Alpine climate probably once, and some Alpine plants and animals have
been stranded on the tops of our highest hills and remain there to this
day. In those icy times English lungs were probably free of disease. Has
formic acid ever been used for experiments on bacilli? It is the ant
acid; they are full of it, and it is extracted and used for some purposes
abroad. Perhaps its strong odour is repellent to parasites. To return:
while the honey-bees live in comparative safety, the more or less
solitary wild bees have a great struggle to repel various creatures that
would eat them or their young, and, be as watchful as they may, all their
efforts at nest-building are often rendered nugatory by the success of a
parasite. So it is not worth while to catch them just for the purpose of
identification, for they have enough enemies in the field without man and
his heartless cabinets. The collector is the most terrible parasite of
all. Let them go on with a happy hum, while the tulip opens in the
sunshine.
THE TIME OF YEAR.
The Emperor moth came out on the 2nd of April, and suddenly filled the
cardboard box like the noonday phantom in the sunshine, so unexpected and
wonderful. His wings, which as he rests are spread open, stretched from
one side of the box to the other, hovering over his old home, a beautiful
grey tipped with pink, and peacock-eyed, ring within ring. He clung to
the piece of heather upon which the caterpillar was found seven months
before, and which he had fixed in the threads of his cocoon. The immense
dark green caterpillar banded with black and spotted with gold was found
on the 29th of August among the heather on the hill-side; the sun
burning, the air all alight with the fire of the beams, a day of
flame--as if the keen tips of the pine needles would take fire in the
glow. The caterpillar in its colour and size seemed almost tropical;
those who have not seen it would scarcely believe that a caterpillar
could be so magnificent; but indoors in the cardboard box he lost his
sun-burnished colour and half his glory. Immediately afterwards he spun
his cocoon, and there he stayed for seven long months, so that the moth
thus suddenly appearing, without any cracking or opening of the cocoon,
appeared to be created on the spot. At first, indeed, some thought it was
a moth that had entered by the window, there being no rent or place of
exit from the perfect case. Within, however, was the broken and blackened
skin of the caterpillar and the detached thorax: the cocoon is like the
baskets for taking fish at weirs, only the willows merely touch at the
tip, and through these he had crept out, and they closed behind him.
The pale purple heather bloom still lies in the bottom of the box. Never
again shall I see a day of such glory of light, of air burning with
light; the very ferns in the shade were bright with the glow, despite
their soft green. A sad hour it was to me, yet I could see all its
beauty; sad, too, to think it will never return. So the Emperor moth came
out on the 2nd of April, and the same day there was a yellow and a white
butterfly in the garden. There had come a gleam of sunshine after two
months of bitter north wind, and the insects took life immediately. Early
in the morning the greenfinches were screaming at each other in the
elm--they were in such a hurry to get out their song, they screamed; the
chaffinches were challenging, and the starlings fluttering their wings at
the high window, and all this excitement at one gleam of sun. A friend
asked me what bird it was that always finished up its song with a loud
call for 'ginger-beer'--whatever he sang he always said 'ginger-beer' at
the end of it; it is the chaffinch, and a very good rendering of the
notes. 'Quawk! Quoak!' the rooks as they went by were so contented
enjoying the sunshine, they took out the harsh 'c' or 'k' and substituted
the softer 'q'--'quawk! quowk!' Another perched on a tree made a short
speech, perhaps he thought it was a song. Sea-gulls have curiously
rook-like habits in some respects, following the plough like them, and in
spring wheeling for hours round and round in the sky as the rooks do.
The blackbirds and thrushes that had been singing freely previously
suddenly ceased singing about December 15, and remained silent for a
month, and as suddenly began singing again about January 15. Where they
all came from I cannot think, there seemed such an increase in their
numbers; one wet morning in a small meadow there were forty-five feeding
in sight that could be easily counted. They say the thrushes dig up and
eat the roots of the arum, yet they are not root-eaters. Possibly it may
have a medicinal effect; the whole plant has very strong properties, and
is still much gathered, I suppose for the herbalists. The root is set
rather deep, quite a dig with a pocket knife sometimes; one would fancy
it was only those which had become accidentally exposed that are eaten by
the thrushes. I have never seen them do it, and some further testimony
would be acceptable. The old naturalists said the bear on awakening from
its winter sleep dug up and ate the roots of the arum in order to open
the tube of the intestine which had flattened together during
hibernation. The blackbirds are the thrushes' masters, and drive them
from any morsel they fancy. There is very little humanity among them: one
poor thrush had lost the joint of its leg, and in order to pick up
anything had to support itself with one wing like a crutch. This bird was
hunted from every spot he chose to alight on; no sooner did he enter the
garden than one of the stronger birds flew at him--'so misery is trodden
on by many.' There was a drone-fly on a sunny wall on January 20, the
commonest of flies in summer, quite a wonder then; the same day a
house-sparrow was trying to sing, for they have a song as well as a
chirp; on January 22 a tit was sharpening his saw and the gnats were
jumping up and down in crowds--this up-and-down motion seems peculiar to
them and may-flies. Then the snowdrops flowered and a hive-bee came to
them; next the yellow crocus; bees came to these, too, and so eager were
they that one bee would visit the same flower five or six times before
finally going away. Bees are very eager for water in the early year; you
may see them in crowds on the wet mud in ditches; there was a wild bee
drowning in a basin of water the other day till I took him out.