come, and never learning that it is too soon; whether the woodbine came
over with 'Richard Conqueror' or the Romans, it still imagines itself ten
degrees further south, so that some time seems necessary to teach a plant
the alphabet. Immediately afterwards down came a north wind and put
nature under its thumb for two months; the drone-fly hid himself, the
bees went home, everything became shrivelled, dry, inhuman. The local
direction of the wind might vary, but it was still the same polar
draught, the blood-sucker; for, like a vampire, it sucks the very blood
and moisture out of delicate human life, just as it dries up the sap in
the branch. While this lasted there were no notes to make, the changes
were slower than the hour hand of a clock; still it was interesting to
see the tree-climber come every morning at eleven o'clock to the
cobble-stone wall and ascend it exactly as he ascends trees, peering into
chinks among the moss and the pennywort. He seemed almost as fond of
these walls as of his tree trunks. He came regularly at eleven and again
at three in the afternoon, and a barn owl went by with a screech every
evening a little after eight. The starlings told the time of the year as
accurately as the best chronometer at Whitehall. When I saw the last
chimney swallow, November 30, they went by to their sleeping-trees about
three o'clock in the afternoon--a long night, a short day for them. So
they continued till in January the day had grown thirty minutes longer,
when they went to roost so much the later; in February, four o'clock; in
March, by degrees their time for passing by the window _en route_ drew on
to five o'clock. Let the cold be never so great or the sky so clouded,
the mysterious influence of the light, as the sun slowly rises higher on
the meridian, sinks into the earth like a magic rain. It enters the
hardest bark and the rolled-up bud, so firm that its point will prick the
finger like a thorn; it stirs beneath the surface of the ground. A
magnetism that is not heat, and for which there is no exact name, works
out of sight in answer to the sun. Seen or unseen, clouded or not, every
day the sun lifts itself an inch higher, and let the north wind shrivel
as it may, this invisible potency compels the bud to swell and the flower
to be ready in its calyx. Progress goes on in spite of every
discouragement. The birch trees reddened all along their slender boughs,
and when the sunlight struck aslant, the shining bark shone like gossamer
threads wet with dew.
The wood-pigeon in the fir trees could not be silent any longer.
Whoo--too--whoo--ooe! then up he flew with a clatter of his wings and
down again into the trees. 'Take two cows, Taffy,' he could not be silent
any longer--whoo--too--whoo--ooe! The blackthorn bloom began to faintly
show the tiniest white studs, and the boys in great triumph brought in
the first blue thrush's eggs. Nature would go on though under the thumb
of the north wind. Poor folk came out of the towns to gather ivy leaves
for sale in the streets to make button-holes. Many people think the ivy
leaf has a pleasant shape; it was used of old time among the Greeks and
Romans to decorate the person at joyous festivals. The ivy is frequently
mentioned in the classic poets. Not so with the countrywomen in the
villages to-day, ground down in constant dread of that hateful workhouse
system of which I can find no words to express my detestation. They tell
their daughters never to put ivy leaves in their hair or brooch, because
'they puts it on the dead paupers in the unions and the lunatics in the
'sylums.' Such an association took away all the beauty of the ivy leaf.
There is nature in their hearts, you see, although they are under the
polar draught of poverty. At last there came a little warmth and the
Emperor moth appeared, yellow and white butterflies came out, flowers
bloomed, buds opened--ripened by the mystic magnetism of the sun in their
sheaths and cocoons--great humble-bees came with a full-blown buzz, all
before the swallow, the nightingale, and cuckoo. It was but for a day,
and then down fell the bitter polar draught again.
MIXED DAYS OF MAY AND DECEMBER
In a sheltered spot the cuckoo was first heard on April 29, but only for
one day; then, as the wind took up its accustomed northerly drift again,
he was silent. The first chimney swallows (four) appeared on April 25,
and were quickly followed by a number. They might be said to be about
three weeks behind time, and the cuckoo a fortnight. The chiffchaff
uttered his clear yet rather sad notes on April 26. The same morning at
five o'clock there had been a slight snow shower, but it was a sunny day.
On May 1 a stitchwort was in flower, a plant that marks the period
distinctly. A swift appeared on May 2; I should not consider this late. A
whitethroat was catching insects in the garden on May 6. The cuckoo sang
again on May 8; the same day a Red Admiral butterfly was seen, and the
turtle-dove heard cooing. Next day, the 9th, the cave swallow appeared,
and also the bank martin. With the cooing of the turtledove the spring
migrants are generally complete; a warm summer bird, he is usually the
last, and if the others had not been seen they are probably in the
country somewhere. The chimney swallows had been absent five months all
but five days (last seen November 30), so that reckoning the first and
the last, they may be said to stay in England seven months--much longer
than one would think without taking the dates. Up till April 20 the
hedges seemed as bare as they were in January, a most dreary spectacle of
barren branches, and the great elms gaunt against the sky. After that the
hedges gradually filled with leaf, and were fully coloured when the
turtle-dove began to sing, but still the elms were only just budding, and
but faintly tinted with green.
Chaucer was right in singing of the 'floures' of May notwithstanding the
northern winds and early frosts and December-like character of our Mays.
That the cycle of weather was warmer in his time is probably true, but
still even now, under all the drawbacks of a late and wintry season, his
description is perfectly accurate. If any one had gone round the fields
on old May-day, the 13th, _his_ May-day, they might have found the deep
blue bird's-eye veronica, anemones, star-like stitchworts, cowslips,
buttercups, lesser celandine, daisies, white blackthorn, and gorse in
bloom--in short, a list enough to make a page bright with colour, though
the wind might be bitter. In the coldest and most exposed place I ever
lived in, and with a spring as cold as this, the May garlands included
orchids, and the meadows were perfectly golden with marsh-marigolds. For
some reason or other the flowers seem to come as near as they can to
their time, let the weather be as hard as it may. They are more regular
than the migrant birds, and much more so than the trees. The elm, oak,
and ash appear to wait a great deal on the sun and the atmosphere, and
their boughs give much better indications of what the weather has really
been than birds and flowers. The migrant birds try their hardest to keep
time, and some of them arrive a week or more before they are noticed.
Elm, oak, and ash are the surest indicators; the horse-chestnut is very
apt to put forth its broad succulent leaves too soon; the sycamore, too,
is an early tree in spite of everything. It has been said that of late
years we have not had any settled, soft, warm weather till after
midsummer. There has been a steady continual cold draught from the
northward till the sun reached the solstice, so that the summers, in
fact, have not commenced till the end of June. There is a good deal of
general truth in this observation; certainly we seem to have lost our
springs. I do not think I have heard it thunder this year up to the time
of writing. The absence of electrical disturbance shows a peculiar state
of atmosphere unfavourable to growth, so that the corn will not hide a
partridge, and in some places hardly a sparrow. Where did the painters
get their green leaves from this year in time for the galleries? Not from
the trees, for they had none.
A flock of rooks was waddling about in a thinly grown field of corn which
scarcely hid their feet, and a number of swallows, flying very low,
scarcely higher than the rooks' breasts, wound in and out among them. The
day was cloudy and cold, and probably the insects had settled on the
ground. The rooks' feet stirred them up, and as they rose they were taken
by the swallows. All over the field there were no other swallows, nor in
the adjacent fields, only in that one spot where the rooks were feeding.
On another occasion swallows flying low over a closely cropped grass
field alighted on the sward to try and catch their prey. There seems a
scarcity of some kinds of insect life, due doubtless to the wind. Out of
a dozen butterfly chrysalids collected, six were worthless; they were
stiff, and when opened were stuffed full of small white larvae, which had
eaten away the coming butterfly in its shell. They were the offspring of
a parasite insect, which thus provided for the sustenance of its young by
eating up other young, after the cruel way of nature. Why does one robin
carefully choose a thatched cave for its nest, out of reach except by a
ladder, and safe from all beasts of prey, and another place its nest on a
low grassy bank scarcely hidden by a plant of wild parsley, and easily
taken by the smallest boy? At first it looks like a great difference in
intelligence, but probably each bird acted as well as could be under the
circumstances. Each robin has to fight for his locality, and he has to
make the best of his territory; if he trespassed on another bird's
premises he would be driven away. You must build your house where you
happen to possess a plot of land. It is curious to see the male bird
feeding the female, not only while on the nest, but when she comes away
from it; the female perches on a branch and utters a little call, and the
male brings her food. He was feeding her the other evening on the bare
boughs of a fig tree some distance from the nest. The warmth of the sun,
although we could not feel it, must have penetrated into the earth some
time since, for a slowworm came forth on a mound for the first time on
April 16. He coiled up on the eastern side every morning for some hours,
but was never seen in the afternoon. His short, thick body and unfinished
tail, more like a punch or the neck of a stumpy bottle, was turned in a
loop, the head nearly touching the tail, like a pair of sugar-tongs.
Coming out from the stitchwort and grasses, the spiders often ran over
his shining dark brown surface, something the colour of glazed
earthenware. A snake or an adder would have begun to move away the moment
any one stopped to look at it; but the slowworm takes no notice, and
hence it is often said to be blind. He seems to dislike any sharp noise,
and is really fully aware of your presence. Close by the mound, which
stands in a corner of the garden, there is a great bunch of blue comfrey,
to which the bees and humble-bees come in such numbers as to seem to
justify the idea that these insects prefer blue. Or perhaps the blue
flowers secrete sweeter honey. Every kind of wild bee as yet flying
visits this plant, tiny bees barely a quarter of an inch long, others as
big as two filberts, some a deep amber, some striped like wasps. A little
of Chaucer's May has come; now and then a short hour or two of sunshine
between the finger and thumb of the north wind. Most pleasant it is to
see the eave swallow dive down from the roof and rush over the scarcely
green garden--a household sign of summer. In the lane if you gather them
the young leaves of the sycamore have a fragrant scent like a flower, and
low down ferns are unrolling. On the low wall sits a yellow-hammer, just
brightly touched afresh with colour. Happy greenfinches go by, and it is
curious to note how the instant they enter the hedge they are lost now
under the leaves; so few days ago they would have been unconcealed. So
near is it to summer that the first thrush begins to sing at three
o'clock in the morning.
THE MAKERS OF SUMMER.
The leaves are starting here and there from green buds on the hedge, but
within doors a warm fire is still necessary, when one day there is a
slight sound in the room, so peculiar, and yet so long forgotten, that
though we know what it is, we have to look at the object before we can
name it. It is a house-fly, woke up from his winter sleep, on his way
across to the window-pane, where he will buzz feebly for a little while
in the sunshine, flourishing best like a hothouse plant under glass.
By-and-by he takes a turn or two under the centrepiece, and finally
settles on the ceiling. Then, one or two other little flies of a
different species may be seen on the sash; and in a little while the
spiders begin to work, and their round silky cocoons are discovered in
warm corners of the woodwork. Spiders run about the floors and spin
threads by the landing windows; where there are webs it is certain the
prey is about, though not perhaps noticed. Next, some one finds a moth.
Poor moth! he has to suffer for being found out.
As it grows dusk the bats flitter to and fro by the house; there are
moths, then, abroad for them. Upon the cucumber frame in the sunshine
perhaps there may be seen an ant or two, almost the first out of the
nest; the frame is warm. There are flowers open, despite the cold wind
and sunless sky; and as these are fertilised by insects, it follows that
there must be more winged creatures about than we are conscious of. How
strange it seems, on a bleak spring day, to see the beautiful pink
blossom of the apricot or peach covering the grey wall with
colour--snowflakes in the air at the time! Bright petals are so
associated with bright sunshine that this seems backward and
inexplicable, till it is remembered that the flower probably opens at the
time nearest to that which in its own country brings forth the insects
that frequent it. Now and again humble-bees go by with a burr; and it is
curious to see the largest of them all, the big bombus, hanging to the
little green gooseberry blossom. Hive-bees, too, are abroad with every
stray gleam of sun; and perhaps now and then a drone-fly--last seen on
the blossoms of the ivy in November. A yellow butterfly, a white one,
afterwards a tortoiseshell--then a sudden pause, and no more butterflies
for some time. The rain comes down, and the gay world is blotted out. The
wind shifts to the south, and in a few days the first swallows are seen
and welcomed, but, as the old proverb says, they do not make a summer.
Nor do the long-drawn notes of the nightingale, nor even the jolly
cuckoo, nor the tree pipit, no, nor even the soft coo of the turtle-dove
and the smell of the May flower. It is too silent even now: there are the
leading notes; but the undertone--the vibration of the organ--is but just
beginning. It is the hum of insects and their ceaseless flitting that
make the summer more than the birds or the sunshine. The coming of summer
is commonly marked in the dates we note by the cuckoo and the swallow and
the oak leaves; but till the butterfly and the bee--one with its colour,
and one with its hum--fill out the fields, the picture is but an outline
sketch. The insects are the details that make the groundwork of a summer
day. Till the humble-bees are working at the clover it is too silent; so
I think we may begin our almanack with the house-fly and the moth and the
spider and the ant on the cucumber frame, and so on, till, finally, the
catalogue culminates with the great yellow wasp. He is the final sign of
summer; one swallow does not make it, one wasp does. He is a connoisseur
of the good things of the earth, and comes not till their season.
On the top of an old wall covered with broad masses of lichen, the
patches of which grew out at their edges as if a plate had taken to
spreading at its rim, the tits were much occupied in picking out minute
insects; the wagtails came too, sparrows, robins, hedge-sparrows, and
occasionally a lark; a bare blank wall to all appearance, and the bare
lichen as devoid of life to our eyes. Yet there must have been something
there for all these eager bills--eggs or pupae. A jackdaw, with iron-grey
patch on the back of his broad poll, dropped in my garden one morning, to
the great alarm of the small birds, and made off with some large dark
object in his beak--some beetle or shell probably, I could not
distinguish which, and should most likely have passed the spot without
seeing it. The sea-kale, which had been covered up carefully with
seaweed, to blanch and to protect it from the frost, was attacked in the
cold dry weather in a most furious manner by blackbirds, thrushes, and
starlings. They tore away the seaweed with their strong bills, pitching
it right and left behind them in as workmanlike style as any miner, and
so boring deep notches into the edge of the bed. When a blackbird had
made a good hole he came back to visit it at various times of the day,
and kept a strict watch. If he found any other blackbird or thrush
infringing on his diggings, he drove him away ferociously. Never were
such works carried on as at the edge of that seaweed; they moved a bushel
of it. To the eye there seemed nothing in it but here and there a small
white worm; but they found plenty, and the weather being so bitter, I let
them do much as they liked; I would rather feed than starve them.
Down at the sea-shore in the sunny hours, out from the woodwork of the
groynes or bulwarks, there came a white spotted spider, which must in
some way have known the height to which the tide came at that season,
because he was far below high-water mark. The moles in an upland field
had made in the summer a perfect network of runs. Out of curiosity we
opened some, and found in them large brown pupae. In the summer-house,
under the wooden eaves, if you look, you will find the chrysalis of a
butterfly, curiously slung aslant. Coming down Galley Hill, near
Hastings, one day, a party was almost stopped by finding they could only
walk on thousands of caterpillars, dark with bright yellow bands, which
had sprung out of the grass. The great nettles--now, nothing is so common
as a nettle--are sometimes festooned with a dark caterpillar, hundreds
upon each plant, hanging like bunches of currants. Could you find a spot
the size of your watch-seal without an insect or the germ of one?
The agriculturists in some southern counties give the boys in spring
threepence a dozen for the heads of young birds killed in the nest. The
heads are torn off, to be produced, like the wolves' of old times, as
evidence of extinction. This--apart from the cruelty of the practice--is,
I think, a mistake, for, besides the insects that injure crops, there are
some which may be suspected of being inimical to human life, if not
directly, indirectly; and if it were not for birds, we should run a very
good chance of being literally eaten up. The difficulty is that people
cannot believe what they cannot immediately see, and there are very few
who have the patience or who feel sufficient interest to study minute
things.
I have taken these instances haphazard; they are large instances, as it
were, of big and visible things. They only give the rudest idea of the
immensity and complexity of insect life in our own country. My friend the
sparrow is, I believe, a friend likewise to man generally. He does a
little damage, I admit; but if he were to resort to living on damage
solely in his enormous numbers, we should not have a single flower or a
single ear of wheat. He does not live by doing mischief alone evidently.
He is the best scavenger the Londoners have got, and I counsel them to
prize their sparrows, unless they would be overrun with uncomfortable
creatures; and possibly he plays his part indirectly in keeping down
disease. They say in some places he attacks the crocus. He does not
attack mine, so I suspect there must be something wrong with the
destroyed crocuses. Some tried to entice him from the flower with crumbs;
they would perhaps have succeeded better if they had bought a pint of
wheat at the seedsman's and scattered it. In spring, sparrows are not
over-fond of crumbs; they are inordinately fond of wheat. During the
months of continued dry, cold, easterly winds, which we have had to
endure this season, all insect-eating birds have been almost as much
starved as they are in winter when there is a deep snow. Nothing comes
forth from the ground, nothing from the deep crannies which they cannot
peck open; the larva remains quiescent in the solid timber. Not a speck
can they find. The sparrow at such a time may therefore be driven to
opening flower-buds. Looked at in a broad way, I am convinced he is a
friend. I have always let them build about the house, and shall not drive
them away.
If you do not know anything of insects, the fields are somewhat barren to
you. The buttercups are beautiful, still they are buttercups every day.
The thrush's song is lovely, still one cannot always listen to the
thrush. The fields are but large open spaces after a time to many, unless
they know a little of insects, when at once they become populous, and
there is a link found between the birds and the flowers. It is like
opening another book of endless pages, and coloured illustrations on
every page.
Blessings on the man, said Sancho Panza, who first invented sleep.
Blessings on the man who first invented the scarlet geranium, and thereby
brought the Hummingbird moth to the window-sill; for, though seen ever so
often, I can always watch it again hovering over the petals and taking
the honey, and away again into the bright sunlight. Sometimes, when
walking along, and thinking of everything else but it, the beautiful
Peacock butterfly suddenly floats by the face like a visitor from another
world, so highly coloured, and so original and unlike and unexpected. In
bright painters' work like the wings of butterflies, which often have
distinct hues side by side, I think nature puts very little green; the
bouquet is not backed with maiden-hair fern; the red and the blue and so
on have no grass or leaves as a ground colour; nor do they commonly
alight on green. The bright colours are left to themselves unrelieved.
None of the butterflies, I think, have green on the upper side of the
wing; the Green Hairstreak has green under wings, but green is not put
forward.
Something the same may be noticed in flowers themselves: the broad
surface, for instance, of the peach and apricot, pink without a green
leaf; the pear tree white, but the leaves come quickly; the apple, an
acre of pink and white, with the merest texture of foliage. Nor are there
many conspicuous green insects-the grasshopper; some green flies; the
lace-fly, a green body and delicate white wings. With the wild flowers,
on the contrary, there seems to come a great deal of green. There is
scarcely a colour that cannot be matched in the gay world of wings. Red,
blue, and yellow, and brown and purple--shaded and toned, relieved with
dots and curious markings; in the butterflies, night tints in the pattern
of the under wings, as if these were shaded with the dusk of the evening,
being in shadow under the vane. Gold and orange, red, bright scarlet, and
ruby and bronze in the flies. Dark velvet, brown velvet, greys, amber,
and gold edgings like military coats in the wild bees. If fifteen or
twenty delicate plates of the thinnest possible material, each tinted
differently, were placed one over the other, and all translucent, perhaps
they might produce something of that singular shadow-painting seen on the
wings of moths. They are the shadows of the colours, and yet they are
equally distinct. The thin edges of the flies' wings catch the sunbeams,
and throw them aside. Look, too, at the bees' limbs, which are sometimes
yellow, and sometimes orange-red with pollen. The eyes, too, of many
insects are coloured. They know your shadow from that of a cloud. If a
cloud comes over, the instant the edge of the shadow reaches the Grass
moths they stop, so do some of the butterflies and other insects, as the
wild bees remain quiescent. As the edge of your shadow falls on them they
rise and fly, so that to observe them closely it must not be allowed to
overlap them.
Sometimes I think insects smell the approaching observer as the deer wind
the stalker. The Gatekeeper butterfly is common; its marking is very
ingenious, may I say? regular, and yet irregular. The pattern is
complete, and yet it is incomplete; it is finished, and yet it suggests
to the mind that the lines ought to go on farther. They go out into space
beyond the wing. If a carpet were copied from it, and laid down in a
room, the design would want to run through the walls. Imagine the
flower-bird's wing detached from some immense unseen carpet and set
floating--it is a piece of something not ended in itself, and yet
floating about complete. Some of their wings are neatly cut to an edge
and bordered; of some the edge is lost in colour, because no line is
drawn along it. Some seem to have ragged edges naturally, and look as if
they had been battered. Towards the end of their lives little bits of the
wing drop out, as if punched. The markings on the under wings have a
tendency to run into arches, one arch above the other. The tendency to
curve may be traced everywhere in things as wide apart as a flower-bird's
wing and the lines on a scallop-shell.