prophetess Mother Shipton, and bearing an undecipherable inscription. One
of her rhymes is well remembered in the neighbourhood:--
When Watchet is all washed down
Williton shall be a seaport town.
This is founded on the gradual encroachment of the sea, which is a fact,
but it will be some time yet before masts are seen at Williton.
At Dunster there is a curious mill which has two wheels, overshot, one in
front of the other, and both driven by the same sluice. It as very hot as
we stood by the wheels; the mill dust came forth and sprinkled the
foliage so that the leaves seemed scarce able to breathe; it drifted
almost to the stream hard by, where trout were watching under a cloud of
midges dancing over the ripples. They look as if entangled in an
inextricable maze, but if you let your eye travel, say to the right, as
you would follow the flight of a bird, you find that one side of the
current of insects flies up that way, and the other side returns. They go
to and fro in regular order, exactly like the fashionable folk in Rotten
Row, but the two ranks pass so quickly that looked at both together the
vision cannot separate them, they are faster than the impression on the
retina.
At Selworthy a footpath leads up through a wood on Selworthy Hill, and as
it ascends, always at the side of the slope, gradually opens out what is
perhaps the finest view of Dunkery Beacon, the Dunkery range, and that
edge of Exmoor on to the shore of the sea. Across the deep vale the
Exmoor mountains rise and reach on either hand, immense breadths of dark
heather, deep coombes filled with black shadow, and rounded masses that
look dry and heated. To the right is the gleaming sea, and the distant
sound of the surge comes up to the wood. The headland and its three
curves boldly project into the sunlit waters; from its foot many a
gallant stag hard pressed by the hounds has swum out into the track of
passing vessels. Selworthy Woods were still in the afternoon heat; except
for the occasional rustle of a rabbit or of a pheasant, there was no
evidence of life; the sound of the sea was faint and soon lost among the
ferns. Slowly, very slowly, great Dunkery grew less hard of aspect,
shadows drew along at the base, while again the declining sun from time
to time sent his beams into valleys till now dark. The thatched house at
Holnicote by the foot of Selworthy much interested me; it is one of the
last of thatched houses inhabited by a gentleman and landed proprietor.
Sir Thomas Acland, who resides here, is a very large owner. Thatch
prevails on his estates; thatched cottages, thatched farmhouses, and his
thatched mansion. In the coolness of the evening the birds began to sing
and squirrels played across the lawn in front of Holnicote House.
Humble-bees hummed in the grass and visited the flowers of the holly
bushes. Thrushes sang, and chaffinches, and, sweetest of all, if simplest
in notes, the greenfinches talked and courted in the trees. Two cuckoos
called in different directions, wood-pigeons raised their voices in
Selworthy Wood, and rooks went over cawing in their deliberate way. In
the level meadow from among the tall grasses and white-flowering wild
parsley a landrail called 'crake, crake,' ceaselessly. There was a sense
of rest and quiet, and with it a joyousness of bird-life, such as should
be about an English homestead.
AN ENGLISH DEER-PARK.
There is an old park wall which follows the highway in all its turns with
such fidelity of curve that for some two miles it seems as if the road
had been fitted to the wall. Against it hawthorn bushes have grown up at
intervals, and in the course of years their trunks have become almost
timber. Ivy has risen round some of these, and, connecting them with the
wall, gives them at a distance the appearance of green bastions. Large
stems of ivy, too, have flattened themselves upon the wall, as if with
arched back they were striving like athletes to overthrow it. Mosses,
brown in summer, soft green in winter, cover it where there is shadow,
and if pulled up take with them some of the substance of the stone or
mortar like a crust, A dry, dusty fern may perhaps be found now and then
on the low bank at the foot--a fern that would rather be within the park
than thus open to the heated south with the wall reflecting the sunshine
behind. On the other side of the road, over the thin hedge, there is a
broad plain of corn-fields. Coming from these the labourers have found
out, or made, notches in the wall; so that, by putting the iron-plated
toes of their boots in, and holding to the ivy, they can scale it and
shorten their long trudge home to the village. In the spring the larks,
passing from the green corn to the pasture within, fluttering over with
gently vibrating wings and singing as they daintily go, sometimes settle
on the top. There too the yellow-hammers stay. In the crevices blue tits
build deep inside passages that abruptly turn, and baffle egg-stealers.
Partridges come over with a whir, but just clearing the top, gliding on
extended wings, which to the eye look like a slight brown crescent. The
waggoners who go by know that the great hawthorn bastions are favourite
resorts of wood-pigeons and missel-thrushes. The haws are ripe in autumn
and the ivy berries in spring, so that the bastions yield a double crop.
A mallow, the mauve petals of which even the dust of the road cannot
impair, flowers here and there on the dry bank below, and broad
moon-daisies among the ripe and almost sapless grass of midsummer.
If any one climbed the wall from the park and looked across at the plain
of corn-fields in early spring, everywhere there would be seen brown dots
in the air--above the first slender green blades; above the freshly
turned dark furrows; above the distant plough, the share of which,
polished like a silver mirror by friction with the clods, reflects the
sunshine, flashing a heliograph message of plenty from the earth;
everywhere brown dots, and each a breathing creature--larks ceaselessly
singing, and all unable to set forth their joy. Swift as is the vibration
of their throats, they cannot pour the notes fast enough to express their
eager welcome. As a shower falls from the sky, so falls the song of the
larks. There is no end to them: they are everywhere; over every acre away
across the plain to the downs, and up on the highest hill. Every crust of
English bread has been sung over at its birth in the green blade by a
lark.
If one looked again in June, the clover itself, a treasure of beauty and
sweetness, would be out, and the south wind would come over acres of
flower--acres of clover, beans, tares, purple trifolium, far-away crimson
sainfoin (brightest of all on the hills), scarlet poppies, pink
convolvulus, yellow charlock, and green wheat coming into ear. In August,
already squares would be cut into the wheat, and the sheaves rising,
bound about the middle, hour-glass fashion; some breadths of wheat
yellow, some golden-bronze; besides these, white barley and oats, and
beans blackening. Turtle-doves would be in the stubble, for they love to
be near the sheaves. The hills after or during rain look green and near;
on sunny days, a far and faint blue. Sometimes the sunset is caught in
the haze on them and lingers, like a purple veil about the ridges. In the
dusk hares come heedlessly along; the elder-bushes gleam white with
creamy petals through the night.
Sparrows and partridges alike dust themselves in the white dust, an inch
deep, of midsummer, in the road between the wall and the corn--a pitiless
Sahara road to traverse at noonday in July, when the air is still and you
walk in a hollow way, the yellow wheat on one side and the wall on the
other. There is shade in the park within, but a furnace of sunlight
without--weariness to the eyes and feet from glare and dust. The wall
winds with the highway and cannot be escaped. It goes up the slight
elevations and down the slopes; it has become settled down and bound with
time. But presently there is a steeper dip, and at the bottom, in a
narrow valley, a streamlet flows out from the wheat into the park. A
spring rises at the foot of the down a mile away, and the channel it has
formed winds across the plain. It is narrow and shallow; nothing but a
larger furrow, filled in winter by the rains rushing off the fields, and
in summer a rill scarce half an inch deep. The wheat hides the channel
completely, and as the wind blows, the tall ears bend over it. At the
edge of the bank pink convolvulus twines round the stalks and the
green-flowered buckwheat gathers several together. The sunlight cannot
reach the stream, which runs in shadow, deep down below the wheat-ears,
over which butterflies wander. Forget-me-nots flower under the banks;
grasses lean on the surface; willow-herbs, tall and stiff, stand up; but
out from the tangled and interlaced fibres the water flows as clear as it
rose by the hill. There is a culvert under the road, and on the opposite
side the wall admits the stream by an arch jealously guarded by bars. In
this valley the wall is lower and thicker and less covered at the top
with ivy, so that where the road rises over the culvert you can see into
the park. The stream goes rounding away through the sward, bending
somewhat to the right, where the ground gradually descends. On the left
side, at some distance, stands a row of full-grown limes, and through
these there is a glimpse of the old manor-house. It is called the old
house because the requirements of modern days have rendered it unsuitable
for an establishment. A much larger mansion has been erected in another
part of the park nearer the village, with a facade visible from the
highway. The old manor-house is occupied by the land-steward, or, as he
prefers to be called, the deputy-forester, who is also the oldest and
largest tenant on the estate. It is he who rules the park. The labourers
and keepers call him the 'squire.'
Now the old squire's favourite resort is the window-seat in the gun-room,
because thence he can see a section of the highway, which, where it
crosses the streamlet, comes within half a mile of the house. There the
hollow and the lower wall permit any one at this window to obtain a view
of the road on one of the sides of the valley. At this declivity it
almost faces the house, and whether the passers-by are going to the
market town, or returning to the village, they cannot escape observation.
If they come from the town, the steep descent compels them to walk their
horses down it; if from the village, they have a hard pull up. So the
oaken window-seat in the gun-room is as polished and smooth as an old
saddle; for if the squire is indoors, he is certain to be there. He often
rests there after half an hour's work on one or other of the guns in the
rack; for, though he seldom uses but one, he likes to take the locks to
pieces upon a little bench which he has fitted up, and where he has a
vice, tools, a cartridge-loading apparatus, and so forth, from which the
room acquired its name. With the naked eye, however, as the road is half
a mile distant, it is not possible to distinguish persons, except in
cases of very pronounced individuality. Nevertheless old 'Ettles,' the
keeper, always declared that he could see a hare run up the down from the
park, say a mile and a half. This may be true; but in the gun-room there
is a field-glass, said to have been used at the siege of Seringapatam,
which the squire can bring to bear upon the road in an instant, for from
constant use at the same focus there is a rim round the tarnished brass.
No time, therefore, need be lost in trials; it can be drawn out to the
well-known mark at once. The window itself is large, but there is a
casement in it,--a lesser window,--which can be thrown open with a mere
twist of the thumb on the button, and as it swings open it catches itself
on a hasp. Then the field-glass examines the distant wayfarer.
When people have dwelt for generations in one place they come to know the
history of their immediate world. There was not a waggon that went by
without a meaning to the squire. One perhaps brought a load of wool from
the downs: it was old Hobbes's, whose affairs he had known these forty
years. Another, with wheat, was Lambourne's team: he lost heavily in
1879, the wet year. The family and business concerns of every man of any
substance were as well known to the squire as if they had been written in
a chronicle. So, too, he knew the family tendency, as it were, of the
cottagers. So and So's lads were always tall, another's girls always
tidy. If you employed a member of this family, you were sure to be well
served; if of another, you were sure to be cheated in some way. Men vary
like trees: an ash sapling is always straight, the bough of an oak
crooked, a fir full of knots. A man, said the squire, should be straight
like a gun. This section of the highway gave him the daily news of the
village as the daily papers give us the news of the world. About two
hundred yards from the window the row of limes began, each tree as tall
and large as an elm, having grown to its full natural size. The last of
the row came very near obstructing the squire's line of sight, and it
once chanced that some projecting branches by degrees stretched out
across his field of view. This circumstance caused him much mental
trouble; for, having all his life consistently opposed any thinning out
or trimming of trees, he did not care to issue an order which would
almost confess a mistake. Besides which, why only these particular
branches?--the object would be so apparent. The squire, while conversing
with Ettles, twice, as if unconsciously, directed his steps beneath these
limes, and, striking the offending boughs with his stick, remarked that
they grew extremely fast. But the keeper, usually so keen to take a hint,
only answered that the lime was the quickest wood to grow of which he
knew. In his heart he enjoyed the squire's difficulty. Finally the
squire, legalising his foible by recognising it, fetched a ladder and a
hatchet, and chopped off the boughs with his own hands.
It was from the gun-room window that the squire observed the change of
the seasons and the flow of time. The larger view he often had on
horseback of miles of country did not bring it home to him. The old
familiar trees, the sward, the birds, these told him of the advancing or
receding sun. As he reclined in the corner of the broad window-seat, his
feet up, and drowsy, of a summer afternoon, he heard the languid cawing
of an occasional rook, for rooks are idle in the heated hours of the day.
He was aware, without conscious observation, of the swift, straight line
drawn across the sky by a wood-pigeon. The pigeons were continually to
and fro the cornfields outside the wall to the south and the woods to the
north, and their shortcut route passed directly over the limes. To the
limes the bees went when their pale yellow flowers appeared. Not many
butterflies floated over the short sward, which was fed too close for
flowers. The butterflies went to the old garden, rising over the high
wall as if they knew beforehand of the flowers that were within. Under
the sun the short grass dried as it stood, and with the sap went its
green. There came a golden tint on that part of the wheat-fields which
could be seen over the road. A few more days--how few they seemed!--and
there was a spot of orange on the beech in a little copse near the limes.
The bucks were bellowing in the forest: as the leaves turned colour their
loves began and the battles for the fair. Again a few days and the snow
came, and rendered visible the slope of the ground in the copse between
the trunks of the trees: the ground there was at other times indistinct
under brambles and withered fern. The squire left the window for his
arm-chair by the fire; but if presently, as often happens when frost
quickly follows a snow-storm, the sun shone out and a beam fell on the
wall, he would get up and look out. Every footstep in the snow contained
a shadow cast by the side, and the dazzling white above and the dark
within produced a blue tint. Yonder by the limes the rabbits ventured out
for a stray bunch of grass not quite covered by the drift, tired, no
doubt, of the bitter bark of the ash-rods that they had nibbled in the
night. As they scampered, each threw up a white cloud of snow-dust behind
him. Yet a few days and the sward grew greener. The pale winter hue,
departing as the spring mist came trailing over, caught for a while in
the copse, and, lingering there, the ruddy buds and twigs of the limes
were refreshed. The larks rose a little way to sing in the moist air. A
rook, too, perching on the top of a low tree, attempted other notes than
his monotonous caw. So absorbed was he in his song that you might have
walked under him unnoticed. He uttered four or five distinct sounds that
would have formed a chant, but he paused between each as if uncertain of
his throat. Then, as the sun shone, with a long-drawn 'ca-awk' he flew to
find his mate, for it would soon be time to repair the nest in the limes.
The butterflies came again and the year was completed, yet it seemed but
a few days to the squire. Perhaps if he lived for a thousand years, after
a while he would wonder at the rapidity with which the centuries slipped
by.
By the limes there was a hollow--the little circular copse was on the
slope--and jays came to it as they worked from tree to tree across the
park. Their screeching often echoed through the open casement of the
gunroom. A faint mark on the sward trended towards this hollow; it was a
trail made by the squire, one of whose favourite strolls was in this
direction. This summer morning, taking his gun, he followed the trail
once more.
The grass was longer and coarser under the shadow of the limes, and
upborne on the branches were numerous little sticks which had dropped
from the rookery above. Sometimes there was an overthrown nest like a
sack of twigs turned out on the turf, such as the hedgers rake together
after fagoting. Looking up into the trees on a summer's day not a bird
could be seen, till suddenly there was a quick 'jack-jack' above, as a
daw started from his hole or from where the great boughs joined the
trunk. The squire's path went down the hollow till it deepened into a
thinly wooded coomb, through which ran the streamlet coming from the
wheat-fields under the road. As the coomb opened, the squire went along a
hedge near but not quite to the top. Years ago the coomb had been
quarried for chalk, and the pits were only partly concealed by the
bushes: the yellow spikes of wild mignonette flourished on the very
hedge, and even half way down the precipices. From the ledge above, the
eye could see into these and into the recesses between the brushwood. The
squire's son, Mr. Martin, used to come here with his rook-rifle, for he
could always get a shot at a rabbit in the hollow. They could not see him
approach; and the ball, if it missed, did no damage, being caught as in a
bowl. Rifles in England, even when their range is but a hundred yards or
so, are not to be used without caution. Some one may be in the hedge
nutting, or a labourer may be eating his luncheon in the shelter; it is
never possible to tell who may be behind the screen of brambles through
which the bullet slips so easily. Into these hollows Martin could shoot
with safety. As for the squire, he did not approve of rifles. He adhered
to his double-barrel; and if a buck had to be killed, he depended on his
smoothbore to carry a heavy ball forty yards with fair accuracy. The
fawns were knocked over with a wire cartridge unless Mr. Martin was in
the way--he liked to try a rifle. Even in summer the old squire generally
had his double-barrel with him--perhaps he might come across a weasel, or
a stoat, or a crow. That was his excuse; but, in fact, without a gun the
woods lost half their meaning to him. With it he could stand and watch
the buck grazing in the glade, or a troop of fawns--sweet little
creatures--so demurely feeding down the grassy slope from the beeches.
Already at midsummer the nuts were full formed on the beeches; the green
figs, too, he remembered were on the old fig-tree trained against the
warm garden wall. The horse-chestnuts showed the little green knobs which
would soon enlarge and hang all prickly, like the spiked balls of a
holy-water sprinkle, such as was once used in the wars. Of old the folk,
having no books, watched every living thing, from the moss to the oak,
from the mouse to the deer; and all that we know now of animals and
plants is really founded upon their acute and patient observation. How
many years it took even to find out a good salad may be seen from ancient
writings, wherein half the plants about the hedges are recommended as
salad herbs: dire indeed would be our consternation if we had to eat
them. As the beech-nuts appear, and the horse-chestnuts enlarge, and the
fig swells, the apples turn red and become visible in the leafy branches
of the apple-trees. Like horses, deer are fond of apples, and in former
times, when deer-stealing was possible, they were often decoyed with
them.