4. The black alder (_Sialis nigra_, or _Lutaria_).

What shall be said, or not be said, of this queen of flies? And what of

Ephemera, who never mentions her? His alder fly is—I know not what;

certainly not that black alder, shorm fly, Lord Stowell’s fly, or

hunch-back, which kills the monsters of the deep, surpassed only by the

green drake for one fortnight; but surpassing him in this, that she will

kill on till September, from that happy day on which

‘You find her out on every stalk

Whene’er you take a river walk,

When swifts at eve begin to hawk.’

O thou beloved member of the brute creation! Songs have been written in

praise of thee; statues would ere now have been erected to thee, had that

hunch back and those flabby wings of thine been ‘susceptible of artistic

treatment.’ But ugly thou art in the eyes of the uninitiated vulgar; a

little stumpy old maid toddling about the world in a black bonnet and a

brown cloak, laughed at by naughty boys, but doing good wherever thou

comest, and leaving sweet memories behind thee; so sweet that the trout

will rise at the ghost or sham of thee, for pure love of thy past

kindnesses to them, months after thou hast departed from this sublunary

sphere. What hours of bliss do I not owe to thee! How have I seen, in

the rich meads of Wey, after picking out wretched quarter-pounders all

the morning on March-brown and red-hackle, the great trout rush from

every hover to welcome thy first appearance among the sedges and

buttercups! How often, late in August, on Thames, on Test, on Loddon

heads, have I seen the three and four pound fish prefer thy dead image to

any live reality. Have I not seen poor old Si. Wilder, king of Thames

fishermen (now gone home to his rest), shaking his huge sides with

delight over thy mighty deeds, as his fourteen-inch whiskers fluttered in

the breeze like the horsetail standard of some great Bashaw, while

crystal Thames murmured over the white flints on Monkey Island shallow,

and the soft breeze sighed in the colossal poplar spires, and the great

trout rose and rose, and would not cease, at thee, my alder-fly? Have I

not seen, after a day in which the earth below was iron, and the heavens

above as brass, as the three-pounders would have thee, and thee alone, in

the purple August dusk, old Moody’s red face grow redder with excitement,

half proud at having advised me to ‘put on’ thee, half fearful lest we

should catch all my lady’s pet trout in one evening? Beloved alder-fly!

would that I could give thee a soul (if indeed thou hast not one already,

thou, and all things which live), and make thee happy in all æons to

come! But as it is, such immortality as I can I bestow on thee here, in

small return for all the pleasant days thou hast bestowed on me.

Bah! I am becoming poetical; let us think how to tie an alder-fly.

The common tie is good enough. A brown mallard, or dark hen-pheasant

tail for wing, a black hackle for legs, and the necessary peacock-herl

body. A better still is that of Jones Jones Beddgelert, the famous

fishing clerk of Snowdonia, who makes the wing of dappled peacock-hen,

and puts the black hackle on before the wings, in order to give the

peculiar hunch-backed shape of the natural fly. Many a good fish has

this tie killed. But the best pattern of all is tied from the mottled

wing-feather of an Indian bustard; generally used, when it can be

obtained, only for salmon flies. The brown and fawn check pattern of

this feather seems to be peculiarly tempting to trout, especially to the

large trout of Thames; and in every river where I have tried the alder, I

have found the bustard wing _facile princeps_ among all patterns of the

fly.

Of palmers (the hairy caterpillars) are many sorts. Ephemera gives by

far the best list yet published. Ronalds has also three good ones, but

whether they are really taken by trout instead of the particular natural

insects which he mentions, is not very certain. The little

coch-a-bonddhu palmer, so killing upon moor streams, may probably be

taken for young larvæ of the fox and oak-egger moths, abundant on all

moors, upon trefoils, and other common plants; but the lowland

caterpillars are so abundant and so various in colour that trout must be

good entomologists to distinguish them. Some distinction they certainly

make; for one palmer will kill where another does not: but this depends a

good deal on the colour of the water; the red palmer, being easily seen,

will kill almost anywhere and any when, simply because it is easily seen;

and both the grizzle and brown palmer may be made to kill by adding to

the tail a tuft of red floss silk; for red, it would seem, has the same

exciting effect on fish which it has upon many quadrupeds, possibly

because it is the colour of flesh. The mackerel will often run greedily

at a strip of scarlet cloth; and the most killing pike-fly I ever used

had a body made of remnants of the huntsman’s new ‘pink.’ Still, there

are local palmers. On Thames, for instance, I have seldom failed with

the grizzled palmer, while the brown has seldom succeeded, and the

usually infallible red never. There is one more palmer worth trying,

which Scotsmen, I believe, call the Royal Charlie; a coch-a-bonddhu or

furnace hackle, over a body of gold-coloured floss silk, ribbed with

broad gold tinsel. Both in Devonshire and in Hampshire this will kill

great quantities of fish, wherever furzy or otherwise wild banks or

oak-woods afford food for the oak-egger and fox moths, which children

call ‘Devil’s Gold Rings,’ and Scotsmen ‘Hairy Oubits.’

Two hints more about palmers. They must not be worked on the top of the

water, but used as stretchers, and allowed to sink as living caterpillars

do; and next, they can hardly be too large or rough, provided that you

have skill enough to get them into the water without a splash. I have

killed well on Thames with one full three inches long, armed of course

with two small hooks. With palmers—and perhaps with all baits—the rule

is, the bigger the bait the bigger the fish. A large fish does not care

to move except for a good mouthful. The best pike-fisher I know prefers

a half-pound chub when he goes after one of his fifteen-pound jack; and

the largest pike I ever ran—and lost, alas!—who seemed of any weight

above twenty pounds, was hooked on a live white fish of full

three-quarters of a pound. Still, no good angler will despise the minute

North-country flies. In Yorkshire they are said to kill the large chalk

trout of Driffield as well as the small limestone and grit fish of

Craven; if so, the gentlemen of the Driffield Club, who are said to think

nothing of killing three-pound fish on midge flies and cobweb tackle,

must be (as canny Yorkshiremen are likely enough to be) the best anglers

in England.

In one spot only in Yorkshire, as far as I know, do our large chalk flies

kill: namely, in the lofty limestone tarn of Malham. There palmers,

caperers, and rough black flies, of the largest Thames and Kennet sizes,

seem the only attractive baits: and for this reason, that they are the

flies of the place. The cinnamon Phryganea comes up abundantly from

among the stones; and the large peat moss to the west of the tarn

abounds, as usual, in house-flies and bluebottles, and in the

caterpillars of the fox and oak-egger moths: another proof that the most

attractive flies are imitations of the real insects. On the other hand,

there are said to be times when midges, and nothing else, will rise fish

on some chalk streams. The delicate black hackle which Mr. Stewart

praises so highly (and which should always be tied on a square sneck-bend

hook) will kill in June and July; and on the Itchen, at Winchester,

hardly any flies but small ones are used after the green drake is off.

But there is one sad objection against these said midges—what becomes of

your fish when hooked on one in a stream full of weeds (as all chalk

streams are after June), save

‘One struggle more, and I am free

From pangs which rend my heart in twain’?

Winchester fishers have confessed to me that they lose three good fish

out of every four in such cases; and as it seems pretty clear that chalk

fish approve of no medium between very large flies and very small ones, I

advise the young angler, whose temper is not yet schooled into perfect

resignation, to spare his own feelings by fishing with a single large

fly—say the governor in the forenoon, the caperer in the evening,

regardless of the clearness of the water. I have seen flies large enough

for April, raise fish excellently in Test and other clear streams in July

and August; and, what is more, drag them up out of the weeds and into the

landing-net, where midges would have lost them in the first scuffle.

So much for our leading chalk flies; all copies of live insects. Of the

entomology of mountain streams little as yet is known: but a few

scattered hints may suffice to show that in them, as well as in the chalk

rivers, a little natural science might help the angler.

The well-known fact that smaller flies are required on the moors than in

the lowlands, is easily explained by the fact that poorer soils and

swifter streams produce smaller insects. The large Phryganeæ, or true

caperers, whose caddis-baits love still pools and stagnant ditches, are

there rare; and the office of water-scavenger is fulfilled by the

Rhyacophiles (torrent-lovers) and Hydropsyches, whose tiny pebble-houses

are fixed to the stones to resist the violence of the summer floods. In

and out of them the tiny larva runs to find food, making in addition, in

some species, galleries of earth along the surface of the stones, in

which he takes his walks abroad in full security. In any of the brown

rivulets of Windsor forest, towards the middle of summer, the

pebble-houses of these little creatures may be seen in millions, studding

every stone. To the Hydropsyches (species _montana_? or _variegata_? of

Pictet) belongs that curious little Welsh fly, known in Snowdon by the

name of the Gwynnant, whose tesselated wing is best imitated by brown

mallard feather, and who so swarms in the lower lakes of Snowdon, that it

is often necessary to use three of them on the line at once, all other

flies being useless. It is perhaps the abundance of these tesselated

Hydropsyches which makes the mallard wing the most useful in mountain

districts, as the abundance of the fawn and grey Phryganidæ in the south

of England makes the woodcock wing justly the favourite. The

Rhyacophiles, on the other hand, are mostly of a shining soot-grey, or

almost black. These may be seen buzzing in hundreds over the pools on a

wet evening, and with them the sooty Mystacides, called silverhorns in

Scotland, from their antennæ, which are of preposterous length, and

ringed prettily enough with black and white. These delicate fairies make

moveable cases, or rather pipes, of the finest sand, generally curved,

and resembling in shape the Dentalium shell. Guarded by these, they hang

in myriads on the smooth ledges of rock, where the water runs gently a

few inches deep. These are abundant everywhere: but I never saw so many

of them as in the exquisite Cother brook, near Middleham, in Yorkshire.

In that delicious glen, while wading up beneath the ash-fringed crags of

limestone, out of which the great ring ouzel (too wild, it seemed, to be

afraid of man) hopped down fearlessly to feed upon the strand, or past

flower-banks where the golden globe-flower, and the great blue geranium,

and the giant campanula bloomed beneath the white tassels of the

bird-cherry, I could not tread upon the limestone slabs without crushing

at every step hundreds of the delicate Mystacide tubes, which literally

paved the shallow edge of the stream, and which would have been

metamorphosed in due time into small sooty moth-like fairies, best

represented, I should say, by the soft black-hackle which Mr. Stewart

recommends as the most deadly of North-country flies. Not to these,

however, but to the Phryganeæ (who, when sticks and pebbles fail, often

make their tubes of sand, e.g. _P. flava_), should I refer the red-cow

fly, which is almost the only autumn killer in the Dartmoor streams. A

red cowhair body and a woodcock wing is his type, and let those who want

West-country trout remember him.

Another fly, common on some rocky streams, but more scarce in the chalk,

is the ‘Yellow Sally,’ which entomologists, with truer appreciation of

its colour, call _Chrysoperla viridis_. It may be bought at the shops;

at least a yellow something of that name, but bearing no more resemblance

to the delicate yellow-green natural fly, with its warm grey wings, than

a Pre-Raphaelite portrait to the human being for whom it is meant.

Copied, like most trout flies, from some traditional copy by the hands of

Cockney maidens, who never saw a fly in their lives, the mistake of a

mistake, a sham raised to its tenth power, it stands a signal proof that

anglers will never get good flies till they learn a little entomology

themselves, and then teach it to the tackle makers. But if it cannot be

bought, it can at least be made; and I should advise everyone who fishes

rocky streams in May and June, to dye for himself some hackles of a

brilliant greenish-yellow, and in the most burning sunshine, when fish

seem inclined to rise at no fly whatsoever, examine the boulders for the

Chrysoperla, who runs over them, her wings laid flat on her back, her

yellow legs moving as rapidly as a forest-fly’s; try to imitate her, and

use her on the stream, or on the nearest lake. Certain it is that in

Snowdon this fly and the Gwynnant Hydropsyche will fill a creel in the

most burning north-easter, when all other flies are useless; a sufficient

disproof of the Scotch theory—that fish do not prefer the fly which is on

the water. {74}

Another disproof may be found in the ‘fern web,’ ‘bracken clock’ of

Scotland; the tiny cockchafer, with brown wing-cases and dark-green

thorax, which abounds in some years in the hay-meadows, on the fern, or

on the heads of umbelliferous flowers. The famous Loch-Awe fly,

described as an alder-fly with a rail’s wing, seems to be nothing but

this fat little worthy: but the best plan is to make the wings, either

buzz or hackle, of the bright neck-feather of the cock pheasant, thus

gaining the metallic lustre of the beetle tribe. Tied thus, either in

Devonshire or Snowdon, few flies surpass him when he is out. His fatness

proves an attraction which the largest fish cannot resist.

The Ephemeræ, too, are far more important in rapid and rocky streams than

in the deeper, stiller waters of the south. It is worth while for a good

fish to rise at them there; the more luxurious chalk trout will seldom

waste himself upon them, unless he be lying in shallow water, and has but

to move a few inches upward.

But these Ephemeræ, like all other naiads, want working out. The species

which Mr. Ronalds gives, are most of them, by his own confession, very

uncertain. Of the Phryganidæ he seems to know little or nothing,

mentioning but two species out of the two hundred which are said to

inhabit Britain; and his land flies and beetles are in several cases

quite wrongly named. However, the professed entomologists know but

little of the mountain flies; and the angler who would help to work them

out would confer a benefit on science, as well as on the ‘gentle craft.’

As yet the only approach to such a good work which I know of, is a little

book on the trout flies of Ripon, with excellent engravings of the

natural fly. The author’s name is not given; but the book may be got at

Ripon, and most valuable it must be to any North-country fisherman.

But come, we must not waste our time in talk, for here is a cloud over

the sun, and plenty more coming up behind, before a ruffling south-west

breeze, as Shelley has it—

‘Calling white clouds like flocks to feed in air.’

Let us up and onward to that long still reach, which is now curling up

fast before the breeze; there are large fish to be taken, one or two at

least, even before the fly comes on. You need not change your flies; the

cast which you have on—governor, and black alder—will take, if anything

will. Only do not waste your time and muscle, as you are beginning to

do, by hurling your flies wildly into the middle of the stream, on the

chance of a fish being there. Fish are there, no doubt, but not feeding

ones. They are sailing about and enjoying the warmth; but nothing more.

If you want to find the hungry fish and to kill them, you must stand well

back from the bank—or kneel down, if you are really in earnest about

sport; and throw within a foot of the shore, above you or below (but if

possible above), with a line short enough to manage easily; by which I

mean short enough to enable you to lift your flies out of the water at

each throw without hooking them in the docks and comfrey which grow along

the brink. You must learn to raise your hand at the end of each throw,

and lift the flies clean over the land-weeds: or you will lose time, and

frighten all the fish, by crawling to the bank to unhook them. Believe

me, one of the commonest mistakes into which young anglers fall is that

of fishing in ‘skipjack broad;’ in plain English, in mid-stream, where

few fish, and those little ones, are to be caught. Those who wish for

large fish work close under the banks, and seldom take a mid-stream cast,

unless they see a fish rise there.

The reason of this is simple. Walking up the Strand in search of a

dinner, a reasonable man will keep to the trottoir, and look in at the

windows close to him, instead of parading up the mid-street. And even so

do all wise and ancient trout. The banks are their shops; and thither

they go for their dinners, driving their poor little children tyrannously

out into the mid-river to fare as hap may hap. Over these children the

tyro wastes his time, flogging the stream across and across for weary

hours, while the big papas and mammas are comfortably under the bank,

close at his feet, grubbing about the sides for water crickets, and not

refusing at times a leech or a young crayfish, but perfectly ready to

take a fly if you offer one large and tempting enough. They do but act

on experience. All the largest surface-food—beetles, bees, and

palmers—comes off the shore; and all the caperers and alders, after

emerging from their pupa-cases, swim to the shore in order to change into

the perfect insect in the open air. The perfect insects haunt sunny

sedges and tree-stems—whence the one is often called the sedge, the other

the alder-fly—and from thence drop into the trouts’ mouths; and within

six inches of the bank will the good angler work, all the more sedulously

and even hopefully if he sees no fish rising. I have known good men say

that they had rather _not_ see fish on the rise, if the day be good; that

they can get surer sport, and are less troubled with small fish, by

making them rise; and certain it is, that a day when the fish are rising

all over the stream is generally one of disappointment.

Another advantage of bank fishing is, that the fish sees the fly only for

a moment. He has no long gaze at it, as it comes to him across the

water. It either drops exactly over his nose, or sweeps down the stream

straight upon him. He expects it to escape on shore the next moment, and

chops at it fiercely and hastily, instead of following and examining.

Add to this the fact that when he is under the bank there is far less

chance of his seeing you; and duly considering these things, you will

throw away no more time in drawing, at least in chalk-streams, flies over

the watery wastes, to be snapped at now and then by herring-sized

pinkeens. In rocky streams, where the quantity of bank food is far

smaller, this rule will perhaps not hold good; though who knows not that

his best fish are generally taken under some tree from which the little

caterpillars, having determined on slow and deliberate suicide are

letting themselves down gently by a silken thread into the mouth of the

spotted monarch, who has but to sail about and about, and pick them up

one by one as they touch the stream?—A sight which makes one think—as

does a herd of swine crunching acorns, each one of which might have

become a ‘builder oak’—how Nature is never more magnificent than in her

waste.

The next mistake, natural enough to the laziness of fallen man, is that

of fishing down-stream, and not up. What Mr. Stewart says on this point

should be read by every tyro. By fishing up-stream, even against the

wind, he will on an average kill twice as many trout as when fishing

down. If trout are out and feeding on the shallows, up or down will

simply make the difference of fish or no fish; and even in deeps, where

the difference in the chance of not being seen is not so great, many more

fish will be hooked by the man who fishes up-stream, simply because when

he strikes he pulls the hook into the trout’s mouth instead of out of it.

But he who would obey Mr. Stewart in fishing up-stream must obey him also

in discarding his light London rod, which is in three cases out of four

as weak and ‘floppy’ in the middle as a waggon whip, and get to himself a

stiff and powerful rod, strong enough to spin a minnow; whereby he will

obtain, after some weeks of aching muscles, two good things—a fore-arm

fit for a sculptor’s model, and trout hooked and killed, instead of

pricked and lost.

Killed, as well as hooked; for how large trout are to be killed in a

weedy chalk-stream without a stiff rod which will take them down, is a

question yet unsolved. Even the merest Cockney will know, if he thinks,

that weeds float with their points down-stream; and that therefore if a

fish is to be brought through them without entangling, he must be

‘combed’ through them in the same direction. But how is this to be done,

if a fish be hooked below you on a weak rod? With a strong rod indeed

you can, at the chance of tearing out the hook, keep him by main force on

the top of the water, till you have run past him and below him,

shortening your line anyhow in loops—there is no time to wind it up with

the reel—and then do what you might have done comfortably at first had

you been fishing up—viz., bring him down-stream, and let the water run

through his gills, and drown him. But with a weak rod—Alas for the tyro!

He catches one glimpse of a silver side plunging into the depths; he

finds his rod double in his hand; he finds fish and flies stop suddenly

somewhere; he rushes down to the spot, sees weeds waving around his line,

and guesses from what he feels and sees that the fish is grubbing

up-stream through them, five feet under water. He tugs downwards and

backwards, but too late; the drop-fly is fast wrapt in Ceratophyllum and

Glyceria, Callitriche and Potamogeton, and half-a-dozen more horrid

things with long names and longer stems; and what remains but the fate of

Campbell’s Lord Ullin?—

‘The waters wild went o’er his child,

And he was left lamenting.’

Unless, in fact, large fish can be got rapidly down-stream, the chance of

killing them is very small; and therefore the man who fishes a

willow-fringed brook downward, is worthy of no crown but Ophelia’s,

besides being likely enough, if he attempt to get down to his fish, to

share her fate. The best fisherman, however, will come to shame in

streams bordered by pollard willows, and among queer nooks, which can be

only fished down-stream. I saw, but the other day, a fish hooked

cleverly enough, by throwing to an inch where he ought to have been, and

indeed was, and from the only point whence the throw could be made. Out

of the water he came, head and tail, the moment he felt the hook, and

showed a fair side over two pounds weight . . . . and then? Instead of

running away, he ran right at the fisherman, for reasons which were but

too patent. Between man and fish were ten yards of shallow, then a deep

weedy shelf, and then the hole which was his house. And for that weedy

shelf the spotted monarch made, knowing that there he could drag himself

clear of the fly, as perhaps he had done more than once before.

What was to be done? Take him down-stream through the weed? Alas, on

the man’s left hand an old pollard leant into the water, barring all

downward movement. Jump in and run round? He had rather to run back

from the bank, from fear of a loose line; the fish was coming at him so

fast that there was no time to wind up. Safe into the weeds hurls the

fish; the man, as soon as he finds the fish stop, jumps in mid-leg deep,

and staggers up to him, in hopes of clearing; finds the dropper fast in

the weeds, and the stretcher, which had been in the fish’s mouth,

wantoning somewhere in the depths—_Quid plura_? Let us draw a veil over

that man’s return to shore.

No mortal skill could have killed that fish. Mortal luck (which is

sometimes, as most statesmen know, very great) might have done it, if the

fish had been irretrievably fast hooked; as, per contra, I once saw a

fish of nearly four pounds hooked just above an alder bush, on the same

bank as the angler. The stream was swift: there was a great weed-bed

above; the man had but about ten feet square of swift water to kill the

trout in. Not a foot down-stream could he take him; in fact, he had to

pull him hard up-stream to keep him out of his hover in the alder roots.

Three times that fish leapt into the air nearly a yard high; and yet, so

merciful is luck, and so firmly was he hooked, in five breathless minutes

he was in the landing-net; and when he was there and safe ashore, just of

the shape and colour of a silver spoon, his captor lay down panting upon

the bank, and with Sir Hugh Evans, manifested ‘a great disposition to

cry.’ But it was a beautiful sight. A sharper round between man and

fish never saw I fought in Merry England.

I saw once, however, a cleverer, though not a more dashing feat. A handy

little fellow (I wonder where he is now?) hooked a trout of nearly three

pounds with his dropper, and at the same moment a post with his

stretcher. What was to be done? To keep the fish pulling on him, and

not on the post. And that, being favoured by standing on a four-foot

bank, he did so well that he tired out the fish in some six feet square

of water, stopping him and turning him beautifully whenever he tried to

run, till I could get in to him with the landing-net. That was

five-and-thirty years since. If the little man has progressed in his

fishing as he ought, he should be now one of the finest anglers in

England.

* * * * *

So. Thanks to bank fishing, we have, you see, landed three or four more

good fish in the last two hours—And! What is here? An ugly two-pound

chub, Chevin, ‘Echevin,’ or Alderman, as the French call him. How is

this, keeper? I thought you allowed no such vermin in this water?

The keeper answers, with a grunt, that ‘they allow themselves. That

there always were chub hereabouts, and always will be; for the more he

takes out with the net, the more come next day.’

Probably. No nets will exterminate these spawn-eating, fry-eating,

all-eating pests, who devour the little trout, and starve the large ones,

and, at the first sign of the net, fly to hover among the most tangled

roots. There they lie, as close as rats in a bank, and work themselves

the farther in the more they are splashed and poked by the poles of the

beaters. But the fly, well used, will—if not exterminate them—still thin

them down greatly; and very good sport they give, in my opinion, in spite

of the contempt in which they are commonly held, as chicken-hearted fish,

who show no fight. True; but their very cowardice makes them the more

difficult to catch; for no fish must you keep more out of sight, and

further off. The very shadow of the line (not to mention that of the

rod) sends them flying to hover; and they rise so cautiously and quietly,

that they give excellent lessons in patience and nerve to a beginner. If

the fly is dragged along the surface, or jerked suddenly from them, they

flee from it in terror; and when they do, after due deliberation, take it

in, their rise is so quiet, that you can seldom tell whether your fish

weighs half a pound or four pounds and a half—unless you, like most

beginners, attempt to show your quickness by that most useless exertion,

a violent strike. Then, the snapping of your footlink, or—just as

likely—of the top of your rod, makes you fully aware, if not of the

pluck, at least of the brute strength, of the burly alderman of the

waters. No fish, therefore, will better teach the beginner the good old

lesson, ‘not to frighten a fish before you have tired him.’

For flies—chub will rise greedily at any large palmers, the larger and

rougher the better. A red and a grizzled hackle will always take them;

but the best fly of all is an imitation of the black beetle—the

‘undertaker’ of the London shops. He, too, can hardly be too large, and

should be made of a fat body of black wool, with the metallic black

feather of a cock’s tail wrapped loosely over it. A still better wing is

one of the neck feathers of any metallic-plumed bird, e.g., _Phlogophorus

Impeyanus_, the Menaul Pheasant, laid flat and whole on the back, to

imitate the wing-shells of the beetle, the legs being represented by any

loose black feathers—(not hackles, which are too fine.) Tied thus, it

will kill not only every chub in a pool (if you give the survivors a

quarter of an hour wherein to recover from their horror at their last

friend’s fate), but also, here and there, very large trout.

Another slur upon the noble sport of chub fishing is the fact of his not

being worth eating—a fact which, in the true sportsman’s eyes, will go

for nothing. But though the man who can buy fresh soles and salmon may

despise chub, there are those who do not. True, you may make a most

accurate imitation of him by taking one of Palmer’s patent candles, wick

and all, stuffing it with needles and split bristles, and then stewing

the same in ditch-water. Nevertheless, strange to say, the agricultural

stomach digests chub; and if, after having filled your creel, or three

creels (as you may too often), with them, you will distribute them on

your way home to all the old women you meet, you will make many poor

souls happy, after having saved the lives of many trout.

But here we come to a strip of thick cover, part of our Squire’s home

preserves, which it is impossible to fish, so closely do the boughs cover

the water. We will walk on through it towards the hall, and there

get—what we begin sorely to need—something to eat. It will be of little

use fishing for some time to come; for these hot hours of the afternoon,

from three till six, are generally the ‘deadest time’ of the whole day.

And now, when we have struggled in imagination through the last bit of

copse, and tumbled over the palings into the lawn, we shall see a scene

quite as lovely, if you will believe it, as any alp on earth.

What shall we see, as we look across the broad, still, clear river, where

the great dark trout sail to and fro lazily in the sun? For having

free-warren of our fancy and our paper, we may see what we choose.

White chalk-fields above, quivering hazy in the heat. A park full of

merry haymakers; gay red and blue waggons; stalwart horses switching off

the flies; dark avenues of tall elms; groups of abele, ‘tossing their

whispering silver to the sun;’ and amid them the house. What manner of

house shall it be? Tudor or Elizabethan, with oriels, mullioned windows,

gables, and turrets of strange shape? No: that is commonplace.

Everybody builds Tudor houses now. Our house shall smack of Inigo Jones

or Christopher Wren; a great square red-brick mass, made light and

cheerful though, by quoins and windows of white Sarsden stone; with

high-peaked French roofs, broken by louvres and dormers, haunted by a

thousand swallows and starlings. Old walled gardens, gay with flowers,

shall stretch right and left. Clipt yew alleys shall wander away into

mysterious glooms: and out of their black arches shall come tripping

children, like white fairies, to laugh and talk with the girl who lies

dreaming and reading in the hammock there, beneath the black velvet

canopy of the great cedar-tree, like some fair Tropic flower hanging from

its boughs. Then they shall wander down across the smooth-shorn lawn,

where the purple rhododendrons hang double, bush and image, over the

water’s edge, and call to us across the stream, ‘What sport?’ and the old

Squire shall beckon the keeper over the long stone bridge, and return

with him bringing luncheon and good ale; and we will sit down, and eat

and drink among the burdock leaves, and then watch the quiet house, and

lawn, and flowers, and fair human creatures, and shining water, all

sleeping breathless in the glorious light beneath the glorious blue, till

we doze off, lulled by the murmur of a thousand insects, and the rich

minstrelsy of nightingale and black-cap, thrush and dove.

Peaceful, graceful, complete English country life and country houses;

everywhere finish and polish; Nature perfected by the wealth and art of

peaceful centuries! Why should I exchange you, even for the sight of all

the Alps, for bad roads, bad carriages, bad inns, bad food, bad washing,

bad beds, and fleas, fleas, fleas?

Let that last thought be enough. There may be follies, there may be

sorrows, there may be sins—though I know there are no very heavy ones—in

that fine old house opposite: but thanks to the genius of my native land,

there are at least no fleas.

Think of that, wandering friend; and of this also, that you will find

your warm bath ready when you go to bed to-night, and your cold one when

you rise to-morrow morning; and in content and thankfulness, stay in

England, and be clean.

* * * *

Here, then, let us lounge a full two hours, too comfortable and too tired

to care for fishing, till the hall-bell rings for that dinner which we as

good anglers will despise. Then we will make our way to the broad

reaches above the house. The evening breeze should be ruffling them

gallantly; and see, the fly is getting up. Countless thousands are

rising off the grass, and flickering to and fro above the stream. Stand

still a moment, and you will hear the air full of the soft rustle of

innumerable wings. Hundreds more, even more delicate and gauzy, are

rising through the water, and floating helplessly along the surface, as

Aphrodite may have done when she rose in the Ægean, half frightened at

the sight of the new upper world. And, see, the great trout are moving

everywhere. Fish too large and well fed to care for the fly at any other

season, who have been lounging among the weeds all day and snapping at

passing minnows, have come to the surface; and are feeding steadily,

splashing five or six times in succession, and then going down awhile to

bolt their mouthful of victims; while here and there a heavy silent swirl

tells of a fly taken before it has reached the surface, untimely slain

before it has seen the day.

Now—put your Green-drake on; and throw, regardless of bank-fishing or any

other rule, wherever you see a fish rise. Do not work your flies in the

least, but let them float down over the fish, or sink if they will; he is

more likely to take them under water than on the top. And mind this

rule: be patient with your fish; and do not fancy that because he does

not rise to you the first or the tenth time, therefore he will not rise

at all. He may have filled his mouth and gone down to gorge; and when he

comes up again, if your fly be the first which he meets, he will probably

seize it greedily, and all the more so if it be under water, so seeming

drowned and helpless. Besides, a fish seldom rises twice exactly in the

same place, unless he be lying between two weeds, or in the corner of an

eddy. His small wits, when he is feeding in the open, seem to hint to

him that after having found a fly in one place he must move a foot or two

on to find another; and therefore it may be some time before your turn

comes, and your fly passes just over his nose; which if it do not do, he

certainly will not, amid such an abundance, go out of his way for it. In

the meanwhile your footlink will very probably have hit him over the

back, or run foul of his nose, in which case you will not catch him at

all. A painful fact for you; but if you could catch every fish you saw,

where would be the trout for next season?

Put on a dropper of some kind, say a caperer, as a second chance. I

almost prefer the dark claret-spinner, with which I have killed very

large fish alternately with the green-drake, even when it was quite dark;

and for your stretcher, of course a green-drake.

For a blustering evening like this your drake can hardly be too large or

too rough; in brighter and stiller weather the fish often prefer a fly

half the size of the natural one. Only bear in mind that the most

tempting form among these millions of drakes is that one whose wings are

very little coloured at all, of a pale greenish yellow; whose body is

straw-coloured, and his head, thorax, and legs, spotted with dark

brown—best represented by a pheasant or coch-a-bonddhu hackle.

The best imitation of this, or of any drake, which I have ever seen, is

one by Mr. Macgowan, whilome of Ballyshannon, now of No. 7,

Bruton-street, Berkeley-square, whose drakes, known by a waxy body of

some mysterious material, do surpass those of all other men, and should

be known and honoured far and wide. But failing them, you may do well

with a drake which is ribbed through the whole length with red hackle

over a straw-coloured body. A North-countryman would laugh at it, and

ask us how we fancy that fish will mistake for that delicate waxy fly a

heavy rough palmer, made heavier and rougher by two thick tufts of yellow

mallard wing: but if he will fish therewith, he will catch trout; and

mighty ones they will be. I have found, again and again, this drake, in

which the hackle is ribbed all down the body, beat a bare-bodied one in

the ratio of three fish to one. The reason is difficult to guess.

Perhaps the shining transparent hackle gives the fly more of the waxy

look of the natural insect; or perhaps the ‘buzzly’ look of the fly

causes the fish to mistake it for one half emerged from its pupa case,

fluttering, entangled, and helpless. But whatever be the cause, I am

sure of the fact. Now—silence and sport for the next three hours.

* * * * *

There! All things must end. It is so dark that I have been fishing for

the last five minutes without any end fly; and we have lost our two last

fish simply by not being able to guide them into the net. But what an

evening’s sport we have had! Beside several over a pound which I have

thrown in (I trust you have been generous and done likewise), there are

six fish averaging two pounds apiece; and what is the weight of that

monster with whom I saw you wrestling dimly through the dusk, your legs

stuck knee-deep in a mudbank, your head embowered in nettles, while the

keeper waltzed round you, roaring mere incoherencies?—four pounds full.

Now, is there any sherry left in the flask? No. Then we will give the

keeper five shillings; he is well worth his pay; and then drag our weary

limbs towards the hall to bath, supper, and bed; while you confess, I

trust, that you may get noble sport, hard exercise, and lovely scenery,

without going sixty miles from London town.

III.

_THE FENS_.

A CERTAIN sadness is pardonable to one who watches the destruction of a

grand natural phenomenon, even though its destruction bring blessings to

the human race. Reason and conscience tell us, that it is right and good

that the Great Fen should have become, instead of a waste and howling

wilderness, a garden of the Lord, where

‘All the land in flowery squares,

Beneath a broad and equal-blowing wind,

Smells of the coming summer.’

And yet the fancy may linger, without blame, over the shining meres, the

golden reed-beds, the countless water-fowl, the strange and gaudy

insects, the wild nature, the mystery, the majesty—for mystery and

majesty there were—which haunted the deep fens for many a hundred years.

Little thinks the Scotsman, whirled down by the Great Northern Railway

from Peterborough to Huntingdon, what a grand place, even twenty years

ago, was that Holme and Whittlesea, which is now but a black, unsightly,

steaming flat, from which the meres and reed-beds of the old world are

gone, while the corn and roots of the new world have not as yet taken

their place.

But grand enough it was, that black ugly place, when backed by Caistor

Hanglands and Holme Wood, and the patches of the primæval forest; while

dark-green alders, and pale-green reeds, stretched for miles round the

broad lagoon, where the coot clanked, and the bittern boomed, and the

sedge-bird, not content with its own sweet song, mocked the notes of all

the birds around; while high overhead hung, motionless, hawk beyond hawk,

buzzard beyond buzzard, kite beyond kite, as far as eye could see. Far

off, upon the silver mere, would rise a puff of smoke from a punt,

invisible from its flatness and its white paint. Then down the wind came

the boom of the great stanchion-gun; and after that sound another sound,

louder as it neared; a cry as of all the bells of Cambridge, and all the

hounds of Cottesmore; and overhead rushed and whirled the skein of

terrified wild-fowl, screaming, piping, clacking, croaking, filling the

air with the hoarse rattle of their wings, while clear above all sounded

the wild whistle of the curlew, and the trumpet note of the great wild

swan.

They are all gone now. No longer do the ruffs trample the sedge into a

hard floor in their fighting-rings, while the sober reeves stand round,

admiring the tournament of their lovers, gay with ears and tippets, no

two of them alike. Gone are ruffs and reeves, spoonbills, bitterns,

avosets; the very snipe, one hears, disdains to breed. Gone, too, not

only from Whittlesea but from the whole world, is that most exquisite of

English butterflies, _Lycæna dispar_—the great copper; and many a curious

insect more. Ah, well, at least we shall have wheat and mutton instead,

and no more typhus and ague; and, it is to be hoped, no more

brandy-drinking and opium-eating; and children will live and not die.

For it was a hard place to live in, the old Fen; a place wherein one

heard of ‘unexampled instances of longevity,’ for the same reason that

one hears of them in savage tribes—that few lived to old age at all, save

those iron constitutions which nothing could break down.

And now, when the bold Fen-men, who had been fighting water by the help

of wind, have given up the more capricious element for that more

manageable servant fire; have replaced their wind-mills by steam-engines,

which will work in all weathers; and have pumped the whole fen dry—even

too dry, as the last hot summer proved; when the only bit of the primæval

wilderness left, as far as I know, is 200 acres of sweet sedge and

_Lastræa thelypteris_ in Wicken Fen: there can be no harm in lingering

awhile over the past, and telling of what the Great Fen was, and how it

came to be that great flat which reaches (roughly speaking) from

Cambridge to Peterborough on the south-west side, to Lynn and Tattershall

on the north-east, some forty miles and more each way.

To do that rightly, and describe how the Fen came to be, one must go

back, it seems to me, to an age before all history; an age which cannot

be measured by years or centuries; an age shrouded in mystery, and to be

spoken of only in guesses. To assert anything positively concerning that

age, or ages, would be to show the rashness of ignorance. ‘I think that

I believe,’ ‘I have good reason to suspect,’ ‘I seem to see,’ are the

strongest forms of speech which ought to be used over a matter so vast

and as yet so little elaborated.

‘I seem to see,’ then, an epoch after those strata were laid down with

which geology generally deals; after the Kimmeridge clay, Oxford clay,

and Gault clay, which form the impervious bedding of the fens, with their

intermediate beds of coral-rag and green sand, had been deposited; after

the chalk had been laid on the top of them, at the bottom of some ancient

ocean; after (and what a gulf of time is implied in that last ‘after!’)

the boulder-clay (coeval probably with the ‘till’ of Scotland) had been

spread out in the ‘age of ice’ on top of all; after the whole had been

upheaved out of the sea, and stood about the same level as it stands now:

but before the great valley of the Cam had been scooped out, and the

strata were still continuous, some 200 feet above Cambridge and its

colleges, from the top of the Gog-magogs to the top of Madingley Rise.

In those ages—while the valleys of the Cam, the Ouse, the Nene, the

Welland, the Glen, and the Witham were sawing themselves out by no

violent convulsions, but simply, as I believe, by the same slow action of

rain and rivers by which they are sawing backward into the land even

now—I ‘seem to see’ a time when the Straits of Dover did not exist—a time

when a great part of the German Ocean was dry land. Through it, into a

great estuary between North Britain and Norway, flowed together all the

rivers of north-eastern Europe—Elbe, Weser, Rhine, Scheldt, Seine,

Thames, and all the rivers of east England, as far north as the Humber.

And if a reason be required for so daring a theory—first started, if I

recollect right, by the late lamented Edward Forbes—a sufficient one may

be found in one look over a bridge, in any river of the East of England.

There we see various species of Cyprinidæ, ‘rough’ or ‘white’ fish—roach,

dace, chub, bream, and so forth, and with them their natural attendant

and devourer, the pike.

Now these fish belong almost exclusively to the same system of

rivers—those of north-east Europe. They attain their highest development

in the great lakes of Sweden. Westward of the Straits of Dover they are

not indigenous. They may be found in the streams of south and western

England; but in every case, I believe, they have been introduced either

by birds or by men. From some now submerged ‘centre of creation’ (to use

poor Edward Forbes’s formula) they must have spread into the rivers where

they are now found; and spread by fresh water, and not by salt, which

would destroy them in a single tide.

Again, there lingers in the Cam, and a few other rivers of north-eastern

Europe, that curious fish the eel-pout or ‘burbot’ (_Molva lota_). Now

he is utterly distinct from any other fresh-water fish of Europe. His

nearest ally is the ling (_Molva vulgaris_); a deep-sea fish, even as his

ancestors have been. Originally a deep-sea form, he has found his way up

the rivers, even to Cambridge, and there remains. The rivers by which he

came up, the land through which he passed, ages and ages since, have been

all swept away; and he has never found his way back to his native

salt-water, but lives on in a strange land, degraded in form, dwindling

in numbers, and now fast dying out. The explanation may be strange: but

it is the only one which I can offer to explain the fact—which is itself

much more strange—of the burbot being found in the Fen rivers.

Another proof may be found in the presence of the edible frog of the

Continent at Foulmire, on the edge of the Cambridge Fans. It is a moot

point still with some, whether he was not put there by man. It is a

still stronger argument against his being indigenous, that he is never

mentioned as an article of food by the mediæval monks, who would have

known—Frenchmen, Italians, Germans, as many of them were—that he is as

dainty as ever was a spring chicken. But if he be indigenous, his

presence proves that once he could either hop across the Straits of

Dover, or swim across the German Ocean.

But there can be no doubt of the next proof—the presence in the Fens

(where he is now probably extinct) and in certain spots in East Anglia,

which I shall take care not to mention, of that exquisite little bird the

‘Bearded Tit’ (_Calamophilus biarmicus_). Tit he is none; rather, it is

said, a finch, but connected with no other English bird. His central

home is in the marshes of Russia and Prussia; his food the mollusks which

swarm among the reed-beds where he builds; and feeding on those from

reed-bed to reed bed, all across what was once the German Ocean, has come

the beautiful little bird with long tail, orange tawny plumage, and black

moustache, which might have been seen forty years ago in hundreds on ever

reed-rond of the Fen.

One more proof—for it is the heaping up of facts, each minute by itself,

which issues often in a sound and great result. In draining Wretham

Mere, in Norfolk, not so very far from the Fens, in the year 1856 there

were found embedded in the peat moss (which is not the Scotch and Western

_Sphagnum palustre_, but an altogether different moss, _Hypnum

fluitans_), remains of an ancient lake-dwelling, supported on piles. A

dwelling like those which have lately attracted so much notice in the

lakes of Switzerland: like those which the Dyaks make about the ports and

rivers of Borneo; dwellings invented, it seems to me, to enable the

inhabitants to escape not wild beasts only, but malaria and night frosts;

and, perched above the cold and poisonous fogs, to sleep, if not high and

dry, at least high and healthy.

In the bottom of this mere were found two shells of the fresh-water

tortoise, _Emys lutaria_, till then unknown in England.

These little animals, who may be seen in hundreds in the meres of eastern

Europe, sunning their backs on fallen logs, and diving into the water at

the sound of a footstep, are eaten largely in continental capitals (as is

their cousin the terrapin, _Emys picta_, in the Southern States). They

may be bought at Paris, at fashionable restaurants. Thither they may

have been sent from Vienna or Berlin; for in north France, Holland, and

north-west Germany they are unknown. A few specimens have been found

buried in peat in Sweden and Denmark; and there is a tale of a live one

having been found in the extreme south part of Sweden, some twenty years

ago. {103} Into Sweden, then, as into England, the little fresh-water

tortoise had wandered, as to an extreme limit, beyond which the change of

climate, and probably of food, killed him off.

But the emys which came to the Wretham bog must have had a long journey;

and a journey by fresh water too. Down Elbe or Weser he must have

floated, ice-packed, or swept away by flood, till somewhere off the

Doggerbank, in that great network of rivers which is now open sea, he or

his descendants turned up Ouse and Little Ouse, till they found a mere

like their old Prussian one, and there founded a tiny colony for a few

generations, till they were eaten up by the savages of the table

dwelling; or died out—as many a human family has died out—because they

found the world too hard.

And lastly, my friend Mr. Brady, well known to naturalists, has found

that many forms of Entomastraca are common to the estuaries of the east

of England and to those of Holland.

It was thus necessary, in order to account for the presence of some of

the common animals of the fen, to go back to an epoch of immense

remoteness.

And how was that great lowland swept away? Who can tell? Probably by no

violent convulsion. Slow upheavals, slow depressions, there may have

been—indeed must have been—as the sunken fir-forests of Brancaster, and

the raised beach of Hunstanton, on the extreme north-east corner of the

Wash, testify to this day. But the main agent of destruction has been,

doubtless, that same ever-gnawing sea-wash which devours still the soft

strata of the whole east coast of England, as far as Flamborough Head;

and that great scavenger, the tide-wave, which sweeps the fallen rubbish

out to sea twice in every twenty-four hours. Wave and tide by sea, rain

and river by land; these are God’s mighty mills in which He makes the old

world new. And as Longfellow says of moral things, so may we of

physical:—

‘Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding

small.

Though He sit, end wait with patience, with exactness grinds He all.’

The lighter and more soluble particles, during that slow but vast

destruction which is going on still to this day, have been carried far

out to sea, and deposited as ooze. The heavier and coarser have been

left along the shores, as the gravels which fill the old estuaries of the

east of England.

From these gravels we can judge of the larger animals which dwelt in that

old world. About these lost lowlands wandered herds of the woolly

mammoth. _Elephas primigenius_, whose bones are common in certain

Cambridge gravels, whose teeth are brought up by dredgers, far out in the

German Ocean, off certain parts of the Norfolk coast. With them wandered

the woolly rhinoceros (_R. tichorhinus_), the hippopotamus, the lion—not

(according to some) to be distinguished from the recent lion of

Africa—the hyæna, the bear, the horse, the reindeer, and the musk ox; the

great Irish elk, whose vast horns are so well known in every museum of

northern Europe; and that mighty ox, the _Bos primigenius_, which still

lingered on the Continent in Cæsar’s time, as the urus, in magnitude less

only than the elephant,—and not to be confounded with the bison, a

relation of, if not identical with, the buffalo of North America,—which

still lingers, carefully preserved by the Czar, in the forests of

Lithuania.

The remains of this gigantic ox, be it remembered, are found throughout

Britain, and even into the Shetland Isles. Would that any gentleman who

may see these pages would take notice of the fact, that we have not (so I

am informed) in these islands a single perfect skeleton of _Bos

primigenius_; while the Museum of Copenhagen, to its honour, possesses

five or six from a much smaller field than is open to us; and be

public-spirited enough, the next time he hears of ox-bones, whether in

gravel or in peat (as he may in the draining of any northern moss), to

preserve them for the museum of his neighbourhood—or send them to

Cambridge.

But did all these animals exist at the same time? It is difficult to

say. The study of the different gravels is most intricate—almost a

special science in itself—in which but two or three men are adepts. It

is hard, at first sight, to believe that the hippopotamus could have been

the neighbour of the Arctic reindeer and musk ox: but that the woolly

mammoth not only may have been such, but was such, there can be no doubt.

His remains, imbedded in ice at the mouth of the great Siberian rivers,

with the wool, skin, and flesh (in some cases) still remaining on the

bones, prove him to have been fitted for a cold climate, and to have

browsed upon the scanty shrubs of Northern Asia. But, indeed, there is

no reason, _à priori_, why these huge mammals, now confined to hotter

countries, should not have once inhabited a colder region, or at least

have wandered northwards in whole herds in summer, to escape insects, and

find fresh food, and above all, water. The same is the case with the

lion, and other huge beasts of prey. The tiger of Hindostan ranges, at

least in summer, across the snows of the Himalaya, and throughout China.

Even at the river Amoor, where the winters are as severe as at St.

Petersburg, the tiger is an ordinary resident at all seasons. The lion

was, undoubtedly, an inhabitant of Thrace as late as the expedition of

Xerxes, whose camels they attacked; and the ‘Nemæan lion,’ and the other

lions which stand out in Grecian myth, as having been killed by Hercules

and the heroes, may have been the last remaining specimens of that _Felis

spelæa_ (undistinguishable, according to some, from the African lion),

whose bones are found in the gravels and the caverns of these isles.

And how long ago were those days of mammoths and reindeer, lions and

hyænas? We must talk not of days, but of ages; we know nothing of days

or years. As the late lamented Professor Sedgwick has well said:—

‘We allow that the great European oscillation, which ended in the

production of the drift (the boulder clay, or till), was effected during

a time of vast, but unknown length. And if we limit our inquiries, and

ask what was the interval of time between the newest bed of gravel near

Cambridge, and the oldest bed of bogland or silt in Cambridgeshire and

Norfolk, we are utterly at a loss for a definite answer. The interval of

time may have been very great. But we have no scale on which to measure

it.’

Let us suppose, then, the era of ‘gravels’ past; the valleys which open

into the fen sawn out by rivers to about their present depth. What was

the special cause of the fen itself? why did not the great lowland become

a fertile ‘carse’ of firm alluvial soil, like that of Stirling?

One reason is, that the carse of Stirling has been upheaved some twenty

feet, and thereby more or less drained, since the time of the Romans. A

fact patent and provable from Cramond (the old Roman port of Alaterna) up

to Blair Drummond above Stirling, where whales’ skeletons, and bone tools

by them, have been found in loam and peat, twenty feet above high-water

mark. The alluvium of the fens, on the other hand, has very probably

suffered a slight depression.

But the main reason is, that the silt brought down by the fen rivers

cannot, like that of the Forth and its neighbouring streams, get safe

away to sea. From Flamborough Head, in Yorkshire, all down the

Lincolnshire coast, the land is falling, falling for ever into the waves;

and swept southward by tide and current, the debris turns into the Wash

between Lincolnshire and Norfolk, there to repose, as in a quiet haven.

Hence that vast labyrinth of banks between Lynn and Wisbeach, of mud

inside, brought down by the fen rivers; but outside (contrary to the

usual rule) of shifting sand, which has come inward from the sea, and

prevents the mud’s escape—banks parted by narrow gullies, the delight of

the gunner with his punt, haunted by million wild-fowl in winter, and in

summer hazy steaming flats, beyond which the trees of Lincolnshire loom

up, raised by refraction far above the horizon, while the masts and sails

of distant vessels quiver, fantastically distorted and lengthened,

sometimes even inverted, by a refraction like that which plays such

tricks with ships and coasts in the Arctic seas. Along the top of the

mud banks lounge the long black rows of seals, undistinguishable from

their reflection in the still water below; distorted too, and magnified

to the size of elephants. Long lines of sea-pies wing their way along at

regular tide-hours, from or to the ocean. Now and then a skein of geese

paddle hastily out of sight round a mud-cape; or a brown robber gull

(generally Richardson’s _Skua_) raises a tumult of screams, by making a

raid upon a party of honest white gulls, to frighten them into vomiting

up their prey for his benefit; or a single cormorant flaps along, close

to the water, towards his fishing ground. Even the fish are shy of

haunting a bottom which shifts with every storm; and innumerable shrimps

are almost the only product of the shallow barren sea: beside, all is

silence and desolation, as of a world waiting to be made.

So strong is the barrier which these sea-borne sands oppose to the

river-borne ooze, that as soon as a seabank is built—as the projectors of

the ‘Victoria County’ have built them—across any part of the estuary, the

mud caught by it soon ‘warps’ the space within into firm and rich dry

land. But that same barrier, ere the fen was drained, backed up for ages

not only the silt, but the very water of the fens; and spread it inland

into a labyrinth of shifting streams, shallow meres, and vast peat bogs,

on those impervious clays which floor the fen. Each river contributed to

the formation of those bogs and meres, instead of draining them away;

repeating on a huge scale the process which may be seen in many a

highland strath, where the ground at the edge of the stream is firm and

high; the meadows near the hillfoot, a few hundred yards away, bogland

lower than the bank of the stream. For each flood deposits its silt upon

the immediate bank of the river, raising it year by year; till—as in the

case of the ‘Levée’ of the Mississippi, and probably of every one of the

old fen rivers—the stream runs at last between two natural dykes, at a

level considerably higher than that of the now swamped and undrainable

lands right and left of it.

If we add to this, a slope in the fen rivers so extraordinarily slight,

that the river at Cambridge is only thirteen and a half feet above the

mean sea level, five-and-thirty miles away, and that if the great

sea-sluice of Denver, the key of all the eastern fen, were washed away,

the tide would back up the Cam to within ten miles of Cambridge; if we

add again the rainfall upon that vast flat area, utterly unable to escape

through rivers which have enough to do to drain the hills around; it is

easy to understand how peat, the certain product of standing water, has

slowly overwhelmed the rich alluvium, fattened by the washing of those

phosphatic greensand beds, which (discovered by the science of the

lamented Professor Henslow) are now yielding round Cambridge supplies of

manure seemingly inexhaustible. Easy it is to understand how the

all-devouring, yet all-preserving peat-moss swallowed up gradually the

stately forests of fir and oak, ash and poplar, hazel and yew, which once

grew on that rank land; how trees, torn down by flood or storm, floated

and lodged in rafts, damming the waters back still more; how streams,

bewildered in the flats, changed their channels, mingling silt and sand

with the peat-moss; how Nature, left to herself, ran into wild riot and

chaos more and more; till the whole fen became one ‘Dismal Swamp,’ in

which the ‘Last of the English’ (like Dred in Mrs. Stowe’s tale) took

refuge from their tyrants, and lived, like him, a free and joyous life

awhile.

For there were islands, and are still, in that wide fen, which have

escaped the destroying deluge of peat-moss; outcrops of firm land, which

even in the Middle Age preserved the Fauna and Flora of the primæval

forest, haunted by the descendants of some at least of those wild beasts

which roamed on the older continent of the ‘gravel age.’ The

all-preserving peat, as well as the monkish records of the early Middle

Age, enable us to repeople, tolerably well, the primæval fen.

The gigantic ox, _Bos primigenius_, was still there, though there is no

record of him in monkish tales. But with him had appeared (not unknown

toward the end of the gravel age) another ox, smaller and with shorter

horns, _Bos longifrons_; which is held to be the ancestor of our own

domestic short-horns, and of the wild cattle still preserved at

Chillingham and at Cadzow. The reindeer had disappeared, almost or

altogether. The red deer, of a size beside which the largest Scotch stag

is puny, and even the great Carpathian stag inferior, abound; so does the

roe, so does the goat, which one is accustomed to look on as a mountain

animal. In the Woodwardian Museum there is a portion of a skull of an

ibex—probably _Capra sibirica_—which was found in the drift gravel at

Fulbourne. Wild sheep are unknown. The horse occurs in the peat; but

whether wild or tame, who can tell? Horses enough have been mired and

drowned since the Romans set foot on this island, to account for the

presence of horses’ skulls, without the hypothesis of wild herds, such as

doubtless existed in the gravel times. The wolf, of course, is common;

wild cat, marten, badger, and otter all would expect; but not so the

beaver, which nevertheless is abundant in the peat; and damage enough the

busy fellows must have done, cutting trees, damming streams, flooding

marshes, and like selfish speculators in all ages, sacrificing freely the

public interest to their own. Here and there are found the skulls of

bears, in one case that of a polar bear, ice-drifted; and one of a

walrus, probably washed in dead after a storm.

Beautiful, after their kind, were these fen-isles, in the eyes of the

monks who were the first settlers in the wilderness.

The author of the History of Ramsey grows enthusiastic, and, after the

manner of old monks, somewhat bombastic also, as he describes the lonely

isle which got its name from the solitary ram who had wandered thither,

either in some extreme drought or over the winter ice, and never able to

return, was found, fat beyond the wont of rams, feeding among the wild

deer. He tells of the stately ashes—most of them cut in his time, to

furnish mighty beams for the church roof; of the rich pastures painted

with all gay flowers in spring; of the ‘green crown’ of reed and alder

which girdled round the isle; of the fair wide mere with its ‘sandy

beach’ along the forest side: ‘a delight,’ he says, ‘to all who look

thereon.’

In like humour, William of Malmesbury, writing in the first half of the

twelfth century, speaks of Thorney Abbey and isle. ‘It represents,’ he

says, ‘a very Paradise, for that in pleasure and delight it resembles

heaven itself. These marshes abound in trees, whose length without a

knot doth emulate the stars. The plain there is as level as the sea,

which with green grass allures the eye, and so smooth that there is

nought to hinder him who runs through it. Neither is therein any waste

place for in some parts are apple trees, in other vines, which are either

spread on the ground or raised on poles. A mutual strife is there

between nature and art; so that what one produces not, the other

supplies. What shall I say of those fair buildings, which ’tis so

wonderful to see the ground among those fens upbear?’

But the most detailed picture of a fen-isle is that in the second part of

the Book of Ely; wherein a single knight of all the French army forces

his way into the isle of St. Etheldreda, and, hospitably entertained

there by Hereward and his English, is sent back safe to William the

Conqueror, to tell him of the strength of Ely isle.

He cannot praise enough—his speech may be mythical; but as written by

Richard of Ely, only one generation after, it must describe faithfully

what the place was like—the wonders of the isle: its soil the richest in

England, its pleasant pastures, its noble hunting-grounds, its store of

sheep and cattle (though its vines, he says, as a Frenchman had good

right to say, were not equally to be praised), its wide meres and bogs,

about it like a wall. In it was, to quote roughly, ‘abundance of tame

beasts and of wild stag, roe, and goat, in grove and marsh; martens, and

ermines, and fitchets, which in hard winter were caught in snares or

gins. But of the kind of fish and fowl which bred therein, what can I

say? In the pools around are netted eels innumerable, great water

wolves, and pickerel, perch, roach, burbot, lampreys, which the French

called sea-serpents; smelts, too; and the royal fish, the turbot [surely

a mistake for sturgeon], are said often to be taken. But of the birds

which haunt around, if you be not tired, as of the rest, we will expound.

Innumerable geese, gulls, coots, divers, water-crows, herons, ducks, of

which, when there is most plenty, in winter, or at moulting time, I have

seen hundreds taken at a time, by nets, springes, or birdlime,’ and so

forth till, as he assures William, the Frenchman may sit on Haddenham

field blockading Ely for seven years more, ‘ere they will make one

ploughman stop short in his furrow, one hunter cease to set his nets, or

one fowler to deceive the birds with springe and snare.’

And yet there was another side to the picture. Man lived hard in those

days, under dark skies, in houses—even the most luxurious of them—which

we should think, from draughts and darkness, unfit for felons’ cells.

Hardly they lived; and easily were they pleased, and thankful to God for

the least gleam of sunshine, the least patch of green, after the terrible

and long winters of the Middle Age. And ugly enough those winters must

have been, what with snow-storm and darkness, flood and ice, ague and

rheumatism; while through the long drear winter nights the whistle of the

wind and the wild cries of the water-fowl were translated into the howls

of witches and demons; and (as in St. Guthlac’s case) the delirious

fancies of marsh fever made fiends take hideous shapes before the inner

eye, and act fantastic horrors round the old fen-man’s bed of sedge.

The Romans seem to have done something toward the draining and embanking

of this dismal swamp. To them is attributed the car-dyke, or catch-water

drain, which runs for many miles from Peterborough northward into

Lincolnshire, cutting off the land waters which flow down from the wolds

above. To them, too, is to be attributed the old Roman bank, or

‘vallum,’ along the sea-face of the marshlands, marked to this day by the

names of Walsoken, Walton, and Walpoole. But the English invaders were

incapable of following out, even of preserving, any public works. Each

village was isolated by its own ‘march’ of forest; each yeoman all but

isolated by the ‘eaves-drip,’ or green lane round his farm. Each ‘cared

for his own things, and none for those of others;’ and gradually, during

the early Middle Age, the fen—save those old Roman villages—returned to

its primæval jungle, under the neglect of a race which caricatured local

self-government into public anarchy, and looked on every stranger as an

alien enemy, who might be lawfully slain, if he came through the forest

without calling aloud or blowing a horn. Till late years, the English

feeling against the stranger lasted harsh and strong. The farmer, strong

in his laws of settlement, tried at once to pass him into the next

parish. The labourer, not being versed in law, hove half a brick at him,

or hooted him through the town. It was in the fens, perhaps, that the

necessity of combined effort for fighting the brute powers of nature

first awakened public spirit, and associate labour, and the sense of a

common interest between men of different countries and races.

But the progress was very slow; and the first civilizers of the fen were

men who had nothing less in their minds than to conquer nature, or call

together round them communities of men. Hermits, driven by that passion

for isolated independence which is the mark of the Teutonic mind, fled

into the wilderness, where they might, if possible, be alone with God and

their own souls. Like St. Guthlac of Crowland, after wild fighting for

five-and-twenty years, they longed for peace and solitude; and from their

longing, carried out with that iron will which marked the mediæval man

for good or for evil, sprang a civilization of which they never dreamed.

Those who wish to understand the old fen life, should read Ingulf’s

‘History of Crowland’ (Mr. Bohn has published a good and cheap

translation), and initiate themselves into a state of society, a form of

thought, so utterly different from our own, that we seem to be reading of

the inhabitants of another planet. Most amusing and most human is old

Ingulf and his continuator, ‘Peter of Blois;’ and though their facts are

not to be depended on as having actually happened, they are still

instructive, as showing what might, or ought to have happened, in the

opinion of the men of old.

Even more naïve is the Anglo-Saxon life of St. Guthlac, written possibly

as early as the eighth century, and literally translated by Mr. Goodwin,

of Cambridge.

There we may read how the young warrior-noble, Guthlac (‘The

Battle-Play,’ the ‘Sport of War’), tired of slaying and sinning,

bethought him to fulfil the prodigies seen at his birth; how he wandered

into the fen, where one Tatwin (who after became a saint likewise) took

him in his canoe to a spot so lonely as to be almost unknown, buried in

reeds and alders; and among the trees, nought but an old ‘law,’ as the

Scots still call a mound, which men of old had broken into seeking for

treasure, and a little pond; and how he built himself a hermit’s cell

thereon, and saw visions and wrought miracles; and how men came to him,

as to a fakir or shaman of the East; notably one Beccel, who acted as his

servant; and how as Beccel was shaving the saint one day, there fell on

him a great temptation: Why should he not cut St. Guthlac’s throat, and

install himself in his cell, that he might have the honour and glory of

sainthood? But St. Guthlac perceived the inward temptation (which is

told with the naïve honesty of those half-savage times), and rebuked the

offender into confession, and all went well to the end.

There we may read, too, a detailed account of a Fauna now happily extinct

in the fens: of the creatures who used to hale St. Guthlac out of his

hut, drag him through the bogs, carry him aloft through frost and

fire—‘Develen and luther gostes’—such as tormented likewise St. Botolph

(from whom Botulfston=Boston, has its name), and who were supposed to

haunt the meres and fens, and to have an especial fondness for old

heathen barrows with their fancied treasure hoards; how they ‘filled the

house with their coming, and poured in on every side, from above, and

from beneath, and everywhere. They were in countenance horrible, and

they had great heads, and a long neck, and a lean visage; they were

filthy and squalid in their beards, and they had rough ears, and crooked

nebs, and fierce eyes, and foul mouths; and their teeth were like horses’

tusks; and their throats were filled with flame, and they were grating in

their voice; they had crooked shanks, and knees big and great behind, and

twisted toes, and cried hoarsely with their voices; and they came with

such immoderate noise and immense horror, that him thought all between

heaven and earth resounded with their voices. And they tugged and led

him out of the cot, and led him to the swart fen, and threw and sunk him

in the muddy waters. After that they brought him into the wild places of

the wilderness, among the thick beds of brambles, that all his body was

torn. After that they took him and beat him with iron whips; and after

that they brought him on their creaking wings between the cold regions of

the air.’

But there are gentler and more human touches in that old legend. You may

read in it, how all the wild birds of the fen came to St. Guthlac, and he

fed them after their kind. How the ravens tormented him, stealing

letters, gloves, and what not, from his visitors; and then, seized with

compunction at his reproofs, brought them back, or hanged them on the

reeds; and how, as Wilfrid, a holy visitant, was sitting with him,

discoursing of the contemplative life, two swallows came flying in, and

lifted up their song, sitting now on the saint’s hand, now on his

shoulder, now on his knee. And how, when Wilfrid wondered thereat,

Guthlac made answer, ‘Know you not that he who hath led his life

according to God’s will, to him the wild beasts and the wild birds draw

the more near.’

After fifteen years of such a life, in fever, agues, and starvation, no

wonder if St. Guthlac died. They buried him in a leaden coffin (a grand

and expensive luxury in the seventh century) which had been sent to him

during his life by a Saxon princess; and then, over his sacred and

wonder-working corpse, as over that of a Buddhist saint, there rose a

chapel, with a community of monks, companies of pilgrims who came to

worship, sick who came to be healed; till, at last, founded on great

piles driven into the bog, arose the lofty wooden Abbey of Crowland; in

its sanctuary of the four rivers, its dykes, parks, vineyards, orchards,

rich ploughlands, from which, in time of famine, the monks of Crowland

fed all people of the neighbouring fens; with its tower with seven bells,

which had not their like in England; its twelve altars rich with the

gifts of Danish Vikings and princes, and even with twelve white

bear-skins, the gift of Canute’s self; while all around were the cottages

of the corrodiers, or folk who, for a corrody, or life pittance from the

abbey, had given away their lands, to the wrong and detriment of their

heirs.

But within these four rivers, at least, was neither tyranny nor slavery.

Those who took refuge in St. Guthlac’s peace from cruel lords must keep

his peace toward each other, and earn their living like honest men, safe

while they did so; for between those four rivers St. Guthlac and his

abbot were the only lords, and neither summoner, nor sheriff of the king,

nor armed force of knight or earl, could enter ‘the inheritance of the

Lord, the soil of St. Mary and St. Bartholomew, the most holy sanctuary

of St. Guthlac and his monks; the minster free from worldly servitude;

the special almshouse of most illustrious kings; the sole refuge of

anyone in worldly tribulation; the perpetual abode of the saints; the

possession of religious men, specially set apart by the common council of

the realm; by reason of the frequent miracles of the holy confessor St.

Guthlac, an ever-fruitful mother of camphire in the vineyards of Engedi;

and by reason of the privileges granted by the kings, a city of grace and

safety to all who repent.’

Does not all this sound—as I said just now—like a voice from another

planet? It is all gone; and it was good and right that it should go when

it had done its work, and that the civilization of the fen should be

taken up and carried out by men like the good knight, Richard of Rulos,

who, two generations after the Conquest, marrying Hereward’s

granddaughter, and becoming Lord of Deeping (the deep meadow), thought

that he could do the same work from the hall of Bourne as the monks did

from their cloisters; got permission from the Crowland monks, for twenty

marks of silver, to drain as much as he could of the common marshes; and

then shut out the Welland by strong dykes, built cottages, marked out

gardens, and tilled fields, till ‘out of slough and bogs accursed, he

made a garden of pleasure.’

Yet one lasting work those monks of Crowland did, besides those firm

dykes and rich corn lands of the Porsand, which endure unto this day.

For within two generations of the Norman conquest, while the old wooden

abbey, destroyed by fire, was being replaced by that noble pile of stone

whose ruins are still standing, the French abbot of Crowland sent French

monks to open a school under the new French donjon, in the little Roman

town of Grante-brigge; whereby—so does all earnest work, however

mistaken, grow and spread in this world, infinitely and for ever—St.

Guthlac, by his canoe-voyage into Crowland Island, became the spiritual

father of the University of Cambridge in the old world; and therefore of

her noble daughter, the University of Cambridge, in the new world which

fen-men, sailing from Boston deeps, colonized and Christianized, 800

years after St. Guthlac’s death.

The drainage of the fens struggled on for these same 800 years slowly,

and often disastrously. Great mistakes were made; as when a certain

bishop, some 700 years ago, bethought him to make a cut from Littleport

drain to Rebeck (or Priests’-houses), and found, to his horror and that

of the fen-men, that he had let down upon Lynn the pent-up waters of the

whole higher bogs; that rivers were running backwards, brooks swelling to

estuaries, and the whole north-eastern fen ruinate, to be yet more

ruinate by banks confusedly thrown up in self-defence, till some order

was restored in 1332, and the fens prospered—such little of them as could

be drained at all—for nigh two hundred years. Honour, meanwhile, to

another prelate, good Bishop Morton, who cut the great learn from

Guyhirn—the last place at which one could see a standing gallows, and two

Irish reapers hanging in chains, having murdered the old witch of Guyhirn

for the sake of hidden treasure, which proved to be some thirty shillings

and a few silver spoons.

The belief is more general than well-founded that the drainage of the

fens retrograded on account of the dissolution of the monasteries. The

state of decay into which those institutions had already fallen, and

which alone made their dissolution possible, must have extended itself to

these fen-lands. No one can read the account of their debts, neglect,

malversation of funds, in the time of Henry VIII., without seeing that

the expensive works necessary to keep fen-lands dry must have suffered,

as did everything else belonging to the convents.

It was not till the middle or end of Elizabeth’s reign that the recovery

of these ‘drowned lands’ was proceeded with once more; and during the

first half of the seventeenth century there went on, more and more

rapidly, that great series of artificial works which, though often faulty

in principle, often unexpectedly disastrous in effect, have got the work

done, as all work is done in this world, not as well as it should have

been done, but at least done.

To comprehend those works would be impossible without maps and plans; to

take a lively interest in them impossible, likewise, save to an engineer

or a fen-man. Suffice it to say, that in the early part of the

seventeenth century we find a great company of adventurers—more than one

Cromwell among them, and Francis, the great and good Earl of Bedford, at

their head—trying to start a great scheme for draining the drowned

‘middle level’ east of the Isle of Ely. How they sent for Vermuyden, the

Dutchman, who had been draining in North Lincolnshire, about Goole and

Axholme Isle; how they got into his hands, and were ruined by him; how

Francis of Bedford had to sell valuable estates to pay his share; how the

fen-men looked on Francis of Bedford as their champion; how Charles I.

persecuted him meanly, though indeed Bedford had, in the matter of the

‘Lynn Law’ of 1630, given way, as desperate men are tempted to do, to

something like sharp practice unworthy of him; how Charles took the work

into his hands, and made a Government job of it; how Bedford died, and

the fen-men looked on him as a martyr; how Oliver Cromwell arose to

avenge the good earl, as his family had supported him in past times; how

Oliver St. John came to the help of the fen-men, and drew up the

so-called ‘Pretended Ordinance’ of 1649, which was a compromise between

Vermuyden and the adventurers, so able and useful that Charles II.’s

Government were content to call it ‘pretended’ and let it stand, because

it was actually draining the fens; and how Sir Cornelius Vermuyden, after

doing mighty works, and taking mighty moneys, died a beggar, writing

petitions which never got answered; how William, Earl of Bedford, added,

in 1649, to his father’s ‘old Bedford River’ that noble parallel river,

the Hundred foot, both rising high above the land between dykes and

‘washes,’ _i.e._ waste spaces right and left, to allow for flood water;

how the Great Bedford Rivers silted up the mouth of the Ouse, and backed

the floods up the Cam; how Denver sluice was built to keep them back; and

so forth,—all is written, or rather only half or quarter written, in the

histories of the fens.

Another matter equally, or even more important, is but half

written—indeed, only hinted at—the mixed population of the fens.

The sturdy old ‘Girvii,’ ‘Gyrwas,’ men of the ‘gyras’ or marshes, who in

Hereward’s time sang their three-man glees, ‘More Girviorum tripliciter

canentes,’ had been crossed with the blood of Scandinavian Vikings in

Canute’s conquest; crossed again with English refugees from all quarters

during the French conquest under William. After the St. Bartholomew they

received a fresh cross of Huguenot, fleeing from France—dark-haired,

fiery, earnest folk, whose names and physiognomies are said still to

remain about Wisbeach, Whittlesea, and Thorney. Then came Vermuyden’s

Dutchmen, leaving some of their blood behind them. After the battle of

Dunbar another cross came among them, of Scotch prisoners, who, employed

by Cromwell’s Government on the dykes, settled down among the fen-men to

this day. Within the memory of man, Scotchmen used to come down into the

fens every year, not merely for harvest, but to visit their expatriated

kinsmen.

To these successive immigrations of strong Puritan blood, more than even

the influence of the Cromwells and other Puritan gentlemen, we may

attribute that strong Calvinist element which has endured for now nigh

three centuries in the fen; and attribute, too, that sturdy independence

and self-help which drove them of old out of Boston town, to seek their

fortunes first in Holland, then in Massachusetts over sea. And that

sturdy independence and self-help is not gone. There still lives in them

some of the spirit of their mythic giant Hickafrid (the Hickathrift of

nursery rhymes), who, when the Marshland men (possibly the Romanized

inhabitants of the wall villages) quarrelled with him in the field, took

up the cart-axle for a club, smote them hip and thigh, and pastured his

cattle in their despite in the green cheese-fens of the Smeeth. No one

has ever seen a fen-bank break, without honouring the stern quiet temper

which there is in these men, when the north-easter is howling above, the

spring-tide roaring outside, the brimming tide-way lapping up to the

dyke-top, or flying over in sheets of spray; when round the one fatal

thread which is trickling over the dyke—or worse, through some forgotten

rat’s hole in its side—hundreds of men are clustered, without tumult,

without complaint, marshalled under their employers, fighting the brute

powers of nature, not for their employer’s sake alone, but for the sake

of their own year’s labour and their own year’s bread. The sheep have

been driven off the land below; the cattle stand ranged shivering on high

dykes inland; they will be saved in punts, if the worst befall. But a

hundred spades, wielded by practised hands, cannot stop that tiny

rat-hole. The trickle becomes a rush—the rush a roaring waterfall. The

dyke-top trembles—gives. The men make efforts, desperate, dangerous, as

of sailors in a wreck, with faggots, hurdles, sedge, turf: but the bank

will break; and slowly they draw off; sullen, but uncomplaining; beaten,

but not conquered. A new cry rises among them. Up, to save yonder

sluice; that will save yonder lode; that again yonder farm; that again

some other lode, some other farm, far back inland, but guessed at

instantly by men who have studied from their youth, as the necessity of

their existence, the labyrinthine drainage of lands which are all below

the water level, and where the inner lands, in many cases, are lower

still than those outside.

So they hurry away to the nearest farms; the teams are harnessed, the

waggons filled, and drawn down and emptied; the beer-cans go round

cheerily, and the men work with a sort of savage joy at being able to do

something, if not all, and stop the sluice on which so much depends. As

for the outer land, it is gone past hope; through the breach pours a

roaring salt cataract, digging out a hole on the inside of the bank,

which remains as a deep sullen pond for years to come. Hundreds,

thousands of pounds are lost already, past all hope. Be it so, then. At

the next neap, perhaps, they will be able to mend the dyke, and pump the

water out; and begin again, beaten but not conquered, the same

everlasting fight with wind and wave which their forefathers have waged

for now 800 years.

He who sees—as I have seen—a sight like that, will repine no more that

the primæval forest is cut down, the fair mere drained. For instead of

mammoth and urus, stag and goat, that fen feeds cattle many times more

numerous than all the wild venison of the primæval jungle; and produces

crops capable of nourishing a hundred times as many human beings; and

more—it produces men a hundred times as numerous as ever it produced

before; more healthy and long-lived—and if they will, more virtuous and

more happy—than ever was Girvian in his log-canoe, or holy hermit in his

cell. So we, who knew the deep fen, will breathe one sigh over the last

scrap of wilderness, and say no more; content to know that—

‘The old order changeth, yielding place to new,

And God fulfils himself in many ways,

Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.’

IV.

MY WINTER GARDEN. {135}

SO, my friend: you ask me to tell you how I contrive to support this

monotonous country life; how, fond as I am of excitement, adventure,

society, scenery, art, literature, I go cheerfully through the daily

routine of a commonplace country profession, never requiring a six-weeks’

holiday; not caring to see the Continent, hardly even to spend a day in

London; having never yet actually got to Paris.

You wonder why I do not grow dull as those round me, whose talk is of

bullocks—as indeed mine is, often enough; why I am not by this time ‘all

over blue mould;’ why I have not been tempted to bury myself in my study,

and live a life of dreams among old books.

I will tell you. I am a minute philosopher: though one, thank Heaven, of

a different stamp from him whom the great Bishop Berkeley silenced—alas!

only for a while. I am possibly, after all, a man of small mind, content

with small pleasures. So much the better for me. Meanwhile, I can

understand your surprise, though you cannot understand my content. You

have played a greater game than mine; have lived a life, perhaps more fit

for an Englishman; certainly more in accordance with the taste of our

common fathers, the Vikings, and their patron Odin ‘the goer,’ father of

all them that go ahead. You have gone ahead, and over many lands; and I

reverence you for it, though I envy you not. You have commanded a

regiment—indeed an army, and ‘drank delight of battle with your peers;’

you have ruled provinces, and done justice and judgment, like a noble

Englishman as you are, old friend, among thousands who never knew before

what justice and judgment were. You have tasted (and you have deserved

to taste) the joy of old David’s psalm, when he has hunted down the last

of the robber lords of Palestine. You have seen ‘a people whom you have

not known, serve you. As soon as they heard of you, they obeyed you; but

the strange children dissembled with you:’ yet before you, too, ‘the

strange children failed, and trembled in their hill-forts.’

Noble work that was to do, and nobly you have done it; and I do not

wonder that to a man who has been set to such a task, and given power to

carry it through, all smaller work must seem paltry; that such a man’s

very amusements, in that grand Indian land, and that free adventurous

Indian life, exciting the imagination, calling out all the self-help and

daring of a man, should have been on a par with your work; that when you

go a sporting, you ask for no meaner preserve than the primæval forest,

no lower park wall than the snow-peaks of the Himalaya.

Yes; you have been a ‘burra Shikarree’ as well as a ‘burra Sahib.’ You

have played the great game in your work, and killed the great game in

your play. How many tons of mighty monsters have you done to death,

since we two were schoolboys together, five-and-twenty years ago? How

many starving villages have you fed with the flesh of elephant or

buffalo? How many have you delivered from man-eating tigers, or wary old

alligators, their craws full of poor girls’ bangles? Have you not been

charged by rhinoceroses, all but ript up by boars? Have you not seen

face to face Ovis Ammon himself, the giant mountain sheep—primæval

ancestor, perhaps, of all the flocks on earth? Your memories must be

like those of Theseus and Hercules, full of slain monsters. Your brains

must be one fossiliferous deposit, in which gaur and sambur, hog and

tiger, rhinoceros and elephant, lie heaped together, as the old

ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs are heaped in the lias rocks at Lyme. And

therefore I like to think of you. I try to picture your feelings to

myself. I spell over with my boy Mayne Reid’s amusing books, or the ‘Old

Forest Ranger,’ or Williams’s old ‘Tiger Book,’ with Howitt’s plates; and

try to realize the glory of a burra Shikarree: and as I read and imagine,

feel, with Sir Hugh Evans, ‘a great disposition to cry.’

For there were times, full many a year ago, when my brains were full of

bison and grizzly bear, mustang and big-horn, Blackfoot and Pawnee, and

hopes of wild adventure in the Far West, which I shall never see; for ere

I was three-and-twenty, I discovered, plainly enough, that my lot was to

stay at home and earn my bread in a very quiet way; that England was to

be henceforth my prison or my palace, as I should choose to make it: and

I have made it, by Heaven’s help, the latter.

I will confess to you, though, that in those first heats of youth, this

little England—or rather, this little patch of moor in which I have

struck roots as firm as the wild fir-trees do—looked at moments rather

like a prison than a palace; that my foolish young heart would sigh, ‘Oh!

that I had wings’—not as a dove, to fly home to its nest and croodle

there—but as an eagle, to swoop away over land and sea, in a rampant and

self-glorifying fashion, on which I now look back as altogether

unwholesome and undesirable. But the thirst for adventure and excitement

was strong in me, as perhaps it ought to be in all at twenty-one. Others

went out to see the glorious new worlds of the West, the glorious old

worlds of the East—why should not I? Others rambled over Alps and

Apennines, Italian picture-galleries and palaces, filling their minds

with fair memories—why should not I? Others discovered new wonders in

botany and zoology—why should not I? Others too, like you, fulfilled to

the utmost that strange lust after the burra shikar, which even now makes

my pulse throb as often as I see the stags’ heads in our friend A—’s

hall: why should not I? It is not learnt in a day, the golden lesson of

the Old Collect, to ‘love the thing which is commanded, and desire that

which is promised.’ Not in a day: but in fifteen years one can spell out

a little of its worth; and when one finds one’s self on the wrong side of

forty, and the first grey hairs begin to show on the temples, and one can

no longer jump as high as one’s third button—scarcely, alas! to any

button at all; and what with innumerable sprains, bruises, soakings, and

chillings, one’s lower limbs feel in a cold thaw much like an old

post-horse’s, why, one makes a virtue of necessity: and if one still

lusts after sights, takes the nearest, and looks for wonders, not in the

Himalayas or Lake Ngami, but in the turf on the lawn and the brook in the

park; and with good Alphonse Karr enjoys the macro-microcosm in one ‘Tour

autour de mon jardin.’

For there it is, friend, the whole infinite miracle of nature in every

tuft of grass, if we have only eyes to see it, and can disabuse our minds

of that tyrannous phantom of size. Only recollect that great and small

are but relative terms; that in truth nothing is great or small, save in

proportion to the quantity of creative thought which has been exercised

in making it; that the fly who basks upon one of the trilithons of

Stonehenge, is in truth infinitely greater than all Stonehenge together,

though he may measure the tenth of an inch, and the stone on which he

sits five-and-twenty feet. You differ from me? Be it so. Even if you

prove me wrong I will believe myself in the right: I cannot afford to do

otherwise. If you rob me of my faith in ‘minute philosophy,’ you rob me

of a continual source of content, surprise, delight.

So go your way and I mine, each working with all his might, and playing

with all his might, in his own place and way. Remember only, that though

I never can come round to your sphere, you must some day come round to

me, when wounds, or weariness, or merely, as I hope, a healthy old age,

shall shut you out for once and for all from burra shikar, whether human

or quadruped.—For you surely will not take to politics in your old age?

You will not surely live to solicit (as many a fine fellow, alas! did but

last year) the votes, not even of the people, but merely of the

snobocracy, on the ground of your having neither policy nor principles,

nor even opinions, upon any matter in heaven or earth?—Then in that day

will you be forced, my friend, to do what I have done this many a year;

to refrain your soul, and keep it low. You will see more and more the

depth of human ignorance, the vanity of human endeavours. You will feel

more and more that the world is going God’s way, and not yours, or mine,

or any man’s; and that if you have been allowed to do good work on earth,

that work is probably as different from what you fancy it as the tree is

from the seed whence it springs. You will grow content, therefore, not

to see the real fruit of your labours; because if you saw it you would

probably be frightened at it, and what is very good in the eyes of God

would not be very good in yours; content, also, to receive your

discharge, and work and fight no more, sure that God is working and

fighting, whether you are in hospital or in the field. And with this

growing sense of the pettiness of human struggles will grow on you a

respect for simple labours, a thankfulness for simple pleasures, a

sympathy with simple people, and possibly, my trusty friend, with me and

my little tours about that moorland which I call my winter-garden, and

which is to me as full of glory and of instruction as the Himalaya or the

Punjab are to you, and in which I contrive to find as much health and

amusement as I have time for—and who ought to have more?

I call the said garden mine, not because I own it in any legal sense (for

only in a few acres have I a life interest), but in that higher sense in

which ten thousand people can own the same thing, and yet no man’s right

interfere with another’s. To whom does the Apollo Belvedere belong, but

to all who have eyes to see its beauty? So does my winter-garden; and

therefore to me among the rest.

Besides (which is a gain to a poor man) my pleasure in it is a very cheap

one. So are all those of a minute philosopher, except his microscope.

But my winter-garden, which is far larger, at all events, than that

famous one at Chatsworth, costs me not one penny in keeping up. Poor,

did I call myself? Is it not true wealth to have all I want without

paying for it? Is it not true wealth, royal wealth, to have some twenty

gentlemen and noblemen, nay, even royal personages, planting and

improving for me? Is it not more than royal wealth to have sun and

frost, Gulf-stream and south-westers, laws of geology, phytology,

physiology, and other ologies—in a word, the whole universe and the

powers thereof, day and night, paving, planting, roofing, lighting,

colouring my winter-garden for me, without my even having the trouble to

rub a magic ring and tell the genii to go to work?

Yes. I am very rich, as every man may be who will. In the doings of our

little country neighbourhood I find tragedy and comedy, too fantastic,

sometimes too sad, to be written down. In the words of those whose talk

is of bullocks, I find the materials of all possible metaphysic, and long

weekly that I had time to work them out. In fifteen miles of moorland I

find the materials of all possible physical science, and long that I had

time to work out one smallest segment of that great sphere. How can I be

richer, if I have lying at my feet all day a thousand times more wealth

than I can use?

Some people—most people—in these run-about railway days, would complain

of such a life, in such a ‘narrow sphere,’ so they call it, as

monotonous. Very likely it is so. But is it to be complained of on that

account? Is monotony in itself an evil? Which is better, to know many

places ill, or to know one place well? Certainly—if a scientific habit

of mind be a gain—it is only by exhausting as far as possible the

significance of an individual phenomenon (is not that sentence a true

scientific one in its magniloquence?) that you can discover any glimpse

of the significance of the universal. Even men of boundless knowledge,

like Humboldt, must have had once their speciality, their pet subject, or

they would have, strictly speaking, no knowledge at all. The volcanoes

of Mexico, patiently and laboriously investigated in his youth, were to

Humboldt, possibly, the key of the whole Cosmos. I learn more, studying

over and over again the same Bagshot sand and gravel heaps, than I should

by roaming all Europe in search of new geologic wonders. Fifteen years

have I been puzzling at the same questions and have only guessed at a few

of the answers. What sawed out the edges of the moors into long narrow

banks of gravel? What cut them off all flat atop? What makes _Erica

Tetralix_ grow in one soil, and the bracken in another? How did three

species of Club-moss—one of them quite an Alpine one—get down here, all

the way from Wales perhaps, upon this isolated patch of gravel? Why did

that one patch of _Carex arenaria_ settle in the only square yard for

miles and miles which bore sufficient resemblance to its native sandhill

by the seashore, to make it comfortable? Why did _Myosurus minimus_,

which I had hunted for in vain for fourteen years, appear by dozens in

the fifteenth, upon a new-made bank, which had been for at least two

hundred years a farm-yard gateway? Why does it generally rain here from

the south-west, not when the barometer falls, but when it begins to rise

again? Why—why is everything, which lies under my feet all day long? I

don’t know; and you can’t tell me. And till I have found out, I cannot

complain of monotony, with still undiscovered puzzles waiting to be

explained, and so to create novelty at every turn.

Besides, monotony is pleasant in itself; morally pleasant, and morally

useful. Marriage is monotonous: but there is much, I trust, to be said

in favour of holy wedlock. Living in the same house is monotonous: but

three removes, say the wise, are as bad as a fire. Locomotion is

regarded as an evil by our Litany. The Litany, as usual, is right.

‘Those who travel by land or sea’ are to be objects of our pity and our

prayers; and I do pity them. I delight in that same monotony. It saves

curiosity, anxiety, excitement, disappointment, and a host of bad

passions. It gives a man the blessed, invigorating feeling that he is at

home; that he has roots, deep and wide, struck down into all he sees; and

that only The Being who will do nothing cruel or useless can tear them

up. It is pleasant to look down on the same parish day after day, and

say, I know all that lies beneath, and all beneath know me. If I want a

friend, I know where to find him; if I want work done, I know who will do

it. It is pleasant and good to see the same trees year after year; the

same birds coming back in spring to the same shrubs; the same banks

covered with the same flowers, and broken (if they be stiff ones) by the

same gaps. Pleasant and good it is to ride the same horse, to sit in the

same chair, to wear the same old coat. That man who offered twenty

pounds’ reward for a lost carpet-bag full of old boots was a sage, and I

wish I knew him. Why should one change one’s place, any more than one’s

wife or one’s children? Is a hermit-crab, slipping his tail out of one

strange shell into another, in the hopes of its fitting him a little

better, either a dignified, safe, or graceful animal? No; George Riddler

was a true philosopher.

‘Let vules go sarching vur and nigh,

We bides at Whum, my dog and I;’