part of the copse to themselves. Just level with the gardens the
wood is almost bare of undergrowth; there is little to obstruct the
sight but the dead hanging branches, and one couple are always up
and down here. They are near enough for us to see the dark marking
at the end of the tail as it is spread open to assist the upward
flight from the ground to the tree. Outside the garden gate, about
twenty yards distant, there stand three or four young spruce-firs;
they are in the field, but so close as to touch the copse hedge. To
the largest of these one of the pigeons comes now and then; he is
half inclined to choose it for his nest, and yet hesitates. The
noise of their wings, as they rise and thresh their strong feathers
together over the tops of the trees, may often be heard in the
garden; or you may see one come from a distance, swift as the wind,
suddenly half close two wings, and, shooting forward, alight among
the branches. They seem with us like the sparrows, as much as if the
house stood in the midst of the woods at home. The coo itself is not
tuneful in any sense; it is hoarse and hollow, yet it has a pleasant
sound to me--a sound of the woods and the forest. I can almost feel
the gun in my hand again. They are pre-eminently the birds of the
woods. Other birds frequent them at times, and then quit the trees:
but the ring-dove is the wood-bird, always there some part of the
day. So that the sound soothes by its associations.
Coming down the Long Ditton road on May 1, at the corner of the
copse, where there are some hornbeams, I heard some low sweet notes
that came from the trees, and, after a little difficulty, discovered
a blackcap perched on a branch, humped up. Another answered within
ten yards, and then they sang one against the other. The foliage of
the hornbeam was still pale, and the blackcaps' colours being so
pale also (with the exception of the poll), it was not easy to see
them. The song is sweet and cultured, but does not last many
seconds. In its beginning it something resembles that of the
hedge-sparrow--not the pipe, but the song which the hedge-sparrows
are now delivering from the top sprays of the hawthorn hedges. It is
sweet indeed and cultured, and it is a pleasure to welcome another
arrival, but I do not feel enraptured with the blackcap's notes. One
came into the garden, visiting some ivy on the wall, but they are
not plentiful just now. By these hornbeam trees a little streamlet
flows out from the copse and under the road by a culvert. At the
hedge it is crossed by a pole (to prevent cattle straying in), and
this pole is the robin's especial perch. He is always there, or
near; he was there all through the winter, and is there now.
Beneath, where there are a few inches of sand beside the water, a
wagtail comes now and then; but the robin does not like the
intrusion, and drives him away.
The same oak at the end of the garden, where the wryneck calls, is
also the favourite tree of a cock chaffinch, and every morning he
sings there for at least two hours at a stretch. I hear him first
between waking and sleeping, and listen to his song before my eyes
are open. No starlings whistle on the house-tops this year; I am
disappointed that they have not returned; last year, and the year
before that--indeed, since we have been here--a pair built under the
eaves just above the window of the room I then used. Last spring,
indeed, they filled the gutter with the materials of their nest, and
long after they had left a storm descended, and the rain, unable to
escape, flooded the corner. It cost eight shillings to repair the
damage; but it did not matter, they had been happy. It is a
disappointment not to hear their whistle again this spring, and the
flutter of their wings as they vibrate them superbly while hovering
a moment before entering their cavern. A pair of house-martins built
under the eaves near by one season; they, too, have disappointed me
by not returning, though their nest was not disturbed. Some fate has
probably overtaken late starlings and house-martins.
Then in the sunny mornings, too, there is the twittering of the
swallows. They were very late this spring at Surbiton. The first of
the species was a bank-martin flying over the Wandle by Wimbledon on
April 25; the first swallow appeared at Surbiton on April 30. As the
bank-martins skim the surface of the Thames--there are plenty
everywhere near the osier-beds and eyots, as just below Kingston
Bridge--their brown colour, and the black mark behind the eye, and
the thickness of the body near the head, cause them to bear a
resemblance to moths. A fortnight before the first swallow the large
bats were hawking up and down the road in the evenings. They seem to
prefer to follow the course of the road, flying straight up it from
the copse to the pond, half-way to Red Lion Lane, then back again,
and so to and fro, sometimes wheeling over the Common, but usually
resuming their voyaging above the highway. Passing on a level with
the windows in the dusk, their wings seem to expand nine or ten
inches. Bats are sensitive to heat and cold. When the north or east
wind blows they do not come out; they like a warm evening.
A shrike flew down from a hedge on May 9, just in front of me, and
alighted on a dandelion, bending the flower to the ground and
clasping the stalk in his claws. There must have been an insect on
the flower: the bright yellow disk was dashed to the ground in an
instant by the ferocious bird, who came with such force as almost to
lose his balance. Though small, the butcher-bird's decision is
marked in every action, in his very outline. His eagle-like head
sweeps the grass, and in a second he is on his victim. Perhaps it
was a humble-bee. The humble-bees are now searching about for the
crevices in which they make their nests, and go down into every hole
or opening, exploring the depressions left by the hoofs of horses on
the sward when it was wet, and peering under stones and flints
beside the way. Wasps, too, are about with the same purpose, and
wild bees hover in the sunshine. The shrikes are numerous here, and
all have their special haunts, to which they annually return. The
bird that darted on the dandelion flew from the hedge by the
footpath, through the meadow where the stag is generally uncarted,
beside the Hogsmill brook. A pair frequent the bushes beside the
Long Ditton road, not far from the milestone; another pair come to
the railway arch at the foot of Cockrow Hill. In Claygate Lane
there are several places, and in June and July, when they are
feeding their young, the 'chuck-chucking' is incessant.
Beside the copse on the sward by the Long Ditton road is a favourite
resort of peacock butterflies. On sunny days now one may often be
seen there floating over the grass. White butterflies go
flutter-flutter, continually fanning; the peacock spreads his wide
wings and floats above the bennets. Yellow or sulphur butterflies
are almost rare--things common enough in other places. I seldom see
one here, and, unless it is fancy, fewer the last two seasons than
previously.
In the ploughed field by Southborough Park, towards the Long Ditton
road, partridges sometimes call now as the sun goes down. The corn
is yet so short and thin that the necks of partridges stand up above
it. One stole out the other evening from the hedge of a field beside
the Ewell road into the corn; his head was high over the green
blades. The meadow close by, the second past the turn, is a
favourite with partridges, though so close to the road and to
Tolworth Farm. Beside Claygate Lane, where the signpost points to
Hook, there is a withybed which is a favourite cover for hares.
There is a gateway (on the left of the lane) just past the signpost,
from which you can see all one side of the osiers; the best time is
when the clover begins to close its leaves for the evening. On May
3, looking over the gate there, I watched two hares enjoying
themselves in the corn; they towered high above it--it was not more
than four or five inches--and fed with great unconcern, though I was
not concealed. A nightingale sang in the bushes within a few yards,
and two cuckoos chased each other, calling as they flew across the
lane; once one passed just overhead. The cuckoo has a note like
'chuck, chuck,' besides the well-known cry, which is uttered
apparently when the bird is much exerted. These two were quite
restless; they were to and fro from the fields on one side of the
lane to those on the other, now up the hedge, now in a tree, and
continually scolding each other with these 'chuck-chucking' sounds.
Chaffinches were calling from the tops of the trees; the chaffinches
now have a note much like one used by the yellow-hammer, different
from their song and from their common 'fink tink.' I was walking by
the same place, on April 24, when there was suddenly a tremendous
screaming and threatening, and, glancing over the fields bordering
on the Waffrons, there were six jays fighting. They screamed at and
followed each other in a fury, real or apparent, up and down the
hedge, and then across the fields out of sight. There were three
jays together in a field by the Ewell road on May 1.
Just past the bridge over the Hogsmill brook at Tolworth Court there
begins, on the left-hand side of the road, a broad mound, almost a
cover in itself. At this time, before the underwood is up, much that
goes on in the mound can be seen. There are several nightingales
here, and they sometimes run or dart along under the trailing ivy,
as if a mouse had rushed through it. The rufous colour of the back
increases the impression; the hedgerows look red in the sunshine.
Whitethroats are in full song everywhere: they have a twitter
sometimes like swallows. A magpie flew up from the short green corn
to a branch low down an elm, his back towards me, and as he rose his
tail seemed to project from a white circle. The white tips of his
wings met--or apparently so--as he fluttered, both above and beneath
his body, so that he appeared encircled with a white ring.
The swifts have not come, up to the 10th, but there are young
thrushes about able to fly. There was one at the top of the garden
the other day almost as large as his parent. Nesting is in the
fullest progress. I chanced on a hedge-sparrow's lately, the whole
groundwork of which was composed of the dry vines of the wild white
convolvulus. All the birds are come, I think, except the swift, the
chat, and the redstart: very likely the last two are in the
neighbourhood, though I have not seen them. In the furze on Tolworth
Common--a resort of chats--the land-lizards are busy every sunny
day. They run over the bunches of dead, dry grass--quite white and
blanched--grasping it in their claws, like a monkey with hands and
prehensile feet. They are much swifter than would be supposed. There
was one on the sward by the Ewell road the other morning, quite
without a tail; the creature was as quick as possible, but the grass
too short to hide under till it reached some nettles.
The roan and white cattle happily grazing in the meadows by the
Hogsmill brook look as if they had never been absent, as if they
belonged to the place, like the trees, and had never been shut up in
the yards through so terrible a winter. The water of the Hogsmill
has a way of escaping like that of larger channels, and has made for
itself a course for its overflow across a corner of the meadow by
the road. A thin place in the rather raised bank lets it through in
flood-time (like a bursting loose of the Mississippi), and down it
rushes towards the moat. Beside the furrows thus soaked now and
then, there are bunches of marsh-marigold in flower, and though the
field is bright with dandelions and buttercups, the marigolds are
numerous enough to be visible on the other side of it, 300 yards or
more distant, and are easily distinguished by their different
yellow. White cuckoo-flowers (_Cardamine_) are so thick in many
fields that the green tint of the grass is lost under their silvery
hue. Bluebells are in full bloom. There are some on the mound
between Claygate and the Ewell road; the footpath to Chessington
from Roxby Farm passes a copse on the left which shimmers in the
azure; on the mound on the right of the lane to Horton they are
plentiful this year--the hedge has been cut, and consequently more
have shot up. Cowslips innumerable. The pond by the Ewell road,
between this and Red Lion Lane, is dotted with white water-crowfoot.
The first that flowered were in the pond in the centre of Tolworth
Common. The understalks are long and slender, and with a filament
rather than leaves--like seaweed--but when the flower appears these
larger leaves float on the surface. Quantities of this ranunculus
come floating down the Hogsmill brook, at times catching against the
bridge. A little pond by the lane near Bone's Gate was white with
this flower lately, quite covered from bank to bank, not a spare
inch without its silver cup. Vetches are in flower; there are always
some up the Long Ditton road on the bank by Swaynes-Thorp.
Shepherd's purse stands up in flower in the waste places, and on the
side of the ditches thick branches of hedge-mustard lift their white
petals. The delicate wind anemones flowered thickly in Claygate Lane
this year. On April 24 the mound on the right-hand side was dotted
with them. They had pushed up through the dead dry oak-leaves of
last autumn. The foliage of the wind anemone is finely cut and
divided, so that it casts a lovely shadow on any chance leaf that
lies under it: it might suggest a design. The anemones have not
flowered there like this since I have known the lane before. They
were thicker than I have ever seen them there. Dog-violets, barren
strawberry, and the yellowish-green spurge are in flower there now.
The pine in front of my north window began to put forth its catkins
some time since; those up the Long Ditton road are now covered thick
with the sulphur farina or dust. I fancy three different sets of
fruit may sometimes be seen on pines: this year's small and green,
last year's ripe and mature, and that of the year before dry and
withered. The trees are all in leaf now, except the Turkey
oaks--there are some fine young Turkey oaks by Oak Hill Path--and
the black poplars. Oaks have been in leaf some time, except those
that flower and are now garlanded with green. Ash, too, is now in
leaf, and beech. The bees have been humming in the sycamores; the
limes are in leaf, but their flower does not come yet. There were
round, rosy oak-apples on the oak by the garden in the copse on the
9th. This tree is singular for bearing a crop of these apples every
year. Its top was snapped by the snow that fell last October while
yet the leaf was on. I think the apples appear on this oak earlier
than on any about here. As for the orchards, now they are beautiful
with bloom; walking along the hedges, too, you light once now and
then on a crab or a wild apple, with its broad rosy petals showing
behind the hawthorn. On the 7th I heard a corncrake in the meadow
over Thames, opposite the Promenade, a hundred yards below
Messenger's Eyot. It is a favourite spot with the corncrake--almost
the only place where you are nearly sure to hear him. Crake! crake!
So it is now high May, and now midnight. Antares is visible--the
summer star.
VIGNETTES FROM NATURE
I.--SPRING
The soft sound of water moving among thousands of grass-blades is to
the hearing as the sweetness of spring air to the scent. It is so
faint and so diffused that the exact spot whence it issues cannot be
discerned, yet it is distinct, and my footsteps are slower as I
listen. Yonder, in the corners of the mead, the atmosphere is full
of some ethereal vapour. The sunshine stays in the air there as if
the green hedges held the wind from brushing it away. Low and
plaintive comes the notes of a lapwing; the same notes, but tender
with love.
On this side by the hedge the ground is a little higher and dry,
hung over with the lengthy boughs of an oak which give some shade. I
always feel a sense of regret when I see a seedling oak in the
grass. The two green leaves--the little stem so upright and
confident, and though but a few inches high, already so completely a
tree--are in themselves beautiful. Power, endurance, grandeur are
there; you can grasp all with your hand and take a ship between the
finger and thumb. Time, that sweeps away everything, is for a while
repelled: the oak will grow when the time we know is forgotten, and
when felled will be mainstay and safety of a generation in a future
century. That the plant should start among the grass to be severed
by the scythe, or crushed by cattle, is very pitiful; I cannot help
wishing that it could be transplanted and protected. O! the
countless acorns that drop in autumn not one in a million is
permitted to become a tree: a vast waste of strength and beauty.
From the bushes by the stile on the left hand (which I have just
passed) follows the long whistle of a nightingale. His nest is near;
he sings night and day. Had I waited on the stile, in a few minutes,
becoming used to my presence, he would have made the hawthorn
vibrate, so powerful is his voice when heard close at hand. There is
not another nightingale along this path for at least a mile, though
it crosses meadows and runs by hedges to all appearance equally
suitable. But nightingales will not pass their limits; they seem to
have a marked-out range as strictly defined as the line of a
geological map. They will not go over to the next hedge, hardly into
the field on one side of a favourite spot, nor a yard farther along
the mound. Opposite the oak is a low fence of serrated green. Just
projecting above the edges of a brook, fast-growing flags have
thrust up their bayonet-tips. Beneath, these stalks are so thick in
the shallow places that a pike can scarcely push a way between them.
Over the brook stand some high maple-trees: to their thick foliage
wood-pigeons come. The entrance to a combe--the widening mouth of a
valley--is beyond, with copses on the slopes.
Again the plover's notes, this time in the field immediately behind;
repeated, too, in the field on the right hand. One comes over, and
as he flies he jerks a wing upwards and partly turns on his side in
the air, rolling like a vessel in a swell. He seems to beat the air
sideways, as if against a wall, not downwards. This habit makes his
course appear so uncertain: he may go there, or yonder, or in a
third direction, more undecided than a startled snipe. Is there a
little vanity in that wanton flight? Is there a little consciousness
of the spring-freshened colours of his plumage and pride in the
dainty touch of his wings on the sweet wind? His love is watching
his wayward course. He prolongs it. He has but a few yards to fly to
reach the well-known feeding-ground by the brook where the grass is
short; perhaps it has been eaten off by sheep. It is a straight and
easy line--as a starling would fly. The plover thinks nothing of a
straight line: he winds first with the curve of the hedge, then
rises, uttering his cry, aslant, wheels, and returns; now this way,
direct at me, as if his object was to display his snowy breast;
suddenly rising aslant again, he wheels once more, and goes right
away from his object over above the field whence he came. Another
moment and he returns, and so to and fro, and round and round, till,
with a sidelong, unexpected sweep, he alights by the brook. He
stands a minute, then utters his cry, and runs a yard or so forward.
In a little while a second plover arrives from the field behind;
he, too, dances a maze in the air before he settles. Soon a third
joins them. They are visible at that spot because the grass is
short; elsewhere they would be hidden. If one of these rises and
flies to and fro, almost instantly another follows, and then it is
indeed a dance before they alight. The wheeling, maze-tracing,
devious windings continue till the eye wearies and rests with
pleasure on a passing butterfly. These birds have nests in the
meadows adjoining; they meet here as a common feeding-ground.
Presently they will disperse, each returning to his mate at the
nest. Half an hour afterwards they will meet once more, either here
or on the wing.
In this manner they spend their time from dawn, through the
flower-growing day, till dusk. When the sun arises over the hill
into the sky, already blue, the plovers have been up a long while.
All the busy morning they go to and fro: the busy morning when the
wood-pigeons cannot rest in the copses on the combe side, but
continually fly in and out; when the blackbirds whistle in the oaks;
when the bluebells gleam with purplish lustre. At noontide in the
dry heat it is pleasant to listen to the sound of water moving among
the thousand thousand grass-blades of the mead. The flower-growing
day lengthens out beyond the sunset, and till the hedges are dim the
lapwings do not cease.
Leaving now the shade of the oak, I follow the path into the meadow
on the right, stepping by the way over a streamlet which diffuses
its rapid current broadcast over the sward till it collects again
and pours into the brook. This next meadow is somewhat more raised,
and not watered; the grass is high, and full of buttercups. Before I
have gone twenty yards a lapwing rises out in the field, rushes
towards me through the air, and circles round my head, making as if
to dash at me, and uttering shrill cries. Immediately another comes
from the mead behind the oak; then a third from over the hedge, and
all those that have been feeding by the bank, till I am encircled
with them. They wheel round, dive, rise aslant, cry, and wheel
again, always close over me, till I have walked some distance, when
one by one they fall off, and, still uttering threats, retire. There
is a nest in this meadow, and, although it is, no doubt, a long way
from the path, my presence even in the field, large as it is, is
resented. The couple who imagine themselves threatened are quickly
joined by their friends, and there is no rest till I have left their
treasures far behind.
II.--THE GREEN CORN
Pure colour almost always gives the idea of fire, or, rather, it is
perhaps as if a light shone through as well as the colour itself.
The fresh green blade of corn is like this--so pellucid, so clear
and pure in its green as to seem to shine with colour. It is not
brilliant--not a surface gleam nor an enamel--it is stained through.
Beside the moist clods the slender flags arise, filled with the
sweetness of the earth. Out of the darkness under--that darkness
which knows no day save when the ploughshare opens its chinks--they
have come to the light. To the light they have brought a colour
which will attract the sunbeams from now till harvest. They fall
more pleasantly on the corn, toned, as if they mingled with it.
Seldom do we realize that the world is practically no thicker to us
than the print of our footsteps on the path. Upon that surface we
walk and act our comedy of life, and what is beneath is nothing to
us. But it is out from that underworld, from the dead and the
unknown, from the cold, moist ground, that these green blades have
sprung. Yonder a steam-plough pants up the hill, groaning with its
own strength, yet all that strength and might of wheels, and piston,
and chains cannot drag from the earth one single blade like these.
Force cannot make it; it must grow--an easy word to speak or write,
in fact full of potency.
It is this mystery--of growth and life, of beauty and sweetness and
colour, and sun-loved ways starting forth from the clods--that gives
the corn its power over me. Somehow I identify myself with it; I
live again as I see it. Year by year it is the same, and when I see
it I feel that I have once more entered on a new life. And to my
fancy, the spring, with its green corn, its violets, and hawthorn
leaves, and increasing song, grows yearly dearer and more dear to
this our ancient earth. So many centuries have flown. Now it is the
manner with all natural things to gather as it were by smallest
particles. The merest grain of sand drifts unseen into a crevice,
and by-and-by another; after a while there is a heap; a century and
it is a mound, and then everyone observes and comments on it. Time
itself has gone on like this; the years have accumulated, first in
drifts, then in heaps, and now a vast mound, to which the mountains
are knolls, rises up and overshadows us. Time lies heavy on the
world. The old, old earth is glad to turn from the cark and care of
driftless centuries to the first sweet blades of green.