A soft sound of water moving among thousands of grass-blades--to the
hearing it is 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 come 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 the 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. Of 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 in 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 lines 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
edge of a brook, fast-growing flags have thrust up their bayonet-tips.
Beneath their 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
coomb, 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 course of the hedge, then rises aslant,
uttering his cry, 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 coomb-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 brook, 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
their possessions threatened are quickly joined by their friends, and
there is no rest till I have left their treasures far behind.