meadow sails a dark, hawk-like figure, swift and silent,
disappearing in the oak wood on the farther shore. In a moment
every voice is hushed. Not a bird calls. Not even a wren dares to
utter an alarm. There is a sudden rush of wings. A merlin dashes
from the thicket by the shore, catches up the dipper in its cruel
claws, and, alighting on a great flat stone, in the middle of the
river, it buries its merciless bill again and again in the white
breast of its struggling captive. What a picture! The sunlight is
full on the blue back of the beautiful little falcon, as it leans
forward a little, half hiding its prey under its drooping wings.
Giving a swift glance to right and left--the sparkle of its keen
eyes plain to see--it tears out a little cloud of feathers that
flutter lightly down, and sail away upon the stream. Again the
merlin looks up. Something has startled him. He gives one glance
this way. He catches sight of a figure under the alder trees. Like
a flash he is gone. The dead dipper falls into the water, sailing
down the river, in which but a few minutes since it was playing,
full of life and happiness, the white feathers from its
blood-stained gorget floating away from it at every swirl of the
current; a sorrowful little heap of ruffled plumage, whirling with
the whirling stream.
[Illustration: AN EXMOOR SKETCH.]
WINSFORD: VOICES THREE.
On the slopes of a great hollow in the heart of Exmoor, a hot sun
beats fiercely down. True that it is an April sky whose clouds and
sunshine weave their changing web of lights and shadows over the
landscape. True that the landscape, even yet, wears but little of
the guise of springtime. But to-day no touch of east is in the
air, and the smoke columns, rising slowly from the chimneys of the
village, and showing so blue against the oak plantation on a
distant shoulder of the moorland, are drifting slowly from the
southward. From this upland country, over which the snow lay deep
for two whole months, the grip of winter has been slow to loosen.
But the trees and hedgerows are answering at last to the magical
influence of the sunshine, and "the useful trouble of the rain."
The grass of these rich meadow lands--for months past all burnt
and brown, as if after a long, rainless summer--wears now its very
loveliest hue. There is a fringe of pale blue violets along the
edge of every woodland path. Stars of celandine are scattered over
every field, and among the tangle of the withered hedge-row
grasses. Marsh marigolds are gleaming in the wet earth about the
roots of the alders by the river. Even at this distance, the great
clumps of primroses show like points of light on the slope of the
orchard by the vicarage. Surely never were there such beautiful
masses of wood-sorrel as, with their vivid leaves and dainty,
purple-veined flowers, brighten now the banks of every deep-worn
lane.
The tall chestnut by the church, but yesterday just dusted over
with fine points of gold, is now a very cloud of fresh young
foliage. Each day strengthens the green hue of the larches
crowning the bold spur beyond the village. Each day deepens the
warm purple of fast-opening blossoms round the heads of the tall
elms of the village, and the great oaks of this warm slope. Noble
trees they are, these hoary patriarchs that the woodman's axe has
spared. Their mighty branches, gnarled and twisted and
storm-beaten, towering far up against the pale blue heaven, are
shaggy with ages' growth of lichens. Moss grows thick over the
furrowed rind, not of their broad stems alone, but almost of their
topmost branches. In the crannies of the bark, fringed with
grey-green tongues of fern, woodbine and briar and slim
mountain-ash have found anchorage. Over their old arms the
nuthatches wander up and down, calling to each other with that
loud musical trill so characteristic of the springtime.
On every side, among the broad stumps of vanished forest monarchs,
long dethroned, are springing the sturdy forms of another
generation, young pines and oaks and beeches, that are doing their
best to fill the places of the fallen, and although the giant
sycamore that overhangs the path is still all bare and leafless,
everywhere in the grass beneath its shadow, its children, tiny
double blades of tender green, are springing, thousands strong.
It is a scene of marvellous beauty upon which the eye looks down
from the welcome rest of this fallen tree beside the woodland
path. Below, at the foot of the slope, the border line between the
wild life of the covert and the order of the well-kept farm lands,
runs a swift moorland stream, whose broad band of silver is broken
again and again by the rude stone bridges of the village streets.
Every reach of the river seems to have its several sound, that,
"Low at times, and loud at times
And changing like a poet's rhymes,"
seems, with the rush of the wind among the rocking tops, and with
the songs and call-notes of a hundred birds, to fill the hollow.
In the pauses of the roar of the white lasher by the mill, a roar
that sinks and swells with every flaw that blows, the ear may
catch now the sound of the swift current brawling over its brown
pebbles, now the swirl of water round a bar of shingle, now the
chafing of the stream among the alder roots, and now the soft
sound of ripples on a sandy shallow. Round the broad green knoll
that rises from the river, filling all the centre of the valley,
and almost islanded by wandering streams, cluster the houses of
the hamlet, whose white walls and brown and moss-grown roofs of
thatch, whose pointed gables and quaint deep-sunk dormer windows
show plainly now among sheltering elms, that in the summer-time
will hide them in a very bower of green.
High over the roofs of the village, high even above the topmost
trees, rises the grey tower of the church. Round its turrets a
troop of daws are fluttering. Is it only fancy, or is there really
a note of protest and impatience in their snatches of clear-cut
speech? For weeks past these bold frequenters of the church have
been piling sticks upon the turret stair, by way of foundation for
their great untidy nests. They had strewn a cartload of rubbish
over the floor of the belfry, when the sexton arose in his wrath
and blocked up all the tower windows and the loophole lights of
the stairway, so that the daws were compelled to change their
quarters to the roofs of the village. But they still linger round
their ancestral homestead, and one pair, determined not to quit
altogether the sacred precincts that have sheltered them and
theirs for generations, have established themselves in a niche
behind the iron pipe of the stove. It is a hole that might just
contain the nest, but the birds have thought it necessary to fill
up with sticks a yard or more of the space between the chimney and
the tower wall, as if by way of outworks to their fortress.
A flood of sunshine is falling at this moment on the ancient
tower, on the brown thatch of the old houses, on the purple
lacework of the budding elms, until the whole beautiful picture
stands clear-drawn against the soft background of the far
hillside, still all in shadow. The sunlight glitters on the slate
roofs of houses lower down, and flashes on the winding river until
every reach of it is a sheet of burnished silver. Now it brightens
yet more the vivid green of the meadows, now it touches the red
slopes of distant corn-lands, and now it seems to linger on a far
shoulder of the moor, whose brown heath and dead grey gorse
bushes, and ancient thorn trees straggling up the hill, are
transfigured to a very vision of glory by the dreamy, sunlit haze.
Dream-like, too, is the quiet that broods over this peaceful
valley--a quiet even deepened by those Voices Three, of the wind,
and the birds, and the river. No sound of toil or traffic rises
from the village, save the clink of iron in the smithy, the thud
of a woodman's axe among the young alders by the water, or, still
more rarely, the lumbering of a cart along one of the deep lanes
that slope upward to the moor, or that wander with the winding
streams. The wind that sways the oak boughs overhead has a stormy
sound. But this sheltered corner under the hill, with its screen
of thick-growing fir and holly, is full of the warm south, of soft
and gentle airs, scented with the sweet resinous fragrance of the
pines.
And all the while, louder than the rush of the wind, clearer far
than the sound of the river, there float from tree to tree the
happy voices of the woodland singers. Everywhere among the
leafless boughs the chiff-chaffs are calling. Here and there along
the slope a tree pipit, rising high above his station upon some
yet wintry branch, sinks slowly downward through the sunny air,
singing as he sinks, till he alights again upon his windy perch.
Loud above all other sounds there strikes in now and then the
whistle of a blackbird, wild and clear, and at times the yet
sweeter carol of the blackcap. Rooks call hoarsely to each other
as they pass, on the way to their great settlement far down the
river. At times the white pigeons of the vicarage, hovering a
moment in mid-air, descend like a shower of snowflakes on their
dovecot. From the shelter of the old Scotch firs at the far end of
the wood, where the trees have long been left untouched, come now
and then the deep notes of carrion crows, low-toned, sullen,
unmirthful. They are ill neighbours for all the weaker children of
the wood. Later on in the season, the edge of the Punch Bowl, that
great hollow beyond the oak coppice, whose rim just shows against
the sky line, the hollow where the red deer are so fond of lying,
will be strewn with broken eggs of black game and pheasant, the
spoil of raids in the heather and the covert. And here, too,
scattered under the trees, are broken ringdoves' eggs, bearing
plainly the marks of those black-coated, merciless marauders. From
that corner too, out of the jungle of broom, and hazel, and
wild-briar, comes at intervals the crow of a pheasant--a strident
and far-reaching cry, different altogether from all other woodland
voices. And in every tree along the slope willow warblers are
crooning, over and over, their dainty snatches of sweet, low-toned
song. It is a sleepy tune; a leisurely cadence of soft sounds,
suggestive of sunshine and the summer, of
"Music, that gentlier on the spirit lies,
Than tir'd eyelids upon tir'd eyes."
[Illustration: A MESSAGE FROM THE SEA.]
BREAN DOWN: FLOTSAM AND JETSAM.
It is a cold, grey world that lies waiting for the dawn--a misty
sky, in which one pale planet glimmers; a hazy sea, whose fretted
levels shine faintly in the moonlight; shadowy hills, along whose
winding line, here darkened with clustering woodlands, and there
whitened by still slumbering hamlets, a grey mist hangs. It hangs,
too, like a vast canopy, over the wide plain, whose sunburnt
meadows seem to melt away into an infinite distance; and along
the wandering river whose brown flood loiters idly to the sea.
A silent world, for the most part. Even the voice of the river,
that but now was chafing loud against the shingle bar piled high
along the shore, is failing in the swift inrush of the tide. It is
a slow moving and taciturn stream that, as it wound along the
level fringes of the hills, long since forgot the sunshine and the
laughter and the crystal clearness of its youth, when, under banks
that were hung with fern and meadow-sweet, it sang over the brown
pebbles of its bed, round
"... Many a fairy foreland, set
With willow-weed and mallow."
But the tide, that is hushing the hoarse song of the river, swells
louder every moment the troubled roar of the sea, whose grey waves
are plunging in over the rattling shingle and the shining sand.
And as the light of dawning strengthens over the low grey hills to
the eastward, other sounds break in upon the stillness. Far off
across the moor a curlew calls. A heron who all night long, it may
be, has been keeping his lone vigil in the marshes, and who is now
flying leisurely home-ward to the hills, lets fall a muttered
croak in passing--midnight revellers both. But the white gulls
that rise and fall and toy like butterflies above the broadening
stream calling to each other with discordant voices, are children
of the sunshine.
Of the sunshine, too, is the music of a lark, who, high up in the
grey mist, brooding like a fate over the brown and thirsty
meadows, seems to hover at the very gates of dawn. Yet there is a
sound of the sea even on his silvery tongue. Among the sweet notes
of his familiar "babble of green fields," he brings in at times
the cry of the curlew and the whistle of the plover.
A breath of the sea there is, too, in the chatter of the starling
on the roof above. The croak of the heron and the call of the
whimbrel are common speech with him. And now he even imitates the
creak of the cordage on the coasting smack swinging in the stream
yonder, where two men are busy setting the old brown sails.
From the cliffs that break the round swell of the hill a line of
daws are streaming, eager, clamorous, on the wing for their
hunting ground upon the moor. One troop has wheeled aside to
alight among the boughs of a cherry-tree in a little walled-in
space of garden at some distance from the house. The farmer, who
has just appeared, with his milking-pail upon his shoulder, and
who looks up to nod a friendly greeting, pauses a moment in the
doorway to watch the marauders at their work, while the old
sheep-dog waits wondering at his side.
Suddenly, far out on the moor, beyond the cattle that stand
motionless, expectant, all looking this way, a tall figure looms
out of the mist, and across the fields comes a strange cry:
"Leave your meadow grasses mellow,
Mellow, mellow;
Quit your cowslips, cowslips yellow."
The old dog hears, and bounds forward to his work. But the sleek
and sober herd, never turning their heads to look behind them,
move slowly, as by common impulse, converging fanwise to the gate.
Men in white smocks, and with shining pails upon their backs, are
striding through the meadows towards the farm. And all the while
the milking call sounds at intervals across the fields:--
"Quit your pipes of parsley hollow,
Hollow, hollow;
Come uppe Lightfoot, rise and follow;
Lightfoot, Whitefoot,
From your clovers lift the head."
But along the side of the green headland that, beyond the old
farm-buildings stretches a mile or more into the sea, silence
still reigns, save for the sound of the waves, for the plaintive
cry of a curlew or the clamour of a troop of gulls.
When a gleam of sunshine breaks the grey veil of cloud, changing
the sombre hues of the mud flats to warm tones of brown and
purple, turning to gold the broad beach and the ragged sand-hills,
birds, unseen before, start swiftly into view. Here a tall curlew
stalks solemnly along, erect and watchful. There an inky crow is
picking dainty morsels from the ooze. And here a party of trim
black-headed gulls have collected round some treasure trove left
by the last tide. A troop of sandpipers sweeps along, now flashing
in a hundred points of silver in the sunlight; now, as they wheel,
all lost again in the brown hues of their haunts. As far as the
eye can reach are scattered gulls, shieldrakes, oyster-catchers,
rock-doves even, foraging by the edge of the water, falling back
before the rising tide.
But sounds of life are faint, even now. Among the boulders pipits
flit at times with feeble cries. And a brood of young kestrels
lately fledged, sail and soar along the cliff farther on, and
scream as if in defiance of the wind, against which their keen
wings are beating. The rocky brows that overhang the shore are
thick with grasses and sweet bedstraw, with flags and mullein, and
tall evening primrose. In the crannies campion and sea-pink are
rooted. Here a yellow poppy trembles in the wind, and there a
great cluster of samphire fills a rocky cleft. There are tufts of
it quite low down, but it is a plant that always grows above
high-water mark, and many a shipwrecked sailor, thrown ashore
among the rocks, has taken heart again when, in the darkness, his
despairing grasp has tightened on those strangely smelling leaves.
It is St. Peter's plant--Saint Pierre, sampier, samphire.
Now the shrill screaming of the kestrels rises louder still, the
fierce cry of the old birds mingling with the plaintive clamour of
their brood. Now one of them, sweeping round the headland, poises
a moment in the air, his wings motionless, his tail spread wide,
his figure dark upon the western sky. Slowly stooping, he alights
on the crown of a rocky pinnacle, a crag that stands out from the
cliff like the tower of some old stronghold; and, with feet spread
wide, clutching with his strong claws the rifted rock, his head
lowered to the wind, stands a splendid figure, as still as if he
were the living rock. Many a keen-eyed falcon has looked out over
the sea from that high watch tower, round whose base wander grey
arms of ivy, gnarled and wrinkled, centuries old.
Nor do hawks alone find sanctuary here. So quiet is this lonely
shore, so complete its solitude, that among these cliffs even the
raven and the peregrine are safe.
In the shelter of a long line of sand-hills that centuries have
heaped over the old sea-wall, there stands a solitary cottage. Its
brown eaves just peer over the dyke of sand. No window looks to
seaward through its massy wall. It is close above high-water mark.
Often, on wild nights of winter,
"The startled waves leap over it; the storm
Smites it with all the scourges of the rain,
And steadily against its solid form
Press the great shoulders of the hurricane."
Close by it runs a belt of shingle, and, beyond, there stretches
away to the brown sea a wide sweep of sand, on whose wet surface
the heron and the curlew leave their traces, where whole armies of
sandpipers weave a maze of tiny footprints. To them this barren
shore is a land of plenty. This open beach is to them the very
safest of sanctuaries. No wildfowler can get within range of them
unobserved. Their only foes are the herring-gull--the pirate of
the sea--or the keen-eyed falcon that has his hold in yonder
cliff.
Except at times of very high tides--even then only when
accompanied by stormy weather--the sea never quite reaches to the
sand-hills; but in summer especially, a mirage is occasionally
seen on this wide beach,--a phantom sea, in whose smooth surface
are reflected the jagged line of sand-hills, the church of the
distant village, and the few houses scattered at far intervals
along the coast.
It is a fruitful plain, whose level meadows stretch away from the
old farm, fading only on the far horizon. So low it lies that,
were it not for yonder mounds of sand, whose jagged fringes line
the coast for miles, the high October tides would often, when a
strong wind is blowing, find their way among the hamlets far
inland. Many a time has the old wall given way; never, perhaps,
with quite such dire results as in the great flood of 1607, when
the salt water was twelve feet deep in villages five miles from
the sea. Thirty hamlets were overwhelmed. Scores of unhappy
villagers perished. So swift was the rush of the water that there
was no chance of escape, and for many--in the words of a
black-letter chap-book of the time, "their last refuge was
patiently to die. Cattle were drowned in droves. Rabbits being
driven out of their burroughes by the tyde, were seene to sit for
safety on the backs of sheepe, as they swom up and downe, and at
last were drowned with them.... Deade bodies floate hourely above
water, and are continually taken uppe. It cannot yet be knowne
howe manye have fell in this Tempest of God's fearful judgement."
Life here was not always quiet. The green slopes of the hill above
are scarred all along with old earthworks, so defaced by plough
and spade, so trampled down by men and cattle, so worn by the
storms of untold centuries, that the eye can hardly trace their
outlines in the smooth short sward. Not even a tradition survives
of the lost inhabitants whose rude pottery and flint arrow-heads
the rabbits bring up among the red earth of their burrows.
Compared with this old hill fortress, the earthworks round the
tower of the church yonder, the square lines of a Roman camp, the
last fort on the well-guarded road down which was brought metal
from the mines among the hills, are works of yesterday.
Again and again this coast was wasted by the Danes, who plundered
not the hamlets by the shore alone, but villages twenty miles from
the sea. Victory was not always with the invaders. Athelney is not
far distant. Ethandune was on that low line of hills to the
southward. And in the very year of that crowning victory, a few
miles farther down, "the brother of Hingwar and Halfdene came with
twenty-three ships ... and he was there slain, and with him eight
hundred and forty of his army, and there was taken the war-flag
which they called the Raven." By the river that loiters seaward
under the blue hills across the bay, whose broad mouth shines like
silver in the sun, still stands the green mound of Hubbalowe,
which the vikings piled over the ashes of the dead sea-rover. On
every hill-top in the West Country
"The brake and the tufted grass are high
On the low mounds where warriors lie."
Each point of vantage on the hills has its time-worn lines of old
entrenchments. There is hardly a lofty crest but has had its
cluster of green grave mounds. But of the builders there remains
little but the shapes of their ruined strongholds, their rude
pottery, and still ruder weapons, from which to build up our dim
conjectures of what manner of men they were who held these hill
tops against the arms of Claudius and Vespasian. Even of the
legionaries who forced their way thus far into the West, our
knowledge has been gained by fragments. It is by accident that we
have obtained our most vivid glimpses of their arts, their arms,
their way of life. Massive ingots of lead have from time to time
been found in the fields or along the line of one or other of the
old military roads, whose stamps showed clearly how soon, after
the landing of Claudius, the conquerors took possession of the
mining country.
Again, when the plough struck on a stone coffin in a field remote
from any sign of human occupation; and when further search
revealed the ruins of a Roman villa, with beautiful pavements
still undisturbed, it was possible to guess, from the lettering of
the coins which were strewn among broken amphoræ and scraps of
Samian, the very year in which the house was last inhabited. Many
a hoard of silver pieces has been found among these hills, buried
doubtless in some "dark hour of doubt and dread," to wait for
better times that never came. Many a time the labourer's spade has
clashed on a rusted spear-head, a broken urn, a handful of
denarii. At times even on
"A tarnished ring, whose fiery gems,
Still on its circle set,
From the far sands of Indus brought,
Gleam through their setting, rudely wrought,
As if the sky, their hues had caught,
Flamed in their glory yet."
Relics like these--a flint arrowhead, a fragment of pottery, a
handful of denarii, a camp, a tumulus--eke out the scanty records
of the time, the pages of Asser, the meagre outlines of the Saxon
chronicle.
Hardly a point in all the landscape but is linked with some
stirring memory. It was on the little island lying off the point
here that Githa found refuge after Hastings. Two years later all
this shore was ravaged by the sons of Harold; and in the Domesday
record, made eighteen years afterwards, we still can trace their
handiwork in the lessened values of villages they had plundered.
Over and over again after the brief sketch of a hamlet, its list
of boors and villeins, its corn and grass land, its mill, its
fishpond--perhaps even its patch of vineyard--follow such words
as these: "it was worth 100s., now only 60"; or "it was worth four
pounds, now only 40 shillings."
In the Armada days--for half a century, indeed, before the sailing
of "that great fleet invincible"--there stood, on the high ground
across the river, according to a quaint map of the period, "The
Coste of England uppon Seuerne," a tower, in which a gun was
mounted, as a defence against invasion. Not a stone remains of the
tower which in King Harry's time guarded the little port. But all
this coast was armed and ready, years before the sailing of the
Armada, watching for the red glow on Dawnsboro' that should call
up the bold yeomen of the moors to face the "Inquisition dogs, and
the devildoms of Spain."