Government--"after having vewed and trayned the nombers bothe of
foote and horse twyce since my coming into this countie--the
trewthe is, it is a most gallaunte contrey for the men, armor, and
rediness." The authorities were constantly furnished with
"Certyffycathes," showing the numbers of duly qualified pikemen
and archers. Again and again were the justices urged to keep
everything in readiness, since "the wings of man's life are plumed
with the feathers of death"; and to train their men to meet any
emergency, because "great dilatory wants are found upon all sudden
hurly-burlies." Early Orders in Council declared that any
able-bodied man between seventeen and fifty-nine who should be
found to "lacke a bowe and fower arrowes" was to be fined.
Later, in Elizabeth's reign, more attention was paid to the use of
firearms, and most minute instructions were issued from
headquarters as to the training of marksmen. The musket was to be
fired at first with priming only, then with half a charge, and
finally, when the men were ready for it, the full amount of powder
was to be used. This was with an eye to the right training of men
who, "by reason of the churlishness of their pieces, and not being
made acquainted therewith by degrees, are ever after so
discouraged as either they wincke or pull their heades from the
piece, whereby they take no perfect level, but shoot at random,
and so never prove good shottes."
Among the seaweed on the bank of shingle by the cottage all kinds
of strange things are found--palm wood, long bamboos, seeds from
the West Indies, sabots, children's toys. Once even a clock was
washed up on the beach. A few months since the sands were strewn
with parts of carriages from the wreck of a vessel that was
carrying railway plant to South America. As you stand in the
little garden, whose broad edges are none too good protection for
it against the wind, you will notice that everything about the
place has a touch of this sombre local colouring. Every piece of
woodwork is part of a wreck. There is not a hinge or a bolt,
hardly a nail even that did not come out of some ship's fittings.
The posts on which the garden gate is hung are pieces of a mast.
The gate itself is made of planks that have been picked up on the
sand. Mahogany panels from the saloon of some steamship have been
worked into the walling of the garden shed. No coal is ever needed
here. A little peat is all that is wanted. The sea brings an
endless store of firewood almost to the door.
Too often, alas! the ebbing tide leaves yet sadder jetsam on the
shore--white, still figures, lying face down on the yellow sand;
to be lifted reverently, perhaps, but yet by stranger hands, and
committed with brief rites to the corner of the ancient
burial-ground on the headland yonder, where "the little grey
church on the windy hill" stands among the green graves of
centuries, roofless, dismantled, and forlorn.
[Illustration: MOORLAND NEAR THE SEA.]
THE COUNTRY LIFE.
The man who can look back over thirty years of rural life, of life
spent among woods and meadows, has doubtless learnt something at
least of the ways of the wild creatures of his district, of its
beasts and birds, of its reptiles, and fish, and insects, even of
forms of life still lower in the scale. In the works of Nature,
her lovers find a never-failing charm. There is no book like hers,
as we read it in green field and country lane, in copse, and
stream, and hedge-row. There is no voice like hers, as we hear it
in the sounds of the wood, in the sounds of the sea, in the sounds
of the night. No poet ever breathed such songs. No writer of
romance has ever woven such tales of mystery and wonder.
There are few of us probably who, looking back on the country life
of our early days, would not be ready to admit that among its
pursuits and pleasures, many and various as they were, the art and
craft of birds'-nesting stood supreme. It is a pursuit that has a
charm peculiarly its own. It may be that, in the days of our
youth, the love of having and holding was one chief motive; a love
that some of us have not shaken off yet, though perhaps, it is
lavished on more useful things. Even the lust of plunder and
destruction may have had its weight with us, as we feel sure it
has with the village children. Not every nest-robber, it is true,
is really a lover of Nature. But the birds'-nester who is a
naturalist born soon wakens, not only to the beauty, but to the
significance, of his fragile treasures.
Perhaps few young collectors pay much conscious attention to the
construction of the nest, or notice how skilfully its materials
are made to harmonise with its surroundings, or see how
wonderfully some eggs are protected by their colouring. But his
would be a dull soul on whom these things did not, sooner or
later, make some impression. There are some birds'-nesters who are
no longer young--no longer able to climb a tree or ford a river,
to whom, year after year, the season of nests brings new delight;
to whom the exquisite workmanship of the chaffinch seems each year
more wonderful than ever, and in whose eyes the blue of a
song-thrush's egg will never lose its charm.
These two nightjars' eggs, for example, are exquisitely beautiful,
with their soft shades of brown and grey, veined like some rare
marble. But as you look at them you think less of their beauty
than of the moment when, in the corner of the old orchard, the
bird got up, almost under your feet, and you watched it sail away
to one of the fir-trees in the hedge-row, and crouch down on a low
branch to watch your movements. Then, looking down, you saw, on
the bare earth, these eggs, so near that another step would have
crushed them. This is only a magpie's egg, but the date on it
reminds you of that stiff climb up the giant fir-tree in the
coppice, when for want of a box to carry them in, you had to bring
your spoil down in your cap held between your teeth; while the
farmer below shouted encouragingly: "Bring 'em all, sir; doän't
'ee leave none on 'em. I doän't want none o' they varmint on my
ground."
Here is a kestrel's egg on which there is a date written, and a
name--the name of a once-familiar hill-top. As you look, the
scene of long ago comes back. It was an early morning in May. The
dew lay heavy on the bracken, whose stout young fronds joined
hands across the path. And as you paused on the hill slope and
looked back, you saw how all the upland pastures, and the broad
meadow lands below, were glistening in the light of the just risen
sun. Through the grey haze that veiled the distance showed,
faintly and more faint, range after range of low blue hills, with
white hamlets glimmering here and there. The light of sunrise had
just caught the windows of the old manor house on the slope, some
mile away, and they flashed and flamed like fire. The grey cliffs
above you had the flush of dawn upon their storm-worn steeps, and
the light air tossed the leaves of the wayfaring trees rooted in
the crannies, till they glittered like blades of silver. Among the
elms about the farmstead, on the knoll below, sounded the uneasy
chatter of a magpie. A crow was flying leisurely up to his
fastness in the clump of old Scotch firs on the low hill-top. From
a belt of coppice further down there rose at intervals, above the
low sweet notes of the warblers, the clear call of a cuckoo.
Overhead a woodlark drifted in vast circles, singing as he flew.
When at length you gained the hill crest, you heard the challenge
of a black-cock. Over the wide pasture the lapwings were calling.
Now they wheeled across the pale blue heaven, now they swooped
swiftly almost to the ground, turning over and over in the air.
Now one flew by, so near that you saw clearly the long plume upon
his glossy head, and heard the musical throb of his strong wings
sounding loud in the quiet morning air.
As you paused on the short turf close to the brow of the cliff,
and looking down once more, saw your shadow falling on the young
corn of the ploughed land far below, a hawk dashed out from the
cliff below you, and then, staying its swift course, hovered a
moment in mid air, while the sunshine lighted up its rich brown
plumage. As you peered over the brink of the cliff there were no
signs of a nest. But a tall sapling rooted in a ledge some ten
feet below looked safe to hold by. Cautiously you slid over the
edge, and dropped within reach of the branches, and so, from ledge
to ledge, you climbed slowly down, holding on by points of rock or
tufts of grass, or stems of ivy, until--yes, there, at your feet,
in an arched crevice of the cliff, on a little earth, with no sort
of nest, lay the four exquisite eggs, whose radiant beauty--so
much richer five-and-twenty years since--seemed to your enraptured
gaze to light up the little hollow. As you stooped to take one of
them in your hand--how warm it was--and clung there, gloating over
the beauty of your treasure, the old hawk hovered near, sounding
at times her wild cry of anger and alarm, answered far off by her
fierce mate, hurrying homeward on his swift, keen wings.
It is not given to all alike to be able to appreciate the true
pleasure of a country walk. It is a thing that many of us prize,
and that even more of us long for. And yet there are some people,
really fond of walking, to whom it seems to make little difference
whether their road goes evenly along the Queen's highway, and is
hemmed in by straight stone walls, or loiters through winding
by-ways, under banks crowned with straggling hedge-rows, overhung
with sheltering elms. There are those who take their weekly tramp,
and who say they like it best so, on Sunday, through the
monotonous dreariness of London streets. To them a country walk,
with its possible mud, and with its certain solitude and tameness,
is, at least in fancy, flat and stale and altogether profitless.
It is largely a matter of training. We may learn to love bricks
and mortar and the traffic of the town more than the quiet of
woods and meadows, and the companionship of the everlasting hills.
But there are others who cannot breathe amid the stir and noise
and money-grubbing fever of the city; to whom the air of the open
country is the Elixir of Life; who love its restful quietude, and
who, at each turn along the favourite path, look for some old
friend, some familiar bird, or flower, or insect.
With those who are really fond of rural life, other things have
weight besides the mere landscape, besides the beauty of the view
or the exhilaration of the keen air of the hill-tops. The charm of
woodland walk, of river path, of quiet lanes, or of lonely places
in the hills, is increased a hundredfold by some knowledge of
rural sights and sounds. A power to recognise the songs of birds,
some acquaintance with insect life, a little plant lore, a little
knowledge of rocks and fossils--in a word, some tincture of
Natural History--combine to make a ramble in the country one of
the best things that life can offer us.
This love of Nature is again largely a matter of training.
Schoolboys, as a race, are strangely slow at first to see plants,
or shells, or fossils. But the young birds'-nester, for instance,
whose first motive was, it may be, nothing nobler than the lust of
having and holding, the love of plunder, or even the savage
pleasure of destruction, may soon be trained to see the meaning of
the shape and tints and markings of the eggs; not only to
appreciate the beauty of the nest and the skill with which it was
put together, but to learn in time the song of the builder and to
know something of its habits. The butterfly hunter may be taught
to recognise not merely the beauty of his captives, but to see
something of those marvellous devices by which Nature hides
caterpillar and chrysalis, and even perfect insect, from prying
eyes.
The boy who has acquired a love for Natural History has something
to be thankful for, all the days of his life, a possession that
may be the means of bringing more comfort to his soul than all the
wisdom of the ancients. Of no man can it be so truly said as of
the naturalist that he
"Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything."
It is true enough that, to most men, a knowledge of flowers or
fossils, of insect life or of the habits of birds, will bring no
return in hard cash. But there are other things in life besides a
balance at the banker's. And a love of art is not more lucrative,
or a taste for music or for books.
There are people who, if they would, might do much to aid the
study of Natural History; people whose avocations take them much
into the open air, and who have opportunities which some of us
long for in vain. The fisherman, the keeper, the shepherd, and the
farm labourer might, if they could be won over to take interest in
such things, contribute not a little to our knowledge of the life
history of even the most familiar of animals. Fishermen along the
coast see things sometimes the description of which rouses envy in
the breasts of less fortunate listeners. Not long since a man was
rowing out to his nets in the early morning just outside the bar
of a small tidal river in the West Country, when he saw a raven
sweeping slowly along the hill-slope near by--the grassy side of a
long promontory stretching far out into the sea, muttering to
itself at times with that deep voice that, happily, is still
familiar to the long-shore dwellers on that coast. Suddenly the
bird paused, and with swift descent swooped down among the brown
heather and the stunted bushes of the hill, seizing in its strong
claws a hare that had been lying crouched among the herbage. But
the bird was too late in using its beak or else missed its stroke
altogether, for in a moment the hare and the raven, locked fast
together, rolled over and over, kicking, struggling, flapping down
the rough slope below; until the bird, dismayed by such an
unwonted experience and the buffeting of the rocks and broken
ground, let go its hold. The hare was on its feet and had vanished
like a flash, while the baffled raven, rising slowly in the air,
sailed reluctantly away.
The naturalist is not now, even in country districts, looked upon
quite in the same light as he once was--but one degree removed
from the state of lunatic. The old order of things, the prejudice,
the bigotry, the superstition of half a century ago has to a great
degree disappeared. There are many English parishes still without
a railway; there is none probably without a newspaper. The
presence of a single naturalist, parson or village doctor, or what
not, has been known, like the little leaven that leaveneth the
whole lump, to rouse a real interest among the neighbours in birds
and beasts and even insects. A man's reputation for being fond of
strange creatures may perhaps be laughed at, at first, and
perhaps be always a little looked down on. But by degrees, very
slow it may be, the influence spreads. The keeper brings him a
strange bird, the labourer a nest of dormice found in stubbing up
a hedge-row, or a clutch of quails' eggs he has come upon among
the clover. The old mole catcher, too, is a very mine of stories
about the strange beasts he has seen in his sixty years'
experience. One of his most wonderful tales is about the great
snake--"more 'n _that_ long,"--a matter of five feet or so,--which
he killed as it was sucking the milk of a cow: "and" as he will
add triumphantly, "there were more 'n a pint of milk in him":--the
crushed eggs of the unfortunate reptile no doubt, but it is
altogether useless to suggest any such paltry explanation.
One autumn a boy at work among the potatoes turned up with his
spade something that instantly, so he declared, became a bird and
flew away. The boy ran home in horror. His parents would not
believe a word of the story, but the boy was too big to be flogged
as a mere liar. They were greatly relieved on learning that
something of the kind was at least possible, and regarded with no
little interest a Death's Head hawkmoth, for such no doubt the
apparition was, preserved in a collection.
[Illustration: A WEST COUNTRY MOLE CATCHER.]
The change from egg to caterpillar is a thing with which every
rustic is probably familiar; but in remote rural districts there
are still men who cannot believe that a caterpillar can ever
become a butterfly, and who still entertain strange superstitions
about toads and snakes and slow worms.
Perhaps in time the County Councils may do something for the
rustic enlightenment, by means of lectures and the limelight. The
rural population is, however, notoriously hard of belief; is the
most difficult of all populations to move from the faiths of their
fathers. There is many a farmer's wife even yet who will labour
with the churn from morning till night,--lamenting all the while
that the butter will not come,--rather than by the use of a
thermometer so regulate the temperature that the whole process
would be over in half-an-hour. A series of lectures lately given
in Somersetshire on the management of farm stock was, however,
well attended by the younger farmers at any rate. They were keenly
interested, and although they may, perhaps, have mostly adjourned
afterwards to discuss each discourse at the public-house, it was
not as sceptics; and the local ironmonger always found it
necessary to lay in a stock of thermometers as soon as the
lectures had begun. The older men mostly kept aloof. They had no
faith in any new-fangled ways. They are a stiff-necked generation.
As their fathers did, so do they. One burly, red-faced farmer of
the old school was lately heard to express his contempt for the
educational efforts of the County Council. "What be the use," said
he, "of wasting the public money sending round men to talk about a
dairy as don't know a cow from a elephant? And these yar cook'ry
classes. 'Tis my belief that if a man have got summat to cook,
he'll soon find out how to cook un."
With a few popular lectures and a little practical help and
guidance the farmer and the farm labourer might render untold
service to science, with all their long hours in the open air,
summer and winter, seedtime and harvest. They see some strange
things now, or think they see them. Snakes are the theme of many
marvellous tales. "I were walking along the path through the
wheat," said an old villager, "when I heard a rustling, like a
robbut: I thought 'twere a robbut. But a gurt viper come out of
the wheat and jumped across the path so high's my head."
A captive tortoise escaped one day into the road, and was soon the
centre of a knot of astonished villagers. After long debate they
concluded it was either "a tremendous gurt tooad, or some
wendimous warmint"; and they decided to kill it on the spot--a
task of no small difficulty, as may well be imagined.
[Illustration: A QUIET CORNER.]
HALE WELL: A QUIET CORNER.
On the south slope of an old West Country orchard there is a
sheltered corner lying open to the sun. Above it rises a broad,
unkempt, straggling hedge-row--holly and hawthorn, bramble and
sweetbriar--and behind this again the green slopes of the hill. On
the left, rising at intervals through the tangled thickets that
form the eastern limit of the orchard, is a line of old Scotch
firs, and beyond them, dimly seen through the haze that broods
over the landscape, are the grey ramparts of a range of limestone
cliffs. The wind of March is in the dark foliage of the firs,
tossing their gnarled arms against the pallid sky. But here the
golden blossoms of the gorse, the brown stems of last year's
bracken, stand unmoved. The dark firs are stirring with a sound as
of the sea, but here, on this sunlit slope, is the very air of
summer,
"... the grace,
The golden smile of June,
With bloom and sun in every place,
And all the world in tune."
Butterflies flit idly by--dark-winged peacocks, soft brown
tortoise-shells, pale yellow brimstones like flying gleams of
sunshine. The apple boughs are fretted all over with fine points
of green, the purple mist round the heads of the great elms
deepens in the warm air, the old hedge-row wears already the
bright garb of spring. The air is full of spring time, of the
breath of primroses and violets, full of pleasant sounds of
country life, of the wakening of the world, of the happy voices of
a hundred birds, whose glad hearts are revelling in the golden
weather.
The birds know well this sunny hollow. Here spring comes early,
and summer lingers late. While the fields without are white with
wintry rime,
"... here the glancing sunbeams throng,
And tasselled larches droop to hear
A grace of fleeting song."
To-day, on every side, the feathered woodlanders are stirring.
From an old Scotch fir that towers out of the hedge-row--its dark
shape showing like a shadow through the leafless boughs of the
apple-trees--falls the rich music of a blackbird's song, clear and
wild and flute-like. He is a noble singer; less great, indeed,
than the song-thrush, but yet a master of his art. And there are
those who hold that there is more beauty in the depth and
richness, in the power and passion, of his few brief bars, than in
all the magnificent anthem of his rival. Farther off, low down in
a leafless elm by the border of the orchard, is the thrush
himself, flooding the whole glade with his wonderful melody. Over
and over there sounds the polished lyric of the wren; over and
over again the metallic clink of a coaltit rings out above the
plaintive carol of the robin, the sober ditty of the
hedge-sparrow. Over all the fields the larks are singing. In the
hedges that skirt the orchard sounds the sweet cadence of the
chaffinch, the wild warble of the missel-thrush, at times the
ringing call of some light-hearted oxeye. From farther up the
hollow, from his sanctuary in the old, neglected wilderness of
unpruned, lichen-coated trees, floats down the soft laugh of a
woodpecker, a mellow sound, a note of peace and solitude, and
sylvan greenness. Is it only fancy that here, among these hills,
in this sweet country air, among these untarnished immemorial
elms, there is more melody in the skylark's song, that there is a
finer tone in the cool, clear singing of the robin, that there is
a touch of music in the chatter of the very sparrows? But hark, a
fainter note floats lightly down from the tree-tops; a note not
strong or musical, but heard through all the blended harmonies of
a score of singers. It is the call of the chiff-chaff, the first
returning wanderer from the warm south, fresh from the orange
groves of Sorrento, or the sunny slopes of the Sabine hills. When
his small figure shows presently against the dark foliage of a
Scotch fir, there is that about him which seems to suggest that he
is well content with his home-coming, even though woods are bare
and skies are cheerless. He flutters up and down among the
branches, never still for a moment. Even when he pauses,--looking
like a point of light against the sombre leaves behind him,--to
call his own name over and over, it is easy to see that his whole
small figure is trembling with the ardour of his eager little
soul.
A tiny figure, and a simple song. But there is more of meaning in
those few faint notes than in all the rest of the great chorus
that day by day is gathering strength in the woodland. For in the
chiff-chaff's call there is the Promise of Spring. It is said that
when the Siberian exiles hear for the first time, after their long
and bitter winter, the cry of the cuckoo, the familiar voice
rouses in their weary souls a resistless longing to taste once
more, if only for a day, the sweets of freedom; that there are
always some who, at the summons, elude the vigilance of their
guards, and take to the forest, lured by the magic of that
wandering voice. And so, in our hearts, this feeble note rouses a
longing for green fields and country lanes, for flowers and
sunshine, for summer and the coming of the swallows.
Somewhere in the elms a nuthatch sounds at intervals his
flute-like call--a wandering voice, now among the topmost
branches, whose sunlit purple holds so well against the pallid
blue, now near the ground, now in some mighty bough that leans
far out over the field. Now the bird's figure shows darkly on the
sky, and now, as he glides head foremost down, like the born
acrobat that he is, his grey plumage lights up for a moment in the
sunshine. And now he leaves the tree, still calling as he flies,
and sinks down among that grey fringe of orchard, where his mate
and he have, perhaps, already fixed on the hole in the old apple
tree in which they mean to take up their quarters for the season.