days considered fourteen quotidian miles not discreditable to us,
particularly when taking into consideration the bleats and baas and
whimpering laggardness with which we returned from three-mile excursions
during the first few days we were in the tramping-line. By degrees we
thus explored the whole country within a radius of seven miles of Ethel.
With this we were content, yea, even proud; for did not many of our
boating women-neighbors grumble even at their walk to the river and
declare they would rather row five miles than walk one? We were proud,
for we knew every church, every picturesque cottage and ruin, within our
radius, while our aquatic friends knew only those bordering the river.
We were proud--until, ah me! until that desolate day when a merrily,
merrily flying squad swooped down upon us and declared they had 'cycled
every inch of the _twenty-mile_ periphery of which Ethel's neighboring
church tower was the centre!
That cutting down of our pedal pride resulted in our subscribing to a
daily paper. Every morning before stretching out to our regular day's
tramp we had been wont to trot through dewy lanes, over stiles, and
across subtly-colored turnip- and cabbage-fields, to purchase in the town
of M---- a luxury not to be had in our own hamlet,--the "Daily News."
Rain or shine, that trot must be trotted, for there were those among us
who would have tramped sulkily all day and sniffed the sniff of wrath at
ivied church and thatched cottage were the acid of their natures not
made frothy and light by the alkali of their morning paper. It had never
occurred to us, not even when we camped beneath wayside shade around our
sandwiches and ale or in some stiff and dim inn-parlor and listened to
the reading of the "News," that in reality the town of M----, and not
the brickhood of Ethel, was thus the centre of all our ambulatory
circumferences. It had never before dawned upon us that we thus added
three uncounted miles to our fourteen diurnally counted ones. What
astonishment at our own pedometric weakness of calculation! What disgust
to find our periphery thus three whole miles smaller than it need have
been!
The next day we subscribed to the "News," and walked nine miles as the
bee flies from the front door of Ethel even unto the ruins of Medmenham.
And we vowed by all our plaster gods and painted goddesses that another
summer we would tramp no more. We would 'cycle.
A mile away from Ethel is the village proper of Cookham. It is a sleepy
town, save in the boating-season; and whoever enters the post-office in
any season finds it empty and inhospitable. Raps upon a tightly-closed
inner door call a woman attendant from rattling sewing or noisy gossip
of the invisible penetralia; and as soon as the business is done the
inhospitable door swings shut again in the stranger's face.
Cookham houses are quaint, often timbered, frequently ivy-grown from
basement to roof. One imagines them assuming a half-sullen air at this
yearly breaking of their dreamy repose by incursions of parti-colored
hordes for whom life seems to hold but two supreme objects,--boats and
pictures.
The most picturesque feature of the place is the old church, set amid
tombs whose mossy and time-gnawed cherubs have exchanged grins for two
hundred years and more. The old flint tower is grave and grim, but
softened by a wonderful centuries old ivy in a veil of living green. A
pathetic interest to artists hallows the venerable church-yard. Here
sleeps Frederick Walker, a genius cut off before his meridian, and
resting now amid his kindred in a lowly grave, over which the Thames
waters surge every spring, leaving the grave all the rest of the year
the sadder for its cold soddenness and for the humid mildew and decay
eating already into the headstone, as yet but twelve years old. In the
church itself is Thorneycroft's mural tablet to the dead artist, a
portrait head of him who was born almost within the old church's shadow,
and whose pencil dealt always so lovingly with the poetic aspects of his
native region.
MARGARET BERTHA WRIGHT.
BIRDS OF A TEXAN WINTER.
White of Selborne was, on the whole, tolerably content to plunge his
swallows, or a good proportion of them, into the mud and deposit them
for the winter at the bottom of a pond. Professionally conservative, as
a fine old Church-of-England clergyman, though constitutionally
sceptical, as became one of the earliest of really observant
naturalists, he was loath to break flatly with the consensus of
contemporary opinion, rustic and philosophic, and found a _modus
vivendi_ in the theory that a great many, perhaps a majority, of the
swifts and barn-swallows did go to Africa. He had seen them organizing
their emigration-parties and holding noisy debate over the best time to
start and the best route to take. The sea-part of the travel was of
trifling length, and baiting-places were plenty in France, Spain, and
Italy. Sometimes, such was their power of wing, they were known to take
the outside route and strike boldly across the Bay of Biscay, for they
had alighted on vessels. Probably the worthy old man was reluctant to
wrench from the rural mind a harmless remnant of superstition,--if
superstition it might be called, in view of the fact that sundry
saurians and chelonians, held by classifiers to be superior in rank to
birds, do hibernate under water, and that, more marvellous than all, the
quarrymen of his day, like those of ours, insisted that living frogs
occasionally sprang from under their chisel, leaving an unchallengeable
impress in the immemorial rock. It must indeed have been up-hill work to
extinguish the old belief in the minds of men who had seen the
water-ouzel pattering in perfect ease and comfort along the floor of the
pellucid pool, and who had heard from their fisher friends from the
north coast of the gannets that were drawn up in the herring-nets.
Most of us, even _color chi sanno_, like to retain a spice of mystery in
our mental food. It may constitute no part of the nutriment, and may
often be deleterious, but it meets a want, somehow or other, and wants,
however undefinable, must be recognized. It is a spur that titillates
the absorbent surfaces and helps to keep them in action. It is a craving
that the race is never going to outlive, and that will afford occupation
and subsistence to a considerable class of its most intelligent and
respectable members until the year one million, as it has done since the
year one. The great mass of us like to see the absolute reign of reason
tempered by the incomprehensible, and are ever ready to lend a kindly
ear to men and things that humor that liking.
Where do all the birds, myriads in number and scores in species, go when
they leave the North in the winter? A small minority lags, not
superfluous, for we are delighted to have them, but in a subdued,
pinched, and hand-to-mouth mode of existence in marked contrast to their
summer life and perceptibly marring the pleasure of their society. They
flock around our homes and assume a mendicant air that is a little
depressing. Unlike the featherless tramps, they pay very well for their
dole; but we should prefer them, as we do our other friends, to be
independent, and that although we know they are but winter friends and
will coolly turn their backs upon us as soon as the weather permits. The
spryest and least dependent of them all, the snow-bird, who sports
perpetual full dress, jerks at us his expressive tail and is off at the
first thaw, black coat, white vest, and all. No tropics or sub-tropics
for him. He can stand our climate and our company with a certain
condescending tolerance so long as we keep the temperature not too much
above zero, but grows contemptuous when Fahrenheit grows effeminate and
forty. Nothing for it then but to cool off his thin and unprotected legs
and toes in the snows of Canada. "The white North hath his" heart. Our
winter is his summer. There is nothing in his anatomy to explain this
idiosyncrasy. His physical construction closely resembles that of his
insessorial brethren, most of whom go when he comes. He has no
discoverable provision against cold. Adaptation to environment does not
seem to cover his case. It does not cover his legs. They remain
unfeathered. We shudder to see his translucent little tarsi on top of
the snow, which he obviously prefers as a stand-point to bare spots
where the snow has been blown away. Compared with the ptarmigan and the
snowy owl, or even the ruffed grouse, all so well blanketed, he suggests
a survival of the unfittest.
The movements of this tough little anti-Darwinian are overlapped by the
bluebird and the robin,--our robin, best entitled to the name, inasmuch
as it is accorded him by fifty-odd millions against thirty millions who
give it to the redbreast,--who are usually with him long before he gets
away. They never move very far southward, but watch the cantonments of
Frost, ready to advance the moment his outposts are drawn in and signs
appear of evacuation. Their climate, indeed, is determined in winter
rather by altitude than by latitude. The low swamps and pineries that
skirt tide-water in the Middle States furnish them a retreat. Thence
they scatter themselves over the tertiary plain as it widens southward
beneath the granite bench that divides all the great rivers south of the
Hudson into an upper and a lower reach. Detachments of them extend their
tour to the Gulf. Readers of "A Subaltern on the Campaign of New Orleans
in 1814-15" will recall his mention of the assemblage of robins hopping
over the Chalmette sward that were the first living inhabitants to
welcome the weary invaders on emerging from the palmetto marshes. They
can hardly be said to reach the particular region of which we propose to
speak, both species, the bluebird especially, being almost strangers to
it.
Other species, the cardinal grosbeak among them, may be said to stop,
as it were, just out of hearing, the echo of their song slumbering in
the thin, keen air, ready to swell again into unmistakable reality.
Between these stubborn fugitives and those who follow the butterflies to
the tropics there is a wide variety in the extent of travel in which our
winged compatriots indulge.
Quadrupeds, whose movements are less speedy and more limited, have to
adapt themselves to the Northern winter as best they may. Hard and long
training has made them less the creatures of climate than their
feathered associates, who might themselves in many cases have learned
perforce to stay where they were reared but for possessing the light and
agile wings which woo them to wander. We may fancy Bruin, with his
passion for sweet mast and luscious fruits, eying with envy the martin
and the wild fowl as they sweep over his head to the teeming Southland,
and wondering, as he huddles shivering into his snowy lair, why Nature
should be so partial in her gifts. The call of the trumpeting swan, the
bugler crane, and the Canada goose falls idly upon his ear. To their
breezy challenge, "A new home,--who'll follow?" he cannot respond.
Let us join this tide of travel and move sunward with some of those who
take through-tickets. We can easily keep up with them now. Steam is not
slower than wings,--often faster. Sitting at ease, yet moved by iron
muscles, we can time the coursers of the air. A few decades ago, when
this familiar motor was a new thing comparatively, we could not do so.
At the jog of twenty miles an hour, even the sparrow could pass us on a
short stretch, and the dawdling crow soon left us in the rear. Our gain
upon their time is so recent that the birds have not yet fully realized
it. Unaccustomed to being beaten by anything _on earth_, they will skim
along abreast of a train till, to their unspeakable, or at least
unspoken, wonderment, they find that what they are fleeing from is
fleeing from them. One morning last winter I was speeding eastward to
the Crescent City, the freshest of my memories a struggle at Houston
with one of those breakfasts which so atrociously distinguish the reign
of the magnate who is said to supply under contract all the meals of the
Southern railway-restaurants, and who, "if ever fondest prayer for
others' woe avail on high," will certainly be booked, with the vote of
some of his victims, for a post-mundane berth a good deal warmer than
his coffee and more sulphurous than his eggs. Afar off to the right the
sun was rounding up from the Gulf and clearing the haze from his broad,
red face, the better to look abroad over the glistening prairie and see
if the silhouetted pines and cattle were where he had left them the day
before. Glancing to the left, which was my side of the car, I became
aware of a large bird suspended in the air, not motionless, for his
wings were doing their best, but to all appearance as stationary as the
scattered trees and cattle, and about fifteen yards distant. Every
feature and marking of the "chicken," or pinnated grouse, was as
distinct to the eye as though, instead of making thirty-two miles an
hour, he were posing for his photograph. For full two hundred yards he
sustained the race, until, finding that his competitor had the better
wind, he gave it up and shot suddenly into the sedge. How much longer
the match had lasted I could not say. He must have got up near the
engine--of course losing some time in the act of rising--and fallen back
gradually to my place, which was in a rear car. But when a schedule for
birds comes to be framed, it is safe to set down _Tetrao cupido_ at
about the speed above named. Timed from a rail-car, that is; for, looked
at over a gun, he seems to move five times as fast. The double-barrel is
a powerful binocular.
Steam, then, soon carries us to the resort of the lost truants, who have
travelled with the lines of longitude by guides and tracks over that
invisible road as unerring as those of the railway. We shall find them
in close companionship with friends unknown in our latitude, whose
abiding-places are at the South, as those left behind are fixed dwellers
at the North.
From the window at which I sit on this morning late in January and this
parallel of thirty degrees,--window open, as well as the door, for no
norther is on duty to-day,--I see flocks of our familiar redwings,
cowbirds, and blackbirds, all mingled together as though the hard and
fast lines of species had been obliterated and made as meaningless as
the concededly evanescent shades of variety, trooping busily over the
lawn and blackening the leafless China-trees. But they have a crony
never seen by us. This is the crow-blackbird of the South, or jackdaw as
it is wrongly called, otherwise known as the boat-tailed grackle, from
his over-allowance of rudder that pulls him side-wise and ruins his
dead-reckoning when a wind is on. His wife is a sober-looking lady in a
suit of steel-gray, and the pair are quite conspicuous among their
winter guests. The latter are far less shy than we are accustomed to
find them, a majority being young in their first season and with little
or no experience of human guile. No one cares to shoot them, in the
abundance of larger game, and the absence of stones from the fat
prairie-soil places them out of danger from the small boy. Their only
foe is the hawk, who levies blackmail on them as coolly and regularly as
any other plumed cateran. Partly, perhaps, by reason of this outside
pressure, they are cheek by jowl with the poultry,--the cow-bunting,
which is the pet prey of the hawk, following them into the back porch
and insisting sometimes on breakfasting with Tray,--or rather with
Legion, for that is the name of the Texas dog. In this familiarity they
are approached, though not equalled, by that more home-staying bird the
meadow-lark, who is here a dweller of the lawn and garden and adds his
mellow whistle to the orchestra of the mocking-bird. This so-called lark
is classed by most naturalists among the starlings, as are two of the
blackbirds, which two he resembles in some of his habits, but not in
migrating, being about as much of a continental as any other biped
American. Nor is he like his cousins in changes of dress. Out of a dozen
of the latter that may be brought down at a shot, you will scarcely find
three exactly alike. They moult at the South, and the young pass
gradually into adult plumage. The male redwing, up to his first autumn,
is hardly distinguishable in dress from his mother. Here he dons his
epaulettes, beginning with the threadbare worsted yellow of the private,
and rising in grade to the rich scarlet and gold of the officer fully
commissioned to flame upon the marsh and carry havoc among its humblest
inhabitants.
A month or two hence, the plover, as shy in his Northern haunts as the
lark, will, in three species, be as much at home upon the lawn. Youth
and inexperience must, as in the case of the other birds, be one
explanation of this unwonted familiarity. Among other reasons is the
abundance of food, under a mild sky, with but rare frosts to bind the
earth and no snows to cover it. The temperature of an average winter day
is 60° or 65°. A norther is apt to blow three or four times in the
season, and it brings the mercury down to freezing-point or some degrees
lower. After the two or three days of its duration, the first warm
morning covers the walks and most other bare parts of the soil with
worm-casts,--revealing the larders of the smaller birds. At an average,
too, of four or five places in an acre one notices a hillock two or
three feet in diameter tipped with a yellowish spot that deepens into
orange and broadens as the air grows warm. These erections are the work
of ants, the emergence of which intelligent insects in greater or less
numbers, according to the temperature, causes the coloring which we
observe. Intelligent we cannot help terming a creature so remarkable in
its various species for the evidences of calculation furnished by its
habits of life,--evidences nowhere better worth studying than among the
leaf-cutting, slave-holding, and shade-planting ants of Texas; but we
are sometimes tempted to deny the character to this particular species
when we perceive the utter indifference to safety with which it selects
a site for its communistic abode. One of these is located in the middle
of the principal (sandy and unpaved) street of a village, within twenty
steps of the railroad-track, and subject to the impact of wheels and
mule-, ox-, or horse-hoof many times an hour; yet the semblance of a
dwelling is maintained, and the little tawny cloud comes up smiling
whenever the sun allows, asking no other permission. These ant-hills, I
am persuaded, supply a foundation to certain tufts of low trees which
spring up in dampish places where the spring fires have less sweep. The
hillocks are well drained, as appears from their composition of clear
gravel, a material of which you will find more in one of them than on a
surface of many feet around; and you may see the sweeter grasses
gradually mantling them, these being followed by herbage of larger
growth, which, accumulating humors at their roots, bourgeon into
arborescence, until, one vegetable entity shouldered into substance and
thrift by another, the nucleus built by our tiny red friends has
broadened into a tree-clad knoll. The mezquit, not many years ago
confined for the most part to the arid region beyond the Nueces, is
spreading eastward, and the clumps of it which begin to skirt the
original copses here may be supposed to owe their first foothold to the
ant. This humble promoter of forestry is duly appreciated, if only as a
viand, by his neighbors. Full-grown, and still more in the larval stage,
he is esteemed by them as both a toothsome and a beaksome bit. He--or,
more numerously, she, if we insist on sex and decline the more
practically correct _it_--forms thus the lowest term in an ascending
series of animal life that grows out of the ant-hill like the tree. So
much may one such settlement in a rood of ground do for the maintenance
of organic existence.
A still more diffused, perhaps, if less productive, source of life
exists in another burrower and mound-builder, the crawfish. Unlike the
ant, which likes to drain, he is an advocate of irrigation. In this art
he can give our well-diggers odds in the game. His genius for striking
water is wonderful. On the dryest parts of the prairie, miles from any
permanent stream, his ejections of mud may be found. Shallow or deep,
his borings always reach water. He is always at home, but less
accessible to callers than the ant. To the smaller birds he is forbidden
fruit. In wet weather, when his vestibule is shallow, the sand-hill
crane may burglarize him, or even get a snap judgment on him at the
front door. The bill of the great curlew cannot be sent in so
effectively, not being so rightly drawn; but that bird, more common in
the season than anywhere else away from the coast, finds plenty of other
food. He is not here in the winter. His place just now is filled by the
jacksnipe, which flutters up from every boggy place and comes to bag in
a condition anything but suggestive of short commons. The snipe's
terrestrial surface lies two and a half inches beneath ours. At that
distance he strikes hard pan; but it is margin enough for his
operations, and he is not often caught among the shorts. Gourmands
assure us that he lives "by suction," and that there is consequently no
harm in eating his trail. There is comfort in this creed, whatever may
be our private belief in the substantiality of what the bird absorbs;
and we cheerfully eat, after the suggestion of Paul, "asking no
questions," the while tacitly assuring ourselves, like old Fuller with
the strawberry, that a better bird might doubtless have been made, but
as certainly never was. For game flavor not even the partridge (Bob
White), also exceptionally abundant here, is his superior.