Field and Hedgerow Part 3

The idea has become familiarised to us by reading, but the fact is none the less marvellous. This man saw the fact first, before he had the idea, and he had sufficient imagination to realise it. At the village post office they ask for 'Letterhead, please, sir,' instead of a stamp, for it is characteristic of the cottager that whatever words he uses must be different from those employed by other people. Stamp is as familiar to him as to you, yet he prefers to say 'letterhead'--because he does. There are many curious old houses, some of them timbered, still standing in these parts. The immense hearths which were once necessary for burning wood are now occupied with 'duck's-nest' grates, so called from the bars forming a sort of nest. In one of the hamlets the women touched their hats to us.

Not far from the hop-kiln I found a place where charcoal-burning was carried on. The brown charcoal-burner, upright as a bolt, walked slowly round the smouldering heap, and wherever flame seemed inclined to break out cast damp ashes upon the spot. Six or seven water-b.u.t.ts stood in a row for his use. To windward he had built a fence of flakes, or wattles as they are called here, well worked in with brushwood, to break the force of the draught along the hill-side, which would have caused too fierce a fire. At one side stood his hut of poles meeting in a cone, wrapped round with rough canvas. Besides his rake and shovel and a short ladder, he showed me a tool like an immense gridiron, bent half double, and fitted to a handle in the same way as a spade. This was for sifting charcoal when burned, and separating the small from the larger pieces.

Every now and then a puff of smoke rose from the heap and drifted along; it has a peculiar odour, a dense, thick smell of smothered wood coal, to me not disagreeable, but to some people so annoying that they have been known to leave their houses and abandon a locality where charcoal-burning was practised. Dim memories of old days come crowding round me, invisible to him, to me visible and alive, of the kings, great hunters, who met with the charcoal-burners in the vast forests of mediaeval days, of the n.o.ble knights and dames whom the rude charcoal-burners guided to their castles through trackless wastes, and all the romance of old. Scarcely is there a tale of knightly adventure that does not in some way or other mention these men, whose occupation fixed them in the wildernesses which of yore stretched between cultivated places. I looked at the modern charcoal-burner with interest. He was brown, good-looking, upright, and distinctly superior in general style to the common run of working men. He spoke without broad accent and used correct language; he was well educated and up to the age. He knew his own mind, and had an independent expression; a very civil, intelligent, and straightforward man. No rude charcoal-burner of old days this. We stood close to the highway road; a gentleman's house was within stone's throw; the spot, like the man, was altogether the reverse of what we read in ancient story. Yet such is the force of a.s.sociation that I could not even now divest myself of those dim memories and living dreams of old; there seemed as it were the clank of armour, a rustic of pennons in the leaves; it would have been quite natural to hold bow and arrow in the hand. The man was modern, but his office was ancient. The descent was unbroken. The charcoal-burner traced back to the Norman Conquest. That very spot where we stood, now surrounded with meadows and near dwellings, scarcely thirty years since had formed part of one of the largest of the old forests. It was forest land. Woods away on the slope still remained to witness to traditions. As the charcoal-burner worked beside the modern highway, so his trade had come down and was still practised in the midst of modern trades, in these times of sea-coal and steam. He told me that he and his brothers were maintained by charcoal-burning the year through, and, it appeared, in a very comfortable position. They only burned a small quant.i.ty here; they moved about from place to place in the woods, according as the timber was thrown. They often stopped for weeks in the woods, watching the fires all night. A great part of the work was done in the winter, beginning in October--after the hop-picking. Now resting in his lonely hut, now walking round and tending the smoking heap, the charcoal-burner watched out the long winter nights while the stars drifted over the leafless trees, till the grey dawn came with h.o.a.r-frost. He liked his office, but owned that the winter nights were very long. Starlight and frost and slow time are the same now as when the red deer and the wild boar dwelt in the forest. Much of the charcoal was prepared for hop-drying, large quant.i.ties being used for that purpose. At one time a considerable amount was rebaked for patent fuel, and the last use to which it had been put was in carrying out some process with Australian meat. It was still necessary in several trades. Goldsmiths used charcoal for soldering. They preferred the charcoal made from the thick bark of the b.u.t.ts of birch trees. At the foot or b.u.t.t of the birch the bark grows very thick, in contrast to the rind higher, which is thinner than on other trees. Lord Sheffield's mansion at Fletching was the last great house he knew that was entirely warmed with charcoal, nothing else being burnt. Charcoal was still used in houses for heating plates. But the princ.i.p.al demand seemed to be for hop-drying purposes--the charcoal burned in the kiln where I had been resting was made on the spot. This heap he was now burning was all of birch poles, and would be four days and four nights completing. On the fourth morning it was drawn, and about seventy sacks were filled, the charcoal being roughly sorted.

The ancient forest land is still wild enough, there is no seeming end to the heath and fern on the ridges or to the woods in the valleys. These moor-like stretches bear a resemblance to parts of Exmoor. The oaks that once reached from here to the sea-sh.o.r.e were burned to smelt the iron in the days when Suss.e.x was the great iron land. For charcoal the vast forests were cut down; it seems strange to think that cannon were once cast--the cannon that won India for us--where now the hops grow and the plough travels slowly, so opposite as they are to the roaring furnace and the ringing hammer. Burned and blasted by the heat, the ground where the furnaces were still retains the marks of the fire. But to-day there is silence; the suns.h.i.+ne lights up the purple heather and the already yellowing fern; the tall and beautiful larches stand graceful in the stillness. Their lines always flow in pleasant curves; they need no wind to bend them into loveliness of form: so quiet and deserted is the place that the wide highway road is green with vegetation, and the impression of our wheels is the only trace upon them. Looking up, the road--up the hill--it appears green almost from side to side. It is well made and firm, and fit for any traffic; but a growth of minute weeds has sprung up, and upon these our wheels leave their marks. Of roads that have become gra.s.s--grown in war--desolated countries we have all read, but this is our own unscathed England.

The nature of the ancient forest, its quiet and untrodden silence, adheres to the site. Far down in the valley there is more stirring, and the way is well pulverised. In the hollow there is an open s.p.a.ce, backed by the old beech trees of the park, dotted with ashes, and in the midst a farmhouse partly timbered. Here by the road-side they point out to you a low mound, at the very edge of the road, which could easily be pa.s.sed unnoticed as a mere heap of sc.r.a.pings overgrown with weeds and thistles.

On looking closer it appears more regularly shaped; it is indeed a grave.

Of old time an unfortunate woman committed suicide, and according to the barbarous law of those days her body was buried at the cross-roads and a stake driven through it. That was the end so far as the brutal law of the land went. But the road-menders, with better hearts, from that day to this have always kept up the mound. However beautiful the day, however beautiful the beech trees and the ashes that stand apart, there is always a melancholy feeling in pa.s.sing the place. This thistle-grown mound saddens the whole; it is impossible to forget it; it lies, as it were, under everything, under the beeches, the sunlit sward and fern. The mark of death is there. The dogs and the driven cattle tread the spot; a human being has pa.s.sed into dust. The circ.u.mstance of the mound having been kept up so many years bears curious testimony to the force of tradition.

Many writers altogether deny the value of tradition. Dr. Schliemann's spade, however, found Troy. Perhaps tradition is like the fool of the saying, and is sometimes right.

SWALLOW-TIME

The cave-swallows have come at last with the midsummer-time, and the hay and white clover and warm winds that breathe hotly, like one that has been running uphill. With the paler hawkweeds, whose edges are so delicately trimmed and cut and balanced, almost as if made by cleft human fingers to human design, whose globes of down are like geometrical circles built up of facets, instead of by one revolution of the compa.s.ses. With foxglove, and dragon-fly, and yellowing wheat; with green cones of fir, and boom of distant thunder, and all things that say, 'It is summer.' Not many of them even now, sometimes only two in the air together, sometimes three or four, and one day eight, the very greatest number--a mere handful, for these cave-swallows at such times should crowd the sky. The white bars across their backs should be seen gliding beside the dark fir copse a quarter of a mile away. They should be seen everywhere, over the house, and to and fro the eaves, where half last year's nest remains; over the meadows and high up in the blue ether.

White b.r.e.a.s.t.s should gleam in the azure height, appearing and disappearing as they climb or sink, and wheel and slide through those long boomerang-like flights that suddenly take them a hundred yards aside. They should crowd the sky together with the ruddy-throated chimney-swallows, and the great swifts; but though it is hay-time and the apples are set, yet eight eave-swallows is the largest number I have counted in one afternoon. They did not come at all in the spring. After the heavy winter cleared away, the delicate willow-wrens soon sang in the tops of the beautiful green larches, the nightingale came, and the cuckoo, the chimney-swallow, the doves softly cooing as the oaks came into leaf, and the black swifts. Up to May 26 there were no eave-swallows at the Suss.e.x hill-side where these notes were taken; that is more than a month later than the date of their usual arrival, which would be about the middle of April. After this they gradually came back. The chimney-swallows were not so late, but even they are not so numerous as usual. The swifts seem to have come more in their accustomed numbers.

Now, the swallows are, of all others, the summer birds. As well suppose the trees without leaves as the summer air without swallows. Ever since of old time the Greeks went round from house to house in spring singing the swallow song, these birds have been looked upon as the friends of man, and almost as the very givers of the suns.h.i.+ne.

The swallow's come, winging His way to us here; Fair hours is he bringing, And a happy new year!

They had a song for everything, the mill song, the reapers' song, just as in Somerset, the apple country, they still have a cider song, or perhaps, rather, an orchard song. Such rhymes might well be chanted about the hay and the wheat, or at the coming of the green leaf, or the yellowing of the acorns, when the cawing of the rooks is incessant, a kind of autumn festival. It seems so natural that the events of the year should be met with a song. But somehow a very hard and un.o.bservant spirit has got abroad into our rural life, and people do not note things as the old folk did. They do not mark the coming of the swallows, nor any of the dates that make the woodland almanack. It is a pity that there should be such indifference--that the harsh ways of the modern town should press so heavily on the country. This summer, too, there seems a marked absence of bees, b.u.t.terflies, and other insects in the fields. One bee will come along, calling at every head of white clover. By-and-by you may see one more calling at the heathbells, and nothing else, as in each journey they visit only the flower with which they began. Then there will be quite an interval before a third bee is seen, and a fourth may be found dead perhaps on the path, besides which you may not notice any more. For a whole hour you may not observe a humble-bee, and the wasp-like hover-flies, that are generally past all thought of counting, are scarcely seen. A blue b.u.t.terfly we found in the dust of the road, without the spirit to fly, and lifted him into a field to let him have a chance of life; a few tortoisesh.e.l.ls, and so on--even the white b.u.t.terflies are quite uncommon, the whites that used to drift along like snowflakes.

Where are they all? Did the snow kill them? Is there any connection between the absence of insects and the absence of swallows? If so, how did the swallows know beforehand, without coming, that there were no insects for them? Yet the midsummer hum, the deep humming sound in the atmosphere above, has been loud and persistent over the hayfields, so that there must have been the usual myriads of the insects that cause this sound. While I was thinking in this way a swallow alighted on the turf, picked up a small white moth from among the short gra.s.s, and went off with it. In gloomy overcast weather the swallows at the sea-side frequently alight on the pebbles of the beach to pick up the insects which will not rise and fly. Some beaches and sandbanks are much frequented by insects, and black clouds of them sometimes come drifting along, striking the face like small hail.

When swallows fly low, just skimming the ground, it is supposed to be a sign of rain. During the frequent intervals of heavy, overcast weather which have marked this summer, they might have been observed flying low for a week together without a spot of rain falling. Chilly air drives insects downwards, and, indeed, paralyses a great many of them altogether. It is a fall of temperature, and not wet, that makes the swallows chase their prey low down. Insects are not much afraid of rain if it is warm and soft, so that in the midst of showers, if there is suns.h.i.+ne too, you may see the swallows high in the atmosphere. It is when they fly low, but just missing the gra.s.s, that their wonderful powers of flight appear. In the air above there are no obstacles, and if you shoot an arrow it travels to the end of its journey without let or hindrance; there are no streets there to turn corners, no narrow lanes, no trees or hedges. When the shallow comes down to the earth his path is no longer that of the immortals, his way is as the way of men, constantly obstructed, and made a thousandfold more difficult by the velocity of his pa.s.sage. Imagine shooting an arrow from the strongest bow in such a manner that it might travel about seven inches above the ground--how far would it go before it would strike a tall b.u.t.tercup, a wiry bennet, or stick into a slight rise of the turf? You must imagine it given the power to rise over hedges, to make short angles about buildings, slip between the trunks of trees, to avoid moving objects, as men or animals, not to come in contact with other animated arrows, and by some mysterious instinct to know what is or what is not out of sight on the other side of the wall. I was sitting on a log in the narrowest of narrow lanes, a hedge at the back, in front thick fir trees, whose boughs touched the ground, almost within reach, the lane being nothing more than a broader footpath. It was one of those overcast days when the shelter of the hedge and the furze was pleasant in July. Suddenly a swallow slid by me as it seemed underneath my very hands, so close to the ground that he almost travelled in the rut, the least movement on my part would have stopped him. Almost before I could lift my head he had reached the end of the lane and rose over the gate into the road--not a moments pause before he made that leap over the gate to see if there was a waggon or not in the way; a waggon-load of hay would have blocked the road entirely. How did he know that a man or a horse would not step into his course at the instant he topped the bar?

A swallow never hesitates, never looks before he leaps, threads all day the eyes of needles, and goes on from half-past two in the morning till ten at night, without so much as disturbing a feather. He is the perfection of a machine for falling. His round nest is under the eaves, he throws himself out of window and begins to fall, and keeps on fall, fall, for twenty hours together. His head is bullet-shaped, his neck short, his body all thickened up to the shoulders, tailing out to the merest streak of feather. His form is like a plummet--he is not unlike the heavily weighted minnow used in trolling for pike. Before the bend of the firmly elastic rod, the leaded minnow slides out through the air, running true and sinking without splash into the water. It is proportioned and weighted so that its flight, which is a long fall, may be smooth, and perfectly under control. If wings could be put to the minnow, it would somewhat resemble the swallow. For the swallow is made to fall, and his wings to catch him, and by resisting his descent these outstretched planes lift him again into the sky. He does not fall perpendicularly, the angle of his fall is prolonged and very low, and the swifter he goes the more nearly it approximates to the horizontal. I think he goes swifter when flying just over the ground than when lounging in the easy hammock of the atmosphere. My swallow that came down the lane, in twenty yards opened his wings twenty times and checked his fall, almost grazing the earth, and imperceptibly rose a little, like a flat stone thrown by a boy which suddenly runs up into the air at the end of its flight. He made no blow with his wings; they were simply put out to collect the air in the hollow of their curves, and so prolong his fall.

Falling from morn till night, he throws himself on his way, a machine for turning gravity into a motive force. He fits to the circ.u.mstances of his flight as water fits to the circ.u.mstances of the vessel into which it is poured. No thought, no stop, no rest. If a waggon had been in the way, still he would have got left or right through the very eye of the needle.

If a man had been pa.s.sing, the rush of his wings would not have disturbed the light smoke from his cigar. Farther up the lane there are two gateways opposite without gates. Through these swallows are continually das.h.i.+ng, and I have often felt when coming up the lane as if I must step on them, and half checked myself. I might as well try to step on lightning. A swallow came over the sharp ridge of a slate roof and met a slight current of wind which blew against that side of the shed and rose up it. The bird remained there suspended with outstretched wings, resting on the up-current as if the air had been solid, for some moments. He rode there at anchor in the air. So buoyant is the swallow that it is no more to him to fly than it is to the fish to swim; and, indeed, I think that a trout in a swift mountain stream needs much greater strength to hold himself in the rapid day and night without rest. The friction of the water is constant against him, and he never folds his fins and sleeps.

The more I think the more I am convinced that the buoyancy of the air is very far greater than science admits, and under certain conditions it is superior to water as a supporting medium. Swift and mobile as is the swallow's wing, how much swifter and how much more mobile must be his eye! This rapid and ever-changing course is not followed for pleasure as if it were a mazy dance. The whole time as he floats, and glides, and wheels, his eye is intent on insects so small as to be invisible to us at a very short distance. These he gathers in the air, he sees what we cannot see, his eyes are to our eyes as his wings are to our limbs. If still further we were to consider the flow of the nerve force between the eye, the mind, and the wing, we should be face to face with problems which quite upset the ordinary ideas of matter as a solid thing. How is it that dull matter becomes thus inexpressibly sensitive? Is not the swallow's eye a miracle? Then his heart, for he sings as he flies; he makes love and converses, and all as he rushes along--his hopes, his fears, his little store of knowledge, and his wonderful journey by-and-by to Africa. Remember, he carries his life in his wings as we should say in our hands, for if by chance he should strike a solid object, his great speed renders the collision certain death. It stuns him, and if he recovers from that his beak is usually broken so that he must starve.

Happily such accidents are rare. The great rapidity of a bird's heart beating so fast seems to render it peculiarly susceptible to death from shock. Great fright will sometimes kill a bird, as for instance, when they have wandered inside a room, and been thoughtlessly held in some one's hand. Without visible injury, the heart, after beating excessively violently, almost as rapidly slows, the nict.i.tating membrane is drawn over the eyes, the head falls to one side, and the bird becomes lifeless from nervous exhaustion. The beautiful swallows, be tender to them, for they symbol all that is best in nature and all that is best in our hearts.

BUCKHURST PARK.

An old beech tree had been broken off about five feet from the ground, and becoming hollow within, was filled with the decay of its own substance. In this wood-sorrel had taken root, and flower and leaf covered the s.p.a.ce within, white flower and green leaf flouris.h.i.+ng on old age. The wood-sorrel leaf, the triune leaf, is perhaps more lovely even than the flower, like a more delicately shaped clover of a tenderer green, and it lasts far on into the autumn. When the violet leaves are no more looked for, when the cowslips have gone, and the bluebells have left nothing behind them but their nodding seed-cases, still the wood-sorrel leaf stays on the mound, in shape and colour the same, and as pleasantly acid to the taste now under the ripening nuts as in May. At its coming it is folded almost like a. green flower; at Midsummer, when you are gathering ferns, you find its trefoil deep under the boughs; it grows, too, in the crevices of the rock over the spring. The whortleberry leaves, that were green as the myrtle when the wood-sorrel was in bloom, have faded somewhat now that their berries are ripening. Another beech has gone over, and lies at full length, a shattered tube, as it were, of timber; for it is so rotten within, and so hollow and bored, it is little else than bark. Others that stand are tubes on end, with rounded knot-holes, loved by the birds, that let air and moisture into the very heart of the wood. They are hardly safe in a strong wind. Others again, very large and much shorter, have sent up four trunks from one root, a little like a banyan, quadruple trees built for centuries, throwing abroad a vast roof of foliage, whose green in the midst of summer is made brown by sacks and sacks of beech nuts. These are the trees to camp by, and that are chosen by painters. The bark of the beech is itself a panel to study, spotted with velvet moss brown-green, made grey with close-grown lichen, stained with its own hues of growth, and toned by time. To these add bright sunlight and leaf shadow, the sudden lowering of tint as a cloud pa.s.ses, the different aspects of the day and the evening, and the changes of rain and dry weather. You may look at the bark of a beech twenty times and always find it different. After crossing Virgil's Bridge in the deep coombe at the bottom of Marden Hill these great beeches begin, true woodland trees, and somehow more forest-like than the hundreds and hundreds of acres of fir trees that are called forest. There is another spirit among the beech trees; they look like deer and memories of old English life.

The wood cooper follows his trade in a rude shed, splitting poles and making hoops the year through, in warm summer and iron-clad winter. His shed is always pitched at the edge of a great woodland district. Where the road has worn in deeply the roots of the beeches hang over, twisted in and out like a giant matting, a kind of cave under them. Dark yew trees and holly trees stand here and there; a yew is completely barked on one side, stripped clean. If you look close you will see scores in the wood as if made with a great nail. Those who know Exmoor will recognise these signs in a moment; it is a fraying-post where the stags rubbed the velvet from their horns last summer. There are herds of red deer in the park. At one time there were said to be almost as many as run free and wild over the expanse of Exmoor. They mark the trees very much, especially those with the softer bark. Wire fencing has been put round many of the hollies to protect them. A stag occasionally leaps the boundary and forages among the farmers' corn, or visits a garden, and then the owner can form some idea of what must have been the difficulties of agriculture in mediaeval days. Deer more than double the interest of a park. A park without deer is like a wall without pictures. However well proportioned the room, something is lacking if the walls be blank.

However n.o.ble the oaks and wide the sweep of sward, there is something wanting if antlers do not rise above the fern. The pictures that the deer make are moving and alive; they dissolve and re-form in a distant frame of tree and brake. Lately the herd has been somewhat thinned, having become too numerous. One slope is bare of gra.s.s, a patch of yellow sand, which if looked at intently from a distance seems presently to be all alive like mites in cheese, so thick are the rabbits in the warren. Under a little house, as it were, built over a stream is a chalybeate fountain with virtues like those of Tunbridge Wells.

The park is open to visitors--here comes a gay four-in-hand heavily loaded sweeping by on its road to that summer town. There is much ironstone in the soil round about. At the edge of the park stands an old farmhouse of timber and red tile, with red oast-house beside it, built with those gables which our ancestors seemed to think made such excellent rooms within. Our modern architects try to make their rooms mathematically square, a series of brick boxes, one on the other like pigeon-holes in a bureau, with flat ceilings and right angles in the corners, and are said to go through a profound education before they can produce these wonderful specimens of art. If our old English folk could not get an arched roof, then they loved to have it pointed, with polished timber beams in which the eye rested as in looking upwards through a tree. Their rooms they liked of many shapes, and not at right angles in the corners, nor all on the same dead level of flooring. You had to go up a step into one, and down a step into another, and along a winding pa.s.sage into a third, so that each part of the house had its individuality. To these houses life fitted itself and grew to them; they were not mere walls, but became part of existence. A man's house was not only his castle, a man's house was himself. He could not tear himself away from his house, it was like tearing up the shrieking mandrake by the root, almost death itself. Now we walk in and out of our brick boxes unconcerned whether we live in this villa or that, here or yonder. Dark beams inlaid in the walls support the gables; heavier timber, placed horizontally, forms, as it were, the foundation of the first floor. This horizontal beam has warped a little in the course of time, the alternate heat and cold of summers and winters that make centuries. Up to this beam the lower wall is built of brick set to the curve of the timber, from which circ.u.mstance it would appear to be a modern insertion. The beam, we may be sure, was straight originally, and the bricks have been fitted to the curve which it subsequently took. Time, no doubt, ate away the lower work of wood, and necessitated the insertion of new materials. The slight curve of the great beam adds, I think, to the interest of the old place, for it is a curve that has grown and was not premeditated; it has grown like the bough of a tree, not from any set human design. This, too, is the character of the house. It is not large, nor overburdened with gables, not ornamental, nor what is called striking, in any way, but simply an old English house, genuine and true. The warm sunlight falls on the old red tiles, the dark beams look the darker for the glow of light, the shapely cone of the hop-oast rises at the end; there are swallows and flowers, and ricks and horses, and so it is beautiful because it is natural and honest. It is the simplicity that makes it so touching, like the words of an old ballad. Now at Mayfield there is a timber house which is something of a show place, and people go to see it, and which certainly has many more lines in its curves and woodwork, but yet did not appeal to me, because it seemed too purposely ornamental. A house designed to look well, even age has not taken from it its artificiality.

Neither is there any cone nor cart-horses about. Why, even a tall chanticleer makes a home look homely. I do like to see a tall proud chanticleer strutting in the yard and barely giving way as I advance, almost ready to do battle with a stranger like a mastiff. So I prefer the simple old home by Buckhurst Park.

The beeches and oaks become fewer as the ground rises, there are wide s.p.a.ces of bracken and little woods or copses, every one of which is called a 'shaw.' Then come the firs, whose crowded spires, each touching each, succeed for miles, and cover the hill-side with a solid ma.s.s of green. They seem so close together, so thickened and matted, impenetrable to footsteps, like a mound of earth rather than woods, a solid block of wood; but there are ways that wind through and s.p.a.ce between the taller trunks when you come near. The odour of firs is variable; sometimes it fills the air, sometimes it is absent altogether, and doubtless depends upon certain conditions of the atmosphere. A very small pinch of the fresh shoot is pleasant to taste; these shoots, eaten constantly, were once considered to cure chest disease, and to this day science endeavours by various forms of inhalations from fir products to check that malady.

Common rural experience, as with the cow-pox, has often laid the basis of medical treatment. Certain it is that it is extremely pleasant and grateful to breathe the sweet fragrance of the fir deep in the woods, listening to the soft caressing sound of the wind that pa.s.ses high overhead. The willow-wren sings, but his voice and that of the wind seem to give emphasis to the holy and meditative silence. The mystery of nature and life hover about the columned temple of the forest. The secret is always behind a tree, as of old time it was always behind the pillar of the temple. Still higher, and as the firs cease, and shower and suns.h.i.+ne, wind and dew, can reach the ground unchecked, comes the tufted heath and branched heather of the moorland top. A thousand acres of purple heath sloping southwards to the sun, deep valleys of dark heather; further slopes beyond of purple, more valleys of heather--the heath shows more in the sunlight, and heather darkens the shadow of the hollows--and so on and on, mile after mile, till the heath-bells seem to end in the sunset. Round and beyond is the immense plain of the air---you feel how limitless the air is at this height, for there is nothing to measure it by. Past the weald lie the South Downs, but they form no boundary, the plain of the air goes over them to the sea and s.p.a.ce.

This wild tract of Ashdown Forest bears much resemblance to Exmoor; you may walk, or you may ride, for hours and meet no one; and if black game were to start up it would not surprise you in the least. There seems room enough to chase the red stag from Buckhurst Park with horn and hound till, mayhap, he ended in the sea at Pevensey. Buckhurst Park is the centre of this immense manor. Of old time the deer did run wild, and were hunted till the pale was broken in the great Civil War. The 'Forest' is still in every one's mouth--'on the Forest,' 'by the Forest,' 'in' it, or 'over' it, everything comes from the 'Forest,' even stone to mend the roads, or 'through the Forest,' as up from Brighton. People say this farm used to be forest, or this garden or this house was the first built on the forest. The enclosures are small, and look as if they had been hewn out of wood or stubbed out of heather, and there are numbers of small owners or settlers. Here and there a house stands, as it seems, alone in the world on the Forest ridge, thousands of acres of heather around, the deep weald underneath--as at Duddleswell, a look-out, as it were, over the earth. Forest Row, where they say the courtiers had their booths in ancient hunting days; Forest Fold, Boar's-head Street, Greenwood Gate--all have a forest sound; and what prettier name could there be than Sweet-Haws? Greybirchet Wood, again; Mossbarn, Highbroom, and so on.

Outlying woods in every direction are fragments of the forest, you cannot get away from it; and look over whatever gate you will, there is always a view. In the vale, if you look over a gate you only see that field and nothing beyond; the view is bounded by the opposite hedge. Here there is always a deep coombe, or the top of a wood underneath, or a rising slope, or a distant ridge crowned with red-tiled farmstead, red-coned oast-house, and tall spruce firs. Or far away, miles and miles, the fields of the weald pushed close together by distance till in a surface no larger than the floor of a room there are six or seven farms and a village. Clouds drift over; it is a wonderful observatory for cloud studies; they seem so close, the light is so strong, and there is nothing to check the sight as far as its powers will reach. Clouds come up no wider than a pasture-field, but in length stretching out to the very horizon, dividing the blue sky into two halves; but then every day has its different clouds--the fleets of heaven that are always sailing on and know no haven.

HOUSE-MARTINS.

Of five houses, a stable, and chapel wall, much frequented by martins, the aspects were as follows:--House No. 1, nests on the north side, south side, and east, both the south and east very warm; No. 2, on the south and east walls--these walls met in an angle, and as it were enclosed the sunbeams, making it very heated sometimes; No. 3, on the south and west walls, the warmest sides of the building; No. 4, all along under the southern eaves, a very warm wall; No. 5, also under the southern eaves, and not elsewhere. The stable fronted south; there were nests front and back, north and south; the chapel eave that was frequented faced towards the west. In the case of several other houses the nests were on the sunny side; but I am not so well acquainted with the localities. So far as my observation goes, I think the house-martin--with all the swallow tribe--prefers warmth, and, if possible, chooses the sunny side of a building. A consideration, however, that weighs much with this bird is the character of the take-off; he likes a s.p.a.ce immediately in front of his nest, free of trees or other obstructions, so that when rus.h.i.+ng out from his little doorway he may not strike against anything. For ages it has also been remarked that the house-martin likes the proximity of man, and will build by choice in or over a porch or doorway, whether of house or stable, or over a window--somewhere where man is about. It is curious that in this country, so subject to cold and cold winds, so many houses are built to face north or east, and this fact often compels the house-martin to build that side, the back of a house being frequently obstructed. In the case of house No. 1 there was a clear take-off on the north side, also with the stable. Houses are generally built to face the road, quite irrespective of the aspect, which custom is the origin of many cheerless dwellings. I think that house-martin fledglings and eggs are capable of enduring the utmost heat of our English summer, and the nests found deserted were abandoned for some other reason. More likely that the deficiency of insect food caused by the inclement weather weakened the parent. Sometimes these harmless and useful birds are cruelly shot. I have never seen a nest injured by heats; on the contrary, I should imagine that heat would cause the mortar to cohere more firmly, and that damp would be much more likely to make it unsafe. At house No. 2 the heat in the angle of the two walls was scarcely bearable on a July day. If a nest were taken down and put in an oven I should doubt if it would crack. In nature, however, everything depends on locality. The roads in that locality were mended with flint, and the mortar from puddles appeared to make good cement. Possibly in some districts there may be no lime or silicon, and the mortar the birds use may be less adherent. The more one studies nature the more one becomes convinced that it is an error to suppose things proceed by a regular rule always applicable everywhere. All creatures change their habits with circ.u.mstances; consequently no observation can be accepted as final.

AMONG THE NUTS.

The nuts are ripening once more, and it is almost the time to go a-gipsying--the summer pa.s.ses like the shadow of a cloud which strikes the edge of the yellow wheat and comes over and is gone; it does not give you time to rub out a single ear of corn. Before it is possible to gather the harvest of thought and observation the summer has pa.s.sed, and we must bind the hastily st.i.tched book with the crimson leaves of autumn. Under these very hazel boughs only yesterday, _i.e._ in May, looking for cuckoo-sorrel, as the wood-sorrel is called, there rolled down a brown last year's nut from among the moss of the bank. In the side of this little brown nut, at its thicker end, a round hole had been made with a sharp tool which had left the marks of its chiselling. Through this hole the kernel had been extracted by the skilful mouse. Two more nuts were found on the same bank, bored by the same carpenter. The holes looked as if he had turned the nut round and round as he gnawed. Unless the nut had shrunk, the hole was not large enough to pull the kernel out all at once; it must have been eaten little by little in many mouthfuls. The same amount of nibbling would have sawn a circle round the nut, and so, dividing the sh.e.l.l in two, would have let the kernel out bodily--a plan more to our fancy; but the mouse is a nibbler, and he preferred to nibble, nibble, nibble. Hard by one afternoon, as the cows were lazily swis.h.i.+ng their tails coming home to milking, and the shadow of the thick hedge had already caused the anemones in the gra.s.s to close their petals, there was a slight rustling sound. Out into the cool gra.s.s by some cowslips there came a small dark head. It was an adder, verily a snake in the gra.s.s and flowers. His quick eye--you know the proverb, 'If his ear were as quick as his eye, No man should pa.s.s him by'--caught sight of us immediately, and he turned back. The hedge was hollow there, and the mound grown over with close-laid, narrow-leaved ivy. The viper did not sink in these leaves, but slid with a rustling sound fully exposed above them. His grey length and the chain of black diamond spots down his back, his flat head with deadly tooth, did not harmonise as the green snake does with leaf and gra.s.s. He was too marked, too prominent--a venomous foreign thing, fit for tropic sands and nothing English or native to our wilds. He seemed like a reptile that had escaped from the gla.s.s case of some collection.

The green snake or gra.s.s snake, with yellow-marked head, fits in perfectly with the floating herbage of the watery places he frequents.

The eye soon grows accustomed to his curves, till he is no more startling than a frog among the water-crowfoot you are about to gather. To the adder the mind never becomes habituated; he ever remains repellent. This adder was close to a house and cowshed, and, indeed, they seem to like to be near cows. Since then a large silvery slowworm was killed just there--a great pity, for they are perfectly harmless. We saw, too, a very large lizard under the heath. Three little effets (efts) ran into one hole on the bank yesterday. Some of the men in spring went off into the woods to 'flawing,' _i.e._ to barking the oak which is thrown in May--the bark is often used now for decoration, like the Spanish cork bark. Some were talking already of the 'grit' work and looking forward to it, that is, to mowing and haymaking, which mean better wages. The farmers were grumbling that their oats were cuckoo oats, not sown till the cuckoo cried, and not likely to come to much. So, indeed, it fell out, for the oats looked very thin and spindly when the nuts turned rosy again. At work hoeing among the 'kelk' or 'kilk,' the bright yellow charlock, the labourers stood up as the cuckoo flew over singing, and blew cuckoo back to him in their hollow fists. This is a trick they have, something like whistling in the fist, and so naturally done as to deceive any one. The children had been round with the May garland, which takes the place of the May-pole, and is carried slung on a stick, and covered with a white cloth, between two little girls. The cloth is to keep the dust and sun from spoiling the flowers--the rich golden kingcups and the pale anemones trained about two hoops, one within the other. They take the cloth off to show you the garland, and surely you must pay them a penny for thought of old England. Yet there are some who would like to spoil this innocent festival. I have heard of some wealthy people living in a village who do their utmost to break up the old custom by giving presents of money to all the poor children who will go to school on that day instead of a-Maying. A very pitiful thing truly! Give them the money, and let them go a-Maying as well. The same bribe they repeat at Christmas to stay the boys from going round mumming. It is in spring that the folk make most use of herbs, such as herb tea of gorse bloom. One cottage wife exclaimed that she had no patience with women so ignorant they did not know how to use herbs, as wood-sage or wood-betony. Most of the gardens have a few plants of the milky-veined holy thistle--good, they say, against inflammations, and in which they have much faith. Soon after the May garlands the meadow orchis comes up, which is called 'dead men's hands,'

and after that the 'ram's-horn' orchis, which has a twisted petal; and in the evening the bat, which they call flittermouse, appears again.

The light is never the same on a landscape many minutes together, as all know who have tried, ever so crudely, to fix the fleeting expression of the earth with pencil. It is ever changing, and in the same way as you walk by the hedges day by day there is always some fresh circ.u.mstance of nature, the interest of which in a measure blots out the past. This morning we found a bramble leaf, something about which has for the moment put the record of months aside. This bramble leaf was marked with a grey streak, which coiled and turned and ran along beside the midrib, forming a sort of thoughtless design, a design without an idea. The Greek fret seems to our eyes in its regularity and its repet.i.tion to have a human thought in it. The coils and turns upon this leaf, like many other markings of nature, form a designless design, the idea of which is not traceable back to a mind. They are the work of a leaf-boring larva which has eaten its way between the two skins of the leaf, much like boring a tunnel between the two surfaces of a sheet of paper. If you take a needle you can insert the point in the burrow and pa.s.s it along wherever the bore is straight, so that the needle lies between the to sides of the leaf. Off-hand, if any one were asked if it were possible to split a leaf, he would say no. This little creature, however, has worked along inside it, and lived there. The upper surface of the leaf is a darker green, and seems to the touch of firmer texture than the lower; there are no marks on the under surface, which does not seem touched, so that what the creature has really done is to split one surface. He has eaten along underneath it, raising it no doubt a little by the thickness of his body, as if you crept between the carpet and the floor. The softer under surface representing the floor is untouched. The woodbine leaves are often bored like this, and seem to have patterns traced upon them. There is no particle of matter so small but that it seems to have a living thing working at it and resolving it into still more minute atoms; nothing so insignificant but that upon examination it will be found to be of the utmost value to something alive. Upon almost every fir branch near the end there are little fragments like cotton, so thick in places as to quite hang the boughs with threads; these gossamer-like fragments appear to be left by some insect, perhaps an aphis; and it is curious to note how very very busy the little willow-wrens are in the fir boughs. They are constantly at work there; they sing in the firs in the earliest spring, they stay there all the summer, and now that the edge of autumn approaches their tiny beaks are still picking up insects the whole day long. The insects they devour must be as numerous as the fir needles that lie inches thick on the ground in the copse.

Across a broad, dry, sandy path, worn firm, some thousands of ants pa.s.sing to and fro their nest had left a slight trail. They were hurrying on in full work, when I drew the top of my walking-stick across their road, obliterating about an inch of it. In an instant the work of the nest was stopped, and thousands upon thousands of factory hands were thrown out of employment. The walking-stick had left two little ridges of sand like minute parallel earthworks drawn across their highway. Those that came out of the nest on arriving at the little ridge on their side immediately stopped, worked their antennae in astonishment, then went up to the top of it, and seemed to try to look round. After a moment they ran back and touched those that were coming on to communicate the intelligence. Every ant that came did exactly the same thing; not one of them pa.s.sed the little ridge, but all returned. By-and-by the head of the column began to spread out and search right and left for the lost track.

They scouted this way and they scouted that, they turned and doubled and went through every possible evolution, hundreds of them, sometimes a score at once, yet not one of them attempted to go straight forward, which would have brought them into their old path. It was scarcely thrice the length of an ant's body to where their path began again; they could not see or scent, or in any way find out what was so short a distance in front of them. The most extraordinary thing was that not one ventured to explore straight forward; it was as if their world came to an end at that little ridge, and they were afraid to step into chaos. The same actions were going on behind the other ridge of sand just opposite, an inch away.

There the column of ants that had been out foraging was met with a like difficulty, and could not find their way. There, too, hundreds of ants were exploring right and left in every direction except straight forward, in a perfect buzz of excitement. Once or twice an ant from either party happened to mount on the parallel ridges at the same time, and if they had strained forward and stretched out their antennae they could have almost touched each other. Yet they seemed quite unconscious of each other's presence. Unless in a well-worn groove a single ant appears incapable of running in a straight line. At first their motions searching about suggested the action of a pack of hounds making a cast; hounds, however, would have very soon gone forward and so picked up the trail.

If I may make a guess at the cause of this singular confusion, I think I should attribute it to some peculiarity in the brain of the ant, or else to some consideration of which we are ignorant, but which weighs with ants, and not to any absence of the physical senses. Because they do not do as we should do under similar circ.u.mstances is no proof that they do not possess the power to hear and see. Experiments, for instance, have been made with bees to find out if they have any sense of hearing, by shouting close to a bee, drawing discordant notes on the violin, striking pieces of metal together, and so on, to all of which the bee remained indifferent. What else could she do? Neither of these sounds hurt if she heard them, nor seemed to threaten danger; they simply conveyed no impression at all to her mind. Observe your favourite p.u.s.s.y curled up in the arm-chair at such time as she knows the dishes have been cleared away, and there is no more chance of wheedling a t.i.tbit from you. You may play the piano, or the violin, or knock with a hammer, or shout your loudest, she will take no notice, no more than if she actually had no ears at all. Are you, therefore, to conclude she does not hear you? As well conclude that people do not hear the thunder because they do not shout in answer to it. Such noises simply do not concern her, and she takes no notice. Now, though her eyes be closed, let a strange dog run in, and at the light pad pad of his feet, scarcely audible on the carpet, she is up in a moment, blazing with wrath. That is a sound that interests her. So, too, perhaps, it may be with ants and bees, who may hear and see, and yet take no apparent notice because the circ.u.mstances are not interesting, and the experiment is to them unintelligible. Fishes in particular have been often, I think, erroneously judged in this way, and have been considered deaf, and to have little intelligence, while in truth the fact is we have not discovered a way of communicating with them any more than they have found a way of talking with us. Fishes, I know, are keener of sight than I am when they are interested, and I believe they can hear equally well, and are not by any means without mind. These ants that acted so foolishly to appearance may have been influenced by some former experience of which we know nothing; there may be something in the past history of the ant which may lead them to profoundly suspect interference with their path as indicative of extreme danger. Once, perhaps, many ant-generations ago, there was some creature which acted thus in order to destroy them. This, of course, is merely an ill.u.s.tration put forward to suggest the idea that there may be a reason in the brain of the ant of which we know nothing. I do not know that I myself am any more rational, for looking back along the path of life I can see now how I turned and twisted and went to the right and the left in the most crooked manner, putting myself to endless trouble, when by taking one single step straight forward in the right direction, if I had only known, I might have arrived at once at the goal. Can any of us look beyond the little ridge of one day and see what will happen the day after? Some hours afterwards, towards evening, I found the ants were beginning to get over their difficulty. On one side an ant would go forward in a half-circle, on the other another ant would advance sideways, and meeting together they would touch their antennae, and then the first would travel back with the second, and so the line was reestablished. It was very much as if two batsmen at opposite wickets should run forward each halfway, and after shaking hands and conversing, one of them should lead the other safely over.

WALKS IN THE WHEAT-FIELDS.

I.

If you will look at a grain of wheat you will see that it seems folded up: it has crossed its arms and rolled itself up in a cloak, a fold of which forms a groove, and so gone to sleep. If you look at it some time, as people in the old enchanted days used to look into a mirror, or the magic ink, until they saw living figures therein, you can almost trace a miniature human being in the oval of the grain. It is narrow at the top, where the head would be, and broad across the shoulders, and narrow again down towards the feet; a tiny man or woman has wrapped itself round about with a garment and settled to slumber. Up in the far north, where the dead ice reigns, our arctic explorers used to roll themselves in a sleeping-bag like this, to keep the warmth in their bodies against the chilliness of the night. Down in the south, where the heated sands of Egypt never cool, there in the rock-hewn tombs lie the mummies wrapped and lapped and wound about with a hundred yards of linen, in the hope, it may be, that spices and balm might retain within the sarcophagus some small fragment of human organism through endless ages, till at last the gift of life revisited it. Like a grain of wheat the mummy is folded in its cloth. And I do not know really whether I might not say that these little grains of English corn do not hold within them the actual flesh and blood of man. Transubstantiation is a fact there.

Sometimes the grains are dry and shrivelled and hard as shot, sometimes they are large and full and have a juiciness about them, sometimes they are a little bit red, others are golden, many white. The sack stands open in the market--you can thrust your arm in it a foot deep, or take up a handful and let it run back like a liquid stream, or hold it in your palm and balance it, feeling the weight. They are not very heavy as they lie in the palm, yet these little grains are a ponderous weight that rules man's world. Wherever they are there is empire. Could imperial Rome have only grown sufficient wheat in Italy to have fed her legions Caesar would still be master of three-fourths of the earth. Rome thought more in her latter days of grapes and oysters and mullets, that change colour as they die, and singing girls and flute-playing, and cynic verse of Horace--anything rather than corn. Rome is no more, and the lords of the world are they who have masters.h.i.+p of wheat. We have the masters.h.i.+p at this hour by dint of our gold and our hundred-ton guns, but they are telling our farmers to cast aside their corn, and to grow tobacco and fruit and anything else that can be thought of in preference. The gold is slipping away. These sacks in the market open to all to thrust their hands in are not sacks of corn but of golden sovereigns, half-sovereigns, new George and the dragon, old George and the dragon, Sydney mint sovereigns, Napoleons, half-Napoleons, Belgian gold, German gold, Italian gold; gold sc.r.a.ped and scratched and gathered together like old rags from door to door. Sacks full of gold, verily I may say that all the gold poured out from the Australian fields, every pennyweight of it, hundreds of tons, all s.h.i.+pped over the sea to India, Australia, South Africa, Egypt, and, above all, America, to buy wheat. It was said that Pompey and his sons covered the great earth with their bones, for each one died in a different quarter of the world; but now he would want two more sons for Australia and America, the two new quarters which are now at work ploughing, sowing, reaping, without a month's intermission, growing corn for us. When you buy a bag of flour at the baker's you pay fivepence over the counter, a very simple transaction. Still you do not expect to get even that little bag of flour for nothing, your fivepence goes over the counter in somebody else's till. Consider now the broad ocean as the counter and yourself to represent thirty-five millions of English people buying sixteen, seventeen, or eighteen million quarters of wheat from the nations opposite, and paying for it s.h.i.+ploads of gold.

So that these sacks of corn in the market are truly filled with gold dust; and how strange it seems at first that our farmers, who are for ever dabbling with their hands in these golden sands, should be for ever grumbling at their poverty! 'The nearer the church the farther from G.o.d'