MacMillan's Reading Books Part 32

_Cimmerian_. The Cimmerians were a race dwelling beyond the ocean stream, in utter darkness.

_Euphrosyne_ Mirth or gladness.

_In unreproved pleasures_ = In innocent pleasures.

_Then to come_ = Then (admit me) to come.

_Corydon and Thyrsis_. Names for a rustic couple taken from the mythology of the Latin poets. So _Phillis and Thestylis_.

_Rebecks_. Musical instruments like fiddles.

_Junkets_. Pieces of cheese or something of the kind.

_By friar's lantern_ = Jack o' Lantern or Will o' the Wisp.

_In weeds of peace_ = the dress worn in time of peace.

_Hymen_. G.o.d of wedlock.

_Jonson_. (See previous note to _Ben Jonson_.)

_Sock_. The shoe worn on the ancient stage by comedians as the buskin was by tragedians.

_Lydian airs_. Soft and soothing, as opposed to the Dorian airs, which expressed the rough and harsh element in ancient music.]

THE PLEASURES OF A LIFE OF LABOUR.

I wish to show you how possible it is to enjoy much happiness in very mean employments. Cowper tells us that labour, though the primal curse, "has been softened into mercy;" and I think that, even had he not done so, I would have found out the fact for myself. It was twenty years last February since I set out a little before sunrise to make my first acquaintance with a life of labour and restraint, and I have rarely had a heavier heart than on that morning. I was but a thin, loose-jointed boy at the time--fond of the pretty intangibilities of romance, and of dreaming when broad awake; and, woful change! I was now going to work at what Burns has instanced in his "Twa Dogs" as one of the most disagreeable of all employments--to work in a quarry. Bating the pa.s.sing uneasiness occasioned by a few gloomy antic.i.p.ations, the portion of my life which had already gone by had been happy beyond the common lot. I had been a wanderer among rocks and wood--a reader of curious books when I could get them--a gleaner of old traditionary stories; and now I was going to exchange all my day-dreams, and all my amus.e.m.e.nts, for the kind of life in which men toil every day that they may be enabled to eat, and eat every day that they may be enabled to toil!

The quarry in which I wrought lay on the southern side of a n.o.ble inland bay, or frith rather, with a little clear stream on the one side, and a thick fir wood on the other. It had been opened in the old red sandstone of the district, and was overtopped by a huge bank of diluvial clay, which rose over it in some places to the height of nearly thirty feet, and which at this time was rent and s.h.i.+vered, wherever it presented an open front to the weather, by a recent frost. A heap of loose fragments, which had fallen from above blocked up the face of the quarry, and my first employment was to clear them away. The friction of the shovel soon blistered my hands, but the pain was by no means very severe, and I wrought hard and willingly, that I might see how the huge strata below, which presented so firm and unbroken a frontage, were to be torn up and removed. Picks, and wedges, and levers, were applied by my brother workmen; and simple and rude as I had been accustomed to regard these implements, I found I had much to learn in the way of using them. They all proved inefficient, however, and the workmen had to bore into one of the inferior strata, and employ gunpowder. The process was new to me, and I deemed it a highly-amusing one: it had the merit, too, of being attended with some such degree of danger as a boating or rock excursion, and had thus an interest independent of its novelty. We had a few capital shots: the fragments flew in every direction; and an immense ma.s.s of the diluvium came toppling down, bearing with it two dead birds, that in a recent storm had crept into one of the deeper fissures, to die in the shelter. I felt a new interest in examining them. The one was a pretty c.o.c.k goldfinch, with its hood of vermilion, and its wings inlaid with the gold to which it owes its name, as unsoiled and smooth as if it had been preserved for a museum. The other, a somewhat rarer bird, of the woodp.e.c.k.e.r tribe, was variegated with light blue and a grayish yellow. I was engaged in admiring the poor little things, more disposed to be sentimental, perhaps, than if I had been ten years older, and thinking of the contrast between the warmth and jollity of their green summer haunts and the cold and darkness of their last retreat, when I heard our employer bidding the workmen lay by their tools. I looked up, and saw the sun sinking behind the thick fir-wood beside us, and the long dark shadows of the trees stretching downwards towards the sh.o.r.e.

This was no very formidable beginning of the course of life I had so much dreaded. To be sure, my hands were a little sore, and I felt nearly as much fatigued as if I had been climbing among the rocks; but I had wrought and been useful, and had yet enjoyed the day fully as much as usual. It was no small matter, too, that the evening, converted by a rare trans.m.u.tation into the delicious "blink of rest," which Burns so truthfully describes, was all my own. I was as light of heart next morning as any of my fellow-workmen. There had been a smart frost during the night, and the rime lay white on the gra.s.s as we pa.s.sed onwards through the fields; but the sun rose in a clear atmosphere, and the day mellowed, as it advanced, into one of those delightful days of early spring which give so pleasing an earnest of whatever is mild and genial in the better half of the year! All the workmen rested at mid-day, and I went to enjoy my half-hour alone on a mossy knoll in the neighbouring wood, which commands through the trees a wide prospect of the bay and the opposite sh.o.r.e. There was not a wrinkle on the water, nor a cloud in the sky, and the branches were as moveless in the calm as if they had been traced on canvas. From a wooded promontory that stretched half-way across the frith, there ascended a thin column of smoke. It rose straight as the line of a plummet for more than a thousand yards, and then, on reaching a thinner stratum of air, spread out equally on every side like the foliage of a stately tree. Ben Wyvis rose to the west, white with the yet unwasted snows of winter, and as sharply defined in the clear atmosphere as if all its sunny slopes and blue retiring hollows had been chiselled in marble. A line of snow ran along the opposite hills; all above was white, and all below was purple. They reminded me of the pretty French story, in which an old artist is described as tasking the ingenuity of his future son-in-law by giving him as a subject for his pencil a flower-piece composed of only white flowers, of which the one-half were to bear their proper colour, the other half a deep purple hue, and yet all be perfectly natural; and how the young man resolved the riddle, and gained his mistress, by introducing a transparent purple vase into the picture, and making the light pa.s.s through it on the flowers that were drooping over the edge. I returned to the quarry, convinced that a very exquisite pleasure may be a very cheap one, and that the busiest employments may afford leisure enough to enjoy it.

The gunpowder had loosened a large ma.s.s in one of the inferior strata, and our first employment, on resuming our labours, was to raise it from its bed. I a.s.sisted the other workmen in placing it on edge, and was much struck by the appearance of the platform on which it had rested.

The entire surface was ridged and furrowed like a bank of sand that had been left by the tide an hour before. I could trace every bend and curvature, every cross-hollow and counter-ridge of the corresponding phenomena; for the resemblance was no half-resemblance--it was the thing itself; and I had observed it a hundred and a hundred times when sailing my little schooner in the shallows left by the ebb. But what had become of the waves that had thus fretted the solid rock, or of what element had they been composed? I felt as completely at fault as Robinson Crusoe did on his discovering the print of the man's foot on the sand. The evening furnished me with still further cause of wonder.

We raised another block in a different part of the quarry, and found that the area of a circular depression in the stratum below was broken and flawed in every direction, as if it had been the bottom of a pool, recently dried up, which had shrunk and split in the hardening. Several large stones came rolling down from the diluvium in the course of the afternoon. They were of different qualities from the sandstone below, and from one another; and, what was more wonderful still, they were all rounded and water-worn, as if they had been tossed about in the sea, or the bed of a river, for hundreds of years. There could not, surely, be a more conclusive proof that the bank which had enclosed them so long could not have been created on the rock on which it rested. No workman ever manufactures a half-worn article, and the stones were all half-worn! And if not the bank, why then the sandstone underneath? I was lost in conjecture, and found I had food enough for thought that evening, without once thinking of the unhappiness of a life of labour.

HUGH MILLER.

THE FLIGHT OF BIRDS.

A good ornithologist should be able to distinguish birds by their air, as well as by their colours and shape, on the ground as well as on the wing, and in the bush as well as in the hand. For, though it must not be said that every species of birds has a manner peculiar to itself, yet there is somewhat in most kinds at least that at first sight discriminates them, and enables a judicious observer to p.r.o.nounce upon them with some certainty.

Thus, kites and buzzards sail round in circles, with wings expanded and motionless; and it is from their gliding manner that the former are still called, in the north of England, gleads, from the Saxon verb _glidan_, to glide. The kestrel, or windhover, has a peculiar mode of hanging in the air in one place, his wings all the while being briskly agitated. Hen-harriers fly low over heaths or fields of corn, and beat the ground regularly like a pointer or setting-dog. Owls move in a buoyant manner, as if lighter than the air; they seem to want ballast.

There is a peculiarity belonging to ravens that must draw the attention even of the most incurious--they spend all their leisure time in striking and cuffing each other on the wing in a kind of playful skirmish; and when they move from one place to another, frequently turn on their backs with a loud croak, and seem to be falling on the ground.

When this odd gesture betides them, they are scratching themselves with one foot, and thus lose the centre of gravity. Rooks sometimes dive and tumble in a frolicsome manner; crows and daws swagger in their walk; woodp.e.c.k.e.rs fly with an undulating motion, opening and closing their wings at every stroke, and so are always rising and falling in curves.

All of this kind use their tails, which incline downwards, as a support while they run up trees. Parrots, like all other hooked-clawed birds, walk awkwardly, and make use of their bill as a third foot, climbing and descending with ridiculous caution. c.o.c.ks, hens, partridges, and pheasants, etc., parade and walk gracefully, and run nimbly; but fly with difficulty, with an impetuous whirring, and in a straight line.

Magpies and jays flutter with powerless wings, and make no dispatch; herons seem enc.u.mbered with too much sail for their light bodies; but these vast hollow wings are necessary in carrying burdens, such as large fishes, and the like; pigeons, and particularly the sort called smiters, have a way of clas.h.i.+ng their wings, the one against the other, over their backs, with a loud snap; another variety, called tumblers, turn themselves over in the air. The kingfisher darts along like an arrow; fern-owls, or goat-suckers, glance in the dusk over the tops of trees like a meteor; starlings, as it were, swim along, while missel-thrushes use a wild and desultory flight; swallows sweep over the surface of the ground and water, and distinguish themselves by rapid turns and quick evolutions; swifts dash round in circles; and the bank-martin moves with frequent vacillations, like a b.u.t.terfly. Most of the small birds fly by jerks, rising and falling as they advance. Most small birds hop; but wagtails and larks walk, moving their legs alternately. Skylarks rise and fall perpendicularly as they sing; woodlarks hang poised in the air; and t.i.tlarks rise and fall in large curves, singing in their descent.

The white-throat uses odd jerks and gesticulations over the tops of hedges and bushes. All the duck kind waddle; divers and auks walk as if fettered, and stand erect on their tails. Geese and cranes, and most wild fowls, move in figured flights, often changing their position.

Dabchicks, moorhens, and coots, fly erect, with their legs hanging down, and hardly make any dispatch; the reason is plain, their wings are placed too forward out of the true centre of gravity, as the legs of auks and divers are situated too backward.

REV. GILBERT WHITE.

THE VILLAGE.

Sweet was the sound, when oft at evening's close Up yonder hill the village murmur rose.

There as I past with careless steps and slow, The mingling notes came softened from below; The swain responsive as the milk-maid sung, The sober herd that lowed to meet their young, The noisy geese that gabbled o'er the pool, The playful children just let loose from school, The watch-dog's voice that bayed the whispering wind, And the loud laugh that spoke the vacant mind; These all in sweet confusion sought the shade, And filled each pause the nightingale had made.

But now the sounds of population fail, No cheerful murmurs fluctuate in the gale, No busy steps the gra.s.s-grown foot-way tread, For all the bloomy flush of life is fled.