Afoot in England Part 3

The s.e.xton was there and told us that he was but ten years old when Miss Mitford died, but that he remembered her well and she was a very pleasant little woman. Others in the place who remembered her said the same--that she was very pleasant and sweet. We know that she was sweet and charming, but unfortunately the portraits we have of her do not give that impression. They represent her as a fat common-place looking person, a little vulgar perhaps. I fancy the artists were bunglers. I possess a copy of a very small pencil sketch made of her face by a dear old lady friend of mine, now dead, about the year 1851 or 2. My friend had a gift for portraiture in a peculiar way. When she saw a face that greatly interested her, in a drawing-room, on a platform, in the street, anywhere, it remained very vividly in her mind and on going home she would sketch it, and some of these sketches of well known persons are wonderfully good. She was staying in the country with a friend who drove with her to Swallowfield to call on Miss Mitford, and on her return to her friend's house she made the little sketch, and in this tiny portrait I can see the refinement, the sweetness, the animation and charm which she undoubtedly possessed.

But let me now venture to step a little outside of my own province, my small plot--a poor pedestrian's unimportant impressions of places and faces; all these p's come by accident; and this I put in parenthetically just because an editor solemnly told me a while ago that he couldn't abide and wouldn't have alliteration's artful aid in his periodical. Let us leave the subject of what Miss Mitford was to those of her day who knew her; a thousand lovely personalities pa.s.s away every year and in a little while are no more remembered than the bright-plumaged bird that falls in the tropical forest, or the vanished orchid bloom of which some one has said that the angels in heaven can look on no more beautiful thing. Leaving all that, let us ask what remains to us of another generation of all she was and did?

She was a prolific writer, both prose and verse, and, as we know, had an extraordinary vogue in her own time. Anything that came from her pen had an immediate success; indeed, so highly was she regarded that nothing she chose to write, however poor, could fail. And she certainly did write a good deal of poor stuff: it was all in a sense poor, but books and books, poor soul, she had to write. It was in a sense poor because it was mostly ambitious stuff, and, as the proverb says, "You cannot fly like an eagle with the wings of a wren." She was driven to fly, and gave her little wings too much to do, and her flights were apt to be mere little weak flutterings over the surface of the ground. A wren, and she had not a cuckoo but a devouring cormorant to sustain--that dear, beautiful father of hers, who was more to her than any reprobate son to his devoted mother, and who day after day, year after year, gobbled up her earnings, and then would hungrily go on squawking for more until he stumbled into the grave. Alas! he was too long in dying; she was worn out by then, the little heart beating not so fast, and the bright little brain growing dim and very tired.

Now all the ambitious stuff she wrote to keep the cormorant and, incidentally, to immortalize herself, has fallen deservedly into oblivion. But we--some of us--do not forget and never want to forget Mary Russell Mitford. Her letters remain--the little friendly letters which came from her pen like b.a.l.l.s of silvery down from a sun-ripened plant, and were wafted far and wide over the land to those she loved.

There is a wonderful charm in them; they are so spontaneous, so natural, so perfectly reflect her humour and vivacity, her overflowing sweetness, her beautiful spirit. And one book too remains--the series of sketches about the poor little hamlet, in which she lived so long and laboured so hard to support herself and her parents, the turtledove mated with a cormorant. Driven to produce work and hard up for a subject, in a happy moment she took up this humble one lying at her own door and allowed her self to write naturally even as in her most intimate letters. This is the reason of the vitality of Our Tillage; it was simple, natural, and reflected the author herself, her tender human heart, her impulsive nature, her bright playful humorous spirit. There is no thought, no mind stuff in it, and it is a cla.s.sic! It is about the country, and she has so little observation that it might have been written in a town, out of a book, away from nature's sights and sounds. Her rustic characters are not comparable to those of a score or perhaps two or three score of other writers who treat of such subjects. The dialogue, when she makes them talk, is unnatural, and her invention so poor that when she puts in a little romance of her own making one regrets it. And so one might go on picking it all to pieces like a dandelion blossom. Nevertheless it endures, outliving scores of in a way better books on the same themes, because her own delightful personality manifests itself and s.h.i.+nes in all these little pictures. This short pa.s.sage describing how she took Lizzie, the little village child she loved, to gather cowslips in the meadows, will serve as an ill.u.s.tration.

They who know these feelings (and who is so happy as not to have known some of them) will understand why Alfieri became powerless, and Froissart dull; and why even needlework, the most effective sedative, that grand soother and composer of women's distress, fails to comfort me today. I will go out into the air this cool, pleasant afternoon, and try what that will do.... I will go to the meadows, the beautiful meadows and I will have my materials of happiness, Lizzie and May, and a basket for flowers, and we will make a cowslip ball. "Did you ever see a cowslip ball, Lizzie?" "No." "Come away then; make haste!

run, Lizzie!"

And on we go, fast, fast! down the road, across the lea, past the workhouse, along by the great pond, till we slide into the deep narrow lane, whose hedges seem to meet over the water, and win our way to the little farmhouse at the end. "Through the farmyard, Lizzie; over the gate; never mind the cows; they are quiet enough." "I don't mind 'em," said Miss Lizzie, boldly and' truly, and with a proud affronted air, displeased at being thought to mind anything, and showing by her att.i.tude and manner some design of proving her courage by an attack on the largest of the herd, in the shape of a pull by the tail. "I don't mind 'em." "I know you don't, Lizzie; but let them, alone and don't chase the turkey-c.o.c.k. Come to me, my dear!" and, for wonder, Lizzie came.

In the meantime my other pet, Mayflower, had also gotten into a sc.r.a.pe.

She had driven about a huge unwieldy sow, till the animal's grunting had disturbed the repose of a still more enormous Newfoundland dog, the guardian of the yard.

The beautiful white greyhound's mocking treatment of the surly dog on the chain then follows, and other pretty scenes and adventures, until after some mishaps and much trouble the cowslip ball is at length completed.

What a concentration of fragrance and beauty it was! Golden and sweet to satiety! rich in sight, and touch, and smell! Lizzie was enchanted, and ran off with her prize, hiding amongst the trees in the very coyness of ecstasy, as if any human eye, even mine, would be a restraint on her innocent raptures.

Here the very woman is revealed to us, her tender and lively disposition, her impulsiveness and childlike love of fun and delight in everything on earth. We see in such a pa.s.sage what her merit really is, the reason of our liking or "partiality" for her. Her pleasure in everything makes everything interesting, and in displaying her feeling without art or disguise she succeeds in giving what we may call a literary expression to personal charm--that quality which is almost untranslatable into written words. Many women possess it; it is in them and issues from them, and is like an essential oil in a flower, but too volatile to be captured and made use of. Furthermore, women when they write are as a rule even more conventional than men, more artificial and out of and away from themselves.

I do not know that any literary person will agree with me; I have gone aside to write about Miss Mitford mainly for my own satisfaction.

Frequently when I have wanted to waste half an hour pleasantly with a book I have found myself picking up "Our Village" from among many others, some waiting for a first perusal, and I wanted to know why this was so--to find out, if not to invent, some reason for my liking which would not make me ashamed.

At Swallowfield we failed to find a place to stay at; there was no such place; and of the inns, named, I think, the "Crown," "Cricketers,"

"Bird-in-the-Hand," and "George and Dragon," only one, was said to provide accommodation for travellers as the law orders, but on going to the house we were informed that the landlord or his wife was just dead, or dangerously ill, I forget which, and they could take no one in.

Accordingly, we had to trudge back to Three Mile Cross and the old ramshackle, well-nigh ruinous inn there. It was a wretched place, smelling of mould and dry-rot; however, it was not so bad after a fire had been lighted in the grate, but first the young girl who waited on us brought in a bundle of newspapers, which she proceeded to thrust up the chimney-flue and kindle, "to warm the flue and make the fire burn," she explained.

On the following day, the weather being milder, we rambled on through woods and lanes, visiting several villages, and arrived in the afternoon at Silchester, where we had resolved to put up for the night. By a happy chance we found a pleasant cottage on the common to stay at and pleasant people in it, so that we were glad to sit down for a week there, to loiter about the furzy waste, or prowl in the forest and haunt the old walls; but it was pleasant even indoors with that wide prospect before the window, the wooded country stretching many miles away to the hills of Kingsclere, blue in the distance and crowned with their beechen rings and groves. Of Roman Calleva itself and the thoughts I had there I will write in the following chapter; here I will only relate how on Easter Sunday, two days after arriving, we went to morning service in the old church standing on a mound inside the walls, a mile from the village and common.

It came to pa.s.s that during the service the sun began to s.h.i.+ne very brightly after several days of cloud and misty windy wet weather, and that brilliance and the warmth in it served to bring a b.u.t.terfly out of hiding; then another; then a third; red admirals all; and they were seen through all the prayers, and psalms, and hymns, and lessons, and the sermon preached by the white-haired Rector, fluttering against the translucent gla.s.s, wanting to be out in that splendour and renew their life after so long a period of suspension. But the gla.s.s was between them and their world of blue heavens and woods and meadow flowers; then I thought that after the service I would make an attempt to get them out; but soon reflected that to release them it would be necessary to capture them first, and that that could not be done without a ladder and b.u.t.terfly net. Among the women (ladies) on either side of and before me there were no fewer than five wearing aigrettes of egret and bird-of-paradise plumes in their hats or bonnets, and these five all remained to take part in that ceremony of eating bread and drinking wine in remembrance of an event supposed to be of importance to their souls, here and hereafter. It saddened me to leave my poor red admirals in their prison, beating their red wings against the coloured gla.s.s--to leave them too in such company, where the aigrette wearers were wors.h.i.+pping a little G.o.d of their own little imaginations, who did not create and does not regard the swallow and dove and white egret and bird-of-paradise, and who was therefore not my G.o.d and whose will as they understood it was nothing to me.

It was a consolation when I went out, still thinking of the b.u.t.terflies in their prison, and stood by the old ruined walls grown over with ivy and crowned with oak and holly trees, to think that in another two thousand years there will be no archaeologist and no soul in Silchester, or anywhere else in Britain, or in the world, who would take the trouble to dig up the remains of aigrette-wearers and their works, and who would care what had become of their pitiful little souls--their immortal part.

Chapter Seven: Roman Calleva

An afternoon in the late November of 1903. Frost, gales, and abundant rains have more than half stripped the oaks of their yellow leaves. But the rain is over now, the sky once more a pure lucid blue above me--all around me, in fact, since I am standing high on the top of the ancient stupendous earthwork, grown over with oak wood and underwood of holly and thorn and hazel with tangle of ivy and bramble and briar. It is marvellously still; no sound from the village reaches me; I only hear the faint rustle of the dead leaves as they fall, and the robin, for one spied me here and has come to keep me company. At intervals he spurts out his brilliant little fountain of sound; and that sudden bright melody and the bright colour of the sunlit translucent leaves seem like one thing. Nature is still, and I am still, standing concealed among trees, or moving cautiously through the dead russet bracken. Not that I am expecting to get a glimpse of the badger who has his hermitage in this solitary place, but I am on forbidden ground, in the heart of a sacred pheasant preserve, where one must do one's prowling warily. Hard by, almost within a stone's-throw of the wood-grown earthwork on which I stand, are the ruinous walls of Roman Calleva--the Silchester which the antiquarians have been occupied in uncovering these dozen years or longer. The stone walls, too, like the more ancient earthwork, are overgrown with trees and brambles and ivy. The trees have grown upon the wall, sending roots deep down between the stones, through the crumbling cement; and so fast are they anch.o.r.ed that never a tree falls but it brings down huge ma.s.ses of masonry with it. This slow levelling process has been going on for centuries, and it was doubtless in this way that the buildings within the walls were pulled down long ages ago. Then the action of the earth-worms began, and floors and foundations, with fallen stones and tiles, were gradually buried in the soil, and what was once a city was a dense thicket of oak and holly and thorn. Finally the wood was cleared, and the city was a walled wheat field--so far as we know, the ground has been cultivated since the days of King John. But the entire history of this green walled s.p.a.ce before me--less than twenty centuries in duration--does not seem so very long compared with that of the huge earthen wall I am standing on, which dates back to prehistoric times.

Standing here, knee-deep in the dead ruddy bracken, in the "coloured shade" of the oaks, idly watching the leaves fall fluttering to the ground, thinking in an aimless way of the remains of the two ancient cities before me, the British and the Roman, and of their comparative antiquity, I am struck with the thought that the sweet sensations produced in me by the scene differ in character from the feeling I have had in other solitary places. The peculiar sense of satisfaction, of restfulness, of peace, experienced here is very perfect; but in the wilderness, where man has never been, or has at all events left no trace of his former presence, there is ever a mysterious sense of loneliness, of desolation, underlying our pleasure in nature. Here it seems good to know, or to imagine, that the men I occasionally meet in my solitary rambles, and those I see in the scattered rustic village hard by, are of the same race, and possibly the descendants, of the people who occupied this spot in the remote past--Iberian and Celt, and Roman and Saxon and Dane. If that hard-featured and sour-visaged old gamekeeper, with the cold blue unfriendly eyes, should come upon me here in my hiding-place, and scowl as he is accustomed to do, standing silent before me, gun in hand, to hear my excuses for trespa.s.sing in his preserves, I should say (mentally): This man is distinctly English, and his far-off progenitors, somewhere about sixteen hundred years ago, probably a.s.sisted at the ma.s.sacre of the inhabitants of the pleasant little city at my feet. By and by, leaving the ruins, I may meet with other villagers of different features and different colour in hair, skin, and eyes, and of a pleasanter expression; and in them I may see the remote descendants of other older races of men, some who were lords here before the Romans came, and of others before them, even back to Neolithic times.

This, I take it, is a satisfaction, a sweetness and peace to the soul in nature, because it carries with it a sense of the continuity of the human race, its undying vigour, its everlastingness. After all the tempests that have overcome it, through all mutations in such immense stretches of time, how stable it is!

I recall the time when I lived on a vast vacant level green plain, an earth which to the eye, and to the mind which sees with the eye, appeared illimitable, like the ocean; where the house I was born in was the oldest in the district--a century old, it was said; where the people were the children's children of emigrants from Europe who had conquered and colonized the country, and had enjoyed but half a century of national life. But the people who had possessed the land before these emigrants--what of them? They, were but a memory, a tradition, a story told in books and hardly more to us than a fable; perhaps they had dwelt there for long centuries, or for thousands of years; perhaps they had come, a wandering horde, to pa.s.s quickly away like a flight of migrating locusts; for no memorial existed, no work of their hands, not the faintest trace of their occupancy.

Walking one day at the side of a ditch, which had been newly cut through a meadow at the end of our plantation, I caught sight of a small black object protruding from the side of the cutting, which turned out to be a fragment of Indian pottery made of coa.r.s.e clay, very black, and rudely ornamented on one side. On searching further a few more pieces were found. I took them home and preserved them carefully, experiencing a novel and keen sense of pleasure in their possession; for though worthless, they were man's handiwork, the only real evidence I had come upon of that vanished people who had been before us; and it was as if those bits of baked clay, with a pattern incised on them by a man's finger-nail, had in them some magical property which enabled me to realize the past, and to see that vacant plain repeopled with long dead and forgotten men.

Doubtless we all possess the feeling in some degree--the sense of loneliness and desolation and dismay at the thought of an uninhabited world, and of long periods when man was not. Is it not the absence of human life or remains rather than the illimitable wastes of thick-ribbed ice and snow which daunts us at the thought of Arctic and Antarctic regions? Again, in the story of the earth, as told by geology, do we not also experience the same sense of dismay, and the soul shrinking back on itself, when we come in imagination to those deserts desolate in time when the continuity of the race was broken and the world dispeopled?

The doctrine of evolution has made us tolerant of the thought of human animals,--our progenitors as we must believe--who were of brutish aspect, and whose period on this planet was so long that, compared with it, the historic and prehistoric periods are but as the life of an individual. A quarter of a million years has perhaps elapsed since the beginning of that cold period which, at all events in this part of the earth, killed Palaeolithic man; yet how small a part of his racial life even that time would seem if, as some believe, his remains may be traced as far back as the Eocene! But after this rude man of the Quaternary and Tertiary epochs had pa.s.sed away there is a void, a period which to the imagination seems measureless, when sun and moon and stars looked on a waste and mindless world. When man once more reappears he seems to have been re-created on somewhat different lines.

It is this break in the history of the human race which amazes and daunts us, which "shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation."

Here, in these words of Hermann Melville, we are let all at once into the true meaning of those disquieting and seemingly indefinable emotions so often experienced, even by the most ardent lovers of nature and of solitude, in uninhabited deserts, on great mountains, and on the sea.

We find here the origin of that horror of mountains which was so common until recent times. A friend once confessed to me that he was always profoundly unhappy at sea during long voyages, and the reason was that his sustaining belief in a superintending Power and in immortality left him when he was on that waste of waters, which have no human a.s.sociations. The feeling, so intense in his case, is known to most if not all of us; but we feel it faintly as a disquieting element in nature of which we may be but vaguely conscious.

Most travelled Englishmen who have seen much of the world and resided for long or short periods in many widely separated countries would probably agree that there is a vast difference in the feeling of strangeness, or want of harmony with our surroundings, experienced in old and in new countries. It is a compound feeling and some of its elements are the same in both cases; but in one there is a disquieting element which the other is without. Thus, in Southern Europe, Egypt, Syria, and in many countries of Asia, and some portions of Africa, the wanderer from home might experience dissatisfaction and be ill at ease and wish for old familiar sights and sounds; but in a colony like Tasmania, and in any new country where there were no remains of antiquity, no links with the past, the feeling would be very much more poignant, and in some scenes and moods would be like that sense of desolation which a.s.sails us at the thought of the heartless voids and immensities of the universe.

He recognizes that he is in a world on which we have but recently entered, and in which our position is not yet a.s.sured.

Here, standing on this mound, as on other occasions past counting, I recognize and appreciate the enormous difference which human a.s.sociations make in the effect produced on us by visible nature. In this silent solitary place, with the walled field which was once Calleva Atrebatum at my feet, I yet have a sense of satisfaction, of security, never felt in a land that had no historic past. The knowledge that my individual life is but a span, a breath; that in a little while I too must wither and mingle like one of those fallen yellow leaves with the mould, does not grieve me. I know it and yet disbelieve it; for am I not here alive, where men have inhabited for thousands of years, feeling what I now feel--their oneness with everlasting nature and the undying human family? The very soil and wet carpet of moss on which their feet were set, the standing trees and leaves, green or yellow, the rain-drops, the air they breathed, the suns.h.i.+ne in their eyes and hearts, was part of them, not a garment, but of their very substance and spirit. Feeling this, death becomes an illusion; and the illusion that the continuous life of the species (its immortality) and the individual life are one and the same is the reality and truth. An illusion, but, as Mill says, deprive us of our illusions and life would be intolerable.

Happily we are not easily deprived of them, since they are of the nature of instincts and ineradicable. And this very one which our reason can prove to be the most childish, the absurdest of all, is yet the greatest, the most fruitful of good for the race. To those who have discarded supernatural religion, it may be a religion, or at all events the foundation to build one on. For there is no comfort to the healthy natural man in being told that the good he does will not be interred with his bones, since he does not wish to think, and in fact refuses to think, that his bones will ever be interred. Joy in the "choir invisible" is to him a mere poetic fancy, or at best a rarefied transcendentalism, which fails to sustain him. If altruism, or the religion of humanity, is a living vigorous plant, and as some believe flourishes more with the progress of the centuries, it must, like other "soul-growths," have a deeper, tougher woodier root in our soil.

Chapter Eight: A Gold Day At Silchester

It is little to a man's profit to go far afield if his chief pleasure be in wild life, his main object to get nearer to the creatures, to grow day by day more intimate with them, and to see each day some new thing.

Yet the distance has the same fascination for him as for another--the call is as sweet and persistent in his ears. If he is on a green level country with blue hills on the horizon, then, especially in the early morning, is the call sweetest, most irresistible. Come away--come away: this blue world has better things than any in that green, too familiar place. The startling scream of the jay--you have heard it a thousand times. It is pretty to watch the squirrel in his chestnut-red coat among the oaks in their fresh green foliage, full of fun as a bright child, eating his apple like a child, only it is an oak-apple, s.h.i.+ning white or white and rosy-red, in his little paws; but you have seen it so many times--come away:

It was not this voice alone which made me forsake the green oaks of Silchester and Pamber Forest, to ramble for a season hither and thither in Wilts.h.i.+re, Dorset, and Somerset; there was something for me to do in those places, but the call made me glad to go. And long weeks--months--went by in my wanderings, mostly in open downland country, too often under gloomy skies, chilled by cold winds and wetted by cold rains. Then, having accomplished my purpose and discovered incidentally that the call had mocked me again, as on so many previous occasions, I returned once more to the old familiar green place.

Crossing the common, I found that where it had been dry in spring one might now sink to his knees in the bog; also that the snipe which had vanished for a season were back at the old spot where they used to breed. It was a bitter day near the end of an unpleasant summer, with the wind back in the old hateful north-east quarter; but the sun shone, the sky was blue, and the flying clouds were of a dazzling whiteness.

s.h.i.+vering, I remembered the south wall, and went there, since to escape from the wind and bask like some half-frozen serpent or lizard in the heat was the highest good one could look for in such weather. To see anything new in wild life was not to be hoped for.

That old grey, crumbling wall of ancient Calleva, crowned with big oak and ash and thorn and holly, and draped with green bramble and trailing ivy and creepers--how good a shelter it is on a cold, rough day! Moving softly, so as not to disturb any creature, I yet disturbed a ring snake lying close to the wall, into which it quickly vanished; and then from their old place among the stones a pair of blue stock-doves rushed out with clatter of wings. The same blue doves which I had known for three years at that spot! A few more steps and I came upon as pretty a little scene in bird life as one could wish for: twenty to twenty-five small birds of different species--t.i.ts, wrens, dunnocks, thrushes, blackbirds, chaffinches, yellowhammers--were congregated on the lower outside twigs of a bramble bush and on the bare ground beside it close to the foot of the wall. The sun shone full on that spot, and they had met for warmth and for company. The t.i.ts and wrens were moving quietly about in the bush; others were sitting idly or preening their feathers on the twigs or the ground. Most of them were making some kind of small sound--little exclamatory chirps, and a variety of chirrupings, producing the effect of a pleasant conversation going on among them. This was suddenly suspended on my appearance, but the alarm was soon over, and, seeing me seated on a fallen stone and, motionless, they took no further notice of me. Two blackbirds were there, sitting a little way apart on the bare ground; these were silent, the raggedest, rustiest-looking members of that little company; for they were moulting, and their drooping wings and tails had many unsightly gaps in them where the old feathers had dropped out before the new ones had grown. They were suffering from that annual sickness with temporary loss of their brightest faculties which all birds experience in some degree; the unseasonable rains and cold winds had been bad for them, and now they were having their sun-bath, their best medicine and cure.

By and by a pert-looking, bright-feathered, dapper c.o.c.k chaffinch dropped down from the bush, and, advancing to one of the two, the rustiest and most forlorn-looking, started running round and round him as if to make a close inspection of his figure, then began to tease him. At first I thought it was all in fun--merely animal spirit which in birds often discharges itself in this way in little pretended attacks and fights. But the blackbird had no play and no fight in him, no heart to defend himself; all he did was to try to avoid the strokes aimed at him, and he could not always escape them. His spiritlessness served to inspire the chaffinch with greater boldness, and then it appeared that the gay little creature was really and truly incensed, possibly because the rusty, draggled, and listless appearance of the larger bird was offensive to him. Anyhow, the persecutions continued, increasing in fury until they could not be borne, and the blackbird tried to escape by hiding in the bramble. But he was not permitted to rest there; out he was soon driven and away into another bush, and again into still another further away, and finally he was hunted over the sheltering wall into the bleak wind on the other side. Then the persecutor came back and settled himself on his old perch on the bramble, well satisfied at his victory over a bird so much bigger than himself. All was again peace and harmony in the little social gathering, and the pleasant talkee-talkee went on as before. About five minutes pa.s.sed, then the hunted blackbird returned, and, going to the identical spot from which he had been driven, composed himself to rest; only now he sat facing his lively little enemy.

I was astonished to see him back; so, apparently, was the chaffinch. He started, craned his neck, and regarded his adversary first with one eye then with the other. "What, rags and tatters, back again so soon!" I seem to hear him say. "You miserable travesty of a bird, scarcely fit for a weasel to dine on! Your presence is an insult to us, but I'll soon settle you. You'll feel the cold on the other, side of the wall when I've knocked off a few more of your rusty rags."

Down from his perch he came, but no sooner had he touched his feet to the ground than the blackbird went straight at him with extraordinary fury. The chaffinch, taken by surprise, was buffeted and knocked over, then, recovering himself, fled in consternation, hotly pursued by the sick one. Into the bush they went, but in a moment they were out again, darting this way and that, now high up in the trees, now down to the ground, the blackbird always close behind; and no little bird flying from a hawk could have exhibited a greater terror than that pert chaffinch--that vivacious and most pugnacious little c.o.c.k bantam.

At last they went quite away, and were lost to sight. By and by the blackbird returned alone, and, going once more to his place near the second bird, he settled down comfortably to finish his sunbath in peace and quiet.

I had a.s.suredly witnessed a new thing on that unpromising day, something quite different from anything witnessed in my wide rambles; and, though a little thing, it had been a most entertaining comedy in bird life with a very proper ending. It was clear that the sick blackbird had bitterly resented the treatment he had received; that, brooding on it out in the cold, his anger had made him strong, and that he came back determined to fight, with his plan of action matured. He was not going to be made a fool every time!

The birds all gone their several ways at last, I got up from my stone and wondered if the old Romans ever dreamed that this wall which they made to endure would after seventeen hundred years have no more important use than this--to afford shelter to a few little birds and to the solitary man that watched them--from the bleak wind. Many a strange Roman curse on this ungenial climate must these same stones have heard.

Looking through a gap in the wall I saw, close by, on the other side, a dozen men at work with pick and shovel throwing up huge piles of earth.

They were uncovering a small portion of that ancient buried city and were finding the foundations and floors and hypocausts of Silchester's public baths; also some broken pottery and trifling ornaments of bronze and bone. The workmen in that bitter wind were decidedly better off than the gentlemen from Burlington House in charge of the excavations.

These stood with coats b.u.t.toned up and hands thrust deep down in their pockets. It seemed to me that it was better to sit in the shelter of the wall and watch the birds than to burrow in the crumbling dust for that small harvest. Yet I could understand and even appreciate their work, although it is probable that the glow I experienced was in part reflected. Perhaps my mental att.i.tude, when standing in that sheltered place, and when getting on to the windy wall I looked down on the workers and their work, was merely benevolent. I had pleasure in their pleasure, and a vague desire for a better understanding, a closer alliance and harmony. It was the desire that we might all see nature--the globe with all it contains--as one harmonious whole, not as groups of things, or phenomena, unrelated, cast there by chance or by careless or contemptuous G.o.ds. This dust of past ages, dug out of a wheat-field, with its fragments of men's work--its pottery and tiles and stones--this is a part, too, even as the small birds, with their little motives and pa.s.sions, so like man's, are a part. I thought with self shame of my own sins in this connection; then, considering the lesser faults on the other side, I wished that Mr. St. John Hope would experience a like softening mood and regret that he had abused the ivy.

It grieves me to hear it called a "noxious weed." That perished people, whose remains in this land so deeply interest him, were the mightiest "builders of ruins" the world has known; but who except the archaeologist would wish to see these piled stones in their naked harshness, striking the mind with dismay at the thought of Time and its perpetual desolations! I like better the old Spanish poet who says, "What of Rome; its world-conquering power, and majesty and glory--what has it come to?" The ivy on the wall, the yellow wallflower, tell it. A "deadly parasite" quotha! Is it not well that this plant, this evergreen tapestry of innumerable leaves, should cover and partly hide and partly reveal the "strange defeatures" the centuries have set on man's greatest works? I would have no ruin nor no old and n.o.ble building without it; for not only does it beautify decay, but from long a.s.sociation it has come to be in the mind a very part of such scenes and so interwoven with the human tragedy, that, like the churchyard yew, it seems the most human of green things.

Here in September great ma.s.ses of the plant are already showing a greenish cream-colour of the opening blossoms, which will be at their perfection in October. Then, when the sun s.h.i.+nes, there will be no lingering red admiral, nor blue fly or fly of any colour, nor yellow wasp, nor any honey-eating or late honey-gathering insect that will not be here to feed on the ivy's sweetness. And behind the blossoming curtain, alive with the minute, mult.i.tudinous, swift-moving, glittering forms, some n.o.bler form will be hidden in a hole or fissure in the wall.