Grain and Chaff from an English Manor Part 18

The same position is selected by the aphis of the rose, the bean, and every plant or tree subject to aphis attack--it is the undeveloped and therefore unprotected part which is chosen.

It is remarkable that when a destructive blight is proceeding--generally in a wet and cold time--and a sudden change occurs to really hot dry weather, the hop plant often recovers its tone automatically, shakes off the disease, and the blight dies away, a fact which strengthens the a.s.sumption that in normal weather the plant can protect itself. Again, the blight is always most persistent under the shade of trees or tall hedges, or where the bine is over luxuriant, when owing to the exclusion of light and air the plant is unable to elaborate its natural safeguard.

Fertilizers not well balanced as to their const.i.tuents, and containing an excess of nitrogen, act as stimulants without supplying the minerals necessary for perfect health. The effect is the same as that produced in man by an excess of alcohol and a deficiency of nouris.h.i.+ng food, the health of the subject suffers in both cases, leaving a predisposition to disease.

Reasoning by a.n.a.logy, these causes affecting the success or failure of plants give us the clue to the remedies for bacterial disease in man.

Disease is the consequence and penalty of life under unnatural or unfavourable conditions, which should first receive attention and improvement. When in spite of improved conditions disease persists, specifics must be sought. The conditions which produce disease in the vegetable world are fought by the active principle of each plant, and inasmuch as the germ diseases of man are probably, though distantly, related to those which affect vegetable life, the specific protections of plants should be exploited for the treatment of human complaints.

This, of course, has for long been a practice, but possibly more success might be achieved by careful research to identify each distinct bacterial disease in man with its co-related distinct disease in plants, so as to utilize as a remedy for the former the natural protection which the latter indicates.

Our artificially evolved domesticated plants are more subject to disease than their wild prototypes, because they are not natural survivals of the fittest. They are survivals only by virtue of the art of man, inducing special properties pleasing to man's senses, and therefore profitable for sale; but in the development of some such special excellence, ability to elaborate protective defence is generally neglected, and the special excellence produced may possibly be antagonistic to the really sound const.i.tution of the plant. It is thus that cultivated plants are more in need of watchful care and attention than their wild relations, and that, in the development of quality, a sacrifice of quant.i.ty may be involved.

The observant hop grower notices constant changes in the appearance of his plants from day to day under varying weather influences and other conditions: a r.e.t.a.r.ded and unhappy expression in a cold, wet and rough time; an eager and hopeful expansiveness under genial conditions; a dark, plethoric and rampant growth where too much nitrogen is available, and a brilliant and healthily-restrained normality when properly balanced nourishment is provided.

There should be sympathy between the grower and his plants, such as is described by Blackmore in his _Christowell_; though in the following pa.s.sage with consummate art he puts the words into the mouth of the sympathetic daughter of the amateur vine-grower, and gives the plant the credit of the first advance:

"'For people to talk about "sensitive plants,"' she says, 'does seem such sad nonsense, when every plant that lives is sensitive. Just look at this holly-leafed baby vine, with every point cut like a p.r.i.c.kle, yet much too tender and good to p.r.i.c.k me. It follows every motion of my hand; it crisps its little veinings up whenever I come near it; and it feels in every fibre that I am looking at it.'"

Blackmore was much more than a writer of fiction; I think he had a deeper insight into the spirit of Nature and country character than perhaps any writer of modern times; he combined the accuracy of the scholar with the practical knowledge of the farmer and gardener; the logic of the philosopher with the fancy and expression of the poet. I regard the appreciation of his _Lorna Doone_--a book in which one can smell the violets--as the test of a real country lover; I mean a country lover who, besides the gift of acute observation, has the deeper gift of imaginative perception. If only the book could have been ill.u.s.trated by the pencil of Randolph Caldecott, such a union of sympathy between author and artist would have produced a work unparalleled in rural literature.

Like all insects the aphis has its special insect enemies, among which the lady-bird ("lady-cow" in Worcesters.h.i.+re) is the most important. It lays its eggs in cl.u.s.ters on the hop-leaf, and in a few days the larvae (called "n.i.g.g.e.rs") are hatched, aggressive-looking creatures with insatiable appet.i.tes. It is amusing to watch them hunting over the lower side of the leaf like a sporting dog in a turnip field, and devouring the lice in quant.i.ties. I knew an old hop grower in Hamps.h.i.+re who had a standing offer of a guinea a quart for lady-birds, but it is scarcely necessary to add that the reward was never claimed.

The hop is dioecious (producing male and female blossoms on separate plants), but very rarely both can be found on the same stem--the plant thus becoming monoecious. In 1893, a very hot dry year, several specimens were found, including one in Kent, one in Surrey, one in Herefords.h.i.+re, and one in my own hopyards at Aldington. It is curious that the same unusual season should have produced the same abnormality in places so far apart, practically representing all the hop districts of the country.

"Till James's Day be past and gone, You might grow hops or you might grow none."

St. James's Day is July 25, and so uncertain was the crop in the days before insecticides were in use, that the saying fairly represents the specially speculative nature of the crop in former times. As an instance of the effects of varying years I had the uncommon experience of picking two crops in twelve months: the first in a very late season when the picking did not commence till after Worcester hop-fair day, September 19th, and the second the following year when picking was unusually early, and was completed before the fair day. At Farnham, where many of the tradespeople indulged in a little annual flutter as small hop growers, in addition to a more regular source of income from their respective trades, it was said that the first question on meeting each other was not, "How are you?" but "How are _they_?"

Hop-picking is always somewhat reminiscent of the Saturnalia; with hundreds of strangers from distant villages and a few gipsies and tramps, it is not possible to enforce strict discipline, for it is very necessary to keep the people in good-humour. On the final day of the picking they expect to be allowed to indulge in a good deal of horse-play, the great joke being suddenly to upset an unpopular individual into a crib among the hops. Shrieks of laughter greet the disappearance of the unlucky one, of whom nothing is to be seen except a struggling leg protruding from the crib.

The last operation in the hop garden is stacking the poles, and burning the bine, a most inflammable material which makes a prodigious blaze. As the men watch the leaping flames the same remark is made year after year--"fire is a good servant, but a bad master." These fires seem a great waste of good fibrous matter, as in former times the bine was utilized for making coa.r.s.e sacking and brown paper.

During the war I suggested to the National Salvage Council that, owing to the scarcity of both these articles, it might be worth while to attempt the resuscitation of the manufacture. The suggestion was followed by experiments which produced quite a useful brown paper of which I received a sample, but the cost of treatment was unfortunately prohibitive from the commercial point of view.

Worcester hop fair is the start of the trade, and the market is held behind the Hop-Pole Hotel, where there are s.p.a.cious stores and offices for the merchants. When the crop is bountiful the stores are filled to overflowing, and the ancient Guildhall built in 1721 has to be requisitioned. On either side of the doorway stand the statues of Carolus I. and Carolus II., who must have watched the entrance and the exit of innumerable pockets. Worcester is distinguished as the Faithful City, for like the County it had small use for Cromwell and his Roundheads; and to this day, on the date of the restoration of Charles II.--"the twenty-ninth of May, oak apple day"--a spray of oak or an oak-apple is in some villages worn as a badge of loyalty, the penalty for non-observance being a stroke on the hands with a stinging-nettle.

It was a great relief to get away from my 300 pickers and ride the eighteen miles to Worcester on my bicycle, through the lovely river scenery of the Vale of Evesham, the hedges drooping beneath the weight of brilliant berries, the orchards loaded with apples, the clean bright stubbles, and the cattle in the lush aftermath; then, after a visit to the busy hop-market and a stroll among the curio shops in New Street, to return by a different road as the shadows were lengthening beside the copses and the hedgerow timber trees.

In former times the October fair at Weyhill, near Andover, was the market for the Hamps.h.i.+re and Farnham hops; it was the custom for the growers to send them by road, and load back with cheese brought to the fair by the Wilts.h.i.+re farmers. I heard of a Hamps.h.i.+re grower, who in a year of great scarcity had spent some time trying to sell several pockets to an anxious but reluctant buyer, unwilling to give the price asked--20 a hundredweight. They continued the deal in the evening at the inn at Andover, where both were staying, and said "Good-night"

without having concluded the bargain. The grower was in bed and almost asleep when he heard a knock at his door, and a voice, "Give you 18,"

which he refused. Next morning trade was dull and the buyer would not repeat his offer, and at the end of the week the grower sent his hops home again. Prices continued to fall, until two years later he sold the same lot at 5s. a hundredweight to a cunning speculator, who took them out to sea, after claiming a return of the duty (about 1 a hundredweight originally paid by the grower), which the Excise refunded on _exported_ hops. The hops went overboard of course, and the buyer netted the difference between the price he paid and the amount received for the refunded duty.

At these old fairs the showmen and gipsies take large sums in the "pleasure" departments for admission to their exhibitions--swings, roundabouts, shooting-galleries, and coco-nut s.h.i.+es. In Evesham Post-Office a gipsy woman once asked me to write a letter; she handed me an order for 10, and instructed me to send it to a London firm for 5 worth of best coco-nuts and 5 worth of seconds. They were for use on the s.h.i.+es; it struck me as a large supply, and the economical division of the qualities as ingenious.

CHAPTER XIX.

METEOROLOGY--ETON AND HARROW AT LORD'S--"RUS IN URBE."

"But if I praised the busy town, He loved to rail against it still, For 'ground in yonder social mill We rub each other's angles down,

"'And merge,' he said, 'in form and gloss The picturesque of man and man.'"

--_In Memoriam_.

During the terribly wet summer of 1879 the following lines were written--it was said by the then Bishop of Wakefield--in the visitors'

book at the White Lion Hotel at Bala, in Wales:

"The weather depends on the moon, as a rule, And I've found that the saying is true; For at Bala it rains when the moon's at the full, And it rains when the moon's at the new.

"When the moon's at the quarter, then down comes the rain; At the half it's no better I ween; When the moon's at three-quarters it's at it again, And it rains besides mostly between."

Rather hard on Bala, for the summer was so abnormally wet that these lines would have been true of any part of England. I suppose everybody is more or less interested in the weather, but the custom of alluding to the obvious, as an opening to conversation, is probably a survival from the time when everyone was directly interested in its effect upon agriculture.

Nothing proves how completely town interests now dominate those of the country so much as the innovation called "summer time." During the war it was no doubt a boon to allotment holders, and of course it gives a longer evening to those employed all day indoors; but it inflicts direct loss on the farmer, who is practically forced to adopt it in order to supply the towns with produce in time for their altered habits. The farmer exchanges the last hour of the normal day, one of the most valuable in the old working time, for the first hour of the new day, one of the most useless, for owing to the dew which the sun has not had time to dry up, many agricultural operations cannot be properly performed or even commenced--hay-making and corn-hoeing for instance are impossible. We may be sure that the former times of beginning and ending farm-work, which I suppose had been customary for at least 2,000 years in England, did not receive the sanction of such a period without good reason, and it seems to me, that so far as outdoor work is concerned the new arrangement savours of "teaching our grandmothers to suck eggs."

There is a saving of lighting requirements, no doubt, but in such a six weeks of winterly mornings as we had, following the commencement of "summer time" this first year of peace, there is a considerable increase in the consumption of fuel. Wherever possible, I suppose, most houses are built to face the south, and the breakfast-room would be generally on that side, so that by 9 o'clock, old time, the sun had warmed the room, but at 9 o'clock, new time, the sun has scarcely looked in at the window; a fire is probably lighted and to save trouble kept up all day. If the new arrangement is continued, and I understand that it was tried more than 100 years ago and abandoned as a mistake, it would be much better to begin it at least a month later.

Our present May Day is nearly a fortnight earlier than before the New Style was introduced, which is the reason why old traditions of May Day merry-makings appear unseasonable; and probably the promoters of summer time have not heard of "blackthorn winter" and "whitethorn winter," which, in the country, we experience regularly every year in April and May.

"When the gra.s.s grows in Janiveer It grows the worse for it all the year,"

and

"If Candlemas-Day be fine and fair The half of winter's to come and mair; If Candlemas-Day be wet and foul The half of winter was gone at Yule,"

are both rhymes suggesting the probability of wintry weather to follow, if the early weeks of the year are mild and unseasonable, and they may be considered as generally correct prognostications. A neighbouring village had the distinction of possessing a weather prophet, with the reputation also of an astrologer; he could be seen when the stars were gleaming brightly, late at night, gazing upwards and making his deductions, though, in reality, I fancy, his inspiration came from the study of almanacs which profess to foretell the future. He was quiet and reserved, with a spare figure, dark complexion, and an abstracted expression. Occasionally I could induce him to talk, but he did not like to be "drawn." He told me, as one of his original conceptions, that he thought the good people were accommodated in the after-life within the limits of the stars of good influence, and that the wicked had to be content with those of an opposite character.

The proverb about March dust, and "A dry March and a dry May for old England," are both apposite, for they are busy months on the land, and a wet March amounts to a national disaster; but everyone forgives April when showery, for we all know that "April showers bring forth May flowers." Shakespeare, too, says:

"When daffodils begin to peer, With heigh! the doxy over the dale, Why, then comes in the sweet of the year."

A charming sentiment and charmingly rendered, but possibly more accurate when the Old Style was in vogue, and the seasons were nearly a fortnight later than now. The modern "daffys" too, no doubt, "begin to peer" somewhat earlier than those of the reign of Queen Elizabeth.

During a very hot summer I suggested to the Board of Agriculture that it might be worth while to experiment with explosions of artillery, with a view of inducing the clouds to discharge the rain they evidently contain when they keep pa.s.sing day after day without bursting. I had seen it stated that many great battles had ended in tremendous downpours, and that it was believed that the rain was caused by concussion from the explosions. The Board replied, however, that experiments had been conducted in America for the purpose, without in any way substantiating the theory; and the experiences of the Great War have since conclusively proved that it has no foundation.

As to weather signs, I have already quoted the original p.r.o.nouncement of my carpenter, T.G., that "the indications for rain are very similar to the indications for fine weather," and there is a good deal in his words. My own conclusion, after fifty years of out-door life on the farm, in the woods, in the garden, at out-door games, and on the roads, is that fine weather brings fine weather, and wet weather brings wet weather, in other words, it never rains but it pours, in an extended sense.

My impression is that when the ground is dry there is a minimum of capillary attraction between it and the clouds, and though the sky may look threatening they do not easily break into rain. On the other hand, when the ground is thoroughly wet and evaporation is active, capillary attraction tends to unite earth and clouds, and rain results. We all know that hill-tops receive showers which frequently pa.s.s over the vales without falling, probably because of the greater proximity of the hills. In a long drought a violent thunderstorm, which soaks the ground, will often be followed by a complete change of weather, as the result of contact established between the earth and the clouds.

The best description I know of a really hot and cloudless day is that by Coleridge in the _Ancient Mariner_:

"The sun came up upon the left, Out of the sea came he; And he shone bright, and on the right Went down into the sea."

The succession of monosyllables expresses most forcibly the monotony of a day of blazing suns.h.i.+ne, unruffled by a cloud; and the absence of incident ill.u.s.trates the remorseless march of the dominant sun across the heavens.

Very little of my time has been spent in London or any other town, and my early recollections of pa.s.sing through London on my way to or from school after or before the holidays are of very depressing weather conditions--fog, greasy streets and pavements, or a sun veiled in a haze of smoky vapour. Even when I went to Lord's annually in July to see the Eton and Harrow match my recollection of the weather is of dull, sultry heat and oppression of spirits. Cricket never seemed the same game as I knew and loved at Harrow, or in my own home in Surrey; there was an unreality about it, and a black coat and top hat were insufferably uncongenial.

I am able, as an eye-witness on one of these occasions, to write of an incident which, I think, has been almost forgotten. It was within a year of the marriage of King Edward, then Prince of Wales, and Queen Alexandra. A ball had been hit almost to the boundary, but was stopped by a spectator close to the ropes, thrown in to the fielder, and smartly returned to the wicket-keeper. The batsmen took it for granted that it was a boundary hit, and were changing ends when, one man being out of his ground, the wicket was put down, the wicket-keeper not recognizing that the ball was "dead." The umpire gave the man "out."