Chapter III: Part 3

But alas, there is another spectator of its movements. Across the meadow sails a dark, hawk-like figure, swift and silent, disappearing in the oak wood on the farther shore. In a moment every voice is hushed. Not a bird calls. Not even a wren dares to utter an alarm. There is a sudden rush of wings. A merlin dashes from the thicket by the shore, catches up the dipper in its cruel claws, and, alighting on a great flat stone, in the middle of the river, it buries its merciless bill again and again in the white breast of its struggling captive. What a picture! The sunlight is full on the blue back of the beautiful little falcon, as it leans forward a little, half hiding its prey under its drooping wings. Giving a swift glance to right and left--the sparkle of its keen eyes plain to see--it tears out a little cloud of feathers that flutter lightly down, and sail away upon the stream. Again the merlin looks up. Something has startled him. He gives one glance this way. He catches sight of a figure under the alder trees. Like a flash he is gone. The dead dipper falls into the water, sailing down the river, in which but a few minutes since it was playing, full of life and happiness, the white feathers from its blood-stained gorget floating away from it at every swirl of the current; a sorrowful little heap of ruffled plumage, whirling with the whirling stream.

WINSFORD: VOICES THREE.

On the slopes of a great hollow in the heart of Exmoor, a hot sun beats fiercely down. True that it is an April sky whose clouds and sunshine weave their changing web of lights and shadows over the landscape. True that the landscape, even yet, wears but little of the guise of springtime. But to-day no touch of east is in the air, and the smoke columns, rising slowly from the chimneys of the village, and showing so blue against the oak plantation on a distant shoulder of the moorland, are drifting slowly from the southward. From this upland country, over which the snow lay deep for two whole months, the grip of winter has been slow to loosen. But the trees and hedgerows are answering at last to the magical influence of the sunshine, and "the useful trouble of the rain." The grass of these rich meadow lands--for months past all burnt and brown, as if after a long, rainless summer--wears now its very loveliest hue. There is a fringe of pale blue violets along the edge of every woodland path. Stars of celandine are scattered over every field, and among the tangle of the withered hedge-row grasses. Marsh marigolds are gleaming in the wet earth about the roots of the alders by the river. Even at this distance, the great clumps of primroses show like points of light on the slope of the orchard by the vicarage. Surely never were there such beautiful masses of wood-sorrel as, with their vivid leaves and dainty, purple-veined flowers, brighten now the banks of every deep-worn lane.

The tall chestnut by the church, but yesterday just dusted over with fine points of gold, is now a very cloud of fresh young foliage. Each day strengthens the green hue of the larches crowning the bold spur beyond the village. Each day deepens the warm purple of fast-opening blossoms round the heads of the tall elms of the village, and the great oaks of this warm slope. Noble trees they are, these hoary patriarchs that the woodman's axe has spared. Their mighty branches, gnarled and twisted and storm-beaten, towering far up against the pale blue heaven, are shaggy with ages' growth of lichens. Moss grows thick over the furrowed rind, not of their broad stems alone, but almost of their topmost branches. In the crannies of the bark, fringed with grey-green tongues of fern, woodbine and briar and slim mountain-ash have found anchorage. Over their old arms the nuthatches wander up and down, calling to each other with that loud musical trill so characteristic of the springtime.

On every side, among the broad stumps of vanished forest monarchs, long dethroned, are springing the sturdy forms of another generation, young pines and oaks and beeches, that are doing their best to fill the places of the fallen, and although the giant sycamore that overhangs the path is still all bare and leafless, everywhere in the grass beneath its shadow, its children, tiny double blades of tender green, are springing, thousands strong.

It is a scene of marvellous beauty upon which the eye looks down from the welcome rest of this fallen tree beside the woodland path. Below, at the foot of the slope, the border line between the wild life of the covert and the order of the well-kept farm lands, runs a swift moorland stream, whose broad band of silver is broken again and again by the rude stone bridges of the village streets. Every reach of the river seems to have its several sound, that,

"Low at times, and loud at times
And changing like a poet's rhymes,"

seems, with the rush of the wind among the rocking tops, and with the songs and call-notes of a hundred birds, to fill the hollow. In the pauses of the roar of the white lasher by the mill, a roar that sinks and swells with every flaw that blows, the ear may catch now the sound of the swift current brawling over its brown pebbles, now the swirl of water round a bar of shingle, now the chafing of the stream among the alder roots, and now the soft sound of ripples on a sandy shallow. Round the broad green knoll that rises from the river, filling all the centre of the valley, and almost islanded by wandering streams, cluster the houses of the hamlet, whose white walls and brown and moss-grown roofs of thatch, whose pointed gables and quaint deep-sunk dormer windows show plainly now among sheltering elms, that in the summer-time will hide them in a very bower of green.

High over the roofs of the village, high even above the topmost trees, rises the grey tower of the church. Round its turrets a troop of daws are fluttering. Is it only fancy, or is there really a note of protest and impatience in their snatches of clear-cut speech? For weeks past these bold frequenters of the church have been piling sticks upon the turret stair, by way of foundation for their great untidy nests. They had strewn a cartload of rubbish over the floor of the belfry, when the sexton arose in his wrath and blocked up all the tower windows and the loophole lights of the stairway, so that the daws were compelled to change their quarters to the roofs of the village. But they still linger round their ancestral homestead, and one pair, determined not to quit altogether the sacred precincts that have sheltered them and theirs for generations, have established themselves in a niche behind the iron pipe of the stove. It is a hole that might just contain the nest, but the birds have thought it necessary to fill up with sticks a yard or more of the space between the chimney and the tower wall, as if by way of outworks to their fortress.

A flood of sunshine is falling at this moment on the ancient tower, on the brown thatch of the old houses, on the purple lacework of the budding elms, until the whole beautiful picture stands clear-drawn against the soft background of the far hillside, still all in shadow. The sunlight glitters on the slate roofs of houses lower down, and flashes on the winding river until every reach of it is a sheet of burnished silver. Now it brightens yet more the vivid green of the meadows, now it touches the red slopes of distant corn-lands, and now it seems to linger on a far shoulder of the moor, whose brown heath and dead grey gorse bushes, and ancient thorn trees straggling up the hill, are transfigured to a very vision of glory by the dreamy, sunlit haze.

Dream-like, too, is the quiet that broods over this peaceful valley--a quiet even deepened by those Voices Three, of the wind, and the birds, and the river. No sound of toil or traffic rises from the village, save the clink of iron in the smithy, the thud of a woodman's axe among the young alders by the water, or, still more rarely, the lumbering of a cart along one of the deep lanes that slope upward to the moor, or that wander with the winding streams. The wind that sways the oak boughs overhead has a stormy sound. But this sheltered corner under the hill, with its screen of thick-growing fir and holly, is full of the warm south, of soft and gentle airs, scented with the sweet resinous fragrance of the pines.

And all the while, louder than the rush of the wind, clearer far than the sound of the river, there float from tree to tree the happy voices of the woodland singers. Everywhere among the leafless boughs the chiff-chaffs are calling. Here and there along the slope a tree pipit, rising high above his station upon some yet wintry branch, sinks slowly downward through the sunny air, singing as he sinks, till he alights again upon his windy perch. Loud above all other sounds there strikes in now and then the whistle of a blackbird, wild and clear, and at times the yet sweeter carol of the blackcap. Rooks call hoarsely to each other as they pass, on the way to their great settlement far down the river. At times the white pigeons of the vicarage, hovering a moment in mid-air, descend like a shower of snowflakes on their dovecot. From the shelter of the old Scotch firs at the far end of the wood, where the trees have long been left untouched, come now and then the deep notes of carrion crows, low-toned, sullen, unmirthful. They are ill neighbours for all the weaker children of the wood. Later on in the season, the edge of the Punch Bowl, that great hollow beyond the oak coppice, whose rim just shows against the sky line, the hollow where the red deer are so fond of lying, will be strewn with broken eggs of black game and pheasant, the spoil of raids in the heather and the covert. And here, too, scattered under the trees, are broken ringdoves' eggs, bearing plainly the marks of those black-coated, merciless marauders. From that corner too, out of the jungle of broom, and hazel, and wild-briar, comes at intervals the crow of a pheasant--a strident and far-reaching cry, different altogether from all other woodland voices. And in every tree along the slope willow warblers are crooning, over and over, their dainty snatches of sweet, low-toned song. It is a sleepy tune; a leisurely cadence of soft sounds, suggestive of sunshine and the summer, of

"Music, that gentlier on the spirit lies,
Than tir'd eyelids upon tir'd eyes."

BREAN DOWN: FLOTSAM AND JETSAM.

It is a cold, grey world that lies waiting for the dawn--a misty sky, in which one pale planet glimmers; a hazy sea, whose fretted levels shine faintly in the moonlight; shadowy hills, along whose winding line, here darkened with clustering woodlands, and there whitened by still slumbering hamlets, a grey mist hangs. It hangs, too, like a vast canopy, over the wide plain, whose sunburnt meadows seem to melt away into an infinite distance; and along the wandering river whose brown flood loiters idly to the sea.

A silent world, for the most part. Even the voice of the river, that but now was chafing loud against the shingle bar piled high along the shore, is failing in the swift inrush of the tide. It is a slow moving and taciturn stream that, as it wound along the level fringes of the hills, long since forgot the sunshine and the laughter and the crystal clearness of its youth, when, under banks that were hung with fern and meadow-sweet, it sang over the brown pebbles of its bed, round

"... Many a fairy foreland, set
With willow-weed and mallow."

But the tide, that is hushing the hoarse song of the river, swells louder every moment the troubled roar of the sea, whose grey waves are plunging in over the rattling shingle and the shining sand.

And as the light of dawning strengthens over the low grey hills to the eastward, other sounds break in upon the stillness. Far off across the moor a curlew calls. A heron who all night long, it may be, has been keeping his lone vigil in the marshes, and who is now flying leisurely home-ward to the hills, lets fall a muttered croak in passing--midnight revellers both. But the white gulls that rise and fall and toy like butterflies above the broadening stream calling to each other with discordant voices, are children of the sunshine.

Of the sunshine, too, is the music of a lark, who, high up in the grey mist, brooding like a fate over the brown and thirsty meadows, seems to hover at the very gates of dawn. Yet there is a sound of the sea even on his silvery tongue. Among the sweet notes of his familiar "babble of green fields," he brings in at times the cry of the curlew and the whistle of the plover.

A breath of the sea there is, too, in the chatter of the starling on the roof above. The croak of the heron and the call of the whimbrel are common speech with him. And now he even imitates the creak of the cordage on the coasting smack swinging in the stream yonder, where two men are busy setting the old brown sails.

From the cliffs that break the round swell of the hill a line of daws are streaming, eager, clamorous, on the wing for their hunting ground upon the moor. One troop has wheeled aside to alight among the boughs of a cherry-tree in a little walled-in space of garden at some distance from the house. The farmer, who has just appeared, with his milking-pail upon his shoulder, and who looks up to nod a friendly greeting, pauses a moment in the doorway to watch the marauders at their work, while the old sheep-dog waits wondering at his side.

Suddenly, far out on the moor, beyond the cattle that stand motionless, expectant, all looking this way, a tall figure looms out of the mist, and across the fields comes a strange cry:

"Leave your meadow grasses mellow,
Mellow, mellow;
Quit your cowslips, cowslips yellow."

The old dog hears, and bounds forward to his work. But the sleek and sober herd, never turning their heads to look behind them, move slowly, as by common impulse, converging fanwise to the gate. Men in white smocks, and with shining pails upon their backs, are striding through the meadows towards the farm. And all the while the milking call sounds at intervals across the fields:--

"Quit your pipes of parsley hollow,
Hollow, hollow;
Come uppe Lightfoot, rise and follow;
Lightfoot, Whitefoot,
From your clovers lift the head."

But along the side of the green headland that, beyond the old farm-buildings stretches a mile or more into the sea, silence still reigns, save for the sound of the waves, for the plaintive cry of a curlew or the clamour of a troop of gulls.

When a gleam of sunshine breaks the grey veil of cloud, changing the sombre hues of the mud flats to warm tones of brown and purple, turning to gold the broad beach and the ragged sand-hills, birds, unseen before, start swiftly into view. Here a tall curlew stalks solemnly along, erect and watchful. There an inky crow is picking dainty morsels from the ooze. And here a party of trim black-headed gulls have collected round some treasure trove left by the last tide. A troop of sandpipers sweeps along, now flashing in a hundred points of silver in the sunlight; now, as they wheel, all lost again in the brown hues of their haunts. As far as the eye can reach are scattered gulls, shieldrakes, oyster-catchers, rock-doves even, foraging by the edge of the water, falling back before the rising tide.

But sounds of life are faint, even now. Among the boulders pipits flit at times with feeble cries. And a brood of young kestrels lately fledged, sail and soar along the cliff farther on, and scream as if in defiance of the wind, against which their keen wings are beating. The rocky brows that overhang the shore are thick with grasses and sweet bedstraw, with flags and mullein, and tall evening primrose. In the crannies campion and sea-pink are rooted. Here a yellow poppy trembles in the wind, and there a great cluster of samphire fills a rocky cleft. There are tufts of it quite low down, but it is a plant that always grows above high-water mark, and many a shipwrecked sailor, thrown ashore among the rocks, has taken heart again when, in the darkness, his despairing grasp has tightened on those strangely smelling leaves. It is St. Peter's plant--Saint Pierre, sampier, samphire.

Now the shrill screaming of the kestrels rises louder still, the fierce cry of the old birds mingling with the plaintive clamour of their brood. Now one of them, sweeping round the headland, poises a moment in the air, his wings motionless, his tail spread wide, his figure dark upon the western sky. Slowly stooping, he alights on the crown of a rocky pinnacle, a crag that stands out from the cliff like the tower of some old stronghold; and, with feet spread wide, clutching with his strong claws the rifted rock, his head lowered to the wind, stands a splendid figure, as still as if he were the living rock. Many a keen-eyed falcon has looked out over the sea from that high watch tower, round whose base wander grey arms of ivy, gnarled and wrinkled, centuries old.

Nor do hawks alone find sanctuary here. So quiet is this lonely shore, so complete its solitude, that among these cliffs even the raven and the peregrine are safe.

In the shelter of a long line of sand-hills that centuries have heaped over the old sea-wall, there stands a solitary cottage. Its brown eaves just peer over the dyke of sand. No window looks to seaward through its massy wall. It is close above high-water mark. Often, on wild nights of winter,

"The startled waves leap over it; the storm
Smites it with all the scourges of the rain,
And steadily against its solid form
Press the great shoulders of the hurricane."

Close by it runs a belt of shingle, and, beyond, there stretches away to the brown sea a wide sweep of sand, on whose wet surface the heron and the curlew leave their traces, where whole armies of sandpipers weave a maze of tiny footprints. To them this barren shore is a land of plenty. This open beach is to them the very safest of sanctuaries. No wildfowler can get within range of them unobserved. Their only foes are the herring-gull--the pirate of the sea--or the keen-eyed falcon that has his hold in yonder cliff.

Except at times of very high tides--even then only when accompanied by stormy weather--the sea never quite reaches to the sand-hills; but in summer especially, a mirage is occasionally seen on this wide beach,--a phantom sea, in whose smooth surface are reflected the jagged line of sand-hills, the church of the distant village, and the few houses scattered at far intervals along the coast.

It is a fruitful plain, whose level meadows stretch away from the old farm, fading only on the far horizon. So low it lies that, were it not for yonder mounds of sand, whose jagged fringes line the coast for miles, the high October tides would often, when a strong wind is blowing, find their way among the hamlets far inland. Many a time has the old wall given way; never, perhaps, with quite such dire results as in the great flood of 1607, when the salt water was twelve feet deep in villages five miles from the sea. Thirty hamlets were overwhelmed. Scores of unhappy villagers perished. So swift was the rush of the water that there was no chance of escape, and for many--in the words of a black-letter chap-book of the time, "their last refuge was patiently to die. Cattle were drowned in droves. Rabbits being driven out of their burroughes by the tyde, were seene to sit for safety on the backs of sheepe, as they swom up and downe, and at last were drowned with them.... Deade bodies floate hourely above water, and are continually taken uppe. It cannot yet be knowne howe manye have fell in this Tempest of God's fearful judgement."

Life here was not always quiet. The green slopes of the hill above are scarred all along with old earthworks, so defaced by plough and spade, so trampled down by men and cattle, so worn by the storms of untold centuries, that the eye can hardly trace their outlines in the smooth short sward. Not even a tradition survives of the lost inhabitants whose rude pottery and flint arrow-heads the rabbits bring up among the red earth of their burrows. Compared with this old hill fortress, the earthworks round the tower of the church yonder, the square lines of a Roman camp, the last fort on the well-guarded road down which was brought metal from the mines among the hills, are works of yesterday.

Again and again this coast was wasted by the Danes, who plundered not the hamlets by the shore alone, but villages twenty miles from the sea. Victory was not always with the invaders. Athelney is not far distant. Ethandune was on that low line of hills to the southward. And in the very year of that crowning victory, a few miles farther down, "the brother of Hingwar and Halfdene came with twenty-three ships ... and he was there slain, and with him eight hundred and forty of his army, and there was taken the war-flag which they called the Raven." By the river that loiters seaward under the blue hills across the bay, whose broad mouth shines like silver in the sun, still stands the green mound of Hubbalowe, which the vikings piled over the ashes of the dead sea-rover. On every hill-top in the West Country

"The brake and the tufted grass are high
On the low mounds where warriors lie."

Each point of vantage on the hills has its time-worn lines of old entrenchments. There is hardly a lofty crest but has had its cluster of green grave mounds. But of the builders there remains little but the shapes of their ruined strongholds, their rude pottery, and still ruder weapons, from which to build up our dim conjectures of what manner of men they were who held these hill tops against the arms of Claudius and Vespasian. Even of the legionaries who forced their way thus far into the West, our knowledge has been gained by fragments. It is by accident that we have obtained our most vivid glimpses of their arts, their arms, their way of life. Massive ingots of lead have from time to time been found in the fields or along the line of one or other of the old military roads, whose stamps showed clearly how soon, after the landing of Claudius, the conquerors took possession of the mining country.

Again, when the plough struck on a stone coffin in a field remote from any sign of human occupation; and when further search revealed the ruins of a Roman villa, with beautiful pavements still undisturbed, it was possible to guess, from the lettering of the coins which were strewn among broken amphoræ and scraps of Samian, the very year in which the house was last inhabited. Many a hoard of silver pieces has been found among these hills, buried doubtless in some "dark hour of doubt and dread," to wait for better times that never came. Many a time the labourer's spade has clashed on a rusted spear-head, a broken urn, a handful of denarii. At times even on

"A tarnished ring, whose fiery gems,
Still on its circle set,
From the far sands of Indus brought,
Gleam through their setting, rudely wrought,
As if the sky, their hues had caught,
Flamed in their glory yet."

Relics like these--a flint arrowhead, a fragment of pottery, a handful of denarii, a camp, a tumulus--eke out the scanty records of the time, the pages of Asser, the meagre outlines of the Saxon chronicle.

Hardly a point in all the landscape but is linked with some stirring memory. It was on the little island lying off the point here that Githa found refuge after Hastings. Two years later all this shore was ravaged by the sons of Harold; and in the Domesday record, made eighteen years afterwards, we still can trace their handiwork in the lessened values of villages they had plundered. Over and over again after the brief sketch of a hamlet, its list of boors and villeins, its corn and grass land, its mill, its fishpond--perhaps even its patch of vineyard--follow such words as these: "it was worth 100s., now only 60"; or "it was worth four pounds, now only 40 shillings."

In the Armada days--for half a century, indeed, before the sailing of "that great fleet invincible"--there stood, on the high ground across the river, according to a quaint map of the period, "The Coste of England uppon Seuerne," a tower, in which a gun was mounted, as a defence against invasion. Not a stone remains of the tower which in King Harry's time guarded the little port. But all this coast was armed and ready, years before the sailing of the Armada, watching for the red glow on Dawnsboro' that should call up the bold yeomen of the moors to face the "Inquisition dogs, and the devildoms of Spain."

"The trewthe is," wrote the Muster-Master, in his report to the Government--"after having vewed and trayned the nombers bothe of foote and horse twyce since my coming into this countie--the trewthe is, it is a most gallaunte contrey for the men, armor, and rediness." The authorities were constantly furnished with "Certyffycathes," showing the numbers of duly qualified pikemen and archers. Again and again were the justices urged to keep everything in readiness, since "the wings of man's life are plumed with the feathers of death"; and to train their men to meet any emergency, because "great dilatory wants are found upon all sudden hurly-burlies." Early Orders in Council declared that any able-bodied man between seventeen and fifty-nine who should be found to "lacke a bowe and fower arrowes" was to be fined.

Later, in Elizabeth's reign, more attention was paid to the use of firearms, and most minute instructions were issued from headquarters as to the training of marksmen. The musket was to be fired at first with priming only, then with half a charge, and finally, when the men were ready for it, the full amount of powder was to be used. This was with an eye to the right training of men who, "by reason of the churlishness of their pieces, and not being made acquainted therewith by degrees, are ever after so discouraged as either they wincke or pull their heades from the piece, whereby they take no perfect level, but shoot at random, and so never prove good shottes."

Among the seaweed on the bank of shingle by the cottage all kinds of strange things are found--palm wood, long bamboos, seeds from the West Indies, sabots, children's toys. Once even a clock was washed up on the beach. A few months since the sands were strewn with parts of carriages from the wreck of a vessel that was carrying railway plant to South America. As you stand in the little garden, whose broad edges are none too good protection for it against the wind, you will notice that everything about the place has a touch of this sombre local colouring. Every piece of woodwork is part of a wreck. There is not a hinge or a bolt, hardly a nail even that did not come out of some ship's fittings. The posts on which the garden gate is hung are pieces of a mast. The gate itself is made of planks that have been picked up on the sand. Mahogany panels from the saloon of some steamship have been worked into the walling of the garden shed. No coal is ever needed here. A little peat is all that is wanted. The sea brings an endless store of firewood almost to the door.

Too often, alas! the ebbing tide leaves yet sadder jetsam on the shore--white, still figures, lying face down on the yellow sand; to be lifted reverently, perhaps, but yet by stranger hands, and committed with brief rites to the corner of the ancient burial-ground on the headland yonder, where "the little grey church on the windy hill" stands among the green graves of centuries, roofless, dismantled, and forlorn.

THE COUNTRY LIFE.

The man who can look back over thirty years of rural life, of life spent among woods and meadows, has doubtless learnt something at least of the ways of the wild creatures of his district, of its beasts and birds, of its reptiles, and fish, and insects, even of forms of life still lower in the scale. In the works of Nature, her lovers find a never-failing charm. There is no book like hers, as we read it in green field and country lane, in copse, and stream, and hedge-row. There is no voice like hers, as we hear it in the sounds of the wood, in the sounds of the sea, in the sounds of the night. No poet ever breathed such songs. No writer of romance has ever woven such tales of mystery and wonder.

There are few of us probably who, looking back on the country life of our early days, would not be ready to admit that among its pursuits and pleasures, many and various as they were, the art and craft of birds'-nesting stood supreme. It is a pursuit that has a charm peculiarly its own. It may be that, in the days of our youth, the love of having and holding was one chief motive; a love that some of us have not shaken off yet, though perhaps, it is lavished on more useful things. Even the lust of plunder and destruction may have had its weight with us, as we feel sure it has with the village children. Not every nest-robber, it is true, is really a lover of Nature. But the birds'-nester who is a naturalist born soon wakens, not only to the beauty, but to the significance, of his fragile treasures.

Perhaps few young collectors pay much conscious attention to the construction of the nest, or notice how skilfully its materials are made to harmonise with its surroundings, or see how wonderfully some eggs are protected by their colouring. But his would be a dull soul on whom these things did not, sooner or later, make some impression. There are some birds'-nesters who are no longer young--no longer able to climb a tree or ford a river, to whom, year after year, the season of nests brings new delight; to whom the exquisite workmanship of the chaffinch seems each year more wonderful than ever, and in whose eyes the blue of a song-thrush's egg will never lose its charm.

These two nightjars' eggs, for example, are exquisitely beautiful, with their soft shades of brown and grey, veined like some rare marble. But as you look at them you think less of their beauty than of the moment when, in the corner of the old orchard, the bird got up, almost under your feet, and you watched it sail away to one of the fir-trees in the hedge-row, and crouch down on a low branch to watch your movements. Then, looking down, you saw, on the bare earth, these eggs, so near that another step would have crushed them. This is only a magpie's egg, but the date on it reminds you of that stiff climb up the giant fir-tree in the coppice, when for want of a box to carry them in, you had to bring your spoil down in your cap held between your teeth; while the farmer below shouted encouragingly: "Bring 'em all, sir; doän't 'ee leave none on 'em. I doän't want none o' they varmint on my ground."

Here is a kestrel's egg on which there is a date written, and a name--the name of a once-familiar hill-top. As you look, the scene of long ago comes back. It was an early morning in May. The dew lay heavy on the bracken, whose stout young fronds joined hands across the path. And as you paused on the hill slope and looked back, you saw how all the upland pastures, and the broad meadow lands below, were glistening in the light of the just risen sun. Through the grey haze that veiled the distance showed, faintly and more faint, range after range of low blue hills, with white hamlets glimmering here and there. The light of sunrise had just caught the windows of the old manor house on the slope, some mile away, and they flashed and flamed like fire. The grey cliffs above you had the flush of dawn upon their storm-worn steeps, and the light air tossed the leaves of the wayfaring trees rooted in the crannies, till they glittered like blades of silver. Among the elms about the farmstead, on the knoll below, sounded the uneasy chatter of a magpie. A crow was flying leisurely up to his fastness in the clump of old Scotch firs on the low hill-top. From a belt of coppice further down there rose at intervals, above the low sweet notes of the warblers, the clear call of a cuckoo. Overhead a woodlark drifted in vast circles, singing as he flew.

When at length you gained the hill crest, you heard the challenge of a black-cock. Over the wide pasture the lapwings were calling. Now they wheeled across the pale blue heaven, now they swooped swiftly almost to the ground, turning over and over in the air. Now one flew by, so near that you saw clearly the long plume upon his glossy head, and heard the musical throb of his strong wings sounding loud in the quiet morning air.

As you paused on the short turf close to the brow of the cliff, and looking down once more, saw your shadow falling on the young corn of the ploughed land far below, a hawk dashed out from the cliff below you, and then, staying its swift course, hovered a moment in mid air, while the sunshine lighted up its rich brown plumage. As you peered over the brink of the cliff there were no signs of a nest. But a tall sapling rooted in a ledge some ten feet below looked safe to hold by. Cautiously you slid over the edge, and dropped within reach of the branches, and so, from ledge to ledge, you climbed slowly down, holding on by points of rock or tufts of grass, or stems of ivy, until--yes, there, at your feet, in an arched crevice of the cliff, on a little earth, with no sort of nest, lay the four exquisite eggs, whose radiant beauty--so much richer five-and-twenty years since--seemed to your enraptured gaze to light up the little hollow. As you stooped to take one of them in your hand--how warm it was--and clung there, gloating over the beauty of your treasure, the old hawk hovered near, sounding at times her wild cry of anger and alarm, answered far off by her fierce mate, hurrying homeward on his swift, keen wings.

It is not given to all alike to be able to appreciate the true pleasure of a country walk. It is a thing that many of us prize, and that even more of us long for. And yet there are some people, really fond of walking, to whom it seems to make little difference whether their road goes evenly along the Queen's highway, and is hemmed in by straight stone walls, or loiters through winding by-ways, under banks crowned with straggling hedge-rows, overhung with sheltering elms. There are those who take their weekly tramp, and who say they like it best so, on Sunday, through the monotonous dreariness of London streets. To them a country walk, with its possible mud, and with its certain solitude and tameness, is, at least in fancy, flat and stale and altogether profitless.

It is largely a matter of training. We may learn to love bricks and mortar and the traffic of the town more than the quiet of woods and meadows, and the companionship of the everlasting hills. But there are others who cannot breathe amid the stir and noise and money-grubbing fever of the city; to whom the air of the open country is the Elixir of Life; who love its restful quietude, and who, at each turn along the favourite path, look for some old friend, some familiar bird, or flower, or insect.

With those who are really fond of rural life, other things have weight besides the mere landscape, besides the beauty of the view or the exhilaration of the keen air of the hill-tops. The charm of woodland walk, of river path, of quiet lanes, or of lonely places in the hills, is increased a hundredfold by some knowledge of rural sights and sounds. A power to recognise the songs of birds, some acquaintance with insect life, a little plant lore, a little knowledge of rocks and fossils--in a word, some tincture of Natural History--combine to make a ramble in the country one of the best things that life can offer us.

This love of Nature is again largely a matter of training. Schoolboys, as a race, are strangely slow at first to see plants, or shells, or fossils. But the young birds'-nester, for instance, whose first motive was, it may be, nothing nobler than the lust of having and holding, the love of plunder, or even the savage pleasure of destruction, may soon be trained to see the meaning of the shape and tints and markings of the eggs; not only to appreciate the beauty of the nest and the skill with which it was put together, but to learn in time the song of the builder and to know something of its habits. The butterfly hunter may be taught to recognise not merely the beauty of his captives, but to see something of those marvellous devices by which Nature hides caterpillar and chrysalis, and even perfect insect, from prying eyes.

The boy who has acquired a love for Natural History has something to be thankful for, all the days of his life, a possession that may be the means of bringing more comfort to his soul than all the wisdom of the ancients. Of no man can it be so truly said as of the naturalist that he

"Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything."

It is true enough that, to most men, a knowledge of flowers or fossils, of insect life or of the habits of birds, will bring no return in hard cash. But there are other things in life besides a balance at the banker's. And a love of art is not more lucrative, or a taste for music or for books.

There are people who, if they would, might do much to aid the study of Natural History; people whose avocations take them much into the open air, and who have opportunities which some of us long for in vain. The fisherman, the keeper, the shepherd, and the farm labourer might, if they could be won over to take interest in such things, contribute not a little to our knowledge of the life history of even the most familiar of animals. Fishermen along the coast see things sometimes the description of which rouses envy in the breasts of less fortunate listeners. Not long since a man was rowing out to his nets in the early morning just outside the bar of a small tidal river in the West Country, when he saw a raven sweeping slowly along the hill-slope near by--the grassy side of a long promontory stretching far out into the sea, muttering to itself at times with that deep voice that, happily, is still familiar to the long-shore dwellers on that coast. Suddenly the bird paused, and with swift descent swooped down among the brown heather and the stunted bushes of the hill, seizing in its strong claws a hare that had been lying crouched among the herbage. But the bird was too late in using its beak or else missed its stroke altogether, for in a moment the hare and the raven, locked fast together, rolled over and over, kicking, struggling, flapping down the rough slope below; until the bird, dismayed by such an unwonted experience and the buffeting of the rocks and broken ground, let go its hold. The hare was on its feet and had vanished like a flash, while the baffled raven, rising slowly in the air, sailed reluctantly away.

The naturalist is not now, even in country districts, looked upon quite in the same light as he once was--but one degree removed from the state of lunatic. The old order of things, the prejudice, the bigotry, the superstition of half a century ago has to a great degree disappeared. There are many English parishes still without a railway; there is none probably without a newspaper. The presence of a single naturalist, parson or village doctor, or what not, has been known, like the little leaven that leaveneth the whole lump, to rouse a real interest among the neighbours in birds and beasts and even insects. A man's reputation for being fond of strange creatures may perhaps be laughed at, at first, and perhaps be always a little looked down on. But by degrees, very slow it may be, the influence spreads. The keeper brings him a strange bird, the labourer a nest of dormice found in stubbing up a hedge-row, or a clutch of quails' eggs he has come upon among the clover. The old mole catcher, too, is a very mine of stories about the strange beasts he has seen in his sixty years' experience. One of his most wonderful tales is about the great snake--"more 'n _that_ long,"--a matter of five feet or so,--which he killed as it was sucking the milk of a cow: "and" as he will add triumphantly, "there were more 'n a pint of milk in him":--the crushed eggs of the unfortunate reptile no doubt, but it is altogether useless to suggest any such paltry explanation.

One autumn a boy at work among the potatoes turned up with his spade something that instantly, so he declared, became a bird and flew away. The boy ran home in horror. His parents would not believe a word of the story, but the boy was too big to be flogged as a mere liar. They were greatly relieved on learning that something of the kind was at least possible, and regarded with no little interest a Death's Head hawkmoth, for such no doubt the apparition was, preserved in a collection.

The change from egg to caterpillar is a thing with which every rustic is probably familiar; but in remote rural districts there are still men who cannot believe that a caterpillar can ever become a butterfly, and who still entertain strange superstitions about toads and snakes and slow worms.

Perhaps in time the County Councils may do something for the rustic enlightenment, by means of lectures and the limelight. The rural population is, however, notoriously hard of belief; is the most difficult of all populations to move from the faiths of their fathers. There is many a farmer's wife even yet who will labour with the churn from morning till night,--lamenting all the while that the butter will not come,--rather than by the use of a thermometer so regulate the temperature that the whole process would be over in half-an-hour. A series of lectures lately given in Somersetshire on the management of farm stock was, however, well attended by the younger farmers at any rate. They were keenly interested, and although they may, perhaps, have mostly adjourned afterwards to discuss each discourse at the public-house, it was not as sceptics; and the local ironmonger always found it necessary to lay in a stock of thermometers as soon as the lectures had begun. The older men mostly kept aloof. They had no faith in any new-fangled ways. They are a stiff-necked generation. As their fathers did, so do they. One burly, red-faced farmer of the old school was lately heard to express his contempt for the educational efforts of the County Council. "What be the use," said he, "of wasting the public money sending round men to talk about a dairy as don't know a cow from a elephant? And these yar cook'ry classes. 'Tis my belief that if a man have got summat to cook, he'll soon find out how to cook un."

With a few popular lectures and a little practical help and guidance the farmer and the farm labourer might render untold service to science, with all their long hours in the open air, summer and winter, seedtime and harvest. They see some strange things now, or think they see them. Snakes are the theme of many marvellous tales. "I were walking along the path through the wheat," said an old villager, "when I heard a rustling, like a robbut: I thought 'twere a robbut. But a gurt viper come out of the wheat and jumped across the path so high's my head."

A captive tortoise escaped one day into the road, and was soon the centre of a knot of astonished villagers. After long debate they concluded it was either "a tremendous gurt tooad, or some wendimous warmint"; and they decided to kill it on the spot--a task of no small difficulty, as may well be imagined.

HALE WELL: A QUIET CORNER.

On the south slope of an old West Country orchard there is a sheltered corner lying open to the sun. Above it rises a broad, unkempt, straggling hedge-row--holly and hawthorn, bramble and sweetbriar--and behind this again the green slopes of the hill. On the left, rising at intervals through the tangled thickets that form the eastern limit of the orchard, is a line of old Scotch firs, and beyond them, dimly seen through the haze that broods over the landscape, are the grey ramparts of a range of limestone cliffs. The wind of March is in the dark foliage of the firs, tossing their gnarled arms against the pallid sky. But here the golden blossoms of the gorse, the brown stems of last year's bracken, stand unmoved. The dark firs are stirring with a sound as of the sea, but here, on this sunlit slope, is the very air of summer,

"... the grace,
The golden smile of June,
With bloom and sun in every place,
And all the world in tune."

Butterflies flit idly by--dark-winged peacocks, soft brown tortoise-shells, pale yellow brimstones like flying gleams of sunshine. The apple boughs are fretted all over with fine points of green, the purple mist round the heads of the great elms deepens in the warm air, the old hedge-row wears already the bright garb of spring. The air is full of spring time, of the breath of primroses and violets, full of pleasant sounds of country life, of the wakening of the world, of the happy voices of a hundred birds, whose glad hearts are revelling in the golden weather.

The birds know well this sunny hollow. Here spring comes early, and summer lingers late. While the fields without are white with wintry rime,

"... here the glancing sunbeams throng,
And tasselled larches droop to hear
A grace of fleeting song."

To-day, on every side, the feathered woodlanders are stirring. From an old Scotch fir that towers out of the hedge-row--its dark shape showing like a shadow through the leafless boughs of the apple-trees--falls the rich music of a blackbird's song, clear and wild and flute-like. He is a noble singer; less great, indeed, than the song-thrush, but yet a master of his art. And there are those who hold that there is more beauty in the depth and richness, in the power and passion, of his few brief bars, than in all the magnificent anthem of his rival. Farther off, low down in a leafless elm by the border of the orchard, is the thrush himself, flooding the whole glade with his wonderful melody. Over and over there sounds the polished lyric of the wren; over and over again the metallic clink of a coaltit rings out above the plaintive carol of the robin, the sober ditty of the hedge-sparrow. Over all the fields the larks are singing. In the hedges that skirt the orchard sounds the sweet cadence of the chaffinch, the wild warble of the missel-thrush, at times the ringing call of some light-hearted oxeye. From farther up the hollow, from his sanctuary in the old, neglected wilderness of unpruned, lichen-coated trees, floats down the soft laugh of a woodpecker, a mellow sound, a note of peace and solitude, and sylvan greenness. Is it only fancy that here, among these hills, in this sweet country air, among these untarnished immemorial elms, there is more melody in the skylark's song, that there is a finer tone in the cool, clear singing of the robin, that there is a touch of music in the chatter of the very sparrows? But hark, a fainter note floats lightly down from the tree-tops; a note not strong or musical, but heard through all the blended harmonies of a score of singers. It is the call of the chiff-chaff, the first returning wanderer from the warm south, fresh from the orange groves of Sorrento, or the sunny slopes of the Sabine hills. When his small figure shows presently against the dark foliage of a Scotch fir, there is that about him which seems to suggest that he is well content with his home-coming, even though woods are bare and skies are cheerless. He flutters up and down among the branches, never still for a moment. Even when he pauses,--looking like a point of light against the sombre leaves behind him,--to call his own name over and over, it is easy to see that his whole small figure is trembling with the ardour of his eager little soul.

A tiny figure, and a simple song. But there is more of meaning in those few faint notes than in all the rest of the great chorus that day by day is gathering strength in the woodland. For in the chiff-chaff's call there is the Promise of Spring. It is said that when the Siberian exiles hear for the first time, after their long and bitter winter, the cry of the cuckoo, the familiar voice rouses in their weary souls a resistless longing to taste once more, if only for a day, the sweets of freedom; that there are always some who, at the summons, elude the vigilance of their guards, and take to the forest, lured by the magic of that wandering voice. And so, in our hearts, this feeble note rouses a longing for green fields and country lanes, for flowers and sunshine, for summer and the coming of the swallows.

Somewhere in the elms a nuthatch sounds at intervals his flute-like call--a wandering voice, now among the topmost branches, whose sunlit purple holds so well against the pallid blue, now near the ground, now in some mighty bough that leans far out over the field. Now the bird's figure shows darkly on the sky, and now, as he glides head foremost down, like the born acrobat that he is, his grey plumage lights up for a moment in the sunshine. And now he leaves the tree, still calling as he flies, and sinks down among that grey fringe of orchard, where his mate and he have, perhaps, already fixed on the hole in the old apple tree in which they mean to take up their quarters for the season.

The old hedge-rows round the orchard are but wintry still for the most part, save for a few buds of hawthorn just breaking into leaf, or an elder bush already tinged with green. But on the banks of the tiny stream that wanders leisurely along the lane below, celandine and sweet violet are in bloom; and primroses, no longer pale and stunted, as in the rougher days of March, lend their rare perfume to the air. Meadowsweet and brooklime are springing by the oozy shore, and on the dark boughs of the alders that lean over it the catkins cluster thick.