Fresh Fields

by John Burroughs

I

In crossing the Atlantic from the New World to the Old, one of the first intimations the traveler has that he is nearing a strange shore, and an old and populous one, is the greater boldness and familiarity of the swarms of sea-gulls that begin to hover in the wake of the ship, and dive and contend with each other for the fragments and parings thrown overboard from the pantry. They have at once a different air and manner from those we left behind. How bold and tireless they are, pursuing the vessel from dawn to dark, and coming almost near enough to take the food out of your hand as you lean over the bulwarks. It is a sign in the air; it tells the whole story of the hungry and populous countries you are approaching; it is swarming and omnivorous Europe come out to meet you. You are near the sea-marge of a land teeming with life, a land where the prevailing forms are indeed few, but these on the most copious and vehement scale; where the birds and animals are not only more numerous than at home, but more dominating and aggressive, more closely associated with man,

contending with him for the fruits of the soil, learned in his ways, full of resources, prolific, tenacious of life, not easily checked or driven out,—in fact, characterized by greater persistence and fecundity. This fact is sure, sooner or later, to strike the American in Britain. There seems to be an aboriginal push and heat in animate nature there, to behold which is a new experience. It is the Old World, and yet it really seems the New in the virility and hardihood of its species.

The New Englander who sees with evil forebodings the rapid falling off of the birth-rate in his own land, the family rills shrinking in these later generations, like his native streams in summer, and who consequently fears for the perpetuity of the race, may see something to comfort him in the British islands. Behold the fecundity of the parent stock! The drought that has fallen upon the older parts of the New World does not seem to have affected the sources of being in these islands. They are apparently as copious and exhaustless as they were three centuries ago. Britain might well appropriate to herself the last half of Emerson's quatrain:—

"No numbers have counted my tallies,

No tribes my house can fill;

I sit by the shining Fount of Life,

And pour the deluge still."

For it is literally a deluge; the land is inundated with humanity. Thirty millions of people within the area of one of our larger States, and who shall

say that high-water mark is yet reached? Everything betokens a race still in its youth, still on the road to empire. The full-bloodedness, the large feet and hands, the prominent canine teeth, the stomachic and muscular robustness, the health of the women, the savage jealousy of personal rights, the swarms upon swarms of children and young people, the delight in the open air and in athletic sports, the love of danger and adventure, a certain morning freshness and youthfulness in their look, as if their food and sleep nourished them well, together with a certain animality and stupidity,—all indicate a people who have not yet slackened speed or taken in sail. Neither the land nor the race shows any exhaustion. In both there is yet the freshness and fruitfulness of a new country. You would think the people had just come into possession of a virgin soil. There is a pioneer hardiness and fertility about them. Families increase as in our early frontier settlements. Let me quote a paragraph from Taine's "Notes:"—

"An Englishman nearly always has many children,—the rich as well as the poor. The Queen has nine, and sets the example. Let us run over the families we are acquainted with: Lord —— has six children; the Marquis of ——, twelve; Sir N——, nine; Mr. S——, a judge, twenty-four, of whom twenty-two are living; several clergymen, five, six, and up to ten and twelve."

Thus is the census kept up and increased. The land, the towns and cities, are like hives in swarming

time; a fertile queen indeed, and plenty of brood-comb! Were it not for the wildernesses of America, of Africa, and Australia, to which these swarms migrate, the people would suffocate and trample each other out. A Scotch or English city, compared with one of ours, is a kind of duplex or compound city; it has a double interior,—the interior of the closes and alleys, in which and out of which the people swarm like flies. Every country village has its closes, its streets between streets, where the humbler portion of the population is packed away. This back-door humanity streams forth to all parts of the world, and carries the national virtues with it. In walking through some of the older portions of Edinburgh, I was somehow reminded of colonies of cliff swallows I had seen at home, packed beneath the eaves of a farmer's barn, every inch of space occupied, the tenements crowding and lapping over each other, the interstices filled, every coign of vantage seized upon, the pendent beds and procreant cradles ranked one above another, and showing all manner of quaint and ingenious forms and adaptability to circumstances. In both London and Edinburgh there are streets above streets, or huge viaducts that carry one torrent of humanity above another torrent. They utilize the hills and depressions to make more surface room for their swarming myriads.

One day, in my walk through the Trosachs in the Highlands, I came upon a couple of ant-hills that arrested my attention. They were a type of

the country. They were not large, scarcely larger than a peck measure, but never before had I seen ant-hills so populous and so lively. They were living masses of ants, while the ground for yards about literally rustled with their numbers. I knew ant-hills at home, and had noted them carefully, hills that would fill a cart-box; but they were like empty tenements compared with these, a fort garrisoned with a company instead of an army corps. These hills stood in thin woods by the roadside. From each of them radiated five main highways, like the spokes of a wheel. These highways were clearly defined to the eye, the grass and leaves being slightly beaten down. Along each one of them there was a double line of ants,—one line going out for supplies and the other returning with booty,—worms, flies, insects, a constant stream of game going into the capitol. If the ants, with any given worm or bug, got stuck, those passing out would turn and lend a helping hand. The ground between the main highways was being threaded in all directions by individual ants, beating up and down for game. The same was true of the surface all about the terminus of the roads, several yards distant. If I stood a few moments in one place, the ants would begin to climb up my shoes and so up my legs. Stamping them off seemed only to alarm and enrage the whole camp, so that I would presently be compelled to retreat. Seeing a big straddling beetle, I caught him and dropped him upon the nest. The ants attacked him as wolves

might attack an elephant. They clung to his legs, they mounted his back, and assaulted him in front. As he rushed through and over their ranks, down the side of the mound, those clinging to his legs were caught hold of by others, till lines of four or five ants were being jerked along by each of his six legs. The infuriated beetle cleared the mound, and crawled under leaves and sticks to sweep off his clinging enemies, and finally seemed to escape them by burying himself in the earth. Then I took one of those large, black, shelless snails with which this land abounds, a snail the size of my thumb, and dropped it upon the nest. The ants swarmed upon it at once, and began to sink their jaws into it. This woke the snail up to the true situation, and it showed itself not without resources against its enemies. Flee, like the beetle, it could not, but it bore an invisible armor; it began to excrete from every pore of its body a thick, whitish, viscid substance, that tied every ant that came in contact with it, hand and foot, in a twinkling. When a thick coating of this impromptu bird-lime had been exuded, the snail wriggled right and left a few times, partly sloughing it off, and thus ingulfing hundreds of its antagonists. Never was army of ants or of men bound in such a Stygian quagmire before. New phalanxes rushed up and tried to scale the mass; most of them were mired like their fellows, but a few succeeded and gained the snail's back; then began the preparation of another avalanche of glue; the creature seemed to dwindle in

size, and to nerve itself to the work; as fast as the ants reached him in any number he ingulfed them; he poured the vials of his glutinous wrath upon them till he had formed quite a rampart of cemented and helpless ants about him; fresh ones constantly coming up laid hold of the barricade with their jaws, and were often hung that way. I lingered half an hour or more to see the issue, but was finally compelled to come away before the closing scene. I presume the ants finally triumphed. The snail had nearly exhausted its ammunition; each new broadside took more and more time and was less and less effective; while the ants had unlimited resources, and could make bridges of their sunken armies. But how they finally freed themselves and their mound of that viscid, sloughing monster I should be glad to know.

But it was not these incidents that impressed me so much as the numbers and the animation of the ants, and their raiding, buccaneering propensities. When I came to London, I could not help thinking of the ant-hill I had seen in the North. This, I said, is the biggest ant-hill yet. See the great steam highways, leading to all points of the compass; see the myriads swarming, jostling each other in the streets, and overflowing all the surrounding country. See the underground tunnels and galleries and the overground viaducts; see the activity and the supplies, the whole earth the hunting-ground of these insects and rustling with their multitudinous stir. One may be pardoned, in the

presence of such an enormous aggregate of humanity as London shows, for thinking of insects. Men and women seem cheapened and belittled, as if the spawn of blow-flies had turned to human beings. How the throng stream on interminably, the streets like river-beds, full to their banks! One hardly notes the units,—he sees only the black tide. He loses himself, and becomes an insignificant ant with the rest. He is borne along through the galleries and passages to the underground railway, and is swept forward like a drop in the sea. I used to make frequent trips to the country, or seek out some empty nook in St. Paul's, to come to my senses. But it requires no ordinary effort to find one's self in St. Paul's, and in the country you must walk fast or London will overtake you. When I would think I had a stretch of road all to myself, a troop of London bicyclists would steal up behind me and suddenly file by like spectres. The whole land is London-struck. You feel the suction of the huge city wherever you are. It draws like a cyclone; every current tends that way. It would seem as if cities and towns were constantly breaking from their moorings and drifting thitherward and joining themselves to it. On every side one finds smaller cities welded fast. It spreads like a malignant growth, that involves first one organ and then another. But it is not malignant. On the contrary, it is perhaps as normal and legitimate a city as there is on the globe. It is the proper outcome and expression of that fertile and bountiful land,

and that hardy, multiplying race. It seems less the result of trade and commerce, and more the result of the domestic home-seeking and home-building instinct, than any other city I have yet seen. I felt, and yet feel, its attraction. It is such an aggregate of actual human dwellings that this feeling pervades the very air. All its vast and multiplex industries, and its traffic, seem domestic, like the chores about the household. I used to get glimpses of it from the northwest borders, from Hampstead Heath, and from about Highgate, lying there in the broad, gentle valley of the Thames, like an enormous country village—a village with nearly four million souls, where people find life sweet and wholesome, and keep a rustic freshness of look and sobriety of manner. See their vast parks and pleasure grounds; see the upper Thames, of a bright Sunday, alive with rowing parties; see them picnicking in all the country adjacent. Indeed, in summer a social and even festive air broods over the whole vast encampment. There is squalor and misery enough, of course, and too much, but this takes itself away to holes and corners.