My grandfather writes on 23 March 1861, “Mr ***** put some eggs under the jackdaws in the tower in hopes they would build in the town place, which they no doubt will some day.” It was the church tower, where the bells are hung; and Mr ***** was a churchwarden. The eggs, of course, were rooks’ eggs: he desired a rookery in the elms outside.
He writes on 26 December 1847, “The church singers by their inveteracy have rather disturbed the neighbourhood both Friday night and last night. [They used to bring the church bass-viol and violin and flute.] I order them not to come near, but unfortunately I am surrounded by a road, and they will pass near me: which my dogs notice.”
The dogs here were formidable. He writes, 10 May 1846, “I must get rid of Bess. She sat on a man to-day in the road.... If you strike Ben, you make him savage—I do not dare to repeat a blow to him—though such a good tempered old fellow.” There was always a Ben here, and this Ben was born in 1839 and died in 1852. My grandfather writes, 3 March, “Poor old Ben died on Monday, and was buried in the garden, just below where Fanny was buried. [Fanny, another old dog, died just before.] He lay down there on Saturday—I never before saw him lie there: one would almost think he found he was dying, and chose his place of burial.”
There are plenty of vipers hereabouts, but I never thought much of them until one killed my dog, 8 April 1920. She was a small sheep-dog, Rose by name, and she was out for a walk with me and was rummaging about in a hedge; and there the viper got her in the pad, between the second and third toes of the left fore-paw. These hedges harbour snakes. My grandfather writes to my father, 2 May 1852, “A fine sunny morning, and we went out for a walk to see if we could find any snakes in our hedges, for now is the time to see them, before the hedges get covered.”
He writes on 25 April 1858, “When I was at the Cleave on Friday, a viper made its appearance and then another and so on till there were four, all in a few minutes. It being very warm, this was (I think) their first appearance from their winter hiding place: they were very lean.” He speaks of fishing in the Bovey down below the Cleave, 17 May 1846, “There is a timidity about me, I am looking every step I plant my foot, fearing the ‘varmints’ as Farmer ***** calls them: not so before now—would brush by everything, and even step on them.”
He also writes, 22 March 1855, “Tuesday was the first day of summer, and it was so warm and pleasant that a lizard got on a shawl that was put out on the side of the hedge in the eye of the sun, where he appeared very comfortable in his warm bed. But the poor thing lost his life in consequence.” The people here call lizards crocodiles, and always slaughter them as noxious things. I never heard of a lizard doing any harm here, excepting one that was licked up by a cow and got down into her lung and killed her.
Some years ago a venerable lady came down to stay with me, and she wore a wide-brimmed hat with feathers enough to cover a swan. One afternoon I left her sitting on the hill side, looking at the view, while I went after something else; and presently I saw a buzzard hovering right over her with its head bent forward and staring intently down. Up there the buzzard could only see the feathers and very little else; and I feared she would be terribly upset, if this huge bird dropped down on her and carried off the hat. And the bird could easily have done it, as these buzzards measure forty or fifty inches across their outspread wings.
An owl came down the chimney of the Higher Parlour here and bounced into the room, its great eyes blinking through a cloud of soot; and it rather scared a couple of young people who were having a quiet flirtation there. And once the Higher Parlour was attacked by bees. Some honey had been taken from the hives and put into a cupboard there, and they came after it—there must have been ten thousand of them in the room at once. That was in the happy days before disease was brought here from the Isle of Wight. The bees are all dead now; but usually there were a dozen hives, and sometimes many more—the old straw hives, each standing on a sort of one-legged table and covered with a sheaf of straw like an extinguisher. It was pleasant on a sunny day to see the bees out playing round the hives, and the cats all stretched out in the grass below, waiting there to eat the mice that came to eat the honey.
When bees were swarming, we went out with bells and gongs and metal pans and made a hideous noise, relying on the old belief that clanging metal tempted swarms to pitch close by instead of flying away. But, by Lubbock’s showing, it was all in vain, as bees are deaf. In describing his experiments, Ants, Bees and Wasps, page 290, ed. 1898, he says—“I tried one of my bees with a violin. I made all the noise I could, but to my surprise she took no notice. I could not even see a twitch of the antennæ.” Bertini made a marble statue of Jenner vaccinating a child. Some modern man might rival it with Lubbock playing to a bee.
Whether the bees heard us or not, they usually pitched close by; and then the next thing was to gather some bame and cut down boughs of halse. (Bame is balm, and halse is hazel.) Then some sugar was put into a clean straw hive and was rubbed in with the bame, the sap making a sort of syrup; and then the hive was held out (upside down) underneath the swarm. If the swarm had pitched on the branch of a tree—as was usually the case—it could be jerked off bodily into the hive by giving the branch a knock: failing that, it might be swept in sideways with a brush. But, if the queen was left behind, the other bees went back to her; and then we had to try again. When the swarm was in, the hive was put down on a sheet (the right way up) and was covered over with the boughs of halse. And at nightfall, when the bees had gone to sleep, the hive was taken up again and placed upon its little table and roofed in with its sheaf of straw, and hoops were slipped on over the sheaf to keep it in its place.—But the swarms did not always pitch close by: sometimes they went soaring up, and then away across the valley, far beyond pursuit.