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,