The rest of this chapter is necessarily unpleasant and distressing reading, but it is necessary if we are to understand the romance of the fields. As one wanders over the grassy pastures of Southern Scotland, where the black-faced sheep foolishly start away, and where one's ears are irritated by the scolding complaints of the curlew or whaup, it is no rare accident to find a few broken-down walls, a clump of nettles, and badly grown ash trees. That was once a farm steading, where a healthy troop of children used to play together after walking three or more miles barefoot to school. The ash trees were planted at every farm "toon," for the Scottish spear was a very necessary weapon until recent times. Often also, upon some monotonous grouse moor, one sees the ridges that betoken a little croft where a cottager lived.
In one parish (Troqueer) over seventy country cottages have been abandoned during the lifetime of a middle-aged person.
Many families, of which the laird was often the best farmer in the district and his own factor, have disappeared. The fine houses, with their parks and shootings, are let to strangers, who come for a few weeks or months, and then leave it in charge of a caretaker. Before this recent development, the "family" lived all the year round upon the land; they spent their income chiefly in wages to the country people. Where once forty or fifty people were employed all the year, there are now but three or four. The big house with shuttered windows and weed-grown walks, is a distressing and saddening spectacle.
Of course such changes must occur. The farmer's and the cottar's children are now carrying out in Canada, Australia, or the United States, what was done in Scotland from 1780-1830. India, South Africa, and China have been developed by the brains and hold the graves of many of the laird's sons.
Yet this poor old country, abandoned of her children, shows signs of revival. Both the poor and the rich are beginning to find out that a country life is healthier, quite as interesting, and sometimes quite as profitable as the overcrowded city with its manufactories, mills, and offices. All new countries are beginning to fill up, and there is some hope that a new and vigorous development of farming may make the countryside once more vigorous, prosperous, and full of healthy children.
CHAPTER XII
ON PLANTS WHICH ADD TO CONTINENTS
Lake Aral and Lake Tschad—Mangrove swamps of West Africa—New mudbanks colonized—Fish, oysters, birds, and mosquitoes—Grasping roots and seedlings—Extent of mangroves—Touradons of the Rhone—Sea-meadows of Britain—Floating pollen—Reeds and sedges of estuarine meadows—Storms—Plants on ships' hulls—Kelps and tangles in storms—Are seaweeds useless?—Fish.
THE way in which the savage, rugged, inhospitable Britain of the Ice Age changed into our familiar peaceful country formed the subject of the last chapter.
But plants do far more than cover the earth and render it fertile, for some of them assist in winning new land from the sea or from freshwater lakes. The Sea of Aral, for instance, or Lake Tschad are rapidly becoming choked up by reeds and other vegetation. Blown sand from the deserts around is caught and intercepted by these reeds, so that fertile pastures are gradually forming in what used to be the open water of a deepish lake.