Some insects are much more powerful than would be supposed. A garden was enclosed with fresh palings formed of split oak so well seasoned (split oak is the hardest of wood) that it was difficult to train any creepers against them, for a nail could not be driven in without the help of a bradawl. Passing along the path one afternoon I heard a peculiar rasping sound like a very small saw at work, and found it proceeded from four wasps biting the oak for the materials of their nest. The noise they made was audible four or five yards away, and upon looking closer I found the palings all scored and marked in short shallow grooves. The scores and marks extended along that part of the palings where the sunshine usually fell; there were none on the shady side, the wasps preferring to work in the sunlight.
Soon the clouds began to break, and then the sun shone on innumerable rain-drops. I at once started forth, knowing that such a storm is often followed by several lesser showers with brief intervals between. The deserted ice-house was rarely visited—only, perhaps, when some borage was wanted to put in summer drinks. For a thick growth of borage had sprung up by it, where perhaps a small garden patch had once been cultivated, for there was a pear-tree near. The plant, with its scent of cucumber, grew very strong; the blue flowers when fallen, if they had not been observed when growing, might be supposed to have been inserted exactly upside down to their real manner of attachment. In autumn the leaves of the pear-tree reddened, and afterwards the ivy over the entrance to the ice-house flowered; then in the cold months of early spring the birds came for the ivy-berries.
A FARMER OF THE OLDEN TIMES.
The winding paths traced by a hare in spring as he roams over an arable field show that he must cover a mile within a furlong. From a gateway one morning I watched a hare busy in this way, restlessly passing to and fro over the 'lands.' Every motion was visible, because, although the green wheat was rising in an adjacent field, no crop had yet appeared here. Now the hare came direct towards me, running down a furrow; then he turned short and followed a course like the letter V; next he crossed the angle of the field and came back along the shore of the ditch, under the hedge. Then away to the centre of the field, where he stayed some time exploring up one furrow and down another, his ears and the hump of his back only seen above the clods.
But suddenly he caught a scent of something that alarmed him, and away he went full speed: when on the open ground the peculiar way in which the hind limbs are thrown forward right under the body, thus giving an immense 'stride,' was clearly displayed. I had been so interested in the hare that I had not observed Hilary coming along on the other side of the low fence, looking at his wheat. The hare, busy as he was and seeming to see nothing, had crossed his 'wind.' Hilary came to me, and we walked together along the waggon-track, repassing the wheat. He was full about it: he was always grieving over the decadence of the wheat crop.
There was nothing, he went on, so pleasant to watch as it came up, nothing that required so much care and skill, nothing so thoroughly associated with the traditions of English farming as wheat, and yet nothing so disappointing. Foreign importations had destroyed this the very mainstay. Now, that crop which he had just left had 'tillered out' well; but what profit should he get from the many stalks that had tillered or sprung from each single grain, thus promising a fiftyfold return? It had been well got in, and, as the old saw had it, 'Well sown, half grown;' it had been in the ground the proper time ('Long in the bed, big in the head'); but likely enough the price next autumn would not much more than pay the expenses of preparation.
The thunderstorm before Christmas was not perhaps a favourable omen, since
Winter's thunder and summer's flood