When the jack has been much disturbed no one can do more than obtain a view of him, however skilfully he may conceal himself. The least sign of further proceedings will send the jack away; sometimes the mere appearance of the human form is sufficient. If less suspicious, the rod with the wire attached—or if you wish to make experiments, the rod without the wire—can be placed in the water, and moved how you choose.
SPORT AND SCIENCE
Kingfisher Corner was the first place I made for when, as a lad, I started from home with my gun. The dew of September lies long on the grass, and by the gateway I often noticed wasps that had spent the night in the bunches, numbed and chilled, crawling up the blades bent into an arch by the weight of the drops. Thence they got on the gate, where, too, the flies congregated at that time in the morning; for while it was still cool at the surface on the ground, the dry wood soon absorbed the heat of the sun. This warmth brought them to life again, and after getting well charged with it, the insects flew off to any apples they could discover. These heavy dews, as the summer declines, keep the grass fresh and green, and maintain the leaves on hedge and tree; yet they do not reach the earth, which remains dry. It is a different dew to the spring dew, or acts in another manner: the spring dews moisten the earth, and from the arable lands as the sun shines forth you may see the vapour rise and drift along the surface, like the smoke of a gun on a damp day. The mottled geometrical giant spiders find their webs thick with this September dew, which seems as if a little unctuous. Stepping through the gateway with the morning sun behind me, I saw at each step a fresh circle of dewdrops gleam, some ruby, some emerald, some brightly white, at the same distance in front. The angle of refraction advanced as I moved; there was a point at which the dewdrop shot back a brilliant ray, and then became invisible, or appeared a mere drop of dull water.
By moonlight there is thus formed a semicircle of light on the grass, which continually moves before you; it is a halo on the grass-tips. I noticed this as a boy, and tried all sorts of experiments respecting it, but never met with any mention of it in books till quite lately, in Benvenuto Cellini's "Autobiography." He says, "There appeared a resplendent light over my head, which has displayed itself conspicuously to all I have thought proper to show it to, but those were very few. This shining light is to be seen in the morning over my shadow till two o'clock in the afternoon, and it appears to the greatest advantage when the grass is moist with dew; it is likewise visible in the evening at sunset. This phenomenon I took notice of in Paris, because the air is exceedingly clear in that climate, so that I could distinguish it there much plainer than in Italy, where mists are much more frequent; but I can still see it even here, and show it to others, though not to the same advantage as in France." Benvenuto thought this one of the most extraordinary things that had happened to him; and records it after a wonderful dream, as if it, too, were supernatural. It is, however, possible that some eyes are so constituted as not to be able to see this phenomenon in their own case; at least, I have sometimes tried in vain to get other people to see it. I should not have noticed it had I not been about at all hours with my gun as a boy. It is much more visible by moonlight, when the rabbits' white tails go dot, dot, lightly over the grass, and you are just as likely to shoot at their shadows as at their bodies. As the scythe of the mower mows a swathe before him, so the semicircle of light moves in front over the dew, and the grass appears another tint, as it does after a roller has passed.
In a scientific publication not long since, a letter was published describing what the writer supposed was indeed something extraordinary. He had seen a fragment of rainbow—a square piece, as it were—by itself in the sky, some distance to one side of the sun. In provincial papers such letters may often be found, and even, until lately, in papers issued in London; now with accurate accounts of an ordinary halo about the sun, now with a description of a prismatic cloud round the moon, and one day some one discovered that there were two currents of air, as the clouds went in two directions. Now, it is clear enough that none of these writers had ever been out with a gun or a rod; I mean out all day, and out in the full sense of the phrase. They had read books of science; from their language they were thoroughly educated, and felt a deep interest in natural phenomena. Yet what a marvel was here made out of the commonest incidents of the sky! Halos about the sun happen continually; the prismatic band or cloud about the moon is common; so is the detached rainbow; as for the two currents of air, the clouds often travel in three directions, occasionally in four. These incidents are no more surprising to a sportsman than the sunset. I saw them, as a boy, almost day by day, and recorded the meteors in the evening. It seems to me that I used to see scores of meteors of various degrees of brightness. Once the path, the woods, the fields, and the distant hills were lit as if with a gigantic electric light; I was so interested in tracing the well-known scene so suddenly made apparent in the darkness that it was not for some seconds I thought of looking for the bolide, but even then I was in time to see it declining just before extinction. Others who have been out with their guns have, of course, seen exactly the same things; I do not mention them to claim for myself any special powers of observation, but as instances of the way in which sport brings one in contact with nature. Other sportsmen, too, must have smiled at the marvel made of such appearances by clever and well-educated, but indoor, people.
This very spring (1883), as I walked about a town in the evening, I used to listen to find if I could hear any one mention the zodiacal light, which, just after sunset, was distinctly visible for a fortnight at a time. It was more than usually distinct, a perfect cone, reaching far up into the sky among the western stars. No one seemed to observe it, though it faced them evening after evening. Here was an instance in the opposite direction—a curious phenomenon, even now rather the subject of hypothesis than of demonstration, entirely overlooked. The common phenomenon made a marvel, and the unexplained phenomenon unnoticed. Both in the eyes of a thoughtful person are equally wonderful; but that point of view is apart from my present object, which is to show that sport trains the eye. As a boy, roving about the hedges with my gun, it was my especial delight to see Mercury, because one of the great astronomers had never seen that planet, and because in all the books it was stated as difficult to see. The planet was favourably situated, and I used to see it constantly after sunset then, pale, and but just outside the sunset glow, only a little way above the distant hills. Now it is curious, to remark in passing, that as the sun sets behind a hill the slope of the hill towards you is often obscured by his light. It appears a luminous misty surface, rosy-tinted, and this luminous mist hides the trees upon it, so that the slope is apparently nothing but a broad sweep of colour; while those hills opposite the sun, even if twice as distant, are so clearly defined that the smallest object is evident upon them. Sometimes, instead of the mist on the western hill, there is a blood-like purple almost startling in its glory of light.
There have been few things I have read of, or studied, which in some manner or other I have not seen illustrated in this country while out in the fields. It is said that in the Far West, on the level prairies, when the snow covers them, you see miles and miles away, a waggon stopping; you hurry on, and in half a day's journey overtake it, to find the skull of an ox—so greatly has distance and the mirage of the snow magnified its apparent size. But a few days since I saw some rooks on the telegraph wires against a bright sky, but as I approached they flew and resolved into starlings, so much had the brilliant light deceived me. A hare sometimes, on the open ground, looks at a distance, in the sunny days of May when hares are often abroad in daylight, as big as a good-sized dog, and, except by the leap and the absence of visible tail, can hardly be told from a dog. The bamboo fishing-rods, if you will glance at the bamboo itself as you fish, seem the most singular of growths. There is no wood in the hedge like it, neither ash, hazel, oak, sapling, nor anything; it is thoroughly foreign, almost unnatural. The hard knots, the hollow stem, the surface glazed so as to resist a cut with a knife and nearly turn the steel—this is a tropical production alone. But while working round the shore presently you come to the sedges, and by the sedges stands a bunch of reeds. A reed is a miniature bamboo, the same shape, the same knots, and glazy surface; and on reference to any intelligent work of botany, it appears that they both belong to the same order of inward-growing Endogens, so that a few moments bestowed on the reed by the waters give a clear idea of the tropical bamboo, and make the singular foreign production home-like and natural.
I found, while I was shooting every day, that the reeds, and ferns, and various growths through which I pushed my way, explained to me the jungles of India, the swamps of Central Africa, and the backwoods of America; all the vegetation of the world. Representatives exist in our own woods, hedges, and fields, or by the shore of inland waters. It was the same with flowers. I think I am scientifically accurate in saying that every known plant has a relative of the same species or genus, growing wild in this country. The very daisy, the commonest of all, contains a volume of botany; so do the heaths, and the harebells that hang so heavily under the weight of the September dew. The horse-tails by the shore carry the imagination further back into the prehistoric world when relations of these plants flourished as trees. The horse-tails by ponds are generally short, about a foot or eighteen inches high, more or less, but in ditches occasionally there are specimens of the giant horse-tail as high as the waistcoat, with a stem as thick as a walking-stick. This is a sapling from which the prehistoric tree can readily be imagined. From our southern woods the wild cat has been banished, but still lives in the north as an English representative of that ferocious feline genus which roams in tropical forests. We still have the deer, both wild and in parks. Then there are the birds, and these, in the same manner as plants, represent the inhabitants of the trackless wilds abroad. Happily the illustration fails mostly in reptiles, which need not be regretted; but even these, in their general outline as it were, are presented.
It has long been one of my fancies that this country is an epitome of the natural world, and that if any one has come really into contact with its productions, and is familiar with them, and what they mean and represent, then he has a knowledge of all that exists on the earth. It holds good even of Australia; for palaeontologists produce fossil remains of marsupials or kangaroos. As for the polar conditions, when going round for snipes I constantly saw these in miniature. The planing action of ice was shown in the ditches, where bridges of ice had been formed; these slipping, with a partial thaw, smoothed the grasses and mars of teazles in the higher part of the slope, and then lower down, as the pressure increased, cut away the earth, exposing the roots of grasses, and sometimes the stores of acorns laid up by mice. Frozen again in the night, the glacier stayed, and crumbling earth, leaves, fibres, acorns, and small dead boughs fell on it. Slipping on as the wind grew warmer, it carried these with it and deposited them fifty yards from where they originated. This is exactly the action of a glacier. The ice-mist was often visible over the frozen water-meadows, where I went for duck, teal, and at intervals a woodcock in the adjacent mounds. But it was better seen in the early evening over a great pond, a mile or more long; where, too, the immense lifting power of water was exemplified, as the merest trickle of a streamlet flowing in by-and-by forced up the thick ice in broad sheets weighing hundreds of tons. Then, too, breathing-holes formed just as they are described in the immense lakes of North America, Lakes Superior or Michigan, and in the ice of the Polar circle. These were never frozen over, and attracted wild-fowl.
In August, when there were a few young ducks about, the pond used to remind me in places of the tropical lakes we heard so much of after the explorers got through the portentous continent, on account of the growth of aquatic weeds, the quantity and extent of which no one would credit who had not seen them. No wonder the explorers could not get through the papyrus-grown rivers and lakes, for a boat could hardly be forced through these. Acres upon acres of weeds covered the place, some coming up from a depth of twelve feet. Some fish are chiefly on the feed in the morning, and any one who has the courage to get up at five will find them ravenous. We often visited the place a little after that hour. A swim was generally the first thing, and I mention a swim because it brings me to the way in which this mere pond illustrated the great ocean which encircles the world. For it is well known that the mighty ocean is belted with currents, the cold water of the Polar seas seeking the warmth of the Equator, and the warm water of the Equator floating—like the Gulf Stream—towards the Pole, floating because (I think I am right) the warm water runs on the surface. The favourite spot for swimming in our pond was in such a position that a copse cast a wide piece of water there into deep shadow all the morning up till ten o'clock at least. At six in the morning this did not matter, all the water was of much the same temperature; having been exposed to the night everywhere, it was cold of course.