Now there were a score or so of the farm folk waiting hard by, each armed with a cudgel; and with them seemingly every dog in the village. As the machine went round, every time making the patch of standing corn smaller, I could see rabbits bolting in all directions from the diminishing cover; and there uprose continually a hubbub of voices from dogs and men. Towards the end, the stubble became alive with the little dark scurrying forms, fleeing to the surrounding fields, the most of them escaping harmlessly for want of pursuers. But even then, as I afterwards learned, some eight or nine dozen were killed.

I have always kept away from these harvest battues, as indeed from all scenes of sport and congregations of sportsmen. I am willing enough to profit by these activities, and receive and enjoy my full share of the furred and feathered spoil admittedly without one humanitarian qualm. But this much confessed, I would gladly welcome the day when everywhere, save in the rabbit warrens, the sound of the sporting gun should cease throughout this southern land. Rabbits must be kept down to the end of time; but, for the creatures that require preservation, too great a price is paid, and paid by the wrong class. It is not the owner of game-preserves who bears the main cost of his thunderous pleasuring. It is the lover of wild life, who sees the hawks and owls and small deer of the woodlands growing scarcer with every year; and the children who, in the springtime, are cheated out of their right to wander through the primrose glades.

To many this may seem a wearisomely trite point of view, affecting a grievance as old as the hills, and even less likely of obliteration. But though the point of view is ancient enough, the grievance is no longer so. Of late years the ranks of village dwellers have been very largely reinforced from the classes who care little for sport and a great deal for all other allurements of the country-side. Rural England is no longer peopled by sportsmen and the dependents of sportsmen; but, slowly and surely, a majority is creeping up in the villages, composed of men and women both knowing and loving Nature, and to whom the old-time local policy of endurance under deprivation of rights for expediency’s sake, is an incomprehensible, as well as an intolerable thing. All the vast-winged, beautiful marauders of the air that I love to watch, are ruthlessly shot down by the gamekeepers on a suspicion presumptive and unproved; but the fox that, in a single night, massacres every bird in the villager’s hen-roost, must go scatheless because poor profit may not be set before rich pastime.

One day, almost the hottest so far, I was out in the meadows, and came upon a curious thing. The path, or rather green lane, ran between high hedges. On either hand there was a great field of flowering crops, the one red clover, the other sainfoin. There must have been twenty or thirty acres of each stretching away under the tense still air and light, much of a colour, but the sainfoin of a softer, purer pink. Both fields seemed alike attractive to the bees; but while, to the right, the sainfoin gave out a mighty note of organ music, the red clover on my left was utterly silent. Looking through a gap in the foliage, I could not see there a single butterfly or bee. The truth, of course, was that the nectar in the trumpet-petals of the clover was too far down for the honey-bee to reach; nor would even the bumble-bees trouble about it, with a whole province of sainfoin hard by, over-brimming with choicer, more attainable sweets.

As I wandered along, between these great zones of sound and silence, the air seemed to grow hotter and more oppressive with every moment. There was something uncanny in the stillness of all around me. The green sprays in the tops of the highest elms lay against the blue sky sharp and clear, as though enamelled upon it. Not a bird sang in the woodland. Save for the deep throbbing melody from the sainfoin, all the world lay dumb and stupefied under the noontide glare. And then, chancing to turn and look southward, I saw the cause of it. A storm was coming up. Close down on the horizon lay a bank of cloud like a solid billow of ink. It was driving up at incredible speed. Though not a leaf or grass blade stirred around me, the cloud seemed tossed and torn in a whirlwind’s grip. Every moment it lifted higher towards the sun, changing its shape incessantly, black fold upon fold rolling together, colliding, giving place to others blacker still. And flying in advance of all this, borne by a still swifter air-current, were long sombre streamers of cloud rent into every conceivable shape of torn and tattered rags.

And now, as the dense cloud-pack got up, the brilliant light was blotted out at a stroke, and this startling thing happened. Every bee, apparently, at work in the vast field of sainfoin, spread her wings at the ominous signal, and raced for home. They swept over my head in numbers that literally darkened the sky. Again, literally, the sound of their going was like a continuous deep syren-note, striking point-blank in the ear. For a minute at most it endured, and then died away almost as suddenly as it came. A bleak ghostly light paled on everything around me. Little cat’s paws of wind flung through the torpid air. Afar the harsh voice of the oncoming tempest sounded. Slow hot gouts of water began to fall, and every moment the inky pall of cloud lit up with an internal fire.

At first, as I made off homeward in the track of the vanished bee-army, I tried to emulate their speed. But the torrent came surging and crying up in my rear, and in a dozen yards I was waterlogged. Thereafter, going leisurely, I came at last into the village, and so to the house. And here, in spite of the deluge, I must stop and look on at more wonders. It seemed almost impossible for any bird to sustain itself on wings under such a cataract. But there above me the martins were at their old incessant gambols, circling and darting about, hither and thither, high and low, in a whirling madcap crew; and higher still, right in the throat of the tempest, I could make out the swifts, hundreds strong, weaving their old mazy pattern on the sky, as though in the pearl and opal dusk of a summer’s evening.

THE TEA-GARDEN
AUGUST

I

Old Runridge’s misadventure in wedlock has proved a trouble to more people than one in Windlecombe. In former years, though boating parties from the town were continually to be seen on the river, when the August holiday season began, they seldom pulled up at our ferry stairs. From the waterside the village had a somewhat inhospitable look, while a mile farther on there were the North Woods, Stavisham’s traditional picnicking ground, where, at the gamekeeper’s cottage, all were sure of a welcome. Such wandering holiday-makers as found their way into Windlecombe came usually by road, and were of the tranquil, undemonstrative breed, like pedestrians all the world over. There would seem to be something about sitting long hours in a rowing-boat which is detrimental, even debasing, to a certain common variety of human nature. The tendency to run and shout and skylark on reaching dry ground again appears to be irresistible to this numerous class. And it is at Mrs. Runridge’s door that we must lay the blame of submitting Windlecombe to a pestilent innovation.