While I sat on the log under the oak, every now and then wasps came to the crooked pieces of sawn timber, which had been barked. They did not appear to be biting it—they can easily snip off fragments of the hardest oak—they merely alighted and examined it, and went on again. Looking at them, I did not notice the lane till something moved, and two young pheasants ran by along the middle of the track and into the cover at the side. The grass at the edge which they pushed through closed behind them, and feeble as it was—grass only—it shut off the interior of the cover as firmly as iron bars. The pheasant is a strong lock upon the woods; like one of Chubb’s patent locks, he closes the woods as firmly as an iron safe can be shut. Wherever the pheasant is artificially reared, and a great ‘head’ kept up for battue-shooting, there the woods are sealed. No matter if the wanderer approach with the most harmless of intentions, it is exactly the same as if he were a species of burglar. The botanist, the painter, the student of nature, all are met with the high-barred gate and the threat of law. Of course, the pheasant-lock can be opened by the silver key; still, there is the fact, that since pheasants have been bred on so large a scale, half the beautiful woodlands of England have been fastened up. Where there is no artificial rearing there is much more freedom; those who love the forest can roam at their pleasure, for it is not the fear of damage that locks the gate, but the pheasant. In every sense, the so-called sport of battue-shooting is injurious—injurious to the sportsman, to the poorer class, to the community. Every true sportsman should discourage it, and indeed does. I was talking with a thorough sportsman recently, who told me, to my delight, that he never reared birds by hand; yet he had a fair supply, and could always give a good day’s sport, judged as any reasonable man would judge sport. Nothing must enter the domains of the hand-reared pheasant; even the nightingale is not safe. A naturalist has recorded that in a district he visited, the nightingales were always shot by the keepers and their eggs smashed, because the singing of these birds at night disturbed the repose of the pheasants! They also always stepped on the eggs of the fern-owl, which are laid on the ground, and shot the bird if they saw it, for the same reason, as it makes a jarring sound at dusk. The fern-owl or goatsucker is one of the most harmless of birds—a sort of evening swallow—living on moths, chafers, and similar night-flying insects. Thus the man in velveteens plays ‘fantastic tricks’ before high heaven!
Continuing my walk, still under the oaks and green acorns, I wondered why I did not meet any one. There was a man cutting fern in the wood—a labourer—and another cutting up thistles in a field; but with the exception of men actually employed and paid, I did not meet a single person, though the lane I was following is close to several well-to-do places. I call that a well-to-do place where there are hundreds of large villas inhabited by wealthy people. It is true that the great majority of persons have to attend to business, even if they enjoy a good income; still, making every allowance for such a necessity, it is singular how few, how very few, seem to appreciate the quiet beauty of this lovely country. Somehow, they do not seem to see it—to look over it; there is no excitement in it, for one thing. They can see a great deal in Paris, but nothing in an English meadow. I have often wondered at the rarity of meeting any one in the fields, and yet—curious anomaly—if you point out anything, or describe it, the interest exhibited is marked. Every one takes an interest, but no one goes to see for himself. For instance, since the natural history collection was removed from the British Museum to a separate building at South Kensington, it is stated that the visitors to the Museum have fallen from an average of twenty-five hundred a day to one thousand; the inference is, that out of every twenty-five, fifteen came to see the natural history cases. Indeed, it is difficult to find a person who does not take an interest in some department of natural history, and yet I scarcely ever meet any one in the fields. You may meet many in the autumn far away in places famous for scenery, but almost none in the meadows at home. On the other hand, if the labouring classes have a holiday, they immediately go out into the country.
I stayed by a large pond to look at the shadows of the trees on the green surface of duckweed. The soft green of the smooth weed received the shadows as if specially prepared to show them to advantage. The more the tree was divided—the more interlaced its branches and less laden with foliage, the more it ‘came out’ on the green surface; each slender twig was reproduced, and sometimes even the leaves. From an oak, brown, and from a lime, orange leaves had fallen, and remained on the green weed; the flags by the shore were turning brown; a tint of yellow was creeping up the rushes, and the great trunk of a fir shone reddish brown in the sunlight. There was colour even about the still pool, where the weeds grew so thickly that the moorhens could scarcely swim through them. In a recent paper in Chambers’s Journal ([No. 25]) I mentioned some of the points of interest that might be found about roofs. Since then, a correspondent has told me that in Wales he found a cottage perfectly roofed with fern—it grew so thickly as to conceal the roof. Had a painter put this in a picture, many would have exclaimed: ‘How fanciful! He must have made it up; it could never have grown like that!’ Not long after receiving my correspondent’s kind letter, I chanced to find a roof near London upon which the same fern was growing in lines along the tiles. It grew plentifully, but was not in so flourishing a condition as that found in Wales. Painters are sometimes accused of calling upon their imagination when they are really depicting fact, for the ways of nature vary very much in different localities, and that which may seem impossible in one place is common enough in another.
BY MEAD AND STREAM.
CHAPTER LII.—HOW IT WAS DONE.
Coutts was for an instant dumb with surprise and chagrin. That smart stroke of business on which he had been priding himself was completely spoiled, and all possibility of ingratiating himself with Mr Shield was at an end.
When the bill was produced by Coutts, Wrentham had become white, and his lips, dry and feverish, closed tightly. When the signatures were calmly acknowledged by Philip and Shield, he gazed at them with a bewildered expression, then grasped the back of a chair and pretended to be looking through the window at something opposite. Sergeant Dier gave a slight jerk of his body as if lifting his heel from the floor. He darted a suspicious glance at his employer and at Wrentham. Then he turned to Tuppit and gazed at him with a bland admiring smile. Shield, Beecham, Philip, and Tuppit were unmoved.
Coutts took the bill from Tuppit, and after deliberate examination replaced it in his pocket-book.
‘I am delighted to find that it is all right, and that it will be duly honoured,’ he said; but cool as he was, the acrimony of his tone contradicted the words. ‘The fact that it is so takes me out of a very awkward corner. I must say, however, Mr Shield, that you would have saved yourself and me a great deal of unnecessary trouble and waste of time if you had told me when I first came that the thing was correct.’
‘Have a lot of things on my mind. Forget sometimes,’ Shield jerked out carelessly.