CHAPTER VIII
Hampshire, north and south—A spot abounding in life—Lyndhurst—A white spider—Wooing spider's antics—A New Forest little boy—Blonde gipsies—The boy and the spider—A distant world of spiders—Selborne and its visitors—Selborne revisited—An owl at Alton—A wagtail at the Wakes—The cockerel and the martin—Heat at Selborne—House crickets—Gilbert White on crickets—A colony of field-crickets—Water plants—Musk mallow—Cirl buntings at Selborne—Evening gatherings of swifts at Selborne—Locustidæ—Thamnotrizon cinereus—English names wanted—Black grasshopper's habits and disposition—Its abundance at Selborne.
In the last chapter I got away—succeeded in breaking away, would perhaps be a better expression—from that favourite hunting-ground of mine farther south; and the reader would perhaps care to know why a book descriptive of days in Hampshire should be so much taken up with days in one small corner of the county. Hampshire is not a very large county compared with some others: I have traversed it in this and in that direction often enough to be pretty familiar with a great deal of it, from the walled-round cornfield which was once Roman Calleva to the Solent; and from the beautiful wild Rother on the Sussex border to the Avon in the west. There is much to see and know within these limits: for all those whose proper study is man, his history and his works; and for the archæologist and for the artist and seekers after the picturesque, there is much—nay, there is more to attract in the northern than in the southern half of the county. I, not of them, go south, and by preference to one spot, because my chief interest and delight is in life—life in all its forms, from man who "walks erect and smiling looks on heaven" to the minutest organic atoms—the invisible life. It here comes into my mind that the very smell of the earth, in which we all delight, the smell which fills the air after rain in summer, and is strong when we turn up a spadeful of fresh mould, which the rustic calls "good," believing, perhaps rightly, that we must smell it every day to be well and live long, is after all an odour given off by a living thing—Cladothrix odorifera. Too small for human eyes, which see only objects proportioned to their bigness, so minute, indeed, that millions may inhabit a clod no larger than one's watch, yet they are able to find a passage to us through the other subtler sense; and from the beginning of our earthly journey even to its end we walk with this odour in our nostrils, and love it, and will perhaps take with us a sweet memory of it into the after-life.
Life being more than all else to me, I am drawn to the spot where it exists in greatest abundance and variety.
I remember feeling this passion very strongly one day during this summer of 1902 after looking at a spider. It was an interesting spider, and I found it within a couple of miles of Lyndhurst, of all places; a spot so disagreeable to me that I avoid it, and look for nothing and wish for nothing to detain me in its vicinity.
Lyndhurst
Lyndhurst is objectionable to me not only because it is a vulgar suburb, a transcript of Chiswick or Plumstead in the New Forest where it is in a wrong atmosphere, but also because it is the spot on which London vomits out its annual crowd of collectors, who fill its numerous and ever-increasing brand-new red-brick lodging-houses, and who swarm through all the adjacent woods and heaths, men, women, and children (hateful little prigs!) with their vasculums, beer and treacle pots, green and blue butterfly nets, killing bottles, and all the detestable paraphernalia of what they would probably call "Nature Study."
It happened that one day, a mile or two from Lyndhurst, going along the road I caught sight of a pretty bit of heath through an opening in the wood, and turning into it I looked out a spot to rest in, and was just about to cast myself down when I noticed a small white spider, disturbed by my step, drop from a cluster of bell-heath flowers to the ground. I stood still, and presently the spider, recovered from its alarm, drew itself up again by an invisible thread and settled down on the bright-coloured blossoms. Seating myself close by, I began to watch the strangely shaped and coloured little creature. It was a Thomisus—a genus of spiders distinguished by the extraordinary length of the two pairs of forelegs. The one before me, Thomisus citreus, is also singular on account of its colour—pale citron or white—and its habit of sitting on flowers. This habit and the colour, we may see, are related. The citreus is not a weaver of snares, but hunts for its prey, or rather lies in wait to capture any insect that comes to the flower on which it sits. On white, yellow, and indeed on most pale-coloured flowers, it almost becomes invisible. On the brilliant red bell-heath blossom it showed plainly enough, but even here it did not look nearly so conspicuous as when on a green leaf.