Hampshire Days

by W. H. Hudson

Wooing spider's antics

I had observed this white spider before, but had always seen it sitting motionless in its flower; this one was curiously restless, and very soon after I had settled myself down by its side it began to throw itself into a variety of strange attitudes. The four long forelegs would go up all at once and stand out like rays from the round, white body, and by-and-by they would drop and hang down like two long strings from the flower. Pretty soon I discovered the cause of these actions in the presence of a second spider, less than half the size of the first, moving about close by. His smallness and hideling habits had prevented me from seeing him sooner. This small, active, white creature was the male, and though moving constantly about in the heath at a distance of half a foot from her, it was plain that they could see each other and also understand each other very well. As he moved round her, passing by means of the threads he kept throwing out from spray to spray, she moved round on her flower to keep him in sight; but though fascinated and drawn to her, he still dreaded, and was pulled by his fear and his desire in opposite ways. The excitement of both would increase whenever he came a little nearer, and their attitudes were then sometimes very curious, the most singular being one of the male when he would raise his body vertically in the air and stand on his two pairs of forelegs. When very near, they would extend the long forelegs and touch one another; but always at this point when they were closest and the excitement greatest a panic would seize him, and he would make haste to get to a safer distance. On two such occasions she, as if afraid to lose him altogether, quitted her beloved flower and moved after him, and after wandering about for some time to no purpose, found another flower-cluster to settle on. And so the queer wooing went on, and seemed no nearer to a conclusion, when, to my surprise, I found that I had been sitting and lying there, with eyes close to the female spider, for an hour and a half. Once only, feeling a little bored, I gently stroked her on the back, which appeared to please her as much as if she had been a pig and I had scratched her back with my walking-stick. But no sooner had the soothing effect passed off than she began again watching the movements of that fantastic little lover of hers, who loved her for her beautiful white body, but feared her on account of those poison fangs which he could probably see every time she smiled to encourage him. At the end of my long watch the conclusion of the whole complex business seemed farther off than ever: fear had got the mastery, and the male had put so great a distance between them, and moved now so languidly, that it seemed useless to remain any longer.

A little forest boy

I had not been watching alone all this time: when I had been about half an hour on the spot I had a visitor, a small miserable-looking New Forest boy; he came walking towards me with a little crooked stick in his hand, and asked me in a low, husky voice if I had seen a pony in that part of the Forest. I told him sharply not to come too near as his steps would disturb a spider I was watching. It did not seem to surprise him that I was there by myself watching a spider, but creeping up he subsided gently on the heath by my side and began watching with me. At intervals when there was a lull in the excitement of the spiders I could spare time for a glance at my poor little companion. He was probably eleven or twelve years old, but his stature was that of a boy of eight—a small, stunted creature, meanly dressed, with light-coloured lustreless hair, pale-blue eyes, and a weary sad expression on his pale face. Yet he called himself a gipsy! But the south of England gipsies are a mixed and degenerate lot. They are now so incessantly harried by the authorities that the best of them settle down in the villages, while those who keep to the old ways and vagrant open-air life are joined by tramps and wastrels of every shade of colour. This little fellow had little or no Romany blood in his watery veins.

He told me that his people were camping not far off, and that the party consisted of his parents with six (the half-dozen youngest) of their thirteen children. They had a pony and trap; but the pony had got away during the night, and the father and two or three of the children were out looking for it in different directions. We talked a little at intervals, and I found him curiously ignorant concerning the wild life of the Forest. He assured me that he had never seen the cuckoo, but he had heard of its singular habits, and was anxious to know how big a bird it was, also its colour. In some trees near us a wood-wren was uttering its sorrowful little wailing note of anxiety, and when I asked him what bird it was, he answered "a sparrer." Nevertheless he seemed to feel a dim sort of interest in the spiders we were watching, and at length our intermittent conversation ceased altogether. When at last, after a long silence, I spoke, he did not answer, and glancing round I found that he had gone to sleep. Lying there with eyes closed, his pale face on the bright green turf, he looked almost corpse-like. Even his lips were colourless. Getting up, I placed a penny piece on the turf beside his little crooked stick, so that on awaking he should have a gleam of happiness in his poor little soul, and went softly away. But he was sleeping very soundly, for when after going a couple of hundred yards I looked back he was still lying motionless on the same spot.

But when I looked back, and when, regaining the road, I went on my way, and indeed for long hours after, I saw the boy vaguely, almost like a boy of mist, and was hardly able to recall his features, so faintly had he impressed me; while the spider on her flower, and the small male that wooed and won her many times yet never ventured to take her, were stamped so vividly on my brain, that even if I had wished it I could not have got rid of that persistent image. It made me miserable to think that I had left, thousands of miles away, a world of spiders exceeding in size, variety of shape and beauty and richness of colouring those I found here—surpassing them, too, in the marvellousness of their habits and that ferocity of disposition which is without a parallel in nature. I wished I could drop this burden of years so as to go back to them, to spend half a lifetime in finding out some of their fascinating secrets. Finally, I envied those who in future years will grow up in that green continent, with this passion in their hearts, and have the happiness which I had missed.

I, of course, knew that it was but the too vivid and persistent image of that particular creature on which my attention had been fixed which made me regard spiders generally as the most interesting beings in nature—the proper study of mankind, in fact. But it is always so; any new aspect, form, or manifestation of the principle of life, at the moment it comes before the vision and the mind, is, to one who is not a specialist, attractive beyond all others.

But, after all is said and done, I have as a fact spent many of my Hampshire days at a distance from the spots I love best, and my subject in this chapter will be of my sojourn in that eastern corner of the county, in the village and parish which all naturalists love, and which many of them know so well.

Visitors to Selborne

It is told in the books that some seventy or eighty years ago an adventurous naturalist journeyed down from London by rough ways to the remote village of Selborne, to see it with his own eyes and describe its condition to the world. The way is not long nor rough in these times, and on every summer day, almost at every hour of the day, strangers from all parts of the country, with not a few from foreign lands, may be seen in the old village street. Of these visitors that come like shadows, so depart, nine in every ten, or possibly nineteen in every twenty, have no real interest in Gilbert White and his work and the village he lived in, but are members of that innumerable tribe of gadders about the land who religiously visit every spot which they are told should be seen.