Sounds do not always give us pleasure according to their sweetness and melody, nor do harsh sounds always displease. We are more apt to be captivated or disgusted with the associations which they promote than with the notes themselves. Thus the shrilling of the field-cricket, though sharp and stridulous, yet marvellously delights some hearers, filling their minds with a train of summer ideas of everything that is rural, verdurous, and joyous.
The delight I know, but I cannot wholly agree with the explanation. A couple of months before this visit to Selborne, on 25th May, on passing some small grass-fields, enclosed in high, untrimmed hedges, on the border of a pine wood near Hythe, by Southampton Water, I all at once became conscious of a sound, which indeed had been for some considerable time in my ears, increasing in volume as I went on until it forced my attention to it. When I listened, I found myself in a place where field-crickets were in extraordinary abundance; there must have been many hundreds within hearing distance, and their delicate shrilling came from the grass and hedges all round me. It was as if all the field-crickets in the county had congregated and were holding a grand musical festival at that spot. A dozen or twenty house-crickets in a kitchen would have made more noise; this was not loud, nor could it properly be described as a noise; it was more like a subtle music without rise or fall or change; or like a continuous, diffused, silvery-bright, musical hum, which surrounded one like an atmosphere, and at the same time pervaded and trembled through one like a vibration. It was certainly very delightful, and the feeling in this instance was not due to association, but, I think, to the intrinsic beauty of the sound itself.
Wild flowers
The Selborne stream, or Bourne, with its meadows and tangled copses on either side, was my favourite noonday haunt. The volume of water does not greatly diminish during the summer months, but in many places the bed of the stream was quite grown over with aquatic plants, topped with figwort, huge water-agrimony, with its masses of powdery, flesh-coloured blooms, creamy meadow-sweet, and rose-purple loosestrife, and willow-herb with its appetising odour of codlins and cream. The wild musk, or monkey-flower, a Hampshire plant about which there will be much to say in another chapter, was also common. At one spot a mass of it grew at the foot of a high bank on the water's edge; from the top of the bank long branches of briar-rose trailed down, and the rich, pure yellow mimulus blossoms and ivory-white roses of the briar were seen together. An even lovelier effect was produced at another spot by the mingling of the yellow flowers with the large turquoise-blue water forget-me-nots.
The most charming of the Selborne wild plants that flower in July is the musk mallow. It was quite common round the village, and perhaps the finest plant I saw was in the churchyard, growing luxuriantly by a humble grave near the little gate that opens to the Lyth and Bourne. As it is known to few persons, there must almost every day have been strangers and pilgrims in the churchyard who looked with admiration on that conspicuous plant, with its deep-cut, scented geranium-like, beautiful leaves, tender grey-green in colour, and its profusion of delicate, silky, rose-coloured flowers. Many would look on it as some rare exotic, and wonder at its being there by that lowly green mound. But to the residents it was a musk mallow and nothing more—a weed in the churchyard.
When one morning I found two men mowing the grass, I called their attention to this plant and asked them to spare it, telling them that it was one which the daily visitors to the village would admire above all the red geraniums and other gardeners' flowers which they would have to leave untouched. This simple request appeared to put them out a good deal; they took their hats off and wiped the sweat from their foreheads, and after gravely pondering the matter for some time, said they would "see about it" or "bear it in mind" when they came round to that side. In the afternoon, when the mowing was done, I returned and found that the musk mallow had not been spared.
During my stay I was specially interested in two of the common Selborne birds—the cirl bunting and the swift. At about four o'clock each morning the lively, vigorous song of the cirl bunting would be heard from the gardens or ground of the Wakes, at the foot of the hill. From four to six, at intervals, was his best singing-time; later in the day he sang at much longer intervals. There appeared to be three pairs of breeding birds: one at the Wakes, another on the top of the hill to the left of the Zigzag path, and a third below the churchyard. The cock bird of the last pair sang at intervals every day during my visit from a tree in the churchyard, and from a big sycamore growing at the side of it. On 14th July I had a good opportunity of judging the penetrative power of this bunting's voice, for by chance, just as the bells commenced ringing for the six o'clock Sunday evening service, the bird, perched on a small cypress in the churchyard, began to sing. Though only about forty yards from the tower, he was not in the least discomposed by the clanging of the bells, but sang at proper intervals the usual number of times—six or eight—his high, incisive voice sounding distinct through that tempest of jangled metallic music.
Cirl bunting
I was often at Farringdon, a village close by, and there, too, the churchyard had its cirl bunting, singing merrily at intervals from a perch not above thirty yards from the building. And as at Selborne and Farringdon, so I have found it in most places in Hampshire, especially in the southern half of the county; the cirl is the village bunting whose favourite singing place is in the quiet churchyard or the shade-trees at the farm: compared with other members of the genus he might almost be called our domestic bunting. The yellowhammer is never heard in a village: at Selborne to find him one had to climb the hill and go out on the common, and there he could be heard drawling out his lazy song all day long. How curious to think that Gilbert White never distinguished between these two species, although it is probable that he heard the cirl on every summer day during the greater part of his life.
Visiting swifts