HAMPSHIRE
DAYS

W. H. HUDSON

1923
J. M. DENT & SONS LTD.
LONDON & TORONTO
PARIS: J. M. DENT ET FILS

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

INSCRIBED TO
SIR EDWARD AND LADY GREY
NORTHUMBRIANS
WITH HAMPSHIRE WRITTEN IN THEIR HEARTS

CONTENTS

Autumn in the New Forest—Red colour in mammals—November mildness—A house by the Boldre—An ideal spot for small birds—Abundance of nests—Small mammals and the weasel's part—Voles and mice—Hornet and bank-vole—Young shrews—A squirrel's visit—Green woodpecker's drumming-tree—Drumming of other species—Beauty of great spotted woodpecker—The cuckoo controversy—A cuckoo in a robin's nest—Behaviour of the cuckoo—Extreme irritability—Manner of ejecting eggs and birds from the nest—Loss of irritability—Insensibility of the parent robins—Discourse on mistaken kindness, pain and death in nature, the annual destruction of bird life, and the young cuckoo's instinct.

[CHAPTER II.]

Between the Boldre and the Exe—Abuse of the New Forest—Character of the population—New Forest code and conscience—A radical change foreshadowed—Tenacity of the Forest fly—Oak woods of Beaulieu—Swallow and pike—Charm of Beaulieu—Instinctive love of open spaces—A fragrant heath—Nightjars—Snipe—Redshanks—Pewits—Cause of sympathy with animals—Grasshopper and spider—A rapacious fly—Melancholy moods—Evening on the heath—"World-strangeness"—Pixie mounds—Death and burial—The dead in the barrows—Their fear of the living.

[CHAPTER III.]

A favourite New Forest haunt—Summertide—Young blackbird's call—Abundance of blackbirds and thrushes, and destruction of young—Starlings breeding—The good done by starlings—Perfume of the honeysuckle—Beauty of the hedge rose—Cult of the rose—Lesser whitethroat—His low song—Common and lesser whitethroat—In the woods—A sheet of bracken—Effect of broken surfaces—Roman mosaics at Silchester—Why mosaics give pleasure—Woodland birds—Sound of insect life—Abundance of flies—Sufferings of cattle—Dark Water—Biting and teasing flies—Feeding the fishes and fiddlers with flies.

[CHAPTER IV.]

The stag-beetle—Evening flight—Appearance on the wing—Seeking a mate—Stag and doe in a hedge—The plough-man and the beetle—A stag-beetle's fate—Concerning tenacity of life—Life appearances after death—A serpent's skin—A dead glow-worm's light—Little summer tragedies—A snaky spot—An adder's basking-place—Watching adders—The adder's senses—Adder's habits not well known—A pair of anxious pewits—A dead young pewit—Animals without knowledge of death—Removal of the dead by ants—Gould's observations on ants.

[CHAPTER V.]

Cessation of song—Oak woods less silent than others—Mixed gatherings of birds in oak woods—Abundance of caterpillars—Rapacious insects—Wood ants—Alarm cries of woodland birds—Weasel and small birds—Fascination—Weasel and short-tailed vole—Account of Egyptian cats fascinated by fire—Rabbits and stoats—Mystery of fascination—Cases of pre-natal suggestion—Hampshire pigs fascinated by fire—Conjectures as to the origin of fascination—A dead squirrel—A squirrel's fatal leap—Fleas large and small—Shrew and fleas—Fleas in woods—The squirrel's disposition—Food-hiding habit in animals—Memory in squirrels and dogs—The lower kind of memory.

[CHAPTER VI.]

Insects in Britain—Meadow ants—The indoor view of insect life—Insects in visible nature—The humming-bird hawk-moth and the parson lepidopterist—Rarity of death's-head moth—Hawk-moth and meadow-pipit—Silver-washed fritillaries on bracken—Flight of the white admiral butterfly—Dragon-flies—Want of English names—A water-keeper on dragon-flies—Moses Harris—Why moths have English names—Origin of the dragon-fly's bad reputation—Cordulegaster annulatus—Calopteryx virgo—Dragon-flies congregated—Glow-worm—Firefly and glow-worm compared—Variability in light—The insect's attitude when shining—Supposed use of the light—Hornets—A long-remembered sting—The hornet local in England—A splendid insect—Insects on ivy blossoms in autumn.

[CHAPTER VII.]

Great and greatest among insects—Our feeling for insect music—Crickets and grasshoppers—Cicada anglica—Locusta viridissima—Character of its music—Colony of green grasshoppers—Harewood Forest—Purple emperor—Grasshoppers' musical contests—The naturalist mocked—Female viridissima—Over-elaboration in the male—Habits of female—Wooing of the male by the female.

[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—Girl 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.

[CHAPTER IX.]

The Selborne atmosphere—Unhealthy faces—Selborne Common—Character of scenery—Wheatham Hill—Hampshire village churches—Gilbert White's strictures—Churches big and little—The peasants' religious feeling—Charm of old village churches—Seeking Priors Dean—Privett church—Blackmoor church—Churchyards—Change in gravestones—Beauty of old gravestones—Red alga on gravestones—Yew trees in churchyards—British dragon-tree—Farringdon village and yew—Crowhurst yew—Hurstbourne Priors yew—How yew trees are injured.

[CHAPTER X.]

Wolmer Forest—Charm of contrast and novelty in scenery—Aspect of Wolmer—Heath and pine—Colour of water and soil—An old woman's recollections—Story of the "Selborne mob"—Past and present times compared—Hollywater Clump—Age of trees—Bird life in the forest—Teal in their breeding haunts—Boys in the forest—Story of the horn-blower.

[CHAPTER XI.]

The Hampshire people—Racial differences in neighbouring counties—A neglected subject—Inhabitants of towns—Gentry and peasantry—Four distinct types—The common blonde type—Lean women—Deleterious effects of tea-drinking—A shepherd's testimony—A mixed race—The Anglo-Saxon—Case of reversion of type—Un-Saxon character of the British—Dark-eyed Hampshire people—Racial feeling with regard to eye-colours—The Iberian type—Its persistence—Character of the small dark man—Dark and blonde children—A dark village child.

[CHAPTER XII.]

Test and Itchen—Vegetation—Riverside villages—The cottage by the river—Itchen valley—Blossoming limes—Bird visitors—Goldfinch—Cirl bunting—Song—Plumage—Three common river birds—Coots—Moor-hen and nest—Little grebes' struggles—Male grebe's devotion—Parent coot's wisdom—A more or less happy family—Dogged little grebes—Grebes training their young—Fishing birds and fascination.

[CHAPTER XIII.]

Morning in the valley—Abundance of swifts—Unlikeness to other birds—Mayfly and swallows—Mayfly and swift—Bad weather and hail—Swallows in the rain—Sand martins—An orphaned blackbird—Tamed by feeding—Survival of gregarious instinct in young blackbirds—Blackbird's good-night—Cirl buntings—Breeding habits and language—Habits of the young—Reed bunting—Beautiful weather—The oak in August.

[CHAPTER XIV.]

Yellow flowers—Family likeness in flavours and scents—Mimulus luteus—Flowers in church decoration—Effect of association—Mimulus luteus as a British plant—A rule as to naturalised plants wanted—A visit to Swarraton—Changes since Gilbert White's day—"Wild musk"—Bird life on the downs—Turtle-dove nestlings—Blue skin in doves—A boy naturalist—Birds at the cottage—The wren's sun-bath—Wild fruits ripen—An old chalk pit—Birds and elderberries—Past and present times compared—Calm days—Migration of swallows—Conclusion.

HAMPSHIRE DAYS

CHAPTER I

Here, by chance, in the early days of December 1902, at the very spot where my book begins, I am about to bring it to an end.

A few days ago, coming hither from the higher country at Silchester, where the trees were already nearly bare, I was surprised to find the oak woods of this lower southern part of the New Forest still in their full autumnal foliage. Even now, so late in the year, after many successive days and nights of rain and wind, they are in leaf still: everywhere the woods are yellow, here where the oak predominates; the stronger golden-red and russet tints of the beech are vanished. We have rain and wind on most days, or rather mist and rain by day and wind with storms of rain by night; days, too, or parts of days, when it is very dark and still, and when there is a universal greyness in earth and sky. At such times, seen against the distant slaty darkness or in the blue-grey misty atmosphere, the yellow woods look almost more beautiful than in fine weather.

The wet woodland roads and paths are everywhere strewn, and in places buried deep in fallen leaves—yellow, red, and russet; and this colour is continued under the trees all through the woods, where the dead bracken has now taken that deep tint which it will keep so long as there is rain or mist to wet it for the next four or five months. Dead bracken with dead leaves on a reddish soil; and where the woods are fir, the ground is carpeted with lately-fallen needles of a chestnut red, which brightens almost to orange in the rain. Now, at this season, in this universal redness of the earth where trees and bracken grow, we see that Nature is justified in having given that colour—red and reddish-yellow—to all or to most of her woodland mammals. Fox and foumart and weasel and stoat; the hare too; the bright squirrel; the dormouse and harvest-mouse; the bank-vole and the wood-mouse. Even the common shrew and lesser shrew, though they rarely come out by day, have a reddish tinge on their fur. Water-shrew and water-vole inhabit the banks of streams, and are safer without such a colour; the dark grey badger is strictly a night rover.

Autumn in the New Forest

Sometimes about noon the clouds grow thin in that part of the sky, low down, where the sun is, and a pale gleam of sunlight filters through; even a patch of lucid blue sky sometimes becomes visible for a while: but the light soon fades; after mid-day the dimness increases, and before long one begins to think that evening has come. Withal it is singularly mild. One could almost imagine in this season of mist and wet and soft airs in late November that this is a land where days grew short and dark indeed, but where winter comes not, and the sensation of cold is unknown. It is pleasant to be out of doors in such weather, to stand in the coloured woods listening to that autumn sound of tits and other little birds wandering through the high trees in straggling parties, talking and calling to one another in their small sharp voices. Or to walk by the Boldre, or, as some call it, the Lymington, a slow, tame stream in summer, invisible till you are close to it; but now, in flood, the trees that grow on its banks and hid it in summer are seen standing deep in a broad, rushing, noisy river.

The woodpecker's laugh has the same careless happy sound as in summer: it is scarcely light in the morning before the small wren pours out his sharp bright lyric outside my window; it is time, he tells me, to light my candle and get up. The starlings are about the house all day long, vocal even in the rain, carrying on their perpetual starling conversation—talk and song and recitative; a sort of bird-Yiddish, with fluty fragments of melody stolen from the blackbird, and whistle and click and the music of the triangle thrown in to give variety. So mild is it that in the blackness of night I sometimes wander into the forest paths and by furzy heaths and hedges to listen for the delicate shrill music of our late chirper in the thickets, our Thamnotrizon, about which I shall write later; and look, too, for a late glow-worm shining in some wet green place. Late in October I found one in daylight, creeping about in the grass on Selborne Hill; and some few, left unmarried, may shine much later. And as to the shade-loving grasshopper or leaf cricket, he sings, we know, on mild evenings in November. But I saw no green lamp in the herbage, and I heard only that nightly music of the tawny owl, fluting and hallooing far and near, bird answering bird in the oak woods all along the swollen stream from Brockenhurst to Boldre.

This race of wood owls perhaps have exceptionally strong voices: Wise, in his book on the New Forest, says that their hooting can be heard on a still autumn evening a distance of two miles. I have no doubt they can be heard a good mile.

A house by the Boldre

But it is of this, to a bird lover, delectable spot in the best bird-months of April, May, and June that I have to write. The house, too, that gave me shelter must be spoken of; for never have I known any human habitation, in a land where people are discovered dwelling in so many secret, green, out-of-the-world places, which had so much of nature in and about it. Grown-up and young people were in it, and children too, but they were girls, and had always quite spontaneously practised what I had preached—pet nothing and persecute nothing. There was no boy to disturb the wild creatures with his hunting instincts and loud noises; no dog, no cat, nor any domestic creature except the placid cows and fowls which supplied the household with milk and eggs. A small old picturesque red-brick house with high-pitched roof and tall chimneys, a great part of it overrun with ivy and creepers, the walls and tiled roof stained by time and many-coloured lichen to a richly variegated greyish red. The date of the house, cut in a stone tablet in one of the rooms, was 1692. In front there was no lawn, but a walled plot of ground with old, once ornamental trees and bushes symmetrically placed—yews, both spreading and cypress-shaped Irish yew, and tall tapering juniper, and arbor vitæ; it was a sort of formal garden which had long thrown off its formality. In a corner of the ground by the side of these dark plants were laurel, syringa, and lilac bushes, and among these such wildings as thorn, elder and bramble had grown up, flourishing greatly, and making of that flowery spot a tangled thicket. At the side of the house there was another plot of ground, grass-grown, which had once been the orchard, and still had a few ancient apple and pear trees, nearly past bearing, with good nesting-holes for the tits and starlings in their decayed mossy trunks. There were also a few old ivied shade-trees—chestnuts, fir, and evergreen oak.

Best of all (for the birds) were the small old half-ruined outhouses which had remained from the distant days when the place, originally a manor, had been turned into a farm-house. They were here and there, scattered about, outside the enclosure, ivy-grown, each looking as old and weather-stained and in harmony with its surroundings as the house itself—the small tumble-down barns, the cow-sheds, the pig-house, the granary with open door and the wooden staircase falling to pieces. All was surrounded by old oak woods, and the river was close by. It was an ideal spot for small birds. I have never in England seen so many breeding close together. The commoner species were extraordinarily abundant. Chaffinch and greenfinch; blackbird, throstle and missel-thrush; swallow and martin, and common and lesser whitethroat; garden warbler and blackcap; robin, dunnock, wren, flycatcher, pied wagtail, starling, and sparrow;—one could go round and put one's hand into half a dozen nests of almost any of these species. And very many of them had become partial to the old buildings: even in closed rooms where it was nearly dark, not only wrens, robins, tits, and wagtails, but blackbirds and throstles and chaffinches were breeding, building on beams and in or on the old nests of swallows and martins. The hawfinch and bullfinch were also there, the last rearing its brood within eight yards of the front door. One of his two nearest neighbours was a gold-crested wren. When the minute bird was sitting on her eggs, in her little cradle-nest suspended to a spray of the yew, every day I would pull the branch down so that we might all enjoy the sight of the little fairy bird in her fairy nest which she refused to quit. The other next-door neighbour of the bullfinch was the long-tailed tit, which built its beautiful little nest on a terminal spray of another yew, ten or twelve yards from the door; and this small creature would also let us pull the branch down and peep into her well-feathered interior.

Abundance of nests

It seemed that, from long immunity from persecution, all these small birds had quite lost their fear of human beings; but in late May and in June, when many young birds were out of the nest, one had to walk warily in the grass for fear of putting a foot on some little speckled creature patiently waiting to be visited and fed by its parents.

Nor were there birds only. Little beasties were also quite abundant; but they were of species that did no harm (at all events there), and the weasel would come from time to time to thin them down. Money is paid to mole-catcher and rat-catcher; the weasel charges you nothing: he takes it out in kind. And even as the jungle tiger, burning bright, and the roaring lion strike with panic the wild cattle and antelopes and herds of swine, so does this miniature carnivore, this fairy tiger of English homesteads and hedges, fill with trepidation the small deer he hunts and slays with his needle teeth—Nature's scourge sent out among her too prolific small rodents; her little blood-letter who relieves her and restores the balance. And therefore he, too, with his flat serpent head and fiery killing soul, is a "dear" creature, being, like the poet's web-footed beasts of an earlier epoch, "part of a general plan."

The most abundant of the small furred creatures were the two short-tailed voles—field-vole and bank-vole; the last, in his bright chestnut-red, the prettiest. Whenever I sat down for a few minutes in the porch I would see one or more run across the stones from one side, where masses of periwinkle grew against the house, to the other side, where Virginia creeper, rose, and an old magnolia tree covered the wall. One day at the back of the house by the scullery door I noticed a swaying movement in a tall seeded stem of dock, and looking down spied a wee harvest-mouse running and climbing nimbly on the slender branchlets, feeding daintily on the seed, and looking like a miniature squirrel on a miniature bush.

Just there, close to the door, was a wood-pile, and the hornets had made their nest in it. The year before they had made it in a loft in the house, and before that in the old barn. The splendid insects were coming and going all day, interfering with nobody and nobody interfering with them; and when I put a plate of honey for them on the logs close to their entrance they took no notice of it; but by-and-by bank-voles and wood-mice came stealing out from among the logs and fed on it until it was all gone.

I was surprised, and could only suppose that the hornets did not notice or discover the honey, because no such good thing was looked for so close to their door. Away from home the hornet was quick to discover anything sweet to the taste, and very ready to resent the presence of any other creature at the table.

Hornet and bank-vole

At the riverside, a few hundred yards from the house, I was sitting in the shade of a large elm tree one day when I was visited by a big hornet, who swept noisily down and settled on the trunk, four or five feet above the ground. A quantity of sap had oozed out into a deep cleft of the rough bark and had congealed there, and the hornet had discovered it. Before he had been long feeding on it I saw a little bank-vole come out from the roots of the tree and run up the trunk, looking very pretty in his bright chestnut fur as he came into the sunlight. Stealing up to the lower end of the cleft full of thickened sap he too began feeding on it. The hornet, who was at the upper end of the cleft, quite four inches apart from the vole, at once stopped eating and regarded the intruder for some time, then advanced towards him in a threatening attitude. The vole was frightened at this, starting and erecting his hair, and once or twice he tried to recover his courage and resume his feeding, but the hornet still keeping up his hostile movements, he eventually slipped quietly down and hid himself at the roots. When the hornet departed he came out again and went to the sap.

Wishing to see more, I spent most of that day and the day following at the spot, and saw hornet and vole meet many times. If the vole was at the sap when the hornet came he was at once driven off, and when the hornet was there first the vole was never allowed to feed, although on every occasion he tried to do so, stealing to his lower place in the gentlest way in order not to give offence, and after beginning to feed affecting not to see that the other had left off eating, and with raised head was regarding him with jealous eyes.

Rarely have I looked on a prettier little comedy in wild life.

But to return to the house. There was quite a happy family at that spot by the back door where the hornets were. A numerous family of shrews were reared, and the young, when they began exploring the world, used to creep over the white stone by the threshold. The girls would pick them up to feel their soft mole-like fur: the young shrew is a gentle creature and does not attempt to bite. Some of the more adventurous ones were always blundering into the empty flowerpots heaped against the wall, and there they would remain imprisoned until some person found and took them out.

One morning, at half-past four o'clock, when I was lying awake listening to the blackbird, a lively squirrel came dancing into the open window of my bedroom on the first floor. There were writing materials, flowers in glasses, and other objects on the ledge and dressing-table there, and he frisked about among them, chattering, wildly excited at seeing so many curious and pretty things, but he upset nothing; and by-and-by he danced out again into the ivy covering the wall on that side, throwing the colony of breeding sparrows into a great state of consternation.

Drumming of woodpecker

The river was quite near the house—not half a minute from the front door, though hidden from sight by the trees on its banks. Here, at the nearest point, there was an old half-dead dwarf oak growing by the water and extending one horizontal branch a distance of twenty feet over the stream. This was the favourite drumming-tree of a green woodpecker, and at intervals through the day he would visit it and drum half a dozen times or so. This drumming sounded so loud that, following the valley down, I measured the distance it could be heard and found it just one-third of a mile. At that distance I could hear it distinctly; farther on, not at all. It seemed almost incredible that the sound produced by so small a stick as a woodpecker's beak striking a tree should be audible at that distance.

It is hardly to be doubted that the drumming is used as a love-call, though it is often heard in late summer. It is, however, in early spring and in the breeding season that it is oftenest heard, and I have found that a good imitation of it will sometimes greatly excite the bird. The same bird may be heard drumming here, there, and everywhere in a wood or copse, the sound varying somewhat in character and strength according to the wood; but each bird as a rule has a favourite drumming-tree, and it probably angers him to hear another bird at the spot. On one occasion, finding that a very large, old, and apparently dying cedar in a wood was constantly used by the woodpecker, I went to the spot and imitated the sound. Very soon the bird came and begun drumming against me, close by. I responded, and again he drummed; and becoming more and more excited he flew close to me, and passing from tree to tree drummed at every spot he lighted on.

The other species have the same habit of drumming on one tree. I have noticed it in the small spotted, or banded, woodpecker; and have observed that invariably after he has drummed two or three times the female has come flying to him from some other part of the wood, and the two birds have then both together uttered their loud chirping notes and flown away.

On revisiting the spot a year after I had heard the green woodpecker drumming every day in the oak by the river, I found that he had forsaken it, and that close by, on the other side of the stream, a great spotted woodpecker had selected as his drumming-tree a very big elm growing on the bank. He drummed on a large dead branch about forty feet from the ground, and the sound he made was quite as loud as that of the green bird. It may be that the two big woodpeckers, who play equally well on the same instrument, are intolerant of one another's presence, and that in this case the spotted bird had driven the larger yaffle from his territory.

Our handsomest bird

One of the prettiest spots by the water was that very one where the spotted bird was accustomed to come, and I often went there at noon and sat for an hour on the grassy bank in the shade of the drumming-tree. The river was but thirty to forty feet wide at that spot, with masses of water forget-me-not growing on the opposite bank, clearly reflected in the sherry-coloured sunlit current below. The trees were mostly oaks, in the young vivid green of early June foliage. And one day when the sky, seen through that fresh foliage, was without a stain of vapour in its pure azure, when the wood was full of clear sunlight—so clear that silken spider webs, thirty or forty feet high in the oaks, were visible as shining red and blue and purple lines—the bird, after drumming high above my head, flew to an oak tree just before me, and clinging vertically to the bark on the high part of the trunk, remained there motionless for some time. His statuesque attitude, as he sat with his head thrown well back, the light glinting on his hard polished feathers, black and white and crimson, the setting in which he appeared of greenest translucent leaves and hoary bark and open sunlit space, all together made him seem not only our handsomest woodpecker, but our most beautiful bird. I had seen him at his best, and sitting there motionless amid the wind-fluttered leaves, he was like a bird-figure carved from some beautiful vari-coloured stone.

The most interesting events in animal life observed at this spot relate to the cuckoo in the spring of 1900. Some time before this Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace said, in the course of a talk we had, that he very much wanted me to find out exactly what happened in a nest in which a young cuckoo was hatched. It was, I replied, an old, old story—what could I see, supposing I was lucky enough to find a nest where I could observe it properly, more than Jenner, Hancock, Mrs. Hugh Blackburn, and perhaps other writers, had told us? Yes, it was an old story, he said, and he wanted it told again by someone else. People had lately been discrediting Jenner's account, and as to the other chief authority I had named, one writer, a Dr. Creighton, had said, "As for artists like Mrs. Blackburn, they can draw what they please—all out of their own brains: we can't trust them, or such as them." Sober-minded naturalists had come to regard the habit and abnormal strength attributed to the newly-hatched cuckoo as "not proven" or quite incredible; thus Seebohm had said, "One feels inclined to class these narratives with the equally well-authenticated stories of ghosts and other apparitions which abound."

Since my conversation with Dr. Wallace we have had more of these strange narratives—the fables and ghost stories which the unbelievers are compelled in the end to accept—and all that Dr. Jenner or his assistant saw others have seen, and some observers have even taken snapshots of the young cuckoo in the act of ejecting his fellow-nestling. But it appears from all the accounts which I have so far read, that in every case the observer was impatient and interfered in the business by touching and irritating the young cuckoo, by putting eggs and other objects on his back, and by making other experiments. In the instance I am about to give there was no interference by me or by the others who at intervals watched with me.

A cuckoo in a robin's nest

A robin's nest with three robin's eggs and one of the cuckoo was found in a low bank at the side of the small orchard on 19th May, 1900. The bird was incubating, and on the afternoon of 27th May the cuckoo hatched out. Unfortunately I did not know how long incubation had been going on before the 19th, but from the fact that the cuckoo was first out, it seems probable that the parasite has this further advantage of coming first from the shell. Long ago I found that this was so in the case of the parasitical troupials of the genus Molothrus in South America.

I kept a close watch on the nest for the rest of that afternoon and the whole of the following day (the 28th), during which the young cuckoo was lying in the bottom of the nest, helpless as a piece of jelly with a little life in it, and with just strength enough in his neck to lift his head and open his mouth; and then, after a second or two, the wavering head would drop again. At eight o'clock next morning (29th), I found that one robin had come out of the shell, and one egg had been ejected and was lying a few inches below the nest on the sloping bank. Yet the young cuckoo still appeared a weak, helpless, jelly-like creature, as on the previous day. But he had increased greatly in size. I believe that in forty-eight hours from the time of hatching he had quite doubled his bulk, and had grown darker, his naked skin being of a bluish-black colour. The robin, thirty or more hours younger, was little more than half his size, and had a pale, pinkish-yellow skin, thinly clothed with a long black down. The cuckoo occupied the middle of the deep, cup-shaped nest, and his broad back, hollow in the middle, formed a sort of false bottom; but there was a small space between the bird's sides and the nest, and in this space or interstice the one unhatched egg that still remained and the young robin were lying.

During this day (29th) I observed that the pressure of the egg and young robin against his sides irritated the cuckoo: he was continually moving, jerking and wriggling his lumpish body this way and that, as if to get away from the contact. At intervals this irritation would reach its culminating point, and a series of mechanical movements would begin, all working blindly but as surely towards the end as if some devilish intelligence animated the seemingly helpless infant parasite.

Of the two objects in the nest the unhatched egg irritated him the most. The young robin was soft, it yielded when pressed, and could be made somehow to fit into the interstice; but the hard, round shell, pressing against him like a pebble, was torture to him, and at intervals became unendurable. Then would come that magical change in him, when he seemed all at once to become possessed of a preternatural power and intelligence, and then the blind struggle down in the nest would begin. And after each struggle—each round it might be called—the cuckoo would fall back again and lie in a state of collapse, as if the mysterious virtue had gone out of him. But in a very short time the pressure on his side would begin again to annoy him, then to torment him, and at last he would be wrought up to a fresh effort. Thus in a space of eight minutes I saw him struggle four separate times, with a period of collapse after each, to get rid of the robin's egg; and each struggle involved a long series of movements on his part. On each of these occasions the egg was pushed or carried up to the wrong or upper side of the nest, with the result that when the bird jerked the egg from him it rolled back into the bottom of the nest. The statement is therefore erroneous that the cuckoo knows at which side to throw the egg out. Of course he knows nothing, and, as a fact, he tries to throw the egg up as often as down the slope.

The process in each case was as follows: The pressure of the egg against the cuckoo's side, as I have said, was a constant irritation; but the irritability varied in degree in different parts of the body. On the under parts it scarcely existed; its seat was chiefly on the upper surface, beginning at the sides and increasing towards the centre, and was greatest in the hollow of the back. When, in moving, the egg got pushed up to the upper edge of his side, he would begin to fidget more and more, and this would cause it to move round, and so to increase the irritation by touching and pressing against other parts. When all the bird's efforts to get away from the object had only made matters worse, he would cease wriggling and squat down lower and lower in the bottom of the nest, and the egg, forced up, would finally roll right into the cavity in his back—the most irritable part of all. Whenever this occurred, a sudden change that was like a fit would seize the bird; he would stiffen, rise in the nest, his flabby muscles made rigid, and stand erect, his back in a horizontal position, the head hanging down, the little naked wings held up over the back. In that position he looked an ugly, lumpish negro mannikin, standing on thinnest dwarf legs, his back bent, and elbows stuck up above the hollow flat back.

Once up on his small stiffened legs he would move backwards, firmly grasping the hairs and hair-like fibres of the nest-lining, and never swerving, until the rim of the cup-like structure was reached; and then standing, with feet sometimes below and in some cases on the rim, he would jerk his body, throwing the egg off or causing it to roll off. After that he would fall back into the nest and lie quite exhausted for some time, his jelly-like body rising and falling with his breathing.

These changes in the bird strongly reminded me of a person with an epileptic fit, as I had been accustomed to see it on the pampas, where, among the gauchos, epilepsy is one of the commonest maladies;—the sudden rigidity of muscle in some weak, sickly, flabby-looking person, the powerful grip of the hand, the strength in struggling, exceeding that of a man in perfect health, and finally, when this state is over, the weakness of complete exhaustion.

I witnessed several struggles with the egg, but at last, in spite of my watchfulness, I did not see it ejected. On returning after a very short absence, I found the egg had been thrown out and had rolled down the bank, a distance of fourteen inches from the nest.

The young cuckoo appeared to rest more quietly in the nest now, but after a couple of hours the old fidgeting began again, and increased until he was in the same restless state as before. The rapid growth of the birds made the position more and more miserable for the cuckoo, since the robin, thrust against the side of the nest, would throw his head and neck across the cuckoo's back, and he could not endure being touched there. And now a fresh succession of struggles began, the whole process being just the same as when the egg was struggled with. But it was not so easy with the young bird, not because of its greater weight, but because it did not roll like the egg and settle in the middle of the back; it would fall partly on to the cuckoo's back and then slip off into the nest again. But success came at last, after many failures. The robin was lying partly across the cuckoo's neck, when, in moving its head, its little curved beak came down and rested on the very centre of that irritable hollow in the back of its foster-brother. Instantly the cuckoo pressed down into the nest, shrinking away as if hot needles had pricked him, as far as possible from the side where the robin was lying against him, and this movement of course brought the robin more and more over him, until he was thrown right upon the cuckoo's back.

Instantly the rigid fit came on, and up rose the cuckoo, as if the robin weighed no more than a feather on him; and away backwards he went, right up the nest, without a pause, and standing actually on the rim, jerked his body, causing the robin to fall off, clean away from the nest. It fell, in fact, on to a large dock leaf five inches below the rim of the nest, and rested there.

After getting rid of his burden the cuckoo continued in the same position, perfectly rigid, for a space of five or six seconds, during which it again and again violently jerked its body, as if it had the feeling of the burden on it still. Then, the fit over, it fell back, exhausted as usual.

I had been singularly fortunate in witnessing the last scene and conclusion of this little bloodless tragedy in a bird's nest, with callow nestlings for dramatis personæ, this innocent crime and wrong, which is not a wrong since the cuckoo doesn't think it one. It is a little curious to reflect that a similar act takes place annually in tens of thousands of small birds' nests all over the country, and that it is so rarely witnessed.

Marvellous as the power of the young cuckoo is when the fit is on him, it is of course limited, and when watching his actions I concluded that it would be impossible for him to eject eggs and nestlings from any thrush's nest. The blackbird's would be too deep, and as to the throstle's, he could not move backwards up the sides of the cup-like cavity on account of the smooth plastered surface.

After having seen the young robin cast out I still refrained from touching the nest, as there were yet other things to observe. One was the presence, very close to the nest, of the ejected nestling—what would the parents do in the case? Before dealing with that matter I shall conclude the history of the young cuckoo.

Having got the nest to himself he rested very quietly, and it was not till the following day (1st July) that I allowed myself to touch him. He was, I found, still irritable, and when I put back the eggs he had thrown out he was again miserable in the nest, and the struggle with the eggs was renewed until he got rid of them as before. The next day the irritability had almost gone, and in the afternoon he suffered an egg or a pebble to remain in the nest with him without jerking and wriggling about, and he made no further attempt to eject it. This observation—the loss of irritability on the fifth day after hatching—agrees with that of Mr. Craig, whose account was printed in the Feathered World, 14th July, 1899.

The young cuckoo grew rapidly and soon trod his nest into a broad platform, on which he reposed, a conspicuous object in the scanty herbage on the bank. We often visited and fed him, when he would puff up his plumage and strike savagely at our hands, but at the same time he would always gobble down the food we offered. In seventeen days after being hatched he left the nest and took up his position in an oak tree growing on the bank, and there the robins continued feeding him for the next three days, after which we saw no more of him.

I may add that in May 1901 a pair of robins built on the bank close to where the nest had been made the previous year, and that in this nest a cuckoo was also reared. The bird, when first seen, was apparently about four or five days old, and it had the nest to itself. Three ejected robin's eggs were lying on the bank a little lower down.

It is hardly to be doubted that the robins were the same birds that had reared the cuckoo in the previous season; and it is highly probable that the same cuckoo had returned to place her egg in their nest.

The end of the little history—the fate of the ejected nestling and the attitude of the parent robins—remains to be told. When the young cuckoo throws out the nestlings from nests in trees, hedges, bushes, and reeds, the victims, as a rule, fall some distance to the ground, or in the water, and are no more seen by the old birds. Here the young robin, when ejected, fell a distance of but five or six inches, and rested on a broad, bright green leaf, where it was an exceedingly conspicuous object; and when the mother robin was on the nest—and at this stage she was on it a greater part of the time—warming that black-skinned, toad-like, spurious babe of hers, her bright, intelligent eyes were looking full at the other one, just beneath her, which she had grown in her body and had hatched with her warmth, and was her very own. I watched her for hours; watched her when warming the cuckoo, when she left the nest and when she returned with food, and warmed it again, and never once did she pay the least attention to the outcast lying there so close to her. There, on its green leaf, it remained, growing colder by degrees, hour by hour, motionless, except when it lifted its head as if to receive food, then dropped it again, and when, at intervals, it twitched its body as if trying to move. During the evening even these slight motions ceased, though that feeblest flame of life was not yet extinguished; but in the morning it was dead and cold and stiff; and just above it, her bright eyes on it, the mother robin sat on the nest as before, warming her cuckoo.

How amazing and almost incredible it seems that a being such as a robin, intelligent above most birds as we are apt to think, should prove in this instance to be a mere automaton! The case would, I think, have been different if the ejected one had made a sound, since there is nothing which more excites the parent bird, or which is more instantly responded to, than the cry of hunger or distress of the young. But at this early stage the nestling is voiceless—another point in favour of the parasite. The sight of its young, we see, slowly and dumbly dying, touches no chord in the parent: there is, in fact, no recognition; once out of the nest it is no more than a coloured leaf, or a bird-shaped pebble, or fragment of clay.

It happened that my young fellow-watchers, seeing that the ejected robin if left there would inevitably perish, proposed to take it in to feed and rear it—to save it, as they said; but I advised them not to attempt such a thing, but rather to spare the bird. To spare it the misery they would inflict upon it by attempting to fill its parents' place. They had, so far, never kept a caged bird, nor a pet bird, and had no desire to keep one; all they desired to do in this case was to save the little outcast from death—to rear it till it was able to fly away and take care of itself. That was a difficult, a well-nigh impossible task. The bird, at this early stage, required to be fed at short intervals for about sixteen hours each day on a peculiar kind of food, suited to its delicate stomach—chiefly small caterpillars found in the herbage; and it also needed a sufficient amount by day and night of that animal warmth which only the parent bird could properly supply. They, not being robins, would give it unsuitable food, feed it at improper times, and not keep it at the right temperature, with the almost certain result that after lingering a few days it would die in their hands. But if by giving a great deal of time and much care they should succeed in rearing it, their foundling would start his independent life so handicapped, weakened in constitution by an indoor artificial bringing up, without the training which all young birds receive from their parents after quitting the nest, that it would be impossible for him to save himself. If by chance he should survive until August, he would then be set upon and killed by one of the adult robins already in possession of the ground. Now, when a bird at maturity perishes, it suffers in dying—sometimes very acutely; but if left to grow cold and fade out of life at this stage it can hardly be said to suffer. It is no more conscious than a chick in the shell; take from it the warmth that keeps it in being, and it drops back into nothingness without knowing and, we may say, without feeling anything. There may indeed be an incipient consciousness in that small, soft brain in its early vegetative stage, a first faint glimmer of bright light to be, and a slight sensation of numbness may be actually felt as the body grows cold, but that would be all.

Mistaken kindness

Pain is so common in the world; and, owing to the softness and sensitiveness induced in us by an indoor artificial life—since that softness of our bodies reacts on our minds—we have come to a false or an exaggerated idea of its importance, its painfulness, to put it that way; and we should therefore be but making matters worse, or rather making ourselves more miserable, by looking for and finding it where it does not exist.

The power to feel pain in any great degree comes into the bird's life after this transitional period, and is greatest at maturity, when consciousness and all the mental faculties are fully developed, particularly the passion of fear, which plays continually on the strings of the wild creature's heart with an ever varying touch, producing the feeling in all degrees from the slight disquiet, which is no sooner come than gone, to extremities of agonising terror. It would perhaps have a wholesome effect on their young minds, and save them from grieving over-much at the death of a newly-hatched robin, if they would consider this fact of the pain that is and must be. Not the whole subject—the fact that as things are designed in this world of sentient life there can be no good, no sweetness or pleasure in life, nor peace and contentment and safety, nor happiness and joy, nor any beauty or strength or lustre, nor any bright and shining quality of body or mind, without pain, which is not an accident nor an incident, nor something ancillary to life, but is involved in and a part of life, of its very colour and texture. That would be too long to speak about; all I meant was to consider that small part of the fact, the necessary pain to and destruction of the bird life around them and in the country generally.

Annual bird-mortality

Here, for instance, without going farther than a hundred yards from the house in any direction, they could put their hands in nests in trees and bushes, and on the ground, and in the ivy, and in the old outhouse, and handle and count about one hundred and thirty young birds not yet able to fly. Probably more than twice that number would be successfully reared during the season. How many, then, would be reared in the whole parish! How many in the entire New Forest district, in the whole county of Hampshire, in the entire kingdom! Yet when summer came round again they would find no more birds than they had now. And so it would be in all places; all that incalculable increase would have perished. Many millions would be devoured by rapacious birds and beasts; millions more would perish of hunger and cold; millions of migrants would fall by the way, some in the sea and some on land; those that returned from distant regions would be but a remnant, and the residents that survived through the winter, these, too, would be nothing but a remnant. It is not only that this inconceivable amount of bird life must be destroyed each year, but we cannot suppose that death is not a painful process. In a vast majority of cases, whether the bird slowly perishes of hunger and weakness, or is pursued and captured by birds and beasts of prey, or is driven by cold adverse winds and storms into the waves, the pain, the agony must be great. The least painful death is undoubtedly that of the bird that, weakened by want of sustenance, dies by night of cold in severe weather. It is indeed most like the death of the nestling, but a few hours out of the shell, which has been thrown out of the nest, and which soon grows cold, and dozes its feeble, unconscious life away.

We may say, then, that of all the thousand forms of death which Nature has invented to keep her too rapidly multiplying creatures within bounds, that which is brought about by the singular instinct of the young cuckoo in the nest is the most merciful or the least painful.

I am not sure that I said all this, or marshalled fact and argument in the precise order in which they are here set down. I fancy not, as it seems more than could well have been spoken while we were standing there in the late evening sunlight by that primrose bank, looking down on the little flesh-coloured mite in its scant clothing of black down, fading out of life on its cold green leaf. But what was said did not fail of its effect, so that my young tender-hearted hearers, who had begun to listen with moist eyes, secretly accusing me perhaps of want of feeling, were content in the end to let it be—to go away and leave it to its fate in that mysterious green world we, too, live in and do not understand, in which life and death and pleasure and pain are interwoven light and shade.

CHAPTER II

Between the Boldre and the Exe, or Beaulieu river, there is a stretch of country in most part flat and featureless. It is one of those parts of the Forest which have a bare and desolate aspect; here in places you can go a mile and not find a tree or bush, where nothing grows but a starved-looking heath, scarcely ankle-deep. Wild life in such places is represented by a few meadow-pipits and small lizards. There is no doubt that this barrenness and naked appearance is the result of the perpetual cutting of heath and gorse, and the removal of the thin surface soil for fuel.

Those who do not know the New Forest, or know it only as a collecting- or happy hunting-ground of eggers and "lepidopterists," or as artists in search of paintable woodland scenery know it, and others who make it a summer holiday resort, may say that this abuse is one which might and should be remedied. They would be mistaken. What I and a few others who use their senses see and hear in this or that spot, is, in every case, a very small matter, a visible but an infinitesimal part of that abuse of the New Forest which is old and chronic, and operates always, and is common to the whole area, and, as things are, irremediable. To discover and denounce certain things which ought not to be, to rail against verderers, who are after all what they cannot help being, is about as profitable as it would be to "damn the nature of things."

It must be borne in mind that the Forest area has a considerable population composed of commoners, squatters, private owners, who have inherited or purchased lands originally filched from the Forest; and of a large number of persons who reside mostly in the villages, and are private residents, publicans, shopkeepers, and lodging-house keepers. All these people have one object in common—to get as much as they can out of the Forest. It is true that a large proportion of them, especially those who live in the villages, which are now rapidly increasing their populations, are supposed not to have any Forest rights; but they do as a fact get something out of it; and we may say that, generally, all the people in the Forest dine at one table, and all get a helping out of most of the dishes going, though the first and biggest helpings are for the favoured guests.

New Forest conscience

Those who have inherited rights have indeed come to look on the Forest as in a sense their property. What is given or handed over to them is not in their view their proper share: they take this openly, and get the balance the best way they can—in the dark generally. It is not dishonest to help yourself to what belongs to you; and they must live—must have their whack. They have, in fact, their own moral code, their New Forest conscience, just as other men—miners, labourers on the land, tradesmen, gamekeepers, members of the Stock Exchange, for instance—have each their corporate code and conscience. It may not be the general or the ideal or speculative conscience, but it is what may be called their working conscience. One proof that much goes on in the dark, or that much is winked at, is the paucity of all wild life which is worth any man's while to take in a district where pretty well everything is protected on paper. Game, furred and feathered, would not exist at all but for the private estates scattered through the Forest, in which game is preserved, and from which the depleted Forest lands are constantly being restocked. Again, in all this most favourable country no rare or beautiful species may be found: it would be safer for the hobby, the golden oriole, the hoopoe, the harrier, to nest in a metropolitan park than in the loneliest wood between the Avon and Southampton Water. To introduce any new species, from the biggest—the capercailzie and the great bustard—to the smallest quail, or any small passerine bird with a spot of brilliant colour on its plumage, would be impossible.

The New Forest people are, in fact, just what circumstances have made them. Like all organised beings, they are the creatures of, and subject to, the conditions they exist in; and they cannot be other than they are—namely, parasites on the Forest. And, what is more, they cannot be educated, or preached, or worried out of their ingrained parasitical habits and ways of thought. They have had centuries—long centuries—of practice to make them cunning, and the effect of more stringent regulations than those now in use would only be to polish and put a better edge on that weapon which Nature has given them to fight with.

This being the conclusion, namely, that "things are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be," some of my readers, especially those in the New Forest, may ask, Why, then, say anything about it? why not follow the others who have written books and books and books about the New Forest, books big and books little, from Wise, his classic, and the Victoria History, down to the long row of little rosy guide-books? They saw nothing of all this; or if they saw un-pleasant things they thought it better to hold their tongues, or pens, than to make people uncomfortable.

I confess it would be a mistake, a mere waste of words, to bring these hidden things to light if it could be believed that the New Forest, in its condition and management, will continue for any length of time to be what it is and has been—just that and nothing more. A district in England, it is true, but out of the way, remote, a spot to be visited once or twice in a lifetime just to look at the scenery, like Lundy or the Scilly Isles or the Orkneys. But it cannot be believed. The place itself, its curious tangle of ownership—government by and rights of the crown, of private owners, commoners, and the public—is what it has always been; but many persons have now come to think and to believe that the time is approaching when there will be a disentanglement and a change.

A change foreshadowed

The Forest has been known and loved by a limited number of persons always; the general public have only discovered it in recent years. For one visitor twenty years ago there are scores, probably hundreds, to-day. And year by year, as motoring becomes more common, and as cycling from being general grows, as it will, to be universal, the flow of visitors to the Forest will go on at an ever-increasing rate, and the hundreds of to-day will be thousands in five years' time. With these modern means of locomotion, there is no more attractive spot than this hundred and fifty square miles of level country which contains the most beautiful forest scenery in England. And as it grows in favour in all the country as a place of recreation and refreshment, the subject of its condition and management, and the ways of its inhabitants, will receive an increased attention. The desire will grow that it shall not be spoilt, either by the authorities or the residents, that it shall not be turned into townships and plantations, nor be starved, nor its wild life left to be taken and destroyed by anyone and everyone. It will be seen that the "rights" I have spoken of, with the unwritten laws and customs which are kept more or less in the dark, are in conflict with the better and infinitely more important rights of the people generally—of the whole nation. Once all this becomes common knowledge, that which some now regard as a mere dream, a faint hope, something too remote for us to concern ourselves about, will all at once appear to us as a practical object—something to be won by fighting, and certainly worth fighting for.

It may be said at once, and I fancy that anyone who knows the inner life of the Forest people will agree with me, that so long as these are in possession (and here all private owners are included) there can be no great change, no permanent improvement made in the Forest. That is the difficulty, but it is not an insuperable one. Public opinion, and the desire of the people for anything, is a considerable force to-day; so that, inspired by it, the most timid and conservative governments are apt all at once to acquire an extraordinary courage. Sustained by that outside force, the most tender-hearted and sensitive Prime Minister would not in the least mind if some persons were to dub him a second and worse William the Bastard.

The people in this district have a curious experiment to show the wonderful power of the Forest fly in retaining its grasp. A man takes the fly between his finger and thumb, and with the other hand holds a single hair of a cow or horse for it to seize, then gently pulls hair and fly apart. The fly does not release his hold—he splits the hair, or at any rate shaves a piece off right down to the fine end with his sharp, grasping claw. Doubtless the human parasite will, when his time comes, show an equal tenacity; he will embrace the biggest and oldest oak he knows, and to pluck him from his beloved soil it will be necessary to pull up the tree by its roots. But this is a detail, and may be left to the engineers.

Overlooking Beaulieu

Beyond that starved, melancholy wilderness, the sight of which has led me into so long a digression, one comes to a point which overlooks the valley of the Exe; and here one pauses long before going down to the half-hidden village by the river. Especially if it is in May or June, when the oak is in its "glad light grene," for that is the most vivid and beautiful of all vegetable greens, and the prospect is the greenest and most soul-refreshing to be found in England. The valley is all wooded and the wood is all oak—a continuous oak-wood stretching away on the right, mile on mile, to the sea. The sensation experienced at the sight of this prospect is like that of the traveller in a dry desert when he comes to a clear running stream and drinks his fill of water and is refreshed. The river is tidal, and at the full of the tide in its widest part beside the village its appearance is of a small inland lake, grown round with oaks—old trees that stretch their horizontal branches far out and wet their lower leaves in the salt water. The village itself that has this setting, with its ancient watermill, its palace of the Montagus, and the Abbey of Beaulieu, a grey ivied ruin, has a distinction above all Hampshire villages, and is unlike all others in its austere beauty and atmosphere of old-world seclusion and quietude. Above all is that quality which the mind imparts—the expression due to romantic historical associations.

Swallow and pike

One very still, warm summer afternoon I stood on the margin, looking across the sheet of glassy water at a heron on the farther side, standing knee-deep in the shallow water patiently watching for a fish, his grey figure showing distinctly against a background of bright green sedges. Between me and the heron scores of swallows and martins were hawking for flies, gliding hither and thither a little above the glassy surface, and occasionally dropping down to dip and wet their under plumage in the water. And all at once, fifty yards out from the margin, there was a great splash, as if a big stone had been flung out into the lake; and then two or three moments later out from the falling spray and rocking water rose a swallow, struggling laboriously up, its plumage drenched, and flew slowly away. A big pike had dashed at and tried to seize it at the moment of dipping in the water, and the swallow had escaped as by a miracle. I turned round to see if any person was near, who might by chance have witnessed so strange a thing, in order to speak to him about it. There was no person within sight, but if on turning round my eyes had encountered the form of a Cistercian monk, returning from his day's labour in the fields, in his dirty black-and-white robe, his implements on his shoulders, his face and hands begrimed with dust and sweat, the apparition on that day, in the mood I was in, would not have greatly surprised me.

The atmosphere, the expression of the past may so attune the mind as almost to produce the illusion that the past is now.

But more than old memories, great as their power over the mind is at certain impressible moments, and more than Beaulieu as a place where men dwell, is that ineffable freshness of nature, that verdure that like the sunlight and the warmth of the sun penetrates to the inmost being. Here I have remembered the old ornithologist Willughby's suggestion, which no longer seemed fantastic, that the furred and feathered creatures inhabiting arctic regions have grown white by force of imagination and the constant intuition of snow. And here too I have recalled that modern fancy that the soul in man has its proper shape and colour, and have thought that if I came hither with a grey or blue or orange or brown soul, its colour had now changed to green. The pleasure of it has detained me long days in spring, often straying by the river at its full, among the broadly-branching oaks, delighting my sight with the new leaves

against the sun shene,
Some very red, and some a glad light grene.

Love of open spaces

Yet these same oak woods, great as their charm is, their green everlasting gladness, have a less enduring hold on the spirit than the open heath, though this may look melancholy and almost desolate on coming to it from those sunlit emerald glades with a green thought in the soul. It seems enough that it is open, where the wind blows free, and there is nothing between us and the sun. It is a passion, an old ineradicable instinct in us: the strongest impulse in children, savage or civilised, is to go out into some open place. If a man be capable of an exalted mood, of a sense of absolute freedom, so that he is no longer flesh and spirit but both in one, and one with nature, it comes to him like some miraculous gift on a hill or down or wide open heath. "You never enjoy the earth aright," wrote Thomas Traherne in his Divine Raptures, "until the sun itself floweth through your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars, and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world."

It may be observed that we must be out and well away from the woods and have a wide horizon all around in order to feel the sun flowing through us. Many of us have experienced these "divine raptures," this sublimated state of feeling; and such moments are perhaps the best in our earthly lives; but it is mainly the Trahernes, the Silurist Vaughans, the Newmans, the Frederic Myers, the Coventry Patmores, the Wordsworths, that speak of them, since such moods best fit, or can be made to fit in with their philosophy, or mysticism, and are, to them, its best justification.

This wide heath, east of Beaulieu, stretching miles away towards Southampton Water, looks level to the eye. But it is not so; it is grooved with long valley-like depressions with marshy or boggy bottoms, all draining into small tributaries of the Dark Water, which flows into the Solent near Lepe. In these bottoms and in all the wet places the heather and furze mixes with or gives place to the bog myrtle, or golden withy; and on the spongiest spots the fragrant yellow stars of the bog asphodel are common in June. These spots are exceedingly rich in colour, with greys and emerald greens and orange yellows of moss and lichen, flecked with the snow-white of cotton-grass.

Here, then, besides that cause of contentment which we find in openness, there is fragrance in fuller measure than in most places. One may wade through acres of myrtle, until that subtle delightful odour is in one's skin and clothes, and in the air one breathes, and seems at last to penetrate and saturate the whole being, and smell seems to be for a time the most important of the senses.

Among the interesting birds that breed on the heath, the nightjar is one of the commonest. A keen naturalist, Mr. E. A. Bankes, who lived close by, told me that he had marked the spot where he had found a pair of young birds, and that each time he rode over the heath he had a look at them, and as they remained there until able to fly, he concluded that it is not true that the parent birds remove the young when the nest has been discovered.

I was not convinced, as it did not appear that he had handled the young birds: he had only looked at them while sitting on his horse. The following summer I found a pair of young not far from the same spot: they were half-fledged and very active, running into the heath and trying to hide from me, but I caught and handled them for some minutes, the parent bird remaining near, uttering her cries. I marked the spot and went back next day, only to find that the birds had vanished.

Snipe: Redshank

The snipe, too, is an annual breeder, and from what I saw of it on the heath I think we have yet something to learn concerning the breeding habits of that much-observed bird. The parent bird is not so wise as most mothers of the feathered world, since her startling cry of alarm, sounding in a small way like the snort of a frightened horse, will attract a person to the spot where she is sheltering her young among the myrtle. She will repeat the cry at intervals a dozen times without stirring or attempting to conceal the young. But she does not always act in the same way. Sometimes she has risen to a great height and begun circling above me, the circles growing smaller or larger as I came nearer or went farther from the spot where the young were lurking.

It was until recently a moot question as to whether or not the female snipe made the drumming or bleating sound; some of the authorities say that this sound proceeds only from the male bird. I have no doubt that both birds make the sound. Invariably when I disturbed a snipe with young, and when she mounted high in the air, to wheel round and round, uttering her anxious cries, she dashed downwards at intervals, and produced the bleating or drumming which the male birds emit when playing about the sky.

In all cases where I have found young snipe there was but one old bird, the female, no doubt. In some instances I have spent an hour with the young birds by me, or in my hands, waiting for the other parent to appear; and I am almost convinced that the care of the young falls wholly on the female.

The redshank, that graceful bird with a beautiful voice, breeds here most years, and is in a perpetual state of anxiety so long as a human figure remains in sight. A little while ago the small vari-coloured stonechat or fuzz-jack, with red breast, black head and white collar, sitting upright and motionless, like a painted image of a bird, on the topmost spray of a furze bush, then flitting to perch on another bush, then to another, for ever emitting those two little contrasted sounds—the guttural chat and the clear, fretful pipe—had seemed to me the most troubled and full of care and worries of all Nature's feathered children—so sorrowful, in spite of his pretty harlequin dress! Now his trouble seems a small thing, and not to be regarded in the presence of the larger, louder redshank. As I walk he rises a long way ahead, and wheeling about comes towards me—he and she, and by-and-by a second pair, and perhaps a third; they come with measured pulsation of the long, sharp, white-banded wings; and the first comer sweeps by and returns again to meet the others, clamouring all the time, calling on them to join in the outcry until the whole air seems full of their trouble. To and fro he flies, to this side and that; and finally, as if in imitation of the small, fretful stonechat, he sweeps down to alight on the topmost spray of some small tree or tall bush—not a furze but a willow; and as it is an insecure stand for a bird of his long thin wading legs, he stands lightly, balancing himself with his wings; beautiful in his white and pale-grey plumage, and his slender form, on that airy perch of the willow in its grey-green leaves and snow-white catkins; and balanced there, he still continues his sorrowful anxious cries—ever crying for me to go—to go away and leave him in peace. I leave him reluctantly, and have my reward, for no sooner does he see me going than his anxious cries change to that beautiful wild pipe, unrivalled except by the curlew among shore birds.

Pewit

Worst of all birds that can have no peace in their lives so long as you are in sight is the pewit. The harsh wailing sound of his crying voice as he wheels about overhead, the mad downward rushes, when his wings creak as he nears you, give the idea that he is almost crazed with anxiety; and one feels ashamed at causing so much misery. Oh, poor bird! is there no way to make you understand without leaving the ground, that your black-spotted, olive-coloured eggs are perfectly safe; that a man can walk about on the heath and be no more harmful to you than the Forest ponies, and the ragged donkey browsing on a furze bush, and the cow with her tinkling bell? I stand motionless, looking the other way; I sit down to think; I lie flat on my back with hands clasped behind my head, and gaze at the sky, and still the trouble goes on—he will not believe in me, nor tolerate me. There is nothing to do but get up and go away out of sight and sound of the pewits.

It appears to me that this sympathy for the lower animals is very much a matter of association—an overflow of that regard for the rights of and compassion for others of our kind which are at the foundations of the social instinct. The bird is a red- and a warm-blooded being—we have seen that its blood is red, and when we take a living bird in our hands we feel its warmth and the throbbing of its breast: therefore birds are related to us, and with that red human blood they have human passions. Witness the pewit—the mother bird, when you have discovered or have come near her downy little one—could any human mother, torn with the fear of losing her babe, show her unquiet and disturbed state in a plainer, more understandable way! But in the case of creatures of another division in the kingdom of life—non-vertebrates, without sensible heat, and with a thin colourless fluid instead of red blood, as if like plants they had only a vegetative life—this sympathy is not felt as a rule. When, in some exceptional case, the feeling is there, it is because some human association has come into the mind in spite of the differences between insect and man.

Walking on this heath I saw a common green grasshopper, disturbed at my step, leap away, and by chance land in a geometric web in a small furze bush. Caught in the web, it began kicking with its long hind legs, and would in three seconds have made its escape. But mark what happened. Directly over the web, and above the kicking grasshopper, there was a small, web-made, thimble-shaped shelter, mouth down, fastened to a spray, and the spider was sitting in it. And looking down it must have seen and known that the grasshopper was far too big and strong to be held in that frailest snare, that it would be gone in a moment and the net torn to pieces. It also must have seen and known that it was no wasp nor dangerous insect of any kind; and so, instantly, straight and swift as a leaden plummet, it dropped out of the silvery bell it lived in on to the grasshopper and attacked it at the head. The falces were probably thrust into the body between the head and pro-thorax, for almost instantly the struggle ceased, and in less than three seconds the victim appeared perfectly dead.

Grasshopper and spider

What interested me in this sight was the spider, an Epeira of a species I had never closely looked at before, a little less in size than our famous Epeira diadema—our common garden spider, with the pretty white diadem on its velvety, brown abdomen. This heath spider was creamy-white in colour, the white deepening to warm buff all round at the sides, and to a deeper tint on the under surface. It was curiously and prettily coloured; and, being new to me, its image was vividly impressed on my mind.

As to what had happened, that did not impress me at all. I could not, like the late noble poet who cherished an extreme animosity against the spider, and inveighed against it in brilliant, inspired verse, remember and brood sadly on the thought of the fairy forms that are its victims—

The lovely births that winnow by,
Twin-sisters of the rainbow sky:
Elf-darlings, fluffy, bee-bright things,
And owl-white moths with mealy wings.

Nor could I, like him, break the creature's toils, nor take the dead from its gibbet, nor slay it on account of its desperate wickedness. These are mere house-bred feelings and fancies, perhaps morbid; he who walks out of doors with Nature, who sees life and death as sunlight and shadow, on witnessing such an incident wishes the captor a good appetite, and, passing on, thinks no more about it. For any day in summer, sitting by the water, or in a wood, or on the open heath, I note little incidents of this kind; they are always going on in thousands all about us, and one with trained eye cannot but see them; but no feeling is excited, no sympathy, and they are no sooner seen than forgotten. But, as I said, there are exceptional cases, and here is one which refers to an even more insignificant creature than a field grasshopper—a small dipterous insect—and yet I was strangely moved by it.

The insect was flying rather slowly by me over the heath—a thin, yellow-bodied, long-legged creature, a Tipula, about half as big as our familiar crane-fly. Now, as it flew by me about on a level with my thighs, up from the heath at my feet shot out a second insect, about the same size as the first, also a Dipteron, but of another family—one of the Asilidæ, which are rapacious. The Asilus was also very long-legged, and seizing the other with its legs, the two fell together to the ground. Stooping down, I witnessed the struggle. They were locked together, and I saw the attacking insect raise his head and the forepart of his body so as to strike, then plunge his rostrum like a dagger in the soft part of his victim's body. Again and again he raised and buried his weapon in the other, and the other still refused to die or to cease struggling. And this little fight and struggle of two flies curiously moved me, and for some time I could not get over the feeling of intense repugnance it excited. This feeling was wholly due to association: the dagger-like weapon and the action of the insect were curiously human-like, and I had seen just such a combat between two men, one fallen and the other on him, raising and striking down with his knife. Had I never witnessed such an incident, the two flies struggling, one killing the other, would have produced no such feeling, and would not have been remembered.

We live in thoughts and feelings, not in days and years—

In feelings, not in figures on a dial,

as some poet has said, and, recalling an afternoon and an evening spent on this heath, it does not seem to my mind like an evening passed alone in a vacant place, in the usual way, watching and listening and thinking of nothing, but an eventful period, which deeply moved me, and left an enduring memory.

The sun went down, and though the distressed birds had cried till they were weary of crying, I did not go away. Something on this occasion kept me, in spite of the gathering gloom and a cold wind—bitterly cold for June—which blew over the wide heath. Here and there the rays from the setting sun fell upon and lit up the few mounds that rise like little islands out of the desolate brown waste. These are the Pixie mounds, the barrows raised by probably prehistoric men, a people inconceivably remote in time and spirit from us, whose memory is pale in our civilised days.

"World-strangeness"

There are times and moods in which it is revealed to us, or to a few amongst us, that we are a survival of the past, a dying remnant of a vanished people, and are like strangers and captives among those who do not understand us, and have no wish to do so; whose language and customs and thoughts are not ours. That "world-strangeness," which William Watson and his fellow-poets prattle in rhyme about, those, at all events, who have what they call the "note of modernity" in their pipings, is not in me as in them. The blue sky, the brown soil beneath, the grass, the trees, the animals, the wind, and rain, and sun, and stars are never strange to me; for I am in and of and am one with them; and my flesh and the soil are one, and the heat in my blood and in the sunshine are one, and the winds and tempests and my passions are one. I feel the "strangeness" only with regard to my fellow-men, especially in towns, where they exist in conditions unnatural to me, but congenial to them; where they are seen in numbers and in crowds, in streets and houses, and in all places where they gather together; when I look at them, their pale civilised faces, their clothes, and hear them eagerly talking about things that do not concern me. They are out of my world—the real world. All that they value, and seek and strain after all their lives long, their works and sports and pleasures, are the merest baubles and childish things; and their ideals are all false, and nothing but by-products, or growths, of the artificial life—little funguses cultivated in heated cellars.

The barrow on the heath

In such moments we sometimes feel a kinship with, and are strangely drawn to, the dead, who were not as these; the long, long dead, the men who knew not life in towns, and felt no strangeness in sun and wind and rain. In such a mood on that evening I went to one of those lonely barrows; one that rises to a height of nine or ten feet above the level heath, and is about fifty yards round. It is a garden in the brown desert, covered over with a dense growth of furze bushes, still in flower, mixed with bramble and elder and thorn, and heather in great clumps, blooming, too, a month before its time, the fiery purple-red of its massed blossoms, and of a few tall, tapering spikes of foxglove, shining against the vivid green of the young bracken.

All this rich wild vegetation on that lonely mound on the brown heath!

Here, sheltered by the bushes, I sat and saw the sun go down, and the long twilight deepen till the oak woods of Beaulieu in the west looked black on the horizon, and the stars came out: in spite of the cold wind that made me shiver in my thin clothes, I sat there for hours, held by the silence and solitariness of that mound of the ancient dead.

Sitting there, profoundly sad for no apparent cause, with no conscious thought in my mind, it suddenly occurred to me that I knew that spot from of old, that in long-past forgotten years I had often come there of an evening and sat through the twilight, in love with the loneliness and peace, wishing that it might be my last resting-place. To sleep there for ever—the sleep that knows no waking! We say it, but do not mean—do not believe it. Dreams do come to give us pause; and we know that we have lived. To dwell alone, then, with this memory of life in such a spot for all time! There are moments in which the thought of death steals upon and takes us as it were by surprise, and it is then exceeding bitter. It was as if that cold wind blowing over and making strange whispers in the heather had brought a sudden tempest of icy rain to wet and chill me.

This miserable sensation soon passed away, and, with quieted heart, I began to grow more and more attracted by the thought of resting on so blessed a spot. To have always about me that wildness which I best loved—the rude incult heath, the beautiful desolation; to have harsh furze and ling and bramble and bracken to grow on me, and only wild creatures for visitors and company. The little stonechat, the tinkling meadow-pipit, the excited whitethroat to sing to me in summer; the deep-burrowing rabbit to bring down his warmth and familiar smell among my bones; the heat-loving adder, rich in colour, to find when summer is gone a dry safe shelter and hibernaculum in my empty skull.

So beautiful did the thought appear that I could have laid down my life at that moment, in spite of death's bitterness, if by so doing I could have had my desire. But no such sweet and desirable a thing could be given me by this strange people and race that possess the earth, who are not like the people here with me in the twilight on the heath. For I thought, too, of those I should lie with, having with them my after life; and thinking of them I was no longer alone. I thought of them not as others think, those others of a strange race. What do they think? They think so many things! The materialist, the scientist, would say: They have no existence; they ceased to be anything when their flesh was turned to dust, or burned to ashes, and their minds, or souls, were changed to some other form of energy, or motion, or affection of matter, or whatever they call it. The believer would not say of them, or of the immaterial part of them, that they had gone into a world of light, that in a dream or vision he had seen them walking in an air of glory; but he might hold that they had been preached to in Hades some nineteen centuries ago, and had perhaps repented of their barbarous deeds. Or he might think, since he has considerable latitude allowed him on the point, that the imperishable parts of them are here at this very spot, tangled in dust that was once flesh and bones, sleeping like chrysalids through a long winter, to be raised again at the sound of a trumpet blown by an angel to a second conscious life, happy or miserable as may be willed.

I imagine none of these things, for they were with me in the twilight on the barrow in crowds, sitting and standing in groups, and many lying on their sides on the turf below, their heads resting in their hands. They, too, all had their faces turned towards Beaulieu. Evening by evening for many and many a century they had looked to that point, towards the black wood on the horizon, where there were people and sounds of human life. Day by day for centuries they had listened with wonder and fear to the Abbey bells, and to the distant chanting of the monks. And the Abbey has been in ruins for centuries, open to the sky and overgrown with ivy; but still towards that point they look with apprehension, since men still dwell there, strangers to them, the little busy eager people, hateful in their artificial indoor lives, who do not know and who care nothing for them, who worship not and fear not the dead that are underground, but dig up their sacred places and scatter their bones and ashes, and despise and mock them because they are dead and powerless.

It is not strange that they fear and hate. I look at them—their dark, pale, furious faces—and think that if they could be visible thus in the daylight, all who came to that spot or passed near it would turn and fly with a terrifying image in their mind which would last to the end of life. But they do not resent my presence, and would not resent it were I permitted to come at last to dwell with them for ever. Perhaps they know me for one of their tribe—know that what they feel I feel, would hate what they hate.

Has it not been said that love itself is an argument in favour of immortality? All love—the love of men and women, of a mother for her child, of a friend for a friend—the love that will cause him to lay down his life for another. Is it possible to believe, they say, that this beautiful sacred flame can be darkened for ever when soul and body fall asunder? But love without hate I do not know and cannot conceive; one implies the other. No good and no bad quality or principle can exist (for me) without its opposite. As old Langland wisely says:

For by luthere men know the good;
And whereby wiste men which were white
If all things black were?

CHAPTER III

Looking away from Beaulieu towards Southampton Water there is seen on the border of the wide brown heath a long line of tall firs, a vast dark grove forming the horizon on that side. This is the edge of an immense wood, and beyond the pines which grow by the heath, it is almost exclusively oak with an undergrowth of holly. It is low-lying ground with many streams and a good deal of bog, and owing to the dense undergrowth and the luxuriance of vegetation generally this part of the forest has a ruder, wilder appearance than at any other spot. Here, too, albeit the nobler bird and animal forms are absent, as is indeed the case in all the New Forest district, animal life generally is in greatest profusion and variety. This wood with its surrounding heaths, bogs, and farm lands, has been my favourite summer resort and hunting-ground for some years past. With a farm-house not many minutes' walk from the forest for a home, I have here spent long weeks at a time, rambling in the woods every day and all day long, for the most time out of sight of human habitations, and always with the feeling that I was in my own territory, where everything was as Nature made it and as I liked it to be. Never once in all my rambles did I encounter that hated being, the collector, with his white, spectacled town face and green butterfly net. In this out-of-the-way corner of the Forest one could imagine the time come when this one small piece of England which lies between the Avon and Southampton Water will be a sanctuary for all rare and beautiful wild life and a place of refreshment to body and soul for all men.

The richest, fullest time of the year is when June is wearing to an end, when one knows without the almanac that spring is over and gone. Nowhere in England is one more sensible of the change to fullest summer than in this low-lying, warmest corner of Hampshire.

The cuckoo ceases to weary us with its incessant call, and the nightingale sings less and less frequently. The passionate season is well-nigh over for birds; their fountain of music begins to run dry. The cornfields and waste grounds are everywhere splashed with the intense scarlet of poppies. Summer has no rain in all her wide, hot heavens to give to her thirsty fields, and has sprinkled them with the red fiery moisture from her own veins. And as colour changes, growing deeper and more intense, so do sounds change: for the songs of yesterday there are shrill hunger-cries.

Young blackbird's call

One of the oftenest heard in all the open woods, in hedges, and even out in the cornfields is the curious musical call of the young blackbird. It is like the chuckle of the adult, but not so loud, full, happy, and prolonged; it is shriller, and drops at the end to a plaintive, impatient sound, a little pathetic—a cry of the young bird to its too long absent mother. When very hungry he emits this shrill musical call at intervals of ten to fifteen seconds; it may be heard distinctly a couple of hundred yards away.

The numbers of young blackbirds and throstles apparently just out of the nest astonish one. They are not only in the copses and hedges, and on almost every roadside tree, but you constantly see them on the ground in the lanes and public roads, standing still, quite unconscious of danger. The poor helpless bird looks up at you in a sort of amazement, never having seen men walking or riding on bicycles; but he hesitates, not knowing whether to fly away or stand still. Thrush or blackbird, he is curiously interesting to look at. The young thrush, with his yellowish-white spotty breast, the remains of down on his plumage, his wide yellow mouth, and raised head with large, fixed, toad-like eyes, has a distinctly reptilian appearance. Not so the young blackbird, standing motionless on the road, in doubt too as to what you are; his short tail raised, giving him an incipient air of blackbird jauntiness; his plumage not brown, indeed, as we describe it, but rich chestnut-black, like the chestnut-black hair of a beautiful Hampshire girl of that precious type with oval face and pale dark skin. A pretty creature, rich in colour, with a musical, pathetic voice, waiting so patiently to be visited and fed, and a weasel perhaps watching him from the roadside grass with hungry, bright little eyes! How they die—thrushes and blackbirds—at this perilous period in their lives! I sometimes see what looks like a rudely painted figure of a bird on the hard road: it is a young blackbird that had not the sense to get out of the way of a passing team, and was crushed flat by a hoof or wheel. It is but one in a thousand that perishes in that way. One has to remember that these two species of thrush—throstle and blackbird—are in extraordinary abundance, that next to starlings and chaffinches they abound over all species; that they are exceedingly prolific, beginning to lay in this southern country in February, and rearing at least three broods in the season; and that when winter comes round again the thrush and blackbird population will be just about what it was before.

Fruit-eating birds do not much vex the farmer in this almost fruitless country. Thrushes and finches and sparrows are nothing to him: the starling, if he pays any attention to the birds, he looks on as a good friend.

Starlings breeding

At the farm there are two very old yew trees growing in the back-yard, and one of these, in an advanced state of decay, is full of holes and cavities in its larger branches. Here about half a dozen pairs of starlings nest every year, and by the middle of June there are several broods of fully-fledged young. At this time it was amusing to watch the parent birds at their task, coming and going all day long, flying out and away straight as arrows to this side and that, every bird to its own favourite hunting-ground. Some had their grounds in the meadow, just before the house where the cows and geese were, and it was easy to watch their movements. Out of the yew the bird would shoot, and in ten or twelve seconds would be down walking about in that busy, plodding, rook-like way the starling has when looking for something; and presently, darting his beak into the turf, he would drag out something large, and back he would fly to his young with a big, conspicuous, white object in his beak. These white objects which he was busily gathering every day, from dawn to dark, were full-grown grubs of the cockchafer. When watching these birds at their work it struck me that the enormous increase of starlings all over the country in recent years may account for the fact that great cockchafer years do not now occur. In former years these beetles were sometimes in such numbers that they swarmed in the air in places, and stripped the oaks of their leaves in midsummer. It is now more than ten years since I saw cockchafers in considerable numbers, and for a long time past I have not heard of their appearance in swarms anywhere.

The starling is in some ways a bad bird, a cherry thief, and a robber of other birds' nesting-places; yaffle and nuthatch must hate him, but if his ministrations have caused an increase of even one per cent. in the hay crop, and the milk and butter supply, he is, from our point of view, not wholly bad.

In late June the unkept hedges are in the fullness of their midsummer beauty. After sunset the fragrance of the honeysuckle is almost too much: standing near the blossom-laden hedge when there is no wind to dissipate the odour, there is a heaviness in it which makes it like some delicious honeyed liquor which we are drinking in. The honeysuckle is indeed first among the "melancholy flowers" that give out their fragrance by night. In the daytime, when the smell is faint, the pale sickly blossoms are hardly noticed even where they are seen in masses and drape the hedges. Of all the hedge-flowers, the rose alone is looked at, its glory being so great as to make all other blooms seem nothing but bleached or dead discoloured leaves in comparison.

Beauty of the hedge rose

He would indeed be a vainly ambitious person who should attempt to describe this queen of all wild flowers, joyous or melancholy; but substituting flower for fruit, and the delight of the eye for the pleasure of taste, we may in speaking of it quote the words of a famous old writer, used in praise of the strawberry. He said that doubtless God Almighty could have made a better berry if He had been so minded, but doubtless God Almighty never did.

I esteem the rose not only for that beauty which sets it highest among flowers, but also because it will not suffer admiration when removed from its natural surroundings. In this particular it resembles certain brilliant sentient beings that languish and lose all their charms in captivity. Pluck your rose and bring it indoors, and place it side by side with other blossoms—yellow flag and blue periwinkle, and shining yellow marsh-marigold, and poppy and cornflower—and it has no lustre, and is no more to the soul than a flower made out of wax or paper. Look at it here, in the brilliant sunlight and the hot wind, waving to the wind on its long thorny sprays all over the vast disordered hedges; here in rosy masses, there starring the rough green tangle with its rosy stars—a rose-coloured cloud on the earth and Summer's bridal veil—and you will refuse to believe (since it will be beyond your power to imagine) that anywhere on the earth, in any hot or temperate climate, there exists a more divinely beautiful sight.

If among the numberless cults that flourish in the earth we could count a cult of the rose, to this spot the votaries of the flower might well come each midsummer to hold their festival. They would be youthful and beautiful, their lips red, their eyes full of laughter; and they would be arrayed in light silken garments of delicate colour—green, rose, and white; and their arms and necks and foreheads would shine with ornaments of gold and precious stones. In their hands would be musical instruments of many pretty shapes with which they would sweetly accompany their clear voices as they sat or stood beneath the old oak trees, and danced in sun and shade, and when they moved in bright procession along the wide grass-grown roads, through forest and farm-land.

Lesser whitethroat

In the summer of 1900 I found the lesser whitethroat—the better whitethroat I should prefer to call it—in extraordinary abundance in the large unkept hedges east of the woods in the parishes of Fawley and Exbury. Hitherto I had always found this species everywhere thinly distributed; here it was abundant as the reed-warblers along the dykes in the flat grass-lands on the Somerset coast, and like the reed-warblers in the reed- and sedge-grown ditches and streams, each pair of whitethroats had its own part of the hedge; so that in walking in a lane when you left one singing behind you heard his next neighbour singing at a distance of fifteen or twenty yards farther on, and from end to end of the great hedge you had that continuous beautiful low warble at your side, and sometimes on both sides. The loud brief song of this whitethroat, which resembles the first part of a chaffinch's song, is a pleasant sound and nothing more; the low warbling, which runs on without a break for forty or fifty seconds, or longer, is the beautiful song, and resembles the low continuous warble of the blackcap, but is more varied, and has one sound which is unique in the songs of British birds. This is a note repeated two or three times at intervals in the course of the song, of an excessive sharpness, unlike any other bird sound, but comparable to the silvery shrilling of the great green grasshopper—excessively sharp, yet musical. The bird emits this same silver shrill note when angry and when fighting, but it is then louder and not so musical, and resembles the sharpest sounds made by bats and other small mammals when excited.

One day I sat down near a hedge, where an old half-dead oak stood among the thorns and brambles, and just by the oak a lesser whitethroat was moving about and singing. Out among the furze bushes at some distance from the hedge a common whitethroat was singing, flitting and darting from bush to bush, rising at intervals into the air and dropping again into the furze; but by-and-by he rose to a greater height to pour out his mad confused strain in the air, then sloped away to the hedge and settled, still singing, on the dead branch of the oak. Up rose the lesser whitethroat and attacked it with extreme fury, rising to a height of two or three feet and dashing repeatedly at it, looking like a miniature kestrel or hobby; and every time it descended the other ducked his head and flattened himself on the branch, only to rise again, crest erect and throat puffed out, still pouring forth its defiant song. As long as this lasted the attacking bird emitted his piercing metallic anger-note, rapidly and continuously, like the clicking of steel machinery.

Alas! I fear I shall not again see the lesser whitethroat as I saw him in that favoured year: in 1901 he came not, or came in small numbers; and it was the same in the spring of 1902. The spring was cold and backward in both years, and the bitter continuous east winds which prevailed in March and April probably proved fatal to large numbers of the more delicate migrants.

In this low, level country, sheltered by woods and hedgerows, we feel the tremendous power of the sun even before the last week in June. It is good to feel, to bathe in the heat all day long; but at noon one sometimes finds it too hot even on the open heath, and is forced to take shelter in the woods. It was always coolest on the high ground among the pines, where the trees are very tall and there is no underwood. In spring it was always pleasant to walk here on the thick carpet of fallen needles and old dead fern; now, in a very short time, the young bracken has sprung up as if by miracle to a nearly uniform height of about four feet. It spreads all around me for many acres—an unbroken sea of brilliant green, out of which rise the tall red columns of the pines supporting the dark woodland roof.

A sheet of bracken

Why is it, when in June the luxuriant young bracken first drops its fully developed fronds, so that frond touches frond, many overlapping, forming a billowy expanse of vivid green, hiding, or all but hiding, the brown or red soil beneath—why is it the eyes rest with singular satisfaction on it? It is not only because of the colour, nor the beauty of contrast where the red floor of last year's beech leaves is seen through the fresh verdure, and of dark red-boled pines rising from the green sea of airy fronds. Colours and contrasts more beautiful may be seen, and the pleasure they give is different in kind.

Here standing amid the fern, where it had at last formed that waving surface and was a little above my knees, it seemed to me that the particular satisfaction I experienced was due to the fine symmetrical leafing of the surface, the minute subdivision of parts which produced an effect similar to that of a mosaic floor. When I consider other surfaces, on land or water, I find the same gratification in all cases where it is broken or marked out or fretted in minute, more or less orderly subdivisions. The glass-like or oily surface of water, where there are no reflections to bring other feelings in, does not hold or attract but rather wearies the sight; but it is no sooner touched to a thousand minute crinkles by the wind, than it is looked at with refreshment and pleasure. The bed of a clear stream, with its pavement of minute variegated pebbles and spots of light and shade, pleases in the same way. The sight rests with some satisfaction even on a stagnant pond covered with green duckweed; but the satisfaction is less in this case on account of the extreme minuteness of the parts and the too great smoothness. The roads and open spaces in woods in October and November are delightful to walk in when they are like richly variegated floors composed of small pieces, and like dark floors inlaid with red and gold of beech and oak leaves. Numberless instances might be given, and we see that the effect is produced even in small objects, as, for instance, in scaly fishes and in serpents. It is the minutely segmented texture of the serpent which, with the colour, gives it its wonderful richness. For the same reason a crocodile bag is more admired than one of cowhide, and a book in buckram looks better than one in cloth or even vellum.

The old Romans must have felt this instinctive pleasure of the eye very keenly when they took such great pains over their floors. I was strongly impressed with this fact at Silchester when looking at the old floors of rich and poor houses alike which have been uncovered during the last two or three years. They seem to have sought for the effect of mosaic even in the meaner habitations, and in passages and walks, and when tesseræ could not be had they broke up common tiles into small square fragments, and made their floors in that way. Even with so poor a material, and without any ornamentation, they did get the effect sought, and those ancient fragments of floors made of fragments of tiles, unburied after so many centuries, do actually more gratify the sight than the floors of polished oak or other expensive material which are seen in our mansions and palaces.

There is doubtless a physiological reason for this satisfaction to the eye, as indeed there is for so many of the pleasurable sensations we experience in seeing. We may say that the vision flies over a perfectly smooth plain surface, like a ball over a sheet of ice, and rests nowhere; but that in a mosaic floor the segmentation of the surface stays and rests the sight. To go no farther than that, which is but a part of the secret, the sheet of fern fronds, on account of this staying effect on the vision, increases what we see, so that a surface of a dozen square yards of fern seems more in extent than half an acre of smooth-shaven lawn, or the large featureless floor of a skating-rink or ball-room.

Harshening bird-voices

On going or wading through the belt of bracken under the tall firs—that billowy sea of fronds in the midst of which I have so long detained my patient reader—into the great oak wood beyond and below it, on each successive visit during the last days of June, the harshening of the bird voices became more marked. Only the wren and wood-wren and willow-wren uttered an occasional song, but the bigger birds made most of the sound. Families of young jays were then just out of the nest, crying with hunger, and filling the wood with their discordant screams when the parent birds came with food. A pair of kestrels, too, with a nestful of young on a tall fir incessantly uttered their shrill reiterated cries when I was near; and one pair of green woodpeckers, with young out of the breeding-hole but not yet able to fly, were half crazed with anxiety. Around me and on before me they flitted from tree to tree and clung to the bark, wings spread out and crest raised, their loud laugh changed to a piercing cry of anger that pained the sense.

They were now moved only by solicitude and anger: all other passion and music had gone out of the bird and into the insect world. The oak woods were now full of a loud continuous hum like that of a distant threshing-machine; an unbroken deep sound composed of ten thousand thousand small individual sounds conjoined in one, but diffused and flowing like water over the surface, under the trees, and the rough bushy tangle. The incredible number and variety of blood-sucking flies makes this same low hot part of the Forest as nearly like a transcript of tropical nature in some damp, wooded district as may be found in England. But these Forest flies, even when they came in legions about me, were not able to spoil my pleasure. It was delightful to see so much life—to visit and sit down with them in their own domestic circle.

In other days, in a distant region, I have passed many a night out of doors in the presence of a cloud of mosquitoes; and when during restless sleep I have pulled the covering from my face, they had me at their mercy. For the smarts they inflicted on me then I have my reward, since the venom they injected into my veins has proved a lasting prophylactic. But to the poor cattle this place must be a very purgatory, a mazy wilderness swarming with minute hellish imps that mock their horns and giant strength, and cannot be shaken off. While sitting on the roots of a tree in the heart of the wood, I heard the heavy tramping and distressed bellowings of several beasts coming at a furious rate towards me, and presently half a dozen heifers and young bulls burst through the bushes; and catching sight of me at a distance of ten or twelve yards, they suddenly came to a dead stop, glaring at me with strange, mad, tortured eyes; then swerving aside, crashed away through the undergrowth in another direction.

Dark Water

In this wood I sought and found the stream well named the Dark Water; here, at all events, it is grown over with old ivied oaks, with brambles and briars that throw long branches from side to side, making the almost hidden current in the deep shade look black; but when the sunlight falls on it the water is the colour of old sherry from the red soil it flows over. No sooner had I sat down on the bank, where I had a little space of sunlit water to look upon, than the flies gathered thick about and on me, and I began to pay some attention to individuals among them. Those that came to suck blood, and settled at once in a business-like manner on my legs, were some hairy and some smooth, and of various colours—grey, black, steel-blue, and barred and ringed with bright tints; and with these distinguished guests came numberless others, small lean gnats mostly, without colour, and of no consideration. I did not so much mind these as the others that simply buzzed round without an object—flies that have no beauty, no lancet to stab you with, and no distinction of any kind, yet will persist in forcing themselves on your attention. They buzz and buzz, and are loudest in your ear when you are most anxious to listen to some distant faint sound. If a blood-sucker hurts you, you can slap him to death, and there's an end of the matter; but slap at one of these idle, aimless, teasing flies as hard as you like, and he is gone like quicksilver through your fingers. He is buzzing derisively in your ears: "Slap away as much as you like—it pleases you and doesn't hurt me." And then down again in the same place!

When the others—the serious flies on business bent—got too numerous, I began to slap my legs, killing one or two of the greediest at each slap, and to throw their small corpses on the sunlit current. These slain flies were not wasted, for very soon I had quite a number of little minnows close to my feet, eager to seize them as they fell. And, by-and-by, three fiddlers, or pond-skaters, "sagacious of their quarry from afar," came skating into sight on the space of bright water; and to these mysterious, uncanny-looking creatures—insect ghosts that walk on the water, but with very unghost-like appetites—I began tossing some of the flies; and each time a fiddler seized a floating fly he skated away into the shade with it to devour it in peace and quiet all alone by himself. For a fiddler with a fly is like a dog with a bone among other hungry dogs. When I had finished feeding my ghosts and little fishes, I got up and left the place, for the sun was travelling west and the greatest heat was over.

CHAPTER IV

The stag-beetle—Evening flight—Appearance on the wing—Seeking a mate—Stag and doe in a hedge—The ploughman and the beetle—A stag-beetle's fate—Concerning tenacity of life—Life appearances after death—A serpent's skin—A dead glow-worm's light—Little summer tragedies—A snaky spot—An adder's basking-place—Watching adders—The adder's senses—Adder's habits not well known—A pair of anxious pewits—A dead young pewit—Animals without knowledge of death—Removal of the dead by ants—Gould's observations on ants.

The stag-beetle

During the last week in June we can look for the appearance of our most majestical insect; he is an evening flyer, and a little before sunset begins to show himself abroad. He is indeed a monarch among hexapods, with none to equal him save, perhaps, the great goblin moth; and in shape and size and solidity he bears about the same relation to pretty bright flies as a horned rhinoceros does to volatile squirrels and monkeys and small barred and spotted felines. This is the stag-beetle—"stags and does" is the native name for the two sexes; he is probably more abundant in this corner of Hampshire than in any other locality in England, and among the denizens of the Forest there are few more interesting. About four or five o'clock in the afternoon, the ponderous beetle wakes out of his long siesta, down among the roots and dead vegetable matter of a thorny brake or large hedge, and laboriously sets himself to work his way out. He is a slow, clumsy creature, a very bad climber; and small wonder, when we consider how he is impeded by his long branched horns when endeavouring to make his way upwards through a network of interlacing stems.

As you walk by the hedge-side a strange noise suddenly arrests your attention; it is the buzz of an insect, but loud enough to startle you; it might be mistaken for the reeling of a nightjar, but is perhaps more like the jarring hum of a fast-driven motor-car. The reason of the noise is that the beetle has with great pains climbed up a certain height from the ground, and, in order to ascertain whether he has got far enough, he erects himself on his stand, lifts his wing-cases, shakes out his wings, and begins to agitate them violently, turning this way and that to make sure that he has a clear space. If he then attempts to fly—it is one of his common blunders—he instantly strikes against some branch or cluster of leaves, and is thrown down. The tumble does not hurt him in the least, but so greatly astonishes him that he remains motionless a good while; then recovering his senses, he begins to ascend again. At length, after a good many accidents and adventures by the way, he gets to a topmost twig, and, after some buzzing to get up steam, launches himself heavily on the air and goes away in grand style.

Hugh Miller, in his autobiography, tells of the discovery he made of a curiously striking resemblance in shape between our most elegantly made carriages and the bodies of wasps, the resemblance being heightened by a similarity of colouring seen in the lines and bands of vivid yellows and reds on a polished black ground. This likeness between insect and carriage does not appear so striking at this day owing to a change in the fashion towards a more sombre colour in the vehicles; their funeral blacks, dark blues, and greens being now seldom relieved with bright yellows and reds. The stag-beetle, too, when he goes away with heavy flight always gives one the idea of some kind of machine or vehicle, not like the aerial phaeton of the wasp or hornet, with its graceful lines and strongly-contrasted colours, but an oblong, ponderous, armour-plated car, furnished with a beak, and painted a deep uniform brown.

Birds, especially the more aerial insectivorous kinds, have the habit of flying at and teasing any odd or grotesque-looking creature they may see on the wing—as a bat, for instance. I have seen small birds dart at a passing stag, but on coming near they turn tail and fly from him, frightened perhaps at his formidable appearance and loud noise.

Notwithstanding his lumbering, blundering ways, when the stag is abroad in search of the doe, you may see that he is endowed with a sense and faculty so exquisite as to make it appear almost miraculous in the sureness of its action. The void air, as he sweeps droning through it, is peopled with subtle intelligences, which elude and mock and fly from him, and which he pursues until he finds out their secret. They mock him most, or, to drop the metaphor, he is most at fault, on a still sultry day when not a breath of air is stirring. At times he catches what, for want of better knowledge, we must call a scent, and in order to fix the direction it comes from he goes through a series of curious movements. You will see him rise above a thorny thicket, or a point where two hedges intersect at right angles, and remain suspended on his wings a few inches above the hedge-top for one or two minutes, loudly humming, and turning by a succession of jerks all round, pausing after each turn, until he has faced all points of the compass.

This failing, he darts away and circles widely round, then returning to the central point suspends himself as before. After spending several minutes in this manner, he once more resumes his wanderings. Several males are sometimes attracted to the same spot, but they pass and repass without noticing one another. You will see as many as three or four or half a dozen majestically moving up and down at a hedge-side or in a narrow path in a hazel copse, each beetle turning when he gets to the end and marching back again; and altogether their measured, stately, and noisy movements are a fine spectacle.

A slight wind makes a great difference to him: even a current of air so faint as not to be felt on the face will reveal to him the exact distant spot in which the doe is lurking. The following incident will serve to show how perfect and almost infallible the sense and its correlated instinct are, and at the same time what a clumsy, blundering creature this beetle is.

Seeking a mate

Hearing a buzzing noise in a large unkept hedge, I went to the spot and found a stag trying to extricate himself from some soft fern-fronds growing among the brambles in which he had got entangled. In the end he succeeded, and, finally gaining a point where there was nothing to obstruct his flight, he launched himself on the air and flew straight away to a distance of fifty yards; then he turned and commenced flying backwards and forwards, travelling forty or fifty yards one way and as many the other, until he made a discovery; and struck motionless in his career, he remained suspended for a moment or two, then flew swiftly and straight as a bullet back to the hedge from which he had so recently got away. He struck the hedge where it was broadest, at a distance of about twenty yards or more from the point where I had first found him, and running to the spot, I saw that he had actually alighted within four or five inches of a female concealed among the clustering leaves. On his approaching her she coyly moved from him, climbing up and down and along the branchlets, but for some time he continued very near her. So far he had followed on her track, or by the same branches and twigs over which she had passed, but on her getting a little farther away and doubling back, he attempted to reach her by a series of short cuts, over the little bridges formed by innumerable slender branches, and his short cuts in most cases brought him against some obstruction; or else there was a sudden bend in the branch, and he was taken farther away. When he had a chain of bridges or turnings, he seemed fated to take the wrong one, and in spite of all his desperate striving to get nearer, he only increased the distance between them. The level sun shone into the huge tangle of bramble, briar, and thorn, with its hundreds of interlacing branches and stringy stems, so that I was able to keep both beetles in sight; but after I had watched them for three-quarters of an hour, the sun departed, and I too left them. They were then nearly six feet apart; and seeing what a labyrinth they were in, I concluded that, strive how the enamoured creature might, they would never, from the stag-beetle point of view, be within measurable distance of one another.

Something in the appearance of the big beetle, both flying and when seen on the ground in his wrathful, challenging attitude, strikes the rustics of these parts as irresistibly comic. When its heavy flight brings it near the labourer in the fields, he knocks it down with his cap, then grins at the sight of the maltreated creature's amazement and indignation. However weary the ploughman may be when he plods his homeward way, he will not be too tired to indulge in this ancient practical joke. When the beetle's flight takes him by village or hamlet, the children, playing together in the road, occupied with some such simple pastime as rolling in the dust or making little miniature hills of loose sand, are suddenly thrown into a state of wild excitement, and, starting to their feet, they run whooping after the wanderer, throwing their caps to bring him down.

A stag-beetle's fate

One evening at sunset, on coming to a forest gate through which I had to pass, I saw a stag-beetle standing in his usual statuesque, angry or threatening attitude in the middle of the road close to the gate. Doubtless some labourer who had arrived at the gate earlier in the evening had struck it down for fun and left it there. By-and-by, I thought, he will recover from the shock to his dignity and make his way to some elevated point, from which he will be able to start afresh on his wanderings in search of a wife. But it was not to be as I thought, for next morning, on going by the same gate, I found the remains of my beetle just where I had last seen him—the legs, wing-cases, and the big, broad head with horns attached. The poor thing had remained motionless too long, and had been found during the evening by a hedgehog and devoured, all but the uneatable parts. On looking closely, I found that the head was still alive; at a touch the antennæ—those mysterious jointed rods, toothed like a comb at their ends—began to wave up and down, and the horns opened wide, like the jaws of an angry crab. On placing a finger between them they nipped it as sharply as if the creature had been whole and uninjured. Yet the body had been long devoured and digested; and there was only this fragment left, and, torn off with it, shall we say? a fragment of intelligent life!

We always look on this divisibility of the life-principle in some creatures with a peculiar repugnance; and, like all phenomena that seem to contradict the regular course of nature, it gives a shock to the mind. We do not experience this feeling with regard to plant life, and to the life of some of the lower animal organisms, because we are more familiar with the sight in these cases. The trouble to the mind is in the case of the higher life of sentient and intelligent beings that have passions like our own. We see it even in some vertebrates, especially in serpents, which are most tenacious of life. Thus, there is a recorded case of a pit viper, the head of which was severed from the body by the person who found it. When the head was approached the jaws opened and closed with a vicious snap, and when the headless trunk was touched it instantly recoiled and struck at the touching object.

Tenacity of life

Such cases are apt to produce in some minds a sense as of something unfamiliar and uncanny behind nature that mocks us. But even those who are entirely free from any such animistic feeling are strangely disturbed at the spectacle, not only because it is opposed to the order of nature (as the mind apprehends it), but also because it contradicts the old fixed eternal idea we all have, that life is compounded of two things—the material body and the immaterial spirit, which leavens and, in a sense, re-creates and shines in and through the clay it is mixed with; and that you cannot destroy the body without also destroying or driving out that mysterious, subtle principle. Life was thus anciently likened to a seal, which is two things in one—the wax and the impression on it. You cannot break the seal without also destroying the impression, any more than you can break a pitcher without spilling the liquor in it. In such cases as those of the beetle and the serpent, it would perhaps be better to liken life to a red, glowing ember, which may be broken into pieces, and each piece still burn and glow with its own portion of the original heat.

The survival after death of something commonly supposed to be dependent on vitality is another phenomenon which, like that of the divisibility of the life-principle, affects us disagreeably. The continued growth of the hair of dead men is an instance in point. It is, we know, an error, caused by the shrinking of the flesh; and as for the accounts of coffins being found full of hair when opened, they are inventions, though still believed in by some persons. Another instance, which is not a fable, is that of a serpent's skin. When properly and quickly dried after removal, it will retain its bright colours for an indefinite time—in some cases for many years. But at intervals the colours appear to fade, or become covered with a misty whiteness; and the cause, as one may see when the skin is rubbed or shaken, is that the outer scales are being shed. They come off separately, and are very much thinner than when the living serpent sheds his skin, and they grow thinner with successive sheddings until they are scarcely visible. But at each shedding the skin recovers its brightness. One in my possession continued shedding its scale-films in this way for about ten years. I used it for a book-marker and often had it in my hands, but not until it ceased shedding its scale-coverings, and its original bright green colour turned to dull blackish-green, did I get rid of the feeling that it had some life in it.

But the most striking instance of the continuance or survival long after death of what has seemed an attribute or manifestation of life remains to be told.

A dead glow-worm's light

One cloudy, very dark night at Boldre, I was going home across a heath with some girls from a farmhouse where we had been visiting, when one of my young companions cried out that she could see a spark of fire on the road before us. We then all saw it—a small, steady, green light—but on lighting a match and looking closely at the spot, nothing could we see except the loose soil in the road. When the match went out the spark of green fire was there still, and we searched again, turning the loose soil with our fingers until we discovered the dried and shrunken remains of a glow-worm of the previous year. It had been trodden into the sand, and the sand driven into it, until it was hard to make out any glow-worm shape or appearance in it. It was like a fragment of dry earth, and yet, so long as it was in the dark, the small, brilliant green light continued to shine from one end of it. Yet this dried old case must have been dead and blown about in the dust for at least seven or eight months.

On going up to London I carried it with me in a small box: there in a dark room it shone once more, but the light was now much fainter, and on the following evening there was no light. For some days I tried, by moistening it, by putting it out in the sun and wind, and in other ways, to bring back the light, but did not succeed; and, convinced at length that it would shine no more, I had the feeling that life had at last gone out of that dry, dusty fragment.

The little summer tragedies in Nature which we see or notice are very few—not one in a thousand of those that actually take place about us in a spot like this, teeming with midsummer life. A second one, which impressed me at the time, had for its scene a spot not more than eight minutes' walk from that forest gate where the stag-beetle, too long in cooling his wrath, had been overtaken by so curious a destiny. But before I relate this other tragedy, I must describe the place and some of the creatures I met there. It was a point where heath and wood meet, but do not mingle; where the marshy stream that drains the heath flows down into the wood, and the boggy ground sloping to the water is overgrown with a mixture of plants of different habits—lovers of a dry soil and of a wet—heather and furze, coarse and fine grasses, bracken and bog myrtle; and in the wettest spots there were patches and round masses of rust-red and orange-yellow and pale-grey lichen, and a few fragrant, shining, yellow stars of the bog asphodel, although its flowering season was nearly over. It was a perfect wilderness, as wild a bit of desert as one could wish to be in, where a man could spy all day upon its shy inhabitants, and no one would come and spy upon him.

Here, if anywhere, was my exulting thought when I first beheld it, there should be adders for me. There was a snakiness in the very look of the place, and I could almost feel by anticipation the delightful thrill in my nerves invariably experienced at the sight of a serpent. And as I went very cautiously along, wishing for the eyes of a dragon-fly so as to be able to see all round me, a coil of black and yellow caught my sight at a distance of a few yards ahead, and was no sooner seen than gone. The spot from which the shy creature had vanished was a small, circular, natural platform on the edge of the bank, surrounded with grass and herbage, and a little dwarf, ragged furze; the platform was composed of old, dead bracken and dry grass, and had a smooth, flat surface, pressed down as if some creature used it as a sleeping-place. It was, I saw, the favourite sleeping- or basking-place of an adder, and by-and-by, or in a few hours' time, I should be able to get a good view of the creature. Later in the day, on going back to the spot, I did find my adder on its platform, and was able to get within three or four yards, and watch it for some minutes before it slipped gently down the bank and out of sight.

Watching adders

This adder was a very large (probably gravid) female, very bright in the sunshine, the broad, zig-zag band an inky black on a straw-coloured ground. On my third successful visit to the spot I was agreeably surprised to find that my adder had not been widowed by some fatal accident, nor left by her wandering mate to spend the summer alone; for now there were two on the one platform, slumbering peacefully side by side. The new-comer, the male, was a couple of inches shorter and a good deal slimmer than his mate, and differed in colour; the zigzag mark was intensely black, as in the other, but the ground colour was a beautiful copper red; he was, I think, the handsomest red adder I have seen.

On my subsequent visits to the spot I found sometimes one and sometimes both; and I observed them a good deal at different distances. One way was to look at them from a distance of fifteen to twenty yards through a binocular magnifying nine diameters, which produced in me the fascinating illusion of being in the presence of venomous serpents of a nobler size than we have in this country. The glasses were for pleasure only. When I watched them for profit with my unaided eyes, I found it most convenient to stand at a distance of three or four yards; but often I moved cautiously up to the raised platform they reposed on, until, by bending a little forward, I could look directly down upon them.

When we first catch sight of an adder lying at rest in the sun, it strikes us as being fast asleep, so motionless is it; but that it ever does really sleep with the sun shining into its round, lidless, brilliant eyes is hardly to be believed. The immobility which we note at first does not continue long; watch the adder lying peacefully in the sun, and you will see that at intervals of a very few minutes, and sometimes as often as once a minute, he quietly changes his position. Now he draws his concentric coils a little closer, now spreads them more abroad; by-and-by the whole body is extended to a sinuous band, then disposed in the form of a letter S, or a simple horseshoe figure, and sometimes the head rests on the body and sometimes on the ground. The gentle, languid movements of the creature changing his position at intervals are like those of a person reclining in a hot bath, who occasionally moves his body and limbs to renew and get the full benefit of the luxurious sensation.

That the two adders could see me when I stood over them, or at a distance of three or four yards, or even more, is likely; but it is certain that they did not regard me as a living thing, or anything to be disturbed at, but saw me only as a perfectly motionless object which had grown imperceptibly on their vision, and was no more than a bush, or stump, or tree. Nevertheless, I became convinced that always after standing for a time near them my presence produced a disturbing effect. It is, perhaps, the case that we are not all contained within our visible bodies, but have our own atmosphere about us—something of us which is outside of us, and may affect other creatures. More than that, there may be a subtle current which goes out and directly affects any creature (or person) which we regard for any length of time with concentrated attention. This is one of the things about which we know nothing, or, at all events, learn nothing from our masters, and most scientists would say that it is a mere fancy; but in this instance it was plain to see that always after a time something began to produce a disturbing effect on the adders. This would first show itself in a slight restlessness, a movement of the body as if it had been breathed upon, increasing until they would be ill at ease all the time, and at length they would slip quietly away to hide under the bank.

The following incident will show that they were not disturbed at seeing me standing near, assuming that they could or did see me. On one of my visits I took some pieces of scarlet ribbon to find out by an experiment if there was any truth in the old belief that the sight of scarlet will excite this serpent to anger. I approached them in the usual cautious way, until I was able, bending forward, to look down upon them reposing unalarmed on their bed of dry fern; then, gradually putting one hand out until it was over them, I dropped from it first one then another piece of silk so that they fell gently upon the edge of the platform. The adders must have seen these bright objects so close to them, yet they did not suddenly draw back their heads, nor exsert their tongues, nor make the least movement, but it was as if a dry, light, dead leaf, or a ball of thistledown, had floated down and settled near them, and they had not heeded it.

In the same way they probably saw me, and it was as if they had seen me not, since they did not heed my motionless figure; but that they always felt my presence after a time I felt convinced, for not only when I stood close to and looked down upon them, but also at a distance of four to eight yards, after gazing fixedly at them for some minutes, the change, the tremor, would appear, and in a little while they would steal away.

Enough has been said to show how much I liked the company of these adders, even when I knew that my presence disturbed their placid lives in some indefinable way. They were indeed more to me than all the other adders, numbering about a score, which I had found at their favourite basking-places in the neighbourhood. For they were often to be found in that fragrant, sequestered spot where their home was; and they were two together, of different types, both beautiful, and by observing them day by day I increased my knowledge of their kind. We do not know very much about "the life and conversation" of adders, having been too much occupied in "bruising" their shining beautiful bodies beneath our ironshod heels, and with sticks and stones, to attend to such matters. So absorbed was I in contemplating or else thinking about them at that spot that I was curiously indifferent to the other creatures—little lizards, and butterflies, and many young birds brought by their parents to the willows and alders that shaded the stream. All day the birds dozed on their gently swaying perches, chirping at intervals to be fed; and near by a tree-pipit had his stand, and sang and sang when most songsters were silent, but I paid no attention even to his sweet strains. Two or three hundred yards away, up the stream on a boggy spot, a pair of pewits had their breeding-place. They were always there, and invariably on my appearance they rose up and came to me, and, winnowing the air over my head, screamed their loudest. But I took no notice, and was not annoyed, knowing that their most piercing cries would have no effect on the adders, since their deaf ears heard nothing, and their brilliant eyes saw next to nothing, of all that was going on about them. After vexing their hearts in vain for a few minutes the pewits would go back to their own ground, then peace would reign once more.

A dead young pewit

One day I was surprised and a little vexed to find that the pewits had left their own ground to come and establish themselves on the bog within forty yards of the spot where I was accustomed to take my stand when observing the adders. Their anxiety at my presence had now become so intensified that it was painful to witness. I concluded that they had led their nearly grown-up young to that spot, and sincerely hoped that they would be gone on the morrow. But they remained there five days; and as their solicitude and frantic efforts to drive me away were renewed on each visit, they were a source of considerable annoyance. On the fourth day I accidentally discovered their secret. If I had not been so taken up with the adders, I might have guessed it. Going over the ground I came upon a dead full-grown young pewit, raised a few inches above the earth by the heather it rested on, its head dropped forward, its motionless wings partly open.

Usually at the moment of death a bird beats violently with its wings, and after death the wings remain half open. This was how the pewit had died, the wings half folded. Picking it up, I saw that it had been dead several days, though the carrion beetles had not attacked it, owing to its being several inches above the ground. It had, in fact, no doubt been already dead when I first found the old pewits settled at that spot; yet during those four hot, long summer days they had been in a state of the most intense anxiety for the safety of these dead remains! This is to my mind not only a very pathetic spectacle, but one of the strangest facts in animal life. The reader may say that it is not at all strange, since it is very common. It is most strange to me because it is very common, since if it were rare we could say that it was due to individual aberration, or resulted through the bluntness of some sense or instinct. What is wonderful and almost incredible is that the higher vertebrates have no instinct to guide them in such a case as I have described, and no inherited knowledge of death. To make of Nature a person, we may see that in spite of her providential care for all her children, and wise ordering of their lives down to the minutest detail, she has yet failed in this one thing. Her only provision is that the dead shall be speedily devoured; but they are not thus removed in numberless instances; a very familiar one is the sight of living and dead young birds, the dead often in a state of decay, lying together in one nest: and here we cannot but see that the dead become a burden and a danger to the living. Birds and mammals are alike in this. They will call, and wait for, and bring food to, and try to rouse the dead young or mate; day and night they will keep guard over it and waste themselves in fighting to save it from their enemies. Yet we can readily believe that an instinct fitted to save an animal from all this vain excitement, and labour, and danger, would be of infinite advantage to the species that possessed it.

Animals and their dead

In some social hymenopterous insects we see that the dead are removed; it would be impossible for ants to exist in communities numbering many thousands and tens of thousands of members crowded in a small space without such a provision. The dead ant is picked up by the first worker that happens to come that way and discovers it, and carried out and thrown away. Probably some chemical change which takes place in the organism on the cessation of life and makes it offensive to the living has given rise to this healthy instinct. The dead ant is not indeed seen as a dead fellow-being, but as so much rubbish, or "matter in the wrong place," and is accordingly removed. We can confidently say that this is not a knowledge of death, from what has been observed of the behaviour of ants on the death of some highly regarded individual in the nest—a queen, for instance. On this point I will quote a passage from the Rev. William Gould's Account of English Ants, dated 1747. His small book may be regarded as a classic, at all events by naturalists; albeit the editors of our Dictionary of National Biography have not thought proper to give him a place in that work, in which so many obscurities, especially of the nineteenth century, have had their little lives recorded.

It may be remarked in passing that the passage to be quoted is a very good sample of the style of our oldest entomologist, the first man in England to observe the habits of insects. His small volume dates many years before the Natural History of Selborne, and his style, it will be seen, is very different from that of Gilbert White. We know from Lord Avebury's valuable book on the habits of ants that Gould was not mistaken in these remarkable observations.

In whatever Apartment a Queen Ant condescends to be present, she commands Obedience and Respect. An universal Gladness spreads itself through the whole Cell, which is expressed by particular Acts of Joy and Exultation. They have a peculiar Way of skipping, leaping, and standing upon their Hind Legs, and prancing with the others. These Frolicks they make use of, both to congratulate each other when they meet, and to show their Regard for the Queen.... Howsoever romantick this Description may appear, it may easily be proved by an obvious Experiment. If you place a Queen Ant with her Retinue under a Glass, you will in a few Moments be convinced of the Honour they pay, and Esteem they entertain for her. There cannot be a more remarkable Instance than what happened to a Black Queen, the beginning of last Spring. I had placed her with a large Retinue in a sliding Box, in the Cover of which was an Opening sufficient for the Workers to pass to and fro, but so narrow as to confine the Queen. A Corps was constantly in waiting and surrounded her, whilst others went out in search of Provisions. By some Misfortune she died; the Ants, as if not apprised of her Death, continued their Obedience. They even removed her from one Part of the Box to another, and treated her with the same Court and Formality as if she had been alive. This lasted two Months, at the End of which, the Cover being open, they forsook the Box, and carried her off.

Two days after I found the dead pewit the parent birds disappeared; and a little later I paid my last visit to the adders, and left them with the greatest reluctance, for they had not told me a hundredth part of their unwritten history.

CHAPTER V

The nightingale ceases singing about 18th or 20th June. A bird here and there may sing later; I occasionally hear one as late as the first days of July. And because the nightingale is not so numerous as the other singers, and his song attracts more attention, we get the idea that his musical period is soonest over. Yet several other species come to the end of their vocal season quite as early, or but little later. If it be an extremely abundant species, as in the case of the willow-wren, we will hear a score or fifty sing for every nightingale. Blackcap and garden warbler, whitethroat and lesser whitethroat, are nearly silent, too, at the beginning of July; and altogether it seems to be the rule that the species oftenest heard after June are the most abundant.

The woodland silence increases during July and August, not only because the singing season is ended, but also because the birds are leaving the woods: that darkness and closeness which oppresses us when we walk in the deep shade is not congenial to them; besides, food is less plentiful than in the open places, where the sun shines and the wind blows.

Woods, again, vary greatly in character and the degree of attractiveness they have for birds: the copse and spinney keep a part of their population through the hottest months; and coming to large woods the oak is never oppressive like the beech and other deciduous trees. It spreads its branches wide, and has wide spaces which let in the light and air; grass and undergrowth flourish beneath it, and, better than all, it abounds in bird food on its foliage above all trees.

My favourite woods were almost entirely of oak with a holly undergrowth, and at some points oaks were mixed with firs. They were never gloomy nor so silent as most woods; but in July, as a rule, one had to look for the birds, since they were no longer distributed through the wood as in the spring and early summer, but were congregated at certain points.

Mixed bird-companies

Most persons are familiar with those companies of small birds which form in woods in winter, composed of tits of all species, with siskins, goldcrests, and sometimes other kinds. The July gatherings are larger, include more species, and do not travel incessantly like the winter companies. They are composed of families—parent birds and their young, lately out of the nest, brought to the oaks to be fed on caterpillars. It may be that their food is more abundant at certain points, but it is also probable that their social disposition causes them to congregate. Walking in the silent woods you begin to hear them at a considerable distance ahead—a great variety of sounds, mostly of that shrill, sharp, penetrative character which is common to many young passerine birds when calling to be fed. The birds will sometimes be found distributed over an acre of ground, a family or two occupying every large oak tree—tits, finches, warblers, the tree-creeper, nuthatch, and the jay. What, one asks, is the jay doing in such company? He is feeding at the same table, and certainly not on them. All, jays included, are occupied with the same business, minutely examining each cluster of leaves, picking off every green caterpillar, and extracting the chrysalids from every rolled-up leaf. The airy little leaf-warblers and the tits do this very deftly; the heavier birds are obliged to advance with caution along the twig until by stretching the neck they can reach their prey lurking in the green cluster, and thrust their beaks into each little green web-fastened cylinder. But all are doing the same thing in pretty much the same way. While the old birds are gathering food, the young, sitting in branches close by, are incessantly clamouring to be fed, their various calls making a tempest of shrill and querulous sounds in the wood. And the shrillest of all are the long-tailed tits; these will not sit still and wait like the others, but all, a dozen or fifteen to a brood, hurry after their busy parents, all the time sending out those needles of sound in showers. Of hard-billed birds the chaffinch, as usual, was the most numerous, but there were, to my surprise, many yellowhammers; all these, like the rest, with their newly brought out young. The presence of the hawfinch was another surprise; and here I noticed that the hunger call of the young hawfinch is the loudest of all—a measured, powerful, metallic chirp, heard high above the shrill hubbub.

Caterpillars and ants

Watching one of these busy companies of small birds at work, one is amazed at the thought of the abundance of larval insect life in these oak woods. The caterpillars must be devoured in tens of thousands every day for some weeks, yet when the time comes one is amazed again at the numbers that have survived to know a winged life. On July evenings with the low sun shining on the green oaks at this place I have seen the trees covered as with a pale silvery mist—a mist composed of myriads of small white and pale-grey moths fluttering about the oak foliage. Yet it is probable that all the birds eat is but a small fraction of the entire number destroyed. The rapacious insects are in myriads too, and are most of them at war with the soft-bodied caterpillars. The earth under the bed of dead leaves is full of them, and the surface is hunted over all day by the wood or horse ants—Formica rufa. One day, standing still to watch a number of these ants moving about in all directions over the ground, I saw a green geometer caterpillar fall from an oak leaf above to the earth, and no sooner had it dropped than an ant saw and attacked it, seizing it at one end of its body with his jaws. The caterpillar threw itself into a horseshoe form, and then, violently jerking its body round, flung the ant away to a distance of a couple of inches. But the attack was renewed, and three times the ant was thrown violently off; then another ant came, and he, too, was twice thrown off; then a third ant joined in the fight, and when all three had fastened their jaws on their victim the struggle ceased, and the caterpillar was dragged away. That is the fate of most caterpillars that come to the ground. But the ants ascend the trees; you see them going up and coming down in thousands, and you find on examination that they distribute themselves over the whole tree, even to the highest and farthest terminal twigs. And their numbers are incalculable—here in the Forest, at all events. Not only are their communities large, numbering hundreds of thousands in a nest, but their nests here are in hundreds, and it is not uncommon to find them in groups, three or four up to eight or ten, all within a distance of a few yards of one another.

I had thought to write more, a whole chapter in fact, on this fascinating and puzzling insect—our "noble ant," as our old ant-lover Gould called it; but I have had to throw out that and much besides in order to keep this book within reasonable dimensions.

There is another noise of birds in all woods and copses in the silent season which is familiar to everyone—the sudden excited cries they utter at the sight of some prowling animal—fox, cat, or stoat. Even in the darkest, stillest woods these little tempests of noise occasionally break out, for no sooner does one bird utter the alarm cry than all within hearing hasten to the spot to increase the tumult. These tempests are of two kinds—the greater and lesser; in the first jays, blackbirds, and missel-thrushes take part, the magpie too, if he is in the wood, and almost invariably the outcry is caused by the appearance of one of the animals just named. In the smaller outbreaks, which are far more frequent, none of these birds take any part, not even the excitable blackbird, in spite of his readiness to make a noise on the least provocation. Only the smaller birds are concerned here, from the chaffinch down; and the weasel is, I believe, almost always the exciting cause. If it be as I think, a curious thing is that birds like the chaffinch and the tits, which have their nests placed out of its reach, should be so overcome at the sight of this minute creature which hunts on the ground, and which blackbirds and jays refuse to notice in spite of the outrageous din of the finches. The chaffinch is invariably first and loudest in these outbreaks; a dozen or twenty times a day, even in July and August, you will hear his loud passionate pink-pink calling on all of his kind to join him, and by-and-by, if you can succeed in getting to the spot, you will hear other species joining in—the girding of oxeye and blue tit, the angry, percussive note of the wren, the low wailing of the robin, and the still sadder dunnock, and the small plaintive cries of the tree-warblers.

Weasel and small birds

What an idle demonstration, what a fuss about nothing it seems! The minute weasel is on the track of a vole or a wood-mouse and cannot harm the birds. Yes, he can take the nestlings from the robin's and willow-wren's nests, and from other nests built on the ground, but what has the chaffinch to do with it all? Can it be that there is some fatal weakness in birds, in spite of their wings, in this bird especially, such as exists in voles, and mice, and rabbits, and in frogs and lizards, which brings them down to destruction, and of which they are in some way conscious? Some months ago there was a correspondence in the Field which touched upon this very subject. One gentleman wrote that he had found three freshly-killed adult cock chaffinches in a weasel's nest, and he asked in consequence how this small creature that hunts on the ground could be so successful in capturing so alert and vigorous a bird as this finch.

For a long time before this correspondence appeared I had been trying to find out the secret of the matter, but the weasel has keen senses, and it is hard to see and follow his movements in a copse without alarming him. One day, over a year ago, near Boldre, I was fortunate enough to hear a commotion of the lesser kind at a spot where I could steal upon without alarming the little beast. There was an oak tree, with some scanty thorn-bushes growing beside the trunk, and stealing quietly to the spot I peeped through the screening thorns, and saw a weasel lying coiled round, snakewise, at the roots of the oak in a bed of dead leaves. He was grinning and chattering at the birds, his whole body quivering with excitement. Close to him on the twigs above the birds were perched, and fluttering from twig to twig—chaffinches, wrens, robins, dunnocks, oxeyes, and two or three willow-wrens and chiffchaffs. The chaffinches were the most excited, and were nearest to him. Suddenly, after a few moments, the weasel began wriggling and spinning round with such velocity that his shape became indistinguishable, and he appeared as a small round red object violently agitated, his rapid motions stirring up the dead leaves so that they fluttered about him. Then he was still again, but chattering and quivering, then again the violent motion, and each time he made this extraordinary movement the excitement and cries of the birds increased and they fluttered closer down on the twigs. Unluckily, just when I was on the point of actually witnessing the end of this strange little drama—a chaffinch, I am sure, would have been the victim—the little flat-headed wretch became aware of my presence, not five yards from him, and springing up he scuttled into hiding.

Fascination

If, as I think, certain species of birds are so thrown off their mental balance by the sight of this enemy as to come in their frenzy down to be taken by him, it is clear that he fascinates—to use the convenient old word—in two different ways, or that his furred and feathered victims are differently affected. In the case of the rabbits and of the small rodents, we see that they recognise the dangerous character of their pursuer and try their best to escape from him, but that they cannot attain their normal speed—they cannot run as they do from a man, or dog, or other enemy, or as they run ordinarily when chasing one another. Yet it is plain to anyone who has watched a rabbit followed by a stoat that they strain every nerve to escape, and, conscious of their weakness, are on the brink of despair and ready to collapse. The rabbit's appearance when he is being followed, even when his foe is at a distance behind, his trembling frame, little hopping movements, and agonising cries, which may be heard distinctly three or four hundred yards away, remind us of our own state in a bad dream, when some terrible enemy, or some nameless horror, is coming swiftly upon us; when we must put forth our utmost speed to escape instant destruction, yet have a leaden weight on our limbs that prevents us from moving.

I have often watched rabbits hunted by stoats, and recently, at Beaulieu, I watched a vole hunted by a weasel, and it was simply the stoat and rabbit hunt in little.

Weasel and vole

It is a typical case, and I will describe just what I saw, and saw very well. I was on the hard, white road between Beaulieu village and Hilltop, when the little animal—a common field vole—came out from the hedge and ran along the road, and knowing from his appearance that he was being pursued, I stood still to see the result. He had a very odd look: instead of a smooth-haired little mouse-like creature running smoothly and swiftly over the bare ground, he was all hunched up, his hair standing on end like bristles, and he moved in a series of heavy painful hops. Before he had gone half a dozen yards, the weasel appeared at the point where the vole had come out, following by scent, his nose close to the ground; but on coming into the open road he lifted his head and caught sight of the straining vole, and at once dashed at and overtook him. A grip, a little futile squeal, and all was over, and the weasel disappeared into the hedge. But his mate had crossed the road a few moments before—I had seen her run by me—and he wanted to follow her, and so presently he emerged again with the vole in his mouth, and plucking up courage ran across close to me. I stood motionless until he was near my feet, then suddenly stamped on the hard road, and this so startled him that he dropped his prey and scuttled into cover. Very soon he came out again, and, seeing me so still, made a dash to recover his vole, when I stamped again, and he lost it again and fled; but only to return for another try, until he had made at least a dozen attempts. Then he gave it up, and peering at me in a bird-like way from the roadside grass began uttering a series of low, sorrowful sounds, so low indeed that if I had been more than six yards from him they would have been inaudible—low, and soft, and musical, and very sad, until he quite melted my heart, and I turned away, leaving him to his vole, feeling as much ashamed of myself as if I had teased a pretty bright-eyed little child by keeping his cake or apple until I had made him cry.

With regard to these fatal weaknesses in birds, mammals and reptiles, which we see are confined to certain species, they always strike us as out of the order of nature, or as abnormal, if the word may be used in such a connection. Perhaps it can be properly used. I remember that Herodotus, in his History of Egypt, relates that when a fire broke out in any city in that country, the people did not concern themselves about extinguishing it; their whole anxiety was to prevent the cats from rushing into the flames and destroying themselves. To this end the people would occupy all the approaches to the burning building, forming a cordon, as it were, to keep the cats back; but in spite of all they could do, some of them would get through, and rush into the flames and die. The omniscient learned person may tell me that Herodotus is the Father of Lies, if he likes, and is anxious to say something witty and original; but I believe this story of the cats, since not Herodotus, nor any Egyptian who was his informant, would or could have invented such a tale. Believing it, I can only explain it on the assumption that this Egyptian race of cats had become subject to a fatal weakness, a hypnotic effect caused by the sight of a great blaze. In like manner, if our chaffinch gets too much excited and finally comes down to be destroyed by a weasel, when he catches sight of that small red animal, or sees him going through that strange antic performance which I witnessed, it does not follow that the weakness or abnormality is universal in the species. It may be only in a race.

Strange weaknesses

Again, with regard to rabbits: when hunted by a stoat they endeavour to fly, but cannot, and are destroyed owing to that strange—one might almost say unnatural—weakness; but I can believe that if a colony of British rabbits were to inhabit, for a good many generations, some distant country where there are no stoats, this weakness would be outgrown. It is probable that, even in this stoat-infested country, not all individuals are subject to such a failing, and that, in those which have it, it differs in degree. If it is a weakness, a something inimical, then it is reasonable to believe that nature works to eliminate it, whether by natural selection or some other means.

The main point is the origin of this flaw in certain races, and perhaps species. How comes it that certain animals should, in certain circumstances, act in a definite way, as by instinct, to the detriment of their own and the advantage of some other species—in this case that of a direct and well-known enemy? It is a mystery, one which, so far as I know, has not yet been looked into. A small ray of light may be thrown on the matter, if we consider the fact of those strange weaknesses and mental abnormalities in our own species, which are supposed to have their origin in violent emotional and other peculiar mental states in one of our parents. "The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and their children's teeth are set on edge," is one of the old proverbs quoted by Ezekiel. I know of one unfortunate person who, if he but sees a lemon squeezed, or a child biting an unripe-looking fruit, has his teeth so effectually set on edge, that he cannot put food into his mouth for some time after. Here is a farmer, a big, strong, healthy man, who himself works on his farm like any labourer, who, if he but catches sight of any ophidian—adder, or harmless grass snake, or poor, innocent blindworm—instantly lets fall the implements from his hands, and stands trembling, white as a ghost, for some time; then, finally, he goes back to the house, slowly and totteringly, like some very aged, feeble invalid, and dropping on to a bed, he lies nerveless for the rest of that day. Night and sleep restore him to his normal state.

I give this one of scores of similar cases which I have found. Such things are indeed very common. But how does the fact of pre-natal suggestion help us to get the true meaning of such a phenomenon as fascination? It does not help us if we consider it by itself. It is a fact that "freaks" of this kind, mental and physical, are transmissible, but that helps us little—the abnormal individual has the whole normal race against him. Thus, in reference to the cat story in Herodotus, here in a Hampshire village, a mile or two from where I am writing this chapter, a cottage took fire one evening, and when the villagers were gathered on the spot watching the progress of the fire, some pigs—a sow with her young ones—appeared on the scene and dashed into the flames. The people rushed to the rescue, and with some difficulty pulled the pigs out; and finally hurdles had to be brought and placed in the way of the sow to prevent her getting back, so anxious was she to treat the villagers to roast pig.

This is a case of the hypnotic effect of fire on animals, and perhaps many similar cases would be found if looked for. We know that most animals are strangely attracted by fire at night, but they fear it too, and keep at a proper distance. It draws and disturbs but does not upset their mental balance. But how it came about that a whole race of cats in ancient Egypt were thrown off their balance and were always ready to rush into destruction like the Hampshire pigs, is a mystery.

To return to fascination. Let us (to personify) remember that Nature in her endeavours to safeguard all and every one of her creatures has given them the passion of fear in various degrees, according to their several needs, and in the greatest degree to her persecuted weaklings; and this emotion, to be efficient, must be brought to the extreme limit, beyond which it becomes debilitating and is a positive danger, even to betraying to destruction the life it was designed to save. Let us consider this fact in connection with that of pre-natal suggestion—of weak species frequently excited to an extremity of fear at the sight, familiar to them, of some deadly enemy, and the possible effect of that constantly recurring violent disturbance and image of terror on the young that are to be.

The guess may go for what it is worth. We know that the susceptibility of certain animals—the vole and the frog, let us say—to fascination, is like nothing else in animal life, since it is a great disadvantage to the species, a veritable weakness, which might even be called a disease; and that it must therefore have its cause in too great a strain on the system somewhere; and we know, too, that it is inheritable. But the facts are too few, since no one has yet taken pains to collect data on the matter. There is a good deal of material lying about in print; and I am astonished at many things I hear from intelligent keepers, and other persons who see a good deal of wild life, bearing on this subject. But I do not now propose to follow it any further.

I went into the oak wood one morning, and, finding it unusually still, betook myself to a spot where I had often found the birds gathered. It was a favourite place, where there was running water and very large trees standing wide apart, with a lawn-like green turf beneath them. This green space was about half an acre in extent, and was surrounded by a thicker wood of oak and holly, with an undergrowth of brambles. Here I found a dead squirrel lying on the turf under one of the biggest oaks, looking exceedingly conspicuous with the bright morning sun shining on him.

A poor bag! the reader may say, but it was the day of small things at the end of July, and this dead creature gave me something to think about. How in the name of wonder came it to be dead at that peaceful place, where no gun was fired! I could not believe that he had died, for never had I seen a finer, glossier-coated, better-nourished-looking squirrel. "Whiter than pearls are his teeth," were Christ's words in the legend when His followers looked with disgust and abhorrence at a dead dog lying in the public way. This dead animal had more than pearly teeth to admire; he was actually beautiful to the sight, lying graceful in death on the moist green sward in his rich chestnut reds and flower-like whiteness. The wild, bright-eyed, alert little creature—it seemed a strange and unheard-of thing that he, of all the woodland people, should be lying there, motionless, not stiffened yet and scarcely cold.

A keeper in Hampshire told me that he once saw a squirrel accidentally kill itself in a curious way. The keeper was walking on a hard road, and noticed the squirrel high up in the topmost branches of the trees overhead, bounding along from branch to branch before him, and by-and-by, failing to grasp the branch it had aimed at, it fell fifty or sixty feet to the earth, and was stone-dead when he picked it up from the road. But such accidents must be exceedingly rare in the squirrel's life.

Fleas large and small

Looking closely at my dead squirrel to make sure that he had no external hurt, I was surprised to find its fur peopled with lively black fleas, running about as if very much upset at the death of their host. These fleas were to my eyes just like pulex irritans—our own flea; but it is doubtful that it was the same, as we know that a great many animals have their own species to tease them. Now, I have noticed that some very small animals have very small fleas; and that, one would imagine, is as it should be, since fleas are small to begin with, because they cannot afford to be large, and the flea that would be safe on a dog would be an unsuitable parasite for so small a creature as a mouse. The common shrew is an example. It has often happened that when in an early morning walk I have found one lying dead on the path or road and have touched it, out instantly a number of fleas have jumped. And on touching it again, there may be a second and a third shower. These fleas, parasitical on so minute a mammal, are themselves minute—pretty sherry-coloured little creatures, not half so big as the dog's flea. It appears to be a habit of some wild fleas, when the animal they live on dies and grows cold, to place themselves on the surface of the fur and to hop well away when shaken. But we do not yet know very much about their lives. Huxley once said that we were in danger of being buried under our accumulated monographs. There is, one is sorry to find, no monograph on the fleas; a strange omission, when we consider that we have, as the life-work of an industrious German, a big handsome quarto, abundantly illustrated, on the more degraded and less interesting Pedicularia.

The multitude of fleas, big and black, on my dead squirrel, seemed a ten-times bigger puzzle than the one of the squirrel's death. For how had they got there? They were not hatched and brought up on the squirrel: they passed their life as larvæ on the ground, among the dead leaves, probably feeding on decayed organic matter. How did so many of them succeed in getting hold of so very sprightly and irritable a creature, who lives mostly high up in the trees, and does not lie about on the ground? Can it be that fleas—those proper to the squirrel—swarm on the ground in the woods, and that without feeding on mammalian blood they are able to propagate and keep up their numbers? These questions have yet to be answered.

It struck me at last that these sprightly parasites might have been the cause of the squirrel's coming to grief; that, driven to desperation by their persecutions, he had cast himself down from some topmost branch, and so put an end to the worry with his life.

A squirrel's disposition

Squirrels abound in these woods, and but for parasites and their own evil tempers they might be happy all the time. But they are explosive and tyrannical to an almost insane degree; and this may be an effect of the deleterious substances they are fond of eating. They will feast on scarlet and orange agarics—lovely things to look at, but deadly to creatures that are not immune. A prettier spectacle than two squirrels fighting is not to be seen among the oaks. So swift are they, so amazingly quick in their doublings, in feints, attack, flight, and chase; moving not as though running on trees and ground, but as if flying and gliding; and so rarely do they come within touching distance of one another, that the delighted looker-on might easily suppose that it is all in fun. In their most truculent moods, in their fiercest fights, they cannot cease to be graceful in all their motions.

A common action of squirrels, when excited, of throwing things down, has been oddly misinterpreted by some observers who have written about it. Here I have often watched a squirrel, madly excited at my presence when I have stopped to watch him, dancing about and whisking his tail, scolding in a variety of tones, and emitting that curious sound which reminds one of the chattering cry of fieldfares when alarmed; and finally tearing off the loose bark with his little hands and teeth, and biting, too, at twigs and leaves so as to cause them to fall in showers. The little pot boils over in that way, and that's all there is to be said about it.

Walking among the oaks one day in early winter when the trees were nearly leafless, I noticed a squirrel sitting very quietly on a branch; and though he did not get excited, he began to move away before me, stopping at intervals and sitting still to watch me for a few moments. He was a trifle suspicious, and nothing more. In this way he went on for some distance, and by-and-by came to a long horizontal branch thickly clothed with long lichen on its upper sides, and instantly his demeanour changed. He was all excitement, and bounding along the branch he eagerly began to look for something, sniffing and scratching with his paws, and presently he pulled out a nut which had been concealed in a crevice under the lichen, and sitting up, he began cracking and eating it, taking no further notice of me. The sudden change in him, the hurried search for something, and the result, seemed to throw some light on the question of the animal's memory with reference to his habit of hiding food. It is one common to a great number of rodents, and to many of the higher mammals—Canidæ and Felidæ, and to many birds, including most, if not all, the Corvidæ.

When the food is hidden away here, there, and everywhere, we know from observation that in innumerable instances it is never found, and probably never looked for again; and of the squirrel we are accustomed to say that he no sooner hides a nut than he forgets all about it. Doubtless he does, and yet something may bring it back to his mind. In this matter I think there is a considerable difference between the higher mammals, cats and dogs, for instance, and the rodents; I think the dog has a better or more highly developed memory. Thus, I have seen a dog looking enviously at another who had got a bone, and after gazing at him with watering mouth for some time, suddenly turn round and go off at a great pace to a distant part of the ground, and there begin digging, and presently pull out a bone of his own, which he had no doubt forgotten all about until he was feelingly reminded of it. I doubt if a squirrel would ever rise to this height; but on coming by chance to a spot with very marked features, where he had once hidden a nut, then I think the sight of the place might bring back the old impression.

I have often remarked when riding a nervous horse, that he will invariably become alarmed, and sometimes start at nothing, on arriving at some spot where something had once occurred to frighten him. The sight of the spot brings up the image of the object or sound that startled him; or, to adopt a later interpretation of memory, the past event is reconstructed in his mind. Again, I have noticed with dogs, when one is brought to a spot where on a former occasion he has battled with or captured some animal, or where he has met with some exciting adventure, he shows by a sudden change in his manner, in eyes and twitching nose, that it has all come back to him, and he appears as if looking for its instant repetition.

The lower kind of memory

We see that we possess this lower kind of memory ourselves—that its process is the same in man and dog and squirrel. I am, for instance, riding or walking in a part of the country which all seems unfamiliar, and I have no recollection of ever having passed that way before; but by-and-by I come to some spot where I have had some little adventure, some mishap, tearing my coat or wounding my hand in getting through a barbed-wire fence; or where I had discovered that I had lost something, or left something behind at the inn where I last stayed; or where I had a puncture in my tyre; or where I first saw a rare and beautiful butterfly, or bird, or flower, if I am interested in such things; and the whole scene—the fields and trees and hedges, and farm-house or cottage below—is all as familiar as possible. But it is the scene that brings back the event. The scene was impressed on the mind at the emotional moment, and is instantly recognised, and at the moment of recognition the associated event is remembered.

HAMPSHIREDAYS

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

HAMPSHIRE
DAYS