Illustrated

by E.J.Com^ton

I

THE LIBRARY

OF

THE UNIVERSITY

OF CALIFORNIA

PRESENTED BY

PROF. CHARLES A. KOFOID AND

MRS. PRUDENCE W. KOFOID

p

IDYLLS OF THE FIELD

FRANCIS A. KNIGHT,

AUTHOR OF 'BY LEAFY WAYS.'

ILLUSTRATED BY R. T. COMPTON.

LONDON :
ELLIOT STOCK, 62, PATERNOSTER ROW.

1889.

[All Eights Reserved.}

Mxfr

K^

THOSE WHO HAVE FOUND PLEASURE BY ' LEAFY WAYS '

THESE PAPERS,

WHICH FIRST APPEARED IN THE DAILY NEWS,

BY

THE AUTHOR.

M363533

Thanks for the sympathies that ye have shown !

Thanks for each kindly word, each silent token,
That teaches me, when seeming most alone,

Friends are around us, though no word be spoken.

******

Therefore I hope, as no unwelcome guest,

At your warm fireside, when the lamps are lighted,

To have my place reserved among the rest,
Nor stand as one unsought and uninvited !'

TABLE OF CONTENTS

A WINTRY DAWN ------ i

WINTER IN THE MARSHES - ... 8

FOOTPRINTS IN THE SNOW - - - "15

A SECRET OF THE HILLS - - - - -22

HERALDS OF THE SPRING- - - - 29

HIS ISLAND HOME- - - - - '37

CASTLES IN THE AIR - - - - "44

MEADOWS OF ASPHODEL - - - • "51

WHEN ALL THE WORLD IS YOUNG - - 59

THE POSTERN GATE - - - - - 66

AT THE BEND OF THE RIVER - - - 76

THEIR FIRST APPEARANCE - - - - 84

THE GIFT OF SONG - - - - " 92

A ROBBER STRONGHOLD ----- 108

A SEA-BIRDS' HAUNT - - - - - I ID

FLOWER-DE-LUCE - - - - - - 120

CHEDDAR CLIFFS - - - - - - 125

IN THE HEART OF THE MOUNTAINS - - - 1 32

vi Table of Contents.

l'AGE

THE HEART OF THE FOREST - - - - I40

A NEW FACE AT THE DOOR • - - - 147

HIS NATIVE HEATH - - - - 155

A WOODLAND WALK ..... 162

WHEN THE WIND BLOWETH IN FROM THE SEA - 1 69

THE BIRD OF YULE .... - 177

ST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

CHURCH AT SOUTH BRENT

BAMBOROUGH CASTLE

THE POSTERN AT BAMBORCUGH -

INITIAL — ARMS FROM SEDGEMOOR

RUINS OF OLD NORMAN MILL, WINSCOMBE

INITIAL— DAFFODILS

HADRIAN'S VILLA — TIVOLI

IN RICKFORD COMBE

TINTERN ABBEY -

THE NORTH END OF LUNDY

THE HOLLENTHAL HUT -

THE EIBSEE ....

UNDER SNOWDON -

KYNANCE COVE ....

SWANS .....

I'AGE

Frontispiece
I

7
8

- 29

- 5i

- 59

- 67
92

116
132
140

154
169
176

To face

To face

!;

A WINTRY DAWN.

the hour of dawn.

amber glow is spreading in the eastern

sky, above a long, dark bank of purple

cloud. The waning moon, hung like

a broken ring of silver high in heaven, is bright against

the pallid blue. Across the dark levels of the sea the

1 wild white horses ' are plunging in towards the sandy

2 Idylls of the Field.

shore that sweeps its winding miles far down the
coast.

Cold and dark are the little islets whose grim rocks
break the sky-line. Clear cut above the nearest stands
out St. Cuthbert's Tower, whose massive masonry has
weathered the rude blasts of ages. Boldly, too, upon
the saffron sky rises the tall shaft of the famous light-
house that for fifty years has been associated with the
story of a woman's daring and devotion. There, too,
still remain the old fire-beacons that even in this
century threw their fitful glare across the waves.

The sands of yonder bay are strewn with the black
skeletons of ships ; round those cruel reefs a hundred
gallant craft lie deep beneath the sea.

You may read the story of the coast among the
houses of the hamlet. Here a gate is hung from a
broken spar. There a battered figure-head lies by the
cottage door. Yonder an old ship's bell hung in the
entry startles the visitor with its sullen clang, as if in
echo of the sound of doom, when rough billows dashed
the iron tongue against the shuddering metal.

Cold and gloomy is the stonework of the great grim
fortress that here, on the brink of the northern sea,
rises above its skirts of black basalt, calm and defiant
still as in the days when its garrison had naught to
fear by land or sea save treachery within the gates.
There is no sign of life about its towers and parapets,
except the troop of daws that, with sharp and eager
clamour, float round the massive keep, or alight on

A Wintry Dawn. 3

the corroded guns of the ancient battery, or, perched
in line along the battlements, plan the mischief of the
morning.

On the sands below, a few oyster-catchers and a
redshank or two wander up and down along the lines
of weed that are left as the tide goes out, or explore
the little heaps of foam that are lightly tossed this way
and that by the wind. The gulls are mostly out at
sea, or scattered over the fields inland, in company
with curlews and plovers, who have left the frozen
sands to forage in the furrows.

Suddenly, in a hollow among the sandhills, whose
hoary sedges seem still whiter in this pallid light, there
is a stir as of some moving animal. There is a hasty
gallop of light feet, behind a ridge of Sand, and then
— a fox leaps lightly down upon the shore, joined half
a second later by another, following in hot pursuit.
Fine fellows they are, with their thick brushes tipped
with white, and with a tinge of grey upon their winter
coats. One behind the other they canter easily down
to the edge of the water as if in hopes of picking up
for breakfast some wounded teal or mallard that may
have drifted in with the tide. They leap over a little
promontory of rock, and disappear behind the sand-
hills. Here they come again, racing along side by
side. Now they pause upon the sand, and turn and
face each other, and leap, and dance, and snarl play-
fully, like two unthinking cubs, forgetful altogether of
dignity and decorum. Now one turns and dashes off,

i — 2

4 Idylls of the Field.

followed instantly by the other, and round and round
they go, now in line, now side by side, as full of fun
and as intent upon their game as if there were no
hounds in the county, and a view halloa was a thing
forgotten. But alas ! they stop short ; they hold their
heads high and look round with eager suspicion.
What is it ? Did some rabbit watching the perform-
ance from his burrow involuntarily give a stamp of
applause ? Alas ! no, it is the figure among the sand-
hills. They are gone, and the beach once more is
empty and deserted.

Suddenly, as swift as thought, along the jagged edge
of yonder purple cloud there flashes out a thin line of
gold. Over it hovers a soft ethereal fan of light like
the herald angel of the dawn. Broader grows the
fringe of gold, swiftly running left and right along the
cloudy heights, and reddening as it goes. Tiny cloud-
lets, unseen before, are touched with glowing fire, and
float like attendant spirits clad in burnished gold. It
is the gold of Paradise. No ore of earthly mine ever
shone with lustre a hundredth part so fair.

Now the broadening glow has kindled into flame,
glorious, dazzling, unsupportable. Now look again.
Round and fair the sun has risen on the wakening
world. And lo ! the cold earth, as by the wand of a
magician, is transfigured by its light. All the colour
has gone out of the cloudbank that, but a few
moments since, stood out against the glowing east a
rampart as solid as the Alps. It is there still, but

A Wintry Dawn. 5

the eye can scarcely trace its shadowy outline on the
sky.

The sunlight brightens the low basaltic cliffs of the
islands, whitens the surf that beats about their feet,
glitters on the lighthouse windows like a phantom of
their midnight glare.

The sea that was so cold and dark is shot with
green and purple, while the wet sand shines like a very
opal. Wandering sea-birds catch the light upon their
shining wings. The dark plumage of a solitary cor-
morant— as still as if carved out of the basalt on which
he stands, shines with added gloss as the sunlight
glances on his dusky wings. Just beyond him a flock
of pintails — the sea-pheasants of the fishermen, are
making for the shore, diving as they drift along.
Farther out a fleet of eider ducks ride lazily on the
heaving waves.

There are few handsomer sea-fowl than the drake
eider, but his mate is sober enough in her dress of
brown. They breed yonder on the Fame Islands, but
this is their southern limit. Shy as they are now, they
lose their wildness altogether in the breeding season,
as if the touch of St. Cuthbert's kindly hand were still
a shield to them from harm. Other ducks too,
widgeon, and mallard, and scaup, sail along in clouds
far out at sea ; now dark against the sky, now brighten-
ing like gleams of silver as the light falls upon their
upturned wings.

Along the rocks inshore there flies a hooded crow

6 Idylls of the Field.

—a strange-looking bird in his suit of black and grey,
like a dress of motley. He is a winter visitor to Eng-
land for the most part, though found in summer in the
sister kingdoms.

Yonder comes a long line of peewits, with that
strange rhythmic beat of wing that distinguishes them
afar off from rooks even when their speech or colouring
does not betray them.

Here and there among them flies a curlew, and,
close behind, a troop of golden plovers, uttering at
times their musical call. How mournful, in the hush
of night, sounds on lonely moors that plaintive cry !
A note of terror, too, for to the Northumbrian peasant
the birds are no other than the wandering spirits of
Jews whose impious hands were laid upon our Lord.

And now, too, the great fortress wakens into life.
Its cold stonework glows under the soft fingers of the
young Aurora. On tower and turret streams the
mellow light ; it reddens the round arch of the postern,
up whose time-worn steps the bold defenders in its last
blockade retired before the onset of the Rose of York ;
it blazes on the gilded figures of the dial, glitters on
the eastern windows, flashes among the claymores on
the armoury wall. Even the ancient gun that tradition
Drought from a Spanish galleon, that in the flight of
the Armada went to wrack out there among the islands,
glimmers under its rusty coat as the sunshine glances
on its battered metal.

But now the clock, like a wakeful sentinel, proclaims

A Wintry Dawn. 7

the hour. It is a mellow note, a calm and peaceful
sound; and yet the daws, that but now were lining
the long parapet, suddenly start up and circle round
the stately keep, scared from their rest by the familiar
clang. Does something in its tone recall that other
note of fear that from the self-same throat sounds on
wild nights to call the lifeboat crew to peril their lives
upon the sea ?

It is the hour of day. Sounds of labour have long
been rising from the peaceful hamlet, and

' From the hundred chimneys of the village,
Like the Afreet in the Arabian story,

Smoky columns
Tower aloft into the air of amber.'

WINTER IN THE MARSHES.

OWHERE, perhaps, have
autumn rain and winter frost
left heavier traces than on
the wide levels of the turf
moor. These meadows, that all
the summer through were rich and
green, purple with sheets of orchis,
and aflame with flower de luce, and dotted over with
white plumes of cotton grass, like a touch of early
snow, are brown and dreary wastes. Cold and dismal
are the belts of marsh-land. Beaten down are all their
tasselled sedges, while a few forlorn bulrushes lift gaunt
and ragged heads among forests of their withered
leaves.

In the patches of coppice, spared as yet by the

Winter in the Marshes. 9

Vandal axe of the woodman, where the tangled thickets
shelter many a shy bird that shrinks from the ways of
man, where the boughs in summer are draped with
woodbine, where the ground is dense with meadow-
sweet and marestail, thick with clustering bracken and
heavy with the breath of flowers — a few dead leaves
rustle among tattered boughs, and all the rest is bare.
The water-violet lights no more the sullen ditches with
its peerless bloom ; closed are the bright blue eyes of
the forget-me-not ; lost is all the perfume of the
flowers.

The sedge-birds that wove their nests among the
reeds ; the warblers that hid their fragile habitations
in the shelter of the grass, have vanished with the
summer.

There are a few tenants still that linger in the
marshes. The snipe lies close among the withered
sedge, with whose streaks of brown and yellow her
pencilled plumage harmonizes well ; the moorhen
shows now and then her red helmet as she steals softly
through the thickets. The magpie comes home to
roost in the coppice. The crow keeps watch over the
country from his favourite elm. There is still the
robin's cheery strain ; and the song-thrush hails the
wintry dawn with a burst of music that has all his
heart in it ; but in the dark days of winter the birds
make little sign.

There is no flush of purple on these banks of ling,
among whose tangled roots lie deep the lizard and the

io Idylls of the Field.

snake until the sun shall rouse them from their winter
sleep. The rushes still are green, but it is a cold and
sullen tint.

There is a look of winter everywhere. The little
rivers that wander idly through the meadows, swollen
with long weeks of rain, have risen over their banks,
and have changed the lower levels into wide lagoons.
Lines of pollard willows, whose slender branches
redden in the sinking sun, stand far out in the flood,
and mark the course of unseen water-ways. Tops of
hedges show here and there ; solitary houses are
islanded by the far-reaching water. So altered is the
face of the country that one might almost fancy the
flying years to have retraced their steps, and that this
was once again the mere across whose moonlit waters
the sad-eyed queens bore in their dusky barge the
fallen hero to his rest.

Over all the land linger the memories of a bygone
time. On the hills that fringe the wide expanse there
is a picture-writing, plain to read, in which is written
the story of the past. Every knoll that lifts its head
above the moor, in those old days a point of vantage
and a safe retreat, is seamed with ancient earthworks
and crowned with barrows of the dead.

Under the briars and bracken of the copses that
nestle in the hills are ruins of the Roman villas that
once, among rich belts of vines and cornland, looked
seaward from these sunny slopes. No step of man
sounds now upon their ruined pavements. The timid

Winter in the Marshes. n

night-jar nestles in their shadows. The rabbit burrows
undisturbed under the crumbling brickwork ; the viper
basks upon their broken stones.

The black mould of the moor is rich in memorials
of still earlier date. The plough has clashed upon a
rusted anchor of rude and primitive design ; the spade
has brought to light the black framework of an old
canoe, of the same cut as the quaint craft that still bear
home the hay along these ancient water-ways. Deep
under the peat, whose slow, resistless growth covers
up with broad brown mantle all the works of man, lies
still the Abbot's Way, along whose mortised beams of
oak the friars crossed the treacherous swamps on the
business of the monastery. Traces of them still the
moor men find among the ancient timbers — a signet
wrought in gold, or a token stamped with the abbey
arms.

Beyond that blue line of hills, just where two lazy
rivers meet, stands the mound of Athelney. Among
these primitive cottages are some so bent with age
that, looking through the low doorway at the glimmer-
ing fire of peat, one may see in fancy still the Royal
exile by the hearth ; may hear

The good wife scold with kindling eye
In good broad Somerset. And sigh
And wish the tale were true.

And in the mist of that fatal summer morning eight
centuries later, when the Royal horse swept the wreck
of Monmouth's army from this very field, the trembling

12 Idylls of the Field.

fugitives sought shelter here beneath these low-browed
eaves, too often, alas ! in vain.

Still the plough turns up heavy bullets and corroded
cannon-balls. Still on many a cottage wall there hang
old arms that played a part in that fierce struggle.
Now it is the broadsword of a Royal trooper ; now the
rusted rapier of a rebel captain ; now a halberd of
elaborate device bent with a last desperate blow struck
for a hopeless cause. Still among these hamlets linger
traditions of the fight ; of the cruelties of the inhuman
Kirke, of the judicial infamy of the unspeakable
Jeffreys.

Among the ditches that cross the scene of conflict,
in quiet pools screened with dark alder-trees and set
round with fringing reeds, the teal finds safe retreat.
Hard by, in summer-time, the shrike builds in a way-
side thorn, and impales on its sharp points the mice
and beetles of her larder. In the early days of autumn
quail lie close among the stubble ; and even a clutch
of their broadly-painted eggs is not an unheard-of find
among the summer clover.

Here, in the chill dawns of winter, long lines of
mallard, bearing downward from their swift career,
descend with a great rush upon the water, striking up
a cloud of spray that hides them for a moment ; or
alighting perchance on an unexpected sheet of ice,
they skim far along the glassy surface in helpless and
comical confusion.

At times there drifts over the moor a wedge of

Winter in the Marshes. 13

clangorous geese, making for the Channel, whose
brown flood just shows among the ragged outlines of
the sandhills that keep back the Severn Sea.

And on the long-disused decoys, or on the quiet
ponds where many a lusty pike was netted for the
Abbot's table, there is ever seen among the reeds the
white forehead of the coot, or the restless figure of the
little dabchick.

Or from the shore a water-rail starts up, the dark red
of its beak and legs and the flicker of its white tail
forming welcome points of relief on the dull brown of
the reeds.

On the shore of a little creek, where once no doubt
the barges of the abbey were moored alongside the
barn, whose ancient gables peer through green waves
of ivy, a drowned sheep has drifted in, and a troop of
crows even now are gathering to the banquet.

In the flooded field beyond, the edge of the water
is lined with the white figures of a flock of gulls ;
others are paddling leisurely this way or that, riding
high on the cold grey ripples after the manner of their
race. A heron, too, among them stands waiting
soberly for any plunder that the wind may drift
ashore.

The hour grows late ; the light is failing fast. The
eye can trace no longer the outline of the ancient barn
The gnarled figures of the pollards grow dim and
ghostlike in the gathering dusk.

Suddenly, from the old tower that from the hill-slope

14 Idylls of the Field.

looks down, unseen now in the darkness, although the
leafage of its sheltering elms has long since fallen
away, floats the faint music of the curfew bell. Through
a rent in the grey clouds the moon shines out with
sudden gleam. There is a touch of light on the wet
stems of the willows ; a cold glitter on the flooded
fields; a touch of silver on the distant sea. Then,
dark and cold, the night descends upon the wintry
landscape.

FOOTPRINTS ON THE SNOW.

A SNOWSTORM in town is no doubt regarded for
the most part by the order-loving citizen, re-
membering the worries that follow in its train, with
anything but friendly eyes. He may tolerate it as
long as he is in the country. He may, indeed, look
out on the smooth lawn through windows that never
rattle with the roar of London with something of
pleasure in its sunlit beauty. He may even cheer his
youngsters on to face with bold hearts the stinging
missiles, in their hot conflict in the trampled snow,
while old memories stir his pulses of the day when he,
too, stood up to the fire of the enemy as coolly as the
last hero at Maiwand.

But he turns away with a sigh, knowing that in the
streets of the town the snow will stop the traffic, break
down the wires, and turn every street into a sea of
slush.

In town the snow to him is nothing but a nuisance.
But in the open country, where long after it has fallen

1 6 Idylls of the Field.

it lies as pure and stainless as the raiment of the
angels, the snow is the crowning glory of the winter.

Marvellous is the skill of the Frost Spirit ; wonder-
ful the foliage of the forests that under his magical
fingers grow nightly on the frozen panes ; priceless
the pearls he strings upon the spider's web ; exquisite
the lacework with which he fringes grass, and fern,
and tree.

But, with the snow, Nature transfigures all the land-
scape. At one sweep of her broad brush all the
clumsy touches with which man has marred the beauty
of the world are effaced. The ordered stiffness of the
hedgerow, the even line of the highway, are softened
down. The hills are rounded to a riper beauty. The
fields lie smooth, and white, and fair — an unwritten
page waiting as for the bold outlines of some new
design.

What a wonder is there in its very fall ! when all the
air is filled with snow, carried. this way and that, never
with fixed purpose, never falling straight, but streaming
down from the silent sky that everywhere is full of
whirling snowflakes, with soft resistless touches hush-
ing half the noises of the world.

How the wind drives headlong all the eddying
crowd ! Under the lee of the hedgerow filters through
a powdery stream that fills the roadway with the mimic
scenery of the Alps. The hedges are covered up, the
way-marks disappear, the roads are blotted out, huge
white mounds make new features in the landscape.

Footprints on the Snow. 17

Alas ! then, for the belated shepherd on the moor,
seeking vainly to recover the lost track. When the
wind seems like some cruel demon, buffeting, blinding,
maddening, as by ways rendered unfamiliar with the
drifts he plunges along helpless, hopeless j fainter and
more faint, until at last there comes the awful moment
when he can fight no longer, and he sinks powerless
down, down into the soft and fatal depths. The drift
sweeps over him. He is lost as surely as ' some strong
swimmer in his agony' who sinks in mid- Atlantic
among the boiling surge.

Wonderful, too, is the snow that falls in the still
weather, fair and even; that with more deliberate
touches, brushed by no rough wind away, loads with
beauty all the bending trees. Snow that, unseen and
unsuspected,

..." had begun in the gloaming,

And busily all the night,
Had been heaping field and highway

With a silence deep and white."

" Every fir, and pine, and hemlock,
Wore ermine too dear for an earl ;
And the poorest twig on the elm tree
Was ridged inch-deep with pearl."

And then before the dawn was clear, ere yet the light
of sunrise lent a rosy flush to the hills and hollows of
the whitened world, how the creatures of the wild have
hastened to trace their names upon the glittering sur-
face !

Some beasts there are that never leave a footprint

2

1 8 Idylls of the Field. -

in the snow. All the cold-hearted race of reptiles are
asleep. The badger seldom stirs abroad in the depth
of winter, sleeping out the barren hours among the
grass and fern that he has heaped far in along his
winding gallery.

But in the lane that wanders along the hillside you
may find the footmarks of a score of creatures that
have passed unseen, but have left behind them traces
that betray their names as plainly as would the colour
of their coats.

These broad marks, fringed with the print of long
claws — quite different from this dog-track that passes
near, wandering dog-like from side to side of the lane
— tell how a fox went by here in the dawn. Look how
he stopped at the gate — a familiar one no doubt to
him, recalling many a successful foray among the
poultry of the farm up yonder on the hill. It was not
then, we may be sure, that a rabbit left these delicate
footprints.

Bolder and firmer are these tracks of a hare. He
leaves three marks only as he passes, for the forefeet
come down so close together that no space divides
their imprints. What a leisurely gallop it was ! No
horn to-day to hurry his pace ; no bay of dog or view
halloa quickened his pulses as he ambled across the
road and out on the open hill.

Here under the hedge and all along the bank a
mouse has left her tiny marks ; now and then her tail
has drawn a fine curve that makes a sort of flourish to

Footprints on the Snow. 19

her name. There goes a squirrel scampering over the
snow in full retreat to its fastness in the fir-trees that
cluster about the old British earthworks on the crest
of the hill. Many a dinner he and his clan have made
among the cones, as the gnawed fragments that already
strew the snow remain to testify.

A flock of starlings rise from the farther side of the
field as the squirrel races past. Against the white
background the plumage of the birds has quite a
dingy effect, that seems to harmonize with their de-
jected look.

Days like these tell hard upon the children of the air.
Deep snow means starvation to thousands, and of all
the imprints made by hungry foragers none are so
frequent as those left by industrious birds. Here have
passed a party of tits, whose busy feet have cleared the
snow from the ground in hope of chance provision
underneath. Silent are they these hard days. Even
the thrush is a-cold, and has little heart for the noble
minstrelsy that of late has charmed our ears. No-
thing can deter the robin, he is singing still ; and high
up in the blue heaven there is even now the music of
a lark. Here, too, among a very maze of light feet,
you may read how he has been walking on the snow.
His long hind-claw points him plainly out among the
common crowd of finch and bunting.

Here a ringdove has alighted ; you will know him
by the rounded pressure of his cushioned feet.

The rooks have left the print of their great claws all

20 Idylls of the Field.

over the field, where they have shovelled the snow
away with their strong beaks to get at the grubs, not
yet too safely frozen in from their attack.

Here is a strange foot-mark : the track of no common
bird is this. Two toes only in front and two behind.
Nothing but a woodpecker has left that mark, and
from its small size it was not the more familiar green
woodlander, but one of his rarer spotted cousins,
whose shy ways and inconspicuous colouring keep
them mostly hidden from the general eye. There is
no record that one was ever seen along this lane ; but
he has left his card here, plain enough.

There is the call of a partridge ; and yonder, far up
the slope, there is a line of tiny figures moving over
the crest of the hill, calling at intervals fainter and
more faint as they gain the hollow on the farther
side.

Game birds make strangely different tracks upon
the snow. The hind-claw both of the pheasant and
the partridge, raised as it is above the level of the
rest, leaves little sign. The toes of the latter, partially
united by a membrane, have a curious effect in a foot-
print, almost suggestive of a swimming bird.

The great blackcock has a heavier foot. His hind-
claw, too, is down almost on the same plane with the
others ; and all the toes, before and behind, are ser-
rated at the edge — a sort of comb round each claw.

The snow is generally too soft at first to show slight
points of this sort, but when it is in the state to make

Footprints on the Snow, 21

good snowballs, then, in the lanes on the edge of the
coppice, in the clearings of the wood, its surface be-
comes as the pages of a great manuscript covered over
with these picture writings. No aimless and uncertain
marks are these ; no Etruscan tongue to which no man
knows the key, but the runes of the shy races that
have their dwelling in the fields, a language that the
lover of country sights and sounds has early learned to
read.

A SECRET OF THE HILLS.

A COUNTRY lane, a rough and narrow way that
wanders between high banks overgrown with
briar and woodbine, whose opening buds give promise
of returning spring, leads up to a ravine that runs into
the heart of Mendip. High above the road meet the
arms of stately elms that, held in close embrace by
clinging ivy, wear a wealth of borrowed foliage that
might suit the summer. Green and fair, too, are the
ferns that fill the fissures in their rifted stems. About
their knotted roots the snowdrops are already peering
through the brown beds of leaves that the winds have
heaped under the hedgerow.

Half hidden by the orchards farther on, where
among. the grey branches the oxeye sounds at intervals
his ringing call, are the houses of a little hamlet, nest-
ling close under the steep sides of the hollow. Their
rugged walls, with quaint gable windows deep set
under frowning brows of thatch, were old when news
of the Armada passed along these hills.

A Secret of the Hills. 23

Beyond the village the road enters the ravine, whose
steep sides are covered thick with furze and bracken,
through which bold crags of limestone, rough with
rowan and wayfaring-tree, raise their rugged heads.

Along one side of the valley rises a wall of cliff, re-
lieved by the dark foliage of stunted yews that have
twisted their tough roots into the crevices, or by the
now leafless branches of the white beam, on which
linger still a few clusters of fruit that have escaped the
keen eyes of the daws that nest among the ledges.
Here, too, the bold kestrel finds a safe retreat, and
from her eyrie in the windy steep looks down upon
the few signs of life that stir below.

It is indeed a quiet spot. Few sounds disturb the
stillness beyond the scream of a hawk, the cry of a
solitary ouzel, or the chatter of a troop of daws.

It is hard to realize how brief a time has passed
since this solitary glen was a scene of life and busy
movement. - But over the crest of the cliff the ground
is seamed and broken with the old workings of the
miners — of the men who

'poured to war from Mendip's sunless caves.'

It is not long, reckoning by years, since Nature drew
her green veil over the heaps of refuse ; but the in-
dustry that barely half a century ago employed the
country side is now no more than a tradition.

Among the hills there linger older memories than
these. The rabbits that burrow under the smooth

24 Idylls of the Field.

turf of the great encampment yonder, whose rampart
of loose stones stands out against the sky, bring up
to the light of day the coins and pottery, the flints and
fibulae, of two races of defenders.

But hidden away in dark recesses in this lonely
gorge there are dim records that go back to the un-
certain mist of a time long before these broad hill-tops
became the hunting-ground of Saxon kings.

Here, close at hand, under a great archway in the
living rock, a cavernous chamber runs deep into the
hill. Its early explorers found skeletons beneath the
floor in such numbers, and disposed with such orderly
arrangement, as to show that the cave was anciently a
place of burial. Rude flint implements discovered
here suggest human occupation, but of far earlier
date : the Cave Men were not so careful in the disposal
of their dead. But whoever they were whose bones
were laid in this dark chamber under the hill, no clue
to their history remains. Their skeletons have long
since crumbled into dust. Nothing now is left but a
dim and dateless memory.

Farther up the ravine, screened from sight by the
contour of the hill, is another cave — a retreat, perhaps,
of the still earlier race. There is a hollow round the
entrance that suggests the hand of man, while the
great blocks of limestone that with rugged brows pro-
tect the low dark archway are themselves almost like
the work of some Cyclopean architect. The deep
wrinkles that frost and rain have graven in the rock

A Secret of the Hills. 25

are green with ferns ; the ivy and the briar hang
graceful sprays over the entrance.

The cave is higher when the threshold is well
passed, and soon the glimmer of the candles lights up
a vaulted roof, fretted and ribbed and sculptured by
the slow tools of unnumbered ages. Here on the soft
black earth that covers all the floor of this the first
great chamber, badgers have left their footprints, and
perhaps even now are watching anxiously unseen.
Farther on, the roof is dark with clusters of bats that,
folded close within their leathern wings, hang motion-
less, all unconscious of intrusion. By what strange
faculty do they mark the time and know the hour for
sallying out into the twilight?

The stalactites that once in thousands glittered from
the rock overhead have long been broken away, but
the massive sculpture on the walls defies the puny
hammer of the spoiler, and all the sides of the cavern
are hung with strange and graceful figures moulded by
the dripping water.

It is by a very labyrinth of passages that you reach
the end of the cave. The first descent is by a shaft
that yawns like a well in the rocky floor. It is the
Giant's Stairs. There is no need of a rope. Even
ladies have ventured down that dark abyss. When
you have stuck a candle against the rock, look back a
moment to watch the lights of your companions
twinkling down the steep slope of the chamber and
throwing fantastic shadows on the rocky wall. Now

26 Idylls of the Field. ;,

slide gently down j there is good footing a few feet
below. Thence through winding passages you make
your slow way.

Now the narrow gallery is too low to stand upright
in j now the cavern widens out into a spacious chamber
hung with delicate draperies of stone. Then by a last
descent, so steep and difficult that it was christened
long ago the Chimney, you slip cautiously down,
steadying yourself with knee and elbow, into the great
hall at the end of the cavern.

Here plunges through a narrow rift a stream that
has worn its way into the very heart of the hill. Here
in rude lettering, half effaced by damp, explorers have
left their names, sometimes with a friendly caution as
to the right turning, for, in the multitude of branching
galleries, to lose the way is easy.

It is not a pleasant experience when an uneasy sense
of something wrong breaks on the minds of a party of
cave-hunters. When remembered marks are missed,
and a familiar passage is looked for in vain, men try
to look unconcerned, but the dull candles light up a
circle of serious faces.

Gloomy traditions start swiftly into memory, of men,
lost in this very cave, who perished miserably in the
dark ; of the suspense of anxious friends, of the dismal
duty of the search party.

Why does a bat choose this particular moment to
brush past like a phantom, on its noiseless wings ?

There is a moment of ominous silence, broken only

A Secret of the Hills. 27

by the ceaseless drip of water and the far-off plash of
the stream.

x\ll the lights are put out except that carried by the
leader of the party, who goes back alone to try and
recover the lost clue. The others watch his light
grow fainter and then vanish, and hear his footsteps
die away along the gallery.

After a few minutes, which to their troubled souls
seem ages, comes a shout that puts new heart into the
listeners, and calls back an answering cheer. Candles
are relit, a few steps are retraced, and all is well.

By-and-by appears in the distance a faint glimmer,
like a star, far on in front. It is the light of day,
doubly welcome after those brief moments of sus-
pense.

The old inhabitants, probably, seldom penetrated far
into the interior. It is here, close to the entrance,
that we must look for their traces. The cave men
have left but little from which we can picture their
way of life. In few but graphic touches is written the
story of the race. About the red earth of their hearths
we find no shards of pottery, no coloured beads, no
weapons but the rudest instruments of flint.

There is nothing left of them but relics of the chase,
a human skull here and there, rude carvings traced
with knives of flint on cave bear-tooth or mammoth-
tusk. They are a vanished race ; there is no people
that can call them kin.

The barrows that crown the hill-crest up yonder

28 Idylls of the Field.

were raised over the dust of heroes, who sought in
vain to bar the path of the legions, or fell in battle with
Ceawlin. Their story, too, remains untold ; but they
are men of yesterday compared with the wild figures
that crouched round camp-fires lit among these rocks,
who stalked the mammoth in the hollows of these
ancient hills.

HERALDS OF THE SPRING.

the darkest days *^;« |

of winter, when -,-':.-■<

the fields are

brown and bare ; when the woods are emptied of

their beauty, and all the world seems dead; he

30 Idylls of the Field.

who will may read how life even then is stirring in the
leaves ; how the great heart of Nature never is at rest ;
how plain to feel, in all the stillness, is the beating
of her mighty pulse. For even when the few last
leaves are floating down through the chill December
air their very death is a fluttering of life. The faded
leaf is hurried to its fall by the swelling of the bud
that will broaden into beauty in the spring.

Even when the days are shortest the willows tinge
their golden branches with a purple flush, and the
sprays of honeysuckle are studded with tufts of green.
And when once the days begin to lengthen and
February has begun, we find in lane and woodland
the light footprints of the spring.

It is true they are but light. There is no denying
that there are evil days in store ; weeks of sullen skies
and bitter weather, months of searching, biting, cruel
wind. Returning winter may even cover all with
snow.

But still with calm, unfaltering finger Nature writes
on bank and hedgerow, day by day in plainer letters,
the promise of the wakening of the world.

Everywhere the arum thrusts through the brown
earth its folded green, and the ground ivy pushes out
its long red stems as if feeling for the light. On
upland fields, where the plough lies idle in the last
furrow of the stubborn soil, the coltsfoot scatters
broadcast its bright, leafless flowers. In sheltered
hollows, where the untrimmed hedgerows lean over

Heralds of the Spring. 31

with protecting arms, primroses have looked out with
sweet pale faces all the winter through. A tiny speed-
well here and there opens bright blue eyes to meet
the sun, timid yet, and tearful, and soon discouraged,
but gaining strength and beauty in the lengthening
sunshine.

The cones of the great alder by the weir, that all
the year have hung like sad coloured beads from
every spray, are relieved by the fresher tint of opening
catkins. The wash of the water has worn the earth
away from the roots of the old tree and made a very
jungle among the tangled fibres. Here the water-rail
finds cover when the reeds are thinned and beaten
down. Hither the moorhen hastens to find sanctuary,
skilfully threading the winding channels of the weed ;
and then scrambling ashore, steals far in under the
bank until the steps have died away along the lane.

No winter yet was known to freeze this pool. The
springs that boil up through the sand far down in that
great hollow, sending up now and then a stream of
silvery bubbles, are beyond the reach of frost, and
here in the hardest weather the mallard can always
find a stretch of open water.

On the soft sands of the shallow streamlet farther
down a whole tribe of water-loving creatures write in
clear symbols their unlettered names. These tiny
round footprints, neatly set in pairs, are the record of
the vole. Those broad angular imprints are the
cipher of the water-hen. This deep, deliberate stamp

32 ■ Idylls of the Field.

is the seal of the heron, and everywhere across the
yielding surface the slender feet of the wagtail have
run in endless mazes. It is their special hunting-
ground ; year by year they hide their nest hard by in
the ruins of the mill.

It is long since the plash of the wheel and the hum
of rude machinery disturbed the silence of these quiet
meadows. Eight long ages its pleasant murmur
mingled with the music of the stream. We read of it
in Domesday Book. The record is but brief : ' There
is a mill paying five shillings.'

The village mill was a point of special notice in
the old Norman survey. Scattered up and down its
quaintly-written pages, together with the list of boors
and slaves and villeins, of ploughs and vinelands, of
forges and of fishponds, we find careful statements of
the tax the miller paid.

We meet with varying assessments, from twenty
shillings down to sixpence. Sometimes two adjacent
hamlets joined at a mill. In one case 'two parts
paying three shillings ' belong to one, and ' a third
part paying two shillings' to another village. On
another page, ' half a mill ' pays seven shillings and
sixpence, the other 'half nine shillings. In one
instance half a mill is assessed at five shillings,
but of the second half there is no trace discover-
able.

It is not many years since the broken wheel was
still lying in the ruins, but of the building itself little

Heralds of the Spring. 33

trace remains. There is still the low archway under
which flashed the water from the sluice. Still the
stream pours down into the hollow where turned .the
ancient wheel, ever moistening with its scattered
spray the bright green moss that clings about ever/
stone of the loosened masonry, and the long fronds
of hartstongue fringing all the crevices of the crumb-
ling walls. Ages' growth of ivy drapes the remnant
of a gable ; tall elder-trees are rooted in the
stones.

Along the stream that wanders away beyond the
ruin the opening buds of the saxifrage are beginning
to tinge the low green banks with their golden mist.
Farther on, the snowdrops nestle under the bushes,
growing tall and strong in the shelter of an ancient
tree, or looking down on their white bells mirrored
in the loitering stream. Among the hazels that lean
over the brook swing the eager titmice — their clear
and ringing notes the very bugles of advancing spring
— and scatter from the fleecy catkins little showers of
gold.

Even amid the stir of busy streets, the starling on
the gable feels through his dusky coat a glow that
makes him suddenly break off his odd and tuneless
chatter to copy the pipe of the wryneck still far off in
southern lands, or startle the listener with a stave of
song so true that he looks up as half expecting, even
now, to see a swallow 'swim into his ken.'

The robin in the wayside elm, a faithful minstrel

3

34 Idylls of the Field.

who has sung to us through the dark December days,
now with blither strain, clearer and more confident
as the days draw near that bring a fuller crimson to
his breast, pours out his heart in bursts of happy
song.

But chief of all, now, while still the year is young,
sweetest perhaps before the brightening dawn, the
song-thrush leads the chorus. No singer can surpass
him. Not the blackbird, for all the full melody of
his dulcet pipe ; he is too brief, too wild, too careless
altogether. Not even the skylark, for all the floods of
delicious music that from his hover in the quiet sky
he pours down upon the listening world. Nor can
the very nightingale's brief months of music rank
higher in our favour than the long, generous service
of the faithful thrush.

He is ever a sweet musician; but at times there
sounds among the crowd a burst of song from one
more tuneful than his fellows that stays the passing
steps to listen, and year by year draws new lingerers
about his haunt.

In a quiet corner of the wood yonder, a great singer
keeps his court.

Cross the soft ground beneath the trees, where the
brown earth is breaking into points of green, and
where patches of bright moss hush the sound ot
passing footsteps. Follow the faint path that winds
among the trees, plainer now for the rich heaps turned
up by some restless mole; rustle among the deep

Heralds of the Spring. 35

autumn leaves, still glorious in their ruin, where, not
yet hidden in the green tide that ere long will rise
among the trees, lie broken boughs torn away by the
winds of winter from the great roof overhead, and
now wrapped about by the soft grey-green of delicate
lichens, like rare growths of coral, whose exquisite
touch renders the fallen monarch of the forest still
more beautiful in death.

Now a sudden gleam of sunshine, breaking through
the clouds that bar the saffron sky, brightens the grass
that skirts the wood. Now it lingers on the stems
of the great oaks that but a moment since stood
cold, and bare, and sullen. It leaves them glowing
with its soft caress, catches a hundred points of
scattered light on polished beech-bark and on shining
ivy-leaf, and transfigures all the woodland with its
glory.

And then, in the corner at the foot of the slope
where the wild branches of the clustering elms make
ever a half-twilight under the brightest noon ; where
wandering sprays of briar and tangled trails of wood-
bine canopy the way the chief of singers answers to
the call.

High up in the branches of the beech, that among
the ranks of elm-trees stands alone, its dry leaves
reddening all the woodland round, the thrush is
sitting, a mere dark speck against the glowing west.
But from his swelling throat there falls such a flood
of music, stealing up the slope, reaching far among

3—2

36 Idylls of the Field.

the tall pillars of the glade, through the solemn still-
ness of the woodland, at the quiet hour —

Just ere the brooding Twilight

Unfolds her starry wings,
And worn hearts bless with tenderness

The peace that evetide brings —

as proves him sovereign by right divine.

HIS ISLAND HOME.

A STORMY day inland is to the birds for the
most part a season of discomfort. It drives
them from their haunts in the open to the covert of
the hedgerow, to the shelter of the ivy, or to holes
beneath the eaves.

The missel-thrush, indeed — a bold-hearted bird that
will buffet the hawk who ventures too near his nest,
and drive off a marauding crow — cares little for the
weather. He really seems to revel in the storm, and
his wild song rises all the higher when a fierce wind
is blowing and the rain drives in sheets across the
dreary landscape.

But stormy weather by the sea is quite another
thing. Days like these bring in the gulls and divers
from the open j for although seabirds seem to take
pleasure in fighting with the wind, and to be most
in their element when they face the wild weather, yet
there are times when even they are forced to take
refuge by the shore j when they even fly far inland to
peaceful havens on quiet lakes and rivers.

38 Idylls of the Field.

Farther than that they cannot go : no tree can
shelter them; their feet have no power to grasp the
branches. They must fight it out, and face the blast,
however hard it blows.

Life by the shore is at all times more variable than
among the fields and lanes. In the country there is
always a certain settled population, independently of
the migrants who come home to build their nests in
summer and the shivering fugitives who in winter are
driven from the frozen north. But there are parts of
the coast where in calm weather few birds are visible
at all during the hours of daylight. There are times
when you may wander by the sea with no birds in
sight, except a wandering gull that, far off upon the
waves, shows for a moment like the surf, or a cloud of
ducks that, in even line, fly low along the water far
from land.

But when the sun is well down in the west, when
the dull mud-flats begin to take colour from the sky,
then the life of the shore seems suddenly to waken.

A hundred yards in front of you, as you stroll along
the edge of the tide, a flock of sandpipers are scattered
on the wet sand. Now the swift wave flows about
their feet, then retires again, while the active little
birds run to and fro picking up the tiny morsels that
the tide has brought them.

As you draw nearer, one of the little company with
plaintive cry takes wing, then another, and then all at
once the whole troop rise and fly straight out over the

His Island Home. 39

sea. Turning shorewards now, on rapid wings, they
alight again far down the beach where the eye no
longer can make out their graceful forms.

Across the sky overhead, with long beaks plainly
visible, and uttering now and then a plaintive call,
floats a line of curlews. Now they open out in
skirmishing order, and settle on a bank of sand that
the sea is leaving bare.

As the dusk grows deeper, a flock of purres and
plovers, that your hushed footfalls on the sand have
not disturbed, rise suddenly unseen from every side
at once, and all the air is full of cries and rushing
wings.

That long trill is the call of an oystercatcher,
wandering somewhere among the fringe of weed round
the great rock by the river, whose rugged mass is now
a mere shadow on the sky. The oystercatcher is
native here, but many of the tenants of the shore are
nomads, and as spring draws near will vanish some
moonlight night, and, disbanding by the shores of
northern seas, or in the solitude of Siberian moors,
will spend the months ot summer far from here.

Then as the dunlins go, a few terns may pay us a
visit for a week or two on their homeward way, and
delight our eyes with their graceful evolutions.

Many callers put into the bay as the year goes
round. Hard days in winter may bring a flock of
Brent geese into the river, sometimes even a herd of
swans. Now and then from rocky haunts on the

40 Idylls of the Field.

opposite coast appears a cormorant. More rarely still
a diver will spend a day or two among the sprat-nets,
astonishing the fishermen with his amazing powers of
staying under water.

The face of Nature, ever fair and young, is fresher
still and fairer in the light of dawn; and none can
know it better than the man who, from his boat on
the river, has watched the young light breaking in the
east ; who has seen the dim outlines of the hills take
shape against the sky — the broad shoulders of Mendip
rank behind rank far down their winding line ; has
watched the mist clear off the moorland, and the blue
smoke of scattered hamlets rise among the sheltering
trees.

Drifting down the tide with idle oar, he comes
suddenly on a creek by the river where, all night long,
a grey old heron has watched and waited by the shift-
ing sea. The startled bird, with muttered croak, draws
in his long neck, spreads his great wings, stretches out
his awkward legs, and with slow, deliberate flight makes
for his home among the hills.

Over one of the ditches of the level fields that
fringe the banks a kingfisher is hovering, poised above
the water like a hawk. The sun flashes on his bright
plumage as he swoops down now and then to reappear
fifty yards farther on.

From the feeding-grounds on shore mallard and
widgeon are hurrying to the sea. Here comes a string
of teal that, leaving the moorland ditches where all

His Island Home. 41

the night they have been foraging in the darkness,
follow now the windings of the river, their flying
figures dark upon the sunlit sky. They quicken their
pace a little as they pass overhead, although the
watchful figure in the boat makes no movement to
disturb them. They have passed the rock ; they have
gained the open sea.

Suddenly, from the brow of the long cliff whose
rocky barrier stretches far out into the bay, sweeps
down a bird. By his powerful flight and the bold
markings of his plumage you will know him well. It
is a peregrine ; and the frightened teal, too, know well
the rush of those terrible wings.

They make a desperate effort to sheer off and beat
out from the shore ; but it is too late. The keen-
eyed falcon has marked his bird. There is a scream ;
a little cloud of feathers that float upon the air, and
then, with laboured flight, the peregrine with his booty
in his clutches turns seaward too, in the track of the
vanished teal.

It is a safe retreat to which the robber bears his
prey. Straight up from the water rise the rugged
cliffs, their seagirt steep whitened by the shingle of
a single landing-place — elsewhere an unbroken wall
that many a time in bygone days has made the little
islet a safe refuge from pursuit.

Here it was that Gildas spent seven years of
solitude among the birds who shared with him his
lonely rock, until the rude manners of the Orcadian

42 Idylls of the Field.

sea-rovers drove him to seek shelter in the halls of
Glastonbury.

Here, too, a century later, the pirate fleet, beaten
off from the mainland further on by the bold Somerset-
shire yeomen, put in for breathing-space, and, reduced
to dire extremity by their resolute opponents, were
fain to cut their way through as best they might, and
withdraw their shattered powers to harry some
remoter shore.

Here it was that Githa, after that sorrowful search
on the red grass of Senlac, stayed awhile with her train
— mourning like her for the harvest of that stubborn
field.

Here, too, in a fitting spot, a little colony of monks
escaping from the world found a solitude in which,
like a band of mason bees, they built their simple
cells.

The spade of the labourer has found far under the
surface here the fragment of a wall, there a little group
of nameless graves. All else has vanished.

From monkish times may date, perhaps, the wild
peony, whose red petals still, in spite of ruthless
botanists, tinge the stunted grass. No other trace
recalls the faded memories of this sea-girt rock.

From the windy steep, whence Githa looked sea-
ward with sad eyes for the white sails that were to
bear her far from home, frown the grim guns of the
battery, whose handful of artillerymen seems almost
to accentuate the solitude.

His Island Home. 43

The stillness now is broken but by the scream of
the falcon flying to his fastness, or the clamour of the
gulls that wheel idly over the sea. The pirates that
to-day find shelter here are the raven and the pere-
grine. Sea-lavender and cistus bloom above the
buried ruins of the priory, and the scented clusters of
the thyme wander over long-forgotten graves.

CASTLES IN THE AIR.

THE winds of March have passed into a proverb.
There is no time in all the year when the
cruel east blows with keener and more pitiless breath.
Spring is in her most capricious mood. She is indeed
a wayward damsel at her best. Year by year we watch
her smile turn swiftly to a frown ; we upbraid her for
a jilt and a deceiver ; we swear that her vaunted
graces are nothing but a fraud.

But she has, even in March, her moods of sweet-
ness. Right royal favours, after all, are her days of
genial sunshine, when the vanes veer idly to the west-
ward, and the air is almost still j when the long-silent
birds find voice again, when butterflies begin to stir
abroad, and the bees are busy gilding their brown
coats in the wide crocus blooms.

The bitter memories are nothing to us then. Who
could doubt when looking at a face so fair ? Surely
no malice underlies that kindly smile. Yes, it is a
hard experience; it is long ere we wholly learn the
lesson of distrust.

Castles in the Air. 45

But March for once has had more in it of westward
than of east, after all ; no bitter winds have chilled the
generous sunshine of the lengthening days.

Under its influence benign the purple blossoms
jewel all the branches of the elms, a mist of green is
gathering in the thickets, the blue-bell leaves are
springing in the underwood.

Under every hedgerow the celandine spreads its
petals to the utmost, as if to gather from the sunlight
an added touch of gold.

There are speedwells by the wayside; there are
primroses in the copse. Stray violets begin to scent
the lanes, and the fair faces of the wood anemones
are peering through the deep, dead leaves.

Everywhere the birds are busy. On the housetop
sits the chattering starling, his half-finished nest in
the gable beneath him abandoned for the moment ;
while in his own quaint way he gives utterance to the
love that stirs his pulses.

In the warm sun the chaffinch sings, with hardly a
pause between the endless verses of his simple ballad.

A sober hedge-sparrow, creeping mouse-like through
the bushes, searching the leaves for snail or insect,
looks up from his work now and then, and sings with
all his might ; or, as his mate draws near, lowers his
voice until the listener can hardly catch the notes of
the tender little love-song that he whispers in her ear,
as if jealous lest some idle mischief-maker strolling by
should overhear him, and mock the story of his love.

46 Idylls of the Field.

Farther down the hedge there sits another pair of
lovers — two blue tits in their bright spring dress, now
circling round each other, now chattering softly, now
fluttering a little way into the air, and now flying off
in company to see if the old hole in the ruined wall
yonder, where the ivy hangs its friendly veil before the
door, is vacant again this season.

Overhead a lark is singing, not with the full flood of
melody that later in the year will charm us with its
magical music, but with sweet snatches of most
exquisite song; and as he sinks downward to the
wintry fields again, another rises, and follows with a
few bars at least of that strain that, heard under un-
familiar skies, has roused, in the softened hearts of
rugged settlers, long-buried memories of home and
childhood.

The songs of birds are to them the prelude of the
little drama of their lives that, each returning spring, is
acted and reacted in the greenwood, in the meadow, by
the sea, by masters of the art.

Still, through the opening scenes the music lingers,
rising higher, sweeter, clearer ere its close, when the
long vigil of the mother bird is ended, and when she
and her mate have time for nothing but to minister to
the needs of their little family of gaping, goggle-eyed,
naked nestlings.

We watch the old birds carrying food ; we hear the
querulous voices of their young, but we see compara-
tively little of their domestic arrangements.

Castles in the Air, 47

Sometimes the nest is hidden away from sight alto-
gether, in a hole in an overhanging bank, or deep
in a crevice in the wall.

Some birds, again, conceal their nests by skilfully
harmonizing the materials with the surroundings.

A wonderful charm there is in looking on as the
work progresses, to watch the creeper glide up the
rugged bark of the tall elm with a feather fluttering in
her beak, and disappear behind the knotted ivy stems
that hold her cosy nest ; to see the starling carry his
untidy odds and ends into the woodpecker's hole in
the walnut-tree ; to watch the woodpecker himself, the
rightful owner, venture near now and then to look on
with unmistakable signs of indignation.

But conspicuous now among the busy throng are
the rooks, and loud above the notes of shyer builders
rises the clamour of the rookery.

The magpie and the crow, birds of the same out-
lawed clan, are as shy in their building work as they
are in other ways. They choose the darkest corner
of the wood, the most solitary clump of trees, the
tallest elm on the farm j and it is as hard to watch
them at their work as it is to stalk them in the open.

But it is quite otherwise with the rook. It is no un-
common thing to find among the busy streets of a
town a row of elms where the great ungainly birds
build with perfect confidence their huge nests, and sit,
and wrangle, and make love, careless of the roar of
traffic, and all unconscious of the passers by.

48 Idylls of the Field.

High up in the rocking tops all day the birds are
working, repairing a foundation here, making good a
breach there, now putting fresh touches to the lining.

Every moment arrives a party of foragers, greeted
with new clamour from their friends at home, who
recognise far-off their mates among the dusky crowd.

Wheeling on broad wings across the wind that drives
the white clouds fast across the pale blue overhead,
the great birds bring home their plunder.

Here comes one grasping in his beak a stick so long
and heavy that he can scarcely reach his nest.
Another carries to his mate a seed-potato plundered
from some newly-planted field.

The solemn caws of dignified citizens mingle with
the sharper clamour of irreverent youth; some are
hoarse from age or temper; while one bird, whose
vocal organs have perhaps been damaged in that
baptism of fire that yearly waits the hapless young,
utters a cry like the shriek of a sea-gull.

There seems to be the slenderest idea of the rights
of property among the members of the commonwealth.

Now one bird, leaving his own nest where he has
been honestly at work for the last ten minutes, sidles
up to another — the property, probably, of a newly-
married pair who have yet to learn the ways of their
friends and neighbours — seizes a handful of the lining
that has taken so much trouble to collect, and then
scrambles off across the branches to make use of his
ill-gotten gains in his own abode. And when one of

Castles in the Air. 49

the aggrieved couple returns, and makes an effort to
protect his property, the impudent thief actually buffets
him off and helps himself to another handful.

There is no honour among these thieves, and that
is the reason, no doubt, why so many nests are
guarded by one owner while the other is foraging
abroad.

Sometimes three or four pirates will put their dark
heads together and make a sudden descent on even a
guarded nest, driving the owner, dismayed by the odds
against him, off in headlong flight, and then coolly
help themselves to any handy sticks that may take
their fancy.

Quarrels of this kind are not conducted in silence,
and there is a good deal of plain language when a nest
is approached, whether with peaceable intentions or
not, by those who are not on visiting terms with the
tenants.

It is a peaceful spot the birds have chosen for their
home. One is tempted to fancy that these stately
elms, screening with sheltering arms the old church
that nestles close under the shadow of the hill, were
standing here, in the pride of youth and beauty, when
the ill news travelled fast across the marshes, from the
low blue hills to the eastward, that the bolt had fallen at
last, and that the glory of the great abbey had departed.

The knoll above is crowned by the ramparts of
a Celtic camp. Traditions of King Arthur's time
peopled the fortress with a race of giants. Stray hand-

4

50 Idylls of the Field.

fuls of coins found from time to time among the earth-
works on its summit, the rusted arms of Dane and
Saxon turned up among the rich black earth of the
meadows at its foot, are clearer evidence that the
Eagle and the Raven folded here for a space their
conquering wings.

Here round the ancient tower the rooks find safe
asylum. As the sun sinks in the west, the black-
coated citizens gather in the tree-tops, and talk in
hushed and solemn tones, as if the clamour of the day-
light were a thing to be forgotten.

Through the western windows of the church the
light of sunset falls like a glory round the kneeling
figure of a long-forgotten cavalier.

There, week by week, the sounds of that labour
that knows no day of rest are heard in the pauses of
the hymn ; while at times, above the Babel in the tree-
tops, rises the loud twitter of a nuthatch or the shrill
cry of a restless starling.

The sun is down. The far-off hills are growing cold
and dark ; the silver of the sea is changing into sullen
gray ; the mist that rises from the marsh-land gathers
round the hill like the waters of a silent sea.

Suddenly, from his retreat in a hollow elm near by,
flies out an owl, and on noiseless wings flits like a
phantom across the darkening graves. He has
vanished in the dusk ; but, as the night settles softly
down among the clustering trees, there sounds along
the hill at intervals his mournful, mellow call.

MEADOWS OF ASPHODEL.

HE month of March, with its
broken sunshine and its windy
skies, has brightened the lanes
and meadows with touches of that
colour that, under the warmer sun
of April, will broaden now from
week to week until it ripens into the
flowery prime of May.

From far southern lands come back the wander-
ing birds. The swallow, lost to us so long, seeks
again the haunts of her youth. All day long the chiff-
chaff is telling to the children of the wood the news
of her return ; and on every hand, in field and hedge-
row, fresh plants are opening to the sun.

4—2

52 Idylls of the Field.

Some flowers there are whose colour lends but little
to the scene. Small, or few in number, or quiet in
their tone, the world will pass them by unnoticed.

The ladies'-tresses that shyly lifts its fragrant spike
of green among the tall grasses on the hill, the orchis,
whose marvellous flowers cling to the stem like cluster-
ing bees, might almost 'look away and never be
missed ' save by the lover of Nature, who knows them
well.

Other flowers again make themselves a part of the
very landscape.

Such are even the daisies scattered broadcast over
the April fields, and gathering thick upon the slopes
like patches of drifted snow. Such are the bluebells
that make a purple cloud among the copses. Such,
too, the buttercups that tinge with gold the mowing
grass. Such the warm crocus blooms, that flush the
autumn meadows like a twilight mist touched with the
fire of sunset.

As bold in colouring as any, and doubly welcome
now ere the full noon of spring, are ' the daffodils
that come before the swallow dares,' and with their
generous wealth set all the fields aflame.

Now in countless thousands rise the pale green
leaves ; acres of broad pasture-land are glowing with
the yellow blooms.

For centuries, no doubt, these meadows have worn
each year this crowning glory of the wild March weather.

For centuries the children of the hamlet have

Meadows of Asphodel, 53

carried home to light their cottage dwellings rich arm-
fuls of the plundered gold.

Perhaps the forgotten warriors, whose mail-clad
effigies guard now the porch of yonder church, re-
membered long these sunny fields.

Marlborough's stately duchess may have wandered
many a time in fancy back to this quiet Mendip
village, where she, too, a careless child, played in these
meadows of asphodel.

Round another house some miles away, which
tradition also points to as a home of hers, are daffodils
again.

Not in broad sheets gilding the level fields, but
peering out of hedgerows, skirting the edges of wood-
lands, leaning over the waters of the brook that,
breaking from its dark chamber in the hill, steals
away to join the lazy river that winds across the moor-
land to the sea.

Higher up among the hills, in a rocky valley over-
grown with thickets, is a great colony of daffodils that
have found a spot more picturesque perhaps, though
without the striking effect of the rich masses that
spread untrammelled in the open.

The ground is honeycombed with crumbling shafts
and ruined galleries, piled with heaps of rubbish and
strewn with refuse ore.

These hills are rich in metal. They have had a
long history. The ores of Somerset were known even
to Tyrian traders. The Roman conquerors laid eager

54 Idylls of the Field.

hands on the ' silver ' mines of Mendip ; and it is
barely half a century since the palmy days of these
now ruinous villages, when every man who worked for
his own hand could raise a pound's worth of metal in
a day.

But the ore was poor. It would not repay the cost
of machinery, and when the veins ran too deep to be
easily managed by manual labour, they were followed
no further.

Thus the hills are scarred from end to end with the
abandoned workings. Thus the mining villages have
fallen on evil times, and the ' rugged miners ' are now
little more than a memory.

One curious relic of their craft survives. The
divining-rod, constantly employed in bygone days in
tracing the course of veins of metal, is even in our
time by no means forgotten.

There are still men who can ' dowse ' for ore or
water. Still before a well is sunk the aid of the
1 dowsing-rod ' is called in to make sure of a suitable
spot.

Over all the valley there grows a very jungle of
hazel and briar, with scattered oak trees and clumps
of blackthorn.

Among the thickets badgers still find shelter.

On heaps of stone, whose hard edges are blurred
with moss and fringed with graceful ferns, vipers bask
in the long summer afternoons, and warm their dusky
armour in the sun.

Meadows of Asphodel. 55

Here in this sheltered hollow we may read how well
with her deft ringers Nature hides the works of Man,
how swiftly his memory is effaced, how soon his
presence is forgotten.

This rugged brow, that looks no other than the
living rock, so grey is it with clinging lichens, so draped
with soft green moss, so hung with ivy, and so tasselled
everywhere with ferns, is the entrance of an ancient
mine.

In the crevices of the unmortared masonry the
wood-sage is beginning to unfurl its wrinkled leaves.

Over the mounds near by, the spotted blades of
early orchises give promise of plenty of rich colour
later on.

Under a great bramble, whose armed branches
shelter well the plants that put their trust in its shadow,
springs the rich green foliage of a tall spurge-laurel,
that in its growth recalls the graceful figure of the
hapless Daphne, and in the sweet breath of its pallid
blossoms the fragrance of her youth.

And everywhere among the thickets, lifting their
bright faces through the tangle of the briars, drooping
gracefully from crevices in the rock itself, are myriads
of daffodils. There are clumps of them among all the
scattered bushes, there are patches on the hill-crest
highes up, they peer out of the hedge of the lane that
winds along at the foot of the valley, they have
climbed the steep slope of the pasture beyond.

Lying idly here upon the sunny slope you gradually

56 Idylls of the Field,

grow conscious of the presence near you of a score of
shy companions who, when you are still, will pursue
without fear their various avocations.

Faint rustling sounds among the bushes betray the
movements of some mouse or lizard.

There are dormice here — Seven Sleepers the villagers
call them — but they are hardly awake so early as this.

Yonder a tiny sun beetle in glittering armour
hurries across a patch of sandy soil.

Another beetle, wheeling past like a sleepy blue-
bottle fly, settles down within reach of your hand.
Look away for a moment and you will find it hard to
see him again, so well does his green coat fit in with
the tint of the surrounding leaves. It is not easy to
catch him, he is quick in his movements and prompt
to take wing, and when he is caught he may give you
a smart nip with his strong jaws that will make you
think ' tiger-beetle ' no bad name for him. He is a
cannibal too, and should you be so rash as to imprison
two together, you will be reminded, when you open
the box, of the fate of the Kilkenny cats.

Now you hear among the grass the faint cry of a
shrew, perhaps even see the timid little creature that
vanishes at your slightest movement.

That prolonged rustle is perhaps a grass snake
gliding away among the thickets.

A very real touch of spring-time is the butterfly
that is flitting here and there among the bushes, his
yellow wings just matching the colour of the daffodils.

Meadows of Asphodel. 57

This sunny morning has tempted him from his winter
sleep to make the most of the last few weeks of his
brief existence.

In the topmost branches of a beech, that lifts its
slender column high above the underwood, a party of
linnets have alighted. They are singing all at once,
and as the spray that bends beneath their weight
swings gently in the wind, the rhythm of their song
seems just in keeping with the dreamy motion.

From the depths of a broad holly bush below there
comes the note of a restless blackbird, whose mate is
perhaps by this time sitting on her eggs in the friendly
shelter of the prickly bush.

Presently something startles him outright, and he
dashes headlong from cover with a shriek of terror
loud enough to frighten all the birds in the valley.

In old days, so runs the legend, some master of the
Black Art surprised in his cavern a white bird un-
earthing with irreverent bill the treasures concealed
beneath the floor. Still the unhappy bird wears
the suit of sable to which, by the wand of the
enchanter, was changed his garb of snow. Still
the blackbird repeats the scream he uttered as
he fled headlong from the terrible presence. Still
to his beak there clings a trace of the magician's
gold.

Close by, the footfall of a bird stirs among the
withered leaves, and presently a robin flies up into
the dwarf oak-tree overhead, and flits uneasily from

58 Idylls of the Field.

branch to branch, uttering at times a single plaintive
note.

Can his nest be near? In a hollow in the rock
before you a few dead leaves have lodged, and before
them hang like a veil three fronds of harts-tongue.
There seems no definite arrangement, no trace of art
about them, but when you put the ferns aside you see
the rounded outline of a nest, and within it are the
four warm eggs.

This, then, is what the robin is anxious about. You
will leave his nest unharried, remembering the service
of the bright-eyed singer, and, as you make your way
down through the thickets, he will pay you with a
song.

WHEN ALL THE WORLD IS YOUNG.

T is the very glory of the spring-
time. Though April, coy as ever,
was chary of her sunshine and all too lavish of the

60 Idylls of the Field.

useful trouble of the rain, she left the lanes and
copses all aglow with flowers.

Broader grow each day the fans of the horse-chestnut,
sweeter the fragrance of the black poplar, brighter the
glow of blossoming almond-trees.

Deeper are the clouds of green that among the
dark pines on the hill are gathering round the larch
tops.

Higher still under the hedgerows grows the wilder-
ness of flowers and ferns and leaves.

Louder rises the clamour of the rookery as the
querulous cries of the nestlings grow stronger in their
wind-rocked cradles.

More glorious yet is the music of the thrush ; and
at the hour of twilight welcome still as ever comes
the blackbird's song.

Now, too, the redstart and the wryneck, the black-
cap and the nightingale, and many another truant who
left us when the leaves began to fall, come back across
the sea, and take their part in the great chorus.

And if at times the air blows keen on the world
without, this sheltered hollow is ever full of the warm
south ; here we seem even on the threshold of the
summer.

Over the soft earth turned up by mouse and mole
and worm, until the foot sinks deep at every step, is
spread a very carpet of celandine leaves, strewn with
wide yellow blooms like studs of gold. The white
stars of wood anemones are scattered like snow on all

When all the World is Young. 61

the slopes. Wood violets open shyly their pale eyes,
as if conscious of their lost perfume.

Leaves that promise a very blaze of colour are
springing everywhere among the thickets. The bright
foliage of the hawthorn, the bronzed palms of the
sycamore, the swaying canopies of woodbine, and the
feathery tufts upon the larch, seem to fill the glade
with a soft green mist and to tinge the very air with
their tender tone.

The wood is all astir with life and music. Chaffinch
and oxeye, wren and robin, missel-thrush and black-
bird, are singing all day long on every side, and not a
note too much, nor ever out of tune.

Among the swaying elm boughs overhead a willow-
warbler, just come back, utters at intervals his gentle
song. The quiet little cadence rippling down through
the branches has in it almost a murmur of regret, as if
for summer lands too soon forsaken.

It is a quiet spot. There is indeed a pathway here,
but so seldom is it used that a thrush has built un-
disturbed so near the way that you might touch her
with your hand in passing. She is sitting even now.
Over the rim of the nest you can see her tail erect,
her sharp bright eye that is conscious of your every
movement. She will let you almost touch her if you
approach her softly, but, just before you can stroke
her smooth brown back, she glides away from under
your hand, leaving to your mercy the bright blue eggs
warm from the pressure of her tender breast.

62 . Idylls of the Field.

Disturbed, perhaps, by her passing shadow as she
stole silently away, a wren, that was just now singing
loud and clear his perfect little melody, startles the
woodland with his shrill alarm.

Close by is his dwelling — a handful of dry leaves
among the ivy that holds a sturdy oak in close em-
brace. Reassured by your stillness, however, the
restless little builder grows quiet again, and even
creeps back through the bushes to resume his work.
Presently, with a tuft of down in his beak, he flies up
to the nest, and disappears within the tiny entrance.

From the shadows of the elms, that cluster on the
opposite slope, comes now and then the pleasant coo
of the ringdove ; more rarely still the quiet laugh of a
solitary woodpecker.

And all the while, among the tree-tops, in the
bushes, on the ground itself, sounds the pleasant voice
of the busy little chiffchafT.

Suddenly breaks in a louder song, sweeter, clearer,
richer still than all. It is the blackcap's mellow
strain, and yonder flits among the thickets the restless
figure of the singer.

He is silent again, and you can trace him now only
by the tremor of a spray that bends beneath his
weight, or a rustling among the dry leaves of the
bramble.

Then in the shadows unseen he sings again —

1 Low at times and loud at times,
And changing like a poet's rhymes.'

When all the World is Young. 63

Now his voice is faint, and hardly heard above the
sounds of the wood. Now it is harsh and altogether
unmusical. Again, it is a faultless strain that rivals
the paean of the very nightingale.

Silent again, the wilful little singer ! Then he
threads his way upward through the bushes, and
coming to the light at last, he balances a moment on
a spray of briar just touched with vivid green, and
pours his heart out in a burst of song.

The slender outline of his sylph-like form, the delicate
gray of his breast, the dark feathers of his tufted crown,
are clear against the green background of the wood.

How dull and cold must seem to him these wintry
thickets after the fair lands he has traversed in his
homeward flight !

For his comrades who linger by the way, the orange-
groves are sweet on the steep slopes of Sorrento, the
sun is warm upon the Pincian Hill.

It was but yesterday that he, too, felt the hot breath of
Vesuvius, lingered among its sunny vineyards, or sang
in the green lanes that vein the warm heart of Apennine.

He may have loitered, perhaps, in the lovely wilder-
ness that day by day grows wilder still round the
neglected villa in the Sabine Hills.

Resistless, indeed, is the charm of its cool arcades
and stately cypresses, the ceaseless plash of its waters,
the breath of its blossoming trees. Endless is the
beauty of its tangled ways, where dripping statues
of river-gods lie half hidden in the tall reeds, where

64 Idylls of the Field.

graceful nymphs peer shyly out through the wild
orange-trees.

Listen ! how in the dark thickets the blackcaps sing !

To them, too, it is a garden of delight, a lotos-land

too fair to leave. And among the broken music of

their dulcet strains the ear of fancy feigns the chorus —

' We will return no more.'

Do they ever sing to each other here in this sober
English woodland of that paradise that, stretching far
along those sunny slopes, makes the wreck of
Hadrian's magnificent villa more glorious now in
the splendour of its ruin than when the stout-hearted
Emperor died unwept upon the shore at Baias ?

Its costly marbles are scattered to the winds, but
the ivy and the creeper have draped with rarer beauty
the ruined arches with their bright festoons ; flower
and fern have crowned the crumbling walls with
waving plumes.

And in place of rare mosaics, once the wonder of
the world, the warm sun of April has scattered bright
anemones — crimson, white, and blue — broadcast in
the rich green grass.

And in the roofless halls, where once in peerless
beauty shone the triumphs of the sculptor's art, the
coronella, mingling with the dark foliage of the ilex,
droops its scented gold. The wind that wanders
through the silent corridors is heavy with the breath
of flowers.

Across the sunny spaces in the ruins flit bright-

When all the World is Young, 65

winged butterflies, resting on the sweet lips of an
orchis, or on the crimson petals of a cyclamen.

And everywhere, like the genii of the place, innu-
merable lizards, clouded with exquisite tones of brown
and green, sun themselves on every stone, and cling
to the rough bark of the ancient olive-trees, and at
the sound of footsteps vanish swift as thought into
unsuspected crannies in the walls.

At times a dark snake, basking on a heap of frag-
ments overgrown with thyme, and borage, and cycla-
men, uncoils its dusky folds and glides rustling away.

At times there floats upon the quiet air the music
of the nightingale.

Everywhere among the ilex thickets sounds the
blackcap's song. The little singers have reached the
limit of their wanderings ; they will never pass beyond
the gray fringe of olives that skirts the rugged hills.

No note of discord breaks the quiet of their rest.
The god of silence, long since borne from his neglected
shrine, sits forlorn amid the stir of Rome ; but still
his reign endures, broken only by hushed footfalls on
the turf, by rustle of timid creatures in the grass, by
sigh of wind, or song of nightingale.

What wonder if, amid the peace and beauty of this
fair retreat, the wanderers should pause from their
weary journey, fold their tired wings, and sing in
plaintive tone —

1 — Our island home
Is far beyond the wave ; we will no longer roam.'

5

THE POSTERN GATE.

ABROAD and well-kept highway winds down this
quiet glen. Noble woods, whose fresh young
leafage brightens in the sweet May weather, clothe the
sides of the ravine, and far in among the green depths
all day the birds are singing.

But the trees stand back for the most part behind
a fringe of fields. The flowers that light the shadows
about the feet of the tall beeches look down from a
distance on the wistful eyes of the wayfarer.

Bright butterflies flit across in the sunshine, and toy
and circle in the air, and seem like points of light
against the living green.

Now and then a jay drifts overhead to her nest
among the trees that cling to the steep sides of the
valley.

From the larches on the hill the soft voices of
ringdoves ripple downward through the dreamy air.

Out of the hedgerows, that, with their lavish flowers,
their ivy-clad tree-roots, and their wealth of green, are
the very outposts of the wood, shy field-mice creep

The Postern Gate, 69

out in the gloaming, and frisk along the strip of grass
that skirts the highway; perhaps a weasel may run
hastily across, and shrews are faintly heard among the
tangle of the banks.

But the real life of the woodland is still unseen ;
save for their voices, the tenants of the sylvan sanc-
tuaries make little sign.

Along the broad paths that have been cleared
through the thickets you may draw nearer to the
tenants of the wood. Through the bushes peer the
bright eyes of rabbits ; the ground is scratched and
scarred by their industrious feet ; the light earth
from their burrows is heaped high under the hazels.
From a rocky hollow overhung with holly boughs a
blackbird dashes out ; there is her nest, deftly cradled
in a coil of knotted ivy-stems. A wren, too, a mere
ball of brown, seems to fall from an ivied tree-stump,
and goes singing down the path before you.

Now the pathway wanders along under the hill in
the shade of stately beeches, wearing now their very
loveliest of May attire. Clustering fir-trees mingle
their dark foliage with the graceful plumes of the
larch. In a yew bough drooping low, a pair of gold-
crests have woven, among the slender twigs, their tiny
nest.

Still greener grows the path. The foot falls noise-
less on the mossy way. A wood-warbler swinging
overhead, conscious of no intrusion, utters now and
then his hasty little gushes of song, or calls with

jo Idylls of the Field.

musical tongue to some distant comrade of the green-
wood. The ringdove, brooding on her white eggs
among the ivy, hears you not till you are close beneath
her tree, and then crashes out with a loud clatter of
her startled wings.

But still, you are only on the threshold; not yet
have you reached the heart of the woodland. Only
to him who steals silently along by unfrequented
ways the timid children of the wood reveal their secrets.
Only for him who enters by the postern gate are the
little dramas of their lives laid bare.

There is no broad pathway now, no entrance well
defined ; the thickets are tangled, and the way is
rough.

The trunk of a grey old ash-tree hewn down long
since, and left forgotten where it fell, lies half buried
in the soft earth. Shell-like fungi, marked with
delicate wavy lines of green and brown and yellow,
cling by hundreds to the crumbling bark. Strong
sprays of bramble arch it over. Springing leaves of
meadow-sweet promise a canopy of fragrant foam.
Midsummer will hide it altogether with grass and fern,
and broad leaves of the burdock.

And like some huge rock that winter storm has
hurled into a mountain stream, the old tree has made
more devious still the uncertain path that wanders idly
through the bushes.

On either side rises a tall elm whose boughs lean
down to sweep the very ground.

The Postern Gate. 71

It is the postern gate. Few footsteps enter here.
Even the keeper seldom puts aside the guelder rose
and the maple that join hands to bar the way. The
light feet of the sleek brown spaniel, that follows him
like a shadow, rarely rustle in these deep dead leaves.
The very rabbits, astonished here to meet a stranger,
stand at gaze a moment before they turn to fly.

The ground is green with broad leaves of garlic,
patches of wood-sanicle, and belts of the enchanter's
nightshade. Orchis and bluebell, primrose and
anemone, woodspurge and pale herb paris are strewn
broadcast among the bushes — a very paradise of
flowers. The woodruff already begins to scent the air,
and the sorrel hangs its dainty bells by hundreds
among the moss of ancient trees.

Standing here among the sheltering thickets you
begin to realize how full the woodland is of life ; how
many birds they are that sing to us of summer. High
above them all sounds the cuckoo's cry, full and
clear and mellow, and with no suspicion in it yet of
the hoarseness that in a few short weeks will overtake
him.

Small wonder is it that his voice should fail !
Early and late he is calling, often for hours together,
with hardly a pause for rest, in answer, so the legends
say, now to love-sick youth, and now to weary age,
each asking him with anxious heart the same question —
1 How long must I wait ?'

He is sitting now on the very summit of a lofty

72 Idylls of the Field.

ash, whose branches, tipped with black like points of
charcoal, show yet no sign of budding green. Now he
takes wing, still calling as he flies, pausing now and
then to say softly, and under his breath, in rapid
notes, ' kawk, kok, kak, kikj and then again resumes
b's clear familiar cry.

Suddenly, above the sweet harmonies of the wood,
sounds the voice of a starling, copying in swift succes-
sion the notes of jackdaw and yellow-hammer, swallow
and missel-thrush.

What is he doing here, in the heart of the wood ?
He is perched in one of a group of beeches that lift
their stately heads high above the thickets.

You are just beneath the tree, hushing as best you
may the sound of your movements on the rustling
leaves, when a dead stick snaps under your tread.

The starling overhead takes wing with startled
cry. Another, flying out from lower down, betrays
the secret. They are land-grabbers ; they have driven
out the rightful tenants, and taken possession of their
holding.

The old trunk is scarred and pitted by the beaks
of woodpeckers, and some twenty feet from the
ground is the hole that was once their nest. The
round entrance bears marks of age. The bark has
long since hidden the signs of the miner's tool. The
polished sides betray the passing of generations of
starlings.

The woodpeckers have found another home ; they

The Postern Gate, 73

are near us still, and at times you may hear above
the rich music of the thrush, and in the pauses of
the robin's song, their bursts of laughter ringing clear
and loud.

Over the hedge that skirts the lower border of the
wood are visible the straggling apple-trees of a neg-
lected orchard. Among the grey boughs a redstart
utters now and then his unstudied little song. You
may even catch the sudden flicker of red as the
bright little bird leaps lightly down to the grass
beneath him.

In another tree, standing rather apart from the rest,
a nuthatch wanders up and down, calling to some
companion — his mate, perhaps — who answers from
one of the sturdy oaks across the valley.

Let us cross the strip of ploughed land to the
orchard, where the bright grass is brighter still with
cuckoo-flower and cowslip, and look at the tree.

A nuthatch flies out, and taking refuge in the pollard-
ash hard by, watches anxiously our movements.

Here is the hole. The birds have found the open-
ing too large to suit them, and have been plastering it
up with mud. The little masons have laid on a coat-
ing more than an inch thick already, and the well-
tempered surface is dinted all over with the marks of
their sharp bills.

The nest itself is hardly begun yet — merely a hand-
ful of dry leaves about a foot below the entrance.

How the birds are singing in the wood ! A score

74 Idylls of the Field.

of species, at least, there are taking more or less part
in the service.

Not always is the harmony unbroken. In the inter-
lacing boughs of the two elms, beneath whose shade
we entered, a pair of missel-thrushes have built their
nest. And now, when a magpie, sweeping down from
the wood above, sails idly past to forage in the fields,
the two thrushes dash headlong from their cover to
chase the foe from their threshold.

And all at once, with the shrieking of the angry
thrushes, the chatter of the astonished magpie — taken
for once all unaware — and the alarms of startled
blackbirds, the wood is in an uproar.

The fugitive dives into a thicket ; close behind
him follow his pursuers. He seeks refuge in the air,
but they follow him still, scolding him with shrill
tongues, and buffeting him with their wings. Not
satisfied with driving the enemy from the gate, they
chase him far down the valley, until the sounds of
conflict die away in the distance, and quiet settles
down once more upon the peaceful wood.

And, as if by way of contrast to these notes of
discord, there rises high above all other sounds the
song of an unseen nightingale. A moment only does
he sing. There are but a few bars of his rare and ex-
quisite melody, and he is heard no more.

It is not the hour for him yet. But when the light
of sunset is drawn across the entrance of the valley,
when fiery clouds are red through the pine-trees on

The Postern Gate. 75

the hill, when the singers of the daylight grow silent
one by one, there will rise above the rush of the far-
off stream

1 The self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears among the alien corn.'

AT THE BEND OF THE RIVER.

IT is the time when leaves are greenest. Summer
has begun her reign ; Spring is vanishing among
the trees.

It is the May-time of the poets. Surely never were
there whiter sheets of daisies in the pasture, never
blazed so bright the gorse upon the hill, never shone
the meadows with such wealth of gold. Never were
, woods more full of beauty, skies more blue, or fields
more fair.

We will hold no longer by the saws that warned us
of the treachery of May, of her fleeting sunshine, of
her fickle moods. She is a queen, a goddess born.
Prophecies of evil fall on heedless ears as we feel our
hearts beat high in answer to her soft caresses, while
her breath is sweet upon our heated brows ; when we
think, as we listen in the twilight, that the year has
lent new beauty to the blackbird's hymn, that there is
more charm than ever in the music of the lark.

It is a day of golden weather.

A haze as of the summer broods over the landscape,

At the Bend of the River. yj

and deepens the soft blue shadows among the elms
that tower into the dreamy air.

Here behind this fringe of alders no breath can
reach you from without; ever the warm sun beats
down upon this sea of boulders — the playthings of
the wild river in far-off days, the days when all was
young.

As you bask in the sunshine, you may watch at will
the birds that haunt this quiet nook ; watch the dainty
wagtails wander up and down upon the yellow sand,
hear the musical cry of the sandpiper borne on swift
wings down the shore, see the dipper flying to his nest
in the cool and moss-grown hollow in the rocks across
the stream, where tasselled sedges clinging to the
bank below lean down to kiss the water, and, lightly
touched in answer by the careless ripples, keep time
for ever to their rhythmic song.

Higher up, at the bend of the river, where it widens
out over the rapids, the sunlight plays on every whirl
and eddy of the swift-running water until a belt of
silver, almost too bright to look on, quivers among
the dark, moss-tinted stones.

From the sparkling shallows tiny trout are leaping
in the sun, and over the water is poised a cloud of
gnats in shadowy column, ever rising, falling, circling
up and down, the hum of their myriad wings unheard
in the murmur of the stream.

Below the dipper's nest the channel narrows be-
tween the rocks, and the river rushes in green waves

78 . Idylls of the Field.

headlong through, to widen further down in a deep,
dark pool that the storms of ages have hollowed in its
granite bed.

Tall young royal ferns fringe with pale fronds the
wandering shore. The steep bank is crowned with
tangled underwood and knotted willow-roots, in whose
shade the otters come by night and plunge down into
the pool below, where now the slow-moving water
lingers by the shore to double in its magic glass the
beauty of the broom.

High over all rises a belt of noble woodland, among
whose clustering trees you may catch brief glimpses
of warblers stirring in the bushes, of ring-doves that
forage in the rustling leaves.

Now a whitethroat, after warbling half his breathless
little madrigal in the heart of a thicket, rises high in
air, as if upborne by the resistless impulse of his happy
soul, singing all the while ; and then, the music ended,
he dives headlong downwards into the green depths
to sit again beside his mate. You watch his flight,
but the song itself can hardly reach you here across
the river. The air is full already of soft and soul-like
sound.

Over all other voices swells the ceaseless murmur of
the river. At times is faintly heard the mingled music
of the birds far up the slope in the shadow of the
trees, the stir of leaves that flutter overhead, the soft
sighing of the wind that ever lightly stirs along the
stream. Yes,

At the Bend of the River. 79

' There is sweet music here that softer falls
Than petals from blown roses on the grass.
Music that gentler on the spirit lies
Than tired eyelids upon tired eyes.'

Above the gentler sounds breaks in at times the
shrill call of a pheasant. His mate and he wander in
the covers idle and disconsolate. Other tenants of
the wood are toiling for their children's bread ; their
work is taken from them.

Even now, among the coops scattered along the
sunny slope of the paddock on the hill, the keeper has
his hands full with the foster-mothers and their tender
charge.

When the young broods are strong and are driven
to the woods, they will meet their rightful parents as
strangers altogether.

A brief life at best is theirs. A single summer
among the green wilderness of this quiet valley, and
then, some cool October morning, swift fate will over-
take them, and struck down, perhaps by the very hand
that now with jealous care protects them, they will fall,
dying on the dying leaves.

Suddenly there comes a shadow on the water, and
a slow, stately beat of wings.

A heron drifts by along the river, nor dreams that
strange eyes see him pass. His long legs trail behind
him; his sharp beak is sunk upon his breast. He
is so near that you may see every tone of grey and
white and black among his plumage, the long feathers

80 Idylls of the Field.

that droop upon his breast, the dark plume upon his
head, the yellow stains upon his cruel bill.

No thought of danger ruffles his calm, cold heart,
or quickens by a single beat the movements of his
mighty wings. With slow, deliberate flight he sweeps
along, almost touching the water as he flies.

He has reached the bend of the river. He is gone,
uttering, just before he vanished behind the green wall
of alders, a muttered croak, as if satisfied, on nearing
his favourite strip of sand, to find no brother angler
on the ground before him.

A couple of lapwings, disturbed perhaps by his
approach, rise above the trees, and after circling idly
once or twice across the river, fly off towards their
haunt among the hills.

Their work is over for the season. The young lap-
wings, who can run as soon as they are out of the
shell, and quickly learn to find a living for themselves,
return no more at night to the shelter of their mother's
wings.

Here among the hills of Devon you may see little
of these active dwellers on the heath. But in the
heart of Mendip, perhaps, where the spaces are less
vast, you may chance on a little company not yet
scattered to the winds.

It is a lonely spot. The great gorge has died away
on the edge of the moor. The King of Mendip, with
his crown of barrows, lifts broad shoulders far along
the sky-line. The slopes are brown and bare, save

At the Bend of the River. 81

where forests of young bracken light the long sweeps
of sad-coloured hills.

In the distance are the roofless buildings of a de-
serted mine. Everywhere in this great hollow the
ground is rough and broken in the search for ore —
turned and re-turned by the miners of two thousand
years.

Now over all is a silence as of the grave. No sign
of life is there, except a party of lapwings that wheel
and tumble in the air after the manner of their kind,
and cry now and then in plaintive tone.

Some on the ground take wing as you draw near ;
but two remain, until you can see their long curved
crests and the green and chestnut markings of their
glossy plumage. Then they too rise, and sail reluct-
antly away.

As you stand a moment to watch their flight across
the sky you suddenly become aware of a tiny moving
figure hurrying up the slope after the old birds. A
young peewit, no doubt. It stops. You note the
place with care, and walk straight up to the spot;
when, lo ! there is no bird to be seen. Some clods of
earth, indeed, but the young peewit has vanished alto-
gether.

But as you look closer at the clods of earth some-
thing in their shape attracts your notice, and you see,
not one alone, but two young lapwings crouching flat
n the short grass at your very feet.

Take one up in your hand. An odd little object he

6

82 Idylls of the Field.

is, with preposterously long legs, a coat of down
marked and mottled like the dry earth of the hill, and
absurd little winglets like the flappers of a seal. When
you set him down upon the grass again he toddles off
a little way on his long, ungainly legs, pauses a moment
to cry for help with the voice of an anxious kitten, and
then makes off up the hill as fast as he may.

His comrade rises, too, and follows, and the two
quaint little figures climb safely up the slope and dis-
appear.

The old birds, too, have vanished, and even these
gleams of life have faded from the dreary moorland.

For ages, perhaps, the lapwings have returned each
spring-time to this broad hollow in the hills. Year by
year their haunt among the rushes remains undis-
turbed.

Not always did such stillness brood over this voice-
less waste. The brake grows high where once the
legions trod. These mounds and hollows are the
ghosts of a forgotten town. Its very name has
perished.

But, in all the fields about, the plough turns up
bright shards of pottery, that bear in bold relief figures
of fighting legionaries, or stories of the chase.

Even in our own time the labourer's spade still
brings to light hoarded handfuls of denarii; clashes
still on sling-bolt and spear-head, on broken amphora
and rusted sword.

Corroded sheets of lead record that the levies of

At the Bend of the River. 83

Antonine tamed, for a space at least, the wild tribes
of the hills. No further clue to their history remains.
No other hint of their victory or defeat. No word to
tell whether their dark Armenian captain passed in
safety through the perils of the war, or whether, on
some hill-top near, his ashes lie —

1 Heaped over with a mound of grass,
Two handfuls of white dust shut in an urn of brass.'

6—2

THEIR FUST APPEARANCE.

THERE is no time in all the year in which some
young birds do not begin to earn their first
experience.

Sparrows and starlings sometimes leave the nest
in the very depth of winter. Robins have been
hatched at Christmas. Waterton found in Decem-
ber even a young owlet wearing still its dress of down.

But it is now, when woods are greenest, now in the
warm June weather, that the tide of life is rising to
the full. Now it is that we hear on every side, from
hedge and tree and housetop, the childish voices of
the young poets of the air.

Not a tithe of all the gathering multitudes can ever
see a second season. For the weasel and the sparrow-
hawk, the caitiff crow and all his brother bandits, will
hold high revel in the covers.

Were it not for the balance which is thus maintained,
we should be overrun altogether by crowds of hungry
birds.

Nature manages her own affairs much better than

Their First Appearance. 85

we can, with our tinkering interference. If hawks
were spared and magpies left in peace, we should
hear very little about plagues of small birds.

Even the owl, impelled by the needs of her nest-
lings to start on the chase somewhat earlier in the
day than usual, may pick up a casual youngster here
and there that happens to come in her way.

It is very little, however, that owls do in this direc-
tion. The very hours they keep ensure their paying
attention more to fur than feather, and careful ex-
amination of the rejected remains of food that accumu-
late in their haunts has proved again and again that
birds form a very small part indeed of their customary
diet.

The eagle owl, indeed, has been known to bring
home partridges and blackcock, and even dead lambs.

But the eagle owl is a stranger here ; when he does
pay us a visit, he meets with a reception that precludes
all hope of his return.

The owlets who were hatched in the early days of
May are hardly ready yet to join the twilight forays of
their elders. An odd-looking crew they are, huddled
together in their hollow tree. Even the old bird is a
ludicrous object.

But, after all, the eyes of day have no business with
the bird of night. It is only in the twilight that he
wakens into life. Sallying out at dusk from his snug
retreat in tower or tree, he floats like a phantom over
the fields on his soft and soundless wings ; or, perched

86 Idylls of the Field.

in one of the tall elms on the edge of the meadow,
startles the stillness with his mellow call.

To the owlet spreading for the first time his downy
wings to leave the shelter of his home, the outer
world is altogether strange and new.

Ever, indeed, will he look upon the landscape with
other eyes than ours. For him the shadow goes
backward on the dial. The fire of sunset is to him
the light of dawn ; his day, the silent hours of night
lit with cold stars or keen full moon.

Some birds there are who early in their young
experience learn something of the stir of life. Young
kingfishers, hatched in the darkness of their tunnel,
come to the entrance and look out long before their
wings are grown. They grow familiar with the hum of
the mill and the dreamy plash of the old wheel, they
watch the play of ripples round the stones, they see
the cloud of minnows dart like arrows up the
stream.

But to the young jackdaws in the tower the world
at present means no more than a grim Norman wall,
a brief stretch of narrow, time-worn stair, a single
gleam of daylight overhead.

The whole ascent is strewn with piles of sticks and
heather. Above the belfry, the way is blocked en-
tirely by the great nests that the old birds have heaped
even four feet high upon the ancient steps.

And now the time approaches when the dark-coated
nestlings begin to scramble off their nests, and

Their First Appearance. 87

flutter up the winding stair towards that narrow
chink above them. They have heard but little yet
of the stir of life, beyond the hum of the village or the
clangour of the bells.

Now they look down upon a great world far below
them, a world of blossoming orchards and rich
meadow lands. It is their first sight of tree or sun
or sky.

Four grey heads look anxiously down from the
narrow threshold. Their elders all the while are
wheeling round the tower, floating now and then
near by as if to tempt the timid aeronauts to make
that first perilous plunge.

One of them gathers heart and flutters out. He
gains the footing of one of the gargoyles that the
barbarous ' restorers ' have spared to the grey old
pile, while all the neighbours shout a chorus of en-
couragement. Another spreads his wings and alights
on a battered scrap of carving on the wall.

Now all four have passed the brink, and one by
one they gain the battlement of the tower, fluttering
from point to point, until at last they muster courage
to trust themselves upon the yielding air, and follow
their parents to the fields below.

It is a strange collection of materials that the
jackdaw loves to accumulate in its untidy nest.
Sticks and paper, carpet and cowhair, bits of cloth
and scraps of string, are all made use of.

Most birds that are hangers-on of men, and find a

88 Idylls of the Field.

living in the farm-yard or the street, are ready to avail
themselves of the handiwork of their suzerain in the
construction of their nests.

A stray end of string or worsted "used in this way as
building material has, ere now, brought dire disaster
on the unfortunate architects. One old bird even
contrived to hang itself in a loop of worsted. Young
sparrows, snared by the lining of the nest, have been
imprisoned until late in the winter, fed all the while
by faithful relatives, until some kindly hand released
them from their bondage.

Although many broods are fledged already, and
many more will soon have taken wing, there are not
a few birds that still possess their souls in patience,
warming their unhatched eggs.

The kestrel, in her crevice in the cliff, has heard no
faint note of life beneath her sheltering feathers.

Still the goldcrest is swinging in her snug green
hammock among the dark leafage of the churchyard
yew. A tiny nest it is to hold so much. A family of
eight have to find room in it, under their mother's
wings. But they are a tiny race ; five of them full-
grown would not amount altogether to a single
ounce.

Less fettered still are the swifts, whose labours
have hardly even yet begun. Still on their untiring
wings they career with joyous screams across the
sky.

Astir before the day begins to glimmer in the east,

Their First Appearance. 89

on the wing through the hot summer noon, still flying
when the glow of sunset has faded from the sea, all
day long they wander in the air.

The nest of the swift shows but little art in its con-
struction, nor is it always, indeed, the work of the bird
itself. It will, occasionally at least, appropriate a
house-sparrow's nest, whether occupied or not ; and
more than once has a brood of young sparrows been
seen which had apparently been turned out by the
swifts and left to perish on the ground.

The sparrow, for his part, is much addicted to
seizing on the nest of a swallow — more frequently still
on that of a house-martin, even when just new from
the hands of the builders.

It has often been said that the aggrieved owners
have been known to call in the assistance of sympathiz-
ing neighbours, and that the assembled troop have
then walled up the unfortunate sparrows — to die of
starvation in their ill-gotten hold. Happily, however,
for the reputation of the martin, it is very doubtful
if there is any real authority for the story.

Swifts seem unusually abundant this year (1889),
but swallows and martins have come back to us in
sadly diminished numbers.

The reason for this difference is not far to seek.
The dark plumage of the swift has no charm in the
eyes of the high-born beauties, for whose adornment
so many thousand lives have been sacrificed this
spring.

go Idylls of the Field.

The destruction of swallows has, indeed, been most
lamentable. The report recently presented to the
Zoological Society of France, after describing how the
birds are taken, and for what purpose they are killed,
urges that the French Government should interfere to
protect a race whose services to man are beyond all cal-
culation. So great has been already the havoc made
that there are parts of France where the swallow,
once numerous, is now unknown. ' If this destruction
goes on for a few years longer,' continues the report,
' France will in ten years have no more swallows
except in her collections.'

Unhappily for us, the homeward path of our
migrants lies through France, and thus it happens
that our own particular birds are killed in thousands
on the Mediterranean coast as they alight spent and
breathless on the land.

The most destructive means employed is the
treacherous wire, on which the tired travellers too
trustfully alight, and are slain wholesale by an electric
discharge.

This is a swift, and perhaps a painless death, but
the report alludes also to snares and even hooks. One
shudders to think of the little creatures fluttering in
agony upon a baited hook — for what ? To furnish an
adornment for some Parisian belle ' all gentleness,
mercy, and pity.'

This is the reason why this, year so many of us miss
the pleasant twitter of the martins round our eaves ;

Their First Appearance. 91

why the nests where we have so often seen them
cling are crumbled and deserted. This is why the
swallows come no more to their nests among the
rafters.

How dark to us would be the dawn of spring if
on the empty sky we should watch for them in vain !
How cold the summer days in which we heard no
more their snatches of sweet song, nor caught the
glitter of their sunny wings ! They would be to us as
to the poet the vanished faces of his friends —

1 Something is gone from Nature since they died,
And summer is not summer, nor can be.'

THE GIFT OF SONG.

-c-'crsssnj* a- — •

overpast. The long
summer days, with all their
glory of leaves and flowers
and fragrance, have lost the
crowning touch of melody,

and there is more of clamour than of music in the
sounds that stir the stillness of the wood.

The Gift of Song. 93

The anthem of the thrush, indeed, to which with
eager ears we listened even in the dark days of
January, is sounding for us still. The whistle of the
blackbird, that gathered strength in the bright days of
April, and reached its prime in the splendour of a
perfect May, in woodland walks and garden alleys,
echoes still. Still the chaffinch sings, and the wren.
Still the blackcap makes sweet music in the green
aisles of the wood.

But we hear no more the white-throat and the
willow-wren, the redstart, and all the inconstant
troubadours who came to us from the warm south.

The nightingale is silent altogether. The general
verdict ranks him first of all the tuneful train. And
when his heart is in his singing there is none to
match him of all sweet minstrels of the wood or field.

But he is a wilful singer. Many a night he holds
his peace altogether, or sings a few brief bars, and
then is silent. And there is always for him the charm
of the hour, the glamour of ' serene and quiet nights
when all the heavens are fair.'

We pass, by the well-remembered gate, into the
shadows of the wood. The path that winds through
the thickets is hardly seen under its canopy of hazel
and of briar. The trees are still. There is no sound
but the low murmur of some distant owl, or the faint
rustlings of night-wandering creatures on the withered
leaves.

Suddenly, out of the darkness close at hand, there

94 Idylls of the Field.

rise a few loud notes that seem to cut the air with
keen clear tone.

That is the prelude. And then follow the liquid
warble, the plaintive monotone, the silvery trill — all
the beauty of that wonderful song that poets in all
ages have delighted to honour.

And although Audubon claimed the mocking-bird
as the chief of singers ; though to the fancy of Linnaeus
sweeter seemed the warble of the redwing ; though to
the colonist of New Zealand the organ-bird surpasses
all the half-forgotten songsters of his native land, the
nightingale, at his best, need fear no rival.

In so long a composition it is not surprising that
there should be constant variations, and indeed it is
probable that few birds repeat their songs without
alteration. Even the chiffchaff constantly varies the
arrangement of his simple notes, and the chaffinch is
for ever changing the position of the trills in his
polished little ditty, and the number of notes in the
flourish at the end.

A bird like the sedge-warbler — who weaves together
any songs to which he listens, and who copies all with
equal skill — brings endless changes into his song,
though it lacks the vigour and expression of more
original composers.

He, too, sings in the twilight, though, like the
nightingale, you may hear him all the livelong day.

His haunt is by the stream that loiters through the
meadows, or among the reeds along the ditch over-

The Gift of Song. 95

grown with bitter-sweet and iris, where, in the shelter
of some low willow bush, his mate and he may weave
the fragile nest. The water-rat ploughs a labyrinth of
paths through the mantling weed j the rail wanders
silently in the hollows under the bank ; even the
heron folds at nightfall here his broad grey wings.

Here, there sounds among the reeds the twitter of a
swallow ; then a sparrow chatters in the grass ; among
the willow-roots rises a bar or two from even the carol
of the lark. That is the sedge-warbler's song ; a quiet
strain, subdued and soft like the plain tones of his
plumage.

Most musical birds, indeed, are plainly dressed, and
brilliant feathers are rarely associated with the gift of
song.

The parrots, brave in gold and scarlet, green and
azure, cannot raise a song among them, unless we
dignify by such a name the warbling of the para-
keets.

Perhaps none of all the feathered tribes are more
exquisitely tinted than the humming-birds, and yet
among some four hundred species there is only one
who sings at all.

Of the Birds of Paradise we know very little.
There are species of which only a single specimen has
ever been seen by Europeans. Not even the natives
of the wild islands of their strange shallow sea know
anything of the nest or eggs of any one of the species,
But crows they are for all their beauty, and those who

96 Idylls of the Field.

have listened to their voices say that their speech
betrays them.

According to the method of the Swedish naturalist
Sundevall about one-fourth of all known birds are
placed together, in a class called Osdnes, at the head
of the list.

In this division are reckoned the warblers, thrushes,
larks, linnets, and finches — in fact, all the birds that
sing, as well as a good many, such as the crow and his
clan, which are not musical at all.

Birds outside this pale have no gift of song what-
ever. We listen with delight to the cooing of the
dove, to the cry of the cuckoo, to the whistle of the
plover, but none of these rises to the dignity of a
song.

It is considered by some ornithologists that if birds
were classified according to their brain-power, their
'wit and wisdom,' and the completeness of their
organization, the raven would take the first place.
And although his natural note is harsh in the extreme,
he is found to possess the muscles of song in a high
state of development.

Once, indeed, according to the legend, he was a
bird of rare plumage and melodious song. But his
gifts were taken from him by the gods in punishment
for vanity and disobedience.

The song-muscles, however, remain ; and this is no
doubt the reason why the raven learns to copy with
such startling clearness the language of his captors.

The Gift of Song. 97

Too often, indeed, his speech is of the pit, and savours
of the nether world — not altogether out of harmony
with his plumes of sable.

Birds of Paradise, no doubt, have equal powers of
utterance ; were they caught and trained, their language
would surely be more in keeping with their bright
attire.

The chatter of the jackdaw as, when work is over,
he wings his way homeward to his rest among the
ruins, has something almost of music in its sound.

Through the hours of daylight, toiling for his brood,
the daw has time for little interchange of speech beyond
brief monosyllabic greetings as his neighbours pass.
But you will hear him better when the shadows gather
in the valley, when the light of sunset lingers on the
tracery of the great abbey window, and streams in
glory down the roofless nave.

From the quiet lane that winds upward from the
river you look back to watch the cloud of daws drifting
homeward from the hill.

Faintly sound their voices in the distance, growing
clearer now, as, nearer still and nearer, float their dark
figures on the saffron sky. Now they pause above the
ruin, with a mingled chorus from a hundred throats.
Now they wheel above the ancient gables, now they
flutter down and vanish in unnumbered niches ; or,
alighting in dark clusters on some favourite point,
they gossip with their neighbours before turning in.

The light fades slowly from the ivied walls. The

7

98 Idylls of the Field.

swifts no longer scream down the dismantled aisles.
The daws are silent ; all the sounds of day are
hushed.

Somewhere in the valley hoots a restless owl, linger-
ing in the shadows till the gloom shall deepen in the
abbey.

Overhead a ringdove flutters out from the shelter of
a yew-tree that leans over the lane.

Its dark boughs overshadow a little space of graves ;
a lonely spot, nestling close under the shelter of the
hill. The grass grows high round ancient stones
whose rude inscriptions and still ruder rhymes hand
down the names, the hopes, the fears of men who may
have watched for news of the Armada or taken sides
with King or Commons.

There is a half-suggested war-note in the quaintly
ordered lines on one recumbent slab :

INTERED * HE * LYETH * VNDER

GROVND * VNTEL ' THAT * DAY

THE ' TRVMPET ' SOVND.

Surely it is Puritan dust over which a fragment lies
bearing, in the lettering of the Stuart time, these words
alone :

I ' TREAD • SATAN * VNDER ' MY * FEET.

Hard by, upon another broken stone, is traced this
brief pathetic phrase —

AND * ONE * SWEET ' SISTER " ALSO.

The Gift of Song, 99

Were they two children of the village, who, still fair
and young, crossed the dark river hand in hand ? Was
he a Cavalier, who burnt his heart out in a hopeless
cause ? Did the news of Naseby pale her cheek, or
silver ere its time her auburn hair ?

Did he pass unscathed the perils of the field to fall
with Keymiss in the storming, when he and his handful
of heroes held in vain the fortress down the river,
whose roofless ruin, now a very bovver of green, looks
down into the wandering Wye ?

And had he long to wait upon 'the other side'?
Did she climb alone this steep path between the
hedgerow's, day by day with slower pace, until she
came no more to grieve over that dear, dead dust
beneath the turf?

Perhaps there was the same soft scent of roses in
the air, the same sweet woodbine incense floating in
the lane, when at last they bore her gently up this
narrow way, and laid her sadly at his side — one grave,
one stone, and now, one epitaph.

His memory is lost ; his deeds, his very name for-
gotten. No note remains, except the link with her in
the eloquent silence of that single line —

AND * ONE * SWEET • SISTER ' ALSO.

FLOWER-DE-LUCE.

Beautiful lily, dwelling by still rivers,

Or solitary mere,
Or where the sluggish meadow-brook delivers

Its waters to the weir.'

IT is the hour of noon.
On the soft azure overhead there floats no fleck
of cloud. The sun shines hot upon the meadows ; over
all the valley lies the scent of hay.

But it is the hour of rest.

Sunbrowned mowers, with faces buried in the short,
cool grass, lie quiet in the shadow of the trees. No
sound of labour rises from the fields, no stave of song,
no clink of whetted scythe.

The white houses of the hillside village seem to
slumber in the heat, and the shadows deepen round
their immemorial elms. Against the haze that hangs
along the hill, the old tower rises, hardly seen.

The very birds are silent, save that now and then
some restless white-throat sings a few brief notes, or
low-voiced willow-wren croons in the alder shade a
sleepy tune.

Flower-de-Luce. 101

Only the insects are astir : bees that are busy in
the clover blooms, butterflies that lightly float from
flower to flower, burnet moths in black and crimson
that flutter lazily along, and flies innumerable, that
follow everywhere with hateful hum.

Welcome to-day is the murmur of the stream ; cool
the plash of water down the dripping weir; pleasant
the pathway that through bright, scented meadows
follows the windings of the river.

No rigid lines define these level fields. Their
outlines, traced by wandering rivulets, follow lightly
every careless curve, now broad, now narrow, and
with many a shady nook and sunny corner, loved of
birds and bright with flowers. Along the margin of
the meadow, dark belts of alder stand, their sober green
relieved with fringe of willow herb and marestail, and
brightened with broad leaves of iris, that mark with
lamps of gold the hidden streams.

Troops of cattle, weary of the blaze of noon, stand
knee-deep in the river, and just lift their heads a
moment as you pass, to peer with lazy eyes through
the cool covert of the trees.

Little colour is there now among this summer
green. The glory of the hawthorn is long since
scattered on the grass ; fallen are the white flowers
of the wayfaring tree, nor touched as yet its berries by
the wizard sun, who, with his lamp of magic, turns
their summer greenness into autumn flame.

But the bryony twines shining wreaths among the

102 Idylls of the Field.

brambles ; the elder spreads broad discs to tempt the
winged crowds.

And fairest of all flowers of summer the sweet June
roses bloom on all their swaying sprays. Some, with
generous beauty opened to the full, a soft flush on
their wide, scented petals. Others, still folded close,
just part their rosy lips to breathe a tender perfume on
the air.

And though the midsummer meadows have lost
something of the bold colouring of spring ; though
there are no sheets of daisies now, no broad unbroken
acres of buttercup gold, fhere is a fuller beauty on the
fields of June. Tall ox-eye daisies, white and pure,
are strewn like stars among the waving grass. Red
plumes of sorrel, patches of yellow-rattle, and sweet
beds of clover, set all the fields aglow.

The ditches that drain these level sweeps of marsh-
land are outlined by young rushes, bright and warm,
over whose forest of green lance-points the ragged
robin waves its crimson flags. And brighter still
than all, the orchis blooms. Some there are, all pale
and colourless, and poised like plumes of white on
shafts of green ; others tinged with soft shades of
lavender; others again whose spikes of rich imperial
purple shine like fire along the ground. White tufts
of cotton-grass are sprinkled here and there, and
down among the sedges, half hidden by the tall,
green blades, blue flowers of milkwort droop their
timid heads.

. Flower -de-Luce. 103

Standing out from the belt of alders is a stalwart
ash-tree, wide of girth and broad of base, with roof of
feathery green that invites you to its shadow. Strong
stems of ivy cling about the grey old trunk ; round its
roots there gather in the soft, black earth reeds and
rushes and meadow-sweet, and all the plants that love
the moisture and the shade.

Who sees it from the pathway only has not learned
the secret of the ancient tree. But the loiterer, who
follows the windings of the hedgerow, finds on the
farther side a spacious chamber, a great hollow hewn
by sun and rain.

In a niche within its crumbling walls the flycatcher
makes her nest, the creeper hides her home behind
the tangle of the ivy, field-mice frolic in the lofty
hall.

Other feet, perhaps, have left their traces on that
earthen floor. Faltering steps have crossed the
meadow to the well-remembered tree — a trysting-
place, that may have witnessed, in its time, scenes of
some village idyll j that may have watched, in the
scented air of twilight, for a white figure coming slowly
across the grass, scattering torn daisy petals as she
passed, and whispering softly to herself, ' He loves me,
loves me not.'

Suddenly, out of the grass at your very feet, starts
up with plaintive cry a tiny bird — a tree-pipit — that
not long has left the nest, and makes what way he
can with wings and feet along the path in front. He

104 Idylls of the Field.

is easily caught ; and then, as if resigned to meet his
fate, looks boldly at you with his bright black eyes.
His little wings are not half grown, and still there
clings about his sleek brown head the nestling down
of youth.

In an apple-tree near by the parent birds are crying.
One of them, no doubt the mother, flits from bough
to bough with piteous appeal.

You set the little captive down, and straight it
vanishes into the forest of the grass. The anxious
mother, flying down to meet it, is content ; her cry is
heard no more.

Just in front a whinchat hovers, poised above a
bright thistle-head, the bars of black and white on
his expanded tail clear-cut against the green. He
has settled now, and clinging to the crimson flower
that sways beneath his weight, he utters now and then
a sharp ' Click, click/ of caution and alarm as he
watches your approach. You will not disturb him ;
you turn aside to meet the river.

In the low bushes by the shore a sedgewarbler is
singing. White-breasted martins, too, floating on the
sunny air, stoop down to touch the stream, meeting
their own fair figures in its tranquil face.

A little troop of starlings hurries overhead — two
broods at least — neighbours perhaps, hatched beneath
the thatch-eaves of village barn, and beginning already
to join forces for the winter.

Now a blackbird, flying low across the field, drops

Flowcr-de-Lucc. 105

down into the tangle by a distant hedgerow— visiting
his nest perhaps, or stooping to dip in the cool stream
his yellow bill.

Among the trees across the brook there lies a
little space of marshland circled by swift streams : a
tangle of alder and willow, a wilderness of buck-
thorn and hazel ; a place of treacherous ground, in
which the unwary foot may suddenly sink deep in un-
suspected mire. Among its thickets birds find safe
sanctuary, and it is the very Camp of Refuge for all
the children of the river.

Across two great willow trees, that, uprooted by
some wintry storm, lie locked in close embrace, you
may pass the little stream.

In the shadow of the mingled boughs that arch it
over like a cloister roof, the brooklet wanders clear.
Trout are poising in mid-stream, water-rats sit silent
by the shore.

As you pause a moment in the shade of the grey
willow leaves, even a kingfisher settles near, and
watches with keen eyes the silver flow. So near is
he that you can see his tiny feet that grasp the
rugged bark, can see the glitter on his burnished
feathers. So stands he for a moment, silent, motion-
less, beautiful. Then with sudden start spreads wide
his wings, and sails across the meadow like a gleam of
light.

It is a very jungle that lines the farther shore.
Knee-deep are the tasselled sedges, breast-high the

106 Idylls of the Field.

meadowsweet and marestail, the broad blades of the
iris and the graceful leafage of the rue.

A passage through the thickets, hardly seen, a green
lane among leaves of bog-bean and tall, tufted grass
leads to a little open space in the very heart of the
swamp.

Here in the summer evenings drones the night-jar.
Here pheasants crow in the twilight, and woodcock
find safe cover in the autumn. Here, too, by the im-
print of her slender feet, you may track the moor-hen
to her haunt.

The ground is carpeted with flowers. Spikes of
purple orchis, dwarf tufts of broom, and tall red
thistles brighten all the grass. The air is heavy with
the breath of fragrant marsh plants, crushed beneath
your tread.

At every step, too, moths, and butterflies, and
delicate insects, with blue lace-like wings, rise from the
green tangle underfoot.

As you put aside with careful touch the stems of
sedge that cut like knife-blades the incautious hand,
you see below pale lavender pimpernels and bright
flowers of the moneywort that scatters on the ground
its lavish gold. Vetches, too, clamber up out of the
green wilderness, and lay hold of friendly stems that
help them to the light.

And filling all the open spaces in the thickets, now
brightening the dim shadows of the bushes, now

Flower-dc-Luce. 107

flaming like a glory in the sun, droop the fair petals of
the flower-de-luce, here, as ever, haunting still

' the sylvan streams,

Playing on pipes of reed the artless ditties
That come to us as dreams.'

No whisper of unrest can mar the quiet of this far
retreat. From distant meadows rise the softened
sounds of toil, fainter still the gentle murmur of the
streams. No louder voice is here than song of gold-
finch, sweet and low, the rustle of the restless sedge,
the sigh of summer breezes in the reeds.

A ROBBER STRONGHOLD.

THE blue hills of Devon are fading far astern.
The heights of Exmoor, the rugged coast-line,
the little ports whose streets like stairways rise steeply
from the sea, are vanishing in the mist of dawn.
From the lighthouse tower of Hartland shines a feeble
gleam, that ' shows the matin to be near, and 'gins to
pale his ineffectual fire.'

On the smooth water whole fleets of sea-birds ride,
idly rocked on the long ocean swell, their white breasts
mirrored in the clear green waves.

Some, at the beat of paddles, start as if from dreams,
turn to gaze a moment, and then vanish, diving swift
as thought beneath the sea.

Others, as the boat draws near, reluctantly take
wing, some struggling far along the surface before
rising clear.

Right before us, faint and shadowy as some phantom
land, dim through the mists of morning, rise the bold,
bare cliffs of Lundy.

Under the shelter of that granite rock, set like a

A Robber Stronghold. 109

wall against the stormy west, many a good ship rides
safe on wild nights, when winds are raging up the
Channel, when the foam-flakes sing over the island,
and the caverns in the cliff are thundering with the
fierce Atlantic surge.

Many a good ship, alas ! has made for it in vain,
hurried helpless to her doom among fatal sands or
still more cruel reefs.

A Royal Commission reported thirty years ago that
of all points on the Channel, Lundy Island was the
best adapted for the much-needed Harbour of Refuge
on this dangerous sea.

There is deep water all round it. The material,
too, is all at hand. The cliffs of the island furnish
granite well suited for the needful breakwaters. It is
twenty years since the works of the company who
quarried here for the Thames Embankment were
abandoned, and fern, and broom, and heather, since
then have done their best to cover up the traces that
remain. But better stone than they exported, needing
no wax to hide its faults, exists there in abundance.

It is merely a question of expense. Scores of tall
ships are lost each year, hundreds of gallant fellows
meet their doom for want of a refuge that might easily
be paid for by the cost of one first-class ironclad.

But we are nearing land. The iron heart of the
little steamer throbs no longer; we are drifting with
the tide on a current that rushes by like a mill-race.
The dinghy is lowered, and we pull for the beach.

no Idylls of the Field.

The lightest air from the east makes landing diffi-
cult, and now there is a heavy surf along the shore.
But by choosing the right moment, and taking advan-
tage of the shelter of a great rock, the boat is run
upon the shingle, and we are safe ashore.

The men push off their little craft again and pull
back to the steamer. The boat is hauled up, the
paddles churn the sea into a flood of foam, the skipper
waves a last salute, and we are left upon the empty
shore.

There is no sign of life anywhere. Two ancient
boats that may have drifted over from the mainland,
spars of old ships, and sea-worn timbers high and dry
above the tide-mark, might have lain here for ages.

As we pause a minute on the shingle, the solitude
and silence are enough to call up memories of
marooned sea-captains, of long lonely vigil upon sea-
girt rocks.

Over the wide sea is silence — no sail, no cry of
bird, no flash of wing. No stir of life along the shore
save the dark figure of a drifting cormorant, no sound
save the hoarse note of a raven watching from the
cliff, and the rhythmic beat of surf along the strand.

On a bold rock, standing like a sentry on the height
above, a pile of granite, lichen-draped, brightened
with sea-pink and green tongues of fern, a buzzard
rests. So still is he, he seems but part of the stone
on which he stands.

A herring gull, on broad wings sailing by, catches

A Robber Stronghold. in

sight of the motionless figure, and, with hoarse notes
of challenge, deals him a buffet as he passes.

The buzzard, spreading with reluctance his great
brown wings, wheels into the air. He has no mind
for battle, but his enemy presses him hard with beak
and pinion. The two figures, dark and light, rise and
fall, and flutter, and wheel this way and that, and then
drift screaming round the headland, fighting still.

Now above the low grey coast-line peers the sun.

There is no splendour in the misty sky, no gleam of
golden arrows among purple clouds. Only a touch of
fire that broadens fast into a round, red shield.

The ripples on the sea are lined in crimson. The
piles of rock along the shore, draped with rich brown
weed, still glistening from the falling tide, are touched
with gold. There is silver on the flashing surf, on the
wet slope of pebbles, on the shining line of seaweed
that sweetens the cool air of morning with its fragrant
breath.

This brief stretch of shingle is the only break in all
the coast-line. A narrow way winds upward from the
sea, a road that a handful of defenders might hold
against an army.

Some points there are, on the far side of the island,
where a man may scramble up the rocks, but so well
defended by its cliffs is the little islet that ' there is no
entrance but for friends.'

This granite rock, from the mainland but a line of
cloud along the sea, at most a purple bar against a

H2 Idylls of the Field.

sunset sky, in thick weather not seldom altogether lost
in haze, has been in its time a very nursery of sea-
rovers, a stronghold for the pirates of a thousand
years.

Hardy Norsemen anchored here their dark-ribbed
keels — perhaps even gave the isle its very name. No
runes remain to tell their story, but the plough and
the spade have brought to light relics of old frays
which may be memorials of their time.

Forty years ago some labourers, in digging the
foundation for a wall, laid bare a slab of granite. Be-
neath it, in a rude chamber framed of blocks of stone,
lay a gigantic skeleton, that measured more than eight
feet in length. No weapons had been buried with the
dead, no ornaments even were discovered, beyond
some scraps of bronze and a few beads of pale blue
glass. Other skeletons lay near, some arranged with
care, others in a mingled mass, as if many bodies had
been huddled into a common grave.

Scattered over the island are abundant traces of its
old inhabitants — faint signs of ancient tillage, shape-
less heaps of stone. The cliffs are pierced with caves
and galleries, to which the finger of tradition points as
holding still the gold of the buccaneers.

Of the convicts, who under sentence of banishment
to Virginia were landed here by Benson in the middle
of last century and set to labour on the island, little
trace remains beyond rude walls of unhewn stone.

But, from end to end of the island, the bracken

A Robber Stronghold. 113

hides the low mounds of old dwellings, the heath is
high round ruined towers, from which, perhaps, the
pirates of old days watched the slow sailing of deep-
laden argosies. Over the granite dykes of ponds long
choked with moss and reeds grow cotton-grass and
asphodel ; and among the fern and ling that hide the
ruins of 'The Widow's Tenement,' still her roses bloom.

The steep brow over the landing-place is crowned
by the old Marisco fortress, whose lords were long the
terror of the sea. Still stands the low square keep of
the pirate hold, but in the chinks of its rude masonry
the samphire grows. No sentry from its walls looks
seaward for the gleam of hostile sails. No warning
signal from the turret summons the islanders to arms.

But from the white staff that rises in the court there
flutters week by week — brooding like the dove of
peace over the robber stronghold — the call to prayer
in the tiny church beneath the hill.

Over ruined tower and rampart the sweet lotos
blooms; bright blue scabious nestles in the rifted
stones.

Far down below lie the pale green waves, fringing
dark reefs with hungry foam.

In the hands of resolute defenders this fortress,
guarded by steep cliff and stormy sea, must in old
days have been all but impregnable.

But force or fraud have found ere now a way up
that steep path from the beach. These flowery slopes
that stretch away from the outworks of the castle,

8

H4 Idylls of the Field.

where the breath of clover mingles with the fragrance
of the thyme, have been trampled by the heels of
Spanish captains, who forced the ill-guarded path and
plundered the defenceless islanders.

The ports of Devon long remembered the corsair
Algerines who moored their galleys in the bay.
Over and over again the privateers of France found
sanctuary here and made booty of the shipping of
the Channel.

Once a French war-ship, with false colours flying,
asked leave to bury, in the ancient graveyard on the
hill, the body of her captain. The leave was granted.
The funeral party came ashore, passed with slow pace
up the steep road, and laid their burden down within
the church.

Few minutes, however, had elapsed when a body of
men, armed with weapons that had been hidden in
the coffin, rushed out upon the helpless islanders.
Everything of value was taken or wantonly destroyed.
Cattle were thrown into the sea, the forts were dis-
mantled, the guns hurled over the cliff.

So runs the story ; and still upon the beach there
lies a long iron gun that, thrown from the steep brow
overhead, for two centuries has rusted in the shingle.

Long since ruined is the ancient church ; no trace
but the foundation now remains.

But the graveyard round is full to overflowing with
grass-grown mounds, nameless and dateless, hidden
deep in fern and bramble.

A Robber Stronghold. 115

Here through long generations the islanders have
laid their weary bones. Here the Marisco lords have
brought their dead. Here lay, ' unwept, unhonoured,
and unsung,' the body of the recreant knight who
brought the noble Raleigh to his doom.

Here, too, by stranger hands committed to the dust,
have been laid the wasted forms of hapless mariners
who perished on this stormy sea —

' Those for whom
The place was kept at board and hearth so long ;

The prayer went up through midnight's breathless gloom,
And the vain yearning woke mid festal song.'

A SEA-BIRDS' HAUNT.

IT is the north end of Lundy.
Among the short heath that purples all the hill,
patches of bare grey granite rise, like the brows of
ancient cliffs deep sunk amid a sea of green.

There is no sign or sound of man, or beast, or bird,
save the sharp note of a stonechat swaying on a spike
of foxglove, or the faint cry of a wandering gull, whose
white wings float a moment over the shoulders of the
hill.

No sound is there even of the sea, that in the soft
air of summer sleeps far down about the bases of the
cliffs.

A wall of granite bars the way — a pile of worn and
lichen-covered blocks, with all their ledges set with
yellow hawkweed and pale tufts of thrift.

A narrow pass leads downward through the rocks,
and opens — like some gate of magic — on another
world.

To right and left lies a broad hollow — a stretch of
grass that slopes steeply to the sea, bright with mingled

L ,.■

Photogravure

.UNDY ISLAND.

A Sea-Birds' Haunt 117

tints of thrift, and heath, and stone-crop, and strewn
with blocks of granite, lying broadcast on the ground
or piled high like the rude monuments of barbaric
kings.

Beyond are wide sweeps of dark-blue sea with pale
green shallows foaming white round a low line of
reef. And everywhere, on land, and sky, and wave,
are myriads of sea-fowl.

It is the sea-birds' haunt.

On every stone stands a group of puffins ; the ledges
of the cliff are outlined with the forms of innumerable
razor-bills and guillemots j scattered over the sea
thousands of drifting figures rock idly on the waves.

On the sharp crags that skirt the slope herring gulls
are resting. Some rise as you draw near, their broad
wings bright against the pallid blue. Their flight is a
very triumph of the wing. They float and wheel, and
rise and fall with no perceptible beat of their long
pinions — only a turn of the glossy head or slight
movement of the broad, expanded tail. They sweep
slowly by, a few feet overhead, crying with discordant
notes that have, at times, a weird suggestion of Satanic
laughter.

The herring gull is a powerful bird — a pirate, too,
shunned and dreaded by all the lesser toilers of the
sea, almost as much even as the raven.

Scattered among the fern and heather of the little
glens that break the wall of cliff, many a broken
eggshell bears his robber's mark. Many a young

n8 Idylls of the Field.

kittiwake has felt the grip of his cruel bill. Hundreds
of young puffins he has taken unaware at the mouths of
their burrows or snatched up from the surface of the
sea.

On the reefs that fringe the shore groups of cor-
morants are drying their wet plumage in the sun.

From a great chasm in the rocks, a mighty rift
with bare precipitous walls running deep into the
island, sounds now and then the clamour of a colony
of gulls ; and, at times, hundreds of kittiwakes, as if
moved by common impulse, rise in a cloud from the
dark hollow, float like flecks of foam over the sea, and
then sink slowly back into the cavernous depth.

In these rocky hollows seals find shelter still, and
it is not long since a shepherd-dog was seen barking
furiously at a seal, lying on a reef a few yards from
shore, who for his part was staring hard at this strange
monster of the land. The presence of the shepherd
broke the spell. The seal gazed a moment at the
man — a form but too well known to all the timid race
— and sank down into the sheltering waves.

The whole surface of the water as far as the eye can
reach is dotted with figures light or dark, swimming,
diving, drifting idly with the current. Far out a white
cloud of gulls has gathered over some object floating
in the waves.

A few gannets sail over the water, their outstretched
necks, slow flight, and pure white plumage singling
them plainly out among the motley crowd.

A Sea-Birds' Haunt. 119

They were once more plentiful here, and in old
days formed a source of revenue to the islanders. In
an old inventory, dated 1321, we find mention of
' a certain rock called the Gannett Stone, with two
places near it where gannetts settle and breed, worth
in ordinary years sixty-six shillings and eightpence,
but this year destroyed in great part by the
Scots.'

The Gannet Stone still bears its name, but it is long
since it had any tenants. The birds have more than
once been entirely driven from the island, and Lundy
gannets have founded one colony, at least, upon the
coast of Wales.

A huge pyramid of stone that rises by the shore is
crowded with razor-bills and guillemots, and far along
the cliff the ledges are lined with countless figures,
motionless and silent.

Many of these ledges seem so narrow and insignifi-
cant that the eye could hardly trace them, were it not
for their dusky tenants.

And not only are sea and shore, and cave and cliff,
thus crowded with unnumbered birds, but all the
while an incessant stream of flying figures is passing
through the air. Every moment puffins emerge from
their crevices and burrows and fly swiftly downward
with strange moth-like flutter to the sea. Every
moment hundreds more come up from the water,
carrying fish into their holes.

As you make your slow way down the grassy slope

120 Idylls of the Field.

under the cliff, among the piles of granite, puffins
start in scores from the ledges of the rocks.

But when you pause in the shelter of a great block,
hoary with its long gray lichens, the birds return to
the resting-places from which your coming startled
them.

Some of them, perched in little companies on their
favourite ledges, have not stirred at all, but allowed
you to pass almost within arm's length, without sign
of fear.

One particularly pretty group of some fifty puffins
has collected on the shelves and ledges of a picturesque
pile of granite within a dozen yards.

Nearer still, on a broad stone, hardly two yards
away, another company is gathering. One by one the
birds drop out of the flying stream and settle down
upon the stone. Then walking up to the edge, with
steps half dainty, half awkward, they stare at you with
odd, reproachful, inquisitive faces.

A sudden rush of wings passes overhead ; a puffin
hovers over the rock before you, with legs hanging
down as if feeling for the land. It flaps its wings a
few times as if to settle its balance, and then takes its
place among the little crew of odd, upright figures,
half shy, half scared — some with heads turned drolly
on one side, that regard you with comical expres-
sion.

A shadow falls from the rock overhead. You look
up. A puffin is standing just above you, with a fish

A Sea-Birds' Haunt. 121

glittering in his beak. So near is he that you might
almost reach him with your hand.

They are all silent, but their looks and attitudes
express, as plain as words could put it, ' When will
this tiresome fellow go away ?'

Now one stands up to flap his short black wings.
Another yawns j a second follows suit. Now one,
with great show of deliberation, crouches flat upon the
rock, as if he, at least, had made up his mind to make
a night of it, and tire the intruder out. Many of them
have tiny fish hanging from their beaks, and are, no
doubt, impatient to visit their nests, but are uncertain
whether it is safe to venture yet.

But as time goes on, and you keep quiet, they gain
confidence at last, and one by one they fly down
from the rocks to the entrance of their burrows.
Pretty pictures they make, as they stand among the
tufts of thrift, with their dark backs and snowy breasts,
their neat black collars, their brilliant feet, their
strangely shaped and coloured bills. One stoops
down and peers into his burrow; then he turns to
look at you ; then he takes heart, and plunges in.
Another follows, and another. Ere long your pre-
sence is forgotten, and the birds resume their inter-
rupted duties without further sign of fear.

The burrows here look as if they were the work of
the birds themselves, whose sharp bills and powerful
claws are well suited for mining in this yielding ground.
But puffins often make use of rabbit holes, and it is

122 Idylls of the Field.

no uncommon thing for the birds to turn out the rabbits
almost to the extent sometimes of a whole warren.

The burrows, though often not more than four or
five feet in length, sometimes run in to twice that
distance, and either from accident or design are
generally so crooked that it is not easy to reach the
end. There is usually a bird on guard, too, and a
puffin's beak is no toy weapon of defence.

The broad stone in front is only a look-out or a
place of meeting, but the birds that crowd the ledges
higher up are on the threshold of their dwellings, and
have little families hidden away among the hollows of
the rocks behind them.

The puffins' eggs are long since hatched, and the
young birds, though wearing still their coats of down,
are already beginning to come out of their holes and
scramble down to the sea.

As you clamber about among the rocks you will
hear the cries of the young, and may perhaps discover
in a narrow crevice among the granite slabs a member
of the rising generation. Near the entrance sits the
old bird, her plump figure just filling the fissure ;
turning up to you her strange, owl-like face, apparently
with no thought of fear, anxious only about the
safety of that dusky ball of down that crouches at the
far end of the crevice.

The mother is not easily caught. She fights hard
with beak and claws, whose marks will perhaps remain
long imprinted on your fingers.

A Sea-Birds' Haunt. 123

The young bird makes no resistance, and you are
at leisure to note the strange contrast between its
sooty coat and the snowy plumage of its parent — to
compare, too, the highly-arched and brightly coloured
beak of the one, with the straight and undecorated
bill of the other ; the vivid scarlet of the strong feet
of the old bird with the black paddles of its single
fledgling.

They are indeed an odd couple. You let them go
at length. The young one scrambles down again into
its cavern, the mother darts straight as an arrow out
to sea, flying fast and far over the water, as if too
angry ever to return.

On a ledge close by, on the hard bare earth that
time has collected on the rock, lies a great pear-
shaped egg, whose white ground is finely decorated
with rich brown markings. It is a razor-bill's egg,
and in the niches in the rocks you soon discover
more.

The birds themselves, who for the most part haunt
stations nearer to the sea, are looking down at you all
the while, perched in a row upon the rock, and craning
their necks to watch your every movement. Fine
fellows they are, with their snowy breasts, dark backs,
and smart, soldierly attitude.

But as you watch them, their forms are growing
faint and dim. A cold wind is blowing up the
hollow ; and now, hiding fast the sky and sea, veiling
the glory of the sinking sun and all the trembling

124 Idylls of the Field.

path of golden ripples that lies along the waves, a
rolling sea-fog sweeps fast along the hill.

The groups of puffins vanish in the streaming mist.
The rocky stage and all its feathered actors fade behind
the cold gray curtain.

But still the voices of the gulls sound ghostlike
through the cloud ; the chorus of the drifting razor-
bills rises faintly from the sea. Still, without pause,
there hurries by unseen the rush of innumerable
wings.

CHEDDAR CLIFFS.

A RECENT note of warning as to the danger
Ji~ V which threatens the beauty of Cheddar has not
been sounded a moment too soon. It is true that the
actual cliffs are still untouched, but what is being
done has already spoilt beyond remedy not a little of
their charm. The slopes of rock and stones which
harmonize so well with the stern and magnificent
outlines of the cliffs are being quarried at intervals
from one end of the ravine to the other — here for
building, there for lime, everywhere for mending the
roads.

One of the finest points of view is already sadly
marred, and even if the work should at once be dis-
continued, it will be many years before the signs of
quarrying disappear before the softening influences of
time and weather.

Cheddar is a national glory. There is not a finer
piece of cliff scenery in the British Islands. Even a
travelled American said of it, as he walked up the

126 Idylls of the Field.

grand ravine, ' We have a Yosemite and a Niagara,
but we have no Cheddar Cliffs.'

The cliffs, at their base an almost unbroken wall of
rock, but separated towards their summits into pic-
turesque masses like towers of Cyclopean masonry,
skirt one side of a long, winding ravine — a rift that
runs into the very heart of the hills, not, as an old
writer says, the work of Nature 'in one of those
moments when she convulsed the world with the
throes of an earthquake, burst asunder the rocky ribs
of Mendip and tore a chasm across its diameter of
more than a mile in length,' but slowly sculptured by
water, of whose action it bears abundant traces.

The height of the cliffs is often overstated. A late
inhabitant who measured them with a line and plum-
met found the highest point to be not more than
360 feet above the road. But their beauty does not
depend upon their altitude ; Cheddar is one of those
places which never disappoint, and of which no de-
scription can surpass the reality.

Beautiful even when trees are bare and skies are
grey, when snow lies white along the ledges, and icy
fringes glitter in the wintry sun, it is in springtime that
the cliffs are at their best; when the foliage that
softens all their stern and rugged faces is brightening
in the sun of May ; when all the thousand tenants are
busy round their castles in the air.

Then, in the twilight, wander down the gorge, while
the flush of sunset lingers still upon the rocky steeps.

Cheddar Cliffs. 127

Round the grey pinnacles float the silent, ghost-like
figures of the daws. Far above them soaring swifts
have still the gleam of daylight on their wings.

Every leaf is still. There is no sound but now
and then the clamour of some home-returning troop of
birds, or the rustling of a rock-dove's wings as she
flutters home to roost.

The weathered faces of rock are in many places too
steep and smooth for any but the smallest plants to
find a footing ; but in the crevices, and especially in
the recesses high up among the cliffs, there flourishes
a luxuriant growth.

The dark foliage of the yew, the silvery leaves of the
white beam, and the varied tints of half a score of
other hardy shrubs which, blended in picturesque
confusion, have anchored themselves in the shattered
buttresses, form, with the cool green of the ivy that
clings everywhere in graceful draperies, an exquisite
relief among the delicate grey of the time-worn lime-
stone.

Not a few flowers, too, find a home upon the rocks.
In the summer the frail yellow poppy clings about
their feet ; abundant wall-flowers scent the air ; soft
blue harebells nestle in the grass. Sober wood-sage
and bright stone-crops wander among the shattered
fragments ; while on all the ledges and in every
crevice the delicate little Cheddar pink, pride at once
of the cliffs and the country, shows its tender flush of
rose on every buttress of the mighty wall. There is

128 Idylls of the Field.

no fear of exterminating that. It grows mostly beyond
the reach of the casual visitor. Maidenhair there is
not, and probably never was ; but ferns of many kinds
fringe the rocky cornices with their graceful fronds.

But the gorge has other tenants. Crowds of jack-
daws haunt its rocky niches ; and the Babel of their
thousand tongues, and the flutter of their dusky wings
as they float far up against the blue sky, are for a great
part of the year features never absent from it. Among
the dark plumage of the daws flash the grey wings of
the rock-dove ; and the scream of the kestrel every
now and then breaks in upon the chattering chorus.

Years ago the lordly peregrine kept his castle with
the rest ; but both he and the raven, though not un-
known, seldom revisit now their ancient haunts.

The limestone of the Mendips is pierced by many
caves, some of which, like that of Goatchurch at
Burrington, are long and intricate. Despoiled of
their beauty long ago, and having yielded rich harvests
of bones to Beard, Dawkins, and other cave-hunters,
there is little in them now to tempt the explorer.

A better fate has attended the cavern at Cheddar,
which, half a century ago, was discovered by accident
in digging foundations for a stable. Its treasures have
been guarded with such care, that, it is no exaggeration
to say, there are few more beautiful caverns in the
world than this pride of a little West-Country village.

There are few allusions to the cliffs in old writers,
who, indeed, seldom troubled themselves about the

Cheddar Cliffs. 129

works of nature; Camden makes merely a passing
reference to the village.

The earliest mention of the name is probably in
Domesday. 'The King,' says the old Norman
Survey, ' holds Cedre. King Edward held it. It has
never paid tax, nor is it known how many hides there
are in it.'

The whole district was a favourite royal hunting-
ground both before and after the Conquest. The
bare brown uplands, which fringe the summits of the
cliffs and reach far over the sterile hills, were densely
covered then with noble forests, the haunt of those
tall red deer which the Norman King loved as if he
were their father.

One of the Saxon Kings nearly lost his life there.
Following a stag through the woods, and carried by
the heat of the chase close to the perilous verge, he
saw both the deer and the hounds, unable to pause in
their career, hurled over the edge of the precipice, and
himself narrowly escaped their terrible fate.

The dwellers in the white hamlets scattered along
the bases of the hills must have been long familiar
with the howl of wolves among the wild ravines ; and
the curfew — still rung in some of these ancient villages
— may well have been the signal to the fierce marauders
to descend on the defenceless farms.

The face of the country has seen much change since
then. The far-reaching moor, that from the mouth of
the gorge stretches away until its shadowy rim fades

9

130 Idylls of the Field. '

into the grey horizon— then a swampy wilderness not
seldom inundated by the sea, the haunt of crane and
bittern ; the lair of boar and aurochs — has been
drained and tilled.

The forest, except a few dwindling strips of stunted
wood, harbour for fox and badger, has long since
disappeared.

But the tall cliffs remain. No hand but that of
time has yet been laid on these tremendous ramparts.
They have seen Kelt and Roman, Saxon and Norman,
pass along the road which sweeps like a winding river
at their feet.

It is historic ground. Every hill-top is crowned
with its earthen rampart ; every road follows the
course of a Roman way.

At Wedmore, a few miles out on the moor, are the
massy foundations of Alfred's summer palace ; beyond
the low blue hills are still ploughed up, at Athelney,
fragments of tiles from the monastery which the great
West Saxon King is said to have founded there in
gratitude for his deliverance.

Round the grey towers of Wells cling memories of
Ken and Still, of Laud and Wolsey.

The noble ruins of Glastonbury are haunted by dim
traditions of Dunstan and King Arthur.

Many a bold son of the district faced King James's
men down there in the moor.

Along that fatal dyke ;
Where Monmouth's boors, with hearts of proof,
Kept Churchill's foaming horse aloof ;

Cheddar Cliffs. 131

And scorned to fly, nor deigned to yield,
While, ere he fled the hopeless field,
Flashed their stout leader's pike.

Behind the low hills above the gorge, by the village
of Charterhouse, lie the faint vestiges of a vanished
town. A Roman settlement was planted there among
the Kangic lead-mines. The refuse which their im-
perfect appliances forced them to leave has been
smelted and resmelted since then, and only a few
years back the works were still in operation. Few
signs are left of either conquerors or conquered.
Foundations of buildings have been traced. Fine
Samian ware and rude British pottery, coins and
ornaments, tools and weapons, have been discovered
in ' The Town Field.'

A broken tablet records that the Armenian legion
was posted here. Huge blocks of lead still exist
bearing the names of Vespasian and Antonine. Little
else remains. But, in all the country side

Some trace of Imperial tenure now,

Clashes at times on the peasant's plough ;
Fragments of graceful vases

With gods and heroes traced ;
Records of Roman triumph

In letters half effaced ;
A tarnished ring, whose fiery gems,

Still on its circle set,
From the far sands of Indus brought,
Gleam through their setting, rudely wrought,
As if the sky their hues have caught

Flamed in their glory yet.

IN THE HEART OF THE MOUNTAINS.

RIGHT in the heart of the Bavarian Highlands
lies the wild valley of the Hollenthal. It is
some way off the beaten track. The nearest village

In the Heart of the Mountains. 133

is three hours away, and there is not a single outlying
homestead on the road to it.

Indeed, as we stood under the broad eaves of the
forester's house in Grainau, saying ' Good-bye ' to the
assembled household, our little party had quite the
air of travellers setting off for some unexplored region,
whose safe return was a matter of uncertainty.

The path lay for some distance through the forest,
in which a few beech-trees made a pleasant relief
among the sombre ranks of red and white pines.
Some of the latter were giants indeed. We counted
228 rings in a fresh stump, and there were other trees,
even larger, still standing in their prime.

Emerging from the forest, wre followed a narrow
path cut in the sides of the Wachsenstein, whose
steep flank towered 4,000 feet above us, while beneath
lay the magnificent gorge of the Max Klamm — 500
feet sheer down.

Although an Alpine climber would make light of it,
it is not altogether a path to be recommended for
those with a tendency to dizziness. On the day we
left the valley ten people who had started together for
the Hollenthal were so infected by the nervousness and
final collapse of one of the party that they all turned
back before reaching the most ticklish point.

Crossing a wooden bridge to the farther side of the
Klamm, we could see far below us the boiling waters
of a torrent on its headlong way to join the Isar.

Deep into the rock the stream had worn its way,

134 Idylls of the Field.

until now it ran 300 feet below the little bridge that
spanned the narrow chasm. The steep sides were
covered thick with bright fronds of oak-fern, and
nodding plumes of tall spireas. Patches of sweet
pyrolas nestled in its sheltered hollows ; farther down,
spikes of yellow foxglove swayed gently in the wind ;
clumps of dark purple gentian had found a footing
even in this rocky steep.

The track now was less distinct and occasionally
difficult j we had to help one of the party by fencing
him off from the abyss with an alpenstock held between
two.

At last we came down to the stream, and crossing
it again by a fallen pine-trunk, found ourselves near
the end of our labours. In a few minutes we were
well within the Hollenthal.

It is not inaptly styled the Valley of Hell. It is
walled in by the steep sides of giant mountains, culmi-
nating at the farther end in the huge mass of the
Zugspitze — the highest peak in all Bavaria, whose
twin summits bar the way like the grim guards of an
enchanted land.

On the right the cliff is silvered by the now dwindling
waters of the Mariensprung, a fall which ceases, so
tradition says, on the Virgin's birthday.

Beyond the fall the mountain-side is bare, pre-
cipitous, and inaccessible — except at the head of the
valley, where a climb of 2,000 feet leads up to the
Riffel, and thence down to the Eibsee.

In the Heart of the Mountains. 135

The left side of the valley is irregularly clothed
with pines, and there are patches of forest further on.
A great part of the bottom of the gorge is covered by
a broad belt of stones — the bed of a great torrent in
winter time. In summer there is still a stream fed by
the Zugspitze Glacier, but it runs under the stones.

Right before us, at the foot of the pine-covered
slope, was our hut.

I suppose that everyone, as he first read the story of
Robinson Crusoe, was fired with the desire to go and
live on an uninhabited island — to be shipwrecked in
preference to any other way of getting there; to go
about clad in the quaint costume of that amiable
recluse, and armed with guns of ancient pattern but
unrivalled performance ; and to live all alone in a hut
constructed by his own hands.

Here was our chance, then. Here was a log-hut in
the very heart of the wilderness, far away from sight
or sound of man. In the silence of this lonely valley
was a solitude like that of Crusoe.

The hut was built for the use of the foresters of the
district, and is like an Alpine refuge, only rather more
clean, and dry, and comfortable. There was not much
superfluous furniture. There was a stove and sauce-
pans ; the usual shelf of hay to sleep on ; and blankets
of the ordinary Alpine colour and pattern — that is to
say, black and tattered.

We were soon in possession. In a few minutes a
fire was crackling in the little stove ; a fatigue-party

136 Idylls of the Field.

went off to the spring for water ; and it was not long
before we were engaged on our first meal in our new
quarters.

The little hinged table just held the bread, the
meat, and honey; there was no room for plates if
there had been any.

The want of these was supplied by spare pine
shingles for mending the roof, which we held on our
knees, and changed for the second course by the
simple process of turning them over. Our diet was
plain, perhaps, but even a queen has been known to
have no better fare than bread and honey, whereas
we, happy savages in our lonely hut, had that, and
bilberry-jam as well. Dinner over, three of us started
to explore the valley, while the artist got to work at
his canvas.

From a patch of forest further up, we started a
stag, that went bounding across in tremendous leaps
and up the slope on the left.

High overhead floated a pair of buzzards — dark
against the vivid blue — calling now and then to each
other as they sailed in vast circles. Once a hoopoe flew
by and settled on a dead pine not twenty yards away.

In the trees were crested tits, and black redstarts,
and we heard both the nutcracker and the great black
woodpecker.

We noticed numbers of a brilliant beetle, a
Chrysomela, green, with a gold border, on the leaves
of the burdock.

In the Heart of the Mountains. 137

It was late for flowers ; but there were a few tall
gentians and occasional patches of holly fern, with
seas of cranberry plants, the vivid scarlet of whose
leaves made, with the yellow stains of the lichen,
happy touches of relieving colour among the piles of
grey rock — the long-accumulated spoils of storm and
avalanche.

At the head of the gorge is a waterfall of great
height — 1,000 feet the foresters say; though its silvery
column was but slender now.

When the labours of the day were over, and we
gathered round the door in the deepening twilight,
there was a cloud upon the brow of the man whose
turn it was to cook for the company.

A pot in which he was stewing bilberries for supper
had taken it into its ill-balanced mind to topple
over, and spill half the precious compound on the
floor.

To add to his misery, the tea which we had purchased
of an Apothek in Garmisch could not be induced, by
any persuasion whatever, to impart any colour, to
speak of, to the water. He had stirred it vigorously
with no effect ; in vain had he put in another spoonful ;
he had placed the teapot on the very stove to no
purpose at all.

It was some consolation to him at such a moment
to be reminded of Darwin's camp among the moun-
tains, and the ' cursed pot ' which c did not choose to
boil potatoes,' and his soul was soothed at length with

138 Idylls of the Field.

the reflection that no man, at such an altitude, could
have extracted more colour from the leaves.

Night came on very rapidly. When the sun sank
behind a shoulder of the Zugspitze there was a brief
but magnificent afterglow that bathed the stern faces
of the mountain ramparts with a flood of rosy light.

Then all was cold and grey again ; the stars came
out all at once ; the plash of the waterfalls sounded
nearer and more distinct ; and an awesome feeling of
solitude settled down upon us as we stood silently
round the door before turning in.

The shelf on which we were to sleep held four
exactly, two at each end.

The distribution of blankets was a matter of some
difficulty, from their age and condition ; but all were
at length satisfied — or at least quieted, and we essayed
to sleep. Some hours later we were roused by hail
pattering on the roof, and we heard distant thunder
rumbling among the mountains.

One night we heard strange noises outside, as of
some large animal stamping and knocking against the
walls. It was too dark to see anything when we went
out, and no doubt the beast, whatever it was, took
fright at the first sound of opening the door.

By the middle of the third day we began to have
fears of famine. Our appetites had grown to such an
alarming extent that the bread was vanishing at a pace
we had never contemplated. However, a man who
came into the valley to look after some heifers took

In the Heart of the Mountains. 139

back a message to Ostler Toni in Grainau ; and sure
enough, at six the next morning, appeared that worthy
with a yard of bread on his back j and more welcome
still, some letters — carefully wrapped in two handker-
chiefs and a sheet of paper.

The last evening we made a mighty bonfire. Trunks
of dead fir-trees in the middle, a huge pile of dry
branches round them, a match applied, and in a few
minutes the whole mass was a vast pyramid of flames.
A wonderful stream of sparks towered straight up into
the night. The black fir-trees that stood round like
sentinels, and the grey mountain-sides, were lighted up
as with a sunset ; and four wild-looking forms seen in
the lurid glare might have made a night-o'ertaken
wanderer of the Zugspitze think that the valley had
earned its name in sober earnest, and that the figures
round the fire were kobolds planning mischief for the
morrow.

THE HEART OF THE FOREST.

THE Eibsee is one of a group of many lakes which
lie scattered among the Bavarian Highlands, and
look, from the top of the mountains, like silver studs
on the great round shield of the landscape.

The If cart of the Forest, 141

When under the deep blue sky of summer the great
mountains wear no sign of winter beyond a few
white patches that linger in deep rifts here and there,
or a scanty glacier that fills some cool hollow at the
foot of a precipice, there are few haunts of the wander-
ing Briton more dear to the lover of nature and the
follower of art among the wild recesses of these
southern Highlands.

The hostelry upon its shore seems like the last
outpost of civilization, pushed to the farthest limits of
the world.

Close round the broad-eaved chalet gather the dark
ranks of pines that like a sea stretch away far up the
steep sides of the great amphitheatre that rises round
the lake. Above the dark waves of the forest tower
the huge buttresses of the mountain wall — ending at
last in the rugged majesty of the monarch of the
Highlands.

The soft air that steals in at the open window's is
heavy with the swreet breath of the forest. From the
little balcony you may hear the call of the hoopoe, or
see the bright plumage of the oriole flash among the
shadows of the trees.

From your window you may watch the shy black
woodpecker settle on the topmost bough of a withered
pine, whose skeleton arms rise grey and gaunt above
its younger comrades. He makes a fine figure up
there with his sable plumage and his crimson crown,
looking up now and then to utter his long - drawn
melancholy cry. Now his call is answered from the

142 Idylls of the FMd.

forest ; now he takes wing, and with laboured flight
plunges down among the green waves below.

Among the pines on the edge of the clearing, a
party of crested tits alight. Clinging with their tiny
feet to the brown clusters that hang thick under the
boughs, they split off the loose scales from the cones
in search of insects, or rummage among the long tufts
of grey lichen that drape these patriarchs of the forest.
Now climbing among the fir-cones, now swinging head
downwards, full of grace and life, they have the busy
lively ways of all their race, but they have less to say
to each other as they work, and the notes they utter
now and then are quite unlike the familiar voices of
their more common relations.

There are generally a few black redstarts flitting
about among the rocks near the house, and if you keep
still they may even alight on the balcony by you as
you sit looking out over the landscape.

It is but a few paces from the hostel to the lake.

You make your way down to the water through a
group of swarthy mountaineers, who loiter round the
doorway. Picturesque of dress and pleasant of speech,
they are a turbulent race, these wild dwellers by the
lonely lake — slayers of the King's deer, smugglers of
contraband goods over the border, at feud with the
foresters and the frontier guard.

Round the broken coastline runs a fringe of stones,
then a bright green line of grass and ferns, and every-
where a dense growth of pines that crowd to the shore
as if to bar the way.

The Heart of the Forest. 143

Along the farther side there glides a skiff, across the
water floats the beat of oars, and clear and shrill at
intervals comes the chorus of a song.

The sounds have ceased. There is silence every-
where, save that from the mountain-side you hear at
times the soft plash of a waterfall, or the faint tinkle of
a cow-bell from a distant alp.

The soft blue shadows of the pine-trees as you drift
along suggest a cool retreat. You ground your skiff
on a little beach of shingle, and go ashore into the
forest. Tall silver firs on either hand rise like the
columns of the green canopy overhead. About their
roots is spread a thick carpet of ferns, and moss, and
bilberry plants.

At your feet there lies a pool, as green as emerald.
The rocky shore, the stately pines, are mirrored in its
perfect face. Among the smooth stems of the trees
the eye may catch brief glimpses of the dim recesses
of the forest.

There is no pathway here, no trace of man. The
footprints on the shore are of the roebuck and the
heron. The signs of labour are the half-gnawed fir-
cones some squirrel has scattered on the ground.
Two great dragon-flies, with spots of purple on their
rustling wings, poise over the water. No other sound,
nor sign of life. It is an enchanted spot. Are there
no shadowy figures stealing away into the forest, no
dryads peering from behind the trees ? It is a place

Where elves hold midnight revel,
And fairies linger still.

144 Idylls of the Field.

You climb over the rocky barrier of the shore, and stroll
into the forest.

Life is not abundant in a place like this. You may
wander for hours and see no living thing.

At last there is a sound of something falling
on the withered leaves. From far overhead looks
down a black squirrel, whose white breast relieves the
inky colour of his coat. He is busy at his dinner, but,
if you move a step nearer, he drops his fir-cone and
disappears behind a branch. Next moment you catch
sight of him in another tree racing like the born
acrobat he is, along boughs that hardly bend beneath
his tread.

He is gone. The silence is the deeper for his
going.

The sense of solitude is almost painful. The great
trees divide you from the outer world. The green
roof shuts out the very sky.

It is a relief to come upon a little clearing where the
pines stand back to make way for the sunshine. The
ground is brightened with a touch of colour. Tall
yellow foxgloves lift their heads above the ferns ; and,
among the brilliant flowers of a patch of willow herb,
pale Alpine butterflies sun their lovely wings. Across
the sky a great buzzard floats, sailing in wide circles,
calling now and then perhaps to some comrade beyond
our ken.

There is a sudden rustle on the dead leaves. Light
footfalls are approaching from behind the rocks. You

The Heart of the Forest. 145

crouch closer in the shadows and watch with bated
breath as a roe saunters idly down to cool her parched
tongue in a little pool among the boulders. She
pauses a moment to browse upon a tuft of bracken.
She scents no peril in the air ; her great eyes are calm
and fearless. She moves nearer ; she is not twenty
yards away. Your foot slips off a stone j it was the
slightest movement in the world, but the keen eyes are
ware of danger. There is a rush of flying feet ; an
eddy of dry leaves, as if caught up by a passing gust,
here and there along the slope, and the startled
creature has disappeared in the forest.

A few paces further you come again upon the lake,
which here thrusts a long arm of silver in among the
trees. A troop of nutcrackers are wrangling in the
pine-tops, screaming like their brighter cousin the jay,
and sailing into the air at times with the grace of a
soaring swallow.

As you make your slow way through the tangled
undergrowth that skirts the shore, a huge bird breaks
from cover almost at your feet with a commotion that
makes you stop short in amazement. It is a caper-
cailzie— a noble bird, the prince of forest fowl.

He is just long enough in getting clear of the bushes
for you to mark the gorget of rich green upon his breast,
his crested head, and the crimson streak over the eye
which is the badge of honour of his clan.

He flies straight over the water with a great rush of
wings. He is making for the farther shore, and you

10

146 Idylls of the Field.

watch his figure dwindle in the distance until at last he
sinks down among the shadows of the pines.

But it is time to turn back. It is drawing near the
hour of sunset, for the horizon here is half-way up the
sky. By the time you have got back to the boat and
paddled across the lake, the hush of night is already
settling down upon the little hostelry. Bold and clear
against the saffron west stand the stern outlines of the
mountains.

No sound disturbs the silence but the rush of a
torrent or the wail of some night-wandering bird.

Suddenly the night comes down. From the dark
vault overhead myriads of stars look down into the
glassy lake.

Or, after a day of heat and ominous gloom, there
descends upon the mountains the terror of a midnight
storm. How awful in the still hours of night sounds
the loud artillery of heaven ! Far through the tossing
forest howls the sudden tempest. The rude windows
rattle with a great rush of rain. An incessant blaze of
quivering light reveals the calm faces of the mountains,
looking down unmoved upon the tumult. Along the
stupendous cliffs rolls the long roar of the thunder —

While frighted echoes, in the gorges round,
Waked for a moment, calling each to each
With fainter voices, sink again to sleep.

A NEW FACE AT THE DOOR.

ONCE more the sky is blue, the sun is warm.
But although rain and wind and misty air are
forgotten for a season, the stormy weather has left its
mark upon the landscape. Bright days may lengthen
out for us the glory of this golden year, but Summer
sleeps, no spell can wake her more. A week ago the
elms were all untouched by the keen autumn air ; the
creeper had not scattered on the grass its crimson
leaves. The green of the woodlands was the green of
summer still. But now along the woodland ways the
leaves begin to fall j the needles of the pine are
scattered on the path. There is gold upon the leafage
of the lime ; a ruddy glow is kindling on the rowan.
There is a look of autumn everywhere. The hawthorn
and the ash are shrivelled by the wind ; the flowers
are beaten down, the birds are still. Summer was
with us but one short week ago, and now — ' There is
a new face at the door.' Now twilight airs grow
keen and cold. There is rime upon the moorland
grass ; there is snow upon the hills of Wales.

IO 2

148 Idylls of the Field.

A week ago. the bells in all the country-side were
ringing for the Harvest Home ; the tents of village
festivals were white on many a glebe.

Five centuries, at least, this church has crowned the
hill-slope, looking down upon the hamlet. Five long
centuries the children of the village, week by week,
have gathered in the shadow of its ancient yew. For
ages the music of its mellow bells has summoned all
its sons of toil, when fields were reaped and sheaves
were safe at home, to bow the knee to the Giver of
seed-time and harvest, summer and winter.

But never, perhaps, in all its history, has the old
Norman church been draped with richer trophies.
Never, in the memory of man, has a richer reaping
crowned a more generous year. And as they joined
with fervent hearts in the thanksgiving, a look of con-
tent was on the faces of the farmers that seemed to
soften down and smooth away the lines of care, that
years of hard times and barren seasons had graven on
their rugged foreheads. Yes, it has been a perfect
year. In golden weather the rich hay harvest was
gathered in. The August rains refreshed the thirsty
fields. The first weeks of September, bright and fair,
brought no rain to mar the sunshine, no clouds to dim
the splendour of the harvest moon.

But in the church, among the ripened sheaves, deft
fingers had twined round the old Norman pillars,
festoons of bryony hung with dark purple leaves,
wreaths of the wild clematis white with winged seeds,

A New Face at the Door. 149

sprays of barberry, tasselled with crimson fruit, boughs
of hedge-maple, touched with autumn gold.

It is in letters such as these that Nature loves to
write the story of the year, in clear and vivid signs
that he who runs may read.

And among the houses of the hamlet, that nestle
half-hidden among sheltering trees, are the sounds of
the labours of the autumn — the sound of the flail upon
the granary floor, the low rumble of the cider mill ;
while the scent of the crushed apples hangs heavy on
the air, and from distant fields of stubble comes the
creaking of the plough.

Not yet, from the orchards, has all the fruit been
gathered in.

Still upon the lichened boughs hangs the rich
harvest, of russet, and crimson, and gold. Heaped
high in the long grass among the trees, piles of bright
fruit are ready for the waggon, that even now is brim-
ming over with its fragrant load.

Windfalls, scattered broadcast right and left, shine
like fire among the green— apples of Sodom, some of
them, for all their beauty, with rough taste that defends
them well.

Here the wasps hold high revel among the fallen
fruit. Starlings and finches make havoc of the
scattered spoil. Rooks, too, are terrible fellows in an
orchard, and will make short work of the fruit of any
particular tree that may happen to take their fancy.

Perhaps the most destructive visitor ever known

150 Idylls of the Field.

among the apples is the crossbill, whom old writers
describe as appearing in great numbers in the time of
harvest, and cutting the fruit in two at one stroke of
its strangely shaped bill, merely to get at the pips
i aside ; or, as another writer says : 'haveinge a bill
with one beake wrythinge over the other, which would
presently bore a greate hole in the apple and make
way to thekernells ; they were of the bignesse of a bull-
finch, the henne right like the henne of the bull-
finch in coulour ; the cock a very glorious bird, in a
manner, al redde or yellowe on the brest, back, and
head. The oldest man never hearde or reade of any
such-like bird.'

The increased cultivation of larch and pine trees
since the date (1593) of this inroad has probably
turned the attention of the birds elsewhere, for little
has been heard of such depredations in modern times.

Beyond the orchard a lane leads towards the hills, a
pleasant way, a road seldom trodden by foot of man,
marked by wheel -tracks only when, in the late
autumn, the bracken-gatherers bring down their loads
of brown litter. The steep banks are a very jungle of
bramble and fern and travellers' joy. Few flowers
linger by the way ; a few spikes of agrimony scented
still ; dark blue scabious and rich purple loose-strife.
The great convolvulus still hangs its white bells on
the hedgerow, but its leaves are burnt and brown.

Under a broad oak, that spreads green arms over-
head, a few grey feathers scattered on the grass show

A New Face at the Door. 151

where, to their feast of acorns, the ringdoves came
down, ere a soul was stirring in the village.

Among the old orchard-trees over the hedge there
sounds the chiff-chaff's cheery note. Almost the last
he is to leave us of all the throng that crossed the seas
for a brief summer in the north.

The swallow too still lingers. In a cartshed at the
farm below, there is even a nestful of youngsters that
have not yet proved the wings that ere long must bear
them far to southward, across the burning sands of the
Sahara.

From the topmost branches of the oak comes the
musical call of a nuthatch, and now and then the
sharp tapping of his bill against the rugged bark.

Birds are very silent now. Only the robin sings.
Among all the minstrels of the spring-time, we are apt
to pass him over. But our ingratitude makes no
difference to him ; there is no note of murmuring to
mar the beauty of his music.

Other singers come and go ; we listen for a brief
space to their sweet melodies, and then, as the days
grow longer, we miss them one by one. But the
robin's cheerful strain is sweeter now and clearer than
when, in the chill March weather, he sang to cheer his
mate. All day long he charms our listening ears.
One sweet singer haunts the gable of the barn ;
another loves the topmost rung of the tall ladder in
the stackyard, where, upon the yellow thatch, the
silent finches gather in a busy crowd.

152 Idylls of the Field,

The lane opens on a long slope of hill, crowned by
grey limestone crags. Broad sheets of sunburnt
bracken are outlined by belts of withered grass.

Bright among these sombre tones are the patches
of the golden furze. A gracious flower it is for all its
armoured stems. Is it not true that

' Kissing is never out of season, when the gorse is in bloom ' ?

The heather has lost already the splendour of its
prime.

But a few flowers still linger on the broad hillside.
There is the mountain meadow-sweet, and a late St.
John's Wort or two ; perhaps a few spikes of sweet
ladies' tresses, breathing still their sweet perfume.

High above the slope a kestrel is hovering. The
sun is bright upon his chestnut feathers, as on quiver-
ing wings he hangs poised upon the air. He pays no
heed to a troop of swallows fluttering round him, but
scans with keen eyes all the hill, all the spaces among
the gorse or ling. Now he swoops nearly touching
the ground, but recovers himself, and hovers again.
Now, sudden and swift, he falls, and is lost behind
the shoulder of the hill.

It is growing late. The rocky brow above, darken-
ing against the saffron west, flings its shadow far down
on the bracken at our feet.

A party of bats that have left their shelter, ere yet
the sun is down, flutter on dark wings across the
glowing sky. From the elms below a woodpecker is

A New Face at the Door. 153

calling. The mellowed voices of the rooks rise faint

from distant fields.

Just off the homeward path that wanders down the

steep slope of the orchard lies a fallen tree, its ancient

stem half hidden among grass and ferns. Strong

young branches springing upward arch it over. It is

the very

' seat beneath the shade,
For talking age and whispering lovers made.'

No breath of wind sways the long arms of briar and
tall plumes of grass that crown the hedgerow. Nothing
is stirring but the gnats that hover in the twilight air,
tiny feet of timid field-mice rustling in the bushes, or
restless blackbirds calling to each other in the thick
shelter of the hedges in the lane.

The smoke of a woodman's fire, mingling with the
soft vapour that rises from the meadows, steals slow
along the distant hill.

Through the mist that veils the far horizon, a line
of glory shows for a moment on the cold grey water —
the last gleam of the sun —

' Like a golden goblet falling
And sinking into the sea.'

Yonder among the trees shows the white roof of
Barton Camp, the shelter of the little colony of waifs
that, year by year, are brought by kind hands out of
dark corners of the city, to taste the sweet air of the
hills, to wander through green fields and pleasant
lanes.

154 Idylls of the Field.

The camp is silent now : the birds have flown.
They have gone back into the smoke and turmoil of
the streets, their young lives brightened by memories
of meadow and hilltop, of songs of birds and scent of
flowers : memories, perchance, that

In the sorrow and strife of their after-life,
Will come back to their hearts in dreams.

Fhrrtpgr avur e KRiff artJi . B erlin .

HIS NATIVE HEATH.

HIS NATIVE HEATH.

AMONG the birds which we reckon on our list as
British, there are not a few which, once native
here, have with changed conditions gradually dimi-
nished in numbers, until being no longer regular
residents, they appear now only as stragglers from
more settled haunts.

The engineer's level has ever been more fatal to
aboriginal races than the long-bow or the rifle. The
draining of the fens has been more disastrous to our
native birds than the invention of gunpowder.

No longer in the dwindling reed forests is there
found a shelter for the tall figure of the crane. The
ploughshare and the spade have long since driven the
ruff from his haunts among the marshes.

Many birds of prey, again, from long and ruthless
persecution, are almost extinct. It is rare to see even
a peregrine or a harrier ; while the kite and the osprey
linger only in jealously guarded sanctuaries.

In the case of the chough, however, it seems difficult
to assign any sufficient reason for its increasing rarity.

156 Idylls of the Field.

Its haunts have not been disturbed. It has not been
hunted down for its misdeeds by vengeful keeper or
exasperated farmer.

But from some cause or other there is no doubt that
it has disappeared from many spots where once it was
a familiar resident. Along the white cliffs of Dover it
' wings the midway air ' no more.

There is hardly a spot along the coast from Kent to
Cornwall where now it holds its own.

In Scotland and Ireland there is the same story —
the same gradual dwindling away of a bird which
appears once to have been common.

No doubt there are nooks along the Cornish coast
where this graceful bird still looks down upon the
surge that thunders in the caverns far below. And at
other points, round Wales especially, there are still
unharried haunts from which the chough is not yet
driven.

On the Continent of Europe it lives less by the sea,
and makes its home among the mountains ; and we,
too, possess at least one such hill fortress where still
the chough breeds undisturbed.

An old miners' path winds down the steep side of
the valley to the bank of the river. On either hand
are abundant traces of old workings. To the left are
heaped huge piles of refuse ore, from these long dis-
used galleries that run deep into the heart of the hills.

Hard, indeed, have the silent slaves of Nature
striven to cover up these scars that mar the beauty of

His Native Heath. 157

the grand ravine. A hundred plants are spreading
bright leaves over the rubbish. Clustering ferns fill
with their tender foliage rifts in the shattered rock.
Moss grows thick about the mouldering timbers of the
galleries whose rough walls are draped with tapestries
of living green, glistening with the water that trickles
from the dripping roof.

The path crosses the river by a line of ancient
stepping-stones, whose dark forms, worn down by cen-
turies of passing feet, are now hardly visible above the
brown waters of the swirling stream.

A party of crows, on the watch perhaps for some
hapless lamb drifting down the river, fly out of the
alders on the bank and alight in a cluster on the
branches of a withered tree.

There are few birds in the valley. There is a wag-
tail pacing with dainty steps along the muddy shore,
and a dipper leaves his perch on a boulder in mid-
stream as we cross the stones ; but with so few trees
and such little cultivation birds are scarce.

The path leaves the river and climbs the opposite
slope.

On the broad top of yonder knoll, whose steep sides
of rock are overshadowed with a dense crown of oak-
leaves, are the grey ruins of an ancient camp. Mere
heaps of stones they are, peering out through a wilder-
ness of brake fern and heather. But around them
lingers yet the memory of the bold chief whose altered
name clings to the historic hilltop.

158 Idylls of the Field.

At a sudden turn in the path a great bird rises from
the side of the road, and, spreading wide his mighty
wings, drifts leisurely down to the wall under the
encampment. It is a buzzard, a bird tamer than
many of his fierce race, perhaps because his solitude
is seldom broken. And now he lingers until we can
see the markings on his rich brown coat. Then at
last he rises once more, and we lose sight of him
among the trees.

Yonder is another that, floating on motionless wings
with every variety of graceful curve, soars in ever-
widening circles along the mountain-side until it gains
the summit, and disappears over the crest of the hill.

As he passes the grey wall of cliff, whose shattered
buttresses break the round swell of the valley, a
clamorous party of dark birds emerge from their
hiding-places in the rocks. They are choughs. There
is little to identify them with certainty at such a dis-
tance; but although their flight suggests that of the
rook, they are lighter in build, and their clear, emphatic
cries of * Kae, kaej are quite unlike the voices of any
others of their race. They settle down in their rocky
haunts again, and are seen no more.

The path has reached the top of the slope, and we
stand on the brink of a mighty hollow in the moun-
tains.

It is a wild spot. The ground has been torn up as
by a waterspout. Piles of shingle and boulders alter-
nate with yawning hollows made in search of ore.

His Native Heath. 159

Here a headlong torrent is brawling in its rocky bed.
There a quiet pool mirrors in its silver face its fringe
of fern and sedges. Here a patch of heather or a
clump of asphodel rises like a small green island in a
sea of ruin.

It was not always thus bare and desolate. The
broken ground reveals the stumps of gigantic trees,
hewn down long ages since, and covered deep with
peat and shingle : trees whose wide arms once filled
this bleak hollow with fair green waves of forest.

The pathway gains a higher level still, winding
among rocky knolls through knee-deep heather that
purples all the hill.

On the summit of a grey monolith that lifts its
mighty head above a sea of fern there sits an ouzel,
presently flying off to higher ground with ringing call-
note, answered by a comrade in the distance.

Far up against the sky, just clear of the great peak
that now looks down into the valley, floats the figure
of a raven, drifting away towards some white object
on a distant ridge.

The pathway brings us nearer. It is the body of a
sheep, from which three sombre figures rise reluctantly
with deep and sullen croak as they leave for a space
their hapless prey.

There are more traces of the miners now; ruined
cottages, windowless, roofless, dismantled; rude fur-
naces in which is lying still the half-roasted ore, cold
this many a day.

160 Idylls of the Field.

Here, too, after the brief interregnum of man's
misrule, re-asserts itself the kindly reign of Nature.
Sweet mountain-ferns fringe the widening crannies of
the stonework. Beech-ferns cluster about the feet of
idle falls that turn no more the useless wheels.
Bright stone-crops gild the arches of long empty
aqueducts.

But over all there is a sense of gloom and desolation,
heightened by the pallor of the sunset and the deepen-
ing purple of the hills.

This cavernous tunnel is the entrance of the mine.
Heaps of ore are piled about among the ruins. Scraps
of rusted ironwork are scattered on the ground. After
groping some way along the gallery, whose floor is
deep in mud coloured richly by water that has oozed
out of the ore, you reach an air-shaft, and pause a
moment to look round you. The rock is stained with
warm tones of red and orange and yellow. Tiny
ferns have found footing on the narrow ledges. Patches
of moss mingle their soft shades of green with the
ruddy colouring of the rock.

Suddenly the eye catches sight of a bird standing
motionless in a niche in the side of the air-shaft, only
a few feet overhead. It is a chough. Its glossy black
plumage, the bright red of its legs and beak, its little
canopy of tinted rock, make a charming study — espe-
cially to the naturalist who thus, for the first time,
contemplates at his leisure the features of this rare and
graceful bird upon its native heath.

His Native Heath. 161

Some sound at last disturbs it from its rest. It
flutters up the shaft. A comrade, hitherto unseen,
disturbed by the sound of passing wings, flies out
from higher up, and with a chorus of excited cries they
gain the open hill.

They are gone. It is but a brief glimpse that we
have had of them. We might easily have ' secured a
splendid specimen.'

Better the memory of the twilight in the hills ; the
well-remembered picture of the sleeping birds, the
sound of its unfamiliar voice, and the rush of its
vanishing wings, than the possession of its skin mounted
by the most dexterous hand — all the grace gone out
of it. No more of the free life of the hills ; no more
triumphant flights across those seas of purple heather.
Nothing but to stand for ever behind the glass of an
ugly bird-case in the den of a musty naturalist.

1 1

A WOODLAND WALK.

THE fierce winds of November have swept away
at last the rich autumn foliage that, through
the long Indian summer, lingered so late upon the
trees.

The elms that cluster in the sheltered hollows are
indeed still draped in gay attire, and shimmer in the
sunlight like a mist of gold. And the tangle of the
underwood, which wears no more the monotonous
hue of summer, is picked out with a myriad touches
of vivid colour. Tattered sprays of elm and maple
whose every leaf is turned to gold still cling here
and there, like points of light, among dismantled
boughs.

But the green veil that hid so long the mystery of
the woodland has fallen, and the eye may wander at
will far into the forest sanctuaries.

The paths are covered deep with scented spoils
that rustle with each passing tread.

At times the wind, sweeping round a hollow of the
road, calls from their rest the coloured leaves that,

A Woodland Walk. 163

whirled up in sudden eddy, hurry headlong down the
path like the phantom dance of Pau-Puk-Keewis.

And when for a brief space there streams through
rifted clouds a flood of sunshine down the wooded
slope, then all at once the pallid greens and yellows
on the heads of oak and elm, all the bright colours
of the thickets, glow as in the light of dawn. The
splendour brightens even the sombre foliage of the
firs and kindles on their ruddy branches with the
sheen of gold.

The dwellers in the woodland, too, the light-hearted
elves that chatter in the tree-tops, raise their voices
above the rattle of the boughs and the rustle of dead
leaves, to welcome back the lost glory of the summer.

A creeper, gliding mouse-like up the stem of a
reeling ash-tree, searching the crevices of the bark for
insects as he goes, puts new strength into his feeble
note.

A troop of coal-tits start a ringing measure as they
swing among the firs.

An oxeye, too — a smarter fellow than his sober-
coated cousins, with his yellow vest and black facings
— chimes in with his musical refrain, and for a minute
or two the merry chorus recalls the opening days of
spring.

High up in an elm-tree, from which the screen of
leaves has fallen away, is a woodpecker's hole. It is
long since the little family climbed out into the world,
and, holding on tight with crooked claws, wandered

11 — 2

164 Idylls of the Field.

among the branches until their wings were strong and
they gathered courage to launch out upon the yielding
air. But the hollow may be occupied still by the old
birds, for here in the heart of the greenwood starlings
are less likely to have taken possession.

Yonder flying figure is perhaps one of the tenants.
He is coming this way. After a few quick beats of
his powerful pinions he closes his wings and sweeps
along with undulating flight, the last wave of which
brings him up to the stem of an old elm, where for a
moment he clings, silent and watchful, ere he begins
to beat the covers of what is no doubt a familiar
hunting-ground ; for sheets of bark stripped off and
ragged holes in the wood show that this is by no
means his first visit to the place.

How still he is ! That, indeed, is the first rule of
woodcraft, as every naturalist has to learn. It is little
that he will see of life in the greenwood who canno
in that respect copy the children of the forest.

The path gains the crest of the hill, and winds
down the farther slope between lines of noble trees,
whose dishevelled tresses strew the stony way. A
few bright leaves still cling about the Spanish chestnut
boughs, and flicker in the wind like flames.

On a branch that leans out over the path crouches
a squirrel, watching you with all his eyes. He wears
his winter coat, warmer and thicker than his summer
dress, with an added dash of grey in it, and with long
tufts upon his pointed ears.

A Woodland Walk. 165

There is slight cover for him now among the rock-
ing tops, but he is a master of woodcraft, and, like the
woodpecker, knows well that cardinal rule of keeping
cool and quiet. Nine times out of ten you may pass
him by unnoticed, although the bright black eyes may
be but a few feet overhead. He is often discovered
more by sound than sight ; for if you keep still for a
few minutes in the wood you may often hear the
noise of the fir-cone chips that he drops from his
dinner-table ; and by following the sound you may at
last distinguish among the branches his bushy tail and
his rich brown coat.

He may take fright if you approach too near, and,
scurrying up the trunk, will pause perhaps on a higher
level to stamp his little feet or bark with comical
gestures of indignation at your intrusion on his privacy.
Then from bough to bough he leaps, with marvellous
ease and grace, disappearing at last in his snug home
in the depths of a sheltering fir.

Seen from below, his nest might well pass for that
of a magpie, but it is built more of moss than of
sticks, and sometimes seems to have no visible entrance
whatever.

Here for more than half the year the young squirrels
stay with their parents, until the time when they have
gained sufficient confidence to set up housekeeping
for themselves.

The squirrel is a vegetarian as a general rule, but
was observed by Darwin to feed on the grubs of oak-

1 66 -Idylls of the Field.

galls ; and there is strong evidence that he is a poacher
on occasion, devouring not only eggs, but young
birds.

Somewhere in the rift of an old stump, or in a little
cave among the twisted roots of some tall beech-tree,
he has his stock of acorns laid up against the hard
times coming on.

Not only do mice and squirrels hoard in this way
their nuts and beech-mast, but even moles are said to
provide against the difficulties of a frosty season by
storing earthworms in a hollow in the ground.

A stone near the squirrel's tree is strewn with
broken shells, but that is not his work. His traces
lie about in plenty on the ground in the shape of
gnawed fir-cones. No, this great flat stone, sunk deep
among the moss and leaves, is a sort of stone of sacrifice
where all the thrushes of this corner of the wood bring
snails, to crack them for their dinners.

You may often hear the 'tap, tap' among the
bushes. Not the sound of striking wood ; no wood-
pecker or tit, nothing like it ; but a sound that finishes
with a crash, and is followed by a moment of silence,
as the bird swallows the kernel, so to speak, of his
plunder.

Still lower winds the pathway. And now, above
the deep voice of the pine-trees comes another sound
— a sound that rises no higher as the wind blows
hard, nor pauses in the intervals of calm.

It is the murmur of the sea. Now through the

A Woodland Walk. 167

leafless branches come glimpses of the bay : the long
sweep of yellow sand, the low promontory with its
skirts of black and broken rocks, the rugged sand-
hills covered thick with tall, grey sedges, the wander-
ing line of the old sea-wall, and the green levels of the
moor.

The tide is out. Over the wide mud-flats, brown
by the brink of the angry sea, tinged with purple
nearer in, and lighted here and there by steel-like
gleams of water left in the long hollows, wander troops
of waders. Even at this distance one can distinguish
the long bill of the curlew; the black and white
plumage of the oyster-catcher. Gulls driven ashore
by the rough weather are scattered in hundreds over
the mud ; some of them are even foraging like rooks
in the meadows of the moor.

Out on the rough water, their dark figures rising
now on the crest of a wave, now hidden altogether by
the swell, ride a fleet of scaup ducks. Winter visitors
they are, from the far and frozen North. They are
splendid fellows, with their dresses half of glossy
black, half of pencilled grey, but so shy and so well
acquainted with the speed of a boat and the range of
a fowling-piece that it is no easy matter to get near
enough to see them well.

Round the grey tower of the little church under the
hill cluster the white cottages of a straggling hamlet,
once, as its name implies, a place of boats.

A flight of rude stone steps crossing the footpath

1 68 Idylls of the Field.

farther on led from the little port up the steep brow
to the great stronghold whose ruined walls and moss-
grown outworks wander far among the thickets of the
hill.

It is a fortress such as crown so many of the heights
of Mendip, guarding the long line of road from the
distant lead-mines to the sea.

Among this tangled underwood the eye may still
discover the pit-dwellings of the old inhabitants, who
perished when Ceawlin stormed these border strong-
holds, may discern among the charred remains of
their ruined homes some relics of the vanquished —
here a rusted spear-head, there a hoard of blackened
corn ; now a bead of quaint device, perhaps even a
Phoenician ring.

Here, too, beneath broad arms of bracken buried
deep, have been found the grim memorials of desperate
fray — bones of forgotten heroes, scarred with sword
and war-axe, lying where they fell, above their burnt
and plundered hearths.'

It was the debateable country, the border-line
between the races, and in all the country-side there
is no hilltop but has its lines of earthworks, its
legends of old fight, its barrows of the unremembered
dead.

WHEN THE WIND BLOWETH IN FROM
THE SEA.

THE strong winds that swept the lingering beauty
from the woods still sway the branches. Day
after day the storm-signal swings from the white staff
on the hill. Day after day comes in an angry sea,
strewing fresh heaps of weed along the shining sands,
and tearing new gaps in the coastguard path that,
marked by heaps of whitened stones, wanders along
the brink of the crumbling cliff. Day after day, about
the lonely cottages nestling close under the steep shore
of the cove, the air is filled with flying foam, the white
wings of sea-birds, and the thunder of the surge.

170 Idylls of the Field.

To the watcher looking seaward there seems at
times to come a lull in the mad plunge of the landward
rushing breakers.

Then far out there rises a great green billow that
rolls in under the shore j pauses a moment as if to
measure its might against the calm brows of the cliff
that looks down unmoved on all the tumult ; then hurls
itself at the land, leaping far up the steep, in clouds of
spray, and, falling back, melts into a hundred tiny
rivulets that silver with their white tongues all the dark
crannies of the rock.

What a hungry sound there is in the rush of the
foam, as the fierce waves thunder up the shingle ! With
what a rattle and a roar of pebbles each wave, after
spreading out in a smooth and creamy flood, draws
back before returning to the charge !

On the right of the cove are heaped high wild
masses of serpentine, divided in some cases by straits
so narrow that it seems a light thing to leap across ;
but more than one adventurer has missed his footing
on the slippery verge, and perished in the boiling surf
of that cruel chasm.

The warm red colouring of the rock is relieved by a
hundred touches of scanty vegetation — patches of
thrift and stains of lichen, and varied by mazy lines of
white stone that wander through the heart of the rock.

Far away to the left sweeps the broken coast line,
range after range of dark, stern headlands, and then,
running a long way out to sea, is a chain of reefs over

When the Wind bloweth in from the Sea. 171

which there leap every now and then white sheets- of
spray.

And all across the restless water, grey on the sea-
line, blue in the nearer distance, then pale green, with
bands of purple over beds of weed, ' The wild white
horses foam and fret.'

As the tide goes down, the narrow strip of hard,
bright sand that fringes the bay and wanders among
the outlying piles of rock, is strewn with spoils from
the dark forests of the sea — strong, pliant stems of
kelp with waving fronds of deep olive, their twisted
roots still wrapped close about the sea-worn stones
they have brought up from their lost moorings, bright
ocean weeds of green and crimson, lying like patches
of vivid colour among the pebbles.

Here, a score of painted shells have been stranded
in a crevice, and not yet beaten into fragments on the
stones.

There, has floated in the broad white ' bone ' of a
cuttle-fish, its fragile shape hardly injured by its stormy
voyage. A few holes in its underside show where
some sea-bird has made trial of its soft substance and
left it, disgusted at its dryness.

A couple of turnstones, smart little birds in brown,
with bright red legs and beak, are busy on a heap of
kelp over some treasure-trove that the sea has left for
them.

Very pretty they look against the dark background
of the weed, but perhaps even prettier is the rich violet

172 Idylls of the Field.

colouring of the shells they have been breaking on the
pebbles. No natives of the coast are these. They
are waifs from the Atlantic, argonauts drifted by the
long-continued gales far from their ocean rest, and
stranded here on this unfriendly shore.

In their home in mid-ocean they live chiefly at the
surface, buoyed up by a kind of raft. This raft, which
is among the most wonderful of natural objects, con-
sists of a membrane extending from the mouth of the
shell, like an unusual development of the little valve
that closes so tightly on the domestic arrangements of
the periwinkle. On the underside of the raft hang, in
a sort of fringe, the creature's eggs, which remain there
until they are hatched.

This Ianthina is a singularly helpless sailor. It has
little control over its movements ; it is without the
power of sight ; it drifts aimlessly at the mercy of the
waves.

But not only does the stormy weather strew the sand
with weeds and shells j it drives the sea-birds to seek
shelter by the shore.

The ledges of the cliffs, as far as the eye can reach,
are white with gulls, whose snowy plumage rivals the
very foam which some higher wave than usual scatters
over their ranks.

Less noticeable are the sombre cormorants that,
sheltering in deep niches round the sounding caverns
under the cliff, are darker even than the dark rock that
leans out over their heads.

When the Wind bloweth in from the Sea. 173

All the air meanwhile is crowded with flying gulls,
beating up against the wind — now hovering above some
waif floating in the water ; now swooping down to dip
the surface ; now rising with a fish that shows a
moment as a gleam of silver in its captor's beak.

It is a mingled crew that fights its way against the
gale. These, by their slight figures and their delicate
garb of white and lavender, are kittiwakes.

Yonder great bird in brown is a herring-gull : not
until his fifth year will he change his youthful dress for
perfect plumage.

Here comes a black-headed gull : not black-headed
now, and wearing but a single spot of that neat dark
hood that will appear all at once in the spring.

He is struggling hard against the wind. Now he
hangs motionless a moment ; now he sails in swift and
graceful curves across the wind ; now he dips towards
the water, followed in an instant by a score of eager
screaming comrades.

Now he gives in to the gale, and in a moment is
swept a hundred yards down the wind. But, undis-
mayed, he still holds on, and before long has fought
his way in shore again, and now settles down on one
of the crowded ledges, whose tenants greet the new-
comer with a sort of querulous chorus.

Now a herring-gull drifts over, a full-grown bird this
time, so near that we can see not only the spotless
purity of his breast and the black tips of his wings, but
the white of his keen eyes and the red stain upon his

174 Idylls of the Field.

yellow bill. He turns his smooth head this way and
that, keeping sharp look-out on the seething water;
his whole frame quivers with the beats of his strong
wings. He pauses a moment just overhead, and then,
falling back, he too is swept unresistingly away.

Some forty yards from shore, now skimming the
rough crest of a breaker, now lost in the trough of a
wave, and evidently quite in his element in this war of
waters, is a much less familiar figure than herring-gull
or kittiwake — a little dark bird whose flight and figure
are suggestive of a swallow.

It is a stormy petrel, a real sea-rover, whose whole
existence, except for the brief space of the breeding
season, is spent out of sight of land. At other times,
only a long spell of rough weather brings it off the sea.

Modern science has dispelled the mist of fable that
so long obscured the life-history of this little bird. No
longer is it looked upon as a herald of the storm ;
probably not even in a forecastle yarn is it said to
hatch its eggs under its wings.

There are many spots round the coast, especially in
the north, and in outlying islands, where in the early
summer the petrel comes ashore to lay, in a crevice in
the rock, or in a burrow in the sand, her one large egg ;
but as she is nocturnal in her habits, leaving her nest
only when other birds retire to roost, she is even then
but seldom seen.

Were there any truth in the weird legend which sees
in the stormy petrel the wandering spirit of some

When the Wind bloweth in from the Sea. 175

drowned mariner, the bird well might haunt this fatal
shore. Every reef has its record of disaster; every
headland its tale of wreck and ruin.

Beyond the twin towers, that send their white shafts
of light far out over the surge, stretch long lines of
nameless graves.

Still, on the beach to northward there shine at times
among the shingle, after heavy gales, the sea-worn
dollars from a Spanish treasure-ship whose freight of
silver rests beneath the sand.

The fishermen still hear in fancy, in the pauses of
the storm, the crash of timbers, and the shrill despair-
ing wail, where, long years ago, a great transport sank
with all her crew.

There is no winter but adds something to the
record ; hardly a tide but drifts into these

' Sheltered coves and reaches
Of sandy beaches,'

some message from the sea.

THE BIRD OF YULE.

•

HRISTMAS in the olden time has ever
been a favourite theme with the poet and
the painter ; but, like many another ideal of the good

The Bird of Yule. 177

old days, much of its merit was, to say the least of it,
shadowy and unreal, and comes down to us

• Magnified by the purple mist,
The dusk of centuries and of song.'

The Christmas of our day, if it has in it less of
revelry, has gained by what is lost, and is honoured in
a better, calmer spirit than in Yules of bygone years.

The very festival is other than it was ; other viands
are chosen for the banquet. The boar's head that we
so often associate with the Christmas of our fathers
went out with the Long Parliament. The crane and
the bittern are found no longer on the Royal table.
No directions for the treatment of a swan or a heron
occur in modern cookery books.

This has not been entirely an affair of taste.
Various causes have contributed to bring about the
change.

By the time that Yule-tide revels were revived after
the Commonwealth, the wild-boar had disappeared
from the forests.

Of the birds whose names are common in the
ancient bills of fare most have left the country.

Driven from the island by the destruction of their
ancient haunts, they visit us now so seldom, that their
coming is to the ornithologist a matter of mark beyond
the politics of Europe.

Six centuries ago cranes built their rude nests by
hundreds among the reed-forests of the Fens, and the

12

178 Idylls of the Field,

bird long formed a Christmas dish on the table of the
Sovereign.

Three hundred years later there was still a statute for
the protection of its eggs, but since that time, as mere
and marshland have been drained and tilled, the crane
has retired before the conquering share.

Now, like the great bustard — the story of whose
banishment is of much later date — it is an exile and a
stranger.

Of other birds that found favour in Tudor times, the
heron and the swan still hold their ground. The
latter, now only a visitor, has long ceased to make its
nest with us, but its flying visits are neither few nor far
between.

The former is a resident still ; more than a hundred
heronries remain scattered up and down in England,
and there are few low-lying shores where herons do not
stalk in stately fashion by the falling tide like the
ghosts of vanished friars.

The swan is seldom killed for the table — less per-
haps from its demerits than its rarity.

The heron, on the other hand, except when young,
and doctored with powerful condiments, has a rank
and fishy flavour, and its disuse as an article of diet
and its removal from the game list must be regarded
as marking an improvement in the national taste.

The bird of Yule of our time has no such history to
look back on. Somewhere about the middle of the
sixteenth century, while the crane and the bustard were

The Bird of Yule. 179

still taken for the Royal table, the turkey began to
supplant our native wildfowl, and rapidly acquired
almost a monopoly of popular favour.

The actual time of its first importation is involved
in obscurity. Its very name shows how little was
known of its origin.

Thus much is clear. The turkey was brought from
North America by Spanish explorers. From Spain —
then in constant communication with England — it
made its way into this country, and caught the popular
fancy like the fragrant weed railed on in the Royal
1 Counterblast.'

A writer of the time of James I. remarks that ' those
outlandish birds called Ginny cocks and Turkey cocks '
were not seen in England before 1530. Hakluyt, too,
writing near the end of the sixteenth century, speaks
of the turkey as having been known in this country for
fifty years.

It is also clear that the epithet turkey was at first
applied indiscriminately to this bird and to the guinea-
fowl, which reached England about the same time by
way of Levantine ports.

The confusion between the two birds is well illus-
trated by a passage in an old Spanish dictionary, where
gallipavo is defined as 'a turkey or guinea cock or
hen.'

The tame turkey of America was probably a re-
importation from Europe. The original wild species,
which still inhabits the whole continent east of the

180 Idylls of the Field.

Rocky Mountains, from Panama to the north of
Canada, far surpasses the domestic breed both in size
and in the beauty of its plumage. Audubon writes of
wild turkeys of thirty and forty, and even alludes,
though somewhat doubtfully, to a monster of sixty
pounds' weight.

The weight of the famous bird which Scrooge de-
clared would need a cab to carry it to Camden Town
is not stated in pounds. Perhaps it is merely a
question of resistance of material to find how much it
would take to snap a bird's legs ' off short like sticks of
sealing-wax.'

The festival in which the penitent figure of Dickens's
pleasant story played so prominent a part is honoured
again to-day by all sorts of men under all sorts of con-
ditions.

In lonely outposts high up among Himalayan snows,
on the wild waves of distant seas, on the fringe of the
New Zealand bush, under the fierce Australian sun,
men to-day will lay aside for a brief space the thought
of danger and the race for wealth, to dream of home,
and kin, and far-off firesides that for them may never
brighten more.

In many a jovial circle here at home will be read
and re-read the ever-welcome story of those midnight
visitors, that to the reluctant Scrooge played the part
of ministering angels.

Never was the touch of the master brighter or better

The Bird of Yule. 181

than in his pictures of song, and mirth, and revelry,
round the branches of the Christmas Tree.

And the pathos of his tender story may well soften
our hearts as we watch the red tongues leaping high
about the logs of Yule. It was a pleasant fancy that
all jealousy and mistrust, and memory of bitter words,
passed in the flames of the Christmas fire.

There is ever a vein of sadness in the midst of
mirth. In many an eye a mist will gather in thinking
of the vacant chair :

1 A narrowing circle, year by year,

Draws round the hearth on Christmas Day.

Ah me ! for faces kind and dear,
Dispersed through regions far away,

Or passed unto that shadowy shore

Whence never echo travels o'er.'

These are hard times. In many a dark and desolate
home there will be no Christmas cheer, no roaring log,
no lighted tree. And among the happy and light-
hearted who gather round the board to commemorate
this, the fairest day that ever dawned on suffering, sad
humanity, those who out of the fulness of their festal
cheer can feel that they have lighted the cold hearth
and gladdened the heavy heart of one single sorrowful,
struggling fellow-mortal, will find their own joy the
sweeter, and their roaring Yule log brighter still, for
thinking of the outcast and the orphan, for the hand
held out to the widow and the fatherless ; and though

1 82 Idylls of the Field.

for us no guiding star lights up the winter midnight,
still there sounds for all the message of the angels —

' Oh, brother, wouldst thou hear the strain ?

Let go the lust of gold ;
Let go the passions fierce and vain ;

Let go the sins of old.
Thine eyes shall see, thine ears shall hear,
God and His angels hovering near.'

THE END.

Elliot Stock, Paternoster Row, London.

By the same Author.

NOW READY, THIRD EDITION.

Tastefully printed in crown 8vo., and bound in cloth, gilt lettered,
price 5s. ; or with gilt edges, 5s. 6d.

BY LEAFY WAYS:

$vte£ (Stub us in the |fook oi Mature*
With numerous beautiful Illustrations by E. T. Compton.

OOnSTTZEHSTTS.

Tenants of a Season

A Citizen of the World

The Promise of May

A River Path

By Leafy Ways

A Rising Generation

A Cold-blooded Race

By Quiet Waters

As Evening Darkens

A Paradise of Birds

Sabrina Fair

All Among the Barley

The Misty Moorland

Footprints on the Sands
The Parting Guests
Flying, Flying South
The Return of the Fieldfare
The Summer of St. Martin
A Great Frequenter of the

Church
Sylvan Minstrels
Winter Visitors
Adapted Plumage
Outlaws
Some Bird Myths
When Woods are Bare

A few Large- Paper Copies are still on sale, handsomely
bound, price 21s. each nett.

cSrjmc ©jrinixms oi the #rcss.

' Cne likes to fancy how Gilbert White would have welcomed Mr. Knight hsd
they been contemporaries, and of the talks they would have had together. He
would have found a man after his own heart — full of pleasant chat, deeply versed
in all the latest literature, gifted with a brilliancy of expression such as the old
author never aimed at, even supposing he could have attained it.' — Academy.

1 Mr. Knight seems to be quite as attentive and sympathetic an observer as
the late Mr. Jefferies, and there is much in his essays which is both instructive
and eloquent.' — The Globe.

' A charming book on Natural History, beautifully illustrated, and full of
delightful reading. Dealing chiefly with bird life, the work also contains much
information about the denizens of English lanes, woods and meadows, written in
a very pleasing and agreeable style.'— Newcastle Chronicle.

1 Mr. Knight has a happy touch in describing the ways of birds and the aspects
of the fields, and has a keenness of observation akin to the faculty that was so
remarkably developed in the "The Gamekeeper at Home."' — Scotsman.

' Not the least important feature of these studies is to create a love for all the
lower forms of life by showing their usefulness in one particular or another. The
book is very beautifully illustrated by Mr. E. T. Compton, and also by photo-
gravures of delightful bits of scenery.' — Stockport Advertiser.

LONDON : ELLIOT STOCK, 62, PATERNOSTER ROW, E.C.

,.:-

3