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THE RING OF NATURE

\

THE
RING OF NATURE

BY

G. G. DESMOND

WITH FOUR ILLUSTRATIONS BY

J. LEY PETHYBRIDGE

METHUEN & GO. LTD.

36 ESSEX STREET W.C.

LONDON

First Published in 1913

Q.H
SI

TO

A. G. GARDINER

EDITOR OF

' THE DAILY NEWS AND LEADER '

BUT FOR WHOSE ENCOURAGEMENT

DURING THE LAST TEN YEARS

THIS BOOK WOULD NOT HAVE

BEEN WRITTEN

908758

CONTENTS

JANUARY— I

WAKING AND SLEEPING

PAGE

The economy of sleep — Mild winters the hardest — The
harvesting hare — The sleeping badger — The southerning
bird — Problems of insect-eaters — A flittermouse abroad
— Wasps and bees — Sleeping butterflies — Torpid reptiles
— A newt's adventure — And a newt Xenophon — The
climate of colonists ....... 1

JANUARY— II

THE SUN BEHIND

Fog effects — Invisible sparrows and flying"t»read — A
mistaken crow — Unexpected colour — The bullfinch's flag
— And how he is caught — A mesmerized jay — ' Yarding'
deer — The sun in strife — Mouse and hawthorn berries —
The pleasure of hunger — What to eat in the open air—
A week's fast .....*.. 14

FEBRUARY— I

THE SQUIRREL

The colour of winter — The pine-wood squirrel — Con-
ventional versus real— A rough-and-tumble— Dormouse
or rabbit? — A mysterious sound — Tree dogs — A protean
creature — The philosophy of thumbs — How the squirrel
feeds — Its manner of life — Practical jokes ... 26

viii THE RING OF NATURE

FEBRUARY— II
ST. VALENTINE"^ DAY

PAGE

Town wood-pigeons — Sky-high gulls — Quarrelsome
sparrows — Origin of St. Valentine's Day — Elm blossom
— Love-lighted doves — Truculent moor-hens — The battle
of the dingle — A rabbit hunt — Dog-and-rabbit curve —
Wisdom in the circus— February Fair Maids— Terrible
chaffinches 37

MARCH— I

CATKIN TIME

The alder and its catkins — Ladies must not be kept
waiting — The impatient lamb's tail — The smoking yew —
Sulphurous rain — The widow o' 'Lombardy' — The bee-
loved willows — How to make bees — The mother bees-
Resurrected butterflies— The spirit of Spring . . 50

MARCH— II

BEES — HUMBLE AND OTHERWISE

How many humble-bees? — The New Zealand story —
The two redtails — Sixty and yet more — Cuckoo humble-
bees — The mark of the robber — ' Hairy-legs ' — ' Mrs.
Hairy-legs ' and her cuckoo — The cuckoo's cuckoo — The
golden Andrena — The mark of the wasp — Better than
cold storage — Study for a lifetime ..... 60

APRIL— I

SONGS TO THE SUN

The ox-eye and his congeners — From caw to chatter —
Thrush and blackbird — Bread, cheese, and ginger-beer
— The exuberant wren — How the lark sings — The ill-
treated peewit — The crooning in the pool — A mixed
assembly — Some spawning habits — An instrumentalist —
How to catch slugs— The little brown bird ... 73

CONTENTS ix

APRIL— II

THE HOMECOMERS

PAGE

Not foreigners — Stay-at-homes and wanderers — The
winter-moping, sky-ascending pipit — The best of the
wagtails— Perils of migration— Accident and murder-
Swallows' wings for ladies' hats !— Brigand Italy-
Massacred to make a Christian holiday — The miracle of
the year — The very same birds — A successful roll-call . 85

MAY— I

SNAKES

A tangle of snakes— Defiance at the ford — An accom-
plished swimmer — The Lily Wood— The grass snake's
defence — And means of escape — Its furious bluff — Snake's
eggs — A viper — The child and the viper— Smooth snake
and slow-worm ........ 97

MAY— II

WHEN ALL THE WORLD IS YOUNG
The teeming jungle — Shamming dead — Hooded crows
— The young turkeys — The blood of caterpillars — Voles
and owls— The hamster — The little bunnies — Weasels at
play— Baby foxes 110

JUNE— I

CATERPILLARS INNUMERABLE

The bold puss — Hawks and the death's head— The
terrific lobster — Caterpillar plagues — A shower of buff-
tips — Eggers — The ( Lucky Farmer ' — ' Buttons ' — 'Sem-
bling — The moth whose wife is a spider — The marvellous
leaf-roller 123

JUNE— II

IN THE HAYFIELD

Waist-deep in flowers— What the grass hides — The
fascination of nests — Idyl and reality — Down the ladder
of toil — An old man's reminiscence 135

x THE RING OF NATURE

JULY— I

A NIGHT OUT

PACK

The long-winded night-jar — The night bee — Noctule —
Pipistrelle — Long-eared bat — Water bat — 'Flower-face'
— A world of fancies — Seeing with the nose — Noises of
silence — Fox and ducks — Seen with the ears — A lost
bird ?— The magic gate— Pale-cheeked dawn . . .147

JULY— II

THE MYRMIDONS

An ant in the wood— What happens in a tree— The
nest — Swarming time — The slave-queen's problem —
Living on one's own eggs — The origin of slave-making?
— The ant is a bee — A humble-bee's nest — The arch
cuckoo — A wasp's nest ....... 159

AUGUST— I

IN THE SEA

The wave formula — Land, sea, and amphibious mol-
luscs— The purple — The anatomy of a whelk — The
shell-boring Nassa — ' Patella vulgaris ' — The top and the
cowrie — What is a barnacle ? — The ancient Terebratula —
The ammonite and belemnite — The invisible prawn —
Seaweed and ' seaweed'— Fishes 174

AUGUST— II

PLANTS ON THE MOVE

A thistle-blow— The pappus— The half-pappus — The
sliugers — Catapults — The screw of the stork's bill —
Animal carriers — The ubiquitous burr — Their illimitable
journey— The bird-stickers— The fraud of ' fruit '—The
use of the ant— Cows and elephants— Flowers that do
their own planting— Orchids 187

CONTENTS xi

SEPTEMBER— I

THE WHEAT-FIELD

PAGE

From stalk to grain— The less the sowing, the greater
the crop — The fowls of the air — The robber poppies—
The wheat's poor cousin — The weeds of cultivation—
Cow-wheats— Parasites— 'Hurtful darnell '—Rabbits in
the corn— Foxes and stoats 109

SEPTEMBER— II

HORSE-TAILS

From the sun-scorched common — The fight for the
pond — Where are the horse-tail's leaves? — Girders of
flint— Games of the voles— How flowers are made-
Beauty from nuisance— Honey glands— Floral locks and
insect keys ......... 211

OCTOBER— I

WILD FltUITS

Hips and haws — The sad-eyed greenfinch — Reminders
of past flowers— ' High-bush cranberries' — Spindle-wood
— Why the yewberry is poisonous— How to eat sloes-
Herb Paris— Spurge laurel— Deadly nightshade— Prickly
pear — Henbane — Cuckoo-pint — The luscious whortle-
berry—Pacific winter-green 222

OCTOBER— II

THE BROWNING OF THE LEAVES

,How the trees undress — The penalty of remaining
clothed— An experiment with iodine — A strategic re-
treat— Why are empty leaves red?— Are they rusty? —
Reason for St. Martin's Summer— Untimely blossoms-
Reluctant bedtime— Little misers — Vole, dormouse, and
squirrel— The sign of the nut 236

xii THE RING OF NATURE

NOVEMBER— I

A WALK ROUND THE ZOO

The squirrel's suburb— Tame little misers— The tree
kangaroo— Horns and temper— The mesmerizing snake
— The maggot lure — Galloping wolves — The lightning
cheetah — Tigers and artists — No orange, no climb — A
Japanese family— Reason at the Zoo— Twilight animals . 249

NOVEMBER— II

THE MYSTERIOUS FUNGUS

Plants for the slug, flowers for the fly — The wood-
witch — Beefsteak — A fairy grotto — Luminous fungi — A
mystery of growth — Trains and rails of food — Edible
fungi — The two chautarelles — Boleti — Fungi of the double
life— Ergot of rye— Eaters of steel and glass . . . 262

DECEMBER— I

CLEANING-UP TIME

The leaves and the earth — New view of the trees-
Revelations in the hedge— Weeding out the birds— Our
glorious stalwarts— Our well- loved hedge-sparrow— Tink-
ling tits— Gold crest and brown Jenny — Nature's hopper
— The tit and the saw-fly — Snippets of nothing — Sur-
vival of the fittest 275

DECEMBER— II

DEAD LOW

Dead world and barren sky— The optimist wren— How
does the thrush know? — Only skin-deep— Floral hypo-
crites— The aconite's summer — Verdant setterwort —
Daphne laurel — Digging blackbirds — Where the black-
bird sleeps— Chilly twilight— An amazing scarlet .

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

AT THE GATE OF THE YEAR .... Frontispiece

FACING PAGE

WHEN THE LARK SINGS 74

THE WATER BAT's HAUNT . . . . . .150

WILD FRUITS .222

THE RING OF NATURE

JANUARY

WAKING AND SLEEPING

' Dreaming when Dawn's left hand was in the sky,
I heard a Voice within the Tavern cry,

Awake, my little ones, and fill the Cup,~^~
Before Life's liquor in its Cup be dry.'

OMAR KHAYYAM.

JUST as there is a false or left-handed dawn
to the day, so is January to the year. The
birds, the flowers, the animals commonly take
an exaggerated view of the lengthening of the first
few days after Christmas. Snowdrops, crocus,
hellebores and daphnes push up with new vigour
or break into blossom at any rate if, as often
happens, the dawn of the new year has a few
mild days. But afterwards it seems to be realized
that the climb of the sun to the Easter equinox
is to be a long and a stiff one, and Nature halts
or even appears to go back. Midwinter day,
if you please, is marked in the calendar not as
A

2 THE RING OF NATURE

the end or even the middle of winter, but the
beginning.

It is the act of waking that runs the liquor out
of life's cup. The animal that remains sound asleep
is marvellously sustained with no perceptible ex-
penditure of fat. The woodman has knocked out
from an ash ' stowl ' a fat, cold dormouse, his head
tucked under his tail, stiff in that curled posture,
and without the faintest beat of the heart to signify
that he is alive. If I put him in a warm room he
will awake and be immediately hungry, but it
may be that if I put him into a cold chamber he
would wake up apparently not a day older ten
years hence.

It is not possible, I suppose, that a dormouse
could survive in unbroken sleep a whole ice age,
and then wake to perpetuate its race in a new
tropical world. Rip van Winkle stories of that
sort cluster only round such cold-blooded creatures
as the toad. The fable of the toad in the solid
rock has not been authenticated, but an English
investigator has buried one in a closed vessel
underground, and dug it up alive at the end of
two years. The cold-blooded vertebrates, how-
ever, are good famishers even when awake,
some of the large snakes kept in zoos having
been known to go for upwards of a year without
food.

It is the mildness of our winter that makes
it harder for the animals than the out-and-out
cold of Norway or the mountains of Switzerland.

WAKING AND SLEEPING 3

Few of our warm-blooded creatures sleep till the
real dawn appears, though our fauna numbers
many alleged hibernators. On this first day of
January the squirrel of the pine-wood, nay, all
the squirrels of the pine-wood, are abroad. They
are down upon the floor digging up nuts and
chestnuts, sampling fir-cones, nibbling the bark
of ground ash to replenish life's liquor in its cup.
The squirrel, it is true, is not exactly a hibernator.
He belongs to the intermediate type that stores
food against its awakening. These are all rodents.
The best sleeper of them all, the dormouse, has a
store of nuts that he will not break into much
before April. The brown rat has the saitte, though
he is seen out and about in the coldest weather.
The field vole makes his store of wheat or haws,
or other convenient food, unless he can rely on the
mountain of food that man puts up in the potato
or mangel clamp. But in every fall of snow I see
the dirty tracks of the voles, or can unroof their
galleries under the cold crust. The storing habit
does nbt, so far as I know, descend to our
rabbits. They stay much underground, dozing
and living quietly on their own fat, or leisurely
digesting their last cropful of grass. Some have
wondered whether a rabbit may not chew the cud,
but the hypothesis has no facts to go upon.

A little more and our rabbit might have been
a hay-maker like the Little Chief hare or pica of
the Rocky Mountains. This animal, though it
likes to come out in the winter, would have little

4 THE RING OF NATURE

to sustain its waking activities if it did not collect
bundles of grass in the autumn, carefully dry them,
and stow them in its cave. Little Chief or crying
hare, why do you cry ? Simply because you have
learnt to care about the future ?

Our best sleeper in the true sense is the badger.
All its winter stores are on its ribs, and when it
wakes it has to forage for food just like the bear.
The badger is mainly an insect-eater, and only the
wasps have learnt to store insects for food. There
is nothing a badger likes better than the grubs of
a large wasp-nest. No doubt the contents of a
humble-bees' nest are as welcome, and when it
robs one of these the badger, like the bear, tastes
the joys of honey. The bear will break open a
rotten log for wood-boring caterpillars ; so will
the badger. The eggs of ground-nesting birds are
a delicacy in spring, and young birds and rabbits
and other trifles keep the badger going. None of
these things are to be found now, and therefore
the brock is underground fast asleep on a good bed
of dry grass and leaves. But he will be up soon
to taste the lean fare of blue-bell bulbs as soon as
the green tips appear above ground, and before
too much of the bulb content has been converted
into sap. I fancy I can hear him snoring some-
times when I put an ear into the mouth of his
sett.

None of the birds hibernate, even Gilbert White's
swallows refusing to be found asleep in the bottoms
of horse-ponds or in caves or old buildings. When

WAKING AND SLEEPING 5

you look at their remote ancestry, you might
suppose that they would provide, at least, a sleeper
or two, for there seems little doubt that they are a
branch of the great reptile family, all the represen-
tatives of which in England are fast asleep at the
present time.

Having wings they have little need to sleep
through the winter, and still less of the passive tem-
perament that makes such long oblivion possible.
When coldness and scarcity of food come, the bird,
except such steadfast souls as the robin, drifts with
the sun a little way southward, and there finds food
plentiful for another week. Thus it southerns
and southerns till the sea is reached, ancRhat, too,
it crosses if it has the hereditary instinct to face
a landless stretch that seems from the shore to
have no limit. The autumn migration of birds is
not our only evidence that Britain and Spain were
once joined with land. Ages ago, no doubt, a
southern lake across which the migratory bird
flew widened year by year till it became a strait, a
sea, an ocean, over which the birds still fly, because
their ancestors have done so every year for a
myriad generations. Any migrating animal would
have been stopped before the river had widened
to half a mile, unless we are to take it that the
strange whim that leads the hamsters to travel
across Norway in occasional swarms and throw
themselves into the sea is inherited from hamsters
of a million years ago th'at walked into Scotland
dry-foot by this route.

6 THE RING OF NATURE

The birds that stay the winter with us are also
saved from the necessity of hibernation by their
wings. Any one of them can cover a far larger
space of earth in its quest for food than a mere
wingless animal. In a few minutes a flock of star-
lings can sweep over several parishes, and dropping
here and there find some field on the sternest day
of frost capable of yielding grubs. The shrews,
eating much the same food, dare not even appear
for a moment in the middle of a bare field for fear
of the birds of prey. So the shrews are safely
tucked away in some dry hedgebank, from which,
however, they stir occasionally even in the coldest
months to find food for their hot-blooded needs.
You would think that if any animals had to sleep
in the winter it would be those that eat insects.
We have, however, a still more wonderful contra-
diction of such a reasonable expectation to show.

To-day when the sun was doing his watery best
to shine on the bare and apparently dead branches
of the apple trees, a little black smudge went
flittering across his mild disk, and in and out across
the steely, barren sky. I should think that if I
could take a muslin bag as wide and as long as the
twenty-acre field, and sweep with it the whole
country of the Hunt, I should not catch enough
winter gnats or other rare riff-raff of the sky to
furnish a nuncheon for a single bat. Never was
the extravagance of winter wakefulness so clearly
shown as in this January midday flittering of our
little pipistrelle. What an appetite he is certain

WAKING AND SLEEPING 7

to catch urging himself on wings through this keen
air. And his chances of satisfying even the dryness
of his palate are scarcely better than if the whole
world had been sterilized. If anything in this
world is certain, Master Flittermouse will go to bed
ten times hungrier than he came out, and on a
stomach sharpened and a system made lean by
midwinter exercise he must clem till a less fallacious
bright day in March really does provide something
for the catching.

The miracle of hibernation is the insect. I have
known many a fat caterpillar, but never a fat insect.
Yet the queen wasp or humble-bee leaves the
revelry of late autumn and tucks herself up in some
dry place, and sleeps four or five good months
without the necessity of renewing her frugal
tissues. The honey-bee is, of course, in another
case. It is, like man, a civilized creature capable
of providing stores to carry it over the winter, not
asleep but drowsily awake, like a Russian on his
oven, or, a Laplander in his igloo, coming forth on
warm days for a stretch in the sun, talking on such
days of making the queen lay again, eager for the
first flower, even if it be Christmas rose and winter
aconite. I know not how a hive bee may sleep in
the cold of a Swiss or Canadian winter, but in
England it does a little sweeping and clearing up
nearly every day.

In the garden is an old building with double
wooden walls, which, in order to keep a delayed
promise, we have begun to pull down on the first

8 THE RING OF NATURE

day of the new year. The space between the walls
is stuffed with moss by the bygone builder, and
the moss may be said to be almost stuffed with
queen wasps that tucked themselves away there
when the summer failed. Six of them lie before me
on the writing-table, an apparent row of corpses,
their limbs so stiff that they would break if you
tried too resolutely to bend them, their grim,
yellow jaws tense and dry, and no sign of life any-
where about them. But I know that if I put them
a little nearer the fire those dead limbs would stir,
the antennae would feel about with an expression
of ' Where am I ? ' and in time the wings would
whirr, and the black-and-yellow machine become
once more alive and hungry. A very little sun in
the new year suffices to wake a wasp here and
there, though it is doubtful whether they can as
easily get to sleep again, and I think the untimely
wasps must mostly perish. The humble-bees are
more exact in their waking, and do not come
abroad until there is a reasonable prospect of a
very industrious insect making some sort of a
living. We rarely come across their hibernaculum,
though I have been told that they can be found in
dry turf stacks. I fancy they creep in under the
roots of thyme where it grows on a porous bed of
rubbly limestone, and no doubt there are many in
hollow trees. The shrew-mice will have a good
chance of coming across hibernating humble-bees
in their rambles about the earth caves of the hedge-
row, though they will not eat so rich as when their

WAKING AND SLEEPING 9

thigh baskets are stuffed with pollen and there is
honey in their sac.

In a loft over the stable a dozen small tortoise-
shell butterflies have folded their painted banners,
and are hanging by hooked feet to a beam. They
belong to the only group of hibernating butterflies
in our country, and it is fairly certain that the
whole of the group has the habit. Some good
naturalists have mentioned quite casually having
seen half a dozen red admirals flying about in
midwinter, whereas others have expressed their
strong doubts as to whether this species hibernates
at all in this country. The comma, painted lady,
Camberwell beauty, and others of the same or
allied genus, undoubtedly hibernate, and the brim-
stone, which comes out from its bed-chamber in
February looking astonishingly neat and bright,
shows by that fact, and by other characteristics,
that if not rightly a Vanessid it is of very close
cousinship.

The sleepers that you are most unlikely to see
abroad in January are the grass snake and the
adder. They sleep with great regularity till the
vernal equinox, the adder waking a little before
and the grass snake a little later than that prime
landmark of the year. Sunshine is their need —
the bright golden sunshine of April, unchecked by
leaves and caught on some grassy bank, or sheltered
by a good hedge from the wind. The wise snake
knows how to find such a place as soon as the
sun is of the right strength, and so the wise

10 THE RING OF NATURE

man knows how to find the place where the grass
snake or adder is certain to be. We could find
them now by grubbing up a sufficiency of the hazel
stools in the wood, the grass snakes in a tangle
perhaps amounting to dozens, and the vipers
mostly solitary.

For some reason, that other sun-lover, the slow
worm, does occasionally turn in its winter bed, and
come sliding forth even with frost on the ground.
At any rate I have found them more than once
dead on the road in the middle of the winter. All
the chilly-blooded tribe are liable to be paralysed
by the cold, and there are many degrees between
the absolute torpor of a happy sleep and the light-
ning speed with which a midsummer lizard darts
through the wild thyme when disturbed in its
sun-bath or insect-hunt.

The lizards proper lie deep, and are seldom en-
countered till it is their time to come above ground
again, but a cold, shrivelled newt is often found
not very deep in a dry stone wall or under some
stone or timber balk on the ground. The great-
crested newt has lost all the frills that make him
so handsome in the summer pond and beyond that ;
his fat sides have sunk to less than half their proper
girth. All the water is dried out of him, and his
lively sliminess has turned to a sort of hard india-
rubber. I have even found him as stiff as a stick,
from which state, no doubt, he accomplishes the
miracle of resurrection. In fact, I can cite a case
even stronger than that.

WAKING AND SLEEPING 11

One year when the frost came late in March, it
must have caught the newts after their return to the
ponds in anticipation of summer. As we skated
over the clear ice of a certain brick-field we saw
the orange belly of a newt that had got frozen tight
in the under surface, and, marking it, were able to
secure a cake of the ice with the newt frozen fast
in it. The creature seemed as brittle as its aspic,
and I believe that if we had tried to bend it it
would have snapped almost as readily. Yet when
the ice came undone in an aquarium, the newt
came to life and swam about as though his ex-
perience had been one of the usual incidents of his
career.

Newts are often gregarious in their hibernaculum.
In the head of an oak that had been for years an
ornament and a perch for aubrietia in the centre
of a flower-bed, we found one winter over thirty
smooth newts lying up together. There are two
small ponds near, one twenty yards away, the
other more than fifty, and both with a good deal
of difficult country between them and the stump.
It seemed a wonderful thing that all those newts
had managed on leaving the water in autumn to
reach their favoured winter bedroom. Who has
ever been encouraged to form a high opinion of the
family instincts of newts ? Yet it seems as though
some wise amphibian of ten years ago must have
brought his children here to sleep, that they
brought their offspring, and so from generation to
generation the leader who knew the way raised

12 THE RING OF NATURE

the cry of ' Who goes home ? ' and led the sprawling
army from the water, which had thus far been the
only experience of many of them, up the correct
bank at the correct corner, over the grass, through
the raspberry canes, across the path, through the
strawberry bed, over the high bank, and down to
the gravel, and then across the flower-bed and into
the proper doorway of the stump. In the spring,
old Xenophon would lead his squad fresh from
sleep back into the pond, and then would do his
best to eat the eggs that were to become the recruits
of the army he would have to lead back to bed
in the autumn. Twice every year this migration
must have been going on for ten years, and yet
none of us humans had seen it or got the slightest
inkling of it till, the time of the stump having
come, wre unearthed a part of the secret with a
stock-hoe.

Everything sleeping just as much as it must.
Everything of no matter what low order of reptile
or insect intelligence having just enough to enable
it to choose the very best place to sleep in, or far
place to retire to, while the winter passes. Nothing
sleeping so soundly that the sun will not call
it up whether its waking-day be the first of
January or the last day of April. The animals
of this country, endowed as are no others with
the strength of constitution to endure one or two
false awakenings and the hunger of wakefulness
in cold and foodlessness. And the lord of the
animals, man himself, most adaptable to the

WAKING AND SLEEPING 13

climates of the whole world, when he has been
bred in these islands. Read the history of coloniza-
tion and see if it is not so. Write the diary of
an average English winter and see if it must not
be so.

14 THE RING OF NATURE

JANUARY
II

THE SUN BEHIND

WE have already seen the sun many times
since Christmas, that is, we have been able
to look without blinding ourselves through clear air
at a ball of watery fire. In fact, it is only now, if
at all, that we do see the sun, for, as Meredith truly
says, he can only be seen in his effects : —

' Visions of her shower before me ; but from eyesight,
Guarded she would be, like the sun, were she seen.'

If we see the sun through smoked glass, then we
see him in January through the fog. When he
breaks through and becomes so bright that we
cannot see him, our gratitude is as great as that of
the Irishman for the moon, which, unlike the sun,
shines when it is dark.

Under a thick mist stained with town smoke
the world and every article in it has an entirely
new aspect. At one degree of the darkness the
ground seems actually brighter than in sunshine.
The stones of the gravel path, the frozen clods

THE SUN BEHIND 15

of the flower-beds, and the rime-decorated lawn
shine as though with an internal brilliance. They
are brighter than the sky, if we can call the mist
that puts the tops of the nearest trees out of sight
the sky. It is as though each thing on the ground
were under its special tube, giving it a glimpse of
the sun that is hidden from us.

The fog this morning has gone further than that.
I step out from the lighted house into a day of
night. What is it that makes a fog, though less
obscure than a really dark night, more bewildering ?
I suppose it is that each ray that struggles through
has been zig-zagged and twisted so that it cannot
tell the truth about that on which it lights. Things
seen are distorted in size and shape and, as it were,
the things unseen are also distorted. We cannot
take any of them for granted as we can in the dark.
The things beyond the foreground, however familiar
they may have been, may not be there, or they
may be something quite different from what used
to be there. ' In fact, I expect that if we could take
the scientific bearing of the wych elm that by day-
light is due north of the garden gate, it would be
found to be a point to the east or west when seen
through the fog. Its dimensions and apparent
distance are undoubtedly new ones.

I grope down the path to where the bird-table is
when it is light, though I can see none of its detail
this morning. The birds, however, have found it,
as a very strange phenomenon testifies. I can see
the pieces of white bread I have thrown on the lawn,

16 THE RING OF NATURE

and when they have rested there a moment or two
they get up one by one and fly away. Brown
sparrows in a brown fog have seized them. This
world of mystery ought certainly to be explored,
and on returning to the house I take further equip-
ment and come out for a longer expedition.

If I had wanted to end the career of a certain
unpopular crow I ought to have brought a gun.
Here comes the old rascal hoarsely cawing, a black
blot in an umber sea, and so near to me that I can
hear his wings whistling like creaky leather in the
thickened air. After all, that is not very near,
for I have heard many wings of which I could not
see the owners. The crow, however, perches for a
few moments in a hedgerow sapling that I know
to be less than thirty yards away. It is about
one-third the minimum distance that he usually
considers safe.

The birds and animals soon get to appreciate the
treachery of the fog, but in early days they often
fall victims to the gunner astute to seize his oppor-
tunity. The wild things are like children, who,
for some years, cannot learn the meaning of per-
spective, and so speak of objects far away as small.
A fog puts a man with a gun four times as far away
from a crow as he really is, and the crow thinks
that the safety margin has been observed. How
foolish of him, yet, dear reader, say off-hand
whether he is in a measure saved from his folly ;
but the thickness of the fog, which will reduce the
range of the gun, reduces the striking power of the

THE SUN BEHIND 17

pellets, and deflects the aim by placing the object
in a false position.

If the crow had not spoken I might not have
known it for the bird it is. A bird that looks every
bit as big in this magnifying fog turns out to be a
bunting, rather bigger in fact than the greenfinches
and yellow-hammers in whose company he is on
the hedge skirting the cornfield. These bright
finches give the only bit of colour, and so brilliant
are they by contrast that the fog seems not to
have dimmed them by a tone. They sit rosy,
bright yellow, and olive-green on a rime-tipped
blackthorn, cut off from all background as com-
pletely as though this bunch of jewels had been
thrust through a curtain of brown paper. Then
the birds jump and disappear one by one, as though
so many sparks had flown upward and become
extinguished in the act of flight.

On the hard ground out by the oaks the rabbits
are stamping their fog signals, and now and then I
see a ghostly white scut tremble for three bobs
till the mist swallows it up. If there were young
rabbits now, as there are not, how useful would
that follow-my-leader signal be to guide them in
the right way. It is essentially for use in the dusk
or in the all-day-long twilight under the bushes.
The roe-deer that haunt the smallest scrub of the
forest have a flag almost the size of a handkerchief,
and the bird that is best endowed with a signal to
be seen from behind is the bullfinch, that when it is
a little frightened is particularly given to travelling

18 THE RING OF NATURE

for a long way in the arcades of a thicket, and
even in the interior of a hedge.

The lads here have a method of catching the bull-
finch that is certainly sometimes successful. They
get it in a hedge between two parties of boys and
throw stones at it, just as they do at the other birds
desired for a pie. But a few stones crashing
through the twigs anywhere near a bullfinch so
terrifies it that it goes to the bottom of the hedge,
and can be picked up there apparently in a trance.

I once caught a jay very much in the same way.
Getting up early I found a party of them busy
at the cherries, and sent after them the charge of
a short-barrelled gun that when a boy I was allowed
to use. Of course I voted one of them hit. No
great encouragement is ever needed for that self-
flattery. It flew away, settled on the outside of
a hedge into which it thrust its head, and there
stayed till I went up and pulled it out ; but I could
find no bodily trace of its having been hit, and I
kept it alive as a pet.

At this time of year we find the deer in a part of
the forest that is almost impenetrable with black-
thorn bushes. Under these great hollow thorns the
air is appreciably warmer, and under anything
but a heavy downfall the tangled twigs would
furnish a good roof. It is just such a place as the
deer would choose for their ' yard ' if the snows
of northern Canada came down here ; a place they
could surround with beaten paths for exercise,
and in whose lairs they could await with patience

THE SUN BEHIND 19

the reopening of spring. The natural gloom of
the hawthorn caverns is scarcely deepened by the
frosting of the crystal dome above them, but the
fog gives them the mystery of a cathedral when
the verger has turned the lights out.

I am within thirty paces of a small herd of
magnificent bucks before I see them moving like
faint stains in a screen of wool. They are feeding
along a line that crosses obliquely in front, and I
move cautiously further up towards the point of
intersection. I should have come round a big
holly bush, and stood face to face with them, if
there had not been one more than I reckoned for.
Perhaps he saw me, and stalked me as I stalked
his fellows. He burst away from about four yards
on my left, while the herd was about fifteen yards
away. Off they go with staggering bounds, making
more noise than usual, partly because of the fright
they have had, partly because the fog hinders
them from choosing their footsteps as a deer in-
stinctively does in daylight.

As I climb the hill it is seen that the world is not
entirely sun-forsaken. As the sun first appears
through the fog, it is a disk of palest aluminium
across which the mist moves like smoke, sometimes
quite obliterating it, sometimes making a half-
moon of it, but on the whole giving way. Motion
is hopeful. There is nothing down here to contra-
dict the feeling that the fog is here for ever, but
up there we can see battle in which light must
inevitably win.

20 THE RING OF NATURE

It is just noon now. I can fancy or feel a sort
of shivering of the air crystals as though the world
acknowledged the fact. It seems as though, in
spite of the myriad million obstructions, the sun
managed to send down a subtle X-ray of hope.
Then he fades from aluminium to pale paper and
again disappears. But in twenty minutes he has
not only come to life again, but has grown to the
warmth of copper. As the hill slips below me he
brightens and brightens, till at the summit he is
actually blinding to look at and casts a shadow.
My face acknowledges his warmth, so does the
hoar-frost, for it flees from the grass he kisses, and
only holds its own behind the bushes.

Yes, get behind your bushes while ye may, slaves
of Sut. ' His going forth is from the end of the
heaven, and his circuit unto the ends of it ; and
there is nothing hid from the heat thereof.' Only
for a very little while can the vapours of earth
cheat us of the great fact that winter has done its
worst and summer is coming.

The robin is singing up here, but that is nothing.
The robin was singing in the midst of the mist, the
only bird that was quite certain that it was all a
hoax. But from the hill-top up goes the 'dew-
delighted skylark ' — up to find a place in heaven
where it can sing its heart out. Two ring-doves
flying far up catch the sun full on their breasts as
I have seen them lighted in the morning before
the sun reaches the earth. Yes, two doves and, if
you please, a pair of doves up in the air as love is,

THE SUN BEHIND 21

and looking on the bright side of things. Below
them is the mist like a great brown cloud where
the earth should be, or is it sparkling in the sun
like a sea of very tender hoar-frost ? At any rate,
under it the corn is growing to feed their little ones,
and all the delights of May are preparing.

The tops of the junipers on the hillside swim out
of the mist as though it was water, the darkness
of their foliage making the contrast more sudden.
The upper branches are almost dry, and as I come
down to them the skirts are fringed with crystals.
The hawthorns have some of their berries left, black
with age, and perhaps some sweetness is coming in
the tips of the leaf buds. An adventurous mouse
has climbed far into the tree after something or
other. It is a red wood-mouse with white throat
and belly, and its bright prominent eye must surely
see me as I stand quite near and take note of it.
Though the eye sees me the owner does not, or
thinks that after the trouble of climbing so high
it need not come down till war is actually on foot
against it. The spray with the rather brightly-
coloured creature on it stands out from the thick
background much as the bright finches did. Such
pictures are hard to find on a day like this, but
they are admirably framed when found.

The birds are already thinking of bed in the
gorse and bramble of the first hill-fields. What is
there but bed on such a day ? The open air is full
of the * prtt, prtt ' of their wings, and we hear them
cannoning through the twigs, yet rarely see them

22 THE RING OF NATURE

in this double dusk. The blackbirds are known by
their 'plaining ' tut, tut,' seldom to-day breaking
into the ' weech-a-weech-a-weech ' that they give
when through the clear air they see man coming.
The linnets are known by their tinkling chirrup
that sounds like forced cheerfulness, but the other
birds are vocally too silent for us to know what
they are.

There is nothing like these January days for
giving us the pleasure of intense and satisfiable
hunger. The civilized man who sits down to a
dinner of many courses with the remark that he is
famished, and then deliberates over the selection
of his hors-d'oeuvre, simply uses the exaggeration
that is one of the curses of civilization. He has
probably never known what hunger is. Neither
do I contend that the hunger established on a ten-
mile walk is comparable with that of a man six days
without food, though that also a man ought to
know before he speaks on the subject.

The usual hour for luncheon has scarcely gone
by when the man tramping in the open air is
assailed by a feeling not quite in the region of the
stomach, but behind the region of the solar plexus,
known in old boxing parlance as the ' bread basket '
but to-day as the ' mark.' It is the grand ter-
minus of all our radiating activities — gastronomi-
cal, physical, and perhaps spiritual. I believe it is
a good sign of physical wholeness that hunger soon
attacks us there. It takes you like a crisis of life

THE SUN BEHIND 23

comparable with the splitting of the chrysalid's
case for the emergence of the perfect insect, with
the bursting of a blossom from its bud, or the
elaboration of wax from the body of the bee. It
takes me with a feeling of faintness and a weaken-
ing of the legs and a little moistness of the brow
as of fright at a new resolution of one's bodily
component.

There is no question now of hors-d'oeuvre or
anchovy toast. Simple bread and cheese, of
which I have a small packet providentially in my
pocket, is ambrosia. Not merely do the salivary
glands clamour for them ; it seems as though the
teeth themselves dissolved in the biting. There was
never such a dish prepared in the cleverest foreign
restaurant as this bread and cheese. Call it not
coarse fare. The nectar that the fairies sip would
be far more gross if the fairy were less hungry than
I am. The question must be decided entirely by
appetite. If the appetite is such that it over-
whelms its provender as a whirlwind overwhelms
a feather, then the meal is a dainty one even if it
consists of bones or stones. A mouse eating of a
dead lion must feed grossly, while a hungry lion
picking up a mouse would feed daintily. I have
boggled at many a sardine worse than I now do
at a chunk of cheese and a slab of bread.

What is the thing to live on in the open air ?
Some of us believe that there must be meat. They
will have ham sandwiches, beef sandwiches, or, at
least, hard-boiled eggs. A good portable form that

24 THE RING OF NATURE

saves the trouble of cutting sandwiches is the cold
sausage. A quickly made sandwich that takes a
good eating certificate is made by clapping a hot
rasher between two slices of bread. When it has
frozen cold and set in its own aspic from the thin
juice it makes undoubtedly a capital lunch.

I have found my best satisfaction in a lighter
preparation than any of these. Between slices of
cold, dry toast you put a spreading of the solid
honey that belongs to winter. It is somewhat apt
on a warmish day to run, or rather crawl out, and
make a little messiness on the paper, but there
are many virtues to make up for this one possible
inconvenience. If the bread is of the right kind
and well toasted, it supplements the pointed sweet-
ness of the honey in an uncommonly toothsome
way. It stops that craving sweetly, pleasantly,
and without a jolt, and it sustains the system
through a twenty or a forty mile walk as very few
other foods can. So honey and toast for me
whenever I can get them.

I have said that the pangs of a hunger for a meal
only shortly overdue may not be comparable with
those of a week-old fast. Yet any one who has
had the curiosity to try has found the longer fast
a far different experience than they expected.
That imperative emptiness lasts till not more than
twenty-four hours from the latest meal, neither
does it gnaw all the time. It makes itself felt at
what were the old meal-times, and the greatest
effort of the starving man is to get over the first

THE SUN BEHIND 25

or second meal- time. When the second breakfast
has been missed we feel an unusual lightness of
body and clarity of mind. Problems at other times
complex resolve themselves easily into their answers.
The universe is likely to be revealed in the light
of some startling paradox. It is an exhilarating
time. The writer gets to his task with a zest, and
does it passing well.

I have not pursued the fast beyond the third
day. I believe that the results thereafter are quite
negative. The desire for food becomes less, the.
habit of the meal-time having been lost, and the
resumption of eating after a long fast becomes
rather a critical undertaking. But a fast for a few
days by one who can rather easily endure it,
broken by a gradual resumption of the usual habit,
is a useful rest for the usually overworked organs,
and proves the wisdom of the Lenten system that
belongs to many religions.

26 THE RING OF NATURE

FEBRUARY

THE SQUIREEL

THIS is the first magic day of spring. The
rays of the sun, even when they are
not direct, strike through the clothes as though
they were not there, and thrill us with a new
message. When you sit before the hottest fire,
you do not feel warm through the clothes all at
once, nor for a few moments. Nor if you wait for
hours, or for ever, will you get any of the subtle
ichor of benefit with which the sunshine of a spring
day floods you in a moment. We have to fall
back on a molecular theory of heat to get a
conception of the fact. It is as though the fire
pelted us with large pebbles, while the sun had
a fire of sand finer than the meshes of any
clothing.

Rooks and starlings are drawing across the field
the line of their search that surely nothing can
escape. The light sits on their backs, and glances
from shoulder to shoulder as they walk. It brings
up the sheen of colour, the purples and the greens

THE SQUIRREL 27

that have been absent for months, and now vividly
rebuke any one who should say that rooks and
starlings are black. The winter black of tree trunks
is also a thing of the past, for now even the most
sober of them is bronze or silver or golden with
the sap of life shining through the bark. Willows
and the cornel are the brightest, as they were the
only ones to show colour in the dark days of
December and January ; next to them come the
poplars, which are first cousins to the willows.
The white poplar shines like burnished silver in
all its branches, and its twigs are swelling intb
the great red catkins that make us wonder in a
few weeks' time where the tree has been hiding
itself all the summer and winter. The elms, too,
are very visibly burgeoning into their crimson
glory of blossom.

The flowers in the wood seem to know that it
will be useless to try and grow when there is a
canopy of leaves overhead. Violet and blue-bell,
daffodil, primrose, lily of the valley, anemone, must
all have done blossoming before the beeches are
in leaf, and they are visibly preparing for it. Even
they have no chance where the dog's mercury has
established itself. It makes a continuous carpet
of leaves, which you can see shake in their tops
when mouse or adder moves through the stalks.
The dog's mercury is blossoming amain, hanging
out its green catkins, from which every footstep
sends out puffs of pollen. The sun falling in
patches through the branches flecks their deep green

28 THE RING OF NATURE

with circles and long shafts almost as bright as
beech leaves.

Further on, the trees change to pine. The sun
splashes their red trunks with flame, and even
brings colour into the burnt-out floor. Walking
on the dead and silent needles, I check automati-
cally as something warmer and hairier than vege-
table debris catches the eye. It is the long, dry
hair that feathers a squirrel's tail. The little animal
has its back to me, and is busy digging in the soft
super-mold, working briskly with its fore-paws, his
nose all the while between them to seize the prize
as soon as it comes in sight.

It fishes out something, perhaps no more than
a half-decayed fir-cone, and sitting up with the
morsel held in its hands, sets to work with its teeth.
Over the bushy tail I can see the long winter tufts
of its ears twitching and nodding at the work
of the jaws. Creeping silently round I catch the
profile of its face, with one of the bright black eyes
that seem to look out on all sides at once.

It is the conventional squirrel picture. The tail
is up parallel with the back, but curled away from
the head like an acanthus leaf. The tufted ears
point straight up from the smooth-haired face, the
Roman nose of which ends in sharp chisels busy on
the cone, which the fore-feet hold close beneath
the chin. All is according to convention except
the colouring, for we have very few animal artists
who can refrain from drawing the squirrel in a
mixed dress of summer and winter. The red

THE SQUIRREL 29

squirrel is as grey as a rabbit in winter, and it is
only then that it has the long ear-tufts. By the
time it has got on its summer red the tufts are gone,
and its ears are scarcely more distinguished than
those of the mouse.

Suddenly I lose the picture of an acanthus-tailed
squirrel even in grey. Perhaps it has been digging
at another squirrel's hoard, perhaps it is the victim
of robbery, more likely the spirit of boisterous love
comes into the wood on a sunbeam. There is a
short sound like a cough, and another squirrel
rushes out from somewhere, the acanthus-tailed
one drops its booty, and, as Huckleberry Fin sa^s
expressively, ' lights out.' All its beautiful pose is
thrown to the wind, the curved body becomes a
long straight line, and the tail a long straight
continuation. The two squirrels rush off venire a
terre, just like stoats, double round a tree, and
come rushing back towards me, double again and
away, but this time the pursuer, taking a shorter
corner, catches the other, and for a moment they
tumble one over the other more like vulgar rats
than the dainty squirrels they are. Then one of
them, it is impossible to tell which, rushes up a
tree, and the other comes nosing back towards the
little pit whence the fir-cone was dug.

When the squirrel is moving about leisurely in
the search of food on the ground, it is seen to be
much more like a large dormouse than a small
rabbit. The dormouse, too, in spite of its sleepy
habit during the winter, is an astonishingly active

30 THE RING OF NATURE

animal, leaping high up a tree trunk, and clinging
where it touches with the certainty of the squirrel,
though not having the same power of running up
a vertical surface.

With back rounded in typical mouse curve, my
squirrel goes loping round this bush and that, re-
minding me far more of the kangaroo than the
rabbit ever does by the light way in which it
touches the ground with its fore-paws between the
hops that it takes from the hind-feet. Suddenly
it sits up, far up, on its hind-legs, its ears pricked,
and its face expressing puzzled anxiety. The first
sound that alarmed it was the chuckling voice and
the whirring wings of a pheasant down in the
hollow where the nut-brakes are. But now there
is a measured ' chunk, chunk,' like the bite of a
keen axe into wood. It is purely a mechanical
sound, and if not of human agency must be the
hammering of a nut-hatch on the shell of a nut
he has unexpectedly found. Foolish squirrel to
twitch and turn about so at such an innocent sound.

The ' chunk, chunk ' continues, and now appears
to be nearly over my head. It cannot be a nut-
hatch, for it obviously moves about, whereas the
bird fixes his nut in a crevice of the bark and
hammers at it there till his meal is reached. The
squirrel takes three jumps, and reaches the nearest
tree. It pauses a moment, and lashes its tail like
a cat — its beautiful acanthine tail thrashing to
and fro in angry wags. Then it clasps the tree
and runs up the trunk with a ' wow-wow-wow-

THE SQUIRREL 31

WOW- wow ' that is far more canine than any other
rodent can accomplish, with the possible exception
of the prairie ' dog.'

I look up, and behold the mechanical ' chunk,
chunk ' is the vocal product of the other squirrel
running lightly on the black clouds of the pine
foliage, and crying ' cave ' to its companion. It
runs right to the edge of a cloud, its hind-feet
turned out till they almost point backward, so
that they hold a sheaf of twigs between their hands.
And it jumps frpm one cloud to the next, passing
from tree to tree as easily as we from paving-stome
to paving-stone. The other squirrel pauses at
the first fork and looks back at me, working its
jaws in a kind of mumbling rage. I clap my hands,
and its rushes up the next stage with another
' wow- wow- wow- WOW- wow,' turning and sitting
there, and again wagging its tail like an angry cat.

No more sitting up with elegant acanthine tail.
Squatting along a branch or dumped into a fork,
it peers impudently out, or it takes a straight-
tailed run and launches itself flatly on the air,
almost flying to the next tree, or it spread-eagles
on a trunk almost like a handkerchief with hooks
at each corner, or hangs from only the hind-legs
like a bat, this protean creature that seems many
animals rolled into one. I shall have to leave it
now, for it is far too much offended to do any-
thing but hurl at me its arboreal Billingsgate, and
shout to his brother burglar, ' Here 's a stranger,
Bill, let 's heave a brick at 'im.'

32 THE RING OF NATURE

The squirrel is the monkey of the rodent tribe.
Its feet, compared with those of the rabbit, are
wonderfully elaborated for a climbing life. The
fingers are long and thin, with claws for hooking
into the bark of a tree, like climbing irons, whereas
the monkey climbs like an expert alpinist with
the padded tips of its fingers. Let any man tackle
the rough bark of an unswarmable oak in this
way, and he will get something like a revelation.
With two fingers of each hand hooked on pro-
jections not twice the thickness of a penny, he can
hang the weight of his body what time he gets a
lodgment of the same kind for each of his nail-
edged boots. He could climb no better in stockings,
because the toes are not prehensile, and their pads
cannot be brought into action on account of the
nails.

The squirrel, working with nails instead of toe-
pads, brings his hind-feet into action almost
exactly in the same way as we use the climbing
irons, catching the hooks in well out on each
side of the line of the body. It is his work in
the smaller branches that has most modified its
members however. The thumb instead of being
opposable, as in the monkeys and man, is almost
aborted. The gymnast on the horizontal bar
never uses his thumbs, has to work, in fact, on the
assumption that he has no thumbs. He wraps
his fingers round, and hangs on by their pressure.
If he had nothing but horizontal bar work all his
life, and life after life, his thumbs would become

THE SQUIRREL 33

mere supernumeraries, and in the course of ages
dwindle entirely away.

Little did you guess, O squirrel, the immense
consequences that hung on the way in which you
took hold of the first tree. If you had but walked
along the branches holding them between hand
and thumb like the monkeys (and incidentally the
chameleon), you might have evolved into something
much more man-like than you are. When you
hold a nut you wrap the whole hand round it
instead of holding it with precision between finger
and thumb. Perhaps the size of the nut is against
you, perhaps the monkey developed his thumb
in order to catch fleas. Inconveniences and
calamities are the greatest blessings sometimes.
A more persistent enemy than the pine-marten
might have given our red squirrel wings or an
extended parachute such as some of the tribe have
acquired.

If the squirrel's food were entirely fruitarian, as
some people imagine it is, he would fare but ill
during the time between the end of the winter store
and the ripening of next year's nuts. He must be
hard set in winter, to judge from the scores and
hundreds of fir-cones nibbled into cotton reels
that we find in the wood. The pine kernel is an
excellent food when it assumes the proportions
found in the stone pine — a roll of fat containing
almost the bulk of a pea, but there is very little
food in the cone of the larch or the Scotch pine.
As soon as the trees begin to shoot, the squirrel

34 THE RING OF NATURE

begins to live on salad and the sugary layer between
the outer bark and the wood of favoured trees like
the sycamore. Some of his digging in the floor of
the wood unearths such substantial succulents as
blue-bell bulbs and the richly-stored rhizomes of
anemone. Whenever he gets a chance he prefers
to take something substantial to stuffing his crop
with grass like a rabbit.

It is inevitable that our friend should find many
a bird's nest in his arboreal capers. He is the soul
of curiosity, and it was not for a moment to be
expected that the first squirrel should fail to sample
these strangely-coloured acorns found three and
four in a cup, that we call eggs. Even our so-called
vegetarians eat eggs, and so does the squirrel. He
is not so particular about their freshness, and an
egg that has sprouted into a chick is no more amiss
to him than an acorn that has hatched into a young
oak. So the bird population owes a good deal of
its restraint to the patrolling of the squirrels.

Last autumn I came upon a squirrel sitting
acanthus-tailed on a log, and very busily eating.
He was dining on the brown fungi that sprouted
from the decayed wood. An experienced mycolo-
gist would have taken home such fungi and eaten
them cooked, but the majority of people would
have called them ' nasty poisonous cankers.' I
think that the squirrel eats a good many fungi that
even the mycologist bars. At any rate, there is
among the edible ones a vast store of nourishing
food during the fungus season, and in what month

THE SQUIRREL 35

of the year does not some boletus, morel, puff-
ball, or agaric produce its fleshy fruit ?

The fungus-eating squirrel was, of course, im-
mensely indignant when he looked up and found
me watching him at his meal. He popped a large
piece in his mouth, and ran up the trunk of an oak
that bristled with tiny shoots. This ' brushwood
sheaf ' he hurriedly probed with his nose, at last
finding a cupboard in which he might dare leave
his treasure, and when his mouth was free to tell
me what he thought of my impertinence, he let
me have it with all the force of his vocabulary.

By May, our little grey squirrel will be in his
summer red, and his ears close cropped by com-
parison with the tufts he wears now. His mate
will by then be a mother. Their nest is usually
stored in a hollow tree where such sites are common ;
but in our wood they build the great domes of
sticks familiarly called dreys high in the branches
of beech or pine. At the age of six weeks the
young squirrels are fully active and charming
miniatures in every respect of their parents, whom
they accompany in their frolics till near the end
of the year.

When the trees are fully leaved we naturally see
less of our arboreal friends. But taking full ad-
vantage of their cover, they do not trouble to
absent themselves when man comes into the wood.
One of the most delightful incidents of a solitary
lunch in the wood, or of an artist's seance there, is
the way in which the squirrels peep at one from

36 THE RING OF NATURE

this side and that, then come and show off just
like so many small boys anxious to attract atten-
tion. They dare one another to come near to you,
fight one another to show what brave fellows they
are, pretend great alarm when you move, and only
when you treat them very badly will they shout
and swear at you, as they will when the woods are
bare and life is perhaps a little annoying.

One summer habit of the squirrel leads forcibly
to the conviction that he loves a practical joke.
He takes his food to the top of the tree under which
you are sitting. There he tears it to pieces, be it
green pine-cones or what not, and the rejected
fragments bump through the branches and fall
with wonderful precision on and round the big
non-climbing biped on the ground. There is no
finer picture of summer peace than to stand under
a beech sixty or seventy feet high, whose trunk is
completely lost as soon as it pierces the first tier
of leaves, to hear the faint ticking of the little
animal's teeth, and to see the husks of beech mast,
as though thrown from a fairyland above the
bean-stalk, come trickling down.

ST. VALENTINE'S DAY 37

FEBRUARY

II

ST. VALENTINE'S DAY

OVER the door of the Salvation Army Shelter
in Blackfriars Road is a plane, bearing
among its branches the remains of a wood-
pigeon's nest. Thus can a ray of wildest country
life penetrate to this wilderness of squalid houses
in the centre of London. To-day it seems as
though the old nest is patched with a few new
sticks, and certainly both the birds are back, sitting
beside it in the sun with an air that speaks plainly
of their intention to start housekeeping anew.

Over Blackfriars Bridge the hundreds of gulls
that have lived on the bounty of Londoners through
the winter are daily putting on their nuptial
plumage. In the winter, they were just grey and
white birds of so general a gull type that many
called them kitti wakes and suffered no reproof.
Then a little black crescent appeared behind the
ear, next a little black dot between that and the
beak, and now the spots are spreading towards
each other, and in some of the birds have flooded

38 THE RING OF NATURE

the whole face with the hood that proclaims the
black-headed gull.

The aerial evolutions of these Embankment
gulls become daily more ambitious. Leaving the
water and the outstretched hands that more rarely
than of yore offer them food, they spread their
motionless wings and, now leaning upon the wind,
now sailing before it, ascend their wonderful spiral
staircase till they are no more than dots in the
far sky. From such a height they can see, when
the weather is clear, the stretches of Thames
estuary and the low island in the marshes where
they were hatched last summer, and will breed in
the summer to come. Daily, some of them head
off to the east, and come down no more to the
charity of the Embankment. No doubt, they
establish here their parties of two, and make shy
elopement from the crowd here to the daily growing
crowd in the breeding rookeries.

There is a shrill squabbling at the top of a shop
fafade, and two sparrows locked in strife fall to
the pavement almost under my feet. If St. Valen-
tine will not be denied here, how he must be
revelling in more sylvan scenes.

When Christianity began to gain the upper hand
in Rome it found that the Feast of Lupercal, falling
on the day that we now call the fourteenth of
February, was one of the best observed of solar
holidays. It is half-way between solar Christmas
and solar Easter, the winter solstice and the vernal
equinox. Every one upon a journey is fond of

ST. VALENTINE'S DAY 39

the half-way house and, after that, of the quarter-
way house. If the ideal is midsummer, we are
half-way there at Christmas. We are down at the
bottom of the hill below which there is no other
deep, and, as we turn our faces upward, there is
a paean of rejoicing that the darkest day is past.
At Easter we are within sight of the end of the
journey, and in possession of half the sweets of
summer. There is no longer any hurry. We
should not mind keeping the flowers of May till
it was time for winter again, so that for many
people the happy land is reached at Easter, and
St. Valentine's Day becomes the real half-way
house.

In Rome the Lupercalian Feast was a kind of
Saturnalia, a feast of love founded, as it appeared
to the Christians, on a purely material and carnal
base, and so we established the Feast of St. Valen-
tine as a prophylactic. The wine to be put in the
old bottle must not be too new. There must be
jollity of a slightly more secular flavour than the
austerity of confirmed Christianity required, in
order to attract the young people who had found
joy in the Lupercalia. And the result has been
that the Feast of St. Valentine was always more
secular than ecclesiastic, and has to-day lost nearly
all its appeal.

The slipping out of the calendar of eleven days,
whereby all our dates are shifted back towards
Christmas, and therefore become colder, has also
helped to kill the day of St. Valentine, May-day,

40 THE RING OF NATURE

and other fixtures. Perhaps, too, the English
climate was always too fickle to bear the trans-
planting of these spring festivals from the more
settled climates in which sun-worship originated.
But we nature-lovers, or I to speak for one of them,
cling to these fixed sun-marks with a faith that is
unshaken by many disappointments. If it is not
the actual day on which birds mate, as country
tradition will have it to be, there is, even in the
worst of years, a good deal of avine courting to be
seen on this day.

In Hyde Park there are hundreds of wood-
pigeons, or, as we must say to-day, scores of pairs.
They are busy in the tops of the elms, perhaps
getting sticks for their nests, but more likely just
toying with those early emblems of love and
summer, the buds swelling and bursting into rosy
blossoms. We earthlings had no idea that flower-
time was so near up there, till the wanton doves
threw down on us little sprays of pink elm-roses.
One pair of wood-pigeons is just sitting on a dead
branch in the full bathe of the sun. The birds
do not even trouble to look at one another ; each
knows that the other is by, and that is enough.
The sun striking them full in the breast brings up
out of the grey, a purple iridescence on the neck,
a bluish-pink on the bosom, and a warmth of the
dove-like tones as though they were translucent
to a light within. Perhaps they are.

Not even the doves can enjoy love without battle.
You see them lift a pinion and flap a rival appar-

ST. VALENTINE'S DAY 41

ently as harmlessly as a lady strikes with a fan,
but, as a matter of fact, the blow is no mean one.
The wing has hard knuckles, and can bruise almost
like the pads of a hare when he boxes for the right
to make a doe his own.

See the meek moor-hen that walks so mincingly
on those long, green toes that seem as soft as the
cooked feet we still sometimes meet with in a hash
of fowl. To-day, the cock moor-hen hunches his
shoulders, thrusts out his beak, and runs most
truculently after another that dares to invade itis
territory. The other knows the weight of a moor-
hen's weapons and makes such haste to get away
that he violates a year-long tradition and takes
to his wings. The hunch-backed one follows, over-
takes him on the water, and forces him to a naval
engagement. The two birds face one another,
sitting well back in the water. Then they fly up
like barn-door cocks, each striving for the upper
hand, and each clawing at the other with those
long, limp -looking, but really hurtful feet. There
is plenty of spring-time courage in this bird, and
the battle is fought out many times at intervals
of hours and days before the marriages of the year
are arranged.

There is a never-failing comedy in progress on
the piece of water called the Dingle at the foot
of the fall out of the Serpentine. This is by far
a more suitable and aesthetic nesting site for the
mallard than any other in the Park. Below the
fall there is a little creek gently winding through

42 THE RING OF NATURE

a thicket of bamboo and other growth to a pool
with green lawns sloping to the edge of the water,
with sprouting giant rhubarb and polygonum, with
flags, Japanese butter-burr, and many other delights.

A duck and a mallard are swimming on the
pool, she talking a good deal, he taciturn as men
generally are. From far up the Serpentine, high
in air, come two birds, whose outstretched heads
and wings set far back proclaim them to be ducks.
They circle magnificently overhead, and at last
descend to the pool by a steep spiral and a straight
plane, that lands them like two ploughs on the
water, cutting furrows two yards in length before
they can pull up.

The duck in possession chatters more shrilly
than ever. You can plainly hear her say, ' Send
the impudent baggage packing, dear, and her
man with her.' The drake in possession goes
after the new duck and chivies her round the
pond. It is the best way to make the other
drake fight, and besides, there is pleasure in
mixed cruelty and gallantry to the opposite sex.
Cruelty gets the upper hand, for he rushes at her
and pulls a feather out. She utters a squawk,
labours to her wings, and goes off up Serpentine
whence she came. Her mate, who ought to have
fought for her, takes wing too, and joins her, no
doubt explaining when he catches her why it
was. that he elected not to fight. The duck in
possession is plainly relieved at the upshot. It
seems to be on the cards that one's man may

ST. VALENTINE'S DAY 43

make love instead of war to a new-comer, and
send both his former mate and the new drake
packing.

Sometimes the drake is sent away, and the
duck with the persistence of her sex only retires
up the meadow, then comes back and chitters
about the marge, now and then re-entering the
water. In such a case, as often as not, the resi-
dent duck takes up the war and chases her rival
out of the water and along the meadow till the
other takes wing and off. Never many minutes
pass without some more or less determined effort
on the part of another pair to win the pool. The
first occupiers are very seldom, if ever, evicted, so
much advantage does the consciousness of right
give. I have no doubt that the drake that can
win and keep this most eligible site may have the
pick of all the ducks of Hyde Park, St. James's,
Buckingham Palace, and Holland House.

The meadow, which is a good hundred yards
long, and half that width, slopes upward all the
way from the pool. A few trees stand about it,
and bushes encroach from the sides. Any one
would say that it was an ideal place for rabbits,
and there are rabbits. Not the grey wild rabbit,
however, but black ones and yellow ones. The
grass is extraordinarily green at all times of the
year, and five or six of these strongly coloured
rabbits make a complete and fascinating picture
that few Londoners fail to appreciate.

To-day there is the excitement of a rabbit hunt.

44 THE RING OF NATURE

The best regulated of dogs will sometimes get out
of hand, and it is not uncommon for the park
police to have to exact damages for destruction
of life. Even the winged things, such as the
absurdly tame wood-pigeons, fall victims to the
sudden onslaught of an active terrier. Before
they can get wing they are down, and then it is
a case of ' I 'se warrant you how he mammocked
it.'

A well-bred rough terrier, and one that has
evidently been well cared for, and well trained, has
probably come out for a walk without his best-
obeyed master. He leaps the railings, and charges
down their sacred green among the rabbits. They
bolt in all directions. The dog begins to follow
one, changes his mind as another flashes more
temptingly across his vision, takes after that one
a trifle too late, and so loses them all in the bushes,
not being a dog of nose.

But there never was a dog of gaze yet but made
greater pretence to nose than the veriest blood-
hound. He comes running and sniffing over the
green, like a boy scout who imagines himself a
Sherlock Holmes. One rabbit, instead of running
to the bushes, has contented itself with just put-
ting a tree between itself and the danger. We
can all see the rabbit and the dog, but the dog
knows nothing of the rabbit, and the rabbit does
not know exactly where the dog is.

At length, by a pure fluke, the pursuer comes
round the tree and almost stumbles on the rabbit.

ST. VALENTINE'S DAY 45

Off it goes like a shot, and the dog lumbers after.
Some imagine it a very close thing ; but just as
the dog is getting its stride, a magisterial whistle
puts him out, and after a wild circle or two over
the delightfully fresh grass he clears the railing
and leaves the circus to the rabbits only.

If the chase had taken place in the snow, as it
often may on St. Valentine's Day, we should have
had an interesting record of dog and rabbit char-
acter. The track of the dog would be represented-
by a series of curves, almost running to circles,
and that of the rabbits by straight tangential lines.
The explanation is that the rabbit makes straight
for home, while the dog makes straight for the
rabbit where it is seen from time to time in its
course across the dog's horizon. It is only the dog
wise by experience that guesses the point the
rabbit is making for and runs in a straight line to
cut him off. And then the rabbit may turn just
at the right time and give him his trouble for
nothing. Other things being equal, the chances
are in favour of the pursued, and the beast of prey
must either be very much swifter or more cunning.

By feeding in company, rabbits have evidently
yet another string to their bow, as our rough-
haired terrier showed us so well. Not only must
you be fleet enough to catch a rabbit, but you must
be able to make up your mind which rabbit you
will run down, and stick to it. There is a proverb
better known in Denmark than here : ' He who
chases two hares will lose them both.'

46 THE RING OF NATURE

But let us leave Hyde Park far behind and
keep St. Valentine's Day where no one lives
but those who get their living direct from the
soil. The cottage gardens are one sheet of
snowdrops — Fair Maids of February — standing in
their spotless thousands like uncountable confir-
mation candidates. (Candidate, a candid person,
from Candida, signifying shining white.) You
would think that these gardens were dedicated to
nothing but snowdrops the whole year through ;
but somehow in summer the roots of other flowers
feed without harm among the sleeping bulbs, and
give us sheets of other colour almost as close-woven
as this shining white garment.

On the orchard bough that overleaps the cottage
roof, not the orchard bough of which Browning
sang, but with bare grey twigs showing as yet none
of the promise of May, sits and sings a chaffinch.
The slate of his neck has burst into a blue flame,
the chestnut of his breast overflows his wings
and glows like incandescent copper ; and when
he flies before his mate with the deliberate inten-
tion of showing off his charms he flashes dazzling
white swords in his tail, and dazzling white bars
upon his wings.

The chaffinches are everywhere as we walk
along, sitting on vantage trees and singing their
stammered cry of ' g-g-g-ginger beer.' They do
not, as most birds, sing all alike, but a bird here
and there has taught himself a longer song, or
introduced some variation into the war-cry of the

ST. VALENTINE'S DAY 47

race. Then up from a hedge go two of the birds,
beak to beak, towering like butterflies, but fight-
ing to far more purpose. They come down locked
to the ground, from which only one flies away.
I pick up the other, and find as I feared that one
of its eyes has been pecked sightless. It is some
minutes before the poor thing can recover and
fly away, all its warlike pride for the time being
destroyed.

Every one desires to sing on such a day as this.
Even the rook, which at other times never attempts
more than plain speech, and that none of the
sweetest, ^ comes to his love with drooping wing
and upspread tail, bowing like a ring-dove and
' caw-caw-cawing ' in an absurd attempt to play
' Home, sweet Home ' on one note.

The woodpecker is far wiser. He knows that
his voice is a poor one, and he makes the woods
ring with a very pretty piece of instrumental
music. The great spotted - woodpecker is par-
ticularly industrious and successful. Choosing
the most resonant piece of dead wood in the
whole country-side, he comes to it again and
again at intervals of a few minutes throughout
the day, and makes a rattle upon it that stirs
the heart of nature like a violin, not merely through
the drum of the ear, but through the nerves of the
skin. He is a solitary bird and a rare bird, but
at length his far-ringing call reaches the ear of
another. She comes near and answers the call
with a like vibration on another tree, and some

48 THE RING OF NATURE

naturalists have declared of their experience that
the hen-bird never sounds upon any other branch
that will not give a note about a tone lower than
the one struck by the cock.

I can hear all day the rattle of one of these
birds that has apparently not yet found a mate,
and when I like can go out and see how he
performs his music. So rapidly does he move
his head that it runs into a blur, and he delivers
some ten strokes, the whole sum of his call, in
the space of a second. Sometimes when you
open the lid of a box against a wooden wall, it
hits with a shivering succession of rebounds that
fairly well produces the call of the great spotted-
woodpecker.

Each bird has its own distinctive charm in the
way it ' shows off ' at mating time. The humble
hedge-sparrow has its own, which earns for it
the name of ' shuffle-wing.' The goldfinch makes
wonderful play with the gold upon its wings,
so does the scarcely less aureate greenfinch, the
plover flashes from rifle green to white with un-
wonted verve, the jay and the hawfinch fly slowly
before their lady-loves so as to show how wonder-
fully they are coloured on an expanded view.

Every one has his favourites. Mine, I think,
is the pied wagtail. It droops its wings and
struts them upon the ground, like a very daintily
made turkeycock. It is so ethereal in its mar-
tial loveliness that it seems to have a diffi-
culty in keeping the ground, for it blows up

ST. VALENTINE'S DAY 49

into the air, still maintaining its spread-eagleism,
occupying a space that seems three times as
much as usual, but with an obvious tenuity of
substance that makes you think you are looking
not at a bird but a butterfly. So with a picture
of the amorous wagtail, culled from a thousand
to be seen on a fortunate day, I maintain from
year to year my impression of St. Valentine's Day.

50 THE RING OF NATURE

MARCH

CATKIN TIME

ALL along the river the alder pyramids have
burst in a single night into clouds of
powdered primrose. The catkin buds, which
were yesterday short and brown, have opened
like concertinas and become full-grown ' lambs'
tails.' Packed in each of those brown buds
were some hundred and fifty fleshy bosses, each
holding about twenty male blossoms or pollen
masses. The stalks on which the bosses sit had
but to lengthen to some three times its length,
and the pollen masses are uncovered to the
sun and the wind. The sun ripens them, and
then the wind bears the dust from the trees in in-
calculable multitudes of grains, almost as small
as atoms of scent. The air for many square miles
is far more full of them than it is of snowflakes
in the fiercest storm. At the greatest height at
which a balloon travels we should not escape
them, and a female catkin twenty miles away
would run quite a good chance of getting fertilized.

CATKIN TIME 51

Yet, if we are conscious of them at all, it is merely
as an odour, while we fondly imagine that the
catkins themselves are just one of the fancies
of Spring's paint-brush somehow designed for our
delectation.

I have got down a spray from the alder tree's
primrose mountain. At the tip it bears on three
twigs three of the male catkins. The pale yellow
is sprinkled with hard brown dots, in which you
recognize the colour that belonged to the whole
catkin before it opened. You can shut up the
concertina with difficulty, and the brown dots
come together, reproducing the state of affairs that
by itself it can never reproduce. On the next
twig above the catkin twig is one bearing five
tiny little cones, which a magnifying-glass shows
to be slashed with crimson, and to be potentially
shaped like the dry and open cones of last year
that still adhere to the tree. Remote from both
catkins and cone, on the same spray but nearer
to the trunk, are the leaf buds, as yet showing
few signs of opening.

Nearly always the male catkins open before the
females. All nature is thus gallant. The ladies
must not be kept waiting, and often and often it
is the fate of the male to perish in a late frost that
just misses the more phlegmatic sex. The male
nightingale, willow wren, or other migrant arrives
by a more perilous passage some days before the
hen, as though to prepare a place for her in this
cold country ; the cocks of our resident species

52 THE RING OF NATURE

grow vocal and pugnacious while their prudent
hens still think it too early to think of nesting ;
the male bee hardens in a week of March wind
before the future mothers appear. In no depart-
ment must the ladies be kept waiting.

The crimson slashings on the cones or female
catkins are the peepings of the stigmas. Unlike
the male element, these can be to a certain extent
covered again after being uncovered, and thus
saved from sudden inclemency of the weather.
They do not become receptive till the males have
discharged their pollen by millions and trillions of
grains, and the atmosphere is one vast bath of
impregnation. Then the alder trees suddenly
turn from yellow to rose-colour, the lengthened
female catkins exposing all their crimson, but
diluting their brilliance writh the sober scales that
covered them in the bud. All along the river then
are trees of one colour, and the other, yellow next
to rose, yellow perceptibly turning to rose, and
finally the pale peep of green.

The lambs' tails of the nut bushes have been
flying all the winter. Over and over again the
tragedy of the fatally disappointed male has been
played. The frosts have nipped off several armies
of them, the rains have soddened the pollen so
that it could not fly, and the wise little stigmas
kept themselves close in bud. The nut bush does
not produce all its catkins at once, but sends scout
armies forward at each slightest hint of spring.
It will be found, though, that the alder and the other

CATKIN TIME 53

trees putting forth catkins now do so with their
whole strength.

Wind flowers upon trees must be produced
before the leaves have started to open. Multitu-
dinous as the pollen is, it must be set free in a world
that is not everywhere clogged with foliage to
catch it and put a fruitless end to its voyage.
How multitudinous it is, who can say ? Figures
would be of no avail. Possibly it is greater in the
evergreens than in deciduous trees, as though these
trees knew how much greater is the danger of pollen
going astray among leafed branches. The yews
are now studded with innumerable little yellow
balls like the flower of mimosa. I touch a branch
of it and the powder flies off like smoke, as thin and
as volatile, melting into the air like the steam of
a locomotive, though, unlike the water particles of
steam, each atom invisible in its smallness is an
atom of life expressly aimed at the fertilization
of a seed of its own kind. How futile to attempt
to -calculate the number of pollen grains on this
one yew tree among the millions that stud our
chalk hills !

In districts where many pines are grown, not
merely the stigmas and the twigs, and the trunks
of the pines, but every tree within miles, the grass,
the rocks, and the whole earth, are covered with a
layer of pollen that paints them all yellow. When
the rain comes, the streams are yellow, and where
the flood has been out it leaves a deeper stain on
the ground from the swollen grains that makes

54 THE RING OF NATURE

men say that a sulphurous rain has fallen. It is
while the pollen is flying that the scent of the pine-
woods is most apparent. It is then that we fill
the lungs with ecstasy, and declare how much good
we are receiving. Each grain is, in fact, no more to
us than the theoretical particles of which an odour
is composed. Perhaps to some very tiny creatures
the air seems full of flying pebbles or balls of resin.

The silver poplar, the black poplar, the tall
Lombardy, the balsam and the cotton-wood have
all swung out their incredibly thick and solid tails
apparently grown in a few hours. They require
a good deal of sun to set their powder flying, and
it often happens that a cold wind brings the catkins
down before the powder has been shed. The
Lombardy poplar really comes from the Himalayas,
and reached this country from Turin in 1758.
Suppose that I say next that there is only one tree
of its kind in Great Britain to-day.

I would not go quite so far as that. Every one
knows that tall steeple-like poplar whose branches,
instead of spreading outward like the oak, grow
parallel with the trunk. That is Populus fastigiata,
and its Latin name is unusually easy to understand.
If you cut off a branch and stick it in the ground,
it is fairly certain to grow ; and even if it has been
roughed into a stake or a gate-post, it will equally
become a tree. Then is it a new tree or only part
of the old one ? If the tree from which it was
cut was a male, the stake grows up a male and
never a female ; and because Lord Rochford only

CATKIN TIME 55

happened to bring males here in 1758, all or nearly
all the Lombardy poplars in this country now are
males and bits of the same original male. There
are found here very rarely now some female Lom-
bardy poplars, perhaps introduced by some other
acclimatizer, or possibly cross-bred with one of the
other poplars.

Like the poplars, the willows have catkins of
only one sex on one tree. It is they that give us
the ' palm,' best loved of all catkins. They bear
not hanging catkins, but, in token that they are
something better than wind-lovers or anemophilous
trees, catkins upright like flowers. We like them
so well, at any rate the male blossoms, because
after their silver stage they hang out golden
stamens, evidently meant to be seen, and because
they are fragrant with honey for the attraction
of bees. Their pollen is of another kind than that
of the alders, because they drive another trade.
Instead of a dry dust that will cling to nothing
but the sticky stigmas, the pollen of the willow is
soft and mellow. It smudges the face of our little
daughter with gold when she smells the * pussy-
willow,' and so it smudges the bees that, unlike the
little daughter, have noses also for the female
blossoms on another tree, as honeyed as these
though they are but green.

We can smell the ' palm ' trees far through the
wood. It is like hot wax or a honeycomb that
gives up all its odours at once and in concentrated
form. If even the human nose responds to it at

56 THE RING OF NATURE

the distance of several hundred yards, it must
appeal to the delicate sense of an insect for a mile.
Sight too might find it almost as far. When from
the opposing height we have had the whole dark
wood under view, the sallow bushes in full bloom
have stood up not so much like vividly coloured
things as like illuminations.

Sure enough there are upon the sallow at its
blooming, specimens of nearly every insect awake.
Blue-bottle and green-bottle flies buzz about in
their short undignified way, and with them the
drone-fly, earliest and latest of all summer's mani-
festations. He is not very wonderfully like a bee,
but there are comparatively few of my acquaintance
who dare so far rely on his fly-hood as to catch him
in the hand.

If you were to take a bull calf, kill it without
breaking the skin, and place it in a stone vault
with the windows open, it may be that in time
the drone-flies would lay eggs in it, and a swarm
of rat-tailed maggots live in it till they in turn
became drone-flies, and a person lacking in ento-
mology, approaching at the right time, might
declare that he saw thousands of bees. That
at any rate was an old recipe from before the days
of Virgil for obtaining a swarm of bees. Not many
years ago the plan was tried by a Cornish gentle-
man, who declared it to be a success.

The real hive bees are here too, rounder of
body and more stately of flight, not alighting with
an impertinent jerk, but coming deliberately to

CATKIN TIME 57

anchor like the important ships that they are.
Besides the brown bees that we call our own,
and which I prefer in my apiary to any foreigner,
there are some yellow Italians that must have come
nearly two miles, for Italians are not kept nearer.
Then there are humble - bees, yellow - banded,
furnace-tailed and yellow-headed. Far more im-
portant people these than the worker bees from
the hive, for each of them represents a community
in herself; each is a mother out for the house-
keeping of a family that shall by and by be a great
and flourishing city.

In sheer contrast to the fussing, industrious bees
are the peacock and small tortoise-shell butterflies
that sit and sip and bask with slow-winking, painted
wings signalling their ecstasy. Theirs is a rare
pleasure even in butterfly-dom, for it is a renewal
of joy after personal annihilation. These gems
knew the ivy blossom last autumn, and then laid
themselves by in winter coma to be called only a
day or two ago by the warmth of summer's new
sun. Even in autumn they did not know any joy
comparable to this spring riot of sallow blossom.

The full glory of the sallow blossom is not quite
yet, but there is much fascination in finding now
the few trees in favoured situations that have
struck the golden note in advance of their rivals.
The entomologist, who does not care for hibernated
specimens, goes to the sallow by night, and there
gets a few of the hardy early moths of the year.
I can see them now as I saw them twenty years

58 THE RING OF NATURE

ago, silently flapping their large thin wings on the
catkins, that seem to glow like faint lamps in the
dark.

And here comes ambling down the blackthorn
grove the daintiest, freshest butterfly of the
whole year, and so unfailingly early of appearance
as to deserve the name of the very spirit of spring.
Who does not find a sunny day in March made
perfect by the brimstone butterfly ? It has had
its flight in autumn and has bestowed its feathered
wings somewhere out of reach of the mould of
winter, and it appears now as fresh as though it
had been fashioned to-day in freshest butter —
a fancy perhaps that has given the name of butter-
fly to the whole order.

The blackthorns are just bursting their crimson-
brown cerements and are here and there covered
with dazzling stars, but the brimstone butterfly
ignores them all and goes ' boffling ' on, covering
an immense stretch of country and showing itself
to a large number of connoisseurs of spring in a
day's journey. (' Boffle-fly ' may give another
clue to the origin of the name ' butterfly.')

For a moment or two it hangs on a holly bush,
and then, if the under sides of the leaves are show-
ing, you have the greatest difficulty in finding the
insect, for its yellow, without being nearly the
same colour, is quite undistinguished from the
pale-bluish green of the leaves. By the time we
have found it, and admired a little the smooth
beauty of its wing and the chaste decoration of

CATKIN TIME 59

one small reddish ' o ' like a fungus-mark on the
leaf-shaped wing, the spirit of spring is off again.
It is making a search, which would puzzle most
botanists hereabouts, for a bush that, when it comes
into leaf, will declare itself to be buckthorn, for it
is on that plant that brimstones' eggs must be
laid if the caterpillars are to live. I may confess
that I have never seen the buckthorn here ; yet
that it is to be found the punctual appearance of
fresh-and-fresh brimstones in July seems to testify.
I cannot say that the butterfly succeeds in
identifying the plant before it is in leaf, for I do
not know that the eggs have been found before
May, and then they are fixed on the leaves them-
selves. But what wonderful instinct is this that
enables a honey-living creature to select from all
the leaves of the forest that one which its larvae
must eat if they are to grow up into butterflies
themselves ?

60 THE RING OF NATURE

MARCH
II

BEES — HUMBLE AND OTHERWISE

THERE is no more joyous sound than the
deep hum of the first humble-bee as she
winnows the red beech leaves on some bank that
she is searching for a site for her nest. It is
usually the yellow-banded bee that thus first pre-
sents herself. The big red-tailed bee comes next,
and the yellow-thoraxed bee, not usually so large
as either of these, but still a giant by comparison
with the hive bee, generally gets up last.

A writer in the British Bee Journal says of the
wild bees : — ' I love them so well that I could even
tell the species by their hum, as you may the birds
by their song, or the butterflies by their flight,
or the flowers by their scent.' The ordinary reader
may spend a few hours in the garden listening to
the one or two bees that he knows, and he may
imagine that he has reached the same height of
musical appreciation. He will find most of the
queen humble-bees of the neighbourhood humming
round the flowering currant if it is well out and the

BEES— HUMBLE AND OTHERWISE 61

air is balmy and the sun shining. How many
species will he reckon them ?

Every one knows the story of how humble-bees
had to be sent to New Zealand in order that the
colonists might raise red clover. Perhaps few
know the whole story. It ought to begin with
the sorites, invented by Darwin and elaborated by
a later hand, to prove that old maids were one of
the mainstays of England. Old maids keep cats ;
their cats catch mice that destroy bees' nests,
thus saving the bees which are essential ,to the
fertilization of red clover; red clover nourishes
the beef of old England, but for which our valour
might starve.

So when the New Zealanders began to raise the
same kind of beef by planting red clover, they
found that, through the absence of long-tongued
bees in their country, it would not set seed.
The obvious thing was to import humble-bees,
and with that the story usually ends.

But there are humble-bees and humble-bees.
The yellow -banded humble-bee with the white
tail, which happens to have been selected for
emigration to New Zealand, is very much given to
biting holes through calyx and corolla, and thus
taking a flower's honey without fertilizing it.
Any one who watches a row of scarlet-runners or
a patch of comfrey in blossom, will see blossom
after blossom thus bitten, and bee after bee sipping
the nectar without one thought of pushing its
tongue through the proper flower entrance.

62 THE RING OF NATURE

Mr. F. W. L. Sladen, one of those who under-
stand bees in this country, was therefore respon-
sible for sending as the second consignment to New
Zealand the red-tailed humble-bee, which is not
given to the nefarious habit, and henceforth the
roast beef of New Zealand rested on a firmer basis.

Let us find this red-tailed humble-bee on the
flowering currant. She is seen in a moment.
Her name of course is Bombus lapidarius. You
will find her later in the year heading a consider-
able nest in a deep hole on some stony bank, and
if you attempt to interview her there, you will find
that she is the fiercest of all our humble-bees.
On the other hand, you may think that you find
her inhabiting a moss-woven nest on the surface,
and then you will find her a very mild-mannered
bee. In the second case, you are dealing with
B. derhamellus, quite another kind of bee. The
quickest way to tell them apart is to see whether
one of them has the hairs of its pollen baskets
and some other of its leg-hairs red instead of
black. If it has, it is derhamellus.

I would not attempt in this place to unravel the
species that may be described as yellow-thoraxed.
Suffice it to say that there are about twelve of
them, more or less alike to the casual eye. The
rest of our humble-bees may be put down by the
uninitiated as varieties of our banded bee,
Bombus terrestris. Added to those already given,
they make up the list to twenty. Three times
twenty are sixty, and that gives the number of

BEES— HUMBLE AND OTHERWISE 63

males, females and workers, each bearing its
own distinct livery, that have to be known,
whether to the ear or to the eye, before our know-
ledge of the humble-bees is complete. More than
that, our humble-bees are very variable. In each
sex of each species many well-marked varieties
have been tabulated by entomologists, and often
the work of one investigator has been undone by
another, who has found that some of his specimens
have been put under the wrong label.

Here, for a striking example, comes a bee that
will not be found in your gallery of coloured
portraits of the types of all the British species.
It is neither yellow at one end, red at the other,
nor banded in the middle. It is a large and heavy
bee, of one uniform black all over. That is the
extreme melanistic type to which several of our
species run, and you will only be able to decide
its species by attention to the proportions of its
parts, either to the eye or through the microscope.
It may be one of several humble-bees ; it may be
no humble-bee at all. That red-tailed one too,
and yonder banded one, they are not humble-
bees unless you extend the term to cover four
more species.

What is this riddle ? Any one would swear
that the bees just pointed out were humble-bees
if the others were. Still more would he swear it
if he saw the suspected creatures entering a humble-
bee nest with others apparently just like them.
The bees themselves are evidently deceived by

64 THE RING OF NATURE

these cuckoo bees that enter their nests, and there
live and multiply at the expense of their hosts.

There have at present been discovered only
four species of these cuckoo humble-bees, but as
the genus is well spread throughout the world,
and as these parasites usually very closely resemble
their hosts, it is likely that there are other dis-
coveries in store for some lucky or enterprising
entomologist. At any rate, the knowledge that
there are such beings adds to the interest with
which we daily watch the flowering currant bush.

Apathus, unfeeling, is the name by which we
know this genus of humble-bee parasites. They
are generally to be known from the honest insects
they personate by their darker wings and more
shiny abdomen. By this latter characteristic the
bee-keeper knows those of his hive bees that have
taken to robbing their neighbours. He believes
that the defenders strip off some of the hairs of
the invaders in their struggles to prevent their
entrance. It is strange that a similar mark
should adhere by inheritance to these unchallenged
thieves of the humble-bee.

As soon as the red dead-nettle is well in bloom
it is visited by another bee, obviously not of the
' humble ' persuasion. It is when it first appears
a yellow-thoraxed bee, of a stoutness approaching
that of the class just mentioned, but of far livelier
habits, darting this way and that at speed and
hovering before a flower in a way that reminds
us of the humming-bird hawk-moth. When the

BEES— HUMBLE AND OTHERWISE 65

sun has played on it for a few hours it is a greyish
bee with a white face and — but let me catch one
and show you. Afraid of being stung ? No,
for the simple reason that I know this bee to be a
male. There. You see that the whole of its face
is a staring cream colour, next that the middle pair
of legs are furnished with extraordinarily long
hairs of which no one yet has learned any use —
except one, as a means of naming the insect. We
call it Anthophora pilipes, or, in the bosom of the
family, ' Old Hairy-legs.'

And where is Mrs. Hairy-legs ? You would
never guess. A few days ago she slept in her
chrysalis underground. Hairy-legs came first to
the dead-nettles or the white alyssum — the ladies
must not be kept waiting. But now I see, Mrs.
Hairy-legs is here also. She is that coal-black
bee with yellow pollen baskets, for, unlike her
destined husband, she is hard at work collecting
food for her destined young. You don't believe
it ? Ah, now Hairy-legs has discovered her.
See him hover behind her on rapidly vibrating
wing, all the ardour of love in his very hum. See
him dart at her like a shot suddenly released from
a catapult. Yes, that is certainly Mrs. Hairy-
legs, and if you catch her, she will give you some-
what of a sting, a very sharp prick that hurts quite
as much at the outset as our hive bee herself,
but leaves a less poisonous result.

We could scarcely select a better solitary bee
for open-air study than this same Hairy-legs.

66 THE RING OF NATURE

It is so widely distributed that I have seen it
within the boundaries of the city of London,
hovering on a sunny day round the flower stalls
in our streets at the time when daffodils are most
in evidence. Only, as a rule, the males appear in
such a public place. They are at all times both
more numerous and more daring than the females.
The flower sellers do not mind them, but they
rather stare when a man comes by and calmly
scoops them into the hand as they hover before the
blossoms.

We must find a quieter place than Regent Circus
for studying our Anthophora. There must be an
enormous colony of them at Kew to judge by the
number of females in the Alpine garden from the
time of the crocus till the Solomon's seal is in
flower. I have not yet found that colony.
Probably in some sandy bank, or it may be in a
wall with many nail-holes, a swarm of these black
bees should be found digging their galleries or
plenishing them with pollen mixed with honey.

Among them, sailing about with demurer flight,
may be seen some grey bees more like Hairy-legs
than his wife, but on closer acquaintance very
different from either. It is really a black bee with
white spots on it — yes, spots and not bands as
most bees are marked with. These are upon the
abdomen, the thorax being bordered with whitish
hairs so as to leave a triangle of black in the
middle. A demure hypocrite is this Melecta
armata, for it is sailing about in this busy colony

BEES— HUMBLE AND OTHERWISE 67

for an opportunity to lay its egg in the pollen mass
that Anthophora has accumulated for her own
progeny. Once that is done, of course, the parasite
wins, at any rate, from the Anthophora grub,
for it hatches earlier and shoulders the other off
in true cuckoo fashion. Yet wait. The cuckoo
mother may have unwittingly carried into the
nest another parasite on her back, and that may
win the race both over the host grub and the
cuckoo grub.

These entomological studies are apt to lead us
far astray from any mere tribe with which we
start. The parasite that enters on the back of
the parasitic Melecta springs from the egg of a
beetle, the ponderous oil beetle often met with
upon the road by a good hedgerow in early spring.
The oil beetle lays its egg in a likely flower, and
the egg hatches into a leggy and active grub, which
seizes the first opportunity offered to jump on to
the first bee that visits the flower and to hang on to
her hairs and not to leave till she comes to her
own nest. Then the oil beetle larva buries itself
in the larder, shortly abandons its legginess and
lives the next stage of its life as a fat and rolling
maggot.

It may seem natural that a slovenly parasite
bee may be more prone to victimization by a sub-
parasite than the industrious Mrs. Hairy-legs
herself, and Melecta gets the credit for bringing
in the oil beetle in most cases where it is found in
sole occupation of Anthophora's nest. At any rate,

68 THE RING OF NATURE

a Melecta armata has been found so covered with
the parasites that it was unable to take flight.
So in this case the nimble creatures had overdone
the thing and perhaps all perished because the
last comers would not heed the cry of ' Full up.'

Another bee that forces itself on the attention of
even the most casual observer is Andrena fulva,
affectionately called golden Andrena. When the
female first appears it is a stoutish bee well covered
with long silky hairs of a rich, almost dazzling
orange. It appears in dozens and scores, settling
on the sun-bathed ground and not fearing the
earthquake that we are when we walk. It is a
stingless bee, and so we can catch it and admire
its feathered legs and general woolly appearance,
and offering a finger to its mandibles find out how
well it can bite. But by watching respectfully
we find out more of its economy.

Under a sheltering and land-marking leaf on
the edge of the gravel path or on the lawn, the
little golden lady begins to dig a hole just the
outside diameter of her body. As the hole
deepens, a little pile of debris marks the opening
of the shaft and the bee does not rest till she
has a more or less vertical gallery nearly a foot
in depth. Then she fetches pollen and makes
provision for one grub, the egg for which she lays
on the mass. She roofs that cell and successively
constructs four or five others above it, each stored
with the right quantity of pollen and furnished
with an embryo grub to eat it. We note that

BEES— HUMBLE AND OTHERWISE 69

long before she has reached this stage, her golden
duvet has worn off and she appears as a very
commonplace brown bee. Let the reader discover
for himself her male from among those of the
sixty-three British bees that belong to the genus
Andrena.

And what is this elegant little wasp that so
diligently flies about among the burrows of the
Andrena ? It is Nomada ruficornis, as you may
see by catching it and looking at its horns. Ah,
you caught a big one and it stung you. I knew it
would, but as its sting is but a feeble one I worked
this little surprise for All Fools' Day. If you
had caught a smaller one you would probably have
had no sting, for the male, as in every species of
wild bee and wasp except one, is smaller than
the female. Lastly, be it known that this insect
that we have been calling wasp, and which is
so emphatically like one, is technically known to
entomologists as a bee.

What makes it a bee ? A solitary wasp when
found will be seen to resemble our social wasps
not only in colour, but in the power of folding its
wings lengthways when it settles. The wasp at
rest appears to have wings that are mere strokes
and obviously incapable of raising the insect into
the air. It is because each has been doubled along
its length and folded together. It is a businesslike
arrangement that suits the bustling underground
habits of the wasps, though it would equally suit
the hundreds of bees that also dig holes for a

70 THE RING OF NATURE

living. Nevertheless, none of our bees have
folding wings, and they remain the unfailing
trade-mark of the wasp.

The solitary wasp when found will furnish an
even more exciting exhibition than the leaf-cutter
or the mason bee. The food it supplies to its
future progeny has not the keeping qualities of
honey. It consists of caterpillars, flies, gnats, or
other animal substances, according to the species
of the wasp, which usually, with the unerring skill
of a trained entomologist, selects some particular
species of some particular genus for its prey.
Seeing that a dead gnat or caterpillar will go bad
in a week or even before the grub that ought to
live on it for several weeks is born, the wasp must
adopt some system of cold storage or preservation,
in order to prolong its keeping qualities.

The caterpillar might be supplied alive, but
then its struggles would prove too much for the
tiny maggot that begins to eat it. But if the
wasp mother stings it lightly just in the right
nerve ganglion, that will paralyse it and render
it docile to the devourer and as little subject to
decay as a man in a trance. They are not merely
superficial observers but biological, distinguishing
apparently between similar species by differences
in the nervous systems, or, in other words, by the
situation of the place where a sting will paralyse
the victim without killing it. The insect thus
deftly stabbed remains alive for days and even
weeks, but all the time motionless and fit prey

BEES— HUMBLE AND OTHERWISE 71

for a young and tender grub. The grub, by the
way, must be as expert an anatomist as its mother,
for it has to feed for a long time only on such
parts of the caterpillar's body as can be eaten
without bringing its life to an end.

These amazing wasp-surgeons are by no means
uncommon. In this country they are mostly in
small sizes, but there is one that occasionally
appears in the Isle of Wight whose prey is the
honey bee. One of large size and more likely to
be met with is one or other of the Ammophila
genus, frequenting such sandy places as the dunes
by Liverpool, Lowestoft, Deal, and other places.
The Ammophilas or ' sand-lovers ' are extraordi-
narily long of waist, the abdomen appearing to be
so detached from the body that when the insect
is flying it looks like two insects closely following
one another. They are sometimes black, banded
with red, sometimes black with yellow stripes, and
sometimes the stripes only appear as dots.

There is no more interesting sight than a colony
of these very busy wasps digging their holes in
the sand, covering them with flat stones while they
go hunting, and dragging home their prey with
great appearance of fussiness and anxiety, like
policemen quite new to their work. One of them
has gained the almost unique eminence among
animals of a tool-user, for it has been seen to keep
a selected stone to use as a rammer for finishing
off the tampion with which it finally closes down
its living larder and nursery.

72 THE RING OF NATURE

Other good large solitary wasps of true wasp
livery will be found burrowing in decayed trees,
a habit that earns for them the name of carpenter
wasps ; other smaller ones make neater and more
workmanlike holes in sound larch palings or other
woodwork. None of them has been studied in
this country as they and their associates have
been in France by M. Fabre and others, or in
America by Mr. and Mrs. Peckham. In this
small sub-department of natural history, then,
there is a field for entertaining observation not
merely through one summer, but through many
years. Here is research work worthy of the
highest science and within the capacity of the
quite uninstructed but painstaking boy ; food for
the entertainment of an afternoon or for the
absorbing attention of a lifetime.

SONGS TO THE SUN 73

APRIL

SONGS TO THE SUN

WHEN the April sun is shining through the
bare branches of the orchard, casting
blue shadows on the grass and persuading the
bunches of blossom to open without delay, there
is no song that so appropriately accompanies this
foretaste of summer as that of the great tit.
' Peter, Peter, Peter,' he sings everywhere, for he
is happily a common bird. It is a good swinging
note that expresses not merely the happiness of
sunshine but the vigour of spring. If you want
the mellowness of summer, wait a few days till the
cuckoo comes. His is the same see-saw between
two notes but altogether in another key and
measure. The great tit has been singing two full
months when the cuckoo comes. A sparkling
north-east wind is quite good enough for him,
with plenty of work to do before he can get his
tale of caterpillars.

The blue tit tries to outsing his big brother
with a song of ' Silly me me me me,' the coal tit

74 THE RING OF NATURE

has somewhat the same remark to make, and the
marsh tit sings I cannot remember what, words
that doubtless sound like English nonsense, but
which convey a very good message of praise for
all that makes life worth living. The long-tailed
tit has a hymn of which no one can catch all the
notes any more than any artist can catch all the
tints and turns of his beauty as he flits racket-
tailed across the blue sky or sportfully chases his
tiny wife in and out among the yew branches.
They will be nesting in the blackthorn half a mile
from the nearest hen-roost, but they will line and
quilt their nest with thousands of the softest feathers
they can pick up when no one is by to see. The
actual number of feathers counted in one nest by
' the accurate M'Gillivray ' was 2379.

There is another kind of music in the raucous
' kyarrh ' of the carrion crow, which one can hear
further than the songster can be seen as he balances
on a tall elm or swoops up and down in the presence
of his more retiring partner. His call is obviously
harsher than the ' caw ' of contentment that comes
from the innocent rookery where one bird of each
pair keeps a very watchful eye on the nest while
the other is foraging for sticks or lining material.
A third member of the crow tribe, the rosy plum-
aged, blue-winged jay, brings the ' caw ' down to a
' squawk,' and a fourth, the magpie, debases it to
a chatter that rings wonderfully across the sloping
field whose hedges of hawthorn are greening so
brightly under the influence of early April.

I'HEN THE LARK SINGS

SONGS TO THE SUN 75

The ' Summer is coming. I know it, I know it '
of the thrush is a cheerful song that scarcely
rises and falls with the fortunes of the day. Even
when clouds float over the sun he knows it, he
knows it and affirms it, affirms it as confidently
as when the sun shines and sets all the minor
poets singing. The blackbird, on the other hand,
keeps his mellow, sympathetic notes for occasions
that specially appeal to him. He welcomes the
dawn with a dreamy, well-pitched rapture, and
towards the setting of the sun his rich music again
rings flute-like through the thicket. But he sings
most cheerfully of all when a shower has just
fallen, and when, before the last drops are down,
the sun is shining in what we call April fashion.
Does he rejoice to see the rainbow in the sky —
or to think of the worms that the warm rain will
bring forth ?

When we hear the chaffinch and the yellow-
hammer sing side by side, we are tempted to wonder
whether the classifiers have done well to place
them far apart, describing one as a finch and the
other as a bunting. The song of each is much the
same twitter, and seems to end on much the same
note. At any rate, the construction is but one
for the two songs, which resemble besides only
those of the corn bunting and the greenfinch.
The ' little bit o' bread and no cheese ' of the
yellow-hammer is universally known. Not so
happy have been the attempts to vocalize the
chaffinch's shorter song. ' Come my love and

76 THE RING OF NATURE

meet me he-ere ' takes many liberties with it.
The last word is clearly ' ginger-beer,' and all the
rest is mere stuttering on the first syllable. Thus
between the two, these two birds demand a fair
lunch. It remains for the greenfinch and the corn
bunting to make constant insistence on the one
omitted article, the ' che-ee-ese,' the shrill, dreamy
shout for which echoes from the hedges all day
long.

And if the chaffinch is a bunting, what, then, is
this bird like a dowdy kingfisher sitting in an oak
and singing like a tit ? It is the nut -hatch, occupy-
ing a genus and a family all to himself, and it
seems fairly clear that it has deliberately borrowed
a song from the tits, having none of its own. So
we must admit that the chaffinch may have
borrowed also (with marked improvement) from
a generic stranger. For the bullfinch, who might
stand for the king of the finches, has in nature
scarcely a vestige of that bold pipe with which the
enslaved and educated tame bullfinch delights us.
The hawfinch is equally silent, and the goldfinch
sings, from lack of force, a good deal less notably
than the chaffinch.

We are apt to overlook the robin in our
catalogue of March music, because he has been
singing so cheerfully all through the cold weather.
Scarcely less optimistic has been the hedge-sparrow,
who for ever sings a very sweet exordium and
ends it on a frayed note that no hedge-sparrow
yet has managed to splice on to a discourse. It

SONGS TO THE SUN 77

is as though he for ever chanted some such words
as these : ' Whereas the summer is really and
truly just about to begin,' and never managed to
overleap the first comma. The jolly little wren,
on the other hand, generally brings his energetic
twitter to a satisfying period. We never realize
quite how energetic his song is till we see him
clutching his perch as though for dear life, his
tiny body staggering and trembling with the
strength of his emotion, his yellow mouth wide
open in a barely sufficient effort to emit the ringing
effusion of his soul.

But the first song and the last song of all to
charm us in the open field, when the blue sky is
wide open and the sun at its height, is that of the
lark. His wing-work under the dome of heaven
seems to pump his organ pipes full of air, so that
he sings, as stop-watch critics have noted, by the
four or five minutes together, surging from gentle
to strong in each bar, and with a crescendo from
the first bar to the last. Who does not stop to
throw his head back and scan the almost intoler-
ably bright sky to find the swimming dot whose
motions are timed to that fountain of music ?
Still more we recognise the artistry of the lark
when we see him gently lowering, lowering, with
wider and wider oscillations, to his home in the
field, and mark with what taste his song is altered
to fit the new movement, swinging slower and
wider with the actor's movements, till it stops as
he drops to his home in the grass.

78 THE RING OF NATURE

In the next field those pretty clowns, the
peewits, are ' bofning ' up and down, their broad-
ended wings seeming ever about to fail them
and send them tumbling beyond recovery, but
actually bearing them with extraordinary deft-
ness. The common name I have selected from
many gives some faint idea of the weird sweetness
of their call. It is just a symbol by means of which
can be called up the shrill but beautiful com-
plainings with which they greet our steps when
they stray anywhere near their eggs upon the
ground. They have evidently eggs just now in
the rough field, where they tumble and wheel
with an excess of anxiety that many a lady in
town must own is not unjustified. Can there be
any one in the world who, having seen a newly
hatched lapwing, can still eat plovers' eggs ?
Can there be any farmer aware of one tenth of
the bird's usefulness who can permit her to
do so?

The reddish-brown ploughed field dips at an
edge and makes a little glen thick with the ebony
of blackthorn, on which the starry white blossoms
are just opening in showers. A song of a new kind
comes from there — a low vibrant throb that speaks
of sunshine caught in a thicket, rather than the
free sunshine in which the lark swims. It is nearly
the same music that the pigeons make as they
sprawl on the sunny slope of a roof. We hear it
again in June when our migrant turtle dove has
come to us from Egypt.

SONGS TO THE SUN 79

Doves ot the fir- wood walling high our red roof,
Through the long noon coo, crooning through the

The crooning from the blackthorn thicket is
evidently a chorus. It keeps on incessantly at
great volume yet rises and falls as voices are
evidently added to or taken from it. Under the
blossomed boughs, in the little sheep-track of a
path that threads the thicket, not only the air
but the very earth seems to vibrate with the
exultant yet low- toned croon. I reach the edge
of a pond, the surface of which seems to be
covered with white bubbles blown here and there.
Whiter than bubbles, they are like goose down
floating on the water, and they swell into new
whiteness and subside into comparative grey as
the song comes and goes.

We have to walk with great silence in order to
see the frogs well, swelling out their white throats
and crooning their ecstatic song. At the least
alarm, violent ripples take the place of the white
bubbles, and the whole company goes down among
the sub-aquatic weeds. Then we have to wait
quietly, and one by one the heads pop up again,
two prominent eye-cases and a third point above
water for the nose. Then the throat comes up so
white that you would think nothing could be
whiter, but while you look it swells three times
whiter, invades the chest and the neck to the back
of the head, and the musical drum-like throb calls

80 THE RING OF NATURE

through air and water to the other frogs to resume
their chorus.

These frogs in the blackthorn dingle are late this
year. The pond is already half full, as it would
seem, of the spawn of earlier frogs, and as I listen
to the rapidly growing chorus again, the short, high
yelp of the toad breaks in. A hotter sound this
than the March croaking of the frog, and the
spawning time of the toads is usually a fortnight
later than that of the frogs. But one year I saw
frogs and toads both in the midst of their spawning
on the same day. The sun had evidently delayed
to shine till after the frogs' time, and then had
come out strong with the call to frogs and toads
together.

So excited and thronged were the rival
amphibians that they did not know one another
for scions of different houses, and you saw strange
love-making between Montagues and Capulets and
Capulets and Montagues. I doubt, however,
whether cross-bred progeny of toad and ' hop-
toad ' has often if ever been noted. As it
happened on that day, at about three in the
afternoon, the toads all began to climb out of the
pond and make for the bushes. Some carried
frogs on their backs, but the latter, not relishing
an advance into the interior, dropped off and made
back to the water, where they met and passed
toads that had torn themselves from their more
aquatic loves to join the landward route march.
I went to the pond a few days after. The frogs

SONGS TO THE SUN 81

were spawning, but of the hundreds of toads not
one was to be seen or dug up from among the dead
leaves beyond the bank.

Another time I found hundreds of toads issuing
from a long brick wall bounding for, perhaps, a
mile Osterley Park in Middlesex. A road runs
next the wall, and the toads were flopping about
the road shouting their mellow call, that of the
female about a third lower than that of the male,
making together a perfect babel of oily music. The
sun had fetched them out from a maze of sleep-
ing-places in the decayed foundation of the wall,
and they were perfectly heedless of the fact that
they were on a high road — a fact marked by more
than a dozen bodies that had been crushed by the
wheels of bicycles and motor-cars that had gone
by. What made the concourse more mysterious
was the fact that though I looked well, I could
find no trace of any pond within hundreds of
yards of the place, on the road side of the wall.

It is known, of course, that frogs and toads
both breed in the water. But it does seem as
though either of them could manage to produce
young that would grow to maturity without an
actual pond or pool. I have found frogs of all
sizes in a walled garden of rank wet grass not
far from where an old pond had been, but two
or three years after the pond had gone and the
garden had been enclosed.

The habits adopted by species of frogs through-
out the world are many and various. The well-
F

82 THE RING OF NATURE

known Surinam toad has the eggs placed on her
back, and there the young remain each in a
separate cell through the tadpole stage and until
they reach the adult form. In Darwin's frog the
onus of nursing is transferred to the male, who
carries the eggs in a pouch reached through the
mouth till the young frogs are able to take care of
themselves. A tree frog of South America has a
similar pouch, this time on the back of the female ;
another provides a slimy mass for the eggs in
a nest of bamboo leaves, and there the whole
tadpole stage is passed; in a third species the
tadpoles attach themselves by their sucking
mouths to their mother, and share her fortunes till
they get their four legs. All these habits have
no doubt been created by some such force of
circumstances as the drying up of the ponds in
which the great mass of amphibians spend the
infantine stage of their career.

A short rapid rattle down in the wood reminds
you of the roar of a fallow buck. It is not, however,
the song season of that animal, and I know the
instrumentalist. I can see his instrument in the
gleam of a dead white branch among the green
stipple of the live trees. With a glass I should be
able to make out the musician from here, but it
is not at all likely that he will have finished before
we get down to the wood.

The rattle, repeated faithfully every two or
three minutes, grows louder and louder. The
branch chosen is like a violin in its vibrant response,

SONGS TO THE SUN 83

and any one who sees the great spotted-wood-
pecker at work on his instrument for the first time
must be astonished at the small size of the bird
that makes so much sound. He does not seem
nearly as large as a blackbird, though he is actually
of about the same size. He has, like other wood-
peckers, a red tassel on his head, and he is picked
out with diamonds of black and white that shine
like satin or silk in the bright sun that bathes
him and the clear white branch at which he
hammers.

The world is getting green now, but it is largely
a deceptive green. You do not see that the snails
have made free with the dark glossiness of the
arum or the spiked leaves of the blue-bells. The
stinging nettles are well armed against all but
the caterpillars of the Vanessidae, the ground ivy
is protected by the essence that gives it the strong
aroma we like for auld acquaintance sake, and the
blue-bells and daffodils are full of sharp crystals
that quickly bring sores on the hands of those who
pick them.

Now is the time when we make a great on-
slaught on the snails and slugs in the garden by
putting down traps that catch them by dozens
a day. Cut a turnip, carrot, or other vegetable
into inch-thick slices and place these near your
favourite rockery plants and other things that
slugs like, and in the morning you will find on the
under side many a fat beast of whose presence the
garden will be well rid. You will not catch them

84 THE RING OF NATURE

with turnips when the fresh greenery of the year
is well under weigh.

Sometimes a green or brown caterpillar is found
curled up under the slug trap. It is a grub of last
year that has hibernated somehow in the cold
ground, and is anxious to begin eating again.
The tiny new caterpillars of the year must be very
far to seek, and they are certainly not very satisfying
when they are found. But the birds from over
the sea do not wait till the tide of insect life is full,
so anxious are they to return to the groves of dear
old England. They are ready to starve a little
rather than let their great work get ahead of them,
and in a very few days now they will be here with
their dainty songs and spruce overseas manner.

Hark ! The great tit again, singing his swinging
song to let you know that even an all-day work-
man has breath to give praise. But it is not
' Peter, Peter ' he is calling, unless you allow that
name to be accented equally on each syllable.
Nor is the bird the great tit that skips mouse-like
among the brown twigs of the oak, sending down
now and then a tiny scale that the swelling leaf-
bud has done with. It is a dainty brown bird
countershaded with pearl and of a slim elegance
that our winters do not nourish. And its song,
which for a moment sounded like ' Peter, Peter,'
is ' Chiff-chaff, Chiffy-chaffy, Chiff-chaff.' The
little brown bird is the first of many summer
songsters from over the sea.

THE HOMECOMERS 85

APRIL
II

THE HOMECOMERS

FOR a week, even for a month, the cuckoo
has been reported from one part of the
country and another. Every year he is heard
long before he actually comes. Yesterday, a
favoured farm hand both heard and saw him.
As the man chopped poles from a withy tree,
sending the white chips flying from his keen axe,
the bird sat for a little time in a tree near by and
gave his name a dozen times. We listened for
him all day long and never heard him, but in the
evening there came over the orchard from the
west, first a martin, then another, and then a
swallow, evidently one of our own swallows, for
it stayed and hawked back and forth till the sun
set.

It is a penalty on these birds that spend their
winter in a softer climate that they should be
regarded as foreigners. Just so much foreigners
are the people of the big house who annually
migrate to Italy in autumn, and do not return till

86 THE RING OF NATURE

the cable tells them that England is warm and
vigorous with spring. And the people of the
village are perhaps impartial enough to think of
the unfeathered migrants, too, as something not
quite English.

Every swallow and even every cuckoo that comes
to us in April comes back to its home. Comes
back to the parish and the field where it was
hatched, practices for the first time or once again
the home songs of its parents, woos its English
bride here that perhaps it never looked at in
Africa, and rears its English family here.

Nor are these winter-fleers the tiny minority
among English birds that we imply them to be
when we speak of swallow and cuckoo as though
these were all. On the other hand, if the species
were added up I should not like to say whether
the residents or the migrants would be in the
majority.

Among the crows there are none that go away
for the winter, though in the bordering family of
the shrikes there is not one that resides the year
round, while the well-known butcher bird is a
summer bird, and the woodchat shrike when it does
come comes to breed. The finches are an unbroken
phalanx of year-round residents, and so are the
buntings, though they all move about a good deal
within the confines of the United Kingdom.

On the other hand, think of the tribe of the robin.
Count with the robin the hedge-sparrow, a very
valued resident, but you immediately cancel

THE HOMECOMERS 87

them with the nightingale and the blackcap,
which only come to us in April, and then the non-
residents pile up a reserve of marks with white-
throat, chiffchaff, willow-wren, wood-wren, lesser
whitethroat, garden - warbler, Dartford warbler,
reed-warbler, sedge-warbler, marsh-warbler, grass-
hopper-warbler.

Another more or less natural group of birds
gives us the sturdy little stonechat all the year
round, but we have to wait till summer for the
whinchat, the wheatear and that best of all
summer birds the redstart. The redstart naturally
introduces the spotted flycatcher and the pied,
which have no counterparts among our residents.
Neither have the swallow, the two martins, that
unique bird the swift, the goatsucker, nor the
cuckoo. The wryneck fills a lonely role on the
fringe of the woodpecker family, which gives
us otherwise three species that are with us the
year round, and the pigeons give us the same
respective figures, though the turtle-dove — which
comes to us late in spring — by its wide distribution
and its persistent crooning is as much in evidence
as the other three put together.

A month ago there was not a more melancholy-
looking little bird than the winter-pipit. It was
in from its cold meadows where the moon daisies
dance in summer and mooning about the dung-
mixens and the cow-yards, right under the nose
of any one who went by, not making any but the
most belated attempt to get out of harm's way.

88 THE RING OF NATURE

Now, there flies up from the grass where the pale
green cowslips are opening their honey-yellow
petals a bird that seems bent on reaching blue
heaven itself. Sixty feet up in the air it stops,
bends its back till it seems like to break, makes
parachutes of its wings and tail, and comes spirally
down to its starting-place in a flood of perfectly
ecstatic silvery music. That bird is the winter-
moping meadow-pipit.

Down the road is an ash tree that I like to watch
daily every April, till some morning it keeps mir-
aculous rendezvous with a bird that has wintered
in the south. Ah, there at last he is. Something
tells me that it is he, sitting on the same twig of
the same bough that he occupied last April, but
when he goes up into the air I am joyfully quite
certain of him. Up, up, he goes, then apparently
dislocates his back and comes down on umbrella
wings, singing, singing, singing till he reaches
again the self -same twig from which he started.
Apparently the same bird again as the winter-
moping meadow-pipit, but this is the tree-pipit,
constant to the habit of sky-rocketing from a
tree instead of from the ground, and preferring to
winter gaily in the south rather than moon about
an English dunghill.

The bird that often seems the most beautiful
of all is only seen in some southern counties on
its way to the north. It is only thus that the
redstart is seen in many places that seem eminently
suited to the bird, but which, nevertheless, cannot

THE HOMECOMERS 89

hold it on its way to other very similar places
where redstarts were hatched last year.

More beautiful than the redstart, in a quiet and
artistic way, is this one that I know I can show
you to-day by the old mill. It always lingers
there at least a week, as though it could not
quite make up its mind to leave so beautiful a
spot for another not more suited to its artistic
and material requirements.

There it is on the cart shed, a slim bird mainly
in yellow, but with a black ' chest protector ' and
grey head and back. It flies off with the tell-tale
' chizzick ' of the wagtail, and we can find it
again running with inimitable grace on the wet
stones of the brook. Its real home is in such
places as Tor's Steps on the Barle in Exmoor, or
by Bolton Abbey in Wharfedale, and I never
see it pass through our parish on its spring
migration without thinking of one of those
beautiful stickles in June when the grey wagtail
runs over the brown stones and in and out of
the cool water after caddis grubs and stone-fly
larvae.

The grey wagtail is not truly a migrant. Indeed,
it seems to move rather northward than southward
in winter. The pied wagtail, on the other hand,
moves southward, but still within our country.
The place of its nesting is vacant for the most part
during the winter, and we welcome it back as one
of the harbingers of spring. It is very nice to have
this dainty bird again, running along the house

90 THE RING OF NATURE

ridge and springing, all black-and-white daintiness,
into the air to catch the first gnats of spring.

A true migrant is the yellow wagtail. One
fine morning in spring, a whole company of them
will descend on a field like a cloud of golden
butterflies, and then we know for certain that the
flood of northward migration has set in. They
stay with us in flocks for some little time, assisting
at the potato planting by collecting innumerable
grubs behind the plough and making the dull
earth lively with a gold that rivals that of the
coltsfoot. The French call the bird Bergeronette
printaniere — Little Shepherdess of the Spring,
for it has the pretty habit of running about round
sheep or cattle for the sake of the flies that haunt
their near presence.

Our birds are not given halcyon weather for their
homecoming. The time at which they must
travel in order to make sure of their nesting sites
is one of the most windy and uncertain of all the
year. Whole armies of swallows are sometimes
wiped out in the passes of the Alps by hurricanes
of snow and hail which no bird can foresee. The
winds, especially violent at this time of year,
often sweep the birds far out of their course, tiring
them till they drop in the sea, and directing them
falsely beyond our islands into the wide Atlantic,
which not one short-winged bird in a hundred
thousand can cross. Fogs bewilder them, so that
they dash themselves to pieces against light-
houses and the street lamps of towns, and, among

THE HOMECOMERS 91

minor accidents that civilization arranges for them,
the telegraph wires cut them down as they fly
swiftly across them in heedless flocks. This
morning I picked up a golden plover, thus stopped
in his migration to the northern moors, and lots
of poor people in the neighbourhood keep the pot
boiling in spring from such windfalls. The birds
must fall by the hundred thousand from this one
accident of the telegraph wire alone.

Oh that man would be content to destroy our
songsters only by the accidents of civilization.
The tiny little bodies of our feathered nymphs are
still more coveted by the people of the Continent
for food. They are even valued as marks for the
' sportsman's ' gun, and it is a standing marvel
to Englishmen to see grown Frenchmen take a
delight in shooting tits and willow -wrens sitting,
and gathering every wild thing in feathers that
they can see into their strings of trophies. They
are generally known to pay very heavily for their
' sport ' in plagues of blight and caterpillar, from
which our soft-billed birds largely relieve us.
But in spring and in autumn the Frenchman and
the Italian have the chance to kill OUR birds as
they pass to or from the countries south of the
Alps, and that is a matter that concerns more
countries than the ones in which the shooting is
done. There is, moreover, far worse than shooting
afoot.

Perhaps our womenkind were responsible for
the great French massacres of swallows that took

92 THE RING OF NATURE

place annually until a few years ago. Wires were
set up as resting-places for the tired birds as they
came in from the Mediterranean, and when they
accepted the treacherous invitation an electric
current tumbled them by the thousand dead to
the ground. Now, however, France has joined
the International Convention for the Protection
of Birds, promoted principally by Austria, and
our ladies must wear something other than swallows'
wings in their hats.

Great Britain, whose example is generally con-
sidered of great value in these humane interna-
tional movements, stands outside the Convention,
and her ancient friend Italy takes the excuse to
do the same. Italy has especial opportunities of
waylaying the birds of northern Europe on their
spring journey, and makes the most of those
opportunities.

Nets are spun by the mile round Lago Maggiore
and Lago Lugano during the spring. An average
net is a mile long and fifteen feet high, and into
one of these the tired birds fly by the hundred at
short intervals during the three or four weeks of
migration. 'Roccolo ' hedges of hornbeam have been
planted and tended by the square mile, and they
are tenanted by blinded songsters and other lures
for the free birds. Imitation hawks are sent up
to frighten the birds into these shelters, which are
a maze of network entanglements from which no
escape is possible. The wonder seems to be that
any migrant goes over the passes alive.

THE HOMECOMERS 93

At one station in Upper Italy an ordinary
morning's take is five hundred birds, ranging from
thrushes to willow-wrens. If we were to give that
single station an average of two hundred a day
throughout the season of ten weeks, it would be
responsible for fourteen thousand birds at each
migration.

At Como and Varese ' redbreasts ' are sold not in
mere hundreds but by thousands in a day, their
price averaging from seventy-five centessimo a
dozen when the weather is cool to five centessimo
when the small bodies are not likely to keep.

In October 1890 nearly half a million small
birds crossed the frontier at Brescia, not as they
come into Sussex in spring, on joyful wing and
with glad twitter of anticipation, but in indis-
criminate, shapeless packets of fifty, from which
you could pick out flycatchers, whitethroats,
garden-warblers, pipits, and titmice. From Udine,
two hundred thousand are despatched by rail ; near
Montegrado, fourteen thousand swallows fell in three
days, and ' on the stone-field Crao ' no less than
three million in one season.

Perhaps the nightingale that was strangely
absent last summer from Honeysuckle Lane, or
the redstart you have missed this month from the
Lower Orchard, has been gobbled up in some Italian
polenta. On the other hand, they may have been
caught alive for a worse fate. Perhaps one or
both of them took part in one of those ' beautiful '
Resurrection festivals with which the people of

94 THE RING OF NATURE

Italy testify their faith. ' When the priest intoned
the Gloria,' says Baron von Berlepsch, the great
Austrian bird champion, who writes of these sad
doings, ' the congregation let loose the small birds
they had brought with them, in the brilliantly
lighted church, as a mark of the general feeling
of joy at the blissful Resurrection. The wretched
little winged creatures, dazzled by the light, flew
at the candles, only to be burned and scorched and
to perish in agony.'

Surely it is enough for our little friends to brave
the perils of contrary winds and freezing blizzards,
bewildering fogs and the allurements of light-
houses, the attack of hawks and crows and the
infirmities of weakness and cramp that must
often spoil their marvellous flight, without adding
the deliberate hatred of man.

To mark the reluctance of a whitethroat to cross
as much as half a field in one flight, to pick up the
body of some small unfortunate and examine the
shortness and feebleness of its wing, is to be
astonished at the power which sends them across
a whole continent in order to ' be in England now
that April 's there.' It is distinctly one of the
miracles of the year to find the pipit keeping
punctual tryst with the ash twig that knew it last
year, the two of them having been sundered by
thousands of miles and innumerable life-and-death
adventures.

There is no need for the catching and marking
of birds to see whether it is indeed the same swallow

THE HOMECOMERS 95

that comes back to the third beam in the cowshed
at California Farm, in the parish of Peace, in the
hundred of Comfort, Gloucestershire, England.
Any one who cares a rap for birds knows it to be
so. The flycatcher that only laid two eggs last
summer and only one the year before that, in the
broken plum tree in the Upper Orchard, has
probably been nesting in that tree for the last
twelve years. The martin that has the fancy to
decorate its nest with a long feather and the
swallow that builds in a hanging nest under the
eaves as though it were a martin, declare themselves
by their strange whims to be the same birds that
built in the same places last year. I knew in
Essex a mateless swallow that built nowhere, but
came and sat all day long between its flights on
a certain iron arch in the garden. When the
swallows came again next year that swallow came
and claimed its own perch, and resumed its
solitary life. It had the right to show its affection
thus for the gardener, for he was a humane man
and a great lover of the birds. If the swallow
came a third year it found the garden in other
hands, and then it must have felt that the world
was indeed made of sand. Perhaps it went off
and tried to console itself with another mate of
its own kind. That, at any rate, is what the
widower gardener had done.

I have been round to all the known bird posts,
and have found thus far that, in spite of Italian
roccolo, the privateers of the air, and all other

96 THE RING OF NATURE

impediments, the birds have thus far come back
to the places that knew them last year. With a
low seven-fold whistle in the orchard, the wryneck
said, ' Here.' The redstart wagged his red tail
from the dipping branch of the oak, the willow-
wren sang its ditty from a bramble spray in
Stitchwort Lane, the wood-wren showered its
descending tinkle from the top of the same horn-
beam that knew it last year, the nightingale of
Honeysuckle Lane has not really been poached,
and I heard him there again this afternoon.

In due time I shall hear the same old turtle
dove crooning from the thicket top of a pollard
oak, shall hear the same old night- jar spin its
' rattle note unvaried ' from the larch copse, growl
midnight anathemas at the same old corncrake
uttering its harsh call from the mowing grass all
night long. And then the tale of the homecomers
will be complete and summer at high tide.

SNAKES 97

MAY

SNAKES

ON this beautiful May morning I go out with
entire confidence to look for grass snakes.
There is the very big one that hung out all last
summer next to the water hole in the Upper
Orchard. He was a wily old fellow who never
gave you a chance to catch him, but I think I could
catch him this morning, overcome with the delight
of a sun bath so early in the year. Then there is
the under side of the hedge by the Roman road
where I have often found half a dozen at a time
coiled and ecstatically flung among the primroses.
They hibernate somewhere near and congregate
there thickly for a week or two before each going
off to its own summer domain.

The greatest spring congregation ever seen was
in a field higher up the hill. There on a bank in
full view of the public footpath a bush round a
hawthorn stump yielded one year an amazing
tangle of snakes. They were seen by a party of
women coming down the hill, and they declared

98 THE RING OF NATURE

that there were hundreds of snakes all in a heap
like a magnified handful of elvers. I do not
doubt that there were fully thirty, and that after
all is a good number. As soon as the boys heard
of it they went up there to kill snakes, but though
they hacked the bush up and did a good deal of
digging, not a scale was seen. Happily for them-
selves, the snakes had within the space of little
over half an hour adjourned to the safer hedge.

There is a pleasant summer place for snakes at
the entrance to the wood, where a spring issues
from the rock and meanders through two acres
of swamp gay with marsh marigolds and forget-
me-not and odorous with horse mint. Here one
day last June as a woman came to the stepping-
stones a large snake actually disputed the passage
with her. At any rate, it coiled itself and hissed
instead of making off, and that was quite enough
to determine the woman to go a little way round
and let the thing have its way.

The big snake is not by the stepping-stones
to-day. I had not expected it, for, though no
place is more certain to contain a few of the frog-
hunters in June, they are at present enjoying a
more ecstatic life composed of little else but
unlimited sun. There is a pond just within the
wood where the tadpoles have hatched, but are
not yet big. Last year, when these were about
half-grown, there was a great commotion in the
water one day, and I saw a snake about two feet
long entirely under water, snapping at the tad-

SNAKES 99

poles. They seemed to be perfectly aware of the
danger, for when the snake followed them up for
another snap they broke in all directions like
bleak when the pike is after them.

The grass snake, ringed snake, water snake —
Tropidonatus natrix — is an accomplished swimmer.
When long ago we were fishing in the lake one
of them came swimming in among the little waves,
as though it had come from the other side, nearly
half a mile away. About twenty yards from
shore it coiled and lay there as though it could
easily sleep, ' rocked in the cradle of the deep,'
but there was a wide bright eye gleaming above
an outer loop where the snake's long chin came
from the centre of the coil. But then its eyes
are always so, there being no lids or other means
of closing them. When we had sufficiently re-
covered our spirits to throw a tentative stone at
the reptile, it straightened itself out for a stroke
or two, made a sudden rush for the weeds in the
shallow water and vanished. It had a fancy to
go on dry land for a change and did so. It might
have chosen another means of evading, by going
down to the bottom of the lake, where it could
remain with ease for half an hour without coming
up to breathe.

I call this beautiful wood the Lily Wood, because,
as you can see, it is floored for many acres with
lily of the valley. We can see among them the
taller fronds of Solomon's seal, a fit associate of
the lily in the floral dominancy. Again, there are

100 THE RING OF NATURE

patches of campion which will make the wood
fairly blaze before the blue-bells have done spread-
ing their wonderful nebulous intangible azure,
like a very brilliant blue smoke among the trees.
Here conies, too, a ' bloody man's finger,' as our
country people call the purple orchid. If I live
to be ninety I shall never fail to find the purple
orchid richer and brighter every year. You seem
to see it again and with a new brilliance when you
have taken it in hand and felt the luscious weight
and fullness of its sap. I have not nearly exhausted
even the May beauties of my Lily Wood.

Hullo ! there they go from their basking place
close to the path. One, two, six or seven long
grey bodies shooting through the dog's mercury,
and rapidly reaching safety under the thick rods
of the hazel. I caught one, however, as it made
off to a too distant shelter, and another I hauled
out from a shallow cavity under a nut stowl where
it had coiled itself. One for me and one for you,
dear reader, to put in a handkerchief and take
back to your pupils and make them see its harm-
lessness and its beauty. But you must not mind
its strong smell, the only means it has of persuading
one who laughs at its ' fangs ' and hissing to let
it go.

The smell of the grass snake, that is the effluvium
that it emits when it is angry, hangs on the hands
through several washings. You can for the most
part escape it if you notice that it has origin in a
yellow oil that it exudes near the tail. If you have

SNAKES 101

the animal by the tail and also by the neck, it
cannot coil over the hand and thus put its stain
upon you, and you can carry it to where it can run
in long grass and make itself sweet again. When
I find my hand does smell a little I disguise it in
horse mint before and after washing, and the smell
is soon gone. The snake does not readily emit the
smell again, and it soon grows so tame as to have
no desire to use this unpleasant means of defence.

Holding my snake by tail and neck I cannot
get it quite straight, though nearly enough so to
measure it by a stick and find it more than three
feet long. I find that the grass snake rapidly
reaches this length. The great proportion of those
you find in spring are as long, and few of them,
big of girth as they may be, exceed three feet six,
though I am prepared to find the one by the water
hole in the Upper Orchard nearly five feet long.

Now see how difficult it is to hold a snake by the
tail. If it is upon the ground it will very quickly
get a hitch round some stick, and then you cannot
pull it back. The big scales are pointed behind
like the gills of the fish called ' miller's thumb.'
I regret to say that I have seen a snake torn in
half by its would-be captor when it had got half
its length into a hole. I must drop the tail of this
fellow, take it by the head and draw it through its
entanglement right foot foremost. It comes that
way as smooth as milk.

It is scarcely easier to hold him in the air. Every
snake you catch has the same untaught trick of

102 THE RING OF NATURE

escape. First, it climbs up its own tail and looks
so very like biting your hand that you are almost
certain to let it go. If you have presence of mind,
however, you can shake it straight as often as it
begins to come up, and then this snake that has
never been caught before, and comes of a line
none of the members of which have been so held
for a hundred million years, inevitably tries
another trick so efficacious that it might have been
thought out by a college of scientists.

It hangs straight, then swings in a small circle
that widens and widens till the snake is revolving
round a cone, the base of which is a foot and a
half in diameter. With all that leverage it is
putting a screw motion on its tail, which slips out
of your hand fraction by fraction and inch by
inch till you can hold it no more. If you want
to see more of your snake you must catch it again.

Now see the fury of a baffled snake. When I
go to pick it up this time it flings itself back
in a venomous coil, obviously ready for the strike,
and hisses and hisses in a crescendo of fury. Such
an attitude ought surely to scare any one. But as
I still come on, the coil is readjusted, the spring
tightened to its very tightest, and the hissing, if
possible, redoubled. Finding its enemy still un-
daunted the snake suddenly attempts to slip past
my hand and make off. I get in front again, and
the coiling and hissing are renewed ; I put a
finger on its nose, and it does not bite. It seems
to know that to put its threats into operation

SNAKES 103

would be a mistake. At any rate, after being so
cornered and flaunted my snake becomes resigned
to its fate. It gives up for the present any attempt
to escape, and if I leave it so and move a little way
off it is some moments before it very slowly uncoils
and begins to go off by stealth.

I am not going to trouble it much more. I will
only show you what might possibly have happened
if the snake had proceeded to the extremity of
biting me. I have got its mouth open with some
difficulty, and invite you to put a finger in. Note
the hundreds of very tiny little teeth all pointing
backward. It is easier for you to put your finger
into its mouth than to take it out. The snake can
swallow good large frogs, but it cannot easily
disgorge, and it would be awkward for itself if in
proceeding to the very extremity of hate it were
to anchor itself to an enemy as big as a man.
4 That 's all, Mr. Snake. You may go.' Off he
goes ; the most conspicuous thing about him, the
badge of his harmlessness, the bright yellow
crown at the back of his head, picked out and
accentuated by two black splashes behind it.
You need never give way to a snake so adorned
that disputes the stepping-stones with you.

As June wears on, big snakes annoy the farmer's
wife by haunting the marrow bed in the cowyard
and the waste heaps of straw in the rickyard
where her best hens lay. Before they leave, there
are buried in the warm heaps of fermenting
material strings of tough-skinned eggs about the

104 THE RING OF NATURE

size of pigeons' eggs. You can dig them up there
any year in August and early September, and if
you get them late you will have a chance of seeing
them hatch into young snakes. A reptile seven
inches long comes from the narrow compass of
one of these eggs. As soon as it hatches it coils
and threatens just like its mother. Its proportions,
however, are far more graceful. Its large and
brilliant eyes occupy a greater proportion of its
face, as all baby eyes should. It has the distinctive
yellow crown of its tribe and the black patches
that set it off, and one of these slender, faith-
fully miniatured snakelings swimming through the
dust with its head poised in a manner that any
calisthenic teacher must approve is as pretty an
object as there is in nature.

Last year I came to the wood rather early for
grass snakes, and it was not till I had hunted long
and far that I saw a reptile making off through the
hedge bottom. There was no time to speculate,
and in an instant I had seized it by the tail. In
another second it had dawned upon me that it
was not a grass snake, and with a cry of ' viper '
I flung it down.

The viper comes from its hibernaculum earlier
than the grass snake. It is comparatively an
Alpine species, occupying all the year round these
high dry banks rather than the frogging grounds
affected in summer by the grass snake. The dry
walls of our Cotswold country are its favourite
stronghold, and in spring the vipers are found

SNAKES 105

basking in the rare sunshine within easy reach
of their retreat.

I know a spot in the corner of a cornfield, near
an abandoned cottage garden, where on a bright
day I can find four or five vipers coiled at the edge
of the long grass that the plough does not reach.
Neither do the oats grow in that corner of the
field, but the scarlet pimpernel rambles over the
stone-brash soil and decorates the vipers' with-
drawing room with their bright blossoms. It was
a red-letter day when first I stepped into this
enchanted corner and saw a great female viper
stretched across my path, then a little further on
the darker and more slender body of a male, then
two others coiled in one nest.

Once I put my stick into this coil of two and
succeeded in throwing one of them some yards out
into the field. It was surprising to see with what
unerring instinct the creature pointed back for
' home.' No matter how often I turned it or even
twirled it about with my stick, the moment it came
to rest again it went flowing back as true as needle
to the magnet.

We hear of children and others handling vipers
with confidence and escaping their fangs as by
faith. George Borrow tells how he seized one of
them unbitten, and it was one of the incidents in
his narrative that every critic who knew nothing
about vipers doubted. My first adventure with
a viper was in this wise. Seeing the motion of
some animal through the dog's mercury, I followed

106 THE RING OF NATURE

it up and seized by the middle a snake about two
feet long, of an ash-grey colour with a row of
darker lozenges down its back. The back of its
head was scored with a black ' x ' and a mark
which a more gruesome imagination than mine
would have called a skull above the crossbones.
There was no golden ring at the back of its head,
but I, calling upon an imperfect memory, thought
that I must have heard that one sex of the grass
snake was without this ornament. And as the
snake instead of being squat and fat, as writers
say the adder is, was slim and elegant, I took it
to belong to a harmless species. So I allowed it
to twine itself in and out of my fingers, and even
to push out its tongue against my cheek. It is
this flickering tongue of forked black velvet that
many people insist on calling the snake's fang.

I lodged my snake in an oak that the ivy had
climbed, and as it coiled there took its photograph.
It seemed to have black eyes looking in rapture
to the sky, and as I peered at them and tried
to get them to look at me I was aware of another
pair beneath them that glared at me like garnets.
The black eyes seen first are sham ones, and I
thought that here was an excellent apparatus for
fascinating small creatures.

The snake, tired of being teased and photo-
graphed, now proceeded to climb the tree, and
with the aid of the ivy strands it went up very
well. It could have reached, no doubt, the
chaffinch's nest that I marked up there and

SNAKES 107

proceeded to climb to. I overtook the snake
about half-way up, took him and tied him in my
handkerchief and threw him down, afterwards
carrying him home in the breastpocket of my
coat. I showed him to several people, hand-
ling him with freedom in order to exhibit all
his points, then as he coiled and threatened on
the table I once more stroked the tip of his nose
with my finger. His patience was exhausted, and
like lightning he opened his mouth and bit me.
But as he must have damaged his fangs by biting
the handkerchief on the way home, I cannot say
what the bite of a viper is like. I kept him about
a fortnight, and when the fangs had begun to
grow again I was able to open his mouth and
show them to some young friends.

One more story to the same effect. There was
a little girl living with a friend of mine in Essex
who was exceedingly fond of animals, and, as
animal-lovers do, had a way with them. Once,
in her rambles, she came upon a snake carrying
a nestling bird in its mouth. She prised its mouth
open and took out the little bird, doubtless boxed
the snake's ears for its cruelty, and brought its
poor little dead victim home. From inquiry of
her, and a consideration of the fauna in the neigh-
bourhood, I believe that the snake in question
must have been a viper.

I cannot find you our only other snake, the
smooth snake, for it is of very local occurrence —
Hampshire being its headquarters — and I have

108 THE RING OF NATURE

never seen it wild. Once I saw it in a cage at the
Crystal Palace, where it was labelled as a viper.
It is slightly like that reptile, being in browns and
greys instead of the olive green of the grass snake,
but the double row of dots down its back have not
run into the well-known zig-zag pattern. Neither
has it the skull and crossbones nor other marking
on the top of its head.

If you want a still more harmless ' snake ' than
the grass snake and without its objectionable
smell, look any day on this raised bank and, if
necessary, turn a stone or two, when you will find
slow-worms or blind-worms like models in bronze
come to life. Make bracelets of them and let them
press in and out among your fingers. If they be
not overfull of the slugs they ate overnight they
will do you no offence — as to harm, it is completely
beyond their power. You tell me, of course, that
they are not snakes, the chief distinguishing point
being that they have eyelids that open and shut.
They belong to the family of the lizards that you
can see and often catch as they scuttle for safety
under the gorse bushes on the common. Preferring
a grovelling to a scampering life, the slow-worm
has lost its legs. Why slow-worm ? why blind-
worm ? The first no doubt because, having lost
its legs and not having the facilities for walking
on its ribs that the snake has, it ought to be slow.
On a bare surface it is slow, but it can push itself
about among grass and small stones with no mean
speed. Blind perhaps because, by comparison

SNAKES 109

with the snake, its eyes are small. Every move-
ment and habit, however, shows that the eyes are
good.

In Latin this worm is named better. Anguis
fragilis or brittle-worm, because, like the lizards
(of which you remind me it is one), it can escape
capture by snapping off its own tail, the tail
jumping about like a snake in itself, while the
owner bestows itself in a safe place. Many of the
slow-worms we catch have but stumps of tails
slowly growing to replace the elegant organ that
has been discarded in some sudden panic.

110 THE RING OF NATURE

MAY

II

WHEN ALL THE WORLD IS YOUNG

OOME WHERE in the May-smothered haw-
wj/ thorn bower a bird is singing or calling.
It is a long, sweet scream, something like the
' dreeze ' of the greenfinch, and it has the ven-
triloquial quality not by any means uncommon
with birds, so that I am convinced now that it
comes from high up in the trees, now that it is in
the bracken, now that it is before me and now
behind me. Yet it would be a very small bird
that would be able to move from one position to
another without being seen. Thus we have the
double mystification of not knowing where our
quarry is, and of imagining it to be some exiguous
wren rather than what it is.

There it is at last. An orange-tawny squab of
a newly fledged blackbird, fat as butter and sitting
back on its long legs, head thrust between its
shoulders so that a minimum of effort is sufficient
to open the beak, and let out a plaintive scream
for more f$£& The slim mother haunts through

WHEN ALL THE WORLD IS YOUNG 111

the thicket, and when I am quiet enough and
removed enough, she comes with her beak full of
chopped worm and tries to stay the clamour for a
few minutes.

The long lush grass in which ragged-robins
and moon-daisies are springing only just ahead
of the bents ; the smother of fool's parsley or
Satan's oatmeal flung against the hedge ; the
hedges themselves covered with drooping green
and aromatic with blossom ; the golden gorse, the
myriad-fingered bracken, the waist-high horsetails
are all full now of young things. We do not see
or hear a hundredth part of them, for the majority
of them are very wary of making themselves
known. An age-long tradition of danger has
crystallized into instinctive habits of concealment
which every summer re justifies and strengthens
in the next generation.

As I pass by the only path through a bog
bright with rejuvenated bog-bean and butterwort,
a very furtive bird starts from my very feet and
goes off broken-winged in evident design on the
part of herself or her Creator to lead me astray
from the place where my foot is. And there
under the shade of a thin bush of bog sallow,
in a grass-lined cup, are two quaint, long-necked
birds apparently dead. I take one of them in my
hand and with long limp neck the head hangs over
the edge of my palm, as the necks of dead fowls
hang over the edge of the poulterer's counter.
The eyes are closed and even the body runs a little

112 THE RING OF NATURE

cold, as though to make the fact of death
unquestionable.

But I know that the young snipe are shamming
dead, even as their mother shammed hurt as she
hobbled away. Or is not that word too light to
describe a stratagem of such vital importance ?
Is it not even better to say that my approach
threw the mother into a real paralysis of fear,
a halting between the desire for personal safety
and fear for her progeny, that made her actions
cancel one another and really almost brought her
down from the wing ? If I had chased her, the
personal note would have increased at each
removal of danger from her chicks, and she would
have ended by recovering the full power of her
wings. There need then be no conscious affecta-
tion that could be described as sham in her
case.

Then the snipe chicks are the children of snipe,
with the same sensitive nature, that, when they
grow up, will be put by the cosmic force to the
same protective use. The family nerves throw
them into a trance beyond their control, an almost
more than miniature death, perhaps as distressful
to them as actual dissolution, and only tolerable
to the system because it often saves it from
actual death.

There in the pine tree by the lake is one of the
causes that has turned the ailment of the snipe
into a means of defence. Two old hooded crows
in French-grey and black are wheeling and hovering

WHEN ALL THE WORLD IS YOUNG 113

near the cloud-like foliage, within which I can
make out one by one the fat caricatures of young
birds. It is not their nesting tree. The family
is out for its first flight, and the old birds, having
seen me long ago, are trying to get the young ones
to move on to a safer place. But the latter are
tired and like the place where they are, and this
morning of the whole year Farmer Moriarty
would have a fine chance of getting even with the
hoodies by shooting with luck the old birds first,
and then destroying their young at his leisure.

Farmer Moriarty has a fine brood of quarter-
grown turkey poults running in the field with
their mother. The young things are running
here and there, enjoying this wonderful life to the
full, pecking new young grubs from the grass
bents, and adding to the joys of dinner the zest
of sport by chasing flying and jumping things.
An indigo shadow falls on the fresh green of the
field, and the mother calls wildly the order to
concentrate. She makes off for the hedge, her
chicks following with all the speed of their baby
legs. The indigo shadow deepens and falls ;
a huge bird strikes the field behind the last running
poult, then bounces and falls on the chick. It
rises labouring into the air with the chick in its
talons. The mother turkey rushes at the marauder,
even follows it on the wing to the height of the
tall hedge, and almost catches it before it gets
into its stroke. But her anger is unavailing, and
the first toll from Farmer Moriarty's turkey flock

114 THE RING OF NATURE

has been taken by the peregrine to her brood on
the Eagle Rock.

There are farmers' friends also among the birds
of prey. We do not know what the kestrel sees
as he hovers in the wind high above the meadow.
Doubtless it is some imprudence on the part of
a young vole, an incautious skipping from the
parental to another clean-cut hole, or an exposure
on the bare space usually reserved for nocturnal
gambols. Down he swoops, and a superfluous
mouseling goes to stay the clamours of the young
kestrels. By night, the little owls rejoice at the
abundance and tenderness of the same and other
young things.

When we see a young rabbit struck down by
Mother Stoat or a song bird snapped up by the
sparrow-hawk, we cry involuntarily, * Nature red
in tooth and claw.' But the young whitethroats
are being fed just as bloodily on the hope of the
oak tortrix, the young wagtails are destroying the
progeny of the stone -fly, the young tits are spoiling
the geometric increase of the aphides that
unchecked would soon make the world solid with
green fly.

Nature is full of compensating balances that
automatically come into action in proportion to
the need for them. You can almost tell the
number of caterpillars there are by peeping into
a willow-wren's nest to see whether the eggs are
five this year or six, for a plentiful year of cater-
pillars calls for and gets large broods on the part

WHEN ALL THE WORLD IS YOUNG 115

of the insectivorous birds. So when Scotland was
visited some years ago by a plague of voles, the
voles found themselves visited by a plague of owls.

When voles overstep the bounds of their usual
increase, they soon swarm over fields and parishes
and counties, as thickly as you can see them at
midsummer in the corner of the field whence the
barn owl fetches them for its brood. The task of
keeping them down becomes far beyond the resident
owl population, often reduced almost to zero by
the gamekeeper. Then, as happened in Scotland
at the time of the last vole plague, numbers of
owls arrive from the Continent, where somehow
they get news of the need for them.

The owl organism so thrives on the unaccustomed
plenty of food that clutches of eight and nine
eggs are laid, and two or three broods are brought
off in the season if the vole manna last so long.
Then, their great work of destruction done, the
tyrants are liable to have a hard time for lack of
victims. Nature will no more suffer superfluous
owls than superfluous voles, and the feathered
army, expanded at the special call for its services,
must be contracted again into normal limits.
Starvation attacks not only its winter numbers
but their fecundity in spring. Two or three eggs
are once more enough for a clutch and one brood
enough for the season, until their numbers become
normal to a normal supply of voles.

Most of the rodents are given to gigantic increase.
The hamster and the lemming are well-known

116 THE RING OF NATURE

Continental examples, the latter often saving man
from the full rigour of its fecundity by swarming
from its native hills and in countless armies crossing
the country post haste to fling themselves into the
sea. It is one of the most marvellous of animal
instincts, though perhaps its explanation need not
be recondite. The lemmings eat as they go so
thoroughly that a reindeer or other grazing animal
that comes after them can only get a meal by
killing the animals and biting their stomachs out.
If the rodents worked the problem out by logic,
they would know that there was no turning back.
Sustenance has ever been found in front, and when
the sea is reached, who knows that it will not
yield food on the other side as many a river has
done ?

Another rodent gives us the proverb, ' To breed
like rabbits.' Our friends in Australia know what
that means, and one often wonders why the rabbit
does not more often run to the proportions of a
plague in England. True, we heard not many
years ago of farms being given up in Essex, because
it was practically impossible to save the crops from
these wild and unprofitable grazers ; but in general
the farmer seems not to have the least idea of the
hundreds of pounds worth of damage done by
these creatures. He shoots at sight the stoat
or cat, either of which is worth a good many trusses
of hay to him alive, and when he finds a half-eaten
rabbit carcass he ' tut-tuts ' at ' that blessed fox '
almost as though he had lost a lamb.

WHEN ALL THE WORLD IS YOUNG 117

Very early in the year the first maternal doe
retires a little apart from the warren, and scratches
a nursery burrow scarcely a yard deep. In it
she makes a nest with her own soft fur plucked
off, and when the naked little rabbits are muffled
in it, she comes away and closes the mouth of the
burrow with earth except a small hole at the top
of her ' stop ' to give her babies air. Whenever
she goes to feed them she must dig the door away
and replace it when she goes grazing again.

Some people do not like naked babies, except
their own, but every one likes the little rabbits
when they come from the ' stop ' and follow their
mother, fully clothed in the short grey fur of their
tribe, and bearing on their heads perfect miniature
rabbit ears. They are in everything impertinent
copies of full-grown rabbits, sitting at the openings
of their burrows a good deal longer than the more
prudent old ones, standing on their hind legs and
stretching up to take a good look at you, and giving
with their tiny heels the danger signal before they
bolt within.

By going quietly, you can often cut off a small
rabbit from the hedge in which it would be safe,
especially if he has a little cover in the field and
can be persuaded that if he ' quats ' you won't see
him. But when this advantage is gained, it is by
no means so easy as it seems to catch the little
fellow. You can out-run it by three to one, but
you must be very smart if you can out-dodge it.
Five times you are about to put your hand on it,

118 THE RING OF NATURE

but it breaks full back and is away, then just
before you get the sixth chance, which you persuade
yourself would be surely successful, the hedge is
reached.

When Mother Weasel leads forth her family of
kittens for their first romp in the growing grass
and the blue-bells, may my best friend who is not
a sportsman be there to see. I met a family party
of this kind once in Epping Forest. Six or eight
little weasels (I did not see their mother) were
playing in the undergrowth of a thin bush riddled,
as such places generally are, with shallow mole
runs. They seemed to be playing a game of touch,
above and below ground. A wide-eyed little face
would peep out from a hole evidently on the
qui vive to see its opponent before being seen.
Then perhaps there would be a pinch behind, and
one little weasel would leap forth pursued by
another. They would roll over in wrestlers'
embrace and then perhaps vanish as through a
trap door. In far too short a time, the family had
passed swirling into thicker bushes, and I never
saw another weasel family at play again.

It is, we know, sometimes dangerous to inter-
fere with these weasel schools, many authentic
stories being told of how at the squeaking of an
assaulted member, all the others launch them-
selves on the enemy, running up his limbs and
seeking to attack him in the region that their
hunting experience tells them is vital, the jugular.
A grown man has found it necessary to run for his

WHEN ALL THE WORLD IS YOUNG 119

life when a school of weasels has thus attacked
him.

We have little foxes in the Gorse Field, though
by strict preserver's right they are not ours. The
vixen drew out the earth in March, but it was only
one of two or three that she had her eye on, and she
ended by laying down her cubs a mile away, close
to the ruins of a Roman villa where some centurion
made his garrison duty in these parts as pleasant
as may be.

The fox's ideas of housekeeping are something
like those of a large number of Londoners, who
having made one ' Ivanhoe ' or ' Balmoral ' quite
dirty by three years' occupancy, move on into a
brand-new one. When a vixen has a litter of cubs
in an earth, it is often less than three fortnights
before the too abundant contents of her larder
make the place uninhabitable, and then she moves
her family to other quarters.

The earth in Gorse Field runs clean into the
limestone, the steep bank of the hill making thus
a green amphitheatre into which the tall i;hin
crack opens. The green grass of the year fringes
the rocky portal and almost hides it, leaving only
an indigo slit like any other shadow on very green
grass. That is a sunlight picture. When I go
in the evening to see the young foxes there is less
than that, and I have to use the sight of a little
yellow clay peeping through trampled grass to
give me the exact locality of the entrance. The
field is here full of these scratchings, which young

120 THE RING OF NATURE

summer industriously covers with green blades as
fast as they are renewed. The rabbits are
responsible for nearly all of them, and perhaps as
much as the fox for this particular one.

The grass of the little amphitheatre is gemmed
with flowers, still mostly of the yellow of spring,
nor should I be able to see in this half-light the
bugle, the prunella and other beauties in blue and
purple. The purple orchis, however, is visible
enough as it lifts here and there its pink-purple
' bloody man's thumb ' through the lush grass.
The bush on my left is happily of hawthorn, and
the cream of its bloom is as clear as the almond
scent that is refined and sweetened by the approach
of night. A blackbird perches in an ash overhead
and sings his clear, fluty melody. He might be
the orchestra of the piece for, while he sings, behold
there is a little fox on the mound before the hole.

He did not come. He simply appeared. He was
not there, and then he was there, a goodly little
fox nearly as large as a full-grown rabbit, no longer
looking, as he did when younger yet, like a little
chow-chow puppy, but now in fairly exact
miniature of his parents.

The first time I saw him thus, I knew him to be
the largest of his litter, and beyond reasonable
doubt a dog. In his mother's absence, he has the
guardianship of his brothers and sisters, and every
evening he comes first out from the den to sniff the
air and see if all is well. Now he skips a little
and whisks back into the crack, to tumble out

WHEN ALL THE WORLD IS YOUNG 121

again followed by four other little foxes. They
do not stop to look at the evening, but one is
pushed head-over-heels down the hill, another
pins him by the throat. Presently two others are
standing up and wrestling like Cornishmen, and
soon after, two chasing one another round the
hawthorn pass within two yards of my out-
stretched boot. Between whiles, they take a
momentary rest on the steep of their den, and
then they often all look together in a particular
direction. Luckily it is not my direction, for they
are looking towards the quarter whence their
mother should come. If she saw me as she came
up, there would be no more games to-night, and
to-morrow, perhaps, the little foxes would be
located elsewhere.

Here she comes up the hedge, with something in
her mouth. The rabbits that she meets on her
way make no effort to get more than just out of
her way. They seem to know that she is not in
hunting mood ; moreover, it is very seldom that
the vixen levies toll on her near neighbours. Often
the rabbits will continue to inhabit the side passages
of a burrow that the vixen has chosen for laying
down her whelps.

She has brought them a small rabbit, or it may
be a rat or a young squirrel. In this time of
young things it is mostly the young that suffer.
And now the little kittens of foxes are changed to
raging demons. They fling themselves on the
quarry and pull at it in five directions, growling

122 THE RING OF NATURE

through clenched teeth with a collective moan
like that of ferrets when they feed. There is
nothing quite so much like this worry of the young
foxes as that last act which will terminate their
lives when the hounds ' break them up.'

CATERPILLARS INNUMERABLE 128

JUNE

CATERPILLARS INNUMERABLE

is a row of young poplar trees at the
bottom of our sea-side garden. The leaves
are shiny and tender, scarcely able to hold themselves
up in the heat of the day. No envious tooth has
yet marred their fair symmetry. But at night
a feathery puss-moth visits them, three inches
square of wing and downy as an owl. In the
morning there is a little brown tent about the
size of a pin's head on this leaf, two on another,
a fourth yonder, and others no doubt on other
poplars, willows or sallows within a half-mile
radius.

The puss-moth's egg is unlike that of most
moths or butterflies in that instead of being a
spherical body attached to the leaf by a tangent,
it stands on a flat base and is dome-shaped, just
like a spot of liquid that has been spilt there and
left to harden. And it is chocolate-brown against
the tender green of the leaf on the surface of which
it is laid for all the world to see. I can see the

124 THE RING OF NATURE

eggs on sundry poplar trees about the place as I
walk by, and after a few mornings the egg is
broken and a small black grub takes its place
boldly on the upper surface of the leaf. It seems
to be secure from molestation of bird or ichneumon
fly, and to have no need of hiding itself as other
caterpillars do.

A closer examination reveals a wonderful
elaboration of parts in this bit of black thread.
At one end there are two little tufts like the ears
of a cat, giving it already some right to be called
puss-moth, at the other end are two longer pro-
jections like tails. As soon as the little animal has
reason to be worried by our too close inspection
there is an impatient wriggle of the tailed end,
and from the tails shoot out tiny little red whips
which make a kind of lashing motion over the
middle segments of the creature. If I had been
about the size of a sparrow and had been looking
at this tiny worm with the idea of eating it, I think
that this wonderful whip -behind movement would
make me look for my meal elsewhere. Some
writers imagine that the whips have a physical
energy sufficient to whip off the ichneumon fly
when she settles or attempts to settle on the
caterpillar with the intention of laying eggs within
its body. They imagine that a creature of so
primitive an intelligence as an insect could not be
scared by threats but must be driven off by actual
force.

With every change of skin the puss-moth cater-

CATERPILLARS INNUMERABLE 125

pillar becomes more terrible, but also, strange to
say, more protectively coloured. From black it
becomes green and, as its bulk increases, gets at
each change a greater complexity of shading to
break up the surface, and harmonize it with the
varied lighting of foliage. At length, when the
caterpillar is four inches long and nearly an inch
in diameter, its mainly green body is decorated
along the sides with white o's like portholes, the
head is tucked into two or three double chins by
the telescoping of the neck segments, a lurid
scarlet band is drawn round it like a scarlet shawl
round a woman's face, and over that a brown
shawl with a staring white border covers the whole
back, and is gathered round the aldermanic waist.
The creature sits with its head up, apparently
regarding the world through two dead-black eyes,
which are really only daubs of paint. The two
tails stick up barred with black and white, and
when the creature is irritated it bends head and
tails together and sends out the red whips in
venomous curves. Few countrymen dare to pick
up the monster when they meet it.

This caterpillar has another wonder in store, in
the iron-hard cocoon-case it spins by incorporating
gnawed fragments of wood with its silk. We must
leave that and other wonders, however, for future
exploration, for there are many other caterpillars.
Carefully bestowed on the under sides of poplar
leaves we find the green eggs of poplar hawks.
Rarely scattered on sallow or apple leaves are the

126 THE RING OF NATURE

paler eggs of the eyed hawk, and on the privet the
equally handsome pledges of the privet hawk.
The hawk-moth caterpillar is at once recognized
by its hairless skin and single tail like the horn of
the rhinoceros, but at the opposite end of the beast.
When the privet hawk runs towards its full four
inches of length, its coloration is a marvel of
ingenuity. The apple-green of its otherwise con-
spicuous bulk is broken by seven oblique white
stripes like the white midribs of privet leaves,
shaded with parallel dashes of violet-purple, so as
to appear to stand out from the green as midribs
really do.

I sometimes dream of caterpillars a yard long.
They do not exceed in size those we know, by
more than the hawk-moth caterpillar exceeds
the tortrix. A friend of mine who had never seen
anything larger than the drinker was astonished
to see as he stood in a potato field a beast in the
likeness of a caterpillar, but five inches long. It
was smudged with V markings in green and brown
and violet and black and roughed all over like
goose-skin, and it took its own presence in an
English field in the calmest manner possible,
munching the potato leaves with the usual cater-
pillar gusto. A second beast of the same size
allowed itself to be picked out from the brown and
green potato leaves, and my friend was induced to
realize that it was no dream, but that he had found
two death's-head caterpillars.

We can scarcely mention the puss-moth without

CATERPILLARS INNUMERABLE 127

going on a long journey among the hawk-moths, of
which I have named but a few, leaving out some
of the strangest, such as the elephant hawk. On
another side the puss-moth touches the lobster,
for that is a still stranger example of protection by
aggressive appearance. The lobster caterpillar
does not end behind in prolegs like a respectable
caterpillar, but has a large flat tail upreared like
the business end of a scorpion. The backs of its
segments are cut into all manner of rugosities,
and the creature is in the brown of the leaf scales
of the beech, on which tree it feeds. The real legs
of the caterpillar, those carried next the head, are
abnormally long, and when the animal is alarmed
it throws head and tail together, till it looks like
a particularly venomous spider ready to put its
long legs round the enemy, and poison it out of
hand. It is suggested that when the ichneumon
fly sees this it flees in alarm, and that even the
birds do the same.

These are the giants among caterpillars, but they
are not nearly of so much importance as many
lesser ones. There has never been and never will
be a plague of eyed hawks on our apple trees,
which are devastated nearly every year by a far
humbler caterpillar, with black dots on a dark
grey ground, called the little ermine. This
creature comes not as single spies but in battalions.
We find them everywhere in summer, done up by
hundreds in silken webs of their own contriving,
camping on branches of fruit trees or other timber,

128 THE RING OF NATURE

the leaves of which they speedily strip. This is
one of the creatures on which our Board of
Agriculture has declared war, and it is the subject
of a leaflet all to itself.

Less maggot-like in appearance than the ermine,
though at times scarcely less destructive, is the
lackey. Last August, Lackey Mere decorated
a twig of one of our willows with a close band of
eggs like redskin beadwork. All tits, wrens and
tree-creepers notwithstanding, the decoration held
through the storms of winter, and as soon as there
were leaves to eat, produced from every egg a
tiny caterpillar. Now, there is a big white tent on
a limb, by no means the first to be stripped, and
an army of caterpillars within the tent, each
striped with blue and red, so that, if one should
stray, no bird may imagine for a moment that it
is good to eat.

An army caterpillar not given to travelling under
canvas is the buff-tip, striped somewhat after
the manner of the lackey, but having stronger
bristles. As you walk along the town avenue
you see their pellets on the pavement, and looking
up find that many branches have been stripped,
while one of them that is half stripped is thick
with fat green-and-yellow caterpillars. A slight
shake will bring down a shower, but you had
better make sure that they all fall on the ground.
It is disconcerting to find a little later in the
middle of afternoon tea that a great fat, cold
caterpillar is leaving your collar for the recesses

CATERPILLARS INNUMERABLE 129

of your neck. When they are quite full-fed,
the buff-tips come down apparently with the
intention of getting themselves squashed by the
feet of our fair damsels. In some Continental
countries it is said to have the full processional
habit, marshalling its army in fours and marching
from one place to another with the honours of
war.

One of the most striking of our sociable cater-
pillars is the small egger. I have seen their con-
spicuous tents four or six times as common as
milestones in the hedges along a high road, and
that for many miles through Buckinghamshire
and Oxfordshire. The web they weave is as
tough as scribbling paper, so that some force is
needed to tear it asunder. But the caterpillars
are usually obliging enough to be present in large
numbers on the outside of the envelope, which
they cover thickly on the sunny side at the hour
of the sun-bath. Until it has changed its fourth
skin the caterpillar is comparatively dowdy,
being coloured in subdued reds and browns, but
at that stage a striking transformation occurs,
the new skin being brilliantly marked with scarlet,
edged with white. When, among the dowdy ones
basking on the outside of the tent, one or two
of the brilliant ones are seen, it is difficult not to
think that here are two distinct species playing
some strange role together. Evidently, when the
scarlet and white have been donned, each cater-
pillar becomes able to take care of itself, the

130 THE RING OF NATURE

colours being staring enough to startle any bird
in Christendom, and the community soon breaks
up.

The egger family is a distinguished one in its
caterpillars as well as in its moths. But whereas
the latter are very strong of whig and hard to
catch or even see, the larvae are conspicuous and
often found. The drinker demands admission
to the group. What naturalist's heart has not
leaped a little at seeing in spring his first drinker
larva stretched out on a grass blade, and who
that has collected a dozen of them and fed them
on grass kept fresh by having the ends dipped in
water has not had much delight in the egg-like
cocoon that the full-fed monster spins, and the
big yellow moth, probably never seen in the wild,
that emerges ?

Some of them, however, nourish in their bodies
unseen the maggot of the ichneumon fly, eating
greedily of the animal's fat, but carefully abstaining
from its vital organs. The caterpillar gets
flabbier and weaker, and at length, when the moth
should come forth from the thinly woven cocoon,
or before the poor beast can attempt to weave a
shroud, the small cocoons of a fly burst from its
body and from them go forth other ichneumons to
their fell work.

The drinker and many of the eggers are notable
as large caterpillars early in the year, because
they began life last summer and have spent the
winter in caterpillar form. There is a fine monster

CATERPILLARS INNUMERABLE 131

in a sort of lavender smoke with lots of hairs and
black velvet rings round the body between the
sections. We find it on the heather, where it is
finishing a sort of three-course meal of bramble,
hawthorn and ling. It is well known to the
children of the village by the name of ' lucky
farmer.' This is the northern egger. The oak
egger is much like it, and the fox-moth caterpillar
in rich chocolate with orange bands is a worthy
connection of the family. These aggressively
coloured worms make very sudden appearance on
the grass of a mowing field or on the short turf of
the common. Where no caterpillars were apparent
the day before there is one to every square yard
to-day, and to-morrow perhaps none again.

The pride of the heather is the fat green cater-
pillar, bright as the shoots of the young heather,
running to warts all over and with the prominence
of each wart of a deep yellow thrown at you by
means of black rings. Put it on a plain ground
and you cannot help asking why it should be so
aggressively marked, but replace it on its heather
bush, turn once round, and you will have to look
very hard to find it. The bumpy outline and the
yellow spots somehow match to a T the stippling
of the heather needles.

The last caterpillar, which we affectionately
call ' Buttons,' is the offspring of the emperor moth,
a creature as distinguished as, and sometimes con-
founded with, the purple emperor butterfly. It
spins a clever cocoon of staves running from end

132 THE RING OF NATURE

to end and kept together by wattling, but so
loosely woven at one end that when the moth
pushes from inside, the staves open and it gets out
without the trouble of gnawing. The moth maybe
happens to be a female. Place it in a box on the
window-sill and if there are any males within a
mile, you will have them all calling upon her.
M. Fabre, writing of a Bombyx (fox-moth family),
so rare in his district that in three years he was
unable to get a cocoon, though he had all the
school children in his pay to search for them, thus
describes the assembling of the males to the female
he had at last obtained : —

' The mother Bombyx grew ripe. By a chemistry
of which our science has not the least idea, she
secreted an irresistible essence which would bring
her visitors from the corners of the sky. On the
third day the bride was ready. I was in the
garden, by this time despairing of success, when,
about three in the afternoon, the sun shining
warmly and brilliantly, I saw a crowd of moths
whirling about the open window. They were
the lovers come to visit the fair one. Some were
coming out from the window, others going in,
others resting on the wall after their long
journey. Some had come very far, across mulberry
orchards and woods of cypress. They came from
every direction, but more and more infrequently.
I did not see the beginning of the assembly, and
now the concourse was almost complete. . . .
In the room there was a cloud of males which I
estimated at sixty.'

CATERPILLARS INNUMERABLE 133

The Kentish glory is another moth famous for
the power of its males to find a female exposed
far away, and the sight of these magnificent
creatures beating up wind one after another
straight to their goal (or their death in the
entomologist's net) is one of the amazing sights of
nature.

The females of these 'sembling species are often
very heavy of body and little able to fly, and
some which have probably practised the art for
more ages than the others are entirely without
wings. Such is the little vapourer, whose cater-
pillars gnaw our trees in the heart of the towns.
Hatch out one of these ungainly females, and in
a short time you will have a little army of terribly
ardent males shivering their red wings on the
window-sill where you have put her. Again, in
the winter months we are astonished at seeing a
very fragile-looking moth flying in the bitter breeze
among timber or fruit trees. He is seeking his
wingless female that clings like a very fat grey
spider to the tree on which she lived as a cater-
pillar, on which she will die as a moth made happy
by destiny fulfilled in the shape of a few hundred
eggs, which will continue the work of annoying the
forester or fruit grower.

Caterpillars ? They are everywhere ; on the
grass, in the trees and apparently in the air ; for as
we walk along we get smothered in their hanging
strands of silk, and covered with the trapeze
performers whose lines we have broken. On the

134 THE RING OF NATURE

grey fence round the coppice there are caterpillars
encased in grey splinters of wood, just as caddis
grubs encase themselves under water. There
are others living their grubhood inside the leaves,
that is between the upper and lower layer of the
leaf as it lies flat. Others snip a bit of leaf and roll
it into a jacket, under which they can walk like
green snails, and thus escape the attention of birds
with an eye for colour, and a very large army of
them roll the leaves into little hollow cigarettes,
in the interior of which they live while they eat
the inner folds.

4 But really,' asks the reader, ' are these riff-raff
worth mentioning ? ' Well, has he ever watched
one of these leaf-rollers in the act of constructing
its cigarette ? Does he not wonder how it is done ?
If he were given a sheet of iron one-eighth of an
inch thick and twelve feet by nine, as much cotton
as he liked and a pot of glue, how long would it
take him to roll himself up in the iron as neatly as
a caterpillar does in the leaf, without hands and
solely by spinning web from its mouth ? Here in
every tree and on every hedge, often under our
very nose and unseeing eyes, is being performed
a piece of work as wonderful as that excellent
effort of Victor Hugo's imagination, the single-
handed salving of a rock-fast ship, in Toilers of
the Sea. (And as the prospect of watching a leaf-
roller at work is certain to exceed the delights of
reading further about mere peacocks and red
admirals, here the chapter ends.)

IN THE HAYFIELD 135

JUNE
II

IN THE HAYFIELD

'T ^7"HAT a crop of hay,' says the townsman
VV wading through the grass that reaches
his waist and holds his feet with a clutch like that
of water. Rabbits are lost in it, but if you make
the right call, that of a fellow rabbit squeaking,
they stand bolt upright and so just manage to
show you a bright eye peering through the grass.
The kestrel poises overhead, then passes on,
knowing the futility of searching for the sign of
a vole moving under that thick jungle. Foam of
marguerites and hedge parsley leaps up at the
pink-and-white dog roses, so that the very bushes
seem about to be overwhelmed in the tide of grass.
It is green and lush under the damp purple of the
clouds that some say have spoilt this June day,
and it does not seem as though any agricultural
art could induce another blade to grow in such a
concourse.

But the farmer shakes his head and says that the
grass has not half grown. He overlooks the

136 THE RING OF NATURE

patches of bird's-foot trefoil that gladden the
uneconomic eye with their clear yellow and flakes
of dragon's blood. He is not deceived by the
ranks of tall sorrel or the waving yellow plumes
of an occasional melilot, or the powdering of
moon daisies, or even the waving heads of timothy
and sweet vernal. He says that the grass has no
bottom, nor ever will have if we do not get the
growing weather that is our right from May to
July. Sun and rain together make growing
weather. We have had weeks of all sun and now
we are having all rain.

When for a few hours the rain holds off and the
sun comes out, a nice problem presents itself :
whether to use the sun for the growing of grass or
for the making of hay, and as the rare days of
sunshine have less and less infected us with hope,
we have more and more given the benefit to the
grass. If the weather should break again, it
would not spoil the grass, while it would sadly
interfere with haymaking. The doubt has saved
us again and again, for not even the finest day,
accompanied by a change in the moon and all
other indications of a permanent change, has been
followed by enough fine weather for the making
of even a scanty crop of hay.

But at last the day of the hill field has come.
The chatter of the mowing machine has silenced
the whitethroat's scolding, has excited the upright
curiosity of distant rabbits, and sent near ones
scampering. Here come the strong, silent horses

IN THE HAYFIELD 137

walking by the wall of grass, which mysteriously
falls down beside them as the hidden knife travels
through. Now it is the turn of marguerites and
red sorrel, as the team comes over the low round of
a dry bank ; now the ragged robins and the big
mauve orchids have it as the knife dips into lower
ground. The white spray of hedge parsley is
shaven from the edge of the rose bush and the
garlands flout the blue sky without answering
bloom below them. For all the gay blossoming
is not merely laid low but extinguished by the
green that falls on them, as they fall on the bleached
green of the field.

Happily there are parts of the field so tumbled
in ' tump ' and hollow that the machine is unable
to negotiate them. When its clattering efficiency
has departed, I am able to renew youth by following
the steady swing of the scythemen as they cut
down the flowers in the way that pleased me nearly
a generation ago. The clean, cool swish of the
scythe is only a note of silence, after the rattle of
the machine. Its method of destruction is orderly
execution instead of massacre ; its rhythm gives
an idea of deliberation that we half expect to see
result in the acquittal of some flower or grass at
the instant before the steel strikes it. But no,
the scythe can only spare by regiments, and the
sweetest, rarest flower goes down in the swathe,
where it has chosen to grow among mowing-grass.
In one part of the field I can pick up bee orchids
almost by the armful.

138 THE RING OF NATURE

Yonder, however, a mower has actually cut his
swathe short in mid field. He has skipped a portion
full half a dozen yards along, and has cut in again
beyond. I know the sign of old. Not mercy, but
fear, has prompted this departure from what
looked like an inexorable sweep. It is an almost
invisible menace that has put off the emblem of
Father Time and of Death. The grasses and the
flowers stand there as calm and as sweet as in any
other part of the field. Then a knautia bobs as
though a partial breeze had struck it, and we see
a tiny yellow body fly to and fro just where half
the moon daisies of a root are standing, the other
half lying low. It is there that our friend entered
a danger zone scarcely less visible or less real
than the marked area across which bullets fly.
At this point the wasps poured out from their
nest and made the stand that every patriot must
make somewhere, or lose his country.

A little further on, the smaller city of the red-
tailed humble-bee has been taken in the mower's
stride without his having perceived it. The laden
merchants, returning one by one, have now accumu-
lated into a small crowd, anxiously seeking their
lost nest, and angrily exclaiming at the monstrous
thing that has befallen it. Where now is the
fabled instinct that, according to some, guides the
bee straight home ? They are searching an area
of a hundred square yards for the little nest they
have lived in for weeks. I end by finding it first,
a little heap of dry moss that the scythe almost

IN THE HAYFIELD 139

shaved as it passed over. Thirty years fly away
as I press gently and hear the whine of the bees
within the nest and feel the moss thrill with their
indignation. I simply must take the roof off and
have a look at the jumble of egg-shaped cocoons
and honey cells that stands so far below the effort
of the hive-bee.

Have there been any joys in life sweeter than
those of following the mower and picking up the
secrets that the grass had hidden and which he
pitilessly lays bare ? Sometimes it is a lark's
nest that would never have been found except by
means of the scythe ; once it was a pipit's nest
containing one ungainly chick, a cuckoo, that the
mower scientifically spared just as his scythe was
about to cut it in two ; sometimes the more con-
siderable embryo brood of the corncrake or part-
ridge delighted me more than a heap of diamonds.
And then, to see the surprise of a snake as it
glided from the standing grass on to the cropped
verdure no longer capable of hiding its sinuous
course ; to tease it with a stick and see it hiss and
hiss and make more and more ready to strike
without actually reaching this final act of baffled
hate ; lastly, to earn the abhorrent wonder of the
mowers by picking it up by the tail and carrying
it for a yard or two. When I came to know the
grass snake quite well I used to break down its
ridiculous bluff by offering a finger to its pre-
tended fangs, when it would become mild as milk,
merely watching for an opportunity for escape

140 THE RING OF NATURE

when its docility should have put its captor off
guard.

' Found any mouse nests ? ' I ask the scytheman
with affected nonchalance, not forgetting that he
is the same man who used to find them for me
when they were extraordinarily precious. He
replies as of yore, without the least affectation, by
telling me that there is one three swathes from
the ash where the coats and the cider-bottle are
lying in readiness for lunch. I get there in time
to see the mother run off like a shadow, her body
flattened so as to be almost covered by the stubble
of the grass. The young mice within the closely
woven ball pink and sprawling, with eyes like
bruises, seem as precious and as hard to deal with
as when I wore knickerbockers. They are just
something to look at, like the sunset. Shall I
confess that they are a little less interesting than
they were one summer when I had a young hawk
to which they were an acceptable change of food ?
A young nephew who is with me wants to take
them out and kill them. When I veto the pro-
position, he clearly thinks that I am unable to
appreciate young mice at their proper value.
His looks raise an uncomfortable feeling that
once upon a time I may have had the same
barbarous instincts. * Here 's another mouse's
nest,' calls the mower from the middle of the field.
One suffices at my age, but the nephew rushes off
at speed to see if it is in any way different from
the last.

IN THE HAYFIELD 141

Now the whole field is down. Purple self-heal,
yellow bird's-foot, starch- white moon daisies,
flaming sorrel, and blue geranium have dis-
appeared. A circle of uniform green or with only
islands of rose-bushes lies there ringed by a sky
whose blue has once more been smudged out by
clouds. The grass is down, but who can say
when the hay will be up. Only this morning,
the farmer said with the air of saying a new thing,
that the weather was really going to mend. To
my certain knowledge he has said it thrice before.
It seems that he will have to say it again.

It is strange how industrious we feel when
an opportunity occurs for interfering in some
one else's business. Because I saw the hay cut
I feel impelled to offer my services in the carrying
of the hay, and indignantly spurning the offer
of lighter work, I undertake the task of pitching
the cocks into the waggon where my friend the
farmer is making the load.

On a glorious summer day, with the lark carolling
on high and bees streaking the vault of heaven,
how delightful are the simple labours of the field.
To push one's pike into a neatly arranged hay-
cock, hoist it over the shoulder, and place it on
the waggon ; perchance to see a shrew or a vole
run off startled when the dome under which it
was sheltering is removed — what unalloyed bliss !

When ten cocks or so, five on each side, have
been packed on the load the bed of the waggon is

142 THE RING OF NATURE

full. Now we must lift our pitch a little higher,
and, watching the loader, place them more or less
where he wants them to stay. Higher still goes
the load, with the effect that each pitch seems
about twice as heavy as the last. Sometimes
when a fair bundle of hay is overhead, down falls
some or all of it, scattering dust in the eyes of the
perspiring pitcher. Finally, every inch of the
pike handle has to be utilised, and instead of
hoisting a little bundle of sweet-smelling hay, one
feels as though the very soul was being wrenched
out by the inexorable tool.

After pitching a few loads I leave off and take
stock of my injuries. A patch of skin has dis-
appeared from the inside of each thumb, there
are blisters visible at the roots of many fingers,
and I feel, though I cannot see, where the handle
has been taking bites preparatory to further havoc.
Moreover, it seems as though I had been con-
verted into a porcupine, for I bristle with the
spears of an atrocity called lop grass — twisty,
double-pointed things that, whichever way they
fall, proceeded to bore through the cloth and enter
the flesh. Such is one form of idyllic summer
labour in the fields.

Then I go to the task of unloading the waggon at
the rick. A few days ago, I saw a woman acquit
herself well at this post, and the work looked
easy and graceful. But alas ! we must know a
great deal about the building of a load before we
can take one to pieces. Standing on a mass of

IN THE HAYFIELD 143

hay some twelve feet by six, I drive in the pike
and try to take up a pitch. The morsel I seize is
locked tightly under the surrounding hay, and
finally under the piece on which I stand.

Pitching was awful, when a load rather too heavy
had to be thrust up from the shoulder. But here
it is like trying to lift the world with the muscles
of the stomach. Even when you pick up the
proper flake of hay — that last put upon the load —
you have hard work to poke it up to the rick above
you. And the seeds, including the detestable
spears of the lop grass, fall far more heavily here
than in the field. For they fall on the next bundle,
which, when it is, in turn, lifted, sends down the
accumulation and also its own quota. The atoms
stick on the perspiring skin, and cover one with
withered herbage, causing all sorts of expressions
of horror when, later, town people come to see it.

The undoing of one load has quite undone me.
Some one tells me that I have earned twopence
in half an hour, which, on dividing the daily
wage of half a crown by the number of loads
usually carried, I find to be correct.

I descend to the last rung of the ladder of the
idyllic labour of the field and go to work with
sundry women and an old man with a weak heart
arranging the little cocks for the pitchers to pick
up. One of the women has her hand bound with
a white rag.

' Got a bad thumb ? ' I asked.

'No,' she replied. 'But I do get terrible

144 THE RING OF NATURE

blistered at this work, and I be trying to kip it
off as long as I can.'

It is true. Even that slight work produces
its own blisters, and bites holes in my skin where
the other forms of labour had not bitten. How-
ever, while the women work or the day lasts I
must work on, especially as the disgrace might
come to us of having the waggon catch us up.

I work next the old man with a weak heart and
presently he begins to talk.

' That was allus my job,' he says, nodding towards
the waggon unloading at the rick. ' I could do
that all day long and not feel it so much as I do
this. Ay, I was as strong as a donkey in those
days.' Then, pitching his voice a fifth higher,
and sending it through his nose, he repeats, ' As
strong as a donkey.'

When I have heard most of what he wants to
tell me about the illness that has laid him low, we
begin to talk of agriculture.

The rent of the farm amounts to about seven-
and-sixpence an acre, which is fully twice as much
as it is worth, for it is dry and shallow hill land.
The next farm, where the land is much richer
and kinder, is let at the same rent, for, whereas
my friend has been twenty-five years in one place,
the next farm has been re-let several times, and
each time the rent has been re-adjusted by
operation of the open market.

' Still,' I say, ' it is a mystery to me how so
much hard work fails to bring profit to landlord

IN THE HAYFIELD 145

and tenant alike. I should have thought that,
with a year to do it in, it would not be hard to get
ten shillings off each acre — in this field, for instance.'

' Ah, but there 's plenty more as isn't worth
half a crown,' he replied. ' That 's wur the
kill-cow do come in.'

' And talking o' mysteries,' he says presently,
' it fair beats me to think how we did live when I
were a boy. My mother had nine children. Her
husband had just a shillun a day. A shillun a
day ' (high up and through his nose).

' And wheat ? ' I asked.

' Wheat flour was clane out o' the question.
What we lived on was barley meal at sixteen
shillings a bushel. That 's the very price it stood
at. Tea was four shillings a pound, and we didn't
get much o' that.'

' No, not much on six shillings a week.'

' Of course, we most of us went to work. I
went when I was seven, and got twopence a day.
An' then we got Irish taturs and salt. Gurt Irish
taturs as big as this ' (holding up two fists each as
large as most potatoes I have seen).

We worked on, both of us appalled at the
question how the family was brought up on so
much of this food as five or six shillings a week
would buy. It was only last night that I saw
the ducks fed on the same food — barley meal and
potatoes.

' There was whate in plenty — for the rats and
mice, but not for us,' continues the old man.

146 THE RING OF NATURE

* The varmers could get nineteen and zix a bushel
for it, just as it might be to-day. They zaid
they 'd kip it till they could get a sovereign.'

Here he pauses, and looks at the horizon as if
the sequel lay there. Then he strikes me con-
fidentially on the chest with the back of his hand
and impressively whispers :

' Almighty zent the peace. Down went the
price o' wheat to zeven and zix. Oh,' he adds,
almost in tears, and throwing up his arms a
little, ' wasn't there a jubilee then. Didn't we
just shout and holler when we knew the blessed
pace had come.'

There is an untaught art about the old man's
recital that could only be produced by having
lived through the terrible times of which he tells.

A NIGHT OUT 147

JULY

A NIGHT OUT

THE long hot days followed by nights almost
as warm, though not so garish, bring
about a reversal of instincts almost throughout
the natural world. The rabbits that in winter
fed by day and retired at dusk now feed by night
and keep out of sight between dawn and dusk.
Birds, cheerful enough at dawn, mope in the
thick leafage at midday and long for the evening.
Snakes no longer seek out the sunniest places,
and only reach their fullest activity as the sun
goes down. Only those torrid beings, the insects,
are active at midday, and at this time of year
the great majority of summer lepidoptera are
night-flying moths.

The night-jar is spinning his long-winded rattle-
note in the larch copse. It is always a marvel to
me that he can hold the one note so long, especially
as in my own experience a note with an r-r-r in
it is the most expensive in breath that we can be
called upon to produce. But he rattles on without

148 THE RING OF NATURE

stumble or halt, and even when he ends on one
note starts without a pause on another, and keeps
that up, too, till the very listener grows breathless.

The gloom has come on so that I can only just
see one of the night- jars come out from a thicket
of guelder-rose and sit toad-like upon the ground,
uttering the ' co-eek ' that is their other vocal
sound. Then she rises by a miracle from her
feeble feet, and on noiseless wing skims over the
gate near my face, and goes hawking down the
meadow. She skims closely along the tops of
the grass whose white campions are shining their
brightest in the dusk, and no doubt snatches many
a moth that the flowers have called to their banquet.
Then the other night- jar joins her and there is
a love-game, one chasing the other with wild
' co-eek,' and clapping the wings above his head
like applauding hands.

It is nearly ten o'clock, but with industrious
hum a big humble-bee still goes about her work
at the blue bugle, which, in the twilight, is of a
dull ashy colour. It is not only a workable hour
for the humble-bee, but perhaps one of the best
as far as honey goes. The hot days dry up the
nectar in its cup, and it will be noted that the
hive-bees bring in more of both honey and pollen
in their first working hours of the morning.

A bat wambles across the open sky, a large bat
flying high, and no doubt a noctule out for its
usual evening hunt of only one hour. Yes, there
is a small party of them round the chestnut tree

A NIGHT OUT 149

where, no doubt, the May-beetles are to be had
easily enough to-night. Every now and then a
bat falls a foot or two, or even ten feet. Thus it
pounces on a hapless beetle, whose ' bones ' you
can sometimes hear crunching under the captor's
teeth, and whose elytra on a very busy evening
can be seen falling as the bats shred them off from
the softer portions. They utter tiny shrieks in
the ardour of the chase, and I wish I could send
up to them the jungle cry of ' A happy hunting.'

The tiny bat skimming the branches of the
trees and the tall hawthorn hedges of the lane
is almost certainly the pipistrelle. It is mostly
after gnats, but one pursues and catches a brim-
stone moth quite near my face. I see it wrap the
prey in its caudal pouch just for the instant
necessary to tuck in its head and get it properly
between the teeth. Our little pipistrelle, unlike
the noctule, flies all night.

Nobody draws for elvin story any other bat
than the long-eared. Draw them as large and as
long as you like, and the ears of the real creature
shall astonish you every time you come to see
them. If we take a candle and interview the
long-eared bat in the manor attic we may see a
very ordinary bat hanging head downwards from
a, rafter. And while we look, it erects one
astonishingly long ear like a sail upon a barge,
then the other, and the two wag at you in a most
eerie way, casting huge shadows on the wall
behind as they play with your flickering candle.

150 THE RING OF NATURE

Feeling that this common bat must be about,
I draw beneath an ash that is still a little sparse of
leaf. He and they are there, not merely catching
their food on the wing, but snatching it from the
leaves or beating it out and catching it as it is
flushed. I can see the whole familiar fairy-tale
silhouette, the big ears seeming to twitch with
excitement as the animal dashes on something
whose shell I can hear cracking in its jaws.

Down by the lake I look for Daubenton's bat
or the water bat, skimming the water in clever
circles, real night-swallows, as any insect that
knew them both would acknowledge. Sometimes
the clumsy desultory little barbastelle, flying like
one that has had too much to drink, joins the
pipistrelle at its work among the trees, where
also can be seen the whiskered bat, the most
arboreal of them all, fetching the moths out from
their cover almost as the spaniel fetches a rabbit
from a bush, or skimming within an inch or so
of the ground as it searches perhaps for female
ghost moths. There are many others and perhaps
one or two more for the keen night naturalist to
discover beyond the fifteen or so that are already
known in our islands.

And here comes old flower-face, the tawny owl,
' sweeping wavy in the dusk lit by one large
star.' Dear, soft, cuddlesome, sharp-clawed and
sharper-beaked flower-face, let us have your
story as it is told in the Mabinogion.

Arionrod laid a * destiny ' upon her son Llew

A NIGHT OUT 151

Llaw Gyffes that he should never have a wife of
the race that now inhabits the earth. So Llew
Llaw Gyffes's uncle Math, the son of Mathonwy,
took counsel with Gwydion and made a damsel
from the blossoms of the oak, the blossoms of the
broom, and the blossoms of the meadowsweet, the
fairest and most graceful maiden that man ever
saw. And they baptized her and gave her the
name of Blodeuwedd or Flower-face. Soon she
was married to Llew Llaw Gyffes.

Then while her husband was away came Gronw
Pebyr and made love to Blodeuwedd, and when
her husband came home she, at Gronw Pebyr's
instigation, wheedled from him what was to be
his manner of death.

The spear that must slay him would have to be
a whole year in the making, and nothing be done
towards it except during the sacrifice on Sundays.
' And then,' said Llew Llaw Gyffes, ' I cannot be
slain within a house or without. And I cannot
be slain on horseback nor on foot.' Finally, she
learnt that he would have to be standing with one
foot on the edge of a roofed bath and the other
on the back of a goat standing outside.

In that position Blodeuwedd placed her husband
at the end of the year, and Gronw Pebyr flung
the specially prepared spear at him, whereupon
Blodeuwedd's husband flew up in the form of an
eagle and gave a fearful scream. ' And thence-
forth,' says the story in that place, ' he was no
more seen.'

152 THE RING OF NATURE

And you, oh Flower-face, were chased by
Gwydion with your maidens till, looking back in
the fear of flight, you fell unaware into the lake.
All were drowned but the guilty Blodeuwedd, and
she was turned into unhappy, hooting Blodeu-
wedd the owl.

The eye, with the imagination behind it, plays
strange tricks in the dark. It is not merely that
we do not see the things that are there, but we
see things that are not there. Something reveals
a blackberry bush. Perhaps the eye smells it,
perhaps it is not really a blackberry bush, but a
patch of bracken. At any rate, we see it, and not
only the leaves stretching out, but the fruit which
will not be there for another two months. In the
darkness of the grass a paler streak appears. The
eye swears that it is a stream, and not till I have sat
down and groped at it with one foot can I be
persuaded that it is merely a path. It does not
matter that I am in well-known country. Trees
become haystacks, bushes are men, desperate
footpads waiting to leap on me, a newly-broken
log is a prone body with staring white face, a mean
barn is a church richly ornamented. Many things
are shown by the night that I did not imagine by
day to be there.

The sense that is not deceived by the dark is
that of scent. It has apparently a double force
by virtue of the resting of the eye. On the other
hand, savours may be fresher by night than by day.
At the crossing of the stream there is a delicious

A NIGHT OUT 153

message from the meadowsweet, though here I
can also see the cream of the blossom. So, too,
the wayfaring tree whose blossoms are not merely
white, but almost luminous in the dark. But
there is nothing but the scent to disclose the
honeysuckle, and it comes from the depth of the
wood with an insistence that would almost persuade
a blind man that he could see. I have smelt the
delicious savour of field beans by night for nearly
a mile, and by day I have never managed to catch
it at more than five or six hundred yards.

Stand still at midnight in the middle of wide
open country and listen to the silence. It is an
astonishing thing. The blackness is the black-
ness of velvet which absorbs sound as completely
as it absorbs light. That is not true though, for
in the midst of night tiny noises come a long way.
Once a chained dog gives tongue, and I know
from the direction that he is two miles away. It
is like a tiny ripple on the black pool of silence,
which immediately closes over it and makes it
as though it had not been. Then a kestrel some-
where turns in his sleep and says one querulous
word. The silence grows deeper than ever, to be
torn in shreds by the hoot of an owl close to my
ear. It is the most startling of all noises, and
the owl is said to use it for making a mouse jump
so as to disclose its whereabouts. The poor thing
must jump and fall dead.

Going by the lake, where the unfailing scent
of water mint greets me, I hear a faint chatter

154 THE RING OF NATURE

out on the water. The ducks are perhaps talking
in their sleep. I know one of the voices for that
of a shell-drake telling his wife that there is really
nothing to be afraid of. Fowlers can tell every
species in the dark by striking a match at the edge
of the broad, when out of the darkness there
comes a sort of roll-call answer from individuals
of many flocks. Perhaps the fox can tell. As I am
coming from the lake I catch a whiff of his trail.
Possibly, knowing his superiority in the dark he
allows me to walk within a few feet of him.

The scent of the gorse is hushed. It needs the
hot sunlight to bring out that. The white scut of
a rabbit flashes, and the dry prickles crackle as
he gains the interior of a bush. Perhaps I have
inadvertently saved his life, for in a neighbouring
cave, blacker than the black of the landscape, two
luminous eyes stare, then oscillate and vanish as
some cottage cat swears to itself and goes off.

I am now high under heaven on a dry bank of
the hill, whence I can see by daylight many miles
in three directions. But now I can only see with
my ears. The rumble of a train five miles away
tells me that there is a trail of white smoke between
Chapel Hill and Oakton, or a trail of smoke that
would be white if there were light to make it so.
The train passes or a whiff of wind takes the sound
elsewhere, and silence falls again so thick that I
hear a leaf rustle as a beetle crawls over it. Then
out of the far quiet comes the tick of a horse's
hoof on the road.

A NIGHT OUT 155

At first I catch only the heaviest beat in each
bar, then a short of dotted common time by which
I know that the horse is trotting. Shortly it
drops to a walk, and I know exactly how far
away it is. The well-fed and somewhat aged beast
is going up Bindles' Pitch. He draws behind him
a low-wheeled vehicle with a comfortable farmer
in it.

Late at night for Farmer B to be out, for

that 's who it is for a shilling. Four good miles
away and not a ray of light to aid me, but I can

see Farmer B dozing behind his grey mare,

on whose neck the reins have fallen as she bows
her head to the slight work of climbing Bindles'
Pitch. I think I could make out an alibi for

Farmer B if they should accuse him of being

ten miles in the other direction at this moment.
Now comes the top of the ' pitch,' and the grey
horse begins to trot again. Just as I can almost
hear the sound of wheels he turns off, and the
sound of his trotting grows dim. He has taken
the way to Farmer B 's house.

There will not be any more noises on the high
road for an hour or two. On the hill under the
larch trees night seems to be holding its breath,
so tensely silent is the world. As I go near a
holly bush a clatter within sends the heart into
my mouth. It is only some small bird disturbed
on its roost. A tiny pipe far up the sky tells me
that it has gone up towards the stars. Will it
fly in that direction till it bursts and falls, as a

156 THE RING OF NATURE

blinded bee does ? It is thought that a bird dis-
turbed at midnight is unable to find a new roost
that night.

Only under the mighty impulse of the annual
migration do our day birds become night birds,
our fluttering birds flying birds, traversing thou-
sands of miles of air high above the clouds and in
the pitch dark. In the usual sense, they must be
completely lost then. If they reasoned about it,
out of sheer fright they would drop into the sea.
But instinct or the faith that removes moun-
tains leads them on and makes them perform
miracles. You might take the willow- wren and con-
struct from its model a flying machine a thou-
sand times as efficient, yet that flying machine
would be left behind in all points if it attempted
to join in the willow -wren's flight from the Cape to
England in April.

With such an illusive topic, what wonder that
I have lost myself ? These woods, familiar enough
by day, have put on a garb of entire novelty.
Instead of screes, there are banks of thyme ; instead
of pools, sand hills; instead of bracken, ragwort
and willow-herb ; instead of beech, mangroves ;
instead of maples, cocoanut palms. I think I
am coming out on the north side by Buckholt.
I begin to construct the landscape on that theory.
Of course. Yonder is the haystack, felt rather
than seen as an extra thickness of air. That
notch in the sky is the entrance to the avenue by
which I shall soon return home. That

A NIGHT OUT 157

Touch wood, and like magic, the whole scene
is changed. The haystack becomes a tree, and
a calf shed springs up where there had been a
willow. The avenue is the gap of a dead tree in
the wood, an open field wheels into position and
occupies the place of a larch copse. All because
one familiar object in a world of mystery has been
identified. As soon as I touched the top rail of a
gate, unsubstantial in the dark as all the rest, I
found myself to my surprise at the south end of the
wood instead of the north. It is the gate of the
outermost field of Dingle Farm.

Here are the white campions again, faintly
swimming out of the night in a field that only
memory knows is of sainfoin. The night- jar no
longer flies over, though he may give another
rattle just before dawn. By persistent peering I
can see quite close to the path the tops of the
grass, though nothing of the rest of the blade.
It might be a sudd floating on the sea, or the top-
most fronds of a tall forest. And though it is
undoubtedly grass it has no colour but grey. When
I grope and find flowers they too are grey. Grey
geraniums that I know to be blue, grey prunella,
grey rest-harrow, grey basil and centaury.

Over the wall from the campion field stretches
a high and open ploughed field. Here is seen
the first colour of the day, for the strong red soil
just shows a glimpse of its quality. Somewhere
at the far end of the ploughing wails a lapwing.
A grey moth, traceable in flight because it has

158 THE RING OF NATURE

white underwings, alights on the wall and in a
twinkling has withdrawn for the day into its
chosen crevice. A bat that may have been
chasing it seems to realize now that the hunting
hour has passed, for it flies overhead almost in
bee-line for its hanging-place in the manor attics.
Almost imperceptibly the message of dawn slides
into the sky. ' Strange her eyes ; her cheeks are
cold as cold sea shells.' The dawn comes, indeed,
with a faint opalescence, a running of grey rose
into grey blue, like a very wet water-colour painting
of mother-of-pearl.

Often there is a pale moon in the sky at the same
time that the sun rises, but this night there has been
no moon. But while the fate of day and night
seem to be in the balance a wood owl hoots for
the last time, and immediately afterwards the crow
calls. Though mankind sleeps for another hour
or two, day has begun.

THE MYRMIDONS 159

JULY
II

THE MYRMIDONS

I AM never sure when I am in a pine wood in
late summer whether or no I can hear the
tramp of the ants. On the whole, it must be
that we do hear an innumerable tiny ticking as
hollow leaves are trodden on and pine needles tilt
and fall back, a million scrapings of the bark
each one of which would be grotesquely inaudible
as the ants clamber here and there upon incessant
forage, even the twitching of their jaws as they
keep them in practice with imaginary work and
the singing of the air as it is drawn into twenty
million spiracles. If it is so, it must grow upon
us so gradually as we come into the wood that
the full din is never apparent. We shall need the
aid of the micro-phonograph to settle the question.
Sometimes people come into our wood, and as
they are picking a primrose, or walking with eyes
on the ground, or chance to look at the right spot
on a tree trunk, they see an ant. One solitary
ant, but of such a size that it might be three or

160 THE RING OF NATURE

four of the largest kind of ant yet seen rolled into
one. Later they may see two or three of these
big ants at once, meeting and racing past one
another on their respective but mutually service-
able business.

If the observer should be a boy scout he might
be able to determine which of two ants passing
one another was going to the nest, and that one
he could follow home. More often we ramble on
and happen on a still more crowded stream and
finally upon the nest.

In the main ant street, about ten yards from the
nest, the whole ground seems to be composed of
ants. Looking carefully we see that all are going
straight along the street in opposite directions.
They have cleared the ground of rubbish, and it
even seems as though the accumulated pressure of
their innumerable feet had smoothed and polished
it into a sort of macadam. Such crowds could not
pass one another without some sort of order, and
when I have watched them I have usually come
to the conclusion that the rule of the ant is the
same as ours, namely to keep to the right. The
rule is not invariably kept, but then neither is
it among men. I should say that the average
ant crowd observes the rule of keep-to-the-right
about as faithfully per head of the population as
the average crowd of people in the Strand.

There are roads running not only along the
ground but up the trees. Most of the ant's foraging
indeed is done in the trees, and those on the ground

THE MYRMIDONS 161

are for the most part going to and from distant
trees. Some bring down small caterpillars or
flies, others have merely collected honey or honey-
dew from the aphides up there. Mr. Edward
Step says that the honey carriers coming down
can be distinguished from the honey fetchers
going up by their greater portliness. Possibly it
is so, though the ant that is merely carrying
honey for the community necessarily has it in
the crop, which I should have thought would show
no outward extension.

Caterpillars are so seldom seen being carried
down the trunk of a tree, and some of them would
be so difficult to manipulate in that position, that
I think a good many must be thrown down on the
chance of a ground forager picking them up. It
would be interesting to climb a tree and spend
an afternoon there seeing all that happened.

And here is the nest. I knew it in February
when all the sticks of last year had vanished, and
there was no more than a slight elevation of earth
like a trampled mole hill. From the centre of
this there oozed on a sunny day a kind of brownish
trickle of ants not unlike an ooze of golden syrup,
the parts of which shone like drops of bare honey,
though it was but the transparence of young ant
carapace. Only two score they seemed, and
their whole sphere of influence was not a square
foot above ground, for they just sprawled and
basked for the two hours that the sun was hot,
and then returned to their gloomy cellars.

162 THE RING OF NATURE

And now the trodden mole hill is buried fathom
deep in a huge pile of tiny sticks thirty feet in
circumference, and the pile of sticks seems to be
covered in turn with a solid mass of ants. But
when I dig a small breach in it with a stick it seems
to be composed throughout of ants, for they rush
up from the depth, slipping on the tumbling
fragments, and boiling rank over rank till the
hole seems solid with ants, and then for those who
are looking for it a tiny spray of liquid shoots
into the air from all over the heap. The ants are
standing on their hind legs with the abdomen
upmost, and are shooting microscopic streams of
formic acid at the invader of their city. If you
put your hand within six or seven inches of the
hill it is covered with the poison in such minute
doses that, though there is no sign of moisture,
the pungent odour can be smelt on the palm for
hours after.

Dig a little deeper into the heap and the huge
' eggs ' are discovered, larger than grains of wheat,
and apparently tossed there anyhow in a heap
under the sticks. They are, of course, pupa cases,
and at this time of year contain not merely young
worker ants but winged males and females.

I have never seen the wood ants swarm. It
should be a sight like the swarming of bees.
Even the little red and black ants of the field
produce many hundreds of ' flies ' nearly as big as
bees. On a given hot day, the whole community
is given over to the vital holiday feast. There

THE MYRMIDONS 163

is no work done, there is no war on foot, not even
a war of defence. The little workers are rushing
everywhere in a plain mixture of helping at a
great departure, and anxiety at losing the big
brothers and sisters they have kept by force in
the nest so long. The honeymooners climb to
the tops of reeds and grasses and launch them-
selves by dozens into the air. I do not say thou-
sands, though most people who saw the air full of
flying ants at swarming time would call it thou-
sands. There is a rain of dark fat bodies with
whirling wings of gossamer that flash in the sun,
and a usual incident of the day is the gathering of
starlings and other birds to gorge themselves on
the unusual insect provender that the ants' holiday
has produced.

Each flying queen is the designed seed of a
future nest, and in view of the millions that any
one of them might produce perhaps it is as well
that they should have many enemies. I could
take you without difficulty to a field of twenty
acres, so full of the ant heaps of the yellow ant
that you could walk across in any direction with-
out descending to the ground. The short-flighted
queen has no doubt the best chance of establishing
a nest, and those that are ambitious to colonize
afar seldom survive the lengthened gauntlet of
birds. Once alighted, the princess loses no time
in snapping off her wings by deftly pushing the
tips against the ground, then she hides her now
thoroughly ant-like body underground. Like the

164 THE RING OF NATURE

queen humble-bee, she has all the drudgery of
making a nest and rearing the offspring of her
first eggs into helpers, so that she may devote the
rest of her life to the sole work of laying eggs.

A little drudgery in early life is nothing for even
a princess of an industrious species like Lasius
niger. But it comes completely amiss to the
heiress of a race of slave-makers so used to being
waited on that they cannot even feed themselves,
but starve in the midst of plenty if their slaves
are taken away from them. The young queens of
some such species take with them from the parental
nest a few slaves to get the new house going till
there are warriors to go out and capture more
slaves. That is the most comfortable way, but
it has not occurred to all slave-making ants.

Atta sexdens is an ant that not only keeps slaves,
but expects them to cultivate fungus for food. A
departing princess of that species takes with her
a little of the mycelium from the family tree, and
condescending to plant that, soon has something
to keep her going. The princess of a less provident
species lives for about a month by absorption of
the muscles that worked her now discarded wings,
that is, the material migrates within her body to
supply other cells, as does the material of a tad-
pole's tail or the food packed between the flakes
of a salmon's flesh. Not even a slave-making ant
has yet reached such a state of dependence that it
cannot do its own digesting.

Let us follow a little the fortunes of Atta sexdens.

THE MYRMIDONS 165

Her first children are but sketches of what her
race will be when she comes to be better fed and
cared for. Still, there are soon a few who can
work. They rear what grubs they can and some
of the eggs, now becoming numerous, they eat.
Another way of making both ends meet is to cast
grubs that they cannot feed on to the fungus heap,
where they contribute to the nourishment of that
succulent vegetable. Often, no doubt, the colony
perishes before it can get firmly on its legs, but
with ordinary luck the dog lives on its own tail
till it is fleet enough to catch a rabbit.

A third means by which the young queen of
a slave-making species begins life opens to us a
view of the probable origin of the cuckoo or slave -
making habit. The female enters the deserted
nest of a colony of her own kind or of another
kind. She is thus at least as much better off than
a mere tramp as the man who has a house is better
off than a man who has none. There is the added
chance of something remaining in the larder, and
of there being even a few slaves knocking about.

If a colony is found that has just lost its queen,
the way of the adventuress is quite smooth, and
this is probably the condition that led to the
founding of the very first slave-owning community.
Ants that have lost their queen will accept a
fresh one of even another species. Say that once
a young queen of our wood ant Formica rufa (to go
no further than our own land for an illustration)
wandered into a nest of F. fusca, where through

166 THE RING OF NATURE

the previous demise of the fused 's own queen, she
was received as the all-important mother. In
due time, the young rufas appeared and increased
till they overran the nest, and from honoured
guests or foster sisters took the role of domineering
masters. Then as the slaves, in the ordinary
course of nature, died off, their loss was so severely
felt by the masters that they went out and attacked
another fusca nest and brought home new ones.
That particular strain of Formica rufa, in fact,
may have become the progenitors of a new species,
Formica sanguined, the British slave-making ant.

F. sanguinea is so like F. rufa in general and
minute form as to appear even to careful observers
identical. The distinguishing difference is found
with a good pocket lens on the shield-shaped
front of the head, which in sanguinea is slightly
notched at the shoulders. It has only been found
as yet in the southem counties, and even there is
scarce. Mr. Horace Hutchinson knows of a nest
somewhere in Ashdown Forest.

When we have seen a queen ant with her wings
on, we have seen the insect complete. As a
winged insect, it falls to be classified with the
bees and the wasps among the hymen optera.
Myrmidons all, in the devotion of each worker to
the common cause, and in the vast numbers they
produce as summer runs its course. It can surely
not have been mere coincidence that made Homer
give to the faithful and numerous followers of
Achilles the name, myrmidons, so near to myrmiz,

THE MYRMIDONS 167

the Greek for ant. The compliment, if deliberate,
was one that the ants and bees well deserved.

I marked in April the place where a yellow-
thoraxed humble-bee went to her nest in the long
dry grass, and though I opened the tiny dome of
moss and discovered her there victualling the one
cell like half a nutshell, she or some other came
back and continued the nest. Now, it requires
some fortitude to break the nest open, and let out
the cloud of bees that very much want to know
what is meant by such a trespass. They are not
so fierce, however, as the red-tailed bees, and
when the nest is open they lie about for the most
part on their backs with their tails in the air
ready to sting if they are touched. Some say
that they feign death, but the attitude reminds
us forcibly of that of the wood ants when their
nest is attacked, and they prepare to squirt poison.

The nest is a very jumble of cells in all stages of
completion, resembling in the final stage the cocoon
cases of the ants done in yellow wax and many
times the size. Some contain fat white grubs,
others indiscriminately mixed with them, dark
and rather insipid honey. The humble-bee does
not ferment and cook and flavour its honey as
the artistic hive-bee does. The cells are stuck
together loosely where they tangentially touch
one another, so that they make a sort of single
comb, for the openings are all on one side. The
triangular spaces between the cells are often
jammed with a mixture of honey and pollen, and

168 THE RING OF NATURE

there is usually a grub feeding on it, perhaps the
grub of the rightful owners, but perhaps that of
one of the cuckoos that victimize the bee.

If we search very carefully, and armed with a
police description previously supplied, we may
find the doyen of all the bee-cuckoos, one that is
got up with an almost complete resemblance to
its host. The host is Bombus virginalis and the
cuckoo Apathus campestris. A parallel description
from the South Kensington catalogue will give
some idea of their similarity : —

B. virginalis A. campestris

Densely clothed with The pubescence black,

black pubescence, the collar with the thorax anteriorly

orange-yellow ; wings sub- and the scutellum clothed

hyaline, their apical mar- with yellow pubescence ;

gins clouded. Abdomen — wings fusco-hyaline. Ab-

the second segment with domen shining, the fourth

bright orange-yellow pu- and fifth segments with

bescence, that on the third yellow pubescence later-

and fourth black ; on the ally,
apical segments it is ful-
vous yellow.

The mam description is followed in each case
with the details of several varieties, for humble-
bees are by no means constant to type. That
our nest will show, whether or no we find therein
a specimen of Apathus, the apathetic or unfeeling
cuckoo. Some are queens, some workers, some
drones or males. We can find out which are the
latter by getting stung by the other two and

THE MYRMIDONS 169

squeezing with impunity the last. The workers
are exceedingly variable in size as well as in colour.
Here is one lying on its back, and no doubt possessed
of a sting, that is not one fourth the length of the
normal. I have never seen quite such a midge
working the flowers, and it may be that these tiny
ones are given duties that keep them entirely at
home. They possibly come from the grubs we
have seen living on the intercellular pollen mixture,
or, at any rate, are the result of stinted feeding on
account of bad weather.

The humble-bee is but a poor breeder of
myrmidons by comparison with the social wasps
and the hive-bee. The underground humble-bee
with yellow bands and a white tail has the strongest
nest, though the underground red-tailed bee and
Bombus sylvaticus frequently run to several hun-
dreds of bees in the nest at one time. But a
fully developed wasp city has been shown to
number forty thousand when its four months
of growth had reached its climax. It is superior
organization that does it, for the humble-bee does
not yield in industry to any insect that flies, and
commonly begins its nest before the wasp.

Orderliness and economy of material have been
carried by the wasps and the hornets to a height
undreamt of by the humble-bee. Cells are built
side by side, so that the six walls of the centre
one form each one wall of the six cells abutting on
it, and this system, as the reader well knows, is
continued through a comb of perhaps a thousand

170 THE RING OF NATURE

cells. The cells are not built of thick dollops
of wax mixed with pollen and honey, but of
exquisitely thin paper which the reader may see
the wasps preparing on any exposed plank of
wood that has not been recently painted. The
whole nest, instead of being dumped down inside
a heap of moss, is anchored to the roof of a cave
excavated to fit it, and surrounded with walls of
wood-paper with air spaces between. Thus it is
kept dry in the wettest weather and of an equable
temperature, wood and air-space having been
proved to be one of the most non-conductive of
materials.

We do not attack the myrmidon city of the wasp
so nonchalantly as the poor village of the humble-
bee. It is necessary to prepare for our visit by
placing within the doorway a grain of cyanide of
potassium, the fumes of which will kill in a few
hours every wasp that goes in, comes out, or stays
within. Then we can quietly dig up the nest with
careful spade and trowel and inspect it as the
wasps built it. Perhaps the chief surprise is to
find that the cells hang mouth downwards, and
the grubs have to maintain themselves in position
by the friction of their fat sides against the walls
and a sucker upon their tails. There are plenty
of other marvels that are best found with the
eyes.

I think that, on the whole, paper must be in
terms of labour a cheaper building material than
wax. Some say that the bee requires to consume

THE MYRMIDONS 171

twelve pounds of honey for the production of one
pound of wax ; others have put it at much less.
But the bee having been appointed worker in wax
rises to the occasion and brings in even more con-
structional ingenuity than the wasp. Her combs
are vertical, and that arrangement enables her to
build the cells not only with party walls side by
side, but with their bases abutting. They are
back-to-back habitations, and so mathematically
constructed that not only does the same amount
of material suffice for two cell bottoms, but less is
required for two than would be required for one.
The vertical double comb even in wax is a great
improvement on the horizontal single comb even
in wood.

A still greater advantage that belongs to the
hive-bee springs in the first place from the nature
of its diet. The wasp eats, at any rate, in the
grub stage, aphides, caterpillars, flies and other
creatures that we are never grateful enough to her
for removing. It is a provender that will not
store, whepeas the nectar of flowers on which the
bee lives can by a skilful and cleanly confectioner
like the hive-bee (though not by the disorderly
humble-bee) be kept over the winter. The result
is well known. In the hive are preserved through
the winter not merely a queen but an army of
some ten thousand workers who, at the first turn
of the year, persuade the mother to lay eggs from
which to nourish fresh colleagues from the winter
store. Two months before the first humble-bee

172 THE RING OF NATURE

has come forth to her arduous labours, there are
young bees helping the old ones, now laying down
one by one their life's work, to forage in the early
flowers and raise constantly increasing hundreds
of bees of the year.

In April, before the humble-bee has got one
daughter to assist her, the hive queen is laying a
thousand eggs a day and accelerating towards
three or four times that number. In May, the
hive is boiling over with sixty or seventy thousand
bees, with as many more in the cells, and by
swarming it divides itself into two parts, each of
which seems by a miracle as multitudinous as the
original whole. Ten days later, the old hive will
often send out another swarm, and the first swarm
may itself swarm before June is out. So the
hive that I may show you with two bees for
every one of the strongest wasp nest may represent
but a third of the increase from the loins of one
queen.

When the eminent bee-keeper, Dzierzon, lost all
his hives but ten, he raised their number in three
years to four hundred, an increase that is perhaps
not, as men say, * the limit,' but shows fairly well
the multiplying power of the honey-bee. When
the bees of an ultra-prolific race, like the Cyprians,
raise queens preparatory to swarming, they some-
times run to the number of thirty in a single hive,
and each of these under favourable circumstances
might become, with a handful of bees to give her
a start, the mother of a full hive. Yet in a wild

THE MYRMIDONS 178

state the hive-bee is rarely more common than
any one of our three or four commonest humble-
bees. The mere fact of having one's eggs all in
one basket, even though it be a large and a sound
one, may prove inimical to success.

174 THE RING OF NATURE

AUGUST

IN THE SEA

ON the first day of the townsman's holiday at
the sea, or at any rate for the first hour, he
is content to lie on his back and watch the waves
dashing up the shingle, or lapping with the sob of
a disappointed ambition. As a passive accepter
he allows their message to beat into his tired but
happy brain. Possibly he interprets them by
means of a little mathematical ' shop,' and no harm
done.

The waves that are beating merely inches high
on our summer strand ran in the deep sea, not as
men say ' mountains high,' but when the wind
had fetched them four hundred miles, thirty feet
high. These monstrous deep-sea waves race along
at the rate of a mile a minute, and the distance
between their crests is some two thousand feet.
Running into shallow water (say merely a hundred
fathoms), they begin to slacken speed, and at
length wave after wave can only crawl in and
throw itself dead on the beach.

IN THE SEA 175

Now watch this. The retardation of each wave
having been the same, it follows that the time
interval between them will remain as it was, and
we have only to take out our watch and time them
to know what waves these were when they raced
(more or less) mountains high in mid-Atlantic.
Thus. Twelve seconds between waves ; squared
is 144 ; multiplied by 5£, and we have waves
measuring 738 feet from crest to crest. (Where-
upon we fall into a mid-day sleep in which all the
glad sounds and sensations of an August day by
the sea are like things seen through tissue paper.)

Everything that we see on the seashore is strange
and new to the dweller in the back country. The
plainest link between the life of the sea and of the
dry land is the snail, and the snails of the sea
constitute fully nine-tenths of all the animate
forms we shall find. Going down the cliff path we
see lots of land snails, in fact, most of them seem
to be more common at the edge of the sea than in
the lanes at home. But when we get to the beach
we find such a wealth of species and so many forms
not even faintly represented on shore that the
most casual observer must find that the sea is the
headquarters of the great molluscan order.

The first band of the shore below high-water
mark is occupied with great uniformity by a genus
of stomach-foots or gasteropods called Littorina.
The common periwinkle is the best-known type,
but before we get to the rocks occupied by the winkle

176 THE RING OF NATURE

we find right at the edge of high-water mark a
shell of the same shape, but perfectly smooth and
usually rejoicing in olive or orange or some kindred
bright colour. The characteristic shape of the
Littorinas we find to be a large round body whorl
and a tiny sharp spire. The eye that has once
taken the characters in cannot be mistaken when
other shells conforming or otherwise present
themselves to view. But the point about the
smooth one, L. palliata, as it is called, is that it is
almost an amphibian. Many individuals must
sometimes live for days at a time out of water,
and it is scarcely fanciful to say that this snail
is about to follow our garden snail, exchange its
gills for lungs, and take up a purely terrestrial life.

L. litorea, the common winkle which we find a
little below the line where the smooth ' sea snail '
is common, has proved itself a traveller of some
merit. A gasteropod of the Old World, and thus
as much a British shell as any we have, it has
travelled along the existing or prehistoric shores
of Iceland and Greenland, and within the last two
centuries has invaded America from the north,
getting with difficulty round Cape Cod, but now
having reached Newport and New York.

A little below the winkle line, but overlapping
it somewhat, we find a shell of quite another
family, the purple or dog-winkle. It is exceedingly
variable in colour, now yellow, now white, now
brown or red, and sometimes striped not merely
in two colours but in three, red, white and black,

IN THE SEA 177

like a very special brandy-ball or lollipop. This,
too, is a British shell that has invaded America,
where it has established at Bar Harbour a well-
known colony rejoicing in vermilion stripes.

It is an interesting and sub -consciously stimu-
lative exercise to analyse the subtle but distinctive
differences of shape that mark off the many genera
of shells. These soft -bodied gasteropods which
most people imagine to be mere formless dollops
of slime leave behind them mementoes as enduring
as the skeletons of mammals, and far more plainly
indicative of their species. In spite of the protean
colour-scheme of the purple, we can tell it at
once from the winkle or the whelk by a difference
of shape that almost escapes analysis. The main
distinction is in the body whorl of the shell, which
in the purple grows smaller towards the opening.
While we are learning to memorize the difference
between the purple and the winkle, We can verify
our verdicts by taking the shell up and looking at
its under side, for the purple has a groove at the
forward end of the shell for the extrusion of the
siphon.

The siphon is a portion of the mantle of the
animal folded into an extempore tube through
which the owner can get a deeper and more vigorous
draught of sea water and oxygen over the gills.
Generally speaking, the gasteropod that has a
siphon is carnivorous, while the one without is
vegetarian.

Let us get a good big whelk from the fisherman's

178 THE RING OF NATURE

boat if we wish to extend our studies a little
further, for the big whelks live beyond low-water
mark, where they are usually attracted to pots
containing fish or other meat bait, and then hauled
up as lobsters are.

The live whelk placed in a pail of sea water
soon extends his horns, his foot, and his siphon,
and comes out for a crawl. We see that he carries
on the end of his foot a slab of horn called the
operculum, which just closes the door when he
withdraws into his shell. If we get him to crawl
on glass and then look at him underneath, we can
see that overlapping the foot is the edge of the
mantle not unlike the edge of a man's coat
surrounding his waistcoat. If we made a dis-
section we should find that the gills are contained
in a pocket of the mantle, not unlike the inner
breast pocket wherein we keep the most valuable
of our papers. In a ticket pocket in the same
garment the whelk keeps a smaller set of gills,
the function of which is to taste or test the water
for purity or other desirable quality. In other
words, the whelk's nose is in its ticket pocket.
We will not go further to-day into its more intimate
anatomy.

If we do not find many whelks in the rock pools
we find plenty of shells. Many are neatly drilled
with round holes, showing how some mighty sea
monster made a way into the citadel and ate the
occupant. That same monster we may find in the
shape of a fellow gasteropod, or, at any rate, we

IN THE SEA 179

can find its shell. It is as though a shell had been
made something like a small whelk shell, of good
thick material, and then had been scored both
ways while it was soft, cutting it all over into
diamonds or lozenges like a golf ball. This shell
has a deep siphon-notch, showing with reasonable
probability that its inhabitant is a carnivore. But
how did such a dollop of slime gain entrance to
the whelk's shell ?

As we have seen, the shell of a whelk is hard
and almost continuous, the operculum making it
entirely so when the animal is within. There is
no way but to bore a hole through the shell, and this
the hungry dog-whelk, Nassa reticulata, proceeds
to do. Protruding its snout, it puts it against
the shell of the whelk and waits. The slightly
acid moisture acts on the lime as we may find
a drop of lemon juice would do, dissolving it or
splitting it up into its airy constituents and letting
the robber's snout through. The dog-whelk then
pushes in its tongue and scratches out the flesh in
morsels.

More surprises in this dollop of slime. A tongue
that will scratch off flesh as a wild-rose bramble
would can scarcely be made of slime. Reader,
you may have seen through a microscope or seen
on a magic lantern sheet an object called ' the
radula of Patella vulgaris.' It is like a coil of rope
set with hooked barbs. I might have said a coil
of barbed wire, but the barbs are far more frequent,
are set in regular rows of several abreast in two or

180 THE RING OF NATURE

more sizes, and are hooked like the claws of the
cat or the thorns of a bramble.

Where is that ' radula of Patella vulgaris ? '
Behold the common limpet. That is Patella
vulgaris. If you are callous enough to wrench
one of these from its rock and, following the lead
of the little red mouth, probe it a little with a
needle, you can extract the radula like a reddish
thread nearly two inches long, and, nicely coiled
under the microscope, it will give you again that
astonishing picture of super-barbed wire. If we
draw the tiny thread through our fingers we can
feel the rasp of the tiny teeth, and understand a
little how the whole snail tribe files up green leaf
and tough bark for its food. There is a distinctly
different pattern of dentition for every family of
gasteropod, and a slightly different one for every
species.

We should need many months of days far
more strenuous than a hot day in August to catch
and examine all the stomach- walking molluscs.
There are the tops, of a new and most beautiful
style of twist and exquisite colouring, of which we
shall find some in the lower pools, the pelican-
foot and its allies in gravel, the smooth and daintily
painted Natica burrowing in sand, the little English
cowrie, the body of which envelops the whole shell
when the animal is out, yet entirely withdraws
through a narrow crack when it is in, the staircase,
the turrets, and many more.

Not of course the barnacles. They never come

IN THE SEA 181

unglued from their native rock or limpet shell.
Their shells open with three or four doors at the
top and thence come out, not the horns of a snail,
but a rosy-red casting-net composed of feathery
and frond-like legs. The net is flung and with-
drawn, and in its meshes comes back the tiny
animal food on which the barnacle lives. Huxley
well said that the barnacle is an animal that stands
on its head, and gets its living by kicking food
into its mouth with its legs. It is of the crustacean
order, and therefore a shrimp, a crab, a bee, any-
thing but a mollusc.

Other months would be needed to cope with
the bivalve shells. As we walk over the rocks at
low tide, we are surprised to see jets of water
thrown into the air from round holes about an
inch in diameter. If we walk more slowly we may
see that the holes are filled with a body like a
white cucumber. A closer look shows a double
nose at the top. It is a double siphon, one barrel

for the injection of water, the other for ejec

' Splash ' goes the fountain into the air as the
startled animal draws its cucumber body back
into the hole. If we can get one out without
ruinous injury we find that here is a remote rela-
tive of the oyster, having two very fragile shells
that fail to cover the animal however tightly they
may be closed, wherefore we call them ' gaper '
shells.

A better type of the bivalve is the cockle, whose
shell we pick up long before we have the oppor-

182 THE RING OF NATURE

tunity of seeing how nimbly the animal can jump
in the soft muddy sand in which it lives.

The shell of the cockle tells its life-history to
any boy scout. The thicker it is the rougher the
sea from which it came, wherefore Cornish cockle-
shells will be found to be much thicker and stronger
than Dawlish cockle-shells. The inner surface of
the shell has tell-tale marks upon it — pits where
the two strong muscles were attached that open
and shut the shell, and a thin line all along to show
where the mantle joined the shell. This line runs
into a deep bay at one end, and that is where the
siphon poked out. If we find no bay in the
mantle-mark, we know that the bivalve whose
remains we are examining had no siphon.

Away with the univalve gasteropods and the
bivalves. We may find a shell like a tiny
elephant's tusk, open at both ends. It belongs to
another order of the everlasting molluscs, the
scaphopods. The little lamp shell with the lower
shell very concave like the old-fashioned lamps,
so shaped to hold the oil, has a yet more illustrious
history. It is a brachiopod, and, if that does not
amaze you, it is called terebratula. Many millions
of years ago all the bivalve molluscs were brachio-
pods and terebratula is a famous name to geolo-
gists. In our day, the pelecypods (oysters) rule
the bivalve world everywhere, and the brachiopods
are virtually extinct. All honour then to little
terebratula caput-serpentis for upholding so long
the dignity of its ancient family.

IN THE SEA 183

Speaking of fossils, what do we make of the
ammonites and the belemnites, by some called
thunderbolts, that we crack out of our blue rocks
at Whitby and often elsewhere ? They surely
are extinct. Yes and no. A mollusc whose
mantle had developed in front into ten arms
covered with suckers like the single one of the
limpet elaborated the ammonite shell at the
proper season to cover her eggs. She sat in it,
perhaps, as the nautilus does to-day, and drifted
across the prehistoric sea bearing her eggs with
her. But later, it would seem, like a lady with
a fashionable hat, she over-elaborated her shell
till it was useless for its purpose, and after dragging
the costly ornament about for a few million years
the race that gave us our countless ammonite
shells became extinct. Not only do nautili and
devil-fish of more reasonable habits survive in
our seas, but they run to enormous size. Some of
them make two or more mouthfuls apiece for a
whale, and some have been encountered weighing
many tons and having tentacles fifteen and twenty
feet in length.

The dry lecture is interrupted by the discovery
of a stranded squid. It is dead, but we can
squeeze from its siphon a jet of sepia, renewing it
again and again by pouring in water and pouring
it out again, richly coloured from the abundant
tube within. The flesh of the animal is of the same
flabby consistency that belongs to the other
molluscs, but the trunk of it contains a hard part,

184 THE RING OF NATURE

the pen or cuttle-bone which we use as an ink
eraser. The thunderbolt or belemnite fossil we
asked about is the pen of a prehistoric cuttle-fish,
and the ink has been found surrounded by the
fossil remains, so little injured by the passage of a
few million years that it gave full satisfaction as
sepia to an artist who painted with it.

So much for the mighty kingdom of the garden
snail. Now we fling off boots and stockings and
go for a paddle in a rock pool. It is glass clear ;
there is no outlet to the sea ; no sooner do we
stir up a cloud of sand than it settles again, so
that we should see the movement of the tiniest
atom. Yet we must search it long and keenly if
we are to find all the animal treasures it contains.

A little submarine eddy near a bank of bright
green seaweed draws attention to apparently a
piece of water in the water, something scarcely
more visible than a flake of sunken ice. It is off
again and again when we try to get a hand beneath
it, and once the eye is removed from it the
invisibility of the pool swallows it. But if we
catch it, we find that this ghostly creature is
clothed in mail, and furnished with the most
delicate and elaborate of legs, antennae and
mouth-parts, with the last of which it can be seen
tucking bunches of sea salad into its gullet in the
most business-like way. And every one knows
that when a prawn is boiled its transparency turns
to the most aggressive of opaque reds, visible half
a street away.

IN THE SEA 185

Then we see tops and whelk-shells scuttling
along the floor of the pool at too great a pace,
and discover the common but perpetually admir-
able hermit crabs. We take up a bunch of seaweed
and find that it grows on the back of a spider
crab, thus rendered invisible in its work among the
seaweed. Nay, we look at the seaweed and find
that it is not vegetable but animal, a colony of
coral-like animals that yield amazing comedies
and tragedies under the microscope. That scented,
fernlike thing, the flustra, is the best zoophyte to
begin with ; it reveals the first antechamber of
its infinite beauties to the pocket magnifying
glass.

Fish are a surer attraction. We seldom approach
a pool so quietly as to see the blenny actually
sunning himself out of water. He has plopped
into his own element and gone to hide himself
under a stone, whence presently we disclose him
and have a most exciting chase round the pool.
He blows out his head into a most terrifying object,
glares with his garnet eye, expels his breath with
a loud pop, and if he has the chance gives you a
shrewd nip with his jaws.

Another good fish to chase (forgetting all the
years that may be our misfortune) is the rock
goby, a smooth black brute with a shining white
throat and a distension of stomach that betrays
the typical sea appetite. And there is the serpent-
like gunnel, flattened from back to belly and
spotted with a fierce indigo that makes most

186 THE RING OF NATURE

children afraid to touch him. Doubly armed, for
the agility of the gunnel to evade pursuit is truly
wonderful.

The little soles met with in the shallow edges
of the sea waves are just like the sand on which
they lie, say, like bits of paper to which grains of
sand have been fixed all over. The older soles
are a far less perfect match, till we remember that
they live not in the shallow sunshine, but in the
depths where the shadows run together more.
Follow the little soles into the deep sea and we
are in an enormous world almost unexplored.
We can dredge up a few monsters or their
integuments, haul a few out with rod and line,
wait for the waves to wash up prizes like the
lesser forkbeard or the wonderful opah naming
with all the colours of the rainbow. But at the
edge of the sea we stand for ever on the border
of a world of life richer in wonder than the land
behind us, and contrived to yield its treasures so
slowly and spasmodically as to last many lifetimes.
Like Newton, we can only hope to pick up a very
few shells before it is time for bed.

PLANTS ON THE MOVE 187

AUGUST
II

PLANTS ON THE MOVE

ON the rocky scarp of my mountain where I
lie and watch the bees busy at the thyme
there is a gentle breeze moving. I look down
at the village almost a mile below as the stone
drops, and pity the people who must stew in a
currentless shimmer. There comes up ever so
gently on the ascending warmth an airy white
flake, so airy that I can only see it when it gets a
dark mass behind it, such as a cavity in the rock
or a juniper bush. The little balloon, wavering
hither and thither, steers on the whole a straight
course almost to my feet, where a sharp edge of
rock catches it for a moment, knocks off its tiny
hanging car, and lets the rest bound up and fly
on through the blue mountain sky.

The car of the balloon which has fallen at the
foot of the stone that dislodged it is the fruit of a
lowland thistle come all this way to establish a
new sept far from the maternal tree. You might
tell what species it belonged to by the structure of

188 THE RING OF NATURE

the balloon or even, the balloon having gone, by
the fluting of the seed case. There are hundreds
of them in this particular trade, the members of
the great composite family numbering in Great
Britain alone fully a hundred and thirty species.
This particular fruit, aided by a very gentle rising
breeze, has travelled uncommonly far for a thistle,
the majority of the balloons we see careering in all
sorts of unexpected places up and down the land
having lost their cargoes within forty or fifty
yards of the parent plant. We may find that
there are some other seeds apparently not so well
equipped for travelling that succeed in colonizing
many thousands of miles from their home.

Nearly all the best flying seeds belong to the
composite family, and nearly every member of
that family migrates by the air. The habit has
in a measure been forced upon them by their very
compositeness. When the flowers, for the purpose
of better attracting the insects, took to growing
all together on one head with a communal arrange-
ment of bracts by way of calyx, we may say that
in quite an impersonal way the question arose,
What was to be done with each flower's own calyx.
The scheme of a dandelion would obviously be
spoiled if a hundred and fifty green calyces poked
out all over and reduced the radiant gold of the
' blossom ' to something little different from the
grass of the field. The florets are safe in their
numbers, and do not require the protection of a
calyx for each of them. The calyx is not wanted,

PLANTS ON THE MOVE 189

and there are only two courses open to it. Either
it may vanish altogether as four out of the five
toes of the horse have vanished, or it may be con-
verted to some other use. It has elected the latter
course, and has become what we call a pappus.

The pappus is in abeyance during the flowering
of the dandelion. When that has been accom-
plished, and the fruit is safely fertilized, the pappus
grows, the dandelion seems to blossom anew, but
this time in white. A huge white bubble occupies
the site of the late golden flower. It is composed
of as many smaller white bubbles as there are
fruits ; the fruits are attached to the parchment
platform below them by the lightest possible
tacking, and at the first puff of wind each of them
goes sailing away as the car of a tiny and
wonderful balloon.

An objection that the evolutionist often meets
with when he has pointed out some such obvious
fact as this, is that, useful as is, for example,
a full-blown balloon such as the dandelion has,
no advantage would be derived from the posses-
sion of the first slight hairiness that was the fore-
runner of a full-grown pappus- to-be some million
generations hence. The objection has very little
force in this particular case. Some of the com-
posites have still very small pappi, not nearly
sufficient to fly upon, and yet in every case it can
be shown that the flower derives benefit from them.
The flower-head of the leopard's bane is only a
little woolly, but the ripe florets take ten times as

190 THE RING OF NATURE

long to fall a given distance as the fruits by them-
selves would do. They are borne on stalks, some
three feet high, and capable when blown by the
wind of giving the seeds a very useful jerk in the
right direction, so that, what with that and the force
of the wind, the seed usually manages to travel a
good six feet from the parent plant.

The bristles that take the place of plumes on
the fruit of the scabious are enough for the wind
to take hold of in the same way, and also serve to
work the seed into any little earth cavity, and
thus effectually plant it. The reader will not be
able to examine any seeding composite, however
elementary its pappus, without congratulating
it upon having done better with its calyx than
merely cast it away. The fruit of the oat-grass
and some others having an equipment not unlike
the bristles of the scabious, by twisting their
awns together like springs that suddenly dis-
engage, get along the ground a few inches in a
series of little hops before encountering an obstacle
under which the same force buries the seed.

Ordinary smooth round seeds that are jerked
out by the wind do not leave the matter by any
means to chance. The long, wiry stalks on which
they grow are eminently calculated to give their
jerk at just the right time to send the seed the
greatest possible distances. If we examine the
common sage or any of the dead-nettles we find
that the lower lip of the calyx is beautifully shaped
for giving the projectile an upward guidance that

PLANTS ON THE MOVE 191

considerably lengthens its parabola. Some calyx
tubes, as in the allied genus Teucrium, are actually
rifled so as to give the shot a spin, on the principle
adopted not long since by the makers of our
rifles and ordnance.

So much for the sling which, like the balloon,
is dependent on the wind for its functioning.
The artillery method practised by a great number
of plants attracts human admiration more quickly.
Every one knows the geraniums and the long
beaks they produce at seeding time, from which
they are known as cranesbills. These beaks are
purely shooting arrangements to be likened to the
barrels of cross-bows, from end to end of which
operate elastic springs to shoot the seeds. There
are five elastic straps attached at one end to the
tip of the beak, and at the other each to a fruit
at the bottom. The elastic strains and tightens
on the fruit, and at the right time the latter is
released, the strap curling sharply up in the
direction of the barrel. In late summer you find
every beak decorated with five curled straps and
apparently a fruit at each end. Long ago I
collected a handful of these ripe fruits and planted
them. Not one came up. I had collected merely
the empty catapults, for each carpel has a slit in
its envelope from which the seed is slung at the
instant when the elastic rolls up. The stork's bill
explodes in much the same way, but the elastic
remains on the seed in a twisted form that
enables it to hop along the ground and bury

192 THE RING OF NATURE

itself. In John's Flowers of the Field, edited by
Clarence Elliott, we read that a twisted capsule,
if moistened and laid on a sheet of paper, ' will, in
its effort to straighten itself, soon crawl an inch or
more away from the spot on which it was laid.'

The geranium shoots its seeds about three yards.
An exotic artillerist Hura crepitans, like a box of
brazil nuts, goes off with a bang, like a pistol, and
shoots its seeds fifteen or twenty yards. The
reader can find for himself what are the accomplish-
ments of others of our common shooting plants
such as the broom, the balsam, and the yellow
wood-sorrel, common in every greenhouse.

Goethe gave in his Travels in Italy the following
account of the artillery performances of Acanthus
mollis : —

' I had brought home several seed capsules and
put them away in an open box, when one night I
heard a crackling noise, and immediately afterwards
a sound like the impact of small bodies against the
walls and ceiling. I could not understand it at
first, but found afterwards that my pods had burst
and scattered their seeds all over the place. The
dryness of the room had caused the fruits to ripen
in a few days to the requisite degree of elasticity.'

Thus we can hear the broom pods crackling on
a hot day as they shoot their seeds and colonize a
further stretch of the field. We can take a pod or
two home, and fixing them in the centre of a table
measure the energy with which they burst.

But to shoot a seed even five yards is not to get

PLANTS ON THE MOVE 193

it planted a thousand miles away. It is enough
to secure fresh soil for the seedling, and also to
secure in a time that is short in comparison with
a geological age the colonization of the largest
piece of land in the world. Even the thistle which
flies its seed only forty yards would take a thou-
sand years to travel twenty miles. And a tree
that only bore fruit at the age of thirty, and
then parachuted its seeds like the sycamore,
would take half a million years to colonize from
Land's End to John o' Groat's. How are we
going to get Claytonia, the perfoliate chickweed,
from America to Europe in a single season ?

It is suggested by Kerner von Marilaun that
some of these shooting seeds are designed to go
off at the right time, so as to shoot a passing
animal and so get transported in its fur or feathers.
The case of the squirting cucumber is a strong one.
In this fruit the skin presses on the liquid contents,
against the resistance of the stalk which acts as
a stopper. A slight jerk from a passing animal
upsets the equilibrium, the stopper flies out, and
a stream of seeds in jelly, something like the
contents of a gooseberry, shoots the intruder like
a spring gun. Anything locomotive thus hit must,
of course, carry a seed or two a considerable
distance before dropping them.

Most plants, however, that rely on animals to
transport their seeds adopt far simpler means.
Of all the flowering plants, one in ten have fruits
capable of hooking themselves at a touch to

194 THE RING OF NATURE

whatever brushes against them as they sit ripe on
their stalks. We only have to walk through a
field, or better still through a wood, to find our
legs or skirt covered with what we generally regard
in a lump as burrs. Some are harder to get off
than others, and that is all that most of us care
to know about them. There are galium, hound's-
tongue, dog's mercury, avens, agrimony, corn-
buttercup, enchanter's nightshade and a hundred
others. The boy scout merely takes a glance at
your trouser-leg and knows the very field you have
been in, while you are quite unaware of the terrible
infection you may be carrying. You and your
spaniel jump into a train, thence into a ship, and
perhaps girdle half the world before the seeds on
your clothes or pelt fall off and come into their
new kingdom.

The burr has scarcely yet been evolved that will
stick to the feathers of a bird. The genus Trapella
gives one excellent example, but curiously enough
that plant is one of the rarest and most local of
plants. On the other hand, the plants that are
most widely distributed throughout the world seem
to be highly qualified in another way to get their
seeds carried by birds.

The three commonest plants throughout the
world are probably purple loosestrife (Lythrum
salicaria), gipsy wort (Lycopus europceus), and self-
heal (Prunella vulgaris). I must leave the reader
to fathom the secret of the gipsy wort. Prunella
will be found to have a sticky fruit against which

PLANTS ON THE MOVE 195

the glossiest feather would scarcely be proof, if
it touched it at just the right condition of
atmosphere, and it is a fruit that by its tininess
and lightness would not call upon the bird about
to migrate for an immediate preening. Prunella
has probably done the journey from England to
South Africa many times.

The seeds of Lyihrum and many other waterside
plants fall into the water and make a film that
closes at once on any solid body that meets them.
Not in themselves sticky, they are highly so by
the suction that a damping gives to such light
particles, and as waterfowl and waders are among
the most active of our migrants, the purple
loosestrife must, like the prunella, owe much to
the birds for its extraordinary distribution. When
no water bird touches them, the autumn floods
take them and wash them out on some meadow
bank many miles from home.

It is hard to find any plant that has not some
visible means of migration. It is as imperative
for plants as for animals to care for their progeny,
and there is no more necessary care than the
provision of new soil wherein to grow. An obvious
method differing from all the others just named is
the surrounding of the precious seed with a fleshy
fruit bribing the birds to their duty, just as the
honey bribed the insects to carry the pollen.

It is strange that man has made so much of
fruit, that is of the fleshy surroundings of fruit, as
an article of diet. It is of the essence of the

196 THE RING OF NATURE

stratagem that these pulps should be a species
of cheap fraud, just a little flavour and a good deal
of water, always perfectly cheap, and sugar, which
is a kind of plant by product. There is no com-
parison in nourishment value between the flesh
of the plum and its kernel. As far as they dare,
the plants make the pulp of their fruit unwhole-
some. Wild fruits are sometimes emetic and
sometimes purgative, so that the bird that has
carried them off will not destroy the precious seed
that they have been bribed to plant. Even the
deadly nightshade which we fear so much is not
fatal to the blackbird. In fact, the bird seems to
enjoy it and thrive on it. Even if it entirely
consumes the seed of some plants there will be
some sticky remnant to be cleaned from the bill,
and thus fall at a distance on new ground. That
is the well-known method of travel adopted by
the mistletoe, and there is no doubt that it is
as well used by the black bryony, the guelder-
rose, and others.

I see the ants laboriously trundling along great
seeds towards their nest, and I laugh to find once
more the plants at their moving. So that is how
the great celandine has got so far down the lane ?
These little beans (though they do not come from
a true pod) are well endowed with a wart of fleshy
matter called a caruncle, and the wise ant knows
no better way to come by this acceptable article of
diet than by carrying the whole seed a good way,
and often all the way home, before it nibbles off

PLANTS ON THE MOVE 197

what it wants, and leaves the rest to grow into a
new plant. For the same reason they do the
often far heavier pantechnicon work of the snow-
drops and chionodoxas of the garden, of the violets
and periwinkles, cow-wheats, pansies, Canterbury
bells, and many others.

The meadow saffron is the abomination of the
farmer for the bad effects that it has on his cows.
He will go to a good deal of expense to get rid of
it, but it usually manages to make one or two
successful blossoms, and has at least one good way
of getting from one field to another. When it
sends up its ovary to the field surface and opens
it, the seed within is sticky as mistletoe, and if a cow
tread on it she carries about with her the germ
that may become a plant that shall be her own
or her daughter's undoing. The greatest blossom
in the world, the Rafflesia, which has no leaves,
only a parasite root, but a blossom eighteen
inches across, gets its seed-carrying done by
elephants. Says Mr. G. F. Scott Elliot, quoting
Goeze : ' When the huge flower decays, it forms
a sticky pulpy mass like broth and full of seeds.
An elephant strolling through the forest will step
in it, and will, of course, naturally scrape its feet
against the next conveniently projecting Cissus
root which it happens to encounter.' The Cissus
root is the actual place whereon the Rafflesia is
designed to grow. Thus, the elephant performs
for Rafflesia the same duty that the mistle-thrush
performs for our mistletoe.

198 THE RING OF NATURE

The possession of winged or burred seeds would
be little to the advantage of the ivy-leaved toad-
flax. To shoot them out as the violet and oxalis
do would be just the same as dropping them to
the foot of the wall or cliff on which the parent
grows, and the foot of the wall is out of the habitat.
The best that the toad-flax can do is to prevent the
seed from falling, to be sure that it will find a
lodgment at the right altitude. So the flower-
stalk bends and searches among the rocks till it
finds a crevice into which it thrusts its precious
burden. Not content with furnishing the seed
with a spade to dig its own grave, it digs the hole
and puts it in.

If our arrangements for our progeny are elaborate
our progeny need not be numerous. The orchids,
which are so careful about their fertilization, are
singularly careless in the matter of seed distribution.
Each one of them produces enough seeds to plant
an acre, but they are so tiny that in the great
majority of them the vital spark cannot live till
germination. They blow in the wind almost like
grains of larch pollen, and it is by means of the
wind that they are sent abroad. But the other
plants that provide more substantial embryos and
more complex means of distribution overwhelm
the orchids in spite of the number of their seeds.
The fact that even our thistle, with a perfect
balloon for each seed, must produce so many seeds
shows what a perilous business this moving is
even under the best of conditions.

THE WHEAT-FIELD 199

SEPTEMBER

THE WHEAT-FIELD

' Yellow with bird's-foot trefoil are the grass glades ;

Yellow with cinquefoil of the dew-grey leaf;
Yellow with stone-crop ; the moss-mounds are yellow ;
Blue-necked, the wheat sways yellowing to the sheaf.'

THUS sang Meredith in the ' yellow verse ' of
his Love in the Valley. The wheat plant
has for some time contained all the good things
that will soon be reaped in the grain. It has been
pouring them, as all plants do, into the precious
seed, the sole hope of the plant when this year's
work is done. The last to go in will be the
finishing touch of cereal excellence now accumu-
lated in the blue neck of the stalk. Even if the
wheat should be cut now, the process would
go on, the grain would ripen in the stooks, and
the farmer would save more of it than he will if
he leaves the crop till it is dead ripe, as neverthe-
less most farmers do.

The wheat is now nearly a year old on its roots,
for the British farmer finds little profit in spring

200 THE RING OF NATURE

wheat. Wheat that lies in the ground through
an English winter employs the time in making
good and long - penetrating roots on which to
rear a crop that shall do it justice and bring the
farmer joy. There is no searcher-out of the good
things that the soil contains like winter wheat.
In the village school they teach the sprouting of
a monocotyledonous seed by putting grains of
wheat to germinate in water. Up goes a little
green plumule and down goes a little root, and the
child imagines that the growth of the wheat is
fully illustrated. A heap of wheat on the ground
would so sprout, and if one of the grains should
bear progeny it would be probably on a single
ear at the end of a single grass. But give it room,
up to a square foot of soil for each grain, and time
to tiller and make preparation, and your single
grain will send up fifty ears and bear a total
increase of over four thousand grains.

In the actual wheat-field before us we find that
each plant has many heads, though seldom so many
as a dozen, nor has each plant more than a six-inch
circle for its own domain. Hence we get this para-
dox, that if we could properly plant each acre with
forty-four thousand grains instead of one hundred
and seventy-six thousand we could get a very much
greater crop, say eighty or a hundred bushels instead
of forty or fifty. In fact, a crop equal to a hundred
bushels has been grown experimentally by planting
and replanting wheat as we do apple trees, each in
its measured space.

THE WHEAT-FIELD 201

Not merely two hundred thousand grains, but
over three million grains to the acre have been
sown to get this laughing crop of blue-necked,
yellowing wheat. The old estimate of ' one for
the crow and two for the hoe' is always very
much exceeded when wheat is being planted,
and when we think of the thousand accidents of
wire-worm, damp, drought, frost, wind, mouse,
mole, slug, rabbit, and the others, it is a marvel
that on so slight an expenditure of seed so uniform
and opulent a crop can be raised.

With a whirr of thunder, a thousand -winged
horde of sparrows and finches flies up from a
corner of the field to perch and roll along the
hedge like a brown cloud. They attack the
wheat in the majesty of its fruition, and even
the bushels that they will take between now and
the harvest can in a measure be spared. The
partridges run along through the forest of corn,
and grow fat on the grains that the sparrows drop.
When the stooks are up, wood-pigeons will come
from the wood and fill their ravenous crops many
times a day. Voles and rats will lay them up
stores for the winter, showers and streams of
grain will be lost on the way to the threshing-
machine, and yet there will be left a mountain of
bread for the feeding of those who have no idea
of the perils that attended its growth.

Any Cockney knows and appreciates the meaning
of these palpable robbers, the birds and the rats,
and even the repulsive rust and smut that reduces

202 THE RING OF NATURE

the fat grain to ashes and corruption. But we
seldom try to compute the potential bushels that
go to feed those brilliant robbers, the poppies and
the purple knautias that dance so shamelessly
above the level of the golden ears. Their beauty
rejoices the eyes of the farmer less than ours,
because they are unbidden guests. They creep
into the corn-field by all manner of means. Some
are sown with the seed, and these have a perfect
knack of keeping step with the legitimate crop,
ripening their seed at the same time so as to be
carried into the granary with it and, unless the
winnowing and sifting has been very elaborate,
to be carried out of the granary with it in the
seed sample and placed in the field under the best
of all conditions for a renewal of the cycle.

The weed seed that is left on the stubble at
harvest runs a very good chance of being swallowed
by the birds under autumn and winter appetite,
of being buried too deep under the ploughing, of
germinating too quickly and then getting dried
up or frozen, or of fermenting into decay instead
of into life. Those who have planted seeds in
boxes know how many are the chances even
under these conditions of something going wrong.
But the seeds that go out with the wheat are sown
just when the seed-bed is ready, and are given
every chance, according to the skill of the farmer,
to grow into good healthy weeds.

When the miller receives wheat for grinding,
his first operation is to clean it of other seeds,

THE WHEAT-FIELD 203

and at this operation no less than fifteen per cent,
of the bulk is screened out. If the average weed
seed is only a third the size of the wheat, this
means that nearly every other seed in the sample
that reaches the miller will produce a weed
instead of wheat when it is sown. Needless to
say, samples for seed have to be cleaner than
that, but in spite of every care some seed is
inevitably drilled in with the wheat.

Other weeds and more of them get into the
field with the manure. It has, no doubt, rotted
and heated in the cow-sheds and elsewhere be-
fore it is spread on the fields and ploughed in.
Before that, if it reached the cows in the form of
hay, it was hastened into premature germination
by the heat of the stack, was scorched and wilted
by the same heat, swallowed and digested by the
cattle, decimated over and over again by dangers
more or less unknown to seeds in a wild state.
Yet if even one per cent, is able to run the gauntlet
and reach the arable land, it will very soon account
for a great robbing of the legitimate crops. I
think it will be seen, however, in most districts
that few weeds found on the arable land are of
the same kind as those that grow in the hay-fields.

The worst weed in the wheat-field is the cooch,
cutch, or twitch, a wiry insinuating weed that it
is almost impossible to eradicate. It takes its
roots six feet down in stiff clay. If you cut off
and burn all but the last inch, that inch will find
its way to the surface and continue the war. In a

204 THE RING OF NATURE

hedge it will send its zigzag stems up ten feet
and then blossom and set seed. A piece of cooch
that had been dried for several years came green,
and began to grow again when it was put into the
ground.

The tender wheat has little chance without the
assistance of man against this villainous compound
of Artful Dodger and Uriah Heep, this creeping,
rampant grass. Yet the cooch is of the nearest
possible affinity to the noble wheat itself. Some
of the first wheat grains cultivated by man have
been found on the hearths of the ancient lake-
dwellers in Switzerland. Even failing them, a
microscopic examination of our wheat shows with
reasonable certainty that it is descended from the
goat grass, a cooch that still grows in Italy. The
goat grass of the lake-dwellings was also cultivated
in India, and may have come thence rather more
like wheat when the Aryan invasion came into
Europe.

It is not surprising if the old primitive wheats
of twenty thousand years ago, or, as recent theory
puts it, of seven hundred thousand years ago,
have disappeared. Very great improvement of
the wheat is a fact of living memory, and the
school of the wheat may now be said to have been
transferred from England to America. In the
experimental centres of the United States and
Canada, hundreds of different varieties are tried
annually, and, sad to say, the pupils from England
no longer stand at the top of the class. The

THE WHEAT-FIELD 205

hard wheats best liked in America, and known
by the millers here to be the best, do not produce
crops of sufficient size to please British farmers.
Lately, the agricultural school of our own Uni-
versity of Cambridge has been engaged in pro-
ducing a hybrid between the prolific soft wheat
and the better but less productive hard Fife
wheat. After hybridization, selection was carried
on for some years, and now it is said that success
has been secured. Another grower announced a
year ago that he had produced a spring wheat of
rapid growth and great cropping power. If it
is not a fact yet, it is an ideal that is certain to
be realized, and, far as the goat grass has gone,
it will go immeasurably further.

It will never be quite known what weedy com-
panions the wheat has picked up in its journeys
over the world ; what weeds of cultivation it took
from Europe to India, from India back again,
from England to America, and vice versa, or what
exchanges it has made with the antipodes. The
scarlet poppy is probably British, a rare plant that
might have been extinct by now, if it had not been
for agriculture. It is seldom found except on or
round the ploughing. The scabious has an air
of oriental magnificence, but that may be only
because it has been unwittingly cultivated for so
many thousand years. It is evidently most at
home in limestone regions, and has probably been
transplanted elsewhere in limestone farm pro-
duce. It would be hard to have to give up our

206 THE RING OF NATURE

veronicas, and so many of them grow in our country
that we may reasonably claim that they are in-
digenous.

Chickweed, the greatest wanderer of them all,
has had its claims investigated and has been
declared to be of British origin. It belongs to a
large genus, Stellar ia (of a large tribe, the carnation
tribe), of which so many members are at home
in our country that it must be regarded as the
headquarters. Pimpernel, on the other hand, has
so lonely a position in the British flora that it may
well have been an immigrant a few thousand
years ago in some sample of foreign wheat.

Most people know well the odd little perfoliate
weed called Claytonia, to which we have so far
refused to accord the honour of a familiar name.
Its general make-up proclaims it to be an alien,
and its advent into this country was well within
historic time.

In many corn-fields, notably in Norfolk and the
Isle of Wight, a conspicuous and handsome weed
appears in great numbers. It is the purple cow-
wheat, Melanpyrum arvense, the latter name, which
belongs to many species, being given to signify
that it is a weed of cultivation. The blossom
itself is pink, yellow, and red, and the bracts add
to the scheme of colour by appearing in rosy
pink instead of green. It has the advantage of
producing seeds of the same size as the wheat,
with which they get cast into the bags at threshing
time and are thus sown again upon the land.

THE WHEAT-FIELD 207

Another cow- wheat, the common yellow one, has
seeds resembling the cocoons of the wood ant,
and it is said that these insects carry them off
in mistake for what they look like, and thus
plant them at a distance from the parent colony.

We are getting into bad company when we
reach the cow-wheats. They and the rattles and
the red bartsia are enemies of the farmer in a
double sense. Not only do they rob better plants
of standing room and manure, but their roots
pierce the roots of the grasses and rob them of the
food they had manufactured for themselves.

Almost as bad as parasites seem the convolvulus
and the buck-wheat or black bindweed, for they
can only live to mingle their seed with the grain
by climbing and hanging on the stalks. In places,
every stalk is wound with the spirals of the
clinging weed. There is no more cutting them
free than there would be cutting free so many
victims that an octopus has grasped. They must
grow together, not only till the harvest, but till
the threshing, and the seeds of the hangers-on are
so nearly the same size as those of the host that it
is a difficult matter to winnow or sift them out.

The tare of Scripture is no doubt the darnel
grass, a widely distributed species that grows so
thickly in Malta that that is probably its head-
quarters. It has got all over the world with the
wheat, and is universally disliked. ' Among the
hurtful weeds,' says Gerarde, ' darnell is the
first.' Virgil before him christened it infelix

208 THE RING OF NATURE

lolium. The seed is poisonous to man and beast,
though, its poison being an intoxicant, it has been
used by not too scrupulous maltsters as an aid
to the fermentation of barley. ' The new bread
wherein darnell is,' continues Gerarde, ' causeth
drunkennesse.' A mixture of the seed with
wheat spoils the colour of the flour, turning it
black. Surely, at the harvest darnel ought to be
gathered into bundles and burnt. In places
where this weed is common it has been given the
expressive name of ' cheat.'

I have not nearly exhausted the list of plants
to be found peculiarly and almost exclusively in
corn-fields and on cultivated land. There is the
cockle, whose name was given in the early edition
of the Bible to the tares that later research has
decided to be the more pernicious darnel. There
are succory, pheasant - eye Adonis, corn - flower,
the very persistent corn - buttercup with burred
seeds, and many others. But the wheat-field is
not only a botanic kingdom of great interest but
also an animal fairyland.

We do not realize the wealth of animal life that
the wheat contains till the sheaves are removed,
and we see the voles darting stealthily through
the stubble. Even the kestrel that sees most
things of the kind can make nothing of them as
he hovers over the wheat-field. The stalks are
far too thick to make for good hunting. An
occasional rat is seen loping into the hedge or
back into his illimitable jungle, and the farmer

THE WHEAT-FIELD 209

knows very well that there are rabbits making
a summer camp far under the forest of stalks
that are at once food and shelter. Like the tares,
the rabbits must stay till the harvest, and then
comes a terrible day of reckoning. As the reaping-
machine goes round and round in ever-narrowing
circles, the rabbits cower into a more and more
crowded sanctuary. Presently, the man in the
seat spies them, and with a good stick or stone
manages to kill one. Then they begin more and
more numerously to break cover and to attempt
the gauntlet through half the village gathered for
the rare slaughter. Some, but not many escape,
and it is wonderful amid such a hullabaloo that
the clearest headed of rabbits should preserve any
idea whatever of the direction wherein safety
lies if only he can reach it. They are exceedingly
quick over short distances, and turn with great
speed from those who have run to head them
off. It needs the co-operation of many men
to overcome one rabbit with hand weapons, and
bunny is better off fighting twenty folk with sticks
and stones than when he bolts from the island of
standing corn within reach of one cold and merciless
gun.

The rabbits' arch enemies also inhabit this
summer jungle that comes to so sudden an end
in September. For some weeks the young foxes
have made it their playground and living-place.
From the top of a tree I have several times got
them under the field-glass in their trampled rod

210 THE RING OF NATURE

in the middle of the twenty acres. They are getting
fine animals now and, if the truth must be told,
the feathers of many a treasured fowl are to be
found round that trampled space that only the
reaping-machine will fully reveal.

You will see the weasel slipping in and out of
the corn on his errand of tyranny over the voles
and mice. The stoat, too, with his half-emanci-
pated family, knows this month in the wheat-field
for one of the best times of the year. At other
times of the year these wild annuals have known
the rough hill-fields, with brakes of gorse and
bramble, where the scent of man rarely intrudes.
But far more remote and wild is the interior of a
corn-field between the last hoeing and the harvest.

HORSE-TAILS 211

SEPTEMBER
II

HOESE-TAILS

IT is furiously hot on the common where,
nevertheless, the perfoliate yellow-wort stands
up in its dress of bluey-green the very emblem of
coolness. Here, too, the bee orchis and the rarer
fly open their rounded blossoms at the top of
lush green spikes, as though no drought that ever
was could touch them. Thyme and marjoram
fill the air with their fragrance, and among them
skip blue butterflies with undersides of daintiest
lace over blue-grey ; great peacock butterflies
come out of the blue sky with a click of the wings
in search of musk thistle or hemp agrimony ;
dragon-flies dash hither and thither after smaller
flies, their prey, and waiting drone bees far up
in the air make a hum as though the whole sky
was a vibrating gong.

The sun is undoubtedly the life of the insect
world, and of all else, but when it glares so strongly
on the common, man flees from it for a while into
the cool of the wood. There we are content with

212 THE RING OF NATURE

second-hand visions of the sun, in the green light
that pours through the beech leaves, the flecks of
gold on the trunks and the uncovered parts of the
floor of last year's leaves, the cool of places that
the sun has scarcely visited to-day, the aroma of
those places where he rested for an hour at noon,
the brisk activities of the horse-ants coming down
the tree-boles from the golden world above, loaded
with their living spoil.

The upper end of my pond in the wood is filled
to the extent of about an acre with horse-tails.
In early summer their modest and scattered
shoots broke the surface of the water, for in those
days the pond was fuller than now. The little
shoots even bowed and went under as the giant
trout pushed their stalks aside as they foraged at
that end of the pond. Primroses gleamed in the
red leaves of the wood under bare twigs, and the
primrose-spotted bank descended to the edge of
the silver water that seemed lifted into little
pimples where the horse-tail shoots came through.
There was none of the wild tangle of amphibious
weeds that has come since to mask the division
between land and water.

All sorts of modern things pushed the horse-
tail from the muddy margin into the water, for
willow-herb, flag, and forget-me-not are immeasur-
ably parvenu compared with equisetum. Old
as the horse-tail is, however, it sometimes fights
a good battle with the moderns, not only in
swampy places, but in dry spots far removed from

HORSE-TAILS 213

water. Many a potato field knows it, and a
mile from the pond it grows, if it does not flourish,
in dry stone brash nine hundred feet above the
level of the sea.

Driven from the lake's edge by flowering plants
of a new model, the jointed canes, with their old-
world whorls of twigs for leaves, have the acre of
water all to themselves, so far as rooted vegetation
is concerned. And what are those minor parts
that I have just written down as ' twigs for
leaves ' ? If we seize the plant and pull both
ways at its trunk it comes apart at a joint, the
lower or socket part of which is fringed with tiny
teeth. These tiny teeth are the leaves — all else
is trunk and branches. But because the plant's
leaves are so poor, all the rest of its anatomy does
leaf duty by remaining green and full of stomatse
wherewith to take food from the air. And the
trunk and each branch seems to get the idea some
dozen times in the course of their length that they
really are deciduous leaves. For the socket and
joint arrangement is like nothing else in nature
so much as that by which the leaf is cast from
the end of the twig when autumn comes.

If we set out to make a model of the horse-tail
we should be compelled to do it in steel. Nothing
else could be drawn so thin and preserve its
rigidity. The stiffening material that the plant
employs for its airy structure is flint in the form
of silicic acid. The skeleton of every twig, nay,
every cell, is composed of this enduring substance,

214 THE RING OF NATURE

and if a plant be burnt with care all the tiny girders
that kept it aloft remain, a system that no human
artificer could copy even to a scale ten times as
large. One of the effects of this construction,
though surely not a primary object as some books
suggest, is that browsing animals cannot eat
horse-tails.

Now, the season of full luxuriance has gone by,
and the plants lie here and there across the line
of their growth. They are forming little banks
across the lake to catch the mud and debris which
the stream brings down. By such tactics these
ancient plants rapidly silt up the pond and —
provide for their own extermination. For when
they have formed a given depth of soil in the
shallow water, their enemies the sedges and other
more terrestrial forms step in and snatch the
dominion. The horse -tail, like many another
pioneer, is ousted from the place, and, if it can
find such, goes forth into some other barren swamp
to teach pampered things how to grow there.

Now that so many stalks have fallen the horse-
tail forest is no longer an impenetrable mystery.
I find, what in June I only suspected, that the
water-voles have their foraging ground within it.
They have been so secure all the summer and the
letting in of light has been so gradual that they
take little heed of our party on the bank. Even the
shrill cry of a child, ' There 's a vole,' does not in
the least agitate them. The object of the excited
remark sits calmly on the fallen branch his teeth

HORSE-TAILS 215

have gnawed so white, and washes his face as
nonchalantly as though the brake still hid him.

He has beautiful golden brown fur, tousled
here and there, with beady eyes watching, mouth
twitching, and hands, but not arms, peeping from
bushes of long hair. Though he takes no notice
of us he hears before we do the tiny paddle that a
friend makes as he swims up. He faces quickly
round, and gives his friend clearly to understand
that the branch on which he sits is his own, and
will not hold two voles. So the other sheers off
a little and goes off, ploughing silvery furrows in
the water with his nose. A third vole is soon
seen, and even a fourth, and as one or the other
is always doing some new quaint thing they
fully entertain us for all the time we have to spare.
While the descending sun makes rosy the open
lake and paints rosy ripples among the shadows,
we watch our voles till we imagine them beavers
playing the old part they played when horse-tails,
already of very ancient growth, were a greater
power in the land than they are to-day.

What is the connection between these flower-
less, fruitless canes of the horse-tails and the
vetches, poppies, foxgloves that drive them into
the wood and press them into the swamp. What
.have the short-flighted flies to do with the butter-
flies of all colours, the bees banded with gold and
orange and equipped with most special apparatus
for collecting honey and pollen ? The eye of
faith, resting here and there on the landmarks of

216 THE RING OF NATURE

fact, can see it all and find it wonderfully inspiring
and interesting.

No one needs to be told that the horse-tails are
survivals from a very ancient age. They existed,
as our coal-fields testify, long before anything in
the shape of flower came on the earth. Whatever
flower a horse-tail may be said to have, was the
only flower that could have been found when the
coal measures were being prepared. How just,
then, that the soul of man was not asked to expand
in such a world.

The 'blossom' of the horse-tail looks like an
abortive shoot or a spray that some mischievous
barber has subjected to the operation of singeing.
The place of each jointed tress that gives the
horse-tail forest so much beauty is occupied by a
mere knob on the surface of the shoot. On closer
inspection, the knob is like a round-headed nail
driven into the stump, and on the under side of
the nail-head are placed little groups of spore-
cells containing a dust not unlike the pollen that
is in a hazel catkin or flies from the stinging-
nettle. It is not of course pollen, but each grain
is a spore from which the new plant springs in the
same mysterious way as a fern or a mushroom.

Yet in these spores you can see the beginnings
of the higher system of reproduction. Under the
microscope they reveal an astonishing elaboration
of structure for such small things. Each has
four arms, long and clubbed at the end like the
antennae of butterflies, and usually worn wrapped

HORSE-TAILS 217

round the body like the threads of a screw. But
at fruiting time, the arms straighten out and then
coil slightly again, so that two or three neighbour-
ing spores link arms with one another, and thus
leave the parent plant and try their poor luck
at spreading the species.

That was the flowering plan, if such it can be
called, favoured by all the trees and plants in the
age when the horse-tail was at its best. It was
the good old plan that had been in vogue for the
last million years, and not to be altered by such
conservatives as our friends in the swamp.

Our friends were to have the opportunity of
learning, however, that nothing lives for itself
alone. The accumulation of nitrogen and other
valuables in the sporangia attracted something
to feed upon them. We cannot say what the
somethings were. They were earlier than the
fly, and bearing the same relation to a fly of to-day
that the horse-tail bears to an orchid. Here was
an evil thing only to be met by a victim so
helpless as a vegetable by passive resistance.

So the old horse-tails found. Not so the new
horse-tails, the degenerate ones willing to com-
promise with the enemy, to throw away their
proud exclusive state and enter into trade relations
with the insect scum that could not yet be called
flies even, let alone bees and butterflies. Thus
from the greed of the insects grew not only the
illimitable improvement of the flowers, but the
beatification of the insects and the education of

218 THE RING OF NATURE

the soul of man not yet within several million
years of his birth.

The flies seldom finish off a sporangium so
cleanly, but there are spores to link arms and fly
away about their business. But now arms are
apt to be linked by spores of distinct plants mixed
in one sporangium by the flies coming dirty-legged
from one plant to another. These, in spite of the
fact that they are as yet asexual bodies, will
produce a stronger progeny, or one better able
to exist in some locality mid-way in dryness or
other quality between those of the parent plants.
For reasons such as this the greater number of
successful offspring will result perhaps not from
the plant that best succeeds in avoiding the flies,
but the one that is most eaten. There is even a
premium set on attractiveness, and straightway
the vista is opened to all the floral beauties of our
own day.

We know how responsive are our own bodies to
stimuli from outside. One look at the horny
hand of toil will give us a satisfying example.
From everything we see, it appears that the
vegetable organism is far more susceptible than
the animal in this physical respect. The endless
variety of tumid and hairy growths fetched up
in the trees and plants by the bites of gall-flies
is a striking example, and it will be seen that
every tree responds in its own special way to the
assault of the pruning knife or the nibbling of
rabbits or cattle.

HORSE-TAILS 219

The flies that tore the plant in robbing it of its
spores perhaps induced a flow of sugar to the
place, though how it could get sugar from the
flinty horse-tail is a little of a mystery. That
plant thereby became more attractive to nectar-
loving insects, and in a thousand years or so an
insect arose with the rudiments of a sac wherein
to carry honey to its progeny. Among the flowers
that offered honey and extra rich pollen, those
succeeded best that turned some of the neigh-
bouring leaves into a different colour, so that the
bee could see from afar, and per contra the bee
succeeded best that was not colour-blind, as the
flies apparently are.

Then there began to be bees with the rudiments
of a special contrivance on the hind leg to carry
off loads of pollen. This robbery the flowers have
to put up with, or can only meet by making the
pollen hard to brush off from the back or the
breast of the bee till it is picked off by the stigma
of another plant. The bee has evolved a pollen
brush that is almost thorough in its work, but
still enough clings to the hairs of the body to
achieve the object of the flowers. Few bees are
so proficient in cheating the flowers as the hive-
bee, wherefore some of the flowers have formed
a special alliance with some of the more careless
bees by evolving on the one side a tube too long
for the hive -bee's tongue, and on the other side a
tongue long enough to reach to the bottom of the
special tube. A particular bee has been given the

220 THE RING OF NATURE

key to a particular floral lock. You will never
see a hive-bee attempt to probe a primrose or
the tubes of the crimson clover.

The step from green leaves to coloured for
advertising purposes was easy enough. The milk-
wort of our own day has a few leaves coloured in
addition to its regular petals, and these extra
leaves do not fall off when the purpose of the
flower is ended, but turn green and take up the
chemical functions of ordinary leaves. That
there is no great fundamental difference between
petals and stamens is shown by the water-lily,
which has petals with anthers on them and stamens
without anthers as though they had half a mind to
be petals.

When a descendant of some early spore-bearing
plant had devoted a whorl of leaves to the
stigmatic function, the next whorl to the provision
of pollen and glands at the base for the secretion
of honey, the next whorl to advertising purposes
as petals, and a fourth as special wraps for the
tender parts of the blossom (sepals), it had marked
a very great advance upon the spore system of
its ancestor. Its attendant insects, too, were
far different from the promiscuous rabble whose
robberies had started the whole movement. But
both flower and insect had still far to go.
Further adaptations to the visits of favoured
insects have given us and are giving us such things
as the petal of special shape to shelter the stamens
of the sage, stamens with a wonderful trap arrange-

HORSE-TAILS 221

ment by virtue of which the bee paints its own
back with pollen just where the next stigma
needs it ; the box of the toad-flax that only the
humble-bee can open ; the spring paint-brush of
the pea, the pollen pistol of the broom, the
gummed pollen mass of the orchid, and a thousand
other contrivances.

Each advance has needed a new instinctive
intelligence and new adaptations on the part of
bee or butterfly, and with them has gone an
increased buoyancy of life that has made the
flower insects more beautiful, more industrious
and more interesting in the details of their life.
The flowers that the bees farm, the flowers that
have made the bees, have won from such as the
horse-tails all the best soils of the earth. They
oust them daily from further fields, drive them
off the mud, through the shallow water where the
hemp agrimony holds sway, even out of the deep
water where the water-buttercup drives its trade
with insects from the mainland. The horse-tails
win the water to mud, others win the mud to dry
land, then come the flowers covering the place
where the pond was, and lo ! the pioneers, the
aristocrats of the coal measures, have disappeared.

222 THE RING OF NATURE

OCTOBER

WILD FRUITS

THE hawthorns, which were the glory of the
month in early May when covered with
creamy, almond-scented blossom, have been
overlooked all the summer. But on a day in
August when the world was wild with blossom, a
hawthorn at the southern angle of the spinney
caught the sun and tossed it back from crowds
of fruit just turning reddish brown. The first
colouring was all on one side like that of rather
dingy apples. But the brown soon covered the
whole fruit, then turned to flaming scarlet, which
is now deepening as the days go by into a richness
that bespeaks ripeness.

Hips and haws are undoubtedly the chief of the
wild fruits that last into the winter. Familiar as
they are, they are so little understood that in most
country places they obtain the one comprehensive
term ' hipseyhaws.' The child is not quite certain
which are hips and which are haws. It is only in
late autumn, when the grass is long and wet

WILD FRUITS

WILD FRUITS 223

and we fight rather shy of the fields, that the
haws become good to eat. Then there is a good
thickness of rich yellow flesh on the hard stones
that, as in most wild fruits, take up too much
room. No one has thought it worth while to take
the hawthorn in hand, and make of it a fruit as
superior as the apple or pear are to their wild
prototypes. It belongs, of course, to the great
rose family that has given us apple, pear, plum,
peach, cherry, strawberry, raspberry and many
another of the joys of civilized life.

Most children know the candy-like sweetness of
the flesh that the hip wears between its shiny
red skin and the itch-provoking seeds. The
greenfinches know it equally well, for you see them
sitting plump and bonny in their livery of ripe
greengage colour carefully chewing the fruit of
the rose for the goodness that is in it. If you
cannot catch these sad-eyed marauders at work,
you can at any rate see the soft hip-skins still on
the twigs, from which they have sucked out the
inside through the outer end.

No ecstasy of the year exceeded that with
which we gazed on the arched sprays of the wild
rose in June. Most of us admired the pink rose
of the sweetbriar or the woody dog-rose most,
but there was another beauty as sweet, if less
attractive, in the creamy blossom of the field rose.
Has our gratitude been so long-lived that we cannot
remember from which hedge the best sprays
waved their garlands ? The bright red, urn-

224 THE RING OF NATURE

shaped hips are there to remind us. We can
count them in their roughly triple arrangement
and, in a measure, reconstruct the pink glories
of the tall hedge that we could not rob even if
we would. The hips of the field rose are rounder
and darker, and they stand in clusters of from
fifteen to twenty on the tops of round bushes out
in the field. This Rosa arvensis is obviously the
natural cluster-rose, and the parent of such garden
beauties as the weeping Ayrshires, the Dundee
rambler and Bennett's seedling. The queen genus
of the great rose order has been made to produce
for us something quite as useful as fruit.

A fruit that becomes conspicuous in the copses
almost as soon as the elder berries have been
formed, and before they have been dyed, is that of
the mealy guelder or wayfaring tree. In a way,
this is a conspicuous bush all the year round. It
carries through the winter, on the stiff thick ends
of its twigs, knobs of tightly rolled flower-buds
clasped with protective sheaths. They brave
successfully all the assaults of frost, snow and
thaw, but do not open till the bush has covered
itself with downy leaves. Then the nights of May
are fragrant with the blossom which is so con-
spicuous by night as to seem to shine. It would
be a very dark night when we should be unable to
see the wayfaring tree in blossom, and it may be
this sightliness in the dark that has given it the
name.

The blossoms pass and are forgotten. Then in

WILD FRUITS 225

the same stiff upright way the berries are
exhibited. on the ends of stiff thick paint-brush
handles. They are flat and crowded so closely
together as to make you think they have been
flattened by contact with one another. At first
they are brilliant pinky-red on one side, and
greenish-white on the other. Then the red grows
deeper and deeper, berries here and there turn
black among the scarlet, and bit by bit the bunch
is thinned as the ripe fruits fall, till with the leaves
it disappears.

And then, after the mealy guelder has passed
its best, what are these other berries drooping
among crimson currant-like leaves, themselves as
brilliant, thin-skinned, and full of juice as red
currants, but almost twice as large ? Surely we
did not miss their blossoms in spring. In order to
see how the blossoms grew, a little reconstruction
is necessary. If these long thin twigs that the
heavy berries bend down so were relieved of their
weight, they would travel through nearly a hun-
dred and eighty degrees, and point straight to
heaven at the top of the bush. Give them blossoms
there, and the casual wayfarer would hardly ever
see them. We did see them, however ; the blossoms
of the wild guelder-rose like nothing so much as a
* cake ' of wasp-grub, all the centre cells empty and
an outer ring of big queen grubs sealed with pure
white caps. Each of the insignificant blossoms
of the centre has set its luscious-looking berry,
while the other big-petalled ones were barren and

226 THE RING OF NATURE

constructed solely for advertising the nectar of
the community.

The near relationship of common and mealy
guelder is startlingly shown when the stone of
each is exhibited. Both are flat, the stone of the
mealy guelder carrying out the shape of the fruit,
but that of the other appearing as a complete
surprise on account of the generous rotundity of
the fruit. The high-bush cranberry is one of the
wild fruits of Canada that are accounted good to
make jam of. An Indian describing the fruit to
a settler put the cap on his definition by saying
that the seeds were ' all same as a bug.' In fact,
the high-bush cranberry and the guelder-rose are
the same shrub, and, little as it is known in this
country, a rather tart red-currant jelly can be
made of these handsome fruits. When raw, they
are so astringent to the palate that it is scarcely
a wonder that they are classed as poisonous.

The handsome spindle -wood ripens its berries a
little later than both the guelders. The starry,
greenish-white blossoms are exquisitely but mildly
beautiful in May. The three-lobed berries begin
to be noticeable when they turn slowly towards
a bright crimson - lake, which they reach in
September. Then the crimson lobes split and
show within the astonishing contrast of bright
vermilion seeds, one in each lobe, an arrangement
that has somehow earned them the name of ' pin-
cushions.' By this time the leaves have taken
on the crimsons and purples of the dogwood

WILD FRUITS 227

tribe to which they seem to be allied. The leaves
drop off rather easily, and when the berries are at
their best there are just enough of them to make
an accompaniment to their gaudy scheme of colour,
and not so many as would hide them from the
most casual eye. Like the Furies, the spindle-wood
genus is called by a pleasant name — Euonymus.
Its vermilion seeds are poisonous to us who never
think of eating them, but only medicinal to the
thrushes which do eat them.

' Happy, happy time, when the white star hovers

Low over dim fields fresh with bloomy dew,
Near the face of dawn that draws athwart the

darkness
Threading it with colour like yewberries the yew.'

There is no gloomier tree than the yew, no more
brilliant berry than those which are set like fiery
stars on its branches. There is only one berry
with such sticky flesh, the mistletoe ; but the
yewberry is sweet as well as viscid, like a piece
of confectionery set on this strange shop-counter.
The seed that peeps out in the midst of this ring
of jelly is poisonous, and so most children leave the
yewberries for the thrushes that simply revel in
them. Such gobblers never think of spitting out
the stones at the time of feasting, but eject them
later when the emetic principle asserts itself,
thus scattering them abroad where there are
openings for young yews.

The strawberry has long since gone, and only the

228 THE RING OF NATURE

blackberry and the sloe of present berries are truly
edible. Some would deny that of the sloe, which
even with the bloom of ripeness on it makes an
astonishingly sour mouthful, setting the teeth on
edge and compelling a wry face in the most stoical
of us. But a few cold nights of autumn or the
first frost will knock the bitterness out of it and
render it eatable enough, while we need not say
that, as sloe cheese or the flavouring element of
sloe gin, this little fruit redeems the reputation
that belongs to the plum family.

Otherwise, our autumn berries are inedible
and often poisonous. A month ago I stooped in
the tangly undergrowth of the wood to pick the
first dewberry. It had but one big black lobe
of flesh, as the dewberry sometimes has. The
calyx stuck out round it like a gladstone collar,
and everything seemed fairly in order. But the
stalk on which the berry was set reached down
among the leaves of dewberry and other things,
till it passed through a quartet of leaves without
stalks and declared the plant to be the poisonous
herb Paris. Thus does it lie about among honest
fruits for the undoing of the unwary.

There is a plant in the woods that is able in the
depth of whiter to remind us of spicy South Sea
islands, coral strands, parrot fish, and all other
tropical luxuriance. It is the spurge laurel, with
its long palm-like trunk at the tip of which is
borne a crown of evergreen, highly polished leaves.
The height of this coco-nut palm is only three or

WILD FRUITS 229

four feet at its best, but it is a wonderful miniature.
In the very early spring, even in January, there
are greenish blossoms like long lilies hanging from
the under side of the crown like crown imperials ;
but now, the coco-nuts are there, lately green,
but now turned purple-black. A sad poisoner is
Daphne laureola, as well as its cousin D. mezereum,
a wildling of ours that has been almost extermi-
nated in the woods so that it may set its bright
pink February blossoms in ten thousand cottage
gardens.

In many a place on the dry hillside stand the
big green bushes of the deadly nightshade. Any
one knows it at sight for a potato, though it belongs
in blossom to a different tribe of the Solanaceae.
The blossom of the deadly nightshade is a bell
(of a deadly, liverish purple), whereas the potato,
tomato, woody nightshade, white nightshade,
Duke of Argyll's tea tree, and many new orna-
mental creepers in our gardens have the star-like
blossom with the yellow stamens pressed into a
cone. The leaves of the deadly nightshade
(Atropa belladonna) are potato-like, but rather
shinier than most varieties, and their pattern as
light-catchers is one of the most beautiful that we
can find, every space being filled with lobes of
diminishing size till very little light passes through
the bush to the ground.

It is in the fruiting stage that the belladonna
shows its potatoship best, the likeness to the
potato ball being, except in colour, exact. The

230 THE RING OF NATURE

fruit is the deadly part of this plant. Now that
it is ripe its colour is the deep black that can only
be attained over purple, and the juice is in fact
like purple ink. One of the best names for it is
Naughty Man's Cherry, the Naughty Man being,
of course, the Prince of the Underworld. Dwale
is another name.

This is most probably the fruit, if fruit it was,
that according to Plutarch brought madness and
death to many Roman soldiers when retreating
from the Parthians. Says the historian : —

' He that had eaten of it immediately lost all
memory and knowledge ; but at the same time
would busy himself in turning and moving every
stone he met with, as if he was upon some very
important pursuit. The camp was full of unhappy
men bending to the ground, and thus digging up
and removing stones, till at last they were carried
off by a bilious vomiting, when wine, the only
remedy, was not to be had.'

It was with dwale, too, that the Scots poisoned
Sweno's Danes, mixing the deadly juice in the
bread which they treacherously gave the in-
vaders during a truce.

After the deadly one, the other nightshades
are comparatively innocuous. At any rate, they
have not poisoned so many people or so badly.
The more dangerous of our two species is the
black one, which some people call white. Its
blossoms are white, and its berries black. It
persists in coming up in the rich soil of an estab-

WILD FRUITS 231

lished garden, and though the plant is but an
annual, our utmost vigilance fails to exterminate
it. Somewhere an overlooked plant will escape
and swiftly set and sow its fruit before we can,
in gardening parlance, ' turn round.' The berry-
is more enticing to children than the oblong red
tomatoes of the woody nightshade or bitter sweet,
probably because none of our edible berries have
the latter shape.

Another annual that has a mysterious hold on
the garden is the prickly pear or thorn-apple,
whose generic name, Datura, will be found in the
dictionary side by side with daturine, a very active
poison extracted from its seeds. There is usually
one in some corner of the garden, opening its
convolvulus-like flower and setting its fruit like
a prickly horse chestnut, from which it throws
when ripe plenty of little black seeds. Sometimes
a year goes by without its thorn-apple, but the
next year it appears again. The seed, no doubt,
can on occasion remian dormant over one season
into the next.

I think the thorn-apple must have survived in
the garden from the time when some eighteenth-
century worthy cultivated it for its (rather complex)
virtue as a * simple.' Its reputation as a curer
of asthma rests on a much firmer foundation
than that of even such a well-lauded simple as
betony, and daturine is to-day one of our best-
used herbal remedies.

I do not find the thorn-apple wild anywhere

232 THE RING OF NATURE

near the one or two far-scattered gardens where it
comes up in spite of persecution. The henbane,
on the other hand, soon gives up its hold on the
old herbal garden, and flourishes in the wild state.
It looks as poisonous as it is. The long bending
sprays with many pairs of opposite leaves has a
general resemblance to Solomon's seal, but the
leaves have an angry appearance that reminds
you of the nettle, bristling in all directions like
the fingers of a hand that is clutching the air with
fury. The blossoms, roughly like the deadly
nightshade in shape, are not so purple, the lurid
veins not discharging into the paler flesh of the
petals, but keeping their colour like scribblings of
a pen dipped in dirty blood.

It is a happy thing for us that the plant looks
a villain all over. The fruit is not in the least
attractive, resembling that of the thorn-apple
in the fact that the seeds are quite dry. Instead of
splitting, the capsule deftly scalps itself like a very
neatly opened egg, showing within the perfectly
packed seeds. A caterpillar of its own, coloured
with the same olive-green as the ripe leaves,
pushes its head into the open box and devours all
the seeds it can get. It is wonderful that the
scientists have not prepared an antitoxin from
that caterpillar to fortify us from the very rare
chance of hyoscine poisoning.

That ends the deadly nightshade — thorn-apple —
henbane family, a very close association of plants
all poisonous, except perhaps the tomato. The

WILD FRUITS 233

potato is hardly an exception. We do not eat its
fruit, and even the root that we do eat is not good
till it is cooked. The root of the cuckoo-pint,
raging with oxalic acid, is perhaps as good as the
potato when it is cooked, which may even be true
of the very deadly hemlock, wolf-bane, water
drop-wort and others. Our subject, however,
is fruits only, and it is nearly finished. The
cuckoo-pint should not be dangerous, its berries
being exhibited in so abnormal a grouping. On
their stiff stalk coming from nowhere, for the
leaves have disappeared, they remind us of some-
thing fungoid rather than vegetable. Children
have, however, fallen victims to their bright
colouring. It is a fiery poison, but probably its
scorching of the mouth comes too late. A berry
has been swallowed, and then the case is a bad
one. Happier the child that tastes gingerly
before eating, for he would assuredly be warned
and get off with nothing worse than a swollen
tongue.

We would fain finish with something more
pleasant than these poisonous fruits. The
whortleberries are as wholesome a family as the
nightshades are dangerous. They are moorland
people, the whortleberry itself being the only
one that sometimes descends to lower levels and
even into such suburban places as Hindhead and
the almost sea-level woods round Farnham and
Woking. The whortleberry, bilberry, or whin-
berry, seems to be in fruit in June, for its somewhat

234 THE RING OF NATURE

fleshy pink blossom is of the same bottle shape,
and gives a generous taste of nectar when it is
held to the tongue. But in August when the
' hurts ' themselves come it is good to be up on
Dunkerry Beacon, Anstey Down, or anywhere
in Exmoor ; to put our hand under the box-like
sprays and tickle the fruit off till we have twenty
or a hundred of the cleanest, solidest, sweetest
fruit that grows, a mouthful to swallow and good
provender for the system withal. By the lane-
sides of moorland Somerset and Devon it grows
extra large, and the traveller who has a bit of
bread and butter to go with it for civilization's
sake has no need of the tavern board. And the
gourmet whose happy stomach is sound has never
tasted anything so wealthy as farm-house bread
spread with whortleberry jam and crowned with
Devonshire cream.

The cranberry, red whortleberry, or cowberry is
not so well known, growing in comparatively few
chosen bogs. Nor is it a raw berry, but cultivate,
dear reader, the love of cranberry jam. There are
few better tonics, and the cranberry must have
been a veritable life-saver in the days before man
domesticated other fruits and vegetables, as a
wholesome change from meat and corn. The
fruit of the bearberry is usually left for the grouse
which, in demolishing its crowded red clusters,
rob the moor of its greatest September beauty.
I do not leave them all the cloudberries when I
come across them gleaming like red blackberries

WILD FRUITS 235

(to whose genus they belong) hi their narrow bogs
on Kinder Scout or Pen-y-ghent. In Scotland
they call it Avrons, and for some reason it tastes
sweeter under that name.

A wild fruit of the heather tribe that science
has labelled for the eye only is the arbutus,
Arbutus unedo. Who can think of it without
thinking of Killarney, where the twisted red trunks
with umbrellas of foliage each of a different olive
or golden-green capture the eye and the heart
far more than the mere configuration of Irish
lakeland ?

A whiff from the drawer reminds me of one
other member of the Ericaceae, the dainty little
winter-green. It grows only in certain beech-
woods of sufficient antiquity to be worthy of so
fastidious a flower. There it comes up abundantly.
From a rosette of leaves, just like those of the
pear, whence the plant gets its botanic name of
Pyrola, it sends up a spike of blossom very like
the lily of the valley, so that the children commonly
call it summer lily of the valley. It is a tiny
phial of oil of winter-green that gives me the
whiff from the drawer. No cork will suppress it.
When I go to handle the bees I rub a spot into
the back of each hand, and no bee offers to sting.
No bee of mine, not one bee in ten thousand
million has seen the winter-green in blossom.
What is the message of the essence of winter-green
to the bee that turns its murderous hum into
amiability ?

236 THE RING OF NATURE

OCTOBER
II

THE BROWNING OF THE LEAVES

THE yellow of autumn is running down the
elms, turning them into astonishing pillars
of pale fire. The big leaves of the lime take the
colour of straw, and drop off almost within the
course of twenty-four hours. The flame-shaped
fingers of the Ampelopsis on the house wall become
coloured images of the devouring element ; the
long fingers of the sumac are bloodily crimson ;
the beech has luminous leaves in every shade
from yellow to scarlet ; the oak is going out in a
sort of sturdy scorched biscuit-colour. The trees,
in short, about to shed their leaves brighten the
world with a display of reds even more remark-
able and varied than the greens with which they
came in.

The phenomenon of the leaf-fall is not, as we
instinctively imagine, easy to explain on the mere
score of change of temperature. As it happens,
this autumn is warmer than the summer has been,
and yet the yellowing of the leaf began as early as

THE BROWNING OF THE LEAVES 237

in other years, and is taking precisely the same
course. Some say that the cooling of the soil is
the determining factor, but artificial experiments
in that direction have resulted not in the un-
pinning and the casting away of the leaves, but
in their shrivelling on the plant. The cutting
off of the sap through the decreased activities of
the roots is an alternative or a supplementary
explanation. But the branches of the sycamore
we cut down last week, thus effectively cutting
off the sap, will have withered leaves on them till
the middle of the winter.

The shedding of its leaves by a deciduous tree
is not a mere negative, but a complex and masterly
process. The health of the tree is shown as much
by the way in which it gets rid of its leaves before
the winter as by the way it puts them on in spring.
A diseased tree often shows its disease by its
incapacity to get rid of its leaves in the proper
way.

Let us ask what are the penalties for retaining
the broad leaves of the deciduous trees. The
first is the waste of vital force by evaporation in
excess of suction, when the colder weather comes.
Yes, or hot weather either, for we must not forget
that in tropical and sub-tropical countries the
approach of the dry season is preceded by a fall
of the leaf, just like that which precedes the winter
in our clime. A second penalty in our climate is
the overweighting and breaking of the branches
by the extra tons of snow that each tree would

238 THE RING OF NATURE

carry if it retained its leaves. Beyond those two
we need not go.

The stripping of the trees is an anticipation of
the cold weather that brings those drawbacks.
The tree that waits till it is cold, as here and
there an oak does, will not be able to lose its leaves,
but must wear them in shrivelled state till the
spring. Of two trees, the one that happens to
have shed its leaves when the cold comes will be
the better off, and so it has come about that nearly
all the broad-leaved trees have developed the habit
of unrobing slowly during the fine days of autumn.

If it were merely a matter of throwing the leaves
off, what an immense amount of capital the trees
would lose, and how much richer would the leaf-
mould be. Nature is not so spendthrift as all
that. Just as the tadpole, instead of shedding its
tail as some suppose, slowly absorbs it into its body
for the nutriment of other parts, so the trees
suck their leaves dry of the starches and sugars
before throwing away the empty skeletons.

There is an interesting summer experiment to
show the chemical action of the leaf-juices. Blot
out the light from a portion of the leaf by pinning
a disk of champagne cork to it. Leave it in the
open air for a few days (the leaf being still on its
plant and growing as before). Now bleach the
leaf by first dipping it in boiling water and then
soaking for a day or two in methylated spirits.
All but the starch will have gone out, and you can
tell where the starch is by dipping it in iodine

THE BROWNING OF THE LEAVES 239

solution. Lo, the circle that has been covered
with the cork remains white, and only the rest goes
black. The circle finding itself in the dark
ceased to secrete starch, and sent in what it had
already made to the midrib, and thence to the
main plant for its common needs.

So in the autumn, and let who will put it down
to mere reflex action in response to failing light.
The days are as long, the sun as near, the air and
soil as warm as in April, when every leaf was hard
at work making green. But something makes
the trees carry out a policy, the utility of which
will be manifest some weeks hence. Every possible
grain of starch is converted by the vegetable
saliva into sugar and carried back into the twigs,
the trunk, or even the roots. When the last
available grain has gone in, a barricade is set up
between twig and leaf, a division neatly sealed
with cork made between them, and the next
breeze casts the empty leaf down. In the case of
compound leaves, like those of the chestnut and
the Virginia creeper, each leaflet is thus cut off,
and a little later, the convoy having passed the
leaf-stalk, that, too, is cut off and thrown away.

But why, when the leaves are empty, are they
not white as in the case of our summer experiment ?
,We bleached that summer leaf by taking away
its chlorophyl or green starch-collecting matter.
In the autumn leaf, the dregs of the chlorophyl
remain as detached units cut off from the retreat
hanging along the veins and the sides of the cells

240 THE RING OF NATURE

that have been mainly drained. However, take
what you will from green, either green or yellow
or blue remains. You can scarcely make it red,
such as the flaming crimson of the sumac or the
violet glow of the dogwood.

Ruskin, speaking to the students of Tunbridge
Wells of the red colour in nature, said : —

4 Iron stains the great earth wheresoever you
can see it, far and wide — it is the colouring sub-
stance appointed to colour the globe for the sight,
as well as to subdue it to the service of man.
You have just seen your hills covered with snow,
have enjoyed, at first, the contrast of their fair
white with the dark blocks of pine woods ; but
have you ever considered how you would like them
always white — not pure white, but dirty white —
the white of thaw with all the chill of snow in it,
but none of its brightness ? That is what the
colour of the earth would be without its iron ; that
would be its colour, nor here or there only, but in
all places, and at all times.

Ruskin then proceeded to tell his hearers of some
of the ways in which the earth was coloured by
iron — the gravel walks, the warm colour of the
common, the earth of the ploughed field, the
golden colour of the seashore.

Is it not possible that he might have added the
glory of the autumn beech to the credit of the
ubiquitous rusty iron ? We only know that it
has been shown that chlorophyl, the green light-
splitting, carbon-elaborating substance of the leaf,

THE BROWNING OF THE LEAVES 241

cannot exist without iron. May it not be then
that the blaze of autumn is caused by the rusting
of millions and millions of fairy girders and stays
in the scaffolding of the leaves from which all
the vital green and their products have been with-
drawn before the trees finally cast them away ?

See how the autumn tries to woo the trees into
imprudent green with bursts of sunshine brighter
and more balmy that many of the months of
summer, but without breaking through the useful
habit that a winter now and then proves to be
for the best. Every one has noticed how, after
September and October have marked the running
down of the year, a second summer intervenes
before the portals of winter are reached. It has
been variously called St. Martin's Summer, St.
Martin's Day being the llth of November ; All
Saints' Summer, for the 1st of November ; or
St. Luke's Little Summer, which brings it back to
the 18th of October.

The ordinary man does not trouble himself to
find a reason for this quickening of summer after
autumn has set in. It would be interesting to
try him and see if he could, by guessing, hit upon
the leading paradox of our solar system. Every
one knows that Great Britain turns away from
the sun at midsummer, that by Christmas it has
reached the limit of its rudeness, and begins to
turn back towards the full light of next midsummer.
Now, from 25th October to Christmas is two
months, and from Christmas to 25th February is
Q

242 THE RING OF NATURE

also two months. Why is it that October is so
much brighter and warmer than February ? The
answer is easy. Because October has the warm
months of August and September behind it, while
February follows a hundred and twenty short
days and long cold nights. The earth chills
slowly and warms up again slowly, so that the
coldest days follow midwinter day and the
warmest days come after midsummer day.

That is one reason why October is not so much
colder than September, nor November so much
colder than October as the days are shorter. One
explanation of so unpractical a problem is usually
held sufficient, and so the practical man never
tumbles on the fact that the sun is actually nearer
the earth at Christmas than at midsummer.
Some of the brilliance of our autumn sun at mid-
day is accounted for by the fact that he is a good
million miles nearer than he was at midsummer.
He will have advanced towards us another million
and a half miles by Christmas. It is only as much
as though a man sitting at the end of a thirty-foot
drawing-room should be asked to come one foot
nearer the fire, turning his chair at the same time
so that the blaze was rather less direct.

It may seem a small thing, but counts for more
hi the case of a very fierce fire like the sun than
where a mild air- warming coal fire is concerned.
Another point in favour of the autumn sun is that
we are advancing towards it all the time, and
thus intercepting its rays at a greater velocity

THE BROWNING OF THE LEAVES 243

than if we were stationary or retreating. The
phenomenon is like the sound of a coming train
which increases its roar tremendously till it has
come abreast, then falls away quite suddenly as
the sound becomes a receding one.

The wild things mostly resist the importunities
of the autumn sun, though, as our gardens testify,
a very little selection is needed to produce crops
of flowers in the summer of St. Martin. The wild
white bush-rose, Rosa arvensis, now and then puts
out a blossom in October or November all among
its red hips. Such bushes as these are the fore-
runners of our cultivated roses that, not content
with overshadowing all other flowers in June,
give us new blossoms to rival the phlox and the
African marigold in their own seasons.

When the cold nights and the rotting rain keep
off we can find plenty of October violets and
primroses with stray campions, pale pink images
of the summer ones, dandelions, buttercups, and
others breaking rank or rather breaking bivouac,
as individuals will in the best organized of armies.
A pear tree occasionally breaks into bloom amid
the ripe fruit, and I have seen a horse chestnut
come out in November as full of fans and blossom-
buds as when they unglue in spring.

These, however, are manifest exceptions.
Though it may be true that the growing leaf-
bud pushes off the old red leaf, yet when that
is accomplished, the pushing movement holds.
The autumn sun may run polishing up and down

244 THE RING OF NATURE

the bare branches, but the buds hold themselves
for the winter that by hereditary experience
they know must intervene before the spring
message, delivered often in far colder weather,
tells them that it is indeed tune to open. Even
the hazel catkins that are half-sized before the
leaves have fallen very rarely open before the
turn of the year, immediately after which they can
be seen swinging as ' lambs' tails,' though the
twigs be rimed with frost.

Her wild children that run about, Nature
catches one by one and forces to take the sleep that
is good and safe for them. The wasp and the late
butterfly remain at the banquet of St. Martin's
Summer as long as they can. By day they feast
on the ivy blossoms or the more generous artificial
nectaries of the garden. Each night they find
some cranny to shelter them from the cold, but
their sleep is apt to get longer and longer, their
hour of rising later and later each day, till the
long sleep of winter overtakes them. We say
lightly of our own dozes of eight hours apiece,
that sleep is mimic death. How much more then
is death imitated by the sleep of the brimstone
butterfly, which keeps it for months so motionless
that not even the microscope can detect any
outward sign of life, or of the wasp, whose limbs
are so brittle that they will break but never bend,
till life reinvades them, oils them, and sets them in
new motion.

The butterflies that hibernate in our country

THE BROWNING OF THE LEAVES 245

are all or nearly all of the Vanessidse, that is pea-
cock, red admiral, painted lady, large and small
tortoiseshell, and probably the Camberwell beauty,
and outside the Vanessidae the brimstone and the
comma. Strange that the sleep habit should
belong only to so well denned a group, for the
comma and the brimstone are so like the Vanessidae
that one or either is usually included by any one
bold enough to make an original classification.
I cannot help thinking that the fact that they
hibernate ought to weigh down the balance in
their favour, and secure them admission to the
noble class of the purple emperor.

The quiet man will see just now at any time
of the day ghostly shapes at work in the hazel
thickets, in the midst of quickset hedges, in the
stackyards and in the corn stubbles. Sometimes
it is a bushy-tailed dormouse, sometimes a white-
vested wood mouse, but much more often a short-
tailed vole. They are easily known apart, mainly
from the characteristics just named. The dor-
mouse is the only one that has the tail clothed with
hair, and the tail of the vole is as though that of a
field mouse had been cut down by a good half.
Furthermore, the vole has a wide face with the
eyes set close together, after the manner of a
caricatured Boer farmer, while the mice have
large and brilliant eyes set at the outer angle of
the face, so that they can look well round at any
one who tries to steal up behind. The vole must
turn its head before it can anything like look over

246 THE RING OF NATURE

its shoulder. That is perhaps a reason why it
lives in communities, — or perhaps the result.
' Father,' asked the inquiring youngster, ' why
does the sole have its eyes both on one side of
its head ? ' ' Because, my son, it lives on the
bottom of the sea, and so has no use for eyes on
the lower side of its head.' ' And, father, why
does it live on the bottom of the sea ? ' ' Because
both its eyes are on the upper part of its head.'

All these ghostly shapes of the hedgerows are
busy gathering their hoards for the winter. Such
a provision on the part of the dormouse seems
uncalled for and scarcely defensible. If it has
the faculty of sleeping through the cold, what
need is there to lay up a store ? Perhaps this
fat gentleman with two strings to his bow is in
a state of transition from the storing habit to
the hibernating habit. He stores in obedience
to an instinct a million years old which the
sleeping habit ought to have removed. And be-
cause he cannot get rid of the habit of taking a
nibble in the middle of the night he cannot become
so perfect a sleeper as the bear, who goes to bed
fat, and never moves until it is time to get up in
spring.

As for the vole and the field mouse, or wood
mouse, they are awake all the winter. There
can be little real work for old farmer Vole to do
in his snug underground retreat with his well-
stocked granary beside him. Yet the snow is
never down many hours before his footsteps are

THE BROWNING OF THE LEAVES 247

plentifully seen in it, and he has driven tunnels
under its crust into which we see him hastily
withdrawing as we pass by. The amount of
wheat, beech nuts, haws, nuts, or other wild or
cultured produce that he will store away has to
be seen to be realized. Sometimes he annexes the
labour of some one else, a whole potato bury in
the rickyard, for example, where he makes himself
very much at home, retreating further and further
among his stores as the human proprietor comes
and removes those of the front row.

That little rascal the squirrel is busy among the
red leaves, nibbling here, scratching there, and not
working so hard as is generally supposed at putting
up a winter store. If there are plenty of nuts,
however, you may find a heap of them hereafter
in some chest of natural wood in the hedge-
row. In the hollow stump of an ash we found last
spring nearly a peck of nuts, when the squirrel
had gone to his hoard and forgotten to shut the
door.

We can find now or in winter the shells of nuts
from which the wild people have extracted the
kernels. The nut with a large and jagged hole
in it has been hammered open by the nuthatch.
That with a rather smaller and much neater round
hole in it has been opened by wood mouse or
dormouse. The one that has been split in halves
is from the squirrel's board. Put the halves
together, and you will find that he first scraped
away the angle at the forward end of the nut,

248 THE RING OF NATURE

then inserted his tooth in the faint crack that he
had uncovered, and jerked the two shells apart.
But make certain that it was indeed the squirrel
that did this, for because it is the best known way
of opening a nut, man has copied it and opens his
nuts with a jack knife in the very same way. It
is easy to see whether the opening has been effected
with the curved instrument of the squirrel or with
the straight edge of the jack knife.

A WALK ROUND THE ZOO 249

NOVEMBER

A WALK ROUND THE ZOO

T~pVERY year the Zoo makes some notable
1 > advance in the direction of showing us the
animal as he really is. Birds instead of perching
for ever in one position in wired boxes are put in
mixed companies in large and lofty open-air
aviaries where they can fly aloft, build their nests
in the various sites suited to the species, and carry
on a comparatively free avine life. Sea-lions can
stretch their limbs and give us a good exhibition
of their marvellous swimming powers in some-
thing that really looks like a lake. The polar
bears have quite recently moved into quarters that
are to the old ones as a field is to a back yard.

Nothing is more typical of the new spirit at the
Zoo than the complete enlarging of dozens of
American squirrels, as well as some exotic doves.
They run about the gardens now with complete
confidence, not to say impudence, joining our
alfresco lunch parties without invitation, and
making us feel that we really are in a garden

250 THE RING OF NATURE

of beasts and not an animal prison. But the
squirrels swarm still more thickly in the Broad
Walk and all over Regent's Park, to the delight of
people far more likely to feed them than they
are in the gardens where monkeys and many others
compete for attention.

The point of approach to the Zoo matters a
good deal, and since the squirrels came there we
like to get there by the Bakerloo railway, and
walk from Regent's Park Station by the Broad
Walk. When one has a bag of nuts or a paper
bag that looks as though it might contain nuts,
the tameness of the squirrels becomes positively
startling. They think nothing of running up the
leg, on to the forearm, and poking their heads
right into the bag to see what it really does hold.
They are usually disappointed if they find there
apples instead of nuts. They do not quite like
to sit there and nibble. They will stay long
enough to push the first nut well into the back of
the mouth, so that they can then take another
and run off with two at once; but unless you
provide it in slices they do not attempt to
negotiate an apple.

The people who attend the free Zoo in Regent's
Park are enormously generous to the squirrels.
There are some who bring up daily basketfuls of
food. You can hardly ever give the frisky little
animals so much that they will cease to take more.
They usually take it a little way off, dig a little
hole, and hide it.

A WALK ROUND THE ZOO 251

I do not know one of these squirrels that has
anything like a cache into which it puts a quantity
of food, though it is likely that the lucky possessors
of hollow limbs for nesting in use them as stores
in autumn. It seems as though every inch of
ground contained its nut. Often a squirrel that
you fondly hoped was coming to your bag will
dig just where it happens to be, fish up a nut of
its own, crack it and eat it. I should think that
by and by mice or voles will increase under the
trees where the squirrels are, and then we shall
need owls to keep them in check. The squirrels
already seem about as numerous as they ought to
be. I hope some of their numbers will be drafted
to our other London parks.

From the vestibule of squirreldom we enter the
Zoo itself by the south gate. We probably find
if we look for it a tree kangaroo coiled up asleep in
the sun on the roof of the ticket-lodge. He, too,
comes from the squirrel's yard in the Zoo, daily
climbing out and coming just as far as the entrance
gate, as if to show that he may come out into the
park if he likes. The squirrels were purposely
let out, but the woolly tree kangaroo is a truant
that has found its way over the supposed un-
climbable railings.

Immediately on our left are the cattle sheds.
The yards are in front, and a very large percentage
of visitors never enter the sheds. Here, however,
are to be seen calves of rare species long before
they go out into the yards. The British wild

252 THE RING OF NATURE

cattle give increase nearly every year, and every
calf dropped strengthens the opinion of those
who say that it is not a true wild breed, but an
artificial one, for whereas the herd-masters of
Chillingham and Chartley will have it that the
colour of the breed is white, the calves at the Zoo
are nearly always black.

Near the hump-backed American bison with
blood-shot eyes is another animal with a far more
peaceable cast of countenance, but a far more
implacable temper. The abiding rage of the
African dwarf buffalo is the most terrible thing
the Zoo has to show. We can understand the
frenzy of a newly caged beast. It is like the rage
of a newly caught criminal. Anger, says the
poet, is short madness, but what is the anger that
lasts unabated for months and years ? The dwarf
buffalo, more than ten years a prisoner, rages
round its pen apparently every minute of every
hour of every day. They dare not put it in the
yard. Once they tried the experiment, and the
first thing it did was to charge furiously at some
one it saw through the railings, nearly knocking
down even that ponderous structure. The blind,
indomitable rage of the species seems to have
reacted on the organism by enlarging the base
of the horns till they form one solid boss of
battering-ram. Sharp horns are not a sign of
such inveterate anger. The sharp-horned of our
domestic breeds are commonly good natured ;
if a little fiery when roused, at least soon quiet

A WALK ROUND THE ZOO 253

again, whereas the hornless breeds often attack
one another with their round but knobby fore-
heads. The hunter of big game in Africa puts
this smooth-browed buffalo almost or quite at
the top of the list of those most dangerous to
encounter.

The snakes and the lions are equidistant from
the other end of the cattle sheds. The snake
house is almost exciting when there are some
rattlesnakes newly arrived. They have not yet
learnt the mysteries of glass. If you go at all near
them they coil themselves into figures of eight,
poise their venomous heads at you, ever bending
the catapult more tensely, while behind, the rattle
quivers till it becomes invisible by the rapidity
of its vibration. You scarcely hear the rattle
through the glass, and as you bend forward to do
so you seem to fall under the mesmerism of the
snake. It is with an effort that you tear yourself
away, though you are at the same time in a cold
sweat at the horror of its deathly power.

You do not find the Indian cobra giving way to
paroxysms like that. The American defends his
snakes by saying that they at any rate give honest
warning of their belligerency. They are not
sneaks like the assassin snakes of India, polished
fiends that would as soon kill you as not, whereas
the rattlesnake only does so if you persist in
disregarding his warning.

But is the rattle of this viper primarily an
instrument of warning ? My own opinion is that

254 THE RING OF NATURE

it is a call designed to imitate the shrilling of a
grasshopper. The bird or the mouse that is
fated to become the rattlesnake's dinner comes
to it because it thinks it hears a grasshopper.
The snake sees it coming, and its tail vibrates with
eagerness for the strike, just as the cat's tail
twitches when she is about to make her spring;
but in the case of the snake, the more the tail
twitches the nearer the bird comes. Afterwards,
the snake sets its rattle going whenever it is about
to strike anything, whether to eat or by way of
self-defence.

Sometimes there is shown at the Zoo a small
snake of the same tribe, but not the same genus as
the rattler, which has an equipment of a slightly
different kind. As in the rattler, the tail append-
age is very different from the next vertebrae. There
is a rattle that does not rattle. It is cream or
bone-white, and it wriggles just like a white maggot
that is for ever crawling out of the grass in which
the reptile is coiled, without getting entirely out.
It has the flowing movement that we can give to
a skipping-rope when one end is free and the other
held in the hand. It is in appearance and in
motion precisely like a very appetizing grub,
whiter than a meal-worm and about as large as
a good fat one. If I were a bird, it is perfectly
certain that I should want that grub badly, and
more than likely that when I went to get it the
owner of the tail would get me.

We have stayed with the horrid beasts long

A WALK ROUND THE ZOO 255

enough. We pass next to the wolves, a neglected
section which signifies its indignation at neglect
by frequent combined howlings. It requires a
little imagination to appreciate the wolves. They
look amiable and harmless enough with their
doggy faces and gently retrousse noses as they
trot rather prettily round their cages. Imagination
has been helped somewhat by the christening of the
finest pair of timber wolves Lobo and Blanca,
after the famous heroes of Mr. Thompson Seton.
Somehow it is the rough, long hair of the back
near the shoulder that makes me see in the captive
wolf all at once a bolt of terror with jaws like a
steel trap, as those who have fought wild wolves
declare they are. When I look at that roughly
parted coarse hair on the shoulder, I can see the
muscles play under it as the beast hunches itself
in constantly accelerated speed and hurls itself
open- jawed on its prey.

In the lion house hard by is a swifter animal
than the wolf, the cheetah. It is a perfect
caricature of speed — the head no bigger than the
neck, the forearm inordinately long and straight,
a hump above the clavicle as though when the
animal was extended that portion of the leg
would telescope out and add further to the length
of stride. There is not nearly room for the cheetah
to stretch its limbs. It stands and looks out, with
its queer baby face marked with big black tear-
stains down the side of its nose, waiting for feeding-
time. When its joint is pushed through the bars

256 THE RING OF NATURE

its long piston-like legs claw at it, like the spokes
of a bicycle wheel, so rapidly that you can scarcely
see them move, and all in a tremble of balked agility
it carries off the food it should have caught at
forty miles an hour — only to gnaw it like a cat
in the back of its cage.

I like the cheetah, the leopards, the puma, and
the tigers better than the king of beasts whose
house they share. The young lions point a curious
moral, if we can read it. Cubs that are bred in
the Zoo are fierce and intractable, while those that
are caught young in the forest are far more amiable.
It is as though all the bitter years of walking up
and down, up and down behind bars to be stared
at by cruel and stupid bipeds, had turned sour the
milk of leonine kindness, and infected the babes
with more than the expressed indignation of the
parents. Tom, Dick and Harry, three fine males
in the Zoo, are forest-bred lions. It is true that
Dick badly mauled a too familiar visitor a few
years ago, and that there is some other little
matter against Harry, but the keeper declares
that the lions were more sinned against than sinning.
Dick is now a married man. It is he and his wife
that inhabit the first den on the lion side after you
pass the keeper's chair.

Behind the keeper's chair a passage runs to
the back. Hence comes the meat at feeding-time,
and this way will the keeper lead wishful visitors
to the regions behind the dens where are some-
times interesting pets. A young lion now nearly

A WALK ROUND THE ZOO 257

half grown still takes an occasional gambol in the
passage or the yard. You can go home and say
you have patted him or even been knocked down
by him. You can, on the one hand, stroke a
puma, and, on the other, look through a little hole
at the fiercest beast in the Zoo, a black jaguar that
spits at you like all possessed, to show you that
nothing shall ever tame it.

Best of all tigers are the pair of Siberians always
to be seen, one or both, on the roof of their shed in
the yard at the back of the lions. Their hair is
rougher and longer than that of the Bengal tiger.
The unrecognized reason why the Londoner likes
them is that the Chinese have painted their tiger
far better than the Indians have painted theirs.
When you have seen the Siberian tiger in Chinese
water-colour or needlework at the British Museum
and also in the flesh at the Zoo, you have a
composite idea of prehistoric magnificence and
fleshly grace far richer than can be inculcated by
the tigers of Indian art and reality. Our own
English sabre-toothed tiger must have been about
such another in many respects as his Hairiness of
Siberia.

The bears fare uncommonly well now, especially
those half-grown ones that occupy the yard that
once belonged to the polar bears. A few years
ago we gave them sugar, only when the keeper
was not looking, but now the keepers have become
reconciled to this, and every one takes a bag of
loaf sugar for the bears. The bear in the pit

258 THE RING OF NATURE

will no longer climb his pole for a mere piece of
sugar. He sits up or stands up or sprawls with
upturned eyes till either you are overcome by his
wiles or drop the morsel by accident. Only after
he has long gazed at an orange and is convinced
that he can get it no other way will he climb.
If he catches the orange up there he champs it,
and spits out only the pips on regaining terra
firma. But if he first takes the orange on the
floor it is marvellous to see how neatly he slits the
peel with his claws, picks out the pips, and eats
only the sweet pulp.

The monkey house is not nearly so terrible a
place as it was. The excitement of seeing some
one else's bonnet snatched off and made the
material of a simian holiday is now denied to us
by the strait-laced authorities. The wire-netting
is too close to permit a monkey to catch hold of
the most careless person's hair. It was in the old
days an illuminating lesson in animal intelligence
(or the lack of it) to see some valiant young man
rescue his adored whose hair had been caught,
by pulling hard at her arm. Surely she could take
that method of extrication herself. Those little
monkey hands are not lion's claws, and can be
caught and unlocked as easily as baby's fingers.
Their owners know it, and rarely suffer you to
touch them.

Out in the gardens not many paces away from
the monkey house is the only baby simian born
in the Zoo. The old Japanese apes and their

A WALK ROUND THE ZOO 259

offspring live together in the open-air cage where
the young one was born about six years ago.
They are a highly interesting, if not engaging family.
She is susceptible to ridicule as well as secretly
jealous of the attention lavished on Young Hopeful,
and she will scold and chatter at you like an old
Irish washerwoman. Father is getting past work.
I believe he never climbs the wire-netting now.
He is rheumaticky and silent, but if his sometimes
thoughtless visitors urge him too much he flies
into a rage more terrible than that of his wife,
and then Young Hopeful joins in with all sorts of
naughty swear words that he really should not
have picked up at such a tender age.

Young Hopeful is scarcely nearer to the stature
of his parents than a child of five years old of our
own species. Like them he has a red face. He
is clad in rather hairy khaki, the trousers of which
appear decidedly baggy. He is always aloft,
where it fatigues his parents to follow, and from
his point of vantage he stretches his arms through
the wire, almost to the shoulder. You hand to
him your closed hand with a bit of apple in the
palm. He seizes a finger, draws the hand nearer,
then unlocks finger after finger till he can get the
food. As he eats it he dances rapidly in a way
that plainly signifies, ' Ain't I a clever fellow, and
didn't I do that beautifully ? '

The inhabitants of the Zoo learn many ways of
extracting food from the visitors. Bears find that
there is a bar of their cage that jangles, and this

260 THE RING OF NATURE

they ring deliberately in order to attract attention.
Some of the monkeys in the side cages rattle their
bars for the same purpose, and one whines for
alms almost with words. You have only to hold
up a piece of sugar to one of the elephants and he
will gravely pirouette for it. A wave of the arm
sends him round the other way, and then he puts
out his trunk and claims his wage. Some say
that the lower animals have no reason. I can
only say that the acts by which we recognize
reason in a child are not more striking.

There are many interesting creatures that you
do not see though you go round the Zoo many times.
The beaver is almost always within his igloo, and
that is a great pity, for there is not a more
astonishing instance of adaptation that his broad
mason's trowel of a tail. There are two badgers
from Cumberland of a most unusual colour, the
stripes being in sandy yellow and white instead of
the usual black. We see neither them nor the
normally coloured specimens unless we ask the
keeper to turn them out from their beds for a
minute. Once a keeper did the same kind turn
with a Tasmanian wolf. Out rushed the gaunt
creature, snarling and snapping at having to face
daylight. We felt as though we were in the
presence of the prehistoric life. It is a tiger
with wolf's jaws, a creature compounded of the
ferocious and the grotesque that might have been
invented by some carver of gargoyles instead of
created by the same Power that made the squirrel.

A WALK ROUND THE ZOO 261

I can vouch for the child who said when going
home in the train from the Zoo, ' Mother, what a
job God must have had to make an elephant.'
There is that other story of the child who thought
the making of grasshoppers must have been
' niggling work.' What, we wonder, would those
two have said if they had seen the Tasmanian wolf ?

We will not go home just yet. Some of our
beasts are of twilight habit, and the best time to
see them is rather late on a winter afternoon.
Then will the kinkajou come forth from its possum-
like slumber and peer about and even climb about
its cage. Then will that even more interesting
animal, the aye -aye, timidly show itself, and
exhibit the marvellous adaptation of its special
finger by extracting its supper from a marrow
bone. Marrow is not a bad substitute for the
wood-boring insects which it extracts with its
astonishingly specialized finger from their auger-
holes in the trees of Madagascar. There would be
many other interesting things to see at the Zoo
if one could stay after the gardens are closed on
the departing public. What an experience it
would be to spend the night there when lions,
wolves, owls, and other fearsome and uncanny
night marauders really feel their pristine instincts !

262 THE RING OF NATURE

NOVEMBER
II

THE MYSTERIOUS FUNGUS

IN the twilight of the year, when all the flowers
have had their day, come the fungi, a sort
of elephantine caricature of the flowers, coloured
like them in an ascending scale of brilliance,
attracting insects and compelling them, as the
flowers do, to carry away the instruments of
fructification, yet differing from the flowers as the
slugs that feed on them differ from the cater-
pillars.

The sweetness of the white clover attracts the
honey-bee, as clean, industrious and cheery as the
flower is sweet. The radiance of the golden rod
is fitted to the magnificence of the red admiral,
which hastens to spread its black-and-scarlet
wings on its stippled gold. But the odour of the
stinkhorn is that of rotten eggs, and the insects
that come to it are the noisome carrion flies.
Give it the politer name of ' wood witch,' and
when you scent its aroma, grateful even to human
nostrils for the associations of former autumns,

THE MYSTERIOUS FUNGUS 263

trace it through the wood till you find the fungus
as the flies find it.

We may have far to go, for the scent of the
wood witch carries far through the wood. But
we come at length to the place where it stands
and shouts its message to the flies. There are the
globular ' buttons ' of growing stinkhorns, which
we like to slice in two for the admiration of the
black and white marble of the internal economy,
and beside them and far above them stands the
stinkhorn of the day, its cap one mass of flies
feeding on its stickiness. They rise with a roar
and allow us to see how the cap has been pitted
with their devourings, adding the appearance of
smallpox to the uncleanness of its stench. And
the feet of the flies, ubiquitous wanderers and
tramplers over everything, are clogged with the
stinkhorn' s gum, and the spores mixed in it for
transportation.

The wood has far more beautiful fungi than the
stinkhorn to show us. Russulas in pink and
mauve and purple, verdigris agaric in sulphuric
green, honey-yellow fascicularis, and slimy black
ink mushrooms and many others have pushed
their way through the foot-deep carpet of fallen
leaves. Always near some birch, the prince of
poison toadstools, the fly agaric, lifts its bright
tomato-coloured cap to which little scabs of
white skin stick to make white dots upon it.
Huge funnel-shaped ' cankers ' full of white juice,
and therefore called lactarius, have thrust up

264 THE RING OF NATURE

among the bracken. Others of equal size are for a
long time undiscovered because of their perfect like-
ness to the dead leaves of an oozing bank on which
they grow. Then we find that every other apparent
leaf is a leaf-shaped and leaf-coloured fungus.

Aloft, we have equal luxuriance. A dead beech
is white to the topmost twigs with a shiny moist
thing in mother-of-pearl that we are informed is
edible. High up in an oak there are beef -steak
mushrooms, each of them weighing two or three
pounds, and, as some think, good as beef-steak
itself to eat. A hornbeam has gushed out into
forty or fifty big brown things like penny buns,
as closely laid one over the other as buns in a dish,
and so highly finished according to bun fancy as
to be each of them decorated with an excellent
imitation of icing. Another tree has fungi of
elephant colour — a hue at once beautifully soft,
of great richness, and as compelling of attention
as even the gaudy fly agaric.

From the grass of the open meadow spring fungi
of quite a new shape. They are thick and fleshy
twigs with the texture of wax candles, some yellow
and some white. Others are branched and compel
the name of staghorn, which has universally been
applied to them.

In the natural history picture book at home
there is a fungus something like these candle
fungi growing from the head of a New Zealand
caterpillar, and the description beneath gives the
impression that to grow into a fungus is about as

THE MYSTERIOUS FUNGUS 265

natural to that particular kind of caterpillar as for
an ordinary ' woolly bear ' to grow into a chrysalis.
Lately, a friend brought home from New Zealand
one of these caterpillars in the flesh, with the
fungus growing from its nose. Perhaps we should
say ' in the wood ' rather than ' in the flesh,' for
both caterpillar and fungus have turned to a sub-
stance almost as hard as oak.

Most of us imagine that these wonderful things
only happen in far off countries, in the tropics or
at the antipodes, whither we shall never have the
luck to go and see them. But, as a matter of fact,
several of our candle fungi have bred in the live
bodies of caterpillars, and are now fruiting from
the dead chrysalis that, as a caterpillar, buried
itself beneath the moss in the fond hope of becom-
ing a moth. And the caterpillars are of the same
genus as those New Zealand ones, and the fungi
of the same genus as the New Zealand disease.

There is no place that we must neglect to look
into in our search for the infinite autumn beauties
of the fungi. The hollow branch of a beech tree
flashes fire as we pass, and when we look in we see
a fairy grotto such as has never been staged out-
side fairydom itself. The ceiling is beautifully
sculptured with the gills of a few large red-brown
fungi which have scattered their spores of brightest
chloride of gold throughout what must surely be
a fairy's drawing-room. First, a spider had spun
its web diagonally from floor to ceiling, and this
the red gold has frosted into a most wonderful

266 THE RING OF NATURE

chiffon. On the floor, a curled beech leaf rests
lightly on its keel. We know how brightly the
autumn beech leaf shines. It seems to have an
inner light of its own, a brilliance to which no other
leaf attains. But this leaf in the fairy's grotto
shines three times as brilliantly as that, because of
the myriad grains of glowing chloride of gold
that have been sprinkled upon it.

Even when night comes we may not lose all the
beauty of the fungi, but may discover a new beauty
even greater than that of day. The luminous
agarics belong entirely to other countries, Greece,
Brazil, and the lands of the fire-fly. But in our
woods a stump of dead tree will sometimes deceive
us with a belief that we have found a glow-worm,
and sometimes a whole log has been found of such
luminosity that it was easy to tell the time by any
part of it, the whole log appearing like a pillar
of fire.

Nothing astonishes us more or is so typically
associated with the fungus as the rapidity with
which it grows. The plant that sends up almost
in a day a fully organized blossom prepared for
the visits of insects and the setting of seed is found
on inspection to have first equipped itself with
very solid stores to which the flower bears the
proper proportion of product to producer. But
if we uproot the giant puff-ball that has sprung up
in the field in a single night we find nothing of
the kind to account for it. The globe of white
flesh bigger than a football is gathered to a point

THE MYSTERIOUS FUNGUS 267

where it rests on the ground, and below that there
is nothing to be seen. It is as though the colt's-
foot root should, instead of merely sending up a
blossom, transform itself into a blossom many
times bigger than itself, move from its place under
the earth and stand on the roots of the grass.

Patient search through the earth beneath the
fungus will reveal a little more of the cause of the
effect, but without diminishing our wonder. The
floor of the wood, hollow with an accumulation of
loose dead leaves, has here and there running in
every direction minute white threads not unlike
the spinnings of a spider. They run through that
precarious soil, leaping from leaf to leaf, weaving
bridges across chasms, linking up communica-
tions as sketchily as pencil marks on a rough-
grained paper. At length, the organization of the
mycelium, as the white threads are termed, comes
to a head at some point the precise situation of
which no mycologist could have predicted, and a
bulbous growth begins to form there. Along the
tiny threads, over the bridges, across the chasms,
come the stores of their tiny spinning. The bulb
grows apace, pushes the pavement of the wood
aside, thrusts out into the day, takes on a vivid
colour, opens its umbrella and displays beneath
it a most marvellously adapted and specialized
apparatus, the familiar 4 gills ' of the mushroom
and other agarics packed with millions of tiny
spores each capable of continuing the fungoid race.

Not only do the cells pour the food along, but

268 THE RING OF NATURE

they themselves are food. The last train takes
up the rails behind it, and they, too, are poured
into the bulbous mass at headquarters. Writing
of the parasol fungus that commonly decorates
our hotbeds, Kerner says that it is elaborated,
fructifies, and passes to deliquescence all in the
space of twenty-four hours. He adds that the
fruit must be many times the weight of the
mycelium that produces it. But how many times
more elaborate. The perfect bee does not weigh
nearly so much as the grub from which it grows,
nor that grub so much as the food it lived upon.
If the fungus weighs only three times as much as
the mycelium, it may be said to represent it in
complexity many more times than that.

The mystery of the fungus is exceedingly old.
Not so old as the flowers, for all the fungi live on
dead organic matter, mostly vegetable. Evidence
of their antiquity need not depend on the geological
records, although these soft and highly perishable
bodies have had their monuments carved in the
rocks, and the proverbial fly in amber has been
found to be infected with the threads of such
a mycelium as destroys them in millions every
autumn now. The enormous number of species,
genera, tribes, and orders into which the toad-
stools, moulds, ferments, and others naturally
divide themselves are evidence just as unequivocal
of the millions of years that they have existed
on the planet.

Considering how much the gourmets enjoy an

THE MYSTERIOUS FUNGUS 269

edible fungus, it is astonishing how rare is the
knowledge of the edible from the poisonous kinds.
In England, the choice of the cook falls on three
species of agaric, all of them with flesh-coloured
gills. Gills of any other hue, and especially white,
are accounted signs of virulent poison. On the
Continent, on the other hand, the white-gilled
fungi are esteemed edible, and those with coloured
gills regarded with suspicion until they have with
difficulty proved their worth.

The Englishman could not make a safer extension
in mycophagy than by cooking a good large puff-
ball. There are puff-balls now in the Home
Close measuring thirty inches in girth, and out-
bulking though not out-weighing a good vege-
table marrow. The puff-ball is that brownish
bladder with a casual rip in it from which, when
you press it with the foot, brown smoke issues in
an apparently inexhaustible stream, every grain
of the smoke being a spore thus set free for
colonization wherever it may settle. No one
would dream of eating a puff-ball in that stage.
It must be taken young, when the whole big globe
cut across is composed of white flesh. Removing
the outer skin you cut the body into suitably sized
pieces, and put them in a covered pie-dish to stew
gently in the oven.

There are many other even noisome-looking
toadstools, not merely good to eat, but surpass-
ing in delicacy of flavour the much-vaunted
mushroom. The fairy-ring champignon has a

270 THE RING OF NATURE

name more famous to the cosmopolitan gourmet
than that of ' mushroom.' Another favourite that
is slowly extending its appeal is the edible
chantarelle. There are two chantarelles, Can-
tharellus cibarius and C. aurantiacus, of which
the former is certainly edible and the latter
doubtful. When fully open they are like
umbrellas blown inside-out, and the gills, not
content with joining the stem inside the crown as
in the mushroom, run down the stalk. The colour
of the edible species is egg-yellow, that of the
other commonly orange. The gills of the right
kind are swollen like veins, not so numerous as in
aurantiacus and meandering. In a few hours
after being picked this fungus develops a scent
like that of apricots. Cibarius grows mostly
under beech trees, aurantiacus mostly under pine.

Quite a different kind of edible fungus is the
beef-steak. It juts from the trunk of an oak,
looking something like an ox tongue, with pinkish
under-side furnished with pin-holes instead of
gills for the carriage of the spores. When broken
open it is seen to be full of a red juice like the
gravy of raw beef. Another of these polyspore
fungi, of which the Italians in London gather vast
quantities in Epping Forest, is the edible boletus,
a fungus with a cap of brown velvet and the under-
side yellow like a very porous sponge cake. But
besides B. edulis there are poisonous species,
piper atus, sathanas, and others. They are mostly
known by their swollen stems, their generally

THE MYSTERIOUS FUNGUS 271

poisonous look, the fact that when bruised they
develop a blue stain, and, if we should be so
curious as to taste one, by their fiery flavour.

The sampling of fungi is a perilous quest.
It seems to be fairly established that even the
true ' mushroom ' has poisoned people. Probably
when the spores are ripe the fungus is more
poisonous, and the reproductive principle defies
the action of the frying-pan. On the other hand,
it is possible and indeed seems probable that even
the poisonous species would become harmless
when quite properly cooked, just as arrowroot
and the wild arum are very well known to do.
In Siberia they use the exceedingly poisonous
fly agaric as the basis of an alcoholic drink, first
drying the fungus, and afterwards steeping it in
whortleberry juice.

After all, what do we gain in return for the
risk, when we try to add a new fungus to the bill
of fare ? It does not seem likely that these sub-
terranean growths, owing no allegiance to the sun,
possessing no chlorophyl, the essential means of
converting sweet fresh air into food, can give us
anything really nourishing or wholesome. The
decadents of Rome said, ' Keep your corn, O
Libya, unyoke your oxen, provided only you
send us mushrooms.' Undoubtedly, however, the
dead leaves of autumn were better converted into
wheat than into the best mushroom that ever
grew.

The country people commonly call those fungi

272 THE RING OF NATURE

that grow on tree trunks, and end by turning into
wood as hard as that of the host, cankers. The
likeness of this word to our most dread disease
has led even some responsible scientists to suggest
that cancer may grow first on decaying trees and
then infect the human body. Certainly, fungi
(assuming for a moment that cancer is one) are
most resourceful colonizers. Many are known
to live at will on hosts of totally different kind,
such as the wheat smut on the barberry, while
waiting for a crop of wheat to devastate. No
doubt there .are very many others with the same
habit not yet discovered. A wounded larch,
the only one in the county, is almost certain to
attract the peziza that is the larch's especial pest.
It comes from the air, say the wise men, thinking
that because it is unseen it must be a case of
spontaneous generation. So they said of plague
and smallpox not many years ago, but we know
better to-day.

Conceivably, the larch may escape the peziza,
but never will the apple escape the fungus that
turns its juice into cider, or the barley grain its
own ferment, or the bit of bread thrown out its
semblance of blood, or the plate of jam its crop
of white whiskers. The spores must have been
waiting somewhere for the opportunity of getting
each one its respective food.

A little is known of the life history of some of
the worst of the minute fungi. Ergot of rye, that
now and then infects whole races of those who

THE MYSTERIOUS FUNGUS 273

eat that grain with leprosy and madness, has one
of the most astonishing. The spores are upon
the grain when it is sown. There is no trace of
them or of the mycelium in the leaf or the root or
the stem during all the months that the plant is
growing. You would think that the sap and the
other digestive and chemical processes would have
converted them again and again into the healthy
life of the plant. But when the time of fruiting
comes again, there is the ergot fructifying in the
ear in long horn-like spikes for all men to see.

Some of the fungi live uncommonly hard.
They cannot, like the plants, convert inorganic
substances such as carbonic acid gas into food.
Chlorophyl alone can do that, and it is apparent
that the fungi have not that any more than we
ourselves. They have almost as good a claim in
this respect to be called animals as plants. There
is plenty of organic food for the toadstools in the
floor of the wood, in the decaying bulk of the tree,
in the richly manured field, in the juices of a doomed
caterpillar, in a cider vat, or a piece of stale bread.
But there is a fungus that grows in the pipes that
convey running mountain water with not a grain
of impurity in a hundred gallons. In such an
unpromising medium, this particularly thrifty
fungus masses up till it flows from the end of the
pipe in streamers of red jelly, and, later on, till
it chokes the conduit and stops the water from
running.

Others of this enterprising class can get a living

274 THE RING OF NATURE

on steel, on apparently pure quartz, and in the
best sterilized medium that man can prepare.
The glass in the Abbey windows that has delighted
twenty generations with the beauty of its colours
is at last afflicted with ' glass disease.' The colour
and the transparency are leaving it, so that in the
last stage of the disease it has scarcely any of the
properties of glass. Minute holes are drilled through
it, and a pressure of the finger produces final
dissolution. The patient fungus biding its centuries
has overcome even the hard and polished and
generally considered impervious glass.

CLEANING-UP TIME 275

DECEMBER

CLEANING-UP TIME

OH the trials of washing-day. Ah, the tribula-
tion of tidying up. The upshot of summer
with its merry holiday-making is a great deal
of disorderly litter which the pruning-shears and
the besom of autumn must remove. The false
luxuriance of the annuals gets nipped off. One
day the tropeolums are green and rambling, the
next they are smitten with a palsy and lie un-
starched on the border, the next, they have
mysteriously disappeared. There is no more stuff
apparently in the nasturtium leaf than there is
in a jelly fish, which melts on the sand, and when
its water has been given back to the atmosphere,
leaves not a wrack behind.

The leaves of our mighty trees are made of
sterner stuff than the grass of the field, but they,
too, in their thousands of millions are made away
with in a silent, inexorable fashion. Getting
them off the trees is the least part of autumn's
task. It is but the first scurry of the broom,

276 THE RING OF NATURE

that makes the children gather into a corner,
rather enjoying the fun of washing-day in its
first stages. The leaves flew from the trees in a
tornado of fun. For a time, they were more in
the way than ever, scurrying across the country-
side, cluttering the roads and paths, drifting
into almost unmanageable heaps. Slowly their
buoyancy was tamed with a little water. They
lost their crinkle, and clung to the ground instead
of bounding over it. Then the worms seized them
and drew them one by one into their holes, the
stuff in them deliquesced and ran into the ground,
the earth claimed them for its own.

The annuals have paid back their brief borrowing
in humus for next year's blossoms. The herbaceous
parts of the perennials have been hauled down,
disintegrated and stowed away. We shall have a
sweetly clean slate again for next summer to write
her gaieties upon. On those terms, we rejoice at
the cleaning-up of autumn. It is a newly revealed
delight, uncounted on in summer, to have the
trees unsmothered so that we can see the beauties
of their inner architecture. The differences of
architecture between chestnut and beech, oak and
elm can be seen hundreds of yards away more
clearly than even when they were covered with
leaves. We can see how each branch has fought
according to its kind for summer after summer
against its fellows, though in a common cause,
against the winds and other adversities which were
also their inspiration.

CLEANING-UP TIME 277

We had altogether forgotten that window hole
in the beech across the lawn, where a branch
after having divided comes together again. The
time of no-leaves restores it to us like a long-
lost friend. The lime, which was beautiful in its
leafage of June and in the golden redolence of
midsummer blossom, is also very beautiful in the
fairylike arches of its winter structure. From far
down the trunk it flings up a shaft which bends
more and more away from its original aim, taking
the parabola of a rocket. The arch ends high in
air, and from the descending part of it a new and
an airier arch reascends. That beauty you can
see over and over again in the lime, but very
rarely in any other tree. Every tree, however,
shows its own curve compounded of the two
elements of aspiration and the force of gravity.
The shoot starts out heavenwards for all the light
it can get. Its very success bows it down with
leaves or fruit. Now that they are gone you can
see the shoots trying to straighten themselves for
the heavenward flight again, but none of them
can get out all the kinks of prosperity. If we
would take the trouble to read such small print,
we could read the history of the good and bad
summers from the spiral of any stick that was
several summers long. We might be able to read
in the old trees the history of wonderful summers
like 1821 and 1848.

The wind is blowing the last of summer's leaves
from the hedge, and many mysteries have come

278 THE RING OF NATURE

to light. The black bryony has receded like a
tide, leaving high and dry upon the hedge-top
a rope of fruit, thick as plaited onions, but more
brilliant than cherries. The long white hairs of
old-man' s-beard, traveller's-joy, or honesty, too,
persist in staying after the leaves are gone. But
they fail to cover the delicate basket that the
whitethroat wove there in the security of thick
leaves and in the abundance of all manner of
insect life in June. In less than two hundred
yards of hedge, looking only from one side, I
have counted seven whitethroat 's nests, though
in summer I do not happen to have looked into
one this year.

There is no such picture of the fugitiveness of
summer as the whitethroat's nest, nearly as good
as when it was woven, but filled with dead leaves
now, and its architect five thousand miles away.
The thrush's nest is not the same. Often it has
haws hi it to show that it is still in use by some
thrifty mouse — like a Bloomsbury mansion turned
into a warehouse. And from the same hedge that
holds the mud-lined nest you can start the thrush
that made it. He (if he had any notable share in
this bit of architecture) is singing now on the
ash tree near by whenever the sun gilds it. He
and she gobble the red berries from the hedge,
where the nightingale, wheatear, butcher-bird,
and many others never saw anything but the
blossom.

It ought to be the gay butterflies that have

CLEANING-UP TIME 279

gone, the dull and gloomy souls that are left. It
is not so, however. The gayest-plumaged bird
that comes for the summer only is the redstart,
and he is easily matched in the same tribe by the
stonechat, whose black cap, snow-white collar,
and magenta breast still decorate the gorse, whose
yellow blossoms they outshone in July. Instead
of the reddish-brown nightingale, we keep the
handsome robin, more in evidence when the world
is frozen under snow than when the hedges were
smothered with June roses.

The swallows are all gone, down to the dingy
sand martin, but the finches present one solid
phalanx of winter-abiding birds. There is not
a dull feather among them. The larch wood is
full of trees of fog, the needles which were the
greenest of spring having turned almost to straw-
colour. Now the towy bristles are falling, as the
chaffinches hop among them, resplendent in slate-
purple, rose, and brilliant white shoulder-knots.
The rose bushes are being stripped by green-
finches in olive green and black, with flight feathers
like solid gold. The thistles are winter provender
for red-cheeked goldfinches, more golden of wing
than the greenfinches, and with legs as though en-
cased in thigh boots spotlessly pipe-clayed. The
privet berries are not so black as the cap of
the bullfinch that loves to eat them, and the
hips are not rosier than his broad breast, whose
feathers curl like little waves over his stiff blue
wing.

280 THE RING OF NATURE

Leaving some other finches unnamed, who can
forget their near ally the bunting, that is to say,
the yellow one, our gorgeous yellow-hammer.
Two of them sit upon the hedge watching one
another so closely that I get within a very few
yards before they fly away. Yellower than
canaries all down the front from crown to the root
of the tail, with back and wings of ruddy brown,
and tail that shows wide white feathers when it
is spread in flight. Easy to say how yellow,
but impossible to give an idea of how lavishly,
healthily splendid, this cold December day.

The warblers cannot be gay except in daintiness
of shape, but one of them, a good deal more gay
than the rest, is the only one that stays the winter
— our very well loved hedge-sparrow, which we
will not call, as we should, hedge-accentor. Here-
abouts they call it blue Isaac, a startling name to
the thousands who declare it at sight to be a mere
brown bird. But its neck and throat blush and
sparkle with a blue iridescence like that which
gleams in spring upon ' the burnished dove.'
Like most other birds, it anticipates spring with
much of its finery, and it now pours out from
the summit of a blackberry bush a silvery tin-
tinnabulation of song that seems to make the
sun shine.

There is a tinkling like little bits of ice jostling
in a stream, and from the larch wood to a beech
out in the field flies a long-tailed tit. Then another
and another, till the air seems full of them, each

CLEANING-UP TIME 281

like a dragon-fly in shape, but plodding in a
straight line instead of taking the strong erratic
course of a dragon-fly. Daintiest of all the tits
in their rose and black and white, though the
great tit and the blue tit, never far to seek, are
more brilliant.

Our tiny tits are staunch to a bird when the
cuckoo, turtle-dove, landrail and night-jar follow
the sun to the south. And smaller even than the
tits, smallest and brightest of all the birds, is the
golden-crested wren, heedless of every other foe,
as of the cold, as he searches with microscopic care
a twig scarcely a yard from my face. Well, say
that he is not smaller, nor prettier, though more
regally coloured than the humble Jenny wren.
She, the reputed wife of the robin, flits every-
where, and searches not only bushes but banks
and rabbit holes for her tiny food, what time she
keeps up her shrill clock-winding, like a little old
lady scolding while she makes vain pursuit of
lost time.

Cleaners-up all. If all the superfluous grubs,
weed seeds, and other eatable nuisances could be
collected into one heap, our avine friends would
perhaps finish the whole in a week. And when
that week was gone there would be nothing to
do but quietly to die of starvation. Instead of
that they feed the whole whiter through at
Nature's hopper. Every day they take all that
is within sight and reach. Clouds of finches and
yellow-hammers are upon the stubble, searching

282 THE RING OF NATURE

every inch for seeds of charlock, dock, and other
hardy weeds that would soon overrun the world.
Every day the tits and others are searching every
niche in the smooth, clean limbs of the leafless
trees. But to-morrow, by some chance of growth or
warmth or frost, something else will be revealed
on the station that is clean picked to-day. The
next grub on the list of death will choose to turn
in its earthen chamber or the movement of a leaf
or clod will give up the secret of a seed that had
hoped to become a tall mustard tree.

There is no better example of the hopper than
the old cones on the alders. Not a day passes
but some school of tits or siskins overrun the trees,
seeming to inspect every crack between the scales
of the cones, yet obviously finding something
every day that on another day had been overlooked.
An expansion of one two-hundredth part of an
inch no doubt will make the difference between
inaccessibility and accessibility to some morsel.

On some trees, such as the hawthorn, there are a
good many dead leaves still clinging to the branches,
some of them lasting till the putting forth of new
leaves. Very often the secret of their adherence
is the spinning up there of some caterpillar, which
remains there in chrysalid shape till the time of
moths comes again. One day a lucky tit passing
that way may catch a glimpse of something large
and round, a feast to stay his appetite for a good
ten minutes.

Every morning this week there has been a blue

CLEANING-UP TIME 283

tit, no doubt the same one, hammering for many
minutes at something hard on the top of the May
tree. It is probably the very tough case of a
saw-fly grub, but we cannot say whether the bird
has yet won his way in or whether he will eventually
do so. Such perseverance ought to succeed. So
firmly does the saw-fly grub encase itself that the
grown fly has to have jaws of steel and extra-
ordinarily sharp, for the single purpose of opening
the cerement. For the rest of its life the jaws have
no use whatever.

A far richer cache for the tits has been awaiting
them ever since the caterpillars crawled from the
cabbages, and slung their chrysalids under the
coping of the garden wall. For weeks and months
they hung there undiscovered, but at length a
party of great tits discovered them and cleared
them off in a single morning. If you think that
all the chrysalids are gone, wait till next April
and see if there are not just as many white butter-
flies as ever. We could point out to some soft-
billed bird another secret that ought to furnish
them with toothsome titbits. Under white silk
caps, about as big as a capital O, there are tiny
fat grubs that under the microscope turn out to
be immature bugs, as those insects that suck
plant juices with piercing trunks are technically
called. I think they are the mothers of next
year's aphides, though they are larger and fatter
than their daughters will be. There are twenty of
these white bed-chambers on the trunk of the

284 THE RING OF NATURE

laburnum alone, and the tits have not yet dis-
covered them.

I have got now on the field of my binocular
a dainty little marsh tit in silver and grey with
brilliant dark eyes. He is hopping along all the
sprays of a wild rose, and every now and then he
pushes his embroidery-scissors beak into a leaf-
bud that is not quite tightly rolled. The morsel he
extracts must be microscopic, yet" the quivering of
the mandibles and the action of the throat indicate
that it is something to keep the engines going.

The birds are here to clean off the superfluous
grubs, pupae and eggs, so that next year's vegetation
may have some sort of a chance. It is quite clear
that, hungry and numerous as they are at the
beginning of autumn, they will never exterminate
a single species. Before the last bird discovered
the last well-hidden animal morsel he would
himself be on his last legs. In fact, it is only a
select band that remains to carry out the last
search before the long-hidden army of spring life
discovers itself by walking abroad. The young
birds at the bottom of the class are ' plucked '
before October is finished. They fall into the
maw of weasel, stoat, or hawk, even if they do not,
as later ones do, perish from starvation. There
were too many birds. An infinite number of
nestlings were of the highest use for the getting
under of infinite hoards of present and future
locusts, but when they had been so used their
surplus, too, must go.

CLEANING-UP TIME 285

The numbers of our resident chaffinches, green-
finches, and sparrows no more increase than those
of the nightingale, whitethroat, cuckoo that must
brave two long flights across the sea. Their
flocks have now been so cleaned up that every
bird of them seems to be a perfect specimen. He
is glossy with health, and brightly painted with
the totems of his order. There is no laggard
when the school moves on to new feeding ground,
no novice bird waits on more experienced ones
in order to beg a crumb. Every bird knows all
the rules of the game, and it is just a matter of
chance which of the troupe makes the next dis-
covery of food. Yet even now there are more
birds than Nature requires as an annual stock,
and these armies of perfect units must be still
more perfected by the removal of some more of the
least unfit. No human eye could tell which are
the doomed ones, but the measuring rod of
Natural Selection is one of infinite discrimination.

286 THE RING OF NATURE

DECEMBER
II

DEAD LOW

' "XT OW is the winter of our discontent.' The
1 \l meadow wherein we seem to have dreamed
that cowslips gemmed it with throbbing green
and daintily confectioned blossom, is frozen as
hard and as barren as city pavement. The soil
that in summer runs through the fingers with a
fatness that we know is life, is as dead as marble
and far less beautiful. There is not a stroke of
new grass, the frozen blades that sparsely decorate
the earth having the toughness and tastelessness
of worsted. The world rolls dead and scorched
with frost under a barren, sunless sky.

True, there is still each day a few hours' view of
the sun. He peeps above the horizon at the
east, skims over to the south, and there goes down
with an air of not quite knowing whether it is
worth while to come again to-morrow for another
look at this hopeless end of the globe. He melted
a little of the rime from the grass at mid -day, but
it has come back again even while he is still to

DEAD LOW 287

be seen redly setting. As for softening the ice-
gripped mould, that he was unable to do. There
is not such a thing as a worm or a grub to be found
among the whole army of thrushes native and
foreign, and the berries of hedgerow and tree
are almost gone. High in air a party of field-fares
going off to roost laugh the harsh chuckle of
people who find that life's irony has passed bearing
point. Redwings are moping about the orchard
as thin as bones, and many have yielded up their
gentle lives. On the other hand, we can detect
no abatement in the cheerfulness of the wren
that still tilts her tail at an absurd angle, and
goes clicking about her work like a well-wound
clock.

It is perfectly natural, of course, that we who
know by an experience of thousands of years
that the sun will stop going down and come again
smothered in flowers should be able to be cheerful
at Christmas. It is not wonderful that we who
have our larders stuffed with last year's fruits,
our cellars (coal cellars I mean) stored with the
spoil of a million ages, and whose ships bring us
daily the gifts of the sun from other parts of the
earth, should feel confident that this age of death
will pass. It is an easy thing to go carolling at
doors that you know will open upon rosy firesides
and tables of plenty, but it is an annual miracle
to hear the thrushes singing obviously about
February courtship, April eggs, and May grubs
when the world is being daily turned away and

288 THE RING OF NATURE

away from everything that made summer life
worth living.

There must be some thrill of renewing life
shooting from the ash branch into the thrush's
legs, or the clear-eyed songster can see that the
buds of the sycamore have not given up the
struggle. I can see as much from my study
window, which is on a level with certain tree-
tops, and the wild people who live among such
things must have countless evidence that summer is
not forgotten. At every touch of milder weather
the crocuses push out their bundles swollen with
blossom-buds. When the frost comes, it cannot
drive them back, and their growth remains through
the severest weather as an encouragement for the
faint-hearted.

As we look round again at our dead world we
must take back the epithet. The twigs of every
tree have the suppleness of life and a certain
purple glow of hope. We catch that best at some
distance and at a good mile it is not hidden from
us. A dead beech is recognizable in a wood of
live beeches, however recently dead it may be.
Even though it has all its twigs, there is an absence
of circulation, a leprosy of skin that marks it out
from the purple health of its fellows. The willows
are even going into the red and the orange that
presage in the several species their bursting into
bud, and the cornel has the October crimson in
its twigs that is our sole excuse for admitting it
to the garden.

DEAD LOW 289

Down among the roots of the big trees the
sovereignty of the frost is not acknowledged.
The moles are running deep now after the worms.
At distances of a yard or six feet they bring up
the rich brown earth, soft and even warm to the
touch by comparison with the metal of the field.
The freshest of the hills are actually moving, if
we approach them quietly enough. We can count
the jerks of the mole's nose with which he thrusts
out the long sausage from the last section of his
' tube ' highway. Then is the opportunity of the
man who wants to get rid of the * wunts ' from
some favourite piece of earth. The catching of
moles is not by any means an easy thing to the
amateur trapper, but with an ordinary fowling-
piece at rather close range we can shoot the little
engineer just at the moment when he is ejecting
his core through the top of the hillock. It is
more to the purpose now to notice how quickly
the live earth of the fresh hillock becomes hairy
with hoar frost, and then so hard that it rings
like iron when we kick it. I think that if I
were a thrush, one of the themes of my mid-
winter song would be the evidence that these
fresh hillocks give that the power of frost is only
skin deep.

It is not enough that the survivors of frost and
winter rot should be ready to sprout quickly when
the sun comes back at Easter. They must begin
to grow without waiting for the message. As
sharer in a Pan-experience, each plant has a

290 THE RING OF NATURE

knowledge of summer after winter as absolute as
that which sets our waits playing and everybody
feasting not long after the shortest day is passed.
But the wild things begin earlier than that. As
soon as the autumn check has fallen the early
flowers of next spring begin to stir. This scene of
death is but a hypocritical surrender to the powers
of cold. In all kinds of odd corners we find the
audacity of new growth. They have pulled up
from the depth of the fish-pond an old water-lily
stowl, and it has tiny heart-shaped leaves at the
ends of new shoots. The rhubarb has little red
leaves almost open beneath the surface of the
frozen earth. There is a waiting regiment of
colt's-foot in what you might think was only a
cemetery of all the years that are gone. Two
of the blossoms, as though taking the signs of
preparation for the actual order to advance, have
sprung out and opened themselves, crumpled and
pinched but undoubted gold. It is just like the
eagerness of a child who has had a butterfly-net
given him at Christmas, and goes out the next
day to see if June has not come.

We find more contradictions of the note of
death in the wood. This is to be accounted for
partly because the wood is more sheltered, partly
because the floor of dead leaves is warmer, partly
because the wood grows on the limestone, whereas
the fields are on the lias. If you kick a hole in
the felt of leaves you will find that it is pierced
everywhere by the white spikes of wild hyacinth,

DEAD LOW 291

which have often a desperately long way to come
before they can blossom. Where there is some-
thing like a cave under the leaves, I find a leaf
or two of that most tender plant the oxalis or
wood sorrel, with the clover-like lobes unfolded
as though the very time of the cuckoo had come.
' Cuckoo's meat ' is here a favourite name of
the wood sorrel, which in April gems the banks
with a show of bells almost as lavish as the stitch-
wort.

There is no understanding the mind, the feeling,
the instinct, the chemical or physical reaction that
makes a flower choose this of all the seasons of
the year for opening its blossoms. Yet the winter
aconite now breaks the crust not merely by
accident, but with the full intention of throwing
open its insect-wooing blossoms now, and only
now in the whole calendar of the year. The snow-
drop is less surprising. We ourselves feel like
burning the winter garment of repentance when
February has come. It takes the average human
being twenty good years to learn that March
and even April can be and often are as shrewish
as November. Still, if the human race were
condemned to sleep for eleven months of the
year, I wonder how many would choose any
month between September and May for the waking
one.

Here is another plant in the wood defying all
the rigour of winter, and putting forth inch after
inch of the very tenderest green. Setterwort or

292 THE RING OF NATURE

stinking hellebore blooms every year before three
men in twenty venture into the woods after spring
flowers. The summer visitor sees only half its
beauty in the maturity of its fingered leaves,
and its triad of seed carpels on plates of purple-
tipped green. The green of its midwinter bur-
geoning is the palest in Nature and also the
most luminous. The setterwort seems now to
be holding fairy lamps above the hard-toothed
leaves of last year. The new hands are crumpled
most prettily like the hands of babies. Above
them come flower buds so globular that they seem
to hold a treasure more enormous than any other
flower. Even these are green when fully open,
and after such luminosity of green it would be
idle for the flower to attempt scarlet or brightest
blue as an advertisement. But who shall dare to
ask where are the insects at this time of year that
ought to come to the little forest of golden stamens
that the bell-like blossoms guard and exhibit ?
If a man should open a fancy wool shop under the
lee of some iceberg within the inmost polar ring
he would apparently have as much chance of
doing business as the setterwort has in the month
it selects for blossoming.

You might think there were laurels growing here
and there in our wood. But if you will examine
one of these clumps of shiny evergreen leaves you
will find that they are borne aloft on long stems
from the ground that resemble in miniature the
trunks of palm trees. They belong to spurge

DEAD LOW 293

laurel or daphne, first cousin of daphne mezereon,
the last bush of which seems to have been removed
from the wood to serve in a cottage garden the
office of proclaiming spring as soon as Christmas
has gone. Daphne laureola blossoms even earlier
than D. mezereon, but it does not cover naked
branches with a solid crust of purple blossom as
the more popular species does. We can find its
blossoms now by turning up the crown of leaves,
beneath which they hang outwards down the
trunk like the blossoms of the crown imperial.
They are in delicate honey-green, long in the
tube as though designed for bees, and opening only
at the extreme end into tiny yellow stars. No
bee ever sucks them, and yet the plant sets every
year a fair number of oval berries that are purple
and poisonous when ripe.

The hellebore, too, is a poisonous plant, though
evidently not to a hungry rabbit. In many
places where there should be a tower of fresh
green above the saw-edged leaves of last year,
there is a little heap of chaff where a rabbit has
sat and helped himself to the more digestible
portions.

Rabbits are not in evidence just now except by
their works, but there are other shapes running
through the brambles and making a noise among
the dead leaves. These are blackbirds, most in-
dustrious diggers in anything soft now that the
frost has bound the meadows. There is no other
bird that thus deliberately turns over the earth

294 THE RING OF NATURE

to find worms and grubs. The starlings drill an
infinite number of little holes in the turf, and no
doubt drag out from them many small grubs,
but the blackbird will soon turn over a barrowful
of leaves or rotting manure and take the fruit
of his digging.

Every other bird in the wood has had the example
of the blackbird before it, through its ancestors,
for thousands of years, and has profited nothing
by it. It is not as though the blackbird had
special tools for the work, as the woodpecker has
for carpentry, or the woodcock for probing in mud.
It is just a winter expedient of a bird with the
same equipment and summer habits as the thrush,
the redwing, the field-fare, and some others. It
is easier to understand how the thrush holds the
monopoly of the trade of opening snails, because
that is a summer accomplishment, and when snails
are plentiful so are worms, but to-day thrushes are
starving only because they cannot copy this simple
expedient of the blackbird.

There are plenty of other birds on the floor
of the wood, searching in a haphazard way for
whatever may have been disturbed by a chance
movement of the leaves. Many of them are
finches, and they, no doubt, are mainly looking
for seed of one kind and another. With the
chaffinches are bramblings on their winter visit
to this country. The moderately careful observer
distinguishes them at once from the chaffinches
by a mottling of reddish-browns and greys all over

DEAD LOW 295

the back and neck, more black and white about
the wings, and a great blaze of white on the rump
as they fly away.

More industrious than the chaffinches and
bramblings are the greenfinches, now of a ripe
golden brown. They carry out a faint feathered
resemblance to parrots, by their habit of almost
walking rather than hopping among the leaves.
When the great tits in saffron and blue-black and
the amazingly blue-and-yellow blue tits are added
to the company of foragers, we have a blaze of
colour that is almost tropical. The coal tit makes
a rather more sober contribution, but the bold
pieing of its neck shows to great advantage as
this mouse-like little bird goes hammering about
with his active little head.

As noon creeps on into night, a night of fifteen
hours, a steel chill strikes through even the cosiest
corners. The blackbird leaves his digging and
goes off last of all, except the robin, to find the
cosiest possible place to keep him alive through
the night. His shrill ' chink-chinking,' usually
attributed to the fear of cats, is a cry of petu-
lance at the cruelty of the winter and of alarm
lest this night should prove worse than the last.
Yet how much worse off are certain birds we
know.

The bJackbird sleeps in the midst of a holly
bush into which the snow comes never and the
rain very seldom. It is as good as the roof of
thatch that the sparrows patronize. Or he sleeps

296 THE RING OF NATURE

with chaffinches and others in the thick ivy that
surrounds some tree in the hedge. But in London
on just as cold a night as this, and even in the
drenching rain or cold snow, thousands of birds
sleep in the bare branches of the planes. You
can see them against the sky, dots upon lines
like a very complicated piece of music. One
or two larger dots among the lesser ones indi-
cate starlings sleeping among the sparrows, and
sometimes, rather nearer the trunk, you can make
out a wood-pigeon or two. It speaks very highly
for the efficacy of feathers, and for the warmth of
bird circulation, that no frozen bodies are found
beneath the tree at dawn.

The windfall of that kind that the lean fox
picks up nowadays is but slight. We see him
prowling about by day, and perhaps his best chance
among the birds is to pounce on a redwing from
behind an orchard tree, not waiting till the frost
and short commons have quite finished their
work. Yet there is hunting at night, as the owls
testify ; the tawny owls of the wood and the white
owls of the church tower often being heard at their
work, and their pellets revealing the skeletons of
mice and voles.

Ugh-r-r-rumph, it makes me shudder to think of
anything alive being abroad on these midwinter
nights. As soon as the sun has finished his futile
journey along the horizon, the mists creep out
and add a rasp to the cold that cannot be measured
by the thermometer. The wood then seems not

DEAD LOW 297

the cosiest place, but the deadliest. The fur of
the mouse or rabbit driven out of home at dusk
by the intensity of winter persecution by day,
catches the hoar frost just like the coldest fern
frond. The air seems to tinkle with the tiny
atoms of ice that, in fact, have taken the place of
its moist vapour.

The truth has to be told that, because it was
my annual practice many years ago, I have come
out after Christmas dinner to shoot a snipe or
woodcock in the marshy hollow below the lake
in the wood. He is not there to-day, perhaps
because the frost has made a crust upon the black
mud, and too hard for his tender beak to pierce.
In places where in the driest summer you would
sink to your knees, the frost has made a bridge you
can walk on. The bog is full of oak branches
black almost as mineralized bog oak, those that
appear above the water being decorated with
bright green moss.

The tiny hairs of the moss have been converted
into crystals of hoar frost, by contrast with which
the green shines as the very emblem of hope in
adversity. And among them, rooted in the same
black and chilly swamp, unfolds the winter peziza,
the outer curve of its wineglass in fiery plum
colour, the inner of the purest scarlet that nature
can produce. It would flame among poppies and
put them to shame, but there are no poppies in
December. It shines in the cold of whiter twilight
with a brilliance that is startling and mesmeric.

298 THE RING OF NATURE

No one can tell why the fungus produces this
brilliance in the depth of winter, unless it be to
show what nature can do even in the darkest
hour. The whole brilliance of summer is foretold
in this first step of the New Year.

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Corbett (Julian' A BUSINESS JN
GREAT WATERS

Croker (Mrs B. M.) ANGEL.
A STATE SECRET.
PEGGY OF THE BARTONS.
JOHANNA.

Dante (Alighleri). THE DIVINE

COMEDY (Cary).

Doyle (Sir A. Conan). ROUND THE
RED LAMP.

Duncan (Sara Jeannette). THOSE
DELIGHTFUL AMERICANS.

Eliot (George). THE MILL ON THB
FLOSs.

Findlater (Jane H.). THE GREEN

GkAVES OK BALGOWR1E.

Gallon (Tom). RICKERBY'S FOLLY.

Gaskell (Mrs.). CRANFORD.
MARY BARTON.
NORTH AND SOUTH.

Gerard (Dorothea). HOLY MATRI-

MONY.

THE CONQUEST OF LONDON.
MADE OF MONEY.

Gisslng (G.). THE TOWN TRAVELLER.
THE CROWN OF LIFE.

Glanvllle (Ernest). THE INCA'S

TREASURE.
THE KLOOF BRIDE.

Gleig ^Charles). BUNTER'S CRUISE.
Grimm (The Brothers). GRIMM'S

FAIRY TALES.

Hope (Anthony). A MAN OF MARK.

A CHANGE OF AIR.

THE CHRONICLES OF COUNT

ANTONIO.
PHROSO.
THE DOLLY DIALOGUES.

Hornung (E. W.). DEAD MEN TELL
NO TALES.

Hyne (C. J.C-)- PRINCE RUPERT THE
BUCCANEER.

Ingraham (J. H.). THE THRONE OF
DAVID.

METHUEN AND COMPANY LIMITED

L0 Queu* (W.I. THE HUNCHBACK

OF WESTMINSTER.
THE CROOKED WAY.
THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW.

Levett- Yeats (S. K.). THE TRAITOR'S

WAY.
ORRAIN.

Llnton (E. Lynn). THE TRUE HIS-
TORY OF JOSHUA DAVIDSON.

Lya.ll (Edna). DERRICK VAUGHAN.

Malet (Lucas). THE CARISSIMA,
A COUNSEL OF PERFECTION.

Mann (Mrs. M. E.). MRS. PETER

HOWARD.
A LOST ESTATE.
THE CEDAR STAR.
THE PATTEN EXPERIMENT.
A WINTER'S TALE.

Marchmont (A. W.). MISER HOAD-

LEY'S SECRET.
A MOMENT'S ERROR.

Marryat (Captain). PETER SIMPLE.
JACOB FAITHFUL.

March (Richard). A METAMORPHOSIS.
THE TWICKENHAM PEERAGE.
THE GODDESS.
THE JOSS.

Mason (A. E. W.). CLEMENTINA.

Mathers (Helen). HONEY.
GRIFF OF GRIFFITHSCOURT
SAM'S SWEETHEART.
THE FERRYMAN.

Meade (Mrs. L. T.). DRIFT.
Miller (Esther). LIVING LIES.

Mltford (Bertram). THE SIGN OF THE
SPIDER.

Montresor (F. P.). THE ALIEN.
Morrison (Arthur). THE HOLE IN

Nesblt (E.). THE RED HOUSE.
Norris (W. E.). HIS GRACE.
GILES INGILBY.
THE CREDIT OF THE COUNTY.
LORD LEONARD THE LUCKLESS.
MATTHEW AUSTEN.
CLARISSA FURIOSA.

Ollphant (Mrs.). THE LADY'S WALK
SIR ROBERT'S FORTUNE.

THE PRODIGALS.

THE TWO MARYS.

Oppenhelm (E. P.). MASTER OF MEN.

Parker (Sir Gilbert). THE POMP OF

THE LAVILETTES.

WHEN VALMOND CAME TO PONTIAC.
THE TRAIL OF THE SWORD.

Pemberton (Max). THE FOOTSTEPS

OF A THRONE.
I CROWN THEE KING.
Phillpotts (Edenl. THE HUMAN BOY.
CHILDREN OF THE MIST.
THE POACHER'S WIFE.
THE RIVER.

' Q ' (A. T. Qulller Couch). THE
WHITE WOLF.

Ridge (W.Pett). A SON OF THE STATE.

LOST PROPERTY.

GEORGE and THE GENERAL.

A BREAKER OF LAWS.

ERB.

Russell (W. Clark). ABANDONED.

A MARRIAGE AT SEA.

MY DANISH SWEETHEART.

HIS ISLAND PRINCESS.

Sergeant (Adeline). THE MASTER OF

BEECHWUOD.
BALBARA'S MONEY.
THE YELLOW DIAMOND.
THE LOVE THAT OVERCAME.

Sidgwlck (Mrs. Alfred). THE KINS-
MAN.

Surtees (R. S.). HANDLEY CROSS.
MR. SPONGE'S SPORTING TOUR.

ASK MAMMA.

Walford fMrs. L. B.). MR. SMITH.

COUSINS.

THE BABY'S GRANDMOTHER.

TROUBLESOME DAUGHTERS.

Wallace. (General Lew). BEN-HUR.

THE FAIR GOD.

Watson (H. B. Marriott). THE ADVEN-
TURERS.

CAPTAIN FORTUNE.
Weekes (A. B.). PRISONERS OF WAR.
Wells (H. G.). THE SEA LADY.

Whitby (Beatrice). THE RESULT Of
AN A:CIDENT.

i. A PASSIONATE PIL-

WilHamion (Mi*. C. N.X PAPA,

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