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LABORATORY OF ORNITHOLOGY
CORNELL UNIVERSITY
ITHACA, NEW YORK

ALBERT R. MANN
LIBRARY

AT

CORNELL UNIVERSITY

THE GIFT OF

K. F. Hirsh Collection

Cornell University

Library

The original of this book is in
the Cornell University Library.

There are no known copyright restrictions in
the United States on the use of the text.

http://Awww.archive.org/details/cu31924022545093

Cornell University Library

PR 6015.U23N3

wii AGUiAANENUN

3 1924 022 545 093

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NATURE IN DOWNLAND

HARVESTING ON THE SouTH Downs

Frontispiece

NATURE IN DOWNLAND

BY
o* a

W. Ho HUDSON

AUTHOR OF ‘BIRDS IN LONDON,” ETC.

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

THIRD IMPRESSION

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CoO.
39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON
NEW YORK AND BOMBAY

1901

Ald rights reserved

7

au

Mann
Spee Coll
re
LO\5
8 a

NSS

so0og7

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I
PAGES

THISTLE-DOWN. ... e 4 aD wh 1-19

On Kingston Hill—View from the hill—A day of thistle-
down—A memory of the pampas—Down of the dwarf thistle
—First sight and pleasant memories of the downs—Resolution
to write a book—Jennings’ Rambles—Sussex in literature—
Less favoured than other counties—Minor poets—Hurdis—
The Favorite Village—In Bishopstone church—Richard Jefferies
—Birds on the beach at Goring—Horses eating sea-weed.

CHAPTER II

CHARM OF THE DOWNS . : . ‘ . 20-31

Scope and limits of this work—A general description of
the downs—Agreeable sensations ; an inquiry into their causes
—Gilbert White’s speculations—The pleasures of the downs
due to a variety of causes—Their shapely human-like curves
—Connection between the senses of sight and touch—Effects
of flowing outlines—Instinctive delight in wide horizons—The
desire to fly—Effect of a series of dome-like forms—The joy
of mountains.

CHAPTER III
THE LIVING GARMENT . ; : : . . 82-58

The South Downs most agreeable in the hot season—
Beauty of the bindweed—Black oxen—The old Sussex breed
of cattle—Black oxen in poetry—Suggestion for group of
statuary—Black and gold in nature—Turf of the downs—
Result of breaking up the turf—A new flora—Variety of
colonising plants—Beauty of the chance-made gardens of the
downs— Flowers in barren places— Forget-me-not— Viper’s
bugloss—Effects of blue flowers in masses—A shepherd boy

v

vi CONTENTS

PAGES
in sainfoin—Field scabious—Fertile spots—Dropwort and
heath—Harebells—Brilliant colour and intensity of life—
Minute fiowers of the turf—Old Gerarde—Kyebright: its
obscure habits—The dwarf thistle.

CHAPTER IV
A FAIRY FAUNA : ' ; j ‘ . ‘ 59-71

Insect-life of the downs— Common snail — Adder-like
colouring of some snails—The “‘thrushes’ anvil’—Eccentric
motions of flies—Peculiar colouring of some flies—The cow-
dung fly—A thyme-loving fly—Butterflies—Disposition and
habits of the small blue—Sleep in insects—The humble-bee
—Intoxicating effect of thistle flower on bees—The unknown
faculties of insects—De Quincey’s “ gluttonism.”

CHAPTER V

WILD LIFE . 5 5 i : : « 72-102

Wild life confined to the furze—The rabbit and his
enemy—The fox abundant—A badgers’ earth—Tenacity of
the badger—Dead shrews—Moles without water—Catching
moles for fun—A shepherd on moles—Birds—Extinct species
—A shepherd’s reminiscences—Buzzards building on bushes
—Black game in Ashdown Forest—The last stone curlew—
Long-eared owl—Pre-natal suggestion in the lower animals—
Existing large birds—-A colony of gulls at Seaford—Kestrel
preying on grasshoppers—Turtle-dove— Missel-thrush and
small birds—Wheatears and sea-poppies—Shrike—The com-
mon lizard’s weakness—Sheep killed by adders—Beauty of
the adder—A handful of adders—Shepherd boy and big
snake.

CHAPTER VI

THE SHEPHERD OF THE DOWNS. : . - 103-125

The shepherd as a picturesque figure—His best qualities
racial—The Saxon type predominant in downland—The
peasant’s good looks—A great beer-drinker—Scene ina village
public-house—Bad and good qualities of the peasant—Charac-
ter in a small boy—Beauty of person—A labourer’s family—
A pet lamb and the Salvation Army—A Sussex maid—Persis-
tence of type—The Culpepper family—The shepherd’s good
looks--Contented minds—A talk with a shepherd.

CONTENTS vil

CHAPTER VII

PAGES

SHEPHERDS AND WHEATEARS 7 - 126-141

The shepherd’s altered condition—His loss of the wheat-
ear harvest—The passion for wheatears—Arrival of the birds
on the downs—* Our ortolan ”’—Coops—The wheatear’s habits
—Sensitiveness to rain—Hurdis and the “‘ pence of ransom "—
A great dame collecting wheatears—John Dudeney’s recollec-
tions—Shepherd’s cease taking wheatears—Probable reason
—How the birds are now obtained—Bird-catchers, poulterers,
and farmers—The law must be enforced—Lark-eating.

CHAPTER VIII
SILENCE AND MUSIC... - . « 142-166

The art of music— Natural music— Sussex voices— A
pretty girl with a musical voice—Singing of the peasants—
Dr. Burton on Sussex singing—Primitive singing—A shep-
herdess and her cries—The Sussex sheep-dog’s temper—Silence
of the hills—Bird music of the downs—Common bunting—
Linnet—Stonechat—Whinchat—The distance which sound
travels — Experience with tramps— Singing of skylarks—
Effects which cannot be expressed.

CHAPTER IX
SUMMER HEAT . : ‘ : nh . 167-183

When the downs are most enjoyable—July in the wooded
lowland—The bliss of summer—Children’s delight in heat—
Misery of cold—Piers Plowman—Langland’s philosophy—The
happiest man in Sussex—A protection from the sun—Heat
not oppressive on the hills—Birds on Mount Harry—A cup of
cold water—Drawing water in a hat—Advantages of a tweed
hat—An unsympathetic woman—Beauty of kindness.

CHAPTER X
SWALLOWS AND CHURCHES . : » « 184-204

Abundance of swallows in downland villages — The
swallows’ bat-like faculty—Old house at Ditchling—Church

vill CONTENTS

PAGES
owls and Ditchling Church—Shingled spires—Pleasure of
finding churches open—A strange memorial in a downland
church—A nap in West Firle churchyard—Slow-worms in
churchyards — Increase of swallows at Ditchling — House-
martins on telegraph wires—The telegraph a benefit to birds
—Telegraph poles in the landscape—Sound of telegraph wires
—A cockney’s bird-lore—A Sussex man on swifts—Swifts
rising from a flat surface—The swift mystery—Swifts at
Seaford—A Somerset bird-boy’s strange story.

CHAPTER XI
AUTUMN . ; : : . . 205-216

Suddenness of the change from summer to autumn on the
downs—Birds in autumn—Meadow-pipits—Shore birds on the
hills—September flowers—Remnant of insect-life—Effect of
rough weather—Effect on the mind of the cessation of life—
Man’s long life—An immortal surveying the insect tribes
of human kind—The prospect from the hills— Pleasure of
walking.

CHAPTER XII
WEST OF THE ADUR ; : : . 217-237

Autumn on thewest downs—Abundance of birds—Village
of Cocking—Drayton’s Polyolbion—A company of magpies;
their inconsequent behaviour—Magpie and domestic pigeon
—Story of a pet magpie—Blackberries on the downs—Elder-
berries—Yews at Kingly Bottom—A tradition—Yew-berries
and the missel-thrushes’ orgie—Hawthorn wood—Charm of
the thorn-tree—Beeches on the west downs—Effect of trees
on the South Downs—Gilpin’s strictures answered—Charac-
teristic trees and bushes—Juniper—A curious effect —
Character of the juniper-tree,

CHAPTER XIII
THE MARITIME DISTRICT . d ‘ : . 238-255

The autumnal movement of birds—Linnets on the downs
—Birds wintering in the maritime district—-Character of the
district—Birdham—Rooks and starlings—Skylarks and finches
—Dunnock and wren—Peewits on the Cuckmere — Pee-

CONTENTS ix

PAGES
wit’s hatred of the rook—Peewit’s wing-exercises—Peewits

in flocks—Black-headed gulls—Charm of the maritime district
—Gloomy weather—Missel-thrush ; his temper, habits, and
song—The spire of Chichester Cathedral ; its esthetic value

in the landscape.

CHAPTER XIV
CHICHESTER : ‘ ‘ : . «256-277

Chichester at a distance and near—Smells and sights—
Public-house signs—Habits of the people—Brewers’ policy
—The church and the clergy—In the cathedral—A wood-
carving—Market-day—Early associations—The Market Cross
and a mystery—Visit to Midhurst—Decaying inns—Increase
of temperance and the cause—Chichester mud—Caging owls
—The owl at Alfriston—A miserable daw—A white owl’s fle
du Diable—An ideal home for an owl—A prisoner without
hope.

CHAPTER XV
WINTER IN WEST DOWNLAND . : , . 278-298

A good-bye to towns—Charm of West Downland in winter
—A cow-boy singing and a missel-thrush—A vein of stupidity
—Anecdotes—Bats eating bacon—Riding to Ringmer and a
downland man’s ignorance—Chilgrove—Gilbert White—Yew,
juniper, and clematis—A wooded combe—A host of wocod-
pigeons—Beautiful downland scenery—Fallen beech-leaves
on snow—South Harting—Conclusion,

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Harvesting on THE SoutH Downs. eM Frontispiece
BISHOPSTONE . : : ‘ : a 7 . page 1
RicHARD JEFFERIES’ COTTAGE : : ‘i a x JS
Grey Plover anp Rincep DortTEREts ; 5 - » 219
Kineston Hitt rrom Mount Harry . ; . to face page 20
Oxren PLOUGHING ‘ : ; é : j 5 36
GuLLs on SEAFORD CLIFF. j ; ‘ . page 73

Tue Souta Downs: NortH EscaRPMENT . . to face page 74

SHEPHERD AND FLock . : . . ‘ ‘ - 104
A Sussex Mai. ‘ : : . ‘ . page 121
WHEATEAR. ; : A ‘ : os fy AT
Joun DuUDENEY, THE LEARNED SHEPHERD . . to face page 134
THE SoutH Downs FRom Ditcutine Hit. 3 152
Out or GaoL . : ‘ ‘ ; ‘i : ‘ « page 175
Oxp House at DitcHLIne . m 3 ‘ ‘ - 5, 185
DitcHitine CHURCH : “ ; 7 : . to face page 186
West Finite CHURCH . ; : : ‘ : - page 193
CisspuRY HILL : i ‘ e Se So & 4 3 205

CissBury Hitt, sHowine Roman Eartuworks . fo face page 212

MaGpigs . . ‘ ‘ ga . . ‘ + page 221

xii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Yew Grove at Kineny VaLe . 5 . to face page 226
HIuL-ror Grove : . ‘ F : ; . page 231
CHICHESTER SPIRE j : F » 4 238

VALLEY oF THE CuckmerE: AuTUMN EveEnine . to face page 244
CuicHesteR HarsourR FROM BosHam . : - 3 254

CHICHESTER CATHEDRAL: EVENING. . - page 298

NATURE IN DOWNLAND

CHAPTER I
THISTLE-DOWN

On Kingston Hill—View from the hill—A day of thistle-edown—A
memory of the pampas—Down of the dwarf thistle—First
sight and pleasant memories of the downs—Resolution to
write a book—Jennings’ Rambles—Sussex in literature—Less
favoured than other counties—Minor poets—Hurdis—The
Favorite Village—In Bishopstone church—Richard Jefferies—
Birds on the beach at Goring—Horses eating sea-weed.

On one of the hottest days in August of this ex-
ceptionally hot year of 1899, I-spent a good many
hours on the top of Kingston Hill, near Lewes. There
are clear mornings, especially in the autumn months,
when magnificent views of the surrounding country
can be had from the flat top of that very long hill.

Usually on hot summer days the prospect, with the sea
A

ids

Q NATURE IN DOWNLAND

of downland and the grey glinting ocean beyond on one
side, the immense expanse of the wooded Sussex weald
on the other, is covered with a blue obscuring haze,
and this hot, windy August day was no exception.
The wind, moreover, was so violent that all winged life,
whether of bird or insect, had been driven into hiding
and such scanty shade as existed ; it was a labour even
to walk against the wind. In spite of these draw-
backs, and of the everywhere brown parched aspect
of nature, I had here some hours of rare pleasure, felt
all the more because it had not been looked for.

Kingston Hill is not one of the dome-shaped downs,
where when not on the very summit you are on a
slope: the top forms a level plateau or table-land of
considerable extent, covered with a thick turf and
occasional patches of furze, with some bramble and
elder bushes. After aimlessly wandering about over
this high plain for some time I went to a spot where
the hill sloped away toward the valley of the Ouse.
Beyond the vast sweep of parched ground beneath me,
green meadows and trees were visible, with scattered
village and farm houses, and the two small churches
of Iford and Kingston vaguely seen in the haze.

Here, sitting on the dry grass with my face to the
wind, I spent two or three hours in gazing at the
thistle-down. It is a rare thing to see it as I had it
before me that day; the sight of it was a surprise, and
I gave myself up to the pleasure of it, wishing for
no better thing. It was not only that the sight was

THISTLE-DOWN 3

beautiful, but the scene was vividly reminiscent of
long gone summer days associated in memory with
the silvery thistle-down. The wide extent of unen-
closed and untilled earth, its sunburnt colour and its
solitariness, when no person was in sight; the vast
void blue sky, with no mist nor cloud on it; the burn-
ing sun and wind, and the sight of thousands upon
thousands of balls or stars of down, reminded me of
old days on horseback on the open pampa—an illimit-
able waste of rust-red thistles, and the sky above
covered with its million floating flecks of white.

But the South American thistle-down, both of the
giant thistle and the cardoon with its huge flower-
heads, was much larger and whiter and infinitely more
abundant. By day the air seemed full of it, and I
remember that when out with my brother we often
enjoyed seeing it at night. After a day or days of
wind it would be found in immense masses in the
sheltered hollows, or among the tall standing stalks
of the dry plants. These masses gleamed with a
strange whiteness in the dark, and it used to please
us to gallop our horses through them. Horses are
nervous, unintelligent creatures, liable to take fright
at the most familiar objects, and our animals would
sometimes be in terror at finding themselves plunged
breast-deep into this unsubstantial whiteness, that
moved with them and covered them as with a
cloud.

The smaller, more fragile English thistle-down, in

4 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

so few places abundant enough to appear as an
element in the scene, is beautiful too, and its beauty
is, I am inclined to think, all the greater because of
its colour, Seen against the deep greens and browns
of the vegetation in late summer it appears white, but
compared with a white feather or white flower we see
that it is silvery, with a faint yellow or brown tinge,
lighter but a little like the brown tinge in the glisten-
ing transparent wings of some drayvon-flies and other
insects.

The down on that August day was of the dwarf
thistle, which has an almost stemless flower, and
appears as a purple disc on the turf. It is the most
common species, universal on the sheep-walks: so
abundant was it this year that as you walked about
the brown and yellow turf appeared everywhere flecked
with silvery white—a patch of white for every square
yard of ground in some places—of the dry flower with
its mass of down spread around it. Thus it was that
sitting on the hill, gazing over the wide slope before
me, I became sensible of the way in which ball after
ball rose up from the ground to fly towards and_ past
me. It was as if these slight silvery objects were
springing spontancously into cxistence, as the heat
opened and the wind lifted and bore them away. All
round me, and as far off as such slight gauzy objects
could be seen, they were springing up from the grass
in this way in hundreds and thousands. Looking
long and steadily at them—their birth and their flight

THISTLE-DOWN 5

—one could fancy that they were living things of
delicate aérial forms that had existed for a period
hidden and unsuspected among the matted roots of
the turf, until their time had come to rise like winged
ants from the soil and float on the air.

When, lying on my back, I gazed up into the blue
sky, the air as far as I could see was still peopled
with the flying down; and beyond all that was visible
to the naked eye, far from the earth still more down
was revealed by my glasses—innumerable, faintly seen
silvery stars moving athwart the immeasurable blue
expanse of heaven.

Somehow, looking back at that day of abundant
thistle-down, the best day of its kind that I have
experienced in England, I find that it is not only a
pleasant memory, but also exists as a symbol of all
my days on the South Downs. For they can all
be shortened in the mind to one day, marked with
a thousand scenes and events, beginning with my
first sight from a distance of these round treeless
hills that were strange to me. Treeless they were,
and if not actually repelling, as indeed some have
found them, they were at all events uninviting in their
naked barren aspect. No sooner had I begun to
walk on and to know and grow intimate with them,
than I found they had a thousand unimagined plea-
sures, springing up in my way like those silvery stars
of down on Kingston Hill—a pleasure for every day
and every hour, and for every step, since it was a de-

6 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

light simply to walk on that elastic turf and to breathe
that pure air.

But for all my pleasure and interest in the district,
I had no faintest thought of a book about it. Why
indeed should any one dream of a book about this
range of hills, so near to the metropolis, its sea coast
and coast towns the favourite haunt of hundreds of
thousands of annual visitors; every hill in the range,
and every species of wild bird and mammal and
insect and flower, known to every one? Without
inquiry I took it that there were books and books
about the South Downs, as there are about every
place on earth and every earthly thing; and that I
did not know them because I had not looked for
them, and they had never by chance come in my
way. It thus happened that in all my rambles in
downland, with no motive but pleasure and health,
I did only that which it is customary for me to do
in all places where I may happen to be—namely, to
note down every interesting fact I came across in my
field naturalist’s journal. Now all at once “ something
has come into my mind”—to wit, a little book ex-
clusively about these hills in which I shall be able
to incorporate a good number of observations which
would otherwise be wasted. But I do not say like
downright old Ben Jonson that it “must and shall”
be written, whether far removed from the wolf’s black
jaw and the other objectionable animal’s hoof or not.
For it will be, I imagine, a small unimportant book,

THISTLE-DOWN 7

not entertaining enough for those who read for pleasure
only, nor sufficiently scientific and crammed with facts
for readers who thirst after knowledge.

Now I am beginning to find out that there does
not appear to be any book about the South Downs
although that district certainly is and has always
been regarded as one of England’s “observables.” It
is true that a portion of Louis Jennings’ Rambles
among the Hills treats of the Sussex range, and
is excellent reading; but this little work does not
satisfy me, since the author misses that which to
many of us is the most interesting part of the subject
—namely, the wild life of the district. His libellous
remarks on that worthy little beast, the mole, are proof
that he was no naturalist, and could not touch on such
subjects without going astray.

Curiously enough, Sussex, or any part of it, can
hardly be said to exist in literature; or if it has any
place there and in our hearts it is a mean one, far,
far below that of most counties. Let me, however, say
in parenthesis that I am not a great reader, and
know few books, that on this subject I therefore
speak as a fool, or, at all events, an ignorant person,
But so far as I know, this county, so near to the
metropolis, so important geographically with its long
coast line of over seventy miles on the Channel, the
“threshold of England,” as it has been called, the
landing-place of the Conqueror and eternal grave of
Saxon dominion, has produced no genius to stamp

8 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

its lineaments on our minds. The Sussexian, who
cares to make the boast, may indeed claim that his
county has given as great names as any other to
poetic and dramatic literature — Shelley, Collins,
Otway, Fletcher. But Sussex was nothing to these
writers, and they are nothing to Sussex. Their con-
nection with their native place was slight; its scenery
never entered into their souls to give a special colour
to their lives and life-work. How differently other
counties have fared in this respect! Who does not know
a hundred, a thousand, places in England, as well as
he knows his own home, though he may never have
seen them? One has but to let one’s thoughts fly
hither and thither at random over the face of the
country. The whole rude coast of Cornwall, where
we must have lived long years in the roar of the sea,
is as well known to us as the cliff at Dover and the
enduring image of the suspended samphire gatherer.
What a strange significance there is in the names
of many places in the south-west and western counties
—Dorset, Devon, and Somerset! How many rivers
we know, and how many hill-ranges all over the land,
from the Quantocks to the Cheviots! But even the
glorious hills and lakes and forests have not painted
themselves more vividly on our minds than the
featureless flats, the low shores and saltings, the
wide moors; the Essex marches with the tragic
figures of Rebow and Gloria; the lonely heath by
Poole water, where we have listened by night and day

THISTLE-DOWN 9

to the mysterious voices of the wind; and the Lincoln-
shire fen-land, over whose desolate expanse, shimmer-
ing in the summer heat, Mariana gazed each day in
vain and said despondingly, “He cometh not!” Hills,
valleys, wolds, dales, plains, marshes, rivers, lakes, moors,
heaths, woods, towns, villages, are in this way known
familiarly to us all over the land; but the county of
Sussex is not included in this spiritual geography.
From the writers of genius who have made so
much of the scenery of England familiar to us all, to
those literary South Saxons who have stayed at home
and written something, little or much, about their
native land—Hayley, William Hay, Charlotte Smith,
Parsons, Hurdis, with a few more of even less account
—is indeed a tremendous descent. These are now
forgotten, and their works will never come back; for
though important in their own day, they were, viewed
at this distance, little people who could have no place
with the immortals, But I do not despise them on
that account; being of that tribe myself, I have
a kindly feeling for little people, not for the living
only, who write in the modern fashion and are by
some thought great, but also for those who have been
long dead, whose fame has withered and wasted in
the grave. And for the last of the few singers I
have mentioned I cherish a very special regard, and
should now like to tell how the forgotten name of
Hurdis came by chance to be associated in my mind
with the South Downs.

10 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

When I was a youth a very long time ago, in a
distant land, poetry about Nature had a peculiar
fascination for me; but it was hard to find, and I fed
mostly (when I got anything to eat) on what would
now be regarded as mere dry husks. A battered old
volume of Shenstone was one of the three or four
poetical works I possessed. In a book of elegant
extracts, in verse and prose, I came upon some
passages from MHurdis—his Village Curate—which
greatly delighted me; and now in another world, and
after a thousand years, as it seems, I am surprised
to find that they still ive in memory. I will even
venture to quote some lines of the favourite passages :—

It was my admiration
To view the structure of that little work,
A bird’s nest—mark it well, within, without :
No tool had he that wrought, no knife to cut,
No rail to fix, no bodkin to insert,
No glue to join ; his little beak was all ;
And yet how neatly finished! What nice hand,
With every implement and means of art,
And twenty years’ apprenticeship to boot,
Could make me such another? Fondly then
We boast of excellence, whose noblest skill
Instinctive genius foils !

It was not strange that these lines pleased me, for
I was myself then a diligent seeker and great admirer
of little birds’ nesties: they were pretty objects to
look at, and there was, moreover, a mystery about
them which made them differ from all other things.
For though so admirably fashioned—whether attached

THISTLE-DOWN 11

to slender swaying reeds and rushes, or placed down
among the grasses, or on wood, or high among the
clustering leaves on trees—as to seem a natural growth,
with their gem-like pearly and speckled eggs, many-
coloured, resting in them like bright polished seeds
in an opening capsule, yet it was not so; they had
not been produced by Nature like leaf and flower and
fruit, but were artificial basket-houses built with much
labour, with many selected materials gathered in many
places, by the little winged men and women called
birds.

The other remembered passage, too long to quote
in full, concludes with these excellent lines :—

Give to repose the solemn hour she claims,
And from the forehead of the morning steal
The sweet occasion. Oh, there is a charm
Which morning has, that gives the brow of age
A smack of youth, and makes the lips of youth
Shed perfumes exquisite,

Nothing more did I learn of Hurdis until quite
recently, after it had occurred to me to write this
book, when at the Brighton Library, in looking
through a collection of works, mostly rubbish, on local
subjects, I came upon a long poem entitled The
Favorite Village, by the Rev. James Hurdis—a thin
quarto bound in calf in the old style, on coarse bluey-
grey paper, “Printed at the Author’s own Press,
Bishopstone, Sussex, 1800.” This was to me a
delightful discovery, not only on account of the old

12 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

memories I have mentioned, but because the poem
had the South Downs for its subject; also because
Bishopstone, the “favorite village,” the author’s birth-
place and where in after life he was vicar, was well
known to me, although I had not yet been in its
church. After reading the work two or three times,
I am compelled to say that it is very bad poetry,
reminding one in its prosy diction and occasional
rhetorical outbursts, now of The Task and now of
The Seasons. In all the mass of descriptive matter
about the downs I am unable to find a passage
worth quoting. In spite of my disappointment, when
Sunday came I went to Bishopstone with a new and
lively interest, and saw that small pretty village
among the downs near Newhaven in its brightest and
best aspect. It was early August; the corn was all
cut and most of it carried, and the round treeless hills
were yellow in that brilliant morning sunshine—straw
yellow against the pure etherial blue of heaven.
And in a hollow among the great hills nestled Bishop-
stone, out of sight but not out of hearing of the sea,
when its “accents disconsolate” sound afar in the
silence of the night—the tiniest and the most charac-
teristic of the downland villages. The few houses,
cottages, and farm buildings, each one unlike all the
others, its own character stamped upon it, but all alike
rich in the ornament of yellow, orange, grey and rust-
red lichen stains, were picturesquely grouped about the
small ancient flint church ; and there was shade of beech

THISTLE-DOWN 13

and elm, and the trees were ancient-looking too, and
tempest-beaten, like most others in this treeless land.
IT was so fortunate as to have a seat near the
middle of the church, abreast of the side door which
stood wide open admitting the summer light and
warmth and out-door sounds; so that while following
the service I could let my eyes rest on the landscape.
That was a beautiful picture I had to look at, with
the doorway for frame; a round yellow hill and the
blue sky beyond, and between the hill and the
church a green meadow, low outhouse and fences,
and a small paddock or enclosure with rooks and
daws and small birds coming and going. And by and
by into that green enclosure came a white calf, and
remained there for some time, standing motionless,
in the centre of the picture. The brilliant sunlight
made it luminous, and it was like a calf hewn out of
a block of purest white chalk. I did not keep my
eyes constantly on it; and after an interval, on looking
again I found that it was gone, and that two red calves
had taken its place. These were moving about crop-
ping the grass, while several starlings were searching
for grubs close to them. But these red animals were
not so fascinating as the white one. And all the time
I was looking at that changing picture, while following
the service, I was thinking of the old last century poet
who had been dear to me so long ago—so far away.
The story of his life, and his writings, poor though
some of them may seem to us at this day, show that

14 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

his feeling for his native place was one of strange in-
tensity, a life-long passion; and when the Venite Lau-
damus Donvino filled the little church with a sudden
tempest of musical sound, the thought of his dust
lying close by came to my mind, and I wished that
that loud noise of the living in a quiet place could
wake him out of his hundred years’ sleep for a brief
spell, so that he might taste the summer sunshine
once more, and look once more, though but for a
moment, on his beloved hills and home.

Enough of Hurdis: after having been his debtor
since boyhood it is satisfactory to feel that that ancient
obligation has at length been discharged in full.

We may say of Sussex that its native writers have
done nothing, or nothing worth doing, for it; and that
no outside writers of note have come to its aid, as has
happened in the case of some other counties. Had
Richard Jefferies lived it would, I believe, have been
different. It is true that his soul was dyed, and dyed
deeply, in that North Wilts nature which he had first
beheld, where his revelation came to him; but the
visible world was too much to him, and his senses too
well trained, to let him rest satisfied with memories;
and we may see in Zhe Story of my Heart and some
other of his writings, that the Sussex coast country where
he found a home powerfully attracted and held him.
The thirteen years that have passed since his sad death
would have brought his splendid powers, always pro-
gressing until the last day of his life, to their fullest

THISTLE-DOWN 15

maturity: perhaps, too, that strain of intense un-
natural feeling, which he so strangely misinterpreted,
and which in his book just named touches the borders
of insanity, would have been outgrown. I am not

RICHARD JEFFERIES’ COTTAGE

sure that he had not outlived that phase before
he died, since his latest work is decidedly of a higher
quality, and even when most inspired by passion,
essentially more sober than the famous Story. That
he would eventually have written a book about the

16 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

downs and the maritime district of Sussex, as good
as any work we have had from him, I feel certain.
Why I said so much about forgotten Hurdis a
little while back has been explained, and now a second
apology seems necessary. Jefferies was much in my
mind just now because by chance I happen to be
writing this introductory chapter in the last house he
inhabited, and where he died, in the small village of
Goring, between the sea and the West Sussex Downs.
A strange, I had almost said a mysterious, adven-
ture befell me as I came hither. On a cloudy melan-
choly day in September I came in search of this cottage,
and walking to the church by a narrow lane with a
low trim wall-like hedge on either side, my thoughts
were of Jefferies, who had doubtless often walked here,
too, feeling the icy hand on him of one that walked
invisible at his side. My mind was full of sadness,
when, hearing the crunching of gravel beneath other
feet than my own, I suddenly looked up, and behold,
there before me stood the man himself, back on earth
in the guise of a tramp! It was a most extraordinary
coincidence that at such a moment I should have
come face to face with this poor outcast and wanderer
who had the Jefferies’ countenance as I knew it from
portraits and descriptions. It was the long thought-
ful suffering face, long straight nose, flowing brown
beard, and rather large full blue eyes. I was startled
at the expression, the unmistakable stamp of a misery
that was anguish and near to despair and insanity.

THISTLE-DOWN 17

He passed me, then paused, and after a moment or two
said hesitatingly, “Can you spare a penny?” I gave
him something without looking at his face again, and
went on my way sorry that I had met him, for I knew
that those miserable eyes would continue to haunt me.

Here, sitting in the room that was his—the author
of the strange Story—the morning sun filling it with
brightest light, the sounds he listened to coming in at
the open window—the intermittent whispering of the
foliage and the deeper continuous whisper of the near
sea, and cries and calls of so many birds that come
and go in the garden, each “ deep in his day’s employ ”
—TI cannot but think of him and lament again that
he was prematurely torn away from this living green
world he worshipped.

Last evening when the tide began to ebb I went
down by the wet shaded lane to the beach, and sat
there for a long time watching a flock of half-a-dozen
little ringed dotterels running about and feeding on a
small patch of clean sand among the shingle. For
three days these dotterels had come to the same spot
at the turn of the tide, one grey plover always in their
company. Evidently no one with a gun had seen
and fired at this plover, and living with the small
tame dotterels he had grown tame too; and it seemed
wonderful to me that this shy bird should continue
quietly feeding within forty yards of where I sat, glass
in hand, never tired of admiring his rarely seen figure

and beautifully harmonious grey mottled plumage.
B

18 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

Very early this morning, on going to the beach, |
found the birds back on their little feeding-ground,
just uncovered by the sea; and close by, sitting on a
groin, was an old man, a carter with his cart and two
horses beside him, patiently waiting for the water to
get a little lower before taking up a load of sand in
his cart. He was a handsome old man, of the type I
have so often admired on the Sussex downs, with a
strong large frame, noble aquiline features, and an
intelligent expression. He told me that he had seen a
kingfisher flying along the coast, just over the water:
its shining blue colour had startled him as it flashed
by, for it was a rare sight at that spot. I had watched
one, probably the same bird, two or three days before,
fishing from a groin in a rough sea. The old man
got down from his seat and, picking up a very big
bunch of ribbon seaweed, shook out the water and
sand and gave half of it to one horse and half to the
other. They ate it greedily, as if it had been the
most fragrant new-mown hay. I had seen New Forest
ponies browsing on furze, deftly cutting off the big
prickly blossoming sprays with their uncovered chisel-
like teeth, and calmly chewing them up apparently
without hurt to their tender mouths; but to see horses
contentedly champing seaweed was new to me. Some
horses liked it and some refused to eat it, he told me.
It was supposed to be good for them to eat it in modera-
tion; his own opinion was that horses that ate seaweed
were stronger and kept their health better than others.

THISTLE-DOWN 19

And so we talked for half-an-hour, standing in the
glorious morning sunshine, the green withdrawing sea
growing smoother by degrees, but far out we could see
it still rough with big rollers, foam-crested ; the little
ringed dotterels and the large grey plover running
about on the sand and feeding unconcerned near us;
the big patient horses standing with masses of wet
seaweed glistening at their feet. It was very wonder-
ful, and I was happy and laughed with the old carter
as we talked; but the thought of Jefferies, slain before
his time by hateful destiny, still haunted me, and deep
down beneath my happiness was an ineffable sadness,

GREY PLOVER AND RINGED DOTTERELS

CHAPTER II
CHARM OF THE DOWNS

Scope and limits of this work—A general description of the downs
—Agreeable sensations; an inquiry into their causes—Gilbert
White’s speculations—The pleasures of the downs due to a
variety of causes—Their shapely human-like curves—Connec-
tion between the senses of sight and touch—Effects of flowing
outlines — Instinctive delight in wide horizons—The desire
to fly—Effect of a series of dome-like forms—The joy of
mountains.

WueEn I stated, perhaps ignorantly, in the last chapter
that nothing had been done by writers of note or of
genius for Sussex, the statement did not include works
of a purely scientific description. There is no lack of
hat kind of literature; the geology especially of the
great range of chalk hills that distinguish this county,
and of the Weald, has been treated at very consider-
able length.

I am not concerned with this aspect of the subject
—the framework or skeleton of downland and the
wonderful story of its creation; but only with its
smooth surface from the esthetic point of view, and
with the living garment of the downs, its animal and
vegetable forms, from the point of view of the lover of
nature and, in a moderate degree, of the field natu-

ralist. These impressions of the downs—of their
20

AWAVH LINNOW WOU TI NOLSONIY

CHARM OF THE DOWNS Q1

appearance and the feelings they evoke in us—need
only to be prefaced by a few sentences descriptive of
the range generally.

The South Downs and the Sussex Downs, as general
use will now have it, mean the same thing; strictly
speaking the name of South Downs is limited to that
portion of the range which rises abruptly from the
flat marsh of Pevensey, and extends from Beachy Head
westward to the river Adur, a distance of twenty-six
miles. The range of the South Downs proper is itself
cut through by two rivers—the Cuckmere, with the
famous old village of Alfriston on its bank, and the
more important Ouse, which flows by Lewes and enters
the sea at Newhaven. Two other rivers cut through
the Sussex range before it enters Hampshire—the
Arun, with the picturesque town of Arundel on its
banks, a dozen miles or so west of the Adur, and about
nine miles west of the Arun the little Lavant. The
whole length of the Sussex range, from Beachy Head
to the western extremity of the county, is fifty-three
miles,

For the first sixteen miles of its westward course
from Pevensey the range keeps to the sea, forming an
almost continuous white cliff to Brighton. At this
point it begins to diverge gradually from the coast,
until at Chichester near the west border of the county
the strip of low flat land between the sea and the
downs has a breadth of several miles.

On the south side of the range the hills are as a

22 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

rule lowest, and slope gradually to the sea. The
aspect of the downs on this side is familiar to most
of us, owing to the large number of persons, probably
amounting to millions annually, who visit one or other
of the sea-side towns and villages that extend in a
chain along this part of the south coast, from East-
bourne to the Selsey peninsula, near Chichester. The
hills are highest on the north side, where they rise
abruptly from the flat weald, like a gigantic buttressed
wall, or an earthwork reared of old by Titans. The
loftiest part of the range is in the South Downs
proper, where, in the neighbourhood of Lewes, east
and west of that town, one may walk many miles
along the erest of the hill, on a turf which makes
walking a joy, and keep at a height of from 700 to
860 feet above the sea level, the ocean six or seven
miles distant on one hand, the deep-green wooded flat
country of the weald on the other.

West of the break caused by the river Adur, the
range, on its north side, rises again to a height of
about 800 feet, at Chanctonbury, and continues high
to the valley of the Arun. West of that river the
downs are less high, and being wooded differ in the
character of their scenery from that of the great naked
hills in the eastern part of the range.

I myself prefer to approach the downs on the
north side, rather than walk five to seven or eight
miles from the coast before getting to the highest
point. The climb up the steep smooth escarpment

CHARM OF THE DOWNS 23

is a good preparation, an intensifier of the pleasure
to follow. Those who know the downs are all agreed
that it 1s a rare pleasure to be on them.. And when
we have had our upward toil on a hot day, and are at
length on the level plateau-like summit, on the turf;
when the wind has blown us dry, and we have ex-
perienced that sense of freedom and elation which is
the result of rising from a low level into a rarefied
atmosphere, these purely physical sensations are suc-
ceeded by a higher, more enduring pleasure, which the
mind receives from the prospect disclosed. I mean
the prospect of the vast round green hills extending
away on either hand to the horizon. What is the
secret of this peculiar pleasure? We may say off-hand
that it is nothing but the instinctive delight which we
have in wild nature and a wide prospect. And this is
no doubt a principal element in the feeling—wild
nature and a wide prospect of unenclosed country,
an elastic turf under foot, and full liberty to roam
whithersoever we will. There is another element
resulting from the conformation of the earth’s surface
—the special character of the scenery. The wildness,
the wide horizon and sense of liberty after the confine-
ment of roads and fences and hedges, come first: it
is the local aspect, appealing as it does to the esthetic
faculties, which makes the feeling distinctive. Thus,
among mountains, on moors, and in vast desolate
marshes, on iron-bound coasts, and on wide sea-side
flats and saltings, and on level plains, 1 experience

24 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

this same feeling of elation, which yet differs in
character in each locality, and I may be able to
analyse my feelings in all or some of these cases and
find out why they differ. What is to be said con-
cerning the special quality of the South Downs—the
mental flavour they impart ?

I remember that Gilbert White speculated on
this very question, in the often-quoted Letter LVI,
where he says: “Though I have now travelled the
Sussex Downs upwards of thirty years, yet I still in-
vestigate that chain of majestic mountains with fresh
admiration year by year, and I think I see new
beauties each time I traverse it... . For my own
part, I think there is something peculiarly sweet and
amusing in the shapely figured aspect of chalk hills,
in preference to those of stone, which are rugged,
broken, abrupt, and shapeless. Perhaps I may be
singular in my opinion . . . but I never contemplate
these mountains without thinking I perceive somewhat
analogous to growth in their gentle swellings and
smooth fungus-like protuberances, their fluted sides
and regular hollows and slopes, that carry at once
the air of vegetative dilatation and expansion; or was
there ever a time when the calcareous masses were
thrown into fermentation by some adventitious mois-
ture—were raised and leavened into shape by some
plastic power, and so made to swell and heave their
broad backs into the sky, so much above the less
animated clay of the wild below ?”

CHARM OF THE DOWNS 25

“Sweet and amusing” are not words we should now
use in this connection ; but the description is pleasant,
and the speculations, albeit fanciful, are suggestive ; for
it is a fact that the attractiveness of these broad hills
is in a measure due to their fungus-like roundness and
smoothness. But not only to these qualities, as we find
when we leave the chain to look upon an isolated
down: it fails to attract; the charm is not in the one
but in the many. Furthermore, it is due to a com-
bination of various causes. To begin with, we have the
succession of shapely outlines; the vast protuberances
and deep divisions between, suggestive of the most
prominent and beautiful curves of the human figure,
and of the “ solemn slope of mighty limbs asleep.”

That modern poet’s vision of a Titanic woman re-
clined in everlasting slumber on the earth, her loose
sweet-smelling hair lying like an old-world forest over
leagues of ground; the poet himself sitting for ever,
immersed in melancholy, in the shadow of her great
head, has seemed a mere outcome of a morbid imagina-
tion. Here, among the downs, the picture returns to
the mind with a new light, a strange grandeur; it is
not a mere “flower of disease” and nothing more, but
is rather a startlingly vivid reminder that we ourselves
are anthropomorphic and mythopeeic, even as our
earliest progenitors were, who were earth-worshippers
in an immeasurably remote past, before the heavenly
powers existed.

Here, too, where the lines of the earth are most

26 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

human-like, we are reminded of the philosophic doctrine
that for us all nature is a secondary object of the pas-
sion of love, and that to this fact the beauty of nature
is chiefly due. The scene also takes us back to the
discredited Hogarthian notion concerning the origin of
our idea of beauty; and at the same time of Burke’s
theory of the beautiful. This, too, has fallen into
neglect, if not contempt, oddly enough, since it con-
tains the germ of our modern philosophy of the beauti-
ful. Perhaps it would not be an exaggeration to say
that it contains a good deal more than the germ.
Burke was assuredly right in maintaining that there
exists a very close connection between the senses of
sight and feeling, and in tracing the agreeable sensa-
tions arising from the contemplation of soft and smooth
surfaces to this connection. To put the theory into
five short words—what we see we feel.

When we look on a landscape, particularly when it
is seen from a considerable elevation, the body goes
with the mind or vision ; in other words, locomotion is
associated with seeing—we are there, as it were, roam-
ing corporeally over the expanse we are gazing on.
When we look at the sky, or a cloud, or the sea, the
sight does not instinctively rest on it, but is satisfied
with a glance; if we continue to gaze, not occupied
with something in us, but seeing vividly, it is because
some object: or some strange or beautiful atmospheric
effect. excites our admiration or curiosity; or because
we are artists, or sailors, or fishermen, and have an

CHARM OF THE DOWNS a7

interested motive in studying water or sky. “I cannot
stand all day on a naked beach watching the capricious
hues of the sea,” pathetically wrote Charles Lamb from
some spot on the south coast, “I would fain retire into
the interior of my cage. While I gaze on the sea I
want to be on it, over it, across it. There is no home
for me here.” I have read that in convents and harems
there is an arrangement of the windows which prevents
the inmates from looking out or down upon the earth;
they are constrained to look up, presumably because
there is no male form, nor shadow nor reflection of one,
in the void above. Those who have been fenced in
from harm in this fashion must have hated the blue
sky as much as Tennyson’s worn-out mariners hated
the dark blue wave. I have noticed that birds when
perched do, even when they appear to be reposing,
gaze a good deal at the sky. They are aérial, of the
sky, and are accustomed to travel and dwell there
with spread wings; and their fellows and enemies
are there.

The sea and the sky in their ordinary aspects do not
hold the attention, because we are not of them, and do
not feel them, and the sensation of moving in or on
them is consequently not here associated with seeing.
The sight dwells with pleasure on the downs, because
they are, in appearance, easy to walk upon, and in a
sense are being walked upon when looked at.

Here, it may be remarked, that a surface which
appears easy to the feet is also easy to the sight. The

9)

28 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

greater pleasure which we receive from flowing out-
lines than from those that are angular, as Herbert
Spencer has pointed out, is due to the harmonious un-
restrained action of the ocular muscles occupied in the
perception of such outlines. On these downs, for the
sight and that bodily sensation which cannot be disso-
ciated from sight, there are no impassable chasms, no
steep heights difficult to climb, nor jagged rocks and
broken surfaces to impede free movement and passage.

Finally we have as another important element in
our pleasure the large prospect disclosed. Why a
wide horizon should have so great a fascination for
us, wingless walkers on the level ground, is a curious
question. Jt is not merely a childish delight in a
novel sensation; I should rather look on it as a
survival, like our fighting, hunting, and various other
instincts—an inherited memory of a period when
the hill top was at the same timo refuge, fortress,
and tower of observation from which all hidden
things stood revealed—where men, losing their fear
and feeling superior to their enemies, were lifted
above themselves.

One would be only too glad to believe the feeling
to be different in its origin, and in a sense prophetic
—like the unnecessarily large brains of primitive
man, according to the Wallacian doctrine—pointing
to a time when we shall be able, with the aid of
perfected machinery, or, better still, by means of
some mystcrious undeveloped faculty within us, to

CHARM OF THE DOWNS 29

rise from earth and float hither and thither at will
through the boundless fields of air.

Oddly enough, that desire which we all have at
times for wings, or at all events for the power of
flight, and which like other vague and idle prompt-
ings is capable of cultivation and of being made a
real source of pleasure, most often comes to me on
these great green hills. Here are no inviting woods
and mysterious green shades that ask to be explored:
they stand naked to the sky, and on them the mind
becomes more aérial, less conscious of gravity and
a too solid body. Standing on one great green hill,
and looking across vast intervening hollows to other
round heights and hills beyond and far away, the
wish is more than a wish, and I can almost realise
the sensation of being other than I am—a creature
with the instinct of flight and the correlated faculty ;
that in a little while, when I have gazed my full
and am ready to change my place, I shall lift great
heron-like wings and fly with little effort to other
points of view.

To come back from this digression, or flight. It
is true that the extent of earth visible from the very
highest downs is not really great, but with a succes-
sion of dome-like outlines extending to the horizon
we have to take into account the illusion of infinite
distance produced on the mind by the repetition of
similar forms. The architect, in a small way, produces
the same effect in his colonnades. I was once very

30 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

much struck by an effect of this kind at sea, in the
South Atlantic, when during perfectly calm weather
there was a stupendous swell, the long vast glassy
rollers succeeding one another at regular intervals.
Viewed from the bridge of the steamer the ocean
appeared to have increased immeasurably in extent;
the horizon was no wider than before, yet it was as
if I had been lifted hundreds of feet above the surface.

Those of my readers whose minds run on moun-
tains, and the joy of mountains, may say here that,
in spite of the illusion produced, the height of the
downs is really so small that the pleasure arising
from that cause must be comparatively very little.
It is, I think, a very common error that the degree
of pleasure we have in looking on a wide prospect
depends on our height above the surrounding earth
—in other words, that the wider the horizon the
greater the pleasure. The fact is, once we have got
above the world, and have an unobstructed view
all round, whether the height above the surrounding
country be 500 or 5000 feet, then we at once ex-
perience all that sense of freedom, triumph, and
elation which the mind is capable of. This “sudden
glory,” which may be ours on a very modest eleva-
tion, is the most we can hope for: we can no more
get a new sensation or a larger measure of the
quickly vanishing pleasure we have enjoyed by trans-
porting ourselves to the highest summits on the
globe, than we can change a Skye-terrier into an

CHARM OF THE DOWNS 31

eagle by taking it three or four miles up in a balloon
and throwing it out of the car.

What we do get by ascending to greater heights,
to the limits of our endurance, is the mountain
scenery, the new aspects of nature, which have an
esthetic value. This is the same kind of pleasure
which we experience in walking or riding through a
picturesque country; but the esthetic pleasure of the
mountain may actually seem more, or keener, on
account of the greater novelty—the unlikeness of
the scene to the more or less familiar aspects of
nature on the level earth. For we live on the earth
and pay but brief visits to mountain summits.

CHAPTER III

THE LIVING GARMENT

The South Downs most agreeable in the hot season—Beauty of the
bindweed—Black oxen—The old Sussex breed of cattle—Black
oxen in poetry—Suggestion for group of statuary—Black and
gold in nature—Turf of the downs—Result of breaking up
the turf—A new flora—Variety of colonising plants—Beauty
of the chance-made gardens of the downs—Flowers in barren
places — Forget-me-not — Viper’s bugloss — Effects of blue
flowers in masses—A shepherd boy in sainfoin—Field scabi-
ous — Fertile spots — Dropwort and heath — Harebells —
Brilliant colour and intensity of life—Minute flowers of the
turf—Old Gerarde—Eyebright : its obscure habits—The dwarf
thistle.

THE South Downs, in their cultivated parts, are seen
at their best in July and August, when the unreaped
corn turns from green to red gold: whether the tint
be yellow or red, it strikes one ag more intense than
on the lower levels. Then, too, among the ripe corn,
along the ragged fringes of the field, and close to the
dusty path, the bindweed, adorned with its delicate
rose-coloured blossoms, runs riot; and twining in and
out ainong the dry, bright stalks, its green, string-like
wandering stem has something of the appearance of
an exceedingly attenuated tree-snake. Why is it that
this most graceful weed, seen in the wheat, invariably

gives me the idea of a sentient being delighting in its
32

THE LIVING GARMENT 33

own mischievous life? It is the pretty spoilt darling
of the fields who has run away to hide in the corn,
and to peer back, with a roguish smile on its face,
at every passer-by. Perhaps the farmer is partly to
blame for the fancy, for the bindweed vexes his soul,
as it will vex and hinder the reapers by-and-by; and
he abuses it just as if it had a moral sense and ears to
hear, and ought to be ashamed of itself. It pleased
me to be told by a village maiden that not bindweed,
nor convolvulus, but lilybind was the true name of this
pretty plant.

Here one may see the corn reaped with sickles in
the ancient way; and better still, the wheat carried
from the field in wains drawn by two or three couples
of great, long-horned, black oxen. One wonders which
of the three following common sights of the Sussex
downs carries us further back in time :—the cluster of
cottages, with church and farm buildings, that form
the village nestling in the valley, and, seen from above,
appearing as a mere red spot in the prospect; the
cloaked shepherd, crook in hand, standing motionless
on some vast green slope, his grey, rough-haired sheep-
dog resting at his feet; or the team of coal-black, long-
horned oxen drawing the plough or carrying the corn.

The little rustic village in the deep dene, with its
two or three hundred inhabitants, will probably outlast
London, or at all events London’s greatness; and the
solitary shepherd with his dog at his feet will doubt-

less stand watching his flock on the hillside for some
c

34 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

thousands of years to come; but these great, slow,
patient oxen cannot go on dragging the plough much
longer; the wonder is that they have continued to the
present time. One gazes lovingly at them, and on
leaving casts many a longing, lingering look behind,
fearing that after a little while their place will know
them no more for ever.

I have described these oxen used in farm-work
on the downs as black in colour, and very nearly
all of them are black; but the fact is, this variety
only dates back about a century in this district, and
was introduced from Wales, though for what reason no
one appears to know, since the original red Sussex
ox was always a “kindly and handsome” beast and
a good worker. A few teams of the red oxen may
still be seen among the downs; probably some of
these, as on the Earl of Chichester’s farm at Stanmer,
being kept more for the sentiment of the thing than
for any other reason. They are noble-looking animals,
well-shaped, long-horned, of a deep rich red colour, a
very much deeper red than the Devonshire cattle,
but not brown. These are of the original Sussex
breed, for which this county was once famous when
it was undoubtedly the greatest cattle-breeding district
in England. “How great on all sides is the abund-
ance of cattle, but how strange a solitude of men!”
says an old traveller, when speaking of the Sussex
weald. And Arthur Young, in his famous Tour
through the Svuthern Counties (1768), telling of the bad

THE LIVING GARMENT 85

roads in this cattle-breeding district, says: “Here I
had a sight, which indeed I never saw in any other
part of England, namely, that going to church in
a village not far from Lewes, I saw an ancient lady
of very good quality drawn to church in her coach
with six oxen: nor was it done but out of mere
necessity, the way being so stiff and deep that no
horses could go in it.” The necessity no longer
exists; and the horse is rapidly taking his place
even in the oxen’s proper work. Down to 1834,
according to Ellman, the well-known improver of the
South Down sheep, almost every farmer in Sussex
worked oxen as well as horses. What a change to
the present time, when the few farmers who still
make use of oxen tell you that even those few are
not bred in the county, that Sussex is now obliged
to go into other counties to get its cattle! Within
the last five or six years I have seen the use of
oxen given up in farms where they had always been
employed, and I greatly fear that those who will
walk on the downs a quarter of a century hence will
see no patient team of “slow black oxen.”

It is possible that black oxen similar to those of
Sussex may be still used in farm-work in some parts
of Ireland: I have not penetrated far into the in-
terior of that distant country. At all events, it seems
unlikely that a Nationalist and leader of the “Celtic
School,” Mr. W. B. Yeats, should have come to the
most Saxon district in England to get that grand

36 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

and sombre simile with which he concludes his poetic
drama of The Countess Cathleen :—

Tell them that walk upon the floor of peace
That I would die and go to her I love ;

The years like great black oxen tread the world,
And God the herdsman goads them on behind,
And I am broken by their passing feet.

The black oxen figure nobly, too, in Mrs. Marriott
Watson’s poem, On the Downs, and these are our
familiar Sussex beasts. I will here quote more than
the necessary lines; and the reader who knows and
loves the district will agree that a more perfect
picture of downland in one of its many aspects was
never written :—

Broad and bare to the skies,

The great down country lies,

Green in the glance of the sun,

Fresh with the keen, salt air;

Screaming the gulls rise from the fresh-turned mould,
Where the round bosom of the wind-swept wold
Slopes to the valley fair.

Where the pale stubble shines with golden gleam,
The silver plough-share cleaves its hard-won way
Behind the patient team,

The slow black oxen toiling through the day ;
Tireless, impassive still

From dawning dusk and chill

To twilight grey.

Far off, the pearly sheep

Along the upland steep

Following the shepherd froin the wattled fold,
With tinkling bell-notes falling sweet and cold
As a stream’s cadence, while a skylark sings
Ifigh in the blue with eager, outstretched wings,
Till the strong passion of his joy he told.

ONIHDNOTG NAxO

THE LIVING GARMENT 37

If unlimited wealth were mine I should be tempted
to become the owner of one of these great hills, to
place upon it, as a gift to posterity, a representation
in some imperishable material of these black cattle
engaged with their human fellow-creatures in getting
in the harvest. Doubtless the people of the future
would say that the hill was never really mine to dis-
pose of as I thought proper; but I imagine that for
their own sakes they would respect the statuary, the
memorial of a vanished time :—

Cold Pastoral !
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man.

To begin with, a sculptor of genius would be required,
a giant among artists; and the materials would be
gigantic blocks of granite and marble—red, black,
grey, and yellow. From these would be wrought,
twice or thrice the size of life, a group—a partly-
loaded waggon, drawn by three couples of great black
bullocks, attended by four or five labourers in their
rough grey garments, strong men with brown bearded
faces and smooth-cheeked youths; one on the top of
the load, the others with their forks tossing up more
sheaves; the oxen holding up their horned, shaggy
fronts—all but the leaders, who have more freedom ;
and these would be turning aside with lowered heads,
eagerly snatching mouthfuls of yellow straw from a
sheaf fallen by chance in their way.

38 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

I have simply described what I saw in the course of
my last late July ramble on the downs; and it seemed
only natural to wish to be able to set up a copy which
would remain unrumed by time and weather for at
least a thousand years. The arrangement of the
group as well as the form of the creatures composing
it—men and great rough-hewn cattle—was wonder-
fully fine; but I also think that colour was a principal
element in the fascinating effect the spectacle pro-
duced—the contrast of those large living biack masses
with the shining red and gold of the wheat. How
strikingly beautiful—startlingly, one might almost say
on account of its rarity—this contrast of black and
gold is in nature may be seen even in so comparatively
small a creature as a blackbird, perched or moving
about amid the brilliant yellow foliage of a horse-
chestnut or some other tree in October. Again, a
large mass of yellow sunlit foliage seen against a black
rain-cloud shows us the same contrast on a grand
scale

The downs are nowhere tame, but I seldom care to
loiter long in their cultivated parts. It seems better
to get away, even from the sight of labouring men and
oxen, and of golden corn and laughing bindweed, to
walk on the turf. This turf is composed of small
grasses and clovers mixed with a great variety of
creeping herbs, some exceedingly small. In a space
of one square foot of ground, a dozen or twenty or more
species of plants may be counted, and on turning up

THE LIVING GARMENT 39

a piece of turf the innumerable fibrous interwoven
roots have the appearance of cocoa-nut matting. It is
indeed this thick layer of interlaced fibres that gives
the turf its springiness, and makes it so delightful to
walk upon. It is fragrant, too. The air, especially in
the evening of a hot spring day, is full of a fresh
herby smell, to which many minute aromatic plants
contribute, reminding one a little of the smell of
bruised ground-ivy. Or it is like the smell of a
druggist’s shop, blown abroad and rid of its grosser
elements: the medicine smell with something subtler
added—aroma and perfume combined, the wholesome
fragrance of the divine Mother’s green garment, and of
her breath.

But all the untilled downland is not turf: there are
large patches of ground, often of twenty or thirty to a
hundred acres in extent, where there is no proper turf,
and the vegetation is of a different character. Some
of these patches have a very barren appearance, and
others are covered with grass and flowers in spring,
but in summer are dry and yellow or brown, when the
turf all round keeps its verdure. This difference in
the vegetation is not caused by a difference of soil, as
one is at first apt to imagine, but to the fact that the
ground at some former period has been tilled. I have
looked at many patches of this kind of land, which
had not been tilled for periods of from five to five-and-
twenty years, and they mostly had the same character.
In spring they produce a scanty crop of thin grass,

40 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

rarely worth cutting, and by July it has all vanished ;
and the sun-baked soil has by then an exceedingly
barren appearance, with its sprinkling of thistles, and
a few minute creeping herbs. This kind of land,
spoilt by the plough, is said by the shepherds to be
“sickly”; and the grass that grows in it, little in
quantity and poor in quality, they call “gratton
grass.”

It has been said that if the turf is once destroyed by
ploughing on the downs it never grows again. This is
not absolutely true, as we may find in the old Roman
earthworks, of which there are so many on the high
downs, and which are now covered with as close and
rich a turf as may be seen anywhere. But this is
undoubtedly to go too far back. That Nature takes
an unconscionably long time to remake the turf charac-
teristic of the downs, when once it has been unmade by
the plough, there is a means of knowing. It happened
that in 1800, when wheat rose to the enormous price
of 160 shillings, and even more, per quarter, that on
the South Downs, as in many other places throughout
the country, a great deal of grazing land was brought
under cultivation. Much of this land, which was
cultivated for a year or two, has remained untilled
ever since; and we see that like the “sickly” lands
that were tilled ten to twenty years ago it has not yet
got a turf. But in some respects it differs from the
sickly land; for although unlike the turfy down-
land which exists side by side with it, it possesses a

THE LIVING GARMENT 41

vegetation which has all the appearance of having
existed at that spot from of old. So unlike the
barren, thistly, and weedy waste lands and fallows
does it look, so harmonious, so natural all that grows
upon it, that in some cases you would find it hard
to believe that the plant life is not native, but has
migrated hither, and was only able to take permanent
hold of the soil because of the destruction of the turf.
These plants came in fact as weeds, but have long
established their position as members of the flora of
the downs, albeit in their larger growth, social habits,
and shorter life they differ markedly from the older
flora of the turf.

The most curious thing about this vegetation of
the lands that have been tilled very many years ago
is that it varies in an extraordinary degree in different
places. A slight difference in the local conditions,
as, for instance, depth of soil, &c., in different hills,
or different spots on the same hill, has probably
brought about this result. At one place two or three
species have by chance fallen upon a suitable unoccu-
pied spot, after the turf has been killed, and have
spread over it and continued in possession ever since ;
but on the next spot different species have colonised.
Some of these places are overgrown with tall grass,
2 monotonous green, with scarcely a flower among
it; but in most places the eye is caught by colour,
and the colour will be yellow, red, blue, purple, or
white, according to the species that predominate; or

42 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

it may be blue and yellow, or red and white, or a
mixture of all colours.

Another marked difference between the true native
flora of the turf, and these intruders which have
become natives, is in the longer life, or at all events
more lasting freshness, of the former. Except in very
dry seasons, when the intense heat burns the hills
brown, the turf is always green and blossoming from
March to October. The colonising grasses and herbs
are at their best in May and June.

A noteworthy fact about these wild chance-made
gardens scattered far and wide over the downs is that,
besides their variety and beauty, there is in some a
singularity which adds to their attractiveness, and
causes them to be vividly remembered afterwards.
This is not solely caused by the contrast of patches
or islands of vegetation unlike that about it, which
gives it something of an exotic appearance, but also
by colour effects not often seen. Some of the prettiest
effects are found on spots where it may be said that
“nothing grows’”—nothing, that is to say, from the
agriculturist’s and the shepherd’s points of view;
where there is an exceedingly thin soil on summits
and high slopes, and the plough having once broken
up and ruined the ancient turf has made the ground
barren for ever. Two such spots I will describe.

On one the thin poor soil was of a fine red colour,
thinly overgrown with an extraordinary variety of
plants, with fine wiry stems and few and scanty leaves,

THE LIVING GARMENT 43

but with flowers almost normal as to size. There was
nowhere a mass or patch of bright colour, but over
the whole surface a sprinkling of yellow, red, white,
purple, and blue colour, the flowers everywhere mixed
with golden brown and silvery brown grasses, while
under this thin herbage appeared the red ground
flecked with white flints. It was a curiously beau-
tiful and fascinating picture. There is nothing in art
that can give us any idea of effects of this kind, which
are not uncommon in nature; but I suppose it is a
fact that artists do sometimes attempt to produce
them; and if we have never seen the originals, or
having seen can blot them out, their attempts may
not seem wholly futile. We may see it, for instance,
in some exceedingly beautiful examples of the potter’s
art, when every colour used in painting clay has been
thrown upon a vase or plaque and by chance a happy
effect has resulted. We see it too in some old Persian
and Turkish carpets, in which a variety of very pure
and beautiful colours are woven in a fabric without
design or pattern. Again, we get an effect of this
kind in a few stained-glass windows. The one I have
in my mind at this moment has given me more plea-
sure than any other window in any church or cathe-
dral in England; and it is without design, for it was
destroyed some three or four centuries ago, but the
fragments were gathered up by pious hands, and after
many years restored to their place pieced anyhow
together.

44 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

A second even more barren spot, a couple of miles
from the one described, was, so far as my experience
goes, absolutely unique in character, and as simple and
chaste in its one beautiful colour as the other was
rich and varied with its sprinkling of half a hundred
colours. Walking on the long plateau-like top of the
high down I saw before me a perfectly white piece
of ground, an area of about twelve to fourteen acres,
and concluded that it was an old pioughed field over-
grown with white campion; but on arriving at the
place I found that my sheet of white blossoms was
nothing but a field thickly strewn with white flints.
It is often said, and it is perhaps true, that the flints
of the chalk downs after exposure to the air become
whiter than any other flints; and these were white
indeed—white as white blossoms in summer, and as
a field covered with snow in winter. That any spot
with so thin a soil, where the blanket or matting of
the turf must have rested on a bed of flinty chalk,
had been thought worth cultivating was something
to wonder at. Now, until I was within twenty or
thirty yards of this stony field, where it touched the
green turf, it appeared absolutely without any plant
life, but at that short distance I found that it was
overgrown with forget-me-not, a plant that, like the
pimpernel, is always found on waste stony or barren
places on the downs where the turf has been destroyed.
But in most places it grows among other plants: here
it had the whole field to itself, and grew to a height

THE LIVING GARMENT 45

of nine or ten inches; its exceedingly thin, dark-
coloured, wire-like, leafless stems crowned with their
loose clusters of minute turquoise blue blossoms. The
smallness of the flowers and thread-like fineness of
the stems had made them invisible until seen close
at hand, and then how beautiful they looked! The
whole level expanse, thick strewn with shining white
flints, appeared covered with a thin veil or mist of a
most exquisite blue.

Of the more splendid—one might almost say
bizarre—effects, caused by masses of bright-coloured
flowers, a good many instances could be given if
space allowed. One must suffice. This was a very
dense growth of viper’s bugloss covering about an
acre of ground on the summit of a down east of the
Cuckmere stream. This plant usually grows scattered
about even when most abundant, as I have found it
in some spots in Suffolk: here the rough stalks
studded with their intense blue flowers grew thick
as corn, one other plant with them—namely, the
large woolly thistle, which grew to the same height
as the bugloss stalks, and had flowers of an enormous
size. One of these big flower-heads would have filled
a small coffee-cup. It struck me as most curious that
the purple of the thistle and the bright blue of the
bugloss looked so well together; but the sight was a
very beautiful as well as a singular one.

I will here remark that large masses of blue flowers
seen under a blue sky in a strong light, however novel

46 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

and enchanting the sight may be as long as the vision
rests on it, does not leave as distinct and vivid a
picture on the mind as masses of flowers of any other
colour seen in similar conditions. It is true that a
sheet of wild hyacinths in a wood in spring is a
beautiful sight that we never forget. But in this case
there is a background of trees, and deep shadow and
green above, between the blue of the flowers and the
blue of the sky.

My mention of the big or woolly thistle reminds me
of another pretty effect of a colonising flower on the
downs which I should not perhaps have thought much
about but for an incident and an attractive human
figure in the picture.

During a walk among the South Downs one day
in June, looking up from the valley I was in, I saw
far up near the top of the hill in front of me a
shepherd boy standing motionless, his crook in his
hand, his dog, held by a cord or chain, at his side.
Wishing to have a talk with him I began the ascent
of the rather steep slope, and he, divining my inten-
tion, waited for me. As I came close to him he made
a very pretty picture, standing against the blue sky,
knee-deep in the tall grass, just beginning to flower,
which covered that part of the down. Among the
grass sainfoin grew abundantly, and the green grass
was sprinkled everywhere with the rose-red of its
blossoming spikes. Even a very few flowers of any
other colour would have taken something from the

THE LIVING GARMENT 47

exquisite beauty of that chance green and rose-red
arrangement. But there were no other flowers. The
young shepherd, aged about fifteen, had one of those
perfectly Saxon faces which you see more in Sussex
than anywhere in England—a large round face, rosy
brown in colour, shy blue eyes and light brown hair,
worn long. The expression, the shy yet pleased look
—pleased that the monotony of his long solitary day
would be broken by this chance encounter with a
stranger—was childlike and very pretty. He had
loose-fitting grey clothes on, and a round grey peakless
cap; and for ornament he had fastened in the middle
of it, where there had perhaps once been a top-knot
or ball, a big woolly thistle flower. It was really very
curious to note how that one big thorny flower-head
with its purple disc harmonised with everything about
the boy and gave him a strange distinction.

Most of the colonising plants on the downs have,
as I have said, their period of greatest beauty in May
and June: the common field scabious is an exception.
Like the blue devil’s-bit scabious it is also found on
the turf; but it flourishes chiefly (and on account of
its long stem is best suited to) the grass lands that
have once been tilled. In such localities it is very
common and outlasts all its neighbours of other
species, and a very pretty effect is sometimes produced
by that flower “blooming alone” when abundant in
the tall grass burnt yellow by the heats of July
and August. The pale mauve-blue of the flower and

48 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

pale yellow of the grass are complementary colours,
and almost as pleasing as the rose-red of sainfoin
blossom with the vivid green of June grass.

When these wild gardens of the old broken-up
grounds are sere and flowerless, or the flowers are few,
the downs where the turf has never been destroyed
still glow with colour as in spring; and it is then
most delightful to visit those wilder places where
many hours, or even a whole day, may be spent out
of sight of any human form, not even excepting
a solitary shepherd, standing motionless and statu-
esque on the side of a distant hill.

Happily such desert spots still exist, wild as when
the vanished bustard had his home in them; miles
upon miles of rough vegetation; acres of luxuriant
furze, flowerless now at the end of summer, darkest
green with a bloom of lighter green, bluish in tint, on
its tops. The furze is like the pine in this; and
looking down upon it one can fancy oneself a Titan
standing waist-deep in a vast pine-forest, with the
blue-green feathery tree-tops all about one. Elsewhere
the furze may be seen growing among other bushes,
appearing as blotches of darkest green among greens
of various lighter shades; trailing brambles, and briars
still waving aloft a few white and red roses; and in
and out among them, hanging everywhere in beautiful
rags, and binding bush to bush with ropes of many-
shaped leaves, convolvulus and fragrant woodbine,
wild clematis in its silky beard, and bryony beaded

THE LIVING GARMENT 49

with green and scarlet berries. Among the bushes on
the lower slopes one stumbles on places of extraordi-
nary fertility, where the thistle, foxglove, ragwort,
viper’s bugloss, agrimony, and wild mignonette grow
to a man’s breast; while over them all the mullein
lifts its great flowery rod to a height of six to nine
feet. From these luxuriant patches you pass to more
open ground covered with golden seeding grasses, and
heather, fiery purple-red, and emerald-green spots
powdered white with woodruff, and patches of purple
thyme. One afternoon, tired with a long day’s ramble
in the burning sun, I cast myself down on one of these
fragrant beds and fell into a doze. That night when
I threw off my clothes I noticed that the fragrance
still clung to them, and when I woke next morning
the air of the room was so charged with it that for a
moment I fancied myself still out of doors, where I
had fallen asleep on that purple flowery bed.

The heather on the downs is of two species—the
pale purple ling, or dwarf heath, and the fiery purple-
red small-leafed heath. I decline to call it by its
common but absurd name—absurd, I mean, when
speaking of it as a common plant of the Sussex
Downs. From July to September is the blossoming
time of the heath, but at one favoured spot I have
found the small-leafed species in fullest bloom in
June; and as in this instance heather and June-
flowering dropwort were blossoming together, where

there was no other plant to spoil the harmony, a
D

50 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

unique and very striking effect was produced. The
dropwort is found all over the chalk hills, everywhere
a smaller, neater plant than its great tall rank cousin
of the moist meads, the fragrant meadow-sweet. On
the close-cropped turf of the downs the dropwort may
be seen flowering with no more than a couple of inches
of stem, but when it grows among furze or heather it
sends up a stem from a foot to eighteen inches high.
At the spot I have spoken of, the fiery blossoms of the
heather covered an area of about three-quarters of an
acre, on the slope of a furzy down, and over the whole
of the ground the dropwort grew, sprinkled so evenly
and abundantly that almost every square yard of
ground had its one slim stem crowned with its loose
cream-coloured cluster. Not a leaf does this plant
show—nothing but the slim tall stem with its flower-
cluster rising several inches above the level of the
rough heather; the intense purple-red glow of the
myriads of small heath bells, massed, or thickly
sprinkled over the dusky green of the ground; above,
the slender stems waving their small creamy-white
flags and rags of blossoms in the wind ;—the effect of
the whole, the contrast in form and colour, the airy
motions of one and immobility of the other, was most
fascinating.

One of the latest summer flowers of the downs,
which is so abundant as to give a colour to the scene
in some spots, is the harebell. It is a dainty flower,
airy and delicate in shape, waving or trembling to

THE LIVING GARMENT 51

every breath on its hair-like stem, of an exquisite
tender blue, the nearest, I think, of any flower to the
cerulean hue of the small butterfly’s wings. It blooms
everywhere on the hills from July to September, but
is most abundant about the end of August; and one
cannot help wondering to see this frail flower looking
its brightest and best—“ enjoying the air it breathes”
—-when the weather is dryest and hottest. Like
the dropwort, it abounds more and grows tallest when
it has the protection of some thorny or uneatable
plant—heath, furze, or bitter grass. On some of the
high downs a grass grows which the sheep refuse to
touch ; it is dull green in colour, changing to greenish-
brown in late summer, and grows thickly and evenly
over the ground to a height of five or six inches,
forming a soft carpet which is pleasant to walk on.
The shepherds call it “ ur-grass.” I am not sure about
the spelling, but it is pronounced something like
i ugh !”—a familiar human grunt or exclamation
of disgust. The summit of Ditchling Beacon, the
highest point of the South Downs (and of Sussex), is
clothed with this grass, and at the end of last August,
after the long excessively hot season, before any rain
had fallen, the harebells were so abundant as to give
a blue tinge to the earth. While resting on ‘the
ground at this spot, it occurred to me to measure
a square yard of the surface and count the fully
open blossoms contained within that space. They
numbered sixty-four.

52 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

Before finishing with this part of the subject it may
be observed that on these high, treeless downs, in the
burning sun, the flowers are more intense in colour
than those that bloom in the shade and close shelter
of the woods and forests of the weald, even those of
the same species—the poor

*

Half-faded blossoms, pale with heat
And full of bitter summer.

Looking round upon the living garment of many
colours, especially where the glowing orange-yellow
patches of the ragwort are most conspicuous, one can
fancy that the strayed pack-horses of a silk merchant
of the olden time have passed this way, and that the
sharp claws of the bramble have caught and pulled
the packages to pieces, scattering far and wide the
shining fabrics of all the hues in the rainbow. This
brilliancy in the colour of the flowers has a counter-
part in the greater intensity of life in the creatures;
or so it seems to me. The hum of the bees; the light-
ning-quick movement of the lizard and of the adder,
when one is so fortunate as to catch a glimpse of him
—a sinuous, swift-moving band of a shining golden-
brown colour; the frantic scuttling into cover of the
disturbed rabbit; the lively movements and music of
the small birds—all give one the idea that the hottest
time of the summer is their period of greatest activity.

These blossoming places in the wilderness which I
have tried to describe, and which make the thought

THE LIVING GARMENT 53

of our trim, pretty artificial gardens a weariness, are
not too many: in most places the untilled downs are
bare of furze and bramble and the plants that take
advantage of the bramble’s protection, and are close
cropped by the sheep. Their very smoothness gives
them a character which is quite unique and has a
peculiar charm. Flowers are abundant and in con-
siderable variety, but many that are luxuriant in rich
soils, wherever there is shelter and protection, here
scarcely look like the same species: they have changed
their habits of growth, their form and size, to suit the
different conditions. The luxury of long stems, the
delight of waving in the wind, and the ambition to
overtop their neighbours, would here be fatal. Their
safety lies in nestling down amid the lowly grass,
keeping so close to the earth as to be able to blossom
and ripen their seed in spite of the ever-nibbling
sheep — the living lawn-mowers perpetually moving
about over them. The vegetation has the appearance
of a beautiful tapestry worked in various shades of
green, roughened with the slender dry bents standing
out like pale yellow thread-ends from the green tex-
ture; flecked, and in places splashed with brilliant
colour—red, purple, blue, and yellow. Or if you look
at the flowers with the sun before you they appear
like shining gems sewn into the fabric and forming
an irregular pattern. The commonest flowers of the
close-fed downs are mostly quite small, Commonest
in spring, when indeed yellow flowers most abound,

54 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

is the bird-foot trefoil. The wee fairy yellow trefoil
is common too; and clovers red and clovers white;
and the kidney vetch, with curious embossed or
jewelled flower-heads. Creeping rock-rose with soft,
silky petals, and clustered bell-flower, deep blue, look-
ing like Canterbury bells picked from their stalk and
scattered about on the grass. Crane’s-bill and musky
stork’s-bill—mere specks of red; little round-leafed
mint, a faint misty purple; and the scented plantain,
its leaves like leaves cut out of green cloth, pressed
flat and sewn upon the green fabric. Rest-harrow,
very dark green on a light green turf, with minute
pink and white butterfly blossoms. Woodruff, round
and among the furze bushes, like powdery snow
newly fallen on the green earth: and curiously named
squinancy-wort, exceeding small and fragrant, bloom-
ing all over the turfy downs, here white, there rose-
red, or deep red, or purple, so variable is it in colour.
More abundant still, and more variable, is the minute
milkwort, quaintly and prettily described by old
Gerarde: “The flower grows at the top of a blew
colour, fashioned like a little bird, with wings, tail,
and body, only to be discovered by those who do
observe the same.” It is indeed blue in many places,
as if a summer shower of blue rain had fallen from
an unclouded sky, and the small stems were still
beaded with the drops; but by-and-by, as you walk
over the downs, you will find—if you do observe the
same—that the flower is getting a paler and paler

THE LIVING GARMENT 55

blue, and finally your little milkwort is seen to be
purest white. Continuing your walk again, you will
soon be in some place where the tiny bird-blossom
will have a rosy blush, and to the blushing flowers
will succeed pink, then red, then purple, and then
blue again. It is interesting to note that the different
colours are not often seen together, or in one place.
Blue, white, pink, and purple flowers are all at some
distance apart, although all may be found on one
hill, with flowers of intermediate shades between.
Thus we see that in this species the colour is not
fixed and the mark of a distinct variety, as in the
pimpernel and other species which produce flowers
of different colours. The colour of the milkwort
probably depends on the character of the soil, or
some other local condition. Has any one ever tried
the experiment of growing the plant in beds from
seeds produced by flowers of different colours?
Observant old Gerarde described them all separ-
ately, and made their number six. “The fourth
kind,” he says, “is like the last in every respect,
but that it hath white floures, otherwise it is very
like.” Then he says: “The purple milkwort
differeth from the others in the colour of its floures,
wherein especially consisteth the difference.” And
finally, his sixth milkwort “is like unto the rest in
each respect, saving that the floures are of an over-
worn ill-favoured colour, which maketh it to differ
from the others of its kind.”

56 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

Next to the delight of flowers themselves is to
me that of listening to the old herbalist discoursing
of the same; and this would I say of no other work
on plant lore, for these are mostly a weariness to read.
The old author is simple, not concerning himself
over much about the reason of things, or as he would
say he loveth not to dance in quagmires. And some-
times he is almost childlike in his repetitions and
reaffirmations; but the colour of his style is never
overworn, and he is for ever fresh and full of variety
and agreeable surprises, like Nature herself, who
maketh her plants not for meat and medicine only,
but some to be esteemed for beauty alone, and as
garlands and crowns for pleasure. Indeed, there is
not seldom a lustre in his words that serves to re-
mind one of the red whortle he greatly admired, which
is full of juice of so orient and beautiful a colour to
limn withal that Indian lacca cannot be compared
thereunto. Nor let it be forgot that it was he who
invented the name of Traveller's Joy; and by in-
creasing the pleasure which all have in that green
and silver adorner of our country waysides and hedges,
may even be said to have added something to
nature.

It would not be possible to mention all nor half
the numerous small pretty flowering herbs that
mingle their roots in the close matting of the turf
that covers the sheep-fed downs; but a word must
be said of the eycbright, that minute shrub a couple

THE LIVING GARMENT 57

of inches high, deepest green in colour, with many
small yet conspicuous blossoms, white and rose
colour, streaked with purple, and for the pupil of its
eye, one spot of divine yellow. It is a flower that
brightens the eye that sees it, since no person can
look at it and not feel gladdened at the sight. It
blossoms from July to October, and I always find it
on very steep slippery downs, often where the chalk
crops out of the thin soil, and I imagine the cause
of this to be that this plant to save itself must be
out of reach of the nibbling sheep. All other herbs
may be eaten down often to the roots without being
destroyed or defeated in their object of ripening their
seed at last; but at the slightest pull the eyebright
comes up, root and branch, and I think that most
if not all of the plants that grow on accessible ground
must get eaten up before they can ripen their seed.
Why the plant comes up so easily in the sheep's
mouth, or in your hand if you attempt ever so gently
to pull one small flowering branchlet, is the eye-
bright’s secret. The plant is supposed to be a semi-
parasite that feeds on the roots of other plants, and
on examining a piece of turf you find that its root-
stems scarcely penetrate to the soil under the mat of
roots of the other plants; that from its root-stems
very fine hair-like fibres branch out, and are loosely
fastened to the grass roots; but whether these fine
fibres suck the sap of the roots they attach them-
selves to, or merely feed on exudations and other

58 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

neglected or rejected materials, the botanists are not
yet able to tell us.

Among the numerous small blooms of the downs,
a few of which I have named, there is one that is
big comparatively —the largest, most conspicuous,
and most generally distributed all over the chalk
hills. This is the dwarf or plume thistle. Its
leaves you do not notice, nor even see unless you
look for them, for like the plantain leaves they are
found close to the ground; sewn, so to speak, into
the fabric of the turf. The solitary flower-head is
practically stemless, and rests like a cup or vase on
the earth—a great amethyst among gems of other
colours and of smaller size.

Though it looks so big among the little blooms,
you see that it is not really big when the queen
humble-bee drops upon it and well-nigh blots out
its purple dise with her large, black, hairy body.

CHAPTER IV

A FAIRY FAUNA

Insect life of the downs—Common snail—Adder-like colouring of
some snails—The “thrushes’ anvil”—Eccentric motions of
flies—Peculiar colouring of some flies—The cow-dung fly
—A thyme-loving fly—Butterflies—Disposition and habits
of the small blue—Sleep in insects—The humble-bee—Intoxi-
cating effect of thistle flower on bees—The unknown faculties
of insects—De Quincey’s “ gluttonism.”

In the last chapter we had an account of a fairy
flora, as we call the numerous minute herbaceous
plants, mixed with small grasses and clovers, which
clothe the sheep-fed downs in a grassy and flowery
mantle. The fairy flora has a fairy fauna to match
it. Where there is no bush vegetation nor heath
and rough herbage for shelter, there are no birds,
At all events none breed on the naked unsheltered
ground, unless it be a wheatear that makes his nest
in an old rabbit-hole in some open stony spot. But
of the birds and beasts of downland I shall treat in
the next chapter. The creatures that mostly impress
us in all the open shelterless places are the insects.
We think less of the innumerable small inconspicuous
snails, whitey-grey like the small fragments of chalk

seen in the turf; indeed we think of them not at all
59

60 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

unless we hear by chance the crunching of their frail
shells beneath our soles as we walk. Alas that, glad
to exist ourselves, we should thus unwittingly tread
out so many small sparks of life!

A word here about our common banded snail
(Helix nemoralis), which is common everywhere in
the furzy places, but is incapable of existence on the
close-cropped turf. Every one knows how extremely
variable in colour the shell of this snail is; in every
garden a pretty collection may be made of shells,
red, yellow, cream, and brown of many shades; shells
marked and unmarked, with great variety, too, in
their markings. Now most of the shells I see on
the downs are of one type; indeed, you may in
some parts search the furzy spots for miles without
getting a snail of any other type. The ground colour
is yellow, or yellowish white, with broad black longi-
tudinal bands. Not only is it a most conspicuous
coloration, but seen casually down among the vivid
green of the furze and herbage it often startles a person
by its curiously close resemblance to a small portion of
a highly-coloured adder’s coil. This chance resemblance
to a dangerous creature does not, however, serve the
snail as a protection from his principal enemies, the
thrushes. Wherever there is a patch of furze there
you will find the “thrushes’ anvil,” usually a flint half
or nearly quite buricd in the soil a few feet away from
the bushes, and all round the anvil the turf is strewn
with shattered shells,

A FAIRY FAUNA 61

To return to the insects of the downs. Of these
flies thrust themselves most on our attention; it is,
in fact, impossible to overlook creatures that conduct
themselves in so wildly eccentric a manner. One big
yellow fly like a honey-bee comes directly at you with
a loud hostile hum or buzz, hovers for a few moments,
dashes away in a straight line, turns off at a tangent,
and, rushing back again, proceeds with extraordinary
velocity to describe curves and circles, parallel lines,
angles, and other geometric figures, in the air; and
finally drops down within a few inches of you, to
remain motionless as a fly carved out of a yellow pebble
until the impulse sends him off again. What his
motives are, what it all means, we are unable to guess;
we can only conclude in our ignorance, judging from
appearances, that he is mad; that, in fact, the pro-
verbial March hare is a pre-eminently sane and sensible
creature in comparison. Somewhat of this light-
headedness is, I imagine, seen in most of the flies,
from the burliest bluebottle to the small gilded variety.
What would it be, I wonder, if these minute creatures
grew to the size of ducks and geese? Our whole time
would be spent in watching their amazing, meaningless
antics; nothing else would be talked or even thought
about in the world. In the end, we should become
strictly nocturnal, in order to be out of their way, or
else we should ourselves go mad in their company.

The peculiarity of another species which is like a
house-fly in size and shape is in his colouring; on his

62 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

jet black body he wears a broad transverse crimson
bar. Of this pretty, most singular fly there is a
pleasant story to tell. In August, when he abounds
most, wild thyme is in the height of its blossoming
season in many places on the downs, both in the hills
and in the deep vales and hollows; and its round
patches of deep green creeping plants, purpled over
with bloom, are exceedingly conspicuous on the paler
green or yellow or grey-brown of the turf. To these
small islands of fragrance the fly resorts, and the
whole island or patch may sometimes be found swarm-
ing with them.

Does the unentomological reader happen to know
an insect, a fly, of quaint and curious aspect, known to
many persons by the good honest vernacular name of
cow-dung fly, and regarded by some good people as an
ugly, repulsive-looking, hump-backed, hairy creature ?
It is an Asilus—a big fly that slays and devours other
flies, even as we kill and eat cows, sheep, and many
other creatures more innocent and beautiful than our-
selves. In spring this fly spreads all over the country,
especially in meadows and grass lands, where he ex-
hibits that extraordinary predilection for cow-dung
which gives him his name. To a piece of fresh cow-
dung they flock in such numbers that it is soon covered
with a dense mass of them, their yellow, hairy, round-
backed bodies making it look like an embossed mound
of dark gold. The exact hue closely resembles what
we call “old gold,” or gold without the glint. When

A FAIRY FAUNA 63

disturbed they rise up with a loud buzz like a swarm
of angry wasps, and after wheeling about in a confused,
noisy cloud for a few moments they settle again, and
the mound of old gold is formed once more. It is a
fascinating sight; and a nature-lover of a sensibility as
exquisite as that of Charles Lamb, when he looked
at the Fleet Street crowd at eleven o'clock at night,
might, too, shed “tears of happiness at the sight of so
much life.”

Now, just as the cow-dung attracts the great
golden fly, so does the purple patch of thyme attract
the smaller crimson-banded fly of the downs. I
suppose it is the scent that draws him, and possibly
they go to it more for pleasure than profit; at all
events, they are not so much occupied in feeding on
the flowers as in rapidly moving about over and
among them; not flying but creeping and running
hither and thither, crossing and recrossing each other’s
track in every direction, a maze of black and red flies
performing a sort of complicated dance, all agitating
and waving their glistening wings, as if that bath of
sweetness had made them mad with delight.

Some of my readers may be inclined to ask—
Why, when describing an interesting habit of any
creature, do I not give the scientific name? Well,
it would undoubtedly be easy to do so in some
cases; for instance, when speaking of the common
or house sparrow, or the stag-beetle, it would be
easy to follow the example of those writers who

64 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

besprinkle their pages with the learned names of
every familiar creature. But the flies are a small and
an exceedingly numerous people. When you happen
on a fly that by chance draws your attention by its
curious actions or appearance, it is not so easy as
the uninformed person may think to give it a name;
I have tried it and therefore know. I have consulted
books and books, and found not what I sought: I
have also consulted entomologists, and they have
asked me in a tone of surprise and mild remon-
strance if I had taken them for Dipterists, when, as
I ought to have known, they were Lepidopterists, or
else Coleopterists. This is indeed the poor, puzzled
field naturalist’s great trouble, that so many mono-
graph compilers occupy themselves with these two
great orders of insects, while other orders, just as
interesting when you come to look at the creatures,
are neglected. Well, it is a comfort to hear that
there is a Dipterist in England, and that he has
nearly finished writing the very book that many of
us want—a monograph of the British flies.

Butterflies are abundant; a brimstone yellow shin-
ing in the sunlight has a very splendid appearance
as he flutters airily by you on his way; but the
larger brilliant-coloured species rest not here, where
the green flowery surface is too smooth for them.
The red admiral is common enough in furzy places;
but on the close-cropped turf the largest butterfly is
the grey heath—the sedentary “gatekeeper,” who

A FAIRY FAUNA 65

seldom flies until disturbed. A brown, a skipper, the
small heath, a small copper—these are some of the
most common species. Most abundant is the little
pale blue of the chalk downs; in fact, he outnumbers
all the others together. Sitting on the grass, you can
sometimes count as many as thirty or forty fluttering
about in sight and near you at one time. It is curious
to note that the hue of the sky and atmosphere
on this insect’s wings appears to have “entered his
soul,” to make him more aérial in habits, more light-
hearted and playful in disposition than his other-
coloured relations. If one has ever seen the great
blue Morpho butterfly of the tropics, one recalls its
wonderful beauty, soaring high in the sunlight, its
colour changing in depth at every moment; now
pale as our pale little blue of the downs, now azure,
now deepest sapphire; and now flashing white as
polished silver, or as crystal. This is the angel
among butterflies, as our small blue of the downs
is the fairy; and, wide apart as they are, it is the
heavenly hue in both that distinguishes them above
other creatures of their class.

As a compensation for their greater activity the
little blues have a shorter day than the other kinds;
like little children who have been running about
playing all day long, they go to bed early. Before
six o’clock, when other butterflies are still abroad
and active, when the sun is more than two hours

from setting, and the humble-bee has yet two hours
E

66 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

of labour before him, they are tired out and their
briefer day is finished. Now most butterflies when
they go to rest tumble anyhow into bed; in other
words, they creep or drop into the herbage, take
hold of a stem, and go to sleep in any position,
their appearance being that of a dead or faded leaf.
The blue has a quite different habit. As a rule, even
where the down is smoothest and without shelter,
there exist slight hollows or depressions, where the
grass is higher and rougher than in other places;
and to such spots the blues gather from all around ;
but instead of creeping down into the grass, they
settle on the very tips of the dry bents. At some
spots in an area of a few square yards they may
be found in scores; one or two or three, and some-
times as many as half-a-dozen, on one bent, sitting
head down, the closed wings appearing like a sharp-
pointed grey leaflet at the end of the stem. It is
hard to believe that they can really be asleep, sitting
thus exposed, their great black eyes looking very wide
awake, the afternoon sun pouring its light into their
tiny brains; but when touched they scarcely move,
and they will even suffer you to pick them off and
replace them on the bent without flying away; and
there they will remain through the night, however
strong the wind may blow.

What we call sleep in an insect resembles the
somnambulistic state, rather than sleep as we experi-
ence it. Thus this resting butterfly can be made to

A FAIRY FAUNA 67

act, and he usually does the right thing. He keeps
his hold on the bent when the wind beats, and when
after being plucked off he is replaced, he grasps it
firmly again; finally, when tossed up, he flies away
and slants down until he touches the grass, then
fastens himself once more to a stem; but there is no
doubt that he does it all unconsciously, like a person
in a hypnotic condition doing what he has been willed
to do.

The little blue butterfly’s habit of roosting on the
tips of the bents is, I imagine, advantageous, and may
be one cause of the abundance of this species, At
sunset, if you narrowly observe the ground in one of
those depressions or hollows where the grass grows
thickest and tallest, and which are the sleeping-places
of all the small butterflies and other diurnal insects of
the downs, you will be surprised at the number of the
rapacious species of various kinds to be seen busily
quartering the ground like so many wood-ants in quest
of prey. They do not climb to the tops of the smooth
slender bents, and the small blue is therefore safe from
them; but it is a wonder that any of the skippers and
other species that creep into the shelter of the grass
should escape the multitude of insect foxes, cats, and
weasels prowling about in search of a meal.

‘When all the small butterflies and diurnal flies and
beetles and the quaint goat-faced grasshopper have
gone to rest, the humble-bee is still at work. No short
day for him! (J¢ or her it ought to be, but let that

68 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

pass.) He reminds me of a London omnibus-driver
who was talked to by a zealous Socialistic friend of
mine on the advantages of an eight hours’ day. His
reply was, “I don’t at all hold with them principles.
’Ain’t a day got twenty-four hours? And what does
that mean? It means, I take it, that there’s twelve
hours for work and twelve for rest. Half one and
half the other. There’s no getting over that—it’s too
plain. [ve always worked twelve hours a day, and,
say what you like, I ain’t going against nature.”

That is also the humble-bee’s philosophy; but
although he is very stable-minded there are moments
when he is tempted to depart from it. The thistle
flower overcomes him with its deliciousness, and he
will stick to it, feasting on its sweets, forgetful of the
community’s claim on him and of the law of his being,
until he is no longer in a fit condition to go home.
At all events, he refuses to do so. Walking about on
the downs in the fading light you will find the belated
reveller half buried in the purple disc, clasping it
affectionately to his bosom; and however stupefied
with nectar he may seem, you will observe that he
still continues to thrust at the small tubular florets
with his proboscis, although probably with a very un-
certain aim. If you compassionately touch him with
a finger-tip to remind him of the lateness of the hour,
he will lurch over to one side and put out one or two
of his anterior legs or arms to make a gesture waving
you off. And if your ears were tuned to catch the

A FAIRY FAUNA 69

small inaudible sounds of nature, you would doubtless
hear him exclaiming with indistinct utterance, “Go
"way; for goo’ness sake don't ’sturb me; lemme be—
Pm a’ right.”

It is noticeable that even in his cups he never
wholly loses the characteristic dignity of manner
coupled with gentleness we so greatly admire in him.
There may be in his order creatures equally intelli-
gent, but morally, or at all events in manner, he is
decidedly their superior. So peaceable and mild in
disposition is he, so regardful of the rights of others,
even of the meanest, that he will actually give place
to a fly coming to feed at the same flower. It is on
this account that, alone among insects, the humble-bee
is universally regarded with esteem and affection, In
his virtues, and in all that is best in him, he is very
human. It is therefore not strange, during a late
walk, when we bid good-night and good-bye to the
darkening downs, that it grieves us a little to find so
estimable an insect in such a plight.

We often say, and it is easily said, that this or
that animal is human-like; but if the truth could be
known about such matters we should probably find
that the social humble-bee, with all his virtues, is just
as far removed from us as any other creature with an
articulated cylindrical body. It is sad to think, or so
it appears to me after a day agreeably spent on the
downs in the society of this small people, that in spite
of all our prying into nature’s secrets, all our progress

70 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

and the vast accumulations of knowledge at our dis-
posal, we do not and never can know what an insect
knows or feel what it feels. What appearance this
visible world has to an eye with twenty thousand facets
toit is beyond our power to imagine or conceive. Nay,
more, we know that these small bodies have windows
and avenues which ours are without; that they are
conscious of vibrations which for us do not exist;
that millions of “ nimble emanations,” which miss us
in spite of our large size, hit them. We can gaze
through a magnifying glass at certain of their complex
organs of sense, but cannot conjecture their use. They
are as great a mystery or as meaningless to us as our
most delicate and complicated scientific instruments
would seem to a wild man of the woods. If it were
not for our limitations—if we could go a little beyond
our tether—we could find out the cause of the seem-
ingly mad behaviour of the fly.

De Quincey wrote very prettily about what he called
“ gluttonism ”—the craving of the mind to know and
enjoy all the good literature and music and art work
that had been produced ; and finally to know the lives
of all men—all who are living and all who had lived
on the earth. It strikes one that this craving, as he
described it, though he says that it afflicts us all, and
that he himself had been reduced to an extremity of
wretchedness by it, must be set down as one of the
many inventions of that fascinating but insincere writer.
Speaking for myself, if the power to attain to all that

A FAIRY FAUNA 71

De Quincey craved, or pretended that he craved for,
were mine, I should not value it; I should give it all
to be able to transform myself for the space of a
summer's day into one of these little creatures on the
South Downs; then to return to my own form and
place in nature with a clear recollection of the wonder-
land in which I had been. And if, in the first place,
I were permitted to select my own insect, I should
carefully consider them all, since they differ as greatly
from each other as bird from serpent, and fish from
mammal. I should pass in review the slow beetle,
heavily armoured, and the fantastic fly, a miracle of
inconsequence; the esteemed humble-bee, and the
wasp, that very fine insect gentleman in his mood of
devilish cheerfulness; the diligent ant, absorbed in
his minute business; the grasshopper, with his small
stringed instrument and long grave countenance; and
the dragon-fly, with those two great gem-like orbs that
reflect a nature of an unimaginable aspect. And after
all I should make choice of the little blue butterfly,
despite his smallness and frivolity, to house myself in.

The knowledge of that strange fairy world it inhabits
would be incommunicable, like the vision vouchsafed
to some religionist of which he has been forbidden
to speak; but the memory of it would be a secret
perennial joy.

CHAPTER V

WILD LIFE

Wild life confined to the furze—The rabbit and his enemy—The
fox abundant—A badgers’ earth—Tenacity of the badger—
Dead shrews—Moles without water—Catching moles for fun—
A shepherd on moles—Birds—Extinct species—A shepherd’s
reminiscences—Buzzards building on bushes—Black game in
Ashdown Forest—The last stone curlew—Long-eared owl—
Pre-natal suggestion in the lower animals—Existing large birds
—A colony of gulls at Seaford—Kestrel preying on grass-
hoppers—Turtle-dove—Missel-thrush and small birds—Wheat-
ears and sea-poppies—Shrike—The common lizard’s weakness
—Sheep killed by adders—Beauty of the adder—A handful of
adders—Shepherd boy and big snake.

THE very small animal life, the fairy fauna as I have
called it, is that of the close-cropped turf; the larger
wild life of bird and beast and reptile is almost exclu-
sively confined to the rough spots overgrown with
furze, bramble, and other bush and dwarf-tree vege-
tation, in some places intermixed with bracken and
heather. These rough isolated places are sometimes
like islands on a wide expanse of smooth turf; and for
those who love wildness, and wild creatures, they are
often delightful spots in which to spend a long summer’s
day. Here the creatures live a comparatively undis-
turbed life; at all events it may be said that they are

not much disturbed by man out of the shooting and
72

WILD LIFE 73

hunting seasons. There are partridges, mostly red-
legs, and a few wild pheasants in some places, and
rabbits everywhere. Seeing these last so abundant,
and so tame in the presence of man, one might
imagine that an island of furze on the downs is a

GULLS ON SEAFORD CLIFF

perfect paradise for bunny all the summer long; but
it is not so; his chiefest and most subtle enemy, the
fox, is always lurking near, watching him in all his
outgoings and incomings. I doubt that foxes are any-
where in England more numerous than in some of the

74 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

furze-grown places on the South Downs. It is true
they are hunted in their season, else they would not be
in existence at all, but I do not think that more than
one fox in every six or eight born each year is killed
by the hounds. How they are kept within reasonable
limits I cannot say; I can only say that some of them
do meet with a violent death, during the summer
months, in spite of the strong feeling in favour of their
preservation among the farmers. As a rule the farmer
declines to make any claim for lambs destroyed, and if
his wife sends in a claim for a dozen or twenty chickens
taken, she gets a sympathetic message, possibly a pair
of gloves, from the M.F.H., and there the matter ends.
Still, the red rascal does often meet with his deserts;
I have found foxes at midsummer, in fine condition
and with a splendid coat of hair, lying dead among the
furze, and could only say, “Careless fellow! you have
gone and got yourself bitten by an adder, and there’s
an end of you.”

In spite of hounds and “ adders,” the fox continues
only too numerous. In the course of one morning’s
walk I have come upon four foxes in a furzy down,
and where I saw four there must have been forty.

The badger, too, still exists in some of the rough
furzy spots. At one place in the South Downs I
discovered an earth in the centre of a large clump
of old furze, mixed with elder bushes, growing on an
exceedingly steep slope, where a man could hardly
stand upright. In the middle of the clump there

LNAINdYVOSY HLYON *+SNMOCQ HLAOS FHL

bb Ql db

WILD LIFE 75

were five great holes and an enormous heap of flints
and lumps of hard chalk, many of them weighing
six to seven pounds. These badgers must indeed
have possessed an amazing strength to make their
earth in such a place. The trunks and low horizontal
branches of the elder bushes had been used, some
to rub their hide on and some to clean their clay-
covered feet, so that some were rubbed smooth and
others plastered with clay. The floors of the burrows
as far down as one could see and feel were thickly
carpeted with freshly gathered moss, carried down
to form the nest.

It struck me very forcibly when viewing this earth,
and thinking of its occupant’s tremendous power,
tenacity, and hardiness, and of his excessive shyness
and strictly nocturnal habits, that, in spite of his rarity,
he may yet win in the race of life with his more
numerous and protected neighbour, the fox. That
fox-hunting will eventually die out as a national
sport in this country is now a common belief even
among those who pursue it with the greatest en-
thusiasm; and when that time arrives there will
be nothing to save the fox from the fate of the wolf,
the marten, and the wild cat; unless indeed a new
sentiment should spring up in the place of the existing
one to preserve him as a member of the British fauna
—a sentiment similar to that which has preserved the
useless heron in this country, and is now saving the
golden eagle from extermination in the north of

76 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

Scotland. It is so easy to kill the fox, and he is
such a destructive beast, that half a century hence
we can imagine the farmer and henwife saying, “If
the fox is wanted alive for the sake of his beauty,
or for some such reason, the good people who want
him must pay for his keep, otherwise it must be a
life for a life.”

But the badger is not destructive; or at all events
the damage he inflicts on the farmer is comparatively
insignificant, and he is very very hard to kill. Though
our largest savage beast he has, up till now, maintained
his existence throughout the length and breadth of
the land, in spite of much persecution; and we now
see that there is growing up a feeling in favour of
his preservation, which will make his position safer.

T learned on inquiry that the badgers whose earth
I had found were not in any danger of being disturbed,
and I was told of a second earth a few miles from
the first where the animals were also allowed to be
at peace,

The stoat is not uncommon on the downs, and
loyally aids the fox in his labour of keeping the
rabbits down. The common shrew also abounds,
although these high and excessively dry hills strike
one as a most unsuitable district for such an animal.
And here as in other places it is a common thing
to find these quaint little creatures lying dead in bare
open spots. All the dead shrews I have examined
on the downs had been killed, and from the crushed

WILD LIFE rie!

condition of some of them I take it that the fox, like
the cat and some other rapacious creatures, mammal
and bird, often kills him on sight and only discovers
afterwards that he has got a shrew instead of a mouse.

The mole is not universal; indeed on many hills
no traces of him are to be seen, but he is common
nevertheless, and on some of the high South Downs
exceedingly abundant. Seeing him so numerous at
the very highest points—the summit of Ditchling Hill
and the long ridge extending from Ditchling Beacon
to Mount Black-cap—the thought came into my
mind that the moles were not like the birds and
like myself, merely visitors on these heights, but old
residents, and that their colonies had doubtless existed
for scores and for centuries of years. And yet how
could this be, since there is no water? For we have
been taught to believe that the mole is a thirsty
creature, that he must drink often, or at regular
intervals, and drink deeply; and that to satisfy this
want he makes runs to the nearest water-course, that
when there is no stream or pond near he sinks a
well. Here there are no water-courses, and the
dew ponds, few and far between, were all dried up
during the excessively hot summer of 1899. The
mole could not possibly sink a well in that hard
chalk. Even human beings cannot do it. The few
cottages that exist in this neighbourhood have no
wells. The cottagers depend on the rain-water they
cateh and store, and when this is consumed in summer

78 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

they have to go a distance of three or four miles
for a supply. Yet here on the highest point, nearly
a thousand feet above the flat country of the weald,
the nearest place where it would be possible for them
to obtain water, with nothing but the thin crust of
soil above the hard chalk for them to live and move
in, the moles were most abundant and active during
the hot dry summer months.

One hot July morning, about ten o’clock, I was
standing on Ditchling Hill looking at the hundreds
of fresh mounds which the moles had been throwing
up, and finding that they were still at work, it sud-
denly struck me that it would be a good plan to cap-
ture one of the industrious little beggars to ask him
to tell me the secret of his presence in that waterless
land. It is always best to go to the fountain-head for
information. After a little watching I detected a
movement in the loose earth in the last mound of a
long row of hills marking the course of a new run,
Placing myself over the mound I waited till it stirred
again, then plunged my hand into the loose earth and
grabbed at the little beast, but he slipped like quick-
silver out of my hand and was gone. I very soon
found another mole at work throwing up earth a foot
or so in advance of a chain of seventeen hills of fresh
dark mould all in a line. Altering my simple tactics,
I thrust the point of my stick into the sod a few
inches back from the point where he was working,
and so cut off his retreat, and then caught and pulled

WILD LIFE 79

him out. I have, first and last, interviewed a good
many moles and know their disposition pretty well,
but the extreme excitability and violence of this mole
of the high downs fairly surprised me. Taking him
to a spot where there was a smooth, close, hard turf, I
released him, when, finding that he could not break
through the matted roots and bury himself in the soil,
he began to act in the maddest way, wriggling his
body and dashing himself on the ground, screaming
all the time as if some one was murdering him, although
I was not touching nor even standing very near him.
It was useless to interrogate so irrational a creature;
and leaving him. to make his way back to his own
subterraneous city, or Welbeck Abbey, I walked on still
occupied with my mole problem. I could not sup-
pose that want of water had made this individual mad,
seeing that he was sleek and well nourished and had
struggled powerfully when I had held him in my
hand. If I, so much bigger than a mole, had his
strength and shape I could move mountains.

Walking on I met an intelligent-looking shepherd,
who was, I found, a good observer and something of a
naturalist; and to him I put the question that occu-
pied me. He told me that he had been shepherding on
these hills above forty years, and the moles had always
been there where they had no water to drink. “They
must drink or die,” said I: “it is down in the books,
and therefore it must be true.” He shook his head
at the books and replied that the moles come out at

80 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

night to lick the grass—the dew was enough for thein.
“Tf that is so,” I said, “then they must die of thirst
in seasons when there is no dew.” “They do die,” he
answered ; “in very dry windy summers, when there
is no dew, you find a good many moles lying about
dead on these hills every morning.” He added that
they did not all die; that a year or so after a time of
great mortality they became numerous again.

The story I had heard of the moles dying in num-
bers when there was no moisture to be got from the
grass was afterwards confirmed by other persons whom
I questioned on the subject—some of them shepherds,
and some men of other occupations whose lives had
been passed among the downs. Yet I could not say
that the books are entirely wrong in what they tell
us: it is a fact, I believe, that in lowlands where ac-
cess to the water is easy moles do drink at regular
intervals, and must drink to live; and we may believe
that the hill-top moles in the course of long centuries,
probably thousands of years, have become inured to
other conditions, and, like many mammals found in
waterless deserts, are able to exist without drinking.
Moles transplanted from the lowlands would doubtless
quickly perish on these hills.

When we come to the bird life of the downs we
find that the species are not many. Nevertheless,
there is more to be said about the birds than the

WILD LIFE 81

mammals of this district, and much that I have to
say about them must be reserved for other chapters.
It may be said, without injustice, that Sussex has
distinguished itself above all counties, with perhaps
the exception of Norfolk, in the large number of
native species it has succeeded in extirpating during
the present century. From its forest and heath lands,
its marshes and shingled flats, its cliffs and downs,
the following species among others of less account
have disappeared: the raven, kite, common buzzard
and honey buzzard, hen harrier and Montagu’s harrier :
of shore birds and terns, several species: bittern and
reed pheasant, bustard, stone curlew, blackcock, chough,
guillemot, razor-bill, kittiwake, and shag. Augustus
Hare, in his lately published work Sussex, speaks of
Beachy Head as a haunt of thousands of sea-fowl—
puffins, seagulls, choughs, &c. Bless the man! he
is many years behind the times. On all the fifteen
miles of precipitous chalk cliffs extending from Beachy
Head to Brighton the only birds to be seen now are
those commonest universal cliff-breeders, the herring-
gull and jackdaw, and a few kestrels. The one sur-
viving pair of peregrine falcons that haunt this coast
have in recent years been annually robbed of their
eggs or young.

It is not possible, said to me a gentleman residing
on this south coast a year or two ago, for any man
to see a large rare bird and not “go for it.” The

pleasure of shooting it is too great to be resisted,
F

82 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

however sorry he may be that all these fine birds
are being exterminated throughout the country. If
he is not himself a collector he will be sure to have
a friend or neighbour who is, and who will be de-
lighted to have a Sussex-killed raven, spoonbill, honey
buzzard, or stone curlew sent him as a present.

This he said to me in explanation of his motives
in shooting a buzzard.

I will here quote a passage touching on the bird
life of the South Downs, in the early years of this
century, from M. A. Lower’s account of the shepherd’s
life in his Contributions to Literature (London, 1854).
“Here are,” Lower says, “the very words of one
now dead, who had himself carried the shepherd’s
crook and worn the shepherd’s greatcoat for many
years on these hills :—

“<The life of a shepherd in my young days was
not the same as it is now. ... You very seldom see
a shepherd’s hut on our hills in these times, but
formerly every shepherd had one. Sometimes it was
a sort of cave dug in the side of a bank or link, and
had large stones inside. It was commonly lined with
heath or straw. The part aboveground was covered
with sods of turf, or heath, or straw, or boughs of
hawth. In rough, shuckish weather, the shepherd
used to turn into his hut and lie by the hour to-
gether, only looking out once in a while to see that
the sheep didn’t stray too far. Here he was safe
and dry, however the storm might blow overhead,

WILD LIFE 83

and he could sit and amuse himself as he liked best.
Tf he could read so much the better. It was in my
hut, over in the next bottom to this, that I first read
about Moses and his shepherding life, and about
David’s killing of the lion and the bear. Ah, how
glad I felt that we hadn’t such wild beasties to
frighten and maybe kill our sheep and us. The
worst we ever had to fear were the foxes that some-
times killed a young lamb or two. But there was
otherwhile a crueller than that. If a ewe happened
to get overturned on a lonesome part of the hill
the ravens and carrion crows would come and pick
out her eyes before she was dead. This happened
to two or three of my ewes, and at last I got an
old gun and shot all the crows and ravens I could
get nigh. Once I shot an eagle, but that was the
only eagle I ever saw. Since the hills have been
more broken by the plough such birds are but
seldom seen. There haven’t been any wild turkeys
either for many a year. I have heard my father
say he killed two or three no great while before I
was born; they used to call them bustards, There
used to be a good many buzzards on the hill when
I was a boy. They did no hurt to the sheep, but
they destroyed the game and the chickens. Once
I set up a pair of clams for one in a thorn-bush in
Box-holt Bottom, and when I went to look the next
morning I found my bird catched by the legs. He
was such a great fellow that I was afraid to tackle

84 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

him, and was obliged to fetch him several raps
over the head with my hook, which brought him
sprawling, clams and all, to the ground, and I had
a great to-do before I could kill him. Mottly
Simmonds, a shepherd’s boy that I once knew, put
a long bit of string with a running knot to it round
a buzzard’s nest that he’d found in the hawth upon
Norton Top, and when he saw her a-coming he got
ready, and as soon as she was settled he pulled the
string and catched her round both legs.”

Old men of eighty or more who have shepherded
on these downs may still remember when buzzards
occasionally built their nests on a hawth or furze
bush; to others it sounds like a story of ancient
times, a picture of wild-bird life of the days when
great bustards roamed in flocks on the downs and
white spoonbills nested on the trees of West Dean,
near Chichester.

The extermination of the black grouse is even
more recent. The Rev. Edward Turner, in a paper
printed in the Sussew Archeological Collections, vol.
xiv. p. 62, writes as follows: “Ashdown Forest was
well stocked with black game. So numerous were
these birds at the commencement of the present
century that it was hardly possible to ride or walk
about it in any direction without disturbing some of
them. At that time the forest was thickly covered
with heath, but since then this has been so generally
cut and carried away that the black game, deprived

WILD LIFE 85

of the food and shelter they so much delight in,
have gradually disappeared, and in this locality are
now very rarely to be met with. This is to be de-
plored, for an old blackcock, with his forked tail
and glossy sable plumage, is one of the finest of the
British birds.”

Of the species that have been extirpated on, the
downs, just now one is inclined to most keenly regret
the stone curlew, not only because it is a fine big
bird, singularly interesting in its habits, and possessing
a powerful wild cry to gladden the souls of those
who hear it, but also because its loss is so recent.
In the early part of the century it was quite common
on the downs, and bred on all the barren stony spots
on the highest hills, as well as on the extensive
shingly flats on the Pevensey coast. In spite of in-
cessant persecution it clung to its ancient southern
haunt, and succeeded each year in rearing a few young
down to about twenty-five to thirty years ago. The
shepherds knew it well, and the old and middle-aged
men among them have many stories of their own
experiences in hunting for its two stone-coloured eggs
in the flinty places. During the last quarter of a
century it has trembled on the verge of extinction,
and I think I can say with truth that it is now, like
the great bustard, nothing but a memory. One pair
bred not far from Chanctonbury Ring about four or
five years ago. In the spring of 1897 another pair
bred on a down south of the village of Jevington,

86 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

and the eggs were found by a shepherd and given
by him to “the young squire,” the landlord’s son,
for his collection. In July this year (1899) I dis-
turbed a stone curlew on the same down; a solitary
bird, probably a survivor of the pair that tried to
breed here two years before, revisiting his old home.
And perhaps that wild yet human-like whistle it
uttered in my hearing was its last farewell to
downland.

It will be newsto most naturalists that the long-
eared owl frequented and probably bred in the thorn,
holly, and furze patches among the South Downs until
recently. I had this from the same observant shep-
herd who enlightened me about the moles, and the
information came out incidentally. He was telling
me of some curious experiences and of curious things
he had seen during the long years of his shepherding
on these hills; and related that about fifteen years
ago a ewe in his flock dropped a lamb which had a
round flat face with two round staring eyes set close
together in the middle of it, and a nose coming to a
sharp point, and bent downward like a hooked beak.
The lamb appeared healthy and strong at birth, but
it could not suck, its mouth being tightly closed,
and in a day or two it died. Its resemblance to an
owl in its face, he said, was quite wonderful; and it
was his belief that the ewe when feeding among the
furze had come upon an owl sitting in the middle
of a bush, and the shock of suddenly seeing its

WILD LIFE 87

round face and staring eyes had caused that deformed
owlish countenance in the lamb.

His story did not surprise me, although monstrosities
of that kind, which are the result of what my friend.
Mr. Frederic W. H. Myers has called (in the human
subject) “pre-natal suggestion,” are comparatively rare
among the lower animals. My belief is that they are
very much more frequent among domestic than among
wild animals, and that they are more common than
we think. Not one case in a hundred is ever heard
of, and when we do hear of one we are satisfied to
classify it as a “freak of nature.” This, however, does
not explain the fact that a cow, or sheep, or cat, or
some other creature, will occasionally produce an off-
spring in the likeness of another very different animal.
This same shepherd had another case in his flock,
This was of a lamb clothed in a brown fur instead of
wool—the fur, in fact, of a hare, and his belief was
that the ewe, when pregnant, had been frightened by
a hare suddenly jumping out of the heather or bushes
where it had been crouching.

What did surprise me was that this man, with only
the light of nature to go by, had found the right
interpretation of these strange cases. With regard to
the first case, I asked him where on the downs could
a sheep ever see an owl. He then told me that a
good many owls had always inhabited the largest
furze patches, and that he had seen the birds closely
on a good many occasions in the summer months, and

88 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

was quite sure that it was the long-eared owl. He had
never flushed an owl of another species in the downs,
but had occasionally seen a white owl at night or late
in the evening. He believed that the long-eared owl
had now forsaken the downs. But though he was so
positive about his facts, I am still in doubt as to
the species: our memories play strange tricks with
all of us at times; and after all it may have been in
the autumn months that the birds were seen, and that
the species was the world-wandering short-eared owl.

The only comparatively big birds to be met with
now among the downs are those very common species
that visit the district more or less regularly to feed.
Large numbers of rooks from the wooded lowlands
and daws from the sea-cliffs have their favourite
feeding-grounds on the sheep-walks. The black-headed
and common gulls winter on the coasts, and wherever
the land is tilled are seen following the plough in
autumn and spring. The bigger herring-cull breeds
on the cliffs, and may be seen flying over the downs
every day throughout the year. Wood-pigeons, the
kestrel, an occasional sparrowhawk, and a few stray
birds of other rarer species are also to be seen. In
the valleys of the rivers Cuckmere, Ouse, and Arun,
that cut through the range, herons from the Parham
heronry are common. I have frequently seen as
many as a dozen to twenty together in the autumn
months. Peewits and a few redshanks breed in the
valleys in spring.

WILD LIFE 89

I have said that the only sea-bird that now breeds
on the cliffs along the southern edge of the South
Downs is the herring-gull. Their most interesting
colony is at Seaford Head, where I have observed
them during the last three summers. At that spot
they are not decreasing, and they have as neighbours
a large number of jackdaws, and two or three pairs of
kestrels. I have a suspicion that the hawks do not
consider that their eggs and young are safe from
attack by their big loud-voiced neighbours, as I occa-
sionally sce a kestrel rise and furiously buffet the
gulls passing and repassing before its nest on the face
of the cliff.

In the first week of June last I had the good
fortune to see the gulls at this spot in a new and
beautiful aspect. At the top of the cliff, where it is
about four hundred feet high, a quantity of earth has
fallen or crumbled away, leaving a gap about thirty
to forty feet deep, and into this I crept and placed
myself as near the edge as I could safely get. Lying
there perfectly still, the birds, which had been flying
up and down before me uttering their loud anxious
cries, began to settle on all the near projecting pieces
of chalk where they could watch me. By-and-by I
had twenty-four of them all perched close to me,
in pairs or small groups of three or four, some of
them standing on the chalk where it was partly over-
grown with patches of sea-pink, or thrift. The in-
tense whiteness of the sunlit chalk and rosy red of

90 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

the numerous flat little flowers gave a novel and very
beautiful appearance to the birds. For they were very
near, and quite motionless, though clamouring with open
beaks and swollen throats, and all their colours were
clearly visible—the white and tender pale grey of the
plumage, the shining yellow eye and yellow beak, with
its orange-red patch on the lower mandible, and the
flesh-coloured legs.

It is interesting to watch the kestrel in summer,
after his breeding season, hunting for food on the
parched downs. He is most common on the high
ridge on the northern border of the range, overlooking
his woodland home on the flat country below. It
strikes one as curious to see this bird haunting the
same slopes day after day, flying about by the hour,
pausing at intervals to hover motionless for a minute
or so, then dashing down to seize his prey; for you
know that no creature as big as the smallest baby
mouse exists at the spot. The fact is, he is catching
vrasshoppers, which are abundant; and the wonder is
that all this important strategy, these beautiful evolu-
tions and display of wing-power, should be put in
practice for such a purpose. The pipits and larks
creeping on the surface capture and swallow their
grasshoppers without any trouble. But the kestrel
has but one method, and he cannot vary it; he must
look for his quarry when at a height of sixty or
seventy feet from the surface, even if it be a grass-
hopper; and must hover lony as if to take a sure aim,

WILD LIFE 91

and finally precipitate himself upon it with as much
violence as he uses for a mouse or bird.

Another common bird of the downland is the
turtle-dove. A shepherd told me that on the arrival
of these birds last spring a flock of not less than five
hundred fed every day for over a week in some fields
at the foot of Mount Black-Cap, near Lewes. The
birds are certainly very abundant, and wherever there
is a patch of large furze mixed with whitethorn and
bramble bushes you find them breeding in numbers,
their frail platform nests placed four or five feet above
the ground out of reach of the foxes, It is pleasant
to listen to their low monotonous crooning in these
quiet solitary places.

In June the missel-thrushes, after rearing their
young, forsake the woodlands and homesteads of the
weald and the maritime district for the open downs,
and are met with everywhere in small flocks of half-
a-dozen to thirty or forty birds. During the sultry
hours they keep close in the shelter of the furze and
brainble bushes, and when disturbed rush violently
out, emitting their harsh cry, and when flying away
look almost white in the dazzling sunlight.

But the missel-thrush is a gipsy and rover at this
season of the year in all the open treeless districts in
the country. The small breeding species character-
istic of the furze-clad downs are the common bunting
and yellow-hammer, the whitethroat, dunnock, meadow
pipit, stonechat, and whinchat. Most of these vanish

92 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

at the approach of winter, some to seek other
climes, and others, the dunnock included, to spend
the cold months in sheltered situations in the low-
lands.

A few birds of the woods and homesteads also come
in summer to the solitary furze-gardens—thrush and
blackbird, robin, wren, and chaffinch. And here too
you find the red-backed shrike; but he is most
common among the thorns at the foot of the downs
on the north side of the range.

All these birds of the downs, I have said, inhabit
and breed in the furze and other bushes. The sky-
lark and wheatear are exceptions. The skylark is
fairly common all over the hills, and breeds either in
the corn-fields or on the untilled downs where they
are covered with a thick grass which the sheep refuse
to eat. The wheatear does not find many suitable
breeding-places on the smooth turf of the sheep-walks ;
the barren, rough, stony places he loves best are few
and far between. He usually lays his eggs in an old
rabbit-hole on some spot where the chalk and flints
are only partially covered by a scanty turf. At one
spot very near the sea I found ten or twelve pairs
breeding quite close together. And here again, as in
the case of the gulls seen standing on and against the
patches of rose-red sea-pink, 1 came upon a wonderful
flower-and-bird scene and living picture of exquisite
beauty, and saw the pretty wheatear as I had never
seen him before, and most probably shall never see

WILD LIFE 93

him again. The birds were breeding near the top
of a high down where it sloped or dropped very
abruptly to the valley below. It was a rough flinty
place, honeycombed with rabbit-holes, and thickly
grown over with big sea-poppy plants in full blossom.
Lying coiled up in a hollow of the ground I had this
garden of poppies, which covered about half an acre
of ground, all round and above me, and looking up,
the higher graceful grey plants, blossom-crowned, were
seen against the sky. The great flower, as I then saw
it for the first time, its purest yellow made luminous
and brilliant with the sunlight streaming through it,
seen against the ethereal blue beyond, had a new un-
imaginable loveliness. The wheatears were all round
me, some with grubs in their beaks, but not venturing
to enter their nesting-holes, flitting from place to place ;
some remaining in one place to keep watch, others
going and coming. But as time went on, and I still
refused to stir, they grew tired of waiting, and of
uttering their chacking alarm-note and flirting their
pretty tails, and began carrying food into the burrows:
two of these were within a dozen yards of my resting-
place. But even after they had quieted down, at
intervals one of the birds would rise up and suspend
himself motionless in the air and watch me for some
moments. Down at the foot of the hill below me
some of the birds were to be seen hunting for insects
on the lawn-like turf, and as they flew slowly over it,
close to the surface, on rapidly beating wings, they

94 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

had the appearance of great black-winged butterflies
flitting across the green sward.

Near this colony, at a spot where there is a good
deal of furze, I observed that the wheatear, like some
small birds of the woodland, is a great hater of the
red-backed shrike. When attacking he hovers like a
kestrel at a height of eight or ten yards above his
enemy, then dashes down upon him and finally chases
him away. It is not very probable that young wheat-
ears are often or ever attacked by the shrike; but this
pretty little bird looks what he is—a butcher among
birds; and besides, the wheatear has doubtless seen
him attack the young of other species, and slay them
with his hawk-like beak.

A few notes on the reptiles of the downs will
conclude this long chapter on wild life.

The common lizard is found everywhere among
the gorse and heath, but is not so abundant as in
suitable localities in the lowlands. Every one is
familiar with the debilitating or paralysing effect
produced on rabbits and hares by a stoat when he
hunts them; and we are familiar, too, with a similar
weakness in the frog when pursued by a snake. But
it is not known that our common little lizard suffers
in the same way. I do not see how any snake,
even the swift-moving smooth snake that preys almost
exclusively on that creature, could ever catch lizards

WILD LIFE 95

if they were not subject to this singular infirmity.
But the lizard is not so easily overcome with terror,
or hypnotised if any one prefers that word, as the
frog; nor does he appear so weak on the high
downs as I have found him on the heaths of Hamp-
shire and Surrey. He is so alert, and quick to vanish
into cover at the slightest alarm, that it is not nearly
so easy to experiment with the lizard as it is with
the frog. It is in fact exceedingly difficult, and fifty
lizards may be found and not one will wait quietly
to be experimented on. But my experience is that
when a walking-stick is thrust snakewise through the
grass or heath towards the basking lizard, he at once
begins to suffer mysteriously in his brightness and
vigour, and his efforts to escape become feebler while
the hidden imaginary enemy steals after him. On
the downs I found that the stick thrust towards the
lizard in many instances did not produce the debili-
tating effect; but the little creature, instantly changing
his habits, ran quickly to and up a bush. One that I
had frightened with my stick amused me by emerging
on the top of a furze bush, and sitting there, high as
my breast, and safe from snakes as he perhaps thought,
curiously eyed me with his bright bird-like little eyes.

This then is our alert and elusive little lizard’s
weakness, and though I have occasionally played on
it for fun during the last two or three summers, I
pitied him, and was almost sorry that I had found it
out.

96 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

Once only in the South Downs have I seen the
lizard’s worst enemy, the smooth snake. He is like
the creature he pursues, alert and quick to escape,
and may not be quite so rare as we imagine.

The adder is common in suitable places, on the
high slopes, especially where the gorse bushes grow
mixed with heath and tussocky grass. In some spots
they are no doubt very numerous, as a good many
sheep die of adder’s bite. Occasionally a sheep is
bitten in the side, and one can only suppose in such
cases that the animal has lain down on a very sluggish
adder basking in the sun at the side of a furze bush.
But most of the victims are bitten on the nose.
Sheep, I believe, have no instinctive fear of a serpent;
and they are always curious about any odd-looking
object they see, and will go out of their way to smell
at and touch it with their nose: it is not strange that
they occasionally get killed.

I see fewer adders by chance, and am less successful
in finding when I look for them, here than in some
favourite haunts in other southern counties, simply
because I go to the downs in summer and not in early
spring. Those who are familiar with the adder, and
occasionally look for and find him, know that he is
most easily found and oftenest seen by chance when
the year is young. This is not because after his
winter sleep he is still dull of sense, slow to move,
and made drowsy or lethargic by the unaccustomed
heat of the sun. In early spring he is on the con-

WILD LIFE 7

trary more alert, more sensitive to the earth-tremors
that warn him of an approaching danger, than at any
later period, It is certain, too, that the females, when
heavy with young in June and July, are much less
wary and quick to slip away than at other seasons.

In spring, especially in March, when winter is still
in the air, the adder must find a sheltered spot
looking towards the sun; and whether on a bank, or
at the side of a furze or bramble bush, or on the
lower part of any sloping ground, the young spring
grass, or the old pale dead grass and leaves of last
year, serve to show him up. Once your eye has
caught and distinguished his form, it looks strangely
conspicuous—a something separate from the vegeta-
tion it rests upon. He is like a richly coloured or
brightly embroidered garter, or ribbon, dropped by
chance on the pale colourless ground. Seeing him
thus, looking so startlingly bright, so separate from
his surroundings, one is apt to imagine that careful
Mother Nature has not been so careful of her adder
as she has of most of her other weak and _perse-
cuted children. At this early season the adder’s only
protection is his alertness and shy habit.

In summer the case is different, when in place of
the young fresh grass and the pale neutral ground-
tints that make him so conspicuous, there is a rough
surface and a rich and various colouring; and though
not invisible he is not easily distinguishable. On hot

days he does not lie exposed to the sun, but prefers
G

98 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

to rest where grasses and herbage, mixed perhaps with
the feathery foliage of the lower branches of a bush,
shot through and sprinkled and spotted with shifting
sunlight and shadow, make up a broken picture,
the numberless minute details of which you cannot
see separately. If, on such a variegated ground, you
are able to detect and closely regard without alarming
him, you will be rewarded with a very beautiful sight.
You will see that his ground colour, whatever the pre-
cise tint may be, from pale yellow or palest brown, to
a copper or terra-cotta red, assimilates to the colour
of the soil, and to the stems and leaves of ripe
grasses; and that the sand in the earth, the seeding
grasses, and scaly coil, sparkle alike at each point
where a sunbeam touches them. The zigzag band,
too, fits in with the shadows, and is not easily distin-
guishable from the dark wavering lines and spots and
blotches made by twigs and leaves that intercept the
sunlight.

The adders of the downs are not so varied in colour
as in the New Forest, and in most cases have a light
yellowish ground colour with an intense black mark.
Some beautiful varieties are, however, to be seen.
Last summer a shepherd described to me one he had
killed as a very pretty creature, with a bright chestnut
red zigzag band on a whitish body.

At a dinner-table at a village in the downs where
I was staying, I once found it necessary to explain to
the others that it did not make me miserable to be

WILD LIFE 99

out all day, and on most days alone on the downs.
It was, I assured them, a constant pleasure to see the
beautiful creatures there—the birds, the adder, the
fox, and others. After a long silence, a man sitting
opposite to me said, “ Excuse me, sir, but did I under-
stand you to say that you consider the adder a beau-
tiful creature?” I replied in the affirmative, and
after another interval of silence he laid down his
knife and fork and delivered himself as follows:
“Well, that I can’t understand. An adder is an
adder, and there’s no doubt about what a man feels
when he sees it. I have never heard any one till
this moment say the contrary. Most people kill an
adder when they find one. I don’t. When I sud<
denly see an adder before me when I am out walking
or riding, and stop still, and he gives me a look out
of his eyes, and I see that he is just getting ready
to fly at me, I don’t stop to kill him. I’m off. You
call that a beautiful creature—O Lord! The look
in his eyes is quite enough for me.”

This is one and a somewhat extreme view of the
adder’s character. But it comes nearest to the popu-
lar feeling about that creature whose power to harm
us we so greatly exaggerate. Here is a case which
presents us with the opposite extreme. A gentleman
of Bognor, Mr. W. H. B. Fletcher, occasionally amuses
himself by taming adders, which he takes with a
butterfly net on the downs. He is accustomed to
pick up his tame adders by the handful—six or seven

100 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

at a time, all wriggling and winding round and among
his open fingers; and he affirms that after an adder
has been four or five days in his keeping it becomes
so tame that it may be handled with impunity—by
Mr. Fletcher. In fact, his serpents are of so gentle
a disposition that he doubts if it would be possible
to tease them into an attempt to bite him. He has
shown me a collection of photographs, of his hand
grasping a bunch of adders, not to be hurled in anger
and with deadly effect at his enemies, but picked up
simply to show what exceedingly mild and sweet-
tempered creatures they are when you trust them, and
they are accustomed to a human hand. Now it is
coramon knowledge that some persons possess a quality,
or energy, which enables them to handle the most irri-
table and venomous reptiles with safety : a touch of their
hand, and, in some extreme cases, their mere presence
will soothe and make them harmless. I do not say that
it is so in this case. Mr. Fletcher laughs at such an
explanation of his power, and says that he would not
venture to pick up wild adders by their tails, as I
sometimes do. His adders are savage at first, but in
a very short time grow accustomed to the hand, and
may then be taken up and handled by any person.
Dr. Giinther says he has met with cases similar to
the one I have related; and he tells of a gentleman
who, to show how harmless the tamed adder can be
made, is accustomed to put one into the hands of his
little child.

WILD LIFE 101

The ring-snake, though found in the valleys, is
exceedingly rare on the high downs. But the snake
compared with the adder is a great traveller, and he is
sometimes met with miles away from the low meadows
and pasture lands where the frog abides; and I will
conclude this chapter with a strange story of a big
snake found by a shepherd boy on one of the highest
points of the South Downs, between the villages of
Jevington and Willingdon. He was an intelligent
boy of thirteen, and finding him in a lonely spot with
his flock I stopped to have a chat with him, and he
was delighted to talk about the small birds, the foxes,
rabbits, adders, and other inhabitants of the furze
bushes known to him. After some talk I said good-
bye and went on; but had not. walked fifty yards
before he came running after me, to say that he had
forgotten to tell me about the big snake. One day
last summer he was with his flock near a wheat field,
and in the corn he found a skylark’s nest, with five
young birds in it. In the evening he told two of his
playmates about the nest; and next day they all went
together to visit it, and agreed to take the young birds
home and bring them up in cages; and as young larks
usually die when taken small they planned to leave
them in the nest until they were grown and almost
ready to fly. When the proper time came, and the
birds were nearly ready to make their escape, they
went to the field with a cage; but on arriving at the
spot found the nest empty, and a huge snake lying

102 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

coiled up near it. When they discovered it they were
very much afraid, owing to its great size and threat-
ening aspect, as it rose up and hissed loudly at them.
But it moved away very slowly, hindered, like the
famous serpent of Horsham, by “a quantity of thick-
ness in the middle.” Arming themselves with big flints,
they began to stone it, and one sharp flint striking
it with great force cut its body open, when, from the
wound, out fell one of the full-grown young larks.
When they had finished killing the snake, and pressed
its body where the thickness was with their feet, the
other four birds were forced out. They took the
snake home, and all the people in the village came
to look at it, hanging to the branch of a tree; and
the schoolmaster measured it with a foot-rule, and
found that it was exactly four feet in length Its
body, the boy said, was as thick as his arm.

There was nothing incredible in his story. There
are well-authenticated cases, of much bigger snakes,
some six feet long, killed in England. Last summer I
caught and measured four snakes in the New Forest,
and the two biggest were three feet, and three feet
one inch, respectively. If these snakes had been killed
they would probably have measured more, as it is
exceedingly difficult to get the proper length when
they are violently struggling to free themselves, and
contracting their bodies; but I should have been
very sorry to kill one even to add several inches to
its three feet.

CHAPTER VI
THE SHEPHERD OF THE DOWNS

The shepherd as a picturesque figure—His best qualities racial—
The Saxon type predominant in downland—The peasant’s
good looks—A great beer-drinker—Scene in a village public-
house—Bad and good qualities of the peasant—Character in
a small boy—Beauty of person—A labourer’s family—A pet
lamb and the Salvation Army—-A Sussex maid—Persistence of
type—The Culpepper family—The shepherd’s good looks—
Contented minds—A talk with a shepherd.

Tat solitary cloaked figure on the vast round hill,
standing motionless, crook in hand, and rough-haired
dog at heel, sharply seen against the clear pale sky,
is one of those rare human forms in this land, which
do not ever seem out of place in the landscape, It
is undoubtedly a form to attract and fascinate the
eye. But behind the seeing eyes are the differing
busy minds. There are those, for instance, who are
interested solely in the image, the semblance; who
are not, like the fox in the fable, concerned as to what
is inside of a pretty head, but who look on living faces
and forms as on carvings and sculptures in a gallery,
Then, again, there are those who perpetually crave to
get at the human heart in any human figure; who
will go on pushing down or peeping behind screen

after screen, and are never satisfied until they have
103

104 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

seen behind the last screen of all. I am not sure if
these were to follow the downland shepherd to his
lowly home, to converse familiarly every day and live
intimately with him, that they would not be dis-
appointed, and conclude that the differences between
him and others of his rank and race, who have other
occupations—the labourer of the weald for instance—
are very much on the surface and hardly worth
troubling about.

I class myself somewhere between the two ex-
tremes: not satisfied with the mere semblance or
appearance of things, seeing men as trees and rocks,
or as works of art, I am nevertheless not teased—
“tormented,” De Quincey would have written— with
that restless desire to pry into and minutely examine
the secret colour and texture of the mind of every
person I meet. It is the mental attitude of the natu-
ralist, whose proper study is not mankind but animals,
including man; who does not wish to worry his brains
overmuch, and likes to see very many things with
vision a little clearer than the ordinary, rather than
to see a very few things with preternatural clearness
and miss all the rest.

In the case of the downland shepherd, this com-
paratively superficial knowledge which contents me
has made me greatly admire him. That he differs
considerably from others on the surface we cannot
but see; and it would indeed seem strange if this
had not been the case, since the conditions of his life

MOOTY GNV CYdFHdAHS

THE SHEPHERD OF THE DOWNS 105

are and have been for generations unlike those of
other peasants; still, his best and sterling qualities are
undoubtedly of the race. Probably the villagers of
the downs and the weald of Sussex have more Saxon
blood in their veins than the people of any other part
of England: at all events it may, I think, be said that
the Saxon characteristics, physical and moral, pre-
dominate in them. Many of the coast people, those
especially who are seafarers, are markedly of Danish
descent: away from the sea the Saxon type is com-
monest; the round, rosy face, steady, sometimes hard
blue eyes, and light brown hair. Red and yellow
hair, too, is very common—-every shade from the pale
reddish yellow miscalled “ ginger,” to the intense colour
miscalled “carroty,” and the beautiful “ auburn” and
“Venetian ” reds.

They are a good-looking people, and good to live
with, though I do not admire, or perhaps it would be
better to say love, them as much as I do the people
of Somerset. It is probably due to the Celtic blood
in the peasants of that county that gives their women
a softness and sweetness exceeding that of other
counties, a more delicate red colour when they are
young. But the Sussexians, though perhaps not the
best, nor the most lovable, are quite good enough, and
are I believe the strongest and hardiest in southern
England. They may also be described as fairly sober,
although they drink a good deal—more perhaps than
the people of any other southern county; but they

106 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

have remarkably steady heads and carry their liquor
well. It is true that you will generally find a few
topers at the village inn, boozing at all hours of the
day, but that you will find all the country over; and
it will always be the same so long as publicans are
permitted by the authorities to serve habitual topers
and half drunk men generally with liquor. We know
that the public-houses are now all tied, and tied very
strictly, and if the publican does not sell as much beer
as the villagers, drunk or sober, are anxious to drink,
he must turn out and give place to some one with a
better sense of what is due to the brewer.

I was much amused one morning at a drinking
scene I witnessed in the village public at East Dean.
It was only eleven o’clock, but in the bar-room I
found six men, who had evidently been there drinking
a long time, each with a tall blue mug of beer at his
side. Five of them were middle-aged—all over forty
T should say, and all Saxons with hard red faces and
hard blue eyes. These were men who could drink
gallons of beer, then walk very steadily home; only a
slight wavering in their eyes when they looked at me
told that they had been a long time busy with their
blue mugs. But the sixth was a young man of a
different type: he had not the breadth and depth of
chest of the others, and his eyes and hair were dark
and his face pale. And he was pretty drunk. The
talk, after ranging over a variety of subjects, was
finally all about getting up early in the morning to

THE SHEPHERD OF THE DOWNS 107

go to work, and the degree of reluctance each man
felt at the necessity of turning out of bed. On this
subject the young and tipsy man spoke feelingly, and
was almost eloquent. He said that with him it gene-
rally depended on how much beer he had drunk the
previous day: if he had drunk a good deal, then he
woke with such a bad head and such a weight on him
that to turn out was a positive torture, and he was
miserable all day long. He believed, he added, that
it must be pretty much the same with everybody.

No one answered him a word; he was touching on
delicate ground. But their silence piqued him, and
staring defiantly round he continued, “If you ask me,
Pll tell you what my opinion really is. My opinion is
that beer is the curse of the country. And when I say
that beer is the curse of the country I’m pretty blank
well sure that I’m pretty blank well right.” And
here, to emphasise his expression of opinion, which
had not perhaps been strong enough to satisfy him,
he banged his fist on the deal table at which he sat,
and in doing so accidentally capsized his tall blue
mug, and sent the contents streaming all over the
wood, Picking up the mug he rapped loudly on the
table with it, and when the publican came from an
inner room ordered him to wipe up the spilt beer and
fill his mug again.

Consistent young man! The others gazed at him
with grave disapproval in their blue not quite steady
eyes, but said nothing. His sentiments were no doubt

108 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

regarded as most unnatural, his words as flat treason
to their order. They did not consider, or did not know,
that their order in another larger sense was not his;
that they were distant children of those who came with
Ella to these purple shores, abandoned by Rome; that
they had not so greatly degenerated in fourteen cen-
turies as not to be able to drink any dark-eyed and
pale-faced young man into the deepest depths of
intoxication, or the grave, without themselves experi-
encing a qualm, physical or mental.

Putting aside the subject of drink, perhaps the two
greatest faults of this people (and too much beer may
be the reason of both) is that they are not very thrifty
and not very pure. In some of the villages illegitimate
children are as plentiful as blackberries. But alto-
gether, the good qualities are more and greater than
the vices, or “amiable weaknesses”; and no person can
help admiring their rock-like stability of character,
their sturdy independence of spirit, and, with it, patient
contentment with a life of unremitting toil; and,
finally, their intense individuality. You will recognise
even in the children these strong enduring qualities,
which make the Sussexian peasant a man “ self-centered
as the trees and animals are.” Here is an account of
a conversation I had with a little fellow, under nine,
at a village on the northern border of the downs. At
sunset on a misty autumn evening I set out to walk to
a spot about three miles from the village. The children
had just been released from school, and I overtook a

THE SHEPHERD OF THE DOWNS 109

group of them going my way in a lane a little distance
from the village. Not being quite sure of the way I
asked them to direct me; but they were too eager to
help, and the short cuts they recommended across fields
and commons, and through woods, with turnings this
way and that way, and numerous other details, only
served to confuse me, and saying that it was no good
I walked on. Then the small rosy, round-faced, blue-
eyed boy said he was going a couple of miles my way
and would show me how to get to my place.

Before we had gone many yards a grey mist came
over and obscured the scene. It was getting dark too,
and I remarked to the little fellow that the days would
be shorter still by-and-by, and that it would be very
dark and lonely for him after school hours. He replied
that he knew the way well across the fields and
common, and by the lanes, and he was not afraid of
the dark. Not when it is quite black, I asked, and
raining or snowing? No, he said, however dark it was
he could not lose his way, and he didn’t mind the rain
in the least. He had a good coat for winter, and good
boots. Here he asked me to stop and look at his boots.
He had another nicer pair for Sunday wear. Then he
gave me a description of all his possessions in the way
of garments; but the winter coat which his mother had
made for him was the possession he valued most. I
asked him if his father worked on a farm. No, he
said, his father had left home a long time ago and
would never return. Perhaps he had gone to some

110 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

other country: he did not know where he was, and
never expected to see him again. Bit by bit he told
me more of his story. There were two—himself, not
nine, and a little brother, too little to go to school.
They lived with a woman who took care of them in a
cottage a couple of miles from the village. His mother,
left to provide for herself and children, had gone into
service at Brighton. She worked very hard and kept
them well clothed. He would see her at Christmas, and
be with her a whole week; that would be a happy time.
Then I remarked tentatively, “I suppose it was drink
that caused the trouble” “Oh no,” he returned
quickly ; “father did not drink—he was not a man of
that sort. Father was not a bad man, I should like
to see him again, but he will never come back.” Then
I said, determined to get at the bottom of the affair:
“Tf your father was not bad, and loved his children, why
did he go away and throw this burden on your poor
mother and cause all this sorrow?” He was silent for
a few moments, and then, with all the gravity in the
world, he replied, “It was an upset,” and beyond that
not one word would he say. If I had given him silver
and gold, it would not have unlocked his firm little lips.

That little word upset is an exceedingly useful one
in the peasant’s limited vocabulary, and covers a great
variety of domestic infelicities in which the passion of
anger plays a part, from the trivial disagreements be-
tween husband and wife which will be forgotten before
the sun sets, to the tragedy that severs all sacred ties

THE SHEPHERD OF THE DOWNS 111

and will be a bitterness in the heart to the very end
of life.

From what I have said so far it will appear that
strength rather than grace and beauty is the principal
characteristic of this people. But beauty we know is
everywhere: and I do not now mean that beauty
which is inherent in all human beings, in all things,
for those who have eyes to see it, but beauty in the
ordinary sense, visible to all, the lustre that is like
genius, and springs up we know not how nor why in
the most unpromising places. Beauty and grace and
sweetness and melody—you will find them here too in
the shadow of the downs, although not so frequently
as in the sweet west country. Still, my experience
is that the fair to see, and the pleasant and gracious,
and the graceful in mind and manner, are not very
rare.

It was my experience at a small downland village,
where I desired to spend a few days, to find on arrival
that, besides the inn where I wished not to go, there
was but one cottage in the place in which it would
be possible to get a lodging, and in this chance cottage
to meet the sweetest people of their class I have
ever stayed with in any village in England. And
I have visited many villages and stayed in many
cottages.

It chanced that a number of persons who had no
home in the neighbourhood had found occupation in
the village, and some of them, eight or nine I think,

112 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

had received accommodation at this place. Hearing
that the house was full I was not very confident of
getting a bed; but when I came and looked at the
place, and passed into the peaceful shadows of its grey
walls and ancient trees, and when I knocked at the
door under the porch, and it was opened to me by a
comely young woman with the softest dark eyes and soft
and most musical voice, I begged her not to refuse me
and make me walk miles away in that blazing sun
when I was tired and hungry and wanted food and
rest. She considered the matter for some moments,
then asked me in to dinner, for it was the dinner hour;
and later in the day some good-natured fellow was
persuaded to give up his room to me and accept a
shake-down in another part of the house.

The place really was a house, although let at a
cottage rental to a working-man. It was a very old
farmhouse, deprived of its land and standing apart
in its own grounds, with large shade-trees in front
and an orchard behind. There were many rooms, low-
ceilinged and scantily furnished, and an immense old
kitchen with a brick floor. The charm of the place
was outside, where for long years Nature had had a
free hand to make it beautiful in her own matchless
way. The rough stone walls and low tiled roof were
overgrown with ivy, and small creepers, and grey and
yellow lichen and stone-crop; and all the orchard and
the ground that had once been garden was covered
with grass and with wild flowers and garden flowers—

THE SHEPHERD OF THE DOWNS 113

wallflower, periwinkle, marigold, and others —run
wild.

The tenant was a giant of a man with the hugest
hands and immense long hairy arms like a gorilla, and
a head that looked as if it had been roughly hewn out
of some great black rock. Big and rough and dark,
he looked almost dangerous, and I wondered how he
had won that very gentle pretty woman to be his wife.
But “ something had come into his heart,” perhaps, to
alter its nature and make him in disposition like her-
self. He was like a good preternaturally grave child,
and being inarticulate he seldom opened his mouth.
I remember one hot afternoon when we were at tea
his sudden appearance in the doorway, and how lean-
ing on the door-frame looking in and down upon us,
tired and black and dusty, his shirt-sleeves rolled up
displaying his huge hairy arms, he seemed like some
strange half-human monster who had just come up out
of the interior of the earth, where he had been occu-
pied blowing the bellows for Vulcan, or on some such
huge grimy task. His wife cast a glance at him, and
after a little while, and with just the faint suspicion of
a smile playing about her mouth, she remarked, “ Look
at Old Blackie!” It was plain to any one who could
read the feeling in the expression and the voice that
she loved her rough giant.

She was helped in the house-work by a sister, a
nice-looking girl of nineteen, and there were two little

children, perfect little Saxons with round rosy faces,
H

114 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

light hair, and blue eyes, as unlike their parents in
appearance as they were in their indomitable little
tempers. But they were pretty, delightful children
for all that.

Besides the people of the house there were four
unhuman inmates—a semi-domestic robin who visited
the kitchen at all hours; a tabby cat who was per-
petually being dragged hither and thither by the two
little ones, and bore it all with singular equanimity; a
very old good-tempered collie dog, and a pet lamb.
The lamb was often tethered in the orchard to keep
him out of mischief, and whenever I went near him
he would look to me for a biscuit or a lump of sugar,
and failing to get it he would try to eat my clothes.
It was on account of this animal that I found out
something of the inner life of the people of the house
which I should not otherwise have known, I told
my gentle hostess that her lamb was not quite
happy left alone tied up in the orchard, and I
wondered that they, poor hard-working people, had
burdened themselves with so unsuitable an animal
for a pet.

She said that the lamb was not intended to be kept
as a pet; they had it for another purpose, and what
that purpose was I easily drew from her and her
husband.

They were religious people, and had always been
“ church,” as their parents and grandparents had been
before them, but now for a very long time past the

THE SHEPHERD OF THE DOWNS 115

church had been growing less and less to them, until
they had ceased to attend it, although there was no
chapel there and they had joined no other sect. The
only reason of this estrangement appeared to be that
their pastor was not a spiritual-minded man, and
though a good many years vicar in a small parish,
he did not even know his own parishioners, and was
wholly occupied with his own mundane affairs and
amusements. Now it is just as hard, nay impossible,
for the ordinary Christian to live his ideal life apart
from teachers and fellow-disciples as for a sheep left
behind by the flock, and lost or abandoned by the
shepherd, to exist by itself on the hills. And these
two, feeling the great want in their lives, had allowed
their hearts and hopes to go out to the Salvation
Army. There would be no coldness nor want of guid-
ance and encouragement in that fold! It was not
their wish to put on a distinctive garb, nor in any way
to make themselves conspicuous in a place where there
was no—what shall I say—barracks, but to continue
to live their own lives in the old way in their remote
village, only feeling that there was a bond between
them and other servants of their Master, that they
were not alone. Thus far had they got when they
heard that a great meeting of the Army was about to
take place at the Crystal Palace—a jubilee or impor-
tant celebration of. some kind, at which the world-
wandering General himself would be present to preside
over a gathering of people from all parts of the king-

116 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

dom, and from all the kingdoms of the earth. They
resolved that the husband should attend the meeting,
and in due time, having got permission from his
master, he journeyed up to London, and after an
absence of two or three days he returned with heart
and mind full of the wonderful things he had wit-
nessed. She had never been to London, and had
never seen a big crowd; but little by little, taking up
the disjointed bits of information that fell from him at
odd times, and piecing them together, she had suc-
ceeded in forming a fairly accurate though somewhat
vague mental picture of the scene. It was a vast
palace of glass, filled with an excited multitude that
no man could number. People were there from all
countries, all regions of the earth; and black and
yellow and red skins were seen among the white; and
some of these people were in strange garments of
bright colours, such as the heathen wear. And there
was a great noise of prayer and praise and of countless
musical instruments, and cries of joy and of shouting
Hosannah to the Lord. Most wonderful was it to
see how one feeling, one spirit, animated all alike,
that in all those thousands upon thousands there
was no eye that was not wet with tears and no
face that did not shine with a divine passion of love
and joy.

When she had finished the story, he, the silent
man, added, “I can’t say what I felt, but when I
saw it all I could only say, ‘If Heaven is like this,

THE SHEPHERD OF THE DOWNS 117

then it must be a good place to be in.” Could he
have said more!

After that great event it was planned that the
wife should go up to the next annual gathering of
the Army, and that like very many others of its
friends she should take some little gift or thank-
offering ; and after many days’ discussion it was settled
that, as they lived in the South Downs, a lamb
would be the most appropriate gift to offer. Money
was put by for the purpose, and a young lamb
bought at a neighbouring farm and reared by hand
so as to make it very tame. It would, they thought,
look so well in a procession of gift-bearers, its fleece
washed white as snow, its neck decorated with bright
ribbons and flowers, its mistress leading it by a silken
cord,

I had forgotten all about the lamb, and was not
too delighted to hear of the glorious future that
awaited it. No doubt it would look very pretty in
its snowy fleece, blue ribbons and flowers, led by its
gentle, dove-eyed mistress; but close behind her and
her singing fellow-processionists I could see as in a
vision the Salvation butcher in his red waistcoat,
keeping time to the musi¢*Wwhile sharpening a big
broad-bladed knife on a screaming steel.

But it was idle to vex my mind about the ulti-
mate destiny of an animal created for man’s use.
I daresay that even that famous lamb that was
accustomed to attend Mary in all her walks had its

118 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

throat cut in the end, and was very much relished,
with mint sauce, by the worthy persons who ate it.

To return to the good people whose simple faith
and lovable disposition was a refreshment to my
soul. How they worked and how they dreamed,
looking forward to the day that would be more than
any other day in the year! By five in the morning
the good man was away to his work, and any time
from six to seven I could count on getting a cup
of tea in the kitchen. At nine we breakfasted: at
one dined: at five had tea, and supped when we
dropped in, at nine or ten o'clock. The hour of
eleven found us often still at table, and our poor
host, who had been toiling all day in the blazing
sun, would sometimes drop off over his supper.
“ Poor old Blackie has gone to sleep,” his wife would
say, and leaning over and shaking his shoulder she
would cry in his ear, “ Wake up!” Then he would
start and rub his drowsy eyes, and go on with his
meal, and by-and-by she who had aroused him would
drop her head; and he would lean over and shake
her by the arm, and in turn cry,“ Wake up!” It
was often a merry time when we were together drink-
ing our last cups of tea before tumbling tired to bed.
Some would have preferred beer or something stronger,
but it was curious to note how those two rare elements
of personal charm and the subtle flame of religious
feeling united in this woman, exercised a subduing
and refining influence on that mixed crew in the

THE SHEPHERD OF THE DOWNS 119

house, and made even the most godless anxious to
seem better than they were in her loved eyes.

Of the wife’s sister, whom I have mentioned, one
slight incident which impressed me at the moment
remains to be told. She was utterly unlike her
sister in her high bright colour, fluffy golden brown
hair, blue-grey eyes, and perfect aquiline features,
One evening she came in from the orchard, where
she had been having a game of romps with the
little children on the grass before putting them to
bed, and to amuse them had pulled some slender
sprays of small-leafed ivy and sewn them round the
band of her cloth cap. Forgetting the garland, and
flushed and merry, she came in and sat down oppo-
site the west window, through which the level rays
of the setting sun streamed full on her face. Look-
ing at it, as it appeared in profile in that dim interior
—the classical lines of the face and sunlit hair and
ivy crown—the effect was as of something quite
familiar and yet novel and never previously seen.
It was in fact a face and head that we are all

> familiar with in art, now for the first time in my

experience seen alive. I vaguely remembered, too,
that once upon a time the old Romans had possessed
an important settlement close by, perhaps at that
very spot; and the thought came to me that perhaps
long long centuries ago, one summer evening, a Roman
maiden of nineteen came in from a merry game with
her married sister's little ones on the grass, her shin-

120 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

ing hair crowned with ivy; and had sat down in
some dim room among her people, just when the sun
was going down behind the great downs, and poured
its red light on her flushed beautiful young face.

It pleased the girl to be told that she was like
a Roman-British maid who had lived at that spot
seventeen centuries ago; but she could not say that
she had any but peasant’s blood in her veins. Her
parents and grandparents, and their families as far
back as she knew, were all of the working-class, and
their home was the Sussex Downs. But the family
memory seldom goes back far enough—it is rare for
it to extend farther than three generations back. We
see that racial characters are practically everlasting,
that they are never wholly swamped. Families of
distinct races may go on mixing and remixing their
blood for scores of generations; yet children ever and
anon will continue to be born that seem not the
offspring of their parents, or of any near progenitors ;
but in them the ancient type that was obscured and
appeared about to be lost for ever is suddenly re-
stored, distinct in all its lineaments. It is as if a
cask of soured and turbid liquor, in some day of
strange atmospheric conditions, had suddenly run
clear again, and had again the lost fragrance and
flavour, and sparkle and brilliant colour: and this
is a miracle of nature, an eternal mystery, and is
like a re-incarnation and a resurrection.

As with racial characters, so it is, although in a

THE SHEPHERD OF THE DOWNS 121

less degree, with fixed family features, and with the
characters, physical and moral, that are produced

A Sussex MAID

by what is called good blood, These features and
characters may become obscured and even disappear
for a time; but they are not lost; from generation

122 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

to generation they will ever and anon continue to
reappear. This well-known fact and the less familiar
fact that a very large number of persons of good
family are constantly being submerged in the lower
ranks, is to my mind a sufficient and the only ex-
planation of the numerous handsome and beautiful
faces and figures to be found among the peasantry.

I here recall the case of the once important and
numerous Sussex family of Culpepper; a member of
that family, the old herbalist, has made the name
familiar to every one. For centuries the Culpeppers
were landowners in various parts of the county, and
at one period there were two baronetcies in the
family. Yet in the course of the last two centuries
they have sunk into utter obscurity, and there is
not now one person of that name in Sussex above
the condition of a labourer.

Similar cases may be found in every part of the
country: the point that concerns us here is that
probably in no other part of Sussex, perhaps in no
other part of the kingdom, has the process of sinking
to the lower social level been so frequent as in down-
land. Or perhaps it would be more correct to say,
that nowhere else have the old families that have
lost their position in the country left so many de-
scendants who bear their names and are labourers on
the lands that were once their ancestors. Among those
of his class in downland the shepherd appears to have
the largest infusion of good blood: it shows itself in

THE SHEPHERD OF THE DOWNS 123

the fine and even noble features that are so frequently
found among them, and a degree of intelligence beyond
that of the average shepherd of other districts.

One of the numerous, mostly minute, differences
to be detected between the downland shepherd and
other peasants—differences due to the conditions of
his life—refers to his disposition. He has a singu-
larly placid mind, and is perfectly contented with
his humble lot. In no other place have I been in
England, even in the remotest villages and hamlets,
where the rustics are not found to be more or less
infected with the modern curse or virus of restless-
ness and dissatisfaction with their life. I have, first
and last, conversed with a great many shepherds,
from the lad whose shepherding has just began to
the patriarch who has held a crook, and “twitched
his mantle blue,” in the old Corydon way, on
these hills for upwards of sixty years, and in this
respect have found them all very much of one mind.
It is as if living alone with nature on these heights,
breathing this pure atmosphere, the contagion had
not reached them, or else that their blood was proof
against such a malady.

One day I met a young shepherd on the highest
part of the South Downs, who was about twenty-three
years old, handsome, tall, well-formed, his face glowing
with health and spirits. I shared my luncheon with
him, and then sitting on the turf we talked for an
hour about the birds and other wild creatures which

124 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

he knew best. He told me that he was paid twelve
and sixpence a week, and had no prospect of a rise,
as the farmers in that part had made a firm stand
against the high wages (in some cases amounting to
eighteen shillings) which were being paid at other
points. I was tempted as an experiment to speak
slightingly of the shepherd’s homely trade. It was
all very well in summer, I said, but what about
winter, when the hills were all white with snow;
when the wind blew so strong that a man could
not walk against or face it; when it was wet all
day, and when all nature was drowned in a dense
fog, and you cannot see a sheep twenty yards off?
“We are accustomed to all weathers,” he replied.
“We do not mind the wet and cold—we don’t feel
it.” I persisted that he earned too little, that shep-
herding was not good enough for him. He said that
his father had been a shepherd all his life, and was
now old and becoming infirm; that he (the son) lived
in the same cottage, and at odd times helped the old
man with his flock, and was able to do a good many
little things for him which he could not very well do
for himself, and would not be able to pay a stranger
to do them. That, I said, was all right and proper;
but his father being infirm would not be able to
follow a flock many years longer on the hills, and
when the old man’s shepherding days were over the
son would be free. Besides, I added, a young man
wants a wife—how could he marry on twelve and

THE SHEPHERD OF THE DOWNS 125

sixpence a week? At that there came a pleasant
far-away look in his eyes: it could be seen that they
were turned inward and were occupied with the image
of a particular, incomparable She. He smiled, and
appeared to think that it was not impossible to marry
on twelve and sixpence a week.

CHAPTER VII
SHEPHERDS AND WHEATEARS

The shepherd’s altered condition—His loss of the wheatear har-
vest—The passion for wheatears—Arrival of the birds on the
downs — “Our ortolan” —Coops— The wheatear’s habits—
Sensitiveness to rain—Hurdis and the “pence of ransom ”—
A great dame collecting wheatears—John Dudeney’s recollec-
tions—Shepherds cease taking wheatears—Probable reason
—How the birds are now obtained—Bird-catchers, poulterers,
and farmers—The law must be enforced—Lark-eating,

To all those who love the Sussex Downs and their
people it must be a source of regret that the old
system of giving the shepherd an interest in the
flock was ever changed. According to the old system
he was paid a portion of his wages in kind—so many
lambs at lambing time; and these, when grown, he
was permitted to keep with the flock to the number
of twenty or twenty-five, and sometimes perhaps more.
At shearing time he was paid for the wool, and he
had the increase of his ewes to sell each year. He
was thus in a small way in partnership with his
master, the farmer, and regarded himself, and was
also regarded by others, as something more than
a mere hireling, like the shepherd of to-day, who

looks to receive a few pieces of silver at each week’s
126

SHEPHERDS AND WHEATEARS 127

end, and will be no better off and no worse off whether
the years be fat or lean.

One would imagine that the old system must have
worked well on the downs, as it undoubtedly does in
other lands where I have known it, and I can only
suppose that its discontinuance was the result of that

WHEATEAR

widening of the line dividing employer from employed
which has been so general. The farmer did not im-
prove his position by the change—lI believe he lost
more than he gained: it was simply that the old
relations between master and servant were out of
date. He was a better educated man, less simple in
his life, than his forefathers, and therefore at a greater

128 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

distance from his shepherd; it would remove all
friction and simplify things generally to put the
shepherd on the same level with the field labourer
and other servants; and this was done by giving him
a shilling more a week in exchange for the four or
five or six lambs he had been accustomed to receive
every year.

There have been other although less important
changes in the life of the lonely man who follows his
flock on the hills: one that has a special interest for
me refers to the annual wheatear harvest, which was
formerly a source of considerable profit to the shep-
herds of the South Downs. Those who engaged in
taking the birds were accustomed to make each season
from four or five pounds to twenty—occasionally
thirty or forty—pounds. A few shepherds have been
known to make as much as fifty pounds. Thus the
most successful actually made more by wheatear
catching from July to September than the farmers
paid them for the whole year’s shepherding. It is
sometimes said that wheatears are not now eaten, and
that the shepherds no longer take them, because the
birds are now so few in number that it would not be
worth any one’s while to catch them. There is no
doubt that they have decreased very much; but they
are still eaten, though the shepherds do not catch
them, and, as we shall see presently, the complaint
that they have decreased is so old that we read of its
having been made a century ago,

SHEPHERDS AND WHEATEARS 129

The passion for wheatears, so far as I know, was
confined to a part of the south coast, and dates some
centuries back in time. At all events, it existed and
was strong in the time of the Stuarts, and at a later
period the demand for the birds increased with the
growth of the coast towns of Eastbourne and Brighton.

The pretty little grey and white, black-winged bird
that loves the stony desert places of the earth is a
strict emigrant, returning to and quitting these shores
earlier than most species; and in July, after rearing
their young, the southward movement begins, and
from all parts of England and Wales, and from Scot-
land and the islands, the birds come in pairs and in
small parties of half-a-dozen or more to the downs.
They are most abundant on the higher part of the
range called the South Downs, where they spend a
few days on the hills, running and flitting over the
close-cropped turf, and playfully pursuing one another
in the air. It is a season of rest and recreation on
the “threshold of England” before their voyage over
sea and subsequent long journey into the interior of
a distant continent; and when, having rested, they
depart, they are succeeded by others, so that they are
never, or but rarely, abundant at any one time, but
are always arriving and always departing. They are
very fat when they arrive on the downs, and the
season during which the shepherds took them, from
mid-July to mid-September, must have been a blessed

time for the gourmets of the past. Whenever the
I

130 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

wheatear (“our ortolan,” as it was affectionately called)
is mentioned by writers of two or three centuries ago,
the charm of the bird (on the table) is so rapturously
dwelt upon, with such an air of rolling a fat delicious
morsel in the mouth, and smacking the lips after
deglutition, and stroking a well-satisfied stomach, that
one is led to think that the happiness of the great,
the wise, and the good of that age was centred in
their bellies, and that they looked on the eating of
wheatears as the highest pleasure man could know;
unless indeed they considered it an even higher one “to
see all their friends drunk and happy about them.”

In July the shepherds made their “ coops,” as their
traps were called—a T-shaped trench about fourteen
inches long, over which the two long narrow sods cut
neatly out of the turf were adjusted, grass downwards.
A small opening was left at the end for ingress, and
there was room in the passage for the bird to pass
through toward the chinks of light coming from the
two ends of the cross passage. At the inner end
of the passage a horse-hair springe was set, by which
the bird was caught by the neck as it passed in, but
the noose did not as a rule strangle the bird.

On some of the high downs near the coast, notably
at Beachy Head, at Birling Gap, at Seaford, and in
the neighbourhood of Rottingdean, the shepherds made
so many coops, placed at small distances apart, that
the downs in some places looked as if they had been
ploughed. In September, when the season was over,

SHEPHERDS AND WHEATEARS 131

the sods were carefully put back, roots down, in their
places, and the smooth green surface was restored to
the hills.

The wheatear when travelling flies low, and has
the habit of alighting on any barren or stony piece
of ground. If a heap of flints be collected, or a few
sods be turned earth upwards, not a bird will come
in sight of the place but will go out of his way to
settle on it, and the larger the patch of ground thrown
into coops the more birds come to it. Again, the
bird has the habit of going into any hole or crevice
it finds in the stony or barren spots it loves to visit.
I have noticed the same habit in birds of other
species that breed in dark holes. The fact that on
bright and cloudless days few wheatears were caught
in the coops and that considerable numbers were
always taken on days of flying clouds and of shadow
and sunlight, seems to show that the birds make
use of the holes as a shelter. They probably greatly
dislike being wetted by rain; and indeed the bird’s
safety must in a great degree depend on his ability
to keep himself dry, since a wet plumage interferes
with flight, and the wheatear, on account of his con-
spicuous plumage, as well as of the open exposed
character of the ground he inhabits, must be more
liable than almost any other species to be attacked
by hawks that prey upon small birds. The sudden
gloom caused by a cloud obscuring the sun is the
forerunner of a swift-coming storm to the bird, a

132 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

sudden shadow being associated with rain in his
mind, and he flies to shelter himself in the nearest
hole; and if the gloom falls on the earth fifty or
a hundred times a day he will act in the same way
every time. It was owing to this extreme sensitive-
ness of the wheatear, and its inability to distinguish
between a rain-cloud and a cloud without rain, that
the shepherds were so successful in taking them in
their simple traps. So well did the shepherd know
this habit and weakness of the bird, that on a dry
day of unbroken cloud he did not look to get more
than a few birds; on a day of continual sunshine
he hardly thought it worth while to visit his coops;
but on a day of flying clouds and broken lights he
would go the round of his coops three or four times
to collect the birds and reset the snares.

Hurdis, the poet of the downs, in The Favorite
Village, in a long passage on the subject of wheatear-
catching, has the following lines :—

So when the fevered cloud of August day

Flits through the blue expanse . . .

The timorous wheatear, fearful of the shade,

Trips to the hostile shelter of the clod,

And where she sought protection finds a snare.
. .. Seized by the springe

She flutters for lost liberty in vain,

A costly morsel, destined for the board

Of well-fed luxury, if no kind friend,

No gentle passenger the noose dissolve,

And vive her to her free-born wing again,

Incautious bird, such as thy lot is now,

Such once was mine... .

SHEPHERDS AND WHEATEARS 133

And in the end, recalling how he .was delivered
and by whom, he resolves that his hand shall “at
distance imitate ’”—

And to the feathery captive give release,
The pence of ransom placing in its stead.
Go, fool, be cheated of thy wing no more !

His “pence of ransom” requires a word of explana-
tion. It was customary for those who required a
supply of wheatears for a big dinner, when there were
none or not enough to be had in the market, to go out
themselves to the downs and collect them from the
coops, and to leave the price of as many birds as
were found caught and taken. All the coops from
which the birds were taken were left uncovered, and
a small pile of silver and copper coins, the market
value of the birds, placed in the last trench. The
shepherd going the rounds of his coops would count
the money, reset the springes, and go back satisfied
to his flock.

When the tender-hearted clergyman-poet left his
pence for the birds, which he took from the coops
merely to set them free, his neighbours must have
regarded him as an exceedingly eccentric person, for
the birds were caught to be eaten by important persons
in Sussex; indeed, the wheatear was created for that
purpose, even as the robin redbreast, wren, and swallow
—sacred birds in other lands—were made to be eaten
by the people of Italy.

134 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

A middle-aged man, a native of the village of East
Dean, described to me how a very great lady of East-
bourne, who entertained a good deal, and liked her
birds fresh caught, used often to go out driving in a
carriage and pair on the downs; and he, a boy of
twelve, used to run after the carriage in hopes of
getting a penny; and how, on arriving at a number
of coops, the big liveried footman would jump down
and uncover coop after coop and wring the necks of
the little birds he took out, until he had got as many
as his mistress wanted, and then she would hand him
the money to leave in a trench, and the carriage would
drive off.

A shepherd of the South Downs, named John
Dudeney, afterwards a schoolmaster in Lewes, where
I believe one or two of his granddaughters still
keep a school, was included by M. A. Lower in his
Worthies of Sussex, on account of his passion for
books and other virtues. And it will be allowed
by every one that a poor peasant youth, who, when
shepherding on the hills, acquired a knowledge of
astronomy and of other out-of-the-way subjects, and
taught himself to read the Bible in Hebrew, was de-
serving of a place among the lesser celebrities of his
county.

In a too short account which Dudeney gave of his
early life and struggles to make money enough to buy
books as well as to live, there is an interesting note
or two on his experiences as a wheatear catcher. Here

JoHN DUDENEY, THE LEARNED SHEPHERD

SHEPHERDS AND WHEATEARS 135

is a picture of his early shepherding days: “I have
sometimes been on the hills in winter from morning to
night, and have not seen a single person during the
whole day. In the snow I have walked to and fro
under the shelter of a steep bank, or in a bottom or
a combe, while my sheep have been by me scraping
away the snow with their forefeet to get at the grass,
and I have taken my book out of my pocket, and as I
walked to and fro in the snow have read to pass away
the time. It is very cold on the downs in such
weather. I remember once, whilst with my father,
the snow froze into ice on my eyelashes, and he breathed
on my face to thaw it off. The downs are very pleasant
in summer.”

Yes, they are.

“ At midsummer, 1799, I removed to Kingston, near
Lewes, where I was under-shepherd for three years.
The flock was large (1400), and my master, the head
shepherd, being old and infirm, much of the labour
devolved on me. While here I had better wages, £6
a year; I had also part of the money obtained from
the sale of wheatears, though we did not catch them
here in great numbers, a dozen or two a day, seldom
more. The hawks often injured us by tearing them
out of their coops, scattering their feathers about, which
frightened the other birds from the coops. During
winter I caught the moles, which, at twopence each,
brought me a few shillings.”

It is a pity that Dudeney did not give the name of

136 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

the bold hawk that tore the captive birds out of the
coops. The kite, buzzard, harriers, as well as peregrine
faleon and sparrow-hawk, were common in those days.
Some of the old shepherds say that the stoats were a
great nuisance, and robbed them of a good many birds.
One old shepherd, who caught wheatears for many
years near Seaford, told me that the starlings gave him
most trouble. They would go poking into the coops and
get. themselves caught. They were unsaleable, and so
he ate them. As soon as he took them out of the
traps he pulled their heads off. That, he informed me,
is the only proper thing to do. If you pull off their
heads they are good to eat, but if you leave their heads
on they are not good.

I always leave my starlings’ heads on.

Dudeney next tells us what he did at Westside
Farm, at Rottingdean, where he was afterwards en-
gaged. “The farm extending along the sea-coast, I
caught great numbers of wheatears during the season
for taking them, which lasted from the middle of July
to the end of August. The most I ever caught in one
day was thirteen dozen. We sold them to a poulterer
at Brighton, who took all we could catch at eighteen-
pence a dozen. From what I have heard from old
shepherds, it cannot be doubted that they were caught
in much greater numbers a century ago than of late.
I have heard them speak of an immense number
being taken in one day by a shepherd of East Dean,
near Beachy Head. I think they said he took nearly

SHEPHERDS AND WHEATEARS 137

a hundred dozen; so many that he could not thread
them on crow-quills in the usual manner, but took off
his round frock and made a sack of it to pop them
into, and his wife did the same with her petticoat.
This must have been when there was a great flight.
Their numbers are now so decreased that some shep-
herds do not set up any coops, as it does not pay
for the trouble.”

This last statement describing the state of things
a century ago struck me as very curious when I first
read it; that the birds had now decreased so much
that it was not worth while setting up coops, was
precisely what the shepherds had said when I asked
them why they had given up catching the wheatears,
But it is not the truth, or not the whole truth. For
about eighty years after Dudeney’s days at Rotting-
dean, the shepherds in that neighbourhood and all
along the South Down range continued to catch
wheatears, and were glad to do so, There is one
old firm of poulterers in Brighton whose custom it
was to pay the shepherds for all the birds they sent
in at the end of the season. When pay-day arrived
the shepherds would come in, and a very substantial
dinner with plenty of beer would be served to them;
and after the meal and toasts and songs every man
would be paid his money. At these yearly dinners,
which were continued down to about 1880, as many
as fifty shepherds have been known to attend. Yet
this firm could not have had more than a third

138 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

or a fourth part of the wheatears supplied by the
shepherds to deal with.

About the date just named, or a little later, the
Rottingdean farmers began to forbid their shep-
herds engaging to supply the Brighton poulterers
with wheatears: the men, they said, were so much
occupied in going the rounds of their coops that
they neglected their proper work. The example
of these farmers spread over the downs, and their
action was, so far as I know, the real cause of the
somewhat sudden abandonment by the shepherds of
their ancient supplementary trade of catching wheat-
ears. That they no longer follow it is a cause of
profound regret to the poulterers, for the demand
still exists and must somehow be supplied. Fowlers
were engaged to go out and shoot and trap the birds
the best way they could, but the shot so injured
the delicate plump little bodies that this method
was discontinued. For some years past the big
poulterers have been compelled to engage the services
of the ordinary bird-catcher of the Brighton slums,
who takes the birds with the common clap-nets,
His method is to go out with a couple of “pals” to
help and to spread his nets at the side of one of
the small solitary dew ponds on the hills. In very
dry hot weather there are always some wheatears
flitting and running about on the turf in the
neighbourhood of the pond, to which they go at
intervals to drink, The nets spread, the helpers

SHEPHERDS AND WHEATEARS 139

make a wide circuit, and when they see a few birds
walk quietly towards them, making them move on
towards the pond. Once they are near it and spy
one of their kind (the decoy wheatear tied to a peg)
they fly to it and are taken in the nets. ‘The number
of birds taken in this slow laborious way is not enough
to meet the demand that still exists. “We could,”
said one of the largest men in the trade at Brighton
to me last summer, “ sell four times as many wheat-
ears as we can get at six shilling a dozen.”

It is curious to have to add that the industrious
bird-catcher cannot now get even this insufficient
supply of birds without exposing himself to the risk
of prosecutions and fines.

In the East Sussex bird-protection order, which was
made law in June 1897, the wheatear is a scheduled
bird, and is therefore fully protected during the close
time, which, in that county, extends to September 1.
The wheatears are in season and are taken in July
and August. The poulterers and game-dealers in the
coast towns, and some of the farmers, are in league
with the bird-catcher, and are perhaps more deserving
of punishment than the man from the slums who does
the dirty work. A certain number of farmers, who do
not mind what they do if they are paid, allow bird-
catchers to have a “ pitch” on their land, and are not
ashamed to take some small sum, usually ten to twenty
shillings a year, for the privilege. The bird-catcher
spreads his nets as far from the road as he can, and

140 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

gives out that he is catching starlings with the farmer’s
permission. The starling is not a scheduled bird, and,
though protected, may be taken by any person on his
own land, or by any one with the owner’s consent.
Catching wheatears for starlings has gone on un-
punished until now, or rather to the end of the last
close time in East Sussex, September 1, 1899, and
ought not to be any longer tolerated. When the
wheatear season comes round once more efforts will,
I trust, be made by residents on the south coast, who
are anxious to preserve our wild bird life, to enforce
the law; and I hope to be there to help them.

It is often said that the wheatears have decreased,
and will continue to decrease, owing to the continual
spread of cultivation and the consequent diminution
of the open, barren, and stony lands which the bird
inhabits. All the more need then to put an end to
the wholesale taking of the birds when they arrive
on the South Downs, during migration. The wheatear
is a pretty, interesting bird, a sweet singer, and dear
to all who love the wildness and solitude of hills and
of desert, stony places, It is not fair that it should
be killed merely to enable London stockbrokers, sport-
ing men, and other gorgeous persons who visit the
coast, accompanied by ladies with yellow hair, to feed
every day on “ortolans” at the big Brighton hotels.

Lark-eating, which revolts us even more than wheat-
ear-eating, is, alas! too common and widespread in the
country to be suppressed in the same easy way. It

SHEPHERDS AND WHEATEARS 141

will not soon be ended—there are too many Britons
with the Italian’s debased passion for a song-bird’s
flesh. But the feeling of intense disgust and even
abhorrence the practice arouses in all lovers of nature
grows, and will continue to grow; and we may look
forward to the time when the feeders on skylarks of
to-day will be dead and themselves eaten by worms,
and will have no successors in all these islands,

CHAPTER VIII
SILENCE AND MUSIC

The art of music—Natural music—Sussex voices—A pretty girl
with a musical voice—Singing of the peasants—Dr. Burton on
Sussex singing—Primitive singing—A shepherdess and her
cries—The Sussex sheep-dog’s temper—Silence of the hills—
Bird music of the downs—Common bunting—Linnet—Stone-
chat—Whinchat—The distance which sound travels—Experi-
ence with tramps—Singing of skylarks—Effects which cannot
be expressed,

PERHAPS it would be as well to explain at the outset
that about music proper I have next to nothing to say
in spite of the heading of this chapter. Music is inex-
pressibly delightful, but when I am with or very near
to or fresh from nature I am cold to it; and when
listening I am in a curious way more than fastidious.
That which is wholly satisfying to the trained followers
and professors, who live and move and have their
beings in a perpetual concord of sweet sounds; that
which they regard as perfection and the best ex-
pression of all that is best in man, is not a great
thing to me. Even when it most enchants me, if it
does not wholly swamp my intellect, I have a sense
of something abnormal in it, or at all events, of some-
thing wholly out of proportion to and out of harmony

with things as they exist. That music comes to us
142

SILENCE AND MUSIC 143

naturally, that it is an instinct, nobody will deny; it is
only music as an art and an end in itself, cultivated
in the highest degree for its own sake alone, and
taken out of its relation with life, that I am compelled
to regard as a mere bye-product of the mind, a beauti-
ful excrescence, which is of no importance to the race,
and without which most of us are just as rich and
happy in our lives.

This question does not concern us. Music in
another wider sense is, like beauty, everywhere ;—
the elemental music of winds and of waters, of

The lisp of leaves and the ripple of rain,

and the music of bird voices. For just as the bird,
as Ruskin says, is the cloud concentrated, its aérial
form perfected and vivified with life; so too in the
songs and calls and cries of the winged people do we
listen to the diffused elemental music of nature con-
centrated and changed to clear penetrative sound.
Listen to the concealed reed warbler, quietly singing
all day long to himself among the reeds and rushes:
it is a series of liquid sounds, the gurgling and chim-
ing of lapping water on the shallow pebbled bed of a
stream. The beautiful inflected cry of the playing
peewit is a mysterious lonely sound, as of some wild
half-human being blowing in a hollow reed he had
made. Listen again to a band of small shore birds—
stints, dotterels, knots, and dunlins—conversing to-
gether as they run about on the level sands, or drop-

144 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

ping bright twittering notes as they fly swiftly past:
it is like the vibrating crystal chiming sounds of a
handful of pebbles thrown upon and bounding and
glissading musically over a wide sheet of ice.

From these small sounds and the smaller still of
insect life, to the greater sounds of bird and mammal
——the noise of the herring and black-backed gulls
drifting leisurely by at a vast height above the earth,
and ever and anon bursting out in a great chorus of
laugh-like cries, as if the clouds had laughed; the in-
numerable tremulous bleatings of a driven flock; the
percussive bark of the shepherd’s dog, and the lowing
of kine in some far off valley. They are all musical,
and are in a sense music. And, best of all, there is
the human voice. Even a musical artist, in spite of
an artist's prejudice, an old English composer, has
said that speech, the sweet music of it, is infinitely
more to us than song and the sound of all our musical
instruments,

T cannot say that the Sussexians have more musical
voices than the people of any other part of the king-
dom, but their speech is pleasant, more so than in
most counties, and they are certainly fond of singing.
The people of the downs have in my experience the
nicest voices in speaking. And here as in other places
you will occasionally find a voice of the purest, most
beautiful quality. I would go more miles to hear a
voice of that description speaking simple words, than
I would go yards to listen to the most wonderful vocal

SILENCE AND MUSIC 145

flights of the greatest diva on earth. Not that the
mere pleasure to the sense would not be vastly greater
in the latter case; but in the other the voice, though
but of a peasant saying some simple thing, would also
say something to the mind, and would live and re-live
in the mind, to be heard again and often, even after
years ; and with other similar voices it would serve to
nourish and keep alive a dream. And after all a
dream may be a man’s best possession; though it be
but of an immeasurably remote future—a time when
these tentative growths, called art, and valued as the
highest good attainable—-the bright consummate
flower of intellect —-shall have withered, and, like
tendrils no longer needed, dropped forgotten from
the human plant.

One such voice I heard to my great delight in or
near a hamlet not many miles from Singleton in the
West Sussex Downs. Sauntering along the path in a
quiet green very pretty place, I spied a girl pushing a
perambulator with a baby in it before her, using one
hand, while in the other hand she held an apple,
which she was just beginning to eat. It was a very
big apple, all of the purest apple green colour except
where she had bitten into it, and there it was snowy
white. She was a slim, gracefully-formed girl of about
fifteen, with the Sussex round face and fine features,
but with a different colour, for her skin was a clear
dark one, her eyes soft deep blue, and her unbound

hair, which was very abundant and very fine, was
K

146 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

black, but showing chestnut brown where the wind
had fluffed it about her face. Perhaps her mouth,
with its delicately moulded lips, was her finest feature ;
and it was very pretty, as she came up to where I
stood waiting for her, to see her small, even sharp pearly
teeth cut into the polished green apple. But though
she was so lovely to look at, if I had allowed her to pass
by without speaking the probability is that her image
would have soon faded out of memory. We see and
straightway forget many a pretty face. But when I
spoke to her and she answered in a musical voice of
so beautiful a quality, that was like a blackbird’s voice
and a willow wren’s, yet better than either, the rare
sweet sound registered itself in my brain, and with it
the face, too, became unforgettable. When she had
given me her answer I thought of other things to ask
—the name of the next village (which I knew) and
the next, and the distance to each, with many other
unnecessary inquiries, and still every time she spoke it
was laore to me than a “melody sweetly played in
tune;” and it was at last with the greatest reluctance
that I was compelled to thank her and let her go.

As to the singing of the Sussex peasants, I must
confess that it has amused rather than delighted me,
but at the same time it is interesting. You can best
hear it in the village ale-house or inn in the evening,
especially on a Saturday, when a pleasant break in the
week has come with rest from toil, and money has
been paid for wages, and life has a more smiling aspect

SILENCE AND MUSIC 147

than on most days. Beer, too, of which unusually
large quantities are consumed at such times, makes
glad the Sussexian heart, and song is with him the
natural expression of the feeling. Willum, asked for
a song, without much demur sings it with all his
heart; he is followed by Tummas, who scarcely waits
to be asked; and then Gaarge, who began clearing his
throat and moistening his lips when Tummas was in
the fourteenth and last stanza, bursts out with his
rollicking song with a chorus in which all join. Then
follow Sammel and Bill (to distinguish him from
Willum), and finally John Birkenshaw, the silent man,
who has been occupied all the evening drinking beer
and saying nothing, gives by general request his cele-
brated murder ballad in twenty-three stanzas. Before
it is quite finished, when he is pointing the moral of
his gruesome tale, warning all fond mothers to look
well after their daughters dear, and not foolishly allow
them to go out walking with young men of doubtful
reputation, the listeners begin to yawn and look
drowsy; but they praise his performance when it is
happily over, and John wipes his forehead, drinks his
beer, and says good-night.

As to their manner of singing, it was admirably
described about the middle of the eighteenth century
by a Dr. John Burton, a clergyman, who was accus-
tomed to “travel” into Sussex at intervals, and who
recorded his observations on the country and its people
in an amusing work entitled Iter Susseriense,

148 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

It has been remarked of the modern writer, Jules
Janin, that when all the good work he has produced
has been forgotten by the world, he will still be re-
membered by his unconsciously humorous description
of the lobster as “the Cardinal of the Sea.” A fate of
that kind has befallen Burton, who is remembered only
as the author of an exceedingly ridiculous saying. He
affirms that oxen, pigs, and women are long-legged in
this county, and speculating as to the reason, asks:
“May it be from the difficulty of pulling the feet out
of so much mud by the strength of the ankle that
the muscles get stretched, as it were, and the bones
lengthened ?”

Of the Sussex manner of speaking and singing,
Dr. Burton wrote: “They raise their voices to a sharp
pitch, and moreover deliver all their words fluently and
in a sort of sing-song. . . . The more shrill-toned they
may be, the more valued they are: and in church they
sing psalms by preference, not set to the old simple
tune, but as if in tragic chorus, changing about with
strophe and antistrophe and stanza, with good measure,
but yet there is something offensive to my ears, when
they bellow to excess and bleat out some goatish noise
with all their might.”

The description is true of to-day, only the goatish
noise, which is offensive to most ears, is not now heard
so much in church, where indeed the Sussex peasant
is not often seen: you hear it in the ale-house and the
cottage.

SILENCE AND MUSIC 149

What strikes me as the most curious and interesting
point about their singing—their love of high-pitched
voices, and, in many of their ballads, their go-as-you-
please tuneless tuneful manner, with the prolonging of
some notes at random and “bleating out of goatish
noises ”—is its resemblance to the singing of the
Basques, which is perhaps the most primitive kind
of vocal music that survives in Europe. This Basque
singing in its turn strongly reminds me of all the
Indians’ singing I have heard in South America,
including that of the Tehuelches—the Patagonian
nomad race. The Gauchos of the Pampas, too, have
inherited something of that manner of singing from
their progenitors, or else have caught it from the
aborigines. The Basques and the red men, like our
Sussexians, are fond of shrillness and acute sounds,
but do not, like the East Indians, cultivate falsetto.

I have described the sweetest, most musical voice
heard in Sussex as that of a young girl in the downs;
another downland girl’s voice was one of the acutest
carrying voices I ever heard in my life. She was
shepherding (a rare thing for a girl to do) on the
very high downs between Stanmer and Westmeston ;
and for two or three days during my rambles among
the hills in that neighbourhood I constantly heard her
oft-repeated calls and long piercing cries sounding
wonderfully loud and distinct even at a distance of
two miles and more away. It was like the shrill
echoing cries of some clear-voiced big bird — some

150 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

great forest fowl, or eagle, or giant ibis, or rail, or
courlan, in some far land where great birds with
glorious voices have not all been extirpated.

It was nice to hear, but it surprised me that all
that outcry, heard over an area of seven or eight
square miles, was necessary. At a distance of a mile
T watched her, and saw that she had no dog, that her
flock, numbering nine hundred, travelled a good deal,
being much distressed by thirst, as all the dew ponds
in that part of the downs were dry. When her far-
sounding cries failed to make them turn then she had
to go after them, and her activity and fleetness of
foot were not less remarkable than her ringing voice;
but I pitied her doing a man and dog’s work in that
burning weather, and towards evening on my way
home I paid her a visit. She was a rather lean but
wiry-looking girl, just over fifteen years old, with an
eager animated face, dark skin and blackish fuzzy hair
and dark eyes. She was glad to talk and explain it
all, and had a high-pitched but singularly agreeable
voice and spoke rapidly and well. The shepherd had
been called away, and no shepherd boy could be found
to take his place: all the men were harvesting, and
the flock had been given into her charge. The shep-
herd had left his dog, but he would not obey her:
she had taken him out several days, leading him
by a cord, but no sooner would she release him
than he would run home, and so she had given up

trying,

SILENCE AND MUSIC 151

I advised her to try again, and the next day I spent
some time watching her, the dog at her side, calling
and crying her loudest, flying over the wide hill side
after the sheep; but the dog cared not where they
went, and sullenly refused to obey her. Here is a
dog, thought I, with good old-fashioned conservative
ideas about the employment of women: he is not
going to help them make themselves shepherdesses
on the South Downs. A probably truer explanation
of the animal’s rebellious behaviour was given by a
young shepherd of my acquaintance. The dog, he
said, refused to do what he was told because the girl
was not his master’s daughter, nor of his house. The
sheep-dog’s attachment to the family is always very
strong, and he will gladly work for any member of it;
but for no person outside. “My dog,” he added, “ will
work as willingly and as well for any one of my sisters,
when I leave the flock to their care, as he will for me;
but he would not stir a foot for any person, man or
woman, not of the family.” He said, too, that this
was the common temper of the Sussex sheep-dog ;
faithful above all dogs to their own people but sus-
picious of all strangers, and likely at any time to bite
the stranger’s hand that caresses them.

IT daresay he was right: I have made the acquaint-
ance of some scores of these downland dogs, and
greatly admired them, especially their brown eyes,
which are more eloquent and human in their expres-
sion than any other dog’s eyes known to me; yet it

152 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

has frequently happened that, after I had established
as I imagined a firm friendship with one, he has
suddenly snapped or growled at me.

My account of that most extraordinary hullaballoo
among the hills made by the young shepherdess has
served to remind me of the subject I had set myself
to write about in this chapter, and which in all these
pages I have not yet touched upon—the wonderful
silence of the downs, and the effect of nature’s more
delicate music heard in such an atmosphere. That
clear repeated call of the young shepherdess would
have sounded quite different from six to eight hundred
feet below on the flat weald, where it would have
mixed with other sounds, and a denser atmosphere
and hedges and trees would have muffled and made
it seem tame and commonplace. On the great smooth
hills, because of their silence and their thinner, purer
atmosphere, it fell startlingly on the sense, and the
prolonged cries had a wild and lonely expression.

This silence of the hills does not impress one at
once if the mind is occupied with thinking, or the
eyes with seeing. But if one spends many hours
each day and many days in lonely rambles (and who
would not prefer to be alone in such a place?), a
consciousness of it grows upon the mind. The quiet
too becomes increasingly grateful, and the contrast
between the hills and the lowland grows sharper with

TE ONITHOLIG WOW SNMOG HLAOS AH]

SILENCE AND MUSIC 153

each day. Coming down to the village where one
sleeps, it seems like a town full of business and noise,
and the sound of a train in the distance has a
strangely disturbing effect. The coarse and common
sounds of the lowlands do not penetrate into the silent
country of the hills. The sounds there are mostly of
birds, and these are comparatively few and are not the
loud-voiced. Furthermore, when they are the same
voices which you are accustomed to hear in hedge and
field and orchard, they do not seem quite the same.
The familiar note of the homestead has a more delicate,
spiritualised sound. The common characteristic song-
sters of the islands and miniature forests of furze are
the linnet, whitethroat, dunnock, meadow pipit, yellow-
hammer, common bunting, whinchat, and stonechat.
They are none of them loud-voiced, and their songs
do not drown or kill one another, but are rather in
harmony and suited to that bright quiet land. I have
said that the song-thrush among other birds of the
orchard goes to the downs and sometimes breeds
there. Now, although I aim as fond of the music of
this thrush as any one can be, heard from the tree-
tops in woods and lanes and fields, where it sounds
best, it was never a welcome voice on the downs.
I seldom heard it in those wilder quiet furze islands
among the high hills; and if the loud staccato song
burst out in such a place I always had a strong in-
clination to go out of my way and throw a stone at
the singer to silence him, On the other hand, I

154 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

never tired of listening to even the poorest of the
characteristic species; even the common bunting was
a constant pleasure. In the wide sunny world I
preferred him to his neighbour and relation, the
yellow-hammer. The sound he emits by way of song
is certainly bright, and, like some other bird-voices, it
is associated in my mind in hot and brilliant weather
with the appearance of water spouting or leaping and
sparkling in the sun. Doubtless such expressions as
“needles of sound,” “splinters,” and “shafts,” and
“jets of sound,” &¢., to be found in writers on bird-
music, are not wholly metaphorical, but actually ex-
press the connection existing in the writer's mind
between certain sounds and sights. The common
bunting’s little outburst of confused or splintered notes
is when heard (by me) at the same time mentally seen
as a handful of clear water thrown up and breaking
into sparkling drops in the sunlight.

Of the songsters of the furze on the downs the best
to my mind is the stonechat. It is true that the
linnet has one exquisite note, the equal of which for
purest melody and tender expression is not to be
found among our feathered vocalists. Those who are
so utterly without imagination as to keep a linnet (for
the love of it) in a wire prison, cannot hear this note
as I hear it. To sing it properly the little bird must
be free of the summer sunshine, the wide blue sky
and green expanse of earth, the furze bushes, aflame
with their winged blossoms and smelling of spice; for

SILENCE AND MUSIC 155

that incomparable note, and the carmine colour which
comes not on his feathers in captivity, express his
gladness in a free aérial life.

If we except that one angelical note, the linnet is
nearly on a level as a singer with the other species I
have named; but the stonechat comes first in the
order of merit, and I think the whinchat comes next.
The ornithological books on this point tell us only
that the stonechat has a short and simple, or a short
but pleasant (or not unpleasant) song; and there is
indeed not much more to say of it as we usually hear
it. No sooner does he catch sight of a human form
in his haunts than he is all excitement and trouble,
and will flit and perch and flit again from bush top to
bush top, perpetually uttering his two little contrasted
alarm notes, the chack, chack, as of two pebbles
struck together, which he has in common with other
chats, and the thin little sorrowful piping sound.
This anxious temper keeps him from singing in our
presence, and causes us to think that he sings but
rarely. Then, too, his voice is not strong, and does not
carry well, and it is not strange that when heard in a
place where bird-notes are many and loud it attracts
but little attention. Heard in the perfect silence of
the downland atmosphere, where the slightest sound
flies far, it strikes me as a very delicate and beautiful
song, in its character unlike that of any other British
species.

One day last June I had a pleasant experience with

156 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

this bird. I sat still among bushes, where stonechats
were breeding, until they got over their anxiety or
forgot my presence, and began to sing; first one and
then another, and at last I had three singing within
hearing distance. To sing the stonechat flies up
almost vertically from his perch on the topmost
spray of a bush to a height of forty or fifty to a
hundred feet, and at the highest point pours out a
vapid series of double notes, the first clear and sharp,
the next deeper or somewhat throaty, then the clear
again, the sound rising and falling rhythmically; and
as he sings he drops rapidly a distance of a couple of
feet, then flutters up and drops again and again. It
is both dance and song, and a very pretty performance.

The whinchat’s song is even less well known, or less
regarded, than that of its more conspicuously coloured
relation, the stonechat. Thus, William Borrer, in his
Birds of Sussex, expresses the opinion that this species
has no song; yet he had spent eighty years of his
long life in a rural district where the whinchat is
fairly common, and had been a lifelong observer of
the birds of his county. It is in fact a low gentle
song that cannot be heard far, and when other birds
are singing it is not regarded. The song is a warble
of half-a-dozen notes, and is hardly longer than the
redstart’s song, with which it has been compared. But
it is not like it. The whinchat’s best notes, though
low, have a full, sweet, mellow quality which makes
them comparable to the blackbird and the blackcap.

SILENCE AND MUSIC 157

The redstart’s best and opening note is bright yet
plaintive, and reminds one at the same time of two
such unlike songsters as the swallow and the robin.

Sitting quietly on a low bush the whinchat will
sometimes warble for half-an-hour at a stretch, utter-
ing his few notes, and repeating them after an interval
so short as to produce at a little distance the effect
of a continuous warble like that of the garden-warbler
or sedge-warbler. But he is never like them excited,
and in a hurry to get his notes out: he sings in a
leisurely manner. Now one June day in a furzy place
I began to hear the almost continuous warble of the
bird, and standing still I tried to catch sight of him in
a clump about fifty yards away. I was sure he was in
that clump and could not be further away, for even
a distance of fifty yards was almost too far to hear
so low a song distinctly. I sat down to listen and
watch, and the song, very sweet and beautiful, went
on and on, and still I could see nothing. At length
I got up and went to the clump and saw no bird,
but the song still went on no louder than before:
I walked, following up the sound, and discovered the
bird at a distance of over four hundred yards from
where I had began to listen to it.

I was greatly surprised on this occasion at the
distance sound will travel on these silent hills; I
was still more surprised on another day when I met
with an amusing experience.

Sometimes, when in some very lonely spot, such

158 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

as I loved to spend a day in, human voices were
distinctly heard coming from a great distance when
no human form was in sight. I was reminded of
poor Peter Wilkins, alone in his desolate antarctic
island, listening during the long polar night to the
mysterious sounds of invisible people talking and
laughing, now on this side, now on that, or else far
up in the pale dim sky. But these voices did not
make me miserable; I had my “beautiful creatures”
for company, and wished not for other. Still I did
not wholly escape from my own kind. One afternoon
in July, in the loneliest spot I knew, where half the
side of a great down is overgrown with luxuriant furze,
I heard a sound of eager talking, as of persons engaged
in argument, which appeared to grow louder and
louder; and at last I spied coming down into the
wilderness of furze three human figures, and turning
my binocular on them made out that they were three
very unpleasant-looking tramps, each with a big bundle,
and they were evidently coming to camp at that
place. After I had been observing them for some
time they all at once caught sight of me, standing
motionless among the bushes at a distance of about,
six hundred yards, and were thrown into a great
state of excitement. “Don’t lose sight of him! Keep
your eye on him while I hide the things away!” I
heard one cry to the others, after which he dis-
appeared for some time among the bushes. For
half-an-hour longer they kept their eyes on me, and

SILENCE AND MUSIC 159

at length the one who had hidden his treasures
away, plucking up courage, came towards me, and
when within about fifty yards began to explain
that he and his mates were doing no harm, but
had only come to that spot to cook a bit of food and
to rest. I answered that I didn’t mind—what they
did there was no business of mine. That greatly re-
lieved him; for having guilty consciences, they doubt-
less had jumped to the conclusion that I was there
in the interests of the landlord to attend to the
safety of the rabbits and warn off suspicious-looking
human beings. He then took notice of my curiously-
shaped binocular, and asked me what I used it for.
I told him that it was for watching birds ;—that
was my business, and I would attend to it and leave
him to attend to his. I spoke a little sharply, not
because of any feeling of enmity towards tramps
generally, but because he was a singularly unpleasant
specimen. He was a small man with low cunning
and rascality written on his dirty face, in ancient
corduroys, waistcoat all rags, and a once black frock
coat, too big for him, shining with dirt and grease as
if it had been japanned in patches: a rusty bowler
hat and broken earth-coloured boots completed his
attire. His manner was even worse—or rather both
of his manners, for at first he had cringed and was
now jaunty. He took the hint and went back to
his companions.

Three days later I spent the last half of a day

160 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

at the same place. There was a stony spot there,
where the ground was quite covered with bleached
flints, with many chipped specimens among them,
and late in the day, while waiting for the sun to
set, I amused myself by turning over and examining
these fragments. A babble of voices in eager dis-
cussion reached my ears and grew louder and nearer,
and at length I spied coming over the hill towards
me the same three vagabonds I had met there before.
And again, on first catching sight of me stooping
among the bushes, they were greatly alarmed, and
becoming silent separated and hid themselves in
the furze. After watching me for some time they
made the discovery that I was the harmless person
whose business it was to watch birds encountered
some days before, and coming out from hiding they
went on their way. When they had got past me
the same man who had talked with me on the
former occasion turned back and came up to where
I was standing. He still wanted to talk, but I did
not encourage him, Then he stood silent for some
time watching me picking up flints, and at last he
said, “I see that you are interested in flints. I
found a very curious one the other day, which |
think you would like to see. It is perfectly round
like a bullet, and weighs about a pound. It has a
hole in it, and I think it is hollow inside. I hid
it under a furze bush, and you can see it if you
will go to the place with me.” I told him that

SILENCE AND MUSIC 161

perfectly round flints with a hollow inside were
quite common on the downs: that if I wanted any
I could find a dozen, or twenty, or forty any day.
It surprised him, he said, to hear that round flints
were so common, as he had never seen but that
one. Then he tried to introduce other topics, and,
snubbed again, he at last left me and went after his
companions. Meanwhile they had been steadily walk-
ing on, and when he at last overtook them they were
a quarter of a mile from me. On catching them up
he exclaimed “I say!” to call attention to something
he wished to tell them, and I listened. “The other
day,” he said, “that man was a naturalist; to-day he
is a geologist !”

It surprised me to hear him use such words, and
show so perfect a knowledge of their right meaning;
but it amazed me that I had been able to hear them
distinctly at that great distance. It was a new
experience, and produced a feeling that I had somehow,
without noticing it at the time, been re-made and
endowed with a new set of senses infinitely better
than the old ones. The tramps, unaccustomed to the
hills, of course had no idea of the distance their voices
carried, or they would not have talked about keeping
their eyes on me and hiding their parcels, &., when
they first saw me. I noticed subsequently that low-
land people generally spoke a great deal louder than
was necessary on the downs. They were accustomed

to a denser and noisier atmosphere, and were like
L

162 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

people who have been conversing with a deaf person,
and when they speak to others cannot drop the habit
of shouting. The shepherd’s manner of speaking, and
his voice too, I think, have been modified somewhat
by his surroundings. At all events, he speaks quietly
and has a very clear voice; a man with a loud thick
speech is not a native of the hills.

But it is when listening to the music of the larks
that we are best able to appreciate the wonderful
silence of the hills, and the refining effect of long dis-
tances in this pure thin atmosphere on the acutest and
brightest bird sounds.

The skylark is found all over downland, and is
abundant wherever there is cultivation. On the sheep-
walks, where favourable breeding-places are coinpara-
tively few, he is so thinly distributed that you may
sometimes ramble about for half a day and not put up
more than half-a-dozen birds. And yet here, on these
sheep-fed hills, out of sight of corn fields, you hear the
lark all day long—not one nor half-a-dozen, nor a score
or two, but many scores, and I should say hundreds of
larks. Go where you like, to the summit of the highest
hill, or down the longest slopes into the deepest combe
or valley at its foot, everywhere you are ringed about
with that perpetual unchanging stream of sound. It
is not a confused, nor a diffused sound, which is
everywhere, filling the whole air like a misty rain, or
a perfume, or like the universal hum of a teeming
insect life in a wood in summer; but a sound that

SILENCE AND MUSIC 163

ever comes from a great distance, out of the sky: and
you are always in the centre of it; and the effect is as
of an innumerable company of invisible beings, forming
an unbroken circle as wide as the horizon, chanting an
everlasting melody in one shrill, unchanging tone, You
may hear it continuously for hours, yet look in vain to
see a bird; I have strained my sight, gazing for an hour,
and have not seen one rising or coming back to earth,
and have looked up and listened in vain to hear one
singing overhead. And I have looked all about the
sky with my strong glasses without being able to detect
one small brown speck on the vast blue expanse. This
was because the birds on these smooth, close-cropped
hills, especially in the dry months of July and August,
were really very few and far between—so far indeed
that not a bird came within ken. And yet on account
of the immense distance the sound travels you can hear
the voices of hundreds.

The highest notes of the lark on these hills may, I
believe, be heard three miles away: that sound carries
three times as far on these heights as it does on the
level country I am positive; and if this be so the
highest notes of all the birds singing on a windless day
within a circuit of eighteen miles are audible. Many,
probably most of the birds one hears are singing over
distant corn-fields; but the fields are too far to be seen,
or they are on slopes behind interposing summits and
ridges. It may happen (it has been my experience
many scores of times) that no bird is near enough for

164 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

the listener to hear any of its lower, harsh, or guttural
notes. But if the listener is near a corn-field, or if any
birds are singing near him, these guttural notes will be
audible, and the effect of the music will not be quite
the same.

The song of the lark is a continuous torrent of con-
trasted guttural and clear shrill sounds and trills, so
rapidly emitted that the notes, so different in character,
yet seem to interpenetrate or to overlap each other ; and
the effect on the ear is similar to that on the eye of
sober or dull and brilliant colours mixed and running
into one another in a confused pattern. The acutest
note of all, a clear piercing sound like a cry several
times repeated, is like a chance patch of most brilliant
colour occurring at intervals in the pattern. As the
distance between listener and bird increases the throat-
notes cease to be audible; beginning with the lowest
they are one by one sifted out, and are followed by the
trills; and finally, at a very great distance—as far, in
fact, as anything of the song is left—the occasional
shrill reiterated notes I have described alone can
be heard.

Let the reader, then, who has not been on these
downs in summer on a brightest, windless day, and
listened alone to this sound—alone, since a companion’s
talk or even his silent presence would in most cases
mar the eftect—let him imagine if he can the effect
of a great number of birds all round the sky pouring
out their highest, shrillest notes, so clarified and

SILENCE AND MUSIC 165

brightened by distance as to seem like no earthly
music. To say of a sound that it is bright is to use a
too common metaphor; this sound shines above all
others, and the multitude of voices made one by
distance is an effulgence and a glory. I have listened
to it by the hour, never wearying nor ceasing to
wonder at that mysterious beautiful music which
could not be called crystalline nor silvery, but
was like the heavenly sunshine translated into sound ;
subtle, insistent, filling the world and the soul, yet
always at a vast distance, falling, falling like a lucid
rain. No other sound would have seemed worth
listening to there. The richest, most passionate strains
of the nightingale, if such a bird had by chance sung
near me in a bush, would have seemed no more than
the chirruping and chiding of a sparrow. And when I
have called to mind the best things our poets have said
of the lark, their words have sounded to me strangely
commonplace and even insipid: “Up with me, up
with me into the clouds”—it is but the common brown
bird of the corn-fields, the bird of earth with a nest
and a sitting mate, and a song full of harsh guttural
sounds mixed with clear notes, they have had in their
mind. But this is not strange, and I am the last
person to abuse the poets, since, apart from nature,
they provide me with the chief pleasure I have
in life.

It is a common experience of the artist with the
brush to see effects in nature which he would never

166 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

dream of attempting to transfer to canvas. They are
beyond him—they are outside of the outermost limits
of his art. So, too, there are things innumerable that
mock the artist in words—even the inspired poet. Of
all who have written, Keats has perhaps come nearest
on a few rare occasions, to an expression of the feeling
which the visible world, in certain of its aspects and
certain of its sights and sounds, inspires in us. That is
the utmost—and how much is it? If any man can say
that Keats has expressed all or as much as he has felt
in nature or more than he has felt, I would say of such
aman that he does not inhabit the same world with
me, but lives in some other world.

CHAPTER IX

SUMMER HEAT

When the downs are most enjoyable—July in the wooded lowland
—The bliss of summer—Children’s delight in heat—Misery
of cold—Piers Plowman—Langland’s philosophy—The hap-
piest man in Sussex—aA protection from the sun—Heat not
oppressive on the hills—Birds on Mount Harry—A cup of
cold water—Drawing water in a hat—Advantages of a tweed
hat—An unsympathetic woman—Beauty of kindness.

THE downs to my mind are most enjoyable during
the eight or ten hottest weeks of the year; not only
because of the greater intensity of life and colour at
that season, but also because the heat of the sun,
always less oppressive than on the country below, and
endurable even at its greatest, as we had it in the
exceptionally hot and dry season of 1899, is at most
times a positive pleasure. Midsummer down on the
level country makes us shade-lovers; here where the
air is more elastic we can rejoice to be in a shadeless
land. And the charm of the downs at this season, if
by chance rain has fallen to refresh and make them
blossom, is never more appreciated than when the
visitor goes to them direct from the wooded district
of the weald. During the last half of July the wood-

land atmosphere weighs somewhat heavily on the
167

168 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

spirits. Month by month the colour has deepened
until it is almost sombre and resembles the everlasting
uniform green of a tropical forest. The tree-shaded
bushes and briars, the rank grasses, creepers, and weedy
flowering plants, wear to our anthropomorphic mind
and vision something of a weary look; they have felt
the decay which is not yet apparent; the brightest
blossoms welcome us to their shady retreats with a
somewhat pathetic smile. Birds are more abundant
than in spring, but they are mostly silent and appear
anxious to escape notice, slipping secretly away and
speaking to one another in low voices that have an
unfamiliar sound. It may even seem that there is
something of mystery, or of apprehension, in their in-
frequent subdued notes, which they utter involun-
tarily when disturbed; that they are prescient of
coming changes, and have even some dim knowledge
of that long journey from which so few will return to
their places in spring; that they have already began
to listen for the breath of autumn, rustling the leaves
with a sharper sibilant sound than that of summer.
The quietude reminds us of the sick-room; the hot,
languid air is like a feverish breath that infects the
blood. It is a joy to escape from such confinement,
to go out into that lofty treeless world, into the glory
of the sun that burns and does not hurt.

The power of the sun and its joy is not felt so early
on the downs as on the lower country, and last season
it was not until the middle of June that I experienced

SUMMER HEAT 169

the blissful sensation and feeling in its fulness. Then
a day came that was a revelation; I all at once had
a deeper sense and more intimate knowledge of what
summer really is to all the children of life; for it
chanced that on that effulgent day even the human
animal, usually regarded as outside of nature, was
there to participate in the heavenly bounty. That I
felt the happiness myself was not quite enough, un-
human, or uncivilised, as I generally am, and wish to
be. High up the larks were raining down their
brightest, finest music; not rising skyward nor falling
earthward, but singing continuously far up in that
airy blue space that was their home. The little birds
that live in the furze, the titlarks, white-throats,
linnets, and stonechats, sprang upwards at frequent
intervals and poured out their strains when on the
wing. Each bird had its characteristic flight and
gestures and musical notes, but all alike expressed
the overflowing gladness that summer inspired, even
as. the flowers seemed to express it in their intense
glowing colours; and as the butterflies expressed in
their fluttering dances, and in the rapturous motions
of their wings when at rest. There were many rabbits
out, but they were not feeding, and when disturbed
ran but fifteen or twenty yards away, then sat and
looked at me with their big, round, prominent eyes,
apparently too contented with life to suspect harm.
But I saw no human creature in the course of a long
ramble that morning until I was near the sea, when

170 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

on approaching a coastguard station I all at once
came upon some children lying on the grass on the
slope of a down. There were five of them, scattered
about, all lying on their backs, their arms stretched
crossways, straight out, their hands open. It looked
as if they had instinctively spread themselves out, just
as a butterfly at rest opens wide its wings to catch
the beams. The hot sun shone full on their fresh
young faces ; and though wide awake they lay perfectly
still as I came up and walked slowly past them,
looking from upturned face to face, each expressing
perfect contentment; and as I successively caught
their eyes they smiled, though still keeping motion-
less and silent as the bunnies that had regarded me
a while before, albeit without smiling, Brer Rabbit
being a serious little beast. Their quietude and com-
posure in the presence of a stranger was unusual, and
like the confidence of the wild rabbits on that day
was caused by the delicious sensation of summer in
the blood. We in our early years are little wild
animals, and the wild animals are little children.

Cold, and the misery of cold have I known; cold
of keen wind and bitter frost; cold of rain that rained
every day where there was no fire to dry me, and no
shelter; cold of long winter nights, spent shivering ;
and cold from hunger and thinness of blood. That
was indeed what winter really meant to a majority
of men, even in this long civilised land not so many
centuries ago. These children reminded me of my

SUMMER HEAT 171

own experiences in the past, and of the state of things
in old times. For our little ones, even in this altered
age in which we have made our own conditions, in
their quick and keen response to nature’s influences,
perpetually recall our own past to us, and that of the
race, The sight of their faces lit with the strong
sunlight from above and the summer bliss from with-
in, brought back the vision of old Piers Plowman, ill-
fed and gaunt and ragged, following his plough on a
winters day—the picture which has often made me
shiver with the sensation of remembered cold. Lines
that had printed themselves indelibly on my memory,
so keenly did I feel when I read them, now seemed
all at once to have a new and deeper significance.
“There the poor dare plead,” the old poet says; and
by “there” he means after life and its miseries, at the
Judgment-seat :—

There the poor dare plead,

And prove by pure reson

To have allowance of his lord,

By the lawe he it claimeth ;

Joye that never joye hadde

Of rightful jugge he asketh,

And seth, Lo, briddes and beasts,
That no blisse ne knoweth,

And wilde wormes in wodes,
Through winter thou them grievest
And maketh them well nigh meke
And mild for defaute ;

And after thou sendeth them somer,
That is their sovereign joye

And blisse to all that ben

Both wilde and tame.

172 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

Note that this interpretation of Christ’s teaching
is not quite the same as ours, in these times of plenty.
This old poet’s philosophy is founded on the parable,
literally taken, of Lazarus and Dives: you cannot have
your sumptuous fare and purple and fine linen both
here and hereafter. For all those whose portion in
this life was perpetual toil and want and misery, and
who bore it patiently (for patience was then the chiet
virtue), there was compensation after death. That was
the law of the parable—

By the lawe he it claimeth.

It was only natural that the author of the V%sion,
living amid the conditions so hard for us to realise,
which he describes, should have held such a belief,
that it should seem “ pure reson” to him. For He who
rules over all is just even to the “briddes and beasts”
and “wilde wormes in wodes.” With winter He grieves
them and afterwards sends them summer; that is
their bliss, the vital beams that gladden the stonechat
and rabbit, and, piercing below the surface, unfreeze
the torpid adder’s blood. So, too, for poor humanity
there is a glorious eternal summer after this life’s
bitter winter. This is the teaching of the Vision—
poverty borne with patience is the best life, better
and blesseder than riches :—

For though it be sour to suffre
Thereafter cometh swete ;

As on a walnut without
Is a bitter bark ;

SUMMER HEAT 173

But after that bitter bark,
Be the shelle awaye,

Is a kernel of comfort
Kind to restore,

At the end of June, a fortnight after seeing the
coastguard children, I was again vividly reminded
of the bliss of summer “to all that ben” in an
amusing way. It was an excessively hot morning, the
hottest of the year so far, and I felt it all the more
for being down in the valley of the Ouse, on a dusty
flinty road, weary to walk in, between the little
riverside villages of Southease and Rodmell. Here
I spied a man coming towards me at a swinging
pace; he was short and thick set, aged about thirty,
clad in old earth-coloured clothes, a small peakless
eap thrust far back on his head, his broad face—the
countenance of a genial ruffian—ashine with sweat
and happiness. His swinging gait, jolly expression,
and a bunch of freshly pulled yellow flag lilies which
he had stuck in the breast of his ragged old coat,
plainly showed that he was no professional tramp.
Yet he stopped me with a loud hearty greeting and
the remark that it was splendid weather; then he
added that he would be glad of a bit of bread and
some beer at the next village, but was stony-broke.
Now I had nothing but a florin in my pocket, and
as my intention was to be out rambling all day I
knew that I should badly want some money for
refreshments before evening, and there was no place
near to get change. I explained this to him, with

174 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

apologies for not relieving his wants. “Oh, never
mind,” he returned, “I'll manage to get to Newhaven.
I’ve just ccm out,” he added. “I’ve been doing
time over there;” here he jerked his thumb over
his shoulder in the direction of Lewes. Then remark-
ing again that it was a splendid day and that he
was very glad to be out once more, he bade me a
hearty good-bye and went on his way to the coast.
I looked after him, almost expecting to hear him
burst out singing. He was probably the happiest
man in Sussex on that hot morning. And no wonder,
since coming out of gaol, whither he had perhaps
been sent when the year was young, he had passed
directly from the winter of his dim stone cell to
summer in the fulness of its glory. He must indeed
have been happy and seen all familiar things with
a strange magical beauty in them, when he plucked
those yellow flags to wear them as a big buttonhole!
It was the only way in which he could express his
overflowing joy, and love of life and liberty and of
green mother earth; since he could not, like the
resuscitated serpent, get himself a new shining gar-
ment for the occasion, nor like the wild bird sing a
new wonderful song.

But the hottest season is after June—the season
when, as I have said, the downs are to me most attrac-
tive. At this season my custom on going out on
the hills is to carry a wetted pocket-handkerchief or
piece of sponge in my hat: by renewing the moisture

SUMMER HEAT 175

three or four times, or as often as water is found, I
am able to keep my head perfectly cool during a
ramble of ten or twelve hours on a cloudless day in
July and August. Long ago, in South America, I
discovered that the wet cloth was a great improve-

Out or GaoL

ment on the cabbage-leaf, or thick fleshy leaf of some
kind, which is universally used as a brain-protector.
So long as the head is comfortable there is nothing
to fear, the rest of the system being safeguarded by
nature. Exercise keeps the body cool.

176 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

In the course of a hot summer day on these shade-
less hills one may experience a variety of tempera-
tures and a succession of contrasted sensations.
Lying flat on the grass on a lower slope it is exces-
sively hot; merely to sit or stand up is to enter
into another and more temperate climate; in toiling
up a steep slope the sensation is that of wading chin-
deep in a hot bath with one’s clothes on; higher up
a breeze is often met which strikes one with a de-
licious chill. The sudden cold produced by rapid
evaporation refreshes and exhilarates at the same
time; it is like a draught of cider to the parched
reaper. However motionless the air may be in the
valleys, the deep clefts dividing the downs, there is
always some wind on the summits.

There are of course some days in July and August
when there is scarcely a breath of wind even on the
highest crests; yet even so the heat is never so
oppressive there. If at the height of 300 feet you
feel that it would be a relief to creep into the shade
of even a stunted blackthorn or furze-bush, at 800
feet you can still sit or even lie in the full blaze and
enjoy it. Birds as well as men feel this; frequently
on a hot windless day I have been surprised on
getting to the highest point in any place at the
number of birds collected on it; not to feed but
merely to repose during the idle noonday hours. One
August day, on coming to the summit of Mount Harry,
west of Lewes, I found a company of rooks and daws

SUMMER HEAT 177

not far short of a hundred, a large covey of red-
legged partridges, many starlings, and about thirty
missel-thrushes, all gathered at one spot on and near
the big barrow on the hill top. I should have been
glad to sit down quietly among them, but they would
not have it so, birds having no power to distinguish
those who wish for a “better friendship” with them ;
and so, some with a discontented caw or croak, others
with whir of wings, and still others with harsh scold-
ing notes, they all flew away in different directions,
and left me with no companions except those wan
people who are always with us and look less substan-
tial than ever in the strong sunlight; and with
nothing to think about but an old unhappy thing;
how on “that dim day of light,” May 14, 1264, dead
bodies covered the ground, and gasping and groaning
was heard on every side; and either was desirous of
bringing the other out of life, and the father spared
not the sonne, nor the sonne the father, and christian
blood was shed without pitie on all that green solitary
hill.

The shepherd of the downs, out for the day in
summer, has a provision against thirst in his can of
water or cold tea, which is usually kept concealed in
» furze-bush. To carry water is a precaution which
I never take, because, for one reason, I love not
to be encumbered with anything except my clothes.
Even my glasses, which cannot be dispensed with,

are a felt burden. Then too, I always expect to
M

178 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

find a cottage or farm somewhere; and the water
when obtained is all the more refreshing when really
wanted; and finally the people I meet are interesting,
and but for thirst I should never know them.

That ancient notion of the value of a cup of cold
water, and the merit there is in giving it, is not
nearly dead yet in spite of civilisation. Water is
the one thing it is still more blessed to give than
to receive; and if you approach any person wearing
on your face the look of one about to ask for some
benefit, and your request is for a drink of water,
you are sure to make him happy. This is not said
cynically: if by chance one of our millionaire dukes
has ever in his life given a drink of water to some
poor very thirsty man, he will secretly know that
this action on his part gave him more happiness
than it did to build a cathedral, or give a park to
the public, or to win the blue ribbon of the turf,
or even to be Prime Minister.

On one excessively sultry breathless morning, when
I had foolishly gone out for a long ramble without
my usual protection for the head, I all at once began
about noon to suffer intolerably from both heat and
thirst. I was probably below par on that day, for I
had never felt more parched, even when travelling for
twelve hours in the sun without a drink of water;
and as to the heat, I experienced that most miserable
sensation of a boiling brain—a feeling which associates
itself in the mind with the image of a pot boiling

SUMMER HEAT 179

on the fire, bubbling and puffing out jets of steam.
The nearest inhabited place in sight was a small farm-
house on the crest of a hill about two and a half
miles away, with deep hollows and hills to descend
and ascend between. But down below me, at the
bottom of the valley, not much more than half a mile
from where I stood, there was a small, half-ruined,
barn-like building, and not far from the building a
shepherd was standing watching his flock. To him
I went and asked if any water was to be had at
that place. He shook his head. “No well there?”
I said, indicating the old stone building. “Oh yes,
there’s an old well there; you can drag the stone
off, but you can’t get any water without a bottle and
string.” The fellow’s indifference irritated me, and
turning my back on him I went and hunted for the
well, and succeeded in dragging aside the heavy
stone that covered it, to find that the water was
not more than about seven feet below the surface.
Twisting the band of my tweed hat in the crook
of my stick handle, then lying so as to hang well
over the edge, I managed to fish up a hatful of
water, and drank the whole of it, much to the shep-
herd’s amusement, who had followed me to watch
operations, The water was delightfully cold and
refreshing, and the well-soaked hat, when I put it
on, kept my head cool for the rest of the day.

My hat of an unsuitable material had proved
directly useful in that case. The straw hat is of course

180 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

lighter and cooler than any other; but no person
with any consideration for the feelings of a bird in
the matter would think of wearing it, any more
than he would think of sporting white or light-
coloured flannels. White and black are equally bad
for those who go a-birding. There is nothing like
tweeds of a greyish-brown indeterminate colour, with
a tweed hat to match.

A second amusing adventure, which I had at a
farm in a deep hollow in the midmost part of the
South Down range, where it is broadest, remains to
be told. The small grey old house, shaded by old
trees, so far removed from the noise of the world
in that deep valley among the great hills, had en-
chanted me when I first beheld it, and hearing later
that the people of the house sometimes took lodgers
in summer, I went to inquire. I left the village
north of the downs where I was staying a little after
seven o'clock in the morning, and after being out
on the hills for over six hours in a great heat, visiting
many furzy places in my ramble, I went down to
that shady peaceful spot where I hoped to find a
home. Some old trees grew on the lawn, and on
a chair in the shade sat a grey-haired man in broad-
cloth clothes, his feet in red carpet slippers, looking
very pale and ill. He was, I supposed, a visitor
or guest, and a town man; probably a prosperous
tradesman out of health, too old to make any change
in the solemn black respectable dress he had always

SUMMER HEAT 181

worn on Sundays and holidays. Going on to the
open front door I knocked, and after a time my
summons was answered by the landlady, a person
of a type to be met with occasionally not in Sussex
only but all over the country, the very sight of
which causes the heart to sink; a large, heavy-bodied,
slow-minded, and slow-moving middle-aged woman,
without a gleam of intelligence or sympathy in her
big expressionless face; a sort of rough-hewn pre-
adamite lump of humanity, or gigantic land-tortoise
in petticoats, When questioned, she said No, she
could not take me in. Yes, she took lodgers and
had a party now; they were going, but then another
party had engaged to come. She never took but
one party at a time—that was her way. Cross-
questioned, she said that it didn’t matter whether
it was a single man who was out every day and all
day long or a family of a dozen, so long as it was
one party. She laid herself out to do for one party
at a time, and had never taken more and couldn't
think of taking two—it upset her.

Very well, that point was decided against me;
it was now time to say that I had been out walking
in the sun for over six hours and was hungry and
thirsty and tired—could she give me something to
eat while I rested? No, she could not; it was hard
to get anything in such an out-of-the-way place,
and the provisions in the house were no more than
were needed. Oh, never mind, I returned, some bread

182 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

and cheese will do very well—I’m very hungry.
But there was no bread and cheese to spare, she
said. Then, I said, I must make a drink of milk
do. There was no milk, said she, or so little that
if she gave me any they would be short. Then, I
said, getting cross, perhaps you will be so good as
to give me a drink of water. She revolved this last
request in her dull brain for a minute or so, then
saying that she could do that, slowly went away to
the kitchen to get the water.

During our colloquy another person, a well-dressed
elderly woman, the wife of the man in broadcloth
and slippers, had come into the hall and listened. She
now dived into her rooms, and in a very few moments
returned with as much bread and cheese as a hungry
man could eat on a plate; then taking the glass
of water from the landlady’s hand, she insisted on
carrying the plate and the glass out to the lawn,
where I could rest in the shade while eating. The
other woman had meanwhile stared in an uncompre-
hending way, the dull surprise in her look gradually
changing to something resembling admiration. What
a strange thing it was that her lady lodger had
popped into the hall, listened like a robin to half
a dozen words, and understood the whole matter
in a flash; and that though it was no concern of
hers, and she had been asked for nothing, and had
her own anxieties and her ailing husband to attend
to, she had in an instant supplied my wants. And

SUMMER HEAT 183

not only that, she had added pleasant words, spoken
quite naturally in a nice voice, just as if I had been
some one belonging to her instead of a rough-looking
stranger. Now she, ponderous earthy soul that she
was, could not have spoken in that tone if she had
practised the trick for fifty years, Truly her lodger
was a wonderful woman !

While eating my lunch I got into conversation with
the man in broadcloth and slippers, his wife mean-
while coming and going, now with a cushion for his
head or something else for his comfort, or only to flit
round us in a bird-like way and see how we were get-
ting on. But when I had finished the water and went
back for more, she met me in the hall with a bottle of
ginger-beer. Now that is a drink which I care not for
on account of its mawkishness, but on this occasion
the taste was delicious; and even its whitish colour,
which had always been unpleasant to my sight, now
looked beautiful, and was caused by a mixture of that
precious fluid which is more refreshing and gladden-
ing to the heart than purple wine or any other drink,

CHAPTER X

SWALLOWS AND CHURCHES

Abundance of swallows in downland villages—The swallow’s bat-
like faculty—Old house at Ditchling—Church owls and Ditch-
ling Church—Shingled spires—Pleasure of finding churches
open—A strange memorial in a downland church—A nap in
West Firle churchyard—Slow-worms in churchyards—Increase
of swallows at Ditchling—House-martins on telegraph wires—
The telegraph a benefit to birds—Telegraph poles in the land-
scape—Sound of telegraph wires—A cockney’s bird-lore—A
Sussex man on swifts—Swifts rising from a flat surface—The
swift mystery—Swifts at Seaford—A Somerset bird-boy’s
strange story.

THE down country appears to have a great attraction for
the swallow, house-martin, and swift. One must group
these three together. The last is swallow-like in his
appearance and aérial habits, and to the popular mind
is, and always will be, a swallow. It may be that the
causes which have resulted in a decrease in the number
of these birds in many other parts of the country are
local, and have not affected this district, At all events,
during the last few years these species, although de-
clining elsewhere, have been exceedingly abundant in
the villages and hamlets among and at the foot of the
downs. At some spots where they most abounded,
looking down on the village from a high window or

other elevation, the effect was produced of a multitude
184

SWALLOWS AND CHURCHES 185

of bees or other insects, flying about over a hive or
some such centre of attraction, so numerous were the

OLp House aT DITCHLING

birds. Among the villages, Alfriston and Ditchling
appeared to be the most favoured by swallows and

186 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

martins, At the former I counted thirteen martins’
mud nests stuck to the wall of a small cottage opposite
to the house I was staying at. These nests and some
hundreds more were occupied, and mostly had young
birds in them; yet more nests were being made, and
if a woman came out of her front door and emptied a
bucket of dirty water in the road, half a dozen martins
would quickly drop down on the wet place to get a
little mortar for the nests they were building. The
ancient chimneys and picturesque red-tiled roofs of
the houses were as attractive to the swallows as the
walls under the eaves to the martins. The birds were
in hundreds, Sitting at a front window, while waiting
for my breakfast, the air seemed full of swallows
whirling about like house-flies in a room, and of the
sound of their voices, Presently another sound was
heard, something between a rumbling and a fluttering,
and down the chimney into the room flew or tumbled
a swallow. I closed the window and tried to catch it
to put it out, but the poor bird flew wildly about the
room and I could not get near it. NowI noticed that
although the two well-cleaned windows at the front
were in appearance two patches of shining light and
open ways to liberty, the bird in all his wild flights
about the large dim room never touched them.
Almost any other bird would have instantly dashed
himself against the glass. Tired of the vain chase,
I finally put up one sash of a window and sat down:
at once the captive, doubtless feeling a way of escape

DITCHLING CHURCH

SWALLOWS AND CHURCHES 187

in the more elastic air coming to it from that direction,
flew straight from the other side of the room and
passed out. Its action appeared to show that the
swallow, in spite of its feathery covering, has an almost
bat-like sensitiveness to enable it in unusual circum-
stances to avoid striking against any object in its
flight. It has been observed that bats flying round
in a dimly-lighted room were not deceived by the light
coming through a pane of glass; but, on the other
hand, they would flutter before a keyhole or any other
small aperture through which a current of out-door
air could come. This exquisite sensitiveness of the
bat’s wing, which is nerve as well as organ of flight,
is a corrective of vision, which is liable in all creatures
to deception. That the swallow, too, should be found
possessed of this additional sense, came to me as a
surprise.

At Ditchling the extraordinary abundance of swallow
and swift life interested me more than the ancient
traditional yarns about Alfred the Great’s connection
with the village; and, a long time after, that of Anne
of Cleves (poor thing !), who, as a divorced lady, appears
to have inhabited a good many houses in these parts.
The church of this same village is greatly admired
by artists as well as by antiquarians; it also possessed
that which to my mind made it the most perfect
sacred edifice in all the downs district—namely, a
family of white owls, strictly protected by the parson,
tamer than most birds of their kind.

188 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

The nest, or breeding hole, was under the eaves,
and after the young were hatched, every evening just
when the sun went down behind the great round
hills, strange noises would begin to issue from the
hole ;—sounds as of a sleeper with a bad cold in
his head, uncomfortably breathing through his nose,
prolonged, sibilant, and tremulous, and occasionally
deeper as if in imitation of the death-rattle in a
human throat. These noises were uttered by the
young birds, crying for their tea, or breakfast, or
whatever we like to call their first meal. And
presently the old owls would shuffle out to fly about
the village in their usual flopping, unballasted, aim-
less manner, this way and that, seemingly at random
as if they had lost their steering intelligence. But
in twenty minutes to half-an-hour one would be back
from the neighbouring rickyard with a mouse in his
claws.

Seated on one of the lichen-stained tombstones,
or in a chair on a small lawn abutting on the
churchyard, each evening while waiting for the owls
to come out, I found my sight resting with a rare
and untiring pleasure on the church before me; so
perfect a building it was of its kind, so well placed
on its mound with the old red-tiled houses harmoni-
ously grouped about it, and so noble a background
had the picture in the great round darkening hills
and the luminous evening sky.

There is a strong family resemblance in the

SWALLOWS AND CHURCHES 189

churches of this district: they are small in small
villages, built of stone or flint, with low square
towers surmounted by small shingled spires. Wood
and stone have the same grey colour of age and
weather, and the exposed wood has the appearance
of being perdurable as the stone. It is indeed long-
lasting, the shingles being made of hard butt oak
and pinned with oak wood, or fastened with copper
nails. In long, excessively dry summers, like that
of 1899, the shingles shrink and grow loose, and
rattle in the hot violent winds so loudly that a person
up in the belfry might imagine that their time had
nearly come, that a mightier blast will by-and-by
tear them off, to whirl them away like thistle-down
and scatter them wide over the country. Such a
fear would be idle; they rattle but keep their hold
until the rain comes to soak and tighten them in
their places ; and they will still be there in all weathers
when we that see them and think about their muta.
tions shall no longer be sensible to summer’s heat
and winter’s wet and cold.

I forget who it was who said of some peaceful
village churchyard that it made one in love with
death to be in such a place. That is a feeling which
may be experienced in some of the villages here—
Wilmington, Berwick, and West Firle, for instance.
Ditchling churchyard is too high above the surround-
ing level, and unshaded with trees, to allow of such
a fancy. Often during a long walk over the downs

190 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

in hot weather I have thought of the church and
churchyard before me as of a shaded fountain in a
parched desert. Arrived at the place I have gone
straight to the church, and am happy to say that
in many instances I have found it open “for private
meditation and prayer.” When on such occasions I
find the door locked against me, then the building
is no longer what it was originally intended for, and
sacred, but is that inhospitable place where a cup
of cold water was refused me when I was athirst,
and my only wish is for a piece of red chalk to set
a mark upon it.

Coming from the burning heat and glare of noon,
how grateful the coolness and how beautiful the
rich everlasting twilight of the interior seem! It
is in the ancient peaceful village church, of all houses
made with hands, that one can know that perfect
rest and contentment, the peace which passeth under-
standing, experienced in our communings with nature,
where nature has not been marred by man.

Only on one occasion did I experience feelings
very different from those I have described, in a down-
land church, which I found open one day at noon, my
favourite hour. On taking a seat about the middle of
the church, I noticed that there was but one memorial
in it—a mural tablet of enormous size—on the wall at
my right, lettered from top to bottom; but for some
time I paid no attention to it. By-and-by turning my
sight that way the huge solitary marble with the big

SWALLOWS AND CHURCHES 19)

inscription arrested my attention and I began to read,
first with but slight curiosity, almost mechanically,
then with surprise and amusement, and when I got
to the end, for the first time in my life I burst out
laughing in a church. This is what I read :—

NEAR THIS PLACE LIES INTERRED

THOMAS JOHNSON,
WHO DEPARTED THIS LIFE AT CHARLTON,

DECEMBER 20TH, 1744.

FROM HIS EARLY INCLINATION TO FOXHOUNDS

HE SOON BECAME AN EXPERIENCED HUNTSMAN,

HIS KNOWLEDGE IN THE PROFESSION, WHEREIN HE
HAD NO SUPERIOR, AND HARDLY AN EQUAL,

JOINED TO HIS HONESTY IN EVERY OTHER PARTICULAR,
RECOMMENDED HIM TO THE SERVICE, AND GAIN’D

HIM THE APPROBATION OF SEVERAL OF THE NOBILITY
AND GENTRY. AMONG THESE WERE THE LORD CONWAY,
EARL OF CARDIGAN, THE LORD GOWER, THE DUKE

OF MARLBOROUGH, AND THE HONOURABLE M. SPENCER.
THE LAST MASTER WHOM HE SERVED, AND IN WHOSE SERVICE
HE DIED, WAS CHARLES DUKE OF RICHMOND

LENNOX AND AUBIGNY, WHO ERECTED THIS MONUMENT
TO THE MEMORY OF A GOOD AND FAITHFUL SERVANT
AS A REWARD TO THE DECEASED

AND AN INCITEMENT TO THE LIVING.

Go thou and do likewise.—St, Luke, chap. x. ver. xxxvii.

Here Johnson lies. What Hunter can deny

Old honest Tom the tribute of a sigh.

Deaf is the Ear, which caught the opening sound,
Dumb is that Tongue, which cheered the Hills around.
Unpleasing Truth, Death hunts us from our Birth,
In view, and Men, like Foxes, take to Earth,

192 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

Even now, when I think of that village in the West
Sussex Downs, and remember the effect the inscription
in its church produced on me when I first saw it, I
am teased with a sudden impulse to explode. But
though I laughed I was not pleased, and to amusement
succeeded disgust; for even those who are without
reverence, and are mockers at religion, do because of
their humanity yet reverence one saying and one
parable of Christ, and think with unconscious worship
that those were beautiful and sacred words used by
Him on that occasion, which are here put to so
degraded a use. The church, even before I left it,
had ceased to be a sacred building. There might
be something there to interest the archeologist; to
me it was only old Tom Johnson’s house, and was no
better than the village ale-house to sit and rest in.

No such feeling have I experienced in any other
downland church; and into how many of them, all
along the range, from Pevensey to the Hampshire
border, have I entered to find rest and refreshment in
burning summer weather !

Cooled in blood and brain, I pass out from the dim
church to the churchyard ; and however deeply shaded
by old trees it may be, the moving air and green
tempered sunlight strike me with a new keen instant
pleasure, as if I had just escaped from confinement in
an underground cell or vault. On such occasions I
am less in love with death than with sleep.

I remember that in the cool shady churchyard at

SWALLOWS AND CHURCHES 193

Firle, lying under a tree on a thick brown and green
turf, soothed by the musical sounds of blackbird and
blackcap, I fell into a very pleasant doze, and that

West FirLe CHURCH

when my eyes began gradually to open they rested on
a silvery grey sinuous streak on the grass, close to my

face. First I took it for a ribbon, then a cord, and
N

194 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

at last it dawned on me that it was a poor little sham
serpent, with the adder’s black mark on its belly, on
which, adder-like, it is compelled to go; but its back
silvery grey, to symbolise its dove-like innocence. So
motionless was it that I thought it dead, or else that
the drowsy peaceful spirit of the place had breathed
upon us both. But when I picked it up it woke, too,
quickly enough, and was glad, when I grew tired of
playing with it, to be released. ,

It struck me at the time as a curious coincidence
that my last meeting with a slow-worm before this one
at Firle was also in a churchyard. This occurred two
months earlier in the season, at Boldre, in the New
Forest. Coming out of church after Sunday morning
service, I went with a party of young girls to look at
Gilpin’s tomb in the churchyard. Pushing some ivy
growing against the stone aside we disturbed the little
silvery snake, who appeared to have made a home of
the grand old Forest parson’s last resting-place.

From churches, owls, and snakes (or lizards) let us
return to the subject of swallows. At Ditchling I
believe the house-martins were rather more than twice
as numerous as the chimney-swallows. In August
some idea of the rapid increase that was going on in
the former species could be had, owing to the habit
of the young birds of congregating on the telegraph
wires in the village. There were four wires, and at
one spot in the middle of the village one lot of the
young birds would crowd the wires for a length of

SWALLOWS AND CHURCHES 195

40 or 50 yards. This crowd numbered about 300;
I counted them, and they always, when they settled
on the wires, occupied the same spot, and in about
the same numbers. A short distance away, at the
end of the village street, a second lot, numbering
about 150, would congregate. There were no chimney-
swallows in these two crowds: it was rare even to see
more than two or three adult martins among the
young birds. The two gatherings were composed of
martins bred in the village, and now able to take
care of themselves: the parent birds were all occu-
pied in hatching more eggs and feeding more young
—second and third broods. Here, then, were 450
house-martins reared in the village by the middle of
August; and as breeding would go on for five or six
weeks longer, at least 150 more birds would be reared,
making an increase of 600 in this species for the
season, The chimney-swallows would rear altogether
not less than 200 young, so that the total swallow
increase would be at least 800.

The young martins were very tame, and were a
pretty and interesting ornament of the village, attract-
ing a good deal of attention even from the most stolid
of the natives, as they sat preening their feathers and
dozing in the hot sun, rows on rows of birds above
the noisy little street, seen sharply against that ever
cloudless bright blue summer sky.

Lying in bed at five o’clock in the morning I could
see and admire them, as they were directly before and

196 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

on a level with my open bedroom window. Very early
one morning a half-dressed, dirty-looking little boy
rushed out of the cottage opposite, and seizing hold of
a passing dog began to tease and drag it about; the
dog after a few minutes escaped out of his hands and
ran away. Then the naughty boy, looking round for
something else to exercise his energies on, caught sight
of the crowd of martins high above him, and began to
shout at them to make them fly. Then he tried to
climb up by one of the posts, but always after getting
up a few feet slipped down. His next move was to
get a stick and beat loudly on the telegraph pole, and
when all these efforts had failed he fell to shouting
again, and shouted and yelled so loudly and persist-
ently that his mother, crazed by the noise, at length
rushed forth and hunted him in, The martins had
quietly sat out the whole performance.

It is curious to see in rural districts how the tele-
graph line from being, like the lighthouse, a danger to
birds, killing and maiming considerable numbers, has
in time grown to be an advantage to them, affording a
convenient perch and lofty lookout which many species
habitually prefer to trees and bushes. It has become
natural to them, as if we had supplied a real want in
their lives, an omission of nature. So, too, it is curious
to note that the long line of tall straight poles and
suspended wires, which one would imagine to be
nothing but a disfigurement to the landscape,
fit into it at many points so admirably as to be an

SWALLOWS AND CHURCHES 197

improvement, a positive beauty in the scene, reminding
one of those tall guide-posts with a crosspiece near the
top to be found on some of the extensive tidal flats on
our sea coast. The upright pole and the flagstaff, and
even the lower finger-posts and the slender stone cross
in many villages, produce an effect like that of the
slim Lombardy poplar in the landscape and please the
eye. The gibbet, too, in vanished days doubtless had
a similar esthetic value.

Breath of Christian charity,
Blow, and sweep it from the earth !

shouted the poet; but who in these days, in spite of
charity, would not welcome back this ancient orna-
ment to the landscape, if it could but be used to
suspend our universally abhorred scorchers by the
neck until they were dead, dead, dead, and food for
crows and pies ?

In its sound, too, the rural telegraph line appeals
to the esthetic sense; it is a harp and mysterious
voice in the desert and in all solitary silent places.
I remember, years ago, in South America, seeing a
group of natives standing and listening to the tremu-
lous musical hum that rose and fell with the wind,
and hearing them gravely say that they could hear
the voices of men sending messages and talking to
each other over long distances, but could not make
out what they were saying. Even for us there is
a slight something of mystery in the swelling and

198 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

dying tones, and the sound is in itself beautiful and
very natural. It closely resembles that most musical
and human-like sound of insect life, which may be
heard in many spots on the high downs in July and
August; a sound of innumerable bees and honey-
eating flies in the flowering heather, their individual
small voices blended into one loud continuous hum
that rises, too, and falls with the wind. A man led
blindfolded over the downs to one of these flowery
places, and standing there in the hot breeze, would
probably think that he was listening to the harp of
the tall wooden pole and suspended wires.

I noticed that in some of the villages in the downs
there were no swifts ; in other villages and in the coast
towns they were abundant. It was not uncommon
to see as many as thirty or forty swifts rushing about
in the air together, and the downs district generally
appeared to be as favourable to these birds as to
the swallows. At one village, one morning, I was
standing in a garden watching the numbers of swifts,
swallows, and martins, peopling the air overhead.
When my host came out to me I called his attention
to the birds. “I call them all swallows,” he said,
and in spite of all I could say on the subject he
assured me that he could see no difference between
swift, chimney-swallow, and house-martin. “Are you
a native of this place?” I asked. “Oh no, I was

SWALLOWS AND CHURCHES 199

born within sound of Bow Bells,” he returned with
pride. That explained his invincible ignorance. But
the Sussexian, though he knows a great deal more
than a cockney, also makes some funny mistakes.
One day at Lewes I noticed a lot of swifts, about
twenty-four birds, rushing round and round in their
usual mad way, and at each turn coming down and
passing so close to the gable of a stone house, a public
school near the station, as to touch the stone wall
a yard or two below the roof with their wings. At
intervals after five or six rushes they would scatter
all about the sky, then in a minute or two gather
and resume their mad flight over the same aérial race-
course, touching the wall again each time as they
swept by. I presently noticed that half a dozen
workmen, standing close by in a group, were also
observing the birds and talking about them. “I
wonder what these mad birds are after?” I said,
going up to the men. One of them undertook to
enlighten me. “They are swifts,” he said, “ but
here we call them Black Jacks. They are after insects
—that’s what they feed on. I mean flies,” he kindly
explained. He then went on to say that when swifts
are seen rushing round in a bunch at one spot it is
because flies are most abundant there, and that the
birds catch many more flies than they can eat. He
once saw a swift fluttering on the ground, unable
to rise, and picking it up he found that flies were
swarming all over it. So many flies had this swift

200 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

caught and put there in its feathers that the weight
of them had borne it down to the ground. I ventured
to tell him that he was wrong, that the flies he
had seen swarming in the plumage of a fallen swift
were parasitical on the bird, and that the swift was
probably in poor condition and so much infested
and tormented by the insects as to be unable any
longer to fly. My man looked gravely at me but
said nothing, and I took his silence to mean that
he did not believe the parasite story, or was not
pleased at being put right about his familiar Black
Jacks in the presence of his comrades, who were
not ornithologists.

The old belief that the swift, when by chance he
comes down, is unable to rise from a flat surface owing
to the length of his wings, is, I think, well-nigh obso-
lete, although one does occasionally hear it. Swifts
get many a fall in spring, and are often to be seen
getting up again from the ground. During the last ten
or fifteen years starlings have increased enormously all
over the country. They are liked better than formerly,
and are not shot so much nor driven away from their
roosting-places in winter, nor are they used much now
for trap-shooting—a form of sport which has been long
declining. One result of this increase of starlings is
that the bird is becoming especially numerous in the
towns and villages, and that in April he takes posses-
sion of the swift’s breeding-holes under the eaves of
cottages, and similar situations. The swifts, on their

SWALLOWS AND CHURCHES 201

arrival in May, find themselves dispossessed of their
holes, and fight to recover them. Then in the early
mornings you may see swifts and starlings falling
from the eaves clenched together, and, when on the
ground, separating and rising up to renew the combat
at the entrance to the hole.

The swift question, which interests naturalists at the
present time, is the habit of the bird, or of the males
when breeding is in progress, of rising up higher and
higher in the air at a late hour in the evening until
they disappear from sight, and finally cease to be
heard. It is supposed that these mounting birds, who
are not seen to return, although it is possible that
they do return after dark, spend the night at a vast
height rushing or sailing about in the air, and that
with morning they return.

In the evening, when there are eggs or young in
the nest, it may be observed that the females are out
feeding and rushing about with their mates, and that
the males drive them back to the nests before going
off themselves for their supposed night out. For some
evenings in June, at Seaford, where the swifts were
very numerous, I watched this interesting performance,
and it was curious and amusing to see a pair in some
cases, the hen-bird wildly rushing away, the mate in
mad pursuit, and then when with infinite pains she
had been driven home suddenly dashing off again, and
the wild chase about the sky beginning afresh. Once
I saw the hen-bird break away four times after being

202 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

brought to the breeding-hole; but after the fourth
time she remained in the nest, and the good zealous
husband went away to enjoy himself. A swift chasing
his wife home in the evening can easily be distin-
guished from one swift chasing another swift for fun,
or whatever the motive is that keeps them in a per-
petual hunt after one another. He follows her closely
in all her mad flights and sudden doublings until he
has got her face towards home, and then keeping close
to her agitates his wings in a peculiar manner, at
intervals gliding smoothly, uttering all the time a
measured sharp clicking chirp—a sound as of re-
peated strokes on a piece of metal.

In Somerset I heard a curious little story which
may prove of interest to those who are accustomed to
watch the flight of the swifts on summer evenings
with the object of finding out their secret.

One April evening, near Wells, I was sauntering
along a road separated from a copse by an old moss-
grown stone wall, when I noticed a boy moving
cautiously about in the deep shadows of the trees,
and watching me suspiciously.

“ Found any nests?” I called out suddenly to him.
He very quickly replied that he was not looking for
nests, and had seen none; then he added that he was
looking for primroses. Now he had no primroses in
his hands, and as a matter of fact none grew in that
particular copse; but I did not point this out to him,
being desirous of engaging him in conversation. He

SWALLOWS AND CHURCHES ~ 203

was a singular-looking boy, about fourteen to fifteen
years old ; very thin, with long legs, small head, and sharp
round face, and was dressed in earth-coloured, thread-
bare clothes much too small for him. With that small
sharp face and those shifty eyes under his little grey
cap, he looked curiously like some furred creature—
rat or vole, with perhaps a dash of stoat in his com-
position, and if his nose had been longer I might have
added that there was even a touch of the shrew-mouse
in his appearance.

After I had been standing there speaking to him for
a little while he got over his distrust, and coming out
of the shadow of the trees climbed upon the wall, and
sitting there became quite talkative, and told me all
about his life and the wild creatures he had observed.
He was a farm labourer’s son, and his birthplace and
home was high up on the Mendips, in the ancient
desolate village of Priddy, a few miles from Wells.
Since he was big enough to run about he had been
employed as a bird-scarer on the farm where his father
worked, and he appeared to have been an extremely
observant boy. Talking of swifts he said, “They
screechers be curious birds: did you ever hear, zur,
that they be up flying about all night and come back
in the marning ?”

I asked him if some one had told him that, and he
said No, he had found it out himself. Morning after
morning he had noticed, just after sunrise, that a
number of swifts suddenly made their appearance at

204 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

the same spot, not far from a field that he had to
watch. The birds would appear first at a great height,
and rush straight down as if falling from the sky,
until within a few yards of the earth, when they would
dash off in various directions or begin flying about the
village. It came into his head to play thei a trick,
and one morning he took the loaded gun, used for
scaring the rooks, and stationed himself a little before
sunrise at the spot where the swifts invariably made
their descent. Shortly after sunrise they appeared,
first as small specks in the sky, coming down with
tremendous speed ; and waiting until they were within
thirty yards of his head he fired his gun into the
middle of the bunch. Instantly the birds scattered,
but after a few moments came together again and
began to mount higher and higher until they dis-
appeared from sight in the sky, and he saw no more
of them until a later hour in the day.

It struck me as extremely improbable that this
most circumstantial story was invented by the boy;
in any case, perhaps it would be as well if those who
are accustomed to watch the swifts rising on a summer
evening until they disappear from sight, and to listen
to their shrill triumphant screams growing fainter and
fainter until they cease to be audible, would also watch
for their return at sunrise in the morning.

CHAPTER XI

AUTUMN

Suddenness of the change from summer to autumn on the downs—
Birds in autumn—Meadow-pipits—Shore birds on the hills—
September flowers— Remnant of insect-life— Effect of rough
weather—Effect on the mind of the cessation of life—Man’s
long life—An immortal surveying the insect tribes of human
kind—The prospect from the hills—Pleasure of walking.

On the South Downs the change from summer to
autumn is almost startling in its suddenness, The
rough September days of wind and driving rain, and
of nights when the temperature drops almost to freez-
ing point, make little difference in the lower sheltered
country; flowers fade and life lessens gradually there,
and from August onwards the change is scarcely per-
ceptible until in October the autumnal colours begin
to appear in the trees. On the treeless hills the effect
of a spell of rough weather with a touch of winter in
it is infinitely greater: you are astonished at the
almost total absence of life and colour, the naked
cheerless aspect of things: September is then like

December.
205

206 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

Succeeding warm days bring back a little of the
lost bloom, and birds increase again ;—rooks, starlings,
missel-thrushes, and some others that were driven
away by the bad weather now return to their old feed-
ing-grounds. Migrants and wanderers, too, appear in
limited numbers; small parties of wheatears, stone-
chats, and pied wagtails. The most numerous of these
travellers that camp on the downs are the meadow-
pipits. Everywhere on the sheep-walks you come
upon their scattered flocks, looking like a lot of mice
creeping about on the turf. They have a thin little
chirping note as they fly from you—a slight sorrowful
sound, yet distinctly reminiscent of their tinkling
fairy-like summer song.

Another melancholy but wilder and more musical
bird-sound to be heard on the high downs is the cry of
migrating shore birds, dotterels and sandpipers as a
rule, They are seen in flocks of two or three dozen
to a hundred or more, sometimes associating with star-
lings and feeding among the scattered sheep. It is a
beautiful cry which they utter as they rise to wheel
about in a small cloud over the green down, changing
from grey to white, and white to grey. That wild,
clear, inflected note has the sound and smell and
freshness of ocean in it.

In warm weather you may look again for flowers:
yellow patches of dwarf whin, and here and there
among the browns and dull greens a glowing bunch
of the small leafed heath or the paler purple ling.

AUTUMN 207

Most summer flowers in fact linger on into or bloom
again in September. On a mullein stalk covered with
dry seed vessels, you will find a solitary blossom; the
honeysuckle has a few blooms, pale and scentless: and
here and there all over the downs you will find,
“blooming alone,” the dwarf thistle, hawkweed, rock-
rose, bedstraw, milfoil, viper’s bugloss, harebell,
thyme, sweet woodruff, and many more. The scabi-
ous, both blue and mauve, is perhaps the commonest
flower at this season; and the minute delightful eye-
bright, the most abundant in certain spots where the
soil is thinnest and the turf scarcely covers the under-
lying chalk. But night by night the year is busy
with her cold fingers picking these last gems out of
her mantle—the ornaments that accord not with her
faded cheeks and sorrowful eyes.

Greatest of all seems the change with regard to in-
sect life: but a few days ago you moved in a world
teeming with millions of brilliant active beings, so
numerous and small and swift in their motions as to
be “seen rather than distinguished.” And now ?—
Well, if the wind is still and the sun shines and you
miss and look for them, you will find a few left: a
bumble bee mechanically going about on his rounds
with a listless flight and the merest ghost of his old
hum; a songless grasshopper; a solitary fly trying to
appear cheerful, You look in vain for the merry little
blue butterflies and the grey heaths, so numerous a little
while ago. It is a surprise to see so splendid a crea-

208 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

ture as the red admiral: he is one of a second brood,
and has come too late into his inheritance and will
not keep it long. For the rest you will see an occa-
sional common white, or a small heath; or your sight
may be attracted by a spot of glowing colour on the
sunny side of a gorse bush—a small copper with open
wings basking and bathing in the vital heat and light,
perhaps for the last time, before day comes to a chilly
end.

Even these few survivors may not remain long;
the September sunshine is very sweet and pleasant to
behold, and may last many days; but it is never con-
fidently looked for, and would not seem half so sweet
if it could be expected to last. After golden days the
grey come again, and the wind blows everlastingly ;
the high hilltops are once more barren and bleak, and
you are glad to come into rough brambly places, where
all wild winged life that has not been blown away has
hidden itself from the blast. But how little it is!
Perhaps you will see a yellow-hammer rush out of its
hiding-place and perch on a bush-top near to see what
creature has disturbed it. There for a few moments
it will sit, swayed about, its feathers roughed, its long
tail blown over its back or to the side at right angles
with its body—a picture of discomfort. You may
think that on such a day more may be seen by sitting
still in the shelter of a bush than by roaming; you
may sit for an hour, or for hours, and see nothing, and
hear nothing—not an echo of any summer note,

AUTUMN 209

Nothing but the wind sweeping through the yellow
bents with a long scythe-like sound, rising in gusty
moments to a loud sharp hiss.

On such a day of silence and desolation a remem-
brance of the late summer has come back suddenly
like a lightning-flash to my mind, with such startling
vividness as to affect me powerfully. A vision of the
vanished insect life that a little while ago covered
these green flowering hills. I moved and had my
being amid that life as in a golden mist spread over
the earth; my ears were full of the noise of innumer-
able fine small voices blending into one voice; where-
soever I looked their minute swift-moving bodies
appeared as thin dark lines on the air and over the
green surface. Forms so infinitely varied, yet so won-
derfully fashioned, each aglow with its complete sepa-
rate life, and all in harmony with all life and all
nature, responsive in a million secret springs to each
and every external influence; so well balanced in their
numerous parts and perfect in their equipment, so
intense in their lives as to seem fitted to endure for
ever. And now in so short a time, in a single day
and night as it seems, it is all over, the feast and fairy-
dance of life; the myriads of shining gem-like bodies
turned to dead dust, the countless multitude of bril-
liant little individual souls dissipated into thin air and
blown whithersoever the wind blows!

The first and inevitable effect of such a thought,

when the tremendous tragedy of the passing year is
Ce)

210 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

brought unexpectedly and vividly before the mind,
compressed into a moment of time, is a profound
melancholy, as of a black shadow of apprehension
coming over the soul. But it is like a shadow on
the earth on a day of flying cloud and broken sun-
shine that is quickly gone. That teeming life of
yesterday has indeed vanished from our sight for
ever; it is nothing now, and its place will know it
no more; but extinction came not on it before the
seeds of the life that is to be were sown—small and
abundant as the rust-coloured seed of the mullein, that
looked like inorganic dust, and was shaken out of its
dead cups by the blast and scattered upon the ground.
Or simaller still; like the infinitesimal particles enclosed
within the round case of the dead fungus of the downs
——the devil’s snuff-box of the peasant—which, when
trodden upon, or broken by a blow of a stick, sends
out a dense purple or deep yellow vapour, which floats
away in the wind and vanishes. The still earth is
full of it. Out of the matted roots of the turf and from
the grey soil beneath, innumerable forms of life resem-
bling those that have vanished will spring to light—
creatures of a thousand beautiful shapes, lit with bril-
liant colour, intense in their little lives, for ever inoving
in a passionate, swift, fantastic dance.

And we shall see it all again, and in seeing renew
the old familiar pleasure. For these innumerable
little lives quickly pass while ours endure. Further-
more, the brief life which they have is but one, and

AUTUMN 211

though their senses be brilliant they see not beyond
their small horizons. To us the Past and the Future
are open, like measureless countries of diversified
aspect, lying beyond our horizon; yet we may see
them and are free to range over them at will. It
may even happen that the autumnal spectacle of the
cessation of life on the earth, nature’s yearly tragedy,
brought thus suddenly and sharply before the mind’s
eye, may cause us to realise for the first time what
this freedom of the mind really means. It multiplies
our years and makes them so many that it is a
practical immortality. A vivid consciousness of it,
coming thus suddenly, puts the soul in a proud
temper, and we all at once begin to abhor the sickly
teachings of those who see in nature’s mutations, in
cloud and wind and rain and the fall of the leaf, and
the going out of ephemeral life, nothing but mournful
messages, dreary symbols, reminders of our mortality.
It is a false, debilitating doctrine which they preach
and sing; an ancient fable, a tale of a bogie invented
a thousand years ago to frighten unruly children and
make them good. We are rather of the psalmist’s
virile mind, when he said that those who had com-
passed him round, and had come to him like bees,
were extinct as the fire under the thorns; and then
triumphantly cried, “ J shall not die, but live!”

Let us imagine a god, or immortal Leing of some
kind, in a reverie, seated on some great hill—Caburn,
or Firle, or Cissbury—seeing as in a vision the “in-

212 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

sect tribes of human kind” that have dwelt upon these
green downs since the coming of man—Saxon, and
Dane, and Roman, and Briton, and the earlier races
that were slain by the Celt, and the earlier still, and
others and still others further back in time. All the
events of long thousands of years, all the thousands
of “generations of deciduous men,” called back and
seen passing in procession before that clear cold im-
mortal mind. Dark and pale races, speaking strange
tongues; love and hate and all passions, heard and
seen in music and laughter and cries, and agitated
speech, and faces ashen white and burning red, and
wide fixed eyes; tumults and wars upon wars, the
shock of furious battle, the shouts of victory that
frightened nature. And thereafter peace; toil and rest,
and day and night; a young mother sitting on the
summit of some high hill, looking out upon the vast
range, the illimitable green world, the distant grey and
silver sea, all the world sleeping in a peaceful sunshine
and no cloud on all the sky ;—a young mother fond-
ling her first-born and laughing in pure gladness of
heart. And then the fading out of earth of. that
golden sunshine, and the grey chill evening of fear and
flight ; men drunk with blood, still thirsting for blood,
their mouths frothing, their eyes ablaze, streaming
over the hills, untiring as wolves on the track of the
fugitives. The slayers in their turn are slain by
death; in long quiet years there is a slow recovery
of lost good, increase of people, and little children

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AUTUMN 213

with shrill glad voices playing merry games in all the
hollows of the hills, and staining their lips purple with
blackberries, as in the old forgotten years. And
once more strife, and all natural calamities—cold,
and fever, and wasting famine; people with white
skeleton faces sitting in rows on the hill-side, like
those who sit by the river waiting for the slow ferry-
man to ferry them over, one by one. Slain by
men or by some natural agency, still they pass
and pass, and are succeeded by others—other tribes,
other races, speaking a new language, but swayed
by the same passion, and war still succeeds war.
Then peace again, the lasting peace that causes all
sweet and gentle feelings, all virtues, all graces,
to flourish—the peace that is like a secret, unfelt
malady which is slowly consuming a beautiful woman’s
life. And after long quiet, the battle-cry, the strange
men with the old wolfish hunger and fury in their faces,
the heavens darkened again with the smoke of cruel
fires; and after the storm, quiet again, the old silence
and desolation, wild-flowers blooming everywhere on
the graves of a dead, forgotten people.

We can imagine that even he, albeit immortal, re-
calling and seeing again that immeasurable procession
of human forms—the long long series of events and
the millions of passionate, strenuous lives that have
ceased to be—all compressed into a few moments of
time, would feel his mind darkened with a sudden
great shadow of sorrow. But the shadow would quickly

214 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

pass; and his immortality would again be to him like
the sun shining in a blue sky that is without a cloud.

Those who walk on the downs at this season,
where they are highest and treeless, will sometimes
feel that the loss of all that life and colour that
made the summer so much to them is in some re-
spects a gain. The vision that a little time ago
roamed bee-like above the surface from bloom to
bloom, ever finding and pausing to contemplate some
fresh object of beauty or interest, is now free to take
longer flights.

The sunlight may not be so bright but the air is
clearer now: there are mornings and whole days when
the world is free from the haze that lately brooded on
the scene and dimmed all things, when you can look
beyond Sussex and see much of Kent and Surrey,
Hampshire and the Isle of Wight. You may walk
for a day along the hill-top, along the northern rim
of the range, and seldom lose sight of the sea, its
grey, immeasurable expanse silvered with the sunlight ;
while far down at your feet you have the flat wooded
district of the weald. On its plain you see scattered
village church towers and spires, and houses showing
red, white, or slate-black among the green oaks; but
the trees are everywhere so abundant in hedgerows
and shaws and fragments of forest that it becomes
easy mentally to see this region as it was before the

AUTUMN 215

Sussex iron workers so greatly altered it. One needs
but to gaze on the scene, then close the eyes, and the
gaps and the straight lines of hedge and fence, and
the white and red spots of walls and roofs, and white
puff of steam swiftly vanish, swallowed up or blotted
out in the boundless expanse of deep uniform green,
the unbroken forest of Andredsweald, as the Saxons
and the Romans before them saw it from their en-
campments on the downs, and as William Hay, of
Glyndbourne, described it a century ago in his Mount
Caburn—

All was one wild inhospitable waste,
Uncouth and horrid, desert and untraced,
Hid by rough thickets from the face of day,
The solitary realms of beasts of prey ;

too gloomy for the nightingale to sing there, and too
wet and cold and dark for the heat and light loving
adder to have a home in it.

The hills in this clear autumn weather, familiar as
their forms are and often as we have walked on them,
seem almost like a new region to the eye, known and
yet novel; the preternatural distinctness and near-
ness of the heights around us produce the illusion
that we ourselves have changed to something better
and higher, and have a more piercing sight and
greater power and swiftness, It is as if like Mercury
we had wings on our heels, and are able to move with
a freedom never before known. Thus, in September,
I at length begin to see men cantering over the open

216 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

turfy downs without envying them their horses: at
last the old second horse-back nature that clings to
me drops off; the rider may gallop proudly past me to
vanish over the next hill, yet leave me content and
even glad to be on foot.

These walks on the downs in the cooler season
are most exhilarating on the high, treeless, and in most
places uncultivated hills east of the Adur. But for
beautiful and varied scenery and abundance and
variety of wild life, the range west of the Adur is
most attractive in September and October, when the
foliage, especially the beech, takes its autumn colour,
and birds in thousands come down from the north to
spend the winter, or remain for a short time in this
district before crossing the sea.

CHAPTER XII

WEST OF THE ADUR

Autumn on the west downs—Abundance of birds—Village of
Cocking—Drayton’s Polyolbion— A company of magpies ; their
inconsequent behaviour—Magpie and domestic pigeon—Story
of a pet magpie—Blackberries on the downs—Elderberries—
Yews at Kingly Bottom—A tradition—Yew-berries and the
missel-thrushes’ orgie—Hawthorn wood—Charm of the thorn-
tree—Beeches on the west downs—Effect of trees on the South
Downs—Gilpin’s strictures answered—Characteristic trees and
bushes—Juniper—A curious effect—Character of the juniper-
tree,

THRouGHOUT the southern half of England generally,
the season from the beginning of April to the end of
June is incomparably the most interesting time of the
year to the bird lover. It is the season of the return
of the migrants, of song, and of breeding. If there
is a district which may be regarded as an exception
it is assuredly that part of the Sussex downs west of
the Adur, or perhaps it would be safer to say west of
the Arun; for while the inland bird life in other
places is diminishing day by day, here it is increasing.
To these wooded and partially cultivated downs, and
to the sheltered strip of rich, flat, maritime country
that lies between them and the sea, birds in numbers

resort in the autumn from the colder northern country,
217

218 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

either to winter or to remain for some weeks or even
months before crossing the sea. From September
until November this movement and ingathering is
going on, until the birds, visitors and residents, are
incredibly abundant and a wonder to see. This abun-
dance has been specially noticeable during the last
three or four seasons, on account of the great increase
in bird life throughout the country since the winter
of 1894-5. Since that disastrous time there have
been no killing frosts, and the summers have been
favourable for breeding, with the result that our com-
mon small birds have increased and multiplied to an
extraordinary extent. The increase is not, however,
confined to the small passerines; it has been equally
great in the rooks and wood-pigeons, and, in a less
degree, in numerous other species.

One bright day in early October, at Cocking, I
witnessed a pretty and amusing little comedy in bird
life, which I relate not only for the interest of the
incident but also to give an idea of the abundance of
resident birds in this part of downland.

Cocking is one of many singularly interesting
villages that nestle, half-hidden, in the shelter of the
downs on the northern edge of the range. Out of a
wooded combe in the side of the sheltering hill issues
a stream, and where it flows or trickles past the vil-
lage it spreads out and forms a marsh grown over
with tall reed and flowering rush, in summer blue
with water forget-me-not and water-mint. At the

WEST OF THE ADUR 219

side of this blossoming marsh, in the middle of the
green churchyard, sheltered and concealed by ancient
trees, stands the small old church, one of the prettiest
to be seen in the district. The stream is a part of
the West Rother, that same pretty little river which
Michael Drayton some three centuries ago spoke of
as running wild in the woods, where it, or she, lived,
and being no comfort to the aged hill who was her
father. Drayton was all for personifying the prin-
cipal features in the landscape—hills, valleys, woods,
marshes, rivers, and what not. Male and female made
he them, and of all ages, connected with each other
by human ties of all kinds; and when he gets into a
broken country like this it becomes difficult to follow
him, and to know what the pother is all about; for
his characters are always quarrelling among them-
selves and threatening in lofty rhymes to “do” for
each other.

Going to the top of the hill above Cocking I sat
down against a hedge, which sheltered me from the
wind, and looked upon the scene spread out before
me. At the foot of the bare down ran a low thorn
hedge, dividing it from the yellow stubble fields be-
yond. At each end of the hedge there were masses
of high trees, fir and beech, and among the trees on
one side a farm-house and buildings were seen. Be-
yond the bare down and fields and village, the flat,
wooded district of the weald spread out before me,
with the little red-coloured town of Midhurst in the

220 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

middle of the picture. As I sat there, idly watching
the wood-pigeons constantly arriving in small parties
of three or four to a dozen to settle down on the
yellow stubble field beneath me, then letting my sight
rest on the small red town two or three miles away,
and, a mile or so to the west of it, the village and
station of Elstead, it all at once came into my mind
that close by, in the small village of Trotton, where
his father was curate, Otway was born. Taking up
my binocular, I began excitedly seeking among the
green oaks near Elstead for that famous spot, but
before I could satisfy myself that I had picked it out
a chance glance at the yellow field at the foot of the
down revealed a black and white patch on the pale
stubble which had not been there a few minutes
before. Bringing my glasses to bear on the patch,
which was alive and moving, I discovered that it was
a party of fifteen magpies busily running about feed-
ing and playfully chasing one another on the ground.
This was to me a most astonishing sight; it is rare in
England to see as many as fifteen magpies together,
even where game is not preserved, and here I was in
a corner of Sussex where pheasant-preserving is carried
to an extreme that occasionally excites the disgust of
even the most enthusiastic sportsmen. Not far from
the spot where I was sitting there was one small
property which was notoriously overstocked with
pheasants, and yet because a big man was coming
down for one day’s shooting, the owner, not satisfied

WEST OF THE ADUR 221

that his birds would be enough, had just bought five
hundred more and put them in his woods. They
were thicker on the ground than fowls on a poultry-
farm, and tamer than fowls.

Naturally, after catching sight of these miraculous
magpies, I thought no more about unhappy Otway,

MAacpligs

but gave all my attention to them, and counted them
at least fifteen times over to make sure that they were
fifteen. Not many yards from them, near the low
hedge, a number of pheasants were sunning them-
selves; and by the side of the flock of magpies a covey
of nine or ten partridges were slowly and quietly

222 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

moving about, searching for grain; and all about them
and over the whole field of many acres the wood-
pigeons in twos and threes and larger parties were
also quietly feeding, while fresh parties were con-
tinually arriving. In that clear air and bright
sunshine they looked lavender-coloured on the pale
yellow stubble. The wood-pigeons scattered over the
field must have numbered six or seven hundred. It
was curious and amusing to note the behaviour of the
magpies, flighty, inconsequent, and perpetually inter-
fering with one another, when thus seen side by side
with the diligent, quietly-moving pigeons and par-
tridges, each occupied with his own business. One
magpie would find or pretend to find something which
he would look down at very intently, and at once two
or three of his neighbours would rush excitedly up;
then all of them, putting their heads together, would
stare at the strange object for a few seconds, and then
fall to quarrelling, or chasing each other's long tails
round and round, or doing some other ridiculous
thing.

By-and-by a domestic pigeon, a pretty red bird
with conspicuous white wing-feathers, came flying from
the farm-house not far off and settled down to feed
among some wood-pigeons, twenty or thirty yards from
the magpies. One of the magpies raised its head and
gazed intently for some moments at the new-comer,
then rising rushed at and drove it away with violence,
The pigeon circled over the field two or three times,

WEST OF THE ADUR 223

then alighted again a little further away. Again the
same magpie got up and went for it; and the same
thing happened over and over again, until the perse-
cuted pigeon gave up trying to feed there and flew
back to the farm-house, and the magpie, well satisfied,
returned to its game of romps with its fellows. How
amusing these crow-brained creatures are, not only
when we see them as pets, and laugh at their pranks,
but away from us in their wild state where there is no
human witness of their actions! They are like preter-
naturally shrewd and mischief-loving little boys, who
for the love of wildness in them have been changed
into wild birds. I could imagine this particular mag-
pie saying, “No, no! You may be a very pretty bird,
and inoffensive, and a first cousin of our friend and
neighbour the ringdove, who lays very nice eggs in
summer; but you are tame, domestic, and have no
business to come here to associate with wild birds.
Off you go!”

That evening, at the inn where I was staying, I
spoke about the magpies and their funny little ways,
my mind being still full of the subject, whereupon the
landlady told me the following story. Her husband,
she said, was exceedingly fond of magpies, and always
kept one when he had the chance, and this fondness
dated back to the period of childhood, when a very
amusing tame magpie was kept by his father. He
was a carpenter in a little rustic village in North
Hampshire; his earnings were small, and he was

224 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

accustomed to hand over a sum of twenty shillings
to his wife every Saturday for housekeeping. There
were nine children to keep, and to make the most of
her money she used to go on Saturday afternoon to
the nearest town, six miles distant, to purchase the
week’s provisions and groceries and anything else that
was required. Two or three of the biggest children
would accompany her to help her with the basket
on their return. Now it fell out that on a certain
Saturday she had all her money in one coin, a gold
sovereign, and this she placed on the kitchen-dresser
while putting her things on; but in a few minutes,
when she was ready to start, the money was gone.
Naturally the whole house was thrown into the
greatest trouble and excitement, and immediately
every one began hunting in every likely and unlikely
place for the missing sovereign, for now the poor dis-
tracted woman began to think that she could not
have put it on the dresser after all. But it could not
be found, and when hope was gone she could not
restrain her tears; and the children, seeing her crying,
realised that there would be no exciting visit to the
town, no Saturday afternoon sweeties, nor any good
things in the house, but a long, long week of want
before them, and they too burst out crying. It was
then that the eldest girl all at once thought of the pet
maypie they kept, and of its love of mischief; and,
jumping up, she ran to the open cage which served
the bird as a roosting-place by night, and which he

WEST OF THE ADUR 225

occasionally visited by day. And there the coin was
found, stuck edge-ways between the wooden floor and
side of the cage, and in a moment, at a loud cry of joy
from the finder, the tears and lamentations of the
whole house were turned to laughter and happiness.
There is an abundance of wild fruit to attract
fruit-eating birds to the downs in autumn, Through-
out the range, including the high treeless South Downs,
the bramble flourishes greatly among the furze on the
slopes, and in the combes and valleys; and from July
to the end of September the bushes are covered with
clusters of the beautiful blue-black and crimson em-
bossed berries for every hand and beak to pluck. The
hands are few indeed except in the vicinity of Brighton
—a pleasant place “for a Wen,” as Cobbett said of it,
but too populous now, and no longer pleasant to those
who love to look upon an unsullied nature. On a
blazing August day I have seen two miles of dusty
road running inland from the town sprinkled with a
straggling procession of poor children, many of them
too small and feeble for such an adventure—children
from the slums and mean streets of the overgrown
Islington-by-the-Sea ; a long straggling column of
ragamuflins out on a raiding expedition to the distant
brambly downs, each carrying a bag, or basket, or mug,
or tin pail, or old tea-kettle, or some other kitchen
utensil, in which to store the juicy loot. Away from
Brighton, outside of its smoke-cloud, and out of sight

of its people, big and little, creeping like black ants
P

226 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

over the green hills, the wild garden is all for the
birds. They are many, and they feast every day and
all day long; but for all their feasting the fruit is still
plentiful when, in early October, the devil flies abroad,
as some believe, to spit on the bramble-bushes and
make its berries uneatable.

The elder is common on the downs, and ripens
early, and I have noticed that the berries are devoured
as fast as they ripen; not, I think, because they taste
better than blackberries to the birds, but because they
are so easily gathered, and being small and round, are
easily swallowed whole even by the smallest bird. A
bird, as a rule, likes to swallow his fruit rather than.
to peck at it; he generally has to peck at the black-
berry, and, compared with the clusters of the elder-
berry, it is not so easily got at.

Of our fruit-eating birds the missel-thrush is the
most common on the downs; this bird loves the yew-
berry above all wild fruits, and there is one spot in
this district where he can feast on it as he cannot do
anywhere else in the kingdom. This is at the famous
“grove,” as it is called, of yews at Kingly Bottom, in
one of the prettiest spots among the West Sussex
downs, near the small village of West Stoke, about
five miles from Chichester. The grove is an isolated
wood, or rather forest, composed almost wholly of yew
trees, growing in a broad combe in the side of a down;
and above the dark-green of the yews the round light-
green summit is seen like a head crowned with a row

WIVA ATONIY LY FAOUD MAA

WEST OF THE ADUR 227

of immense barrows. Tradition tells that at this spot
a great battle was fought by the men of Chichester
against the Danes about eleven centuries ago, and that
the slain sea-kings were buried in the mounds on the
hill, hence the name of Kingly Vale or Bottom. The
belief is that many of these yew trees are two thousand
years old. In one part of the wood, on the right hand
as you go up from the vale, there is no undergrowth,
and in this part you may walk freely among the dark
religious trees with trunks like huge rudely-fashioned
pillars of red and purple ironstone. One has here the
sensation of being in a vast cathedral; not like that
of Chichester, but older and infinitely vaster, fuller of
light and gloom and mystery, and more wonderful in
its associations. Coming from this sacred dim interior,
I have found on its threshold a tree the like of which
is hardly to be seen in England. This is a large and
very perfect yew with horizontal branches of great
length, the lowest of which come down to the ground
on all sides, and are interwoven with and form part
of an immense and most beautiful tangle of juniper,
thorn, bramble, and briar, grown through and over-
grown and bound together with honeysuckle and
deep green ivy and light green traveller's joy, the
last hoary-silver with its profusion of downy dry seed-
feathers. I had measured the trunks of other trees,
but the girth of this could not be taken unless a
man went down on his belly and drew himself snake-
wise through the protecting natural hedge. May no

228 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

sacrilegious hand with hatchet or billhook ever cut a
way through it.

This wood is a paradise of the missel-thrushes in
autumn. Numerous all over the downs, it is not
strange when rough weather comes that they should
gather to it, not only for the sake of the perfect
shelter from the rain and wind it affords, but also
for the abundance of the fruit they like so well. They
seem to delight as much in its insipid sweet taste as
in the somewhat acrid flavour of the orange-scarlet
rowan berries. In the yew-berry there is a disagree-
able bitterness under the sweet gummy pulp, which
is probably deleterious in a slight degree; but the
bird tastes only the sweet, and is not concerned about
the wholesomeness of his food when he is eating not
to satisfy hunger, but purely for pleasure. In most
places where yew trees are few and far between, we
see that the missel-thrushes, assisted by the song-
thrush and blackbird, devour the fruit as soon as it
ripens. In this wood the profusion is so great that
the birds can go on with their feast into October
without making much impression on the myriads of
rose-coloured berries that gem the dark feathery
foliage. And they do feast! It is worse than a feast,
it is a perfect orgie. When a bird, with incredible
greediness, has gorged to repletion he flies down to
a spot where there is a nice green turf and disgorges,
then, relieved, he goes back with a light heart to
gorge again, and then again. The result is that every

WEST OF THE ADUR 229

patch or strip of green turf among or near the trees
is thickly sprinkled over with little masses or blobs
of disgorged fruit, bright pinky red in colour, looking
like strawberries scattered about the ground and
crushed by passing feet. In a single blob or pellet
I have counted as many as twenty-three whole berries,
as bright red as when on the tree, embedded in a
mass of viscid pulp, mixed with many of the dark
green and poisonous stones of the half-digested
berries.

The wood I have described, where the intemperate
missel-thrushes have their revels, is almost unique in
character: there is on the downs west of the Adur
another wood of a kind rarely seen that has a singular
charm. This is a hawthorn wood growing on the
high downs east of the village of Findon, and about
halfway between Cissbury Hill and Chanctonbury
Ring. I have come across patches of wood, excly-
sively thorns, in Savernake Forest, Albury Park, and
on private estates in different parts of the country,
but not one comparable to this in extent and beauty,
The peculiar charm of the hawthorn—and that it
possesses a very great charm every one will allow
—appears to be due to its variety—to the individu-
ality as well as the beauty of the tree. It certainly
has a specific character as marked as that of any
forest tree we have, and is quite unlike any other,
unless we say that it is a miniature oak in appear-
ance, and has the attractive roughness and majesty

230 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

of the great tree in little, with a more varied and
tender colour, more light and shade, a richer beauty.
This is the specific character: then there is the
very piquant individual character, which is an added
distinction; for two thorns are not like two oaks, or
beeches, or elms. Many forest trees are best seen
in masses; for instance, the elm in its summer foliage
and the beech in its autumn colour. The hawthorn,
like the holly and, in a less degree, some other trees,
is best seen growing by itself; and the most perfect
thorn wood is that where there is ample room for
a person to walk freely about in it and see every
tree, or a large proportion of the trees, all round.
That is the character of the wood I am describing,
and its beauty is greatly enhanced by the character
of the open sunlit ground it grows on—a soft elastic
turf, like that of the sheep-walks, but more closely
eaten down by the innumerable rabbits that have
their home in the wood; its harmonious greens and
browns touched or mixed with the brighter colours
of lichen and moss, rust-red and orange and tender
grey and emerald green.

Here, better than in most places, the infinite
variety of the thorn may be admired, especially in
its colour, from August onward to October, when
the many-tinted leaves are finally shed. It is a
familiar fact that the drier and poorer the soil on
which a tree grows the more beautiful will be the
dying colours of the foliage; and these thorns on

WEST OF THE ADUR 231

the high chalk hills are doubtless more brilliantly
coloured in September than most trees of their kind.
But though so various and charming on that account,
you do not get masses of splendid colour in the thorn,
owing to the looseness of its foliage and to the
various colours and shades of colour which may be
seen on almost any tree. Or if in any one tree you
get a mass of intense colour, it is in the fruit and

HILL-TOP GROVE

not the leaf. Here are many trees so entirely covered
with berries as to appear at a short distance like trees
cut out of deepest crimson coral.

For great masses of intense colour nothing can
compare with the beech, which flourishes above all
trees on the West Sussex downs. And here it may
be remarked that it is not only in its magnificent
autumn colours that the beech adds greatly to the
attractiveness of the downland scenery in West Sussex.

232 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

At other seasons, too, even when stript bare, the tall
beeches please the eye. One would say that it was
a very bold experiment to plant groves of beeches
and firs on the summits of these round, smooth, pale
green hills, yet it has been justified by the fine effect
produced. Here are groves that remind one of the
unrivalled Hollywater Clump in Wolmer Forest—
groves visible at an immense distance, standing like
many-pillared temples on the high hills, One does
not wish even these most conspicuous groves away,
because, I imagine, the country is wooded generally,
and the hills are more scattered about and not so
high; it is a broken wooded country, and the tall,
slender beeches and firs predominate.

On the South Downs proper, east of the Adur,
the case is wholly different: the hills are larger and
there is less tillage; the clumps or groves and woods
so few that the effect is strange and inharmonious.
The isolated grove that springs suddenly to the sight
as one mounts a hill, shady and deepest green on a
pale unshaded country, is a blot on the landscape;
and here, if anywhere in England, one would be glad
to see an axe laid at the root of trees of noble growth.
For one cannot say of these trees that they are the
“nobler growth of thought,’ rather we might say
that in planting trees in such a place we have been
playing fantastic tricks with nature.

I must confess that I am speaking only for myself;
perhaps no one would agree with me; and it may be

WEST OF THE ADUR 233

that many a pilgrim to the South Downs, who has
cooled himself in burning summer weather in the
delicious shade of Stanmer, will consider my words
almost sacrilegious. Then I have to reckon with
Parson Gilpin, who rode over these downs a century
or longer ago, and scornfully said of them that they
were “entirely destitute of ornament.” An occasional
glimpse of the sea, he wrote, imparted a little life
and variety to the tame monotonous scene. It is true
that he gave a little faint praise to the situation of
Lewes; but even this he qualified by saying that
the hills round Lewes were chalk—“and chalk spoils
any landscape.” Poor old chalk!

I am not abusing Gilpin; on the contrary, I love
and reverence his memory because of his life-work,
about which he wrote no book, and told the world
nothing. Nevertheless, I cannot help smiling when I
recall the fact that this last book, in which, like the
glorified landscape gardener that he was, he spoke in
dispraise of the downs, was inscribed to the memory of
a still living wife, the faithful companion of his rambles
for over fifty years. Of course he quite expected that
she would be gone before the book was out; but he was
greatly mistaken, just like the rogues who lied in the
famous ballad of the mad dog and the man who was
bitten by it. He it was, even Gilpin, who died, leaving
his good wife alive and well to publish the book, dedi-
cation and all!

One need not fear to offend the parson of Boldre

234 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

by poking a little fun at him at this distant day, so
long after he visited Sussex and spoke slightingly of
chalk. His subsequent rambles, of which we have no
report, must have considerably enlarged his ideas about
scenery and other matters.

We have seen that the West Sussex downs excel
in the beauty of their beeches; that they can boast of
the noblest grove or wood of yew trees in this country,
and also possess a hawthorn wood of rare beauty. It
may be added that the furze also flourishes at numerous
points from end to end of the range: many and many
a shining yellow sheet of bloom, from three or four
to twenty or thirty acres in extent, have I seen and
revelled in among these hills in May and June. Here,
too, that charming climber, the wild clematis or tra-
veller’s joy, finds its most favourable soil, and flourishes
amazingly. I have never seen it look so fine in winter
as ainong the downs; in sheltered hollows among the
hills you will find clumps of trees, evergreen holly
and yew, mixed with leafless oak and thorn and beech,
partially veiled or clouded with the unshed silver-
grey fluff to a height of thirty or forty feet from the
ground. In England we call that silver-grey down
Old Man’s Beard ; in another country I have heard it
called Angel’s Hair.

There is another fine plant characteristic of the
Sussex downs, the juniper, which is not flourishing ;
and this is all the more to be regretted, because it is
not, like the furze and thorn and clematis, to be found

WEST OF THE ADUR 235

all over the land; compared with these species the
juniper is a rare plant, very local in its distribution,
In many places the ground has been cleared of it to
give better food to the sheep, or when well grown it
has been cut down for fuel and for other purposes;
and we may say that in many places the juniper is
disappearing from the downs simply because the great
landowners have not thought proper to preserve it.
Yet how congenial the soil is to it, how readily it
grows, may be seen on some downs, as at Kingly Vale
for instance, where large areas are covered or rather
thickly sprinkled over with its bushes. But you will
not find here one large or well-grown bush; it is all
a dwarf scrub, where no doubt the largest plants are
periodically cut down.

One must go to other districts, in many cases
where the soil is less favourable to it, but where it has
not been ill-treated, to see the juniper in its perfection.
It is a handsome plant, but its greatest attraction lies
in its variety. The variety of the hawthorn, which
gives a charm to that tree, consists as much in colour
and light and shadow as in form; in the juniper the
variety is in the form rather than in colour. To appre-
ciate this character of the plant, it must be seen
where it is pretty abundant, on some open spot away
from all other tree and bush vegetation. At a dis-
tance it may be mistaken for a furze-bush, being not
unlike that plant in size, colour, and manner of growth.
Seen nearer, it is not of so rough and prickly an

236 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

aspect; its pine-needles-like fine foliage give it a
somewhat feathery appearance; it is brighter green
than the furze; the topmost slender sprays, gracefully
curved at their tips, are tinged with red; and where
the foliage is thick there is a bluish tint on the green
that is like a bloom. In some lights, especially in the
early mornings, when the level sunbeams strike on the
bushes, wet with dew or melting hoar-frost, this blue-
ness gives the plant a rare, delicate, changeful beauty.
Even here on the downs, where most of the junipers
one finds are a poor scrub, I have been enchanted at the
effects produced by the light on it, but the loveliest
effect was in part fortuitous, and came as a delightful
surprise.

The south-west gales of October and November
had blown the fallen leaves of a beech-wood for miles
over the downs, and at one spot where an area of
thirty or forty acres was thickly sprinkled over with
a juniper scrub, a drift of yellow and red leaves had
formed at the foot of every bush. Here, on the light
green smooth turf, the little bushes or tufts, three or
four feet apart, showing a blue bloom and play of
rainbow colour in their feathery green foliage, each
with its drift of intense russet-gold at its foot, made
a very singular and very beautiful picture.

Where the juniper is abundant and grows large,
the plants are curiously unlike, and, viewed at a dis-
tance of a couple of hundred yards or so, they have
something of the appearance of a grove or wood of

WEST OF THE ADUR 237

Miniature trees of different species: alike in colour,
in their various forms they look some like isolated
clumps of elms, others columnar in shape, others
dome-like, resembling evergreen oaks or well-grown
yews; and among these and many other forms there
are tall straight bushes resembling Lombardy poplars
and pointed cypresses.

It is, however, not often that one may see even
the large fine junipers all shapely in their various
forms: some are ragged unlovely bushes, and this is
most often the case where they grow in woods and
are to some extent shaded by other trees.

It is to be wished that something could be done
to prevent the destruction of this handsome bush.
If some one of the great landowners of the downs
would but create a juniper preserve at some point
where the plant grows spontaneously and well, he
would deserve the gratitude of all lovers of nature
who are accustomed to take their summer rambles
in downland.

CHAPTER XIII

THE MARITIME DISTRICT

The autumnal movement of birds—Linnets on the downs—Birds
wintering in the maritime district—Character of the district—
Birdbam—Rooks and starlings—Skylarks and finches—Dun-
nock and wren—Peewits on the Cuckmere—Peewit's hatred of
the rook—Peewit’s wing-exercises—Peewits in flocks—Black-
headed gulls —Charm of the maritime district — Gloomy
weather — Missel-thrush; his temper, habits, and song —
The spire of Chichester Cathedral; its esthetic value in
the landscape.

THE autumnal movement of birds, both migrants and
residents, is most marked throughout the downland
and maritime districts of Sussex during the month of
October. Swallows gather in numbers in the weald at
the foot of the downs, but on the long strip of country,
hilly and flat, that lies between the weald district and
the sea the insectivorous migrants are not much seen,
as they do not break their journey here. The excep-

tions are the wheatear, pied wagtail, stonechat (travel-
238

THE MARITIME DISTRICT 239

ling in small flocks), and the meadow-pipit. In October,
when cold and wet weather has set the more dilatory
seed-eating migrants in motion, together with all those
kinds that leave their summer haunts to winter else-
where within the country, birds in multitudes arrive at
this “ threshold of England,” some to rest and recruit
their strength before taking their flight across the
Channel, others in search of suitable winter quarters;
and so long as the weather permits numbers of these
travellers keep to the hills.

On the cultivated downland farms the linnets are
most abundant, and if the weather keeps mild, will
haunt the stubble-fields down to the end of November.
As many as three or four thousand birds may some-
times be seen in a flock, and it is a fine spectacle when
they rise and wheel about the field, and after three or
four turns drop down, a shower of birds, vanishing all
at once from sight. A person may then stand within
fifty yards of the flock without hearing the faintest
sound, or being able to see one of the little brown
creatures busily searching for seeds on the brown soil ;
then suddenly they are all up again, an innumer-
able multitude of swiftly rushing twittering birdlings,
brought, as it were, by a miracle into existence!

From the stubbles they fly to a brake or thick
hedge, and sit so closely crowded together on every
twig that the leafless thorns are brown with them on
the sunny side. If the weather be not too cold one
may then hear the winter singing of the linnet

240 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

delightful to listen to, Heard at a distance of sixty
or seventy yards, it is like the rushing sound the
wind makes in beechen woods in summer; but when
the listener goes nearer he finds that this confused
noise is composed of innumerable fine melodious notes,
a mass and an indescribable tangle of sound, resembling
the evening concert of an immense host of starlings,
gathered at their roosting-place, but more musical.

These large flocks are probably made up of birds
from hundreds of furze-grown commons, moors, and
mountain sides all over the kingdom, and will by-and-
by take their departure to countries beyond the sea.
When cold blasts have driven these and all other
loiterers from the exposed hills, the maritime district
is then the chief haunt and winter home of birds.
Probably this district has the most numerous and
varied feathered population to be found anywhere in
England during the winter months.

The strip of low country extending along the coast
from the mouth of the river Adur to the border of
Hampshire has a strongly-marked character of its own.
The extreme fertility of the soil, and the mildness of the
climate, due to the shelter of the downs on the north
side, and to the nearness of the sea, which is never
cold, has made Worthing what it is—the chief vine-
yard and garden of rare fruits in England. This is
the character of the maritime district, although where
the range of hills retires furthest from the sea, the
flat country is less sheltered from the north and east

THE MARITIME DISTRICT 241

winds. But throughout, the climate is remarkably
mild, even in the widest part between the downs
and the promontory of Selsey Bill. In January, after
walking from Harting over downs white with half
frozen snow, when a furious north-east wind was
blowing, I came to Selsey, and found a different
climate. There was no snow on the green fields and
muddy roads; the wind was light and not unplea-
santly cold, and thrushes, hedge-sparrows, and wrens
were singing.

A few miles from Chichester, on an arm of the
sea, which at low water is mostly a mud-flat, there
is a parish and village of Birdham, or Bridham. This
birds’ home doubtless acquired its name in early
Saxon times, on account of the great numbers of sea
and water fowl that resorted to the spot in winter;
and Chichester harbour is still a favourite haunt of
water-fowl in severe weather. But the entire mari-
time district is a Birdham in winter: the mild climate,
everlasting verdure, abundance of food and water, and
a sparse human population make it indeed an ideal
wintering-place for many birds that have their breed-
ing haunts on the hills and other exposed districts
throughout the country.

Rooks and starlings are excessively abundant. It
is a wonder how any grub can escape their prying
eyes and busy prodding beaks. On some favourite
feeding-grounds the surface is often covered with
grass and moss plucked up by them to get at the

Q

242 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

grubs at the roots. When the grass freshly pulled up
is examined the leaves are invariably seen to be wilted
or of a sickly colour. It is indeed this faded appear-
ance of the grass that reveals the hiding-place of the
larva to the bird, and it may be safely said that he
never pulls a blade of grass without sufficient reason.
But the starlings pull up moss in most places on the
chance, I imagine, of finding insects concealed under
it. Skylarks winter on the grassy flats in considerable
numbers, and flocks of bramblings are met with every-
where, Flocks, too, of chaffinches, yellow-hammers,
corn and reed buntings, and linnets and redpolls.
But the goldfinches are a very few solitary birds:
you will see perhaps two or three in a day’s walk, and
you will probably see quite as many grey wagtails, or
even kingfishers. One day in the course of an eight
miles’ walk I saw two rare birds—one goldfinch and
one great crested grebe.

I have said in a former chapter that the dunnock,
or hedge-sparrow, breeds in the furze-bushes all over
the downs, but in the cold season forsakes that part
of the country. Doubtless many of those downland
birds spend the winter in the maritime district, where
they are extremely numerous in December and Janu-
ary. The downland wrens may have the same habits,
as they are just as abundant: as you walk the brisk
little brown bird flits out of the scanty hedges or from
the sides of the ditches at every few yards.

Herons come to fish, and peewits are common,

THE MARITIME DISTRICT 243

but not in such great numbers as we often see them
in the valleys of the rivers Arun, Ouse, and Cuck-
mere. The artist’s picture of the narrow valley of
the last-named stream, taken from a point close to
Exceat Bridge, on a November evening, shows a
large flock of these birds that continued flying near
us and passing and repassing over our heads during
the whole time he was occupied in making the
sketch.

The peewit breeds in all the downland valleys, and
I have often amused myself watching him defending
the field where he had his nest against all suspected
birds. When the hills are dry in summer the moist
green fields and water meadows are attractive to the
downland rooks; but these white-faced crows are hated
by the plover, and he will not allow them to feed on
the sacred ground where his treasures are. The rook,
we know, is an egg-stealer on occasion; the peewit
evidently believes that he is always one, and he per-
haps knows him better than we do. Still, it is rather
hard on the hungry rook; for it may happen that the
meadow or field forbidden to him is precisely the one
which he is most anxious to investigate. Hundreds
of starlings, those lesser rooks he is accustomed to
associate with, may be there, full in sight, feasting on
fat grubs; but no sooner does he come to join them
than the jealous peewit is up in arms, and then be-
gins that furious persecution which he cannot stand
against, and flying from it he is chased and buffeted

244 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

for a distance of five or six hundred yards from the
ground.

In September and October the resident peewits are
joined by others of their kind; and in the valley of the
Cuckmere, a favourite wintering ground, you may see
a flock of as many as two thousand birds, looking at
a distance, when they are up and flying round, like
a vast cloud of starlings. No bird appears to take
greater pleasure in the exercise of his own powers of
flight than the peewit. Flying is to him like riding,
cycling, rowing or sailing, and skating (I wish I could
udd ballooning or rushing about in a flying-machine)
to ourselves. It is his sport; and during the spring
and summer season, when peewits live in pairs or
small parties, he spends a great part of his time in
those quite useless, but doubtless exhilarating, displays
which we are never tired of watching. Rising to a
considerable height in the air, he lets himself go, with
the determination apparently of breaking the peewit
record; that is to say, of rushing downwards in the
approved suicidally insane manner, with sudden
doublings this way and that, and other violent eccen-
tric motions designed to make him lose his head; and
finally to come at fullest speed within an inch, or as
much less than an inch as he can, of dashing himself
into a pulp on the ground below.

Blake, in his tiger song, exclaims—

And what shoulder, and what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart!

ONINGAY NWOALOY :aYaWNOND AHL dO AATIVA

THE MARITIME DISTRICT 245

The peewit, too, compared with man, must have a
remarkable heart, and brain, and nerves, to do such
things purely for the fun of it. Here, sitting on a
hill side, I watched a male bird, amusing himself in
the air while his mate was on the nest, rise up and
repeat the action of pretending to go mad and hurl
himself down to destruction over fifty times without
resting. Then he alighted, and I began to imagine
what his sensations must be: his brain, I thought,
must seem to him to have got away somehow from
his body and to be rushing madly this way and that
through the air. Meantime the bird was standing
placidly regarding his mate; then he nodded his head
once or twice to her, and in a twinkling was off, high
up, and at his capers once more.

In autumn and winter, when a large number of
peewits are congregated, their wing-exercises are mostly
of another kind. Each bird is then, like the starling,
or linnet, or dunlin, in its flock, one of a company;
and we see and note not individuals but an entire
crowd, or army, moved by one mind or impulse. The
birds often spend many hours of the day in the air,
travelling up and down stream, often changing their
formation; now seen as a flock, a mass, extending
wings on either side, until they present a front of
several hundred feet in length, then closing again and
changing their disposition they are seen as a long
column or winding stream of birds. The smoothness
and discipline with which these evolutions are con-

246 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

ducted incline one to think that sight and hearing
in some gregarious species of aérial habits are supple-
mented by another faculty—a very delicate sense
of touch, as in the bat; that it is a sensation of re-
pulsion informing each member of the flock of the
nearness to it of others, and prevents them from
touching or striking against and impeding one another.
When the flock turns or changes its formation, it may
be observed that while numbers of birds are stream-
ing away to this or that side with accelerated speed,
others, at points where confusion would seem inevit-
able, suspend their flight, and remain almost motion-
less at equal distances apart until the moment comes
for them to join in the swift movement.

Black-headed gulls are as abundant as rooks on
the flat country and on the neighbouring downs where
there is tillage, and may often be seen in screaming
crowds following close at the heels of the ploughman.
When not feeding they are seen at rest on a green field,
and at a distance may be taken for a great patch of
unmelted snow. That beautiful order which so many
gregarious birds observe when on the wing in flocks
is adhered to by the gulls even when resting on the
earth. They invariably sit or stand on the grass with
beaks all pointing one way, to the wind, all at equal
distances apart. These white flocks resting on the
green fields are a familiar feature of the winter land-
scape in this district.

Altogether, this is a spot in which an observer of

THE MARITIME DISTRICT 247

wild birds may pass a very pleasant winter season.
For others, too, the flat land with its mild climate and
perpetual verdure must have a charm in spite of miry
ways and sodden soil. Even under a grey sky, and
it is not always grey, there is colour in the landscape.
The trees are mostly elms, and their rich browns and
purples relieve the universal green of the earth. Ivy
is most luxuriant in this damp land, and wraps the
trunks and branches of trees, and houses and fences,
in its dark mantle. On account of the very limited
horizon a man has when on a perfectly flat surface,
the leaflessness of the winter trees is an advantage
here, and enables one to see the distant small villages
scattered over the district; the stone farm-house, its
old red-tiled roof stained with many-coloured moss
and lichen; the great barn and outbuildings, thatched
with pale yellow straw; and the small, ancient, ivied
Norman church, with the sacred yew in its church-
yard.

In late autumn, when the shortness and darkness
of the days are most noticeable, and in winter, there are
often long spells of mild, wet weather, when the gsouth-
west wind blows continuously, when it rains every day,
until the green’earth is like a swollen sponge, and the
roads are deep with mire, and stream and ditch and
drain are full to overflowing; when in the intervals
of the rain and in rainless days there are driving
mists, sudden showers, and everywhere the spray and
smell of salt water and of seaweed. Days, too, with-

248 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

out any rain, when the vast heavens are filled with
clouds that have never a rift nor a sunlit spot in
them; a universe of slaty-black vapour, miles deep,
rising ever from the dim moaning sea to drown the
earth and all that is in it in everlasting gloom. Such
days are known all over the land and depress the soul,
and when such a cloud has been long above us we
pine for a sight of the pure blue of heaven and the
sunshine, even as a prisoner pines for liberty.

Yet, strange as it may sound, this low, flat land
on a level with the sea has had the greatest charm
for me in precisely such gloomy weather as I have
described. In summer this district does not attract
me; I look at the hills and would be walking on their
elastic turf, and breathing that exhilarating air. The
summer atmosphere is heavy and motionless here;
still, one would say that winter wet and gloom would
make the place intolerable. I can only suppose that
on account of the lowness and flatness of the land,
the nearness of the sea and the superabundant mois-
ture, the gloom is deepest here in dark weather—it
has always seemed so to me; and that the darkness
serves to accentuate the special character of the dis-
trict, and pleases me for that reason. That my plea-
sure is as great as that which I experience on the
treeless hills in July and August, when the sun is
brightest, I do not for a moment say; I can only say
that in the gloomiest weather, a perpetual twilight
which made trees, buildings, hedges, cattle, and all

THE MARITIME DISTRICT 249

objects look dim and distant even when close by,
I have rambled all day long without any sense of
depression or weariness; and that when, hungry
and thirsty, I have sought refreshment at one of the
little village inns, and have found only stale bread
without any cheese to eat, and nothing but four ale
to drink—ale at fourpence a quart—I have eaten
the bread and drunk the beer (a tankard, not a quart
of it), and have gone forth comforted and happy to
resume my wanderings.

There is one thing to make a lover of bird-music
happy in the darkest weather in January in this
maritime district. Mid-winter is the season of the
missel-thrush. The song-thrush has been heard since
the end of November, but he is not the true winter
singer. He is heard often enough—a bird here and
a bird there—when the sun shines, and in cloudy
or in wet weather too, if it be mild. But when it
is too gloomy for even his fine temper, when there
is no gleam of light anywhere and no change in that
darkness of immense ever-moving cloud above; and
the south-west raves all day and all night, and day
after day, then the storm-cock sings his loudest from
a tree-top and has no rival. A glorious bird!

He breeds earlier than most birds, and we have
seen that after that labour is ended he repairs to
the downs and leads a gipsy existence in bands of
a dozen or so, feeding on snails and grasshoppers,
drinking at the dew ponds, and resting at noon in

250 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

the shade of the furze-bushes; also that in autumn
he feasts (often too well) on wild fruits, especially
the poisonous yew-berry. But during all that pleasant
vagrant summer life, when he sings not and has no
family cares, he is still in disposition the bird we
know so well in the orchard and copse, the big olive-
coloured spotty thrush that sits motionless and statu-
esque and flies from you with an angry scream; the
bird whose courageous spirit and fierce onslaught
in defence of his nest makes him the equal of crafty
crows and pies, and of hawks, in spite of their hooked
beaks and cruel sharp talons. Those large black
conspicuous spots of his breast and his habit of
singing in weather that makes all other voices silent,
seem appropriate to a bird of his bold aggressive
temper.

As I walked one hot day on the northern ridge
of the South Downs, a party of half-a-dozen missel-
thrushes flew up from the ground before me, and
rising high in the air went away towards the weald.
A telegraph line crosses the hills at that point, and
just when the thrushes rose up and flew from me
a sparrow-hawk came up swiftly flying over the ridge
and perched on the telegraph wire. I have observed
that this hawk, like the cuckoo, cannot properly grasp
the wire and sit firm and upright on it as most
passerine birds are able to do. Like the cuckoo he
wobbles and drops his wings upon the wire to help
to keep him up. It was so in the present case: the

THE MARITIME DISTRICT 251

hawk was swaying about trying to hold on to the
thin smooth wire when the thrushes passed over him,
thirty or forty yards above, all but one, and this one
remained hovering motionless in the air for a space
of a few seconds directly above the hawk, then
dropped like a stone upon his back, and knocked him
clean off his perch.

It is often stated by writers on British birds that
the missel-thrush ceases singing in March or April;
this is a inistake, as I frequently hear him in May
and June. But why, I have often asked myself, is
he silent on many days in January and February
when the weather is mild, and the song-thrush is
loudest ? I have a suspicion that the missel-thrush
is less tolerant of other bird-voices near him than
most species; and I think that the loud persistent
singing of the song-thrush is more disturbing to him
than any other bird-voice. At all events, I have often
listened for the missel-thrush, in localities where he
was abundant, and have not heard him when the
song-thrush was singing. In the same localities I
have heard the missel-thrush singing everywhere on
days when his rival was silent.

When all the most luscious of the wild fruits
have been eaten,.and frosts and winds make the open
downs impossible to live on, the missel-thrushes break
up their flocks and every bird goes back to his low-
land home. There is then not an orchard, nor copse,
nor grove, without a pair of the big thrushes; and

252 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

on the flat-wooded country on the north of the downs
these birds are, I think, just as numerous. Home
again from his long outing, the missel-thrush soon
begins to sing; and if you should observe him in
rough or gloomy weather, perched on an elm-top,
swayed about this way and that by the gusts, singing
his best, you must believe that this dark aspect of
things delights him; that his pleasure in life, ex-
pressed with such sounds and in such circumstances,
must greatly exceed in degree the contentment and
bliss that is ours, even when we are most free from
pain or care, and our whole beings most perfectly
in tune with nature.

As to the song; although we probably value it
most for its associations, and because it is often heard
when other bird-voices are silent, it is also beautiful
in itself. The sound is beautiful in quality, but the
singer has no art, and flings out his notes anyhow;
the song is an outburst, a cry of happiness, and is over
in a moment, and after a moment of silence he repeats
it, and so on for ten or twenty minutes or longer. In
its quality the sound is most like the blackbird’s; and
when, in early spring, the blackbird, perched on a
tree-top, first tries his long disused voice, the short
confused phrases he blurts out are so like the song
of the missel-thrush that any one may be easily de-
ceived by them. The difference in the voices of the
two birds is that the missel-thrush is not so full and
mellow, and is slightly metallic or bell-like; and it

THE MARITIME DISTRICT 253

is probably due to this quality that the song carries
much further than that of the blackbird.

What the missel-thrush is to the hearing, the
spire of Chichester cathedral is to the sight in this
flat district—the chief feature and object of beauty
and interest for the eyes to rest upon. In a way it
is always present. It may be seen at an immense
distance from the downs—from Cissbury Hill, for
instance, and from the hill-tops far away to the west,
and from the borders of Hampshire; but down on the
flat green country amidst which it rises, so tall and
lessening to a point, we look at it with different eyes,
and its esthetic value in the scene is greater and of
a different kind.

The sound, too, of the cathedral bell, booming out
the hour in deep, measured strokes, will, if the wind
be favourable, follow you many a mile as you walk by
the harbour—

Over the wide-watered shore
Swinging slow with sullen roar.

Where Milton heard the great bell he had in his
mind when he wrote the lines in Penseroso I do not
know, but they admirably describe this great bell
sound from the vast bell-tower at Chichester, when it
travels seawards over the flat harbour country, where
land and water mix. It is the character of the
country, its flatness and silence and the loneliness of
its shores, that gives to this one great sound its im-
portance, or value. For a similar reason this solitary

254 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

soaring spire has a value above that of any other spire
in the land.

We are accustomed to hear Salisbury cathedral
greatly praised; and as a spire it is doubtless very
great, a more beautiful and a nobler work than that
of Chichester. There is no comparison. Nevertheless,
I admire Chichester most, in spite of its inferiority
when viewed merely as a work of art. But I do not
look at it with the architect’s eye. In the inferior
work I see nothing but an object that fits in with and
forms a part of the landscape: more than that, it
“pulls” the scene together, and gives it a unity and
distinction which it would never have possessed if by
chance men had not built that spire precisely where
it stands. This is not the case at Salisbury: I go
out and away from the town and gaze at it from
different points, and still see nothing but a spire,
which, merely as a spire, may be the finest thing in
the world, but is in no way related to the scene amidst
which it is placed. We admire Salisbury just as we
admire St. Paul’s, for itself alone: it receives nothing
from, and gives nothing to, nature: it is a gem of
great value that would look just as well in any other
setting. When I view the Chichester spire, it is but
as a part of the scene—of all that visible nature that
inspires in us feelings compared with which the
highest pleasure the best and most perfect works of
art can give is but a poor insipid thing, and as dreams
compared to realities,

WVHSOG WOW WNOIUVH WALSAHOIHD

THE MARITIME DISTRICT 255

It is not, however, from all points of view that the
Chichester spire is of so much account in the land-
scape. The line of the downs must appear beyond it ;
and downs and spire look best from the green level
land between the cathedral and the sea. In some
states of the weather the spire has a singular beauty,
as when sun-flushed, it appears white against a black
cloud. Perhaps the most beautiful effect is an after-
noon or evening one, when there are clouds, but in the
east and north a pale clear sky, against which the grey
spire and distant downs appear sharply outlined; the
earth green, but the hills in shadow deepest indigo
blue. This effect is a very common one in autumn
and winter evenings.

CHAPTER XIV

CHICHESTER

Chichester at a distance and near—Smells and sights—Public-house
signs—Habits of the people—Brewers’ policy—The church
and the clergy—In the cathedral—A wood-carving—Market-
day—Early associations—The Market Cross and a mystery—
Visit to Midhurst—Decaying inns—Increase of temperance
and the cause—Chichester mud—Caging owls—The owl at
Alfriston—A miserable daw—A white owl’s fle du Diable—
An ideal home for an owl—A prisoner without hope.

To those who know not Chichester, that same tall,
star-ypointing spire in a green level land with round
blue hills beyond, is not only a thing of beauty, a
symbol and remembrancer; but seen at a distance, day
by day, from many points, may come to be even more
than all these to the mind. An ancient town, re-
mote and rural; the sights and sounds and quietude
of nature, as in a village, around and in it, where men
may lead cleaner, saner, less strenuous lives than in
the great centres of population, and have other and
better ideals.

But it is not so; for Chichester is not in itself
sacred, nor pleasant, nor fragrant to the nostrils. On
the contrary, I am here always conscious of an odour
not easily described. Perhaps it comes nearest in

character to an effluvium ascending in warm and damp
256

CHICHESTER 257

weather from long covered old forgotten cesspools,
mixed with something more subtle or volatile, like a
fragrance that has lost its pleasantness. It may be
musk, with which the town dames perfumed them-
selves in bygone centuries, still clinging to the old
spot; and it may be the ghost of old incense, which
filled the sacred buildings every day for ages before its
ceremonial use was discontinued. This odour, or this
mixture of smells, of which the natives are not con-
scious, and the sights which meet the eye, have in my
case a profoundly depressing effect. This depression
is probably the malady commonly known as “the
chichesters,” from which many persons who visit this
town are said to suffer.

As to the sights: when you enter and walk in the
streets, you encounter a strange procession of Signs,
advancing to meet you, not always singly, but often in
twos and threes. They are implements of husbandry,
arms of all colours and degrees, castles, railways, tele-
graphs, globes, ships, tuns, anchors, crosses, and all
sorts of objects. Products of the earth, too, are there,
and signs that have rural associations—barley mows,
wheat-sheafs, chestnuts, oaks, bushes, &. &c. These
are followed by creatures, wild and domestic, outlandish
and familiar, real and fabulous—the most wonderful
happy family on the globe. Behind a lively unicorn,
run, trot, and prance a number of horses of all colours,
and after these, white harts; then cows, spotted and

red, and dogs, and bulls, and lambs, and swans, and
R

258 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

eagles, and after them all a playful dolphin. Nor
is this all; to the procession of birds and beasts and
fishes, succeed things great and beautiful and magnifi-
cent—fountains and rainbows, and the sun in his
glory, and the rising sun, and the moon and half-
moon, and doubtless many stars and constellations;
and angels, too, and beautiful thoughts and emotions,
good intents, and hope, and I daresay faith and
charity to keep her company.

These, the reader will understand, are public-house
signs and names. They are symbols and descriptions
not of things in nature and the soul, but of something
better and dearer to the Chichesterians, and their chief
good. As to beauty in the moral or material world—

The bubbles that swim

On the beaker’s brim

And break on the lips while meeting
is the most beautiful sight they know, and their joy
for ever.

The amazing sight of all these signs, and other
sights that are happily rare in small rural towns, led
me to make a few inquiries, and the result may interest
those of my readers who care to hear something (not
too much) about the little ways and vagaries of their
oWD species.

There are 12,000 souls in the town; that is to say,
an adult male population of 3000. This number in-
cludes a rather large body of clergymen and ministers,
and perhaps a couple of hundred highly respectable

CHICHESTER 259

persons who do not go to bars. To provide this village
population with drink there are seventy public-houses,
besides several wine and spirit merchants, and grocers
with licences. To keep all these houses open, all these
taps perpetually running, there must be an immense
quantity of liquor consumed. At eight o’clock in the
morning you will find men at all the bars, often in
groups of three or four or half-a-dozen, standing, pipe
in mouth and tankard in hand; and at eleven at night,
when closing time comes, out of every door a goodly
crowd of citizens are seen stwubling forth, surprised
and sorry, no doubt, that the day has ended so soon.
In the streets, near the railway station, at the Market
Cross, and at various corners, you will see groups of
the most utterly drink-degraded wretches it is possible
to find anywhere in the kingdom—men with soulless
bloated faces and watery eyes, dressed like tramps—
standing idle with their hands in their pockets. But
there is not a penny there, or they would not be stand-
ing in the mud and rain; and as for doing any work,
they are past’ that. Here that rare spectacle, a man
without a shirt, has met my sight, not once nor twice,
but several times, the naked flesh showing through
the rents of a ragged jacket buttoned or pinned up to
the neck. These loathly human objects are strangely
incongruous at that spot, under the great spire, in
sight of the green open healthy downs, in perhaps the
richest agricultural district in England.

But, it may be said, even allowing that every adult

260 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

male in Chichester drinks every day, and drinks deeply,
also allowing for market-day, when farmers and others
who come into the town on business no doubt consume
a good deal of beer and spirits, how is it possible for so
many licensed houses to exist ?

The publicans themselves told me how it was
managed. They assert, and complain bitterly, that
there are thirty or forty licensed houses too many
in Chichester, and that if they had to pay anything
approaching to the rents paid for houses of this descrip-
tion in other towns they could not live. Fortunately
(and this is the silver lining to the poor publican’s
cloud) the rents are nominal, and in very many in-
stances the houses are rent free. The brewers own
them, and find it more to their profit to give the house
rent free than to close it. The brewers, in fact, pay a
heavy premium to the drink-sellers, lest any of their
seventy precious licences should be lost.

As there are some extremists about just now, it
is perhaps as well to say that I do not agree with
them ; and that, though not so enthusiastic as a clerical
acquaintance of mine, who assures me that he “ simply
adores gin,” I am by no means an abstainer. Wine is
among the kindly fruits of the earth which I appre-
ciate, and failing that I can drink either ale or stout,
or a mixture of both. But the perpetual swilling in
Chichester is enough to turn the stomach of even the
most tolerant man.

And the clergy and ministers of the gospel—there

CHICHESTER 261

are, besides the cathedral, at least twenty churches
and chapels in this small town—what are they doing
in the matter? Nothing, I fear, and probably they
have long discovered that nothing is to be done.
The churches open on Sundays at an hour when the
seventy public-houses are closed, and a certain num-
ber of women and a few married men attend the
services. The cathedral has at least two services
every day, and you will as a rule find six or eight to
a dozen persons at the afternoon service; and these
few are women, or strangers who have come in to
look at the building. The eloquence, if there is any,
the lessons, the sweet and beautiful voices singing
“anthems clear,” are all wasted on the desert breath
of that vast, vacant interior. The ghostly men walk
the town like ghosts indeed, and are unseen or un-
noticed, and at an immeasurable distance from the
people they brush against ; and they are like pilgrims
and passengers in the city, whom nobody knows; nor
does any one inquire who they are, and what they are
doing there.

On a‘ rainy miserable day that was market-day,
when the wind was cold and the streets were foul
with mud; and the bellowings, bleatings, and grunt-
ings of the animals, and the smell of the same, filled
the air, I, greatly suffering from “the chichesters,”
fled into the cathedral and broke my resolution never
to enter that interesting part of the interior from
which the non-paying public, the poor undistinguished

262 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

herd of which I am a member, are excluded. I paid
my coin and signed my name, and was one of a small
exploring party of persons, damp and depressed as
myself, under the guidance of a sexton or verger.
He, unlike us, was in a rather merry mood, and gave
a humorous colour to old traditions and historical
incidents. When we had duly cursed Cromwell the
Destroyer, as I dare say we had cursed him in many
another noble building and in many a ruin, we came
in our rambles to an ancient small chapel where we
saw some curious old monkish wood-carvings which
the Puritans ought in consistency to have destroyed,
but did not. Here were oak seats in rows, and on
the back of each one was a carving representing some
humorous, fanciful, or grotesque scene, but I looked
attentively at only one, the first that caught my eye.
In this, a fox sat at ease in a chair, his legs crossed,
his brush thrown carelessly like a long coat-tail across
his lap, a stringed instrument on which he was
merrily playing in his hand; his foot was pressed on
the bosom of a goose, lying, poor wretch, screaming
and flapping its wings at his feet; while he, inclin-
ing his sharp nose a little, was looking down much
amused at the struggles of his victim. Opposite to
him, in another chair, sat an ape, listening to the
performance with all the gravity in the world.
Perhaps, thought I, those harsh and gloomy-
minded men, who, in their zeal for their unlovely
religion, destroyed so many works that had been a

CHICHESTER 263

joy to men for centuries, had after all some sense
of humour; and, with swords to hack in their hands,
relented when they looked at this wicked and most
comical fox.

I was still occupied with this carving when some
person threw open a door, and called excitedly to our
guide that a drove of pigs had broken or got into the
cathedral grounds, and he was wanted at once to help
get them out.

“IT am not surprised,” I remarked, “The whole
town swarms with pigs.” “Market-day!” he cried,
and, apologising for leaving us so unceremoniously, he
rushed away to give the assistance required.

I followed and gained the street, then took shelter
from the driving rain under the ancient famous
Market Cross, a richly decorated stone pavilion, with
many empty niches from which the stone effigies of
great men were thrown down and shattered by the
destructive Cromwellians.

This structure stands at the meeting of four streets
—East, West, South, and North Streets. Formerly
the cattle-market was held at this spot, and the
narrow busy thoroughfares were then filled with cattle,
sheep, and pigs, and of people buying and selling. A
woman in a shop close by told me that about thirty
years ago, when she was a child, the calves were
always penned in the street directly before the house
where she lived with her parents. The calves were
brought in the day before market-day; and all night

264 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

long, and a great part of the next day, the distressful
lowings of the poor beasts sounded through the house;
and so great was the effect on her, that up to the
present time, after so many years, she cannot hear
a calf calling without experiencing a sudden sense of
misery and desolation, which is torture to her mind.
So vivid are the impressions received, and so lasting
the associations formed, pleasant and painful, in a
child’s mind! These seemingly trivial associations
have a subtle influence, and are part of the character,
a harmony or a discord according to their nature;
and altogether they count for much in the little
obscure history and tragedy of each individual life.

But we are now under the Market Cross.

If a stranger in the town, coming out of the empty
desolate cathedral at the end of the afternoon service,
should take refuge from the rain under its arches, he
will presently see there a small wizened, grey, thread-
bare ghost of a man, and probably take no notice of
him. But if he, the stranger, with the confused sound
of prayer and praise in that sacred empty building still
in his ears, and a vague feeling of wonder and curiosity
in his mind, should by chance fix his eyes on that
small, faded, expressionless face, its colourless orbs will
meet his, and he will read in them a vague response,
an unshaped answer to his unshaped questions; and,
by-and-by, the mysterious man, with a slight nod of
invitation, will pass out, and the stranger, anxious to
get to the bottom of the mystery, will follow. He

CHICHESTER 265

will be led into I know not which of the four ways—
North, South, East, or West; but close by, in one of
them, his guide will pause, look back, then lightly run
down a flight of narrow crooked stairs leading to a
cellar. Following, the stranger will find himself in a
dim, silent, crypt-like place, smelling of ancient damp
and mould, dark at first to his unaccustomed eyes.
But in a little while he will discern a huge recumbent
form, paler in colour than the floor of rotting wood,
the dripping stone walls, and vaulted roof—a stupen-
dous human-shaped monster, like a Daniel Lambert
increased to ten times his great size; his naked body
and limbs extended on the black wet floor, apparently
dead and swollen by death, but the head raised, sup-
ported by a hand and arm; the face, round as an
ancient warriors shield, but larger, turned to him,
froth and yellow slime dropping from the obscene
mouth, the wide bloodshot eyes fixed with a chal-
lenging gaze on his. Fascinated by that gaze, he,
wide-eyed too, will stare back, even as a crystal-gazer
looks expectant into a glass globe before him; and in
those pale blue watery orbs he will see visions appear-
ing and vanishing like lightning, an inconceivably
rapid succession of faces, forms, events—wrecked lives
of innumerable men, broken hearts and homes made
desolate; famine and every foul disease; feverish
dreams and appetites, frantic passions, crimes, ravings
of delirium, epilepsy, insanity ; and strewn over all, the
ashes of death—all seen in one briefest moment of time.

266 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

Amazed and terrified at the sight of such things,
he will turn and hurry away from that dreadful pre-
sence, a sudden darkness in his heart as if all the light
and sweetness and glory had gone out of the world,
all hope from the soul. And his guide will no longer
be there; nor will he miss him, nor require to be
told that he has been face to face with a god, the
only god known and worshipped by the people of this
town.

To come back, We have always known, since
Cowper lived and was once near Chichester, that
“man made the town,” and that he did not well make
it, seeing that all vices and unhealthy appetites and
habits and modes flourish most and take a darker
colour in its close atmosphere. This being true of all
towns, the only fair way to judge the moral state of
any one town is to compare it with others, or with one
other, not greatly differing from it in population, pur-
suits, and other conditions. Here, then, is an experi-
ence which seemed to me to throw a pretty strong
light on the comparative position, with regard to the
drinking habits of the people, of the cathedral town
of Sussex.

From this agricultural centre, with a tall spire
and many tavern signs to distinguish it, I went to
Midhurst, on the other side of the downs, to find
myself in a small, old, and extremely picturesque town,
which, in its rough paved, crooked, uneven streets,
ancient timbered houses, its curfew bell, and darkness

CHICHESTER 267

and silence at night, seemed to have suddenly carried
me back into medieval times. But in spite of its
hoary aspect and air of antiquity and remoteness and
the number of inns, some very large, clustering about
the central part, I felt as I wandered aimlessly about,
and talked, when a chance offered, to working men
and with cottage women and children, that I had
come into a different and better moral atmosphere.
The inns appeared mostly empty, or doing nothing,
and wore a neglected and decaying appearance. At
night I went forth to explore, and stumbling along
on the broken, up-and-down pavements, in a darkness
made visible by a few widely-separated street lamps,
I noticed that there were no lights, or nothing but a
faint glimmer, in the windows of the inns and taverns.
Finally, I made my way to a house, which I had
noticed and admired by daylight, taking it from its
size and general appearance to be the oldest and
most important inn or hotel in the town. After
trying two or three doors, I found one that was not
locked, and groped my way into a dim passage. To
my summons a woman came with a candle, and led
me into a large, dark, fireless room, and explained that
there were no lights or fires in the parlours because
no callers had been expected that evening. I declined
to sit down in that cold, cheerless place, and, after
some hesitation, she took me to an inner private room,
where the landlord was sitting before a big fire. The
room was exceedingly dirty, the floor littered with

268 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

rubbish, and two or three days’ ashes and cinders
heaped in the fireplace; but it was warm, and light,
and social. The landlord was eating his supper; he
had it on the extreme corner of the clothless deal
table, and it consisted of bread and cheese and raw
onions. The room was full of the odour. I sat down
on the other side of the fire; and there, in the inner-
most domestic circle, the so to speak fragrant bosom
of the family, we had a good hour’s talk, chiefly on
the decline of the public business in Midhurst—a
melancholy subject. I learnt that formerly there were
more public-houses in the town, but some had been
compelled to close, and that others were given by the
owners, the brewers, rent free. My host paid not one
penny rent for the grand old house he occupied, and
even so he could hardly make a decent living out of
it. Certainly his evening meal had not struck me as
too luxurious and expensive. Another tenant of an
ancient house close by was in even a worse case,
This landlord, to make both ends meet and save the
house, had conceived the happy idea of providing
sleeping accommodation to poor vagrants at fourpence
a night. He had gone into the byways and hedges
for his guests, and his house had become well known
to all the tramps and beggars that infest that part of
Sussex. The ragged, verminous person who “begs
your pardon” and wishes to say a word to you, is a
common object in Midhurst or the neighbourhood.
The word he wishes to say is that he is in want of

CHICHESTER 269

just one penny to make up the sum of fourpence to
pay for a bed at the hotel.

A Midhurst man, a moderate drinker, with whom
I had some conversation, told me that he had been
all his life in the town, and that a great improvement
in the drinking habits of the people had come about
during the last twenty years. Notwithstanding that
the population had been increasing, and a good deal
of building going on, some of the old inns had been
given up and no new ones had been opened, while
others still open were in the degraded bankrupt state
of those I have described. The brewers were pro-
bably not making anything out of houses kept up in
this way; such houses may even be a loss to them,
but being capitalists they can afford to hold on and
wait for better times. A glorious wave of drunken-
ness may yet be witnessed in the land. The improve-
ment noted had thus been brought about in spite of
all that the brewers and their zealous and faithful
friends and helpers, the licensing authorities, had been
able to do to prevent it.

My interlocutor’s belief was that this better state
of things had resulted from the Education Act. Lads
and young men now had interests, amusements, and
ways of passing their leisure time which did not exist
for their fathers. Newspapers and periodicals to read ;
cheap non-intoxicating drinks, and tea and coffee when
wanted; indoor games, and field sports, the love of
which is fostered at school, have served to make them

270 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

independent of the tavern for amusement. I think
it may be added that cigarette smoking, which has
become universal among the young people in the rural
districts during the last five or six years, has been a
blessing too. It is true that in itself it is an evil, but
a very mild one compared with the foul pipe of strong
shag which the young men and youths of the peasant
class used to smoke, and which is an incentive to
beer-drinking.

Refreshed and exhilarated at what I had heard
and seen at Midhurst, I went on my way, and before
going many miles arrived at a place where there
was a man who was a large employer of labour. I
was assured that he would not employ a man from
Midhurst on account of the well-known drunken habits
of the people of that town !

What then shall we say of the cathedral town,
which has lost none of its beer-houses, where doors
are not closed and windows darkened at eight o’clock
because it is not expected that any one will call;
where the brewers and their good friends, the licensing
authorities, are determined that when a man staggers
out of one tavern he shall not be obliged to walk
more than twenty yards before finding another, where
he may go in to quench his thirst ?

But we have now happily done with this town
and this subject. On many a wet day in autumn
and winter, when walking in the streets and roads, I
looked attentively at the mud, attracted by its peculiar

CHICHESTER 271

grey colour; but I had no scientific person at my
elbow to tell me about that soil and explain the cause
of its pallid hue. Left to my own imaginings, I con-
sidered that Chichester was very old, that it was no
doubt a walled town, perhaps very ancient, before
Christ came, and that countless “generations of de-
ciduous men” had fallen, to mix their ashes with
the soil until it had in time taken that greyish colour.
It was a comfort to reflect that if we cannot have
anything in human shape better than “ these common
men,” now in the place of the vanished and forgotten,
that these too will in a little while fade and fail and
mix with and still further enrich the earth; and that
out of a soil so fertilised, other brighter, higher forms
and intelligences will eventually spring to life to make
glad the world.

Before departing, never to return, I stepped aside
from the road, and very carefully wiped the ash-
coloured mud from my boots on the wet grass, for
I wished not to take any of it away.

That was to me a sad day when I left, for I had
but just come to the finish of a fight which I had been
waging for some days, in which I had been finally
worsted ; and my only consolation in defeat was that
it was in Chichester and not in any other town known
to me in which the incident had occurred.

I have a great regard for the owl; the white owl,
sometimes called the domestic owl, being a special
favourite; and it greatly excites my indignation to

272 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

see this bird in captivity. There is no reason, no
excuse to be made, for confining him; he does not
sing and twitter, nor amuse his gaoler with lively
motions and brilliant colour. Beautiful to see when
flying at sunset about the village and farm where
he is not persecuted, and grotesque beyond description
when viewed by day in his dimly-lighted loft or tower,
rocking his body to and fro, now crouching cat-like,
then stretching himself up, and all the time making
strange weird faces at you, in a cage he is a most
pitiful spectacle, a depressed, dead-alive looking white
owl, no longer white, his beautiful plumage smirched
and disarranged.

A robin redbreast in a cage
Puts all heaven in a rage,

said Blake; and a white owl in a cage must produce
the same effect, if we may indeed believe that un-
earthly eyes regard us, and see the fantastic tricks
which we play with our unhappy fellow-creatures.

On one occasion only have I seen a caged owl
without disgust and anger; this, oddly enough, was
in downland, and the reader if, or when, he is in that
part of the country, may sce the bird for himself, and
admire it as I did. It was at Alfriston, the ancient
interesting village among the South Downs; and the
bird was not the white nor any British owl, but an
exceedingly fine specimen of the beautiful Cape Horned
Owl. It is owned by an old dame, Mrs. Bodle, who

CHICHESTER 273

keeps a very small sweet-stuff, orange, bun and lemonade
shop in the village street. It was picked up, a young
injured bird, by Mrs. Bodle’s son, a soldier in South
Africa, about seventeen years ago, and sent as a gift
to his mother far away in the downland village. She
has indeed cherished and kept it well, and loves it for
itself as well as for her long absent son’s sake; very
proudly she told me that many who had seen had
wished to possess it, and had offered her a big price
for her bird. Now the fame of the owl has spread ;
and all summer long, when visitors to the ancient
village from Eastbourne, Seaford, Brighton, and other
coast towns, are perpetually coming, many of them
find their way to the little shop; and Mrs. Bodle does
a good business and must be making a nice little
fortune, and imagines (good soul!) that her ginger pop
is more refreshing, her oranges and chocolates sweeter,
and her buns more sustaining than those that others
sell. But it is a delusion: most of those who eat her
sweets and drink her lemonade go to see the bird,
who sits all day (at the receipt of custom) in his big
cage in a dim corner; strange and beautiful to look
at in his rich, golden, tawny plumage, barred and
mottled like a tiger-cat, with round, luminous, orange-
coloured eyes, and the weird ornament of two large
black ears. Mrs. Bodle informed me that he had a
beautiful voice, but that he would only sing to or talk
with her; on all others he looked gravely out of his

brilliant orbs, but made no sound. However, after a
s

Q74 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

little persuasion we got him to talk to us, and the
note repeated again and again was like the cooing of
a dove, but more musical; it was a softer, mellower,
and more human sound than the hoot of the wood
owl.

Very different was the life of the white owl in
Chichester. At the inn where I stayed on my last
visit, I found three unhappy prisoners; two of these,
a jackdaw and a blackbird, were kept in rabbit-
hutch-like cages fixed against the ceiling of a long,
narrow, dimly-lighted passage. It was sad to see the
poor daw, the bird that loves soaring in wind and
sunshine, shut up in that narrow house in a perpetual
twilight, his head, when he sat on his perch, pressed
against the ceiling. He always perched at the same
end of his hutch, and the constant pressure of his
head on one spot had made a hole in the plaster
above. People were passing and repassing through
that passage all day long, but without noticing the
daw; for he was hung above the line, so to say, and
to see him it was necessary to look up. Now, I ob-
served that whenever I paused before the cage and
looked up, the bird would instantly jump on to his
perch and, turning his back to me, fix his head against
the ceiling in the corner, and remain motionless in
that strange position. A silent, sullen daw—and no
wonder! He did not, like Sterne’s captive starling,
cry continually, “I can’t get out;” he made no cry,
and had no hope of ever feeling the wind and the sun,

CHICHESTER Q75

or ever seeing the blue sky and green earth again.
Hight to nine years had he been immured in that
cursed prison, and he would never leave it until his
tortured life had left him; then his dead body would
be taken out, and another bird, I daresay, put there
in his place.

The third prisoner was the owl, and I think he
was even worse off than the others; for he was kept
in an always malodorous and usually uncovered cage,
in the kitchen, where a big fire was burning sixteen
to seventeen hours every day. The heat must have
been—and alas! still must be—dreadful to the poor
bird; but if speech had been given him he would, I
think, have complained most of the gas jets: they
were burning all about him until twelve o'clock every
night, and the sensation they produced must have
been as of fine heated needles, heated red and heated
white, stabbing and pricking his sensitive eye-balls.
In this chamber of torture the miserable bird had
existed for nine months.

When I went to the landlady to plead for the
owl, I was very diplomatic, remembering what certain
wise men have taught us—namely, that if we want to
get anything out of anybody we must not begin by
rubbing him up the wrong way. I praised her greatly
for her merciful heart, and told her how it had de-
lighted me to hear her fame in Chichester as a lover
and protector of animals. But her treatment of her
feathered pets was wrong; and in mild language I

276 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

imparted my views on the subject. She was disturbed
at what I said about the owl, and began to excuse
herself, saying that she had taken in the bird solely to
give it a safe and happy home, but she had no desire
to keep it as it was a silent dull bird, and that if I
wished I could take it away and set it free.

I was delighted at my success, and promised to
find before long a suitable home for the bird.

For some days after that I kept a look out during
my rambles; and one afternoon, in the maritime dis-
trict, I came to a small village which struck me as an
ideal home for an owl. For it was a small and most
rustic place, consisting of a little church and a great
thatched barn and many farm buildings. But the
farm-house itself, even in this land of great old farms
that were once manors, was a surprise to me. It was
a very large low stone building, partly overgrown with
ivy, and nearly surrounded by an ancient foss, with
great old elm-trees growing out of the banks. The
people who lived in this grey old manse were worthy
of their home: the lady of the house, who received
me, was young and fair to see, and gracious in mind
and manner; and when I told her my errand, she said
that she and her husband were very fond of birds and
had a peculiar regard for the white owl; and that if
I would take and release it in their barn she herself
would place food for it there every day and see that
it was not disturbed, until it had recovered its strength
and the use of its wings and could find its own living.

CHICHESTER Q77

Meanwhile my landlady had changed her mind,
and when I was ready to take the bird she informed
me that she had decided not to part with it; that on
thinking the matter over she had found out that she
had become attached to the owl, and she also thought
that the bird would be unhappy if taken from the
home and the surroundings he was accustomed to.

In vain I begged and pleaded, not that day only,
but the next, and for several days. She would not
part with the bird for love or money. Up till then I
had visited the bird every day, and opening its cage
would put my hand in to caress it. It liked to be
gently stroked on the breast, and when caressed in
this way would play with my fingers, biting them but
very gently with his beak. But from that time I was
ashamed to go near him, or even to look at him; for
I had promised him his liberty, and could not keep
my word. Nor was it necessary that I should look
at to see him; his melancholy image was too deeply
graved in my mind—a feathered Dreyfus, Semitic
features and all, the head bowed, the weary eyes
closed, the hooked nose just visible amidst a wilder-
ness of white whiskers. I could only try to believe
that there is some foundation for the ancient belief
held in so many lands, that the owl is indeed a
supernatural, or sacred, bird; that when this captive
had been tortured to death and its carcase thrown into
the dust-heap, the loving kindness that had been shown
to him would have a swift and suitable reward.

CHAPTER XV

WINTER IN WEST DOWNLAND

A good-bye to towns—Charm of West Downland in winter—A
cow-boy singing and a missel-thrush—A vein of stupidity
—Anecdotes—Bats eating bacon—Riding to Ringmer and a
downland man’s ignorance—Chilgrove—Gilbert White—Yew,
juniper, and clematis—A wooded combe—A host of wood-
pigeons—Beautiful downland scenery—Fallen beech-leaves on
snow—South Harting—Conclusion.

Ir would not be appropriate, nor even seethly, that a
book of this sort, treating of rural scenes and wild lite,
in which, while keeping a vigilant eye on what my
pen was doing, I have yet allowed it to hint or sug-
gest, in a few faintly-traced lines, what communion
with nature really is to me—it would not be proper
that it should conclude with an account of any town,
and the writer's adventures, the thoughts and expe-
riences that afflicted him, during his sojourn in it.

A friend of mine, a downland rector, expressed his
disappointment at finding that this book was not
what he had thought it was intended to be—a Flora
of the South Downs. It was true, he said, that plants
had not interested him, and that the only wild flowers
he could give a name to when he saw them were the

daisy and dandelion; still it would have been a satis-
278

WINTER IN WEST DOWNLAND 279

faction to have a Flora of the downs on his book-
shelves for reference; and that was what he had
looked for, instead of this—well—this sort of thing.

As a fact, there are several printed lists of the
downland plants to be had by those who want them;
and doubtless there are scores of men and women who
would be only too delighted to compile more such
lists—as many lists, manuals, floras, in fact, as the
publishers and the public would like to buy. Had I
written a book of that kind, instead of “this sort of
thing,” I should not have been able to say anything
about the smells of Chichester, material and moral,
which are in no way related to flowers.

It cannot be said of other downland towns that
they are inodorous, or sweet, or flowery; they are not
that: we all know of loud smells, the metaphor being
common, and coming down to Brighton with senses
purified and sharpened by the mountain air one is
hailed and assailed by perfect trumpet-blasts from
the innumerable fried-fish shops that flourish in that
watering-place. The smells of the cathedral town are
not of this pronounced and vulgar description ; they
are subtle, mysterious, but unhappily they cling longer
to the mind.

No; it was better in the end, or before the end,
to escape from that atmosphere out into the fresh
world; to be blown through and through by the
winter gale, until that effluvium, and all memory of
it, had been blown out of my nostrils and soul; to

280 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

be washed clean by the lustral water of the rain,
sparkling silvery and crystal as it fell, and the wind-
chased snow-flakes that first whitened and then melted
on me—to be one with nature, purified and myself
once more.

Better days than those spent in roughest weather
on the hills I could not well have known. “Oh, but
you should visit this part of downland in spring!” I
was told again and again. It was good enough in mid-
winter in spite of weather of the kind we call bad;
so good indeed as to make me somewhat sceptical as
to its far greater attractiveness in summer. Is there
anything in rural England more gratifying to the
eye than a winter prospect in this green diversified
country, with leafless beechen woods spread over
slopes and summits, and gathered like darkest purple
clouds within the combes and hollows of the great
round hills!

Glad as I was to be out in wind and rain and
snow on the summits, it was often a relief to escape
from so furious a blast by going down to the sheltered
weald the flat, wooded country between Midhurst and
Harting, where I loved to walk, and where these
rambles had to end. I walked by the Rother, that
fairest Sussex river, among the brown and purple
woods, and darker pine. Walking there one day
about noon, when the sky was a very soft blue, with
a few fleecy grey clouds floating in it, and the wind
was still, I came to a wide heath somewhere between

WINTER IN WEST DOWNLAND 281

Midhurst and Trotton, It was very silent; only two
sounds were audible, and I stood for some time listen-
ing to them. One was the sound of a boy singing.
He was a cow-boy; I could see him out in the middle
of the heath, standing among the furze-bushes, where
his cows were grazing. He was perhaps a choir-boy
in one of the village churches; at all events, he was
singing a hymn in a trained and very beautiful voice.
In that still, open air, at the distance I heard him
(two to three hundred yards), the voice seemed purer
and sweeter than any boy’s voice I have ever heard in
any church or cathedral. No doubt it was the dis-
tance, the silence of nature, the wild, solitary scene,
and perhaps, too, the abundant moisture in the air,
that gave the voice its exceeding beauty; and the
effect was as if this sound, too, had been cleansed and
clarified by the rains, even as the sky had been washed
to that softest, lucid blue. I listened to the boy sing-
ing and singing, with a short interval after each verse,
and to the one other sound, which came to ime from
an equal distance on the opposite side—the singing of
a solitary missel-thrush. The clear, bell-like note of
the bird filled the intervals in the boy’s singing; and
the bird, like the boy, had a clearer, purer voice on
that day; and like the other, too, he sang verse after
verse, with short intervals between. The effect was
indescribably beautiful. At last I thought I would
go and make the boy's acquaintance. Many a little
fellow tending cows on a heath have I talked with,

282 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

and this one had something more in him than all
those I had known. As I went over the rain-sodden
heath, often getting into hidden water, the singing
ceased, and when I had got to where the cows were
feeding among some large furze-bushes the boy was
not there, or at all events not visible. I had seen his
grey cap as he watched my approach from behind a
bush a few minutes before; but he was not there
now; he had concealed himself like a shy little lizard,
or furze wren, and after looking about among the
bushes for some minutes, I gave it up.

Possibly it was nothing more than a little rustic’s
shyness that had made him hide; but it is a fact,
I think, that there is a streak or vein of stupidity,
which, running eastward from Hampshire, crops up in
many places among the West Sussex Downs.

One day, seeing a youth harnessing a pony at a
gate, I asked him the name of a hill over which I
had just walked. “I don’t know,” he returned, evi-
dently surprised at the question; “I never heard that
it had a name.” A hill, I assured him, must have a
name; and I remarked that he was probably new to
the neighbourhood. He assured me that he was a
native of the place, and that to his knowledge the hill
had no name; then he added casually, “We call it
Bepton Hill.”

A day or two later a man told me of an inn, away
from any road, in a deep wooded valley among the
hills, where I could get refreshment, and he was very

WINTER IN WEST DOWNLAND 283

particular about giving me proper directions. “What
is the name of the inn?” I asked, and he replied
that it had no name. “An inn,’ I said, “ must have
a name—it is not like a hill that can do without
one.” He shook his head. “We call it the Oak,”
he remarked finally; “but if it has a name I never
heard it, and I have known the place a good many
years now.”

I might have been among the aborigines of Vene-
zuela, or of some other wild remote land, where every
person and perhaps every place has a real name which
is a secret known to few, and sometimes to nobody;
and an appellation besides which is not a real name,
but a sort of nickname, or false or common name, by
which he or she or it is called.

Amusing instances of ignorance, too, and of old
erroneous beliefs which have died out in most places,
are commonly met with in this out-of-the-way corner
of Sussex. One spring-like evening in January, when
talking with some working-men at the village of
Lavant, I called their attention to a bat flying to and
fro near us as a proof of the mildness of the weather.

“You call it a bat,” said one man, “and I grant
it’s very like one; but I call it a fluttermouse. You
see it’s bigger than a bat; but they are all of one
specie. The bigger ones, the fluttermouses as we calls
them, are the ones that eats the bacon. They comes
down the chimney to get it when it’s hanging there
to smoke.” I tried to convince him that he was

284 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

blaming the wrong animal, but he stuck to it that
it was the fluttermouses and not the mouses that
stole the bacon, and finally asserted that he had
actually seen them at it.

About this matter Gilbert White remarks, “The
notion that bats go down chimneys and gnaw men’s
bacon, seems no improbable story.” This reference
to White has served to remind me that one of the
most surprising instances of ignorance I have met
with in the downs was in an educated man.

Readers of the Selborne Letters are familiar with
the name of Ringmer, the pretty, old Sussex village
in the neighbourhood of Lewes, whither the famous
naturalist used to make an annual journey on horse-
back. His visits were to his aunt Rebecca, the wife
of Henry Snooke, and the house they lived in is still
standing. The egregious Mr. Augustus Hare, in his
Sussex, speaking of Ringmer, reminds his readers that
it was from this village that White dated “ several
of his stilted letters.”

During the summer of 1898, in the course of a
ramble on the downs, I made the acquaintance of a
gentleman who is a native, and had spent the sixty
odd years of his life in those parts. Both the man
and the name he bore interested me, the name being
a peculiar and a very ancient one at that spot. The
family is now impoverished and decayed, but there
was little sign of decay in my casual acquaintance,
despite his years. A straight wiry man, with alert

WINTER IN WEST DOWNLAND 285

hawk-like eyes, extremely active in his habits, a field
naturalist in a way, devoted to sport, and an excellent
judge of the points of a horse or dog. He also had
some acquaintance with books, and took an interest
in most things; above all things he was interested in
his own beloved South Downs, and he maintained
that for a man who preferred an outdoor life, and
the freedom of an unenclosed country and of great
hills, there was no spot on the globe to compare
with it.

In the course of a conversation I had with him
after we had known each other a few days and were
becoming fairly intimate, he spoke two or three times
of his rides to Ringmer. At length, with a laugh,
I said that he reminded me of Gilbert White, who,
although living far away in Hampshire, was also
accustomed to ride to Ringmer. As he did not
appear to understand my remark, I was compelled
to explain that I was speaking of the Rev. Gilbert
White, author of the “Natural History of Selborne.”
Alas! I only made matters worse, since after ran-
sacking his brain for some moments he confessed
that he had never heard the name of Gilbert White
nor of the village of Selborne.

I was reminded of an experience I had on a
steamboat in the Solent. It was many years ago,
when I was a stranger in a strange land. I got
into conversation with a gentleman on the deck,
who lived on the island, and when near Cowes he

286 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

gave me the names of several of the yachts we
saw anchored there, and told me a good deal about
their owners. He said that the island was now a
favourite place of residence for men who had made
a@ name in the world, and he proceeded to speak
of several of these famous persons. I was a little
ashamed to find that they were nearly all unknown
to me. The greatest among them, judging from
his way of speaking of him, was the editor of a
sporting paper, who had built himself a house in the
neighbourhood of Osborne.

I remarked that he had omitted all mention of
one of the great men who lived on the island—aAlfred
Tennyson. “Who's he?” said my interlocutor. “A
retired admiral? No! What has he done ?—does he
keep a yacht ?”

I did not think he kept a yacht; and he had not
done anything that I knew of except to write poetry:
he was the poet-laureate.

“ A poet 1—I know nothing about poets,” he said a
little curtly, and very soon afterwards walked off.

It is one of our commonest delusions that the
balance in which we weigh our fellow-creatures, our
measure and perspective, are those in use by mankind
generally: very naturally it disgusted him to have
my poor little obscure poet—all poets were little ob-
secure people to his mind—pbrought into the dis-
tinguished company of sporting men who kept their
yachts in the Solent! All that I could readily under-

WINTER IN WEST DOWNLAND 287

stand—my delusion was just as natural as, and not
less laughable than his; but to meet with a gentleman
who was naturalist as well as sportsman, who had
spent all the years of his life on that “majestic chain
of mountains called the South Downs,” and was accus-
tomed to ride to Ringmer, yet was ignorant of the
name of White of Selborne, filled me with astonish-
ment and even humiliation.

About the house at Ringmer in which White spent
so many of his autumns, the late Mark Antony Lower,
the well-known and excellent writer on local subjects,
relates that some years ago (the date is not given, but
I believe it must have been about 1850) a gentleman
who occupied it as tenant had all the nightingales
frequenting the grounds destroyed. Their late sing-
ing disturbed his rest. A strange fate for the birds
that “sing darkling,” the creatures of “ebullient
heart,” to have met at such a spot! This irritable
gentleman, like my downland friend, had never per-
haps heard of the parson of Selborne; on the other
hand, he had perhaps heard too much about him, and
desired, after the fashion of the Stratfordian who
cut down the sacred mulberry tree, to express his
disapproval of the man or of his work. That his
neighbours did not hunt him out of the village, or even
gently remove him from a world in which he was mani-
festly out of place—*a harsh discordant thing ”—does
not show us the Ringmerites in too favourable a light.

There are many memories of Gilbert White in

288 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

this part of downland, as it was his custom when
travelling to Ringmer to break his journey at Chil-
grove, a charming spot among the downs about
midway between Petersfield and Chichester, and at
Shopwyke House, close to Chichester. Chilgrove
Manor was owned by his friend, Mr. Woods, who gave
White the information about the stone-curlews on the
downs; and Shopwyke House was owned by another
member of the Woods family, who was Gilbert White’s
relation by marriage. The present squire of Chilgrove
is a grandson of White’s friend. During my rambles
in this part I paid two visits to Chilgrove House,
which has been rebuilt since White’s time, and retain
very pleasant recollections of the kind and gracious
members of the family I saw there.

But if there remains anything of interest to be
said about White’s intercourse with the Woods family
and his connection with this part of Sussex, it will
doubtless be told by my friend Dr. Bowdler Sharpe in
the new edition of the Letters he is preparing for the
press. We have lately had a good many editions of
White; but this will be definitive—one which every
British naturalist will feel obliged to add to his
collection; and with this book, and the exhaustive
Life lately contributed to the Dictionary of National
Biography by Professor Alfred Newton, on our shelves,
there will be, I imagine, a slackening of the hunt after
fresh materials, since there can be but little left to
reward even the most diligent gleaner.

WINTER IN WEST DOWNLAND 289

In Chapter XII. I have said not a little about
the arborescent vegetation characteristic of the West
Sussex Downs; and I trust the reader will pardon me
if I go back to that subject here. At Chilgrove there
is a wood which, seen at a distance, looks almost as
uniformly dark as the famous yew grove at Kingly
Bottom; but although the yew abounds greatly in it
and the trees are well grown, throwing out immense
horizontal branches near the ground, giving it that
dark and sombre aspect, it is on a nearer view found
to be composed of all the trees and bushes character-
istic of the chalk downs—yew, beech, holly, thorn,
juniper, furze, and wild clematis. It grows on the
side, near the top, of a long, steep, hanger-like hill,
and overhangs the Chilgrove vale. A wilder and more
beautiful wood of that peculiar type found only
among the west Sussex Downs I had never seen.
Most of it was an almost impenetrable thicket and
tangle, and in the open spaces the foot sank deep in
the thick growth of softest moss. Here were the
largest furze and juniper bushes I have seen in Sussex,
the junipers being, some of them, poplar and cypress
shaped, and others with wide-spreading branches,
looking like yews of a lively green. Some were
fifteen to eighteen feet high, with a girth of two to
three feet; and some of the yew-shaped bushes had
branches six to eight feet in length. Here I observed
that the great, masses of black-green yew-tree foliage
formed a wonderfully effective background to the

T

290 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

feathery foliage of the juniper, a bright but very
delicate glaucous green.

On the edge of this wood I found that curiosity
in plant life—a perfect wild clematis tree. As a rule
when a thorn tree, robbed of light and air by a too
luxuriant clematis spread over it, perishes and finally
crumbles to dust, the semi-parasite dies after it, being
unable to keep itself up, or to live when prostrate
on the earth. Occasionally, however, it does succeed
in keeping off the ground for a time, but in most
cases it has a widowed, forlorn appearance, swayed
about this way and that on its too slender stem, its
head bowed down, and the long attenuated twigs
drooping like loosened hair to the earth. Here is a
clematis that has a different aspect, with a round,
straight, and shapely trunk, twenty-seven inches in
circumference; its height is eighteen feet, and its
innumerable fine pendulous branches give it the
appearance of a weeping-willow tree. At the end of
January when I saw it, it was still clothed in down
as with a silver-grey fluffy foliage.

On the north escarpment of the downs, at this
point, there are some fine yew groves and woods in
the deep combes and hollows and ravine-like clefts in
the sides of the hills. The finest of these is on the
north side of the great down west of West Dean
woods. Here, in the side of the hill, there is an
immense basin-shaped combe, its sloping circular sides
covered with a dense dark growth of yews, and under

WINTER IN WEST DOWNLAND 291

these, the flat bottom of the basin is filled with a
beechen wood. Seated on the turf on the rim of this
great hollow in the side of the hill, one evening in
late January, I had beneath me a scene to make a
man’s heart glad. I had only just discovered this
hidden wood, and it came as a complete surprise;
nothing quite like it had I seen before. In summer,
when the beeches would appear from above as a floor
of deep uniform green, there would not perhaps have
been any special beauty in this spot. Winter had
given the charm and magical effect it had for me on
that evening, when the sun was going down in a cold
but very clear sky. For the tall beeches on which I
looked down appeared as innumerable white or pale
columns standing on a fioor of red and russet gold,
and white columns and golden floor were all the more
beautiful for being seen through the almost cloud-like
tracery of innumerable purple and purplish-red or
“murrey ”-coloured branchlets. The rich colour of
that temple and palace of nature—the golden floor
and purple roof—made the wide band of the yew
wood seem black by contrast; and above the black
yews the smooth turf of the hill-top looked a pale
green.

One thing that added greatly to the charm of
this wood was the vast multitude of wood-pigeons
which were congregated in it. It was, I found,
their favourite roosting-place in this neighbourhood.
Alarmed at my presence they began to rush out of

292 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

the trees on all sides in numbers, the sudden sharp
clatter of their wings sounding at a distance like
castanets. | By-and-by they were all on the wing,
gathered in one immense flock, rushing about this
way and that in the vast wooded hollow beneath my
feet, looking at times almost white as they streamed
over the black yews and caught the level sunbeams
on their upper plumage. This flock could not have
numbered less than two to three thousand birds.
Finally they began to settle on the beeches; and when
all had settled, and with my powerful binocular I
had brought them so close to me as to be able to see
distinctly all the delicate shading of their plumage
and the brighter colours of beak and eye, I had
before me as fascinating a tree-and-bird scene as it
is possible to imagine. The colour and grace of it
could not be described—the multitude of birds, thick
as starlings in the purple branches, not yet recovered
from their alarm, but every one still moving its head
and flirting its tail, and evidently anxious to keep an
eye on the suspicious-looking (although gunless) in-
truder on their privacy.

Of all man’s inventions, this is to me the most
like a divine gift—this double tube in my hand, which
enables me to follow the beautiful children of the air
in their flight; and when they are at home and safe
in woods, and on green waves, and on cliffs, to sit or
float as it were invisible and unsuspected among them.

West of the wooded spots I have described in the

WINTER IN WEST DOWNLAND 293

neighbourhood of West Dean, the charm of this part
of the downland country if anything increases; until,
at Up Park and South Harting, when we are on the
border of Hampshire, and can no further go, we are
in the midst of the most beautiful scenery of the West
Sussex Downs.

At this point there are more woods and copses
resembling in character those described, composed of
yew, thorn, holly, juniper, and furze; but the large
woods are mostly beech. In a former chapter I have
described a singular and very pretty effect produced
by fallen beech leaves blown in drifts against the
juniper scrub on an open down. At Up Park again
I saw another pretty scene caused by beech leaves
carried to a distance by the wind. On the lower slope
of a large smooth round down, covered with frozen
snow, there was a beech wood, through which a violent
north-east wind was blowing, lifting myriads of fallen
leaves and driving them over the smooth hill. The
scene reminded me of a great migration of butterflies,
a phenomenon which I had witnessed on two occasions
in a distant country. The travelling insects flew close
to the surface, and their bright-red fluttering wings
showed well against the green of the spring grass that
covered the plain; but these innumerable fallen leaves,
red and russet-gold, in the winter sunshine, chased by
the wind over that wide expanse of snow, produced an
effect even more novel and beautiful.

The village of South Harting itself is not un-

294 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

worthy of its setting of green hills and purple woods:
of all the downland villages it is to my mind the
most attractive. It is, moreover, distinct and indi-
vidual, without any resemblance to the others that
one likes best—Alfriston, Jevington, West Dean (the
village of that name on the Cuckmere), Wilmington,
Berwick, Ditchling, and perhaps half-a-dozen more.
Its attractiveness is partly due to its unrivalled situa-
tion, and in part to the materials of which it is built
—-a smooth cream-coloured stone dressed with red
brick. The creamy white stone, set off with the
deep red of the door and window mouldings, and the
corners of the walls, has a peculiarly soft and delicate
appearance. Best of all, the church, rarely beautiful
in itself, is in perfect harmony with its surroundings.
It is a large, low building, cream-white and red like
the houses and cottages, with an immense sloping red-
tiled roof, stained with many- coloured lichen and
adorned with the most graceful shingled spire to be
seen in downland.

The church at Alfriston has been called the
“Cathedral of the South Downs”; and from a his-
torical and archzological point of view, it may be
the most important and interesting of the downland
churches; for pure beauty it cannot compare with
that of South Harting. The sight of a church like
this, and the pleasure it gives, make one almost weep
to think of all the important churches one knows,
built by the best architects, of the best materials,

WINTER IN WEST DOWNLAND 295

and at an enormous cost, which fail to please us,
and are often even distressing to look at, all because
they are out of place where they stand—out of keep-
ing and out of harmony with every building and every
object near them, and with the surrounding scenery.

An account of the last day but one spent by me
at this pleasant spot will perhaps strike the reader
as a not inappropriate ending of this chapter, and of
the book. It was a spring-like day in mid-February
(1900), a few miles from Harting, when, after dinner,
I went out for a long walk with a man who was
a native of the place. It is the rarest thing for me
to have a companion out of doors: a day in the
woods or any wild place with another is to me, in
most cases, a wasted day. But with this man I went
gladly; for although not an educated person, and no
naturalist, there was that in him which made him
to differ from the others of his class: in his way of
thinking and mode of life he was somewhat apart.
Besides, he badly wanted to show me something, and
to tell me something. What he wanted to show me
was the scenery amid which he had lived; and he
took me a round of twelve or fourteen miles, in the
course of which we came two or three times on the
Rother and followed its windings for some distance;
we also visited two or three pretty little rustic villages,
and passed through several woods and copses, and up

296 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

and down some hills, pausing from time to time to
take in a particularly fine prospect.

These were the scenes familiar to him since his
childhood, amidst which he had lived with a few in-
tervals all his life. He told me that on three or four
occasions he had left home to better himself, and had
been absent from one to three years; but though he
could make more money at a distance, and had more
comforts, he had on each occasion felt himself com-
pelled to return, and he had now definitely abandoned
all idea of leaving his native place again. He was
anxious to make me understand the character and
strength of the feeling that always drew him back;
and in a roundabout but singularly effective method
he succeeded very well. It was not any human tie
—it was the place. This, away from home, was his
experience. When he was hungry he enjoyed his
food, and when he was tired, rest was grateful. He
slept well, and always after a night’s rest felt refreshed
and glad to begin the day’s work, and his health
always and everywhere was remarkably good. But it
was all of no benefit: every feeling of comfort, of a
want relieved, of satisfaction, of pleasure, was but
for a moment; it passed and left him still wanting,
wishing, waiting, for something else. It was like
the feeling a traveller has who is anxious to get to
the end of his journey. He might just as well have
been out of health, or out of work and penniless—
hungry, ill-clothed, and with an anxious mind. And

WINTER IN WEST DOWNLAND 97

on each occasion, when, on account of this perpetual
gnawing dissatisfaction with life, he came back to the
old place, instantly the trouble vanished; he breathed
freely and was at rest once more, perfectly contented,
perfectly happy.

It took him a long time to tell me all this, as
he had some difficulty in putting his ideas into
words; and then followed the declaration—a wholly
false conclusion to which he had been brought—
that the scenery in this corner of West Sussex, amid
which he had lived and which he had shown me
with so much pride, was the most perfectly beautiful
in the whole country. For how else could it have
taken such a hold upon his heart as to make it
impossible for him to exist in any comfort away
from it?

He was not overpleased to hear me say that he
was mistaken; that the home feeling is in some
degree universal in men born and bred amid rural
scenes, but varies greatly in different persons; and
that when it is exceptionally strong, as in his case,
it produces an illusion and a delusion—a belief that
the one loved spot is in itself in some way better
than all other places; that the superior beauty, or
charm, or restfulness which the heart finds in that
spot is actually inherent in it. Much more I said
on this subject, and told him that men had been
known even to die of that malady that had affected
him, although the scenes for which they had pined

298 NATURE IN DOWNLAND

had not been distinguished by beauty or any pecu-
liarly attractive quality above others.

I fancy that after all I did not convince him
of his error. I rather hope not. For now when I
recall the scenes we looked upon together— that wild
stream of the Rother; the small old-world peace-
ful villages; the hills of so pure and fresh a green,
their lower slopes and valleys purple and dark with

beech and pine; when I find how persistently it all
comes back to me, and how vivid and beautiful the
impression is, I am not quite sure that I was wholly
right in my philosophy, and that his delusion was
nothing but a delusion,

INDEX

COMPILED BY MRS. E, HUBBARD

ADDER, sheep bitten by, 96;
spring colouring, 97; choice of
a resting-place, 98; protective
character of colouring, 98; feel-
ing with regard to, 99; tame,
99, 100

Adur, scenery west of the, 217-
237; east of the, 232

Alehouse, village, singing in, 146

Alfred the Great, his traditional
connection with Ditchling, 187

Alfriston, abundance of swallows
at, 185; tame Cape Horned
Owl at, 272; church at, 294

Andredsweald, forest of, 215

* Angel’s Hair,” 234

Anne of Cleves, her connection
with Ditchling, 187

Anvil, thrushes’, for breaking
snail-shells on, 60

Arun, scenery west of the, 217;
peewits in the valley of, 243

Ashdown Forest, black grouse
formerly present in, 84

Asilus, its habits, 62

Associations, early, their perman-
ence, 264

Autumn, sudden appearance of,
on the downs, 205; vanishing
of insect-life in, 209; clearness
of air in, 214, 215; annual
movement of birds in, 238

Avifauna, extirpation of species
of, in Sussex, 81

BAcon, bats eating, 283, 284
Badger, on the downs, 74; his

299

great strength, 75, his “earth,”
75

Barrows at Kingly Vale, 227

Bats, their sensitiveness of wing,
187

Beachy Head, impoverished bird-
life on, 81

Beautiful, the, theories of, 26

Beech leaves, fallen, seen against
junipers, 236; fluttering over
snow, 293

Beech wood in autumn, 231; in
winter, 291

Beer, a beer-drinker’s denuncia-
tion of, 107

Bell of Chichester Cathedral, 253

Bepton Hill, named but name-
less, 282

Bindweed among the corn, 32

Binocular, its magical powers, 292

Birds, sky watched by, 27; those
now extinct in Sussex, 81;
smaller, of the downs, 91; their
various music, 143; on Mount
Harry, 176; autumnal abund-
ance on the west downs, 217,
218; their love of elder-berries,
226; wintering in the maritime
district, 240

Birds of Sussex,
Borrer, 156

Bird-boy’s story of swifts, 202

Bird-catchers, wheatear catching
by, 138, 139

Birdham or Bridham, 241

Bishopstone, a visit to, 12, 13

by William

300

Bittern, disappearance of, from
Sussex, 81

Black and gold in nature, 38

Black grouse, extermination of,
in Sussex, 81, 84

“ Black Jacks,” 199

Blue butterfly, abundance of, on
the downs, 65; mode of settling
for sleep, 66, 67; autumnal
disappearance of, 207

Blue flowers in masses,
of, 45

Boldre, Gilpin’s tomb at, 194

Borrer, William, his Birds of
Sussex, 156

Boxholt Bottom, a buzzard caught
in, 83

Boy, a Sussex, 108-110; a sweet-
voiced, 281

Blackberry-gatherers, 225

Bramblings, 242

Brewers, their policy as to public-
bouses, 260

Brighton poulterers, wheatears
caught for, 137, 138

Bunting breeding on the downs,
91

Burke on the connection between
sight and feeling, 26

Burton, Dr. John, his [ter Sussext-
ense, 147; on Sussex speech and
singing, 148

Bustard, disappearance of, from
Sussex, 81; its former presence
on the downs, 83

Butterflies of the downs, 64

Buzzard, extirpation of, in Sussex,
81; motive for shooting, 82;
its former presence in Sussex,
83, 84, 136

effect

CARTER, talk with a, 18

Chalk in landscape, Gilpin’s opin-
ion of, 233

Chanctonbury Ring, altitude of,

INDEX

22; stone curlews recently
breeding near, 85

Characteristics, racial, durability
of, 120

Chichester, the cathedral spire,
253-255; local odour of, 256,
279; public-houses, 258; cathe-
dral services, 261

“¢Chichesters, the,” 257

Children in summer, 170

Chilgrove Manor, 288 ; junipers
at, 289

Chough, disappearance of, from
Sussex, 81

Churches of the downs, 189, 190,
294

Churchyards, their charm, 189

Clap-nets, wheatears now caught
in, 139

Clematis, wild, on the downs,
234 ; in tree-form, 290

Cocking, village of, 218; bird
comedy at, 220

Cold, bitter experience of, 170

Collectors, injury caused by, 82

Colour of flowers, intensity of, on
the downs, 52

Contributions to Literature, by
M. A. Lower, quoted, 82

“Coops” for wheatear catching,
130

Cottage welcome, a, 111

Cow-dung fly, its habits, 62

Cuckmere, peewits in the valley
of the, 243 ; a wintering ground
for peewits, 244

Culpepper, the family of, 122

DANISH descent of Sussex coast-
dwellers, 105

Daw, caged, at Chichester, 274

De Quincey’s “‘gluttonism,” 70,
104

Dew as water-supply for moles,
80

INDEX

Ditchling, abundance of swal-
lows at, 185, 187; white owls
at, 187, 188; the churchyard
of, 189

Ditchling Hill, abundance of
moles on, 77 ; attempted mole-
catching on, 78

Dotterels, ringed, with grey
plover, 17

Downs, carrying power of sound
on the, 149, 157, 161, 163;
when most enjoyable, 167, 280

Drayton, Michael, on the Rother,
219

Drink-question, the, at Chiches-
ter, 259, 264, 270

Drinking scene at East Dean,
106

Dropwort on the downs, 50

Dunnock, breeding on the downs,
91; its winter quarters, 242

Dudeney, John, one of Lower’s
*‘Sussex Worthies,” 134; his
wheatear catching, 135

Dwarf-thistle, 4, 58

EAGLE, shooting of, by Sussex
shepherd, 83

**Earth” of a badger described,
75

Earthworks,
downs, 40

East Dean, drinking scene at,
106 ; wheatear catching at, 128-
140

East Sussex bird - protection
order, 139

Education Act, its working for
temperance, 269

Elder-berries, birds’ fondness for,
226

Ellman on the former use of oxen
in Sussex, 35

Entomology, specialisation of, 64

Epitaph on a huntsman, 191

Roman, on the

301

Eye, compound, of insects, 70
Eyebright on the downs, 56

FEAR, paralysing effect of, 94

Field seabious, 47

Firle, slow-worm at, 193

Fletcher, Mr. W. H. B., his tame
adders, 99

Flies, insane behaviour of, 61;
and swifts, 199

Flight, instinctive desire for the
power of, 29; peewits’ display
of, 244

Flints, whiteness of, on the
downs, 44; round and hollow,
161

Flock formation of birds, how
achieved, 246

Flora of the downs, 38-58

Flowers, colonising, on the downs,
42, 46, 47; of the downs in
summer, 45-58; in autumn,
206, 207

“ Fluttermouse,” 283

Forget-me-not on flinty soil, 44

Forms, repetition of similar, 29

Fox abundant on the downs, 73,
74; his ultimate fate, 75;
monkish wood-carving of a, 262

Fragrance of downs turf, 39

Fruit, wild, abundant on the
downs, 225

Furze, ponies browsing on, 18;
its pine-like tints, 48; wild
life in the, 72; on the downs,
234

GARDENS of the downs, chance-
made, 41, 42

‘¢ Gatekeeper ” butterfly, 64

Gerarde, milkwort described by,
54, 55; charm of his Herbal, 56

Gibbet, cesthetic value of, 197

Gilpin's tomb at Boldre, 194 ; his
low opinion of down scenery,

302

233; dedication of his book,
233

Girl, classic appearance of, 119;
a sweet-voiced, 145; acting as
shepherd, 149

‘*Gluttonism,” De Quincey on,
70

Goldfinch, rarity of, 242

Good looks and good blood, 121

Goring, Richard Jefferies’ home
at, 16

Grasshoppers,
on, 90

“Gratton grass,” 40

Grebe, great crested, 242

Grove of yews at Kingly Bottom,
226

Groves on hill-tops, 232

Ginther, Dr., on tame adders,
100

Guillemot, disappearance of, from
Sussex, 81

Gull, black-headed, following the
plough, 88; standing motion-
less, 246; herring, breeding on
Seaford Head, 89; buffeted by
kestrel, 89

kestrels preying

HAREBELL, its abundance on the
downs, 50, 51

Hat, tweed, advantages of, 179

Hawks, wheatears taken from
the coops by, 135

‘¢Hawth,” or furze, 82, 84

Hawthorn, character of its
growth, 229; its individuality,
230

Hay, William, of Glyndbourne,
9; quoted as to the weald,
215

Head, how to keep it cool in
summer, 174

Heat always tolerable on the
hills, 176

Heather on the downs, 49

INDEX

Hen-harrier, disappearance of,
from Sussex, 81

Herons in the maritime district,
242

Heronry at Parham, 88

Home-feeling, intensity of, 296

Honey-buzzard, disappearance of,
from Sussex, 81

Horizon, a wide, its fascination,
28

Horses, their terror at drifts of
thistle-down, 3; seaweed eaten
by, 18 ; oxen superseded by, 35

House-martins at Ditchling, 194;
their rapid increase, 195

Humble-bee, his diligence, 67;
overcome by thistle honey, 68,
an esteemed insect, 69

Hurdis, the Rev. James, a Sussex
writer, 9; his Village Curate,
10; his Favorite Village, 11;
quoted as to wheatear catching,
132

Hut, the shepherd's, 82

INNS at Chichester, 259; at Mid-
hurst, 267

Insects of the downs, 59; nature
of sleep in, 66; their nightly
enemies, 67; their autumnal
vanishing, 207

Iron workers, wooded
changed by, 215

Iter Sussexiense, by Dr. John
Burton, 147

region

JANIN, Jules, his description of
the lobster, 148

Jeffries, Richard, his connection
with Sussex, 14; his death at
Goring, 16

Jennings, Louis, his Rambles
among the Hills, 7

Jevington, stone curlews recently
breeding near, 85, 86

INDEX

July, the woodland in, 167

Juniper on the Sussex downs,
234; variety in the growth of,
235, 289; its changeful beauty,
236

Keats, his feeling for nature, 166

Kestrels buffeting gulls on Seaford
Head, 89; hawking for grass-
hoppers, 90

Kingfisher fishing in the sea, 18

Kingly Bottom or Vale, yew grove
at, 226, 289

Kingston Hill, 2; a shepherd of,
135

Kite, disappearance of, from Sus-
sex, 81

Kittiwake, disappearance of, from
Sussex, 81

LAMB, an owl-faced, 86; a hare-
furred, 87; the, and the Salva-
tion Army, 114-117

Lamb, Charles, iis distaste for
the sea, 27

Lavant, bat-lore at, 283

Lewes, swifts at, 199

Life and heat, relation between,
52

“ Lily-bind,” 33

Ling on the downs, 49

Linnet, its music and colour in
freedom, 154; in autumn, 239

Lizard, the common, on the
downs, 94; in presence of a
snake, 95

Lower, Mark Antony, on Sussex
bird-life,. 82; his Worthies of
Sussex, 134; nightingale killing
recorded by, 287

MacpPiE and domestic pigeon,
222; thieving by a, 224

Magpies at play, 220, 223

Maid, a Sussex, 119

303

Maritime district, the, 2388; a
winter home for birds, 240;
herons in the, 242

Market Cross at Chichester, 263

Martins’ nests at Alfriston, 186

Meadow-pipit breeding on the
downs, 91; on the downs in
autumn, 206

Midhurst, visit to, 266; decline
of publicans in, 268

Milkwort, Gerarde’s description
of, 54; its varying colours, 55

Missel-thrush, the, a summer
rover, 91; its abundance on
the downs, 226; its gluttony,
228; its gallant temper, 249;
attack by, on perching sparrow-
hawk, 250 ; intolerance of other
bird-voices, 251; quality of
song, 252, 281

Moles, presence of, on the downs
far from water, 77; an excit-
able specimen, 79; their death
from drought on the downs,
80

Montagu’s harrier, disappear-
ance of, from Sussex, 81

Morpho butterfly, varying blue
of, 65

Mount Black-Cap, flock of turtle-
doves at, 91

Mount Caburn, by William Hay,
quoted, 215

Mount Harry, varied company of
birds on, 176; memories relat-
ing to, 177

Mud at Chichester, 270

Music, the art of, 142; in nature,
143; of the human voice, 144

Myers, Mr. F. W. H., on pre-
natal suggestion, 87

NAMES, rustic difficulties as to,
283

Nest, mother swift driven to the,
by her mate, 201

304

Nightingales, destruction of, on
account of their singing, 287

*©OLD man’s beard,” 234

On the Downs, by Mrs. Marriott
Watson, quoted, 36

‘Ortolans,” wheatears appearing
as, 130, 140

Owl, Cape Horned, at Alfriston,
272; long-eared, recently in the
South Downs, 86; in furze
patches, 87; white, at Ditch-
ling church, 187; caged, at
Chichester, 272-276

Oxen, black, their use in Sussex,
33; introduced from Wales, 34;
in poetry, 36; red, the old
Sussex breed of, 34

PAMPAS, thistle-down on the, 3

Parasites on swifts, 200

Parham, heronry at, 88

Partridges, red-legged, on the
downs, 73, 177

“ Pence of ransom,” Hurdis’s, 133

Peewit, its abundance in the
valleys, 243, 245; its hatred of
the rook, 248; its wing-exer-
cises, 244

Peregrine falcons
Head, 81

Pheasants, purchase of, for shoot-
ing, 221

Piers Plowman, quoted,
philosophy of, 172

Pigeon, domestic, chased by mag-
pie, 222

Plover, grey, in company with
ringed dotterels, 17

Pre-natal suggestion, 87

Protection of wheatears, 139

Public-house, results of the
“tied” system on, 106

Publicans, concessions to, at
Chichester, 260

on Beachy

171;

INDEX

RasBiTs, on the downs, 73; in
summer, 169

Rabbit-holes, wheatears nesting
in, 92

Ravens, disappearance of, from
Sussex, 81; ewes attacked by,
83

Razor-bill, disappearance of, from
Sussex, 81

Red-admiral, autumnal second
brood of, 208

Redshanks in Sussex, 88

Redstart, its song, 157

Reed-pheasant extinct in Sussex,
81

Reptiles of the downs, 94

Ring-snake rare on the high
downs, 101

Ringmer, Gilbert White’s visits
to, 284; destruction of nightin-
gales at, 287

Rivers of the downs, 21, 219

Romans, probable racial traces
of the, 119

Roman earthworks on the downs,
40

Rook pulling up grass, 242;
hated by peewit, 243

Rother, the, described by Dray-
ton, 219; a walk by, 280

Rottingdean, wheatear catching
at, 138

SAINFOIN, shepherd boy standing
in, 46

Salvation Army, its function, 115,
116

Saxon characteristics of Sussex
peasants, 105

Scabious, an autumn flower of
the downs, 207

“« Screechers,” 203

Seaford Head, colony of herring-
gulls at, 89; kestrels and jack-
daws at, 89

INDEX

Sea-kings, traditional burial of,
at Kingly Vale, 227

Sea - poppy, wheatears nesting
among, 93

Sea-weed, horses eating, 18

Sense-organs, unexplained, in
insects, 70

Shag, disappearance of,
Sussex, 81

Sheep, growth of plants affected
by, 53, 57; fatality among,
from snake-bite, 96

Sheep-dog, its refusal to help a
girl shepherd, 150, 151; its dis-
position, 161

Shepherd, a naturalist, 79; for-
mer life on the downs, 82;
curious experiences of a, 86;
his picturesqueness, 103; his
Saxon characteristics, 105; his
good blood and good looks,
122; his contentment, 123; his
wheatear harvest, 128; girl
acting as, 149

Shepherd-boy, on the downs, 46 ;
and snake, 101

Shopwyke House, 288

Shore birds, notes of, 143, 206

Shrew, the common, on the
downs, 76

Shrike, red-backed, 92; hated by
the wheatear, 94

‘Sickly ’ land, 40

Sight and touch, connection be-
tween, 26

Signs, public-house, at
chester, 257

Silence of the hills, 152

Singing in Sussex, 146; primi-
tive, 149; of boy and missel-
thrush, 281

Skylark, snake and, 101; on the
downs, 162; distance at which
song of, is audible, 163; char-
acter of its song, 164

from

Chi-

305

Sleep in insects, nature of, 66

Slow-worm in a churchyard, 194

Smells, peculiar, of Chichester,
256, 279

Snails, their adder-like colouring,
60

Snake, its power over the frog,
94; smooth, on the South
Downs, 96; ring, rarity of,
101; a large specimen, 102

“«Snufi-box, the devil’s,” 210

Songsters of the hills, 153

Sound, travelling power of, in hill
air, 149, 157, 158, 161, 163

Sounds, description of, in terms
of sight, 154; of the telegraph
wires, 197

South Downs, definition of its
range, 21; former bird-life on
the, 81, 82

South Harting, its attractive-
ness, 294; love of a native for,
295

Sparrow-hawk, his inability to
grasp a telegraph wire, 250;
attack by missel-thrush on,
251

Spoonbills, former nesting of, at
West Dean, 84

Starlings, in wheatear traps, 136 ;
swifts’ breeding-places usurped
by, 200

Statuary, suggestion for a group
of, 37

Stoats, their presence on the
downs, 76; trapped wheatears
eaten by, 136

Stonechat, breeding on the
downs, 91; character of its
song, 154, 196

Stone-curlew, disappearance of,
from Sussex, 81, 85

Story of my Heart, Jefferies’, 14

Stupidity in downland, 282

Summer, the joy of, 169

U

306

Sussex peasants, their character-
istics, 105, 111

Swallow, in the down country,
184; bat-like sensitiveness of
wings of, 187

Swifts, in the downs, 198; a
workman’s explanation of their
ways, 199; parasites on, 200;
power of rising from a flat sur-
face, 200; their struggle with
starlings, 201; their nightly
retreat to the sky discussed,
201-204; hen-birds driven to
their nests, 201

TELEGRAPH poles in the land-
scape, 196

Telegraph wires, their service to
perching birds, 194, 196; their
music, 197 ; in South America,
197 ; difficulty of certain birds
in grasping, 250

Temperance, causes working for,
269

Thirst, an experience of, 178

Thistle, bees intoxicated by
honey of, 68; the dwarf, 4, 58 ;
the woolly, 45

Thistle-down, 2; South Ameri-
can, 3

“Threshold of England, the,” 7,
129

Thrift, or sea-pink, white gulls
on, 89

Thyme, lasting fragrance of, 49 ;
its attraction for certain flies,
62, 63

“Tied” system of public-houses,
106

Tillage, former, its
vegetation, 39

Tour through Great Britain,
Young's, quoted as to use of
oxen, 34

Tramps, encounters

effect on

with, 14,

INDEX

158, 160, 173; at Midhurst,
268

“ Traveller’s Joy,” its name dua
to Gerarde, 56; on the downs,
234

Trotton, Otway born at, 220

Turf of the downs, 38; its frag-
rance, 39; slow in forming, 40

Turtle-dove common in down-
land, 91

“UPSET,” an, a comprehensive
term, 110
“ Ur-grass,” 51

VALLEYS of the downs, herons
in, 88

Vegetation, special, of formerly
tilled soil, 39-41

Viper’s bugloss, 45

Vision, Piers Plowman’s, quoted,
171, 172

Vision of ‘‘the generations of
deciduous men,” 212; of the
drink demon, 265

Voices, Sussex, 144; lasting im-
pression left by sweetness of,
145, 146; heard from afar on
the downs, 149, 150

WaAGEs of the Sussex shepherd,
124, 135; formerly paid partly
in kind, 126

Wales, black oxen introduced
from, 34

Water, a cup of cold, 178

Waterfowl, Chichester harbour a
winter haunt of, 241

Watson, Mrs. Marriott, her poem
On the Downs quoted, 36

Weather, gloomy, pleasures of,
248

Well, drawing water at a, 179

West Dean, spoonbills formerly
nesting at, 84; yew grove near,
290

INDEX

West Rother, the, described by
Drayton, 219

West Sussex downs, varied char-
acter of, 234, 289, 293; charm
of, in winter, 280

Wheat, tillage influenced by price
of, 40

Wheatear, breeding-places of, 92;
among sea-poppies, 93; its en-
mity to the red-backed shrike,
94; its migration and rest, 129;
its sensitiveness to cloud-
shadows, 132; former mode of
trapping, 136; now scheduled,
139

Wheatear-harvest, theshepherd’s,
128

Whinchat, breeding on the downs,
91; quality of its song, 156, 157

White, Gilbert, on the charm
of the Sussex Downs, 24; on
bacon-eating bats, 284; memo-
ries of, in West Sussex, 287

Whitethroat breeding on the
downs, 91

“Wild turkeys,” 83

307

Winter, resort of birds to the
maritime district, 240; in down-
land in, 279

Wood-carving, a monkish speci-
men of, 262

Wood-pigeons, at Cocking, 222;
multitudes of, in a beech wood,
291, 292

Woods family, their connection
with Gilbert White, 288

Worthing, mildness of climate,
240

Wren, its winter quarters, 242

Yeats, W. B., quoted, 35

Yellow-hammer, breeding in the
downs, 91; in windy autumn,
208

Yew-berry, missel-thrushes feast-
ing on, 226, 228

Yew trees, grove of, at Kingly
Bottom, 226; near West Dean,
290

Young, Arthur, employment of
oxen recorded by, 34

THE END

Printed by BaLLantyNe, Hanson & Co,
Edinburgh & London

KW Classified Catalogue

OF WORKS IN

GENERAL LIPFERATURE

PUBLISHED BY

LONGMANS, GREEN, & CO.

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CONTENTS.
AGE PAGE
BADMINTON LIBRARY (THE) - 12 | MENTAL, MORAL, AND POLITICAL
BIOGRAPHY, PERSONAL ME- PHILOSOPHY - 17
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LASSI a
c ates ae TNS Be POETRY AND THE DRAMA 23
COOKERY, DOMESTIC MANAGE- POLITICAL ECONOMY AND ECO-
MENT, &c. 36 NOMICS : 20
ees: ANTHROPOLOGY, POPULAR SCIENCE - 30
. - 21
FICTION, HUMOUR, &c. - 25 RELIGION, THE SCIENCE OF 21
FUR, FEATHER AND FIN SERIES 15 | SILVER LIBRARY (THE) - 33
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HISTORY, POLITICS, POLY,
POLITICAL MEMOIRS, &c. aoe ee ree or
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SCIENCE OF 20 | TRAVEL AND ADVENTURE, THE
LOGIC, RHETORIC, PSYCHOLOGY, ieteecah carta: ahaa 1
&e. 17 | WORKS OF REFERENCE- - + 31
INDEX OF AUTHORS AND EDITORS.
Page Page Page Page
Abbott Peas 3, 22 | Banks (M. M.) - 24 | Campbell(Rev.Lewis) 21,22 | Dauglish (M.G.)_ - 9
—— (J. H. M.) 3} Baring-Gould (Rev. Camperdown (Earl of) g| Davidson (A. M. C.) 22
— ue K) - - 17,18 S.)- - - - 21,38 | Chasseloup - Laubat — _ (W.L.) ” 20, 21
— A.) 17| Barnett(S.A.andH.) 20 (Marquis de) - - Davies (J. F.) 22
ray (A. H. D.) 3| Baynes (T. S.)- - 38 | Chesney (SirG.) - Dent (C.T.) - 14
Acton (eles) - 36 | Beaconsfield (Earl of) i Childe-Pemberton(W.S.) 3 De Salis (Mrs.) = 36
Adeane (J. H.) - 9 | Beaufort (Duke of) - 13, i Cholmondeley-Pennell De Tocqueville (A.) - 4
Adelborg (O.) - 32 | Becker (W. A.) (H.) - 13| Devas (C.S.) - - 19, 20
ZEschylus 22| Beesly (A. H.) - ‘ Christie (R. c. ) 38 | Dickinson fis L.) 4
Ainger (A. C.) - 14 | Bell (Mrs. Hugh) 23 | Churchill(W. Spencer) 4,25 — - 38
Albemarle (Earl of) - 13 | Bent (J. Theodore) - 11| Cicero - 22| Dougall ay 25
Alcock (C. W.) 15| Besant (Sir Walter)- 3 | Clarke (Rev. R. F.) - 19| Dowden (E.) - = 40
Allen (Grant) - 30 | Bickerdyke (J.) - 14,15 | Climenson (E. J.) 10 | Doyle (Sir A. Conan) 25
Allgood (G.) - 3| Bird(G.) - - 23 | Clodd (Edward) - 21,30| Du Bois (W. E. B.)- 5
Alverstone (Lord) 15 | Blackburne (J. H.) 15 | Clutterbuck (W. J.)- 1z | Dufferin (Marquis of) 4
Angwin (M. C.) 36 | Bland (Mrs. Hubert) 24 | Colenso (R. J.) 6 | Dunbar (Mary F.) - 25
Anstey (F.) - 25 | Blount (Sir E.) - g| Conington (John) - 23| Dyson (E.) - 26
Aristophanes 22 | Boase (Rev. C. W.) - 6 | Conway (Sir W. M ) 14
Aristotle - — - 17 | Boedder (Rev. B.) 19 | Conybeare (Rev. W. J.) SH ee dara 15
Armstrong (W.) 13 | Brassey (Lady) Ir & Howson (Dean) 33} Ellis (J. H. ‘ 15
Arnold (Sir Edvyin) - 11,23 | —— (Lord) 14 ; Coolidge (W. A. B.) 11 | —— (R. Ly - 7
— (Dr. T.) 3 | Bray (C.) - 17 | Corbett (Julian S.) - 4 Erasmus - - 9
Ashbourne (Lord) 3 | Bright (Rev. J. F.) - 3 | Coutts(W.) - 22 | Evans (Sir John) 38
Ashby (H.) - 36 | Broadfoot (Major W.) 13 | Coventry (A.) 14 3
Ashley (W. J.)- 3, 20| Brooks (H.J.)- — - 17 | Cox (Harding) 13 | Falkiner (C. L.) 4
Avebury (Lord) 21 | Brown (A. F.) - 32 | Crake (Rev. A. D.) 32| Farrar (Dean) - - 20, 26
Ayre (Rev. J.) - 31 | —— (J. Moray) 14 | Craven (W. G.) 14| Fitzgibbon (M.)_—_- 4
Bruce (R. I.) - 3 raw or (J. H) 25| Fitzmaurice (Lord E.) 4
Bacon - 9,17 | Bryce (J.)- 14 |——(R.) - 11| Folkard (H. C.) 15
Bagehot (W.) - 9, 20, 38; Buck(H. A.) - 14 | Creed (S.) - 25 | Ford (H.) - - 16
Bagwell (R.) - 3 | Buckland (Jas.) 32 | Creighton (Bishop) - 4, 6,9) —— (W. J.) 16
Bailey (H. C.) - 25 | Buckle (H. T,) - 3| Crozier (J.B.)- - 9,17] Fountain(P - Ir
Baillie (A. F.) - 3{ Bull (T.) - 36 | Custance (Col. H.) - 15 Fowler (Edith H.) 26
Bain (Alexander) 17 | Burke (U. R.) 3 | Cutts (Rev. E. L.) 6| Francis (Francis) 16
Baker (J. H.) - 38 | Burns (C. L.) - 36 Francis (M. E.) - 26
—— (Sir S. W.) 11 | Burrows (Montagu) 6 | Dabney (J. P.) - 23 | Freeman (Edward A.) 6
Balfour (A. J.) - 13,21 | Butler(E.A.) - - 30! Dale(L.) - 4| Fremantle (T.F.) - 16
—— (Lady Betty) 6 ——(T. F.) - 14 | Fresnfield (D. W.) 14
Ball (John) - 1z | Cameron of Lochiel 15 | Dallinger rr. w. ) 5 | Frost (G.)- - 38

INDEX OF
Page

Froude ( ames A.) 4,911, fe

Fuller (F. W.) - -

Furneaux (W,) a

Gardiner (Samuel R.) 5

seater Hardy (Hon.
EB.) = > t5, 6

Geils (Rev. Cunning-
ham) - - 38
Gibbons (J. S.) 15
Gibson (C, H.)- 17
Gleig (Rev. G. R.) 10

23
Gore- Booth (Sir H. bs y14
Graham -
— (P. A.)
——(G.F.)

Granby (Marquess of) 15
Grant (Sir A.) - = 17
Graves (R. P.) - 9
Green (T. Hill) -17, 18
Greene (E. B.)- 5
Greville (C. C. F.) 5
Grose (T. H.) 18
Gross (C.) 5
Grove (F. C.) I3
—— (Lady) Ir
— (Mrs. Lilly) 13
Gurdon (Lady Camilla) 26
Gurnhill (J.) - 18
Gwilt (J.) - 31
Haggard (H. Rider)
11, 26, 27, 38
Hake (O.) - - 14
Halliwell-Phillipps (J.) 10
Hamilton (Col.H.B.) 5
Hamlin (A.D. F.) - 36
Harding (S. B.) 5
Ha:msworth (A. C.) 13, 14
Harte (Bret) 27
Harting (J. E.) - 15
Hartwig (G.) 30
Hassall (A.) 8
Haweis (H. R.) 9, 36
Head (Mrs.) 37
Heath (D. D.) - 17
Heathcote a M.) 14
ae 14
— Ir
aces (Hermann
von) 30
Henderson (Lieut
Col. G. F. R.) - 9
Henry (W.) I4
Henty (G. A.) - 32
Herbert {oli Kenney) 15
Hiley (R. W.) - 9
Hill (Mabel) 5
Hillier (G. Lacy) 13
Hime (H. W.L.) - 22

Hodgson ( (Shadworth):8, 38

Hoenig (F.) - 38
Hogan (J. F.) 9
Holmes (R. a 10
Holroyd (M. J.) 9
Hom - 22
Hope (Anthony) 27
Horace - 22
Houston (D, F.) 5
Howard (Lady Mabel) 27
Howitt (W.) Tr
Hudson (W. H) 30
Huish (M. B.) - 37
Hullah (J.) 37
Hume (David) - 18
—— (M.A. S.} 3
Hunt (Rev. W.) 6
Hunter (Sir W.) 6
Hutchinson (Horace G.)
13, 16, 27, 38
Ingelow (eas) 23
Ingram (T. D 6
Jackson (A. o ) 10
James (W.) - - 18
ameson(Mrs.Anna) 37
efferies (Richard) - 38
ekyll (Gertrude) 38
Jerome (Jerome K.) - 27
Johnson (J. & J. H.) 39
ones (H. Bence) - 31
oyce (P.W.) - 6, 27, 39
ustinian - - 18

AUTHORS AND ED!ITORS—continued.

Page
Kant (I.) - - 18
Kaye (Sir J. W.) 6
Keary (C. F.) - 23
Keller (A. G.) - 22
Kelly (E.)- — - 18
Kent (C. B. R.) 6
Kerr (Rev. J.) - 14
Killick (Rev. A. H.) - 18
Kitchin (Dr. G. W.) 6
Knight (E. F.) - - 11,14
Kostlin (J.) 10
Kristeller (P.) 37
»Ladd(G.T.) - 18
Lang (Andrew) 6, 14, 16, 21,
23; 27, 32, 39

Lapsley (G. T.) -
Lascelles (Hon. G. 13, 15
Laurie (S. 8.) - 6
Lawley (Hon. F.) 14
Lawrence (F. W.) 20
Lear (H. L. Sidney) - 36

Lecky (W. E. H.) 6, 18, es
Lees (J. A.) - -

Leighton (J. A.) 8
Leslie (T. E. Cliffe) - 20
Lieven (Princess) 8
Lillie (A.) - 16
Lindley ah) 31
Locock (C. D.) 16
Lodge (H. C.) - 6
Loftie (Rev. W. J.) - 6
Longman (C. J.) - 12, 16
—(F.W.) - 16
—(G.H) - - 12, 15
—— (Mrs. C. J.) 37
Lowell (A. L.) - 6
Lubbock (Sir John) - 21
Lucan - 22
Lucian - 22
Lutoslawski (W. ) 18
Lyall (Edna) - 27
Lynch (G.) : 6
—— (H. F. B.)- - 12
Lyttelton (Hon, R. H.) 13
—— (Hon. A,) - 14
Lytton (Earl of) 6, 24

Macaulay (Lord) 6,7, 10, 24
Macdonald (Dr. G.) - 24
Macfarren (Sir G. A.) 37

Mackail (J. W.) - 10, 23
Mackenzie (C. G.) 16
Mackinnon (J.) 7,
Macleod (H. D.) - 20
Macpherson (Rev.

H. A.) = a 15
Madden (D. H.) 16
Magnusson (E.) 28
Maher (Rev. M.) _ - 19
Malleson (Col. G. B.) 6
Marchment (A. W.) 27
Marshman (J.C.) - 9
Maryon (M.) - 39
Mason (A, E. W.) 27
Maskelyne (J. N.) 16
Matthews (B.) 39
Maunder (S.)_- 31

Max Miller (F.)
10, 18, 20, 21, 22, 27, 39

Mav (Sir T. Erskine) 7
McFerran (J.) - - Ig
Meade (L. T.) 32
Mecredy (R. J.) - 13
Melville ( G.J. Whyte) 27
Metivale (Dean) 7
Merrimia ‘H. S.) 27

Mill (John Stuart) - 18, 20

Millias (J. G.) - - 16, 30
Milner (G.) - 40
Mitchell (E. B.) 13
Monck (W. H. 8S.) 19
Montague (F. C.) GA
Moon (G. W.)- 24
Moore (T.) - 31
—— (Rev. Edward) - 7
Morgan (C. Lloyd) 2r
Morris (Mowbray) 13
——(W.) - 22, 23, 24,
27, 28, 37, He
Mulhall (M. G.) -
Murray (Hilda) a
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)
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