mer

THE LIBRARY

OF

THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA

LOS ANGELES

THE ENGLISH YEAR

SUMMER

THE ENGLISH YEAR

COMPLETE IN THREE VOLUMES

SPRING

SUMMER

AUTUMN AND WINTER

LONDON: T. C. & E. C. JACK
AND ALL BOOKSELLERS

A SURREY MEADOW
By TOM MOSTYN

THE ENGLISH YEAR

SUMMER

BY

W. BEACH THOMAS AND A. K. GOLLETT

With a Series of Reproductions in Colour from

the work of Sir Alfred East, Harry Becker,

and Tom Mostyn, and Drawings in

the Text by A. W. Seaby

BULLFINCH IN BOX-TRI

LONDON: T. G. & E. C. JACK
67 LONG ACRE, W. C.

AND EDINBURGH

CONTENTS

PACK

SUMMER ''". ' "V" . i

JUNE CALENDAR, ..... .;,-»••• - ••.•• 9

CLIMBING THE HEDGEROW, . . . ,«; ». • • 13

THE LONELIER HOURS, . ... ,,:-,. 22

MIDSUMMER BUTTERFLIES, . . , --rt^' <• • r\ 35

THE STRUGGLE FOR LIGHT, . . . -.- r , . 43

DANGERS OF THE GROUND . . . 50

THE ROSE OF ENGLAND, . . . • x * 57

SONGS AND Music, . . . . . . .... 65

ALONG THE RIVER, . , . . ... 73

THE DAY OF THE MOTH, . . • . • 95

ON THE CHALK DOWNS, •] ( "> • • * "**'• [ 1* • I0^

Discs OF BLOSSOM, . . . . . .120

JULY CALENDAR, . . . . ^f . ^ . 127

AMONG THE GRASSES, . . . *, • . 131

LEARNING TO FLY, . . . jf . , ,,., . 141

CORNFIELD FLOWERS, . ,» • ^ • • ^ ., ^ 157

BUTTERFLY FLIGHT, . . » ;- . , , . 167

DYING Music, . .* , . -: ,9i . . .180

THE WAYS or A TROUT, ,.«, i. * • • .185

THE DRAGON FROM THE POND, . i ^ . . .197

THE TURNING TIDE, .* ^ . • , •;.,-. . • 203

THUNDER AND LIGHTNING, . . . . .210

CHAFERS AND CLOCKS, . . . . . .217

WILD WALL-GARDENS, ...... 228

871042

viii SUMMER

PAGB

AUGUST CALENDAR, . . . . . . .239

THE ENDED TRUCE, . . . . . .243

JOY IN HARVEST, . . . . . .252

BELOW THE TlDEMARK, ...... 264

THE YELLOW WASP, . . . . .276

A CHANGE OF DIET, . . . , . .283

FIR-WOODS AND HEATHER, ..... 290

THE SACRIFICE OF WINGS, ..... 300

THE HEAT OF THE SUN, ..... 306

SUMMER LIVERIES, . 313

WHERE FISH ARE FOUND, . . . . .320

SHORE AND SALT-MARSH, ..... 326

INDEX, ........ 337

LIST OF COLOUR PLATES

A SURREY MEADOW. BY TOM MOSTYN, .... Frontispiece

SUMMER (IDYLL). BY TOM MOSTYN, 6

THE GARDEN OF MEMORY. BY TOM MOSTYN, .... 60

THE PATH THROUGH THE WOODS. BY SIR ALFRED EAST, R.A.,

P.R.B.A., . . . . . . . . .114

THE MOWER. BY HARRY BECKER, 136

NIGHT IN THE VILLAGE. BY SIR ALFRED EAST, R.A., P.R.B.A., . 158

A WOODLAND GLADE. BY TOM MOSTYN 180

A SUFFOLK FARMSTEAD. BY HARRY BECKER, . . . .226

THE BEAN HARVEST. BY HARRY BECKER 256

BUILDING THE RICK. BY HARRY BECKER, . . - **. . 286

THE EDGE OF THE WOOD (SURREY). BY TOM MOSTYN, . . 292

THE OLD WATER MILL AT HOUGHTON. BY TOM MOSTYN, . . 322

SUMMER

SUMMER, as compared with the seasons on either side of
it, may be looked upon in spite of many exceptions as a
time of puberty, when vigour keeps, so far as we see, at
a constant point. There are indeed only two seasons,
summer and winter, two static times bound together by the
changing months of spring and autumn. But the tide of
the year, rising in spring, is quicker, more sudden, than the
ebb, though nothing is quite sudden in this happy island of
quiet gradations, where the days are bound, each to each, by
lineal affection. One day in late June, almost before we are
aware, the country before us is at the full — the tide is in.
The green waters have quietly made through the creeks and
inlets and crept through the ridges of the sands. They
have hidden the rocks that sloped down to the sand ; and
the scenery of the shore, various if bleak, is clean gone
under an everlasting wash of twinkling ripples. One may
speak of the summer overcoming the face of the country
very much in the same terms as one may speak of the rising
sea. The green leaves are a tide that hides the tracery of
bough and twig, not much unlike the flowing of the sea over
sand and rock. Many shapes and forms give place to one
wash of colour.

2 SUMMER

The mood of summer is quite another thing than we
have known in spring. Birds and mammals share in the
mood with men. Those ecstatic dashes of flight over wide
seas are passed. The colours that relit the winter feathers
have remained brilliant ; and the body and being of the
animal feels none of the unrest of growth. It is true that
the old birds fall to the work of feeding the young with an

YOUNG WHITETHROATS

energy that is almost the energy of migration ; but the
mood of all animals is in general static. The flight quite
alters. Before summer is over the old blackbirds will hardly
take the trouble to top the hedge when you pass them. The
pigeons no longer clap their noisy wings behind them. The
mothering birds that before showed nervousness of excite-
ment are now among the lurkers, slipping out of sight, not
dashing away on a tumult of wings. The noisy flocks that
challenged observation are split up into secret pairs. You
will have some ado to find where hares are lurking ; and the

SUMMER 3

foxes slink very secretly to their earths. The high tide
hangs at the full or close to the full for a long time, as some-
times the real tide will. All the change you note is that the
elms are blacker and heavier and more massive than ever.
The distinctive shapes and patterns of the hedgerow bottom
are rather more hopelessly buried than ever by grasses and
kexes and nettles. The bronze and reddish colours that

'THE ELMS ARE BLACKER'

bided for a long while on oak and walnut and rose are lost in
a monotone of green which may compare with the sea —
' too full for sound or foam ' — when the air is still. The
true midsummer, the hours of the high tide, come in July.
The very dog-roses, which lit the hedgerows in the splendour
of flaming June, are themselves subdued to the colour that
is now puissant and prevailing. A green case hides the
seeds and swells in the place of the white and pink petals.
A like subdual has come over the chestnut blossoms, which
stood up almost comically like candelabra to carry on the

4 SUMMER

sense of spring into the new season. Summer comes
progressively,

' Annihilating all that 's made
To a green thought in a green shade.

In some countries the symmetry, the changelessness of
summer, becomes an oppression. Colour has the effect of
glare. You escape from a dusty town into country that is
a kiln — such sometimes is the impression. We feel this in
England, too, a little. The world has a desire for something
that is not town and is not, in the ordinary sense, country.
People fly to the sea for the sake of its movement and its
variableness and its coolness ; and to escape the dry and
torrid monotony, as it seems to some, that has taken
possession of the land, while the succulent stems of wild
grass and tame corn are drying their juices, and the leaves of
the trees are impalpably losing freshness and ' surface.'

Great changes there are, of course, in these months ; but
to the eye many of the changes are rather artificial than
natural. The grasses are cut at the time when they have
hardly reached that full tide at which the trees abide the
summer long, and growth begins again after the cutting.
As for harvest proper, it is felt to be an event of autumn,
though it intrudes into summer ; and in a highly cultivated
country makes the greatest change of all.

The sounds of summer suffer a more thorough change
than the sights. Almost before we know it all the birds, or
almost all the birds, have gradually sunk into silence. Even
expert naturalists are surprised year after year by the com-
pleteness of this silence and its early date. Burroughs, king
of American naturalists, came over to England largely to
hear the nightingales sing ; but he went back home with his
desire unfulfilled. He had simply stayed in towns too late ;
and when they journeyed into the country he and his advisers

SUMMER 5

found themselves in a land where ' no birds sing.' The
nightingales were tending their young in the thick coppices
and wide bits of the hedges. The flames of ' flaming June '
had died into a hot glow, and the ecstasy of song into a
motherly quietude. How could birds sing in so gorgeous
a place, where nothing is ' half-revealed and half-concealed,'
where the wonder and the wild desire are subdued to a
steadfast and curtained splendour. You will find in English
poets who have been most prodigal of descriptions of spring

and autumn — especially autumn — and winter scarcely a
really summer song. They are as mute as the birds when
August is near.

What summer songs there are treat of June, which is
half spring, not of full summer ; and even so perhaps the
most notable of June songs in our language is not English.
The words are Lowell's :

' And what so rare as a day in June ?

Then if ever come perfect days,
Then heaven tries earth if it be in tune,
And over it softly her warm ear lays.
The flush of life may well be seen,
Thrilling back over hills and valleys.

6 SUMMER

The cowslip startles in meadows green,

The buttercup catches the sun in its chalice ;

And there 's never a leaf nor a blade too mean
To be some happy creature's palace.'

It is June, not July, with Lowell, too ; and he is thinking not
of the mute nightingale, but the bobbing bobolink. Most of
the summer songs there are find their inspiration in the
water rather than the land. You will mark this especially in
the work of the present Laureate, who is a great teller of the
seasons. He loves January and February and May and
September and October ; but in summer his thoughts belong
to lazy days on the Thames beside which

' The lazy cows wrench many a scented flower,
Robbing the golden market of the bees ;

And laden barges float

By banks of myosote ;
And scented flag and golden flower-de-lys

Delay the loitering boat.'

July is perhaps the month most expressly deserted by the
poets. From June they leap, if no further, at 'least to
August and harvest time, which is almost autumn. Possibly
one of the most perfect summer pieces in the language is
Matthew Arnold's 'Scholar Gipsy,' in which the most
English Oxford county in the summer time is brought clear
before our eyes.

' Here, where the reaper was at work of late,

In this high field's dark corner, where he leaves

His coat, his basket and his earthen cruse,
And in the sun all morning binds the sheaves,

Then here, at noon, comes back his stores to use ;

Here will I sit and wait,
While in my ear from uplands far away
The bleating of the folded flocks is borne,
With distant cries of reapers in the corn,
All the live murmur of a summer day.

SUMMER (IDYLL)
By TOM MOSTYN

SUMMER 7

' Screen'd in this nook over the high half- reaped field,
And here till sundown, Shepherd ! will I be,

Through the thick corn and scarlet poppies peep,
And round green roots and yellowing stalks I see
Pale pink convolvulus in tendrils creep ;

And air-swept lindens yield

Their scent, and rustle down their perfumed showers
Of bloom on the bent grass where I am laid,
And bower me from the August sun with shade,
And the eye travels down to Oxford Towers.'

The lines recall some of the very few lines that surpass
them in giving the sense of a summer. Wordsworth was
not the peer of Arnold as botanist, but the Tintern land-
scape is even surer than the Oxford, and more English.

' The day is come when I again repose
Here under the dark sycamore, and view
These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard tufts,
Which, at this season, with their unripe fruits,
Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves
Among the woods and copses, and disturb
The wild green landscape. Once again I see
These hedgerows, hardly hedgerows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild ; these pastoral farms
Green to the very door ; and wreaths of smoke
Sent up in silence from among the trees ! '

But though we think of summer in England as 'clad in one
green hue,' it is worth remembering that those who have
travelled round the world, and pried into the forests of
tropical regions, have found England conspicuous not only
in soft scents, but in brilliance of colour. Both the joys
and sorrows of English are highly coloured. What is more
gorgeous than the crimson of a field of Australian clover,
or the mauve of common clover, or the pink of sainfoin?
You will find no such fires of colour as the mustard-field
of the Eastern counties or the sham mustard or charlock
that adds too much brilliance to too many fields. The

8

SUMMER

poppies in the corn in Poppyland have a vivid salience you
will try to parallel in vain. When Linnaeus, in the legend,
fell down on his knees to thank God for the golden gorse
that covered one of our Welsh hillsides, he was saying grace
for a sight that quite outdoes the tropics. The tale may be
taken along with the anecdote of Tennyson who, walking
with a friend, suddenly went down on his knees and buried
his nose among the shyest of our flowers, saying, ' Smell 'em,
man. Smell 'em.' We have regions of gold and of scarlet.
We have also great regions of purple which clothe the
summer downs with as joyous a dress as the floor of the
woods in bluebell time.

The meadows are green, and the hedgerows are green,
and the trees are green pillars ; but let those who would
picture the English summer not quite forget the plaques of
colour that the hedges frame or the wide spaces of colour
where no hedgerows are.

YOUNG GREAT TITS

JUNE

'The pinks along my garden wall
Have all shot forth their summer stalks,
Thronging their buds 'mong tulips hot,

And blue forget-me-not.
Their dazzling snows forth bursting soon
Will lade the idle breath of June ;
And waken thro' the fragrant night

To steal the pale moonlight
The nightingale at end of May
Lingers each year for their display ;
Till when he sees their blossom blown,

He knows the spring is flown.
June's birth they greet, and when their bloom
Dislustres, withering on his tomb,
Then Summer hath a shortening day ;

And steps slow to decay.'

ROBERT BRIDGES, Garden Signs.

* Where the bee sucks, there suck I ;
In a cowslip's bell I lie :
There I couch when owls do cry ;
On the bat's back I do fly
After Summer merrily.
Merrily, merrily, shall I live now,
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.'

SHAKESPEARE, ArieFs Song.

THE COUNTRY CALENDAR

JUNE, which is the top of the year, is a month with several constant
epithets. ' Leafy ' June is one. ' Flaming ' June is another, and

o

io SUMMER

the best. Energy and colour are the marks of the month. Spring
is not over, and summer is not stale. The garden certainly flames,
principally and most notably with roses, of which the carmine pillar
is a real pillar of flame. The trees are alight. How many people
in June have thought of the upstanding pink and white flowers of
the horse chestnut as a candelabra? Tennyson, though he was
scolded for it, wrote of the laburnum's ( slow-dropping wells of fire,'
another type of flaming June. The may-trees are bright with
flower, and the lilac and the acacias. The syringa weights the air
with scent. The hedgerow gleams on June nights with discs of
light, with heavy-scented alder-flowers, and guelder and dog-rose
and wayfaring tree, and with a galaxy of kexes at the foot.

The naturalist can pursue every sort of his quarry. The guille-
mots' eggs on the Bempton cliff are still lawful prey ; corn-buntings'
eggs may be found ; and the latest migrants, the reed-warbler, the
flycatcher, turtledove and swifts begin to lay. The leaves of the
hedgerow are alive with young birds ; and the hayfields, which are
reaped this month, are a wishing-well of discoveries. You have
flower, you have fruit, and yet, plain on the ash and oak, you have
the breaking of the leaf-bud and the change from red to green. In
no month do birds so baffle one with a range of notes. Before the
nightingale grows silent towards the end of the month, and the
cuckoo changes his tune, young birds and hen birds, as well as the
fussy cock birds, indulge in a number of calls and cries and whispers
that have quite evaded the attempts at classification. But before
the month is over the hunt for caterpillars and insect food for the
young has brought the song of the parents to an end, and it has
become little more than a cluck such as the robin's when calling the
young, or the blue tit's just before entering the nest.

Some moths now first emerge, the fox moth and the hawk
moth ; but the time is rather remarkable for the host of beetles
and weevils and chafers that appear: the bright green nettle
weevils, the long thin-bodied red ' soldier ' and blue ' sailor ' beetles,
the cockchafer, noisy on June evenings, and the rose chafer. It is
the month too to see the glow-worm, the little beetle of the hedgerow.
The month has several nature festivals.

Shearing day, now an occasion less thought of, was once one
of the most hilarious and characteristic, especially celebrated by the
picking of posies.

JUNE ii

Many country rhymes pay great honour to St. Barnabas' Day,
the summer solstice under the old calendar. The most quaint and
informative runs —

' When St. Barnaby bright smiles night and day,
Poor ragged robin blooms free in the hay.'

Another traditional signpost of the ripening of the grass is the sound
of the seeds in the pod of the yellow rattle ; and this is perhaps a
better sign than the blooming of the ragged robin, which is often
premature. An old weather couplet of the month says truly —

' A leaky May and a warm June
Bring on the harvest very soon.'

A wet June is said to spoil the rest of the year.

In Germany the St. John's wort, which has a saintly splendour
of flower, is associated with St. John's Day, June 24th.

Heavy thunderstorms, which kill many ground-nesting birds, and
towards the end of the month a spell of north wind, are common
symptoms of June weather.

June ist — The close season for coarse fish ends in many waters.

June 24th is Midsummer's Day, the longest day, the sun rising at
3.45 a.m. and setting at 8.19 p.m.

Average temperature of June 1st, 5 7 -4°.

Average rainfall of month, 2 "2 inches.

June 1st. Sun rises 3.51 a.m. ; sets 8.5 p.m.

YOUNG WRYNECKS

CLIMBING THE HEDGEROW

AT a particular date very early in summer the hedgerow,
which was a maze of crooked twigs of quick or a tangle of
many growths, begins to take on an appearance almost as if
it were being crushed out upwards, from bottom to top.
Then begins a race for the upper air, and the hedgerow
bushes, which are always visible, which are the hedge, become
mere supports, like pea-sticks, for a variety of climbing aspir-
ants. At the foot, quaintly suggesting the scoop of a wave
before it breaks, the goose-grasses and stitchworts begin the
race. The stitchwort perhaps would not generally be called
a climbing plant ; but it is too weak-kneed for the most part
to stand alone, and with proper support attains a greater height
than most people would realise. On many characteristic
hedgerows these stitchworts along with the goose-grass, reach
upwards with a concave dip, where they sag before reaching
the support of higher branches. They climb so regularly
that a long stretch is almost symmetrically covered ; and when
the star-flowers come out at the upper edge, you might be
persuaded into thinking that they were flecks of foam on the
upper ridge of a curling wave. The goose-grass is more
regular still and more truly a climber. It has the proper
apparatus, whereas the stitchwort climbs only because it

I4 SUMMER

flourishes most where supports happen to be. The stitchwort
wobbles upwards, if one may say so, resembling Meredith's
maxim that ' the flame of the soul burns upwards ; but we
must allow for atmospheric variation.' No atmosphere or
accident prevents the goose-grass taking the shortest, that is,
the straightest route upwards which its supports allow. It
opens so successfully that often it makes a fringe as sym-
metric as you could see on stuff in a shop.

The device is not uncommon. Touching the plant,
you might vow that it was sticky with a gummy substance.
Even on the hard and smooth palm of the hand it feels
as if it was clinging by some adhesive ooze. The hairs
on stalk and leaf are more numerous and sharper than the
teeth of a fretsaw, and can attach themselves to roughnesses
quite invisible to the eye. It climbs very much as many seeds
distribute themselves, by a system of little grappling irons.
The goose-grass stem and leaf have an affinity with the burr.
But the climbers have more devices than one. The seed, like
the cat in the fable, has one; the climber, like the fox, a
number. Though this mechanical stickiness is the master
device, there are others. Everything that climbs, in what
may be called the loose way, grows at a great pace. The
tip of the goose-grass has just enough strength to keep upright
andjust enough limpness to sway into touch with the nearest
support. Like other climbers this grass tapers to the tip and
anchors itself, like the worm in its hole, by putting out leaves
at right angles. The pretty whorl of leaves, which encircle
all members of the family to which the goose-grass belongs,
may indeed very well be compared with the hairs on the worm.
They lie at first smoothly along the stem or body ; and are
then put out at an abrupt angle, greatly assisting to maintain
the position gained.

When we see first the constellations of the stitchwort and

CLIMBING THE HEDGEROW 15

the tiny flowers of the goose-grass, and note this wealth of
green over the back of the hedgerow we know that summer is
really come. Few plants add more to that luxuriance of green
which distinguishes summer from spring. But these climbing
binds spring to summer and enjoy a progress which shows no
division. A more sudden emergence of a new season is
presented by that prince of climbers the white bryony. It has
no rival in the English hedge, either in speed of growth or in
perfection of device. Botanically it is in a class by itself, as
its colour and form may well suggest. The time to watch it
is in a wind on some loose hedgerow. On the tight, clipped
hedges which are almost walls, this bryony suddenly pops its
head out from the top, growing like Alice when she bit the
tall side of the mushroom ; and it looks almost as much agley
as Alice, in the picture in which she appears to be mostly
neck. It has climbed through the fence with its prehensile
fingers, sailor-like, but is quite at a loss in its new position
with a cut surface below and nothing to cling hold of above
or to the side. Its grappling tools now pull it down instead
of up; and its attraction upwards, an attraction felt by all
plants, even in some degree by ground ivy, is a vain instinct.
Its crooked leaves, glaucous and soft, its green and grey
flowers and spiral shoots make a very lovely fringe along the
top of such a hedge ; and later the berries look as if they had
been placed there in patterns by some artificial aid. But the
real place for the white bryony is in a loose and freely grown
hedge. Here, as you watch it daily, it might almost be taken
for an animal, so conscious the movements seem. Just like
a finger, the lip of the tendril hooks over any twig or leaf.
Almost while you watch the grip is tightened, and the com-
plete hitch made. By the next morning what one may call
the spiral instinct, which is implicit in the growth of nearly
all such plants, begins to express itself. The tendril

B

i6

SUMMER

' corkscrews ' daily, working from both ends, so that in the
sequel you have a double screw, from right to left on one
part, from left to right on the other, the two being joined by
a little untwisted bar. The contraction of the tendril has
pulled the shoot up half an inch or so. These spare springs
are holding the weak shoot in place on all sides and at all
angles, so that it is buoyed in complete safety.

But it is only in a wind that you note the full perfection of
the tendrils. They have done more than pull the parent

WHITE BRYONY

shoot upwards and upwards. Their spiral form is more than
a contraction of the muscles. Though the wind becomes
a hurricane, and the bryony has grown in a place fully
exposed to it and has bridged wide spaces in the hedge,
it will weather the storm without suffering so much as a
strain. The tendrils are springs of such sensitive strength
that they temper the most blusterous attack on the plant.
It is a liberal education in mechanics to watch them give
and stretch and return to their first form ; and in spite
of their tender tissue ride out the gale in consummate

ease.

One of the pleasures of the season is to observe the
sheer speed of growth ; and as one watches one sees how
necessary an aid to the grappling devices is this faculty of
speed. The plant, as it were, rushes at its hills, and sur-

CLIMBING THE HEDGEROW 17

mounts them often by sheer impetus. The speed is curiously
little affected by weather, and few plants are truer to date.
Why this is so, any one will know who has attempted to
translate a white bryony. For the sake of observation the
writer transplanted some from hedgerow plants to his garden,
and a very difficult task it was. The root stock is buried
deep, and it consists of an almost formless mass, a white
rather marrow-like tuber consisting wholly of food. From
this the bryony grows without heed of outer circumstance.
If some moralist is in search of a good illustration of the
causes of success in life he might make good use of the
bryony. This rapid progress to higher things is not, as it
appears, sudden and unexpected. It is the direct result
of years of storing. The preparations have been long
made : all is ready ; and at the signal, at the touch of the
summer sun, the stored power is expressed, the capacity
proved.

There are seductive illustrations too in the clematis, the
lustiest of all the climbers, which is said to be increasing beyond
all measure throughout England. We notice the clematis
most when it is best described by its nickname of ' old-man's-
beard ' ; but it is best worth watching in summer. The
leaf-stems and leaves have more than one curious device.
They delight, as the moralist said,

' To rise on stepping-stones
Of their dead selves to higher things.'

The green stems of last year look, till a late date in spring,
as if they were stone-dead, withered to nothing. Even to
the touch they seem dead. You may say of them, as was
said in another reference, that they are 'generally shamming
when they're dead.' But they are, as one may say, treated
as defunct by the growing shoots. They are made to serve

i8 SUMMER

in the place of ropes by which youth shall climb above the
parents' heads. One may make protest against the wild
clematis that the instinct to grapple is overdone. The leaf,
with its innate power to twist, is so sensitive to stimulus that
it grips instantly whatever it touches. If it can grip nothing
else it grips itself. You may find hopeless knots and tangles
into which some leaves have become so absorbed that they
have ceased to perform the function of leaves. The young
principal shoot only is saved, and it is not always saved from
being dragged down instead of being helped up, by its amazing
rapidity of growth. When once the grip is fixed and the
leaf stem, or indeed the leaf itself has made a half-
hitch, all hope of extrication is over. Not only is the hold
tight and tightened daily, but when once a complete circle
is made the stem thickens and hardens, so that the most
delicate touch could never in any circumstances unwind it.
The stuff, so to say, has set. But in spite of its excesses
the clematis is perhaps the most successful of all climbers.
It reaches immense heights, and being perennial makes
good its position. It has one common, indeed almost
universal trick, in great perfection. The growing shoot
is slim and spearlike, without protuberance on this side
or that. As soon as it has insinuated itself through a
past opposition, out shoots the side leaves at right angles,
making relapse impossible, if there has been any tangle to
penetrate.

This dodge is most necessary perhaps to the blackberry,
a humble and much modified climber. The blackberry
leaves in the sequel actually slope backwards, and being very
stiff, quite prevent the young shoot from slipping backward
through the hedge in which, as a rule, it grows. But the
leaf of the clematis excels in length. The barb, as it were, is
wider, and though its mission is not to be a barb, as in the

CLIMBING THE HEDGEROW 19

blackberry, but a grappling tool, it performs also the double
function. The very tip of the leaf can grasp, only less suc-
cessfully than the tendril of the white bryony, even such
small roughnesses as are formed by the bark of a spruce or
a Scotch fir.

In a contest of what we may call, following Mr. Francis
Darwin, plant intelligence, perhaps the hop would come out
first. The time comes in summer when wide areas of Kent
and Worcestershire are quite changed in appearance by a
strangely sudden metamorphosis, when the obedient bines
mount their poles and wires and strings, all revolving in
accordance with their nature in the same spiral from left
to right. They are also helped to start by deft fingers.
But it is not in a geometric hop garden that you will best
discover the intelligence of the hop plant. Circumstances
there are too easy for the stimulus of intelligence. It is
at its best when seeking a support that is not near at hand.
You would swear then that the tip of the shoot had eyes
or an equivalent sense, such as roots have. The sensitive
tip of a root will make a bee-line for water and will slip
round obstacles miraculously. The hop shoot appears to
possess more than a spider's skill in finding support. The
spider lets herself down on a streamer and swings till
something is caught by chance and the help of the wind.
She plays for the accident. The hop having reached the
top of its support sets out for adventures new with a more
delicate aim.

In a particular adventure watched by us, a shoot which
reached the top of its support, about seven feet from the
ground, set out in a quite direct line for the only pillar that
was within reach. It advanced at right angles to its main
stem, and in spite of some drooping and eccentric wavings in
the wind reached its bourne after a week's journeying. As

20

SUMMER

it grew you could trace the spiral instinct and habit belong-
ing to all the genus. But the screwing in this passage had
the effect of strengthening the stem and increasing its power
of direct growth. It enabled itself to grow horizontally and
in one general direction by twisting its fibres, just as you
can increase the stiffness of rope or string by tightening
the ravels of its skein. This method is adopted in quite
another form both by the black bryony and in a less degree
by the honeysuckle. Almost the normal growth of the

BLACK BRYONY

beautiful black bryony is in the form of a twisted faggot of
stems, which support one another in the upward march, just
as the bundle of fibres within one hop shoot. It makes a
very complete contrast with the white bryony with which
it has no affinity except in name. The one has grey,
furry, odd-shaped leaves. The other's leaves are dark and
very shiny, shaped with precision to a heartlike form. You
scarcely notice the stem of the white for its leaves and
tendrils. The curled stem of the black make one of the

CLIMBING THE HEDGEROW 21

most conspicuous standards of the season. And yet one can
understand the similarity of name. The two are the most
conspicuous climbers of the summer hedgerow, and when
autumn comes both leave strings of poisonous berries along
the line of their withered shoots.

BLACK BRYONY BERRIES

THE LONELIER HOURS

THE glories of summer nights are earth-born, and their lights
are warmer and nearer to us than the splendour of the winter
moon. All night at midsummer the colour of daylight
hardly fades out of the north if the sky is clear ; and on wet
or cloudy nights the dusk is full of earth's perfumes, and
obscurely lit with flowers still gleaming in the unreal dark-
ness. There is seldom a really dark night in June or the
first half of July; the sun's path still creeps so near the
horizon that light is reflected from all light objects, and
even from the upper clouds. The earth on a June night
seems plunged in a conscious rest more refreshing than
sleep ; its spirit seems etherealised rather than sunk in
torpor. Cries of half wakeful birds continually suggest how
light is the veil of unconsciousness ; most creatures hibernate
in some degree like dormice or bears, and expend in summer
wakefulness the energy they accumulate in long winter
sleep. The summer twilight of England is one of the
happiest features of its geographical position. The soft
veil of the June night is a more exquisite gift of nature
than the positive daylight prolonged by the midnight sun.

Sheer daylight prevails in the June nights even in
England ; we can watch the cool grey stain contending with
the stars of the north. In July as the nights grow a little

THE LONELIER HOURS 23

longer, this white light is often replaced in fine summers by
deeper glows still joining the sunset and dawn. Night
becomes stiller and more solemn than at midsummer, but
hardly darker ; and it is often fuller of colour. A glow of
rich orange or living cornfield gold illuminates the northern
sky and defies the darkness ; night is filled with the essence
of sunshine poured in the July day. The afterglow of
sunset is prolonged by exceptional causes, and the nights
become a festival of the sun, yet with the sense of repose
shed by its absence from the sky. The afterglow is caused
by the rays of the descended sun reflected from lofty clouds
or invisible vapours above us, but an ordinary afterglow
fades about an hour after sunset. The remarkable nocturnal
glows which last on almost till dawn may be due to an
unusual volume of floating particles in the higher atmosphere,
such as the dust-clouds expelled by a volcano or lifted by
a tornado from a desert. Sometimes they may share the
principle of the mirage, and be the afterglow of tracts to the
west transmitted round the earth's curve by refraction, as
travellers see the image of towns or ships projected in the
air overhead. The product of earth's own atmosphere,
these summer glows give a sense of the fullness of summer
unlike the alien brightness of moonlight and starlight.

On cloudy summer nights the earth is lit with its own
moons and stars. Elders and wild-rose bushes frame con-
stellations of blossom in the dusky hedges, and a little later
white heads of clover shine in the pastures like a Milky
Way. White campion flowers gleam opaquely pallid on
the grassy banks, and privet blossom stars the shadow of
the thickets. The motionless lamps of these blossoms
are mingled with other moving lights. Glow-worms set
their signals at dusk by roads and rivers, and the white
ghost swiftmoths of midsummer vibrate in their fantastic

24 SUMMER

dances over the grass stems where their golden mates sit
hidden.

This dance of the ghost swifts is one of the most ecstatic
of all flights. No bird and no other insect combines so
intense a movement with so marked a rhythm. While the

moth's wings whir with such
rapidity that it is a mere
nebula in the twilight, it flings
itself backwards and forwards
on a track a yard or so wide
like the weight on the pen-
dulum of a clock. A pasture
or hay-field after dusk at mid-
summer may be covered by
dozens of these large white
moths absorbed in their pas-
sionate exercise. It gives an
intense sense of the vitality
pulsing in the earth at this
midsummer season. The
dance seems intensely ex-
hausting, even for a moth
with such long and powerful
wings. After each bout of
frenzy, lasting for one or two
minutes, the dancer rests on

a grass-stem, looking a little denser and whiter than the
surrounding clover flowers.

The analogy of the displays of birds suggests that the
exhibition of speed and glittering whiteness is designed to
win the admiration of the female moth. Certainly she is
often to be found resting in the grasses over which the male
moths dance ; but it is hard to be sure in the dusk whether

WHITE CAMPION

THE LONELIER HOURS 25

the dancers deliberately perform before her eyes, or whether
the dance is simply an outlet for exultation in her company.
As the last glow fades the dancers rapidly desist, and the
whole display is over before midnight.

Songs of the summer nights mark audibly the change
that comes over the season between the springlike opening
of June and the autumnal ripeness and gravity that tinge
the dewy August dawns. For the first ten days of June
the nightingales are still in song before midnight, though
they are rapidly declining ; song-thrushes sing late into the
white twilight hour, and the cries of plovers and water-fowl
show how lightly they are dipped in sleep. The deep and
passionate song of the nightingale seems in accord with
the scents of evening, and the warmth of the early night.
Nightingales stop singing, as a rule, when the air begins
to grow chilly towards one o'clock ; they are not among
the earliest singers of the dawn, in the keener air of the
new day. After the nightingales have fallen silent, and
before the first larks rise, comes the wind of dawn that
runs round the world in advance of the sun, and divides
the old day from the new one. The change is palpable ;
the cooler air has lost the scents and languors of the out-
worn summer day, and has the renewed freshness of morning.
About two o'clock, before it is light enough to see the larks
rise in the sky, they can be heard in a great singing com-
pany, soaring into the grey morning vault. Sometimes the
music comes from the ground; they seem often to utter
their first hymn to the coming day before it is clear enough
to draw them into the sky. Blackbirds sing a few brief
strains, and then fall silent again for nearly an hour. When
the light is already clear enough to see the dewdrops
hanging on the grass blades, then bursts forth a universal
to the sun. In a wood or garden where birds abound,

26

SUMMER

this song before sunrise in early June is amazing in its
vehemence. It does not give a perfect display of the song
of any one species, for the din of music is so confused that
only the most individual voices can be followed. Blackbird
and blackcap and nightingale and a dozen other species are
mingled in a chaos which can only be likened to the buzz

of voices at a dinner-
party ; and through the
tumult we can only
distinguish clearly the
measured rhythm of

turtle - dove's hollow
double note. This
burst of song lasts for
about twenty minutes ;
then it suddenly ceases,
and the sun being now
well over the eastern
woods the birds fall
keenly to feeding.

There is a great
change in the night
by about the middle
of July. It is still

unmistakably summer. None of the peculiar dampness
of autumn, with its subtle sense of vegetation beginning
to decay, yet hangs in the coolness of dusk or the filmy
mist of dawn ; there is not yet apparent that first presage
of autumn's oncoming, the drenching August dew. But
the night is far more silent. The nightingale's music
is long over; except in cool upland regions and dales
of the north, the evening strain of the song-thrush is

BLACKBIRD

THE LONELIER HOURS 27

also past ; and as the deep glow fades into real darkness
only the babble of the sedge-warbler by the river recalls
the full nocturnal music of early June. The sedge-warbler
is peculiarly associated with July nights; not because it
does not sing as readily by night in earlier summer, but
because other singers are silent, and leave it to chant alone.
There is something strangely conversational in the sedge-
warbler's voluble monologues in the July night. They are
half scurrility like the bickering of the house-sparrow, and

SEDGE-WARBLER

half sheer beauty ; and the bird seems singing for itself for
company, in the loneliness of the night: The ear is struck
with notes that recall the day; it is the sedge-warbler
mimicking the cries of the birds that haunt the streamside
under the sun. Now comes the sharp call of the chaffinch,
now the sibilant signal of the water-wagtail, and presently
the chatter of the sparrows that practise fly-catching under
the noonday willows. A veil of sleep half dulls the sedge-
warbler's vigilance ; the song becomes a softer babble in
the reeds, like the song of a swallow on the weather-cock

28 SUMMER

in the early dawn. A moorhen calls sharply in one of its
nocturnal alarms, and instantly the singer is awake again,
pouring a loud recitation into the darkness. The song dies
away after midnight, when the confines of the new day are
near ; but even as late as August a sudden disturbance by
the river at any time of night will sometimes draw a burst of
song from a sedge-warbler hidden in the reeds.

Sedge-warblers, like nightingales, are day-birds which
also sing at night ; but the nightjar is a true bird of dusk,
though it occasionally murmurs its curious music while the
sun is high. It does not begin to flit abroad till its prey of
moths appears in the darkening air ; but it will rise about
sunset to some bough in the quiet copses, and reel out its
music actively until it is time to feed. It is a strange bird
in many ways, but the reeling murmur which it pours forth
in the dusk is the feature which has most struck popular
imagination in this country. Hence comes its names of night-
jar, evejar, and evechurr; while its other common name of
fern-owl suggests its owl-like flight and plumage and noc-
turnal habits. The nightjar's murmur is emphasised by the
growing stillness of the July nights, like the songs of the
sedge- warbler ; and it is more deeply in accordance with the
ebb of summer vitality which adds solemnity to the summer
darkness. It is a low and monotonous sound compared with
the songs of May. In May, indeed, it is apt to be overlooked
or neglected ; but now it sheds a soothing sound in the night,
and suggests the full but calmer current of the ageing year.
Unlike the cry of the corncrake to many ears, it does not
become wearisome, because its monotony is never absolute.
From time to time the jarring is slightly changed in tone,
like the distant sound of an autumn threshing-machine, which
it often recalls. In the stillness of the night the delicacy of
these modulations is emphasised ; they fascinate the ear by
their slightness and the precision of their effect.

THE LONELIER HOURS

29

In proportion to its gentle pitch the distance to which
the sound will travel is remarkable, but much energy must
go to its utterance. Close observation in the early twilight
has shown the lower mandible of the bill intensely quivering
while the sound was being produced, and there is the same
hint of force in Gilbert White's record of how the Selborne
summer-house quivered when a nightjar perched and mur-
mured on the roof. It seems clear that the song, like the
sedge-warbler's, is prolonged after the breeding season,

NIGHTJAR

though nightjars are late nesters. Depending like swifts and
flycatchers on a diet of summer insects, they do not arrive
till May, and their eggs are often to be found in the middle
of June. In the earlier weeks of their stay, when the cocks
are probably seeking their mates, a reduced half-whispered
jarring is sometimes to be heard uttered from the ground on
ferny commons and in the woods. The same tentative
murmur is sometimes heard early on a June morning a little
before sunrise, but the shades of evening and the early night
form the song-time for this nocturnal bird.

It is rarer to see the nightjar hunting than churring,
because of the increasing darkness ; but it will sometimes
reap a harvest of the little moths that buzz on warm even-

SUMMER

ings round the crown of the oaks, and its flight can sometimes
then be watched against the half-lit sky. It is extremely
rapid and skilful, and the activity of its mazy motion is
emphasised by its silence. The nightjar flies as silently as
an owl ; though moths and beetles cannot be alarmed by
noises, like rats or mice, yet a harsher flight might set up
disturbing currents of air which would be equally effective
in scaring the prey. Very owl-like, too, is its cry of
' kowick, kowick,' which it occasionally utters on the wing.

It gathers its food in its
huge mouth, guarded
with bristles to pre-
vent live insects from
escaping. The bird's
wide gape gave colour
to the widespread
legend that it sucks
the milk of goats,
which is perpetuated in
various languages by
the name of goat-sucker. There is no other explanation of
this ancient slander, except that the rough, dry goat pastures
in many parts of Europe are a favourite haunt of this lover
of warmth and dryness.

The grasshopper-warbler sheds another subtly changeful
murmur into the air of summer evenings. Though it usually
ceases in the later dusk, about sunset this creeping mouse-
like bird is almost as vocal in the river-meadows as the
nightjar a little later in the copses. Its voice is shriller and
more chirping than the nightjar's, but there is no very close
likeness between the irregular and fitful scraping of a grass-
hopper and its steady reeling cry. It is much more like the
sound of a fisherman's well-oiled reel, and as the bird haunts
the same banks as the fisherman at his favourite evening

NIGHTJAR

THE LONELIER HOURS 31

hour, one can easily be mistaken for the other. The grass-
hopper-warbler's song — for it takes the place of a more
musical ditty — possesses nearly as conspicuously as the
nightjar's the delicate change of pitch which averts mono-
tony and adds a characteristic attraction. In the case of the
nightjar the change is said to take place when the bird ceases

GRASSHOPPER-WARBLER

to draw in breath and begins to expel it ; but owing to its
habits of concealment the grasshopper-warbler is one of the
most difficult of all birds to observe, and there is no evidence
of the same cause in its case, though it is at least probable.
The corncrake's note in the June mowing grass constantly
varies in intensity, but has no change of pitch ; and the
alternating softness and loudness of its cry is simply due
to its turning its head in different directions while it calls.
In early May, when the grass is still short, it can sometimes

32 SUMMER

be plainly seen lifting its head above the green pile of the
meadow, and calling in different directions, apparently seek-
ing a mate. In the south of England the corncrake usually
falls silent in June ; but in the valleys of the north and west,
where it remains more abundant than it has been of late
years in the south, it calls in the late-mown hay-fields far
on into July, when the bilberries are ripening on the hills.

One curious feature of the early hours of a summer
morning is the boldness of the beasts and birds. Before five
o'clock very few people are stirring, and wild creatures do

PARTRIDGES DUSTING

not take man into account. They lord it in their own
domain, as once in Eden ; and except for the trim roads and
well-tilled fields telling of daily care, the human explorer of
the June morning might almost feel himself a survivor on
a planet from which mankind had flown. The roads are
occupied by the birds for courting, preening, fighting, bath-
ing in the dust, feeding and exercising their young, and for
every purpose that a smooth and wheelless terrace natur-
ally suggests to a bird's mind. If it were not so natural
and unconscious, there would be something actively con-
temptuous in this annexation of a country highway as a
promenade of infant partridges and amorous yellowhammers.
When the explorer approaches the birds show little of the

THE LONELIER HOURS

33

timidity which they display towards mankind later in the
day. They gaze at him indifferently, and are little disposed
to give him room. The yellowhammer goes on tracing his
golden semi-circles about his hen ; thrushes stare from the
middle of the road as if they were half ready to break out in
noisy abuse, but preferred to treat the intrusion with silent
dignity ; and shyer birds appear so numerously about the
road and hedges as to give a new realisation of their
fugitive and elusive lives in the hours when man is king.
Even the shy hare on its way back from the
cottage garden looks twice and three times at
the rare apparition before deciding that it must
be a man ; and the wilder stoat, which will
sometimes attack a man in defence of its young
by broad daylight, gazes at him in the hour of
dawn with the true look of the wild animal —
half insolence and half sheer bloodthirstiness.
All this hostility and indifference on the part
of the familiar beasts and birds of an English
village gives a curious jar to man's instinctive
sense of his own predominance. We have only
to get up three or four hours before breakfast to
find a world in which we are still of small account ; and it is
positively comforting to human self-esteem to find a friendly
welcome from the old cart-horses in the pasture, pushing
their hairy faces over the palings and expecting to be led off
to work for their masters. At least we have tamed the
horse if we are flouted by the common jenny-wren.

The first note of summer verging towards harvest-time
is heard in the stillness of the June night, when the green
horse-chestnut or tassel of plane-seeds falls to earth with a
single sudden tap. Though the unripe seed falls with a
miniature sound, there is the warning of all autumn in it.

34 SUMMER

The nightingale soon breaks out singing again from his
thicket, and the dawn has its jubilant cries ; the impression
is quickly eclipsed, but returns with gradually increasing
frequency as the summer goes on. July dawns are mistier
than those of June, and far more still ; instead of the chorus
of all the birds, we hear little but the chirp of the sparrows
presaging heat, the faithful crooning of the ring-dove, or the
deep and rasping caws with which the rooks at this time of
morning post from tree to tree on their way to their feeding-
grounds. August dawns break later and mistier still ; and
now, in the weeks of deepest silence by day, the piercing
warble of the robin is lifted to the earliest stain of light. It
is his autumn song renewed ; the birds' moulting time, which
forms the only real break in the circle of the English seasons,
has intervened since he lifted his voice in the psean of the
midsummer morning, and this song already tells that it is
passing.

LITTLE BLUE RESTING

MIDSUMMER BUTTERFLIES

MAY butterflies last long into June, and late June wakes
others which haunt the woods and heaths in July; the
longest day marks a sharper division in the lives of these
sun-loving creatures than for most other wild things. But
there are certain butterflies which are peculiarly the children
of midsummer, and as deeply associated with the pride of
the long June days as the wild roses or the yellow irises,
or the full gleam of the waving hay-fields. So long as the
hay stands uncut the common blue butterflies enjoy the
height of their season among the lotus and clover; but
their bands first broke into the hay-fields in May, and to
find the typical blue butterfly of midsummer we must mount
among the wild hay-crop of the downs. The attraction of
the little blue lies not in conspicuousness or special brilliance
of colour — it is the smallest and one of the duskiest of its
tribe — but in the punctuality of its emergence in the high
June days, and its faithfulness to some definite and fascinat-
ing spot. The rampart of a primeval encampment, lapped
for centuries with the smooth downland turf; a sheltered
dip in the downs where year by year the little burnt orchis
thrusts up its brownish spike ; some thyme-scented flank of
a thorn-clump, where the larks and the sheep-bells mingle

36 SUMMER

in one wide noonday tune ; — in most such haunted spots the
little blues appear punctually June by June, and we know
that if we rise and go into the high places of that wonderful
country we shall find them faithful to their time. Their
unfolded wings are of a smoky brown, like those of the
brown argus ; but those of the male are shot with a purple
iridescence which betrays their family as they flutter gently
from one cluster of bird's-foot trefoil to another, or quiver
on a head of lady's fingers. Ineradicably faithful to their
haunt, they are feeble fliers, and spend much of the bright
days, and all the grey ones, resting with closed wings on a
flower-head or grass stem. The under side of their wings
has the typical pearled and silvery pattern of the blues, but
without the usual brightness. Like so many of the scarcer
butterflies and plants, it is confined to chalk or limestone
soils ; its food-plant in the larval stage is the lady's fingers,
within sight of which it passes all its life.

A little later in the month, on higher and wilder hills
far to northward, the mountain ringlet emerges, and is
equally true to its one chosen spot. It holds a very remark-
able position in English wild life, for it is a surviving
member of the Arctic fauna which flourished here in the
Ice Age, so far as anything can be said to have flourished
at that time. Its only remaining haunt in England is
among the mountains of the Lake District, and that is
its last station until it is found again in the Alps. It lives
in grassy hollows of the mountains at a height over two
thousand feet, and then it may be seen in June and early
July fluttering about the rough slopes in the thin, high
air, whenever the sun shines brightly. It is a dusky little
creature, a little larger than the common small heath, but
at once darker and richer in colour. Its dark brown wings
are banded with deep orange-red, and spotted with a row of

MIDSUMMER BUTTERFLIES 37

the characteristic eyelet markings of this and many other
butterfly tribes. Only the ubiquitous small tortoiseshell
ranges as high as the mountain ringlet among the Lakeland
fells, and the tortoiseshell is a wanderer from nettle-beds in
the dales, and is attached to no native hollow among the
bare grey crags. The Scotch ringlet is a rather larger
butterfly, with the same deep brown and orange markings,
which is not found south of Lancashire. It is curious
that neither of these glacial species survives in the Snowdon
district, or the other mountain masses of Wales.

The large heath is another June butterfly which is con-
fined to the more northern and mountainous parts of the
country, but ranges further south and to lower levels than
the two mountain ringlets. It is commonest in the north
of England and south of Scotland, where it is found on the
mosses, and among the sandhills close to the sea. But
for its larger size, and hoarier colour, it is much like the
small heath, which is almost the commonest and hardiest of
English butterflies. The characteristic hardiness of this
tribe of 'browns' comes out in different ways in different
species. The two mountain ringlets and the large heath
are confined to breasts of high mountains, sweeps of wind-
beaten moor, and barren northern tracts. The small heath
does not refuse to colonise the warmer and more fertile
parts of England, but it cheerfully puts up with the bleakest
and dustiest pastures, and seems indifferent to the wettest
and coldest seasons. Except for the common white, which
is artificially fostered by cabbage-gardens, the first and last
butterfly to be met with on the sparse turf of building plots
in the outskirts of towns is usually the small heath. Par
excellence, it is the 'common brown.' Almost as widely
distributed, and quite as unsusceptible to cold and rainy
summers, is the large meadow brown, which punctually

38 SUMMER

appears every midsummer in pastures and hay-fields just
when the hay harvest is beginning. It flaps across the field
paths as cheerfully in the gloomiest years as in the brightest,
and its casual, skulking flight seems to suggest that it does
not know the difference. The emergence of this unpre-
tentious butterfly is one of the chief events in the year to
all who note the minor signals of the seasons. It foretells
the change from the days of growth to the days of ripening
— from the lengthening to the slowly shortening evenings ;
and although it comes out a little before the longest day,

LARGE MEADOW BROWN

when there is still but small sign of the year's decline, only
too soon the pastures grow dark with July heat. The
bare hay-fields call it to the scanty and monotonous hawk-
weed blossoms which are all that they have to show for
their wealth of blossom among the June grass.

Mountain, moor, sand-dune, and meadow find each some
opportunity for the virtues of this Spartan tribe, and the
common ringlet disregards comfort in the woods. It
varies greatly in numbers in different years, so that presum-
ably it is subject in some way to the hardships of the
seasons ; but certainly it does not share the antipathy of

MIDSUMMER BUTTERFLIES 39

most butterflies for damp and drizzle. On June days of
fine soaking rain it can be seen flitting about the rides and
wet rushy patches in the woods with a movement which, if
not precisely animated, is at least as lively as it displays
on days of true June warmth. It loves the coolness and
shadow of the deeper grassy glades ; and it is one of the
most softly beautiful of all our butterflies, with an extreme
delicacy of bloom which could perhaps only have been
developed by an insect of such quiet ways and gentle flight.
It is very difficult to secure a perfect specimen of the ringlet
for a collection ; despite the utmost care in capture and
setting, the satin lustre of its deep green wings will show
some scratch. Its colour is the dark, full green of a rush-
stem, but darker still ; and the eye-spots common to the
tribe take in this case the unusual form of a variable
number of fine yellow circles, strewn near the margin of
the under side. The haunts of the ringlet are in the deepest
peace of the woods, and all the grace and gentleness of
nature are expressed in its movement and bloom.

One more trace of a hardy evolutionary upbringing may
be noticed in this tribe of browns, and that is the salient fact
of their general emergence in this month. In the Arctic
regions, where a species of mountain ringlet is found about
as far north as butterflies exist, they must emerge in June,
or not at all ; for the time of the midnight sun gives them
a chance of active life which is at once unrivalled and unique.
When most of our own land lay under ice the same exigen-
cies of the seasons must have prevailed to a great extent
here, and the ringlets and other ' browns ' most nearly allied
to them seem to show the ancestral habit to this day. The
most aberrant member of the group is the small meadow
brown, which waits to come out until July, and is abundant
in lanes on the blackberry blossom which opens in that

40 SUMMER

month. It is the brightest of the group, with less brown in
its wings and more gay orange-red, and this coincidence of
brighter colour with later appearance and a more southerly
distribution is suggestive. It may indicate that the small
meadow brown became distinct from one of the other mem-
bers of the group after the Ice Age ended ; or possibly that
it never existed, or became extinct in the northern part of
the country, most of which the ice-sheet covered. In all the
wealth of the June woods it is strange to sit in the sun and
think of a time when, of all our present butterflies, only
a handful of browns and ringlets may have basked on the
raw walls of the glacier's moraine, just as we may still see
them in the higher Alps, where this tribe is characteristically
abundant. A brown butterfly may sometimes be seen travel-
ling in the wind arid sunshine over the crests of the highest
snow mountains.

When ringlets begin to appear in the dewy shadows, the
sunnier foliage of the woodland glades is haunted by the
large skipper and the small pearl-bordered fritillary. Com-
pared with the grizzled and dingy skippers which precede it,
the large skipper is a brighter and far more summer-like
little butterfly, and has all the sturdy liveliness of its tribe.
Its wings are of a rich golden brown, not unlike the tawny
hue which marks the fritillaries, but with less red in it, and
more nearly approaching a bright bay. They are dappled
with deeper brown, and set off in the case of the male — which
is by far the commoner — with an oblique black stripe on each
of the upper pair. Large skippers delight to flicker about
the young sprays of beech and oak and other June foliage,
basking on the tufts outstretched in bright sunshine, and
rubbing the edges of the upper and lower wings together in
active delight. Before they settle down to enjoy the sun-
shine they often pace circumspectly about the chosen leaf
with their stout wings obliquely raised ; then, if any other

MIDSUMMER BUTTERFLIES 41

butterfly appears — but especially one of their own species —
they leap at once into the air, and bicker with it as pugnaci-
ously as the small copper, and with an even more active and
vigorous flight. After buzzing with a flylike motion they
have a way of making a sudden leap or ' skip ' in the air,
which often makes it hard for the eye to follow them ; and
they will practise this elusive flight out of sheer inner velocity,
and when there is no other
butterfly to provoke them.
Though they are often found
in rough pastures, they are
fondest of the sunny glades in
woods and copses ; and they
appear, like the full sprays of
tender foliage, at the height
of the growing year.

Small pearl-bordered fritil-
laries also love luxuriant and
leafy places, and are less often
seen on drier and more open
commons than the earlier
and commoner large pearl-
bordered kind. To the incurious eye they might easily
appear to be small specimens of that fritillary which has
grown so familiar among the bugle blossom and bracken since
some bright morning early in May. But they come freshly
forth when the earlier butterfly grows worn with winds and
wayfaring ; and if we watch it fanning on a spray, or
absorbed in some midsummer blossom, we see that there
are plain differences in its marking. The upper side of the
wings are more lightly chequered with black, giving them a
more uniform and rather less handsome appearance ; while,
on the other hand, the gleaming silver plaques on the under
side are more numerous and convergent. Like most of the

LARGE SKIPPERS

42 SUMMER

fritillaries it feeds in the larval stage on dog-violet leaves ;
but none of the family, except sometimes the large pearl-
bordered, ever see the violet in flower in their winged state,
or feed from its blossoms.

MEADOW CRANE'S-BILL

THE STRUGGLE FOR LIGHT

IF one thing more than another proclaims and boasts the
arrival of summer it is the solid mounds of the elm-trees
cloaked with leaves so thick that they give as little hint of
the structure beneath, as an Eskimo's dress of his anatomy.
If any one would make a picture of summer let him, suppos-
ing the feat possible, paint a great English elm, a Hunting-
donshire oak as it is called, standing solid and vivid against
one of the black thunder-clouds which June breeds. Suppose
presently that thunder-showers fall vertically, the ground
beneath the elm will be surprisingly dry, and it may be that
it will be encircled by a puddle of wet, a gutter round it ;
so successful are the little leaves, in their close ranks, at
drawing off the water. They serve a secondary purpose so.
If you study the way of a root in the ground, a way as
wonderful as that of a bird in the air, you will discover its
marvellous skill in taking a bee-line for dampness and water.
The little sensitive tips, the antennae of the rootlets, wheedle
their way past the stiffest obstructions to the patch of
moisture. They will make their way to this gutter round
the elm, and so roots and branches set up something of an
artistic balance. But this is not the first and foremost
purpose served by the screen of leaves. The clothed tree

44 SUMMER

looks most solid, a hill of green, against the cloud ; but it is
in reality a hollow hill, an architectural dome, hollow in the
centre. Of course the shell of the dome is not symmetric,
but in tree or bush, in elm or rose, a vast majority of the
leaves reach to the outside, and the obscuring of one leaf by
another is avoided with amazing success. Only those who
climb will quite realise this. The leaves on most trees inter-
fere not at all, and though there are little leafy twigs here,
there, and everywhere, the number of leaves they carry is
very small indeed compared with the case of the dome.
Bush leaves are even more successful than tree leaves in this
struggle for 'a place in the sun.' If you were to take an
instrument and peel a wild rose-bush you would disclose an
emptiness of leafless shoots. But the successful skill of the
struggle for light is best seen in the arrangement of the
leaves that have reached the outer circle. They arrange
themselves in mosaics so accurate that a bird looking outward
would scarcely see more than a pattern of slender cracks of
daylight, in places would see merely a pattern of unbroken
leaves. This natural mosaic is perhaps seen best of all in
some climbing plants, notably the ivy. The ivy shoot seems
to rejoice in darkness. It bores its head into any crack, as
it should do seeing that it carries roots. But the leaves are
light-lovers, and however thick they grow they arrange them-
selves so that each overlaps its neighbour as little as may
be. Without much searching, especially if you look to the
younger shoots, you may find patterns as neat and comely
as they are ingeniously fitted.

It is true that leaves both old and young may suffer from
much light, and do indeed take precautions against its dangers.
But the precaution is seldom found by way of avoiding the
field of light. The defence is from within. We can all see
the difference between the bright fresh green of spring, when
first ' burgeons every maze of quick ' and the sober greens

THE STRUGGLE FOR LIGHT 45

of full summer. The change in complexion is due doubtless
first and foremost to age and exposure. It is only extreme
youth that keeps a bloom. Time and weather must tarnish
it. But this darkening is not only a slow progressive thing.
In truth, as in semblance, the leaves are darker one day than
another, and at one hour than another. Within the leaf a
sorting of the green grains takes place, by which they have
the power to protect their complexion from the sun and
arrest the process of exhaustion. Many evergreens grow
darker, even as you look at them, if the sun comes out hot
and scorching ; and they pale again, when coolness returns,
to a tint nearer their spring freshness.

The struggle for light is with plants very much the same
as the struggle for life. Light is life and darkness death.
We have spoken elsewhere of autumn being another, a
second spring. In one respect summer appears not as the
summit of a year but as the preparation for a new year.
The flower is over and the fruit shed from most of our native
trees when they are at the full. The elm behaves as the
crocus, which is a green bundle of shoots now that all sign of
the flower is gone. The leaves, like Shelley's chameleon,
feed on light and air, and are busy with the greatest chemical
marvel of the world, converting the sunlight into the food of
life, bridging the organic and inorganic kingdoms. Without
the due share of light they die like bees in a sunless
world. It is almost a pitiful thing to see, as one has seen,
a shoot of clematis penetrate into a covered place. It waves
this way and that ; it grows apace reaching out for food. If
there is a crack of light it struggles towards that region so
far as its power of growth permits. The leaves acquire a
pale green, and begin with the poor material at their disposal
to manufacture from light, making bricks without straw. But
before the summer is out they are dead, cut off just at the
point where light begins to be insufficient. You may watch

46 SUMMER

some strange struggles between light and darkness. In a
certain high hedgerow an ash and a holly grew in close
juxtaposition, and the holly as it progressed made a dark
shade for some ten feet from the ground. From the ash
stool the shoots set out at an astounding pace to escape
through this deadly darkness. Most of those that reached
the top lived, though even they had a struggle, as the stems
were hardly stouter than reeds so fast had they grown.
Those that could not get a leaf to the light in time withered
and stood in a sheaf like the centre of a blackberry or rasp-
berry bush in winter, when the annual shoots have withered.
Trees and plants go to almost as many devices to obtain
the maximum of sun for their leaves as they do to scatter
their seed in autumn. As a general rule the lower the
boughs the more horizontal. You may see some remark-
able examples on the firs and the maples ; and whatever
the direction of the bough, the leaves turn themselves so
that the plane of their surface is as nearly as may be facing
the sun at its height. On some plants, such as the night-
shade, the size of the leaves varies so that the smaller may
fill up the interstices of the bigger without overlapping. In
some the leaves are actually modified in shape in order that
none may be shaded. The tulip-tree, one of the quaintest
and most charming of exotics, offers examples. In a host of
plants and some trees the stalks of the leaves grow long or
short with just such precision as the mosaic demands. There
is a common wild geranium with a mauve-pink flower that
forms rosettes of almost mathematical precision. The rose
lies flat on the ground, and in a good specimen you may have
some ado either to find any considerable crevice between the
leaves or any serious overlapping of one leaf by another.
Low-lying plants are perhaps most successful in this, especi-
ally if they lie in sombre places where light is valuable.
Some amazing mosaic tracings have been made of ivy growing

THE STRUGGLE FOR LIGHT 47

on the floor of a wood where life depended on utter acquisi-
tiveness of the small rations of sunshine. Plants of course
differ immensely in their need of light. The grass, the else
invincible grass, which makes its way to the roofs and
carpets a neglected roadway in two seasons, pales to a
jaundice colour in a twilight situation, and dies out at once.
The kexes, especially the lesser chervil, grow a splendid dark
green under the shade of very thick hedges, and seem to suffer
not at all. St. John's wort, it is generally supposed, delights
in shade, and has clothed the ground under many a garden
tree with thick cover and flowers as gold and sunny as the
sun. But its delight in such places is in part due merely to
its earliness. When its leaves begin the canopy of the tree is
not yet spread nor the light intercepted. But doubtless it
can endure gloom, as may that lusty and at times light-loving
plant the periwinkle. It is a little surprising too that the
beech, which of all trees is most destructive of life beneath its
shadow, will grow in coppice shape under trees that will shade
other bushes to death. Happily no place is ever quite bare of
the green things whose life is light. Deep mosses mimicking
now trees in their form, now jewels in their tints, carpet the
woods. On the roofs of dark caves by the coast hang green
the ribbon leaves of asplenium marinum, which, like the
mosses, steals light out of water and stores reflected rays.

We all mark the full leafage seeking sunlight and storing
its energy. But flowers and fruit have as vital a need of sun-
shine as the leaves. The sun is needed at all stages. We
just begin to understand that flowers are only fructified when
the sun is hot. The fertilising of the flowers of clover and
hazel and doubtless many others is a midday function, when
the full energy of the sun is directed upon the pollen. Even
when fertilised the seed or fruit has not its full strength to
resist frost unless it enjoys a bout of sun. When well set
it retires for a while in some obscurity behind the leaves and

D

48 SUMMER

develops strange protective devices. The leaves are green,
one might say, in order to be seen. The fruit is green to
escape detection. It is imbued with strange acids that warn
off enemies. The shucks of the marvellously invisible nuts
and walnuts are acutely bitter, and the hop surpasses them.
Green apples are a byword, and only ants or very thirsty
birds will attack green pears. But the sun begins to play
its part again when the fruit is plump ; and the acids
must be baked to sugars, the green rinds split, and the
green skins reddened. But in this little history the most
crucial work of the sun has not been told. Trees in
dark places bear only leaves. They grow but are fruitless.
The great seed places are only the sunny places. But more
than this — fruit is made in the sunny summers, though it
may come to maturity in a dark summer. When a summer
is over the buds for the next year are made. How many
flower-buds, how many leaf-buds will open next year is pre-
ordained. By what alchemy and by what courses the stuff
that the leaves manufacture from the sun are turned into
new buds we cannot trace. The thing is too near the central
mystery of light and growth. But it is tolerably well estab-
lished, at any rate it is a strong and credible belief, that
when the sun is hot the making of fruit-buds flourishes. It
depends on other causes too. There is a sort of exuberant
vitality in trees which tends solely to leaves, to growth not
to produce ; and there is a want of vitality which encourages
fruit. A dying tree will often bear a heavy crop, and young
trees are sparing of flowers. But apart from other causes
we may feel with some confidence, as we bask in the hot
summer or in shade watch the green leaves ' clap their little
hands in glee,' that the agent of present pleasure is also the
earnest of fruit in the year that follows. The twigs and
boughs as well as the leaves are taking profit of the sun.

THE STRUGGLE FOR LIGHT

49

It may well be that the sun performs different functions
at different parts of its course. The midday sun by reason
of its heat is the fertilising sun, and the patterns of the leaves
seem to be designed to meet a vertical sun ; but we have now,
within the last few years, good reason to believe that separate
species of plants are greedy of other angles of sunlight. Just
as a German doctor has maintained that it is only the morn-
ing meal that fattens, some gardeners argue that it is only
the morning sun that properly ripens some fruits and colours
some flowers. Without the early morning sun tomatoes and
nasturtiums languish ; but suffer no sort of harm, at least to
all appearance, if they are screened from the afternoon sun-
light. It has long seemed to the writer that the tits prefer
a nesting-hole which faces the east. We all know that all
birds are at their greatest activity in the morning. The
more one observes nature the more one is struck by the
parallelisms of the natural kingdoms. Many plants may live
their most active hours, like the birds, in these early hours.
The corn-cockle, Jack-go-to-bed-by-noon, takes his rest at this
flaming hour because his energy has remained unflagged
since sunrise, when he found the quality of light that his
being needed. The St. John's wort and tobacco plant are
owls of a sort, disliking the light, and the grass and dandelion
a wake-robin.

YOUNG PARTRIDGES

DANGERS OF THE GROUND

EVEN in midsummer weather, perhaps chiefly in midsummer
weather, the solid earth is one of the most dangerous of
places for birds' nests, though it is quite the best place for
concealment. Probably the safest nests are the highest and
most conspicuous, but in all cases a risk is run. The rooks'
nests are thrown down by a gusty wind. In one case such a
fallen nest was found to have been twice used by other birds
than the maker. A great tit and a starling had both
hatched broods in its interstices, and both for the first time
faced a danger quite new to them. The conspicuous nest
of the colony runs also risks from neighbours. Just as
penguins spend a great part of their time in robbing one
another of stones, the rooks will from time to time, though
not often, steal from any unlucky neighbour who for some
reason has not pleased the flock. There is also another
little known danger. When at all pressed for food squirrels
will climb to the nests and carry away young birds. But
when all is known the rook in the colony is as safe as he
could well wish to be. Compared with such a bird as a
partridge his state of security is complete. For the ground
bird is never safe till the young can fly almost as well as
their parents. When the country naturalist sees descend

DANGERS OF THE GROUND 51

one of those sudden June thunder-storms that gives us
vastly more rain to the minute than any storms of the year,
one of his first thoughts is apt to be of the young partridges.
Every year, or almost every year, scores of young birds are
killed by such rains. It is not that they are drowned right
out, though this may happen. It is that they cannot dry
their fluff. The oil-glands do not work. Though there may
be bouts of sunlight sufficient to dry birds in the open, they
are caught in the corridors of the corn or the tall grasses,
which drip and rub the moisture on them long after the'
storm is over. Rheumatism and all manner of pains oppress
them. They dwindle and die. Even insect food, which is
their chief diet at this date, may be hard to come by in
stormy weather. It is by way of escape from such dangers f
perhaps that often the old bird takes her dapper little brood
to the roadways, which serve as warm and smooth prom- 1
enades, where everything is provided that a bird in search of i
health could well desire. It is a little dangerous perhaps (
if traffic is frequent ; but the spry chicks even when very
young manage as a rule to skedaddle into the gutter of the
roads even if the approaching motor is fast, and pedestrians
who may now and again pick up the young usually replace,
them.

In fear perhaps of the dangers of wet, partridges often ,
prefer the bases of the hedgerows for their nests, but here '
they lose the security of the open field. The hedges are
the roads of all sorts of vermin, of rats and weasels and
stoats. Foxes, moreover, accept the hedgerow as their f
proper hunting-ground. They go out bird-nesting, and
their nose and eye is so keen that they will on occasion
destroy every single nest along a mile or more of hedge. !
Out in the fields it is comparatively rare to find a nest
destroyed by vermin, however obvious the place ; but along

52 SUMMER

the line of any hedge or fence the destructions are innumer-
able. In one case that the writer watched, a rat began a
strangely ingenious and secretive attack on a partridge's
nest, but quite failed for some reason to proceed with it.
The nest was a scooped hollow in some rather rough grass
alongside a line of chestnut fencing, at the bottom of which
was stretched some mesh-wire. A rat, presumably by
design, tunnelled under the fence, coming up in the very
nest, but rather to one side of the centre. Into the hole he

took, or there fell, three of the eggs. It was thought that
the partridge had deserted, as the remaining eggs were cold.
But two days later, when the nest was visited, the nest-end
of the hole was quite covered, indeed half blocked by some
very coarse bents of crested-dog's-tail grass. These were
also spread about the rest of the nest, which looked gener-
ally redecorated, and the eggs were half concealed by grass.
The rat made no further onset, for the very good reason —
such at least was the plausible inference — that the vermin
itself had fallen victim to other vermin. At any rate within
twenty yards of the nest a dying rat was found terribly
mauled by a stoat. Thus did the partridge, after touching
the razor-edge of danger, maintain her place.

All these ground-nesting birds suffer from the increased
thoroughness of cultivation, although some of them, par-

DANGERS OF THE GROUND 53

tridges especially, flourish most on the best-farmed lands.
They rejoice, both for nesting and for refuge, at other times
in any piece of waste ground ; and where these waste bits
have yielded to cultivation the ground-nesters have shrunk
in numbers, except under special and artificial preservation.
They do more than lose their proper haunt. Among the
standing crops, that after all resemble in some respects the
rough growths of untilled land, they suffer from the scythe
and the mower. The corncrake has quite vanished from
many old haunts. The valley of the Huntingdonshire Ouse
is one. One of the delights of warm June or July evenings,
spent in a boat along reaches that encircle a great plain
known as the Port Holm, was the strange mingling of
sounds, of which the corncrake's ventriloquial note was the
most insistent. The wind kept up a rustling whisper, a
secret sibilant mutter among the great banks of reeds. The
reed-warblers, by this date rather chattering than singing,
fluttered in and out ; and among the ranker grasses the
running corncrakes kept up a burr that recalled a frog or a
murmur of distant machinery or some vast grasshopper.
But the sound has been mute for many years, probably
owing to the greater precision and earliness with which the
grass is cut. The ground-nest, though immeasurably hard
to find if you desire it, could not compete with the blade on
the chariot wheel. So the south is in great measure robbed
of this quaint and pleasing summer visitor, though happily it
is still not less common in the far north.

All nests, being in some degree cups, are liable to flood-
ing. One wet June a nuthatch's nest was found flooded out,
and the young dying of wet. They were rescued, the nest
drained, and the birds replaced, when some of the brood
survived ; but their plight showed that even a tree-hole,
carefully selected and at some altitude, is not quite storm-

54 SUMMER

proof. But in general the builders in holes are tolerably
safe, certainly safer than other small birds which choose the
ground or a spot close to the ground. Treading feet must
always be a menace, especially in gardens and places which
men frequent. How often one has watched, with almost
daily anxiety, a nest of a garden robin or chifTchaff escape a
succession of threats ; and then, just when safety seemed at

YOUNG NUTHATCHES

hand, catastrophe has fallen. The chiffchaffs used to build
for example in the gardens of south London, especially
Dulwich. A few no doubt survived ; but some watchers,
at any rate, found not once or twice that just as the young
were nearly fit to fly they fell victims to a prowling cat. The
dog is not, as a rule, though exceptions exist, a bird-nester ;
but in its restless and inquisitive wanderings it will destroy
out of pure frolic many a robin's nest.

Yet some small birds are most singularly successful in rear-
ing their broods. Stonechats and whinchats, which are fond

DANGERS OF THE GROUND

55

of nesting just beyond the shelter of a furze-bush, will defy
the most prying eyes, though the neighbourhood of the nest
is obvious enough. Larks, which build without protection
in the open, suffer very little from weather, and are seldom
pounced upon, thanks to a subtle sense of protective
selection ; and their fondness for very dry commons is no
little protection against the rains of June. How snug the
chats sit under a diaphanous canopy, that keeps off rain but

not the sweet air. There is enjoyment as well as caution in
the round-about approach to the nest, and ecstasy in the
quick final run down the pathway passage. The common is
a safe and lovely place for all the family : for the cock who
sings lustily on the top spray, vaunting his fine colours that
all the world may see ; for the hen, quick with the thoughts
of maternity in the soft nook the two have chosen and
selected ; for the chicks when they come to growth and hear
the parent birds scuttling along the private path, secret from
all intruders' ears and eyes.

56 SUMMER

Those birds of the common, which dislike wet, suffer
very much less from summer downfalls than the water-birds
themselves. • It is unexpected, but ducks which delight in
water, whose young are water-proof, as it were, at birth, and
lovers of the stream, suffer much from heavy rain and wet
weather, overwhelming the feather walls of their nests. It
is not uncommon on this account for the duck to build in the
hollows of waterside trees ; but more often they nest on the
ground, some yards from the water, and during this time suffer
as if they were land-lubberly partridges from flood. But this is
a spring not a summer story. The duck are flying
and may be shot when August begins. It is worth
notice because rare that pheasants will now and
again give up their ground-
nesting habit. In one in-
stance a pheasant's nest
was found, safe from flood
beneath or rain above, in
the upper part of a thick
spruce, her eggs laid on
the flattened deserted nest

w Hi AOH.JJ

of a squirrel.

As numbers increase, and nesting-sites become fewer,
naturalists begin to note a tendency among bush-nesting
birds to seek the ground. Thrushes are certainly more fond
of the ground than they once were. We have found their
homes well concealed in the midst of high kexes in a spinney.
It may have been no more than accident, but the nests were
in such case rather slighter, as if the bird was beginning to
come into line with the ground-nesters which naturally prefer
a hollow in the earth to a manufactured cup. Will the
weasels and rats drive back this company of earth-lovers to
the bushes they have deserted ?

THE ROSE OF ENGLAND

WE go out into our gardens and sow seeds or transplant
plants or watch green tips of herbaceous things top the soil,
or pick our first snowdrops in February if not in January.
The garden is still a pleasant place of flowers and life, it
may be, even in November, if frosts have spared the dahlias
and damp the chrysanthemums. So many things are now
'perpetual' that it is difficult to say which is the proper
month of each flower. If we adopted the custom of the
North American Indians, who called each month by the
name of its properest plant — so June was the Moon of straw-
berries— we should be rebuked for a series of months by
finding bits of June astray in November. Not many flowers
are more perpetual, even those not christened with that
blessed word, than roses, once taken as the very symbol of
brevity. As the petals have multiplied and the colours
extended and the characters commingled, the life has been
prolonged. Not only 'Christmas roses' bloom at Christ-
mas ; and in a garden you may have plenty flowers of ' the
short-lived rose,' from the blooming of the Banksia, it may
be even as early as March, to November or December
blooms of Frau Karl Druschki or Gruss an Teplitz and the
old Blush Monthly.

58 SUMMER

But in spite of science in the garden June remains
above other months the month of roses. The short-lived
flower of single petals gives the note. It begins the rose
season and in one sense ends it. The garden is a fair place
because it is a part, though an intensive and often formal
part, of the nature that is outside it ; and abroad the roses
first bloom in June and are clean vanished before July is
over. Beyond all rivalry the dog-rose is the fairest flower
in English hedgerows. It possesses a score of virtues. The
first green leaf-buds of the year are the buds of the rose, and
most delicate is their tint. Behind the light and airy but
very complete screen of the leaves the early nests are built,
most cunningly built, not inside the bush but right against
the fringe, so that the sitting bird and the young have every
advantage of a screen from prying eyes without any want of
air or light. And the twigs on which their home rests are
so slight that the nest is as safe from heavy climbing crea-
tures— from stoats or rats — as from preying birds. There is
no lovelier thing in the lap of summer than a lichened
chaffinch's nest perched with secure lightness in these fring-
ing leaves, sometimes right against a flower. The bird is
not perhaps so fond of the rose as are some others, as the
whitethroat, for example ; but now and again you find a nest
there of such perfection that it remains a jewel in the mind's
eye however many nests be found elsewhere afterwards.
This dog-rose possesses almost all the qualities that appear
in varying degrees of strength in our newest garden roses.
It is a bush rose, but it is also a climber. Great festooning
sprays swing out above bullfinch hedges ; and as you catch
the dim discs of the many flowers some summer night you
might take them for a pattern of stars, illimitably remote.
The dog-rose has signs, too, of that almost evergreen habit
which we admire in the Wichuriana. It has the colours too.

THE ROSE OF ENGLAND 59

It is pink and it is white, and in its yellow anthers we catch
the promise of the gorgeous things that will emerge under
cultivation and hybridisation.

The gardener owes to the dog-rose other thanks too. It
supplies the power of life to our garden standards, as the
wild crab, its nearest rival in the list of hedgerow beauties,
to our apples. It is surely one of the strangest mysteries of
botany, the mother science of the world, that the budded
scion should be thus fed by the vitality of the wild plant's

CHAFFINCH'S NEST

juices and yet be untouched in mien and character. But the
wild thing rebels sometimes at the service. There are
garden roses which are reluctant to flower on their own
roots, and are always budded at the base of a wild plant.
The frequency of the wild brier in the wilder parts of many
gardens is no doubt in part due to the direct victory of the
wild over the tame. The budded stock has triumphed over
the inserted slip and relapsed to its native state.

England is rich in native roses, more rich than many
good observers quite know. We have native wild roses that
differ widely in all the marks by which we recognise roses :
in flower, in scent, in leaf, in thorn, and in habit. Some of

6o

SUMMER

them, too, have double virtues. The dog-rose, which is the
master of them all, carries flowers which are very pink, almost
as pink as the unopened buds, and others which are nearly
white, only less white than the flowers of the most popular
rival to the dog-rose, rosa arvensis. This ' rose of the field '
is common in most places, and often accepted locally as a
variety of the dog-rose. But the kinship is remote. Its
scent is very much more distinct and sweet. Its petals have

the rich crumpled look of some rock-rose petals, arid the wide
golden centre raised to prominence in the shallow cup lends
it an attraction very rare in the family. Soon, too, one learns
to pick out its guise, its habit of growth, from afar as one
distinguishes the pattern of an oak from an ash. It aspires
nearly as high, but the flowers are ranged in arcs of branches
that set out horizontally from the main stem.

Both the common wild roses that light the June hedge-
row have fathered some of the loveliest garden roses at a
remote date : and many an experiment has been made with

THE GARDEN OF MEMORY
By TOM MOSTYN

THE ROSE OF ENGLAND 61

the little wild bush rose, rosa spinosissima, which you find
mostly by the seaside. Nature herself, too, has strewn the
hedgerows with varieties that are scarcely varieties, differing
capriciously in this quality and that : dog-roses with thorns
almost straight, in place of the vicious hook which has given
this rose its name. The gardens of the nurserymen are full
of odd varieties impure in pedigree, some of which make very
poor standards for the budded rose. But the rose that has
parented one of the most pleasing new roses of recent history
is the sweetbrier, the favourite of all our native roses. Like
mint or currant it is endowed in all its parts with its pecu-
liar and delightful lemon fragrance. The fruit is at least
as fragrant as the dainty leaves, and you can extract the
scent from the bark. It is not, in the words of Bacon's
division, ' fast of its smell,' but breathes it out, especially into
the evening air, so that its neighbourhood is as odorous as
a shut room with bowls of lilac. Its sweetness secured its
place even in the most luxurious of tamed gardens. But the
gardeners were not content ; and at last one of them, in the
garden of Lord Penzance, wedded to the sweetbrier flowers
as bright and various in colour as even the English gardener
could desire. The making of the Penzance Brier, of Anne
of Geierstein, and the rest, joined the garden to the hedge-
row. The bushes are at least as lusty as any dog-rose,
tremendous with thorns, and from the centre branches send
out as sweeping boughs as the 'rose of the field' would boast.
The scent pervades leaves and fruits, and fills a whole garden
on a June evening with the subtle odour. But the flowers, if
single, are garden flowers, pink and russet and bronze ; and
in place of the brevity of the wild roses, a few blooms will
succeed one another for many months of the summer season,
indeed until the heps are red.

The flower of June is the rose ; but the months are now
E

62

SUMMER

almost wiped out in the garden, so ' perpetual ' are the new
flowers. Roses, as different as roses can be, imitate one
another in flowering at seasons the most unnatural. Does
any rose so persist in growing and in flowering even when
summer is forgotten as Gruss an Teplitz ? It is red ; its
flower is rather formless ; it is very fragrant. Racially it is
as divergent as may be from its nearest rival in the art
of putting out lusty and perpetual flowers. Frau Karl
Druschki is pure white when once the bud is open. It has
no odour beyond the faintest suspicion of a scent after the
sun sets. Its form is the most perfect that any judge in

search for the ideal ' four point rose ' could ask for. But it
expresses its hardiness in defying the seasons, both in the
output of flowers and in the sprouting of shoots. It will give
you white blooms in December and green buds in February.
There are those who come to despise the single brier and the
short-lived blooms when they have such variety of gorgeous
and solid hues. The Lyon is a vivid bronze, Juliet doubles
bronze with the deepest purple red, the depth of colour in
Madame Heriot runs over into the leaves, and the yellow
Malmaison has the freshness and scent of early spring. But
when all is said the garden fellows to the six wild briers of
Britain have certain unchallenged beauties. No blaze of
colour quite equals the flame of Paul's Carmine Pillar for a

THE ROSE OF ENGLAND 63

gorgeous week or two in June, and the lustiness of its growth
makes it a fellow even of the wild clematis. No garden can
spare the Dorothy Perkins, with its fresh pink flowers, that
have also some of the perennial quality, and its long green
petals and robustious health. It is an individual opinion
that the loveliest of all is the true single brier Jersey Beauty.
Is there any plant on which leaves and flower consent
together with quite so common a grace ? And if the single
flowers do not live with us with the constancy of Gruss an
Teplitz, the shiny deep-hued leaves are evergreen. As the
crooked fang of the dog-rose announces its hardiness, the
length and straightness and sharpness of the Jersey Beauty's
arms proclaim it a real 'struggle-for-lifer.' If tea-roses and
hybrid perpetuals have multiplied the glory of the garden
indefinitely, the companions of the wild briers, British and
Continental, have made possible new designs and new
structures. They have created, one may say, a new style of
architecture, which might be called the hedgerow style.

We have six, some say seven, wild roses now growing in
England, of which the first three in the list are found almost
everywhere.

Rosa canina. The dog-rose.

Flowering stems long, rather weak and straggling.
Leaflets five, or sometimes seven. Flowers pink
or white, usually sweet scented, solitary, or three or
four together at the end of the branches.

Flowers summer rather early.

Foliage varies considerably, either glabrous or
more or less downy, sometimes glandular at edges.

Fruit ovoid without bristles.

64 SUMMER

Rosa arvensis. Field rose.

More trailing than Rosa canina. Foliage very
similar.

Flowers white with gold stamens. Usually three
or four at the end of the branches, rarely solitary.

Flowers summer, lasting much later than R.
canina.

Rosa rubiginosa. Sweetbrier.

Very nearly allied to R. canina, but easily recog-
nised by the aromatic scent of the foliage when
rubbed.

Leaves glandular.

Flowers pink, usually solitary, rather smaller
than R. canina.

Flowers early summer.

Rosa spinosissima or pimpinellifolia. Burnet or Scotch
rose.

The most spiny of all the roses. Small bushy
shrub.

Leaflets small, seven or nine to each leaf.

Flowers rather small, white or pink, solitary at
the end of the short branches.

Fruit black.

Flowers spring or early summer and sometimes
again later.

Rosa villosa or pomifera. Downy rose.

Fruit globular, more or less covered with small
fine prickles.

Leaflets downy on both sides.
Flowers white or pale pink.
Flowers early summer.

SONGS AND MUSIC

ONLY in June may you hear all the songs and notes of birds,
young and old. There is more of the zest of spring in many
May songs ; and in the middle of June other birds than the
cuckoo change their tune for the worse before descending
into a croak or to silence. But the opening of June is the
only time perhaps when the chorus is quite full, when the
turtle-doves croon behind the leaves, and the pied flycatcher
ripples on his garden perch, and the swifts scream in the high
air, and the corn-bunting gurgles his few rough notes, and
the robin calls fussily to its young. There are at any rate
more noises, if not more song, in early June than at any other
date. This is the time when a real knowledge of song and
note tells. Earlier one has at least a chance of watching
the singer, though it is hard enough even so to mark his
identity. A silhouette against a skyline can give as little in-
formation as any object of sight, but it gives some. In June
the bulk of the songs and sounds come from mysterious
depths of green. You may spend a day in seeking the singer,
and at the end have scarcely caught the glint of his wing.
Even the nightingale, which loves a low perch and is not
very shy, is hard to watch with any distinctness. A wry-
neck is virtually invisible.

66 SUMMER

As one listens to the songs of these invisible singers with
an enjoyment that is quite inexplicable, and tries at all to
analyse the charm, one at once realises that the songs are
not in any strict sense music. What are the most notable
singers ? Probably if a competition were held for the finest
singer among birds five candidates would take the votes :
the nightingale and the blackcap from the migrants ; the
blackbird, thrush, and lark from our home birds. Perhaps a
few would maintain the cause of the missel-thrush and the
willow-warbler.

Of all these the blackbird is the only one which can be
called musical or tuneful in the sense
that one generally gives to ' music ' or
' tune.' He almost, perhaps quite,
whistles an air. The notes are clear,
and succeed one another with a recog-
nisable connection. The tone is fluty ;
and when this early morning singer
breaks through your sleep, you might
mistake him for a cheerful boy whistling

odd bars for sheer lightness of heart. Some people can only
admire the blackbird among birds. They can find no har-
mony to which their ears can respond in other songs. To
their sense the robins and thrushes merely make noises,
which are perhaps some addition to the sense of gaiety in
things, but not sufficiently interesting or musical to warrant
the trouble in distinguishing. ' I know the robin's song
only because it stops so suddenly,' or 'That must be a
thrush because it is saying "Pretty Dick, pretty Dick'" —
their perception of the points of the many songs does not
go further than this. At the other end of the scale we find
ears so finely tuned to the notes of birds that every song
can be remembered as well as recognised. Mr. Hudson,

SONGS AND MUSIC 67

whose ear for song amounts to genius, could recall to him-
self, after twenty years' absence from England, the song of
all our birds save three or four ; and probably the finest
passage in any book of natural history is his account of the
towering songs of the great American birds in one of his
books.

The strangest thing about the welcome given to birds'
songs is that people may be within range of a particular song
year after year and never consciously hear it. One day a
naturalist says to them, ' Listen to the golden-crested wren in
the cedar,' or ' That is a cirl bunting in the elm ' — and for the
future the songs of the two birds, previously unnoticed and
unknown, take their proper place among the pleasures
of the garden. No doubt a surprising number of people
are absolutely deaf to song. The trill of the grasshopper-
warbler — a wonderfully accurate reproduction of the noise
of a fishing - reel, though pitched higher — is wholly in-
audible to some people of moderately acute hearing. The
song of the blue tit and the lark disappears from the
list of audible sounds at the very first approach of deaf-
ness ; and hundreds of country people never seem to have
heard the pretty little whispered piece of the goldcrest.

If music proper be the test the
blackbird comes first. Those seven
or eight clear notes that he whistles
at sunrise and again after sunset also
carry farther than the song of any
bird, even than the thin, pleading
cry of the nightingale beneath the
stillness of summer stars.

, . . NIGHTINGALE

As you loiter near a singing

nightingale the force of the guttural throat most astonishes
and thrills you. But, as the distance from the singer increases,

68

SUMMER

one part of the song after the other falls away till you can
only hear that one lone and thrilling cry. The notes of the
blackbird, very often in a sequence of seven, are describable
in music. They differ a good deal, but the consecutiveness
of the notes and the liquidness of the tone form the most
unmistakable and cheeriest of all songs. Of the strains given
in Witchell's wonderful book the following, though more
monotonous, is, so to speak, the foundation of the song,

f

f

with the exception of the final note, which is the same as the
penultimate. Witchell, however, gives this as the alarm
note. But we must not judge birds' song by any of our
musical standards. Sounds in nature, whether made by
animate or inanimate things, please us because they are

consonant with the mood
and form of the world at
the moment : ' The moan
of doves in immemorial
elms and murmur of in-
numerable bees ' are har-
monious for more esoteric
reasons than — may one

say ? — the music of those
two famous lines of the

young Tennyson. The
tinkle of thin ice, the

chromatic moan of the wind, the sucking whisper of the reced-
ing surf, are not musical sounds, but each has the power to stir
Celtic sense of ' old, forgotten, far-off things ' as powerfully as
the triumphant harmonies of Teutonic masters. Birds' songs

WOOD-WREN

SONGS AND MUSIC 69

have such a quality. The most musical are not always the
most pleasing. Few can give more pleasure than the high
crescendo ripple of the tree-pipit as he makes a sharp gable
of flight above an oak, or — to give a personal preference — the
first bell of the wood-wren, to be heard year after year, much
about the same date, from a neighbouring group of beeches.
It has no music and little variety ; but yet it could ' beget the
golden time again,' as did the cuckoo's song, for Wordsworth
ringing gently like this :

a moving mystery of sound now from one place, now from
another, penetrating the leafage of the wood where he lay on
just one particular sunny day.

The secret of the charm of the more real singers is much
the same as of the cuckoo. In the
lark's song is contained all the sense
of surrounding things, as catalogued —
if one may say so — in Meredith's ' Lark
Ascending,' one of the great poems of

the century. Much of the nightingale's supremacy is due to
the night and quietness, and if the poets had been early
risers we should have heard as much of the blackbird.

The blackbird apart the best songs are least expressible
in music. It is quite impossible to give in musical notation
the song of the lark, which, with a very few exceptions, may
be called the one continuous singer among birds. Scots-
men have compared the song with the music of the pipes,
and the resemblance is quite perceptible. Whether this is an
argument for or against the musical nature of the song is a
question that may be left undecided. But the majority of

7o SUMMER

songs are little set pieces of more or less constant length and
time. They are more easily expressed and learned. The
chaffinch or the vellowhammer are good types of the set

song. The chaf-
finch in captivity
and under instruc-
tion will learn to
lengthen out his
piece by a bar and
more, but in nature
the rippling trill,

suggestive with the tinkling rise in the last two notes of a
fountain, is generally of an even length. An excellent
reproduction, so far as pause goes, of the yellow-bunting's
song is given by Witchell, thus :

But certainly many buntings do not ascend in the first
notes of the song with this regularity. Most, we should say,
do not rise at all, in the first four notes at any rate. The
subject of birds' song and its relation to music is doubtless
worth study ; but to the field naturalist the more absorbing
pursuit is to separate the call notes, alarm notes, and songs,
and to read in them the language of birds. The more you
listen to birds at nesting-time the more clearly you discover
how wide is the range of expression, one might say, of conver-
sation. In their songs, which most arrest our attention, lies but
half their power of articulate utterance. But the learning of
birds' songs and, so to speak, words, is only easy and fruitful
in the early morning. For the rest of the day, with the ex-
ception of a period of evening ecstasy — very different from

SONGS AND MUSIC 71

the morning domesticity — the language of most birds is more
or less pedestrian. Especially do the spring migrants exult
in the morning hours. It is more necessary for the observer
to be up with the blackcap than with the lark, one of the few
midday singers.

The morning too is the best hours for hearing all those
bird conversations which are almost as attractive as the
songs. As great attention has been paid in recent years to

YELLOWHAMMER

the ' call notes ' and ' alarm notes ' of birds as to their songs,
but from all classifications escape a host of half-whispered
notes which are not song or call. The hen-bird does not
sing, but she undoubtedly speaks and whispers. We have
heard the hen stonechat make a singing noise ; and if you
are quite close to young and parents at feeding-time some
summer morning, you will hear eager sounds and soft endear-
ments that suggest a power to talk as well as to sing. Some
cock-birds have a sort of croon which is quite different from
song. You may, for example, hear from the cock bullfinch a

72 SUMMER

nest-side song which is very little like the spring song ; and
the golden-crested wren sings songs which are only recog-
nisable as his because of the tone. The sequence of notes
has no set pattern at all. Perhaps in marking all the minor
songs and calls of birds it is the quality of the voice, if one
may say so, that makes recognition less difficult. The sibilant
goldcrest, the soprano robin, the rough whitethroat, the
hoarse corn-bunting, the liquid wagtail, the squeaky tits —
have all a sort of voice that is recognisable, as well as a sort
of song. Even when birds mimic to perfection, as the
starling mimics the thrush, the quality of voice bewrays them.
This quality abides even when the song is sweet and the
chirp harsh. Larks and pipits, for example, have calls that
are perhaps harsher than any song-bird's. They sound more
akin to the jackdaw than the thrush ; but it is still a lark's
note, only it needs wide skies and a place in continuous
sequence before it can achieve its charm.

ALONG THE RIVER

A STRANGE and luxuriant vegetation runs riot by the margin
of lowland rivers at midsummer, and fosters abundantly the
life of insect and bird. Although the water-plants rose
slowly so long as the mists and frosts lay low along the
stream in the spring months, once the summer suns have
well warmed the marshy ground and shallow pools by the
river their undergrowth grows almost tropical. Of all
British plants the great water-dock has the most sumptuous
and African growth ; and when we see its huge and sappy
leaves gemmed in June with azure dragon-flies, it seems a
glimpse of some exotic flora and fauna. Many of the stream
plants are survivors of very ancient forms of vegetable life,
which have found a lasting refuge in the pools and channels ;
and they wear an alien air among the flowers of the pastures
and hedges. It often happens that the plants of a compara-
tively small stream are more interesting than those of the
land through which it flows. The alluvial ooze and free
water-supply of the river make them less dependent on
local richness in the soil ; so that in the heart of a dull clay
vale or bleak plain on the coal measures, where the land
flowers are surprisingly scarce and monotonously familiar,
there will often be some notable plant in the stream. The

78

74 SUMMER

interest of the river flora is also due to the way in which the
network of a wide water-system provides an easy path for
the dissemination of seeds by birds and waterside animals,
and downstream by the current itself. Rivers are sowers of
most kinds of seed, but specially of those which they foster in
their own sedgy gardens ; and the plants which muster
thickly in such a paradise of watery life as the Norfolk
Broads or the upper Thames backwaters are distributed far
and wide among barer landscapes and beside austerer
shores.

I. THE FLOWERS AND RUSHES

The thick screens of water-plants which fringe the bank
of the Thames, and many other rivers in June, are chiefly
made up of flag and pond-sedge and bur-reed and scented
rush. There are scores of other plants gaily scattered
among them, but these four usually supply the real substance
to the thicket. The flag" or yellow iris is in high flower
before the middle of June, or even in May, in warm and
forward years in the south. Its heraldic blossom seems
emblematic of this regal time; oncoming midsummer lifts
her sceptre by the luxuriant stream. Each flower passes
quickly over, and though several open on a stalk in swift
succession, the flowering of the yellow flag is over only too
soon. The smooth flag-leaves give a glaucous sheen to the
thickets where they predominate ; from the day when they
first push out, lusty and flat, from the knotted roots in April,
they are bluer than most of the plants of the stream. The
pond-sedges — for they vary in size and kind — have a
narrower and greener leaf, rough, with a cutting edge ; it is
loud and rustling when the June storms toss by the water-
side. Its handsome grassy tops of sepia and buff are scarcer
in June than in late April and May, but still help to varie-

ALONG THE RIVER 75

gate the green beds. Bur-reed is brighter green, with soft

blades harmless to the touch ; it has spikes bearing little

silvery heads of unfertile

blossom, and beneath

them the fertile burrs

like little thorn-apples,

which grow larger as

summer goes on. The

scented rush is a local,

but often an abundant,

plant ; if a boat is driven

at random into one of

the reedy islands on the

upper Thames in soft

June weather, the sweet

spicy smell of the bruised

stems and blades will

often rise thickly all

round. The scented rush

bears an outstretched

green finger, like the

spike in the cowl of an

arum, but netted with

angular lines ; by this it

can easily be identified

at a little distance, when

deep water prevents th,e

plant being plucked and

its scent proved.

There is much confu-
sion in the popular names
of many of these water-plants. The scented rush is not one
of the rushes, and indeed does not resemble them ; it is some-

YELLOW FLAG

76 SUMMER

times called the sweet sedge, but belongs to a distinct family
from the other sedges. The handsome plant usually known
as the bulrush is also not a rush ; its right name is the greater
reed-mace. The tall plant usually known as the giant rush
is the true bulrush ; it is the graceful stem, six or eight feet
high, often with a tuft of green blossom at the top, which
grows in the shallower water, but not on land. Though it is
so much like a large rush, and is used to seat rush-bottomed
chairs, it is really not a rush but a sedge. In small streams
the giant rush chiefly contributes to the great rafts of vegeta-
tion which collect against outstretched boughs of hawthorns
and willows, and form playgrounds and resting-places for the
water-rats and moorhens. The stems die, and turn brown
and brittle, in autumn, and rap against each other with a
peculiar restless pattering as they are plucked by the fuller
stream. Presently it snaps them off, and they break into
short lengths as they turn head-over-heels in the flooded
channels. The dipped bough catches the light wreckage,
and the stream continually adds to it and piles it higher,
until nearly a cart-load of dead bulrush stems may be heaped
among the boughs of the anchoring bush. As spring and
summer advance the heap grows smaller than after the
December floods, but settles into a more solid mass ; and by
the time that the new giant rushes are tall above the stream,
it is hard to tell the nature and origin of the mysterious
haycocks piled among the overhanging boughs.

The flowering rush is another delightful plant of the
river-bank which is no real rush. It is not uncommon about
midsummer along the Thames and other lowland rivers with
a rich vegetation, though it is seldom found abundantly. It
has a loose cluster of rosy blossoms springing from the very
tip of its long slender stem. More local and confined to part
of the Thames basin is the summer snowflake, or Loddon

ALONG THE RIVER

77

lily, which flowers in late spring and early summer, long"
after the snowdrop which it resembles has been buried by
the rising vegetation in the woods. It is to escape a like
suffocation that the Loddon lily and all the later plants of the
riverside sedge-belts must grow so tall. Only thus can they
reach the sunlight, except when they have floating or half-
sunken leaves, and flower on the surface of shallow pools
and backwaters. The first blossom of these water-gardens,

LODDON LILY

after the familiar marsh marigold, is the delicate lilac water-
violet, which shakes out its loose cluster in April and early
May. Here the nomenclature of the waterside plants has
run wilder than usual, for the water- violet is neither a true
violet nor resembles one. It is more like the cuckoo-flower
or lady-smock which blooms at the same time in the neigh-
bouring meadows. About midsummer the arrow-head lifts
its pink flowers and angular arrow-shaped leaves out of the
water in many of the shallow ditches communicating with the
Thames. Rarer plants of the same Thames ditches are the

78 SUMMER

frog-bit, with its large white blossom, and the villarsia, which
has yellow flowers, and is like a small water-lily. Water-
lilies spring from deeper water, and send their leaves and
buds to the surface by long clinging stems. The yellow
water-lily is the smaller and commoner of the two ; its
ripening seed-heads smell like anise, and are shaped much
like the capsules of the poppy tribe, with which the water-
lilies are closely allied, for all their difference of habit. The
white water-lily brings the very fullness of summer to the
ample lowland streams ; it first opens its large green buds
about midsummer, and goes on blooming throughout July.
When the seed is ripened, the heads sink again into the
depths. The same object of reaching the sunshine for the
flowering and fruiting time is attained in a highly specialised
manner by the bladderwort, which grows in the shallower
ditches. The fibrous leaves are buoyed up by small bladders,
and the plant thus gains stability to hold erect its spike of
yellow blossoms, mouthed like the snapdragon. Forget-me-
not spreads its turquoise blossoms and fresh green leaves
among the running ditches ; blue brooklime and purple
water-speedwell mingle with the water-cress and white-
flowered marshwort, which mimics the water-cress until we
look for the notched edges to its leaves.

Meadow-sweet and willow-herb are two of the most con-
spicuous plants among the taller vegetation of the river-
banks at midsummer; they begin to bloom when the comfrey
has shed its bell-shaped blossoms of purple, pink, or white.
Like the milkwort of the midsummer downs, its blossoms
run through many shades of colour ; nor does the difference
seem to correspond to any difference in the soil constituents,
as is the case with the garden hydrangea and the white or
yellow anemone. Marsh woundwort lifts its nettle-like leaves
and purple blossoms among the same varied vegetation, and

ALONG THE RIVER

79

with it blooms the gipsy-wort, with clusters of smaller pink
blossoms in the axils of its notched leaves. Another
handsome plant which here and there grows freely on the
Thames banks and
the marshy edges of
the backwaters is the
meadow - rue. This
has creamy yellow
blossoms something
like those of the
meadow - sweet, but
the plant is taller
and its leaves more
deeply cut. Because
it shoots among the
thickest streamside
vegetation, where its
blossom is easily mis-
taken for that of the
meadow-sweet, it is
apt to be overlooked,
though it is one of the
most striking water-
side plants. Much
commoner, and fonder
of growing actually
in the shallow mar-
gin of the river, is the
water-plantain, with

its large head of small lilac flowers. The leaves are shaped
like those of the plantains which deface our lawns, though
the plants belong to quite different tribes. The water-plantain
is of the same family as the arrowhead. It is a curious

MEADOW-SWEET

8o SUMMER

sign of the way in which we regard the water as an alien
element that many water-plants and water-beasts are given
allusive names based on some likeness — often vague enough
— to a plant or animal on the dry land, which is our own
native element We speak of water-plantains and water-
violets and sea-mice and sea-cucumbers and sea-anemones,
but never of land-coral, which would be a good name for
certain fungi, or land - prawns for mole-crickets, or land-
whelks or land-periwinkles for snails. This fantastic nomen-
clature of the water fauna and flora tends to hide the real
wonder and beauty of the life of the water under an artificial
appeal. Much as the manatee used not to be thought to
be interesting enough for showmen to exhibit unless it
was called a mermaid, the water-plantain is named after a
less interesting land-plant in order to recommend it to our
acquaintance in a more familiar light.

Two distinct riverside plants are known as the yellow
loosestrife. One is the moneywort or creeping jenny, which
crawls about damp banks, and opens its bright yellow
blossoms like fallen coins. This is a close relation of the
yellow pimpernel of the shady copses and the red pimpernel
which blooms under the lighter shadow of the corn. The
other yellow loosestrife belongs to the same family, and
perhaps has a better right to the name than the moneywort,
as it has no alternative in common use. Moneywort can
put up with very little sunshine, and therefore remains a
lowly plant, not competing with the tall flags and sedges ;
but the other yellow loosestrife grows in their midst, and
spreads its brilliant yellow blossoms to the sun on strong
branching stems which press among the harsh blades of
the sedge. In its branched growth and the brilliant yellow
of the blossoms it recalls the St. John's wort tribe, and might
be taken for a slenderer tutsan. The commoner purple

ALONG THE RIVER 81

loosestrife belongs to another tribe, despite the name, and to
a different phase of the year. It begins to bloom by the
banks of the river in July, like the willow-herb ; and when
their kindred purples begin to tinge the screens beside the
river we know that the year is already declining, and the riot
of midsummer has gone by.

Beside all these luxuriant marsh and water-plants, the
banks of the river foster another company which prefer a
well-drained soil. They are able to grow by the river
because of the sharp contrast in soils which is often found
in such a place. The low steep banks against which the
river washes are often formed of alluvial grit, washed down
by the river in earlier epochs, and freed of clay and slime.
Thus the banks are porous and well drained, although there
is a free passage of water from beneath to feed the plants
that grow on them. Between the edge of the turf above and
the lip of the water below, among the water-rats' holes and
the rarer galleries of the sand-martins and kingfisher, there
is a group of plants quite different from the stately water-
flowers which overshadow them. It is more varied than the
true water-plants, and includes many species which have
strayed from the cornfields and pastures above ; but several
attractive plants are often found on the little earthen cliff,
and some of the commoner species take a delicate miniature
growth, in scale with the dwarf hanging garden. Dewberry
blossoms open in June on their small straggling briers, and
the soft berry with its delicate bloom is ripe before the black-
berry is yet in flower. Scorpion-grass, with its smaller grey-
blue blossoms, contrasts with the clearer colour and more
luxuriant growth of the forget-me-not in the water below.
Scorpion-grass is a land forget-me-not, and the common
garden varieties are derived from it, and not from the more
handsome water-plant, which is too thirsty a subject for the

82 SUMMER

ordinary garden-bed. One of the most attractive plants
which are usually found by the waterside, and yet require
a dry and well-drained soil, is the skull-cap, with its dark
blue-lipped blossoms and narrow dark green leaves. Among
full-grown trees the common willow has the same prefer-
ence. It likes to plunge its roots in a stratum through
which water passes freely, but to stand in a sound loam.
The sallow, or palm-willow, on the other hand, is fond, like
the alder, of a regular mire or slough, where the moorhens
dabble among the ooze and the draggled sedges. Here and
there, where the river-banks are formed of stiff clay, the bur-
marigolds — there are two closely similar species — lift their
solid round blossoms of dull yellow over frills of deeply-
cut leaves. In its substantial growth and dull colouring the
bur-marigold seems the true offspring of the heavy clays ;
and it is a conspicuous plant of the running ditches among
the pastures of rural Middlesex, where the London clay
nurtures its limited flora. Wild teasels tolerate the same
inhospitable soil, and lift their purple heads and water-catch-
ing frills of leaves on the same clayey banks of the stream.
Drowned insects are often found in these little cisterns, and
they might almost provide breeding-places for the larvae of
mosquitoes, which are gnats under an imposing name.

II. THE BIRDS AND INSECTS

Most of the insects which abound at midsummer by the
river spend their earlier stages among the slime and weeds
of the stiller reaches, or the gravel of the brisker runs.
Mayflies, which rise thickly in early June on many rivers and
certain lakes, spend two years in the mud of the river-
bed before emerging for a few days at most to court in the
air above. The caddis- worms, which drag their varied tubes

ALONG THE RIVER 83

about the bottom of the channels, are not the larvae of May-
flies as is often supposed, but of the heavy reddish sedge-
flies which abound at evening by the water after the time of
the Mayflies is past. With their black heads and fore-
legs protruding from their case, the caddis-worms stumble
among the water-weeds in the clear shallow pools of the
little backwaters, like ants hauling a burden through the
grass. Brown water-boatmen flick themselves with their
paddles through the sun-warmed water, and larger black
water-beetles slant their way down like little turtles through
the weeds. Water-snails of many sizes, with shells in flat
and spiral coils of varied patterns, go delicately gliding
along the green blades of the weed, or tracing a little path-
way across the gritty floor. The swifter life of this exquisite
miniature water-world is supplied by the minnows hanging
poised to start in shoals ; and if we stir the mud beneath we
come upon strange dragons of the under-world — sprawling
larvae of water-beetles, and the dragon-fly in its hideous sub-
aqueous form.

Most dragon-flies are graceful in form and colour as well
as fleet of wing, but the most exquisite species haunt the
watersides from early June. The larger species that rove
freely through gardens, lanes, and clearings in woodlands
in later summer are excelled by several smaller kinds that
haunt the watersides. Dragon-flies are badly off for English
names ; ' horse-stinger ' is crudely misleading, and ' demoi-
selle,' which is sometimes confined to the smaller species, is
not really English. There are scientific Latin names for use
at need, but they seem stiff and out of place while the living
insects float by the June waterside. But it is as well to
know that the two commonest varieties — one with wings
broadly splashed with metallic purple and the other with
rusty red — are the two sexes of one species, and that when

84 SUMMER

they sail together in courtship nature is not planning some
singular hybridisation, as the unlikeness of the two insects
might seem to indicate. Their lazy, flapping flight is in
harmony with the ease of the summer river ; but the little
sapphire dragon-flies that drift in shoals among the sedges
have the nimbleness of the minnows in the water-world,

where life has a crystal lightness
unrelaxed by the July heats.
Light plays in their slender
bodies as in a jewel, and almost
as jewel-like is a delicate crim-
son dragon-fly of the same size,
which is more rarely seen by
the stream. Both sexes of this
species are of the same brilliant
red, but the female of the small
sapphire dragon-fly is dull yel-
low, with darker stripes.

The kingfisher's back as it
shoots down the arcaded channel
has the same sapphire gleam
that harbours in the bodies of
the dragon-flies. Compared
with the brilliant blue of its
back, the ruddy chestnut of its
breast seems almost dusky ; and

even its back loses much of its brilliance as the bird comes
to rest upon a willow-bough, and the light ceases to play
on its metallic feathers. As it sits and eyes the stream
below, waiting for the chance to plunge upon a minnow,
the two white patches on the neck are often its most
conspicuous feature, though we seldom notice them in
flight. The kingfisher is heard three or four times by the

DEMOISELLE

ALONG THE RIVER 85

practised ear for once that it is seen ; its thin but piercing
pipe is very distinctive among the cries of the riverside,
though it occasionally suggests one of the varied notes of
the common sandpiper, which haunts the Thames and other
lowland streams for some time on passage in late spring.
Sometimes when the elfin piping is heard, we look up and
catch a glimpse of the kingfisher spinning like a nebulous
blue meteor in and out of the curves of the stream, or swerving
directly across the meadows to the shelter of the willows ;
but often it flies so low behind the sedge-screen that we only
hear it pass. Kingfishers sit motionless on their perches,

so as not to scare their prey ; but their plunge, when it
comes, is decisive. They strike the stream with a sounding
smack, and usually fly back to their perch at once before
tossing the minnow upright in their beak for convenience in
swallowing it. If they have young to feed, we see the fish
glittering in their bills as they spin off in the direction of the
nest. More rarely they hover over the stream before
plunging ; and this is the most beautiful of all their displays,
as the fanning wings multiply the shimmering iridescence.
Thanks to steady protection, kingfishers are now by no
means rare on the Thames water-system and many other
southern streams. They are scarcer by the rocky torrents

86 SUMMER

of the north and west, for there are fewer calm pools suitable
for their minnow-fishing; but they are found sparingly on
many such waters, and also in rocky harbours and estuaries
by the sea. The common situation for the nest-hole is in
some vertical loamy bank of the river, or a bordering ditch
or backwater ; but occasionally they choose a bank some
hundreds of yards inland from their fishing-grounds, or even
a crevice in a quarry. The hole is much like a water-rat's,
but more evenly oval ; it leads into a gallery about two feet
long, at the end of which the round white eggs are laid.
The birds usually dig a fresh gallery each year, and the con-
dition of the kingfisher's nest at the end of the season is
certainly not attractive to any but an exceptionally dirty
bird. Since they are nursed in the security of this deep
hole, the young birds can afford to develop in their first
plumage the conspicuous family dress ; and the same in-
fluence determines that the eggs shall be white, since in
their position of safety they have no need to mimic their
surroundings.

Sand-martins also nest here and there along the little
earthy cliffs of the river, though the favourite site for one of
their colonies is in some inland sand-pit. By streams lack-
ing dry and friable banks, but otherwise attractive to them,
they have been found, nesting in narrow drain-pipes built into
a stone embankment, and even in galleries bored in the soft
wood of rotten willows. Sand-martins are as gregarious as
kingfishers are solitary, and flutter like clouds of Mayflies
above the midsummer stream. House-martins fly more
strongly, and in more sweeping curves, and swallows more
boldly still ; but the swift is the lord of the swallows by right
of swallow-like flight, though he is no real swallow. One of
the delights of the streamside meadows in summer is to
watch the swifts rushing past so close and low that we can

ALONG THE RIVER 87

see the dull white patch on their chins ; and notice, as summer
goes on, how their sooty feathers get worn by rubbing in
their roosts, and bleached in the strong sun, until they gain
the same transparent greyish look at the edges that we see
in the ruffled plumage of the black swan, or the dowdy black
moth — dressed in insects' bombazine — which is known as the
Old Lady. This large dusky creature is also common in
boat-houses and other buildings by the waterside, but not
until July or August.

By midsummer the water-wagtails and most of the small

SAND-MARTINS

singing-birds of the riverside have finished nesting, and are
in charge of dwindling troops of inexperienced young. But
moorhens and dabchicks seem never to grow tired of the
nursery, and go on nesting into August ; and midsummer is
the height of the nesting season in the scattered colonies of
reed-warblers. The reed-warblers sling their nests over
water on supporting stems, and prudently make sure that
the vegetation is ripe for its purpose before they trust to it.
Exceptionally they hang their nests to willow and lilac twigs
in withy-beds and gardens by the water ; but the traditional
prop of their house is the true reed, with canelike stem and
blue-grey flowering head, which grows in belts and beds not
too commonly by the edge of the river. Like all river-

88

SUMMER

plants the reed springs late, and the reed-warblers wait till it
has formed a dense cover to hide them building. Unlike the

sedge- warblers they usually nest
in colonies, and this is clearly due
to the scarcity of their favourite
reeds, which concentrates them
in the spots where the reeds
grow. The reed-beds ripple at
midsummer with the reed-warb-
lers' babbling song, which recalls
the sedge-warbler's, but is more
silvery. The number of singers
in one place is also apt to at-
tract attention even from those
ramblers who are not on the watch for reed-warblers or the
brakes which hold them. Then, if we watch closely, the
smooth and slender little birds
in their russet coats can be seen
slipping from reed to reed,
and resting on their vertical
stems in a characteristic atti-
tude, with the upper leg bent
and the lower one stretched
to its full reach.

Perhaps because their
colonies are easy for a wan-
dering bird to discover, reed-
warblers are very often victim-
ised by cuckoos. The surest
way to find a cuckoo's eggs or
nestlings is to search in a

colony of reed-warblers' nests. More meadow-pipits' are
utilised by cuckoos than reed-warblers' ; but it is not so easy

ALONG THE RIVER 89

to find the same number of meadow-pipits' nests in a short
time. Cuckoos' eggs found in reed-warblers' nests are
suffused with a peculiar tint of olive green beneath the usual
vague freckles ; this rough approximation to the colour of
their brother-eggs is noticeable if we compare them with
the greyer cuckoos' eggs to be found in the pied wagtails'
nests in the willows, or the browner type which are usual in
the sedge-warblers' nests among the bushes and under-
growth. The young cuckoo is naked and copper-coloured,
and squats at the bottom of the deep conical nest like a
toad in a hole. Its task of murdering its mates is even more
remarkable when it is born in a reed-warbler's nest than
usual, for the sides of the nest are unusually steep and high.
This is of no apparent effect in discouraging the murderous
instinct of the little changeling ; its effect is to prevent the
legitimate eggs being blown out when the reed-beds dip deep
to the stroking wind. The nests are usually bound to the
reeds which support them by strands of reed-flower of the
previous year ; but reed-warblers have a sharp eye for other
and more convenient materials, and use thread for binding
their nests when they can find it.

Except for the placid swans, which seem to take pride
in their favoured position as tame birds, the water-fowl of the
river are shy and elusive. We have to keep a sharp look-
out for a glimpse of the dabchick between its dives, and
when we hear its loud bubbling laugh it comes usually from
the midst of a thicket of water-plants, where the bird is in-
visible. Its nest is as elusive as itself. It needs some little
practice to distinguish it from merely casual heaps of water-
weed drifting on the surface by a shade more of design in its
moulding. It is a round sodden pudding, out of which the
end of one of the dirty white eggs occasionally sticks like a
large almond out of batter. After the first or second egg is

90 SUMMER

laid, the dabchick drags the wet weed over them whenever she
leaves the nest, and this soon changes their original chalky
whiteness to a muddy brown. The eggs of coots and moor-
hens and most water-birds are exceptionally thick-shelled,
which may possibly serve to protect them from being addled
by temporary flooding of the nest. But the dabchick's nest
is always soaking wet, and the thickness of the eggs is
apparently not enough to safeguard them against chills when
the sitting bird is away. Therefore she covers them with a
blanket of weed, and the heat of this decaying vegetation

DABCHICKS

protects them, and probably helps to hatch them. It is clear
that the object of covering the eggs is not primarily to hide
them, for the first pure white egg is often not covered up ;
and later, when the eggs are covered, they are stained so
deeply as to be very inconspicuous on their bed. The dab-
chick is most easily recognised by its quick and constant
diving, in which it excels all the birds of the coot and water-
hen tribe, and also the surface ducks like the teal and mallard.
Its head and beak look impishly large for its body as it floats
low in the water, with its back almost submerged ; and its
neck in the breeding-season is ruddy, where in winter it is

ALONG THE RIVER 91

pale. Careful watching may show the young dabchicks
riding on their parents' backs, or even taking a trip beneath
the water, held beneath their wings.

Moorhens' nests abound in the reeds and rushes in June,
and change their character as the season advances. Their
nests of spring are substantial dishes of dry flags ; in the
warmer summer weather they often build for the later broods
slighter nests largely composed of green flags and sedges of
the year's growth. But these later nests built to hold eggs
must not be confused with the slighter platforms, also formed

MOORHEN CHICKS

of green blades and stems, which the old and young birds
build among the reeds simply to rest on. And all these
structures of the moorhen are distinct from the platforms
made by the water-rats, on which they sit upright like
squirrels, and nibble the soft white stems of water-plants with
incisors shivering in the rodents' familiar manner. So does a
tame rabbit munch a cabbage-stalk, though he has not the
skill to lift his food in his paws. Moorhens' and water-rats'
platforms can be easily distinguished, for the rodent gnaws
the stems into lengths, while the bird packs and twists them
into a rough circle. Besides moorhens and dabchicks and
coots on some slower and wider streams, a fourth species of
water-bird seems to make its appearance in June and July.

92 SUMMER

It runs about as large as a dabchick, and is dingy greyish-
brown above, with a paler throat and breast. These are the
hobbledehoy moorhens, children of April and May, now
mewing their youth by the waters of midsummer and the
dog-days. In August we shall see the cleaner greys and
olives of the adult plumage gradually replacing their in-
determinate shades.

Dabchicks are street-arabs in all their moods and
gestures ; but moorhens are an extremely respectable race,
with the air of being genuinely shocked at any violent or
irregular conduct by the waterside. They seldom err, and

if occasionally they
wander into gardens

. 6

and eat such strange
meat as tomatoes and
hens' eggs, this is
surely a mistake of
inexperience. Even
the dull-looking elder

brothers are said to help their parents in bringing up the
younger broods ; and it may be suspected that the greener
and slighter June nests are often of their building, since
the architecture closely resembles that of the platforms
which they make among the reeds. The sharp, shocked
cries of the moorhens break out by the side of the river all
day, and irregularly through the night. They are a fearful
race, and their underworld is full of sharklike pike. Another
harsh and persistent cry is often heard nowadays by southern
streams where it was unfamiliar twenty years ago. This is
the anxious note of the snipe with young, calling ' kek-kek-
kek-kek' endlessly from the sky above, as some intruder
wanders over the water-meadows, where the young are
hidden. The snipe's more familiar drumming is sometimes

ALONG THE RIVER 93

heard as late as June, but the note of anxiety gradually
replaces it. Like redshank, and the ruff and bittern in one
or two haunts, snipe are distinctly re-establishing them-
selves. This is largely due to increased protection ; but
in the case of snipe and redshank it is probably owing also
to the spread of sewage farms, which form for marsh-birds
a safe and congenial, if a rather unsavoury, asylum.

The touch of fen country associations suggested by the
snipe calling above the level meadows is renewed by many

YOUNG SNIPE

peeps of landscape along the larger rivers. Sometimes the
river diversifies a prosaic region of mildly undulating pastures,
and sometimes woods drape the cliffs, steeply falling to the
shore ; but often between the stream and the nearest hills
there is a mile or half a mile of green East Anglian scenery
set in alien surroundings. A group of poplars dominates the
level meadows, where a straight dike catches a stripe of
brilliant colour from the sunset sky ; or across the green
expanse, with its true fenland note of composed dignity, the
eye rests on the nodding gable of an old white wooden mill.
Only a few hundred yards away the scene may change to

G

94 SUMMER

steep chalk or sandstone cliffs, or hanging woods of oak and
beech ; but the strip of fenland scenery is complete in its own
narrow limits, and adds to the borders of the summer stream
a richness and variety of landscape like its wealth in flowers
and birds.

SNIPE DRUMMING

CINNABAR MOTHS

THE DAY OF THE MOTH

MOTHS are lovers of warm and obscure night skies, but a
small number prefer the full sunshine of day like butterflies.
Most of the day-flying species conform to the bright colours
and markings of the butterfly tribe; but there is no invariable
distinction of this kind, and in this respect, as in others,
the boundary between moths and butterflies is ill-defined.
Several of the thorn moths, the crimson underwings, and
other night-flying species are as brightly coloured as most of
the butterflies and day-flying moths ; while the brown and
white patterns of the Mi moth and bordered white, which fly
by day, seem more in accord with the duskier markings of the
majority of night-fliers. Certainly there is no lack of brill-
iance about the emperor moths which appear on sunny days
in late April or early May in many heather districts, where
the males with their rich orange-red markings and handsome
eye-spots dash more swiftly than any of our butterflies along
the woodland rides and over the shoulders of the moor. In
flight as in colour these are very brilliant moths, and they
have none of the comparative dullness and torpidity which
distinguish many of their tribe. Later come the vermilion
and sepia cinnabar moths, which appear on commons and in
waste fields where ragwort grows, and in weedy gardens

96 SUMMER

where the kindred groundsel feeds their caterpillars. Burnet
moths have much the same contrast of scarlet spots on a dark
green ground, shot with blue like a rook's wing; and the
beautiful yellow underwing flashes like a firefly about the
heaths in the sun. In close company with the Mi moth the
brown and orange burnet noctua visits the flowers in rough
shrubby fields ; and at the end of summer and in early
autumn the bright chestnut wings of the male vapourer
zigzag rapidly from tree to tree, and the humming-bird hawk
moth vibrates with intense rapidity at the flowers. Cinna-
bars and burnet moths are feeble and heavy fliers, but most
of the other day-flying moths add vivacity and vigour to any
summer scene in which they appear.

Emperor moths are the best-known examples in this
country of a family of silkworm moths which in Asia and
North America run to a great size. Their broad eye-spotted
wings are familiar in insect-houses and private collections,
for they are easily reared, largely owing to their habit of
protecting themselves* in a cocoon during the pupa stage.
The cocoon of the emperor caterpillar is spun among the
heather stems in July and August, and consists of a pear-
shaped case of a tough material like oiled paper, surrounded
by yellowish-brown silk, which holds it in place among the
herbage. Inside the tough cocoon lies the pupa, with the
shred of caterpillar's skin which is cast off; but the method
devised for the emergence of the moth in the following
spring is different from that of the common silkworm or the
caterpillar of the oak eggar moth, which also spins a cocoon
among the heather. The cocoons of the oak eggar and silk-
worm are evenly oval, but the narrow end of the emperor's
cocoon is open externally, and is closed inside by a set of
bristly silken threads, converging to a point. These effec-
tually close the orifice against any small creature which might

THE DAY OF THE MOTH 97

try to penetrate, but the emerging moth can easily push
them asunder.

Day-flying moths include representatives of all the most
conspicuous families. The emperor and oak eggar and fox
moth represent the cocoon-spinners ; the humming-bird
stands for the hawk moths, while the heavy noctuae or owl
moths contribute the beautiful yellow underwing, and the
light geometers the speckled yellow of the May copses. But
the great majority of moths are creatures of dusk and dark
ness ; and unlike the day-flying insects
of their kind, they prefer a dim to a
clear sky. This is probably because
overcast nights are warmer than clear
ones, when the radiation of the earth's
heat is unimpeded by cloud ; and so
frail a creature as a moth is naturally
averse from cold, even if it shuns the
sun. For the same reason, they are
scarce in the chilly hours immediately YELLOW UNDERWING
before the dawn, and are most abundant

on the wing from dusk to about midnight. One of the
first signs of full spring in April is the appearance of the
frail and silvery carpet moths after dusk in the soft night air ;
and moths linger late into autumn during soft weather, while
a few flimsy yet hardy species are to be seen abroad on mild
nights all through the winter. If moths originally became
nocturnal creatures in order to escape from birds which fed
upon them by day, the precaution has long ceased to be of
any service. Bats feed far more persistently on moths by
night than any birds do by day ; and the luminous white and
yellow tints of such species as the ghost swift and the
swallowtail and sulphur moths serve as signals for their own
destruction.

98 SUMMER

Though most moths forgo the sunlight, they are as fond
of the nectar in flowers as the butterflies. The luminous
whiteness of some flowers seems correlated to the nocturnal
habits of the moths which fertilise them ; and the flowers
which shine pale at night are often also strongly scented
during the same hours. Other flowers have a rich nocturnal
perfume without the luminous colour. There is no positively
luminous quality in the blossom of the white jasmine or the
garden tobacco plant, as there is in the glow-worm or the
millipede ; but their pale hue makes them visible on any but
the darkest nights. Sometimes we see a sort of live mist,
quivering at a jasmine or petunia blossom in the dusk, and
may be fortunate enough to identify it as one of the rarer
hawk moths. Hawk moths prefer twilight rather than dark-
ness, but the garden blossoms after nightfall are often more
populous than on a sunny day. Even if we are not collectors,
it is worth while to go round the walks with a lantern after
dark, and surprise both ourselves and the nocturnal revellers
which spar so actively or drink so deeply on the blossoms.
The moths now show an activity which is in strong contrast
to their confused and torpid movements when we discover
them by day. They move briskly on the flowers, and turn
on us curious eyes which seem to glow angrily in the light of
the lantern. These jewel-like eyes of the moths are a strik-
ing feature of the feasts on the flowers, and give them an
attractive and oddly intelligent appearance by contrast with
the earwigs which also abound by night on many flowers.
Earwigs when surprised by the light writhe hastily into the
dark, often falling headlong from the pinnacle of the blossom ;
and the same expedient is practised by one group of the
heavy noctuid moths. They do not take wing, but tumble
to the ground ; and then they have two devices. Some lie
as they fall, often on their backs, and try to escape observa-

THE DAY OF THE MOTH 99

tion by remaining perfectly motionless. This instinct is
common to many wild creatures, which are often regarded as
'shamming dead.' But it is doubtful whether there is often
any definite imitation — whether conscious or instinctive — of a
dead body ; more probably the effectiveness of the device is
simply due to the concealment afforded by motionlessness and
the absence of any movement which might excite hostility.
While some moths lie comically supine, with their legs
retracted, others on falling to earth waste no time in racing
into cover. The large yellow underwing moths of several
kinds and the turnip moths and several of their kindred are
great runners, and are built accordingly. They have large
muscular legs which lift them well off the ground, while their
bodies and folded wings form a compact flat slip which
presents as little resistance as possible to the grass and
undergrowth. When disturbed by day, the common large
yellow underwing darts into cover with amusing speed and
cleverness ; and once these running moths have fallen to the
ground by night they vanish almost instantly.

Creeping insects are instinctively repugnant to humanity,
and there is more attraction about the gauzy and slender-bodied
geometer moths, many of which are also to be found feeding
on flowers. Some of them fold their wings upright over
their backs like a butterfly, when they settle on a flower;
and this habit, which is sometimes wrongly stated to be
peculiar to the butterflies, has at least a clean and butterfly-
like air. The geometers are on the whole much lighter in
colour, as well as in build, than the noctuse or owl moths,
which country people call by the expressive name of
' buzzards ' ; and, like the whiter flowers, they give freshness
to the summer night. The sulphur moth flits yellow through
the dusk, outstripped by the paler and much larger swallow-
tail moth, which dances like a will-o'-the-wisp down the

ioo SUMMER

dark garden alleys in July. In June the various species of
emerald moths float abroad, obscurely pallid in the gloom,
but of exquisitely delicate tints of green when we find them
stranded in our windows next morning, or beat them out of
the beech-saplings and undergrowth.

The attraction of bright light for moths at night seems
partly due to their habit of frequenting pale blossoms. They
are accustomed to visit flowers which advertise themselves
in this way, and are consequently sensitive to any illumina-
tion in the gloom. In a perfectly wild land, where there
were no lamps and few or no fires, moths would not be
exposed to the perils which beset them so constantly in
populous countries ; and they have never acquired the power
of guarding themselves against the fatal fascination of the
candle or lamp. In a district where moths of many species
abound, a surprising variety can be observed by placing a
lamp inside an open window on a warm, cloudy night
between nine o'clock and midnight. The commonest species
and the chief tribes can be easily distinguished after a few
evenings' experience by their method of approach. The
strongly-flying noctuse, such as the common yellow under-
wing and the dark arches — which is one of the commonest
June species about lights — arrive with a sudden dash which
often flings them straight upon the floor as they rebound
from the lamp-shade or the wall. Common swifts also flock
to light in large numbers near hay-fields about midsummer,
and they are betrayed at once by their small size and wildly
erratic speed. The flight of the geometers is comparatively
weak and flapping, yet because of the more moderate pace
with which they arrive they often reach the lamps most
directly and singe themselves at the chimney the soonest.
There are nights in June and early July when the moths
seem seized with madness, and fling themselves through the

THE DAY OF THE MOTH 101

window upon the light in an almost unbroken procession.
Yet no extraordinary frenzy really seizes them on these
crowded nights. The number of the visitors indoors is only
proportionate to the multitudes which are stirring out in the
garden and over the uncut hay-fields. They are drawn
abroad in greatest numbers by the warmest and dimmest
nights, especially about midsummer, which is even more the
heyday of moths than of butterflies. The same dark, warm
nights draw out the perfume of the night-scented flowers
most richly ; the flowers and the moths which unconsciously
mate the blossoms are stimulated alike by the warm
nocturnal air.

Many of the blossoms sought by moths have a heady
sweetness, so that it is after all not surprising that a number
of moths can be attracted by smearing trees and walls with
mixtures of beer, sugar, and rum. But these unctuous doses
do not appeal to every species ; and collectors know well
which moths will ' come to sugar,' and which must be
hunted in other ways. Sugar — as the various mixtures are
collectively known to the fancy — will entirely fail to attract a
large number of species, and is chiefly attractive to noctuae.
On the other hand, some moths are seldom caught in any
other way. August brings out in gardens and shrubberies
the copper underwing — a rather large noctua of which the
underwings are of a burnished coppery-brown. It is often
fairly abundant, but is likely to be entirely overlooked
until sugar is tried, whereupon specimens will turn up
regularly every night. Some moths, such as the herald and
old lady, seem to have the tastes of anchorites, and are
seldom found anywhere but in retired corners in sheds and
outhouses. The herald's slate and orange wings, with a
white thread stretched across them, are very commonly seen
folded at rest on a wall in some dusky retreat, but now and

102 SUMMER

then it can be found visiting the garden flowers after night-
fall, and displaying an unexpected activity. Not many
geometers visit sugar spread on trees and walls, but if a spot
of the sweet mixture is brushed on outstanding blossoms in
the garden borders they will feed on it more freely, and can
be caught or examined when the lantern is turned on the
baited flowers. One advantage of spreading the sugar on
flowers instead of on trees, palings, or walls is that it is safer
from the inroads of slugs, which will lick up in an hour after
dark as much of the mixture as would satisfy a hundred
moths. On the other hand, the virtue of the mixture lies
largely in its attractive smell, and it is difficult to spread
enough of it on a flower to make it smell strongly enough to
attract moths from a distance. This method chiefly provides
a more potent attraction for moths which naturally visit
flowers.

Watching for moths as they sit motionless by day on
trunks, walls, and palings is one of the less productive but most
interesting branches of moth-hunting. It is easy to acquire
an almost instinctive habit of looking at all suitable spots as
we pass them, and once this is done regularly, it is remark-
able how often we shall find them occupied by a moth.
Several of the hawk moths occur fairly frequently in this
way, as well as many species of geometers and noctuae.
The habit of resting motionless on the mottled background
of wooden palings or lichened tree-trunks gives a wide
opportunity for the development of protective imitation, and
if moths always sought their appropriate background, they
would be hard to detect without a careful search. Often,
however, they pitch on spots which provide a contrast rather
than a harmony, and are conspicuous to any observant eye.
The willow beauty is a large and common midsummer
geometer which rests on flat surfaces, with all four wings

THE DAY OF THE MOTH 103

widely spread. This plan serves it well enough when it
bivouacs on the trunks of trees which resemble its own
mottled brown, but it is by no means difficult to detect on
the grey rind of a beech, or on wooden palings of grey or
yellow tints. Indoors, where its plan of protection could
hardly be expected to apply, it will fix itself on a buff
distempered wall, or some such situation where it is as
conspicuous as possible. We may conclude, however, that
the willow beauties which betray themselves are in the
minority, and that the greater number perch on protective
backgrounds and are never noticed. The buff-tip moth, of
which the gregarious caterpillars strip the boughs of oaks
and elms in August and September, emerge in June, and sit
with wings wrapped cylindrically round them on posts and
trees. When so arranged, the fore-part of their wings
imitates a dead twig with silvery bark, and the buff-tip the
broken end of the dead wood. But broken dead twigs an
inch long are not usually found adhering vertically to the
sides of the tree-trunks ; and in such a position the little buff
semi-circle is a mark to catch the eye. On the whole,
however, the more closely resting moths are hunted the
more exact and striking the imitative adaptations appear.
The shade of an apple-tree in August is a pleasant place,
and it is worth while to spend a few minutes day by day in
looking for a resting marbled green moth. Its markings of
green and frosted silver make it a beautiful insect, even
when pinned to a board, but more fascinating still is to see
how wonderfully it imitates the lichen on which it rests. The
caterpillar feeds on lichen on walls, and is equally elusive.

The power of the female to attract certain moths is
utilised by collectors with more success than either light or
sugar. The process is known as ' sembling,' or assembling.
If a newly emerged female emperor moth is placed in a

104 SUMMER

muslin cage, and set down in the morning sunshine on a
heath which the species frequent, males will dash up, and
with the utmost eagerness attempt to reach her in the cage.
They are perfectly heedless of danger, and can be caught
with ease as they crawl over the muslin. Remarkable
accounts have been published of the way in which a collector
carrying a live moth in his pocket was beset by the male
emperors, some of which actually crawled into his pocket in
pursuit. The fact that the males travel up wind when they
are drawn by the female suggests that the message is
conveyed by scent ; but the female emperor has no such

FEMALE EMPEROR

scent perceptible to the human sense of smell as is possessed
by the males of the common and green-veined whites, and
the explanation is no more than a probable conjecture. It is
even harder to give precise form to the suggestion that some
form of atmospheric vibration, like wireless telegraphy, is set
up by the female, which the males detect by means of their
unusually elaborate antennae. These are broad and deeply
fringed, like a fern. Many moths of the tribe to which the
emperor belongs show a similar difference between the
simple, threadlike form of the antennae in the female, and a
fringed pattern in the male, and is possible that they all possess
the power of signalling to the male in a less degree, but that

THE DAY OF THE MOTH

105

the fully developed organs of the male emperor are neces-
sary to make the appeal so irresistible as it seems in their
case. If the wings of the female, and the antennae of the
male form a living installation of wireless telegraphy between
these moths, it would be no more wonderful than the normal
change from creeping caterpillar to fettered pupa and winged
imago which all moths undergo. But it is a process which
we cannot yet verify, and the call of the emperors therefore
remains one of the most fascinating mysteries in insect life.

YEW-TREES

ON THE CHALK DOWNS

THERE seems a refining influence in the clean and porous
chalk soil which gives a peculiar distinction and charm to its
characteristic vegetation. Even in winter chalk downs have
distinctive charms, with their smoothly moulded curves,
their dry turf and pure air, and their dark dwarf junipers.
In spring they foster one or two special flowers among the
bleached tufts of grass, such as the rich purple pasque-flower,
or ' Dane's blood,' which is an anemone, like the lighter
blossom of the woods. But the full flower-time of the chalk
downs comes in June, with the rising of the wild hay-crop,
among which many of our scarcer orchids and other curious
plants are born. At the same time another and very distinct
group of midsummer plants is blossoming on the broken
ground and chalky warrens, with which the smooth turf cloak
of the downs is here and there scarred. The ladies' fingers,
with its stem four or five inches long, is a large plant on the
open sward ; but in the warrens the mulleins and viper's
bugloss are measured by feet, not inches, and the henbane
and deadly nightshade form shrubby bushes of poisonous
foliage.

A great swell of the Berkshire or Wiltshire downs at

ON THE CHALK DOWNS

107

midsummer is embroidered with innumerable blossoms, as
finely as the pattern in a piece of tapestry. When we stoop
to examine them, we find that the multitude is composed of
only a few species, but that several of these species are
unusual. The least peculiar plant of the chalk sward is one
of the hawkweeds, which sprinkles the downs in June with
myriads of its small dandelion-like blossoms. All dandelions
can easily be undervalued ; there are no flowers more radiant
in every sense of the word ;
but they are too familiar to be
always impressive, and the
hawkweeds are not their most
striking type. Buttercups,
which blaze in most May and
midsummer pastures, are not
true flowers of the dry down ;
they are chiefly confined to the
damper bottoms, and bloom
among ranker and undownlike
grass. Their place as the
typical golden flowers of the
English landscape is taken by
the common bird's-foot tre-
foil, its relative the horse-shoe
vetch, and the paler ladies' fingers. Bird's-foot, or fingers-
and-thumbs as it is often called by country children, is a
common flower on turf in most places ; but it blooms with a
singular fury in the downs. Its fierce golden yellow kindles
more often to crimson, and its multitudes are innumerable.
Horse-shoe vetch may easily be mistaken for it at first sight ;
but its growth is larger and wirier, its leaves narrower, and
the yellow of its blossoms clearer and less ruddy. When
the seed-pods form the distinction is clear ; for the pods of

BIRD'S-FOOT TREFOIL

io8 SUMMER

the bird's-foot are straight, and three of them thus mimic a
bird's footprint, or the broad arrow, while those of the horse-
shoe vetch are sharply twisted and wrinkled, and often
curved into a horse-shoe. As the vetch is paler yellow than
the bird's-foot, so the ladies' fingers or kidney vetch is a
paler yellow again. It is another member of the great legu-
minous or pealike tribe, and looks much like an unusual
kind of clover. Each stem commonly bears two heads of
blossom, of which one expands just as the other fades.
Though it is a free-growing plant, there is the peculiar
distinction of the chalk flora in the contrast of its yellow
quills with the fine grey wool from which they spring, and
the graceful half-creeping stem. Yet another shade of
yellow is seen in the finely wrought clusters of the yellow
ladies' bed-straw, which foam under the midsummer sky like
a mass of bubbles blown by the frog-hopper from a grass
stem. It is sulphur yellow, with a tinge of green ; and a
companion bed-straw is white. Milkwort sprinkles the chalk
turf with flowers of many shades of purple, blue, and white,
and makes a pleasant contrast with the yellow blossoms.

The two most delicate plants of the chalk turf are bur-
dened with two of the most clumsy names. They are the
cathartic flax and the squinancy wort. These names are
legacies from the old herbalists, who studied botany from a
directly practical standpoint. The cathartic or purging flax
is the branching hairlike plant with little white blossoms
which lifts itself everywhere to its full stature of about three
inches in the shelter of the downland hay. It is a rigid little
plant, full of a miniature precision ; and more graceful and
no less curious is the squinancy wort, which is also found in
almost every square foot of typical downland turf. It creeps
about the turf with clusters of minute pink blossoms, like
flakes of melting foam. Our inquiring ancestors discovered

ON THE CHALK DOWNS 109

in this inconspicuous plant peculiar virtues for relieving
quinsies, and called it by their name.

Besides these staple plants of the down flora, the most
attractive flowers are some of the scarcer orchises. The
common early orchis blooms freely with the cowslip in
April on many slopes of the down, but neither good spring
flower is in any way peculiar to this site or soil. By mid-
summer the pyramidal and bee and fragrant and burnt
orchises are all to be found not uncommonly on many

stretches of down ; while the butterfly orchises, and the white
and red helleborines, are blooming in the clumps and groves
of beeches. The Kentish downs are the chief home of some
of the scarcer kinds, such as the man and musk and spider
and fly, and the rarer lizard ; but several of these species
occur on the chalk hills of other counties, while slopes by the
upper Thames are still a haunt of the military orchis, and
apparently the only one. The commonest of these orchids
are also found frequently on a soil of grey mountain lime-
stone, which is closely akin to chalk, and nurtures much the
same flora. But the chalk is the great headquarters of all
but a very few of our scarcer plants of this tribe.

The pyramidal orchis, which is the commonest of the

H

no SUMMER

typical chalk group, has the shape of the little trees in
German boxes of toys, or their prototypes in Dutch and
Rhineland towns. It is the primmest of all the little plants
of the chalk. The head of purple blossom is conical rather
than pyramidal, but the name gives a good general idea of
its peculiar growth. This orchis is scentless, except for the
slight odour of greenish rankness which is common to most
lilylike plants when they lack any conspicuous smell. The
meadow or fragrant orchis, as its name betokens, is one of
the sweetest of the tribe ; and although it is of much the
same shade of purple as the pyramidal, and comes out
among the same downland grasses and at almost the same
time, it forms a contrast with it both by its fragrance and by
the long, lax growth of its blossom. The fragrant orchis is
in fact one of the lightest and most graceful of the whole
family of British orchids, which, like all their tribe, are
remarkable, on the whole, rather for curious interest than for
grace.

The little burnt or dark-winged orchis, which is also found
sprinkled here and there at midsummer on the downs, is
certainly not a very graceful flower ; and yet there is the
usual fascination of the tribe in its blunt spike of blossoms so
deeply stained with dark crimson that it looks as if the
whole plant might have been seared in a grass-fire. The
larger dark-winged orchis is one of the rarer Kentish
species. The musk orchis, again, is almost an ugly little
plant, with its stumpy spike of rather sickly yellow-green
flowers ; and yet it too has its peculiar charm, in the rich
musky sweetness which the spike gives forth, especially in
hot sunshine. The bee orchis, on the other hand, is both a
curious and a beautiful plant. The allusive name of some of
the orchises — for example, the butterfly — is far-fetched, but
there is nothing fanciful in the name of the bee orchis. The

ON THE CHALK DOWNS in

blossom is astonishingly like a brown bumble-bee sitting
on a three-petalled pink flower. The mimic bee is even
more like one other insect — a certain spotted beetle common
in Switzerland, of which the wing-cases have just the same
mottled colours. It is interesting to bring home a spike of
bee orchis, and keep it in a glass of water in a bright and
airy place, to watch it fertilising itself in the way which
excited Darwin's apprehension and interest in its future. A
day or two after the pink petals unclose and show the bee
we can see, where the insect's head ought to join the thorax
— but the resemblance does not hold good in so much detail
— the two anthers gradually uncurl from their protecting
pent-house, and arch over till their pollened tips adhere to
the sticky plate of the stigma. Here they remain, and
presently wither, with their work done. Darwin wished to
live long enough to witness the gradual extinction of the
bee orchis under this mischievous system of inbreeding ; but,
as he himself pointed out, it is probable that even the nor-
mally self-fertilising plants are occasionally cross-fertilised by
insects, and thus have their vitality reinforced. The appear-
ance and disappearance of this orchis often presents curious
and fascinating points. A new plantation of pines on a
limestone slope in Gloucestershire in a year or two blotted
out a colony which had thriven for many seasons. Thirty
or forty years hence, when those pines should be ripe for
felling, it will be curious to see whether the bee orchises
punctually emerge and begin to bloom again in the sunshine
as if there had been no interruption.

' O mihi tarn longae maneat pars ultima vitae ' —

here again we feel Darwin's desire for more years. It is
strange to see the first appearance of this curious flower in
a new and unexpected situation, as when a single spike

ii2 SUMMER

recently appeared one summer on old and well-trodden turf
in the sanatorium garden of a Berkshire public school.
Is this really a first appearance, or does the bulb or seed
take a rest of a human generation or two in the soil, waiting
for times of refreshment ? We can see the dandelion seed
travelling on the autumn wind, and now and then the water
hemlock seed borne down by the Lammas floods ; but it
is very difficult to account for the dispersal by land of a
minute seed which cannot fly, and so far as we know is not
eaten by any bird. Yet suddenly the bee orchis makes
its appearance across miles of cornfield and wood.

Of the other chalk-loving orchises the man is not rare in
Kent, and is aptly named ; for from each green blossom
there hangs the image of a little manikin, as if snipped
out of paper. Of the two rare Thames-side orchises — the
military and its variety the monkey — both are pink, and in
both cases the little hanging figure has a tail. In either
case this detracts from the verisimilitude of the comparison,
red monkeys and tailed warriors being both rare. The lizard
has a larger spike of spotted blossoms, with the tail vastly
prolonged and agreeably twisted. Here the comparison is
at least ingenious. But inspiration failed in naming the
butterfly orchis, which has nothing of the butterfly but
lightness and the semi-transparency of a butterfly's rubbed
wing. It is a strange, shadow-haunting plant, full of a
sweet and heady scent at evening ; two or three spikes will
perfume half the rooms of a house. More concrete beauty
is shown by the white helleborine, which half opens its
almondlike buds to show the lemon-tinted heart of the
blossom in the shade of beechen groves on the chalk. It
is more local than the butterfly, but sometimes abundant
beneath the shadow of a group of beeches. The broad-
leaved helleborine is a smaller and less handsome orchis

ON THE CHALK DOWNS 113

more often found in woods, and bearing a loose spike of
red or greenish blossoms. This, too, is commonest on
chalky soils, but is not confined to them.

To turn from the miniature plants of the open turf to
the large and bushy growths of the warrens is almost to
pass into a new natural kingdom. Yet luxuriant and brilliant
in colour as are the bugloss and mulleins and other plants
in this group, almost all have the typical distinction of the
chalk flora, and none is merely rank or weedlike, except
possibly the large wild scentless mignonette. Attractive
as well as unusual are the rough grey leaves of the henbane
and common mullein, relieved against the dark green of
the yews and junipers ; and the yellow torches of the
mullein blossom, and the many- branched candelabra of the
bright blue viper's bugloss, make a brilliant contrast with
the many shades of green luxuriating on a downland warren
in a soft and showery June.

On this dry soil ample rain as well as sufficient sunshine
is required to bring the midsummer vegetation to full
growth. Henbane and deadly nightshade and mullein and
bugloss die down annually to the ground, when they are
not purely annuals, and thus depend greatly upon the
character of each individual season. Droughty years pro-
duce scanty and stunted henbanes; if the year before has
been a favourable one, the dry white skeletons of their
predecessors far out-top their flaccid stems and shrunken
trumpets. Henbane blossoms are creamy white, closely
veined with purple; they recall a little the pattern of the
garden salpiglossis, and though they are never so large,
even in the richest years, they are often grouped in clusters.
The plant is sticky as well as woolly to the touch, and has
a strong smell like a blackcurrant bush. A large henbane
may reach a height of two feet ; but its equally poisonous

n4 SUMMER

and more notorious companion, the deadly nightshade, forms
by the middle of June a conspicuous rounded bush of three
or four feet high, and is all the more noticeable for the
fresh green of its broad pointed leaves. The blossoms hang
like bells, and their deep purple brown has a peculiar livid
appearance which is highly suggestive of evil, as is the
henbane blossom with its congested purple veins. Both
plants look thoroughly poisonous, as indeed they are.
Hyoscyamin is the poison yielded by the henbane, atropine
or belladonna that of the deadly nightshade ; and both have
played their part in crime in modern and ancient times.
The peculiar danger of the nightshade is the attractiveness
of its large cherry-like berry to small children later in
summer. It frequently grows among old ruins, which
children like to play in and explore. Like the blackberry
it finds among the decaying mortar a suitable calcareous
soil, and it is fatally easy when blackberrying to turn from
the wholesome to the fatal fruit.

At midsummer the dark blossoms are usually only just
opening their covert eyes, and the bush has only just come
to its full height. Meanwhile the common woody nightshade
is scrambling with its long stringy stems to the tops and
flanks of the yew and elder bushes, or, when unable to reach
any such support, unwillingly disposing itself as a little
standard bush a foot or eighteen inches high. The pretty
purple blossom with its spiked yellow centre is much like a
miniature potato- flower ; for man's staple vegetable belongs
to a shy family, and has barely escaped being a poison
instead of a food. Woody nightshade is an indefatigable
climber, without possessing either the thorns or tendrils or
the spiral habit of growth by which most other climbing
plants make their way. It simply rests its straggling arms
on the twigs among which it climbs, and pushes on a stage

THE PATH THROUGH THE WOODS
By SIR ALFRED EAST, R.A., P.R.B.A.

ON THE CHALK DOWNS 115

further. White bryony, with its delicate ivy-shaped leaves
and greenish white blossoms, is specially fond of the chalk ;
and black bryony, which will grow in most soils, finds the
light porous rock as nutritive as the Midland clays. Both
white and black bryony die down to the ground every
autumn, but, unlike the henbane and deadly nightshade,
spring from a stout perennial stock in the soil. They are
thus less dependent on the moods of the season, though their
' gadding vines ' climb furthest and form the most matted
screens of verdure in hot, moist years. Wild clematis, which

WOODY NIGHTSHADE

is traveller's joy all through the summer and old-man's-beard
in autumn, is one of the favourite plants of chalk and other
calcareous soils. Though the lesser twigs die and turn
brittle in autumn, the stouter bines are perennial, and cling
inextricably among the layers of the thicket.

Mulleins light their fiery torches on English hillsides
about midsummer, like the great yellow gentians that tower
on the Swiss slopes in June. The line of fire creeps up
the torch as the days go on, much as the redder stain mounts
to the top of a stem of foxglove in the copse. These
upstretched flowers are nature's summer gnomons, and seem

n6 SUMMER

to brood on the passing of time ; there is something deeply
impressive and yet satisfying in watching day by day this
silent registration of the year. The tallest torch is upheld by
the common great mullein, with its flannelly leaves. When
the little speckly mullein moth caterpillars are hatched, it is
curious to see how deep they have to dig through the leafs
woolly coating before they come to the succulent green.
Black mullein has a handsomer individual blossom, with a
crimson eye ; but its spikes are usually shorter, although they
are more often borne in a cluster. This plant is the black
mullein, because the other is so white ; its leaves have no
woolly covering, and are actually a rather deep green. It is a
rare pleasure to find mulleins flowering in a dense mass. In
this respect they are far excelled by the purple torches of the
foxglove, which in cleared copses on gritty soils are some-
times massed almost by the acre in June and July. In a cleft
on the Longmynd in Shropshire a bed of dry rods was once
found in winter where the white mulleins must have bloomed
six months before in a dense mass ; but their fire was out,
and they gleamed in the valley like dry bones.

One of the most striking contrasts in the colours of
flowers is their relative translucence or opaqueness. The
mullein's yellow has the clean hardness of the colours in a
mosaic pavement ; but the blue of the viper's bugloss, which
often branches so luxuriantly on the midsummer warrens,
has the liquid depth of a jewel. Like the other plants of
warrens and dry gravelly fields, the bugloss varies greatly in
vigour in different seasons ; but in a good year it forms one
of the most brilliant displays of any English plant, when it
covers wide stretches of soil with tall radiating stems of
sky-blue blossom. It is one of the plants best loved by
the humming-bird hawk moth, which emerges about mid-
summer after feeding the year before in the larval stage on

ON THE CHALK DOWNS 117

the bed-straw ; and the blurred insect darting from one blue
tube to another is one of the most characteristic features
of June.

Bugloss means ox-tongue, and the broad rough leaves
which suggested the name are common to many plants of
the borage tribe, including the luxuriant comfrey of the May
and early June river-banks. Hound's-tongue is another
characteristic plant of the same family, which is fond of a
chalk soil. It is not inaptly named; the leaves, though
rough, are smoother than the ox-tongue leaves, and with
their central furrow, where the main rib comes, they are
not unlike the protruded tongue of a panting dog. The
plant has tall clusters of dull red eyelike blossoms. Some
plants in this family have the peculiar gift of changing from
a similar dull red to blue after they fully expand. The
garden lungwort, which sometimes escapes into hedges and
copses, is the most familiar example of this curious little
trick, while it is also noticeable in the viper's bugloss as the
buds open. In the comfrey the same inconstancy expresses
itself in the free tendency of the plants to bear flowers of
pink or purple or white. Another curious feature of this
group is the excessive hardness of some of the seeds. The
English name of the gromwell seems due to an obscure con-
fusion of the herbalists ; but the scientific name Litho-
spermum — stone-seed — is thoroughly clear and appropriate,
for the little shining seeds are almost as hard as grains of
flint, and are actually said to contain a proportion of silica.
Gromwell often grows with hound's-tongue, and has incon-
spicuous greenish yellow blossoms, which make no great
show among the flowers of June on the chalk.

Yet not all the brilliance of midsummer on the bushy
chalk warrens is due to the brightness of their flowers. In a
good year of heavy showers and warm sunshine, the sheer

n8

SUMMER

verdure of such a spot is almost more beautiful than the
blaze of massed blossoms or the richness of their isolated
heads. Rich chalk turf is one of the most beautiful things
in the world, and the turf only supplies one element of green
in a wonderful variety of verdure. It comes midway in the
scale. Almost black are the yews of the down, and yet they
have latent greenness in every dark branch under the June
sun. The young shoots display it freely ; the old boughs
are reticent, but verdant at heart. The columnar junipers —
they are our little northern cypresses — are also black

JUNIPERS

within, but sparkle with frosted silver where the new shoots
shine. And yet both the black and the silver are phases of
green, and conform to the verdure of the landscape. Lush
elders hung with their cream-white moons are of a brighter
green, and so are the hawthorns, now past their flower-time,
and the vivid bushes of deadly nightshade. The white
bryony hangs in the elders, a little paler and cooler ; and
paler on the turf gleam the henbane and mullein plants,
where the bare chalk strikes whitest of all. When a breeze
ruffles the leaves of the thickets, they change into new
shades, more deeply contrasted. The whitebeam leaves
turn up their silver sides, and catch the eye like a chalk bluff;
then the breeze passes, and the landscape sinks together

ON THE CHALK DOWNS

119

again, its sharper contrasts at rest. A box-tree in June has
half the shades of green in its own boughs, where the young
leaves fleck and cloud the old ; and some of the most subtle,
though not the sharpest contrasts of downland verdure, are
to be seen in June, where the box-coverts stand dappled on
the old turf of Box Hill, or among the even more beautiful
groves of Chequers Park in the Chilterns.

;-,';'•• /,./V (•/

$6®%&$

DISCS OF BLOSSOM

WILD flowers towards midsummer become not only more
numerous but more massive ; and although only the bosom
of the waters sustains in our climate so large a single bloom
as the water-lily, flowering bushes and tall quick-springing
herbage foster heavy clusters of pale blossom that shine in
the midsummer evenings. The abundant discs of elder
blossom catch every eye as the June days lengthen, but
elders are only the most conspicuous and one of the
commonest of the plants with this distinctive habit of
flower. A little earlier the hedges were dappled with the
smaller circles of the water-guelder and wayfaring tree, while
the foaming masses of hawthorn blossom are an aggregate
of many similar clusters. Whitebeam and mountain-ash
drooped larger clusters than those of the two guelder-roses.
After the elder has faded the dogwood dots the dusty road-
side with a smaller generation of clusters, in keeping with
the ebb of summer's life. But in the deepening dusks
the succession of disclike flowers is still luminous. The
hemlocks and fennels are more enduring than the blossoming
shrubs, and produce flower-heads in which the disclike
formation is most precise.

These compound discs of blossom are an illustration of

DISCS OF BLOSSOM 121

the value of combination. So minute a flower as a single
calyx of hemlock or elder would have little chance of thriving
in the fierce competition of the copse and hedgerow in early
summer. In the first place it would tend to be over-
shadowed, and deprived of essential light and air ; and it
would also probably fail to attract the mating insects, unless
it had a disproportionately and almost impossibly powerful
scent. It is noticeable that the disc-flowers have not on the
whole a very strong scent. None of the hemlocks and
other umbellifers have blossoms with a scent worth mention,
and even the scent of the elder is not comparable, mass for
mass, with that of the honeysuckle or the butterfly orchid, or
many other flowers in bloom at the same time. The small
and scentless blossoms consequently form a league or con-
federation, and under a united constitution they do more than
hold their own. The umbellifers are one of the master races
of plants from the time of the blossoming of the cow-parsley
round the hedges in the hay-fields to the end of active growth.
Such scent as they possess is made more powerful by concen-
tration, but they depend more regularly upon the appeal of
colour. Almost all the disc-flowers are whitish, though not
pure white ; and there is often more body in a cream-coloured
mass of blossom than a pure white one when the dusk has
fallen. The fennel has blossoms of greenish yellow, and it
is noticeable that it is much more frequented by butterflies
than any other plants with this form of blossom. It makes
its appeal by day, with a richer colour that is effective by
daylight; but cow-parsnip and elder and the other disc-flowers
are not attractive to butterflies. Some of them are sought
out by day-flying beetles, but they are chiefly sought out by
the small flies which swarm in the soft dusk. The composite
blossom forms an effective signal-lamp, when each single
blossom of which it is composed would be powerless.

122 SUMMER

The formation of the disc-flowers also gives them a solid
advantage in the struggle for sun and light. Each disc is
large and dense enough to cast a shade on competing stems
beneath it, and to divert them in the upward quest for the
sun. Growing shoots do not try to penetrate the federation
of tented umbels formed by a lusty hemlock-plant. They
either go round another way, or simply wither. The hem-
lock or the cow-parsnip provides the most perfect develop-
ment of the composite principle of blossom. The heads of
bloom are more symmetrical than those of the elder or the
mountain-ash or dogwood, and the same regular principle is
carried down through branchlets and main stem to the root.
The whole structure of the umbellifers is designed to support
as many of the flowering umbels as possible in the full eye
of the sun, and the umbels contrive in the same way to
expose as many lesser clusters of blossom. A simple umbel
is a cluster like that of the ivy, in which the blossoms and
berries spring on single stalks branching from the same
point of the flower-stem. The drawback to this plan is that
a cluster, to be compact, must be small ; for if the radiating
stalks were long enough to form a large cluster, they would
be too weak to stand hard usage from the weather. The
compound umbel is the typical pattern in the umbelliferous
tribe of hemlocks and their kin ; and this is an ingenious
development, providing strength as well as area. Each of
the main stems radiates again into a second whorl, and the
composite mosaic of the disc is supported on this series of
secondary stems. The downward structure of the plant is
almost equally symmetrical, till it terminates in the main
stalk and twisted root. The canelike strength of the
hollow hemlock or cow-parsnip stem can be best judged in
winter, when it is dead and leafless, and stands waiting to be
plucked by the hedgerow. It is no longer surprising that

DISCS OF BLOSSOM 123

so heavy a superstructure of broad foliage and massive
umbels can be safely upheld against the gales and thunder-
showers of the stormiest summer. It is extremely rare to
find any umbelliferous plant damaged by bad weather.

Elders and all the tribe of flowering shrubs which spread

COW-PARSNIP

discs in the summer hedgerow bear not umbels but cymes
or corymbs, which are more imperfect expressions of the
same principle. If we lift up one of the lagging clusters of
creamy elder flower, we see that the stems which bear the
separate clusters of blossom are of very different lengths.
The larger branchlets in the cluster are equally irregular.
The peculiar ingenuity of the cyme is the way in which the

I

I24 SUMMER

disc is completed by short and long stems, each lifting a
flower-cluster into the nearest vacant place. But the nether
structure of the disc of elder or water-guelder is feeble com-
pared with a compound umbel ; and the nodding flowers
would miss much light and sunshine if they shot on low
annual stems like the hemlock instead of being lifted above
most of the competition of the hedgerow on the boughs of
flowering shrubs. The discs of whitebeam and mountain-
ash are slightly different again in internal structure, and a
step further from the perfect umbel. Instead of all the
flowers being borne on subsidiary stems, however irregular,
as in the elder disc, in this family some are carried on the
tips of the main stems, which have not learnt that their duty
is to delegate the responsibility of flowering, and confine
themselves to giving support. This form of blossom is called
a corymb, and in the discs of the whitebeam and rowan we
see it on the point of developing into a cyme.

The umbellifers extort admiration rather for the perfec-
tion of their structure than for beauty or serviceableness in
a wild state. On the whole they rank as weeds, while some
are highly poisonous. But the cow-parsley in mass forms
one of the most distinctive charms of spring, and is eaten
by animals without harm. So is the stout leafy cow-
parsnip, which swells its gouty pink flower-stems under the
trampled shadow of the elms in the July pastures. Hemlock
and water-hemlock or cow-bane are the most dangerous mem-
bers of their tribe. The spotted stems of hemlock distinguish
it clearly from cow-parsley, while water-hemlock grows by
running water, and is conspicuously the tallest of its family.
Much in the same way as the potato is a relative of the
deadly nightshade, the garden parsnip and carrot are both
members of the umbelliferous tribe, as a glance at their flowers
will show. The wild original of the carrot is very common
among the dry turf of cliffs and downs ; as the flower fades

DISCS OF BLOSSOM 125

the disc contracts into a cup, wherein we often see sitting a
spider. Wild parsnip is a scarcer native of similar ground, and
has an equally tough and meagre root-stock in the wild state.
The other discs of blossom, formed of cymes and
corymbs, belong to widely different groups of plants from the
umbellifers, as their whole growth and structure indicate. In
autumn they provide the birds with some of their richest
berries ; and most of them, though not the guelders and
elders, belong to the same tribe as the apple and pear. They
are almost as ubiquitous in English scenery as they are con-
spicuous. Where the last solitary tree clings to some high
moorland dingle, it is usually a dwarfed and woody moun-
tain-ash, which spreads its mealy corymbs above the crow's
nest wedged in its crown. Chalk downs are the favourite
home of the whitebeam, which has blossoms of a pearlier
whiteness, faintly scented like primroses in the soft May
weather. The tighter clusters of the guelder-rose open, stiffly
erect, by the white tracks in the same chalky landscapes ; it
is not until they bear the load of the autumn berries that the
stems bend to the whitebeam's graceful curve. The water-
guelder shows a conflict of taste for the dry chalk soil and for
wet streamside hedges ; it is happiest where trenching in the
water-meadows turns up a white edge of chalk along the
stream, and its tastes for once can be combined. Its dull
white discs stretch on straggling boughs over the deep grass
where the corncrakes chide in the June evenings. The
discs of the water-guelder are formed of large barren flowers
on the circumference, almost concealing the small inner
blossoms which produce the berries. Like the blossoms of
the garden hydrangea, these flowers are blind ; they have
only rudimentary organs in the centre of the corolla ; and the
stamens and pistils of a flower have so much the appearance
of its living eye that the water-guelder looks best at a dis-
tance or in the dusk. It is precisely to serve as a distant or

126

SUMMER

nocturnal signal that this border of infertile blossoms seems
to have been devised. The dead flowers — for organically
they are lifeless — draw insects to the living by their white-
ness ; and thus a comparatively small cluster of vital blossom
is enabled to compete with more conspicuous plants of
June. The garden box-rose or snowball-tree is the water-
guelder with fertility banished from the blossoms, and the
barren corollas thickened into a globe. Even in the dusty
fringes of towns the outbreak of large circles of creamy
blossom on the sparse rods of the elder brings a fugitive
luxuriance to the spot ; and over the first-shorn hay-fields in
the midsummer twilight the elders hang in the calm evenings
like constellated planets, or toss like lamps in the wind.
We see no such show of white blossom again, once the elders
have faded.

JULY

Doves of the fir-wood walling high our red roof

Through the long noon coo, crooning through the coo.
Loose droop the leaves, and down the sleepy roadway

Sometimes pipes a chaffinch ; loose droops the blue.
Cows flap a slow tail knee-deep in the river,

Breathless, given up to sun and gnat and fly.
Nowhere is she seen ; and if I see her nowhere,

Lightning may come, straight rains and tiger sky.

GEORGE MEREDITH, Love in the Valley.

In early summer moonlight I have strayed
Down pass and wildway of the wooded hill,
With wonder as again the sedge-bird made
His old, old ballad new beside the mill.
And I have stolen closer to the song
That, lisped low, would swell and change to shrill,
Thick, chattered cheeps that seemed not to belong
Of right to the frail elfin throat that threw
Them on the stream, their waker. There among
The willows I have watched as over flew
A noctule making zigzag round the lone,
Dark elm whose shadow clipt grotesque the new
Green lawn below. On softest breezes blown
From some far brake, the cruising fern-owl's cry
Would stay my steps ; a beetle's nearing drone
Would steal upon my sense and pass and die.'

RALPH HODGSON, The Sedge- Warbler.

THE COUNTRY CALENDAR

JULY has been called, along with August, one of the ' mute months.'
The birds are silent, but the insects are noisy. It is rather one of

127

128

SUMMER

the months when things stand still. The leaves on the trees are as
they were, only less fresh. The fruits hang ripening, and the corn
stands ripening, each in a passive way suffering the sun. July has
few distinctions of its own. When it surpasses June it also borrows
from it ; and its glories of flower and its wealth of insect life are a
continuance rather than a beginning. Hay harvest probably drags
on, and the corn harvest just does not begin. It is a between time
period. In colour, the flowers show very much more red and yellow
than prevailed in spring. That splendid tribe of butterflies, the

fritillaries, are a notable emer-
gence of the month. July has
its extremes. It is, in volume,
the wettest month, for the July
showers have twice the weight
of water of the April showers ;
and it is the hottest month.

We get in July the 'first
faint, hesitant, elusive hints ' of
autumn. — ' And then he flies
away.' The cuckoo gives the
first hint of migration, of depar-
ture ; and other birds, especi-
ally the nightingales and duck,
seem to disappear. There is
silence and retirement, partly
because the energy of spring
could not last and was ex-
hausting, partly because it is

the moulting time. The duck so moult that they are beyond the
power of flight. Other birds, preparing themselves for the great
flights across seas, drop their old and grow their new feathers in
pairs successively, so that flight is not in any way prevented. But
it becomes a bore, and the bushes are preferred.

It is astonishing how prominent a part St. Swithin, whose day
is the 1 5th, plays in weather lore. The most concise rhyme out of
many is this :

' St. Swithin's day if it do rain,
For forty days it will remain.
St. Swithin's day an it be fair,
For forty days will rain nae mair.'

YOUNG CUCKOO

JULY

129

The foundation for the prophecy is this, that in mid-July if the
wet or westerly type of weather sets in, it is apt to remain. If the
dry or northerly type sets in, it too remains. July, that is, has a
certain constancy of its own. It is also tolerably constant to a
warm spell in the early part.

An old verse, containing a very true fact in economic natural
history, may be compared with the cuckoo rhyme :

' A swarm of bees in May
Is worth a load of hay.
A swarm of bees in June
Is worth a silver spoon.
A swarm of bees in July
Is not worth a fly.'

But when all is said of July it is the most gorgeous of all the
months, especially in the garden. It is the one month of real
summer that is plainly neither spring nor autumn.

Average temperature (July ist), 6r5°.

Average rainfall, 2*43 inches.

July ist. Sun rises 3.49 a.m. ; sets 8.19 p.m.

CRAB-APPLE

AMONG THE GRASSES

WHEN the grass begins to sprout spring has come. When
the grass begins to wave it is summer. In winter the grass
seems scarcely to hide the earth and keep off the barren-
ness of the stony lifeless framework of the world. In
spring the soft greenness seems to announce the creation of
life out of matter. In a summer hay-field the richness and
fullness of the living principle are firmly established for all
time. A hay-field is exuberant of the vigour of growth.
You might think of it, as the mice and daddy-longlegs and
innumerable moths and spiders must regard it, as a great
forest undergrowth that has come up in a flash. The insects
hum over it in flocks, like pigeons over a grove. The thou-
sand shapes and colours of the grass-heads almost touch the
boughs of trees, which had looked through the winter like
umbrellas. The underspace is gone, as if, might one say,
the giant trees had waded in up to the hips. Pathways have
disappeared. A tumultuous surface of many colours varies
its infinite variety by 'shifting the sun anew' where the
wind swings and sways the bents. It is opening an eye of
the imagination to watch this luxuriance of form and colour
directly from above. In such a hay-field the writer once
climbed along a curiously horizontal bough of a single elm,

i32 SUMMER

the tips of which had made contact with the grasses. Near
the tree, as often happens, kexes had gained some supremacy
over the grasses. To one looking down the underspace
was imbued with a green light of its own, soft and subdued,
belonging to another kingdom. As the eye grew used to this
light there became obvious a brown patch, which gradually
increased in distinctness, till the form and soft hues and bright
eye of a hen partridge on her nest stood clearly out. The
sun was hot on the field, though the light was low, and further
off the bough you could see the purple clover, and the yellow
trefoil, and even blue speedwell glinting in the green blades
below the waving heads. Looking more minutely you
became aware of the numerous little moths that would not
face a light so strong as prevailed above the seed-heads, but
moved, in preparation for the evening, upon the lower blades.
A picture, such as this, of the abundant life and variety of
this patch of the world, quite barren a few months ago, for
ever raises a hay-field into a great and wonderful world.

Before hay-cutting and after what a difference in the
expression of the country ! The nap has grown over the
meadows by the slow gradation that nature loves, at any rate
in England. It is shorn in these rapid days within forty-eight
hours. The grass lies for a day or two in the level ranks.
Then the tedders get to work, tossing it up as the paddle-
wheel tosses the water out of its quietude and green colour
into tumultuous white. Within a week, if the sun shines hot,
as even in England it may do, the hay-field is become quite
a lawn, bare and shaved and green.

No Englishman will deny the beauty of a lawn in this
country of lawns. The English downs are lovely lawns,
of which the cardinal delight is the short soft smooth
grass unbroken in colour, a tapis vert of great dimensions,
an old bowling-green for giants, a boulevard in the strict

AMONG THE GRASSES 133

sense of the word, which, from want of the proper pleasure
in a lawn, the French have altered till it stands for
an urban street. The lawn grass is as good for food as
for tired eyes. A horse would agree in regard to this form
of food that the nearer the bone the sweeter the meat. It is
the short grass that is richest and most juicy. The bent,
which is the stem that carries a seed-head, is not comparable
with the green blade. But the bents have a beauty that
rivals even garden flowers, and the flower-heads which paint
the surface of a hay-field compass as many rich and delicate
shades as the feathers of a pheasant. Perhaps the worst
meadows in the farmer's eyes are the loveliest. Over all the
face of the country is no more delicate effect of colour than
a slanting light through the ruddy, tawny heads of dock and
sorrel which flourish most in the sourest soil. For a com-
parison you would have to go to the sunset sky. As if the
two had some natural affinity the great moon daisies often
grow along with these feather-heads, and as the sun sinks
one summer evening the colour of the hay-field shifts from a
luminous red or cinnabar into a dull purple and then into
a net of stars. The less the light the more the moon
daisies come out into prominence, and the more the tints of
the bents disappear or merge into a monochrome.

Of all summer bouquets the village children pluck none
is more fine and delicate in form or colour than the bunches
of hay-field grasses. They are composed, one may say,
of mingled flower and fruit. The ' totter-grass ' — vernacular
in the Midlands for the commoner form quaking-grass — is one
of the prizes. Its flower and seed-heads keep up the ruddy
colour of the docks and sorrel, and its perpetual movement
gives the bouquet at the field the shimmer that keeps the colours
shifting in the lightest breeze. But if you look close, and
pay such attention to each grass as you would pay to a flower,

134

SUMMER

CAT5TAIL OR

TIMOTHY

the heads are hardly less decorative one by one than they are
in the mass. But they want for the most part popular names.
These are more often given to
plants or parts of plants that have
some curious, for preference some
grotesque, likeness to a different
thing. The male catkin of the
hazel is a lamb's-tail. The female
flower is nameless. The seed of
the clematis has earned the plant
the nickname of old-man's-beard.
One of the least graceful of the
grasses is called fox-tail, and the
likeness to a fox's brush is both
close and absurd. The crested
dog's-tail, one of the most salient
grasses, is still more grotesque.

* ^sw mi iif i The totter-grass' with its heavy

v!f T^Kw- \II ff I heart-shaped head on the slenderest
thread, outdoes the aspen and
prompts experiment. But there is
no popular, not even an English
name, for many of the filigree grasses
of most delicate pattern. Daintiest
of all, perhaps, are the varieties of
poa that fall in a fine fringe, like
refined miniatures of the pampas.
Most of us are ignorant of these,
while we know well the stiff and
woolly 'Timothy.' The more grot-
esque is the more salient here as in
much English popular art. The grasses have evaded also
the poets. Tennyson's ' Froth-fly on the fescue ' is a great

AMONG THE GRASSES 135

effort to bring into popular speech one of the most common
and useful grasses, whose flower or seed-heads we have most
of us seen, not without curiosity, enveloped by the lump of
froth that conceals the little grub in summer before it joins
the winged multitudes of autumn. 'Twitch' again we all
know. Because it is unpleasant to us we give it a humble
name. It creeps and crawls and roots itself again and again,
like a buttercup, and not at all in the way of a real grass,
which is sown broadcast by the lightest seed that is blown.
And it is the seed that is the crowning beauty of the grass.
The seed has the colour of the ruddy poplar catkins of
spring, and gives the full surface of the hay-field a richness
of tint that much surpasses, if you look close, even the glory
of the corn.

The haysel is a match for the harvest. Of all the feats of
colour in the hay none quite equals the lesser plantain, which
is the terror of the lawn but a great addition to the meadow.
The leaves may rise to a foot in length, and the flower-head
to two feet. This is hung with feathery dust of the subtlest
gradations of colour — white and fawn and browns that deepen
into lilac. For decorative purpose the plantain head could
scarcely be surpassed, and it contains a series of tints into
which the other grasses all fit. Men like to cut their hay
before the bulk of the grasses have ripened and shed their
light seeds, but some of the sorts are too early, too quick for
the mowers. The dog's-tails still hang their heavy ponderous
heads to one side, and their stalwart stems are still too green
and luscious to be called bents. The oat-grasses are not
much more forward than the winter oats. All about the
roots of the tall plants, the sorrels and daisies, and perhaps
here and there kexes and moon daisies, the little bird's-foot
trefoil is soft and green and hardly in flower, and all the
clovers are turgid with fresh moisture. The undergrowth is

136

SUMMER

rich and juicy and still in growth, nor are most seeds on
more barren stalks ripe. But a soft unpalpable dust is

blown across the field, is
sowing itself even on the
roofs of houses and against
the east side of walls and
hedges miles away. In
every species there are
precocious plants which
anticipate the scythe and
cutter, but the mass of
this dust is shed from the
fox-tails. Most children,
and perhaps older chil-
dren, have enjoyed the
peculiar baby pleasure of
stroking off the silky seed
from these grey -green
heads, which mimic the
sallowcatkins more closely
than the fox's brush.

How many seeds are
peculiarly delightful to
handle : the soft fox-tail
seed which you pull into
your palm ; the hard dock
seed that you let trickle
through your fingers ; the
nut that you squeeze from
its patterned sheath ; the
smooth satisfaction of a
horse-chestnut before it is dulled by exposure. But in a
hay-field all your senses are satisfied. Presumably there are

THE MOWER
By HARRY BECKER

AMONG THE GRASSES

137

as pleasant hay-fields in other lands as in England, but it
is certain that the smell of ' new-mown hay ' is everywhere
regarded as English in a peculiar sense. The phrase is
established in the French
language and very freely used
though no phrase could be
easier to translate; and one
would say that the words have
nothing in them particularly
idiomatic. The truth is per-
haps that England is sweeter
than other countries, and
the new-mown hay is more
odorous of the season than
hay in other lands, where the
air is quite robbed by torrid
suns of the dampness that is
the medium of all sweet
scents. And the hay-fields
smell sweeter even than the

' Cottage gardens smelling every-
where,
Confused with smell of orchards,'

which Mrs. Browning selected
as the final beauty of Eng-
land's'ripple of land.' When
the grass has lain a day and
is becoming hay it is as if all
its sweets, which had been in some degree, as Bacon says,
'fast of their smells,' had found expression in a harmony of
scent that might be called orchestral. The lawn, sharply
contrasted in most ways with the hay-field, also yields its
scent, as Matthew Arnold — whose sense of smell was supreme

K

138

SUMMER

— has accorded. He writes of 'sweet heaps of fresh-cut
grass ' as well as of ' scent of hay new mown.'

We see a new expression on the face of the country
when the hay is cut, but the change is a revolution to the
hordes of live things that have made the roots of the grasses
their home. If you use the scythe or follow the cutter you
will see rise along the swath a perfect cascade of flies and
moths. They shoot up into the air in alarm, but fall back
quickly as if to examine the extent of the damage. They
fall back and disappear wonderfully. You would think that

their homes were quite ruined ; but however close the blade
cuts in the hay-field there are left hills and hollows, pillars
and caves, big enough to make a world for much grander
creatures than these hosts of lepidoptera. But they are now
more vulnerable. Not seldom the wagtails discover the reaper
as the gulls discover the ploughs in autumn. You may see
one or two of them following behind, and dancing up and
down in the air, as if they were glass balls on the fountain of
little wings. They turn and twist and poise with more than
flycatcher skill, and seem a different bird from that which we
watch daily on the smooth lawn. Behind the mower they
do on the wing what on the lawn they do on their legs. The

AMONG THE GRASSES 139

sudden running sallies, and quick stops, and sharp turns are
performed above the ground ; and the long tail which looks
exaggerated, almost absurd, a Blondin pole of excessive
length, while the bird is running or strutting about on fine
lawns — this tail takes on the use -and likeness of a third wing,
and more than a wing, a plane and a rudder, both ; with other
uses in the delicate art of momentary hovering. The insect
food is given the birds in such profusion at this juncture,
that they must be as fully gorged as an old trout in Mayfly
time, before they have gone the length of a swath.

How open to attack the creatures of the hay-field are

STARLINGS

when the mowers have passed may be in some measure
gathered from the change of bird population. Some par-
tridges are routed. It happens in places that nests are
cut up, and the old birds will sit so close that they are now
and again killed by the blade. There were finches, including
it is to be hoped goldfinches, flitting down from hedgerow
to the seed-heads. Now, in place of these the starlings
descend. They had perforated the grasses in winter for
grubs, and now they come to return to the charge more or
less intermitted during the period of long grass.

At night the owls have a harvest only less rich than that
of the wagtails. A hay-field is full of mice. You might
think that they would be banished if not killed by the

140

SUMMER

mowers, but it is curious how very few the blade touches ;
and you have to watch like an owl or hawk to catch a sight
of them. Under your very eyes they will creep and glide
through the rough grass stubble, and little nap of short soft
blades, in almost perfect concealment. But when the fear is
over, and their playtime comes, they are more visible and more
vulnerable. The kestrel and the barndoor-owl have easier
hunting ; and within a short while the inhabitants of the field
that have not grassy nests at the roots of the grasses
discover that their home is irretrievably damaged, and are
off to corn-field, or wood, or stackyard.

SPOTTED FLYCATCHERS

LEARNING TO FLY

As song dies down in June the abundance of bird life
increases ; and in the last three weeks in the month the
garden shrubberies and other favourite nesting-places are
more densely peopled than at any other time of year. The
wave of birth has risen to its full height, and the forces of
destruction are only beginning to make away with the
annual superfluity. In a garden where many birds build,
there may easily be twenty-five times as many birds present
at midsummer as at the beginning of the nesting season in
March and early April. The resident birds have been
reinforced by many visitors and migrants, and the parents
are outnumbered by their young. The first young thrushes
and blackbirds of the April broods are now as large and
almost as active as their fathers and mothers ; and the
stock of the young birds of the year ranges from these
lusty marauders of the fruit-beds to the last young wrens.

But owing to the inertness of most young birds even
after they have left the nest, it takes some time to realise
how thickly the bushes are peopled, and how unseen eyes
are gazing from every tree and tussock of undergrowth.
They are gazing, but not as a rule watching us ; and this
vagueness of attention is one reason why the bushes can

142

SUMMER

be so full of young birds without our noticing them. If
the younger fledglings had yet learnt fear of man and
domestic animals, they would fly from us, and all the copse
would be in a scurry, and the thickness of its population
be manifest. But when a young thrush or greenfinch or
water-wagtail leaves the nest without disturbance, it still
regards man without alarm ; anxiety is left to its parents,
which often do their utmost in vain to wake it to a sense
of the perils latent in gardeners and exploring house-dogs.
While they screech and flutter a few yards from the object
of alarm, the young bird sits perfectly calm within a few
feet of it. Silence is eventually restored by the departure
of the intruder, if it is dog or man, or often in a more
disastrous manner if it is the cat. Young birds seem to
have no such instinctive fear of cats as monkeys are said
to have of snakes ; they will wait quite placidly for their
doom. This is not the numbness of fascination ; it is merely
the absence of perception. When
our attention is attracted to a young
robin by a sudden cry from some
bough close to our head, it is often
evident that the little bird has a
very vague idea of what we are, and
sometimes overlooks us altogether.
The round staring eye does not focus
a moving figure, or appear to dis-
tinguish it from the surrounding

shrubbery; it sees men as trees. If the bird is half
startled by the noise of a body pushing through the bushes,
it will shift its position on its perch, or sometimes flutter to
a new one, but still without discovering the intruder by
sight. It is curious to watch the sudden dawn of conscious-
ness in the eyes of a young bird when it does first appre-

LEARNING TO FLY 143

hend us as a detached and coherent body, distinct from
the surrounding scenery. Even then it usually displays a
spectator's curiosity rather than any kind of alarm.

The sudden explosive calls which burst intermittently from
the inner shades of the garden shrubberies at midsummer
are not expressions of fear, but a blind demand for food —
the primitive germ of all language. Young thrushes and'
blackbirds utter a metallic squawk ; young robins a kindred
but shriller cry. Before
they leave the nest broods
of young starlings utter a
rhythmical strident chorus
which rises as they hear
the parent bird's approach,
and dies down again as it
departs with its low note
of satisfied activity. Broods
of white owls under the
church roof raise a louder
and harsher tumult of the
same kind ; sparrows in
the ivy cheep more shrilly ;
and young martins in the
eaves make a murmuring
stir. Some of the noisiest
of all woodland birds as
they gain their feathers are

little woodpeckers. Young green woodpeckers shout from
their hole, in some rotten beech or oak bough, so loud that
they can be heard for a hundred and fifty yards. Their cry
is more like that of the adult great spotted woodpecker,
or the wryneck, than the free laughing note of their parent.
One of the brood often climbs to the mouth of the hole, and

YOUNG GREAT SPOTTED WOODPECKERS

144

SUMMER

peers in the entry as it calls. Young great spotted wood-
peckers make a loud but more confused din, more like the
burden of the starling's brood ; it is curious to see the boldly
pied woodpecker cling beneath the hole, and feed the young
heads clustering in the door. Young cuckoos pursue their
puny foster-parents with a petulant cry too thin for their
burly bodies ; it seems as though they had stolen a young
hedge-sparrow's or meadow-pipit's voice, as well as its
heritage. The more we listen at midsummer, the more the
whole world simmers with the voices of callow nestlings

YOUNG CUCKOO

and fledglings ; life rises in them to hymn the longest day,
and only too quickly dies down as the light declines.

Nature quickly sets to work to select her chosen few
from the multitude of her offspring. Among nearly all
birds the worst enemy is stormy weather. In a wet, cold
May and June so many eggs and young birds perish in
the nest that their numbers are more than decimated before
the time for the general emergence upon the world ; and
then the flood of life at midsummer is greatly reduced,
and the garden shrubbery may miss that haunted week or
fortnight when every bough has eyes. Cats, rats, and owls

LEARNING TO FLY 145

destroy myriads of young birds every year ; but still more
perish through wind and weather. Hunger combines with
cold and wet to starve them, for the insect food which
predominates in the diet of most nestlings and fledglings
is scarce and hard to come by in stormy weather ; and
even the most active parents can bring them least to eat just
when they need most.

Young birds, such as partridges and moorhens, which
leave the nest almost as soon as they are hatched, are far
more alert than the vacuous little thrushes and robins, but

YOUNG PARTRIDGES

they have not much more fear of man. We have seen
a little dabchick paddle straight across a river to a man
standing on the bank, much as a very young lamb will run
to a stranger, from the impression that anything alive and
moving must be friendly. Besides terrestrial enemies young
water-birds are exposed to the greed of pike. Each pair of
moorhens probably produces an average of about twenty
young in the season ; for they nest from March to August,
and in that time bring off two or three broods, and lay from
six to thirteen eggs. Yet the moorhen, though an abundant,
is not an increasing species ; and the residue over the
annual wastage of the adult birds is sacrificed annually to
cold weather and predaceous enemies. There is no percep-

SUMMER

tible relation between the number of eggs laid by any
species of bird and the obvious risks to which it is exposed.
Pheasants may lay a dozen eggs or more, plovers lay four,
and the nightjar only two. Yet all these eggs are laid on
the open ground, and young nightjars are born more help-
less than either young plovers or pheasants. Young birds
nursed to maturity in holes, in banks, or trees would seem
to be safeguarded against half the risks of infancy. Yet the
kingfisher lays eight eggs, the blue tit ten or a dozen, or

YOUNG NIGHTJARS

even more, against the woodpigeon's pair ; and while tits
are stationary, and kingfishers perhaps declining over the
country as a whole, woodpigeons have prodigiously multi-
plied within living memory.

The education of the midsummer fledglings goes on
apace; they soon become worldly-wise and distrustful of
humanity. Before the mock orange-blossom has ceased to
drench the walks with its heady odour of the solstice, the
eyes have vanished from the bushes. Already thinned, the
nimbler troops of young fare forth with their parents to wider
feeding-grounds ; and so, like the faintest movement of the

LEARNING TO FLY 147

ebb-tide in a brimmed sea-channel, the autumn migration
is already distantly begun. Mixed troops of old and young
birds appear in the new-cut hay-fields, pecking at the seeds
of the fallen flowers, or feeding on the insects laid bare in
the swaths and stubble. Plumage grows hard to distinguish,
though not so hard as when the old birds are in full moult in
July ; and some of the young ones wear curious and freakish
liveries. Young willow-wrens, for example, flit among the
currant-bushes in suits almost as yellow as a tit's or wagtail's ;
and in spite of their insectivorous reputations they do not
always spare the fruit. It seems more natural to see young
blue and great tits in bright suits of yellow and green. With

YOUNG GREAT TITS

them the chief point worth notice is that they adopt their
parents' gay colours so early, whereas many other young birds
do not gain the full adult plumage for months or even years.
The first plumage of young robins is a dull brown, flecked
with tawny spots, and few of the young birds which are
brought up in open nests, whether in boughs or on the ground,
present a close likeness to the adult plumage in their first
summer. More uniformity is observable in the case of birds
which nest in holes. Even the young wagtails, which are
usually nested in open and unsheltered cavities, have a plain
family likeness to their parents. The little pied wagtail newly

i48 SUMMER

strayed from the nest is fascinating in its immature parti-
coloured suit ; though it has the blurred markings and rather
impure colours which are characteristic of all young birds.
The young blue and great tits are like smudged copies of the
adult birds, though the likeness does not bear exact compari-
son ; and young woodpeckers and kingfishers also wear the
bright colours of their clans. In a broad way we seem to see
here the working of a principle of natural selection, which
weeds out bright colours among the young hatched in more
exposed situations, and allows them finer development when
the little birds are nursed in sheltered holes. The same prin-
ciple roughly holds good of the hen birds. Hen torn- tits and
kingfishers and woodpeckers are nearly as bright as their
mates, but there is a great difference between the sexes of
blackbirds and pheasants.

Young kingfishers appear from the nesting-holes at very
different dates during spring and summer, but most often
towards the end of June. They sit solemnly in a row on a
rail or outstretched bough by the waterside, and wait to be
fed with the same vacant self-absorption as the young robins
and thrushes in the shady garden shrubbery. All about
them in fine June weather the boughs and sedges of the
river teem with life. The air swarms with insects, and with
birds busily devouring them. Life and death jostle each
other with doubly concentrated fierceness at this time of
year. If happiness depended on length of days, it would be
a dark world for the majority of these young birds and
dancing flies ; but mankind is too apt to view nature by his
own standards, and to demand for all alike the fullness of
his threescore years and ten. The little kingfisher which
perishes in a rainstorm after a week of bright June weather
by the waterside is no fit object of pity because its day was
so brief. It saw the sun, and felt the stir of life, albeit per-

LEARNING TO FLY

149

haps quite unconsciously, and its existence was not in vain.
Most of the pity evoked by the natural incidence of death
among animals is really a form of egoism. Men are reluc-
tant to recognise that their personal views and tastes are not
a universal law ; and this intellectual pride is often rein-
forced by the objection to face death in nature because it
hurts our own feelings. We sometimes read letters in the
newspapers demanding the removal of tramps and beggars
from the streets, not out of any consideration for the welfare
of the vagabonds, but because it is painful to passers-by to

YOUNG KINGFISHERS

see them in their wetness and rags. This is simply selfish-
ness in a thin veil of philanthropy, and it often finds its
counterpart in the attitude of men towards nature. We can-
not huddle the forces of death out of sight, as we can the
broken men and women on the Thames Embankment ; but
we invest them with a sense of horror and injustice which is
not truly theirs.

Such thoughts rise naturally in the heart of the June
day, but do not cloud it for any one who has learnt to face
them fairly. If the best use of life is in busy activity, as we
mostly now hold, young birds, at any rate, do not long waste
their time. Day by day the sandpipers follow their parents

150 SUMMER

more nimbly, skimming by the midsummer stream, where
the water-grasses rise tall around the sand-spits ; and the
young finches, watching on the bough, grow fewer, and turn
into busy hunters in the fields. Gradually the young birds
learn to feed themselves ; usually they seem to learn readily
after the first few days, by imitating their parents, but some-
times the children are backward, and the old birds have to
coax them to peck at some insect tit-bit, instead of feeding
them from beak to beak. Birds never appear in a prettier
light than when the fledgling is itself old and clothed
enough to be pretty, and the parents still feed the spoilt child
which follows them, and begs with trembling wings and
body. The quarrelsome and vulgar cock-sparrow becomes
a tender father, chewing up the cake-crumbs that we throw
him at tea-time on the lawn, and so softening them before he
gives them to his young. It is noticeable that only one
young sparrow is as a rule tended by the old birds in this
affectionate way. This helps to explain why the young one
depends so long on its parents, since it monopolises the
parental care which would have been distributed among a
larger family, and becomes rather ' spoilt ' and helpless. But
it also illustrates the swiftness with which the forces of
destruction act upon nestling and fledgling birds. Broods of
young sparrows usually run from three to six ; and yet, by
the time that they should have been fit to fend for them-
selves in the outer world, we often see only a solitary
survivor.

Birds' flight is by some regarded as an instinctive gift,
while other naturalists have given fanciful accounts of the
care with which young birds are taught to fly by their
parents. The truth seems to lie between the two views,
and the readiness of young birds to fly seems much greater
in the case of the smaller species. Every field naturalist or

LEARNING TO FLY 151

bird-nesting boy must over and over again have startled a
fledged brood of blackbirds, or linnets, or water-wagtails
from the nest for the first time, and seen them flatter in all
directions from the bush or stump. They are ready to fly,
and fly they can and do, though not far or strongly ; and
this may be fairly called an instinctive power, though it needs
practice before it is perfect. Practice chiefly comes in the
case of these smaller birds by imitation of the parents ; as
the water-wagtails flit from stone to stone, and beach to
beach, in finding food for the young, the young ones follow
them. We seldom see small birds coaxing their young to
fly, by fluttering before them in the air, or taking flight just
ahead of them, and looking back to see if they are following.
But from time to time we do see little devices of this kind
among larger birds, which seem to know that they are
heavier, and have the same instinctive fear of a fall as men
and other flightless animals. Alpine choughs can be watched
making many cackling attempts to lure out a brood of
young from a precipice hanging above a snowfield ; and
though the adult choughs frequent the top of the Matter-
horn for scraps from the climbers' lunches, the young ones
show little readiness to take to the air. The efforts of the
old birds to make them fly may fairly be described as teach-
ing, though of a rather clumsy and helpless kind. The
larger the bird the more it seems to need the stimulus of
example, if not of deliberate parental encouragement, to
learn to use its wings. After one has watched many birds
the impression is gained that while the smaller kinds, such as
thrushes and finches, would learn to fly if they were left
entirely to themselves — if they were suddenly deported, say,
to some desert island — the larger species would not, or at
least would proceed by very slow stages, and would take
more than one generation before they reproduced their

152 SUMMER

ancestors' skill. Vultures are among the finest of all fliers ;
but an interesting account of the difficulty with which a
young adopted vulture learnt the art was contributed to a
French journal by the late Captain Ferber, who was himself
killed while flying. It is worth quoting at some length, as
one of the best of the observations on this subject, con-
ducted by men with
a personal acquaint-
ance with the pro-
blem : ' Some time
ago my friend, Cap-
tain Detroyat, wrote
to me : "My brother-
in-law, M. Sala, and
myself have just suc-
ceeded in catching a
young vulture in the
Pyrenees. He is less
than six months old,
and the spread of his
wings is already 2*2
metres. But he is
quite unable to fly,
and he is not even
come to the point of
progressing by flighty jumps. What shall we do ? Shall we
tie a string round his neck, and train him on Archdeacon's
principle by towing from a motor-boat, or shall we push him
into the air from the ' pylon ' of the Aero Club ? " I
replied (says Captain Ferber) as follows : " The case is a
most interesting one, and I should imagine that what is the
matter with the bird is that he has not had an opportunity
of being taught by his parents. You be his father and

ALPINE CHOUGHS

LEARNING TO FLY 153

photograph his attempts. But don't tie him to a motor-
boat. It might be bad for his health. You might push
him off the roof, and if he flies it will show that his instinct
suffices. If he does not fly, it will be plain that he needs a
rational course of instruction."

1 Captain Detroyat did as recommended, and the result of
his observations was as follows: ''On the i5th of Sep-
tember the vulture, who answers to the high-sounding name
of Coco, weighed 9 kilogrammes, and measured 2*2 metres
from tip to tip of his wings, with a maximum width of "5
metre. This is approximately a square metre of surface.
According to the shepherds who brought him in, and by
plotting out a curve of the rate at which his weight
increased, it was probable that the date of his birth fell in
the previous April. He is unable to fly, and can hardly
toddle.

' " ' Coco' is not altogether wild. Indeed, he is so little
wild that it is impossible to frighten him enough to make him
run. At the end of September he tried his wings several
times, very much like a recruit going through his ' extension
motions,' on the top of a pot full of flowers to the very-
great damage of the latter, but without daring to fly to the
ground. One day he was sufficiently venturesome to
attempt gliding from the top of a table or seat with his
wings spread out like a parachute. After that his progress
was made by practising flying jumps. This period was very
long. In spite of the efforts of his adopted father, he could
not be induced to start and practise gliding from the top of
a 2-metre wall which surrounded a field. He was so unen-
terprising that he was finally pushed off a roof, but to
every one's great surprise it was then found that ' Coco '
really could not fly. He fell like a lump after having spread
his wings in a vague and undetermined sort of way. I was

L

154 SUMMER

unable to believe that this was really the case, so I tried
again. The second time he fell head down on the gravel
just about five metres from the spot vertically under the
point at which he started. Unfortunate bird ! I heartily
begged his pardon, for he was really very much afraid, and
in consequence he had a heart attack, and was very ill the
whole evening afterwards.

' " By the 4th of October he was getting on nicely, and was
practising from the top of a hen-house, where he tried his
wings for a long time, and ultimately glided down from the
eminence to a distance of 15 metres, where he landed like a
big chicken. Next he was taken out into the middle of a
big field without trees and incited to run like Santos Dumont
at Bagatelle, during which time he got gradually more
courageous.

1 " He commenced by jumping on his feet and beating his
wings at the same time. These jumps became more frequent,
and increased in length and speed without greatly increasing
his height according as the speed he got up permitted, till
finally he got up sufficient speed in his last jump to leave the
ground definitely, and to continue gliding along at i J metres
above the surface. In this way he covered 30 metres at the
run, and then 100 to 150 metres flying, exactly like Santos
Dumont. He had come to the point at which he was pro-
ceeding from flight to flight.

' " Another series of experiments which he carried out con-
sisted of jumping into the air 3 or 4 metres. To induce him
to do this, we placed him in a small yard which was walled
in on three sides by buildings, the fourth being closed up by
a wall of 2 j- metres in height. He disliked remaining in this
little courtyard, and, after two or three jumps and beating
with his wings, he succeeded in rising high enough to get on
the top of the wall, from which he glided down into the field.

LEARNING TO FLY 155

How did he get out of this narrow space when he found it so
difficult to rise from the ground in an open field ? Possibly
some current of air between the buildings assisted him, or
perhaps necessity made his efforts more violent. The point
has not been decided.

' "Finally, on the 1 3th of October he had become a 'master.'
He flew 200 or 300 metres through the air and returned to
his point of departure, i.e. his pen, without allowing himself
to be tempted away by his wild brothers in the mountains.
At this date he weighed 10 kilogs., while the stretch of his
wings was 2*55 metres. Gradually his absences from home
increased in length, but he always came back without
becoming in any way wilder.

' " Unfortunately, he had not the dread of mankind
possessed by his wild brothers of the mountains, and one
of those brutes with a gun, who must kill everything they can
get near, succeeded in approaching him as he was sitting on
a rock, thinking no harm of any one, and shot him dead.
The ' sportsman ' was rather astonished on approaching the
dead vulture to find a rose-coloured ribbon round his neck."'

The comparative unreadiness of the large birds to take
to the air as compared with small ones is very interesting
when taken in connection with the fact that the biggest birds
do not fly at all. The archaeopteryx, or earliest fossil bird
that can fairly be called a bird and not a reptile, is about the
size of a crow ; and we must take it that from this stem birds
increased in size, as well as diminished, until they came to a
point at which their young could not be got to fly at all. We
usually speak of the ostrich or the great auk as having ' lost '
the power of flight, but it would probably be truer to say
that they failed to acquire it. The explanation of the flight-
lessness of the largest birds is not easy. It does not seem to
be due to the mechanical difficulty of supporting a given

156 SUMMER

weight by a physically practicable wing surface ; expert
opinion holds that the problem ought theoretically to be
easier with a larger bird than with a small one, since in the
smaller bird's wing there is so much more waste margin to
the area. One plausible explanation is that since the power
of the living engine must be supplied by food, it would be
impossible for an ostrich to eat enough to make good the
waste of the extremely powerful muscles which depress the
wings of birds in flight. The failure is thus one of the
digestive processes, in spite of the fact that the ostrich's
digestion is not upset by bits of metal. But the reluctance
of the young vulture, and even of the young choughs, to
trust themselves to the air suggests that the real reason of
the flightlessness of the largest birds may be found in the
familiar perils of the law of gravity. The danger of falling
is greater for big birds than small ones ; while the newly-
hatched duckling can drop safely from a tree, such a fall kills
the young rook. Possibly there came a point in the develop-
ment of the larger species when they feared to practise flight
at all, or when all those who did try it in their unskilful youth
perished, and the remainder became hereditary pedestrians or
divers. It may be some consolation for the loss of human
life in learning to fly that it is not always a safe or simple
process even for birds. Birds, indeed, are too intelligent and
adaptive a race to possess the sort of security that comes of
living by instinct

CORNFIELD FLOWERS

THERE are no weeds in a virgin wilderness, and the briar
and the thorn are as truly the children of nature as the vine
and the fig. Weeds came into being when mankind began
to till the earth ; and they are simply the plants which com-
pete persistently with the crops on cultivated soil. To the
farmer in his strictest moods every plant in a cornfield is a
weed except the wheat ; but the weeds of English cornfields
include some of the brightest, as well as the most delicate,
of our wild flowers. Scarlet is the most brilliant of
all colours, and the only scarlet flowers found in this country
are both blossoms of the corn. The corn poppy blazing
among the swelling ears of corn in July has a shy counter-
part close to the ground in the little red pimpernel. But
even the pimpernel tends to decline from the true brilliance
of scarlet, and to bear flowers of a duller red ; while the
small corn poppy, though it is so like the more abundant
species that it is little more than a dwarf variety, often
bears blossoms which are nearer rose than true scarlet, and
recall red window-curtains faded in the sun.

Poppies and corn marigolds and the hemp-nettles and
most other cornfield flowers are attracted by a broken and

167

158 SUMMER

friable soil, and are therefore found among the corn. If
England were all wild land, they would be far less numer-
ous, and would only be found on the banks of torrents, the
bare and rain-washed flank of hills and cliffs, and other spots

where for one reason or
another there was a
stretch of bare grit or
gravel on porous soil.
Many of them can still
be found in the old
places, just as house-
martins nest here and
there on the face of a
rock ; but the right soil
is formed so seldom with-
out the aid of man that
many of the common
cornfield flowers would
be scarce plants if it
were not for cultivation.
Marsh plants tend to
decline in a civilised
country, because man
sets himself steadily to
drain and transform their
haunts ; but under the
same process plants of
well-drained and broken
ground thrive and multiply, because the process of tillage
turns every piece of arable ground into a congenial home.

Cornfield plants also receive the largest accession of
foreign immigrants. Corn is imported in increasing
quantities for food, while seeds of many kinds are purchased

CORN MARIGOLD

NIGHT IN THE VILLAGE
By SIR ALFRED EAST, R.A., P.R.B.A.

CORNFIELD FLOWERS 159

abroad for English fields and gardens. Other seeds are
introduced accidentally, in the litter used to pack foreign
bales and parcels, in fodder, and in other ways. The seeds
of foreign cornfield plants come in with the corn, and fall
from the railway trucks in which it is transported, or about
the doors of granaries and warehouses. In such places,
especially along the permanent way of the rail, they find the
dry and broken soil which they need ; and railway lines are
a frequent place for finding exotic cornfield weeds. The
seeds imported among more varied merchandise have the
same opportunity of distributing themselves as they are
jolted on their way by rail ; but our imports of foreign corn
and foreign farm and garden seeds are the chief means of
distributing foreign weeds.

Since cornfield flowers like light and broken ground, it
is not surprising that they are found in greatest variety on
sandy and chalky soils, and mostly avoid the heavy clays.
Once a stiff clay land has been brought into good cultivation,
it is easier to keep it free from weeds than most other soils.
Even when it is allowed to become very foul from the
farmer's point of view, there is nothing like the same variety
of weeds as on a lighter soil, though they may be stronger
and more abundant. The common plume-thistle blooms
and seeds thickly amongst the straggling corn ; coltsfoot
spreads its broad leaves, and if the state of the field is very
bad the dismal tribe of docks competes in monotonous
variety. Once the coltsfoot blossom is over, in early spring,
there is little to delight the eye among the wild plants of a
cornfield on the clays ; for even the plume-thistle is the
most commonplace in habit and colour of all its tribe. On
lighter soils the presence or absence of lime makes its usual
striking difference in the character of the weeds. The
brilliant golden corn marigold abhors lime, and is as un-

160 SUMMER

familiar on the chalk and limestone soils as it is abundant
on many grits and sands. Blue corn-flowers prefer a sandy
soil without lime, and so does the purple corn-cockle, and
the little branching spurry, which is one of the most familiar
though unobtrusive of cornfield flowers. Yellow charlock
and white wild radish prefer one of the calcareous soils,
having the appetite for lime which marks the turnip tribe ;
and charlock abounds especially on the chalk soils, which are
usually lighter than those on limestone. The pretty pink
convolvulus is a very tolerant weed, and will thrive in any
soil that is not too wet or heavy ; but it particularly loves the
sandier lands, finding in them the perfection of porous light-
ness which it only partly enjoys on the loams spread over
the chalk downs. It can make itself very happy in looping
and twisting about the grasses and knapweeds on a rough
bank ; but the stems of corn form perfect natural props for
its aspiring bines, and it clasps them as tightly as the elm is
clasped by the ivy.

Broad blood-red stains of poppy are most abundant in
June and July on the sandy soils ; but they also form one of
the great sheets of colour which are the peculiar glory of the
chalk countries. The chalk soil itself is of the most exquisite
richness and delicacy after rain. The white underlying
rock blends with the red upper loam in varying proportions
where the plough has shorn it, until the bare fallow is flushed
and dappled with roan. After a wet night at midsummer, a
bare chalk fallow is as beautiful in the distance as a field of
sainfoin. Then there is sainfoin itself, with the tints of
clouded rose in its massed blossoms. This is so firmly estab-
lished on the chalk that it often appears as a cornfield weed.
Crimson clover spreads a deeper and purer stain ; it is
curiously lucent at dusk, and glows on into the mid-
summer twilight as long as there is any light at all. It is a

CORNFIELD FLOWERS 161

favourite summer crop of the light chalk soils, and not a wild
cornfield flower, except for a stray bloom here and there ;
but its crimson is inseparable in the landscape from the con-
trasted stains of poppies flagrant with scarlet, and charlock
massed yellow as sulphur against the sky. The magnificence
of these sheets of colour is almost incredible ; and to any one
who revisits the chalk countries after absence they are
almost as astonishing as ever, after the comparative dullness
of the colours even at midsummer among farms on other
kinds of soil. Nature shows a complete indifference in
bestowing her glories on the thrifty and the unthankful
crop. The clover and the charlock and the poppy alike
excel the glories of Solomon, irrespective of the part they
play in the economy of man.

' The sleep-flower sways in the wheat its head,
Heavy with dreams, as that with bread '

— but if its splendour of colour were only as portable as the
grain, that pure dream of scarlet would sell dearer in cities
than any opium.

Besides the supreme stains of charlock and poppy, the
colours of other cornfield flowers are splashed on the land-
scape at times with a heavy brush. Corn-flowers dapple the
fields on sandy soil with their deep but brilliant blue. The
same lands are often stained golden yellow with the corn-
marigold ; and purple corn-cockle and tall white campion, as
well as the scarlet poppy, variegate a crop of vetches or
almost hide a growing field of roots. Mayweed, or common
camomile, covers many arable fields with its coarse green
tufts and large daisy-like flowers ; but it is too low-growing
to compete successfully with the rising corn, and is commonest
in root-fields and among garden crops. It has no exclusive
taste for any one soil, and when it appears on chalk it conspicu-

162 SUMMER

ously lacks the peculiar grace of growth that all the chalk
plants share in greater or less degree. When corn-flower and
corn-marigold and poppies and some white flower like campion
or mayweed are thickly mingled in a field of vetches at mid-
summer, their pure, fresh colours in contrast give a peculiar
sense of gaiety to the scene. The filmy and brooding
purples of later summer are still absent, though every day
the earliest field scabious may open on the grassy balks
with its signal of the year's decline. The mixture of blue,
yellow, white, and scarlet tells of the longer days, and
summer still light-hearted and waxing ; and we enjoy the
June scene while there is time. A little later, when the
midsummer burst of blossom is over, the first small flocks
of goldfinches come to pick the ripening seeds from the
fading corn-flower blossoms. Their crimson heads and
striped golden wings flash as they flutter at the bending
flowers ; and the contrast of their own bright hues with the
blue blossoms is one of the most beautiful spectacles in the
summer fields.

All these blossoms are conspicuous for brilliance and
mass ; but there are many pleasant cornfield flowers which
must be sought before they can be enjoyed. They bloom
shyly among the roots of the corn, in the shadowed and
shifting sunshine. Heart's-ease or field pansy is one of the
most attractive of these smaller plants ; there is a suggestion
of a little catlike face which makes the blossom quaint and
fascinating. It is very variable in colour, and produces
almost endless combinations of purple and yellow and white.
This is a distinct plant from the mountain pansy of Wales
and the north, which grows on the open turf, and has a
rather larger blossom, with purer though still variable
colours. The small-flowered field pansy is another common
cornfield species, with dwarfed blossoms which might be

CORNFIELD FLOWERS

163

taken for deformed specimens of the larger kind. Pansies
are a form of violets, unless we choose to say that violets
are a form of pansies ; and these ill-developed blossoms of
the small field pansy have a suggestive likeness to the
unpetalled blossoms of the sweet violet, which produce the
seed. As the cornfield pansy recalls the widely different
scenes where the mountain heart's-ease blooms on the lofty
turf, so the little blue scorpion-grass suggests the forget-
me-not by the June rivers. The
scorpion-grass is plainly a kind of
forget-me-not ; but it is pinched
and almost minute in growth, to
suit the more arid conditions of the
sandy or chalky cornfields where
it grows. The whole growth is
sparer, the blossoms are smaller,
and of a less full and limpid blue,
and the leaves and stem are
covered with the dry bristly down
which so often helps to protect
plants growing in hot, dry situations
from the thirsty beams of the sun,
by checking too free transpiration
through the vegetable pores.

Venus's comb and Venus's looking-glass are a dainty
couple of cornfield flowers often found not apart on chalky
soils. Venus's comb is one of the chervils and cow-parsley
tribe, and has the typical finely cut leaves and unusually
small clusters of white blossoms. These expand on fruiting
into a bunch of long-pointed seed-vessels like the teeth of a
comb ; while, when regarded separately, they have given
the little plant its other name of shepherd's needle. Venus's
looking-glass is more fancifully entitled ; for a name which

164 SUMMER

might very well fit the round shining seed-heads of the
garden honesty has been given to a little campanula with
purple starry blossoms. The special feature of the plant is
its large, swollen seed-capsules, which are as fully developed
when the flower first opens as they are in most plants when
it fades.

Mouthed or lipped flowers are represented among the
smaller cornfield species by several attractive little plants.
Of the snapdragon tribe, in which the lip of the flower is
tightly closed, there are two minute examples in the least
toadflax and the fluellin. The least toadflax is a wiry, bushy
dwarf, often only some three or four inches high ; its flowers
are of the typical tight-lipped pattern, with the lower jaw
yellow and the rest of the blossom purple. Fluellin is a
creeping plant with long stems, and broad leaves set alter-
nately on the opposite sides. The blossoms are spurred as
well as jawed, like the toadflaxes; and small as they are
they are conspicuous from the sharp contrast between the
deep purple or crimson-brown of the upper lip and the yellow
lower one. Often the leaves are sharply angled, like an
arrow-head, and this makes the plant more noticeable among
the corn or late summer stubble ; but they are often smoothly
oval. Sharp-leaved fluellin and round-leaved fluellin are
frequently separated as two distinct species ; but gradations
between the two forms can be found so freely in the same
field, and even on the same plant, that they can hardly be
regarded as more than very inconstant varieties. As for
open-lipped or ' labiate ' flowers, the most striking cornfield
representative of that ample tribe is the large-flowered hemp-
nettle, which grows among the oats and barley in Scottish
glens and wet Welsh valleys. It is a large yellow dead nettle,
splashed with purple, and a more handsome flower than the
yellow nettle, or archangel, of English hedges in May. The

CORNFIELD FLOWERS 165

narrow-leaved hemp-nettle is a very characteristic plant of
chalky cornfields in the south. This is a little branching
plant, usually about six inches high, with clusters of rosy
flowers marked on the lip with a white or yellow spot. It is
usually as neat and compact as the common hemp-nettle of
the hedges is lax and straggling. The difference of habit is
so great that the resemblance of the corn hemp-nettle to the
better-known kind is often masked. Closely allied to the
hemp-nettles are sundry cornfield species of red dead nettle,
which distinguish themselves from the common red nettle of
summer gardens and winter rubbish-heaps by a sparer and
smaller growth.

As midsummer passes, and the corn reaches its full
height, the deep purple blossoms of the greater knapweed
begin to spread their flat fringes a little beneath the swelling
ears. Simultaneously the first lilac flowers of the field
scabious open a little higher and nearer the light. Each of
these cornfield flowers has a meadow counterpart. The
black knapweed, which country people call hardheads, is a
very common weed in the pastures throughout later summer ;
and the small scabious blooms on the down from midsummer
onwards, while later summer brings the devil's-bit scabious in
rough or clayey pastures. But the field scabious and greater
knapweed are each the largest and most graceful of their
families ; the greater knapweed has a clean-cut leaf, and a
general distinction of colour and outline which the scrubby
' hardhead ' lacks. But they are not wholly welcome when
they appear in the corn, even to the nature-lover with no
direct interest in the cleanness of the crop. Their purple
blossoms mark the gradual shortening of the days; and
though they make a new and graver contrast with the tints
of beeswax kindling in the ears of corn, they dispel the
bright midsummer harmony that we noticed in the vetch-

1 66

SUMMER

fields of June. The day soon comes in July when the first
globe of thistle-down is seen travelling on the wind across
the field ; and although no messenger could be more light
and fugitive, none gives a more certain signal of the irrevoc-
able wheeling of the year towards harvest and autumn
decay.

YOUNG SPOTTED FLYCATCHERS

PURPLE EMPEROR

BUTTERFLY FLIGHT

IN July the woods and downs still keep much of the
freshness of midsummer among their flowers and verdure,
although the garnished hay-crop has fallen, or is fast falling,
and the foliage of the forest trees has caught a deep bronzed
green from the sun. As earlier and later in the year, the
butterflies are in harmony with their time. July has no
species so exquisitely tinged with kindling freshness as the
orange-tip of May ; but the deep red and sepia of the
peacocks and red admirals of the August and September
gardens would be even more untrue to its mature but still
sanguine richness. Now the purple emperor sails in the high
sun of the dog-days round the oaks in the heart of the
woods, and the pure white stripes of the white admiral
flicker in the shadows arched with honeysuckle. There is
no hint of deepening autumn languor in the motion or
the colour of those beautiful wings as there is in the Van-
essae of early autumn ; and if the orange-tips have vanished
with the cuckoo-flowers, the marbled whites with their cool
chequered wings of milk-white and umber come forth for the
first time, and float about the yellow fennel-heads by the
paths on the downs and wolds.

The flight of the male purple emperors round their chosen
M

i68

SUMMER

oaks is one of the proudest and most graceful spectacles in
summer life. It differs from the flight of any bird. Birds
soar and glide in high air, regardless for the time being
of any perch or stay ; and for power and grandeur the flight
of a great hawk excels that of any insect, as is only due to
its size. But the peculiar beauty of the purple emperor's
flight is the way in which it is linked to the large contours of
the tree's upper boughs, and in particular to a few favourite

THE HAUNT OF THE PURPLE EMPEROR

perches. From these it leaps high aloft, sweeps and circles
round a friend or rival with the ceremonious grace of
the tournament, rides on outstretched wings as the Vanessae
ride round the autumn dahlia-heads, and again stoops flashing
to its perch. All is still for a few moments, and we only
hear the solemn drone of the innumerable insects of the
sunshine. Then the purple emperor is off and up again,
quickly followed by another from a hitherto unnoticed perch ;
as they flick their wings against the sky over the oak-crown,
the purple iridescence and pure white spots and bands
start momentarily into sharp relief. Another beautiful

BUTTERFLY FLIGHT 169

movement is when they mount across the high folds of the
boughs, sweeping in and out of the knolls and depressions
of the foliage as a swallow skims over the undulating
mustard blossom in the downs. So the proud game of flying
goes on through all the hot hours in the July woods ; and
the peculiar relation of the butterfly's flight to the lines of its
favourite tree seems gradually to shape the tree before our
eyes, like a fine piece of sculpture, and adds beauty to the
oak as to its owner.

Purple emperors are not bred on oaks, as are the little
purple hairstreaks which play at being purple emperors in
the same weeks. The eggs are laid, and the caterpillars live
for nearly a year on the sallows, which in many damp and
clayey oak woods lift their brittle and lowly boughs among
the undergrowth. Nor when the butterflies emerge do they
always set their thrones upon an oak ; a chestnut is fairly
often chosen, and occasionally some other tree. But usually
it is the king of trees that is chosen by this royal butterfly,
and there seems a natural fitness in the choice. The brilliant
bluish-purple gloss is a prismatic or iridescent colour, and
at certain angles the wings appear dark brown, though finely
decorated with the white bands and splashes. The empress,
though larger, has no such gloss ; she is not a brilliant
butterfly, though she is a distinguished one with her large
contrasted markings. Nor does she sport in flight about
the oaks with the males' activity ; she rests much longer
on her perch, which is sometimes much closer to the ground.
In dull weather she may sometimes be found almost torpid
on some branch at the edge of a wood or woodland ride.
The taste of these royal butterflies for carrion is almost
a classical example of a lapse from magnanimity, but it is
not so fixed a weakness as is often supposed. When they
come to the gamekeeper's gibbet, or settle upon filth on the

170 SUMMER

ground, it is usually in dry woods in droughty summers, when
other moisture is rare. Like blues and common whites, in
the July heats they will suck spilt water or oozing earth
when they can find it ; and if they can feed in this way,
baits of carrion are usually set in vain.

White admirals and purple hairstreaks might be imagina-
tively regarded as the purple emperor's queens and princelets.
There is much of the ' royal imp ' about the hairstreaks
born in purple and merrily skipping about the oak boughs ;
while the flight of the beautiful white admiral has a double
portion of the emperor's grace, though it lacks some of
his power. These two butterflies are closely related, and
their brown pattern freaked with white is much the same ;
but the admiral is smaller, and has no purple gloss. It
haunts woods rich in honeysuckle, on which the caterpillar
feeds ; and such woods are among the most beautiful, for the
honeysuckle hangs looped from gnarled old boughs, and
climbs in masses among the undergrowth. The white
admirals come stooping and sailing among the shadows,
gliding down the ladders of sunshine, and following the
contours of the foliage with the same exquisite apprecia-
tion as the purple emperor. Purple hairstreaks have only
such grace as is inseparable from every light and active
butterfly. They are middle-sized butterflies — larger than
most of the blues — and the wings of the male are of a dark
purple-brown, with a tinge of purple less brilliant than the
emperor's but more constant in varying lights. The female
in this species is the brighter; she has a large panel of
brilliant purple-blue in the middle of each upper wing. The
under side of each sex is cool grey, banded with brown,
white and orange, something after the manner of the blues.
The hind wings are tailed, also like one of the rarest blues ;
and the purple hairstreak is altogether a very distinguished-

BUTTERFLY FLIGHT

i7i I

looking little butterfly. It appears irregularly, but very
abundantly in certain years in its special haunts, which are
warm and sheltered oak woods, or copses with oaks as
standards. It plays in flocks about the oak boughs in bright
weather, mimicking on a small scale the soaring of the purple
emperor, and bickering with almost the spirit of the small
copper.

The hairstreaks are a tree-loving race, and the white-
letter hairstreak, which appears more locally and irregularly

PURPLE HAIRSTREAKS

in July, is specially attached to the wych-elm. It is
not always found haunting this tree. A few days after
emergence some hairstreaks have a way of migrating in a
flock to a different level in the woodland ; the purple hair-
streak, for example, may come down from the upper boughs
of an oak to the top of the ash saplings beneath it. So the
white-letter hairstreaks may be found fluttering round a
hazel or some other bush in a hedge, and summer after
summer may see them in the same place. None the less
they have been bred on a wych-elm, and a tree of this kind
will generally be found not many dozen yards away. The

172

SUMMER

white -letter hairstreak is a comely brown butterfly with
white stripes on the under side forming a large zigzag or W.
Several years may pass without a single specimen being
noticed in some familiar haunt, and then, some July day, the
brown butterflies are seen hovering about the well-known
bush again. Great fluctuations of numbers are common in
the case of many butterflies, and usually correspond with dry
and wet years. But the white-letter hairstreak sometimes
seems to thrive worst in the most sunny seasons, and its
close attachment to a single spot is peculiarly marked.
Though we see no specimens for
two or three seasons at a time, it
must be supposed that enough
actually emerge to perpetuate the
colony, but are overlooked. Some
butterflies and moths occasionally
remain in the chrysalis for months,
or even years, longer than usual —
sometimes owing to low tempera-
tures, but sometimes for no reason
that we can see. Possibly the
white-letter hairstreaks are liable

to these curious suspensions of animation, but real evidence
is lacking. In the case of wild butterflies it is much easier
to register the appearance of an additional brood — as often
happens in long, warm summers — than to detect if a season is
skipped. Only the most minute and thorough observation
can safely establish a negative conclusion in such cases.

The marbled white provides a good example of the way
in which many kinds of butterflies multiply in genial summers,
and diminish in wet ones. With the increase of numbers
goes an extension of range, especially in the case of the
butterflies of more roving habits. Female butterflies have

WHITE-LETTER HAIRSTREAK

BUTTERFLY FLIGHT

173

a provident instinct leading them to choose unoccupied plants
for their eggs ; and when there are many mothers of the
flock, they tend to scatter over a wide area when they
are butterflies of naturally vagrant mood. After a cycle of
warm dry summers the conspicuously chequered wings of
the marbled white are often seen on dry slopes many miles
from their usual strongholds. The last time when their
migration became marked was about 1900 and 1901 ; then set
in a series of predominantly wet, cold summers, unfavourable
to all butterfly life, and the marbled whites sank back again
to the cradles of their race on
the dry chalk and limestone
hills. Many butterflies are
more brilliant, but none more
pleasant to the eye, or racier
of their own particular soil, as
they hover with chalk-spotted
wings on the thymy lip of the
white chalk-pits.

In July the chalk-hill blue
comes out to reinforce the
common blues, diminished a
little since June ; and he too seems to have the chalk soil
in his blood, for the blue of his wings is densely filmed with
milk-white, like the blue of the palest summer sky. He is
larger and stouter than the common blue, and is chiefly
found on the same chalk and limestone hills as the marbled
white. In him we see once again that characteristic veiling
of the clearest early summer tints which so many flowers
and insects display after the longest day. With the mauve
scabious comes the filmy tinge of the chalk-hill blue; the
azure speedwell has passed, and the common blues are
growing less numerous and more ragged. The flowers of

MARBLED WHITE

174 SUMMER

the succory now opening are of the most exquisite pale blue;
but they too show a declension from the downright and
confident blues of May and June, and a reversion to April
tenderness. August will bring a second and often a more
numerous brood of the holly blue ; and this too is a repeti-
tion of a spring feature, and a kind of relapse beyond the
days when the early summer tide ran most strongly. Most
of nature's blues become adulterated with purples and lilacs
as the year goes on ; some return to their delicate begin-
nings, but in one way or another the colours after the solstice
are changed.

While the chalk and the flowers of the chalk have their
blues and marbled whites, the heaths and flagrant July
heather gain the lusty flapping graylings. The grayling is
the largest of our English browns, and has in a supreme
degree that casual indifference of flight which is conspicuous
in the large meadow browns either in fair or foul weather.
The grayling does not like foul weather ; he prefers the days
when the heat-mirage quivers over the hill, and the air from
the naked sand of the Long Valley streams parched across
his strip of Government heather. Spectator of innumerable
sham fights, his gift of taking cover is inherited and in-
communicable. He is a large and conspicuous insect as he
flies, but his underwings are so streaked with dark and light
grey that on most backgrounds of sand or stones he is one of
the hardest butterflies to discover. His utilisation of this
feature is peculiarly well marked. Orange-tips and common
pearl-bordered fritillaries are good examples of the way in
which butterflies make themselves inconspicuous at rest by
tucking themselves inside their chequered lower wings. The
grayling does this too, but does more ; he leans over till his
wings are almost flat on the ground, and even the erect out-
line of a perched butterfly is lacking. Possibly this habit

BUTTERFLY FLIGHT

175

may have arisen from the grayling's persistent habit of
basking ; for a wing surface inclined to the sun's rays
secures more warmth than one standing vertically. But
the posture certainly seems to add to the butterfly's in-
conspicuousness ; and if it has protective value, it would not
be less effective for having been developed out of a desire
for warmth. Possibly the many lizards on the sunny heaths
haunted by the grayling are
foes which it is worth while
to deceive.

Graylings are not always
found either among heather
or on sandy commons; they
flap and bask in July and on
into August on many rough
stony hillsides, sitting among
the stones as on the sand.
Most of the browns like bask-
ing on dry ground ; but in
this respect, as in others

, . i , GRAYLING

mentioned in the chapter on

June butterflies, the small meadow brown is an exception.
It is essentially a blossom-haunting brown and it is
specially fond of the blackberry blossom, which comes out
in its own season of July, and with its conspicuous bloom
and rich nectar draws even the purple hairstreaks from
their oaks. Though more local than the large meadow
brown of the pastures, it is a very common butterfly in most
parts of the south and west of England; its brown and
ruddy orange wings with their little black eyelets are part of
the associations of the typical English lane. They mingle
with the large meadow browns in the pastures and along the
rough banks spotted with knapweed blossoms, and meet the

176 SUMMER

gorgeous pacing fritillaries on the blackberry blossom in the
woodland clearings.

Early July is the heyday of the largest members of this
beautiful tribe. They appear not long before the end of
June, and are seldom seen in the southern woods in August,
although the dark green fritillary still flits in some of its more
northern moorland haunts. Dark green and high brown
and silver-washed fritillaries are all characteristic butterflies
of the woods and heaths, and do not frequent gardens, where
the Vanessse are so thoroughly at home. The dark green
is the representative of the tribe in the north and on the
moors, while the high brown and the silver-washed dwell in
glades of the southern woods ; but their territories overlap in
some parts of the country, especially where the same district
gives the high brown its woodlands and the dark green its
open heaths. These two fritillaries are very much alike
when seen upon the wing. Both are large butterflies, with
wings of the bright amber-brown which seems distilled
from clear summer sunshine, and the characteristic darker
chequerings like those on the fritillary or snake's-head flower.
But when we see the dark green alight and fan its wings on
some thistle-head beside a mountain sheepfold, we see that
it is both greener and darker than the high brown of the
woods. The wash of green is conspicuous among the silver
spots on the under side of the lower wings ; and the green
and silver insect makes an exquisite contrast with the purple
thistle, or the heather on which it often settles on the moors.
The high brown and the silver-washed make a more delicate
display on the blackberry blossom in the woodland clearings ;
their lighter and brighter brown harmonises with the pink
and white flowers. The silver-washed fritillary is the largest
of the tribe, with longer wings that almost deserve to be
called pinions, as it floats down through the sunshine over

BUTTERFLY FLIGHT

177

the oak boughs and alights on the sweet bloom. The brown
in its wings has a redder shade ; and while the under side of
the other fritillaries is spotted with silver, this one is more
abundantly striped and splashed. The silver-washed and
high brown fritillaries are the largest butterflies which appear
at this time of year in the woodland clearings, except for the
peacocks and an occasional early red admiral, or the large
cabbage white. But
their season is brief;
and their impetuous
flight and their fond-
ness for frequenting
the bramble - bushes
that attract many other
insects soon destroy
the freshness of their
wings. Blundering
bumble-bees or imper-
tinent small meadow
browns or coppers
jostle them on the
blossom where they
sit ; and they dash off
with an indignant flight
that tears their wings
on the little hooked thorns set beneath the clusters of bloom.
By the end of July the silver-washed in particular is often
torn and shabby, for it is the fondest of the blackberry's
nectar. The high brown ranges more freely about the
sunnier copses, and sits basking on the earth coated with thin
grass, or on ground covered with chips and dry leaves, as
the newly emerged brimstones do in spring.

On wet or overcast days in July a new small butterfly is

FRITILLARY

i;8 SUMMER

found drowsing with closed wings on the heads of tall
grasses. This is the small skipper, which follows the large
skipper a month later, and is the last of its family ; it is
familiar on the grass-banks by the ripe cornfields of late
July, and on hot breezy days buzzes among the scabious and
knapweed flowers almost like a bluebottle. It is a sturdy
little creature, with nut-brown wings of long and angular
shape. The male has a black streak on each upper wing,
like the large skipper. The under sides of the closed wings
show grey and silvery as the butterfly sleeps, and the
colour agrees well with the grass-head drying under the July
suns. But the small skipper is by no means invisible to the
human eye, nor presumably therefore to those of birds. If
one wished one could sometimes walk along the turf bank
dividing unenclosed ploughed fields on a cool and drizzling
day in July, and pick one skipper after another from the
grass-heads with the finger and thumb. Folding their wings
upright like most other butterflies, they are far more con-
spicuous than the dingy skippers which rest on similar dry
grass- heads in May and June, and have the mothlike habit
of resting with their wings folded along their backs. The
distinction between moths and butterflies is an arbitrary one,
in spite of its convenience ; and in the family of skippers we
get very close to the day-flying burnet moths. The scien-
tific name for butterflies is Rhopalocera, or club-horns, while
moths are Heterocera, or all-other-kinds-of-horns. But
one of these kinds — the bandy-sticklike antennae of the
burnet moths — approaches very nearly in shape to the
antennae of the skippers, in which the swelling at the end is
long and gradual, instead of round and sudden as in the
feelers of a white or a blue.

Towards the end of July the second and more abundant
brood of wall butterflies begins to emerge, and sports among

BUTTERFLY FLIGHT 179

the blossoming thyme. May saw the appearance of the
first annual generation, but the wall is associated more
closely with later summer. Now, too, in a ' clouded yellow
year ' the first specimens of this delightful butterfly generally
begin to show themselves, though some may have been seen
as early as June in the clover-fields along the Kent and
Sussex coast. They, too, become commoner and more
widely spread in August ; and from their wandering habits
they are often noticed over a wider and wider area as the
month goes on, though they are not necessarily newly
hatched specimens. They will linger about the late clover
and in the scabious fields until the revolving year puts the
memory of the fritillaries in the wood-clearing far behind us,
and the shadows muster in the red admiral's autumnal
wings.

YELLOWHAMMER

DYING MUSIC

WHEN summer is at the full song scarcely ceases for any
hour in the twenty-four. 4 The earliest pipe of half-awakened
bird ' is very early in the morning. Which bird is the very first
to hail the morn is under some dispute, if the barn-door cock
be ruled out of the competition. But to some of us there
seems little doubt about the question. The most famous of
the singers is, at any rate in normal places and occasions, as
early as any. While darkness lives below, and dawn is no more
than a glint of hidden gold in front of fading stars, the larks
are high above the tree-tops, and at no other moment does
the sound fall so softly in so gentle a cascade. Heard from
quite close the separate notes of the lark may be called harsh
and rough. The morning notes descending from unseen
singers on the edge of dawn are liquid with the music of
another world, where no night is. Meredith must have
heard the lark at these hours, though there are some lines in
his ' Lark ascending ' which suggest a well-risen sun.

For singing till his heaven fills,
'Tis love of earth that he instils,
And ever winging up and up,
Our valley is his golden cup,

A WOODLAND GLADE

By TOM MOSTYN

DYING MUSIC 181

And he the wine that overflows
To lift us with him as he goes :

He sings the sap, the quickened veins ;
The wedding song of sun and rains
He is, the dance of children, thanks
Of sowers, shout of primrose banks
And eye of violets while they breathe :
All these the circling song will wreathe.

A very early bird which has much more music than he is
often given credit for is the starling. Soft whistles and
whisperings and little bouts of song, imitative of thrush and
lark, may be heard in the hollow elms well before dawn, and
in many English homes the tune is the most characteristic
of waking songs. For the starling enjoys the neighbourhood
of houses only less than the sparrow, which wakes us at any
hour when light is once indicated.

When dawn is obvious the whole choir starts ; but notice
is given, the gong is rung, by blackbirds and that most
humble persistent little singer the hedge-sparrow. But
these two early birds differ as widely as any two so far as
seasonal singing goes. You may hear the hedge-sparrow as
early as the first week of February. The blackbird is as late
to begin as any native bird, but when he does begin he is
supreme and dominant. There are houses even in the
nearer London suburbs where sleep to the deepest sleepers
is quite impossible after a certain hour in the morning.
The Jubilate of many blackbirds is much too jubilant for that.
Of course all birds are morning singers. They prefer the
dewy hours just after dawn for their activities. They build
then and feed then and sing then with the greater energy.
But singing is general till sunset. After sunset a few of
those we may call the day singers still refuse to take the
hint of twilight. The thrush is the ' longest ' of our singers

N

182 SUMMER

in most ways. It sings in November and in July. It begins
in good time in the morning and takes few rests during the
day. Often you may hear its still energetic song an hour,
sometimes two hours, after most of the rest are silent. It
sees the stars up as well as the sun down. It is in the choir
at vespers. Its rival is the robin. But the robin's song at
these late hours has become little more than a chirrup on two
notes, a song sung only to show that the singer is awake.
Between the robin's last call and the thrush's good-night
halloo there is no interval of silence. The night singers are
already at work, and their company is not limited to the
nightingale. The swallow often sings in the dark, and the
sedge-warbler and the cuckoo are as regular at night as
the owl, if song is allowed to describe the wild tu-whit of
the barn-door or the monotonous cry of the little owl.

When summer opens some birds in song may be heard
all round the circle of day and night. But the period is soon
over. It ends almost abruptly. The night songs first cease,
then the midday songs, and finally a robin's chirp, or a
short impetuous burst from the large-hearted wren, are the
only birds singing in the garden; and you may travel
a hundred miles along the road without hearing any other
note than the depressed monotonous refrain, • Little-bit-o'-
bread-and-no-cheese ' from the yellowhammer, or a very
wheezy and short bar from the corn- bunting. We notice
this ending of the song-time less because another music takes
its place. As the birds drop into silence, the hum, the
murmur, the buzz of insect wings, and the grating of the
grasshoppers' legs take their place. 'The poetry of earth
is never dead,' wrote Keats, and the sound that set him to
writing that admirable sonnet was the scrape of the grass-
hopper and cricket. Almost like the insect note is the croon
and murmur that may be heard from a few of the birds. The

DYING MUSIC 183

turtle-doves in the elms seem to utter a noise that suggests
some organ very unlike a throat, if it is not quite an insect
noise. But Tennyson quite appropriately connected it with

the

' Murmur of innumerable bees.'

The insect hum is no substitute for the music that is stilled,
but it keeps at bay the silence which is one of the most
unsummer-like of attributes. Music, in the strict sense of
the word, is not to be found even in birds' songs, much less
can it be extracted from the hum of insects. Nevertheless,
we get great pleasure from the unmusical murmur, which
especially belongs to summer evenings. A summer night
would hardly be a summer night without the sound of some
great bold cockchafer dashing out on his thunderous course,
regardless of obstacles. We may call him a night-singer,
like the nightingale. He takes up the chorus dropped by
the bees. Among the bees the latest is the bumble. Long
after the hive- bees are at home, the bumble is abroad
foraging, and making, it seems, a double noise now that she is
alone. With great punctuality she waits as a rule for about
an hour after sunset, rolling about till then in her clumsy
way over the thick rose-petals or any flower she fancies.
She will sometimes tumble into a poppy-head, and roll there
with a high-pitched angry buzz, till she is covered with the
slaty pollen, against her will. Her rather slow and vagrant
course and sleepy hum at this hour is in strange contrast to
her fine intention when the hour for departure has struck,
when the condensing dew or darkening light announce the
end of day. Then she shoots off with a deep and purposeful
hum, as determined on a rapid and straight course as the
cockchafer or the migrant bird.

All these insect sounds have their distinctions, very

184 SUMMER

apparent when you listen for them. The hive-bees them-
selves have many notes. If you put your ear to the hive
you may catch the note of domestic work, low and even and
murmurous. The angry note is high and sharp and quick.
The morning murmur of the workers busy about the
flowers is like neither of these. There are day sounds and
night sounds. But in late summer the bulk of the music is
of one quality. The season's sounds are not vocal but
mechanical, if that may be considered a true contrast ; and
to some ears seem almost as if they came from another
kingdom, from things that grow with roots in the soil.
There are, of course, birds which make mechanical music
almost indistinguishably from vocal. The snipe's tail
feathers are an ^Eolian harp responsive to the tempest of
the bird's descent. No one has yet fully decided how the
lesser spotted woodpecker makes his trill, but even these
sounds are different in quality from the grating of the grass-
hopper's leg, which serves him for fiddle-bow, or the vibrant
shriek of the gnat. When August comes a sort of mechanical
murmur has quite taken the place of the liquid jollity of the
first spring music. You might now almost mistake the
drawling greenfinch and the monotonous bunting for tree
and hedge insects, if not for the grating of a bough.

THE WAYS OF A TROUT

TROUT have less majesty than salmon, but more homeliness.
While salmon and their fellow-migrants, the sea-trout, are
particular in their choice of streams, and sufficiently scarce
to make them celebrated among anglers, brown trout of
more or less weight make their home in the obscurest parish
brook, so long as it is sufficiently brisk of current. The
largest brown trout are lake fish ; but even in the New River
in the north of London a trout was caught a few summers
ago which weighed seventeen pounds. The size of trout
depends on the plentifulness of food, and that to a great
extent on the area of water in proportion to the number of
the trout. This New River trout, like others which occupy
known stations in many streams flowing through towns,
had the monopoly of a large supply of casual offal. At the
other end of the scale are the troutlets no bigger than
minnows which one can find by diverting the water of some
tiny but perennial rivulet draining a small hollow among
the heathery hills. Though there is much dispute whether
various races of trout should rank as distinct species, no one
would question the specific identity of these dwarf trout of
our English brooks with the famous denizens of the Hamp-
shire and Derbyshire dry-fly streams. The whole race of

1 86

SUMMER

trout and salmon in Britain is in a very fluid state, without
the clear distinctions which Nature has by this time imposed
on most groups of creatures.

Trout differ from the so-called coarse fish by spawning in
the winter, and reaching the height of health in early sum-
mer, when coarse fish spawn. At this time they are far better
able than in winter to stand the rush of the lively streams
which they haunt, and may often be seen cruising on the
gravel where in winter or early spring we may look for them

A HAMPSHIRE TROUT STREAM

in vain. After the excitement of spawning time, when in
shallow chalk streams we can see the male fish chasing each
other off their ' redds ' or nesting-places in the gravel, they
lie half-torpid in their shelters, of which every stream holds
many. Roots, rocks, and holes in the bank give them the
protection from the current which they always require when
resting, and especially during their lethargic period in winter.
They feed little until spring begins to produce a supply of
flies, and grow dark and wasted. A course of flies is said
to fatten them more quickly than any other element in their
mixed diet, and by the time that they have gorged on the
March browns and duns and Mayflies of spring and early

THE WAYS OF A TROUT

187

summer they reach the pink of condition. The phrase is
often literally correct, for the flesh of well-conditioned trout
in many streams and lakes is pink like that of a salmon. A
midsummer trout will weigh half as much again, length for
length, as one caught at the opening of the fishing season,
which is usually fixed too early ; and its lusty vigour makes
it one of the most attractive of creatures, either above or
under the water.

Brown trout vary greatly in colour, as is implied to
some extent by their alternative name of yellow trout.

LOCH SHIN

But the range of colour is still more various. It corre-
sponds very closely with the nature of their haunts. Yellow
trout is the commonest name in many parts of Scotland,
and corresponds to the peat-tinged water of most of the
streams flowing from Scottish moors. In such streams,
and even more in many moorland lochs, the trout have
rich golden -brown bellies, darkening to brown on the
back, and variously spotted with red-brown and black.
Very different is the livery of a trout from the pale green
water, transparent as a pane of glass, in some stream from
the granite hills, or from clear sandstone rock with quartz
sand. Here the trout are almost as silvery as sea-trout, and
spotted with bright scarlet, like sprinkled holly-berries.

i88

SUMMER

Trout may vary almost as greatly within a few score yards of
each other in the same river or lake, and the controlling
difference may be of human origin. In one Welsh stream
in our recollection, where most of the trout run moderately
dark, those caught in a long open pool formed by a mill-
weir, with a clear sandy bottom, gleam as bright as whiting
in the creel. To some extent the trout has the power of
altering his colour to suit his surroundings by closing or
opening the pores in the skin which display pigment.

A WELSH TROUT STREAM

Part of the attraction of every trout-pool is in its mystery.
Its life is separated from our own by the element which
is natural to fish but alien to ourselves, and the size and
number of the trout which it harbours are uncertain. The
largest fish only appear very occasionally to feed, and spend
most of their time in hollows among the roots of the willows
or behind the camp-sheathing of the streams in the water-
meadows. Gradually we may form an estimate of the trout
which live in a deep pool by watching what fish appear in
the best feeding-grounds at different times of the day. Every
trout has his own holt or hiding-place, but the more open

THE WAYS OF A TROUT

189

parts of the pool are usually a public feeding-ground, where
the large fish feed when they wish and the smaller fish when
they dare. At times, when the smaller trout are actively
feeding, we may be sure that the monarchs of the pool are
lying torpid. Only in the height of the mad rises after May-
fly, or some other favourite fly, are all the trout in the river
seen rising together, and then the sight is a wonderful one.
The whole stream heaves and boils ; and suddenly we dis-
cover what an unsuspectedly large population of trout

THE LODDON

the stream really contains, though for weeks only a few
may have been seen rising. This frenzied activity often lasts
only for two or three minutes, while the swarm of newly-
hatched fly floats down the stream. The calm of the stream
returns, and the revelation of the life within it seems almost
a dream. On hot summer evenings the trout sometimes rise
with almost equal activity after sunset, and for a longer time.
Often there seem to be no fly to excite them, but close
investigation shows a swarm of minute black midges. The
trout are rising at these black specks in a manner detested by
the fisherman, who has no artificial fly small enough to
counterfeit this minute insect. This rising at black midges

190 SUMMER

is known as ' smutting,' and is a frequent feature of life by
the trout-streams in June.

Great respect is paid to age among trout ; for age means
size, and larger size involves the power to devour. Great
lean old trout with hooked jaws and discoloured skins feed
chiefly on smaller members of their own kind, and their ugly
appearance is set down to their cannibal diet. It is more
probably simply the effect of their age, though it is true that
the older a trout gets the more seldom it will rise to a fly.
But trout of all sizes feed on smaller brothers when they get
the chance. The chance, on the other hand, must be an
obvious and easy one ; and trout do not race about the pool
after each other like sharks. So long as the juniors keep
their distance they are usually safe, and they may feed on
the good gravel shallows when the seniors are not hungry.
By watching a good trout-pool from a bridge when the fish
are still active in early summer, we can see how the whole
life of the pool is a balance of tyranny and recognised
custom. As the duns float down, or as we drop them in for
experimental purposes, first a smaller fish darts up from
some open station and seizes the fly. After this has hap-
pened once or twice, it excites the attention of a larger fish.
Out he lolls from beneath a floating mat of weed, and away
the smaller fish scurries, back to his own inferior position
at the tail of the pool, where he gets his better's leavings.
If the big fish is hungry he may keep his position for some
time, and snap up or at least investigate and reject whatever
flies may come within his reach. If the weather is hot, and
he is torpid, he will soon drop back from the current into
his holt. But the first little fish is rash if he returns again ;
for this activity on the part of the pool's lord has stirred up
another trout, or perhaps two or three, of the next size to
the biggest. He, or they, now take up their station at the

THE WAYS OF A TROUT 191

head of the pool, and if the first little fish is so foolish as to
come back while they are there, one of them will lunge
savagely at him, and he will have to scurry for his life.
If the second-sized fish are first attracted by the flies float-
ing into the pool, they will abscond as swiftly as the little
one when the lord of the pool makes up his mind to come
out. As usual in nature, it is well understood who is master,
and we never see among trout anything like a stand-up fight
among equals. Good holts descend from owner to owner,

A HAMPSHIRE MILL-RACE

like heirlooms ; if the trout in occupation of some comfort-
able eddy or hollow in the lee-side of a rock is caught, next
day his place is often taken by his next junior. What trout
like in summer is a station just outside the full rush of the
stream, but in sight of the current which brings down the
food. When they are not out feeding, they lie in their
holts with their attention more or less alertly fixed on events
outside. They do not dash out to the middle of the feeding-
ground to seize the smaller fish which eat when they are
reposing; but, on the other hand, the smaller fish do not
tempt them by passing too close to the mouth of their dens.
Trout have no eyelids, and it is disputed whether they

192 SUMMER

ever actually sleep ; but they certainly have periods of
unconsciousness which are indistinguishable from sleep in
other creatures. Once in Hampshire, after casting for some
time at a trout from behind without any result, the writer
next cast at it repeatedly from in front, and finally waded
into the river and touched its tail with a landing-net before
it suddenly dashed off in alarm. This was the more curious
as the fish was keeping itself in position with its fins on an
open shallow with a brisk current. Probably this slight
action of the fins is so habitual that the trout performs it
almost as mechanically as we breathe. In winter trout
retreat to the deepest part of their pools ; in severe drought
they creep into holes and lie half-torpid, almost like tench
in the mud. Small hill trout have a curious habit in
hot July weather of creeping into the stony shallows until
their spines are almost out of water ; they scramble away
when alarmed more like lizards than fish. They look as
though they were deliberately sunning themselves; but
they probably frequent these shallows for the sake of the
brisker play of the current across them when the stream is
shrunken and stagnant. It is a quest not for sunshine but
for oxygen.

Trout have many foods, and varied habits of feeding.
The rings of the rising fish which abound on a lake or river
on a summer evening are seldom seen on many other streams
through long weeks of spring. Partly this is due to the
trembling water of the rougher streams, which tend to
conceal surface rises ; but it is largely a sign that the trout
are feeding under water, on minnows, fresh-water shrimps,
and various other small aquatic creatures, including flies in
their immature stages. In the life of the water-flies on which
trout feed the stage corresponding to the pupa or chrysalis
in moths is not helpless and inert, but active ; and these

THE WAYS OF A TROUT

193

nymphs — as they are called — as well as the larvae are freely
devoured by trout beneath the water. Sometimes we see
the undulations produced in a pool by trout which are not
rising and causing rings, but twisting and rolling beneath
the water in an obscure but methodical way. The trout
are then groping about either for nymphs rising to the
surface in order to shed their skins and fly off as duns, or on
larvae at the bottom. The simultaneous behaviour of all the

HAMPSHIRE WATER MEADOWS

trout in a pool in this way betokens a large rise of nymphs,
most of which they devour before they reach the surface.
This trick of the trout is most frequent in cold springs and
summers, when they seem never to acquire properly the
habit of feeding on the surface. It is very exasperating to
dry-fly fishermen, whose strict rules forbid them to fish
except for fish plainly rising on the top of the water. The
presentation above water of the tail instead of the head
of the fish as it grubs for larvae is even more painful to the
purist fisher, who imputes to his fish a code of procedure

194 SUMMER

as scrupulous as his own, and to whom the very foundation
of his cult is that the trout of dry-fly streams feed habitually
on floating flies.

To inspect the diet of trout when they gorge themselves
in a flood, which scours all kinds of food from the floor
of the valley, it is not necessary to clean one's fish oneself
before they are cooked. Often when a trout is landed part
of its most recent meal is still sticking out of its mouth.
Earthworms form the staple of the feast at flood-time ; the
rain and rising waters flood out the worms and wash them
downstream to the fish watching in the eddies. But besides
worms trouts' mouths shed at such times a strange medley
of beetles, caterpillars, fish-spawn, and young fish, and the
remains of the harder and tougher flies such as ' creeper ' or
nymphal stonefly. The rapid digestion of a trout is not
fast enough for its appetite ; it will sometimes come for the
fisherman's fly with the tail of a smaller brother still sticking
out of its mouth. Astonishing, too, is the size of the trout
which are swallowed. In a Hebridean loch the writer has
caught with a sea-trout fly a plump and healthy brown trout
of about fifteen inches, from the mouth of which when landed
there protruded the headless and tailless spine of another
trout, which before digestion began must have measured at
least ten inches, or two-thirds of its captor's own size. Yet
in spite of such a crocodilish feat there is nothing treacher-
ous or repellent in a healthy trout, as there is about the lean
and slinking pike. The trout has the inspiring vigour of the
mountain torrent, and the clean brightness of the chalk
or limestone stream ; the activity of its chosen waters
passes into its firm yet rounded flesh, and it is far less of
a murderer than a fighter. Large trout in slow and easy
waters may grow comparatively dull and lethargic, and on
the whole the smaller the trout the keener is its spirit. The

THE WAYS OF A TROUT

195

prick of a hook is quite insufficient to daunt an active and
inexperienced trout, so long as the tender tongue or gills are
not injured. A fish which carried away the fly at his first
meeting can sometimes be caught again in a few minutes
with the fly still fixed in his lip. Only salmon parr, which
need to grow much faster, are more muscular and voracious
than young trout.

By watching a pool or lakeside carefully day by day,
it is possible to acquire a fascinating knowledge of the
movements and probable size of the trout which it holds.

AMONG THE WEEDS

Where the stream spreads level on the ford, we see the heavy
arrow-head line in the water as the large trout come up to
the shallows to feed for minnows at evening, or perhaps see
one lurking in a cart-rut, or gliding on the pale chalk road.
Some trout in lakes and open pools cruise regularly round
and round on the same track for a certain time each day ; their
line in the deeper water is much less conspicuous than the
ripple ploughed by trout moving on the shallows, and needs
careful watching before its recurrence is clear. Prone
observation on the bank of a trout-pool for half an hour often
reveals much life which is hidden on a casual inspection ;
half-transparent shapes detach themselves from the waver-

I96

SUMMER

ing shadows on the gravel or by the bank, or glide forth and
stand fanning in the current. But the deepest fascination
of trout and of trout-fishing is that there is always so much
more to learn. We cannot tell why trout feed so fitfully and
unaccountably, or whether they can see the colours in the
lures which we dress for them, or perhaps regard them all
as varying shades of grey. Only the flash of light from
some bright substance is unmistakably attractive to them ;
for the rest we are still in doubt. But behind all these
practical problems of the fly-fisher for all lovers of trout and
of nature, there is the primal fascination of the unknown life
in the pool.

THE DRAGON FROM THE POND

OF all the smaller more particular things in nature that have
been crystallised in verse or poetry, no event has been more
successfully translated into words than the emergence of the
dragon-fly. Tennyson delighted always to play the part of
the populariser of science. With his short-sighted eyes he
peered close into things, and he took pains in books too to
find out exactly what happened. Perhaps sometimes he
forgot his poetry in his science. Rather unkindly, but in a
spirit of admiration, Mr. A. Mackie in a charming article once
printed several Tennysonian passages about the dragon-fly
alongside a paragraph from a scientific treatise. The differ-
ence between the two was little more than a difference of
words, though doubtless the word makes all the difference.

' To-day I saw the dragon-fly
Come from the wells where he did lie.

An inner impulse rent the veil
Of his old husk ; from head to tail
Came out clear plates of sapphire mail.

He dried his wings ; like gauze they grew
Through crofts and pastures wet with dew
A living flash of light he flew.

So Tennyson. Now Mr. Davis, zoologist : ' Their flight is

o

i98 SUMMER

exceedingly rapid, making them the swallow of the insect
world. The eggs are laid in water. The full-grown larva
climbs up the stem of some plant till it is above water, when
its skin splits longitudinally along the dorsal surface, and the
adult dragon gradually works its way out. Its wings are
at first flabby and shrivelled. They soon expand and assume
their proper form.'

The complete creature is worthy of the miracle of its
second birth. No more splendid thing emerges into June
than the dragon-fly, nor any which has more of the glory of
summer. When they first appeared we all compared the mono-
plane with a dragon-fly ; it was the first comparison that
sprang to the mind and eye ; and soaring flight is perhaps
the dragon-fly's master of attribute. There is no spectacle in
nature more wonderful, no ' crowded hour ' more glorious,
than the first of the flights. Not once or twice the writer
has watched them emerge from a certain lilied pond. The
pond indeed was so thick with lilies that you could scarcely
see the water. If one watched at the due summer dates you
could make almost sure of seeing the brown masked ugly
grub labour up the stem, as if even this splendid resurgent
life were hardly worth while. The man of science and the
poet have both watched, and if they were classical they
have perhaps recalled the Virgilian lines which fit exactly
this ponderous difficult crawl,

' Sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras
Hoc opus, hie labor est.'

' But, ah, to win the upper air,
What labour and what work is there.'

The process is well known ; it is common to all metamorphosis
in one form or another. The case splits, the imago pushes
its way out, and in this case uses the old case, as the clematis

THE DRAGON FROM THE POND 199

uses its old stem, as a stepping-stone to higher things. But
the flight is what we are concerned with. The crowning
marvel is the growing of the wings. You see growth. A damp,
crumpled thing, like tissue paper crumpled up, not only
unfolds and loses its crinkles, but actually grows ; and when
it is grown it sets into diaphanous crystal, like our breath on
the window, taking the most delicate shape and the most
effective. Within twenty minutes the pinions are waved a
little, gently stroke the air as if the insect were half afraid
that the wing was the weaker and might be abraded by
the invisible gases. But the test is enough. After a
moment's brooding an ecstatic spring is made. Your
eyes must be sharp to follow the green shape between the
glint of silver from invisible wings. Perhaps with the
wisdom, certainly in the manner of the monoplane, the line
of flight becomes at once high and bold ; and the quickest
sight loses the creature somewhere over the boughs of elm
or oak.

The miracle is brought home by contrast. The emergence
is not a certainty. Among the grubs that crawl to the surface
some are either a little wounded or bruised, or the process of
growth has been arrested in some way. The wings are
caught in the sheath or not smoothly disengaged, and the
creature waits for the marvel of the perfect wing in vain.
It struggles for the flight, but either tumbles or blunders on
broken wing to the grass. The miracle has not happened
as Ibsen says of a mental state.

This flying dragon is a dragon indeed, as terrible as any
in the fairy stories. Some of these perfect winged insects of
spring and summer live a life as nearly as may be ethereal
and unmaterial. The Mayfly does not feed at all. The mouth
exists, but is not developed to the point of use. Though
some butterflies, more gorgeous than the dragon-fly, descend

200 SUMMER

to batten on foul meat or rotten fruits, the race of moth and
butterfly live for the most part on the nectar of the flowers
which they rival in shape and colour, and the ethereal
semblance is maintained. But the dragon-fly is never anything
but a dragon. It 'grapples in the central blue,' as Tennyson
foretold of the aeroplanes ; it hawks and destroys, with a
power that is equal to its impetus of flight, and has all the
fierceness of the flesh-eater.

It is, perhaps, alone in its fury. Nearly all insects are
insatiate eaters in the grub state. They resemble a biennial
plant, such as a carrot, which in its first year makes a great
store of food, that suffices for the plant in its second or
flowering time. The dragon-fly grub is a great devourer
while at the bottom of the pond, never descends into the
sleep of the chrysalis, and in his last state is if anything more
destructive than in his first. He is as he looks. The com-
monest dragon-flies, those most of us think of as the proper
presentment of a dragon-fly, is usually an ^schna or one of
the Libellulinse, which are big in structure, and coloured in
curious greens and yellows, with black lines that half suggest
a snake. The eyes are fairy-story eyes as big as saucers in
comparison with the head, which is all eyes and mouth.
They flaunt their aggressive colours, their war-flags ; and
yet just now and again they might be selected by some
zealot in protective coloration as a splendid example of his
thesis. In a certain Midland garden they used to love hang-
ing on the boughs of deodar, and to the scheme and colour
of it they fitted so perfectly that though you saw them pitch
you could scarcely find them. It is so too when they survive
beyond the summer. Often you may find a pair careering
madly about the hedges, and stopping at intervals on the
thorn boughs just losing their fresh green. It is odds that if
you did not see them alight you would pass within inches

THE DRAGON FROM THE POND 201

without noticing them. But such a likeness is, of course,
mere accident.

In general the whole form of the creature is salient, and
it abides in the memory with the force that it strikes the eye.
A caricaturist would probably fasten first on the eyes, but
after that on the legs. They are set on in an odd group in
front of the wings, and are obviously quite useless for the
purpose of most legs. They are impossible legs for walking.
They are admirable for hanging the insect up on a branch ;
and it seems to the writer, though naturalists dispute it, that
they form a sort of net for catching the flies on which the
animal feeds. At any rate they are admirably fitted for the
purpose and — * great is juxtaposition.' They are placed in
a group, all within reach of the mouth. Though the dragon-
fly loves now and again to top high trees and take long
flights into comparatively arid places, it is a lover of the
water, as it was in its crawling stage. It loves the water, as
a swallow does, because flies are numerous. On streams
where the dragon-flies are numerous you may see floating on
the water wings and limbs of the victims clipped off in mid-
air and falling to tempt the smaller fish. They seem, too,
to have some local affections, like the robin. You may find
them for several weeks close to one spot. There they hawk
on their wonderful four wings, each wing separate from the
other, perhaps thus making possible those astounding dashes
and turns that defeat even the bat or the turtle-dove. There,
too, the female, when the times comes, half sinks in the
water to lay her eggs and ensure succession in the same
place.

The dragon-fly is a dragon, but it has also the spirit of
the air. The sunshine, which makes its splendour in our
eyes, is life to this fly. When days are dark the meshed
wings are closed, and the dragon sulks in its tent, suspending

202

SUMMER

its greed as well as its flight. And we must remember there
are dragons and dragons. Some of the tribes are as gentle
and pretty as butterflies. The sky-blue flies, that add much
beauty to many Berkshire streams, have not the tremendous
energy or dash of the yellows. The ' Demoiselles ' are deli-
cate creatures against which no charge of cruelty can be
levelled. But it is of the yellow snake with silver wings
that we think when we call the fly a dragon, or even, in the
American idiom, the 'devil's darning-needle.'

DEMOISELLE

THE TURNING TIDE

EVEN in the luxuriant fullness of the end of June there are
hints that the year is turning towards its decline ; and as the
sheer sunshine reaches its height in July, these warnings to
the watchful eye increase, and signal in a sort of secret code
the still distant oncoming of autumn. The mere shortening
of the day seems almost negligible, when even the equinox
is still remote, and any more definite suggestion of autumn
darkness is precluded by the lingering evening glows which
are at their richest in July. But one of the inexhaustible
interests of the naturalist is to notice the earliest growth of
each season's features, while they are still latent and obscure ;
and autumn can be seen germinating in the shade of summer,
like a seedling oak or sycamore in the depths of a tangled
shrubbery.

The turning-point of summer declares itself both by
positive and negative signs, and both can be so easily over-
looked that there is keen zest in observing them. It is
much easier, for example, to note the date of the first singing
of the blackbird or garden warbler than of its last strain ;
the birds give no warning of farewell, and we need to listen

204 SUMMER

carefully and regularly for the song which marks the end of
their season. Even the positive signs of change, that tell
definitely of autumn waxing, and not simply of spring depart-
ing, are of a kind that is usually missed. Every one notices
the brilliant scarlet bunches of rowan berries when they
weigh down their stems in late September, but few mark
their slow growth and the gradual kindling of their colour
through the months after the blossom faded in May, when
they seem lost in the dull green of the summer foliage. It
gives a strangely quiet and steady sense of the onward
movement of the year to watch week by week the progress
of these unregarded berries which will make so conspicuous
a show in days to come. In July they are already large, but
still hard, and at one stage in their development they display
a singular neutral tint which includes both the unripe green
and the ripe red. To combine these complementary colours
might seem impossible, but it is achieved by the mountain-
ashes in July. Hawthorn berries and rose-hips change
colour with equally few to mark them ; but their gradations
of colour are often less precise, and they transform them-
selves into succulent bird-food more suddenly on autumn's
near approach. But even in July there is an anticipation of
the autumn pillage of the ripe berries. Wood-pigeons are
very experimental in their diet, and sometimes turn at this
time of year to the clustered green berries of the whitebeam,
which yield their kernels in autumn to the great tit.

Wood-pigeons do their best to cheat themselves and us
out of the knowledge that the year is passing ; they murmur
their spring rhythm until late in September, and occasionally
have eggs and young in the garden firs up to the end of
August. But most birds have now finished nesting, and the
empty nests hidden in every bush and hedge are one of the
most significant signs of the season. Sometimes they are

THE TURNING TIDE 205

colonised by birds of other species, which roost in them ;
young birds still fresh from their own nests will often pack
at night into a mossy wren's or greenfinch's nest which they
light upon in the hedges at dusk. They are an alien breed,
and emphasise the nest's forsakenness. Still more marked
is the estrangement of the year when, as sometimes happens,
a mossy abandoned nest is occupied by a swarm of bumble-
bees and filled with their lumps of comb. This is the occa-
sional habit of the small greyish social bumble-bee which also
makes its nest under a dome of moss in woods. A snake
coiled in a hedgeside blackbird's nest is hardly a more
startling discovery than a buzzing swarm of bees in a nest
which a month before was the home of wrens. Occasionally
some specially attractive hole in a tree is colonised in late
summer by a pair of stock-doves, after it has been used earlier
in the year by jackdaws or tawny owls. This is a more
legitimate usurpation than that of the bees ; but it, too, marks
strongly the ageing of the year, with the contrasted recollec-
tion of the earlier brood now vanished into the world
outside.

Up to the time of the blossoming of the elder and wild
rose just before midsummer, the flowering trees had the
fresh pink and white blossoms of spring. Now there comes
a change, and the sweet chestnut and lime which scent the
July lawns relapse to flowers of green, unable, as it seems,
to prolong the vernal colours beyond their time. In fine
July weather the catkins of the sweet chestnut are almost as
sweetly scented as the flowers of the lime, and they colour
the tree more conspicuously with a rich silky gloss, visible
from afar in the sunshine, and glimmering like water under
the flaws of the summer breeze. Both the breeze and the
innumerable insects of July appear to play their part in
fertilising the sweet chestnut's flower. The male and female

206 SUMMER

catkins have a mixed character, between the type of wind-
mated flowers like those of the poplar and hazel, and insect-
fertilised blossoms like the lime's. Chestnuts have also a third
type of catkin which is bisexual, and in all this they offer
a strong suggestion of a transition between the broadcast
method of distribution by the wind and the more precise
intervention of bees and flies. The mass of scent and colour
in the boughs is provided by the long ropes of the male
catkins, which towards the end of the month wither and
strew so thickly the shadowed ground below. But if we
look more closely we see less numerous and more naked stems
bearing little green burrs near their base, and more stunted
downy tufts above. The tufts are the bisexual catkins, and
their function is now almost obsolete. They do not produce
nuts, and in the male purpose of fertilisation they are almost
superseded. The burrs are the female flowers, which will
turn, when fertilised, into the prickly shells of the ripe
October chestnuts ; they have the prickliness already out-
lined, even at this early day and in their infant stages. As
these burrs swell in late July and August, the tree dis-
encumbers itself of the now useless catkins. The quickly
falling ropes are in time to be swept into drifts on the path
by the rains of the usual wet week in early August. In the
mixed heaps of gravel and litter swept up by the gardener
week by week, dead chestnut catkins are now most numer-
ous, as dead ilex leaves were a few weeks before, in June.
The strings of bisexual catkins surmounting the little burry
nuts wither and shrink to a mere tag, but do not always fall.
They are sometimes found still clinging to the full-grown
chestnut when it falls or is gathered in October.

The stems of chestnut catkins stand erect, and thus add
to the gay and summery appearance of a tree in rich flower
in July. Lime-flowers are pendulous, and the glow of pale

THE TURNING TIDE 207

honey-colour that they give to the blossoming tree is less
vivid, though they shed a richer scent. The wafted
fragrance of the chestnut bloom is like the distant odour
of a bluebell copse, but the sweetness of the lime-flower is
individual. The blossoms are richly dewed with nectar, and
they are very attractive to bees, though often mysteriously
fatal. The deep hum of the bees in the garden limes sets
the seal on perfect July weather, like the peaceful conversa-
tion of the rooks in the elms on an April morning. The
flowering of the limes leads in the supreme season of beauty
in the garden, when the desire of distant wandering seems
to vanish with the departed spring, and the tallest and
gravest plants are in bloom.

One sign of the increasing heat of later summer is the
peculiar twisting of the lime-leaves, which seem to avoid the
full heat of the sun. Instead of spreading a horizontal
surface, as most leaves do in our climate, they turn up their
edges to the sky, so that the pale under sides are visible, and
the tree becomes silvery and chequered. This is a very
frequent device of limes in July and August, especially in
hot summers ; and in the hotter and drier climate of North
America it is common among other trees. It is not
attractive from the human point of view, for although the
pale upturned surfaces of the lime-leaves have a cool gleam,
the edges turned to the sky let in the sunshine beneath the
tree, and rob its shelter of its coolness. The eye marks this
obvious deficiency in shade, and the garden wears a hotter
and more feverish look in the sun. Coolness is largely a
matter of suggestion, and great spreading leaves like the
sycamore's, or the broad canopy of cedar boughs, has as
much to do with the sense of ease in a July garden as the
actual reduction in the temperature. There seems no parti-
cular reason why the lime should adopt this evasive trick ;

208 SUMMER

the nearest parallel is in the loose-hung leaves of the poplar,
which turn on their flattened stalks in every wind, and fan
themselves for coolness. But the lime has possibly a trace of
susceptibility to heat, which its wide use as a shade-tree
would not suggest. At any rate, one of the characteristic
secret warnings of summer's decline, both in town and
country, is the fall of the first red lime-leaves, crisped by the
sun. In the country these fluttering signals are seen late in
August, about the time when the lime-hawk caterpillars also
leave the boughs. In the arid London summer this fall of
the leaf may begin early in July.

The secret ageing of the year is to a large extent concealed
by the luxuriance of July vegetation ; while the green
surface of the thickets and belts of undergrowth swell
broader and higher, inside are the dead bones of spring. If
we happen to push inside the matted screen of July plants,
and use the opportunity for examination, we may often re-
discover buried strata of the year's history, as archaeologists
disinter successive Troys. So much has happened since the
primroses bloomed that they have passed out of reckoning,
and it gives almost a shock of surprise to find their tufts of
leaves sprawling lank and bleached beneath the shadow of
the summer undergrowth. Snowdrops are hidden here too,
with leaves equally long and overblown, and tall stalks
drooping with large green seed-capsules. Bluebells trail lax
and anaemic, with their plump seed-heads alone showing
signs of healthy life. In all the flowers of spring there is the
pallid sickness of the shade, and the almost subterranean
fostering of the vital spark. Nor are the plants that eclipsed
the primrose and bluebell themselves in much better case.
The cow-parsley and wild parsnip are now almost as far from
the light as the victims of their own shadow ; their flowers
are over, and their leaves droop faded from the tall central

THE TURNING TIDE 209

stock. Above them spreads the darker July canopy of goose-
grass and bindweed and tangled climbing persicaria and
bryonies and woody nightshade, dense enough when looped
between the shrubs or branches of the hedgerow to keep out
all but the heaviest rain. The soil beneath the violet and
primrose leaves, which in April was fertile and plastic, is now
hard and crumbling to the touch ; in the July heats even the
moss is as dry as tinder. It is a dead city of nature, except for
that promise of life in the sappy seed-heads. There seems
no movement or change or any share in the life of the season
outside. The dry earth is silvered with old snail trails,
traced weeks before, while the earth was still damp and
spring-like ; and often the tented space includes a thrush's
anvil-stone, littered with fragments of shell where the bird
came to break up its prey before the spot was sealed in
shadow. The thrushes will not trouble to push through the
thick screen of foliage to reach their earlier feeding-places
when summer has submerged them. They choose new
stones in the open shrubbery paths. In the world outside
there are still many stages of summer and harvest before
autumn sweeps all away ; but in the thickets the growth of
the year has already brought itself to a standstill by its own
luxuriance.

THUNDER AND LIGHTNING

IN lands devoid of volcanoes thunder-storms provide the
most impressive suggestion of the primal fiery chaos out of
which the earth as we see it was evolved. Great thunder-
storms in England are rare — so rare that one may hardly be
seen in a lifetime ; and lesser disturbances very frequently
follow the same paths, while the country outside them is
comparatively immune. Both river valleys and ranges of
hills attract the summer type of thunder-storm which is
commonest in English latitudes ; and half a dozen storms
may travel in a summer along these thunder zones, while
the country five miles away may remain sunny and waterless
on each occasion. Thunder-storms thus have a double
aspect ; for although they are alarming and dangerous when
severe, they often bring welcome rain in a time of drought.
Partial thunder-rains have often saved the hay or root-crop
in a single parish, or even on a single farm, while a mile
away the crop perished or became practically worthless for
want of moisture.

Thunder-storms are produced by a violent contrast in the
temperature of neighbouring masses of air ; and although the
air itself is invisible, we can often see the conflict traced in
the shape of the thunder-cloud. The towering and rounded
white clouds called ' wool-packs ' or ' thunder-pillars ' mark

THUNDER AND LIGHTNING 211

the sudden volleying ascent of a column of warm moist air
to the cooler heights, and its consequent condensation. They
perpetuate the momentary form of a volume of steam shot
from the funnel of a railway engine. Such clouds are not
always accompanied by thunder; but when these unstable
exchanges of the atmosphere are in progress thunder-storms
are very likely to occur, especially in sultry and windless
weather. Then, in the absence of a steady breeze to carry
off the heated air from near the earth's surface, it rises into
the colder air above ; and, in some way not clearly under-
stood, owing to this displacement the upper layers of the
atmosphere become highly charged with electricity, and
flashes of lightning burst forth between layer and layer of
cloud, or between the cloud and the earth. The thunder-
storm goes on until the accumulation of electricity is evenly
distributed again. By this time, in a normal and wholesome
thunder-storm, the air is freshened by an inrushing current,
and probably by the electric discharges themselves ; vegeta-
tion is revived by the rain accompanying the storm, and by
the peculiar tonic quality in the air after it has passed. The
massive cumulus clouds have broken up with the redistribu-
tion of the air currents, and the whole aspect of the heavens
is changed ; either there is a clear blue sky, or, if the rain has
been heavy, there is often a cool grey canopy of mist which
remains till evening, and dissolves in the course of the night
Summer storms take place most often in the afternoon,
when the heat is normally greatest, or at any rate there is
the largest accumulation of heated air brooding over the
earth. Between three and five o'clock is the commonest
time, and then a serene and refreshing evening may follow.
The proverbial gibe at the English summer is really a testi-
monial to its good qualities ; for if we could always have
1 three fine days and a thunder-storm ' the crops and flocks

212 SUMMER

would be adequately watered with the least possible incon-
venience to man. But thunder-storms are an effect, not a
cause, of bad weather ; and in seasons when the weather is
thoroughly broken they sometimes follow each other in con-
stant succession for weeks. The sky remains misty and livid,
the air is dead and clammy, almost all day and all night the
thunder is growling uneasily round the hills ; and every
second or third day somewhere about the country there is a
savage tempest which strikes sheep and cattle dead as they
stand under the elms and poplars in the meadow, and sears
the trunks of the oaks.

Long and varied lists may be collected of the unaccount-
able arbitrariness of lightning in its onsets on human beings
—how it will kill two men in a group of half a dozen, or pick
up another and drop him yards away, dazed but unhurt.
Fortunately in our climate deaths by lightning are excep-
tional among human beings, although horses, cattle, and
sheep suffer more often owing to their habit of clustering
under trees to escape the thunder-rain. The danger is
notorious of standing close to so probable a conductor of the
lightning- flash as an isolated tree or group of trees. It is
sometimes said that the safest place in a thunder-storm is
close to a tall tree, yet not too close ; but the delicate ques-
tion of exactly how close is safe has not been satisfactorily
determined. In a broad field or on an open road the human
figure itself may become the most natural lightning con-
ductor ; so that both extremes are perilous. Any prominent
tree may attract the flash, irrespective of its kind ; and the
common statement that the beech is never touched by light-
ning is certainly untrue. Beeches are less often struck than
oaks or elms, but that is because they grow far less often
isolated in fields and hedges. They also prefer a dry situa-
tion ; and lightning is attracted by water in the soil, which

THUNDER AND LIGHTNING 213

helps to account for the large number of poplars which are
smitten. The explosive force of the lightning-flash is often
astonishingly shown by the distance to which fragments of
wood are hurled. When the flash passes down the trunk
the wood is rent into long strands, and the tree is rather
burst than merely struck or gashed. The layer of sapwood
is shattered, so that a tree severely struck often dies in the
course of the next year.

The gloom of a thunder-storm by day is often one of its
most appalling features, especially to animals and birds ; but
the play of the lightning is seen most perfectly at night.
Then the spectacle is more beautiful, and less awful ; we see
not only the overmastering flashes, but every crackle and
shimmer of the electric discharges ; and distant nocturnal
storms are among the most attractive of all the year's dis-
plays. For all its violence at close quarters, the sound of
thunder does not carry more than twelve or fifteen miles ;
and the play of lightning at such a range by night may be as
easily visible as though the storm were in the next field. A
thunder-storm is a supremely beautiful spectacle when, as
sometimes happens, it rages in a mass of cumulus cloud
sailing at a good round pace through a clear sky lit by a
large moon. Constant flashes illuminate perpetually varying
lines of cloud, silhouetted in dark curves against its glow,
and delighting the eye by the magnificence of their airy
scenery. Beneath the Surrey Downs we have seen such a
storm pass silently in a July night, apparently following the
crest of the hills not three miles away, though actually it was
five or six times as far distant, and drenching London with
torrential rain. The so-called summer lightning that flickers
after dark in a sky often clear of cloud is the signal of
storms still more remote. With a local canopy of cloud near
the horizon to reflect it, lightning can be seen in this way at

p

2i4 SUMMER

a distance of at least a hundred miles. At forty or fifty
miles' range the display is vivid, and we may stand in the
calm though sultry night and watch the flicker of several
storms in opposite quarters over far-distant counties. The
sense of distance gives a kind of awe to the scene, and close
at hand the nightingale sings fitfully between the flashes.

Apart from the soundless display of distant storms, light-
ning and thunder are inseparable. We see the flash before
we hear the crash, because light travels far more rapidly than
sound ; and we can reckon the distance of the flash by the
interval at which we hear the thunder, and its length by the
time which the clap of thunder lasts. The ratio is one mile
for every five seconds. Lightning flashes of three miles in
length are not uncommon; and their shape, which can be
accurately registered by photography, is very variable, and
depends on the local resistance of the air, or the occurrence
of solid particles which divert the path of the discharge. It
follows the line of least resistance, like a crack in a film of
drying mud. This linear formation is particularly well
marked in the case of what is commonly known as forked
lightning. The zigzag line which stands as the conventional
form of lightning in popular imagination is scientifically
accurate in a certain proportion of flashes, which impress
themselves even on a naked eye by their bold and definite
shape. But photographs show that lightning more usually
takes a veined or rootlike form, sometimes very intricate,
and of great beauty, though very unlike the sharply refracted
outline of the occasional zigzag flash. The spark of fire
heats the air, and the rush into the vacuum so caused sends
out the rumbling crash of the thunder.

Fireballs or thunderbolts are in many cases incandescent
meteorites flying from outer space and finding a target in the
earth, but some of them are genuine electric discharges.

THUNDER AND LIGHTNING 215

As contrasted with lightning they usually move with un-
canny deliberation, floating along so slowly that they have
sometimes been followed by a curious crowd. They usually
end by exploding, sometimes gently, but sometimes with
destructive violence. Genuine fireballs as part of the pheno-
mena of a thunder-storm are seldom seen ; most of the
reports of their observation are due to a confused and
startled impression of some particularly near and vivid
lightning-flash.

Our occasional thunder-storms in winter are more closely
connected with sharp changes of weather than the storms
brewed locally in summer by the heat of the sun. The con-
flicts of temperature which cause them are produced by
eddies and squalls, especially the line-squalls which advance
rapidly across a wide front, and leave the air many degrees
colder behind them. Turbulent south-westerly weather in
autumn produces yet another variety of thunder-storm, due
to the same fundamental opposition of varying temperatures.
On stormy October evenings, with a wild, warm air drawn
from far southward on the Atlantic, there is often a flash of
lightning and a crash of thunder in the clouds racing swiftly
to the east ; and sometimes an autumn thunder-storm rages
for some hours at night. These storms are part of the gale,
and have not the independent solemnity of summer storms,
which so frequently work up on a different current to the air
prevailing on our level. They occur most frequently on the
outskirts of a great cyclonic depression, and at night ; and
the reason in both cases is the same. On the edge of the
cyclone the warm Atlantic wind meets the colder air of our
autumn climate, and at night the temperature falls, so that
the inrushing air meets with a sharper contrasting chill.
Such storms often sweep past so rapidly, and amid such
roaring of the gale, and play of starlight and moonlight in

216 SUMMER

the broken sky, that both thunder and lightning are apt to be
overlooked, and autumn thunder-storms are believed to be
rarer than they are.

All weather broods closer on the sea and on mountains
than on the lowlands between them, where we mostly live.
Mountain ranges are the seat of the thunder-cloud, and their
summits and pinnacles are natural points of discharge for
accumulated electricity. Even on the crests of our English
mountains tingling ears and humming points of walking-
sticks sometimes give warning of keen electric activity, and
if there is any sign of an approaching thunder-cloud it is
wise to descend to safer levels. In the Alps one can stand
above the evening thunder-storm of the valleys, and watch
the turmoil in the earth- cloud from the cool clear air above.
This Olympian delight is rarer in the lower hills and cooler
climate of these islands, but is not unknown. It is exciting
to stand on a low coast when one of the autumnal thunder-
gales comes driving in from the sea with a rack of flashing
cloud, and a dense curtain of rain and hail pouring from its
lower edge. The storm races so low that there sometimes
seems hardly room for it to clear the houses, and though
this impression is exaggerated a tall church spire might be
well within the layer of cloud. If it is hardly yet dusk,
tumult and horror seize the birds in their orderly retirement
to their roosting- places ; gulls wail, and sweep on wide
erratic planes, and rooks and jackdaws tumble cackling into
unaccustomed cover. If night has fallen the lightning bites
an intense whiteness from the belt of surf, and flashes a
mysterious glimmer from the yellow sand-dunes. The sheen
of lightning on sand is almost the most unearthly of earthly
illuminations ; in the heart of green England a distant
summer thunder-storm at night turns the sandy wastes by
Aldershot to the likeness of a landscape in the moon.

COCKCHAFERS

CHAFERS AND CLOCKS

THE humming of the midsummer cockchafers round the
garden trees marks for human ears and eyes the high-water
mark of the beetles' year. Other beetles are signals of
well-marked seasons. The first lush April growth brings
the big black oil-beetles climbing on the hedge-banks ; warm
July nights would not be complete without the light of
the glow-worm, nor August and September evenings with-
out the dor-beetle's heavy drone. The multitudinous effer-
vescence of summer in the oak woods — that sound which
almost more than any other tells of the fullness of life — owes
much of its volume to the myriad minute beetles which
rustle their wings and scrape their wing-cases as they creep
and fly. But the June cockchafer is one of the largest and
most gregarious of its order, and fitly stands for the type
of its kind. The smaller July chafer is often more abundant,
but its inferior size goes against it in popular esteem. It
appears a month or six weeks too late, and has the effect
of an anticlimax. The larger cockchafer is also well known
in its larval stage to every countryman, though not so many
know the connection between them. The fat subterranean
grub of the cockchafer shares the name and the reputation

218 SUMMER

of the leather-jacket, though this becomes no beetle, but
the daddy-longlegs or crane-fly. Both grubs are rapacious
enemies of field and garden cropSt and have secured a
common ill-fame, only excelled in their own line of life by
the wire- worm. If the wire- worm turned later into the stag-
beetle, or even the misnamed black beetle, it might fairly
make a bid for the pinnacle of celebrity ; but the click-
beetles, into which it turns, are undeservedly obscure for
insects with such a curious trick of motion. The claim of
the cockchafer to represent beetles, as the linnet or the
robin might represent birds, is also based on satisfying
qualities of shape and colour. He is neither dingy, like the
devil's coach-horse or the dor-beetle, nor ostentatiously
brilliant, like the soldier or sailor beetles, or the yellow-
banded grave-digger. His clear brown wing-cases and
shepherd's plaid markings on the abdomen make a design
which is modestly effective. His form has the proper
rotundity of a beetle, typified in the Egyptian scarabaeus,
and yet there is a touch of individuality in its lines. It has
no extravagant growth of horns, like the stag-beetle, nor
the sprawling misshapenness of the devil's coach-horse ; but
its antennae are finished in neat filigree, and its legs are
effectively hooked.

The tribe of cockchafers are vegetable feeders in
the perfect as well as in the larval stage ; but many beetles
are carnivorous, and these perform a great service to man.
Some kinds, like the devil's coach-horse, hunt actively for
other insects, or slugs and snails ; the ladybirds rid us of
greenfly ; and other species, such as the burying-beetles and
the dor-beetle, dispose of carrion and other decaying filth.
Beetles play a large part in the destruction of old dead trees,
through which the larvae of many species eat their way;
and in primitive forests it is important for the dead trees

CHAFERS AND CLOCKS 219

to be felled and broken up in order to give room for their
successors, and all the life which they in their turn support.
On the whole the varied appetites of beetles are useful
to man ; but certain beetles become great pests, usually
owing to the specialisation of man's interests in directions
which they cannot be expected to understand. Furs, for
example, to the dermestes-beetles are simply animal remains,
and it is their natural function to destroy them. The same
is true of bacon and cheese, which are attacked by beetles
of the same family. The death-watch beetle lives by de-
stroying dead wood ; he does not know that we regard it
as valuable furniture. The notorious Colorado beetle wins
detestation and renders itself liable to rigorous punishment
by devouring potato plants, but no one would object if it
selected instead the poisonous members of the potato's
family. Weevils also bear a hated name, but many of the
species are unobjectionable browsers on wild plants.

The stag-beetle is the largest British beetle, and one
of the largest in Europe, though it is outstripped by the
monsters of the tropics. Its 'horns' are forked extensions
of its massive jaws, and have apparently no special use,
except to add more power to the jaw by their weight. If
the stag-beetle were a common insect, it would be almost
too noisy for our quiet English woods. It is as insistent
to the ear as a hornet when it takes to wing, and it is
always a striking event of a midsummer day to see it come
sailing round the crown of an oak with the heavy steadiness
of an aeroplane. Its inordinate pomp of noise, and black
horns stuck abroad, give it as grotesque an air as the
flight of the purple emperor round the same boughs is light
and graceful.

Beetles are in fact not eminent fliers, though most of
them can get from place to place well enough at a pinch.

220

SUMMER

They are pre-eminently miners rather than fliers, whether
they burrow in the earth, in decaying wood, or in carrion.
It would be impossible for a butterfly, or even a bee, to
drive galleries in any of these substances without damaging
or defiling its wings past remedy. For combining such a
life with the power of flight, beetles have had to develop
the horny sheaths to their wings which are their distin-
guishing mark among
insects. More terres-
trial than aerial, most
of them are bulky and
bullet-like in build, and
in order to support this
bulk in the air they
need a large spread
of wing. The wings
cannot therefore be
merely covered by the
wing - cases, or they
would be too small ;
they must be folded
up, almost like a tent
in the bag which holds

it. Once the packing-up is finished, the beetle can push
its way through almost anything without injuring its gauzy
membrane. The hard wing-case wards off all stains and
scratches. But this protection is not secured without a
penalty. Unfolding the wings for flight and folding them
up again afterwards are both rather laborious and compli-
cated operations ; a beetle cannot flick into the air as easily
as a butterfly, but must make considerable preparations.
They suggest a sailing vessel starting from a quay. The
awkwardness of a beetle's flight is largely due to the now

STAG-BEETLE

CHAFERS AND CLOCKS 221

useless wing-cases, which have to be lifted clear of the
wings, and seem to offer considerable resistance to the air.
Beetles not only take flight laboriously, but seem to alight
with an obvious sense of relief; many are very awkward
steerers, like barges in a tideway, and have difficulty in
fetching up where they wish. For this reason they dislike
windy days, and perform their voyages in still weather.
The air of adventure and difficulty with which they fly has
its own attraction ; most wild creatures seem to perform
their functions with such effortless perfection that there is
something very human and comprehensible about the beetle's
awkward endeavours. It is very interesting to watch the
packing and unpacking of the wings beneath their horny
coverings, and the beetle's solemn dive into the air when
its wings are ready to be spread is an anxious moment.
Like parachutists, they often fling themselves free, trusting
to the help of the air to spread out their supporting mem-
branes ; and there is often an interval of doubt whether the
creature's wings are going to sustain it, or whether it will
bump down on the ground. At midsummer in the thickets
it is very pretty to watch the life of the little golden green
beetles which abound in the grass and on the sprays of
foliage. Their colour and the neatness of their shape make
every movement attractive, and these adventures as they sail
and crawl from leaf to leaf are numerous and complicated.

Even the water-beetles can fly well enough when they
wish to shift their quarters to other streams, though normally
they spend all their stages of growth in the same dike.
They are among the most voracious of the flesh-eating
beetles, and devour tadpoles, and any other water-creature
that they can catch. The water-boatmen which scull their
way to the surface of ponds and dart down again after
apparently taking a good look at the intruder are not beetles,

222 SUMMER

but a kind of bug, akin to the flat-backed shield bugs which
are often found seated in summer on heads of umbelliferous
and other plants. Their main family characteristic is the
possession of a beak for sucking instead of jaws. Water-
boatmen swim on their backs, and propel themselves with
their hind pair of legs, which are enlarged to serve as
oars. Their trips to the surface of the water are not mere
sallies of inquisitiveness ; they must come up periodically
to breathe. Water-scorpions and pond-skaters belong to the
same beaked tribe. The voracious water-scorpion, which
is common in slowly flowing ditches, has the forelegs strongly
developed to help it in catching its varied prey, and holding
it for the beak to suck. Pond-skaters are surface-feeding
insects, and altogether more attractive. All through the
summer their light forms dart rhythmically in parties over
the surface of ponds and quiet streams ; they are one of
the most animated forms of summer life, and as welcome on
the river as the monkey-flower, or the song of the sedge-
warbler. Another conspicuous summer insect of the same
tribe is the frog-hopper, which lives in the foam-bubbles
hanging to the stems of sorrel and other herbs in May. It
blows these clots of ' cuckoo-spit ' from the sap sucked out
of the plant ; if we search inside them, we shall find the
tender green insect, sheltered from the sun in its tabernacle
of moist bubbles. In June and July, when the ' cuckoo-spit'
has evaporated from the grasses, picnickers and campers
meet the frog-hopper again. It is characteristic of this
tribe of bugs not to show such marked and astonishing
changes of structure as butterflies, for example, undergo
between the egg and the winged insect; and the adult
frog-hopper of the dry summer pastures is easily recognisable
as the mature form of the soft green creature in the ' cuckoo-
spit.' It is larger, tougher, and less vividly green ; but it

CHAFERS AND CLOCKS 223

has the angular shape accentuated, while its tilted attitude
combined with its huge powers of leaping account for its
name of frog-hopper. It is a perfectly harmless little leaper,
though superfluous in a tea-cup or salad-bowl.

Not many of our beetles have any active weapons of
offence, like the stings of wasps and bees, or the proboscis
of gnats. But some can exude an acrid liquid which is
presumably a defensive weapon against birds and other
predatory creatures, and the smallest species can cause
considerable inconvenience if they find their way into our
eye. The bombardier-beetle fires his charge in the shape
of vapour or spray, and with an audible report ; fortunately
he is too large to get trapped in the same way, or he would
be a startling capture. The devil's coach- horse squirts out
a malodorous greenish liquid which is probably unpleasant to
the taste of birds, while its erected tail and jaws give it a
very fierce and desperate air. More curious still for the
uninitiated is an encounter with a click-beetle. In this case
the change from the larva is complete ; the writhing wire-
worm has become a smallish but shapely beetle with a large
rounded thorax and tapering wing-cases. When disturbed
it will probably turn on its back and 'sham dead,' or avoid
any provocatory movement. A sudden click or spasm will
then throw it into the air; it will alight on its feet, and
equably pursue its business. On the under side of the
click-beetle there is a spike or peg on one side of the
central joint, and a socket on the other. The spike fits
into the socket when the beetle chooses, and when it forces
it out again the elastic action throws the beetle bodily into
the air.

The glow-worm is a wingless female beetle, and her
power of signalling seems plainly correlated with her in-
ability to fly. Like Hero's lamp her light is a signal to her

224 SUMMER

lover. There is some excuse for calling her a worm, for she
is a very plain creeping creature, and has not much of the
true beetle air, owing to her complete lack of wing-cases.
Even the plant-bugs, with their curtailed shards, are more
beetle-like than she. She is a dingy grey above, while the
lower segments of her abdomen, from which the light pro-
ceeds, are pale and mottled. She lifts the tip of her
abdomen when she shines, as we can see by examining her
with the rival light of a wax match. The glow-worm is our
English firefly, but, unlike those southern beetles, only the
female glows, and she is stationary. The light varies much
in colour, apparently with the warmth of the weather ; but in
the dampest nights, when the glow-worm sets her lamp, it is
still stronger and steadier than the phosphorescent shimmer
of the millipede. Millipedes stand to centipedes as centi-
pedes to creatures with the normal pair or two of legs. They
are packed with threadlike legs on both sides of their long
thin bodies, and they walk like the movement of fine water-
weeds in a current. The two families are not now held to
be very closely related, and though neither rank as insects
millipedes are perhaps the more insect-like of the two.
Millipedes shelter under logs and in other moist places, like
wood-lice, and can be sometimes seen shining on the walls
of damp sheds. Probably their light is also a signal, and
they badly need some such guide ; for their eyes are very
much atrophied, and they feel their way by constant use of
their little antennas.

It is a curious speculation whether the droning-beetle
hears the noise of his own flight, and the taps of the death-
watch make this seem less improbable than might be
thought. There is little room for doubt that the death-
watch beetles signal to each other by their well-known click-
ing, much as the female glow-worm uses her light. The

CHAFERS AND CLOCKS 225

vibration caused by the taps of these small creatures must be
so slight that it seems very unlikely that they feel the shock,
as a trout can feel a footfall on the bank of the stream. The
only alternative is that they can hear. Certain beetles also
produce chirping sounds in the same way as grasshoppers —
by rubbing one part of their anatomy against another ; and
there is a strong supposition that these too are the call of
mate to mate as well as a method of pleasurable expression,
like the song of birds. It seems possible that the hum of
the beetle is not a mere accompaniment of clumsy flight, but
serves a definite purpose of communication.

The work of the burying-beetles is a remarkable develop-
ment of the carrion-feeding habit which is common to many
species. Burying-beetles are much smaller than a dor-
beetle or a cockchafer, and they work in small parties, or
even singly, so that they have not the ants' advantage of
combination on a large scale in performing their remarkable
feats. For it is a very remarkable feat for three or four
beetles to bury the body of a creature so large in comparison
as a field-mouse or a lark. It is accomplished by burrowing
beneath the body, and clearing out the earth at the sides
until it sinks into the cavity. Then the spare earth is carried
back above it, and the burial is complete. Before this stage,
however, the female beetle has accomplished the main object
of the whole undertaking, and laid her eggs in the body,
which serves as food for the young. A party of burying-
beetles at work upon some dead waif of the meadows is a
common spectacle when the hay is cut ; and the task of the
conspicuous yellow-banded insects is interesting, though
slightly unsavoury.

The common dor-beetle is associated with the evenings
of late summer, though other species are occasionally seen
flying at other times of year. Its heavy drone carries far in

226

SUMMER

the silence of the August and September dusk ; and often
the air at that reposeful season is so quiet that we can hear,
if we stand still, the beetle rasping its way through the
underground tunnel which it bores beneath animal droppings.
The under parts of the dor-beetle are often thickly infested
with bright red mites, which make a striking contrast of
colour with the dark blue of their host. These mites are
closely related to the similar parasites of cage-birds. At
first sight it seems that the beetle is carrying a brood of

newly hatched young. If it did carry its family on airy
excursions, the voyage would be not so strange as that actu-
ally achieved by the larvae of the oil-beetle. It is not for
nothing that this soft, fat beetle frequents the sunny banks
where the April flowers blossom most freely. Hither come
the wild bees, and they are the destined hosts of the youth-
ful oil-beetles. They are hatched as active little six-legged
creatures, and wait on the newly opened blossoms for the
visits of the bees. While the bees are grappling with the
blossom for nectar or pollen, the beetle larvae seize hold
of them, and are carried back to their nests. There they
feed on the honey which belongs by right to the young

A SUFFOLK FARMSTEAD
By HARRY BECKER

CHAFERS AND CLOCKS 227

bees, and after a remarkable series of transformations re-
appear on the spring banks to browse on the young shoots
as wingless adult oil- beetles. Many small beetles are
parasitic in the nests of birds and animals, but they are
seldom seen except by naturalists who take the trouble to
search for them.

In fine, hot summers, a little before the time when the
small July chafer buzzes round the tops of the trees, the
beetle known as the bracken-clock appears abundantly
among the bracken on the moors. This is a small round
coppery-red species also known in the south of England as
the hazel-fly. It feeds on both plants. It is a favourite bait
with fishermen, both alive and imitated with cock's hackle ;
and it is at least one of the wild originals of that mysterious
but celebrated artificial insect, the coch-y-bondhu. Both for
trout and anglers its fame is greatest on the open hills of the
north and west, where there are few trees to breed other
common vegetarian beetles of the lowlands, but bracken
grows in deep beds to the very brink of the mountain tarns.
In these tarns there are often trout both numerous and
heavy, which have developed fitful appetites in their bleak
haunts, where the food supply is irregular and usually scanty.
The warm summer weather stimulates them to unaccustomed
activity, and the same weeks bring the bracken-clocks.
They rise in the wind from the bracken, and fall in the
gusts that eddy about the rocks round the tarn ; and the
tarn trout make holiday, and gorge upon them as the low-
land trout do a few weeks earlier on the Mayfly. The
angler finds the same exceptional opportunity in this glut of
a favourite food, and to him in his dreams of the waterside
the bracken-clock is a cherished symbol of high sport in
clear July weather on the hills.

WILD WALL-GARDENS

IN the midst of the summer luxuriance of vegetation there is
a curious attraction in the miniature gardens of dwarf plants
which are fostered here and there where either soil or
moisture is deficient. When the lack of sufficient moisture
is the cause of the dwarfing of the plant, these Japanese
gardens of nature are usually found on dry crags and pin-
nacles of rock, or the copings and crannies of dry walls.
Elsewhere, by the sides of springs and in stony dripping
lanes, moisture is abundant, but there is no depth of soil ; and
here there arises a fairylike flora of another class, in which
flowering plants are largely replaced by ferns and liverwort
and mosses — miniature representatives of an older vegetable
kingdom.

The richest of these dwarf-gardens are to be found on
the top of old brick or soft stone walls enclosing an ordinary
garden; the wild wall-garden is a miniature copy of the
garden tended by man. It is often a delightful surprise to
find how nature has been quietly mimicking us, like a grave
child ; for there is enough of the artificial human element in
these dwarf-gardens to temper the absolute simplicity in wild
nature with an artfulness which is at least fairylike. The

WILD WALL-GARDENS

229

old builders of the larger garden helped to found the lesser
one when they built the fruit wall giving shelter from the
north and east ; and they supplied the original stocks of
many of the miniature growths when they set the lawns
with spreading wych-elms and shady sycamores, and planted
thickets of holly and yew. These trees and shrubs, and
various garden fruits and flowers like the strawberry and
the snapdragon, have formed
year after year the nursery for
the wild garden on the wall ;
so that the continued care of
man has been needed for its
maintenance, though it has been
given perfectly unconsciously.
This unconscious tendance pro-
longed through several genera-
tions kept up a steady annual
sowing while time softened the
fabric of the wall, collected a
thin layer of soil in the joints
and crevices, and nurtured a
handful of the seeds which were
strewn summer by summer on

such an uncertain bed. We may notice in June or July
the wall-flowers and snapdragons splashing the brick with
crimson and purple, or the thorny arch of the wild rose
swinging its pale pink blossoms against the sky ; but only a
purposeful examination is likely to reveal the minute variety
of the plants and flowers in the wild wall-garden, and the
haunting strangeness of their wild yet man-loving growth.

Some of them are sown by the wind, more by the birds
that raid the garden, and a few by the wild animals. In the
soft steady breezes of late spring, when the seed-pods of the

230

SUMMER

ripe wych-elm stream all day long from the boughs until the
garden gutters are filled with their yellowish spangles, we
can see how the wild wall-garden gets planted with some of
its forest trees. It is the same in early autumn, when the
sycamore keys spin their oblique downward fljght ; if a
sycamore stands thirty yards to windward of the wall when
the keys are falling, some of them are almost certain to alight
on its crown. The likeliest landfall for dropping seeds is
where the upper courses of the wall narrow in a shoulder to
the coping ; and here, if there is a thick rind of moss and the
winter is wet and mild, in spring there will often be a heavy

SEED-PODS OF THE WYCH-ELM

sprinkling of little green sycamores parting their two seed-
leaves from the embryonic stem. Those survive which can
twist their rootlets into a crack between the bricks or stones,
so as to suck a steadier supply of moisture ; and here they
develop a gnomelike growth of swollen and crooked limbs
supporting a scanty crest of spreading leaves, so lowly that
to the eye beneath they are lost among the weeds of the
wall. If a young sycamore finds its way into a deep crack,
it will sometimes start growing with its normal lusty angu-
larity ; but this is not the proper mood of the wall-garden,
and soon brings disaster, for the serious fissure is revealed,
and all the fairyland of many years' growth is swept away by
the trowels of the clambering masons. Secretness is the
essential note of the wild wall-garden ; again like fairies or

WILD WALL-GARDENS 231

children, the plants must play their game without the pry-
ing eye.

Wild birds sow most of the little trees and shrubs in the
wall-garden ; and even they act unconsciously, like the
human gardeners that planned its first foundation. By the
selective genius of the spot berry-bearing plants are especi-
ally favoured. Here grow both the wild strawberry crooking
its neck over its red drooping fruit, and the garden straw-
berry already becoming a dwarf, but still flinging out its

runners in its own manner, and colonising fresh cracks
between brick and brick. Raspberries grow sparingly and
uncomfortably on the crests of walls ; the arid site finds out
their native preference for cool thickets and the wet northern
hills. But gooseberries and red and white currants all
thrive ; they grip the stones with roots like eagles' feet, and
ripen their fruit to a liquid glow in the warmth close to the
wall. Little apple saplings lift their cool green leaves, but
seldom attain flower or blossom. But among the garden
fruits the wild berries of the shrubberies and thickets ripen
in season ; any berry that is loved by the birds gets its chance
of joining the wild garden. Little hawthorns with muscular

232

SUMMER

spiny stems lift half a dozen green berries slowly turning to
red in the summer heats ; elders open a creamy cluster in
June, that shines briefly upon the crown of the wall like the
wild rose blossoms that vanished a week or two earlier.
Small yews clamp their roots among the stones, but these do
not produce flower or fruit ; for fruiting an ampler growth is
needed than they can attain on the scanty soil of the wall.
Birds sowed the berries, and birds come again to feed on
their produce. When the bullfinches and flocks of titmice

begin their autumn wanderings, they pause upon the crest of
the wall to strip the scarlet hips of the wild rose ; and the
blackbirds warily watching till the coast is clear for a descent
upon the July strawberry-beds peck impatiently at the dwarf
red berries beside them, which whet their zest for the richer
spoil below. The hazels and oaks that sometimes foster a
growth of a few inches in the crevices of the wall are probably
sown by mice or rats, and not by birds. Nuthatches and
spotted woodpeckers will carry off nuts from the garden, and
rooks acorns in much the same way ; but none of these
birds have the habit of resting on the garden-wall, as the
marauding blackbirds do, or of hiding their booty in its

WILD WALL-GARDENS 233

crevices, as the rooks will in the turf of the open fields and
downs. But field-mice climb old walls freely, by the help
both of fruit-trees and ivy ; and they are great hoarders and
forgetters of the food harvested in their nocturnal wander-
ings. Rats sometimes form regular runs to the tops of walls,
especially when they are helped on their way by inner
crevices and fractures ; and they too are liable to drop or
forget their booty, or to be killed before they can reap the
results of their care.

The soil of the wall-garden is partly produced by the
decay of the mortar and softer brick or stonework under
frost and rain, and is partly a vegetable mould formed by
decaying mosses and lichens. The mixture of this kind of
leaf-mould with the calcareous weathering of limestone walls
forms a soil which though scanty is kindly, and where both
sunshine and rain are abundant the wall-garden throughout
the summer is delicately gay. The thoroughness and secrecy
of nature's system of seed distribution are emphasised by the
sureness with which wall-flowers appear in course of time on
an old garden-wall. Their small heavy seeds are certainly
not wind-blown to each new site ; we can only judge that
they are carried by birds, like the currant and haw. Several
of the finches, which feed variously on seeds in late summer
and autumn, may well be distributors of the wall-flower ; but
there is no positive knowledge of this link in the garden
chain. In their freedom from the control of the gardener,
wall-flowers in the wild wall-garden tend steadily to return
to their ancestral type, like London pigeons. The lemons
and freaked scarlets disappear, and the stalwart tufts of the
wall deepen to orange-brown and crimson. A native of dry
cliffs the wall-flower thrives better on its spare new soil than
such plants as the elder or the apple-tree. Its blossoms
shoot dense and lusty, and shed a warm tide of scent in the

234 SUMMER

June wind fanning from the trees; but the exceptional
drought of the wall keeps them sparer of foliage than when
they shoot on a cliff, which has generally some percolation
of moisture from the earth above or behind. They thus
conform to the dwarf habit of the wall-garden, and are true
to the scale of the spot, although within miniature surround-
ings ; and with their dense stringy growth they have the

WALL-FLOWERS

stature of a flowering shrub rather than their herbaceous
growth in the setting of a garden-bed. Snapdragons make
mouths upon the wall, thriving like the wall-flower on stony
perches ; and here and there on old walls the spurred
valerian flowers in bushy masses at midsummer, and draws
the whirring hawk moths. Ivy-leaved toad-flax has a flower
mouthed like the snapdragon, but is as delicate in all its
parts as the snapdragon is lusty. This toad-flax is almost
more the child of the wall than the wall-flower ; clambering
from crevice to crevice among the mortar it keeps a perfect

WILD WALL-GARDENS

235

proportion in all its parts, whereas the wall-flower is apt

to over-develop its flowers at the expense of proportionate

foliage. The minute yet individual toad-flax blossoms are

the most perfect expression of that miniature and fastidious

beauty which is characteristic of wall-gardens, especially

wild ones. As we trace this little plant wandering at the

gaps of the wall, we lose our

accustomed sense of scale, and

enter mentally into a fairyland

of new dimensions ; it is the

same as when we watch the

ant toiling with its treasure of

a crumb through the jungle of

the grass-roots, or see the

little gilded beetles of June

launch themselves from the

edge of the violet leaves like

boys diving into a stream.

This toad-flax is said to be
an exotic plant, but perhaps
with no better reason than
the Cheddar pink of the grey
college walls at Oxford. The
story goes that this pink
was brought to England by
the Romans ; but the pink

family are fond of rocky bluffs, and there seems no sure
ground for doubting that its headquarters on the Cheddar
cliffs are an original haunt. Pinks can endure a hot and
thirsty site by means of their stringy growth and protective
sun-livery of pale grey-green ; stonecrops, which abound on
old walls, store up water in their fleshy capsules of leaves
against the fiery days. Both white and yellow stonecrops

IVY-LEAVED TOAD-FLAX

236 SUMMER

delight in the tops of old crumbling walls. They are heavy
plants, growing in thick mats, and cannot easily find a foot-
hold on the perpendicular faces, as the toad-flax does. Both
give a sense of jewelled coolness to the wild wall-garden
under the sun ; the starry yellow blossoms do not faint from
the sunshine, but flash it back, and the white stonecrop
has a snowy coolness. Yet for all the store of water in
their oozy leaves they cannot endure too great heat, and
perish suddenly in an exceptionally fierce July. Their
cool green rugs draping the stones change in a very few
days to the hot russet that we know in the first-fallen
leaves of the limes — the unwholesome and unwelcome hue
of vegetation not failing in its natural decline, but burnt up
prematurely.

These sun-kissed wall-gardens make a strong contrast in
the summer heats with the verdant but almost blossomless
rock-arches where trickling perennial drops nurture a vegeta-
tion exempt from winter, frost, and summer sun. Here, too,
as in the drier wall-gardens, there is a fairylike touch — a
sense of something stranger, if hardly more exquisite, than
resides in our normal roses and violets. In these wet wall-
gardens the touch of strangeness is given by the preponder-
ance of the strange old cryptogamous plants — the ferns and
liverworts and mosses — over the blossoming plants that seem
to look frankly at one, and to belong to an earth which
knows man. These scaly liverworts seem alien survivals in
the human epoch ; they seem cognate with the giant lizards,
and even to-day beneath the lowest bulge of their green
scales there will peer up the spotted throat of the eft. Yet
the film of uncanniness in such spots is thin and dream-
like ; it does not mar the essential delicacy of their beauty,
or stain the purity and coolness of the falling water and
the air. Fern-seed is proverbially magic stuff, and in these

WILD WALL-GARDENS

237

secret gardens there is good store of it. The stone-fern
and lady-fern hang together at the mouth of the little
grotto, or at the drier edge of the dripping wall; and
close to where the water springs there droop the long
polished leaves of the hart's-tongue, and the delicate fronds
of wild maiden-hair, brushed with spray-drops by the wing
of the wren.

AUGUST

' Yonder in the heather there 's a bed for sleeping,
Drink for one athirst, ripe blackberries to eat ;
Yonder in the sun the merry hares go leaping,
And the pool is clear for travel-wearied feet

Sorely throb my feet, a-tramping London highways,
(Ah ! the springy moss upon a northern moor ! )

Through the endless streets, the gloomy squares and byways,
Homeless in the City, poor among the poor !

Oh, my heart is fain to hear the soft wind blowing,
Soughing through the fir-tops up on northern fells !

Oh, my eye 's an ache to see the brown burns flowing
Through the peaty soil and tinkling heatherbells.'

ADA SMITH, In City Streets.

' The red grouse is scattering
Dews from his golden wing

Gemm'd with the radiance that heralds the day ;
Peace in our Highland vales,
Health on our mountain gales —

Who would not hie to the Moorlands away !

Far from the haunts of man

Mark the gray Ptarmigan,
Seek the lone Moorcock, the pride of our dells,

Birds of the wilderness !

Here is their resting-place,
'Mid the brown heath where the mountain-roe dwells.

240 SUMMER

Come then ! the heather bloom

Woos with its wild perfume,
Fragrant and blithesome they welcome shall be ;

Gaily the fountain sheen

Leaps from the mountain green —
Come to our home of the moorland and lea,'

J. W. C., British Sport Past and Present.

THE COUNTRY CALENDAR

ON August ist the close time for birds ends. You may not shoot
grouse till the I2th, or partridges till September, or pheasants till
October, but for the great host of birds it is presumed that nesting
is over and the young are in their full powers when August opens.
Perhaps some day other birds, especially duck, will be protected a
little later, till grouse day. It would be an advantage. For summer
is still summer, and the young still young. The sun shines hot
and the nights are dewy cool.

The greatest change of the year, in regard to the face of the
country, comes in August. It is the harvest month ; and with the
fall of oats and barley and wheat, and the ranging of the stooks on the
stubble, the expression of rural England quite changes. The substi-
tution of bare stubble for standing crops alters the way of life of many
birds, and yet more of rats and mice. The little harvest-mouse,
almost the smallest of all our mammals, which makes a tiny nest
for its miniature self on a corn-stalk unbent by the burden, is often
carried off to the stack where it lives with countless field-mice and
some rats, quite pleased with the new quarters. When the truce
ends on August ist, migration begins. A few cuckoos went in July,
and migration is in some sort a process without abrupt beginnings ;
but we may say that migration becomes an obvious thing in August,
only less noticeable than the migration of men and women from
London to Scotland. The swift goes, the cuckoo goes. In vegetation
it is the most slumberous month of the year. The tide of growth
is stiller than in July, and the activity of autumn change has scarcely
begun. At the seaside, to which so many gravitate by natural
desire, it is rather different. Deep-sea fish come nearer the shore,
and the life of the pools about the beach is richer. There is growth
too in the seaweeds, and spawn covers their surface and floats on
the water in amazing prodigality. The downs have some of the
freshness of the seashore. In August we see many more of the

AUGUST 241

small blue butterflies, the large blue, the holly blue, and others, than
in any month. The bell heather is now at its best, and the close
grass of the commons is dotted with harebell and potentilla. Mush-
rooms are among the gifts of the month, especially in Western
England.

Lammas (loaf-mass) day, the ist of August, may be said to
begin the festival of corn harvest ; and new wheat is still called
Lammas wheat. As for the poets there is Burns's ' Upon a Lammas
night, beneath the moon's unclouded light, corn rigs are bonnie.'
There is a phrase too about * Lammas floods.' The only other day
in the month that has any popular name is the 24th, which is a
favourite of the more hopeful weather prophets. It is said to cancel
St. Swithin :

'All the tears St. Swithin can cry,
St. Bartlemy's mantle wipes them dry.'

Or again, less prettily :

' If the 24th of August be fair and clear,
Then hope for a prosperous autumn that year.'

There is said to be a regular succession of weather during the first
half of the month : wet days followed by cold days followed by heat.

The average temperature : August ist, 62-2° ; August 3ist, S9'9°-

The average rainfall is 2*35 inches.

August i. Sun rises 4.24 a.m. ; sets 7.48 p.m.

August 31. Sun rises 5.12 a.m. ; sets 6.48 p.m.

THE ENDED TRUCE

FOR six months the game-birds have had freedom to build
and breed unmolested. The sound of the gun has been
rare. It is true that even in May rifles, if not guns, are
busy here and there. It is still a common form of sport to
shoot the young rooks soon after they make their first
tentative crawl along the elm boughs ; and rabbits, which
breed at most times of the year, are shot in most seasons.
But for the most part the spring and summer make a six
months of truce, regarded more or less faithfully towards
most birds and many mammals. In summer the truce is
deeper than in spring in some regards. In the rough hill
countries a May fox will be killed now and again ; and the
harriers and beagles are so often afoot in late spring that a
protest against the hunting of heavy hares may be raised
with pardonable iteration. In mid June foxes and hares, and
some of the vermin, are tolerably safe from man. But in
August the truce is formally broken. Happily many birds
are now protected all the year. We are their permanent
friends ; and in England the list of these perpetual allies is
steadily increased by the County Councils who concern them-
selves with the subject. Perhaps it would be better if in
almost all respects the truce were longer. The duck, which
are the first victims in England, and may be shot on August I,

244 SUMMER

are now protected in the United States during nine months
of the year; and each day has its periods of truce. You
may not shoot the birds before dawn or after sunset. By
this means the sport we know as ' flighting ' is abjured.
Since sport is and will be, and perhaps ought to be, it is
difficult with logic to say much against ' flighting,' which is a
poor man's sport. It takes its votaries to wild places, and it
can only be practised with success by those who study the
habits of birds as well as the swing of the gun. It needs a
good eye and a shrewd sense of nature. But the ' flighting' of
duck and birds of their sort is a daily migration to and from
feeding-grounds and sleeping-grounds ; and on this head is
open to the protests made by those fine naturalists and
sportsmen, Mr. Millais and Mr. Selous, against the shooting
of caribou in Newfoundland. The sportsmen, so-called,
sat on the line of migration and shot unhunted animals in
cold blood. Such killing is not of a sportsman's sort. The
evil of ' flighting ' is that it interferes with the instinct of the
bird and its scheme of life ; and because it does this, it drives
the birds from their native haunts, if frequently indulged.
Yet there are strange wild places even in England where
some sort of ' flighting ' is a real sport. Even as early as
August you may feel that the real hunting time has come
if you stand some evening with a gun behind any slight
obstruction on one of the South Welsh marshy moors. The
curlew with their wild call come sailing in from the sea,
and as they pass you can see even after sunset their long
bent beaks clear against the violet sky. The heron calls.
The green sandpiper rises with a snipelike call. A shot
from the far end of the water sets a group of coot on the
wing. They fly over you with the straight directness and
impetus of a bullet before they swing on the first arc of a
circle that will take them higher and higher, till they are

THE ENDED TRUCE 245

above the reach of shot. You had not thought the slow and
sleepy coot — a sort of moorhen, after all — would make such
pace and reach such height. Here the peaceful summer is
clean forgot, and a wilder season begun, though elsewhere
August is heavy with heat and summer sleep.

But this is not the scene of which most naturalists and
sportsmen think when August comes. By what strange
calculation the I2th became the day of the grouse no man
can tell ; but it is a better day for the shooting of grouse
than the ist of Sep-
tember for shooting f •» '
partridges. It is
very seldom that the
grouse are not strong
on the wing, and
few birds seem to
develop wing -power
quite so quickly.
Pheasants are
hatched a month be-
fore partridges, and
are not strong fliers even by October ist when they may be
shot, though they seldom are. They are the slowest to
develop. Young partridges top the grasses in low flight at
as young an age as the young moorhens slip over the surface
of the water as if they were balls of fluff blown by the wind.
But the grouse are even quicker than the partridges to attain
real power of wing ; and, of course, the young are very
early fliers. One of those sights, not in themselves perhaps
remarkable, which make a permanent impact on the mind,
and remain ineffaceable, was a grouse's nest almost alongside
an eider-duck's on a little isle in a West Highland loch. The
young from the one crossed the water, and the young of the

YOUNG GROUSE

246 SUMMER

other took the water as if they were akin to air and water
from their birth. The shooting of grouse is one of the most
attractive of all sports beyond doubt. It is amazing at a
first experience to \vatch the coveys, flying as if they were in
a picture with set wings, appear over the heather ridge, grow
to a vast size in your eyes as if on a sudden, and then
vanish behind you like a streak as if they had been dissipated
into the moorland, and returned to the heather from which
they were created. As so seen you are conscious chiefly of
a shape endowed with singular momentum tearing past you
like a shell in action. You note no colour. It is very
different to flush a cock grouse as you walk across a moor
with or without dogs. Every colour on his handsome body
leaps to the eye, and you think what a splendid bird he is,
too splendid to kill, belonging like the heather indisseverably
to the hill. He does, in fact, so belong in a very real
sense. The red grouse is the one exclusively British bird.
The one food on which he flourishes is the purple heather,
and if the succulent shoots are not there at the due season
he dies, as the young wild-duck die, when hatched before
the insects have multiplied. He seems, too, to keep some-
thing of both the rich and dusky colours of the heath :
he is subdued to that he works in. The willow grouse
of other countries and the ptarmigan, that love the heights,
change their heather colours for the snow colours. But
the grouse is always constant to the tawny shades of the
moor.

No signal of the seasons is obeyed with such headlong
promptitude as the coming of August. Under the dark and
grimy canopy of glass on a North London terminus you may
infer the season with more certainty than most expert
naturalists in the country. The war with the grouse is the
occasion, but no one who has ever escaped from the stale

THE ENDED TRUCE

247

heat of a big town one August day, and awaked the next
morning within call of the grouse, will believe that sport is
the master cause of this exodus.

'What is it steels the sportsman's heart?
It is the conscious pride of art.'

No one can with honesty deny the power of sport over
English people ; and grouse-driving probably comes first in
attractiveness and reputation. But August is a period when

an elemental force drives us away from towns to the sea or
the moor, which has the scope and range of the sea. And
the pleasure of a first day in the haunts of the grouse,
whether the birds be few or many, is like no other change.
Everything is changed and the scale of things is brightened.
We may see a golden eagle ranging the slope, and happily
the eagle is becoming once again a frequent bird. You may
see the red deer, the wildest and shyest of all animals in the
world. The tiger is tame compared with him. The smell
of the bog-myrtle, where the dry moor degenerates in a hag,

248 SUMMER

sets going by its single influence a new train of thought.
The moors are the right place for the human tribe in August;
but they are perhaps even better worth a visit in July, and
without a gun. The few birds that live in coveys are
peculiarly worth observation ; and you may see such a
struggle for life and survival of the fittest as does not appear
in the south. The grouse no doubt flourishes very much
more than the partridge, which only preservation keeps
alive. But the grouse has to exert more intelligence. She
may, as we know, be forced to the device of carrying water
to her young in the sponge of her breast feathers. The
broods are hunted by the eagles as no partridge is pursued
by sparrow-hawk or owl. An eagle, and indeed any moun-
tain hawk, hunts with much method and persistence. You
may see them quartering a hillside in a pattern of flight that
would make a parallel diagram. They have the 'eagle eye,'
yet even so they will pass within a few yards of a grey hen
on her nest and not distinguish her from the inorganic stuff
in which she disappears. But the eagle is a bitter enemy.
His natural prey is the grouse, and a good many fall victims,
yet the toll is very small ; and if the year is free from
disease, and that little parasite of the heather not overmuch
encouraged by the weather, the multiplication of the coveys
is amazing. Doubtless vermin are rarer in Scotland, as in
England, than they were. In the country-houses of the
north you will often find stuffed specimens of the wild cat,
a real tiger of a cat, distinguished from its tame descendants
by the even rings of the tabby tail. But it is some while
since a real wild cat was seen in the Highlands, save for
one or two in their last retreat. The marten is as rare as
the polecat, which has disappeared in the south with
astounding completeness during the present generation.
The stoat is still busy, and when he becomes ermine, as

THE ENDED TRUCE 249

he does not in the south, he accounts for the death of
not a few mountain hares, disguised for defence as he is
disguised for attack. But the eagle is more destructive,
and perhaps harder to avoid, even than the stoat ; and
native himself, he chooses in preference the native bird
for prey.

To a naturalist, at any rate, there is no change of air so
stimulating as a change of flora and fauna; and did the
grouse flourish in Surrey, as Lord Onslow and others hoped

they would, the i2th would not be the I2th in Surrey as it is
in Skye. One desires to be 'up to the hips in heather,' as
Christopher North says ; and to get the taste of the season
there is no better recipe than his.

' But let us off to the moor ! . . . Towards what airt
shall we turn our faces ? Over yonder cliffs shall we ascend,
and descend into Glen Creran, where the stony regions that
the ptarmigan love melt away into miles of the grousey
heather, which, ere we near the salmon-haunted Loch so
beautiful, loses itself in woods that mellow all the heights
of Glen Ure and Fasnacloigh with sylvan shades, wherein the

250 SUMMER

cushat coos, and the roe glides through the secret covert?
Or shall we away up by Kinloch-Etive, and Melnatorran,
and Mealgayre, into the solitude of streams, that from all
their lofty sources down to the far-distant Loch have never
yet brooked, nor will they ever brook, the bondage of
bridges, save of some huge stone flung across some chasm,
or trunk of a tree — none but trunks of trees there, and all
dead for centuries — that had sunk down where it grew, and
spanned the flood that eddies round it with a louder music ?
Wild region ! yet not barren ; for there are cattle on a
thousand hills that, wild as the very red-deer, toss their

'THE STONY REGIONS THAT THE PTARMIGAN LOVE '

heads as they snuff the feet of rarest stranger, and
form round him in a half-alarmed and half-threatening
crescent. . . .

'. . . All these are splendid schemes — but what say
you, Hamish, to one less ambitious, and better adapted to
Old Kit? Let us beat all the best bits down by Armaddy —
the Forge, Glenco, and Inveraw. We may do that well in
some six or seven hours — and then let us try that famous
salmon-cast nearest the mansion — (you have the rods ?) — and
if time permit, an hour's trolling in Loch Awe, below the pass
of the Brander, for one of these giants that have immortal-
ised the name of a Maule, a Goldie, and a Wilson.' How

THE ENDED TRUCE

251

much naturalist and nature-lover, how much mere sportsman,
went to inspire Christopher North to his ecstasy, who shall
say? And such mixed feelings drive most people on the
northern migration.

','"';*;. ,v-»"»:*ll*s»7'

fir:;" Su ,„,

•taflw^w.1 ifvr'H1*;

X"

JOY IN HARVEST

WHEN harvest falls or is ready to fall the whole country, the
scenery as well as the plants, seems to stop growing — the
tide no longer rises. The dapper squares and rectangles
into which much of England is divided might be so many
docks, full or empty, as the tide is let in or out. In January
the floor of the dock is covered with a green weed that has
changed little in appearance, except to thicken somewhat,
since November. As the suns lengthen the green grows
and deepens; the tints are bluer and whiter. In place of
weed there is shallow water in the dock. By the end of
July as much water has been let in as the dock will hold.
It is up to the edge. The corn almost makes the enclos-
ing rim of the hedgerow to disappear. What were ridges,
making each field into a pool, are lines almost flush with the
inner square, and contiguous fields may seem a plain. In
the fen country, where perhaps harvest is most splendid, for
the crops are heavier and the spaces wider, the lines of
division, being not ridges but indentations, disappear quite.
Where the dikes are you see no more than a shadowy dip,

JOY IN HARVEST 253

and the divided farms and fields become a great plain. On
the uplands, as over some of the spacious Berkshire downs,
the coming of harvest time is a growth of colour only, an
emergence as in the daffodil's flower from green into gold.
But everywhere in field, on plain and over down, the ripen-
ing of harvest puts an end to all sign of progress in the
seasons. Nature takes a rest, watching for a while the
prospect from the hill she has climbed before she goes
down by another, a more precipitous route, to a second
spring.

Every additional day of age adds to the risk that the
corn crop runs. It can stand sharp and prolonged frost,
though it may suffer if at all 'winter-proud.' It will endure
even to be grazed by a flock of sheep. Wet and drought
have no very apparent influence on the crop at the early
stage. Scratching larks may make as untidy a mess of
some patches as hens of a henyard, but the plant suffers
curiously little ; and even when starlings descend in their
myriads and nip off a certain number of shoots, the plant
will continue to tiller and send up a sheaf of stems from one
root. But when the straw is long and the ear heavy, the
wheat becomes tender and vulnerable. A July thunderstorm
will have as much effect on it as the wind on a smooth sea,
and leave it frozen into great scoops and waves. A much
' laid ' field will resemble a contour map with its ridges and
table-lands and sloping valleys ; and you will be able to trace
the passage of the storm even on the stubble after the crop
is cut and carried. It is now doubly liable to attacks of both
weather and animals. Even so unlikely an animal as a
vixen with her litter will make a mess of it. The sparrows
can conveniently perch on it, and it is only to the harvester
that such a laid crop is difficult to manage. Even if he can
drive his machine through it, and the weight of the laid and

254

SUMMER

tangled straw does not defeat the binders, he is not through
his troubles. One of the master qualities of the wheat is
i^ts readiness to grow; it germinates 'if you look at it/ as
a farmer used to say in the west country where rains are in
excess, and it will grow without waiting to be sown. On
occasion you may find much of it sprouting before it is
cut, and while the ear is erect enough to be well clear
of the ground. But it is in the stook that the mania
for germination chiefly appears. If the rains have been
lasting and the sunlight rare, a great part of a sheaf may

** ~~ ....'- •*' .

SPROUTING STOCKS

be so fastened together by the bonds of the growing
shoots that the ears are inseparable. Almost every grain
in every ear will have germinated and begun to grow
lustily, feeding on the starch stored in the grain. Some-
times, especially in the west, you may see across the stocks
a green film so vivid as to recall the verdure of a rice-field ;
and this home of tidily garnered wealth, neat as a room at
the mint, grows as desolate as the thatched roof of a
mouldering barn.

Such an untidy mouldering appearance may fall even
on a standing crop if the season has been very wet
and mild. Now and again the clover that should bide its

JOY IN HARVEST 255

time till after harvest will shoot up and top the barley
stems, as now and again weeds will top a Canadian
crop. Instead of the graceful company of drooped heads,
bowing to the season in level ranks, a muddle of contrary
growths intervenes, and harvest and haysel uncomfortably
commingle.

But, year in year out, the acres yield their three or four
quarters if no more of grain, and the corn defeats its enemies
if it suffers in the contest. The cutters-and-binders go through
it, and the harvesters pitchfork the sheaves into stocks. It
is told in a country place how a new landowner, of little

WILD BARLEY

country knowledge, was fretted in his energetic soul at the
waste of labour and time, as he said, of stacking up corn
sheaves in stocks in the field. He gave orders that the
sheaves should be carted straight to the ricks as they fell from
the cutters-and-binders. His orders, which made a good
tale in the village, were of course disobeyed. If there were
no need to let the corn dry and mature awhile in the sheaves
to complete the ripening of the time of growth, harvest would
lose a part of its most distinctive beauty. Few pictures
appeal to the eye more impressively than the stubble aisles
divided by the pillars of the stocks spaced with a regularity
almost architectural. The scene keeps at the flood for a little
longer the high tide of the year. Harvest is a shorter, a more

256 SUMMER

sudden festival, than it once was. We are robbed now of the
sight of the gleaners, women and children who pitched a
tentless camp on the stubble plain and went about, like
sparrows at nesting-time, picking up straws, all busy, till
even the midgets carried to the camp little snoods of corn,
gripped tight at the neck, with a stiff bunch of ears for
head and the straws stretching out in an extending circle
like a long-waisted gown. The sequels to this scene are
gone too. You no longer find half a cottage room packed

,..'W>$>^ V -x \>?\ *\ \

close with the little sheaves rising from the floor till they
were pressed tight against the ceiling ; and the joy of ' the
gleaning loaf,' a bread sweet beyond comparison, is a for-
gotten thing.

Harvest is what harvest was, nevertheless. Perhaps it is
a merrier festival than it used to be and hardly less elemental.
Doubtless the sickle is of a comely pattern, and the swing of
the body to the scythe is a rhythm no dancer or athlete
surpasses. But in Saxon days, up till the coming of the
machines, the first thing you thought of in harvest was
the labour. How 'mortal men 'did ' swink and sweat' to

THE BEAN HARVEST
By HARRY BECKER

JOY IN HARVEST 257

level these ears. They became for the time, as Jefferies
said, gold-miners, sacrificing everything in 'the fierce race
for wealth,' though the wealth was but lesser poverty. It
was a cruel race too. If, in a team of mowers, setting out
to mow in echelon, one man could not maintain the pace
he was derided, and often worked himself almost to death
to keep up with the heavier and stronger. There are old
villagers still living who remember one or two such days
as the very summit of endeavour, glorious but deadly.

What has succeeded this human process? One August
day in the Midlands when the fields were white and golden,
and the harvest hour had struck, an old farmer who had learnt
new methods called his men out into the yard. ' There are
the machines,' he said. ' There are the horses. There are
the fields. I will give you £i an acre to cut and carry and
stack.' With wonderful dash and impetus and a quiet cheeri-
ness the men set to work then and there. One man took a
scythe, as of old, and cut a space round the gateway of the
first field and alongside the rougher hedgerow to give the
machines a start. The teams and the binders followed and
flicked out the bound sheaves with a slick and busy precision
till they lay in ranks like plants ready for bedding out in
a formal garden. It was hot and blazing weather. The
straw was evenly toasted from root to ear, not as in a wet
season, when the drying of the straw extending from top
to bottom does not move smoothly, but leaves green patches
between the rather dirty yellows. The fields too were clean.
There was no mixture of mayweed dirtying the base of the
straw. No pretty but interloping bindweed ran round the
stems intent to carry its pink flower near the light. When you
looked at the standing crop in section, after the machines had
cut a swath or two, it reminded you not of a copsewood of
undergrowth, but of a clean fir plantation of straight trunks

s

258 SUMMER

and level heads, such as you see when the German govern-
ment drills the forests into economic neatness. The men
used the golden time to the utmost. You heard the hum of
the machines when the silver moon was lighting the velvet
colours of the west. In a trice the fields
were levelled. The hedges appeared
again as ridges, and before many days,
so dry were the sheaves, the stackyard
was as full as the fields were empty. The
bargain was fulfilled, the money paid, and
the farmer becoming master again was
paying the ploughman a daily wage for
turning the stubble to tilth.

There are many harvests : the hay
harvest, the clover harvest, the root har-
vest, the potato harvest, the fruit harvest,
the seed harvest. The corn harvest itself
is of many sorts. But there is one
harvest of harvests. The crown of the
year in England is the wheat harvest.
When we speak of corn in England we
think not of oats or barley, however
wide their acreage, nor of maize, which
is what they mean by corn across the
Atlantic, but of wheat, the food of man.
Not once or twice have farmers to their
own loss continued to grow wheat long after it was profitable,
partly from custom, but partly too from the strong attraction
wheat exercises on all who have traffic with the land. It
makes the staple food of man, though there is no reason
at all why it should ; and it has made the staple food of man
in many countries for many years. All the literatures are
inlaid with bright pictures of harvest, and the joy in harvest

SQUAREHEAD'S
MASTER

JOY IN HARVEST

259

is one of the common possessions of mankind. Above the
green rice that they transplant in Japan or the maize that
brings wealth to the Argentine comes the golden wheat,
the one plant about which the farmer is becoming some-
thing of a botanist. His care for this variety or that has
followed the custom of sowing by drill in
neat lines. In these days the newly grown
wheat looks as regular as lines on a sheet of
foolscap, and this neatness informs the whole
crop till it falls. So farmers begin to hate
the sight of a 'robber,' an odd variety that
grows taller or lower or differs in the ear.
The pure seed is demanded whether of the
stout English Squarehead's master, or the
wide-grained long French wheat, or the taper-
ing Wilhelmina from Holland. You may
detect a difference in the wheat harvest as
you approach the towns. So vast is the
quantity of sparrows which the town breeds
that many farmers sow a bearded or Rivet
wheat where the birds chiefly congregate.
You can mark it from a long distance by
the dusky almost blue look of the great
stout ears on which each grain puts forth a
sharp rough spear, making a chevaux de
frise from which even the lustiness of the
sparrow recoils.

Of the true wheats it is the colour that makes the
splendour. They are real gold. They wear ' the burnished
livery of the sun,' while the other grains, more shapely
perhaps taken plant by plant, merely pale in the suns of July
and August. A head of oats is delightful in form, whether
they are the old Tartarean sorts which push out on one side

WILHELMINA
WHEAT

260

SUMMER

and bend in one direction almost like an opening fern leaf ;

or whether they hold their
berries, two or three in a
panicle, at equal spaces all
round the stem. The husk
and case of the berry is itself
a graceful thing, especially
when the black grain peeps
out and the hold of the husk
grows weak.

The barleys, of which
Norfolk and Somerset are
especially proud, have a grace
that has appealed much to
many artists. The flat barley
head with its double row of
grains and fine fringing awns
appears not seldom in archi-
tectural decoration, and is
altogether a much more de-
corative seed-head than the
rough six-rowed barley that
is seen here and there in
these later days. But a field
of oats or a field of barley
has no comparison with a
field of wheat, and gives
small sense of harvest. The
winter oats, which readily
part with their grain if at

all overripe, are often
PERCIVAL'S 'BLUE CONE'

cut in July and a sort of
harvest begins. But now that horses disappear before

JOY IN HARVEST 261

the motor the oat crops grow fewer, and wheat is taking
its place.

Perhaps one day these other crops will displace wheat,
and harvest may mean a fruit or
a vegetable or a root harvest. The
straw is less precious than it was,
though it is far from being burnt
in England as it is on the great
American and Canadian prairies.
Rye straw is more valuable. In-
stead of straw there is growing
need for the fibre of the flax which
in Ireland, and here and there in
England, makes harvest almost as
lovely as if we reaped poppies.
That curious partial little mustard
harvest which makes patches of the
Cambridgeshire farms almost too
vivid to look at is spreading a little,
and alongside we may often see
the pink and white of buckwheat.
Stock grow more valuable and need
more green food, and the green
crops are in their degree splendid,
as you would expect from plants
with bright flowers. What could
be gayer than acres crimson with
alsike clover or pink with sainfoin
or mauve with other vetches, with
tares or alfalfa, the cut-and-come-again crop, which we call
lucerne. Of all the pleasant odours of summer none so over-
whelms us with sweetness as the breath of a beanfield which
carries further an even more delicate scent than the clover.

*A HEAD OF OATS

262

SUMMER

And most of these other harvests are murmurous with the
hum of winged insects. It is an education in summer sounds
to walk between fields of different clovers and vetches, as one
may on some farms. On one side there may be a surge of
continuous sound of hive-bees, on the other scarcely a note ;
and each crop will draw more or fewer bees in proportion to
the depth of the flower. The hive-bees which exult in the
white clover cannot penetrate to the honey of the new red
clovers. Their instruments lack the length of the proboscis
of the noisier bumbles, whose numbers, it is said, not wholly
without book, make or mar the crop of seed clover.

But these crops for all their sweet scents and bright
colours have not the charm of a wheat-field, where the flower
is only visible as a dust and the fruit only visited by sparrows.
Some of the charm of the full harvest remains even to the
bristly stubble, with the shining grooves worn by the carrying
carts and wagons. But a stubble-field, like fair Melrose,
should be visited at night. The cutting of the wheat has
been a calamity to the partridges and the rats and rabbits
and the harvest mice. You may see this in a rather repellent
form when the sporting characters of a village gather round
the last rectangle of standing corn in a harvest, and armed
with sticks if not with guns hunt the creatures that are finally
driven from this refuge. But those that survive the calamity,
or are not carried off to the stuffy but safe security of the

JOY IN HARVEST 263

stackyard, find the stubble a very happy playing-ground
when cleared of its encumbrances. Rats and mice both frolic
about in the moonlight, especially in the Fen country. They
come out from the dikes after sunset, and pick up food or
even make burrows in the new stubble. It is a richer field
for the partridges than was the standing wheat. Indeed
sometimes the birds do not begin to flourish as they should
till the corn is cut. If any one wished a post of observation
there is none comparable with shelter in one of the last of
the stooks in a stubble-field when the moon is full, and the
night animals are playing and feeding, and the night birds
hunting. How quiet are the owls till they split the silence
of their flight with a hunting shriek, and how mysterious the
rustle of the stubble stems beneath scampering feet. The
foxes desert the hedgerow for the open field, and the utter
tenuity of the bat's cry is heard far from buildings and
trees.

BELOW THE TIDEMARK

THANKS to the moon and her tides we gain access twice a
day by the sea-shore to the margin of that hidden region out
of which it is believed that life came, and where it is fostered
in such strange and multifarious forms. It is only a strip
perhaps averaging a hundred and fifty yards wide that the
sea daily bares, with a vertical depth as ridiculously dispro-
portionate to the size of the Atlantic ; and yet it is a world
almost entirely different from our own, and full of unfamiliar
shapes of life.

The herbs of the sea have no flowers, with the technical
exception of the light green ribbon-grass which grows thickly
in muddy shallows, and is a favourite food of the widgeon.
Some of the seaweeds are like liverworts, and others like
lichens, which are partly seaweeds themselves ; but most sea
weeds are quite unlike any form of dry-land vegetation. Where
the tide rolls up at high-water mark a long bolster of tangled
drift, the commonest seaweed is the bladder-wrack, with its
rows of bubbles or blisters. It is common on almost any rock
that the tide lays bare ; and it belongs to the same frontier
of the ocean kingdom that we are allowed to tread. Bladder-
wracks are seaweeds of the surface, and their bladders enable
them to float at the level which suits them, whether they

BELOW THE TIDEMARK 265

hang on the rocks of an English cove or float on the steam-
ing levels of the Sargasso sea. On the coast their character-
istic place is between high and low-water mark, and we can
hunt beneath them at low-water for prawns. On rocks
above high-water mark, where only the spray dashes in
storm, grow the small grey seaweeds that look like lichens,
and are closely related to them. But at ebb of the spring
tides, when the sea yields us a few yards more of its territory
than usual, we may notice that the seaweeds on the lowest
rocks are less often bladder-wrack than the smooth, strap-
like plants of many shapes which are often known as oar-
weed. Oarweeds also grow in the deep rock-pools which
form beautiful natural aquaria on the bolder parts of the
coast. They are the seaweeds of deeper water, and need no
air-bladders to keep them at the surface. Beneath the sea
they form immense waving jungles to a great depth, with
their own deep-water fauna ; but most of them are still
within the power of the upper air. An ordinary breaker is
only a superficial ruffle of the sea, and its effect is felt for a
depth of a few feet. But when steady gales out on the
Atlantic have set in motion a great body of water, the move-
ment of the ground-swell is much deeper, and its power often
immense. All the boulders and shingle off the shore grind
together with a noise which can be heard for miles inland ;
and then the oarweed of the deep water gets torn from its
hold, and is cast up in huge masses. Coves are sometimes
filled with weed to a depth of a yard after a heavy ground-
swell, and the stench of the stuff in decay becomes an almost
intolerable nuisance in creeks and havens. This green
harvest of the sea gives some idea of the extent of the
forests of oarweed which fringe our shores ; and a toy
picture of their luxuriance is to be seen in many of the deep,
warm rock-pools on the coast of Devon.

266 SUMMER

Fresh green tints, like those of the plants of dry land, are
not rare among seaweeds growing within reach of the light,
but tints of olive are commoner, while many seaweeds are red.
These red seaweeds resemble the rootlets of willows and
other riverside trees which are washed by the stream ; they
too wear a red dress, instead of the green which is the
normal colour of vegetation, or the brown or white of roots
which are hidden in the soil. The same tint is seen on
young shoots of the oak and rose and other plants in spring,
while the ash-shoots wear a dark green not unlike the tint of
many seaweeds. All these uncommon vegetable tints form
a protection for the plant against the light. In the oak or rose
shoots this shrinking is due to their tenderness, and the red
tints disappear when the leaves are expanded and firm.
Seaweeds wear a protection against the light not because it
is strong, for it often reaches them veiled and softened by
the water, but because their whole habit is that of plants
developed in obscurity.

The contrasts of form and colour in a well-furnished rock-
pool are perhaps no greater than that in a June wood, but
both forms and colours are new. Oaks do not wave through
the air in broad trunks several hundred yards long, as they
would if they had the habit of this ocean vegetation ; nor in
the terrestrial fauna is there anything like the variety of the
widely diverse orders of animal life under the sea. Instead
of birds and mammals the sea-pools contain fishes, crus-
taceans and molluscs, sea-urchins and sea-worms, and primi-
tive forms of existence which are little more than a stomach
and a squirt. While branched corallines float in the crystal
water, among the crimson and olive tresses of the hairy sea-
weeds ; and as the blue sky is seen through the trees, so the
white sand gleams through the clearings in the shining oar-
weed. The brilliant colours of the sea-anemones which stud

BELOW THE TIDEMARK 267

the rocks defy any reasonable explanation on grounds either
of sexual or natural selection, and emphasise the primal
tendency of nature to produce varied forms of beauty with
which the laws of selection then proceed to work. Unmated
organisms without eyes cannot be supposed to appreciate
each other's beauty, whatever may be the case with sea-fowl
or pheasants, and it has yet to be shown that the colours of
sea-anemones serve a warning purpose such as is attributed
to the bold markings of wasps and certain caterpillars.

The beauty of sea-shells is apparent to all ; and it tends
to make us forget that every shell has been a home, or
rather an intrinsic part, of a creature at least as wonderful.
The living owner of a shell is apt to be regarded as a
nuisance rather than an object of interest, and there is some
excuse for this annoyance in its sulky and defensive attitude
when disturbed. To watch the ways of living molluscs satis-
factorily it is necessary to keep them in aquaria, or to study
them on the shore with experience and knowledge ; but even
a slight comprehension of their living habits adds enormously
to the interest of their dead frames. Cockle-shells are
among the soberest on the beach, with their plain white
ribbing ; nor, when we find a pair of the empty shells
cohering in the simulation of life, is it easy to regard the
cockle as an agile creature. Yet it can move through the
wet sand in which it lives with very tolerable rapidity, by
thrusting out its fleshy foot and pushing itself backwards in
a series of jerks. The long narrow razor-shells which we
find strewn on sandy shores have the same habits and system
of propulsion. These two shell-fish, like the oyster and the
mussel, are diverse forms of the bivalve group of molluscs,
which are not found on dry land, though the large fresh-
water mussel is common in fresh-water lakes. But the dead
shells about high-water mark and the live ones in the pools

268 SUMMER

and on the uncovered rocks also include a wonderful diversity
of snail-like univalves — cousins of the inland snails of fields
and streams. Their spirals are moulded in almost infinite
variety. Even the whelk and periwinkle of the fish-market
show a considerable diversity ; the whelk belongs to the
more elongated spirals, and the periwinkle to the rounder.
Extremely contrasted forms are provided by the long pointed
turritella shells, which look like the trumpets of sea-fairies,
and the bright yellow houses of the sea-snail, in which the
spiral outline is compressed to the smoothness of a pebble.
One striking point of difference as compared with inland
types is the thickness of most of these shells. To resist the
beating of the waves they need far greater strength than
the snails which dwell on land, or in the more even current
of rivers. Inland snails have coats like egg-shells, but most
sea-snails are defended like the kernel of a nut.

Yet not only the hard shell of the molluscs, but the rocks
themselves, yield to the fret of other shells, and some of
them among the frailest of their kind. Single shells of
oyster or mussel or other bivalves are often found pierced
with a neat round hole, as if meant for threading into
children's necklaces. This is the work of the dog-whelk.
The dog-whelk is a small species of whelk — it is reputed
to be poisonous — with a thick smooth shell, which is often
found prowling alive on stones and in pools. It is one
of the predatory species of the beach, hunting for the
bivalves which are apparently so safely sealed in their
double shells. The dog- whelk sits on one of the shells near
the hinge, and bores a hole to the fish inside. It thus
paralyses the muscles which contract the shells, and when
they gape open enters and feeds upon the occupant. To
open an oyster is a sufficiently remarkable feat for a whelk
not half as large as a common garden-snail. But shell-fish

BELOW THE TIDEMARK 269

frailer and hardly larger bore their way into many kinds of
rock. Lumps of chalk and limestone on the shore are often
seen pitted with numerous holes into which one can push the
little finger ; and sometimes the gallery is still occupied by
the borer — a frail though rough white shell, like a large
almond. This is the shell of the pholas, and it is frailer than
most other marine shells because it is nested in these safe
burrows in the stones. The secret by which the pholas
melts the rocks is the same as the legendary method by
which Hannibal split the crags of the Alps, except that it
uses an acid secreted by itself instead of vinegar. It melts
its way into the calcareous rock by dissolving it, just as the
rivers of limestone districts fret out a subterranean path by
means of the carbonic acid from the atmosphere. The most
famous example of the work of these rock-boring shells is in
the columns of the Temple of Serapis on the shore of the
Bay of Naples, which sank till the shell-fish made their
homes in the marble, and now stands dry again. The borers
in this case were date-shells, which are near relatives of the
common mussel.

Shells occupying exposed positions need to anchor them-
selves tightly to their hold. Mussels, which abound on
almost every rock uncovered at low water, are bound to their
place with strands of byssus spun by the animal. Limpets
and barnacles are living synonyms of adhesiveness, and
there is a magnificent simplicity about the limpet's method of
attachment. Unlike the whorled sea-snails and the tightly
closed bivalves, the limpet spreads its largest fleshy area on
the rock, and sits under a conical shell like a bell-tent.
The instant it is alarmed it draws the edge of the shell to
the rock with the strong muscular band round its circum-
ference, and is protected by its hard roof and by the forces
of suction. Even if we were to bore a hole in the top of

270 SUMMER

the limpet's shell, and tie a string to it, the ingenious
mollusc would still be as hard to remove as a leather sucker
from the pavement ; for it forms a concavity at the centre,
with a firm band of muscle at the edge. ' Experiments have
been made showing that a force of sixty-two pounds, or 1984
times its own weight, is required to detach it from the rock.'
Not content with its power of clinging to any flat surface, it
chooses a lair in some snug nook that fits its size, and retires
to it as the tide leaves its rock dry.

Small white acorn barnacles stud almost every rock in
the gaps left by the mussels ; they look like a kind of natural
rough-cast or deposit of lime. The great goose-barnacles
are rarer ; they are occasionally seen clinging in bunches to
wreckage which has long floated on the waters before being
tossed on shore. Like certain slugs they seem to have
greatly outgrown their shells, which are attached to the
timber by a fleshy stalk. From the shell protrude a dozen
threads which constantly finger the sea-waters and collect
small food for the mouth behind them. The belief still
lingers on some parts of the coast that the barnacle geese
which visit us in autumn and winter are developed from these
sea- creatures instead of from eggs. For all their primitive
appearance barnacles are crustaceans, and comparatively high
in the scale of life.

Shell-hunters know how the sea tends to drop dead shells
not broadcast but in lines along the shore, and the same
sifting action of sea-water in motion is evident in the beaches
of shingle and sand. There is an order in all the sea's wild-
ness, and less chaos on the wet beach than among the
tumbled cliffs above. The frontal attack of the breakers
drives the pebbles beyond the sand, and lifts the biggest
pebbles to high -water mark ; we walk to the sea at low-
water through a succession of zones. There is the same

BELOW THE TIDEMARK 271

selective force in the run of the tidal current along the shore.
Along the south coast each tidal wave from the Atlantic
drifts the shingle eastward, dropping the small stones before
the large. The most perfect exhibition of this process is on
the great twelve-mile bank of shingle which forms the Chesil
Beach. Instead of the nooks and capes of an ordinary
coastline, the Chesil Beach forms an even curve where the
process of sifting the stones can be carried out without the
smallest interruption from cross currents and sheltering
rocks. All the way from Bridport to the Isle of Portland
the size of the pebbles increases regularly ; and behind the
great barrier of stones, in a still lagoon, lie hidden the bays
and headlands of the original coastline.

Sand is the finest dust of the sea's floor ; it is the residue
of the hardest and most insoluble rocks, and of broken sea-
shells. Sea-sands vary in colour in accordance with their
substance. Pure white sands are formed either of white
quartz or of sea-shells ; other quartzes give varying shades of
yellow, while the grit from rocks stained with iron gives
certain sands a tinge of red. Brown sands are usually due
to an infusion of mud ; but the waste of granite rocks forms
sands of a cool speckled brown which is pleasantly novel to
the eye accustomed to yellow sands. In certain spots on the
coast the sea seems to have the faculty of disgorging sand
from its depths, almost inexhaustibly, while the winds pile it
up into drifts which endanger the land. The moving sand-
hills on both coasts of the Bristol Channel have at various
periods eaten up farms, churches, and villages. At times the
drift of the sand changes, and the sea lays bare again what
it covered ; but the only sure way of checking such inroads
of sand is by planting the dunes with marram grass, and after-
wards with pines and other sand-loving vegetation. Below the
tide-mark the peril corresponding to the drifting sand-hill

272 SUMMER

is the devouring quicksand. Quicksands may be defined as
water holding sand, instead of sand holding water in the
ordinary way. The stuff is too liquid to support weight, and
yet too tenacious to allow the embedded man or animal
to extricate itself. Imitation quicksands can be made by
working the sand beneath the foot till the concentration
of water softens the mixture ; in some sands it is possible,
for experiment's sake, to embed one's leg nearly to the knee,

and to drag it out with a difficulty which explains the clasp
of the genuine quicksand.

The orderliness and cleanness of the sea find an exquisite
expression in the unspoiled air of freshness which is found in
every cove after the fall of the tide. The sands scrawled and
trampled six or eight hours before are spread as smooth
again as if man had never trodden them ; the rocks drip from
their new bath, and the water in all the pools is freed of the
light scum of fine sand and other impurities which settles on
them even in the fresh air of the shore. Where an eddy
sweeps round a cove as the tide falls, the sand will be left
standing smooth and convex, with little trenches on the lee-
side of all the rocks. But where there is a steady onward
ripple the sand in the shallows preserves the ripple-marks.

BELOW THE TIDEMARK 273

They recall the clouds of a mackerel sky, and the likeness
is not misleading. The rippling pattern of many cloud for-
mations is due to the undulating flow of a current of warm
air at the level where cold causes condensation. The crests
of the waves are chilled into cloud, while the troughs retain
their free vapour. The undulations of the sea in the breeze
are registered in the floating layer of sand, which keeps,
when it solidifies, the print of the last ripple that touched it.
Though moulded by a momentary ripple, and obliterated in
the normal course after a few hours, the ripple-marks on
primaeval beaches have yet survived in stone among the
fossils of ancient rocks. Where blocks of ripple-marked
sandstone overhang a modern beach, the contrast adds a
doubly sensitive charm to the sands bared below at each
tide.

The essential beauty of the sands is in their cleanness and
freedom, and they need adornment even less than the clean
turf of an old lawn. When we tread them at low-water most
of their resident life has gone into hiding, either beneath the
surface or in the pools scooped by the falling tide. But their
smooth expanse is flecked with signs of activity which suggest
the hidden vitality of the spot. Sea-worms have thrown
their casts of sand like the heaps of the earth-worms on a
lawn, and their number is suggested by the abundance of
these little piles after each tide. In the wet sand near low-
water mark the flexible tubes of the terebella emerge on the
surface like large caddis-shells. The bristly sluglike sea-
mouse, occasionally seen striking out of the wet sand, is
a larger and more rapacious worm. Jelly-fish evaporate in
the sun to a mere patterned film, and the track of the star-
fish leads like the print of a rope to the pool under the weed-
hung pile where it found a refuge as the tide fell. The
nettlelike sting of the larger red and purple jelly-fishes is

274 SUMMER

one of the few animal perils of our temperate shores. More
dangerous, though even rarer, is a cut from the black dorsal
iin of the little brown weaver-fish, which lurks near enough
to the surface of wet sand to be occasionally trodden upon
by bathers. Now and then the spiny back of a sea-urchin
protrudes from the sand, as a testimony to the antiquity
of so much of this ocean life. Ages before man was yet
framed these urchins were laid bare on the sands by the
morning's tide. On the chalk downs above the Kentish shore

THE RISING TIDE

we can find half a dozen fossil sea-urchins in flint on the same
morning as their living descendant.

The purity of the sea is partly ensured by its brine, which
reduces the offensiveness of all the offscourings of the beach
and of dead fish and fowl cast ashore. But there is an
enormous army of scavengers perpetually at work, turning
dead matter into wholesome living flesh again by consuming
it as fast as it perishes. The activity of gulls above water is
paralleled by that of crabs beneath it. Crabs are perpetually
on the watch for food of almost any kind, and will strip a
fisherman's hook of bait time after time with almost comical
rapidity. They sidle about the shore in all sizes, from the
little creatures like tarnished sixpences which rest in the
cracks of the shallowest rock-pools to the densely mailed
warriors caught in deeper water in the crab-pots. All the

BELOW THE TIDEMARK

275

many species are almost equally alert and voracious, and
chiefly differ in their methods of protecting themselves from
enemies. Some hide in the sea-weed fringing rocks, and
others in wet sand ; they sit in the sand with only their eyes
pricking the surface, or burrow into it hind part before, and
vanish almost as quickly as a sand-eel. The hermit crab,
which takes refuge in the cast-off shell of a mollusc, is
ingenious but degenerate. He has the birthright of a
nimble crustacean, but exchanges it for the clumsy protec-
tion of a snail-shell. This unworthy incubus hampers his
naturally active movements, and has constantly to be renewed
as he grows.

THE YELLOW WASP

RICHARD JEFFERIES used to say that though our swallow does
not make a spring, our wasp does make a summer. Perhaps
we do think of the wasp as essentially a thing of summer ;
but the queens will emerge in any month, even in January
within the house, and the garden is sometimes full of queens
long before spring is over. Some particular flower or bulb
will lure them long before a true summer date. In one
Hertfordshire garden it is a virtual certainty that queens will
be gnawing wood on a certain cotoneaster, which is trained
against a south wall, long before May is out. But perhaps
Jefferies meant not the queen but the common wasp or
neuter worker, which is certainly one of the least fallible of
all signs of a particular date in advanced summer.

More than this the wasp in her very colour suggests hot
days, and yellow pollen, and ripening fruit, and the noise of
the summer hum over the grass-heads.

The wasp nevertheless is not welcomed even as an
earnest of hot weather. But even that really terrible
creature, in guise and bearing, the rare super- wasp, which we
know as a hornet, is not altogether unlovely. A true tale of
an individual hornet's cleverness and persistence may serve

276

THE YELLOW WASP 277

to persuade those who have a horror of these creatures that
they are at any rate interesting. An idle watcher marked a
hornet digging at the bottom of a hole in a piece of decayed
wood, either with a view of making a nest or carrying away
material for a nest. In the temporary absence of the insect
the watcher stuck a needle across the entrance of the hole.
The hornet on returning strove mightily to remove the
needle, but even her double jaws were useless. They could
get no grip on the smooth and polished surface, so, after a
while, as if in despair, the hornet flew away. She was
absent some twenty minutes. It seemed that she had gone
' for good.' The needle was on the point of being withdrawn
when the hornet flew back and began to work with her jaws
at the needle, not pulling and hauling, but, as it appeared,
mouthing. Soon it became obvious that she was coating
the needle with wax or some waxy substance. It was laid
on, as a man may put resin on his grip, to provide a surer
hold. The policy was effectual, and presently by means of
the adhesive plaster the builder could apply her enormous
strength to some purpose, and pulled away the obstruction.

Such an action is evidence of some capacity very near
reason. At any rate it is an indication that the hornet, the
greatest of the wasp tribe, has an adaptability quite remark-
able among insects. People usually perhaps dislike wasps
too heartily to observe them with much interest. They
certainly add a terror to life. Within some favourite
haunt, such as the side of a Norfolk stream or broad,
they may destroy all the pleasure of an else perfect
place and time. On a hot August day they will swarm
into the cabin of a wherry in such hundreds that existence is
unbearable, and flight is the only safety. Occasions are on
record when they have driven ploughmen from the fields at
a later date. It is a quite repellent experience of very late

278 SUMMER

summer to pick what was once a fruit and find it a barren
chamber, full of heavy and ugly creatures, stupid with the
excess of what they have eaten. They fall to the ground as if
wingless, and crawl and tumble there helplessly. The instinct
of the preservation of the race has abandoned them, and they
eat till they die, often never again returning to the hive. But
this phase, which is only a partial phase, is of a later date.

Generally, from the point of view of an observer, there is
no creature who, may one say, gives you more for your
money than the wasp ? The more you watch hive-bees the
deeper you are plunged into the abysses of a splendid self-
sacrificing, almost intellectual socialism ; but everything is at
this stage in the insects' development cruelly accurate and
mechanical. The wasp is above all things adaptable. With
every experiment you evoke new arts ; and, experto crede, the
wasp is the less angry and venomous of the two insects.

A description of many hours of observation spent lying
down on the side of a hot bank in August will disclose some
of the secrets of the wasp's art, of which little can be found
in any text-book. The nest was made in a favourite site on
the side of a bank. A mouse had made a hole there in the
winter, when food was scarce, in order to get at the bulb of a
daffodil. Such was the inference from the state of the bulb
when found afterwards behind the nest. A terrier in pursuit
of the mouse, which it scented only less cleverly than the
mouse scented the bulb, had considerably enlarged the hole
one winter day. In May a queen wasp, driven by the
sense of her own fertility, adopted the hole, cleaned it up
a little, made her paper cells, laid the first eggs, fed the
grubs, and in due time the workers coming out to help her
a very large nest with four big layers of cells came into being.

On first watching, at the time when the nest was already
big though not at its biggest, the outstanding fact was the

THE YELLOW WASP 279

work of the navvies. Wasp after wasp came out of the hole
carrying lumps of earth, most of them, to suggest a rough
average, about as big as No. 4 shot. Some lumps were as
big as the head of the wasp. All the smaller lumps were
carried clean away. So far as could be seen none was
dropped within fifteen yards of the nest. It is probable that
the wasp must alight before letting go the burden. In order
to watch the wasp more easily a small red currant was

THE WASP'S NEST REVEALED

dropped into the hole. Within a quarter of an hour a wasp
appeared with the currant in her jaws, and as soon as she
reached the entrance she took flight with the usual abrupt
impetus. She was watched by several pairs of eyes, and the
burden was not deposited within twenty yards. Why the
animal should put itself to this superfluous labour is not
clear, unless physically she is not able to let go till she
settles ; and if many navvies alight close to the nest they
might announce the secret of the site. Sometimes the lump
was too heavy for the power of the wings to support. In
that case after several efforts it was let go, and generally

280 SUMMER

rolled down into a little scooped hollow in front of the
nest.

The power of these navvies and their industry is admir-
able enough, but the wasp as navvy is a clumsy creature to
the wasp as mason. Through the earth, guarding the nest
in the bank from profane eyes, several holes were driven.
Within twenty-four hours each hole was always repaired so
thoroughly that no draught could possibly penetrate, some-
times so thoroughly that you could not tell where the hole
had been. Finally, a great part of the earth-wall was
removed, so that the side of the nest was disclosed ; but the
wasps did not shrink from this immense, this colossal work.
A separate gang, not very numerous, was told off; and it was
easy to see exactly how they proceeded. They were so busy
at the work that they did not appear to notice peering eyes,
even within a few inches. The method was never formal or
regular, as is a hive-bee's work. Each mason brought with
her a pellet, a little load of earth. As this was held in the
mouth against the bit to be repaired, some saliva or other
chemical substance was exuded, so that you could see the
hard little lump soften; sometimes it seemed to bubble with the
moist application. When it reached the right consistency,
became 'tacky' as manufacturers say, it was pressed on
partly by the feet, partly by the mouth. But the mouth
served the part of trowel. When the mud was lengthened
out into a ridge of mortar, often about an eighth of an inch
in length, it was always shaped by passing the mouth to and
fro along the top. Often a very neat and comely bevel edge
was left. When a considerable space had been covered by
this process, the effect was of a piece of frozen earth. There
were just the same sort of frost patterns, and the whole sur-
face had a hard, half-polished, cement-like appearance. In
an astonishingly short time the work was very completely

THE YELLOW WASP

281

finished, in spite of no apparent plan or definite co-operation.
If you look closely at any wasp's nest you will see that the
alighting floor or front of the passage is all treated by this
sort of cementing process. The knowledge of it is not
specially developed to meet accidents, but is a part of the
equipment of the wasp's normal instinct.

This masonic work is, of course, not at all comparable with

WASP COMBS

the manufacture by other wasps of the hanging paper nests.
It is a question whether any insect or other animal makes
any home, indeed makes anything, quite so light and delicate
as the hanging wasp's nest. The comparison is doubtless
unworthy, but the colour and in one aspect the consistency
suggest nothing so much as a very perfect cigar ash,
though the colour is rather more lichenous. These glaucous
spheres may be compared with the contour of a chaffinch's
nest or a long- tailed tit's, but both these are very solid

282 SUMMER

structures. The wasp's nest one is afraid to touch lest it
should crumble like an ash, and fall in dust. Yet it is
strong too in its degree. The bigger ones which are rather
rarely found carry quite a fair weight and admirably serve
their nesting purpose. It is curious how very little has been
seen of the building process. They are made, as one may
see, of paper, which is wood-fibre, treated with a chemical
solution very much as the ' mortar ' was treated. But the
paper is very much finer and yet looser than the cells of the
ordinary wasp's nest in the ground. It is de luxe. Country
people often wonder exceedingly at the discovery of such a
nest, which is attributed to all sorts of insects. In one dis-
trict at any rate the nest is quite commonly found in bee hives.
When the Isle of Wight bee disease emptied the hives in one
parish a number of these nests were found, and so perfect were
they that several were preserved as museum specimens.

As the season advances the wasp's character, if so human
a word is allowable, progressively deteriorates. While the
nest is building and work is demanded the whole community
is laborious. But as the need for labour slackens degenera-
tion begins. It is all partly perhaps the fault of the late born
males, the drones. But they are not the only delinquents.
The food changes. As August advances the wasps begin to
fall with fury upon other insects, especially flies, though they
will also clear off blight. If you are much abroad in a garden
in August you will scarcely avoid seeing some unfortunate fly
seized, beheaded, and dislimbed, with a mixture of fury and
precision that is diabolic. The trimmed corpse is carried off to
the swarm, for the corporate spirit is not yet dead. But from
this time the feeling for the society weakens, till finally each is
for himself; and hundreds gorge themselves into extinction
in the rotting fruit, before the queens have gone into hiding, or
the less greedy of the workers taken refuge on the ivy bloom.

A CHANGE OF DIET

ONE of the most novel of local migrations among birds is the
evacuation of the towns by sparrows just about the same
date that society likes to leave. Our towns are a protection,
organised on a vast scale, for certain species of birds. The
suburbs encourage starlings and carrion crows, among others,
but both town and suburb breed sparrows in almost appalling
quantity. The seven million of inhabitants in greater
London are a handful to the sparrows of greater London ;
and the comparative number of sparrows is even greater in the
Midland towns. But the town birds are not quite faithful to
the towns. They have learnt to nest in the towns in any
sort of site. They have even taken to living at this season in
flats, like 'intensive chickens.' More than once one of those
lumps of untidy hay and straw and string and feathers in
which the sparrows' eggs are laid has been found to contain
two or more nests. Sometimes these strange erections have
fallen by their over-weight of untidiness added to the natural
burden. Occasionally mere vexation at the spectacle of the
bad art will cause such a nest to be overthrown. The cock
sparrow is either more irritable or more tidy than the hen.
On one occasion he showed such irritation at the protuber-
ance of a long straw from his nest, built on the side of a

283

284 SUMMER

house in Kensington, that he tugged and tugged until, amid
the laughter of a group of observers, he pulled the whole
structure in ruin over his head, and the two fell in avalanche
together. The towns provide sufficient building sites, and
on the whole sufficient food. But when the young are well
fledged a certain desire of fresh fields comes over a consider-
able proportion of sparrows, especially those in the Midland
towns. Whether food grows scarce or whether they desire
fresher food is not clear, but when August comes and the
corn is whitening to harvest the birds flock to the country.
They go a-harvesting for a summer holiday.

This marauding expedition is on a great scale. The
birds are as thick as midges about the edges of the fields,
eating grain with a greed hardly less than that of the trout
at Mayfly time. It is one of many severe charges brought
by the country against the town that the streets breed these
birds to the destruction of the staple industry of the country.
The habit appears to be new, at any rate in its present
dimensions. It is a result of the progressive dominance,
in mind and fact, of town over country.

But apart from this particular migration of sparrows it is
remarkable, though not very much remarked, how the food of
birds alters with the progress of the seasons. This is largely,
of course, a matter of necessity. You cannot have woolly-
bear caterpillars at Christmas or ripe corn in June. But
instinct and physical needs work in co-operation with the
seasons, and our own birds are those which have the instinct
and the bodily adaptability to obey the almanac in their
dietary. Even the sparrows in spring enjoy animal food.
All young things seem to need insect food, and to grow
faster the more of it they can get. But as the young reach
their full growth in summer the desire dwindles in those we
call the grain-eating birds. Sparrows do not eat insects for

A CHANGE OF DIET 285

more than about a month. Partridges begin to prefer grain
about the same time as sparrows, but they excel the sparrow
in adaptability. When the grain is gone they take to an
exclusive diet of green stuff, so that one could tell tolerably
closely from the contents of a crop what was the date of the
year.

The country as such is not popular with sparrows. In
thinly populated grass country you may search some while
before finding a sparrow. They are, for example, singularly
scarce in the Isle of Wight at a short distance from the
towns. In any country place the numbers will be in close
proportion with the nearness to houses and stackyards. If
you walk along a hedgerow between two fields you will find
bullfinches, blackbirds, thrushes, and in summer the warblers,
a hundred times more numerous than sparrows. Indeed,
you will probably have trouble to find a single sparrow or a
sparrow's nest, old or young. In spite of its lustiness the
bird seems absolutely to depend on man. Its food is on the
road, or by the house, or in the stackyard. Fortified by the
grain and bread that it finds there in quantity, it is master of
almost all birds that are.

Within the stackyards it has one almost invariable com-
panion, the greenfinch, a bird as lusty, and if anything more
voracious. The bird is probably one of the three or four
most numerous in England. All those who have looked for
birds' nests in east and middle England will have felt from
time to time a growing irritation at the quantity of greenfinch
nests. The rather untidy basins of moss and bents, with the
rather dull eggs, are as obvious and many as blackbirds' and
thrushes' nests in an earlier month. The bird is bolder in
some ways than the sparrow. The writer has more than
once fed the old bird while sitting on the nest. They will
not dream of leaving the nest though a group of people

286

SUMMER

stand talking and laughing within a foot or two, and the
nest is little hidden. But if you would see this finch in real
multitude you should watch seed-crops in East Anglia when
the ripening hour is near. One has seen them on mangold
seed as thick as starlings in winter, and those who shoot to
protect their seed find that the slaughter of several hundred,
even on a half-acre plot, makes no apparent difference to the
army. They seem to have a peculiar affection for mangold

seed, as captive bullfinches for hemp or sparrows for wheat.
There are growers of seed who would like to see the green-
finch exterminated if that were possible, as there are apple-
growers who have the worst opinion of the bullfinch. But
let these destroyers once see the greenfinches at work earlier
in the year on an oak-tree devoured by green caterpillars,
and they must grant that the one form of greed cancels the
other. The seed, which is the later form of food, is the
reward for the earlier work of scavenging.

We are blessed in England with an immense multitude of
birds which probably increased by thirty or forty per cent.

BUILDING THE RICK
By HARRY BECKER

A CHANGE OF DIET 287

between 1895 and 1914, thanks partly to protection, partly to
a wider interest in birds, partly to a series of mild winters.
But as numbers have increased feeding habits have a
little changed. More birds certainly now turn their atten-
tion to fruit as summer merges into autumn. Sparrows
and blackbirds will peck small holes in apples, probably
for the sake of the moisture. The blackbird always has
a tendency to fruit-eating. He is as devoted to straw-
berries and raspberries and currants as the greenfinch to
vegetable seed or the goldfinch to thistle or corn-flower
seed. But this apple-eating habit is perhaps on the
increase.

As the rooks grow over numerous they become more grain-
eating than is their wont. Early in the summer a common
sight is the rooks' hunt of the daddy-longlegs emerging in
quantity from the grasses. They will hunt grubs of all sorts in
the cornfields, and eat a certain amount of seed-corn. But
when they are in overwhelming numbers they will now and
again, but more often on the Continent than in England,
deliberately fall to work on the corn, and even develop the
taste of the carrion crow for young birds. The ill effect of
excessive numbers is seen markedly in wood-pigeons, but
both species are essentially useful even in considerable num-
bers ; the rook for his destruction of larvae and the pigeon
for his happy taste in buttercup bulbs. The sparrow's taste
is permanently perverted in some places by excessive
numbers. In one particular village the sparrows have
acquired a taste for the flowers of the wistaria. In most
towns they fall upon the crocus petals in spring, and inter-
mittently snip off pieces of any sort of flower. But that
perhaps is rather an act of wanton damage, the sport of a
restless creature rather than a form of mawkish appetite.

It is sometimes not easy to find the reason for some
U

288

SUMMER

eccentricities of diet. Many visitors to one orchard were
shown as a marvel of growth a line of plum-trees which
had come out into fresh green leaf in August instead of in
May. Many conjectures were offered. The real one, only
known to the owner of the trees, was that every single bud,
leaf, or flower, had been quite cleared off by finches, not as
one might have expected by tits or bullfinches or haw-
finches, all of which have at
times a natural taste in buds,
but chaffinches. 1 1 was feared
that the trees would die, so
complete was the clearance.
In May they were as winter
trees, robbed of all leafage by
the sudden unexpected onset
of these finches. Were the
birds overcome with desire
for green food, or were the
buds infected with some in-
sect plague ? It is a question
unanswered in this case, and
in most of the instances where
finches still attack fruit-buds.

Doubtless a garden interferes with the feeding instinct of
birds. These exotic and artificial tit-bits are a disturbance
of wild ways. In one part of the Isle of Wight the egg-
sucking, bird-killing jays descend every year upon the rows
of peas. They rip up the pods, and are so fond of what they
find inside that they can scarcely be frightened off the rows
even by sight of a gun.

A more steady unbroken instinct possesses the summer
visitors, indeed all the migrants. The warbler and swallows,
the cuckoo and flycatchers, leave us first and foremost

'THEY RIP UP THE PODS'

A CHANGE OF DIET

289

because the insect food grows scarce. With less constancy
the fieldfares and redwings and some other winter visitors
come for particular berries. Our own birds must live by
their wits, taking the foods in their seasons, and, when com-
petition is very keen or temptation strong, trying new sources.
But whatever they try, all of them perhaps do more good
than harm, if all do not confer the inestimable benefits of
the green plover, which we may take to be the prime
benefactor.

FIR-WOODS AND HEATHER

ABOUT the time when the fields grow bronzed and the woods
loose their midsummer freshness, a springlike brilliance
matures in the tracts of heather and fir-woods which are
common on sandy and gravelly soils. Though the evergreen
firs keep this type of scenery gay and cheerful in winter, it
makes singularly little response to the quickening influences
of the normal spring. April and May bring little change to
the firs and the heather ; the primrose and the violet and all
the best-known spring flowers avoid them, and even in early
June these landscapes are shabby and inanimate. Then, as
June increases into July, there is a wonderful change. Like
a dammed-up stream the withheld forces of nature burst
forth with multiplied power. Every pine bough stands
tipped with a new tassel of lustrous green, and this green
contrasts with the brilliant purple of the sheeted heather.
Both the green and the purple are colours charged with a
singular intensity ; if the music of a shepherd's flute seems to
breathe in the colours of spring willows and April cuckoo-
flowers, the firs and heather blow a trumpet-blast. And yet
they have the unstaled freshness of true spring growths ;

FIR-WOODS AND HEATHER 291

their colours are unlike the sere photography of the dog-
days, or the decadent splendours of autumn. They combine
spring tenderness with summer maturity, and they compen-
sate by this peculiar brilliance in July and early August for
their dullness in the earlier part of the year.

In the whole of England and most parts of Scotland
the firs are a modern addition to the landscape, which is
therefore a mixed product of nature and art. The Scotch
pine or fir — it is strictly a pine — had long been extinct
in England when in the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-
turies it began to be planted on the heaths of Windsor
Forest and the sandy Surrey hills. Before that the
heather was usually unbroken by any tree, except where
a few birches, hollies, and -hawthorns were scattered on the
ridges, or alders and sallows formed brakes in the wetter
hollows. Oaks grew in the damp valleys that fringed the
heaths, where the soil became more clayey, and the heather
gave place to grass. Furze and broom dotted the heath in
brakes, and the broom-squires or half-gipsy squatters on the
heath made brooms and besoms first from the broom-plant
itself, but in later years chiefly from heather or birch-twigs.
The changes introduced by plantation, and the choice of the
fir and heather countries as residential districts, have altered
both the aspect of the landscape and the rough and isolated
old life. Except where they are commoners with recognised
rights the heath population has lost much of its living, and
more of its rough old ways. Carts laden high with new
birch-brooms still trail in from the Hampshire heaths to the
Berkshire river-towns, but their ware is the product of a
changed economic system, and they drag on their way
through an altered landscape of the columnar pines.

The firs seed themselves so quickly that they are per-
petually colonising the heather slopes beyond the limits of

292 SUMMER

the enclosed woods. There is a marked difference between
the young woods, where the pines are fighting their way,
and the old plantations. Among the self-sown saplings the
heather still grows thickly and almost undisturbed ; the young
pines toss among its billowy outlines like green buoys in an
impossibly purple sea. In the high woods the heather, over-
shadowed, is moribund ; it grows in limited tracts where the
light falls in, or creeps in a thin occasional growth. Often
the floor of the woods is bare, except for the pale carpet of
dry needles, out of which the ribbed trunks rise in their red
ranks. But sometimes the fir- woods are full of tall bracken-
tall because of the trees' shelter and its own straining towards
the light — and these woods are the most haunting of all.
The bright green fern, the dark green whispering roof up-
borne on the high red trunks, with their silver stains — this
makes a shadowy forest stranger and more like fairyland for
the absence of the usual birds. Birds are scarce in all the
heather country, and scarcer still among the pines, and in
July the pine-wood is a place where 'no birds sing/ Where
a wood is thin enough to let the sun enter fairly freely, but
the heather is not too dense, sometimes the rose-bay willow-
herb will fill it in July with a dense mass of purple blossom as
brilliant as the bloom of the bell-heather, though of a more
tender shade. Sometimes, too, there are foxgloves, and
they have another shade of purple, rosier than the bell-
heather, but more heather-like than the rose-bay.

Three kinds of heather or heath are common on English
and Scottish moors, besides the Cornish heath which cloaks
the bleak moors of the Lizard. The most widely distributed
is the ling, which forms the bulk of the vegetation covering
many moors, and provides the chief food of the grouse.
Ling has a starry blossom of a lighter and more delicate
purple than the common bell-heather ; distant moors where it

THE EDGE OF THE WOOD (SURREY)
By TOM MOSTYN

FIR-WOODS AND HEATHER

293

prevails have a more subdued and tender glow. It grows on
many commons and rough fields where the bell-heather is
unknown. The common bell-heather is also known as the
fine-leaved heath, while the cross-leaved heath also has bell-
shaped blossoms, but rosy instead of purple. It is the
common bell-heather which stains the July heaths of the
lowlands and the high moors in August with their most
brilliant purple dye. As the blossoms pass over they wither

and grow rusty-red, first at the tips and later entirely. When
these rusty blossoms mingle with the purple of the full bloom,
they produce the sheets of crimson which often stain the
more distant tracts of heath in a moorland landscape. The
rosy cross-leaved heath does not grow in uninterrupted
carpets like the purple bell-heather and the ling, and is not
abundant enough to have much effect in painting the land-
scape. It prefers slightly moister ground than the other two
species, and generally grows in slight depressions where
water often collects, and at the base of tufts and islands of
the purple heather and ling. Its leaves are delicate and
hoary, in keeping with the soft pink of its bells, and indi-
vidually it is the most attractive of the three species. In the

294 SUMMER

wetter patches of the moor it grows among the bleached
and tangled ribbons of the flying bent-grass, which covers
wide tracts of moors and mountains with its pale growth, and
forms what hillmen call the ' white ground.' If we cross
the moors on a windy day in winter, when the heath-blossom
is all dead and the foam creeps and mounts at the leeward
edge of the shallow and open pools, the flying bent breaks
beneath our feet and streams down wind at every step.
Then its name seems vivid and accurate, though there may
not appear much meaning in it on the spring and summer
days when the curlews nest in its hollows, and the tit-lark
hides among its tussocks.

The rarer heaths occur mostly in the far west of England
and Ireland, where they are outposts, or it may be relics, of
a Spanish flora which follows northward after the warm
Atlantic winds and the Gulf Stream. The common furze is
another and more widely spread example of the same class
of plants. There are five or six species of these western
heaths, all very local, and particular in their choice of soil
as well as of climate. But visitors to the Lizard in Cornwall
will not have to look long for the common Cornish heath,
which is abundant on the flat, bleak moors that cover the
mass of serpentine rock forming the south of the peninsula.
It has a shrubbier growth than the common heaths, and its
vivid stems and leaves recall the stringy stems of the
common hairmoss. The blossoms are rose-red and rather
small, and the plant is on the whole less attractive than the
bell-heather ; it has not their fine economy of stem and
foliage in proportion to bloom. White heather is not a
separate species, but merely a variety which occurs fairly
frequently on moors where the three common species
abound. In the case of the ling the lack of pigment in the
blossoms often goes with a paler and yellower growth of

FIR-WOODS AND HEATHER

295

foliage. White specimens of the purple bell-heather are the
scarcest. The pink bell-heather lapses more easily into
white and many shades of pale rose.

On many moors the soil itself adds strong colour to the
heather-clad landscape. The peat which forms on the
sandy and gravelly soils lacking in lime sets a black back-
ground in gaps of the purple bloom ; and where the sand is
scarped in pits, or washed into steep banks by the rain, it
often introduces a striking contrast. The crumbled silica of
the rock on the east Yorkshire moors gleams white like

'Wr^-^
«&?

-rr^F^=u^=i -==

FRENSHAM POND

quartz, and the tertiary sands of the southern English
heaths are also white where they have been exposed to rain
and wind. Mixed with peat-dust this white sand becomes a
cool grey ; but the predominant colour is a hot, raw orange-
red, which, when exposed in a sand-pit, makes a violent and
surprising contrast with the mantle of purple above, and
makes the green of the bracken cool and welcome. As the
hill-roads in the chalk-country wind in long white ribbons,
the by-roads on the southern heaths stripe their purple with
yellow and red. Round about stand the deep green fir-
woods, with toothed crests cutting the summer sky ; and pre-
sently we may come to a dip in the orange and purple heaths

296

SUMMER

where the blue sky is mirrored in a wide heath-pool, dotted
with cool white swans.

Natural lagoons are common in the southern heaths, and
others, such as the Frensham ponds, have been formed by
damming little streams and drowning a tract of the waste.
The natural pools are formed by much the same agencies
that produce the peat. Both are caused by lack of drainage
in the soil ; and the acidity of the peat tends to cake together
a layer of the underlying sand, and so to
check drainage further, and cause more peat
and more pools. A characteristic bog flora
often flourishes about these marshy edges and
in the similar moist depressions on the moor.
Sundews trap flies with their hairy leaves, and
white cotton-grass flutters in the wind with its
unique suggestion of solitude and sterility.
Marsh-pennywort creeps by the threads of
water with its round green leaves, and bog
asphodel lifts its golden flower-spikes when the
heather blooms, leaving withered red stems to
mark its place on the winter moor. Both the
drier and the wetter parts of the heath are
haunted by snakes and lizards. Green snakes hunt frogs in
the wet tangle about the edge of the pools, where the air
lies warm and dank on summer days ; and adders and blind-
worms bask on the sand among the heather. Their cast
skins are found knotted among the heather-stems, in which
they entangle themselves so as more easily to twist free of the
old husk. The rare smooth snake — our only poisonous species
besides the viper — is also chiefly found on the southern
English heaths. Dry sunny slopes of the heath are the chief
haunt of the common lizard ; but we seldom catch it basking,
as we can the adder or blindworm. Small and defenceless

GRASS SNAKE

FIR-WOODS AND HEATHER 297

it relies on wariness for safety, and by the time that we
catch sight of it a grey-green shape is wriggling actively
into the heather. The scarcer sand-lizard, which lays eggs
instead of producing living young, is also confined to the
fir and heather country of the south of England. Gilbert
White described in one of his Selborne letters the beautiful
green lizards seen on
a sunny bank at Farn-
ham ; and there the
brilliant sand -lizard
has been recently re-
discovered, and a link
with the days of Gil-
bert White restored. It is worth mention that neither of
our English lizards is of the same species as the little reptile
so commonly seen on sunny walls in the south of Europe.
The common southern lizard does not appear to the north
of the Alps, whereas our common viviparous lizard is far

hardier, and
pushes to the
north of Russia.
One more scarce
^ creeping beast
is found about
the pools on the
southern heaths — the natterjack toad, which is distinguish-
able by his small size and the light stripe down his back, and
can be tracked by his lusty croaking after sunset. Besides
common toads and frogs, newts are also common in some of
the heath-pools in spring, though a dense slimy pond on a
clay soil is the newts' particular fancy.

With all this variety of reptile and amphibian life, the
animals and birds which prey upon it should not be lacking.

GRASS SNAKE

298

SUMMER

Both foxes and otters haunt the borders of the pools for the
sake of frogs. But smaller and slower hawks are the great
devourers of snakes and lizards, and most of them have long
been killed off in their old haunts. Though the hen
harrier has vanished from the heaths, the ash-coloured or
Montagu's harrier has happily nested repeatedly in recent
years on the Surrey heather hills, and may re-establish itself
if the egg-collector and gamekeeper will spare it.

Red grouse chiefly feed on the young shoots of the ling,
but do not haunt the more southern districts in spite of the

abundant supply of their food. They are a northern species,
most closely akin to the willow-grouse of Norway. Black
game prefer scrubby heaths and the borders of farm-land,
where they can find their more varied food ; and formerly
the blackcock and greyhen bred in many heather districts
in the south as well as in the north. They are still to be
seen in some parts of the New Forest, though they would
very probably have died out by this time if they had not
been reinforced by drafts from the north. Heather-shoots
seem a dry and harsh fare for the grouse, except for a few
months in summer when they are young and tender ; and in

FIR-WOODS AND HEATHER 299

hard winters and late springs grouse do appear to suffer from
the poverty of their diet. The recent investigations into
grouse disease strongly suggest that it is not caused by a

BLACK GAME

specific bacillus, such as Professor Koch claimed to have dis-
covered, but is primarily due to want of nutriment. The
parasites which abound in the grouse's interior then sap the
strength of the bird in its underfed state, and it wastes to
death.

THE SACRIFICE OF WINGS

IF you would realise how the ground seethes with insect
life you should lie prone some hot summer day on a lawn cut
close, and yet not overmuch trodden. In congenial places
and times every foot of it is inhabited. You may even hear
the slight but sharp sounds made by many of the company.
Homeric battles are fought there. A yellow ant will drag a
black ant over towering heights and into abysmal depths.
Dead bodies will be rescued and carefully carried home.
The signs of catastrophic issues appear in the marks of the
green woodpecker's bill, which was busy there in the morning
among the whole tribe of ants. There are scores of other
inhabitants, but the ants come first in number by a wide
margin. And in August they challenge attention. At all
times of year, except when it is very cold in winter, ants are
creatures of abiding interest to the Hubers and those who
have time to watch them scientifically, microscopically,
experimentally. They have no seasons, one may say. The
eggs are always being laid and the grubs being hatched.
Throughout the better part of the year ants, which observe
the time of day as carefully as they disregard the almanac,
will be moving the grubs up or down for the sake of warmth
or coolness from an hour after dawn to an hour before sunset.

THE SACRIFICE OF WINGS 301

There is no creature that so scientifically uses the sun's heat
and light for the sake of health. The ant is always a fas-
cinating object of observation ; but it is only in August that it
becomes, so to say, a part of the summer scenery, a common
object, a being of the air as well as of subterranean places.

Most countrymen once or twice at any rate have seen a
cloud of flying ants. The sight is more curious than a swarm
of Mayfly in June or a migrant horde of bees. The speed
of the flight is one of its marvels. One looks upon the ant
in general as an almost subterranean creature, wingless,
rather heavy, and so busy with mundane things that there is
no room for the enjoyment of unessential exercise. We
study them as members of advanced socialistic communities,
endowed with strange instincts and social affections. They
work for the tribe; they recognise friends and fight ene-
mies ; they communicate all sorts of news by strange signs
and touches ; they save their friends from drowning or other
hazard ; they keep their milch cows in the ant-hill, and
foster a strange inexplicable association with wood-lice.
All this and much more is recorded of the ant community,
and when we see the animals in field or garden they seem to
answer to their description.

So it comes with a new surprise, even upon those who
have spent years of study on the ant, to see one day in
August a vast swarm of queens and kings mount into the air
with a dash and speed that seem to excel any other winged
thing. The wings, which are in fact very long and of most
beautiful construction, have become the master member.
They glint and sparkle in the sun as the whole concourse
shoots upwards at a frenzied speed till it disappears, and
you might think that you had mistaken sun motes for a
horde of insects. The flight is a marriage flight, such as
Maeterlinck described with almost extravagant ecstasy in his

x

302 SUMMER

history of the honey-bee. And as with the Mayfly the
flight is composed of many males and some few queens.
Presently all will tumble down, as one has seen a pair of
bees tumble, and the ground receives a shower of ants, the
drops spread so wide that it is invisible.

In August ecstasy is short-lived ; the winged hours are
brief. To see the ants we must return to the roots of the
grasses. All of them become glued to the ground. Most of
the winged crowd lose, as it seems, desire for life now the
climax is reached. Idle and half-helpless winged things are
scattered about the grass, preparing to die. But among these
are some who are preparing to surrender not life but freedom.
The dying horde die within the shroud of their wings. The
survivors, burning their boats, make ready to surrender the
wings on which they have enjoyed the freedom of the air in
order to recover the freedom of the ground. The act is to
all seeming conscious and deliberate. In the actions of
insects there is ever appearing some odd symbolic suggestion,
and among the most suggestive is this shedding of the wings
by the mother ant. Possibly at this date the wings may
grow a little loose in the socket, or begin to cause some
physical irritation ; but what you see is an animal, possessed
of the most splendid and lovely member that is given to any
creature, deliberately and with effect ridding herself of the
gift in order that she may attend to lowly and more necessary
duties. Getting rid of the wings is a most laborious affair,
and there seems to be no established or instinctive method of
doing it. However the stiff short grasses of a lawn are as useful
as anything else. You may see these self-sacrificing insects
scratch and rub their wings against the blades, trying to force
them off in this cumbrous manner. They bend the wing this
way and that, fold it under their body by a complicated grip
of the legs. Finally, after a score of apparently vain efforts

THE SACRIFICE OF WINGS 303

the lovely veined diaphanous thing, beyond the reach of
manufacture, is tumbled into the roots of the grasses ; and
shorn of its chief beauty the ant goes to the labour of the nest.
No doubt the queen bee makes a like surrender. After
that ecstatic dash towards the sun she lives for the most part
a housewife's life and a slave's life till the end comes, when
a young queen is preferred before her. But she does at any
rate keep the engine of flight, if she does not use it. The
winged ants are sometimes handicapped by their wings long
before they come to the time when irritation or a sense of
duty drags them to surrender. If you open a busy hill to
watch the organised industry it happens now and again that
the winged ant, seeming always more aimless than the rest,
will attempt to walk away from the circle of the nest. Not
•once or twice we have seen one of the self-constituted keepers
seize the truant and drag her back incontinent. For such
purpose the wing provides a most useful handle. The tip is
grasped in the jaw, and the whole twisted this way and that
quite regardlessly of the owner's feelings, who stumbles any-
how back to the nest in the wake of the keeper. One cannot
see that the wing suffers in the least. It must be of the
strongest tissue, but even then it seems to be a burden rather
than a heaven-sent engine of flight. This use of the wing as
a sort of handle belongs to the earlier part of the summer.
When the queen is hauled back to the hill in August the
contempt of the wing is more roughly expressed. The
worker ants, socialistic Marthas not without envy, seem
always to have a grudge against the wing ; but it is not till
the marriage flight is over that they anticipate the self-
surrender of the queen, and themselves nip off the wings
before they take on themselves the office of jailer, and
prevent her escaping again from the subterranean home and
prison. One might mistake them for wasps nipping off the

304 SUMMER

wings of a fly in murderous greed rather than for handmaids
insuring the future of the race under the instinct of duty.

Many nightflying insects are, as it were, secretive of their
power of flight, and parsimonious of it. They keep it in
reserve for use at moments so rare that many people never
discover that the crawling creature possesses such a member
at all. More than this, some of the creatures that have the
loveliest and the neatest wings affect for the better part of
their short life a gait, a mode of motion, that almost suggests
the curse on the serpent. In spite of its legs the earwig
looks almost like a little worm, that should live better on the
ground or under it during the whole of its life. How many
countrymen who would regard the earwig as one of the
most familiar of insects have never even suspected the pre-
sence of its wings, though they are visible even when folded
along the back and half hidden under the case, which is itself
a rudimentary wing.

But now and again on late summer evenings you may
see quite a host of earwigs abroad on the wing, and at such
times they will appear in upstair rooms in numbers which
suggest a mystery to those who have looked on the earwig
as a groundling. It is hard to see why animals possessed of
such beautiful and effective planes should use them so
seldom, but flight in this species, as in some of the ants, is
peculiarly associated with the marriage ceremony ; and only
at the breeding season do we see earwigs in any number on
the wing. Both male and female use them at other times,
but it is seldom ; and most of their migrations are made by
that ' fussy wriggle ' which suggests the serpent tribe. They
sacrifice their wings by disuse.

It is only in the final stage, when maturity is reached,
that the wings are fully developed, for the earwig drags out
during the days of its active life that metamorphosis which

THE SACRIFICE OF WINGS 305

is so startling in the butterflies and moths. From the egg —
which the mother earwig hatches almost like a bird — is pro-
duced not a grub, but apparently a creature of the same
general pattern as its parents ; but the wings are missing.
It grows like many creatures — like the spider or the wood-
louse — by successive moults, and the wings appear only at
the end. These moults may be said roughly to correspond to
that slow unseen development when it has passed from the
grub stage to the pupa stage. We see in this insect as a pro-
cess what appears in the butterflies a sudden transformation.

The peculiarity of the wing of the earwig lies in its fold-
ing capacity. It resembles a little in this some of the beetles
and the ladybird ; but it excels them all in complication and
neatness. One may not seldom find a beetle in trouble with
its wing. The diaphanous hinder wing refuses to be pulled
under the hard forward wing or case, and there is a struggle
in the packing. The earwig's wing is rather like one of
those old-fashioned circular fans which were pulled out and
into a hollow case. The ribs and tucks are elaborate and
well marked ; and are not contracted into their narrow space
solely by one reflex action. As a rule, probably always, the
earwig turns up the tail backward and uses the two pincers
— curved in the male, and nearly straight in the female — to
tuck the last folds under the case and along the back.

Of many insects it is true that they only appear beautiful
when our eyes are helped by the microscope ; but the earwig,
which is usually regarded as ugly, if not abhorrent, is large
enough to disclose its beauties to the naked eye if we look
close. The antennae are then seen to be of a complicated
beauty; and it is worth a long watch to see the creeping
thing open and close its silver wings when the dusk of a
summer evening, which is the creature's high noon, tempts
to their use.

THE HEAT OF THE SUN

THE general verdure of English summers gives an added
vividness to the tanned landscapes of drought which recur
every few seasons some time between May and September.
The grass in the open fields loses every glint of green ; from
a ridge of hills overlooking a clay plain only the bronzed
hedges and the brighter line of the sedges by the winding
rivers diversify the dull papery whiteness of the burnt-up
pastures. Under the torrid sun the whitey-brownness of the
dead grass is some shades paler than we see it in March
after a frosty winter ; and now there is the contrast of the
green boughs of trees and bushes, whereas in March the
boughs are bare. This contrast gives the landscape a topsy-
turvy look, as if in a photographic negative. We are
accustomed to see the full body of colour in the sward, with
the green of the trees of less importance ; but now colour
has fled to the boughs, and the earth is blank of verdure,
and has only a stricken sense of drought.

Stridently green as the trees appear against pastures
turned to biscuit colour, they wear a very different green
from their full verdure of May. In every summer there is
a date when the trees suddenly become dark and bronzed,

THE HEAT OF THE SUN 307

after two or three days' hot sunshine, that definitely marks
the turn to summer from spring. In drought this bronzy
darkness is intensified. Sycamores — so exquisitely fresh
when the buds first slip their tissue wrappings — in the days
of the dogstar show blacker in the landscape than pines in
winter. Elms and ashes in the pastures, beeches in the
woods, and apple-trees in the orchards, are almost as
swarthy ; and the twisted hawthorn bushes are as black as
they were white with bloom a few weeks before. It is a
landscape of southern Europe transferred to England, yet
with a difference. In a typical English landscape there is
no such background of bare and rocky hills as usually seems
waiting anywhere in the Mediterranean watershed to send a
thirsty glitter through the summer heat, and make the whole
scene appropriate and natural. The soft green contours of
our hills testify to a moist and fostering sky, and give an
uneasy setting to the waterless lowlands. The even
expanse of Kentish or Midland pastures is an obvious
adaptation to a climate which will grow a real turf sward,
such as is absent from Continental lowlands ; and although
the turf is not as dead as it looks, it is dead enough to give
an unhomely appearance to the landscape.

Instead of cicadas which shrill the more joyfully for the
fiercest heat, our fields have little blue butterflies, which are
gravely disturbed by excess of drought. When the pastures
grow scorched, and possibly the nectar in the flowers more
thick and thirsty, blue butterflies wander away in search of
water. By nine o'clock in the morning, long before the
hours of greatest heat, they flutter in crowds on the moist
gravel at the edge of brooks and ponds, or suck up the
spillings from the farm water-carts in the village street.
Common white butterflies slake their thirst in the same way,
and the anxious flocks of blue and white insects titillating

3o8 SUMMER

the moistened earth with their suckers is one of the most
distinctive features of strong summer drought.

Expedients of thirsty birds and animals often recall hard
winter frosts, when the earth is sealed by our climate's
contrary extreme. Rooks and jackdaws, debarred from
probing in the soil, haunt refuse-heaps in the fringes of
towns, just as they do in a hard January ; and in the heat
and glare by the railway line, they bicker over greasy
sandwich papers containing scraps of passengers' lunches
thrown from the carriage windows. Moles dive deeper

into the earth, as in frost; but sometimes they take an
opposite course, and thrust their way above ground in the
crumbling surface layer of the soil in rides in woods, and
among the roots of the grasses. They probably find
beetles in such places ; hedgehogs hunt the same spots
after dusk, and beetles certainly form a large part of the
urchin's diet.

In blazing July weather most wild flowers cut short
their development of foliage, and concentrate their stunted
energies on blossoming and the ripening of seed. Plants of
swift annual growth from a shallow root, like the common
mullein and the fennel, grow to hardly half their height in a

THE HEAT OF THE SUN 309

sunny and thirsty year. On the other hand the seeds ripen
more lustily, and the garden seeds of a hot dry summer are
often noticeably more productive than those of a damper
year. Plantain leaves outspread upon the gravel in shady
places grow dry and curled as even the shade becomes
torrid, and bring a sense of dishevelment beneath the
boughs. Only those plants thrive which have deep roots
striking to moist layers of earth. The hottest summers
often stimulate the profusest tufts of yellow summer foliage
on the bronzed crowns of the oaks, and in the sere fields
suckers of elm rise thickly from the lateral roots. Nor do
those plants fail which, although of annual growth above the
soil, are fed by a perennial root-stock. Bryonies fling their
bines about the hedgerows with a sappy vigour that
contrasts pleasantly with the tired weeds and dead grass.
Riversides and sedgy pools in the meadows stand forth on
the faded landscape in stripes and patches of emerald ; the
fresh green of the bur-reed and the glaucous blades of the
flag never strike so cool a sense to eye and brain. Marsh
woundwort and gipsywort among the sedges flower on
through the summer heats with a soft luxuriance that the
season takes from the blossoms of arable land and pasture.
In a long droughty summer the weeds of the root-fields
«estivate almost like the snails of hotter climates. After
the first blooming of the poppies and corn marigolds at the
end of June, seed-heads and scanty foliage predominate over
blossom until the coming of the autumn rains, when there is
an outbreak of long-suppressed vigour.

Even in the hottest summer weather there is a surprising
amount of evaporation from the soil in depressions and
hollows which collect water in other seasons. Campers
know the chill that rises towards morning in such sites, and
that the drier the summer and the hotter the weather the

3io SUMMER

colder, as a rule, is the hour before dawn. The pools of
cold air that are found in hollows on hot summer nights are
partly due to the descent of the coldest air to the lowest
ground as the temperature falls ; but partly it is due to the
direct power of the sun, which sucks up the moisture in the
ground to a greater depth than in years of less sunshine.
In the July nights one climbs in a few yards from the damp
chilly air in the hollows to the warm layers of the upper
slopes and the open fields. The transition corresponds to
the daylight boundary between grass brown and dead to the

very root, and turf which still retains a sort of under-fur of
green. Often at dawn in the hottest summer weather high
ranges of hills are also wrapped in mist, though the lowlands
may be almost clear. This, too, is due to the evaporating
power of the sun, which fills the higher air with masses of
vapour which condense at night where they meet the colder
layers of the heights. The fog is often thick enough to drip
profusely from the trees ; and by midday, when the white
road along the hills is lapped in heat, it is curious to see the
dust beneath each tree thickly pitted by the drops. After
a light shower of rain the road outside the tree's shelter is
pitted ; but in the white night-fog the tree itself sheds rain,
while the earth around it is dry.

THE HEAT OF THE SUN 311

On high downs these summer night-fogs help to feed the
dew-ponds, which are so valuable to the upland sheep farmer
in dry seasons, when water for general farm use may have
to be carted two or three miles. Dew-ponds are fed by rain,
when rain falls, like any other ponds ; and it is doubtful
whether dew as distinct from mist contributes much to their
store. They are not so miraculously inexhaustible as is
sometimes said, and they vary a good deal in their power of
withstanding drought according to height and position. But
considering their shallowness, small size, and usual direct
exposure to the sun's rays on the treeless down, it is very
remarkable how often and how long they hold water in the
fiercest summer droughts. The mist condenses on the surface
of the water and on the bare sides of the pool when the
water is low, and if a tree overhangs the supply is increased
by the drip from its boughs. There is no truth in the notion
that an overhanging tree prevents the collection of water
from the atmosphere ; but the presence of a tree at the edge
of a dew-pond is dangerous for another reason. Its roots
are likely to pierce the pan of puddled clay which holds the
water. In making a dew-pond this layer of clay or chalky
marl is the most important feature. A layer of straw is
often placed beneath it ; and though it is sometimes supposed
that the object of the layer of straw is to check the trans-
mission of the earth's heat, and so promote condensation, the
real object seems to be simply the careful packing of the
water-tight bottom. Besides the more copious condensation
of the mist, a reason for making dew-ponds on bare crests
of the down is in order to prevent surface drainage. If a
rivulet entered the pond in times of rain, before long it would
break up the clay pan, and the water would escape into the
chalk. In modern dew-ponds in the chalk valleys surface
water is occasionally utilised, and the inflow of the gutter

3i2 SUMMER

faced with cement. But it is doubtful whether these low-
lying ponds are appreciably fed by mist, or deserve the name
of dew-ponds at all. They have little of the antiquity and
mystery associated with the dew-ponds on the great crests
ringed with earthworks, where the plovers come to bathe in
the yellow summer afternoons, and the sheep follow the
shepherd with his crook, as in old Bible pictures.

'THE MALLARD . . . MUST HIDE3

SUMMER LIVERIES

THE glory of colour which fills our world in spring grows
gradually blurred as summer advances. Doubtless colour is
born at the same time that colour dies. The roses are red
when the leaves are brown, and on the common the gold of
the gorse is succeeded by the purple of the heather. Never-
theless, things do take a sober colouring under the passage
of the suns. But not only leaves so decline. It is easy to
see that feathers lose colour no less than leaves. Some
birds change out of all recognition, so drab is the later
livery and so bright the early. They become 'eclipsed,'
to use the word invented years ago by that fresh and
vigorous naturalist, the polemical Waterton.

Even a Cockney may notice this change that summer
brings to the birds within his ken. When the chestnut
leaves in the parks grow sullied and brown on the lower
boughs, and the trees look as if they were wearing skirts of
two colours and two lengths, the town birds more or less follow
suit, and take their cue from the trees. Indeed, the towns
house three species which undergo a peculiarly well-marked
change — a spring change, and consequently also a summer
change. The sparrow, the pigeon, and the starling all suffer

318

3i4 SUMMER

like the chestnuts, though in a less obvious degree. It is
common knowledge, thanks to Tennyson, even to the urban
mind, that 'in the spring a livelier iris changes on the
burnished dove,' the dove in this case being the wood-
pigeon of the variety that struts and coos in the parks.
But none of Tennyson's illustrations — not the crested lap-
wing, nor the red robin, nor the prismatic pigeon — change
more notably than the cock-sparrow. By the time he begins
carrying straws in the spring and fussing about the untidy
lumps in the trees that he uses for nest, he has changed from
a dull brown bird, scarcely more conspicuous than his sober
mate, into a gorgeously liveried creature. The washy dabs
of dark colour on his throat have grown and brightened into
a deep black, most finely and conspicuously denoting his sex.
He has not moulted in the proper sense, though there are
birds which moult twice and even three times in the year, but
has rubbed off the protective nap which hid his native colour.
By such process does the chaffinch and others, too, make
themselves glitter finely in the spring. But the livery does
not keep its salient freshness very long. As summer
advances, the cock-sparrow that had been ' peacocking ' in
gorgeous superiority to his mate steadily sobers down till
the difference, though obvious, is not striking, and neither
is very much superior in looks. Such a blurring is quite
visible even to the casual eye on the cock-starling, and to a
less extent on the pigeons.

When the change begins to come over these birds they
do not conspicuously lose vitality, as birds do in the moult,
though they and all birds show a diminution of energy when
summer succeeds to spring. A more thorough and over-
whelming experience befalls a bird which also may often be
watched in towns more easily than in the wilds of nature.
The mallard, or male wild duck, is the outstanding example

SUMMER LIVERIES 315

of ' eclipse ' plumage. The wedding feathers of the male
are very splendid. The green is more brilliant than the
laurel leaves, and the white flashes stand out more distinct
on wing and neck than sprays of bloom. Head and wing,
and breast and back are all burnished. Male and female
might be members of different species. With the growth of
fine feathers he is strong on the wing, and enjoys long bouts
of flight. But the duck nests early ; and when summer
comes the young are already capable movers. The mallard
then suffers a sort of collapse. He moults in thorough

fashion. His fine feathers drop, and with this loss he loses
power of wing. It may be, it is the theory, though one can-
not tell, that the loss of colour is a protection necessary to a
creature that has lost vigour. The mallard, being more or
less helpless, skulks, and must hide as best he may, in beds
of reed and rush. He must use his webbed feet instead of
his tough wings. So now he becomes almost the double of
his mate, and they remain in this likeness till the autumn is
on its way.

In all these changes are many mysteries. Volumes
have been written about the meaning of the change and
about the process ; but for most of us the fact is enough.
The tide of energy rises and sinks ; till the heyday of the
year the males 'play the peacock,' as indeed do the
flowers. Nevertheless, the puzzle is attractive. For a little

3i6 SUMMER

while the whole family of the ducks are very much of a
pattern. The young almost exactly resemble their mother
when the close season ends, though at the end of August
you may without difficulty pick out the cocks, and by
November the full male plumage is in evidence. Is the
change just a growth and fall up to and down from that
ecstasy of energy, palpable in all the being of the birds at
spring? or is there a purpose in the particular hues of summer
and winter as well? Is the male colour a developing dis-
tinction, or a disappearing distinction? And what can we
argue from the colouring of the young ? They are supposed
to carry in their feathers or coats the history of the race ;
and many young develop the male colours rather late.
Men with theories begin to believe that once in all species
male and female and young were similar in colour ; and that
colour, appearing first in the male in spring, developed later.
In some cases — the partridge, for example — it is being
assumed by the hen as well as by the cock.

Nevertheless, the summer loss of the ' crest ' and ' livelier
iris' of spring, most sudden and salient in the ruff and the
plover and the dunlin, is rather different from the mallard's
collapse into drab colour and weakness of flight. The black
grouse or blackcock, when the breeding time is over, falls
into as helpless a state as the mallard. He loses a number
of his wing feathers and several of his tail feathers simul-
taneously, so that flight is quite or nearly impossible, and
skulking is the one road of safety. Even the red grouse,
our one native game bird, at this season suffers severely
in vitality as he alters in appearance, and becomes an early
victim of disease — indeed, a much easier victim than the
hen which does not go through these abrupt changes. It
seems that all these birds which moult at what would seem
to be a rather unseasonable hour, suffer in some degree

SUMMER LIVERIES 317

from the oppression of summer coming between the twin
rigours of spring and autumn. That this summer eclipse is
something more than the first stage in a preparation for
the spring splendour is suggested by the ptarmigan, which
is one of the few birds that has a separate dress for spring,
summer, and winter. Both the summer duskiness and the
winter whiteness seem to be in some degree protective*
They help to hide both birds, which are indeed pursued by
a great number of enemies from ermines to eagles. But
how much of what is held to be protective is more or less
accidental ? Is there any bird at any season more glaringly
conspicuous than the cock pheasant, which suffers no eclipse
in summer, yet now and again one sees even a pheasant
strangely disappear into the autumn hues of a wood, as if
he were especially adapted to avoid human enemies when
the sport of shooting begins ? The male and female partridge,
which one must hold in the hand to distinguish from one
another, have a constant colour, very beautiful but not
salient. They are very conspicuous in spite of their brown-
ness on the close-cut stubbles. On the light plough-lands of
Surrey they are perfectly fitted to their surroundings, but
are quite fairly distinguishable on the chalk ploughs of
Berkshire. What is one to infer ?

The fact is, most hunted birds and animals consent in
colour with their surroundings. Stripes and dots are hard
to pick out. Some are said to stand in poses that help
their colours. Mr. Pycraft, one of the specialists on colour,
says that the snipe stands with head down and the bittern
with tail up, each so that he may use his particular pattern
of soft stripes of grey and brown to the best advantage.

But, as it seems to the writer, birds are not growing
better and better fitted to their surroundings, but worse and
worse. The livery of most young birds, when once they

Y

3i8 SUMMER

have left the nest, is more protective than that of their
parents. Young blackbirds are a charmingly evasive
speckled brown, showing, we are told, their affinity to the
thrush from which they have separated. But to-day, at all
times and at all seasons, nothing could be better calculated
to challenge attention than the cock blackbird. That mass
of unbroken black draws the eye, almost as much as if he
could compass all the colours of a parrot. How the young
robin with its pretty speckled brown breast disappears into
the shadows of a bush where the yellow-brown back or
red breast of the parent would challenge attention. The
young cast off their baby clothes at very different dates.
In perhaps the majority of cases the male begins to put
forth his peacock colours about the time that he is growing
strong on the wing, and needs less protection of colour.
Sometimes you come upon well-grown birds, thrushes, for
example, on which the pretty down of their infancy still
clings oddly to the grown feathers, and occasional instances
have been noted of a persistent down. Those who notice
the partridges shot in September will find a fair number
still distinguished by the pointed feathers that are rounded
off in most birds by the time they are strong on the wing.
The livery is doubtless associated with maturity in other
more essential forms. Many gulls are not mature till their
third year ; and the townsman again has the chance
of observing this belated change of livery in the black-
headed gulls that crowd up the Thames and flock in the
parks and reservoirs. In summer birds of the previous
year are still spotted with odd patches of colour, appearing
quite promiscuously; and you can sometimes often detect
the third-year bird from the second, especially the males in
spring.

In these young, at any rate, there is no suggestion of

SUMMER LIVERIES 319

protective colourings. Their livery has no obvious purpose ;
and generally the theory is extended too far. From time
to time any observer must come across examples of adapta-
tion to environment which resemble a parody on the theory
of protective mimicry. We have quoted several elsewhere ;
but the writer has always felt a certain scepticism since
he saw one summer day a barn owl roosting on an apple-
bough up into where had grown a bush spiraea. The
owl's body was a most perfect match to the blurred white
flowers, of which, till you looked close, the bird seemed a
floral extension. However, birds' feathers are very often
consonant with their surroundings, especially when they
are young, and the mother's livery is less conspicuous
than males for protective purpose or with protective effect.

BLACK-HEADED GULL

HICKLING BROAD

WHERE FISH ARE FOUND

WE do not regard any summer month as a time of
migration. It is the habit to think of June and July as a
time when creatures all settle down to their work of breeding
and feeding their young in special and restricted haunts.
But if you live by the sea-shore, or even on inland waters, you
see various forms of migration in process, even in birds, and new
arrivals and departures are of daily occurrence. To Norfolk
Broads in full summer flock many birds of divers kinds more
or less independent of what are marked as migration dates.
Most of them, as they appear before you, even in summer
proper, have their nuptial splendour unsullied : knots and
godwits ' in the red ' ; smart grey plovers, now vested in jet
black ; dunlins, that were white below in winter, are patched
with a horseshoe of black. Spoonbills occasionally amble
about as if they had taken possession ; and ducks, still gaudy,
in spite of the presence of some flappers, people the shal-
lows. Grey herons prance in queer and grotesque attitudes
as they search the creeks for eels or it may be for flounders.
Fishermen may note more remarkable migrations under the
waters. On some of the more difficult rivers, even in North-
West Ireland, the salmon do not take the river falls by storm

WHERE FISH ARE FOUND 321

till June, though they began going up rivers not many miles
distant in January. You may see sea-trout off the east coast
of Norfolk in any of the summer months, and of course the
herrings and sprats wait for full summer to come shorewards.
Less noted, but very strange migrations, are to be observed
among the coarser fish, for which Norfolk Broadland is the
most famous resort.

Anglers in summer are legion ; but visitors cannot com-
pete with native devotees in prowess among the bream,
which bite best at night and run larger in the basket than by
day. It is astonishing what catches a country yokel will make

with a sturdy clothes-prop and the coarsest of tackle. The
common bream teems in every broad, and often affords
excellent sport, catches being estimated by stones, and capture
by the hundredweight being not unusual. The white bream
is abundant, but much more elusive. Bream are somewhat
restless in disposition, and move about in wandering shoals.
They travel from the broads to the rivers, arid from the
rivers back to the broads. These movements may be merely
capricious ; they may be governed by some, to us, obscure
natural laws, like migration proper. On occasion bream will
work well downstream ; and sometimes numbers have been
overtaken by the ' salts ' on an unusually big spring-tide, when
they have ' turned up,' to struggle feebly and die at the surface,
before they could rush back to their favourite safer quarters.
Roach and perch are abundant : the latter of late years

322

SUMMER

has materially deteriorated in size, large specimen perch
being the exception to-day. This species delights in brackish
waters, and will hang upon the verge of the 'salts,' preying
upon the shrimps that come up witn the tide. Little urchins
with a piece of stick and the roughest tackle, angling near
the lock at Oulton Broad, where there are often several
degrees of salinity in the water, capture hungry perch in
numbers. The rudd is abundant at Hickling and in the
Heyham sounds; it is a frolicsome, sturdy fish, giving
excellent sport, taking a bait with an impetuosity which

==5-

makes it a favourite with anglers, who, when out specially
for its capture, in order to locate it, cast bread-crumbs on the
surface of the water. If there be a shoal within seeing dis-
tance, in a few minutes the stream will be alive with the
splashing of their tails as they dash eagerly at the crumbs.
If the angler but flings a lively worm into their midst a fish
inevitably becomes hooked on the instant, and sport, while
crumbs remain, will be fast and furious. The angler who is
wily does not wait for their return, but, quietly drawing his
stakes, shifts his position, following them up. He who is
not so ready to move repeats his seductions, and may be
rewarded time after time by an arrival of a shoal. If a
rippling of wind freckles the surface so much the better.

THE OLD WATER MILL AT HOUGHTON
By TOM MOSTYN

WHERE FISH ARE FOUND 323

Gudgeon are numerous in shallows and at the broad margins,
but like that troublesome little fish the ruffe, who also prefers
the shoal waters, no one seeks their patronage but would
prefer to do without them. Nor does the fisherman by any
means appreciate the attentions of a muddy-skinned eel,
which has a knack in a very few minutes, if not carefully
played, of coiling itself and the line into inextricable knots
and kinks. Dace do not favour the broads and rivers,
although some are occasionally caught ; but there are
survivors from bait-cans thrown after a day's fishing into the
water. Hybrids of the bream and roach and other species,
under the name of Pomeranian bream, and the like, are met
with now and again. Tench are fairly plentiful in some
waters, but rarely take the hook : they are more often
captured in funnel or ' poke nets ' made with hoops, which
are set in out-of-the-way corners. A bunch of gay flowers
placed inside the net has the reputation of being an excellent
lure. In some ditches and in disused clay-pits they are in
some instances abundant.

These and other species have a pleasant time in broad-
land waters, feasting on the abundant pond-life — vermes and
the larvae of various insects, with which the waters teem.
Their joys are broken in upon only by the angler who has
no scruples, and the tyrant pike who has an appetite voracious
as a shark but an eye that has no sense of proportion : it is
by no means an uncommon occurrence for the angler to land
a large roach or a rudd whose sides are deeply scored by the
teeth of a pike whose voracity was more marked than his
sense of judgment. As the angler sits, patient and watchful
as a cormorant, or the loafing boatman laggardly drifts with
wind or tide, he is not seldom aroused from his reverie by the
sudden appearance of a shoal of small fishes that glisten for a
moment in the sun, like flying-fishes, and disappear again as

324

SUMMER

quickly as they came. Some hungry jack is playing the part
of an ogre below, and the scared little creatures are fleeing
him in terror.

As the observer sits or prowls around among these rush-
margined Norfolk lagoons, he finds much to interest him.
There are swimming and diving birds of many kinds croak-
ing and clucking and quacking around, whilst smaller
species, living among the sedges and interminable reed-beds,
pipe and chirp, and warble and chatter all the livelong day,

and often into the night. At eventide the swallows and the
starlings in their hundreds arrive from the surrounding
countryside for miles and miles, to spend a clean-bedded,
tick-proof night's slumbering on the reed-stems, rocked
by the cool night breeze as it pushes its way among the
labyrinths of reeds and rushes.

That elusive, wary animal, the otter, still lives here ; per-
haps even more numerously than most would think in the
fastnesses of these swamps. Occasionally the more prying
nature-lover, who is not content to loiter and navigate his
craft in the more open and frequented ways, comes suddenly
upon the wreckage of a fine plump fish among the stubbly
' rondage,' or on some swampy corner, which an otter has

WHERE FISH ARE FOUND 325

left after a goodly supper. To-day he will be quietly
sleeping off his surfeit in some out-of-the-way lair, known
only to himself, and not even to the vigilant keeper who
prowls around day after day, ever hopeful, but always dis-
appointed— the otter does not intend to make known his

secret hiding-place. Many water voles and shrews hold high
jinks among the 'cuts' and 'decks' by the margins of the
larger lakes. The voles feast upon the luscious grasses that
spring up from the ooze below the shallows, and any dead
fish, flung aside maybe by an angler, or dropped even by
a startled heron, is acceptable. He will devour a roach
right to its backbone, and without a doubt likes a garnishing
of many an insect

SHORE AND SALT-MARSH

ON wide, flat shores fine days in later summer have a peculiar
fascination. There is a freshness in the sea air which has
vanished at this time of year from the inland pastures and
cornfields in the hot part of the day. The untamed sea sends
its breath through the heat of July, and there seems some-
thing wild and akin to it in the flight and cries of the birds
of the salt-marsh and shore. The flowers are also strange
to inland eyes. Yellow sea-poppies seem not only beautiful
but wonderful ; for there is so sudden and marked a change in
the transit from ordered inland landscapes to the alien life of
the shore that it restores to us a child's capacity for fresh experi-
ence. The sea-poppy is certainly less brilliant than the com-
mon corn-poppy, which is the most brilliant of all our flowers ;
but it is a more striking plant in other ways. The pure
yellow blossoms make an exquisite contrast with the cool
blue-green foliage, which is far more abundant than the corn-
poppy's little leaves. Sea-poppies sometimes form thick
beds or brakes, that a rabbit might shelter beneath ; and by
that time the dying blossoms begin to send forth their long
narrow seed-vessels, interlaced like distorted horns.

By August the blossoms are rare, though the eccentric
growth of the stems and seed-vessels is often at its height.

SHORE AND SALT-MARSH

327

Then, as the sea-poppy fades on the shingle-banks, the sea-
lavender comes into bloom on the marshes outside the wall,
occasionally flooded by the tide. Sea-asters dapple the mud-
flats a little nearer the water with their rayed blossoms ; the
sea-aster grows so close to the water that its yellow and
purple flowers are often submerged by a spring tide, and
stained with a grey film of mud. The debatable land of the

SEA-POPPY

salt-marsh is seamed with a network of tidal channels, half
hidden by prostrate masses of dull green sea-blite ; even at
low-water it is impossible to penetrate far into this wilder-
ness without a wetting, and the sheldrake and curlew can
lurk unseen for the whole interval between tide and tide.
Then, when the tide comes back, the marsh is often unap-
proachable in any way ; for many of the channels are too
small to push a boat along, and so numerous that it is impos-
sible to travel more than a few feet safely on dry land.
Swimming-birds ride in safety among the wider channels, or

328

SUMMER

follow the incoming tide on the mud-flats behind the brown-
edged line of foam. Redshanks, and the straggling dunlins
that remain through summer, congregate on some miry islet
out of gunshot, and call inspiritedly, in harmony with the
water's brisker flow. The drowsy calm that filled the period
of low-water in the summer sunshine is over, and usually a
little breeze gets up with the incoming tide, and adds to the
sense of seaside activity that is never missing long. Among
the deep cornfields and dusky pastures within the wall, we
shall have to wait until autumn, or at least until harvest for

the next turning-point in time. Once outside the sea-wall
every tide brings a stir of diurnal change, like the whole cycle
of the equinoxes and the solstices packed into twelve hours,
and the days of July and August go to a livelier and more
springlike measure.

Constant change and stir is provided by the movements
of the birds that haunt sea-marshes and estuaries. As the
advancing tide of the year leaves midsummer behind, the
bird-life of these seaside tracts is replenished from two
sources. First, the birds that nested locally lead forth their
fledged families, and soon there is a steady inflow of the
breeders on inland moors and wastes far to northward, which

SHORE AND SALT-MARSH

329

spend part or whole of the autumn and winter by the shore.
The most conspicuous birds of the first class are the shelduck,
which now breed in increasing numbers on the banks of many
estuaries. They nest as a rule in holes among the sand-hills
or on the sea-walls, and in various districts are called burrow-
ducks ; their favourite site is an outlying rabbit burrow. By
July the ducklings are already out in the world, and scuttling
about the wet sand-banks and oozy channels under the care
of their parents ; and by August they have won the beautiful

DUNLINS

white plumage brindled with chestnut and black, and gleam
almost as large and bright as their elders as they drift up
and down the channels with the tide. Local broods of
mallard are also to be found for some time in the sea-marshes,
but they are fresh-water ducks by habit, and less at home
on the tidal creeks, which are the shelduck's natural haunt.
They are apt to skulk uncomfortably among the overgrown
channels, and seldom join the happy low-tide parties of shel-
duck and vagrant gulls which splash and doze and preen
themselves hour after hour in the sunshine at the edge of
some ooze-locked pool. It seems all as quiet and permanent

330 SUMMER

as the edge of a farmyard pond, as the hours pass in the
sunshine, and the light breeze carries their shed feathers into
a little drift on the leeward shore. Soon the tide returns,
and the scene that seemed so quiet and stable swiftly
vanishes. A wave licks over the sands, and washes out half
the shores of the pool with a single surge. The gulls take
wing, and the shelduck turn tail to the tide, and float away
together over the site of their vanished resting-place.

Redshank breed among the sea-marshes, and become
more numerous though less anxiously noisy from midsummer

SHELDUCK

onwards ; and terns and black-headed gulls multiply in
the immediate neighbourhood of their scattered colonies.
Little is seen of the families bred by the ringed plovers on
flat shingly beaches; these elusive little birds seem no
more numerous when they have done nesting than before.
But there is a gradual access of life — sometimes even as
early as the end of June — when the broods from inland
begin to reach the shore. By August enormous flocks of
common plover collect at the mouth of estuaries near
some district where they breed in abundance. The plover
flocks round the Solway sands in late summer are only ex-
ceeded in size by the great packs seen in hard winter weather.

SHORE AND SALT-MARSH 331

The ' tewfits ' of a hundred parishes among the lowland hills
may be collected in one of those great flocks, which rise
with their innumerable wings flickering and twinkling much
like the ripples on a sunny sea. Large summer flocks are
often seen on the wide estuaries of the rivers flowing into
Cardigan Bay ; and the same late summer migration of flocks
to the shore brings plovers into the life of almost every
stretch of ooze and salting round our whole coast. Flocks
of golden plover are also common in the west and north,
wherever they have breeding-grounds not far away; the

YOUNG SHELDUCKS

moult now over, they have no longer the black breasts and
bellies which are so peculiar and conspicuous a feature of
their breeding plumage on the hills a few months before.
The skimming flocks of dunlin grow rapidly larger, as the
unmated birds which spend all the summer by the shore are
reinforced and eventually outnumbered by the main body
packing southward and to the sea. Curlew and oyster-
catchers reappear on their favourite ooze-banks, and with
them come a group of little land-birds which shift their
quarters in late summer to the seaside as well as to lowland
pools and streams. They include grey and pied wagtails
and meadow-pipits, which feed along the drifts of weed on
the shore, and may all be found on some part of our shore-

z

332 SUMMER

line all the winter. Early in August, and long before there
seems any need to quit England in our warmer seasons, this
group of shore-loving small birds is reinforced by a trickle
of other migrants, leisurely slipping along the shore-line
where it forms a convenient stage on their southern way.
Yellow wagtails join the grey and pied, and players on sea-
side golf links may notice that there are more wheatears
about than can be accounted for by the resources of the
immediate neighbourhood. All this is the beginning of the
autumn migration ; but that great annual event begins so
gradually, and from the human point of view so prematurely,

COMMON PLOVER

that many of the new movements which it brings about are
features not of autumn but of summer.

Many kinds of gulls haunt the same flat shores as the
flocks of waders, and feed at low water on the same banks
of ooze and sand. They are increasing so rapidly that they
are not only colonising many new nesting-grounds, but are
developing fresh tastes and methods of hunting. Tricks
new to experienced observers have been noticed lately in
widely separated parts of the country. Herring-gulls and
black-headed gulls have been watched paddling with their
webbed feet in the shallow water at the edge of the tide,
and catching the food washed out of the mud. The trick
seems to have originated with the herring-gulls and to be

SHORE AND SALT-MARSH 333

copied by the black-headed gulls. But some of the black-
headed gulls have improved upon it ; we have watched them
swimming a little further out in the shallows, paddling with
their dropped feet, and catching the food disturbed in the
water around them. In a flock of scores of birds only half
a dozen may be seen beating out their food in this way,
while the others hunt for what is already exposed ; and the
plan is much more common among herring-gulls than black-
headed gulls. Thrushes will sometimes catch worms in the
same way on a lawn, and marine worms of different species
form probably the bulk of the prey secured by the gulls in
beating both above and below the water. But gulls are
largely garbage feeders, which is one reason why they thrive
as parasites of man about fishing-ports and on the refuse
heaps outside towns. They pick all kinds of animal re-
fuse washed up along high-water mark, from dead birds and
fish to bacon rind thrown from the galleys of passing coal
tramps.

A curious vegetable waif of sandy and gravelly shores
is the tea-plant, which grows in hedges and low thickets, and
is a straggling bush in no way related to the shrub which
gives us tea. It is a member of the solanum tribe, which has
a rare faculty of getting about the world by human aid, as
is shown by the potato and the thorn-apple. The tea-plant
has oval pointed leaves something like those of the real tea-
shrub, and seems originally to have been named by some
confusion. It has pale purple blossoms sufficiently like those
of the woody nightshade to suggest their relationship, and is
conspicuous among the seaside flora when in bloom. Green
hairy tamarisks with their spraylike plumes of pink blossom
are also prominent on the outskirts of seaside towns and
gardens, but they have never freely established themselves
as wild plants. Sea- buckthorn and the shrubby sea-blite

334

SUMMER

form thickets on the sandy and shingly wastes, and give
cover to the gulls and waders when wind and rain beat from
the sea. Sea-buckthorn has narrow hoary leaves, like some
dwarf willow, and bright orange berries in later summer,
which tempt gardeners to naturalise it as an ornamental
shrub. It is chiefly scattered about the sandy coasts of the
east of England, and is one of the plants framed to stand

SEA BUCKTHORN

drought. Shrubby sea-blite forms dense brakes of dull green
foliage at a few points along our coast ; its upright growth
makes it more noticeable than the common creeping kind,
and it is particularly abundant and conspicuous on the great
shingle ridge of the Chesil Beach. Rock, shingle, sand,
and mud have each their own company of sea-plants ; plants
of one type of soil seldom stray to the next, though the
swift alternations of English seaside landscapes may some-
times make them near neighbours. Sea-holly and sea-convol-
vulus love a sandy shore; the little blue-green bushes of

SHORE AND SALT-MARSH 335

sea-holly — like a kind of thorny cabbage — shine coolly among
the sand-hills where the shimmering heat mirage of July
streams aslant in the breeze from the sea. Sea-convolvulus
runs among the same hills of sand, helping to bind them
firmly when the harsh marram grass has succeeded in winning
the first hold. This convolvulus is larger than the pink
corn-convolvulus, but smaller than the white bindweed. The
bindweed has a seaside trick of ' sporting ' into pink, and so
entrapping the unwary flower-lover into the belief that it is

SAND-HILLS AND MARRAM GRASS

the real seaside species; but it clings to hedges and the
herbage of grassy banks and ditch-sides, while the sea-con-
volvulus twists upon the sand. True samphire is a plant of
the steep cliffs, so that its collection would be truly ' a peril-
ous trade,' if there were nowadays enough competition to
induce samphire gatherers to climb the more dangerous
crags for it. But pickled samphire is now not greatly in
demand, and its succulent branched leaves and stiff umbel of
white bloom can be found, for curiosity's sake, without much
risk for the active. Marsh samphire is a spurious imitation
which grows on the level saltings. It has much the same

Z2

336 SUMMER

thick, glassy growth, but the stems are blunt and clubbed,
and there is no disc of white flower. Its interest is borrowed
from the reputation of its namesake, and it is among the
duller plants of the shore, like the sea spinaches, beneath
which the clouded yellow butterflies cling on first crossing
the sea.

HERON

INDEX

ACORN BARNACLES, 2JO.

Adders, 296.

Admiral butterflies, red, 167,

I77> *79; white, 167, 170.
Afterglow in summer, 22, 23.
Alder-flowers, IO.
Alfalfa, 261.
Alpine choughs, 151, 152,

156.
Ants, summer flight of, 300,

301.
Arnold, Matthew, quoted, 6,

137-

Ash-trees, 46, 307.
Aspltnium marinum, 47.
August, calendar of, 239-241.

BAMPTON CLIFFS, 10.

Barley, 260 ; wild, 255.

Barnacle geese, 270.

Barnacles, 269, 270.

Bats, 97.

Beanfields, 261.

Bee-orchis, 111-112.

Beeches, 47, 307.

Bees, bumble, 183, 205 ; hive,
183, 184, 262, 278.

Beetles, 10, 48, 183, 217-227 ;
water, 83.

Bell-heather, 241, 292, 293.

Bent-grass, 294.

Bindweed. See Convolvulus.

Bird hawk moth, 96.

Bird's-foot trefoil, 107, 135.

Birds, dangers to ground-
nests of, 50, 56 ; in summer
mood, 2, 32 ; learning to
fly, 141 ; migration of, 240,
288 ; moulting in July, 128 ;
on the riverside, 82-92 ; on
Norfolk Broads, 320 ; song
in June, 65-72 ; songlessness
in July, 4, 10, 26, 182-184;
summer liveries of, 313-319.

Bittern, 93, 317.

Blackberry, 18, 114.

Blackbirds, 2, 25, 26, 141,
148, 181, 232, 233, 287;
song, 66, 67, 68, 69 ; young,
143, 3i8.

Blackcap, 26, 65, 66, 71.

Camomile, Common, or May-

Blackcock, 298, 299, 316.

weed, 161, 162.

Blackheaded gulls, 318, 319,

Campion, 23, 24, 161, 162.

Bladderwort, 78.

Carpet moths, 97.
Carrots, 124.

Bladder-wrack, 264.

Cathartic or Purging Flax,

Blindworms, 296.

108.

Blue butterflies, 35, 173, 241,

Centipedes, 224,

307.

Cinnabar moths, 95, 96.

Bluebells, 208.

Girl-bunting, 67.

Bog asphodel, 296.

Chafer beetles, 10, 217, 227.

Bombardier beetle, 223.

Chaffinches, 27, 70, 288 ; nest,

Borage tribe, 117.
Box-rose or snowball tree,

58. 59-
Chalk Downs, the, 106-119.

126.

Chalk-hill blue butterfly,

Box-trees, 119.
Bracken, 292.

173-
Charlock, 7, 160, 161.

Bracken-clock beetle, 227.

Cheddar pinks, 235.

Bream, 321, 323.

Chervil, 47, 163.

Brier roses, 6l, 64.

Chesil Beach, 271.

Bridges, Robert, quoted, 6,

Chestnut blossoms, 3, 10.

9-

Chestnut, sweet, catkins of,

Brooklime, 78.

205, 206.

'Brown' butterflies, 36-40,

Chiffchaff, 54.

175-

Choughs, Alpine, 151, 152,

Bryony, 209, 309 ; black, 20-

156.

21, 115; white, 15-17, 20,

Clematis, wild, 17, 45,

115, 118.

115.

Buckthorn, 333, 334.

Click-beetles, 48, 223.

Buckwheat, 261.

Clock-beetles, 217, 227.

Bugs, 222.

Clouded yellow butterflies,

Buff-tip moth, 103.

179. 336.

Bullfinches, 71, 232, 288.

Clover, 7, 23, 47, 135, 160,

Bulrushes, 76.

254, 261.

Buntings, cirl, 67 ; corn, 10,

Cockchafer beetles, 163, 217,

65, 73, 182 ; yellow, 70.

218.

Bur-marigolds, 82.

Cockle-shells, 267.

Bur-reed, 74, 75, 309.

Cocksfoot grass, 136.

Burnet moths, 96, 178.

Colorado beetle, 219.

Burnet (or Scotch) rose, 64. Colouring of summer land-

Burroughs, 4.

scape, 313-319-

Burying-beetle, 218, 225.

Coltsfoot, 159.

Buttercups, 107.

Comfrey, 78, 117.

Butterflies, 35-42, 128, 173,

Convolvulus, 160 ; sea-, 334,

174, 177, 241, 307; flight

335-

of, 167-179. Coots, 90, 91, 245.
1 Copper underwing moth,

CABBAGE WHITE BUTTER- ; 101.

FLIES, 37, 177. j Corn -bunting, IO, 65, 73,

Caddis-worms, 82, 83. | 182.

338

SUMMER

Corn-cockle, 49, 160, 161.

Duck, wild, 56, 128, 314, 320,

Corncrake, 31, 32, 53.

329-

Corn crops, risks to, 253.

Duck-shooting, 243.

Cornfield flowers, 157-166.

Dunlin, 320, 328, 329, 331.

Cornflowers, 160, 161, 162.

Cornish heath, 294.

EAGLES, 248, 249.

Corn-marigolds, 157, 158,

Earwigs, 98, 304-305.

159, 161, 162, 309.

Eels, 323.

Corymbs, 124.

Eider-duck, 245.

Cotton-grass, 296.

Elders, 118, 125, 232; blos-

Cow-bane, 124.

som of, 23, 120, 121, 123.

Cow-parsley, 121, 124, 163,

Elms, 3, 43, 45, 229, 230,

208.

307, 309.

Cow -parsnip, 121, 123,

Emerald moths, 100.

124.

Emperor butterfly, purple,

Crab-apple, 129.

167-170; moths, 95, 96,

Crabs, 274, 275.

104.

Crane-fly, 218.

Evergreens, 45.

Creeping-jennyor Moneywort,

80.

FENNELS, 120, 308.

Cuckoo-spit, 222.

Ferber, Captain, quoted, 152.

Cuckoos, 10, 65, 69, 88, 89,

Fern-owl. Set.}iightja.r.

128, 182, 240, 288; young,

Ferns, 236, 237.

89, 144.

Fescue grass, 134.

Curlews, 244, 327, 331.

Fieldfares, 289.

Cymes, 123.

Finches, 139. See Chaffinches,

Goldfinches, Bullfinches,

DABCHICKS, 87, 89-90, 92,

etc.

145-

Fir-woods, 46, 290 et seq.

Dace, 323.

Fish, migratory movements

Daddy-longlegs, 218.

of, 320.

Dandelions, 107.

Flags, yellow, 74, 309.

Dane's blood or Pasque

Flax, 26 1 ; Cathartic or Purg-

flower, 106.

ing, 108.

Darwin, Charles, III.

Flight, birds' first lessons in,

Darwin, F., 19.

141 et seq. ; of butterflies,

Date-shells, 269.

167-179; of large birds,

Davis, quoted, 197.

151, 152.

Dead-nettles, 164.

' Flighting ' of duck, 244.

Deadly nightshade, 106, 113,

Flowering rush, 76.

114, 1 1 8.

Flowers, discs of blossom in

Deathwatch beetle, 219, 224.

midsummer, 120-126; of

Deer, red, 247.

cornfield, 157-166; ofriver-

Demoiselle dragonfly, 83, 84,

side, 82-92.

2O2.

Fluellin, 164.

Dermestes-beetle, 219.

Flycatchers, IO, 288 ; pied,

Devil's coach - horse beetle,

65 ; spotted, 141, 166.

218, 223.

Fogs in summer, 310.

Dew-ponds, 311-312.

Forget-me-not, 78.

Dewberry, 8l.

Foxes, 51, 263, 298.

Disc-flowers, 120-126.

Foxgloves, 1 1 6, 292.

Docks, 133 ; water, 73.

Fox moth, 10, 97.

Dog-hips, 204.

Fox-tail grass, 134, 136.

Dog-roses, 3, 10, 23, 58,

Frensham Pond, 295, 296.

63-

Fritillary, 177.

Dog's-tail grass, 134, 135.

Fritillary butterflies, 128,

Dog-whelk, 268.

176-177; dark green, 176;

Dogwood, 1 20.

high brown, 176, 1775 pearl-

Dor-beetle, 218, 225, 226.

bordered, 40, 41, 174;

Dragonflies, 73, 83-84, 197-

silver-washed, 176, 177.

202.

Frog-bit, 78.

Droning beetle, 224.
Drought in summer, 307.

Frog-hoppers, 222.
Fruit, ripening of, 48.

GAME, end of close time for,

243-

Geometer moths, 99, loo, 102.

Ghost swiftmoths, 23, 24,
97-

Gipsywort, 79, 309.

Glow-worms, I, 10, 23, 223.

Goatsucker. See Nightjar.

God wits, 320.

Golden eagle, 247.

Golden-crested wren, 72.

Goldfinches, 139, 162, 287.

Goose barnacles, 270.

Goose-grasses, 13, 14, 209.

Gorse, 8.

Grasses in summer, 131-140.

Grasshopper warbler, 30, 67.

Grass-snakes, 296 et seq.

Grayling butterflies, 174, 175.

Greenfinches, 142, 285-286.

Gromwell, 117.

Ground -nesting birds, dangers
to, 30-56.

Grouse, 240, 298, 314.

Grouse • shooting, 245 - 246,
248.

Gudgeons, 323.

Guelder-rose, 10, 125.

Guelder-trees, 120, 124, 125.

Guillemots, IO.

Gulls, 274, 318, 332; black-
headed, 318, 319, 330, 332,
333 ; herring, 332, 333.

HAIRSTREAK BUTTERFLIES,
purple, 170 ; white-letter,
171, 172.

Hampshire mill-race, 191 ;
trout stream, 186 ; water-
meadows, 193.

' Hard heads,' 165.

Harebells, 241.

Hares, 2, 33.

Harvest, 252-263.

Harvest-mouse, 240.

Hawfinches, 288.

Hawk moths, IO, 96, 97, 98,
102.

Hawkweed, 38, 107.

Hawks, 298.

Hawthorn berries, 204 ; trees,
10, 120, 307.

Hayfield, the, 131.

Hazel, fertilisation of, 47.

Hazel-fly, 227.

Heart's-ease, 162, 163.

Heat of the sun, 306-312.

Heath butterflies, 37.

Heather, 290, 292 ; white,
294.

Heaths, Cornish, 294 ; cross-
leaved, 293.

Hedgehogs, 308.

Hedgerows in summer, 13-21.
Hedge-sparrows, 181. See

Sparrows.

Helleborine, 109, 112.
Hemlock blossom, 120, 122,

124.

Hemp-nettle, 157, 164.
Henbane, 106, 113, 118.
Herald moth, 101.
Hermit-crab, 275.
Herons, 244, 320, 336.
Hickling Broad, 321.
Herring, 321.
Herring-gulls, 332, 333.
Hodgson, Ralph, quoted, 127.
Holly, 46.

Holly-blue butterflies, 174.
Hop, 19.

Hornets, 176, 277.
Hound's-Tongue, 117.
House-martins, 86.
Hudson, Mr., 67.
Humming-bird hawk moth,

97, u6.

INSECTS, hum of, 183 ; life in
summer, 300 et seq. ; on
the riverside, 82-92 ; sacri-
fice of wings, 300-305.

Iris, yellow, 74, 309.

Ivy, 44 ; blossom of, 122.

JACKDAWS, 308.

Jack-go-to-bed-by-noon, 49.

Jays, 288.

Jefferies, Richard, 276.

Jellyfish, 273.

July, calendar of, 127-129.

June, calendar of, 9-11; nights

of, 22.
Junipers, 106, Ii8.

KESTRELS, 140.

Kexes, 3, 10, 47, 132, 135.

Kidney Vetch. See Ladies'

fingers.
Kingnshers,84-86,i46; young,

148, 149.
Knapweed, 165.
Knots, 320.

LABURNUM, 10.

Ladies' bedstraw, 108.

Ladies' fingers, 106, 107, 108.

Ladybirds, 218.

Lammas Day, 241.

Larks, 9, 25, 66, 67, 72, 253 ;

nests, 50, 55 ; song, 180.
Leather-jackets, 218.
Leaves, their struggle for

light, 43 et seq.
Light, the struggle for, 43-

49-

INDEX

Lightning, 212-214 > summer,

213.

Lilacs, 10.

Lime-blossom, 205, 206, 207.
Lime-trees, habit of leaves,

207.

Limpets, 269.
Ling, 292.
Linnaeus, 8.
Liverworts, 236.
Lizards, 296.
Loch Shin, 187.
Loddon Lily, 76, 77.
Loddon, the, 189.
Loosestrife, 80.
Lowell, quoted, 5«
Lucerne, 261.

MALLARD, 313, 329. See also

Duck, Wild.
Maples, 46.

Marbled green moth, 103.
Marbled white butterfly, 167,

172, 173.

Marigold, Bur-, 82.
Marigolds, Corn, 157, 158,

159, 161, 162, 309.
Marsh-pennywort, 296.
Marsh samphire, 335.
Marsh woundwort, 78, 309.
Martins, 143, 248 ; house, 86 ;

sand, 86.
Mayflies, 82, 199.
Mayweed, 161, 162.
Meadow brown butterflies, 37,

39, 175, 177-
Meadow grass, soft, 137.
Meadow-pipits, 88, 331.
Meadow-rue, 79.
Meadowsweet, 78.
Meredith, George, quoted,

127, 1 80.
Mi moth, 95, 96.
Mice, 139, 232, 240, 242,

263.

Midsummer's Day, II.
Mignonette, Wild, 113.
Migration of birds, 240, 288.
Milkwort, 78, 108.
Millipedes, 224.
Missel-thrush, 66.
Moles, 308.
Molluscs, 267.

Moneywort, or Creeping-
jenny, 80.

Montagu's harrier, 298.
Moon-daisies, 133-135.
Moorhens, 28, 87, 90, 91, 92,

145-

Moors, the, 292 ; soil of, 295.
Mosses, 47.
Moths, 10, 23, 24, 87,95-105,

178.

339

Mountain-ash berries, 204 ;

blossoms, 1 20, 124, 125.
Mountain ringlet butterfly,

36, 39-
Mulleins, 106, 113, 115, 116,

1 1 8, 308.

Mustard fields, 7, 261.
Mushrooms, 241.
Mussels, 269.

NASTURTIUMS, 49.

Natterjack toad, 297.

Nests on grounds, dangers to,

50-56.
Newts, 297.
Nightingales, 4, 5, 10, 24, 26,

34, 65-67.

Nightjars, 28-30, 146.
Nights of summer, 22-33.
Nightshade, 46 ; deadly, 106,

113, 114, 118; woody, 114,

North, Christopher, quoted,

249.
Nuthatch, 53, 54, 232.

OAK-EGGAR MOTH, 96, 97.
Oaks in summer, 291, 309.
Oar-weed, 265.
Oat -grasses, 135.
Oats, 259, 260, 261.
Oil-beetles, 217, 226.
Old Lady moth, 87, 101.
Old-man's-beard, 134. See

Clematis.

Orange-tip butterflies, 174.
Orchises, 109-112.
Otters, 298, 324.
Owl moths, 97, 99.
Owls, 139, 143, 182, 263, 319.
Oyster-catchers, 331.

PANSY, FIELD, 162, 163.
Parsnip, wild, 124, 125, 208.
Partridges, 132, 139, 240,

245, 262, 263, 285, 318;

dangers to young, 51, 52;

dusting, 32 ; nest, 50 ;

summer livery, 317 ; young,

MS-
Pasque flower, or Dane's

blood, 106.

Peacock butterflies, 167, 177.
Penzance Brier Rose, 6 1.
Perch, 321, 322.
Periwinkles, 268.
Persicaria, 209.
Pheasants, 146, 148, 245,

317; nests, 56.
Pholas, 269.

Pigeons, 2, 313. See Wood-
pigeons.
Pimpernels, 80, 157.

340

SUMMER

Pinks, Cheddar, 235.

Salmon, 320.

Stitch worts, 13, 14.

Pipits, 72 ; meadow, 88, 331 ;

Salt marshes, 326 et seq.

Stoats, 33, 51, 52, 248.

tree, 69.

Samphire, 335 ; marsh, 335.

Stonechats, 54, 71.

Plantain, 135, 309 ; water, 79.

Sand-martins, 86.

Stonecrops, 235, 236.

Plants, struggle for light,

Sandpipers, 149 ; green, 244.

Stubble-fields at night, 262.

43-49-

Sands, the, 271.

Succory, 174.

Plovers, 25, 146, 312, 330,

Scabious, field, 162, 165 ;

Sulphur moths, 97, 99.

332 ; golden, 331 ; green,

devil's bit, 165.

Summer, coming of, I et seq. ;

289 ; grey, 320 ; ringed, 330.

Scented Rush, 75.

drought in, 307 ; nights of,

Plume-thistle, 159.

Scorpion-grass, 81, 163.

22-33; turning-tide of, 203-

Poa grasses, 134.

Scotch ringlet butterfly, 37.

209.

Pond-skaters, 222.

Sea-anemones, 266.

Summer snowflake, 76,

Poppies, 8, 157, 160, 161,

Sea-asters, 327.

Sun, heat of, 306.

309 ; sea-, 326, 327.

Sea-blite, 333, 334.

Sundews, 296.

Potentilla, 241.

Sea-buckthorn, 333, 334.

Sunlight, importance of, 47-

Prawns, 265.

Sea-convolvulus, 334, 335.

49.

Primroses, 208.

Sea-holly, 334, 335.

Swallow-tail moth, 97, 99.

Purging flax, 108.

Sea-mouse, 273.

Swallows, 27, 86, 182, 288.

Pycraft, Mr., 317.

Sea-poppies, 326, 327.

Sweet chestnut catkins, 205,

Sea-shore, the, 326-336; be-

206.

QUAKING-GRASS, 133.

low the tidemark, 264-275.

Sweetbriar, 6l, 64.

Quicksands, 272.

Sea-snails, 268.

Swift-moths, 23, 24, loo.

Sea-spinach, 336.

Swifts, 10, 65, 86, 240.

RABBITS, 243.

Sea-urchins, 266, 274.

Sycamores, 307 ; on walls,

Radish, wild, 160.

Sea-weeds, 264 et seq.

229, 230.

Ragged Robin, n.

Sea-worms, 266, 273.

Syringa, IO.

Rats, 51, 52, 233, 263 ; water-,

Sedge-flies, 83.

91-

Sedge-warblers, 27, 28, 88,

TAMARISKS, 333.

Razor- shells, 267.

182.

Tares, 261.

Redshanks, 93, 328, 330.

Sedges, 74.

Tea-plant, 333.

Redwings, 288.

Seeds sown by birds, 231.

Teasels, 82.

Reed-mace, 76.

Serapis, Temple of, 269.

Tench, 323.

Reed-warblers, 10, 53, 87.

Shearing Day, 10.

Tennyson, quoted, 8, 10,

Ribbon-grass, 264.

Sheldrakes, 327.

197.

Ring-dove, 26, 34.

Shelduck, 327, 329, 330, 331.

Terebella, 273.

Ringlet butterflies, 36-38.

Shells, 267.

Terns, 330.

Ripple-marks, 272, 273.
Riverside, birds and insects

Shrews, 325.
Skipper butterflies, large, 40,

Thistles, 159.
Thorn moths, 95.

at, 82-92 ; flowers and

41 ; small, 178.

Thrushes, 25, 26, 56, 66, 141,

rushes on, 73-82.

Skull-cap, 82.

143, 145, 181, 209, 318,

Roach, 321, 323.

Snails, inland, 268 ; sea-, 267,

333 5 young, 143, 145.

Robins, 34, 54, 65, 72, 318 ;

268 ; water-, 83.

Thunderstorms, 210-216.

song, 66, 182 ; young, 142,

Snakes, grass, 296.

Tide, the rising, 274.

143, 145. 147-

Snapdragons, 229, 234.

Tide-mark, below the, 264-

Rock-pools, 266.

Snipe, 92, 93, 94, 184, 317.

275-

Rooks, 34, 243, 287, 308 ;

Snowball tree, 126.

Timothy grass, 134.

nests, 50.

Snowdrops, 208.

Tits, 49, 72, 148, 232, 288 ;

Rosa arvtnsis, 60, 64.

Soldier and Sailor beetles, 10.

blue, 10, 67, 146, 147, 148;

Rota canina, 63. See also

Song-thrushes, 25, 26.

great, 8, 50, 147, 148.

Dog-rose.

Sorrels, 133, 135.

Toadflax, 164, 234, 235.

Rosa spinosissima, 61, 64.

Sparrows, 27, 34, 150, 181,

Toads, natterjack, 297.

Rosa villosa, 64.

253> 259, 287 ; migration

Tobacco plant, 49.

Roses, 57-64; brier, 61, 64.

from town in summer, 283-

Tomatoes, 49.

Rowan. See Mountain Ash.

285 ; summer livery of, 313-

Tortoise-shell butterflies, 37.

Rudd, 322, 32-?.

316 ; young, 143.

Totter-grass, 134.

Rushes, 74-82.

Spoonbills, 320.

Travellers' joy. See Clema-

Rye-grass, 136.

Sprats, 321.

tis.

Rye-straw, 261.

Spurry, 160.

Tree-pipit, 69.

. !( . ,,

Squinancy-wort, 108.

Trees, their struggle for light,

ST. BARNABAS' DAY, n.

Squirrels, 50.

43-49-

St. Bartholomew's Day, 241.

Stag-beetle, 2 1 8, 219, 220.

Trout, ways of, 185-196.

St. John's wort, II, 47, 49.

Starlings, 50, 139, 143, 181,

Tulip-tree, 46.

St. Swithin's Day, 128.

253, 313.

Turnip moths, 99.

Turtle-doves, 10, 26, 65, 183. I
Twitch, 135.

UMBELLIFEROUS
1 2O et seq.

VALERIAN, 78, 234.
Vapourer moth, 96.
Venui's comb, 163 ; looking-

glass, 163.
Vetches, 161, 162,261; horse-

shoe, 107 ; kidney, IO8.

See Ladies' fingers.
Villarsia, 78.
Viper's bugloss, 106, 1x6.
Voles, water, 325.
Vultures, flight of young, 152

et seq.

WAGTAILS, 72, 138, 147 ;
grey, 331; pied, 89, 147,
331; yellow, 332; water,
27, 87, 142, 151.

Wallflowers, 229, 233.

Wall-gardens, wild, 228.

Warblers, 27, 30, 53, 67, 288;
grasshopper, 30, 67 ; reed,
10, 53, 87 ; sedge, 27, 28,
88, 182 ; willow, 66.

Wasp, the yellow, 276-282.

Water-cress, 78.

Water-beetles, 83, 221.

Water-boatmen, 83, 221,222.

INDEX

Water flora and fauna, nomen-
clature of, 80.

Water-guelder blossoms, 120,
FLOWERS, | 124, 125.

| Water-lilies, 78, 120.
Water-plantain, 79.
Water-plants, 74-82.
Water-rats, 91.
Water-scorpions, 222.

Water-snails, 83.

Water-speedwell, 78.

Water-violet, 77.

Wayfaring tree, IO, 120.

Weasels, 51, 56.

Weaver-fish, 274.

Weeds, 157.

Weevils, 10, 219.

Welsh trout stream, 188.

Wheat, 258.

Wheatears, 332.

Whelks, 268.

Whinchats, 54.

White, Gilbert, 29, 297.

Whitebeam, 118, 120, 124,
125, 204.

White butterflies, 307.

White-letter hairstreak butter-
fly, 171, 172.

Whitethroat, 2, 58, 72.

Widgeon, 264.

Wild cats, 248.

Wild duck, 56, 128,243, 314,
320, 329.

341

Wild geranium, 46.

Wild roses, species of, 63, 64.

See also Dog-rose.
Willow beauty geometer moth,

102.

Willow-warbler,66.
Willow-wren, 147.
Willows, 82.
Wire-wormt, 218.
Witchell, quoted, 68.
Woodpeckers, 148 ; green,

»43> 300; pied, 144;

spotted, 143, 144, 184,

232.
Wood-pigeons, 146, 204,

287.

Wood-wren, 68.
Wordsworth, quoted, 7.
Woundwort, marsh, 78, 309.
Wrens, 33, 182 ; golden -

crested, 67, 72; willow,

147 ; wood, 68.
Wrynecks, II, 65.
Wych - elms on walls, 229,

230.

YEW-TRRES, 106, 118; on

walls, 232.
Yellowhammer, 33, 71, 180,

182.

Yellow rattle, II.
Yellow underwing moths, 96,

97, 99, 100.

Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printer! to His Majesty
at the Edinburgh University Press

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