THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 ALL THE YEAR WITH NATURE
 
 ALL THE YEAR WITH NATURE 
 
 BY 
 
 P. ANDERSON GRAHAM 
 
 LONDON 
 
 SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE 
 1893 
 
 [All rights reserved}
 
 Si 
 
 TO 
 
 W. E. HENLEY 
 
 866907
 
 For permission to refnblish such portions of this book as 
 have already been printed, I have to thank the several Editors of 
 ' Longman's Magazine, ' Macmillaii's Magazine,' the ' National 
 Observer? the ' St. James's Gazette? and other publications. 
 
 P. A. G.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 SPRING 
 
 PAGE 
 
 BIRDS-NESTING I 
 
 HOME 12 
 
 ROBBERY FROM NATURE l8 
 
 THE GULL POND 29 
 
 THE STOCK-DOVE 35 
 
 IN THE GARDEN 42 
 
 PHILOMEL 49 
 
 KNAPPING FLINTS 53 
 
 SUMMER 
 
 THE PLEASURES OF JUNE 69 
 
 WILD LIFE IN LONDON 84 
 
 RABBITS 89 
 
 DRIVING WHALES IOO 
 
 WILD CATTLE 105 
 
 A SUMMER IDYL . I IO
 
 Vlll 
 
 Contents 
 
 AUTUMN 
 
 AN AUTUMN REVERIE 
 
 PAGE 
 . . - 127 
 
 A FARMER'S NOTEBOOK 
 
 - 143 
 
 MAKING EVEN ...... 
 
 . . . I 4 8 
 
 THE HARDEST LABOUR 
 
 . . . 154 
 
 CARTING THE BEES 
 
 ' . -158 
 
 LOWRIE'S GAP 
 
 . . 165 
 
 SEPTEMBER IN THE WOODS .... 
 
 . 170 
 
 LITTLE DUES OF CORN 
 
 175 
 
 WINTER 
 
 
 MEMORIES 
 VILLAGE HEATHEN 
 
 . 181 
 
 . 187 
 
 
 
 NORTHUMBRIAN GUISARDS .... 
 
 . 2OI 
 
 POACHERS 
 
 . 211 
 
 A WINTER'S TALE 
 
 . 219
 
 SPRING 
 
 BIRDS-NESTING 
 
 MY eariiest memory of birds-nesting is that of having" 
 been lifted up, while yet wearing a pinafore, to see 
 the sky-blue eggs of a hedge-sparrow that had built 
 among the black hawthorns by the roadside. It was 
 before their first grey buds had developed into green, 
 or the violet had flowered at their roots. The cock 
 bird sat on the top rail of a gate and girded at us 
 fiercely in his thin little voice, and his mate fluttered 
 uneasily to and fro along the fence. To this day 
 'Billy's' artless note is as welcome as the song of lark 
 or nightingale. But a time soon came for rambling 
 in search of others. 
 
 One favourite field (who does not remember the 
 like ?) was a true birds-nester's paradise. On the 
 north it was sheltered by a strip of tall beech and ash. 
 For two hundred yards of fresh grass there was a 
 precipitous slope to a great hedge, at whose foot the 
 
 B
 
 2 Spring 
 
 marsh marigolds ' shone like fire,' for water oozed 
 through a swamp to a burn that chattered riverwards. 
 A mighty trunk had lain there for years, whereon, 
 if you sat motionless, you would presently see the 
 creatures come forth unconcernedly among the prim- 
 roses that bloomed near by. Towards dusk a 
 hedgehog led forth her annual litter of prickly pig- 
 lings, and a grey and ugly rat emerged from his hole. 
 But pleasantest it was to watch the feathered builders 
 at their work. Out and in from a little hole scarce 
 large enough to take your finger hopped the blue 
 titmouse, whose eggs could only be extracted by the 
 artful use of a crooked stick : the mother hissed like 
 a tiny snake when I ' clapped her in.' Where the 
 falling earth had parted a bed of violets in two, and 
 laid bare some twisting elm-roots, a shy yet impudent 
 and cunning eident-looking robin is ever coming and 
 going with morsels of hair and feather. The moist 
 earth teems with slugs and snails, and by the heap of 
 shells beside the big stone you know that here is a 
 favourite feeding-place of thrush and blackbird. Their 
 homes, too, are close at hand : the red-billed merle 
 whistling in the hedge is calling his mate, who on an 
 untidy home of wool, hair, and hay, is hatching her 
 dirty-grey eggs in a bunch of cut thorn ; while the 
 mavis has his nest compact, strong-walled, and well- 
 lined in the rough twigs low down on the wych elm's 
 trunk. Late in the season, if you are patient and 
 patience is hardly a virtue when it only means smoking
 
 Birds-Nesting 
 
 a few pipes daily, and unconsciously assimilating the 
 beauty of bright daisy-sprinkled grass, where the 
 lambs are at frolic, and the budding trees and spring- 
 ing grass, the twitter of birds, and the brook's eternal 
 song you will see a brown bird come, his head 
 thrown well back on his shoulders, and with the easy 
 flight of a hawk, and till his joyous call floats out in 
 the warm spring air you hardly realise that it is the 
 first cuckoo. Every day he gets new companions, 
 and you make a careful inventory of the homes on 
 view in order to see what husbands are to be duped 
 by this winged Lothario. In the crevice of the dry 
 bank a water-wagtail, whose little flights and runs 
 and flutterings on the close-cropped grass and among 
 the cows and sheep have been part of the place's life, 
 has made a warm, snug nest of moss and bent. One 
 day you find added to the four speckled eggs already 
 there another and a bigger one resembling (as they 
 do) the house-sparrow's, but a size larger than these, 
 and therefrom there issues a ' gowk ' that grows at a 
 pace bewildering to the putative parents. Many 
 other happy households the hedge-sparrow's, the 
 lark's, the meadow-pipit's, even the blackbird's 
 invite the rascal's intrusion : but here he seems to 
 take a peculiar joy in teasing the wagtail. In the 
 wood on the hill there is another tiny home he loves 
 to desecrate. It is built on the side of an ash-bole, 
 and is most difficult to find. But the father, out of 
 the very force of his loving anxiety, tells the seeker
 
 4 Spring 
 
 when he is ' hot ' or ' cold.' ' Tweet, tweet/ says the 
 bold and handsome chaffinch in a low staccato while 
 yet the enemy is afar. There must be a nest there, 
 you think, and the surmise deepens into certainty 
 as with eager eye but sauntering gait you come that 
 way, and the bird's alarm shrills into a sharp ' Twink, 
 twink,' loudening as you near, softening when you 
 take up a wrong scent. At last you discern a bulge 
 in the grey moss on the ash-tree ; closely considered 
 it is a cunningly devised and beautiful contrivance, so 
 like the bark to which it is fastened that if your eye 
 turns from it the search has to be made over again. 
 The mother crouches as you look, and the cock darts 
 round and round in a storm of twinking shrieks. It 
 is probably the cuckoo of most refined and cultivated 
 tastes, the precieux of the tribe, that selects this 
 charming household for his labours. 
 
 After all, however, this was only a kind of birds- 
 nesting for girls : very pretty and interesting, no 
 doubt, but not soul-satisfying, at any rate not to the 
 mature schoolboy of ten or twelve, who made him- 
 self acquainted with the facts, indeed, but only by 
 way of pleasing a cousin in petticoats or initiating a 
 younger brother. He preferred something with a 
 little more excitement. Away over the field are the 
 towers of a ruined, ivy-grown castle, ' bosomed high 
 in tufted trees.' It is on the other side of the river, 
 and that is nine points in its favour. An aged ferry- 
 man would pilot one over for a copper ; but no, that
 
 Birds-Nesting 5 
 
 method of crossing was disdained. Down below the 
 curbing mill-dam the stream breaks away in laughing, 
 rippling rushes over stone and pebble, and past gorse 
 covert and bulrush and fern, and half the fun of 
 birds-nesting in the ruins lay in fording the stream, 
 and a goodly portion of the rest in coming back. It 
 is not particularly easy to get from stepping-stone to 
 stepping-stone with no other impedimenta than a pair 
 of boots and stockings slung round your neck ; but if 
 there are unblown starling's eggs in your cap, if there 
 are young jackdaws noisily cawing in your pockets 
 (and therewith perhaps a pair of featherless pigeons 
 which must on no account be hurt), if one hand is 
 taken up with a ruffing savage young owl, and if, 
 besides, you are a little tired with the excitement and 
 the toil of rifling these prizes from the lofty chambers 
 and high-placed crannies of the ruin, it is by no means 
 contemptible. Should dusk be come and the evening 
 star be glittering in the pool, a nervous parent would 
 sooner pay the ferryman in gold than see you attempt 
 the feat. But when the birds come safely home 
 which they generally do unless there is a slip in mid- 
 water, and callow nestlings and smashed eggs are 
 borne merrily to seaward (often with the adventurer's 
 loose clothing to keep them company) then all's 
 well that ends well, and the intelligent man is more 
 interested in the addition to his boy's aviary than in 
 thinking of perils which, however great and fearsome 
 they were, are ' gone and dead and done.'
 
 6 Spring 
 
 The Dene begins about a hundred paces from the 
 door ; but none ever goes straight to it but girls after 
 a basket of lilies or primroses, or mechanical egg- 
 collectors. Those indeed who best love its slopes and 
 shadowy recesses never go thither of set purpose at 
 all, but are surprised to find themselves there after a 
 wander in which their steps have been guided not by 
 any determining will, but only as impulse ruled, or 
 they were lured from field to field by a memory of 
 things old, or the hope of something new. It is a 
 soft, idle Spring morning, and you know not what it 
 is that woos you forth the oxeye darting in and out 
 of his chink on the sunny garden wall, the ' full, sweet 
 deep, loud and wild pipe' of the blackcap in the 
 shrubbery, or the call of the turtle to his mate hid in 
 the holly. But in the middle of the building season 
 the very lanes are concert-rooms and nurseries in one. 
 The highway is set with elms whose crevices have, 
 from time immemorial, been peopled with starlings 
 and jackdaws, that country folk think glossier of 
 plumage than tenants of the crannied wall. Only a 
 jackdaw of character and originality would dream of 
 dividing from the crowding and chattering of his clan 
 to settle in a lonely tree. And there can be no doubt 
 of his wiliness. With what manifest unconcern he 
 will sit on while a farm-cart rumbles by over the 
 stones ! Yet let a couple of urchins intent on ' clap- 
 ping him in ' steal ever so softly across the grass to 
 him, and long ere they are within shot his duskiness
 
 Birds-Nesting 
 
 emerges from the hole, flits swiftly round the trunk, 
 and disappears through the leafage. And the young 
 soon learn to be nearly as cunning as their elders. 
 You can imagine them laughing at the stupid, groping 
 hand which tears out a bushel of that mass of straw, 
 hair, leather, paper, wool, rags, any and every sort of 
 refuse, which the jackdaw calls a nest, yet goes empty 
 away, they the while being ensconced in some inap- 
 proachable nook of the hollow trunk. The cushat 
 above sits still and unnoticed on her eggs all through 
 this operation, and it is watched from the ground by 
 a little tomtit tucked up under a dome of hay woven 
 round the stem of a thistle ; and not far off some other 
 tiny mothers listen unseen to those voices they dread 
 the most of all. Divided from the road by a dry 
 ditch is a bank that in summer is one rich confusion 
 of wild rose and bramble, foxglove and daisy and 
 speedwell and fern. There, on a bed of moss and hair 
 set in a tiny indentation, sits the sober mate to whom 
 the yellow bunting, from his perch on rail or hedge- 
 top, sings ever of ' a very, very little bit of bread and 
 no cheese ; ' and sometimes her black-headed relative 
 hatches her light-purple-spotted eggs hard by, having 
 ' flitted ' thither from the green rushes and the rough 
 grass of that marshy haugh which is her favoured 
 haunt. 
 
 No boy could stop here ; for under a low single- 
 arched bridge not far away the road is crossed by a 
 stream, and in the pool made for passing horses and
 
 8 Spring 
 
 cattle to drink at, there is an enormous trout a trout 
 at least four inches long ! which hitherto has foiled 
 the rarest ' guddler,' with loaches under the stones, 
 and young eels like living horse-hairs, and water- 
 spiders with air-bubbles, and caddis-worms trailing 
 their houses with them. Birds-nesting would be 
 altogether forgotten but that an exploration of the 
 archway hardly bigger than a fox's earth discovers 
 one of the most beautiful of bird's houses, the spheri- 
 cal mansion of moss and lichen woven by the tiny 
 4 Kitty ma wren ' and perfectly harmonised with the 
 ruining wall. She flits to and fro, cheeping with 
 her thin voice in a superfluity of agitation, for her 
 eight or nine white-and-pale-red-spotted eggs are safe 
 from the rudest hands. Then it is natural to follow 
 a burn, and we go tracing this one. At the meadow, 
 where the fresh green spears of grass are warring with 
 the brown ones of last summer, a heron slowly rises 
 with a fish in his mouth and makes off to the great 
 wood on the other bank of the river. What if his 
 nest be there ? True, the heronry is far away among 
 the hills, in a plantation rising from the bank of a 
 trout-stream ; but here it is common enough for a 
 stray couple to build on the highest oaks or the taller 
 fir-trees. If you want to know why circumspice \ 
 Not only is the brook well stocked with fry, but the 
 river close at hand broadens over areas of yellow sand 
 and gravel, and the rushing stream leaves scores of 
 pools behind it, and there is no house within call, and
 
 Birds- Nesting 
 
 save for a wandering angler there is perfect solitude 
 for the bird to take and enjoy his fish in. But many 
 are the distractions that occur before the wood is 
 reached. From a fork in one of the outermost trees 
 of a spinney by the way a bird darts with the swift- 
 ness of an arrow. It's a sparrow-hawk, and he neither 
 soars nor hangs in air. 'The pale, brown-marked eggs 
 are left unbroken in the ancient crow's nest where 
 they have been laid, but the place is marked for a 
 return, for here in a few weeks will be pets worth 
 having : always supposing, of course, that some fine 
 morning the gamekeeper on his round does not add 
 the parents' heads to the gruesome trophies stoats, 
 weasels, carrion-crows, and magpies which are nailed 
 to the wall of the kennel. But a discovery like that 
 only whets one's appetite for the treasures across the 
 river ; and accordingly it is waded where a willow 
 trunk has fallen athwart the deepest stream, and 
 thereon you clamber, and so do you win to shore. 
 
 An inland boy knows no greater joy than that 
 of rifling a heron's nest, and it is one not to be had 
 once the suppleness of youth is passed. Up on the 
 small branches at a tall tree-top perches a great bunch 
 of sticks lined with wool ; and, however difficult the 
 ascent, it yields no thrill at all comparable to that 
 you feel at the top. The slender boughs bend with 
 your weight, as though at every moment you were to 
 be launched into space ; and if there be a breeze to 
 sway you to and fro, you will have to hold on firmly
 
 i o Spring 
 
 with foot and knee as well as with one hand while 
 you try to take the angry, strong-billed, biting, beau- 
 tiful-eyed fledglings with the other. And your 
 nerves are not at all composed by the old birds either ; 
 for, shrieking aloud and with open bills, they swoop past 
 and past you till your cheeks feel the fanning of their 
 wings, and you fear for your eyes. But if you are 
 worth your salt, you do not give it up till you have 
 flung down the quarry to be reared at home. If, as 
 usually happens, there are four or five young ones in 
 the nest, you leave the parents some that they may 
 not be utterly disconsolate. But should there only be 
 eggs, then these are left alone, for there is nothing 
 against the hernsheugh, and in spite of what is often 
 said to the contrary he is probably increasing and 
 multiplying. 
 
 It is not every day, however, that a heron's nest 
 is found, and but for this one your ramble would have 
 inevitably ended in the Dene, which seems to have 
 been created to be the grave of sunny afternoons. 
 Even the old women who gather sticks for firewood 
 there love it they know not why far better than 
 any place besides, while all wild creatures for miles 
 round make it their home, and its wild flowers are 
 famous near and far. It is as if an enormous plough 
 had cleft the soil, and made a furrow a hundred feet 
 deep, every stone on the steep slopes of it circled by 
 a summer procession of wild flowers. Wild hyacinths 
 are gathered there and lilies of the valley, violets,
 
 Birds-Nesting 1 1 
 
 daffodils and primroses each in due season. At 
 the bottom tinkles a little stream which sometimes 
 vanishes under yards of rotting stick and leaf, yet has 
 crumbled and worn away the earth from a world of 
 twisted roots : a building-place of wren, and robin, and 
 thrush. In the dry wall at the top the shy redstart 
 breeds, and the green linnet n-ests in the hazels. At 
 one end is a magnificent rookery, where innumerable 
 voices incessantly caw, and gurgle, and call. Some- 
 times, after you have watched and listened, a rabbit 
 crouching close at hand with affrighted eyes will start 
 and rustle off among the bracken. The stream comes 
 tumbling into the Dene from a high field, and near 
 the little fall a water-ousel sets her pure white eggs. 
 But the pride of the place is its wood-owls. All the 
 year round ' everie night and alle,' they may be heard 
 hoo-hooing, not in single cries but half-a-dozen or more 
 in concert, each trying to surpass the other's melan- 
 choly. And their nests are easily found, being some- 
 times deep in the cleft of a tree, often in a disused 
 crow's nest. It is not uncommon to catch them 
 hawking about in the early afternoon in the darker 
 parts of the wood ; and the most unobservant could 
 not ignore their presence, for whether from disease 
 or accident one knows not the owl is oftener found 
 lying dead than any other bird. In a hedge running 
 at right angles to the Dene the impudent magpies 
 which you may sometimes see impatiently awaiting 
 the death of a sickly lamb rear in disregard of pub-
 
 1 2 Spring 
 
 licity their monstrous home, one of the most easily 
 harried of all ; while the carrion-crow sometimes 
 builds beside them, and sometimes on the outskirts 
 of the rookery. And if these interest you not, the 
 sweetest and most beautiful of all song birds are also to 
 be found the bullfinch in the thicket, the goldfinch 
 in the hedge. 
 
 HOME 
 
 WITH adequate knowledge it would be interesting to 
 resolve how far man's stubborn and invincible love 
 of home extends into the lower forms of life. Such 
 a tangle of sentiment and hysteria has grown up about 
 and over ' my ain countree ' and ' the little house 
 where I was born,' that a deep and touching emotion 
 has been all but drowned in a flood of worse than 
 idle tears. It is as old as time, and that it is as 
 enduring as nature is shown by its persistence to the 
 very portals of death ; 
 
 As if the quiet bones were blest, 
 Among familiar names to rest. 
 
 The joyful gleam in Sir Walter's dying eye as 
 on his last home-coming he caught sight of ' Gala 
 Water-Buckholm-Torwoodlee,' proved that he struck 
 no false note when he made his minstrel turn his last 
 hopes to a death by Teviot ; nor was it any remnant 
 of superstition that induced Carlyle to choose a grave 
 in Ecclefechan. The institution of family vaults
 
 Home 1 3 
 
 appears at first glance an idle and a vain thing idle 
 and vain, too, the exhumation and shifting of moulder- 
 ing bones, the arrangement of the dead according to 
 parish and family. But dust has its affinities for dust, 
 and not wholly illusory was the poet's consolation that 
 
 From his ashes may be made the violet of his native land. 
 
 By strong but invisible bonds inanimate acres 
 hold fast to the handful from them that a life has 
 gathered and held together. Men have commanded 
 their urns to be emptied in mid- ocean, and have 
 bequeathed their ashes to the vagrant wind, but 
 Nature's most ardent and strenuous lovers cannot be 
 forced into an abstract passion, or estranged from 
 the kith and kin that shared their early susten- 
 ance. The grass with its springtide brightness and 
 the playmates that rejoice in it, the oak and the tall 
 poplar, the green corn and the lark that rises singing 
 from its midst, are they not all foster children of the 
 same nurse ? When my tenancy is expired, and earth 
 reclaims the body I have borrowed from her, shall 
 it not be returned to the woods that have rustled to 
 make me music, to the daisies that have known my 
 feet, to the woodbine and primrose that gave me their 
 earliest blooms rather than to alien flowers ? 
 
 Artificial modes of life and thought affect this 
 passion for home this passion that is deeper than 
 any philosophy but to a very small degree. Faiths 
 alter, and the fashion of them, so that instead of
 
 14 Spring 
 
 desiring to rest under the shadow of the grey church 
 and the dark yew trees, a man will leave his body to 
 be burned, even as they burn the clothes of an in- 
 fected corpse ; yet his friends will gather and treasure 
 the incombustible remnant. But in any case solicitude 
 about burial is only an incidental proof and striking 
 illustration of a love that permeates life, and seems 
 almost as strong in the wild birds whose flight is in scorn 
 of space as in the vegetable fast-rooted and quiet in his 
 corner. When the English snowdrop and crocus are 
 cleaving the wet mould with their first protrusions of 
 green, the swallow is hawking and twittering round 
 the Pyramids ; yet a little while, and, seized with 
 home-sickness, he will come back to their withered 
 yellow and white. And it is not from love of the 
 English Spring, nor is it anything to him that under 
 the budding woods, where the rooks are building, the 
 fern is preparing new fronds : in all that long journey 
 his heart was held light and his spirit high by the 
 memory of a spot whose area is measurable by inches, 
 and where year after year his nest is made. His corner 
 of the window, his nook in the barn, his eave of the out- 
 house, thither so long as life and strength endure will 
 he return as regularly as if, in departing, he had but 
 stretched an elastic leash whose contraction drew him 
 back. Other birds (like the crow) that abide by the 
 same nest, keep an eye all the year round on the 
 family dwelling, or take possession of a hole in the 
 tree or a nook in the chimney as do the jackdaw and
 
 Home 1 5 
 
 starling. Those that annually change, building one 
 year in the larch and another in the holly, or forsaking 
 the primrose bank for the garden wall, move within 
 a narrow area and still have a fixed home. If you 
 catch a sparrow with a white feather in his wing (so 
 that you may know him the more easily) and carry 
 him to a distant county, you will find, if he stays 
 in the neighbourhood (as probably he will), that 
 the natives are continually chasing and pecking him, 
 and that as like as not his death is the end of your 
 experiment. Thus it would seem that not man alone 
 has mapped out the world in territory, and district, 
 and parish, but that his poor relations also have their 
 frontiers. Such phenomena as the occurrence on 
 small islands of species unknown to the neighbouring 
 continent is proof positive that a bird is naturally a 
 stay-at-home : that he uses the power of locomotion 
 only upon compulsion of hunger or cold. 
 
 The oak on the hillside is anchored by his roots ; 
 but the rabbits that play under his boughs, howbeit 
 free to wander at will, are really held within a small 
 circumference by their affection for the burrow where 
 they live. Their comrades, too, have each a centre 
 round which to circle. Your walk across the meadow 
 and over the cornfield and into the plantation winds 
 past a hundred homes. The field-mouse has his neat 
 and tiny hole, the diminutive paths and highways all 
 about it worn by the patter of his feet, and showing with 
 what slender freedom he walks when, daring weasel
 
 1 6 Spring 
 
 and owl, he ventures him forth. And so with vole 
 and shrew, with fox and otter and badger, with hedge- 
 hog and squirrel ; each has one spot that is home to 
 him, and whence he will not wander save under stress 
 of necessity. Indeed, the very river appears to be a 
 series of homes. The red-finned perches, that travel 
 up and down in shoals, invariably come back to the 
 deep hole close to the bank frayed by the beat of the 
 water. In the summer days of three generations an 
 aged and wary pike has held himself as if asleep in a 
 pool all dense with water-weed, in a stream so gentle 
 you may hardly discern the soft movement of the fin 
 that enables him to withstand its compulsion. What 
 angler has not essayed the great salmon that year after 
 year returns from the sea to his quarters in the smooth 
 pool by the willow ? The eel has his little holding of 
 mud, and the bull-trout his fixed domain. Whoever 
 knows a river knows that its tenants are as regularly 
 visible as the blue speedwells in the grass, the sedges 
 where the moor-hen makes her nest, or the holes in 
 the bank to which the sand-martin comes back with 
 Spring. The needs of life may drive them forth upon 
 adventure, but they would fain return to their original 
 abode. 
 
 The inevitable corollary is, that to live in most per- 
 fect adjustment to Nature, andindeepest sympathy with 
 her, is to be possessed most strongly by the passion 
 of home. During a lifetime, patriarchal in its term, 
 hundreds of new scenes and new ideas effect a lodgment
 
 Home 1 7 
 
 in the poet's mind ; yet to the last there is none so 
 strong and fresh and vivid as were garnered in boyhood, 
 and that gain in enchantment with the lapse of time till 
 the rugged elms, the house on the hillside, the ringing 
 copse and spinney all bathed in the soft ' moonlight 
 of memory/ take on a beauty beyond that of fairy- 
 land. An attentive examination of the work of any 
 student and lover of earth will show a remarkable 
 limitation. What is new and real and valuable in it 
 belongs to the few acres round about some woodland 
 cottage or some quiet parsonage : the rest is but com- 
 mentary and illustration ; for a man can do no more 
 than widen his first impressions. At a first glimpse 
 the world seems fairer than ever it will seem again. 
 The sun is more cheerful, the dark and drifting clouds 
 are more mysterious, the trees more stately, the 
 flowers of finer hue ; for time not only blunts the 
 edge of sense but explains the romance and reduces 
 conjecture to mere circumstance. The jaded present 
 seems to grow ever more hackneyed and more com- 
 monplace, but it casts a magic light on the past, blithen- 
 ing the dismal and brightening the dark into an ideal 
 and perfect glory. And it well may be that the love 
 of home in its final and supreme expression is only 
 our hypnotic response to its strong compulsiveness.
 
 1 8 Spring 
 
 ROBBERY FROM NATURE 
 
 AFTER a long, hard winter the calling voice of spring 
 sounds its clear invitation even to the town's inmost 
 heart Something whispers the news to many who 
 never saw dark elm-boughs rocking above wild snow- 
 drops whiter than the lingering snow, or gathered the 
 odorous violets brought by murmuring April to our 
 English lanes who do not know what it is to watch 
 the first glister of flossy catkins on the river willow, 
 the earliest tassels that flutter from the hazel twigs, 
 to hear the first love music of the lark, to welcome 
 the earliest primrose. But if life's stirring renewal is 
 lightly felt and soon forgotten by these, it is gladly 
 welcomed and cherished by the increasing number 
 of those who, although obliged by modern conditions 
 to inhabit the city, even amid the strife and din of its 
 streets, lapse occasionally into dreams of clear brook 
 .and green field, and have leisure and means to gratify 
 their longing. I refer neither to the few who compete 
 for Highland deer-forests and are familiar figures by 
 the fox-covert, whom spring calls to the salmon river 
 and autumn to heather, and stubble, and turnip ; nor 
 to the huge multitudes who on Bank Holiday rouse 
 the dappled deer of Epping Forest with the noise of 
 their merry-go-rounds, and people the beach at Mar- 
 gate, and swarm into every show-place within reach 
 of an excursion ; but to a class between, in whose
 
 Robbery from Nature 1 9 
 
 lives there is more of ease than toil, who in youth 
 were not trained to sport, and to whom taste, culture, 
 and perhaps the doctor also, say that the purest re- 
 creation of their idle moments awaits them out of 
 doors, in the open country. It is their custom to 
 steal away to the fields or the sea-beach, not at set 
 seasons, as when the may-fly is on the river, or when 
 autumnal leaves rival the pheasant's plumage in rich- 
 ness of tint, nor at set holidays, but at any time of the 
 year when circumstances admit and the sun offers a 
 pressing invitation. 
 
 But the restless Englishman in his idlest moments 
 longs for an occupation. It is a physical impossibility 
 for him to dangle his legs over a grassy river-bank 
 and do nothing more important than drop pebbles 
 into the running stream. If he care neither for golf 
 nor any kindred pastime, and if he does not shoot, 
 angle, row, sketch, garden, or give himself to books, 
 the chances are greatly in favour of his seeking amuse- 
 ment in the study of natural history ; for this pursuit, 
 the increasing popularity of which is a healthy reac- 
 tion from the too feverish city life of our time, offers 
 a combination of attractions. By investing the open- 
 air ramble with a purpose it removes the uneasy 
 twitchings of conscience absolute idleness is apt to 
 engender in men habitually busy. There are few so 
 constituted as in a perfectly aimless stroll to derive 
 a full and quiet pleasure from a merely passive sub- 
 mission to the caresses of Nature, and who, when she 
 
 C 2
 
 2O Spring 
 
 fans them with the soft breath of summer and smiles 
 from blue seas that reflect the blue of heaven, and 
 from white-crested wave and green swaying, waving 
 bough, and throat of bird and beast sings her tuneful 
 music, while the very moor is golden with gorse, and 
 every hedgeroot, and ditch, and waste corner has its 
 flower, can imagine no happier paradise. Nor is it 
 everyone who is able to take an interest in minute 
 and practically objectless observations ; who, for ex- 
 ample, at the season when dry rustling thickets have 
 not yet recovered from the dormancy of winter, are 
 content to sit on a scrubby knoll in the woodlands, 
 and while they watch the cloud shadows flicker and 
 pass over russet dead fern, and withered grass, count 
 the voices of the March wind how it rustles and 
 whispers in the low beech-leaves, spared by winter 
 storms, and travels with a long sigh through the 
 shrivelled herbage ; how it goes swish, swish, swish 
 among the bending tree-tops, and gives a long strong 
 sigh to the pollards ; how it laments on the height 
 and in the hollow circles in the faint beginning of 
 a roar that chokes and dies away ere its volume is 
 increased. Nay, it requires either a peculiar tempera- 
 ment or a long training to watch even the movements 
 of living things with quiet and continued patience. 
 There is close to a certain highway a still pond bor- 
 dered with oaks, and in spring it is as clear as to show 
 in sunny days every vein of the rotting leaves that 
 floor its bed. Being deflected by the trees, the wind
 
 Robbery from Nature 2 1 
 
 never blows evenly across its surface, but in capfuls, 
 whose swift course as they dart hither and thither at 
 various angles is marked in a chase of tiny darkling 
 ripples. It is an ideal ocean for schoolboys, and on 
 holiday and in playhour is white with the sails of their 
 mimic fleet ; for that very reason it is shunned by 
 the ordinary student of nature, who is sure they have 
 stoned or terrified to death every living inhabitant 
 of its water. But to-day they are conning Virgil and 
 Euclid, and look you at the circling wavelets like 
 those produced by the rise of a trout or the bobbing 
 of an angler's cork these never were made by the 
 wind. ^Approach, and in a moment all is still as was 
 the mere whereinto Sir Bedevere plunged Excalibur. 
 Wait a little, however, and a score of heads, each 
 jewelled with eyes of matchless beauty and ' freaked 
 with jet,' like Milton's pansy, are thrust cautiously up, 
 and a company of frogs with the full sweet low en- 
 treaty for which croaking is too harsh a term, recom- 
 mence their interrupted love-making. To the true 
 student of nature who, even to a mean degree, pos- 
 sesses some spark of the spirit that animated a 
 Jefferies or a Thoreau, each little comedy of courtship 
 played there is as interesting as is to old age the in- 
 nocent sweethearting of youth, or a wholesome drama 
 to dawning womanhood ; though perhaps of him, as 
 of Wordsworth's ideal poet, it may be said that he was 
 
 Contented if he might enjoy 
 
 The things which others understand.
 
 22 Spring 
 
 If an inference may be drawn from recent mani- 
 festations of taste, it would appear that there is an 
 increase in the number of those who find that, apart 
 from the thirst for knowledge and arrangement and 
 classification, there is an interest in life and matter 
 and motion, and that the green fields and towering 
 mountains and rushing waters of earth are not wholly 
 to be regarded as staging and scenery for human 
 action, or matter for analysis, and that even the low 
 form of worship Carlyle contemptuously set aside as 
 view-haunting is not to be altogether despised. 
 
 But the average man, even though he appreciate 
 this gift in others, desires for himself something more 
 active than mere contemplation, more definite and 
 positive than the observation, that is a reflection of 
 enjoyment rather than an accumulation of facts. And 
 so his devotion to nature takes the form of collecting, 
 wherein he at once finds a pastime that involves 
 no acute physical distress, a mild excitement with a 
 flavour of sport outlet for the universal human desire 
 to gather something, and a pleasing consciousness 
 that he is furthering science and amassing infor- 
 mation. 
 
 The collection of natural objects has advantages 
 over every form of the same passion. Who would 
 gather china or curios, books or pictures, is doomed 
 to wander in dingy streets, to rummage ancient shop 
 and stall, to frequent stuffy auction-rooms, and with 
 the enthusiasm for his hobby to cultivate also the
 
 Robbery from Nature 23 
 
 astuteness of a horse-coper and the close-fistedness 
 of a retail grocer. But Nature loads with unsought 
 gifts those who seek her treasures, and it is no poison- 
 ous wind, but the fresh sea-breeze, that blows upon 
 him who clambers the rocks and examines the tide- 
 pool for shells and algae ; ferns hide in the shadiest 
 and most sequestered nooks ; wild flowers and birds- 
 nests the very mention of them suggests 
 
 ... a season atween June and May, 
 Half prankt with spring, with summer half imbrowned. 
 
 He who flies at no higher game than moss and 
 lichen will still be led to ivied and crumbling ruins 
 and cpol dells where vivid green carpets the earth and 
 a cushion is thrown on the boulders. And whether 
 a man's pursuit carry him to the sea-beach or the 
 forest, to the river or the rill, it is crowned with 
 health. 
 
 Nevertheless, the desire to hoard and save and 
 gather that so often changes a bright enjoyable amuse- 
 ment into an insensate passion, lies in wait even for 
 the naturalist ; and what in others is a pardonable 
 weakness, becomes in him a crime against society a 
 bibliomaniac seized with a craze for filling his shelves 
 with curious books he hardly ever dreams of opening, 
 and whose hunger to acquire has swallowed up the 
 higher love of reading, though he be but a miser under 
 a different guise, is still of service to the community. 
 It is impossible for a book to have more than one 
 owner at a time, and it is an advantage that he should
 
 24 Spring 
 
 rescue it from obscure and unsafe keeping. But the 
 birds that twitter by dusty highway and woodland 
 path, the nests and eggs concealed by them among 
 the green boughs and tall grass, the heaths and grasses, 
 wild flowers and ferns, the mosses and fungi that 
 luxuriously garment the fertile land, and are never 
 wholly absent on the barest scrap of rock or dreariest 
 upland moor, are common property, and never 
 more delightful than in their appointed places. The 
 amateur of curios and the antiquary are able to pre- 
 serve and beautify and enhance the value of their 
 relics. It is not so with the out-of-door collector. A 
 preserved plant is beneath comparison with a living 
 one, an egg's more brilliant colours fade from the 
 moment it is blown, fur and plumage are slightly but 
 perceptibly dulled by death, and the most adept taxi- 
 dermist can show but one attitude of a creature whose 
 chiefest charm lies in change and movement. ' Well- 
 preserved specimens,' says an enthusiastic authority, 
 ' will last for ever and a day ; ' but what he means 
 is, that if assiduously preserved from defilement and 
 mutilation, and insects, a well-stuffed bird may possi- 
 bly last for a century. Long before that period 
 elapses it will become in the eyes of a lover of nature 
 (as distinguished from the student of natural history) 
 as unlike a living bird as a mummy is unlike a human 
 being. 
 
 Nature is so bountiful that without any perceptible 
 impoverishment she is able to fill the cabinets and
 
 Robbery from Nature 25 
 
 museums necessary to scientific research, to give the 
 artist enough of specimens to draw from, and even to 
 satisfy the amateur as long as his numbers do not 
 inordinately multiply, and he is content with the 
 result of his own exertions. But her riches are not 
 inexhaustible, and if the rage for collecting is allowed 
 to go on developing at its present rate, in a country 
 so densely populated as England, it must soon result 
 in a very serious diminution of our avi-fauna. It puts 
 as it were the finishing-touch upon the destruction 
 necessary to agriculture and game-preserving. We 
 drain mere and lake, and the bittern that boomed 
 from t ne Lincolnshire fens and the swampy regions 
 round the upper Isis and the Border mires and bogs is 
 driven from a home to which if he attempts to return 
 he is a target for the collector's gun ; even the very 
 curlew has to retreat as the ploughshare rives up the 
 waste land above which he loves to pipe his melan- 
 choly tune. As soon as ever a bird grows sufficiently 
 scarce to possess a money value, it is hardly possible 
 for it to escape ; not 'because amateurs are so numerous 
 and vigilant, but because the net of the dealer is spread 
 so wide. There is hardly a pot-hunter or shore-prowler 
 who does not know the value of a specimen, and it is a 
 common practice to blaze away on chance at any large 
 or unusual bird, whether it be a rare visitor like the night 
 heron or an estray from an ornamental water like the 
 tame swans of Lord Ducie's that fell victims to a zeal 
 for natural history. When abroad with his gun the
 
 26 Spring 
 
 amateur is not a whit more merciful. ' I must tell 
 you to shoot an unknown bird on sight ; it may give 
 you the slip in a moment and a prize may be lost/ 
 says the author of ' Field and General Ornithology ; ' 
 and there never was a precept more regularly acted 
 upon. The misfortune is, that so many of our visitors 
 are unknown in this sense. On the Cambridge and 
 Oxon hills, which once were visited by flights of 
 dotterel, this bird, when he halts for a day en route 
 to his hilly breeding-grounds, is annually shot as a 
 stranger, and will soon be driven from our shores. 
 Of the golden orioles one sees in provincial exhi- 
 bitions and museums, nearly all are in full breeding 
 plumage, and in some cases were confessedly slain 
 while constructing the hanging nest they attach to a 
 forked bough. 
 
 The worst sufferers, however, are undoubtedly the 
 birds of prey, those that of all others most enhance 
 the beauty of landscape ; for there is not in the realm 
 of wings anything more beautiful than the sight of a 
 white skua hawking along a rocky coast, a hen harrier 
 quartering the meadows like a setter, an eagle swoop- 
 ing from his eyrie. But the stuffer knows well that 
 for these he has a ready custom. An owl with beady 
 eyes looking down on a mouse in its talons, a 
 sparrow-hawk holding a young partridge, a jay or a 
 magpie making off with eggs these are representa- 
 tions of life dear to the heart of a certain type of 
 householder. ' I have seen,' says Mr. Aplin in his
 
 Robbery from Nature 27 
 
 'Birds of Oxfordshire,' 'as many as fifteen (barn-owls) 
 in a bird-stuffer's shop in May, all of which had been 
 recently received.' Nearly thirty years ago, when an 
 extraordinary plague of mice swarmed over the Border 
 farms, it was soon checked by the vast number of 
 carnivora attracted to the spot. Since then game- 
 keeper and collector have steadily pursued the work 
 of extermination, and as a result millions of little 
 pilferers have arisen to spoil husbandry. Sparrow 
 clubs and associations for suppressing wood-pigeons 
 do the work of hawk and falcon. So enormously 
 have starlings increased that it is almost certain they 
 will have to change their diet and steal grain and fruit 
 (which they will already do under stress of hunger), 
 instead of destroying grubs and insects ; just as the 
 rook, from the same cause, annually seems to delight 
 more in eggs and young birds. As to common linnet, 
 and finch, and thrush, and blackbird, there is no 
 gardener who does not wince under the increasing 
 extent of their depredations. 
 
 This state of things is, in large measure, due to the 
 inordinate slaughter of birds of prey ; the doubt is, 
 whether the game-keeper or the collector is the more 
 to blame for it. The former began by thinning down 
 the golden and white-tailed eagles, the osprey and 
 buzzards, the kite, merlin, and peregrine and sparrow- 
 hawk to a point after which a specimen is more or 
 less of a rarity ; and the other completes the work of 
 destruction. Probably the dealer is, in both cases, at
 
 28 Spring 
 
 the root of the evil, for he at once offers an unfailing 
 market for the sale and exchange of specimens, and 
 by his action puts a premium on the extermination 
 of species. On the other hand, there has been during 
 recent years a distinct growth in the number of those 
 who, with no eye to the beauties of nature and no 
 studious aim, have taken to collecting as a light and 
 elegant amusement. One often sees them at work on 
 the shore, on waste or common land, and on farms 
 where the landlords, since the passing of the Ground 
 Game Act, have abandoned the shooting. But, to 
 realise how injurious to wild life this latest fancy is, 
 it is necessary to turn to one of the numerous manuals 
 of instruction drawn up for the guidance of beginners. 
 ' How many birds of the same kind do you want ?' 
 is a question asked in one of the best and most 
 reasonable of these popular handbooks, and the 
 answer is : ' All you can get with some reasonable 
 limitations ; say fifty or a hundred of any but the 
 most abundant and widely diffused species.' To 
 attain this end, the novice is exhorted to begin ' by 
 shooting every bird you can,' and he is assured that 
 he will ' do very well ' if he can average twelve birds 
 a day during the season, although forty or fifty will 
 be bagged by the adept. While the sportsman only 
 counts heads, however, the ornithologist must look 
 to variety ; and unless he has made a rare species 
 still rarer, has no ground for pride. On that account 
 his season is in autumn and in spring, when the dif-
 
 Robbery from Nature 29 
 
 ferent migrants are come ; the time of nest-building 
 having peculiar attractions. If strange eggs are dis- 
 covered, it is generally possible to entrap the dam 
 with a noose of horsehair placed over the nest, and 
 the eminent ornithologist already quoted is strong on 
 the advantage of securing females. ' Bird-life is too 
 beautiful a thing to destroy to no purpose/ he says, 
 and then, after quoting ' Not a sparrow falleth to the 
 ground without His notice,' he proceeds in the next 
 sentence, ' I should not neglect to speak particularly 
 of the care to be taken to secure full suites of females,' 
 and shows the great advantages to science of getting 
 them.in the breeding season, and thus science con- 
 spires with fashion and game-preserving to rob our 
 English fields of their natural inhabitants. 
 
 THE GULL POND 
 
 STANDING on one of the lonely Orcadian shores on 
 a summer day, I have often thought that of all things 
 winged sea-birds offer the most perfect type of wild 
 and happy freedom. The cruising gannet, high in 
 air one moment, the next dropping like a stone upon 
 his prey beneath the water ; the grey gull winging 
 hither and thither on mighty pens or riding buoyant 
 on the seas ; the diver ready between the sighting of 
 a gun and the pulling of a trigger to dive down where
 
 30 ' Spring 
 
 the drowned shipmen and the broken argosies and 
 the mermaids are ; even the greedy, idle cormorant, 
 lazily rocking in the bay all these seem kith and 
 kin to breeze and billow and sunbeam, reckless as 
 these and as these undominated. There is no passing 
 for this fancy within earshot of the deep ; but it fades 
 and vanishes inland. If the gull ever lapses into 
 commonplace it is in early spring, when he joins the 
 rooks in that busy, fluttering, piebald crowd that 
 follows the ploughman's furrow. Even Mr. Swinburne 
 could scarce get up a rapture over a ' grey brother ' 
 gobbling worms as an alderman gobbles early peas. 
 
 Yet there is at least one sea-bird, the black-headed 
 gull, that carries the charm of ocean to his retreat 
 inland. To some two or three districts he comes in 
 thousands at the call of spring, and for a few months 
 a common pond not large enough to be dignified 
 with the name of lake is transformed by him into 
 a sight so beautiful it never fails to surprise and 
 .enchant the lucky wretch who comes upon it unawares. 
 He is listening for the first crake of the landrail, or 
 delighting in the spreading limes and beeches of a 
 roadside park, when gradually his ears are filled with 
 the long withdrawing roar of the sea on a gravel 
 beach. There is no mistaking it. Ceaselessly it goes 
 on, not harsh nor yet musical, rising and falling, till 
 he looks to see at the next turn a long low shore, the 
 curled waves falling on it with a break, and the broken 
 water running murmurous along the strand. Far
 
 The Gull Pond 31 
 
 other is the sight that waits him. A myriad black 
 and white things are fluttering and calling over a 
 pond of many islands ; their plumage is a-sheen with 
 love and spring ; their voices, trained amid rock and 
 breaker, are harmonised into such an inimitable echo 
 of the sea's music as might convince the most doubting 
 that, even as the piping wind has been the music- 
 master of lesser songsters, so the mew has learned his 
 note from the voices of his native element. Wave 
 a white handkerchief till all but the most maternal 
 of mothers have sprung with a gleam into the noisy 
 circle, and you might imagine a nor'-easter was driving 
 his white water-hounds upon a rocky coast. Sit down 
 quietly on a tree-stump till the excitement subsides, 
 and lo ! the noise is diminished to that of summer 
 waves on a sandy shore. Except in the dead of 
 night it is never absolutely stilled. There is such a 
 constant coming and going, a bickering and gossiping 
 and jabbering, as makes you think of the motion of a 
 bee-hive and the riot of a rookery. 
 
 The gull is more picturesque than the rook, but he 
 has not that black citizen's sturdy and staying quali- 
 ties. You may shoot a rookery till you think that 
 scarce a fledgling can be left ; and yet the parents 
 who hate and fear gunpowder with a peculiar intensity 
 will reappear next season and brave it all over 
 again. A gull does not lend itself twice to an affront 
 of that sort. Many old haunts have been forsaken for 
 what the rooks would think no reason at all. For
 
 32 Spring ^ 
 
 instance, if the winter has been wet and the nesting 
 places are covered with water, explorers will come to 
 see what things look like, and then carry the colony 
 elsewhere ' it may be for years, and it may be for 
 ever.' Again, the female gull favours her human 
 acquaintances up to a certain point. Long ago, when 
 landed proprietors were less ' cultured ' than now, and 
 looked on a parcel of unshootable gulls as less an 
 ornament than a nuisance, it was customary to farm 
 the pond to those who sold the young and eggs, which 
 are very pretty eating. Now, Minnehaha a render- 
 ing more free than accurate of the scientific Larus 
 .Ridibundus seems up to a certain point to see the 
 justice of this : not being Irish, she does not expect 
 to live rent free, and she will therefore go so far as to 
 lay three sets of eggs a season one for the landlord, 
 one for the hungry birds-nester, and a third which 
 she thought to hatch. But, as usual, the middleman 
 turned out a rack-renter, and if she had gone on laying 
 all the summer it would have been the same ; so 
 Minnehaha took the pet, and never came back again. 
 Another scare was more effectual still. One spring I 
 was fishing in a little mere among the Cheviots, which 
 twenty or thirty years ago was always at that season 
 crowded with gulls. Not one comes now, though many 
 devices have been tried to bring them : eggs having 
 even been hatched there in the hope that, being 
 natives, the young migrants would return. Here it 
 was not a case of over-flooding. The place was fancied
 
 The Gull Pond 33 
 
 by the mallard (long strings of whose flappers may 
 still be seen swimming among the reeds), and the wild 
 duck was a temptation to the gunner, and the gunner 
 scared away the gull. A strict embargo must be laid 
 alike on guest and gamekeeper if the visitors from the 
 sea are not to have their feelings hurt. 
 
 In consequence of this the gull pond is a refuge 
 and gathering-place for many kinds of water-birds, 
 and the gull suffers somewhat among them on account 
 of the bold, frank, fearless ways he has learned in the 
 course of his seafaring life. The duck and the water- 
 hen and the bald-pated coot, which are here in im- 
 mense- numbers, take some trouble to conceal their' 
 nests, even if they do not go so far as to cover their 
 eggs with weed like the cunning little dabchick, or 
 dull the brightness of them every time they go out ; 
 but the gull twists sedge and grass and reed into a 
 nest conspicuous among the scores of others round 
 it on the bare earth, lays her eggs therein, and then 
 composedly and in view of all men sets about hatch- 
 ing them. More than that, although being strange 
 to trees she seldom perches on them, let her but fancy 
 the grass of the park and she goes and sits there, not 
 watchful and wary, and ready to run like a water-rail, 
 or fly away like a duck at the first alarm, but with 
 a noble composure ; though, if you walk along the 
 further shore of the pond, and along the edge of the 
 wood and so to the gorse, you will find many a heap 
 of bones and white feathers to tell of the vixen's 
 
 D
 
 34 Spring 
 
 passage, and what the nature of her prey when at early 
 dusk she left her brood to prowl round pond and 
 covert. The flavour of a water-bird has a peculiar 
 zest for Reynard and his cubs, or he would hardly 
 leave the well-stocked warren and the pheasantry for 
 the river sedges and the bulrushes by the mere. And 
 his taste is shared by the weasel, who will stealthily 
 leap on the mallard's back as she floats inshore, and 
 take a ducking for his pains if he cannot get at her 
 throat before she dives. 
 
 In the quiet pond breeding goes on apace, and 
 soon grey nestlings are seen swimming in the parent's 
 wake, with tiny, dumpy flappers and long trains of 
 coots and those handfuls of living soot which come 
 from the nest of the moor-hen. The Spring moisture 
 and the hind's toil bring to the surface millions of grubs, 
 which keep the gull's larder always fully plenished ; 
 and ere the bare fields are quite hidden by green corn 
 and grass, when the rook begins to feel a difficulty 
 in foraging for her clamant young, and the stagnant 
 water is filled with weeds, and the islands are rank 
 with vegetation ; when bumpkins meeting on the road 
 cry out against the drought and the heat, then the 
 gull's sojourn at her inland haunt is well-nigh over. 
 The movement seaward is not made suddenly or in 
 combination. When the breeding season is done, the 
 black heads lose something of their brilliance, and 
 with the burnish goes the love of dalliance. The grey 
 fledglings, which do not achieve the dignity of a black
 
 The Gull Pond 35 
 
 cap till the following Spring, grow daily stronger ; and 
 one fine morning, after a little preliminary exercising, 
 a family will extend its ramble for a score of miles to 
 where a cool breeze is driving the white-fringed water 
 over sand and shoal ; one household follows another, 
 as each is relieved from pressing domestic duties, till 
 the last mother is found vainly trying to coax her 
 belated brood to forsake the unnatural company in 
 grass and thicket for that of the kittiwakes and divers 
 and the freedom of the coast ; and if you come that 
 way to joy in the voice of the sea, you will only hear 
 the landrail crying from the park, the pheasant's 
 screanr from the thicket, the loud quack of the mal- 
 lard, and the shriek of the bald-pate. Not till the 
 March winds bring back the violet will the lost music 
 sound again. 
 
 THE STOCK-DOVE 
 
 LET it be said in the stock-dove's praise, that not 
 by obtrusiveness, nor over-multiplication, nor the 
 villainy of pillage has he made himself a nuisance. 
 Whether he is or is not thriving outrageously is what 
 none knows, though appearances are in favour of his 
 prosperity. White of Selborne, in spite of diligent 
 inquiry, never seems to have found where he breeds, 
 nor did his correspondents either ; and as it is now 
 not difficult to discover his nests, the fact would seem 
 to indicate an increase of numbers. But as, unlike 
 
 D 2
 
 36 Spring 
 
 his cousin the cushat, he is a regular migrant, and while 
 he is with us will hide among the tall beeches, feed 
 with a crowd of relatives, and altogether live a life of 
 ease and retirement, none can tell if his times are good 
 or bad. He is the least distinguished of doves. 
 Many country folk, and some sportsmen, believe with 
 their forefathers of a hundred years ago that he has 
 no separate existence that his name is but an alias of 
 the cushat. It is like enough, indeed, that the rural 
 legend of the cushat's song has been developed from 
 this very confusion of identity. Long ago, it says, the 
 cushat nested among nettles or grass on the ground, 
 while the partridge abode in trees. One day, however, 
 two cows trampled the cushat's eggs to pieces. A 
 Welshman came and drove one beast out of the 
 pasture, and the cushat, as he flitted to his new home 
 in the tree-tops, sang and still sang to him, ' tak two 
 coos, Taffy-tak.' I may remark that this onomatopoeia 
 is far truer to the sound than Gawin Douglas's in his 
 exquisite description of the ' gentilldow,' which is 
 simply, ' I come bidder to wow.' That, however, is by 
 the way. What I wanted to remark is that this notion 
 of the cushat building on the ground is not so mad as 
 it seems, for that the stock-dove does so regularly. As 
 the two birds resemble each other closely, the country- 
 folk would naturally conclude that the cushat it was 
 which had his home below. 
 
 Here, indeed, the stock-dove differs from all the 
 rest of the family. You seek the ring-dove's nest in
 
 The Stock- Dove 37 
 
 a tall hedge, a low fir, or a holly ; and, if the district 
 is the right one, there is nothing wonderful in coming 
 upon the equally fragile and slovenly house of the 
 turtle. Again, the rock-dove, like his domestic de- 
 scendant, loves a dark corner to build his cot of twigs 
 and grass in, and on this point he and the stock-dove 
 are more or less at one. In the books the latter bird 
 is usually described as building in hollows of trees, 
 like the starling and the jackdaw of many districts ; 
 and this is doubtless true. Supposing, however, that 
 I wanted a stock-dove's egg, I should not go to the 
 forest, but to a well-remembered spot where as a boy 
 with shame be it spoken I often did that crime 
 which Shenstone's mistress would not pardon : 
 
 For he ne'er could be true, she averred, 
 That could rob a poor bird of its young, 
 
 And I blessed her the more when I heard 
 Such tenderness fall from her tongue. 
 
 I know an old quarry on a lone hillside where the 'red ' 
 (or refuse) has streamed down the brae and been inter- 
 cepted here and there by whins. Above is a wooded 
 knoll, planted with fir-trees, stubbornly upright though 
 gnarled and twisted by long sequences of nor'-easters, 
 and with one or two stunted oaks and elms in the 
 shelter. Below, the neat and hedgerowed fields stretch 
 far across the slow stream, winding in and out like a 
 serpent of silver, now between arable and pasture, and 
 anon fringed with willows or half-hid in woodland. Be- 
 yond the moorland rises into a hill and then slopes to
 
 38 Spring 
 
 the sea, while a crescent of mountains half-shuts the 
 landscape in. Here in the season you may always 
 count on finding a stock-dove's nest in the rough grass 
 on the brae-side under a whin -bush ; but he prefers 
 better hiding than bare earth and a shrub will give, 
 and he will take advantage of any cleft or excavation 
 in the rocks, frequently choosing (like the jackdaw) a 
 disused rabbit-hole, into which he penetrates about an 
 arm's length. Many people think his preference is 
 for timber, and that he only takes to the ground in 
 default of better nesting ; but this I do not believe. 
 There are trees all over the district already referred to ; 
 ashes and elms in the hedgerows, oaks and beeches 
 singly or in clumps on every windy knoll and waste 
 corner, limes and plane-trees and chestnuts in the parks, 
 strips, plantations and spinneys everywhere, phea- 
 sant covers where the young firs are tall enough for 
 cushat, innumerable old woods and a river-side forest. 
 And yet the stock-dove chooses the ground to nest 
 on ; apparently from a freak as unintelligible as that 
 which will sometimes, even in close proximity to cre- 
 viced tree or ruin, cause the jackdaw to forsake both 
 for a rabbit-hole. 
 
 When the eggs are found it is seen that they do 
 not materially differ from those of the wood-pigeon. 
 As is the way of doves there are only two, which seems 
 to show how strong among wild birds is convention. 
 There seems no reason in the nature of things why 
 two should be the limit. If the eggs are taken early
 
 The Stock-Dove 39 
 
 in the season, the mother will produce two more ; if 
 a third is added to the original couple, and it happens 
 to hatch out about the same time they do, all three will 
 be reared, but there she stops. Two is the tradition, 
 two is the proper thing, two is respectability, and she 
 knows it. As for her young, they are easily tamed 
 as cushats, and like these grow very bold and familiar 
 if well treated. It is not an impossible feat to teach 
 them to pass out and in the dovecote, or breed in 
 captivity, but they do not mate with the tame 
 pigeon ; in spite of the once current belief that as- 
 signed them the position now universally conceded 
 to th wild blue rock of being the original of 
 our domestic pigeons. 
 
 Less is known of the stock-dove's habits than 
 about those of far rarer birds, the fact being that only 
 an ornithologist has any great inducement to hunt him 
 up. If he were on the game list, or if he made into 
 delicate pie, things might be different, for sportsmen 
 and pot-hunters would make it their business to find 
 out all about him. Not being so, he is allowed to live 
 what is practically a life of peace. When he does get 
 into trouble the cause is usually bad company, and 
 the time after the breeding season. While living en 
 famille he is as fond of privacy as the typical English 
 lord. But though too conscientious altogether to 
 neglect the domestic duties, he evidently regards them 
 much as Sir Thomas Browne did, and performs them 
 with as much rapidity as is consistent with self-respect
 
 40 Spri; 
 
 He shows little of the bridegroom's impatience. Ere 
 he has chosen his mate the cuckoo is sounding his 
 clear call as he flies from copse to copse, the sky-blue 
 eggs of the hedge-sparrow have chipped and yielded 
 callow birdlets, and the voice of the rook has hoarsened 
 with love. He runs up a house that it is no libel to call 
 jerry-built, and I fancy that, unlike the cushat, which 
 breeds almost as frequently as a house pigeon, he 
 thinks once a year quite enough for this sort of thing. 
 The cushat it is that delights the countryman with 
 the rumour of his passion during so many of the 
 months ; at any rate it is rare to find a stock-dove's 
 nest either very early or very late. 
 
 When nesting is over he gives himself up to that 
 placid enjoyment of life for which he thinks he was 
 born. It would fare better with him, however, if he 
 had not the habit of joining himself to lawless bands 
 of cushats, and getting embroiled in the ceaseless war 
 which the farmer wages upon them. Were he but 
 content to share the mast on the beech-trees with 
 them, all were well with him ; but he must needs join 
 their forays in the corn land and come home to 
 roost with them at night, and the shooter, waiting at 
 a likely corner of the field with two or three dead 
 decoys (their heads propped on sticks), or watching 
 under a favourite pine for the general homing, is at 
 no pains to distinguish nicely between him and his 
 friends. What is it to him whether his quarry has or 
 has not a white ring on neck ? or that he is smaller
 
 The Stock-Dove 41 
 
 than a cushat should be ? or that he wears dark 
 spots on his oar feathers ? Then the hour is 
 usually dusk ; the stock-dove is just about the size of 
 a Norwegian wood-pigeon newly landed on British 
 shores ; and so it often happens that he falls, when 
 recognised he had perhaps been spared. The farmer's 
 feud does not extend to him at all, or would not do so 
 if he were better known ; for to him is referable much 
 of the good with which the cushat is credited. It is 
 known that the latter is an inveterate thief, loving the 
 husbandman's corn as nothing but the forbidden thing 
 is loved ; but the stock-dove has a genuine relish for 
 wild mustard-seed and other pests of the field which his 
 cousin will only eat under compulsion. If you doubt 
 it, shoot a couple in the act of feeding together, or, 
 better still, shoot half-a-dozen of both species ; and 
 when you open their crops, you will find that 
 in the same field they have elected to feed on 
 different stuffs. Of course that is speaking roughly ; 
 for what one will peck at so will the other. 
 
 Another proof of the stock-dove's cultivated habit 
 is his dislike of a British winter. A rough, a coarse, 
 a democratic cushat may choose as he will to shiver 
 on naked fence and icy bough, to pine for hunger and 
 die of cold in our wild climate ; but when the wind 
 begins to breathe the chill of the snow, when the water in 
 the turnip-drills turns to ice and foraging grows diffi- 
 cult, then does the stock-dove hie him away to his 
 winter resort in the milder parts of Europe. There
 
 4 2 Spring 
 
 doth he abide in comfort till the something in the air 
 tells him that life is reviving to the familiar wood ; that 
 the golden whin bloom is gladdening the hillside ; that 
 spring is again alert in grass and tree. But even here 
 he goes by no rule. Some members of his family 
 stay the year round with us, and probably some that 
 leave us never come back, for wild pigeons of all 
 kinds are averse from ' flitting ' when they are com- 
 fortable. 
 
 IN THE GARDEN 
 
 THE ' Complete Gardener ' still remains unwritten 
 on the bookshelves of dreamland ; but that it has not 
 been accomplished is due to no want of trying. What- 
 ever the literary wants of the gardener may be, whether 
 practical information about his craft or poetical musing 
 over it such as he might read in his summer-house, 
 there is an extensive library wherefrom he may 
 choose. But the one excellent book the volume that 
 will instruct the amateur and delight him ; that will 
 be to him encyclopaedia and Shakespeare in one ; that 
 will tell him when to delve, and sow, and graft, and 
 prune, how to cross, and rear, and fertilise, and yet 
 preserve the poetry of lawn, and border, and shrubbery ; 
 that will instruct him as to the duties of the changing 
 seasons, and reproduce in its pages the spirit of the 
 pageant of nature, is still, if I mistake not, to be 
 numbered among things unaccomplished.
 
 In the Garden 43 
 
 As a childless man watching robust youth at play 
 discovers a pensive delight in imagining the son who 
 never can be his, so the gravel walk and the rose- 
 bushes suggest many a visionary plan of this quite 
 impossible volume. It is not to be a book for use or 
 consecutive reading, but one to lie in that nook of the 
 summer-house where a thumbed Chaucer and a worn 
 ' Decameron ' adjoin the jar of tobacco, and provide 
 entertainment when the rushing thunder-shower is 
 pelting the green leaves and making a babbling 
 waterway of the path. The binding should be of strong 
 leather, and the type large and pleasant Pictures 
 and illustrations there will be none, but the head-pieces 
 and the tail-pieces are to be ingeniously devised and 
 formed of English material. Blossomy twigs of pear 
 and plum tree like Aaron's rod that budded, an apple 
 shining ruddy among withering leaves, sprays of roses 
 half-opened, tall sunflowers, and hollyhocks, and 
 dahlias, beds of fragrant pink and gilliflower, a line 
 of daisies white and red, pure snowdrop and yellow 
 crocus flouting at winter, fair lilies and daffodils such 
 as Herrick loved, making a glory of Spring ; drawings 
 of these not with garish and obtrusive splendour, but 
 modestly, are to be laid across the top of the page. 
 For the bottom I would ravish field, and wood, and 
 river-side. Golden whin with a grey linnet's nest, 
 ' the broom, the yellow broom,' a mossy crab and 
 trailing mistletoe, cowslip and wild marigold and 
 violet, forget-me-nots blowing on the fallow where the
 
 44 Spring 
 
 pewits are, poppies like red bubbles of blood on 
 October stubble, wild mustard showing its clear 
 yellow in the green corn ; not forgetting the dande- 
 lion, the crow's foot, the fennel and the fern ; these 
 from Nature's own fair garden, Nature who weaves a 
 chaplet of bramble flowers for the thicket and clothes 
 the desolate hills in a purple garment of heath, and 
 fills quiet lanes with the sweet briar's fragrance. 
 
 In further illustration the ' Complete Gardener ' 
 shall be as full of quotation as old Burton's ' Anatomy.' 
 Carlyle praising that supreme tribute to the lilies that 
 ' toil not neither do they spin ; ' Lord Tennyson's 
 brief pictures from the ' swamps and hollows grey ' of 
 his native county : Jefferies dwelling on a memory of 
 Coate ; Mr. Andrew Lang translating : 
 
 April pride of murmuring 
 
 Winds of Spring, 
 That beneath the winnowed air 
 Trap with subtle nets and sweet 
 
 Flora's feet, 
 Flora's feet, the fleet and fair ; 
 
 these, and many other moderns, but more that are old, 
 shall quicken discernment and sharpen vision till 
 every leafy curve and flowery tint is revealed in utmost 
 beauty. Yet it may not be forgotten that gardening 
 is a secluded and cloistered pleasure, and by a sober 
 melancholy differentiated from the rude and gross 
 joys of fashion. When the orchard grass is white 
 with fallen blossoms and the leaves all green are
 
 In the Garden 45 
 
 quivering to the Spring wind's caress, and the budding 
 plants are modestly rejoicing in the first kisses of the 
 sun ; like a white cloud on a Summer sea a pensive 
 moral shall play over, darkening yet deepening the 
 spectator's sympathy with the glowing palpitating life 
 that is bursting from every pore of earth. How like 
 to human beings, he may exclaim as he thinks of 
 Winter and death, and recalls the melancholy epi- 
 taph : 
 
 Earth goeth on the earth, 
 Glistening like gold ; 
 
 Earth cometh to the earth, 
 Sooner than it wold. 
 
 As, with regret that he should shorten their lives 
 by a single day, he tenderly cuts them for his table, he 
 shall with the aid of George Herbert suck melancholy 
 from the act : 
 
 But him did beckon to the flowers, and they 
 By noon most cunningly did steal away, 
 And withered in my hand. 
 
 With Herrick too he shall exclaim, 'Fair daffodils, we 
 weep to see you haste away so soon,' and thus care- 
 fully attune his soul to the delicate note of mourning 
 that runs like a thread through the happiest cords of 
 nature. 
 
 An advantage of dealing with an imaginary book 
 is that you need imagine only those portions that 
 would catch the eye of an accomplished skimmer as 
 he idly turned the pages. It is a form of authorship
 
 46 Spring 
 
 that involves no hackwork. Wherever solid informa- 
 tion or instruction is required you leave a blank page 
 to be filled in on the next rainy day, and then why 
 then ' To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow ' 
 as dreaming Coleridge wrote at the break of an un- 
 ended poem. When I should be deep in detail 
 thought wanders away to fashion an ideal outfit for 
 the complete gardener. 
 
 Who will follow the calling of Adam worthily 
 shall begin by loving flowers as a scholar loves books, 
 not for the glory of having a great collection, still less 
 for an unintelligent or semi-commercial pride in what 
 is rare and expensive, but for themselves, their fra- 
 grance, their beauty, their foliage, or for the many 
 curious reproductive and other gifts given them by 
 Nature. His enthusiasm should never pass into zea- 
 lotry ; he should be astride of his hobby, not ridden 
 by it. He is a Sybarite and cuts the new-blown 
 roses to make a pot-pourri as delicate as that exhaled 
 by the Bishop de Vannes ; he shall be a gourmet and 
 prepare his own mushrooms in the manner laid down 
 by the Baron de Brisse. There is much else that he 
 cannot avoid being. Botany is inseparable from his 
 craft. Entomology is of the very essence of it, since 
 Darwin and others have so fully explained that 
 ' where the bee sucks ' the fertilisation or hybridisa- 
 tion what we call the origination of new species 
 is taking place. 'Even at night,' says a pleasant 
 American writer, ' in fragrant gardens, in lonely
 
 In the Garden 47 
 
 meadows, in the most sequestered woods the process 
 of insect fertilisation goes on continuously.' The 
 great hawk-moths flit in the early moonlight from one 
 white flower to another ; the rapid Lepidoptera, chased 
 by the bats, drink from the fragrant chalices, or in 
 a playful hunt across the stream tempt the trout 
 from his hiding-place. ' The flowering period of my 
 Japanese honeysuckle,' adds he, ' I have always found 
 a certain index to the commencement of night-fish- 
 ing.' If the pursuit of science tempt him further, he 
 may study the mysterious alchemy by which vegeta- 
 tion transforms earth's rocks and juices into vivid 
 leaf afid nodding flower, draws up the hard flint 
 to support the green corn-stalks, and in decay itself 
 discovers anew the materials of life. 
 
 It is perhaps more to his sorrow than his pride 
 that the complete gardener must be something of an 
 ornithologist. The slender joy of watching the chaf- 
 finch on the apple-tree, or hearing the owl cry in 
 moonlight, is more than counterbalanced by the 
 misery of having to wage continual war upon the 
 little thief who carries no purse, for he steals all he 
 wants, the prolific and impudent sparrow, ' the rook 
 down in the devil's book in roundhand,' and the host 
 of pretty torments who play havoc with the flower- 
 beds and the early peas. The bullfinch ruins his buds 
 and the merle his strawberries, while the very swallows 
 come and build in the chimneys and spoil his medi- 
 tation with their twittering. Yet the thrush piping
 
 48 Spring 
 
 on a wet spray after a shower, the robin whistling^ 
 amid leaves as brown as his wing, even the frog's 
 croaking rouse his enthusiasm as does the music of 
 the cicada, 
 
 Charmer of longing, councillor of sleep ! 
 The corn-field's chorister, 
 Whose wings to music whir. 
 
 These, however, are but incidental and circumjacent 
 delights of gardening. The true Adamite glories in 
 colour as a painter does, but his flowers are not massed 
 nor his blooms mingled to tattoo earth's bosom with 
 a picture ; he has delicate nostrils, but the object of 
 his life is not to produce fragrance ; he is a philosopher, 
 a poet, and a student of science, but only in his spare 
 hours, that he may have matter to reflect upon as he 
 rests from toil or smokes the last and most delicious 
 evening pipe in his shrubbery. Beyond and above 
 all these, there is a strong and inexplicable charm in 
 the art itself. Paint, and music, and old songs have 
 their wizardry ; when clouds scud before the western 
 wind the gun and the rod have a spite in them ; but 
 the sure and quiet magic of the garden, the necro- 
 mancy of life and death as it is accomplished there, 
 is to those who are called the most potent of all.
 
 49 
 
 PHILOMEL 
 
 To realise the strange and almost horrible mingling 
 of beauty and squalor, of passion and indifference, 
 of harmony and discord, that composes into life, there 
 is no more helpful experience than to stand between 
 eleven and twelve at night ' list'ning the nightingale ' 
 on the skirts of Epping Forest. In cherry orchards, 
 when the moon shines so brightly that leaf and flower 
 are as easily distinguished as in broad daylight, you 
 think ypu find in him all the rejoicing merriment that 
 Coleridge found ; and to hear him in some other en- 
 vironment is to agree with Milton that he was ' most 
 musical, most melancholy.' But to come upon him in 
 the wood, out of which he was banished for warbling 
 in, the lonely places where St. Edward used to 
 pray, is to recognise that both the sorrow and the joy 
 were in the listening ear. Here your mind rejects 
 the legendary fancy that he is lamenting or rejoicing 
 his fate, here you can not figure him as a human 
 spirit in the likeness of a brown bird. 
 
 Within the radius of a few miles is many a green, 
 unvisited coppice, ringed in with fresh, cool ferns, 
 where the buds are breaking on the sweetbriar, and 
 the foliage is virgin and undefiled ; but in these you 
 might stand for ever without hearing note of his. Yet 
 here, in these woodlands bedraggled and shamed by 
 
 E
 
 50 Spring 
 
 the neighbourhood of the great city, his melody rings 
 from a hundred corners. 
 
 Call and challenge and retort are carolled from 
 polluted thicket to prostituted grove, from degraded 
 bush to trodden and squalid undergrowth. Nay 
 (you say), but at night the tall trees are as majestic 
 and mysterious near the city as out in the wild, with 
 none but the visitant winds to mark their great 
 transfiguration. But you shall not ravish yourself to 
 Arcady by this trick of fancy. It is past eleven ; the 
 suburban public-houses are closed ; the paths that lead 
 by your chorister's perch are dotted with reeling 
 drunkards some exclaiming within a few yards of 
 
 him that it is ' three miles to Stratford,' others 
 
 profaning the still and solemn night with an inevit- 
 able refrain ; a cartload of girls from a bean-feast, a 
 tipsy picnic party, a horn-blowing coach-and-four, a 
 brass band very much out of tune, a concertina kept 
 going by a blunt unsteady touch, the puffing and 
 clanking of a train all these are here, and all these 
 bear each his testimony that there is a mighty difference 
 between the skirts of Epping and the haunted groves 
 of Arden ! But the nightingales do not know it. 
 Experience has taught that there is nothing to fear 
 from these strayed revellers, and they sing on indiffer- 
 ent as the wind. And if yourself be able, you also, 
 to put off your interest in things external : if you will 
 be content for a time neither to anticipate nor to 
 remember, neither to sorrow nor to rejoice, but to
 
 Philomel 5 1 
 
 accept the noisy drunkard and the shining stars as 
 phenomena exciting neither sadness nor exultation ; 
 you shall soon discover that the merriment, as the 
 melancholy, of Philomel is but a fancy bred of fable. 
 Of all the epithets applied to him by poets, that one 
 of Shelley's, the ' voluptuous ' nightingale, is the most 
 expressive and exact He exults not, neither grieves, 
 nor sings he from the skylark's joy in being. The 
 least fanciful might be forgiven for imagining that 
 the wind, blowing hither and thither, rustles a sigh 
 of regret out of the summer pines ; that there is 
 ' lamentation and mourning and woe ' in the song of 
 breaking waves. It is not so with the nightingale. 
 His merest ' whit- whit- whit ' in the bush beside one } 
 gives one precisely the same feeling of arrested atten- 
 tion that is imparted by the entrance of a great actor. 
 One low and almost plaintive call he has, as it were a 
 signal to some lost mate ; but the very first note of 
 the prelude to his ' amorous descant ' tells you at once 
 that here is the richest of bird voices, here the perfec- 
 tion of bird music. There is no mistaking its intent. 
 The minstrel celebrates no victory, bewails no loss. 
 It is but a sonnet to his mistress' eyebrow. He sits 
 in a dark bush close beside her, and, with an energy 
 surprising as the sustained magic of the song, he 
 breathes out his dear entreaty and desire. For her 
 alone is the music. From some not distant thicket 
 pour the notes of a rival, whom the strains thrill with 
 jealousy. He stops as if to listen ; the other swain
 
 5 2 Spring 
 
 retorts in a splendid burst ; his defiance -brings out 
 a clear, melodious, wrathful rejoinder ; the other 
 serenader puts his whole fierce little soul into his retort ; 
 the wood is alive and ringing with challenge, and pas- 
 sion, and disdain. So rapt is the singer, so drunk with 
 his own wild passion, he pays no heed to noises that 
 at another time might fright him into silence. He is 
 ever one of the least timorous of birds, and to-night, 
 with this business on hand, he is as heedless of the 
 human noisomeness about him as the stars are or 
 the trees. 
 
 Ornithologists tell you he sings by day as well, but 
 that his voice is drowned in the roar of waking life. 
 This is true only here and there. In a certain garden 
 I know, he will be perfectly quiet till about eight of 
 the May and the young June evenings, when he will 
 whistle a call or two, and is hushed again till dark. 
 My experience is that he is at his best towards mid- 
 night When the last toss-pot has gone home, and a 
 hush as of death has fallen on brake and cover ; when 
 the mystery of the trees is at its deepest, and the sky 
 is like a plain glittering with camp-fires, there is an 
 exquisite and sober joy in traversing the woodland 
 dusks alone save for the instancy of his desire. To 
 describe the song were impossible. Attempts to re- 
 duce it to score are foredoomed to failure. No human 
 being who has not heard it could ever so repeat 
 Marco Betton's ' Tiouou, tiouou, tiouou,' and the rest, 
 as to get the faintest conception of it. To hear a
 
 Philomel 53 
 
 flock of waterfowl flying high and viewless in the dark, 
 with cries that seem born of ice and ocean : that is to 
 catch a true expression of melancholy. A mounting 
 skylark seems to find ecstasy in singing for singing's 
 sake, and to find it all the year through, with but the 
 shortest interlude for moulting. But the nightingale's 
 is only a tale of fiery and concentrated passion. He 
 does not rove like the cuckoo, proclaiming his enjoy- 
 ment. At the mating season he begins, and he ends 
 when nesting is over. May is the month of months 
 for him. Year after year he comes back to the same 
 grove ; and, listening, you may well believe that the 
 same twig is his perch for hours. Sunlight inspires 
 him not, nor food ; only darkness and desire. If you 
 suck melancholy from his note, be sure it is but the 
 burden of your own sadness you are casting upon him ; 
 and if his effect be one of merriment, then are you 
 revelling in the laughter of your own glad heart. 
 
 KNAPPING FLINTS 
 
 IN days when the schoolboy, whose practice has 
 been limited to rooks and rabbits, deems a muzzle- 
 loader antediluvian, it is safe to say that, interesting 
 as the making of gun-flints is, the most striking thing 
 about it is that it should continue to exist at all. 
 And yet it is a most flourishing and active industry.
 
 54 Spring 
 
 While the latest invention in hammerless breech-loaders 
 hardly contents our English sportsmen, thousands of 
 rude hunters and warriors possess no deadlier weapon 
 than such a flint-lock gun as you may occasionally 
 find rusting in some loft of an old-fashioned farmhouse. 
 The knappers have not for a long time previously 
 been busier than during the last three years, and flints 
 have gone out of England by millions annually. 
 Exportation to Brazil and South America, on which 
 the greatest dependence used to be placed, has de- 
 creased, but that to South Africa has grown with its 
 recent development. Yet flint-knapping is less attrac- 
 tive as a survival than because it is an ancient pro- 
 bably the most ancient village industry, and is still 
 pursued with the simple tools and by the simple 
 methods used by the forefathers of those engaged in it. 
 Above all, it is a traditional and hereditary calling. 
 Take what branch you may, and it will invariably be 
 found that the craftsman of to-day learned the skill from 
 his father. There is a patriarch of over seventy still to 
 be seen on sunny days hanging about the chalk-pits, 
 though totally unfit to wield the spade or pick. Before 
 the fir-trees were planted that now overshadow some 
 of the white mounds, he remembers coming to help his 
 father and grandsire, while close at hand his son and 
 grandson are at work. 
 
 So it is with the rest. The Brandon flint-knappers 
 form a little colony by themselves, differing alike in 
 character and sentiment from the rustics who sur-
 
 Knapping Flints 55 
 
 round them. For the benefit of those who do not 
 know this pleasant village, it may be as well to say 
 that it stands on the Little Ouse, where that river, 
 gliding over its almost level and weedy bed, passes 
 between Norfolk and Suffolk, on to Downham to join 
 the Great Ouse. Its great rabbit warrens are well 
 known, and it has a whiting and some other small 
 factories ; but from time immemorial flint- pits and 
 knapping-sheds have formed its glory. While a sand 
 mound was being excavated in 1865, a subterranean 
 passage was found at a depth of eighty feet, that long 
 ages ago had apparently been searched for flints. At 
 all events, there was found sticking in one of the sides 
 a strange old pickaxe, made by putting a flint edge on 
 an antler's horn. Very likely it had been used for 
 excavating flint from the soft chalk by the artificers 
 who fashioned arrow-heads for the savages who in- 
 habited ancient Britain, and might have been left 
 there by some prehistoric digger. However, it seems 
 certain that in very remote ages the peculiar value 
 of the flints in the neighbourhood was known and 
 prized. When Canon Greenwell investigated the 
 well-known ' Grimes Graves,' situated in a wood close 
 to the old road leading from Brandon to SwafTham, he 
 found about eighty picks made from the antlers of red 
 deer, which in all probability had been used to get the 
 flint out of the chalk. It would seem, therefore, that 
 the flint-knappers, when they compete as they have 
 often done at exhibitions for a prize given to the
 
 56 Spring 
 
 oldest village industry, are very well entitled to succeed. 
 Most of the workmen confess, however, that they are 
 less skilful at their trade than were those workers 
 of remote antiquity. They find it so difficult so im- 
 possible to imitate the elf arrow that some feel sure 
 it must have been the fairies who made it. ' Not a 
 single skilled workman in Brandon,' wrote Mr. James 
 Wyatt more than twenty years ago, ' has ever suc- 
 ceeded in producing the beautiful conchoidal waves, 
 crimpings, and ripple-work displayed on the surface 
 of tools and weapons found in Scandinavia.' That is 
 a very mild way of stating the inability of the men of 
 to-day. A simple arrow-head found in one of the 
 Brandon fields is so much beyond their imitation that 
 they say that at the making of it there must have 
 been either witchcraft or instruments that have been 
 lost ! But then none of them has (like a well-known 
 practitioner at the Giant's Causeway) made it the busi- 
 ness of his life to make sham arrow-heads. Nor have 
 they any idea that a skilled archaeologist, by studying 
 the methods of those Polynesians, Esquimaux, and 
 others who still use flint implements, can with a rein- 
 deer's horn tied to a bit of wood produce a close ap- 
 proach to all but the most ornate of antique weapons. 
 The Brandon knapper's skill is indubitable, but it is con- 
 centrated on two or three strokes which serve to pro- 
 duce the perfectly unadorned gun-flint of modern times. 
 A gun-flint, or strike-alight, is almost the simplest 
 stone implement that can be made, and the knapper,
 
 Knapping Flints 57 
 
 who is paid by the thousand, cannot afford the time 
 that many ethnologists have given to imitate the 
 craftsmanship and reproduce the tools of primitive 
 man. Regarding the methods by which these were 
 made, the reader may be referred to the ' Ancient 
 Stone Implements, Weapons, and Ornaments of Great 
 Britain,' by Sir John Evans. ' Either bone or stag's 
 horn sets or punches, or else small and hard pebbles,' 
 he says, ' may have been applied at the proper spots 
 upon the surface of the flints, and then been struck by 
 a stone or wooden mallet.' To follow him at present, 
 however, would lead us away from the one little link 
 with the Stone age that we have chosen to examine. 
 
 For I am anticipating, and ought to have begun 
 at the quarries, since it must be understood that the 
 flint used is found in large nodules among chalk, and 
 must be excavated before it can be chipped. If we 
 go out on Brandon Heath, we shall see many acres of 
 rough grassland, bordered on one side by a green 
 plantation and on another by a field of wheat. They 
 are dotted all over with grey heaps of chalky earth, 
 showing where generation after generation of men has 
 been digging for flints. Some of the mounds are so 
 old that the dust blown over them by the wind has 
 become a soil for rough grass ; and self-sown whins 
 (under which rabbits have their burrows) have thrust 
 up between the lumps. But under the trees, and close 
 up to the corn, the mounds are glittering white, for 
 here the men, even now, are tossing up fresh chalk.
 
 58 Spring ^^ 
 
 They have to go deep down, for in the soft upper 
 strata the stones are grey and almost worthless, while 
 the valuable black flints are only found in the harder 
 rock underneath. Exposure to the atmosphere, or 
 even proximity to the surface, appears to have the 
 effect of causing the best black flints to lose some of 
 their colour and lustre, and, besides, it deprives them 
 of the moisture without which they are ever so much 
 more difficult to work. 
 
 To look at one of the diggers is to imagine that, 
 like certain insects, he has taken on the colour of his 
 environment. Not only are his little cap, his torn old 
 jacket, his trousers, and his heavy boots all as dusky 
 white as the clothes of a miller, but the colour of his 
 complexion is midway between that of chalk and 
 cream. It is by no means an unhealthy hue, for he 
 belongs to a strong and long-lived race, but by living 
 out of the sunlight he has become as blanched as a 
 stalk of celery. And to listen to his talk is to be car- 
 ried into another world ; for, like all those who live 
 detached and solitary lives, his impressions of the uni- 
 verse are peculiarly his own. The coal-miner is one 
 of a multitude, and his mind is full of strikes, wages, 
 and friendly societies. In his subterranean gallery, 
 with no companion save a boy assistant on the surface, 
 the flint-digger is master and man in one. Politics, 
 labour questions, and votes interest him little. He is 
 not well paid not much better than a Norfolk farm- 
 servant but ' to be your own master is worth three
 
 Knapping Flints 59 
 
 bob a week,' he says sturdily. His interests all lie in 
 flint and chalk, in pits and burrows, and even his chron- 
 ology differs from that of other men. ' Since the 
 first pit was opened in the plantation,' ' Since the last 
 break of wheat was taken in ' dates like these are 
 his landmarks. Winter and summer, autumn and 
 spring follow and succeed without affecting him. The 
 gorse flowers beside the chalk-heap, the poppy and 
 blueweed come among the corn, wind and sun ripen 
 the ears of wheat, but seventy feet below the surface 
 there is no change of weather. All that he knows is 
 on sunny days to get his new pit opened, and if the 
 rain comes to dive into his deepest burrow and resume 
 the interrupted task. 
 
 He is an inveterate Tory, and by his nature stub- 
 bornly opposed to change of every kind. He does 
 not dispute as how could he ? that the flint might 
 be more easily and expeditiously excavated, but the 
 habit of solitude and independence is so ingrained in 
 him that he continues to work by the old methods, to 
 avoid all sorts of modern improvements, and to carry 
 on his work without associates. 
 
 His only tools are a spade and shovel, a pickaxe 
 and a hammer no engine, no winch, no pulley, not 
 even a ladder. The operations make one think of an 
 unusually intelligent rabbit. Firstly he digs out a 
 square hole to a depth of about six feet, then he bur- 
 rows to right or left, and from the stage thus made 
 drops another six feet, burrowing and dropping alter-
 
 60 Spring 
 
 nately till he is sixty or seventy feet beneath the sur- 
 face. To realise how much labour this involves it 
 must be remembered that the excavated chalk is 
 shovelled upward from stage to stage by hand. His 
 method of descent is by leaping down this flight of 
 gigantic steps. It is no wonder that few visitors care 
 to follow. People who think nothing of descending 
 a coal-mine shrink from it. You jump to the first 
 stage quite cheerily, for you see where you are going 
 to ; at the next the grey landing-place still glimmers 
 as in twilight, but after that the leaps must be taken 
 into a darkness gross as that of Erebus, in blind faith 
 that there must be a platform. When the bottom at 
 last is reached, a faint little flare of candle-light 
 shows the mouth of a tunnel some eighteen feet long. 
 Crawling up this on hands and knees, the jagged 
 white walls hardly visible, you come upon the pitman 
 lying on his side and with his pick trying to loosen 
 the chalk round a heavy nodule of flint Like many 
 solitary workers, he has a way of talking to himself, 
 and now coaxingly addresses the stone, ' Come away, 
 my beauty drop down now that's a good 'un.' 
 Anon he mutters in fury, ' I'll have you, you beast, if 
 the house falls.' But it is a heavy and difficult lump 
 to move. The chalk down here is hard, and his arm 
 cannot get free play, so that there is plenty of time to 
 talk ere it drops noiselessly on the soft grey dust. 
 Often, he says, he has mined down as far as this 
 without discovering a flint, and it is almost his only
 
 Knapping Flints 61 
 
 grievance that he is paid nothing for sinking the pit. 
 His wages are calculated on the number of ' one-horse 
 jags ' or cartloads he can bring to the surface. Occa- 
 sionally there are accidents. Where there is much 
 sand to be pierced ere the chalk is reached the walls 
 sometimes fall in and make the labour all in vain. 
 Life is seldom endangered, however, though men at 
 times have been crippled by being too venturesome. 
 He likes the work for its independence and because it 
 was his father's trade, and he could not endure regular 
 hours or a timekeeper. As to loneliness, he does not 
 know what it means. But here he stops with a shout 
 of triumph, for down the flint has come at last. Now 
 he must drag it to the opening of the gallery, where, 
 if he cannot by raising it on his head and jerking with 
 neck, shoulders, and arms toss it up on the landing- 
 place, he will crack it with a hammer and raise the 
 fragments. Outside the chalk has formed a white 
 encrustation, but the heart is as black as ebony, for, as 
 he puts it, ' floor 'uns be the best, wall 'uns the second 
 best, top 'uns the worst of all.' Why that should be 
 so he never asks. Sartin' sure the chalk has been 
 made by water, for he has found cockle-shells and 
 fishes and little sarpent things in it ; but, like Topsy, 
 the flint growed there. 
 
 I doubt if there is any harder toil than his in exist- 
 ence. Working in a ' burrow ' that is to say, in a 
 gallery three feet high and with a pickaxe endea- 
 vouring to loosen the chalk round a little crag of flint
 
 62 Spring 
 
 is extremely irksome ; but the only reliefs to it con- 
 sist of digging and of throwing up the lumps from 
 stage to stage. Except for his iron tools, he is no 
 better off than the first savage who dug out a pit ; 
 his results come directly from the exercise of his 
 muscle ; he owes nothing whatever to science. 
 
 It is more difficult to get out of the pit than it 
 was to get in. Little footholds have been cut in the 
 chalky sides, and by their aid one has to scale the 
 great ladder as best one can. On the top you will be 
 glad to sit and philosophise a little on the detached 
 and quiet existence of the human rabbit who is bur- 
 rowing down below. The agricultural labourer who 
 complains that the country is so grossly dull leads a 
 wild and stirring life in comparison with the flint- 
 digger, who in solitude and perpetual twilight pursues 
 his craft ; and yet I think the latter is the happier 
 and more contented of the two. 
 
 The second part of the work is done under vastly 
 different circumstances. In the knapping-shed to 
 which the flints are carted some half-dozen men all 
 sit and work together, or rather in twos, for it is a 
 trade of partnership. The typical knapper is a deft 
 pale-faced little man, usually with several bits of 
 sticking-plaster disfiguring his countenance ; for when 
 the flint is sparkling under his hammer ever and anon 
 a tiny chip takes him on the nose, or the cheek, or the 
 eyeball. One whose business it is to break up the 
 blocks of flint sits beside a heap of them on a three-
 
 Knapping Flints 63 
 
 legged stool. His right leg, from the knee up to the 
 thigh, is covered with a heavy guard of thick coarse 
 leather. Looking at him, I have often thought with 
 wonder on a certain passage in Mr. Blackmore's most 
 famous novel. It is where John Ridd breaks the great 
 boulder in the gold mine. ' Then I swung me on high 
 to the swing of the sledge,' says he, ' as a thresher 
 bends back to the rise of his flail, and with all my 
 power descending delivered the ponderous onset.' But 
 the stone-breakers I have known would not dream of 
 accomplishing that feat by main strength, and cer- 
 tainly the flint-knapper does not attempt it. He takes 
 his lump of flint gently on his knee, and turns it over 
 and over, to find out, as he says, where his hammer 
 will take hold ; then, with what is a sharp well-directed 
 tap rather than a downright blow, he splits it in two. 
 Seldom indeed is it necessary to strike twice. But 
 the next operation is a still more wonderful perform- 
 ance with the hammer. Taking a manageable frag- 
 ment in his lap, and catching the nature of its seams 
 and angles with a single glance, he with his light 
 flaking hammer pares off slice after slice in less time 
 than it takes to tell. Every knock at a corner brings 
 away a piece of flint in shape almost identical with 
 that of razor-shells found at the seaside. The edges 
 are like those of a knife, and one side has a surface 
 almost as smooth as glass. On the other he has cal- 
 culated to get two long ridges. To look at the flakes 
 it would appear as though the piece of rock had been
 
 64 Spring 
 
 made of thin layers that the workman has parted. 
 Anyone placing three gun-flints in a row with the 
 smooth side downwards will obtain a fairly accurate 
 idea of the shape. But there are knots, and twists, and 
 seams, and turns, in the grain that produce a great 
 variety in the peelings. To get them off like that is 
 a triumph of manual skill that cannot be achieved 
 except by those who have practised it a long time. 
 Flint-cores, such as are left by the knapper when his 
 flaking is done, have been found in circumstances 
 that seem to point to their survival from the Stone 
 age. 
 
 The second operator sits with a tubful of flakes at 
 his elbow, a tiny steel anvil three or four inches long 
 in front of him, and a peculiar hammer in his hand. 
 In shape it is something like a miniature pick, only 
 its chisel-like face is nearly two inches long. Years 
 of practice have enabled him, when he takes a flint- 
 peeling in his hand, to decide instantaneously what can 
 be made of it. The exporter of gun -flints desires to 
 have many different kinds to suit the various sorts 
 of weapons. There are in all twenty-three different 
 kinds of flint made, but it requires some ingenuity to 
 stretch them out so far. For instance, to make up 
 the list you have grey muskets and black muskets, 
 where difference is not at all in the workmanship but 
 in the alleged quality of the flint. Setting aside 
 minor kinds, the main classes of flint are for the 
 common gun, the pocket and horse pistols, the musket,
 
 Knapping Flints 65 
 
 rifle, and carbine. From the narrow point of his flake 
 the workman chips a diminutive flint for a pocket- 
 pistol, though not so many of these are required as of 
 a larger size for horse-pistols. But the flints most in 
 request are the neat and well-shaped ones used for 
 rifles, and the biggest, of all required for carbines. 
 There is also a continuous, though not a very con- 
 siderable, demand for strike-a-lights, meant for the 
 use of travellers and sportsmen who have had ex- 
 perience of damp matches. As each of these has its 
 own shape and size, which must be accurately repro- 
 duced, it will be seen that the knapper at the anvil has 
 a task demanding both skill and judgment. Yet its 
 execution has become so much a habit with him that 
 he talks and chips away as if by instinct. At every 
 sharp pop down drops a gun-flint, which he takes 
 in his hand and lets the hammer play round till the 
 sharp edges are blunted and the size made exactly 
 what is required. The speed at which he works may 
 be inferred from the fact that each man calculates 
 to turn out on an average three thousand a day. In 
 time of pressure a knapper has been known by 
 commencing very early in the morning and working 
 to a late hour at night to make nine thousand. But 
 that is deemed an extraordinary and prodigious day's 
 work. The employers as well as the men reckon that, 
 taking all the year round, a third of that number 
 represents the output of a man. This means about 
 twelve thousand a week, for it is an old custom in the 
 
 F
 
 66 Spring 
 
 trade to make Saturday and Monday holidays ; the 
 former is devoted to play, and the latter is given up 
 to tool-sharpening. Knapping cannot be done unless 
 the hammers are in perfect order, and it is said that 
 the only smiths who can put them right are a few in 
 the neighbourhood of Brandon, who have done the 
 work from infancy, and know to a nicety the face and 
 temper required. It is very difficult to calculate the 
 gross number of gun-flints made annually, as the work 
 is in more hands than one, but in all England there 
 are certainly not thirty men who can shape a flint. 
 Business used to fluctuate very much, and in dull 
 times some of the operatives were obliged to seek 
 employment elsewhere. From half-a-dozen to a 
 dozen knappers have constant work, however, and 
 while they do not make fewer than four millions 
 annually, they must be very busy to make eight. 
 Brandon is the chief but not the only seat of the 
 manufacture. Gun-flints are still made in small 
 quantities at Malaga, for example, and specimens are 
 to be seen in the British Museum. 
 
 I fear that the figures afford an insecure basis for 
 calculating the number of flint, guns still in use. No- 
 body has been able to tell me how long a flint will 
 serve, and although my earliest firearm was an antique 
 horse-pistol that had never known a percussion cap, 
 my experience is not worth much. Firstly, my 
 allowance of powder being strictly limited, made me 
 careful not to waste any shots, so that the water-voles
 
 Knapping Flints 67 
 
 at which I practised had to be well out on the green 
 willow twigs ere I fired ; and secondly, as flints were 
 difficult to obtain, I had all a boy's patience and 
 ingenuity in exposing first one edge to the hammer, 
 then another. Moreover, the number of miss-fires 
 would have exhausted the patience of any man shoot- 
 ing for his life or his dinner. After thirty or forty 
 shots, however, it is probable that a gun-flint is no 
 longer to be depended upon. 
 
 On being split up, the flint occasionally shows an 
 unexpected colour, and, indeed, the figures shown in 
 this process, though they must have been accidentally 
 produced, are sometimes marvellous. There is one in 
 the possession of a workman now in which a mother 
 suckling her child is shown with a fidelity and dis- 
 tinctness no draughtsman could surpass. But the 
 knapper does not regard these colours with the eyes 
 of an aesthete. He knows that those who barter the 
 flints with the natives find that the pure black are 
 invariably the most highly prized, and accordingly he 
 has to accept a very much smaller price for those of a 
 grey tint. Many of these are probably made into strike- 
 a-lights and never used for guns at all. Yet, when all 
 is said, the number of gun-flints made is sufficiently 
 large to surprise the new generation of English sports- 
 men, who are growing up unfamiliar with any but 
 breech-loading guns. 
 
 Perhaps I may be allowed to conclude this paper 
 with the narration of a little incident that made me 
 
 F 2
 
 68 Spring 
 
 laugh less at the flint-knappers in particular than at 
 human nature in general. Some of them were 
 bewailing their small profits. Except that they 
 worked under cover* said one, they were not better 
 off than the farm labourers. ' Well,' I said, jestingly, 
 ' you can, at all events, strike to get your wages up.' 
 But the spokesman shook his head gravely. ' There 
 were so many in the trade,' he replied, 'you could never 
 get them to agree \ '
 
 SUMMER 
 
 THE PLEASURES OF JUNE 
 
 I 
 
 NEVER do fiery streets and hot, flashing glass, and the 
 noises and odours of town, awake a deeper loathing 
 than in early June, when the fields, coloured and cool, 
 and tuneful, ' half prankt with Spring, with summer 
 half imbrowned,' are commanding rather than inviting 
 our visitation. Life has once more taken full posses- 
 sion of the world, so that to watch its conquering 
 advance is happiness enough for that fortunate and 
 forgetful mortal who can ring down a curtain on the 
 past, and, wasting no speculation on the future, make 
 the present an interlude between them. But how 
 hard to attain this frame of mind ! How rare the 
 capacity to be absolutely idle ! Sitting under the 
 loose and melancholy boughs of an elm, in a green 
 and white and golden meadow, hard by a pond of 
 water-lily blooms and floating leaves, you shall seek
 
 70 Summer 
 
 in vain to conjure your familiars away. Ambition, 
 intrigue, passion, the sorrowful counterfeits of pleasure 
 are wicked necromancers who blur the picture by 
 their black and magical arts, and so poison your 
 senses that Mayfair, or Fleet Street, or the Stock 
 Exchange shall seem to take its place. Yet if you 
 but knew it, each fleeting minute would fain lay its 
 little load of joy at your feet, and no scheming may 
 ensure that the minutes of to-morrow will be so laden. 
 Every sound proclaims that the life around and about 
 you is utterly absorbed in the enjoyment of being. 
 The cuckoo shouts it as he flies ; the ringdove 
 murmurs it from his perch among the twinkling beech 
 leaves ; from a million throats up in the clouds and 
 down on the briar bush the burden is poured. Creation 
 is at flood. The swallows skimming low over the corn- 
 fields, the leverets whose silky ears just top the green 
 young stalks, the landrail croaking from the nettles, 
 the tiny water-voles out on the willow twigs where 
 they lean across the water whatever lives and moves 
 is happy now or will never be happy at all. 
 
 So, too, is he who loves nature for herself alone ; 
 who with no call to study or observe, innocent of any 
 ambition to turn his pleasure into text-books, is con- 
 tent to lounge, and saunter, and dream in sunshine and 
 shadow, watching the grass grow and hearing the 
 birds sing. Where the rivulet has fretted a channel 
 between two breaks of wheat is a stone, over-arched 
 with yellow broom, and there, at highest noon, secluded
 
 The Pleasures of Jime 71 
 
 from the world, he need see nothing but the wren 
 fluttering in and out of her nest below the bank, hear 
 nothing but the song that is no song of the water 
 bickering over the gravel and sliding away among 
 flags and ferns. He will learn nothing, and gain 
 nothing, at least nothing measurable in utilitarian 
 scales ; yet he shall assimilate the stuff of many ex- 
 quisite memories. Nature is a whimsical mistress. 
 She bursts headlong into the presence of minds pre- 
 occupied with heroic endeavour, she delights in visiting 
 vacancy, but for them that search for her clamantly 
 all these she avoids. If the brookside grow tedious, 
 the wcods can never pall, and by woods are meant 
 neither strips of plantation which you may look right 
 through, nor newly-planted carefully tended orna- 
 mental forestings, but old and wild and neglected 
 woodlands where ' cool mosses deep ' are flowering in 
 the vividest hues, and fallen boles rot undisturbed, 
 and the briar-rose clambers up the pine, and the 
 natural thicket is hedged with rank ferns. Not yet 
 is the foliage so thick but the sun may carpet the 
 grass with a pattern of leaves of light in some shady 
 corner of an open glade. To hearken to the cry of 
 breeding pheasants ; or watch the brown snake glide 
 out to bask him in the heat ; or fall into reverie, and 
 let your life merge in the life of grass, and leaf, and 
 tree that is another unforgettable experience, another 
 imperishable gift of June. 
 
 Further afield are resting places still more
 
 7 2 Summer 
 
 beautiful. The flying gold of autumn is not compar- 
 able to the purer hue of early summer. What white 
 can equal the white of a tall hawthorn hedge in bloom ? 
 And none has ever caught, or ever will catch, in words 
 the splendour of such miles upon miles of flowering 
 gorse as you may still see in the north of England, 
 where the fiery sight is rounded by the blue and white 
 of a sunny sea. From the hill slope you may count 
 the white sails (white as the sea-mew's wings), and 
 the black funnels with their trains of smoke. But to 
 landward there is a deep and fertile valley where the 
 half-grown grass gleams like metal in the wind, and 
 great trees, green-mantled solitaries, dose in the sun- 
 shine ; by sedgy margins and banks blue with speed- 
 well, a sleepy river flows through pasture and tilth. 
 At daybreak, when the long shadows lie on every 
 quiet pool, and the scuts of the rabbits show white as 
 they dart through the dewy corn, the very otter-hunter, 
 whose dogs are making merry music down the water, 
 will stop to gladden his eye with the scene. But in 
 the dusk of night it takes on a new and perhaps a 
 more exquisite beauty. The dor-hawk skims the 
 moor with his monotonous churrurr-ing ; the bat is 
 hawking and flying in his silent mysterious way ; the 
 lights of human life are few, and feeble, and remote ; 
 and ere the moon come out, sparkling on the water 
 and brightening the wold, you shall keep your vigil 
 alone in a world of dreams.
 
 The Pleasures of June 73 
 
 II 
 
 To most of us the Highlands seem changeless to 
 wear the same face all the months round. So many 
 things have to be done, and the demands on time by 
 political, professional, and other duties are so varied 
 and incessant, that only a trip a year is possible, and 
 for many a grouse-shooter and deer-stalker the High- 
 lands exist but as stretches of heather past its first 
 bloom, and lying russet under a grey autumnal sky. 
 Who, indeed, shall tell us what they are like in winter, 
 when the snowy Bens look down on vacant lodge 
 and empty caravanserai and half-dispeopled clachan ? 
 Thus, too, the angler returning to his accustomed 
 lochs and streams in April and May, when after 
 making valley and lowland green, the Spring lags 
 slowly up these heights, remembers them by the ever- 
 lasting bleakness of the hills, their bare cold copses, 
 and those chilling winds and frozen rains that numb 
 the fingers till they are past managing a reel, and 
 lend a lasting and peculiar charm to the glow of the 
 tavern ingle. To both shooter and fisherman the 
 June Highlands are an unknown land. And the leafy- 
 month is also well-nigh sacred from that common and 
 gregarious tourist who in July and August so often 
 makes a seat in the coach, a bed at the hotel, or a 
 walk unvulgarised and unprofaned, the rankest im- 
 possibility. 
 
 It is the quiet rambler for rambling's sake that is
 
 74 Summer 
 
 aptest to make the experiment here analysed, and in 
 the heart of the season he reminds you of nothing so 
 much as a nervous elderly gentleman seeking rest by 
 a ' byke ' of wasps. Does he compose himself to 
 recline on the turf? There in horrible proximity the 
 little beasts are passing out and in, and he flees the 
 accursed nook in terror. Does he sit him down on a 
 limb of the fallen willow ? Lo ! their buzzing is in 
 his ear before he has had time to mop his brow with 
 his bandanna. Peace there is none for him unless he 
 shake off the dust from his feet and depart the place. 
 Even so the contemplative tourist in summer. He 
 sits him vacant by the Teith, well pleased to feed his 
 vacancy upon the song of the water ; but he starts in 
 fury and dismay to learn from the ' Saxon, I am 
 Roderick Dhu ! ' of some knickerbockered monster 
 that here is Coil-an-Togle Ford. Or among the green- 
 embowered ruins of Menteith he will hold himself 
 thrice happily unfriended and remote, when lo ! there 
 overtakes him like a flood the odious and inevitable 
 trip in all its obscene garniture of lemonade-bottles, 
 sandwiches, concertinas, flutes, sweethearts, slang, 
 canorous reminiscences of the 'alls. The leafage rings 
 with * Two Lovely Black Eyes,' or ' Ta-ra-ra-,' and 
 the lonely burnsides blush with blazers and dreadful 
 things, chimeras dire in the way of women's hats. 
 And if, in search of solitude by Loch Ard, or on the 
 slopes of Ben Ledi, or where the blue waters of Loch 
 Katrine plash gently on the Silver Strand, he curse
 
 The Pleasures of June 75 
 
 Sir Walter and the Clan Macgregor bodily, and with 
 them every poet, cattle-thief, cateran, and writer of 
 romance that has cast what the excited Cockney calls 
 ' a glamour ' over haunts once innocent and wild, his 
 maledictions are light in comparison to those he vents 
 on hostelries where balmy sleep at night and decent 
 food by day are both exorbitantly charged for, and 
 are both out of the question. If he be wise he will 
 next year steal a march upon his plagues and to the 
 Highlands in June. 
 
 The result is like to be a curious blend of pleasure 
 and disappointment. In the moon wherein I experi- 
 mented there was a minimum of the unpleasing. The 
 winter had been so genial and was followed by a gush 
 of such ' ethereal mildness,' that you have to go back 
 many seasons for a June more prodigal of blossom. 
 The hawthorn, which in the neighbourhood of London 
 had flowered and gone, was still blanching copse and 
 thicket, still gleaming from between green firs on the 
 outlying Highland knolls, and that in such profusion 
 as would be a prophecy of avalanche if there were 
 truth at all in ' mony haws mony snaws.' If Linnaeus, 
 who fell down on his knees and thanked God for the 
 golden gorse, had viewed the river valleys and the 
 low hills, magnificent almost beyond example in their 
 wealth of whin and broom, he would have been kneel- 
 ing all day long. But it was only on the way into 
 the heart of the Highlands that these heartening and 
 enchanting visions were possible, for they belong to
 
 76 Summer 
 
 the skirts of the mountains, the march-land between 
 hill and plain. If you looked down from the 
 shoulder of Ben Venue upon Loch Achray and 
 the woods that slope from it, and up the valley to 
 Loch Katrine and down to Vennachar, you found 
 them few and wide apart. There was scarce a haw- 
 thorn, scarce a whin-bush to be seen. The clump 
 from which the cuckoo was calling his whereabouts 
 was of light and brilliant green, but, apart from its 
 leafage, the great line of Bens was sombre and bleak, 
 for the young sprouts of heather had not yet covered 
 last year's witherings. On the marshy land, wherever 
 the heavy grey curlew called and flew, the dead ferns 
 made a mass of bright red-brown, with the new fronds 
 springing here and there, and touching it with glints 
 of palest green. Yet, now if ever is the time to under- 
 stand and share Sir Walter's enthusiasm for the 
 Trossachs. In late summer it is not easy to do so : 
 firstly, because of that gush of touring humanity from 
 which escape is well-nigh impossible, and against 
 which the human mind revolts ; and secondly, because 
 the thick and heavy foliage and the dense under- 
 growth are too much for the good effects of light and 
 shade. But in June, when the lady of the wood puts 
 on the light and flittering dress that veils without 
 dissembling her form, when the first lustre of the silver 
 fir can only be paralleled by the metallic gleam seen 
 now and then on a living animal, and when the road 
 through the pass winds not among a plump unbroken
 
 The Pleasures of June 77 
 
 mass of green, but over broken ground whose contours 
 are full in view and within eyeshot of mountain 
 streams that will presently be lost, then well ! then 
 
 The stag at eve had drunk his fill 
 Where danced the moon on Monan's rill 
 
 and all the rest of it. That is your frame of mind as 
 long as it keeps fair, while in rainy weather you seem 
 to have been flung back into winter. Whether it be 
 that a Highland wind over lake and hills blows 
 keener than another, or that the Highland hotels are 
 built specially for draughts, certain it is that in the 
 June Highlands you may be extraordinarily uncom- 
 fortable. And neither umbrella, mackintosh, nor any 
 wrappage is proof against a Highland rain. To come 
 in cold and wet is to realise that the tavern in not all 
 your fancy painted. Either the servants are not yet 
 in for the season, or they have failed to learn their 
 duties ; for dinner is dogged by indigestion, and not 
 even the promise of a vail will rouse the waiters' intel- 
 ligence. And cold and rheumatism and influenza are 
 fellow -guests, and sit beside you at the feast. 
 
 Yet if these be braved with impunity, the High- 
 lands in rain offer brave compensation for a wetting. 
 That jovial summer Cockney who talks of Stronash- 
 lasher, and offers with a pint of beer and a lemonade- 
 bottle to produce you a better cascade than is at 
 Inversnaid, might with profit study the water now. 
 Had he stood by Loch Katrine on a rainy day and 
 heard the thunder, deafening as Niagara's, of the falls
 
 78 Summer 
 
 of the great Ben that rises from its shores, and whose 
 monstrous side shows scarce a vein of white in fine 
 weather ; were he to look on the distant mountains 
 streaked and scarred with lines of foam, and could he 
 be got to realise from the look of the swollen burns 
 hard by what it all signifies, he would be as himself 
 might put it ' pretty tolerably flummoxed.' It is 
 worth a man's while to walk in a rainstorm from the 
 Clachan of Aberfoyle to the Trossachs merely to see 
 the fury of the streams near by and the beauty of 
 those afar. But the privilege is one for the few. 
 
 At this time sporadic tourists will always be coach- 
 ing it from place to place ; but none lingers as he 
 goes, firstly because there is no sport, and secondly 
 because the wet hills are past climbing, and even the 
 pleasant bridlepaths impassable. Only he that loves 
 the heights without heather he that delights in the 
 fresh hues of early summer and is not dismayed by 
 bad cookery nor afraid of damp will ' taste ' the June 
 Highlands as he ought. 
 
 Ill 
 
 THERE are two places where I love to sit and moral- 
 ise on human life. One is the corner of an ancient 
 and crowded village graveyard that might have 
 suggested the Elegy to Gray, the other a boulder amid 
 the bracken of a hillside. That among the tombs is 
 of the two the more cheerful resting-place, although 
 it has not yet become like a town cemetery, whither
 
 The Pleasures of June 79 
 
 dressy girls come with their sweethearts and flirt be- 
 side the dead. But it is to no sorrowful tune that the 
 summer wind rustles the ivy on the church wall, and 
 the leaves of the great elm, and the foliage of the dark 
 yews that the sunshine forces out of mourning. The 
 flowers on a few well-tended graves blow happily as 
 in a garden, yet not more happily than the rank grass 
 that shoots lustily upwards and waves and nods over 
 the unheadstoned mounds, where are buried, says the 
 poet, not only the bodies of men, but withered hearts, 
 and crushed genius, and foiled ambition : the wild and 
 strong-winged birds that have beaten themselves to 
 death, against the prison bars of poverty. If such 
 things were not, the churchyard would not be so full 
 of interest. I could never feel that it is sad. It is 
 not death, but life, that is tragic ; and if in fancy I 
 conjure from these tombs the faces of their sleeping 
 tenants, it is not as troubled complaining ghosts they 
 come : though one at least I know who, albeit dowered 
 with full capacity for living, was not permitted so 
 much as to taste of life who, like an athlete debarred 
 from competition by lack of entrance money, was by 
 the sordid accident of want compelled to stand aside. 
 There is no active, sympathetic anxiety now to in- 
 terfere with the calm amusement of readjusting his 
 destiny. The dead are plastic stuff for the fancy to 
 work upon. 
 
 It is more difficult to follow out any cheerful train 
 of thought on the hillside, even when the valley is
 
 So Summer 
 
 lovely enough to please a painter or inspire a poet. 
 Nature has donned the beautiful dress of early 
 summer. The light cloud-shadows play on a land- 
 scape of hedged and cultivated fields ; they darken 
 the ripple of the stream ; they deepen the whin's gold 
 into bronze ; they cast a transitory gloom on gleam- 
 ing fields of unmown grass and green young corn ; 
 they rest for a moment on men and women toiling on 
 the bare soil, and fly over thatched hamlet and red-tiled 
 steading ; they wander across the purple moorland, 
 and are lost at last beyond the glittering waves that 
 wash the edge of the land. When they have passed 
 woodland and hill, the sleeping trees, the glancing 
 river, and the distant sea combine into an exquisite 
 smile, and the soft and fitful breeze ever more sweetly 
 croons its old-world rhyme to the grass and fern. 
 
 It is a witch or a goddess that gazes up from 
 the outstretched country. Her look of laughter, her 
 voice and fragrance declare it ; and perhaps, like Mr. 
 Andrew Lang's goddess, what he seeks in her counte- 
 nance she shows to every wooer. One discovers a 
 well-spring of joy and worships a beneficent Deity ; 
 another shudders at a monster ' red in tooth and claw ' 
 creating only to destroy ; but a third rests in her ferny 
 lap, and listening to the bees humming their way from 
 hill to plain, and watching the hawk hovering above 
 a hay-field and the butterflies fluttering their aerial 
 love-flight in the sunshine, loses thought and memory, 
 and shares, or fancies he shares, the still happiness of
 
 The Pleasures of June 8 1 
 
 the sprouting heather-sprig beside him and the grow- 
 ing crops below. For him the exceeding splendour 
 of the earth and its life is all-sufficing ; if he have a 
 wish it is only that enchantment may fix them for 
 ever in their relative positions ; his dread arises from 
 the transience of pleasure. A spell is upon him. 
 The labouring men are but ' figures in the landscape ' 
 without sorrow or story ; the hawk drops like an 
 arrow on his harmless victim and awakens no thought 
 of cruelty ; the shy hill-rabbit pushes her silky ears 
 above the young fern and excites his envy, for in 
 admiration of her pretty attitude he forgets the terrors 
 and the perils of which it speaks. For him the smile 
 of the fields is one of intense and unalloyed love. 
 But how long will the magic endure ? 
 
 Long ago I used to look on the same scene with 
 a friend whose dust may now be blowing in the white 
 cloud hurrying past gig and lime-cart on the road 
 across the moor. I do not complain that the fields 
 have called him back, but why was pain heaped so 
 heavily on the gentlest and most loving of creatures ? 
 It is no longer possible to regard this earth as a mere 
 picture or a sort of concert-room. These are not lay 
 figures in the fields. Though drugged with the anaes- 
 thetics, labour and care, till they have almost ceased 
 to feel, or aspire, or think, still their movements are not 
 quite automatic : each has his story and his sorrow. 
 Leaves bourgeon, and blow, and wither ; crops are sown, 
 and ripen, and fall ; the wild creatures are born, and 
 
 G
 
 8 2 Summer 
 
 generate, and die ; yet every summer day the same 
 imperturbable smile plays on field, and moor, and sky. 
 The fitful gleam of the fields departs and returns again. 
 It has been seen for centuries from this hilltop, look- 
 ing down wherefrom the figures in the landscape have 
 been to each successive spectator as much alike as 
 this year's and last year's oak-leaves. Yet decay has 
 been busier than growth to torture and destroy. If 
 every living thing in this prodigal display were multi- 
 plied by the number of the countless years the earth 
 has endured, the result would still not equal the 
 number of those vanquished by death. 
 
 The hours used to slip past rapidly here ; for the 
 barley and oat fields faded away, and the road show- 
 ing white patches between the wayside elms, and the 
 inhabited hamlets, and the smokeless and ivied ruins. 
 In place of them grew a golden territory of dream. 
 But it is not golden now, for it is built not in the future 
 but the past, and it is peopled not as of old with 
 glorified pictures of the living but with spectres of 
 the dead. At least that is how I try to explain the 
 element of sadness that has replaced the old exhilara- 
 tion from the shining and fertile fields. If I think of 
 them as changeless, it is as a contrast with the evan- 
 escence engraven on all else ; and Nature's smile seems 
 one of ironic pity for the generations of men who, 
 like the troops of birds, and beasts, and flowers, make 
 a momentary appearance on the stage, but, unlike 
 these, are conscious of transitoriness,and have sufficient
 
 The Pleasures of June 83 
 
 knowledge to regret. A sorceress, looking on for ages 
 at a monotonous repetition of the tragi-comedy of the 
 appearance and disappearance of life, would find a 
 last refuge in irony. It is pitilessness in a mask of 
 sympathy. Nature, in fact, acts the polite worldling 
 to her friends. She is a consoler as long as you do 
 not doubt her sincerity, and when that moment comes 
 she carries her easy and graceful and superficial smile 
 to others. 
 
 So when I wish to be cheerful I hie me down from 
 the mountain-top to the snug graveyard that nestles 
 in the valley. There Nature, Fate, Destiny, whatever 
 you like' to call her, has done her worst. The lives of 
 them that lie there have been lived and are done with. 
 But they are not destroyed. Having once been ad- 
 mitted into the kingdom of Time they can never 
 again be excluded. If I do not know the personalities 
 of the sleepers, it is at least open to me to fit them 
 from imagination, and to make them live their lives 
 once more in a reconstructed world. To the fancy of 
 a dreamer a village churchyard is as rich a storehouse 
 of materials as the annals of history. And no sorrow 
 need mingle with one's meditations here, for the place 
 is purged alike of fear and suffering. Nature's 
 irony is apparent only when she is decked in holiday 
 robes, and her soft unceasing voice talks love, and her 
 laughter seems to rest on all the fields.
 
 84 Summer 
 
 WILD LIFE IN LONDON 
 
 THE Londoner's affection for wild things is one of 
 the most touching features of his character, but it is 
 altogether different from the countryman's. Often it 
 is horribly cruel. Whoever has explored a residential 
 slum must have pitied, almost as much as the wretched 
 children, the still more wretched wild birds seeking 
 to fleet their confinement with delirious music. Larks 
 of smoky hue and bedraggled feather pour forth their 
 strains of unpremeditated art from cages wherein is 
 scarce room to turn ; a tricky siskin lifts his tiny can 
 of food and water next door to a squirrel which is 
 bringing on a galloping consumption by the furious 
 ardour with which he turns his wheel for lack of aught 
 else to do ; chaffinch, and linnet, and starling, thrush, 
 and blackbird chirp and sing with a Mark Tapleyism 
 more distressing than silence. In a moorland cottage 
 or a quiet hamlet you may see the same species 
 almost as closely cabined, yet as merry as if they had 
 never known delightful liberty. The word of the 
 riddle explains how very much wild creatures are 
 slaves to habit. The urban bird-catcher gets the most 
 of his birds in the dead of winter. They are old, and 
 they can never be anything but wild. It is hard to 
 understand how even in the slums (but you find them 
 in places which are not slums at all) the torture of 
 captivity should be their owner's joy. It would be
 
 Wild Life in London 85 
 
 humane to wring their necks and humane to make 
 the capture of them penal. Now, the country urchin 
 who fills his father's aviary is cruel in a very different 
 fashion. He wages war with everything that flies or 
 runs. He goes forth on his rambles armed with a dry 
 bough for the field-mouse that will dart across his 
 path through the plantation, for the weasel he hopes 
 to see peeping from out the nettles, for the vole in the 
 willows by the brook. His pockets are crammed 
 with missiles for any and every bird. The lark's 
 music will insure him no immunity should he light 
 for a moment on the dry dyke ; the guileful tomtit, 
 fluttering and tumbling to wile the young hunter 
 from her nest, is as like as not to tempt forth a stone 
 that will make her a cripple in earnest ; if two robins, 
 as they often will do, get squabbling under the elms, 
 if a patrol of sparrows make a free shindy of it, his 
 glory and delight it is to lay the dirdum in his well- 
 known pleasant and fatal way. But it is the mistake 
 of ' dicky-bird ' sentimentalists to suppose that he is 
 therefore a common savage. On the contrary, it is 
 only a natural outcome of the hunting instinct ; and 
 as long as the sparrow hawks at the bee, and the 
 robin waits for the spider, and the rat murders the 
 mouse, and the stoat creeps on the leveret, it does 
 not seem that any of them have just cause of com- 
 plaint. 
 
 But let this same boy light on a nest of birds or 
 squirrels, and he straightway develops a tenderness
 
 86 Summer 
 
 almost motherly. He thrusts his hand into the dray, 
 and though the young rodents make their sharp teeth 
 meet in his flesh he will bear no malice, but pack 
 them carefully in his pocket, and, dividing the brood 
 among his playmates, rear one for himself so lovingly 
 that the creature plays in freedom in the garden or 
 on the thatch till Spring brings vain and amatorious 
 thoughts, and off he goes to the thronged and secret 
 wood. As for his birds, he takes them callow and 
 unfeathered, when you would think that twelve hours 
 out of their mother's care would certainly mean 
 death by starvation ; yet the way he will bring them 
 up by hand is well-nigh miraculous. He has often 
 watched the process of feeding of the cushat for 
 example, and he imitates it exactly : he fills his 
 mouth with bruised corn or peas, he takes the gob- 
 bet's beak within it, he so transfers the food that his 
 nursling fattens and grows amain and loves him as 
 though he were feathered. For smaller birds as 
 linnets and finches he makes him a little pointed 
 stick, which he dips in a mixture of wild seeds, 
 softened crumbs, or oatmeal and water ; and with 
 the tiniest morsels he sustains and brings to good a 
 gaping and imperious bird-baby that will presently 
 remind you of Lesbia's sparrow ' quern plus ilia oculis 
 suis amabat' 
 
 Thus in the country free birds are very wild, and 
 pets are very tame. The opposite is the case in 
 London. Most of the caged birds are shamefully
 
 Wild Life in London 87 
 
 wild, while the unconfined are almost distressingly 
 domesticated. In Hyde Park, for instance, is a quaint 
 and curious angle. It is not at all sequestered, for it 
 is within a stone's-throw of Rotten Row and a near 
 neighbour to the Serpentine. The true Cockney sees 
 nothing wonderful in it. Here are pigeons ; but so 
 there are at St. Paul's and the British Museum, where 
 they are so tame you can scarce help trampling on 
 them. Yes, but these are true wood-pigeons, and 
 they fill the countryman with amazement. Go into 
 the fields and try to get within gunshot of one, and 
 you will know what it is to stalk the shyest and the 
 wariest of British birds. But these are as tame as the 
 tenants of a dovecot. Crumble a biscuit, and if you 
 stand still, and don't let them catch your eye they 
 will come close up, peck a morsel from your boot, 
 run between your legs, and be more confident than 
 the very sparrows the sparrows here so impudent ! 
 The hour is of little consequence. Just when it is 
 nesting time, the hens sit on the eggs all night, and 
 take an hour to themselves at dusk, when you shall 
 hardly catch sight of a male bird's finer burnish and 
 hear his thrilling note. But at other times he courts, 
 and fights, and coos on the grass or among the leafy 
 trees as happily as in a Highland forest. Yet the 
 only magic by which his wildness has been subdued 
 consists in an abundance of food and a great immunity 
 from disturbance (not perfect immunity, for White- 
 chapel has raided the nests more than once), quite
 
 88 Summer 
 
 contented, for neither the dark ancients nor the 
 brown youngsters attempt to fly away. Thus the 
 lounger in Hyde Park has vastly superior opportuni- 
 ties of studying the creature's habits to those of 
 naturalists living in the woods. 
 
 And the ring-dove is only one of many wild things 
 tamed. Between the road and the close-shaven grass, 
 in the centre of the nook, is a strip of water bordered 
 with sedge and water-flowers. Rabbits, not of any of 
 the house breeds, steal forth fearlessly on the lawn 
 and amuse themselves in public. Here a doe a doe 
 with a litter of five is cropping the herbage as 
 industriously as Mr. Gladstone devours post-cards ; 
 there a few frolicsome young ones are skipping and 
 playing ; while two others (deep in love) are making 
 chase of each other with long deliberate hops, their 
 noses low and their scuts high. Elsewhere you would 
 see them at the slightest noise standing up prettily 
 on their hind legs to listen, or hear them stamping 
 with alarm ; but here the world looks on, and dogs 
 of all shapes and sizes and ferocities trot by, and the 
 little folk go about their business as if their sense of 
 fear were atrophied. So it is with the wild duck. 
 Who that has shot the delicious mallard and contrasted 
 him with his waddling brother of the farmyard could 
 imagine him bringing his agile flappers how mallard 
 do run, and how unlike running they are ! up to the 
 railings to feast on bread-crumbs from your hand ? 
 His plumage, his voice, his flight between his feeding-
 
 Wild Life in London 89 
 
 ground and the Serpentine, proclaim his wildness 
 loudly, but he is rapidly acquiring the true duck-pond 
 habit. While you are looking at him, little moorchicks 
 are playing at the water edge, and their long-legged 
 mother goes darting out of one corner of the sedge 
 and in at another, while on a bit of wood in the 
 middle of the water the cock bird sits preening his 
 feathers with his bright bill as secure as the mallard 
 or the queest. There is many a country face among 
 the watchers, for to them aweary of London to see 
 these dear familiars is almost to revisit the woods and 
 streams of earlier years. 
 
 RABBITS 
 
 RABBIT-SHOOTING suits all sorts and conditions of 
 men. After the rookery, the warren ; you begin with 
 rooks, and you go on to bunny. Nor does the veteran 
 disdain it either ; a day in a well-stocked warren is 
 not wholly beneath comparison with a quest in the 
 heather. But he who likes it best of all is perhaps 
 the man who, without being an infatuated sportsman, 
 yet loves for health's sake, or a taste for the country, 
 or some lazy, hazy inclination to live a great deal in 
 the full air. One reason for this is that it is open 
 all the year. There is no close time ; and no such 
 agitation as was made in favour of the hare has ever 
 been raised for one, the truth being that nothing of 
 the kind is needed. Despite the Ground Game Act
 
 9O Summer 
 
 and the multiplication of poachers, rabbits never 
 were more plentiful than now. The creature seems to 
 benefit by being thinned out to the verge of extermi- 
 nation. However this be, it is certain that nothing 
 tends to disease more than overcrowding, which means 
 the fouling of the grass. His prolific quality enables 
 him to re-stock in a single season a covert which has 
 been trapped and wired even to apparent depopulation. 
 It thus happens that the only season when there is 
 any difficulty in getting him is in the wintry months 
 before seed-time. By then ferret, weather, and gun 
 have done their work, and the fields are bare and 
 without cover. But on fine days even then spaniel or 
 terrier will set him up from the withered grass at the 
 hedge-roots, or from the brushwood of a plantation. 
 
 Undoubtedly, of all the forms of rabbit-shooting 
 the liveliest is that with ferrets, and even that is not 
 to be well done without a considerable knowledge of 
 their habits. It is said they bolt freely on moonlight 
 nights, and I knew an old poacher who on these did 
 all his work. He would slink away up the hillside 
 to the woods an hour or so after dusk with his little 
 dog Nellie, which he used exclusively as a watch, 
 her low growl telling him whenever anybody was by ; 
 and with a net on each bolt-hole and his white ferret 
 hard at work in the burrow, he would seat himself on 
 a log or stone patient and vigilant, and (like Mr. 
 Browning's Artemis) ' await in fitting silence the 
 event ' ! But, as a rule, rabbits never bolt well after
 
 Rabbits 9 1 
 
 mid-day, and the best sport is to be got between ten 
 and twelve. You soon get to know the holes from 
 which they start most readily the best being usually 
 those which open on a steep bank, the worse those 
 which are mined into a level meadow. In the latter 
 the ferret often drives the rabbits into a corner from 
 which there is no exit, while in the former he chases 
 them from chamber to chamber into the open. There 
 is much variety in rabbits. One flies out like a shot, 
 and makes direct for another burrow or covert ; the 
 next stops short and sits down on his front doorstep 
 (as it were) to consider whether he shall go back or 
 maks a rush for it. If they come freely the shooting 
 is just difficult enough to be interesting. Not only 
 does the rabbit offer a smaller target than the hare, 
 but he has a jerky up-and-down run, and his earths 
 are commonly neighboured with brushwood and other 
 cover into which he may, and sometimes does, escape. 
 Besides, it is usual for one gun to look after a number 
 of openings, all of which you must closely watch, so 
 as to knock the quarry over as he slips rapidly from 
 one refuge to another. As a rule you have with you 
 a fast terrier or a small retriever, trained not to touch 
 the ferrets, but fast enough to bring up a wounded 
 rabbit. It is common enough for ferrets, even the 
 most expensive and carefully trained, to ' lie in,' for, 
 as every rabbit-shooter knows, it is a trick that is not 
 too mean for the best of them. Unmuzzled, too, they 
 gorge themselves with rabbit, and when they are
 
 92 Summer 
 
 muzzled and then in the opinion of many they do 
 not work so briskly they will sometimes coil up and 
 go to sleep. To rouse them it is not always enough 
 to hold a dead rabbit at the mouth of the hole and 
 squeak like one in trouble ; the keeper perforce must 
 wake them up with a charge of powder or dig them 
 out. When one is lost he does not seem to wander 
 far ; and he will soon be returned if the ploughman 
 (who is pretty certain to find him hunting for himself 
 along a hedgerow) be not tempted to put him in his 
 pocket and say nothing about him. 
 
 To that sportsman who is not overweeningly 
 anxious to make a big bag, the pleasantest rabbit- 
 shooting is found in a stroll over a big estate, than 
 which there is nothing more enjoyable. A very little 
 experience teaches you when and where to go. Rabbits, 
 like other wild things, have their regular meal-times ; 
 you may smoke a good many pipes under a favourite 
 tree at noon and see nothing. All is perfectly still ; 
 not a wing in the air, not a rustle in the undergrowth. 
 Then, at last, a wood-pigeon flies over from one great 
 wood to another, and is followed by several friends, 
 crows and jackdaws begin to give voice and be busy ; on 
 the stream the trout start rising, and dimple the water ; 
 and hist ! that little dark object unobserved before 
 in the shooting corn or the long grass is a rabbit who 
 has stolen out of his burrow, and whose ear-tips alone 
 are visible as, half-suspicious of a hostile presence, he 
 sits up to listen. If you keep perfectly still and don't
 
 Rabbits 93 
 
 look directly at him (for he is quick to catch your eye) 
 down he'll go, and soon will he be joined in his feed 
 by others. One meal is taken in the early morning, 
 another at four, and a third about dusk ; that is 
 speaking roughly, of course, for where rabbits are 
 plentiful they are popping in and out all day. The 
 extent of their wanderings largely depends upon the 
 weather. After storm or heavy rain you may walk 
 the rough meadows, or beat bracken and gorse for 
 them in vain ; while in a windy evening, when they are 
 not so quick to hear or scent danger, they are easily 
 stalked indeed. In some respects the rabbit is like 
 the \>strich. He does not exactly bury his head in 
 the sand ; but if you take him by surprise in the middle 
 of a field, his one idea of concealment is to stretch full 
 length on the ground, his ears thrown back, and with 
 nothing to differentiate him from a big grey stone 
 except his eyes, in which it is impossible to mistake 
 the look of pain and alarm. But, as you near him 
 from the direction of his home, he screws himself 
 about for flight. If he is allowed to make for his 
 burrow, he does not go off in a direct line, but follows 
 the twists and turnings of his ' run,' for the field is all 
 laid out in rabbit roads, and when he is driven out of 
 them he seems lost. The poacher and the gamekeeper 
 note these runs with equal care, for the loop of wire 
 with which so many rabbits are taken is so placed as 
 to hang over the new-trod way. The rabbit is not 
 very intelligent. Believing himself hidden in a tuft of
 
 94 Summer 
 
 grass or a whin-bush, he will lie there till you pick 
 him up or your dog saves you the trouble. Turned 
 out of a sack at a coursing match, he will sometimes 
 cower down in exactly the same way. He is ex- 
 tremely susceptible to fear, and seems occasionally to 
 get literally frightened out of his wits. I have dis- 
 charged a gun over the head of a rabbit within a 
 couple of paces of his hole, and he has allowed himself 
 to be taken up in a paralysis of terror. What happens 
 when he is hunted by the weasel, the stoat, or the ferret 
 is pretty much the same : he sits stupefied as a mouse 
 does after it has been held unharmed in the grip of a 
 cat. The approach of death operates upon him like 
 an anaesthetic ; instead of taking a line across country 
 to some of the distant haunts where he has gone 
 a-courting on moonlight nights, he potters about the 
 neighbourhood where he was started ; and the slow 
 but devilish weasel will follow him from burrow to 
 burrow, nor turn aside for any of his brothers till he 
 has brought him down. 
 
 During the past few years the depreciation in land 
 and the difficulty of letting to advantage have obliged 
 a number of owners to turn their attention to rabbits 
 as an industry. Now, it is easy to keep up an open 
 warren, where the tenants are not so numerous as to 
 need feeding. If only the keeper is able to protect 
 them against vermin and poachers, they will multiply 
 fast enough to provide constant shooting and some 
 profitable trapping. Some, indeed, who have tried
 
 Rabbits 95 
 
 the experiment believe (as a friend of mine puts it) 
 that ' for profit and pleasure and plenty of rabbits the 
 best way is for a man to farm his own property, and 
 keep up what stock he likes.' This gentleman has an 
 estate of over 2,000 acres on which he kills some 2,000 
 rabbits a year, and his tenants it is a case of pull 
 devil pull baker about as many more. It is obvious 
 that when rental, wages, and other expenses have to 
 be raised from the little beasts, the numbers reared 
 must be vastly greater than that. And yet, on hilly 
 land which commands no high rental, and is only good 
 enough to grow mountain grass, furze, bracken, and 
 some gorse for cover, the experiment seems worth 
 trying. Even here, however, the disappointments 
 may be many and grave. ' I enclosed,' writes one of my 
 correspondents, ' about a hundred acres of the most 
 rabbitty part of the property plantations, furze, grass 
 and so forth. There was a good stock when I enclosed, 
 but I found after a time that there were actually fewer 
 rabbits inside the wire than outside, where they were 
 exposed to the tenants. I think,' he concludes, ' rabbits 
 must like roaming as hares do.' 
 
 It might be thought from the beast's excessive and 
 almost dangerous fecundity, that if a few pairs were 
 carefully surrounded the population would soon swarm 
 to the extreme limits of subsistence. Yet it does not 
 come out that way in practice. In the first place, the 
 fence must be cunningly constructed to keep him 
 within, for he will speedily burrow under sunken wire
 
 g6 Summer 
 
 or any wall whose foundations are not on the solid 
 rock. And yet his engineering is not difficult to foil. 
 When he wants to get out of an enclosure he marches 
 close up to the fence and begins mining ; and if ten 
 inches or so of wire are laid flat on the ground or 
 buried a couple of inches below the surface his game is 
 up. Rats, which are much more clever and inventive, 
 will begin their operations several feet from the 
 obstacle they want to pass. On a hundred-acre 
 warren, I have found many rat-holes, but not one 
 through which a rabbit could escape. Where there is 
 egress, however, he is quick to take advantage of it. 
 As soon as the grass becomes fouled nature seems to 
 prompt him to go afield for food. Even sheep refuse 
 to crop along the borders of a plantation stocked with 
 rabbits : and in successful warrening to keep the grass 
 wholesome is more than half the battle. There . are 
 various devices. One an extremely good one is 
 once or twice a year to sow the land with salt in the 
 proportion of about five hundred pounds to the acre. 
 The mineral not only purifies the ground, but has a 
 medicinal effect upon the tenants, as anyone may find 
 out for himself who will compare the results of a post- 
 mortem of specimens killed inland and on the sea links. 
 The livers of the former are far more frequently diseased 
 than are those of the latter. Another useful artifice 
 is to leave as many as possible of those bare sandy 
 spots which the creatures delight to visit in the moon- 
 light. Everything that induces them to scratch and
 
 Rabbits 97 
 
 play at a distance from the grass is an advantage. It 
 is doubtless their instinct of what is necessary for 
 health which drives them to make such desperate 
 efforts at escape. Where there is no restraint at 
 night, they roam frantic and far, for it is common to 
 find traces of them miles from any burrow. 
 
 The wire fence must be planned as well to bar the 
 way in as the way out. Young rabbits do especially 
 rejoice in enemies. There is hardly a bird of carnivo- 
 rous habit but esteems them (as Mr. Swinburne says 
 of other game) most ' delicate and desirable.' The 
 owl, skimming heath and bracken at dusk, makes off 
 with -one whenever he has the chance ; the carrion 
 crow and the rook pounce on the little creatures in 
 the act of taking their morning bath of sunlight on 
 the green grass outside the parent burrow ; there is not 
 a hawk but delights in them ; and even the sombre 
 and lonely heron, that long-legged, patient eremite, 
 will gobble them up if they venture near the bush 
 where he stands sentinel. No fence is a protection 
 against these ; but with trap and gun the keeper may 
 easily keep them from doing serious damage. No 
 fence will keep out the poachers on four legs. The 
 rat, as we have seen, will burrow his way in ; when he 
 is there he plays havoc with his finds ; and, as with 
 the birds, there is nothing for it but to shoot, ferret, 
 and trap. That net would be fine of mesh indeed 
 through which the weasel could not squeeze his obscene 
 slenderness ; but he has a queer fancy for ' trusting to 
 
 H
 
 Summer 
 
 one poor hole,' and so he helps the keeper to an 
 opportunity of knocking him on the head. Other 
 creatures climb over, and amongst the worst of these 
 are the common cat (when it has forsaken civilisation 
 and the tiles for savagery and the woods), and the 
 stoat, which seems able to climb anything, and whose 
 custom is to leap on the rabbit's back, fasten his teeth 
 in his neck, and ride him till he drops dead. One 
 night I saw a fox clamber up the bole of a tree and 
 leap into the warren. But it is easy to make the fence 
 a snare to all these ruffians. If a breadth of wire is 
 run along the top of it drooping inwards at an angle 
 of something over forty-five degrees (like the eaves 
 of a house) it foils the most agile. Even the squirrel 
 breaks his heart in a vain endeavour to get away ; he 
 climbs up the fence, but is beaten when he finds him- 
 self cornered at the top. In the end, however, every- 
 thing depends on the warrener. Unless he is quick 
 to detect their presence and vigilant to slay, the car- 
 nivora, winged and footed, will make the warren their 
 home. For the benefit of human poachers it is well 
 to have the fence well roughened with spikes. That 
 will not prevent them from getting in ; but if (it is 
 pleasant to know) they are startled at their work and 
 make a hurried attempt to get out, they can only 
 succeed at the cost of lacerated hands and ruined 
 clothes. Where the proprietor is not constantly resi- 
 dent, however, it occasionally happens that systematic 
 robbery is carried on by the warrener.
 
 Rabbits 99 
 
 In the larger warrens to have plump rabbits and 
 saleable, feeding in the autumn and winter is abso- 
 lutely necessary; and there seems little doubt that 
 the best thing is the carrot. Not only is it eaten with 
 relish, but also it is fattening and nourishing. More- 
 over, it does not tend to pot-belly that ruin of 
 rabbits which is the effect of cabbage, turnips, and 
 other more flatulent vegetables. In a large warren 
 with which I am familiar, there has not been a single 
 case of disease, except among hares, which every now 
 and then are picked up dead ; and the owner attributes 
 this to a plentiful use of wheat straw. Little bunches 
 theredl" are left dangling in the wind under a thatch 
 covering, where they keep quite dry. Rabbits come 
 out o' nights and nibble the ends, and lick the rock- 
 salt set near. But (it should be added) the warren is 
 not overcrowded, and annually almost a clean sweep 
 is made of it, and new blood is imported from the 
 neighbouring plantations to prevent in-breeding. The 
 warren, too, has the inestimable advantage of being 
 within easy distance of a town ; so that if the poulterer 
 telegraphs his order (say) at nine in the morning, he 
 may at twelve have on his counter a plentiful supply 
 of rabbits. Three hours before they were nibbling 
 carrots in the field ; and where this is possible the 
 rabbit-farmer competes on favourable terms with the 
 importer.
 
 ioo Summer 
 
 DRIVING WHALES 
 
 FOR the late summer tourist there is no more invigor- 
 ating place than the Orkney Islands. The bloom on 
 the heather comes late and lingers long. When the 
 pedestrian has climbed Wideford Hill, and has at his 
 feet Kirkwall, with its quaint stone-roofed houses rest- 
 ing under the shadow of St. Magnus, he is intoxicated 
 by the salt wind blowing from the craggy coast of 
 Caithness across the Pentland Firth, over the low 
 heathery hills of Orcadia, and ruffling the ocean 
 streams that wash the shores of a hundred islands, 
 churning the blue water till it makes a white fringe for 
 low Shapinsay, and rocky Ronaldshay, and Westray, 
 and Egilshay, and sweeping round the Thieves' Holm 
 and the Horse of Copinshay. He feels that here is 
 indeed the home of the mariner and the sea-gull. 
 And when he is satisfied with archaeological study 
 and observation, when he has looked into the grey 
 churches on the sea-coast, and wandered among the 
 Standing Stones of Stennis, and tried to decipher the 
 runes in Maeshowe, he finds that in the present, too, 
 there is much that is fruitful of interest and amuse- 
 ment. 
 
 For instance, on that very Wideford Hill which 
 we suppose him to have climbed, there stands a cairn 
 of white skulls, and by the Peerie Sea there is a set 
 of furnaces. They are connected with what is, now
 
 Driving Whales 101 
 
 that the wrecking trade has been ruined by civilisa- 
 tion, the most exciting event in island life the 
 slaughter of a shoal of whales. It is a form of sport 
 which, unfortunately, can only be enjoyed by accident. 
 Were it otherwise, the whale would be driven as 
 systematically as the deer is driven, and we should 
 soon have the great mammal on the game list. But 
 local superstition ascribes his coming to a special 
 intervention of Providence. ' When the whales come, 
 O Lord, dinna forget Eday ! ' used to be one of the 
 weekly petitions of an old-world minister. And it 
 may as well be stated, for the benefit of those who do 
 not know, that the event referred to must not be con- 
 founded with the stranding of a huge Greenlander 
 a type which, unfortunately for the Dundee whaler, 
 does not roam about in large herds, though a single 
 estray may occasionally be seen from the boat between 
 Aberdeen and Kirkwall. It is the smaller variety, 
 known as the bottle-nosed whale, or Delpkinus deductor 
 so called because the herd follows the lead of a king 
 bull as wild cattle do. The Orcadians name it the 
 ' ca'ing ' whale because of the shrill bleat of the calves. 
 It travels in immense shoals, and strays into straits 
 and channels from which it does not seem to know 
 the means of egress. Thus, except for the fact that 
 the straits, channels, bays and voes of Orkney teem 
 with snares in their indentations and sinuosities, it has 
 no special connection with the islands. Shoals have 
 frequently been killed in the Hebrides ; they have
 
 IO2 Summer 
 
 been seen far southward off the east coast ; and the 
 largest slaughter of which any record is extant took 
 place near the Faroe Islands in 1644, when over a 
 thousand were killed in two expeditions. In the last 
 year of last century, over two hundred were slain 
 near Fetlar. 
 
 In a general way the temperament of the islesman 
 is slow and torpid, but at the cry of ' Whales in the 
 bay ! ' he wakens up to an extraordinary extent ; for 
 there never was a sea-loving people which was not 
 fond of sport, and besides, the sport is lucra- 
 tive. So whether from church or market, from meat 
 or labour, there is an instantaneous rush to the sea- 
 side. Boats appear as if by magic from you cannot tell 
 where, but every islander seems to have one of some 
 sort. Young and old, the strong and the weak, are 
 equally excited, and arm themselves with the first 
 weapons that come handy : rusty harpoons and 
 ancient flint-guns, scythes, sickles, and pike-staffs. 
 Sometimes, indeed, the whole sport will be spoiled 
 in the flurry, as happened a few seasons back. A 
 cetacean had stranded himself on the sandy shore of 
 Scapa Flow, when a too ardent farmer rushed forward 
 and stabbed him with a dung-fork. Frantic with 
 pain, the creature made a desperate effort, edged off 
 into deep water, and very soon the occasional glitter 
 of a fin or an uncouth gambol told the disappointed 
 onlookers that all the shoal was off to the Pentland 
 Firth. But should no such accident betide, the fleet
 
 Driving Whales 103 
 
 of boats, crazy-looking cobles and skiffs most of 
 them under oars, but if there is a breeze many with 
 sails move out to form a semicircle round the shoal. 
 There is a din as if Bedlam had broken loose, for the 
 object is to frighten the whales till in terror and con- 
 fusion they rush on the shallows and ground. So the 
 water is splashed with the oars, improvised and most 
 unmelodious drums are beaten, and there is a yelling 
 loud enough to wake the dead. From this unearthly 
 turmoil the shy and timid quarry gradually retreats. 
 Yet the battle is not over. If the king bull begins to 
 grow suspicious of the shore, he will turn and charge 
 through the boats. Then there is confusion, indeed, 
 for his lieges follow, and vain are all efforts to arrest 
 their flight. Guns are fired and harpoons cast ; boats 
 are upset, and the cries of half-drowned men and boys 
 mingle with the uproar. If the whales take a direc- 
 tion likely to lead them into further difficulties, chase 
 is given, and the whole business begins again. 
 
 Should there be no stampede, the din and excite- 
 ment increase, till at last the bewildered creatures 
 rush on their doom in the shallows. The boats 
 close upon them, and then begins a murder grim and 
 great. As the islanders hack, and stab, and hew, the 
 scene changes altogether. Soon the surf is incarna- 
 dined with blood, and the shrill dying cries of the 
 whales are distinctly heard in the uproar. They 
 show no fight, for they are the least combative and 
 the gentlest of creatures ; but some die harder than
 
 1 04 Slimmer 
 
 others, and a few of the tough bulls still ply their 
 tails and beat the surf into a semi-crimson foam after 
 they have lost much blood and received many wounds. 
 Extremely few escape a fact which is due to their 
 affectionate nature. They will not leave a wounded 
 comrade behind, and whole shoals are said to have 
 been ruined by this characteristic ; for they will swim 
 round a floating carcase and cry on it to follow, while 
 the harpooner takes them one by one. So, too, the 
 mother which has lost her calf will hover round till 
 she too meets her fate. Were it not that every whale 
 killed means money, the Orcadians might be touched 
 to mercy ; but though far from cruel in their disposi- 
 tions, such thoughts are remote from their minds 
 during a whale-hunt. To lay on right and left, and 
 multiply the number of carcases which will be ulti- 
 mately dragged ashore from these sea shambles, is all 
 their desire. Nor is it possible to blame them, for a 
 shoal of whales is a splendid windfall to people of whom 
 it has been truthfully said that few are wretchedly poor, 
 and fewer still inconveniently rich. Long ago, when 
 their condition was worse than it is now, and a home- 
 lier idea of eating was prevalent in both the North 
 and Western Islands, it was customary to pickle the 
 whale-beef for food ; and those who have tasted it 
 assert that it is by no means bad. Even now, when 
 the Faroe Islanders hear of a great catch, they come 
 in those curious boats of theirs and bargain for it. 
 But the whale's chief value lies in his blubber ; and
 
 Driving Whales 105 
 
 the flensers, or flenchers, as they are locally called, are 
 soon at work stripping this off, while rough furnaces 
 are erected, and the disagreeable odour which mingles 
 with the fresh breeze from the sea tells what is going 
 on long after the pure waves have washed every trace 
 of struggle from the shore. When all is done, how- 
 ever, there may be a sum varying from 1 5o/. to 400!. 
 to divide among those who took part in the hunt ; 
 and when the terrible Orcadian storms are driving the 
 foam from one island shore to another, and the 
 inmates are seated round the peat fire of the cottage, 
 not the least effective of the many plans for whiling 
 away the winter hours will be to recount the prowess 
 and skill shown in the great whale hunt. 
 
 WILD CATTLE 
 
 SINCE the new line of railway has been opened be- 
 tween Cornhill and Alnwick, the easiest way to reach 
 Chillingham from Edinburgh is to get to Cornhill 
 via either Berwick or Waverley route, and thence to 
 Wooler, where there is now a station. No one, how- 
 ever, who visits this part of the country for the first 
 time can do better than forego the luxury of steam 
 for the last stage ; the wide Roman road is ex- 
 cellent for driving, and leads through a land charm- 
 ing in itself, and full of historical and romantic associa-
 
 io6 Summer 
 
 tions. On the left hand is ' the deep and sullen Till,' 
 flowing under historic bridges like Twizel, and past 
 such well-known Border fortresses as Etal and Ford ; 
 on the right are the broad blue Cheviots, with dark 
 Flodden close at hand, and as worthy of its epithet 
 to-day as in the time of Scott, and Yeavering Bell 
 towering in the distance. There is hardly a castle 
 which has not been the scene of a foray, hardly a 
 field whose name does not testify to the baptism of 
 battle. From Wooler, where the prudent traveller 
 will bait his steed and order dinner, the distance 
 is about seven miles, whence the way leads across 
 the Till by a rickety bridge and Wooler Water by a 
 ford. If the visitor is so unfortunate as to arrive at 
 Chillingham in the midst of the pic-nic season, he will 
 probably have time enough to admire the old church 
 and Lord Tankerville's castle before the keeper is at 
 liberty to show him over the park. 
 
 But the last time I was there it was towards even- 
 ing, and the castle shadows had lengthened, and a 
 gloom was gathering among the trees in the park. 
 It is then or at early dawn you most vividly realise 
 that the cattle are wild in the fullest sense of the term. 
 During the day they lie about in secluded corners of 
 the park, or they rest in the woods ; but, like the hare 
 and the rabbit, they begin to move about when dusk 
 comes. And the most interesting thing about them 
 now is their habits. With their appearance Sir Edwin 
 Landseer and other artists in ink as well as paint
 
 Wild Cattle 107 
 
 have made us familiar, and there is no need to describe 
 again the pure white coats and those heads which 
 with their bold upward-curving horns, alert glowing 
 eyes, and black muzzles, seem the very incarnation 
 of wild, shy energy and beauty. Nor is it necessary 
 to rediscuss their origin, as it is still a moot question 
 whether they are descended from a native breed of 
 white cattle a view taken by Mr. Darwin or sprang 
 from progenitors imported at some almost prehistoric 
 period. Local tradition settles the question very 
 summarily, for it says they appeared on the scene 
 miraculously. When the sun went down there was 
 not stech a thing in the park ; when it rose they were 
 roaming among the trees and over the rough hills. 
 An aged keeper who was here over thirty years, and 
 who, coming originally from the neighbourhood of 
 Kingussie, places small faith in Northumbrian folk- 
 lore, has by his scepticism done much to dissipate this 
 superstition. 
 
 It is the extreme wildness of the creatures, how- 
 ever, which is their most interesting characteristic. 
 Theirs is an entirely undomesticated nature. For 
 instance, if a calf which has been concealed by its 
 mother in a thicket is surprised by a visitor, it does 
 not, as a farm one inevitably would, make a vain 
 attempt to fly, but drops like a stone and crouches 
 among the fern as a hare does in its form, as a rabbit 
 will do if you are between him and his burrow, as a 
 young pewit will do among the grey stones of the
 
 io8 Summer 
 
 cornfield. Approach it, and its head is at once set 
 for butting, even though the attempt should cause the 
 feeble little creature to stumble and fall on the fern. 
 In their own struggles and they are the most 
 quarrelsome of beasts they display the cunning of 
 our cleverest wild things. A young bull which is 
 getting 1;he worst of an encounter with the tough old 
 king of the herd will fall and sham death exactly as 
 a weasel does when it wants to beguile you into free- 
 ing it from a trap ; but as soon as the conqueror 
 marches off, the other, which very likely has not been 
 hurt at all, will get up and begin grazing. The 
 heifers hide their young in a quiet place, to which at 
 intervals they return for nursing purposes as warily as 
 .a bird to its nest. And the method employed for their 
 capture is precisely analogous to that used for snaring 
 some other wild beasts. It is in winter alone that they 
 show any signs of tameness, but when the frost is hard 
 and the snow lies, and there is no food on the heights, 
 then they become dependent for support on the long 
 cart sent with hay or turnips. This they have learned 
 to follow fearlessly, and it has consequently become 
 the favourite place of ambush when it is desirable to 
 shoot them. For it is hardly necessary to say that 
 their numbers are kept under control. Lord Tanker- 
 ville does not care to see the herd dwindle below sixty 
 or multiply much above severity ; it numbers seventy- 
 three at present. If some limit were not placed to the 
 numbers of bulls, they might re-enact the tragedy of
 
 Wild Cattle 109 
 
 the Kilkenny cats, for they fight all the year round, 
 kneeling on their fore-legs and throwing the turf over 
 their heads when they challenge. To say that they 
 deliberately kill off the wounded, weak, or ailing is as 
 untrue of them as it is of other wild beasts. But a 
 bull must always be able to keep his head with his 
 horns. When they are roaming or feeding, apparently 
 out of mere devilment one gives another a prod or a 
 push whenever he has the opportunity. Thus a weak 
 bull or heifer, being unable to offer a strong defence, 
 is not by any constructive design, but by a series of 
 accidents, gored and butted to death. In captivity 
 they are as difficult to tame as house mice, even the 
 half and the quarter breeds retaining much of the 
 ancient combativeness. It is very seldom that either 
 on account of sickness or for breeding and crossing 
 purposes there are not one or two in the paddock ; 
 and these the visitor may examine. 
 
 To get close to the herd is impossible. Their 
 scent is so good that a cow has been known to follow 
 a man's track like a bloodhound, and their ears are 
 correspondingly acute. You can only get near enough 
 to bring them in range of a good glass, and even then 
 every head will be turned towards you, and the flap- 
 ping ears will show how little is needed to give the 
 alarm. But it is not necessary for them either to see 
 or hear. If the deer, of which there is a herd of about 
 seven hundred in the park, are alarmed, and fly in the 
 direction of the cattle, the latter also are almost certain
 
 no Summer 
 
 to take to their heels. It is the constant aim of the 
 proprietor to have as few of these stampedes as pos- 
 sible ; for, as the cattle breed all the year round, such 
 alarums and excursions prove fatal to more calves 
 than it is easy to estimate ; and the breeding of so 
 large an animal in wildness is at the best attended 
 with much danger and difficulty. To see them to 
 advantage therefore it is advisable to go alone or with 
 a single companion. And no time can be better than 
 when the clouds above Trickley Wood are reddening 
 with the sunset. Then, as one white form after 
 another is seen emerging from the wood, trampling 
 the fern, cropping the herbage, and biting at the low 
 branches, it is possible to realise what this part of the 
 country must have been like when the deer and cattle 
 had the great forest of Cheviot to roam in, and when 
 all the land between Wooler and Millfield was one sea 
 of yellow broom. 
 
 A SUMMER IDYL 
 
 AMONG the inhabitants of our lakes and rivers, I do 
 not believe there is a greater fraud and disappoint- 
 ment than the pike. Other fish have a character and 
 ideal, and live up to them ; he is only trustworthy in 
 so far as that he is certain to disappoint expectation, 
 to be shy when he should be ravenous and ravenous 
 when he should be shy. That is not the opinion of 
 expert anglers, or of those who write books on fishing ;
 
 A Summer Idyl 1 1 1 
 
 I only give it as the result of my own experience, the 
 experience of an ignorant Cockney. 
 
 I was introduced to the pike under peculiar cir- 
 cumstances. It used to be my invariable custom to 
 spend about a month in summer in a quiet North- 
 umbrian inn on the banks of the Till. My reasons for 
 doing so I am not obliged to state. Perhaps it was 
 because my friend Tom Burton's father lived in the 
 neighbourhood, perhaps because I have a poet's love 
 of the low blue Cheviot Hills and the silent prosperous 
 district over which they cast their shadow, and as a 
 third perhaps I will say that it possibly may have 
 been tecause Mary Burton, Tom's sister, was the 
 sweetest and loveliest maid on the Borders. Indeed 
 it was through thinking so much of her that ever I 
 came to see the pike at all I say the pike because it 
 is to one particular jack I refer. 
 
 I will explain how it came about. As I am of a 
 reserved disposition and dislike being teased about 
 my affairs, I found it necessary to blind my associates 
 in London as to my real purposes in the North of 
 England, so before I took my second journey, I bought 
 a beautiful trouting-rod and spent a fabulous sum on 
 tackle of various descriptions, and gave out that I had 
 become an enthusiastic angler. Such nonsense as 
 that was to be sure ! But by reading old Walton, I 
 gained enough of knowledge to serve conversational 
 purposes, and when I came home I made no scruple 
 to tell a number of extraordinary stories regarding
 
 ii2 Summer 
 
 the havoc I had made among the trout, and even 
 (Heaven forgive me !) the salmon. I do not claim 
 to possess any extraordinary inventive powers on 
 account of such tales ; on the contrary, observation 
 has taught me that among anglers the gift is quite 
 common. 
 
 With me, fishing was a very simple process. But 
 before I describe it let me enter a much-needed 
 protest against Sir Walter Scott's reference to my 
 favourite river as 'the deep and sullen Till.' In the 
 neighbourhood of Flodden Hill it does happen to flow 
 in the midst of green haughs and how beautiful they 
 are in June when the silvery hue of the daisies is 
 broken only by the gold of buttercups in the centre 
 and the blue of speedwells lining the river-brink ! and 
 its slow pace is still further retarded by several mill- 
 dams ; but travel either up or down you will find it 
 streaming gaily past rock and boulder, or clasping in 
 its great arms a buxom island clothed with long grass 
 and fern out of which trees of various kinds are pro- 
 jected. If I do not inform my readers which part I 
 admire most, it is for good and sufficient reasons. It 
 is enough to say that it is one of the most romantic 
 portions of the river. On the one bank a great wood 
 stretches away for miles overshadowing a cool and 
 shaded walk, and the outermost trees wave their 
 branches over the river ; on the other is a steep and 
 broken incline, with gorse and bracken enough on it 
 to form a tolerably good fox-cover. Past the wood
 
 A Summer Idyl 1 1 3 
 
 and the whin the river dances in broken streams that 
 are a joy to the heart of a trout-fisher. 
 
 I am not a real but only a make-believe angler, 
 and therefore when I sallied forth with rod and line 
 I carefully avoided the streams. On the few occa- 
 sions on which I had been tempted to take any other 
 course one of two things had invariably happened. 
 Either my flies had caught the treetops and been lost 
 there, or if I did manage to get them on to the water 
 they speedily got hanked on the weeds and suffered 
 the same fate. Asa lover of the picturesque I adored 
 the streams, and especially at even when the rising" 
 moon 'happened to shine straight down the river and 
 the water like Time moved ever on with its sob or 
 smile, over and past the shadows that waved or were 
 motionless, past them as it had rolled past their 'an- 
 cestors ere the trees that cast them were born, past 
 them as it will roll past their innumerable successors. 
 But as an angler I hated the streams. My favourite 
 place for fishing was in the pool above them ; close 
 beside it was an old willow-tree, the roots of which 
 had been laid bare by the floods. The tree itself, 
 though green and healthy, had fallen almost prostrate 
 in a downward direction. About twenty yards further 
 up was one of those great beds of weed that are so 
 numerous in a hot summer. 
 
 My method of fishing, as I have hinted, was sim- 
 plicity itself. It was merely to cast a line with a worm 
 into this hole, sit down, light a pipe or cigar, and watch 
 
 I
 
 1 1 4 Summer 
 
 the float. In the course of half-an-hour or so a bob- 
 bing up and down of the cork would give warning 
 that something was at the bait. My plan was to give 
 the creature plenty of time. If it continued to tug for 
 five minutes or so I would pull it out, generally to find 
 that it was an abominable eel. Sometimes, however, 
 the appearance of a perch would diversify the pro- 
 ceedings and afford me immense gratification. I was 
 rendered exceedingly proud once by getting no fewer 
 than four of these to my mind beautiful fish in 
 little more than as many minutes. 
 
 I was no angler, and I took no delight in angling, 
 but as I sat in the shade of the willow-tree it was 
 amusing to watch the water-rats playing among the 
 branches, or the little rabbits popping in and out of 
 their holes on the banks, or a water-hen feeding, its 
 brood of young swimming after it like so many tiny 
 balls of black wool. One day, while thus watching 
 and musing my eye fell upon the water, and what was 
 my delight and surprise to notice a great fine-looking 
 fish floating close to the weeds. He might be perhaps 
 four feet below the surface of the clear water, and 
 never moved, except almost automatically to wave his 
 fin or slightly bend his tail. It has always been a 
 great pleasure to me to see closely for the first time 
 any free healthy wild creature, and I might have 
 watched there long enough but that I was desirous of 
 knowing its name. I therefore signalled to the game-
 
 A Summer Idyl 115 
 
 keeper, who was coming along with his gun, and asked 
 him what it was. 
 
 ' Bless you, sir,' he answered, ' it's but an ugly pike. 
 That is his hole ; you may see him any day, and if it 
 warn't for the tree roots and the weeds and the bad 
 landing-place, I would quick shift him with a net. I 
 killed over a hundred in the early part of the summer. 
 They had fairly destroyed the trout-fishing.' 
 
 The keeper, whose acquaintance with me was of 
 long standing, sat down and told me a number of 
 extraordinary stories about pike. I was interested, 
 but not moved. To hear about the pike was pleasant 
 enough, but to fish for him would have demanded 
 too much exertion in hot weather. So I smoked 
 and listened in a very calm and dispassionate state 
 of mind. 
 
 The evening after, as I was walking on the river- 
 side with Mary Burton, I happened in an evil hour to 
 relate to her this incident of the pike enlarging for 
 dramatic effect on his ferocity and appetite. 
 
 My relations with Mary need explanation. I 
 had been her lover for several years, but it was one of 
 her peculiarities to believe that this was a secret. As 
 well as being the prettiest, she was the shyest girl in 
 the district. Although there was no barrier to our 
 union, she always put me off when I asked her to 
 allow me to ask her father's consent to its taking 
 place. That night, under the orchard trees, before 
 parting with her I was urging my suit with more than
 
 1 1 6 Summer 
 
 usual impetuosity, when all at once a bright look 
 flashed upon the drooping face. 
 
 ' Well, dear,' she said, ' I will when ' and at this 
 word the soft eyes began to twinkle with mischief 
 and the sweet lips to assume their sauciest curl 
 ' when. . . . when. . . . you catch that pike ! Good- 
 night ' and before I had quite recovered from the 
 shock, her light dress had disappeared into the house, 
 whence a moment after issued a single peal of soft low 
 mocking laughter. 
 
 For a while I felt as a man feels who has been 
 ' chaffed ' and made ridiculous when he was rather 
 inclined to show off. In the darkness my face flushed 
 to think what a useless ' tailor ' their strongest term 
 of contempt I must appear to these country-people. 
 But the joke had been made in a style too pleasant 
 for it to wound deeply, and with a little effort I soon 
 rallied, but it was with a curious sense of pique. ' I 
 shall take you at your word, Lady-bird,' I said to my- 
 self on my way back to the inn ; ' they laugh best who 
 laugh last, and it will be your turn to blush when I 
 throw down that pike at your feet' How thankful I 
 felt at that moment for having brought with me some 
 books on angling ! Before going to bed I had learned 
 what each of them had to say about the pike, and 
 nothing could by any possibility have been more 
 encouraging ; ' a fresh-water shark,' said one ; ' the most 
 ravenous of river fishes,' said another ; ' will swallow 
 anything,' averred a third ; ' might be killed with a
 
 A Slimmer Idyl 117 
 
 rusty hook and a clothes-line,' contemptuously said 
 a fourth great authority. ' Ho ; Ho : Lady-bird,' I 
 thought to myself. ' Little did you know how easy 
 was the task you set me. Evidently you knew no 
 more about the pike than I did.' Had there been 
 proper tackle at hand I should have gone to the river- 
 side before going to bed, so sure did I feel that master 
 jack could be had for the asking. While I slept that 
 night he was slain a hundred time and more and 
 each time I awoke and discovered the mistake I vowed 
 afresh that he should not see to-morrow's sun go down. 
 
 To make assurance doubly sure, I stepped over 
 next morning to the gamekeeper's cottage to get his 
 advice on some minor points, and also to borrow a 
 stout rod and line my own accoutrement being 
 meant for small trout fishing. Before starting I jotted 
 down what the books seemed to think the favourite 
 baits. These were a lump of fat bacon, an eel's head, 
 a frog, a small trout and a minnow ; others were given, 
 but these seemed the most popular, and I made up my 
 mind to try them in the order in which they are set 
 down. I resolved to say nothing to the keeper about 
 my book-knowledge, but to test the one by the other. 
 When I entered the paddock in front of the dog- 
 kennels he was stripped to the shirt beside a tub of 
 water apparently washing a liver and white setter. 
 
 ' Good morning, James/ I said affably, ' you seem 
 busy.' 
 
 ' Verra, sir. Gettin' the dogs right for next mouth ;
 
 1 1 8 Summer 
 
 they were dressed yesterday, and they're gettin' a wesh 
 this morning. Come up in a week and see the dif- 
 ference of them.' 
 
 ' I am rather sorry you are so much engaged as I 
 had a slight favour to ask, but take a taste of this to 
 kill the odour of these animals,' and I handed him a 
 flask with which I had specially armed myself for I 
 have not spent so much time in the country without 
 learning the surest way to ' fetch ' a gamekeeper. 
 ' The truth is,' I continued, ' I've taken a strong notion 
 to fish for pike, but I have no suitable rod, and besides 
 I don't know anything about it, and would like a hint 
 from you.' 
 
 This was enough. A strong rod and line could 
 easily be procured, and for the rest I learned that my 
 baits were as likely as not to meet with success, 
 ' only/ said my mentor honestly, ' I never try .pike 
 myself except with the net ; ' his information was all 
 second-hand. As I went away to meet him in a 
 couple of hours, when, as he thought, the dogs would 
 be washed, the ferrets fed, and other pressing duties 
 done I carelessly remarked, ' I would stand you a 
 bottle of the best whisky, Robson, if you could put 
 me up to getting that pike at the willow-tree some 
 time this week.' 
 
 ' If you mean it I'll try,' answered the gamekeeper. 
 
 That afternoon at four o'clock I might have been 
 seen with a gigantic rod twenty feet long, and of tre- 
 mendous weight, labouring at my accustomed place,
 
 A Summer Idyl 1 1 9 
 
 heaving a huge lump of bacon over the weeds, and 
 letting it float down past the pool into the stream. 
 It was very exciting at first, for every few minutes the 
 pike seemed to be there, until I discovered that it was 
 the bait caught on weeds or stones. After two hours 
 of such exercise my arms ached fearfully, so throwing 
 my bait into the pool with a float, I sat down and 
 smoked in the semi-despair of smothered expectation. 
 Fruitlessly however ; darkness came and I was forced 
 to go home with an empty basket. That night I 
 scored fat bacon out of all my books, and in the 
 morning continued the campaign with an eel's head ; 
 with a bait like that, I felt myself insulting the enemy, 
 and was hardly disappointed when once more the sun 
 went down without jack as much as venturing out. 
 Next day, however, I thought myself bound to succeed. 
 The keeper had procured a beautiful yellow frog, and 
 all the ancient and modern writers seemed to agree 
 that this was the lure most tempting to a hungry 
 jack. My piscatorial tutor put it nicely on the hooks, 
 so nicely that it swam about with evident enjoyment 
 and agility. He had a big float to keep it from sink- 
 ing too far down, and sinkers to hinder it from rising 
 too far up ; it was gently and firmly coerced into 
 pursuing a strict via media. Still jack was not 
 tempted. He made no effort to contest the owner- 
 ship of the frog, and that unhappy animal after strug- 
 gling until I was sorry for it, finally managed to escape 
 by swimming into the weeds. When I drew out the
 
 I2O Summer 
 
 line he was off and away. I felt too dispirited to try 
 another, and my belief in the voracity of the pike was 
 greatly shaken. I grew desperate, and seriously 
 meditated asking the keeper to kill a pike for me with 
 the net, which I was prepared to affirm was my friend 
 at the willow-tree. I reserved that, however, as the 
 last resource of a baffled and beaten lover. 
 
 My next effort was with a minnow. At first I 
 tried to follow the keeper's directions and work it 
 about in the neighbourhood of the weeds, but as the 
 only result of this was that my line caught on the 
 bottom, I flung it in with a cork float. This time I 
 imagined that I was really to be successful, for as I 
 lay and watched, down with a strong long pull went 
 the cork. My hands shook with excitement as I 
 seized the rod and felt a weight at it such as I had 
 never felt before. With a strong effort, I struggled 
 to remember all I had read and heard about running 
 a great fish, and most warily and cautiously set about 
 landing the monster. But he wouldn't run. When I 
 pulled he put a great stress on the line, when I gave 
 him his way he did not move more than a few yards. 
 This did not last long, for if he would not ' play ' I 
 thought the sooner I got him out the better, so man 
 against fish we both pulled, with the consequence that 
 I proved the stronger and to my infinite disgust suc- 
 ceeded in placing upon the greensward a monstrous 
 eel ! I felt hurt. The denizens of the deep seemed 
 to be having a small joke at me. Nevertheless, I tried
 
 A Summer Idyl 121 
 
 again with minnow and got another great eel, but 
 no pike. 
 
 Next day, when trying with trout, I nerved myself 
 with the thought that this was my last but best chance. 
 The day was approaching on which it would be 
 necessary for me to return to London, and even had 
 that not been the case, I wanted the courage requisite 
 to try any more devices. I prayed the Gods to be 
 propitious to one struggling so hard to achieve a great 
 object by honourable means, and in my inmost heart 
 I threatened them that I would say farewell to 
 honesty if they failed me. All was of no use. As I 
 was exerting all my muscle to make a big cast with 
 my gigantic rod, the hook caught in a whin-bush be- 
 hind me and crack ! the top was broken. Sorrowfully 
 and despairingly, I took up the fragments, and with a 
 long and dismal face, carried them back to the keeper. 
 I had reached the end of my patience. My gloom 
 was momentarily dispersed when I entered the pad- 
 dock. The man of traps and guns, crimson with rage 
 and with a great board in his hand, was careering in 
 full chase after a fine game bantam I had often ad- 
 mired on previous occasions. ' It has nearly killed 
 his best carrier pigeon,' said his comely wife, in 
 explanation of an outburst which was not nearly so 
 surprising to her as to me. In a few minutes her 
 husband came up carrying the dead bird by the heels. 
 As soon as he saw me. his countenance cleared, and 
 his first question was, had I killed the pike ? At my
 
 122 Summer 
 
 mishap he only laughed. Give it up ? Oh no, he 
 would not let me give it up, he was not in the habit 
 of slipping his chances of a bottle of whisky so easily 
 as that. 
 
 ' Look here, sir,' he said, producing a great bottle 
 in which three nice trout were swimming. ' I kept 
 these as a last chance. We'll try a line,' and he looked 
 quite happy and certain. ' You be fishing at about 
 eight to-night as usual with your little rod, and I'll 
 step round that way. I want a rabbit at any rate.' 
 
 As I had been previously struck with the great 
 determination and resourcefulness of this man I im- 
 plicitly obeyed his directions. Before the appointed 
 time I was at my station. Putting a nice red worm 
 on my hook, I flung it in and sat down on a stump 
 to have a smoke until my friend appeared. While in 
 this posture I was so completely shrouded from view 
 by the willows that a great heron, without seeing me, 
 came up from the stream flapping his heavy wings, and 
 alit to fish in one of the shallow streams. I was watch- 
 ing it so intently that I never saw the keeper until his 
 hand was on my shoulder, and he said, ' There's some- 
 thing at your line, sir.' 
 
 ' Oh, never mind the line, it's only an eel, but 
 look at that bird ! Can't you shoot him ? ' The gun 
 was cocked in a moment, but the heron was out of 
 gunshot, and, as if it had heard what we were saying, 
 rose up and departed across the wood to another bend 
 in the river
 
 A Summer Idyl 123 
 
 Then I turned to my line little dreaming what a 
 curious lesson in angling I was about to receive. 
 Dip, dip, dip went the cork below the water, but 
 never stopped long. The jerks were just like those 
 of a small eel. Very carelessly did I commence to 
 draw it in. As I was doing so, however, the fish 
 suddenly seemed to become endowed with the strength 
 of a demon. The reel creaked as the line flew out 
 like lightning. ' Let him go,' yelled the keeper. ' By 
 the Lord Harry, if it's not the pike.' I did let him 
 go. And now the fish getting into mid-stream and 
 not being hooked went slowly, yet as if he knew there 
 was something wrong he rose to the surface. I 
 noticed my line getting higher and higher until at 
 last it seemed to lie on the top of the water. Then 
 there was a swish and plunge, the report of a gun, a 
 cloud of smoke, and my line dangled loose. 
 
 ' Pull him out,' said the keeper. 
 
 ' He's off,' said I. 
 
 ' He's not, for I shot him,' said the keeper. 
 
 Thereupon I drew the line in, and joy ! I felt after 
 all something at the end of it. 
 
 ' It's the dead pike,' said the keeper. 
 
 ' We'll soon see,' I answered, and pulled it ashore. 
 I lifted it easily enough, for to my chagrin what I had 
 hooked was the smallest, most insignificant-looking 
 mite of a red-finned perch it has ever been my lot to 
 see. I stared at it in blank amazement. Imagina- 
 tion failed to conceive how that trembling creature
 
 124 Summer 
 
 could have put such stress on my line. I was roused 
 from my unpleasant reverie by the voice of the 
 keeper, who was saying as much to himself as to 
 me: 
 
 ' I saw the shot strike him. If that fish isn't 
 killed I've made him no weel' a favourite saying of 
 his when he had wounded anything badly without 
 bringing it immediately down. 
 
 ' What fish ? ' I asked bitterly. ' Do you call 
 that thing a fish ? ' touching the poor perch with my 
 toe. 
 
 ' That ! no, I mean the pike. Didn't you see him 
 take your perch as you were drawing it in ? I shot 
 him when he came to the top, and I'll bet my boots 
 he drifts into the stream.' 
 
 We both strained our eyes to look for him in the 
 clear shallow water where the pool merges in the 
 stream. ' Look yonder ! ' cried the keeper ; and sure 
 enough there was the white belly of a dying fish 
 struggling to keep itself from being floated into the 
 head of the stream. Not one word did I say, "but 
 springing up to the waist in water, I darted into the 
 river, and too eager to wait quietly while the pike 
 drifted to a shallow where I could pick him up, down 
 I dived for him at once, and emerged dripping and 
 triumphant with him in my arms. 
 
 ' Hoorah ! ' shouted the keeper. ' Dod, but he is 
 a slapper ! ' and when weighed it turned the scale at
 
 A Summer Idyl 125 
 
 seven and twenty pounds. After getting out I was 
 a new man. 
 
 ' You take that fish up to Miss Burton,' I said to 
 the keeper, ' and when you return to the house you'll 
 find your bottle all right. In the meantime I will 
 change my dress.' 
 
 Shortly after, feeling quite fresh and invigorated 
 after the bath, dressed according to my best taste, 
 and with a choice flower in my button-hole, I stepped 
 up to see Mr. Burton, greatly to the confusion and 
 dismay of his daughter, who tried hard to make us 
 believe that she had never meant what she had said. 
 Before leaving the farmhouse that night we had a 
 consultation over the fate of the pike. Mary timidly 
 proposed to stuff him. 
 
 ' Stoof him ! Thou'lt stoof none of him,' said her 
 Yorkshire parent. ' Woife, thou'lt have him done for 
 breakfast to-morrow morning, an' a bit o' fat bacon ; 
 and thou'lt come, lad, and help us eat un.' 
 
 Need I say how gladly I promised ? 
 
 I looked in at the keeper's as I was going home 
 that night, and I am sorry to confess that I found 
 him and a crony just finishing the whisky, while he 
 tried incoherently to relate the adventure for the 
 hundredth time. 
 
 The rough winds of autumn had stripped the trees 
 of their tender foliage, and the frosts and floods had 
 swept the weed-beds from the river when I returned 
 to Tillside, to carry thence a bride pure as the snow
 
 126 Summer 
 
 that now mantled the Cheviots, as shy as the wild 
 things that lived there. We kept no memorial of the 
 pike, but we called our first-born Jack, and there he 
 lies in the cradle at this instant a sleeping monument 
 to my victory over his namesake.
 
 AUTUMN 
 
 AN AUTUMN REVERIE 
 
 IF there is any type of man I fear, it is Carlyle's 
 favourite Ram Dass ' with fire in his belly.' Unmeta- 
 phored I grant him to be a fit object for philosophic 
 admiration, a person of vigour, bustle, energy, and 
 other virile qualities to which the professed idler lays 
 no claim ; but am I wrong in relating Ram Dass to 
 certain men of whom biographies are written, and 
 who are linked together by their fiery attribute ? Ah ! 
 you need not smile and grunt ready acquiescence, as 
 if you expected a welcome though well-worn gibe. 
 If I do not love the self-made millionaire, whose 
 fortune is founded on the solitary half-crown with 
 which he fared to town in his boyhood ; it is neither 
 because of his ignorance which I respect nor his 
 snobbery, that is amusing, nor any of the other 
 characteristics that make him the aversion of cultivated 
 people. It is exclusively on account of that same 
 ' fire in his belly,' the purpose and energy distinguish-
 
 128 Autumn 
 
 ing and differentiating him from the rest. Essentially 
 and with but slight variation of gift he is one with 
 others who make a hubbub on the otherwise quiet 
 earth, with the heaven-born artist who on his first 
 slate drew a caricature of his nurse, the poet who 
 rhymed 'jam' and 'ham' before he quite knew the 
 use of either, the urchin novelist who romanced to his 
 uncle while still in short clothes all those, in a word, 
 whose missions date from the cradle, and who thus 
 are looped together by this fiery kindredship. 
 Whether he works with paint or plot, rhyme or soap, 
 words or votes, the man of mark, the celebrity of the 
 day, will be shunned and feared by him who loves to 
 lie i' the sun beyond hearing of the troubled noise. 
 
 The matchless charm of the might-have-been is 
 dearer to me than any joy in mere accomplishment. 
 Of the fortune which is made, the book which, is 
 written, there is an end as far as personal interest 
 goes. In hard and definite outline, finite and there- 
 fore disappointing, its exact contours have emerged 
 from the hazy fairy land of futurity shorn of all 
 romantic hopes and boundless possibilities. But what 
 is still undone supplies inexhaustible food to the 
 imagination. Therefore do I love the unpractical 
 theorist who is ever conjuring up visions that shine 
 and are beautiful as long as they are untested and un- 
 approached, but fade and die if you attempt to reduce 
 them to practice, and dislike the narrow practical man 
 whose horizon is confined to the practical and possible
 
 An Autiimn Reverie 129 
 
 and who blushes to be suspected of beating the air. 
 It is pleasanter to sit by one's own library fire of a 
 winter night, and dissect the latest financial project 
 by which an always unfortunate, always hopeful 
 neighbour is prepared to lose another slice of his 
 patrimony, than to follow a bragging, smug-faced, 
 successful man about, as with an insinuated boast he 
 shows in turn his furniture, his pictures, his horses, 
 and other damning proofs of his having lived in direct 
 opposition to the ideal life. And surely, to loiter in 
 a woody lane on a summer afternoon and listen as a 
 young poet describes the never-to-be-printed tragedy 
 by whfch he hopes to electrify London until you are 
 almost infected with his enthusiasm, is more like real 
 poetry than to stand before an author's bookcase and 
 number row upon row of the works by which his 
 fame has been achieved. Until disillusion has actually 
 come to your speculative friend, you have the pleasure 
 of hoping that at last his ill-luck is to be retrieved, and 
 until the poet becomes disgusted with the return of 
 his manuscripts and goes into a place in the City, it is 
 a delight to sit on the willow-stump by the river and 
 share his dreams. There is no need to mourn over 
 their disappointments, for ere the climax comes other 
 aspirants will have come to inspire you with new 
 hopes. 
 
 Nothing leads more inevitably to a doleful conver- 
 sation than an invitation to discuss some ' actual ' or 
 practical idea. It makes one feel as if in a cage. 
 
 K
 
 130 Autumn 
 
 Imagination may not flutter a wing without dashing 
 it against some iron bar of possibility, and every 
 excursion of whim or fancy is arrested by the author's 
 stolid concentration on the workable. But to enter 
 with zest and seriousness into the consideration of an 
 impossible project is to afford scope for all the light 
 artillery of the mind. Any fanciful suggestion, any 
 wild whim or odd paradox lightly put forward with 
 an ' if/ may provisionally be discussed without the ' if,' 
 till, when drained of entertaining matter, the 'if 'is 
 recalled as an executioner. A frolic mood has full 
 swing when there is a luxurious absence of business, 
 and what anyone says is absolutely of no consequence. 
 Of all talkers the most amusing is the hero of the un- 
 accomplished. 
 
 What one prizes most in the country, therefore, is 
 the excellent society it affords. I am no poet, and do 
 not refer to nature ; neither to the brown hills that 
 the sun kisses at bedtime ; nor the winds swishing 
 through the elms and lamenting on the waste ; nor 
 the summer swallows that nest in the window nooks ; 
 nor the winter robins tapping on the frosty pane ; nor 
 to any of the other phenomena whose main use now- 
 a-days appears to be the ornamentation of modern 
 prose, but to the men whose equation is unknown. 
 In town, people are all ' accomplished facts,' and not 
 only does the sight of so much crystallised industry 
 disturb an idler's tranquillity and stimulate him to 
 the exertion he abhors, but when men have adjusted
 
 An Autumn Reverie 131 
 
 themselves to their tasks, and given an adequate taste 
 of their quality, the interest for ever has gone from 
 them. It is the untried racer, the youth whose work 
 is not yet begun, and whose power is ungauged, that 
 gives a fillip to surmise and provokes to speculation. 
 To dream the dreams of an ambitious boy, to see in 
 imagination the beardless writer of an epic (in manu- 
 script) laurelled and famous, to single out some village 
 ragamuffin as a Whittington, or in another mood when 
 the mind desires more active employment to prefigure 
 the downfall of their cloud castles, and watch with the 
 mind's eye the bubble reputation glittering far above 
 them, is more delightful than any show of celebrities. 
 When your own time for building visions has passed, 
 and you have learned that to jog inconspicuously 
 through the world is best, there is no pleasanter way 
 of spending a sunny afternoon than to sit on the bole 
 of a fallen tree under a dome of green, and cast golden 
 horoscopes for your friends, weaving romances that 
 will never see Mudie's, and watching a drama played 
 in a theatre of your own building, that like some 
 itinerant plays has an adjustable ending, tragical or 
 comic as your liver may dictate. One generation 
 treads close on the heels of another, and the characters 
 come trooping to you without the trouble of invention, 
 and while the years are checking one set of forecasts 
 you are fashioning others. 
 
 If anyone asks what is the ultimate gain, reply 
 that there is no such word as 'gain' in your voca-
 
 132 Autumn 
 
 bulary, for your fatherhood is of things undone. Un- 
 painted pictures hang in your galleries, the halls of 
 your fancy are peopled with unsculptured statues, in 
 dreamland you have row upon row of unwritten books, 
 to each of which Time the reviewer is appending his 
 unerring verdict. 
 
 If one ventures to remark that country life is 
 favourable for study, quotidian persons immediately 
 accept it as a commonplace. That fatuous person, 
 the professional nature lover, breaks out at once with 
 his ' picture,' his epithet and his catalogue : Ah, yes ; 
 one has Nature at first hand there. I lay down on a 
 bank of yellow broom. In the valley below, a tattered 
 bare-legged boy is guddling trout in the stony burn. 
 From the gnarled oak beside me, to a green elm on 
 the hill opposite, a cuckoo flew ringing his clear note. 
 A white-throated ousel skims down the stream and 
 lights on a boulder. Near the burn-side a wagtail 
 hops. On the mountain top a fresh breeze is wreath- 
 ing the mist into waving veils and spirals and so 
 on ad infinitum. It is a wholesome exercise in spring 
 to lie at a sunny dyke back, and hear lambs bleat and 
 birds whistle, while cattle low and the ploughman 
 cheerily speaks to his team as, champing their bits and 
 coming smartly over the headland, they snatch the 
 first tender buds from the hedge at which you are 
 lying ; but even a lazy man scruples to call the process 
 studying nature. 
 
 There is no more fatal distraction of one's thoughts
 
 An Aittumn Reverie 133 
 
 in the country than a curiosity about Natural History. 
 To enjoy it thoroughly one must resolutely determine 
 to take no thought of what is passing around. If a 
 man feel under a moral obligation to ' observe ' every 
 weasel in chase of a rabbit, if the appearance of a 
 strange bird sends him home to consult a work on 
 ornithology, if a kestrel questing a field mouse excites 
 him, he will be more tranquil in town. The continuity 
 of his ideas is liable to fracture at the most interesting 
 moment. My most delicious reveries come at even- 
 tide, when the river gleams in moonlight, and the 
 slender willow-boughs droop like a dark fountain in 
 play ; but what would become of them if I had a 
 burning anxiety about every warbler that twitters late 
 in the sedges, if the humming of a beetle made me 
 wish to catch it, if I ever asked was that the barn-owl 
 that shrieked ? No, it is a prime essential not only 
 to meditation but enjoyment, that you have only a 
 negative love of wild things one that consists in an 
 absence of dislike to country sights and sounds. 
 
 For example, there is a certain house wherein I 
 love to be alone, but that is unbearable with company. 
 Owing to an easily explained cause, the wind is always 
 singing mournful tunes to its inmates. Look out of 
 the window and you will easily see why ; it stands in 
 a wooded hollow, and the surrounding heights are all 
 fringed with rows of pine-trees. So every visitor is 
 asked to take note of the ceaseless moaning that 
 swells in storm to a raving, and sinks in calm to the
 
 134 Autumn 
 
 softest and gentlest sigh. Now if others are present, 
 and particularly if my attention is drawn to it, the 
 wind comes laden with dreariness. Waste places 
 over which it has blown spread out before my imagin- 
 ation as I listen ; useless force and matter seem 
 piping their lamentation in it. If I hear a so-called 
 lover of Nature posing as a critic of Nature's sorrow, 
 the music chills and haunts me like a despairing wail. 
 But alone and not consciously listening, the accom- 
 paniment played on the pine-trees weaves itself into 
 dream and fancy. Pipe after pipe is smoked and 
 relit, while an endless procession of figures in shadow- 
 land pass by dead and living, real and imaginary 
 jostling one another in a crowd where all are on an 
 equal footing. Yet if one were to say, ' How sadly the 
 wind moans to-night ! ' the spell is broken. Presto ! 
 Like a troop of ghosts at daybreak, like feeding conies 
 at a gunshot, they have fled. To hear and not to know 
 you are hearing ; to see and be unconscious of sight, 
 these are the only means of tasting the delicious in- 
 fluence of Nature. 
 
 The companionship of books is not much less of 
 a bore than that of human beings. An intellectual 
 hunger in its mildest form is a distraction, and soon 
 develops into a disease. Who, with unassuagable 
 appetite passes on from book to book is worse than a 
 drudge ; he is in the way of becoming a slave to 
 printed matter ; his own individuality is lost among 
 the alien spirits with whom he consorts. The other
 
 An Autiimn Reverie 135 
 
 kind of reader, who is afflicted with a devotion to some 
 favourite author, and reads and re-reads his Shake- 
 speare or his Goethe, his Sterne or his Walter Scott, 
 his Burns or his Tennyson, who, instead of a fresh, 
 crisp newspaper, has Edie Ochiltree to breakfast as 
 often as he has eggs and toast, who carries a pocket 
 Shandy when he takes an airing, and reads the ' Lotos 
 Eaters ' in his summer-house (when he might himself, 
 like an epicurean god, look down on the human 
 turmoil), is still more to be pitied. His analogue is 
 the habitual playgoer who weeps on the fiftieth night 
 exactly where he has wept forty-nine times before, or 
 the countryman who, if dowered with Ayesha's gift 
 of years, would still in his second thousand greet the 
 clown's ' Here we are again ' with the old burst oi 
 laughter. But we, nous autres the eclectic connoisseurs 
 suck but sparingly from these flowers. A book is 
 inferior to a circus horse in so far that it is a precisely 
 mechanical toy. Though the tricks and capers, the 
 gambols, stumbles, and falls of a circus horse are 
 severely regulated and occur time after time in the 
 same order, there is still, while he has life, the chance 
 of his accidental deviation into novelty. Not so with 
 a book. Turn over the leaves and you discover an 
 action of as cast-iron regularity as an automaton or a 
 musical box. People talk fondly of books as com- 
 panions, but fancy a friend who every time you met 
 him started in the same words, and pauses, and phrases, 
 to recite the same rigmarole he knew by heart ! But
 
 136 Autumn 
 
 the act is inevitable, says your critic. Pooh ! nonsense. 
 Suppose Mr. Steinitz the chess-player had published 
 the single score of a game as he played it, and said, 
 ' This is the one way to deal with the Ruy Lopez 
 opening, white must invariably attack thus, black 
 defend with that,' were the moves never so deep and 
 crafty his most docile pupil would refuse to take his 
 word that there are not others as subtle ; for the game 
 is susceptible of infinite variation. Yet critics continue 
 ally assert that in the far more complicated game of 
 life the man of genius sets down forced moves only, as 
 if on the great chess-board the score of one game as 
 written by a master were exhaustive. I find the main 
 pleasure of books to arise not from conning over 
 favourite poems or stories till I have them by heart, 
 not from rummaging in the dust-heaps of literature, 
 but from speculating about their possible variations. 
 How could Shakespeare have solved his hardest 
 problem without putting Polonius behind the arras ? 
 What would the ' Inferno ' have been had Dante 
 chanced to be a Puritan ? To try and invent answers 
 is like wooing the dead from Hades. 
 
 There are still simpler examples. Of all the poets 
 who have tried, say, to concentrate the whole spirit of 
 Autumn into a sonnet or a lyric, is there one who 
 has succeeded so that we can point to his handiwork 
 and say, ' There is the one autumnal song ' ? It is 
 easy to answer with a negative, for the test is at hand. 
 Morning after morning may be spent in the windy
 
 An Autumn Reverie 137 
 
 fields and rustling woods, and though the hues of 
 decay become gradually more brilliant, and the leaves 
 dance before the breeze, and the hedgerows redden 
 with hip and haw, and the squirrel is busy among 
 the hazel nuts, dream and reverie travel on uninter- 
 ruptedly, the present, the future, and the might-have- 
 been blended in disorder. But to him who does not 
 seek for it the poem comes at last, suggested perhaps 
 by a trifle a family of jays flying round the thicket 
 with harsh cry and shining plumage, a flock of rooks 
 tumbling in the October air, a party of gleaners in a 
 neighbouring field. Instead of feeling then that ' The 
 Last Load Home,' or any other poem, is an adequate 
 summary of the suggested vision of work done, and 
 the gathered harvest, and the inevitable moral, it does 
 not convey a tithe of what the brook sings as, with 
 soft and ceaseless lullaby, it flows past the village 
 graveyard, where merry harvesters of a bygone time 
 rest like garnered sheaves. No poem that ever was 
 written gives more than a hint of the broken melodies 
 sung by our Ophelia of the Ages moving on to her 
 doom. Nature is always sad to those in communion 
 with her ; and her love-making is but to find a listener 
 for a tale of woe. Even in spring she seems to whisper ; 
 the young lambs, the bourgeoning trees, the insects 
 and the birds, all drain something from a not inex- 
 haustible source, and are indeed but exudations of 
 decay. With her utmost economy and she flings even
 
 138 Autumn 
 
 dead bodies into the melting-pot for recasting there 
 must be a continual loss. 
 
 My reflections never take this turn save it be after 
 the mind has been stupefied with too much reading 
 and conversation, or as a corrective of what a bard 
 has called ' the wild joy of living ; ' the contemptuous 
 simile of the elder moralist, ' Ants on a dunghill,' is 
 not at all in it with them as a precipitant of that joy. 
 But when they do, whether they stop at an idle 
 musing lit up by a fancy, or travel on to the inmost 
 root of sorrow, they form memories that serve as 
 touchstones and measuring lines of poetry. No verse 
 exactly expresses what the reader or the writer has 
 felt, only a variation of it ; but whatever rings true 
 will awaken or recall those moments of exquisite 
 intimacy with Nature. If they are sad, so is every- 
 thing else that is delightful ; all music is so ; the sea 
 mourns along the beach and round her lonely islands ; 
 the wind's voice is at its sweetest a gentle dirge ; 
 colours are not harmoniously blent till they produce 
 a subdued pensiveness ; and there is a suggestion of 
 grief in every fine and delicate odour. 
 
 It is an advantage of living in the country that it 
 leaves little time for making even unwritten criticism. 
 Every post brings material for a more charming occu- 
 pation. You can tell from the grimaces and motions of 
 his puppets whether the ordinary dramatist is intent 
 on comedy or tragedy. His skill is exerted from the 
 outset to produce an atmosphere suitable to result.
 
 An Autumn Reverie 139 
 
 How the gloom grows and deepens over the ' Bride of 
 Lammermoor ! ' What a light sparkles through every 
 scene of ' The Tempest ' or ' As you Like it ' ! But 
 Nature is a shamelessly inconsistent playwright ; or the 
 finger of fate is hard to discern. There were two lovers 
 whose marriage I felt sure had already been made in 
 Heaven, and in whom one beheld the Baucis and Phile- 
 mon of a long comedy. They blew hot and cold, loved 
 and hated one another, fell out and became reconciled, 
 were jealous and trustful, laughingly mocked and 
 scolded without bitterness ; in a word, played the old 
 game as it has been played since the days of Adam. 
 What a pother when, before more than the prologue 
 was spoken, my comedy was ruined by a railway acci- 
 dent in which the hero was killed, and I had to think 
 out the obscure indications which showed that from 
 the beginning a tragedy was inevitable. There was my 
 modern St. Francis too, how pure and aspiring he was, 
 how sure I felt of the effects of his love and eloquence ! 
 Yet he married a rich widow, and going into Parliament 
 changed a well-imagined epic into burlesque. Ample 
 atonement for mistake is offered by the delight of re- 
 constructing the play. 
 
 Nevertheless there are times when for a space 
 this ingenious puzzle and all its kindred amusements 
 pall, and the mind, losing the activity that is essential 
 to the full enjoyment of idleness, becomes torpid and 
 irritable. Fled is all the poetry and the fun. The 
 silly neighbour chases his soap-bubble as before, but
 
 140 Autumn 
 
 he is not followed by your cheery laughter ; it is out 
 of your power to build castles in the air for anybody 
 the wind pipes but fancy will not dance to it the 
 prattling of the brook is not listened to ; gone are the 
 novels and plays of dreamland, and with them every- 
 thing but the inane. To emerge triumphantly from 
 that morass and slough of despond is a crucial test of 
 philosophy. One man advises a run up to town, a 
 look in at the theatre, a cosy dinner at your club ; 
 and his counsel is not unworthy of regard ; another 
 recommends you to drown care in the Lethe of a 
 thrilling romance, while the child of nature says, ' Drink 
 in the atmosphere swathing the pine-trees, bask in 
 the magical sunlight that plays on the mountain tops, 
 rest you in the kindly lap of earth, thus will the dying 
 red of your humour be fanned into flame again.' But 
 is there no better substitute than these for the harp 
 of David when Saul is possessed by the evil spirit ? 
 There is, and its name is Patience. Wait, and you 
 will find that depression runs its course like a disease 
 and leaves you merrier than before. 
 
 The insane sadness of one's questioning moods 
 causes a hunger for the oblivion of active employment. 
 While your ploughman is labouring like his own 
 horses, the mere happiness of gathering and dispersing 
 force is enough for him ; at leisure he seeks forgetful- 
 ness in drink and opiates. Business, art, sport, 
 literature, are but correlative avenues of escape from 
 oneself, different forms of nepenthe. For it requires
 
 An Autumn Reverie 141 
 
 much courage to be idle, to ripe and ripe in steadfast 
 tranquillity, to rot and rot without flinching, to expand 
 as calmly as the leaf, to wither as uncomplainingly as 
 the flower. The dull workaday citizen plods wearily 
 on his journey for so many hours, and sleep wafts him 
 forward during so many more. Every sunset and sun- 
 rise sees him nearer the end, and in his humble way 
 he is glad, not to be too ardently assailed by cold and 
 hunger, to have some comfort at his hostelry, to reach 
 death by easy stages. More fiery and strenuous souls 
 angry at the slow and jogging pace spring to right 
 and left in pursuit of three masked elusive figures 
 they fain would make companions of. But Pleasure 
 flies from her wooer and flouts him, Fame that frowns 
 on lusty youth mocks bitter age with her embraces, 
 and Wealth the prostitute makes him father of an evil 
 offspring. 
 
 As the kindly spectator, whose dancing days are 
 over, is visited in his overlooking balcony by many a 
 ball-room queen with smiles she will not accord to the 
 envious love-sick gallant, so he who contentedly from 
 an outside vantage point surveys the world's chasing 
 throng may in his cosy nook have many a vision of 
 the damsels who are so shy to their declared and 
 ardent lovers. They come in their simplest apparel, 
 and when at his bidding they unmask, it is to disclose 
 no proud and haughty beauty such as in their mad- 
 ness their frantic suitors have imagined, but sweetness, 
 modesty, and simplicity, such as dwell only on the
 
 142 Autumn 
 
 pure face of a girl. Wealth I trow looks in but 
 seldom, she has so many lovers ; and Fame not oftener, 
 for the door is locked to her brazen-faced usurping 
 sister Notoriety ; but Pleasure, the fairest of the three, 
 is a constant visitor. She will sit by me for hours 
 as I recall what constant playmates we were when 
 children, and how she carried her boy lover to wood, 
 and rill, and river, and romped with him on banks 
 yellow with primroses, and among the meadow daisies 
 and buttercups. ' Do you remember the young 
 thrushes on the banks of the leafy burn that divides 
 the Dene ? ' she will ask, or ' Have you ever had such 
 angling as when you and I caught our first minnows, 
 and our very earliest perch swam forward with his 
 red fins and took the bait ? ' So she will prattle on 
 for hours together, till I forget that I sit in an arm- 
 chair by the fire, and am a boy again, wandering over 
 stony fields above which the black and white pewits 
 fly and shriek, or watch a red squirrel scale the 
 beeches while the lazy cawing of the rooks floats down 
 the air. 
 
 The sun sets as he used to, but with far more peace 
 and glory and a multiplied wealth of golden clouds, 
 and the summer wind blows sweet and faint. For 
 there is nothing my enchantress cannot reproduce at 
 will, from the ditch with its sticklebacks and the over- 
 hanging hawthorn where the greenfinches built, to the 
 river, the ruin, and the ferry. And because of the 
 alternately glowing and disappearing vision of these
 
 An Autumn Reverie 143 
 
 things, I cannot see a child gathering the first violet 
 of Spring, or laughing under Autumn's ruddy fruit- 
 trees, without participating in his pleasure. For me 
 again as for him the clouds are only dark and drifting, 
 shadows diversifying the deep sky's beauty ; the winds 
 blow and the rains fall for his and my amusement, and 
 even the stormy tempests of Winter are a recreation. 
 Though I and my generation pass, and the purpose 
 of our having lived is still inscrutable, yet the bounding 
 life of children, the unperturbed beauty of sunlight, 
 the undivined mystery of existence, are sources of a 
 hope that is the only prophylactic against despond- 
 ency." 
 
 A FARMER'S NOTEBOOK 
 
 A VERY favourite calendar with country folks was 
 ' Rider's British Merlin/ a work adorned with many 
 delightful varieties and useful verities, fitting the 
 longitude and latitude of all capacities within the 
 islands of Great Britain and Ireland. The good 
 compiler, one Cardanus Rider, was no niggard of his 
 information. His geography extended from ' a true 
 and plain description of the highways ' to America 
 ' which consisteth of those two parts Mexicana and 
 Peruana ; ' but chiefly he shone as a chronologist. 
 Would you know the year which saw the flames rise 
 from ' Gomorrovv ' or the Wooden Horse dragged into
 
 144 Autumn 
 
 Troy? He sets you down these delightful things, 
 with hundreds more of the same minting. But 
 mostly it may be supposed the eighteenth century 
 bucolic would ponder the simple yet sage counsellings 
 with which Cardanus embellished his pages. As that 
 in January one must ' use meats that are moderately 
 hot, for the best physick is warm diet, warm clothes, 
 and a merry honest wife ; ' but in July ' Perfume your 
 chamber every morning with Tar upon a Chafing 
 Dish of Coals.' John Nutt, Cardanus his printer, 
 knew well that Farmer Giles was not likely to buy 
 more than one copy in a lifetime, so had the book 
 bound in strong brown leather, and it was still stout 
 and serviceable after twenty years of pocketing. 
 
 It has been my luck to light upon a very inter- 
 esting copy of this work. A gentleman farmer in 
 Wiltshire, knowing me interested in such matters, 
 produced it to show the rate of agricultural wages a 
 hundred and fifty years ago. He found it under a 
 staircase pulled down for repairs. With a pair of 
 compasses, a foot-rule, and other pocket emptyings, it 
 had been left in a corner and the masons had built it 
 in ; cover and leaves are worm-eaten, and the ink is 
 faded, but enough remains decipherable to show that 
 it belonged to Henery Kemble, and how Henery 
 Kemble used it. Henery's house was a very different 
 affair from that one wherein his book was found. 
 Tenant after tenant has built and enlarged till the 
 cottage of 1700 is a goodly mansion. A filthy horse-
 
 A Farmers Notebook 145 
 
 pond used to be where now are lawn, and rose garden, 
 and vineries. Then, you must pull down the trellis 
 and strip off the eglantine, uproot the shrubs, and cast 
 away the gravel, before you can realise the bare 
 thatched house of six or seven rooms as it stood in 
 the beginning of last century. The farm buildings 
 also have been metamorphosed ; though the old wheel 
 granary is still there to remind one of old fashions. 
 The very windmill is a new contrivance for pumping 
 water. A century ago the farmer ground his corn at 
 a watermill by the brook that hurries through the 
 chalky combes. It is standing there yet ; but it has 
 been turned into a couple of cottages. No cart road 
 passes, and the grain to feed it must have been carried 
 on pack-horses. 
 
 Henery Kemble, once the tenant of house, and 
 mill, and farm, acquired his 'British Merlin' in 1711, 
 'being the third year after Bissextile or Leap Year,' and 
 used it for jottings till 1739 ; so that this one almanac 
 served him eight and twenty years. By that time 
 there was no half-inch of paper without its note. The 
 entries, of the most general design, are perhaps for that 
 very reason much more interesting than the contents 
 of a regular account-book. One may easily judge that 
 Henery was a hob-nailed and unlettered Farmer Giles. 
 That his dialect was the broadest Wiltshire is evident 
 from his orthography : ' To noint cows oder ' is one of 
 his recipes ; he writes ' wheats ' for oats, ' ackers ' for 
 acres, ' backon ' for bacon ; and all through his 
 
 L
 
 146 Autumn 
 
 variegated orthography you may discern a leaning to 
 the landward mode of utterance. As might be ex- 
 pected, his main concern is with his bestial. The mat- 
 ing of his black heifers and his red, of his ewes, and 
 mares, and swine, is set down with punctilious care ; 
 as is the cost of pasture and commonage for his ' pide ' 
 cows and his sheep. From the number of recipes 
 you would judge that he trusted little to the farrier. 
 Nearly all are compounded from such well-known 
 herbs asfoxwort and dandelion, comfreyand Solomon's 
 seal, wild carrots and stinging nettles. Here is an 
 exceptional one meant for human beings : ' Take a 
 new laid eg and rost until the yoke will come forth 
 whole and then open the eg then take as much burnt 
 alam as will lay upon the top of the nif put it into the 
 eg and bruse it together and straine it in a linen cloth 
 for sore eyes.' Now and then you get a glimpse of 
 the annotator from another point of view. He appears 
 to have been the moneyed man of the parish, and 
 certain entries show that at need he could stretch forth 
 a helping hand : 'July 7, 1711, 1 Henery Kemble lend 
 John Herring, the shopkeeper, fifty shillings.' Here 
 and there are hints of market-day frolics : as, ' I Henery 
 Kemble took up 2 pounds and 16 shillings of William 
 Kemble, and put 1 1 ginis down in the same glass ' : 
 a trick still practised in the neighbourhood. But 
 such incidents appear to have been rare and surpris- 
 ing excursions out of the jog-trot road of husbandry. 
 There are items the economist will consider with
 
 A Farmers Notebook 147 
 
 zest ; they throw some light upon the Payment of 
 Labour Question in that eighteenth century which, 
 according to Mr. Kebbel, was the golden age of 
 agriculture : ' a broad rich plain lying between two 
 volcanic ranges ; a happy valley rich in corn, and wine, 
 and oil.' Put into figures this blessedness amounted 
 (so far as Hodge was concerned) to eightpence or 
 ninepence a day. ' John Gelt, his bill for work ' came 
 to 2. $s. 6d. for five weeks ; but this (Ss. Sd. a week) 
 appears to have been the highest wages Henery ever 
 paid. Five and threepence for 7 days, three and six- 
 pence for 6 days, two and tenpence for 3 days, and 
 eightpence for a single day such entries occur again 
 and again at intervals within the twenty-eight recorded 
 years. Nor was piecework better paid. * John lea, 
 his bill for mowing 1 1 ackers and a halve' was 0. 
 ijs, $d., but he had 2s. 6d. for ' one acker in the marsh.' 
 John had evidently to sweat for his pound. Plowing, 
 ' thrishing,' and mending of all sort were paid at eight- 
 pence a day. It would be a mistake to think that 
 the money thus earned went very far. Here is what 
 seems to have been the average rent for a cottage. 
 It is a receipt that Henery, who committed himself to 
 few documents, carefully copied into his note-book : 
 ' September 3, 1739, reseved of Jonathan lea 2. os. od. 
 to pound being one years rent dew at Micholmus last 
 past i sai reseved by me Henery Kemble 2. os. od.' 
 Ninepence a week is not much for a house ; but 
 in point of fact it would now be held quite enough
 
 148 Autumn 
 
 for a hovel. And hovels these old Wiltshire cottages 
 must have been. Many thousands of cottages are 
 letting at a shilling a week ; in part of Wales the sum 
 is sixpence ; on outlandish farms in Berks and Oxon 
 cases occur where the labourer is mulcted in not more 
 than fourpence-halfpenny. For a bushel of ' whoats ' 
 Jonathan had to pay three and twopence, and submit 
 to the moulture. ' William Kemble his bill for bakon ' 
 came to 2s. ^d. for 4^ pounds ; and sixpence a pound 
 appears to have been the common price. 
 
 Henery had an unfortunate method of so jotting 
 down his payments that they could be of use to 
 nobody but himself. Occasionally he seems to have 
 been seized with a desire to reckon up his disburse- 
 ments : and fills a whole page with the oddest items. 
 He has paid $is. $d. for ploughing and is. 6d. for a 
 new hat ; i6s. $d. for 'bif and a halfpenny for lard; 
 and a debt of twopence is set down as punctiliously 
 as one of twenty pounds. But, as the quantities are 
 not mentioned, you cannot as much as guess at the 
 cost of many important commodities. 
 
 MAKING EVEN 
 
 Two phrases still recurrent under Henery Kemble's 
 pen are a source of infinite amusement. They illus- 
 trate the countryman's reluctance to make full and
 
 Making Even 149 
 
 final settlement. In nineteen times in twenty, Henery 
 gives the particulars of a bill, and the word that some- 
 thing is ' leaft to pay.' Sometimes you judge from 
 the smallness of the amount' leaft to pay 4^.,' 
 ' leaft to pay 3^.,' ' Leaft to pay id.,' for example 
 that Henery must have suffered from a chronic lack 
 of small change, but just as frequently the cause 
 appears to be a mere dislike to settlement. Indeed, it 
 would be a mistake to suppose that impecuniosity had 
 anything to do with the matter ; for it is plain that 
 Henery was a ' warm ' man, with a good deal of stock 
 and no difficulty in finding money, whether to lend or 
 spend. The ' grippy ' small farmer made it a rule 
 never to part with cash if he could help it. Phrase 
 the second is still more significant, in that it shows 
 that Henery seems scarce ever to have paid wages 
 outright. It is always ' / made even ' with Robert or 
 Abram : with the additions now and then, ' and paid 
 him in full o. 5 s. od.' Every possible bill was treated 
 in like wise. Henery makes even with his cottagers' 
 rent, ' dew at lady day last past,' with ' Miss Pamer ' 
 for his tithes, with ' An Solt ' for the commons of his 
 sheep. The expression is still in common use. ' But 
 if farm labourers,' you ask of complaining village 
 tradesmen, ' spend so much on beer, and dress, and 
 cheap trips, and deal with you on credit, how do you 
 live, and how do they manage to get out of their 
 difficulties ? ' ' Why, we make even somehow,' is the 
 answer : ' by taking a bag of potatoes, a cask of butter,
 
 150 Autumn 
 
 a sack of wheat, or anything else in kind.' Or 
 Tummus, engaged for, say ten shillings a week, but 
 out of cash and credit both at Michaelmas or Lady 
 Day, marches up to his master, and in the great 
 kitchen, the only sitting-room of farmers like Henery 
 Kemble: and 'Please, muster, and axin' pardin,' 
 Tummus says, ' but it be six months since last 
 reck'nin', and I be wonderful short of brass, and if 
 I could have a bit o' my wages, muster .' To which 
 Farmer Giles thus : ' Sartin it is, Tummus, thy money 
 be dew. Wait, then, wile I get the book, and what 
 I owe 'ee I'll pay.' (He gives a look at his ledger.) 
 ' Drabbit, it comes to thirteen pounds, Tummus.' 
 
 TUMMUS (all on fire): 'Just the very money, 
 muster ! ' 
 
 GILES F. (deep in thought} : ' Ay, ay, Tummus, 
 but something mun come off it, I'm sure. We made 
 even last time by leaving the rent over : that's two 
 pound, and then, Tummus, you had a sovran at 
 Christmas ; and ten shill'n for the fair brings it to 
 9/. IOJ., lad.' 
 
 TUMMUS (still blazing) : ' Yes, muster, I reckon 
 that be how it stands.' 
 
 GILES : ' Nay, but Tummus, thou does not think 
 I can give thee meat and taters and cheese and milk 
 and coals for nowt, does thee ? Let me see now, meat 
 fower pound, potatoes two pound, coals a sovereign, 
 other trifles ten shill'n, rent two pound, why . . .'
 
 Making Even 151 
 
 TUMMUS (quite extinguished] : ' Thou's countin' 
 rent twice, muster ! ' (They argue the point at length.} 
 
 GILES (with magnanimity, having floored his man) : 
 ' That makes you owe me half-a-sovran, Tummus 
 counting the pig. So if you give I that, we can make 
 even.' 
 
 TUMMUS (angry and fallen, but powerless} : ' Nay 
 muster, but I be wonderful short of brass, I be ; and 
 the missis when I tell her, her'll say " Go set," and 
 " Here's a man for you, I'll be taken abed with the 
 ninth next week, and the wastrel has drunk six 
 months' wages in a night ! " For her'll think I'n made 
 this p.' 
 
 GILES (heartily) : ' Why, dang me if I see thee 
 beaten, Tummus ; thou's worked well for me, lad, and 
 I'll stand to thee. Thou owes me for the pigling, 
 that's ten shill'n, and we'll let the rent stand over till 
 next reck'nin', that's two pounds. Now if I gin thee 
 thirty shill'n' and thou owes me the rent. And that 
 makes even, dount it ? ' (Scene closes.} 
 
 . In this way, Tummus, with a debt of two pounds 
 and cash in hand to the amount of one pound ten, 
 would start upon another six months' term ; at the 
 end whereof he was pretty sure to be much in the 
 same predicament. It may be deemed that the prac- 
 tice is obsolete, but it is not so. Old customs die 
 very hard, and many forces tend to keep this one in 
 being. Few can penetrate the mysteries of the cot- 
 tage economics, or so much as guess at the contriving
 
 52 Aiitwnn 
 
 and managing by which a family of six or eight is 
 housed, and clothed, and fed, on some twelve to sixteen 
 shillings a week. There is also a strong desire to 
 abolish payment in kind. Full of new wants and in- 
 spired with new ideas in dress and cheap trimming, 
 Tummus hungers for hard money. The agitator 
 backs him ; and wherever there has been disturbance 
 you shall find the bargain between employer and em- 
 ployed most rigid. And even County Court judges, 
 aweary of the bickerings arising out of payments 
 made in kind, will often counsel a farmer to hire for 
 cash. This is leading back to the old trouble. Let 
 it be granted that the barter of labour for produce 
 is rude and bad : that the worst imaginable form of 
 contract was represented by the udal tenure (as it 
 used to prevail in Orkney) under which a tenant paid 
 a third of his crops as rent, and was prohibited from 
 disposing of the rest excepting in exchange for goods 
 supplied by the ' Fowd of the Parish.' But, in prac- 
 tice, if you pass to the other extreme and pay in money 
 only, Tummus is very soon in hot water. The trade 
 of farming is conducted on so fine a margin of profit 
 that labourers are fully aware of the hopelessness of 
 looking for any rise of wages. But their incomes will 
 not stretch out to their requirements unless they 
 advantage themselves by getting food at cost price. 
 This poor Tummus speedily discovers. The store- 
 keeper is as keen as himself for cash, and his prices 
 are far above the farmer's. Soon or late, then, he
 
 Making Even 153 
 
 must go to his master, and ask for a sack of wheat, or 
 a cheese, or a cask of butter at farm rates : the cost to 
 be deducted from his wages ; whence the old pay-day 
 struggle about making even. Any system of allot- 
 ments that would do away with this were a boon 
 indeed, but it is becoming more and more apparent 
 that Tummus cannot and will not give his scanty 
 leisure to the toil of cultivating anything larger than 
 a moderate-sized garden. Farmers, on the other hand, 
 are very willing to forego the regular engagement 
 system, and to take their men on piece-work. Such 
 labourers as believe they can make land pay should 
 be perfectly content with the terms : whenever they 
 may rent an acre of their own, and eke out their wages 
 with the yield. In theory it is perfect, is it not ? But 
 at the critical moment the farmer needs his Tummus, 
 and his Tummus wants to be on his own allotment. 
 
 If Tummus only knew it, or rather if Tummus 
 would forego his wretched yet to him most costly 
 diversions he would profit best by engaging himself 
 for six months or a year, at moderate wages in money 
 and a share in the crops. That would rid him of the 
 poignant affliction of being sent home on rainy days 
 and left with no work and no wages in midwinter ; 
 and it would protect him from that trick of making 
 even so long a scandal in the land.
 
 154 Autumn 
 
 THE HARDEST LABOUR 
 
 ONE of the shrewdest landowners in England, and 
 a farmer to boot, asked of me once upon a time, ' Why 
 torment yourself to account for Hodge's migration ? 
 Here,' he continued, ' is the secret in two words : it 
 is hard work.' Pressed to explain, he said, as one 
 uttering a truth there's no gainsaying, that no toil 
 makes such trial of the muscles as the toil of agricul- 
 ture, and that men who had been to school would not 
 endure it The statement impressed me, and I pro- 
 ceeded to make my oracle particularise. If agricul- 
 tural work be the hardest there is, then what is the 
 hardest agricultural work ? At first he was inclined 
 to give the palm to milking. ' But,' you object, ' is 
 milking not the task of Phyllis, and Rose, and Tess of 
 the D'Urbervilles ? Does not the proposition involve 
 the absurd contention that the average dairymaid is 
 stronger than a coal-porter ? ' These flouts are pre- 
 mature. No one is going to contend that the maid 
 that ' singeth blythe,' the be-hymned of Herrick and 
 the beloved of Burns, is a Hercules in petticoats. But 
 she would need to be that, or something like it, to fill 
 the place of milker on a modern dairy-farm. It is 
 nothing to look after Daisy and Queenie and Blossom, 
 in the intervals of creaming, and churning, and baking, 
 and the rest. It is otherwise when there is a whole
 
 The Hardest Labour 155 
 
 herd to be relieved, and it is milk, milk, milk, all the 
 day long, till, never so strengthened with eelskin, the 
 weary wrists will no longer bear up a pair of hands 
 sore with cow-pox, the milkman's malady. Let the 
 athlete try it for a day, and he is like to admit ere 
 nightfall that till then he never knew what hard work 
 was. 
 
 And this is not the hardest. My friend is a very 
 strong man, and one of the lightest of drinkers withal. 
 Out shooting you cannot tire him. I have seen him 
 come home as fresh as paint after tramping over all 
 sorts of soils, and after carrying a heavy bag for part 
 of a day that lasted from ten in the morning until dusk. 
 Well, one hot June day he undertook to go out with 
 the mowers at five, and work in moderately heavy 
 clover till six at night. He won his bet, but he vows 
 that the experience surpassed his worst surmises. 
 He drank a clean gallon of strong beer, with another 
 of cider ; and, save that he still felt thirstier, the liquor 
 had no effect on him ; and for more than a week he 
 was so stiff and sore that he could hardly walk. Yet 
 he is no carpet-knight, no lisping epicure, but a hale 
 and burly English gentleman, excellent with the 
 gloves, a great wrestler, a proper man of his hands 
 all round. No doubt ' the sweep of scythe in morn- 
 ing dew ' is a charming sound, but there is not much 
 poetry in the act of expending the force that furnishes 
 the song. And, in brief, as milking is the most irk- 
 some, so is mowing the most laborious of rural tasks.
 
 156 Autumn 
 
 Yet an experienced old rustic has told me that 
 the sorest bones he ever did have were got at a wash- 
 ing. It is a delightful scene : A glassy river winding 
 round a broad flat meadow golden with buttercups ; 
 a drooping and branchy green willow ; thigh-deep 
 in the pool, three sturdy bumpkins at regular dis- 
 tances ; a wattled pen full of sheep ; and, ever and 
 anon, some rustic haling one of them into a little 
 passage, and forcing it to jump a bank into the water. 
 Washer the first catches the creature swimming, turns 
 it on its back, sways it hither and hither upon the 
 water, and then shoves it on to washer the second, 
 who, almost in midstream, enacts a similar perform- 
 ance, and passes it on to the third washer, who is 
 somewhat closer to the bank : whereafter the poor 
 beast clambers, white, and dripping, and bleating, up 
 the bank. Now, my informant asserts, and one can- 
 not help believing it, that there is no labour under 
 the broad heavens more frightfully tiring than that 
 of the man on the bank, with a big flock of obstinate 
 old ewes to handle. It looks like sport ; but to go on 
 for hours, catching sheep after sheep and compelling 
 them into the river, is to strain every muscle and sinew 
 in the body. 
 
 One other act of husbandry that of tossing hay 
 or a heavy crop of wheat or oats, may compete for 
 difficulty with any. When leading-time comes, the 
 farmer hands the fork to his strongest harvester ; an 
 elderly man, whose fame as a builder of stacks ex-
 
 The Hardest Labour 157 
 
 tends to the utmost confines of the parish and beyond, 
 mounts the rick ; a robust young woman is appointed 
 to hand him up the sheaves. Age only adds to the 
 builder's reputation and experience ; but the tosser 
 must have youth and strength and endurance. Of 
 those who read this probably not one in twenty has 
 ever forked a stook in his life, or knows how much 
 strength it takes to toss a heavy sheaf of corn up to 
 the top of a long cart three parts loaded ; in which 
 case not one in twenty knows what is the hardest 
 work in the world. An hour of it is enough to break 
 down the stoutest amateur ; yet it is often done at 
 railroad speed. The man with the fork is proud of 
 his place ; and when the farmer, anxious to get his 
 carrying done as speedily as may be, comes in the 
 morning and says, ' Now, my lad, there'll be an extra 
 drink o' beer if the Forty-acre's in to-night,' he smiles 
 a grim smile, flings off his coat and vest, sticks his 
 little cap on the back of his head, and forks the sheaves 
 into the cart at such a rate that he overwhelms the 
 driver, drowns him, so to speak, in corn and straw, 
 and blinds the on-looker to the strain on wrist and 
 shoulder. There is knack in forking, but it is hard 
 work at the best. A great deal of energy must be 
 expended in lifting and throwing the sheaves. Stone- 
 breaking is another matter. Done by a lone old man 
 by the wayside, it seems a most wearisome, monoton- 
 ous, and tiring drudgery : in reality, it is a calling 
 wherein an apparently feeble and exhausted oldster
 
 158 Autumn 
 
 is often able to beat his lusty grandson. The secret 
 consists in looking where you strike. A vast amount 
 of force is wasted, when all that is needed is a clever 
 tap. Road metal is easily broken up if you study 
 grain and edges and seams. 
 
 Some country tasks, as driving horses or machinery, 
 are light enough ; but the most are difficult and hard. 
 No enthusiast, however fired with the love of rural life 
 and rural labour, ever persists for any length of time. 
 Digging, ploughing, draining, hedging and ditching, 
 reaping, and sowing all these are interesting to 
 watch, all these are very wearisome to do. And the 
 bucolic mind has somehow found this out. 
 
 CARTING THE BEES 
 
 WHAT the death of his first trout, his first appearance 
 in a cricket match, or his first ride to hounds on his 
 own Shetland pony, is to the Squire's son, that his 
 first journey with the bees is to the village lad in re- 
 mote north Northumberland. If you pass by a cartshed 
 on a wet day, you will sometimes hear the urchins 
 under its shelter bragging to one another like the rival 
 chiefs in a council of redskins. ' I've been in a railway 
 train,' says one. ' But you never saw the sea ! ' re- 
 torts a second. ' And you've never been with the 
 bees ! ' triumphantly crows the third. And that
 
 Carting the Bees 159 
 
 settles the matter. The boy who has been to the 
 Cheviots has won his spurs has begun to be a man : 
 for, indeed, it remains an event to the strong young 
 village bachelor of twenty-five or so, and even the arch 
 ne'er-do-weel who commands the expedition anticipates 
 it not without a thrill. He, too, is a bachelor ; for, 
 somehow, when a man is married he loses taste for 
 these adventures. You seldom find individuality in 
 a married rustic. As soon as he goes to the altar he 
 perishes, so far as oddity and character are concerned. 
 There is no lack of volunteers to carry the bees to 
 the hills : for the transference should take place in 
 one of the quiet interludes in rural labour that which 
 comes between the hay and the corn harvest ; for the 
 heather blooms on the hill exactly at the time when 
 the oats begin to yellow. The custom is common in 
 those parts of England, Scotland, and Wales that lie 
 too far away from the stretches of heather for the bees 
 to fly to them from their usual stances. The bee- 
 keeper expects two harvests from his little workers, 
 one from the plains, the other from the Cheviots. 
 The first is gathered almost exclusively from the 
 white clover and bean blossom ; and when these are 
 past the bees would be reduced to idleness but for 
 the expedient of carrying them to the hills. Other- 
 wise, as may be proved by weighing the hives, the 
 bees are forced to begin drawing on their capital in 
 other words living on their winter hoard early in 
 August. Of course this does not apply universally,
 
 160 Autumn 
 
 the conditions varying with the character of the agri- 
 culture. The bee man has a second reason for making 
 the change. Flower honey, although the most beau- 
 tiful and delicious, is not the best for the market, 
 as owing to a want of consistency in the wax it runs 
 easily and loses appearance. For that reason, bee- 
 keepers will sometimes put on an ' eke ' instead of 
 removing the ' top ' of flower honey ; an ' eke ' being 
 a narrow band of plaited straw introduced between 
 the ' top ' and the ' skep,' to enlarge the store-room of 
 the bees. If this is done, the insects, which seem 
 aware of the defect in flower-wax, will reseal the ' top ' 
 with what they get from the heather and entirely 
 change its appearance. 
 
 The transference takes place at night. As soon 
 as darkness has driven the busy workers home their 
 egress is stopped by sheets of perforated tin, and the 
 skeps are packed in a long or harvest cart. Probably 
 there are several loads ; for the thrifty shepherd from 
 the farm, the boatman from the ferry, and half a 
 dozen other individuals from various out-of-the-way 
 cottages have joined together to make a convoy. 
 And now the procession gets under way. The two 
 boys selected for the honour of their first journey are 
 ensconced in a half-empty cart, wherein also are the 
 whisky flasks of their elders. Happy are the old 
 hands if the night is inclined to be chilly or even wet, 
 for in close weather there is a danger of the bees
 
 Carting the Bees 161 
 
 getting smothered, or of the honey running and 
 drowning them. 
 
 At first everything goes pleasantly ; the road is 
 smooth, the horses fresh. Much bee-talk is spoken : 
 talk of giant swarms, of prodigious tops of flower 
 honey, of runaway hives charmed back with the music 
 made with a pair of tongs and a frying-pan ; of 
 adventures in the old time, when the journey was 
 made on foot or with ' a cuddy and creels' ; of mishaps 
 on the road ; and how one year horses were stung so 
 that they jumped over a precipice and killed all who 
 were with them, and how more than once the ' maut 
 has got aboon the meal,' and horses and men have when 
 daylight came found themselves lost in a bog. But 
 after awhile the smooth Roman road has to be aban- 
 doned, and the going becomes worse and worse. At 
 last it is only a rut through the fields, and boys and 
 men are shaken and jolted as the wheels rise over 
 immense stones or sink into deep holes. When 
 morning breaks the carts are crawling along a stony 
 road on the side of the green Cheviots wooded with 
 birch and fir to the tops of which the drifting clouds 
 seem tied with waving threads of mist. The cart-rut, 
 overgrown with heather and bracken, passes by the side 
 of a tiny burn which now seems but a series of mossy 
 stones with a clear pool at intervals, yet will be big 
 enough by-and-by. Until about the year 1878, when 
 the last of them fell a prey to the bird-stuffer, golden 
 eagles might have been seen in the early morning 
 
 M
 
 1 62 Autumn 
 
 circling over their prey ; and peregrine falcons and 
 ravens from Henhole and corbies from Harrow Bog 
 still pursue their daily hunt, indifferent to the traveller. 
 But a great barking of dogs proclaims that 
 Goudscleugh has at last been reached. The ' herds ' 
 are cutting the grass in a little green patch of field 
 for vegetation is behindhand at this altitude but 
 they hasten up at that event in the glen, the advent 
 of a stranger. The tired horses are unyoked, the skeps 
 placed on the stances rented at about half a crown 
 each in an old sheepfold surrounded by a dry-stone 
 dyke, and the hospitable wife is soon regaling her 
 guests with a repast of oatcakes and mountain milk. 
 Meanwhile the bees, having been freed, do not show 
 themselves half as much disturbed as a family newly 
 removed to the seaside. A crowd of them rush out 
 and hum and bustle round the doorway of their 
 thatched house, and it may be assumed that the year's 
 swarms the bee children, so to speak feel a little 
 bewildered ; but, being altogether of a practical turn 
 of mind, they soon join the immense flight of bees a 
 thousand hives have been counted in the same fold 
 which is passing to and fro between their homes and 
 the field of heather. In less than half an hour the 
 workers are to be seen returning to the hives laden 
 with honey. During the next fortnight for the best 
 of the heather harvest will be over after that their 
 assiduous toil will never cease save on account of bad 
 weather. Dewy nights and sunny days are the best.
 
 Carting the Bees 163, 
 
 Rain is disastrous, as it washes the honey from the 
 heather. A strong hive will in one good day add 
 between four and five pounds to the weight of the 
 skep. In return for a consideration the shepherd will 
 keep an eye on the hives, and perhaps send a message 
 down the glen if the tops become too heavy and the 
 hives threaten to swarm to obtain more room an 
 event that occasionally happens. With astonishing 
 gravity old Sandy, the leader of the expedition, will 
 lay his commands on the temporary custodians while- 
 the horses are being yoked for the return journey and 
 the boys recovered for they went guddling trout in, 
 the burn and lost themselves. 
 
 With similar rites and ceremonies the bees are 
 brought home again ; but that is not until the har- 
 vesters have carried home the kirn dolly ; till the corn- 
 stacks are being sheathed in their covering of straw ;. 
 till the blackening potato-tops are inviting the digger,, 
 and the ruddy-cheeked apples are glowing amid the 
 many-tinted orchard leaves. It is a good time with 
 the peasants, for the summer's labour is over, harvest 
 wages have been earned and paid ; nothing more 
 than a generous return of honey is needed to crown 
 the year's good luck. It is in speechless excitement,, 
 however, that they in the autumn moonlight grope 
 their way, each man to his own hives, and lift them, 
 with an anxious heart ; for bees are capricious 
 servants, and till he feels their weight the owner 
 cannot guess whether they have gathered for him a.
 
 164 Autiimn 
 
 doctor's bill or a year's rent or have been quite un- 
 profitable. If the season has been dry and fine, and 
 thirty pounders are plentiful, the autumn moon will 
 shine on a happy group of faces, and the long road by 
 the college and past dark Hethpool will tire no merry 
 heart ; but if otherwise, a dolorous party will start 
 homewards through the bog and the mist. Next day 
 begins the division of the spoil ; and then does he 
 who was most careful with his feeding during the 
 preceding winter reap his due reward, for his virgin 
 swarms will have produced the tops which the Squire 
 and the rector and the doctor and the factor are 
 anxious to buy. But he who doled out his boiled 
 beer and sugar as though it were molten gold will 
 have but scanty eight and ten pound hoards, fit only 
 for the cadger or the grocer. Very likely, too, he will 
 have to smoke his skeps with dried fungus, so as to 
 make strong hives by throwing two or three into one. 
 Yet even that unthrifty process has its compensation. 
 It promises enough honeycomb to satisfy the children, 
 and a store besides, out of which the good wife makes 
 mead that will be good to drink when the merry 
 toilers that provided it are fast asleep under the 
 snow wreaths of Christmas.
 
 165 
 
 LOWRIE'S GAP 
 
 ONE sunny day I sat on a log smoking and idly not- 
 ing the characteristic features of a Border scene. A 
 foaming little river (a tributary of Tweed) came 
 dancing down between rocky scaurs, whose red was 
 spotted white with pigeons, fled thither from the 
 dovecot at the farm, and crowned with the oaks and 
 elms of an ancient forest dear to Sir Walter. Had I 
 deliberately sought a place of ambush, I could have 
 found no better than I had chosen by accident. A 
 slope, v a screen of leaves, and an arm of the river all 
 these combined to conceal me from the champaign 
 through which the water bickered further down ; and 
 thus it befel that the two unsoaped, ragged vagabonds 
 that came strolling along the bank recked not of 
 a witness. Suddenly (but after one quick glance 
 round), the elder climbed a tree, while his junior 
 crossed to the other side. As he approached, I saw 
 that he had unpocketed a big fish-hook, with a stout 
 string and a weight ; and when the watcher aloft 
 began calling, ' Weel ower, Wully ; canny, now, canny ; 
 yont a bit,' and the like, the business of these ignoble 
 sportsmen was no more matter of conjecture. In a 
 very few minutes the director shouted, ' Now, pull ! ' 
 and, with a sharp jerk and a haul, out came a wriggling, 
 glittering salmon, infamously hooked in the side. 
 Nor was this the end. The sportsman on the tree
 
 1 66 Autumn 
 
 whom I knew as the hardiest, merriest, and most 
 daring of Border wastrels was (literally) chortling in 
 his joy when his bough broke, and down he splashed 
 into the water. In itself his mishap was trifling, for 
 the place is not deep ; but as he fell a projecting rock 
 got in the way of his head, and so ' davered ' him that 
 he would have stood a fair chance of drowning if I 
 had not come out and pulled him ashore. He recovered 
 easily enough, and ' Wully ' explained what had 
 happened, when he considered me with great suspicion, 
 
 and ' You look d d respectable,' he said. I laughed, 
 
 for I knew what was coming. ' Eh, hewl ! ' he shouted, 
 * it's the chap collar'd me at Lowrie's Gap twa year 
 syne, and then begged us aff. Man, what the deevil 
 are ee daein' here ? ' Now, Lowrie's Gap is the name 
 of a field on the other side of the Border, a good 
 thirty miles from where we stood. It belongs to a 
 friend of mine, with whom, as a matter of fact, I had 
 sat up one night, when I had helped him to capture 
 this particular poacher, who had been released on a 
 solemn promise that a certain estate should not exist 
 for him henceforth. I myself had read the rascal a 
 forcible homily on the iniquity of promise-breaking 
 after such a course of treatment ; and ' You might as 
 well tear a bit of paper in two, and expect it to work 
 like a charm,' said my friend. The event was with 
 him. During subsequent seasons, this and many an 
 English estate was raided from the little towns over 
 Tweed ; and Watty, howbeit he keeps clear of the
 
 Lowries Gap 167 
 
 common gang, has been one of the most active and 
 persistent offenders. 
 
 A realistic novelist would paint a most heartrend- 
 ing picture of this same poacher. He lives in a den 
 you cannot call it a room whose only furniture is a 
 three-legged stool, a crazy table, and a big iron pot. 
 He has not lain in a bed since childhood, but in 
 summer he sleeps at an old dyke-back in a thick 
 plantation, and in winter at any bieldy corner. If it 
 be extremely cold he keeps himself warm by standing 
 against the hot walls of the gas-works of the little 
 town that numbers him as an inhabitant. As to 
 clothet, he has none in particular. ' What do you do 
 when you get wet ? ' I asked him ; and ' Just wait 
 till I'm dry again/ was his reply. Yet the old ruffian 
 (he is over sixty) has never had a touch of rheu- 
 matism or a day's illness in his life. For his diet, it 
 may not be described without offence to ears fastidious. 
 ' Then,' you think, ' his poaching can come to very 
 little ? ' But it is not that. Doubtless he sells his 
 game dirt cheap ; but, if he had a spark of the saving 
 instinct, he would be better off than any skilled 
 labourer. His is a case of lightly come, lightly go of 
 coming by the fife and departing by the drum. Once, 
 by unexampled luck, he came to be lord and master 
 of a five-pound note one Christmas Eve ; he at once 
 exchanged it for a cask of whisky, and on New Year's 
 Day he was comparatively sober, and had not a drop 
 to call his own. Again, it is said that for three con-
 
 1 68 Autumn 
 
 secutive months he has been known to live save for 
 one poor twopenny loaf exclusively on liquor. He 
 is so free-handed, that if you gave him the run of a 
 whole Mansion House Fund, it would be all the same 
 in a week. Yet ( miserable ' and ' wretched ' are the 
 last terms you could ticket his life with. There are 
 few indeed into whose hours so much of happiness is 
 crowded. If he be ever gloomy, it is only when he is 
 hungry or athirst. Let him fill his belly, and he is 
 himself again. Nor is he destitute of a certain love 
 of Nature : ' Man, it was fine to hear the wind soughin' 
 amang the trees again,' he said, after his last spell in 
 gaol. But he cannot read ; he has neither friends nor 
 belongings ; therefore, he knows nothing of care or 
 thought or conscience. A laughing temperament has 
 made him master of his fate. 
 
 The last time I saw him was in October on a 
 moonlight night. I was out late on a lonely bridle- 
 path across a flat Northumbrian moor ; stopping at 
 a sort of No-Man's-Land to note the midnight beauty 
 of the broad, long range of the Cheviots, the mighty 
 shadows, and the deep valleys, I was aware of a 
 glimmer of fire through a dark plantation. I marched 
 up, and there was my poacher gazing into the red 
 embers of a wood fire, crooning an amatorious ditty 
 and watching a roughly spitted rabbit as it roasted. 
 ' Now, lads, run in on him,' I cried, as I had been 
 a keeper directing his assistants. The old man 
 flourished a stout cudgel ; but on second thoughts he
 
 Lowrie s Gap 169 
 
 let it drop. ' Na, na,' he said ; ' I'm a peaceable man, 
 and atween the mairches. It'll be waur for him that 
 first strikes.' Then I came on laughing, and ' Dod, 
 it's ee again, is't ? ' he said, ' it's weel I didna land ye 
 a clout on the cruntle.' Whereupon I squatted on a 
 blown branch and made much of him. He brought 
 out a bottle and a crust of bread, not without an hospit- 
 able offer to share, and fell to on the rabbit ; and,, 
 being honourably entreated, and fully satisfied that I 
 was on no ' splore ' that would peril his operations, he 
 grew confidential. He showed me his ferret (his sole 
 companion), and the home-made nets he used with it. 
 He Explained how he fed the pheasants by a cover 
 and then caught them in such horse-hair nooses as 
 these. He brought out the hook he kept in readiness 
 for a providential salmon. In a word, he plucked the 
 heart out of his mystery. He vowed, too, that he had 
 always kept and meant to keep away from the 
 neighbourhood of Lowrie's Gap ; but he is thought to 
 have gone there the very next day. At all events, the 
 birds vanished, and he was seen thereby. So I yield 
 the honour of converting him the wild man of the 
 woods that he is to some more vigorous and per- 
 suasive missionary.
 
 1 70 Autumn 
 
 SEPTEMBER IN THE WOODS 
 
 As SOON as foliage begins to lose its first bright 
 vernal freshness, the first glory of colour passes into 
 shades of dark green. Ere June is ended the blossoms 
 of hawthorn and orchard are almost gone, and the 
 green fruit is indistinguishable amid the green leaves. 
 The springing corn darkens and so does the clover 
 that awaits the scythe, while the very wild flowers are 
 hidden by the tall rank weeds. But in harvest time 
 the earth begins to glow with new tints, and the 
 woodland glades never are prettier than in September. 
 Autumn has not yet donned its myriad-coloured 
 dress, but is busy in the making of it. The delicate 
 beginnings of decay are everywhere visible. On the 
 elms are patches of bright yellow that in the course 
 of a few weeks will spread all over them. The oak, 
 whose acorns are now full and almost ripe, is showing 
 a light brown that reminds you of premature grey 
 hairs on a young head, and the beeches, too, have 
 just begun to wither, while the chestnuts, as if grief- 
 stricken, are well advanced to the condition that pre- 
 cedes their winter poverty. As you walk in the 
 solitary paths inside the wood, ever and anon in the 
 stillest weather a solitary leaf is detached and like 
 a brown moth flutters downward to your feet. Here 
 and there one has caught in the gossamer festoons,
 
 September in the Woods 171 
 
 ' fine nets of scorched dew,' hung everywhere by the 
 spider and dangling in mid-air. The hardy birches 
 have aged so slowly the process is hardly noticeable. 
 The Lady of the Wood is a little more portly and 
 matronly of aspect than in her girlishly slender days, 
 when her green and fluttering June dress was the 
 prettiest of the forest, but there is as yet nothing in 
 her looks to suggest the advance of winter. 
 
 The hardy shrubs of the woodlands suffuse them 
 just now with the daintiest colours. Even the 
 eccentric gorse, whose gold a few months ago burn- 
 ished the glades, is in some places showing autumn 
 flowers of lighter hue. In corners where the may 
 bloomed most prodigally, the hawthorns are red- 
 dening with a fruit that later on will be prized by the 
 birds ; and the pickers, who are busy filling their 
 baskets with bramble berries, leave only those that 
 are russet. Growing by their side are tall ferns al- 
 ready showing an occasional dead or yellow leaf amid 
 their greenery. As the prevailing colour is dark and 
 heavy, the hues require a degree of sunshine for dis- 
 play ; but of that September is no niggard, and it 
 flowers the grassy carpet under the trees with a leafy 
 design done in light that in itself lends a charm to a 
 walk in the forest. 
 
 At no other season of the year does the woodland 
 appear more populous with bird life. Earlier in the 
 season the birds were engaged in family and domestic 
 duties and lived in deep seclusion ; when they were not
 
 172 Autumn 
 
 tending their nests they were hunting food for them 
 selves or their offspring ; but in September every 
 householder of the forest is the head of a grown-up 
 family. There are more birds now than at any other 
 time of the year, for of all those broods it is astonishing 
 what a small percentage will survive the ravages of 
 winter. It is with them as with the oak that bears a 
 million acorns of which perchance not one will become 
 a tree, or with the fish that deposits several hundred 
 thousand eggs in a season without sensibly adding to 
 the population of the river. Ere nesting time comes 
 again, boys and birdcatchers, net and trap, weasel, 
 hawk, and disease, frost, snow, and farmer, will have 
 slain these songsters by the hundred. Nature carries 
 on the living world at a huge cost in bloodshed and 
 suffering. 
 
 The characteristic bird of the forest is in autumn, 
 I think, the jay. He is growing very scarce in many 
 places, for keepers give him short shrift on account of 
 his egg-stealing propensities ; yet he is so active and 
 amusing, and the number of our brightly-coloured 
 birds is so small, that one would like to crave some 
 quarter for him. In September I see dozens of them 
 in the woods, but not very clearly, for if the jay catches 
 sight of anyone approaching the oak under which he 
 is foraging, he rushes into the thicket with a flash of 
 his blue and white feathers and a harsh cry like that 
 of a crow before nesting time. The shriek which is 
 taken up in this tree and in that, and a flying and
 
 September in the Woods 173 
 
 fluttering and hurrying, tell that the first was no soli- 
 tary wanderer. In the early part of the season the jay 
 keeps to the thickest and most secluded portions of 
 the wood, building where it is almost impenetrable. 
 When his family are able to fend for themselves he 
 grows bolder and his cry is the most familiar of the 
 forest. 
 
 Another bird very much to the fore in September 
 groves is the little tit the ox's-eye, as country folk 
 indiscriminately call both the tiny blue and the cole 
 titmouse. One has no idea what numbers of these 
 active and pretty little birds are near at hand till ac- 
 cidentally, as it were, one of them is discovered. You 
 notice the great overgrown ferns by a thicket of haw- 
 thorn and wild rose swaying and moving in the wind- 
 less air, till you expect a hare or a rabbit to jump out, 
 but instead you catch sight of the white ear of a tit- 
 mouse as it is busy among the insects on the semi- 
 decayed frondage. It sees you too, and it and a little 
 wren hurry off simultaneously. The wren flits softly 
 away without a chirp or any audible rustle of its small 
 wings : not so the bold and ill-tempered titmouse ; it 
 swears vigorously at you while leaving, and it is 
 answered by a volley of oaths from the lichencd 
 branches of the crab, from the rotting leaves of the 
 lm, and from oak and ash, till the grove seems alive 
 and the sober foliage tinted with the plumage of tit- 
 mice. 
 
 Startled by the clamour a stoat crosses the wood-
 
 174 Autumn 
 
 land path, and you may follow it to its hole a hundred 
 yards off by merely listening to the rustle of dead 
 leaves. Indeed, this is a signal worth attention, for it 
 shows that the stoat did not go straight home but, like 
 a Red Indian scouting an enemy, skirted from cover 
 to cover from the ferns to a bunch of nettles, thence 
 to a horrent elm-root, crossing from that to where a 
 holly's low leaves rest on the grass, and so to its 
 citadel. The same noise betrays the snake slyly 
 gliding away from the sunny opening where he was 
 asleep, the pheasant trotting along its high-road 
 through the ferns, the squirrel amassing his hoard, 
 the woodmouse playing hide-and-seek below a mush- 
 room. 
 
 If you walk about quietly and alone in a forest 
 where wild deer run, you may have opportunities to 
 see the ' dappled fool ' to as good advantage . as 
 Jaques. The doe comes down the green rides with 
 her easy springing gallop that carries her away like a 
 dark shadow under the loose and melancholy boughs. 
 Sometimes you may watch her for a long time as she 
 is feeding, but her majestic, wide-antlered mate is more 
 wary. At a single suspicious noise or movement his 
 ears are pricked, and if frightened he is off like a 
 thunderbolt, making splendid leaps over fallen trunks 
 and low boskage ; but if only slightly alarmed he trots 
 gently off till his form is lost among the dark limbs 
 and waving branches of the forest.
 
 LITTLE DUES OF CORN 
 
 IN the close, hazy days of early autumn, when the 
 morning sun glistens mildly on hedges netted with 
 dewy gossamer, and the grass is damp till noon, a 
 kind of soft, contented, half-melancholy joyfulness 
 seems to get into the very air. The earth is at rest 
 after her annual labour, and from her teeming basket 
 pours forth food to her children, and a lazy, idle happi- 
 ness is announced by the very rooks as they leisurely 
 flap from the meadow to the potato-field or caw to 
 one Another on ash or elm. Trees in the quiet air 
 stand sleepy and still as in a trance, all wrapped in 
 long brown cloaks that daily grow more yellow, and 
 a few are splendid in a jewellery of red berries. Wild 
 plantations are almost impossible to traverse, for 
 luxuriant vegetation is at its height nettles and 
 burdocks, brambles and wild briars, creepers and 
 climbers, all the dense undergrowth of the wood, 
 have raised their stems and hung their tendrils every- 
 where ; and only an almost imperceptible fading, a 
 slight blanching of the green, tells that Nature has 
 spoken her ' Thus far and no farther ' to them. 
 Already the sharp morning frosts are arresting the 
 flow of their sap. Some of them will die like the 
 insects thoughtlessly fluttering about them, and be 
 replaced by sproutings from the grains of seed that 
 bird or wind has borne from place to place ; some,
 
 176 Autumn 
 
 like the squirrel who is storing the hazel nut, will 
 sleep through the frost ; and only a few, like the holly, 
 will brave the snow in a dark-green mantle. 
 
 A music sweeter than any bird's song rings from 
 copse and thicket ; for children, whose ruddy faces are 
 tanned with exposure to the hot suns of summer and 
 stained with the juice of blackberries, are laughing with 
 glee and triumph as they crush through the tangle of 
 weeds and shrubs to rifle the hazel bush and bramble 
 of their treasures, stopping every now and then to 
 rush hopelessly after a rabbit that bolts to its burrow, 
 or pelt one another with fungus torn from the rotting 
 elm. Some are only for pleasure, but many that a 
 little may be added to the simple store a widowed 
 mother or disabled father is preparing against the 
 privations of winter. On their brows, however, care 
 sits lightly. The field-mouse does not fill his little 
 granary with a blither heart than do these gather for 
 the humble larder, and all the rest of the year they 
 anticipate with pleasure these autumnal roamings. 
 Close up to the Wolds a line of crab-trees, allowed to 
 grow as a shelter for the sheep, is their orchard ; and it is 
 good to see them climbing and shaking the gnarled 
 boughs, laughing as they cram the bitter fruit into 
 bag or pillow-slip, or wearing themselves out with fun 
 till they are hardly able to toil home under their 
 burdens. Yet next morning, shortly after the misty 
 daybreak, they will be seen quartering the hilly old 
 pastures for mushrooms.
 
 Little Dues of Corn 177 
 
 Among the residents of the hamlet is a thriftless 
 jobbing labourer, whose household is almost main- 
 tained by pilferings from Nature. The pig in his stye 
 is always the fattest, yet in summer it was fed only on 
 boiled nettles and fresh dock-leaves, and in autumn 
 by acorns picked from under the wayside oaks. A 
 bunch of dried sage from a corner of the garden serves 
 for tea, and against times when there is no money 
 for tobacco, he has preserved the great leaves of the 
 * dish-a-laggy ' wherewith to fill his pipe, and he 
 declares that its smoke is pleasant and wholesome. 
 His wife will at Christmas time produce a choice of 
 drinks from her cupboard, mead brewed from the old 
 black unsaleable honeycombs, wine made from the dark 
 fruit of the elderberry, or the white bitter milk of the 
 dandelion, and prides herself on the ketchup seasoned 
 with her own mint and marjoram and other garden 
 herbs. The children hardly ever taste butter, but they 
 prefer the excellent substitutes provided in the shape 
 of preserved wild fruit. Although there is no house in 
 the district where ready money is scarcer or the income 
 less, the most selfish relative does not shun the cottage, 
 for at short notice the hospitable dame, who has tame 
 rabbits and pigeons and one or two fowls at her com- 
 mand, will provide a dinner fit for the best, though 
 the pot is boiled by blown wood and her bread was 
 picked up from the bare stubble. In spring, the 
 waterhen, the peewit, and the black-headed gull 
 provide fresh eggs for them, while many a dainty pie
 
 178 Autumn 
 
 is filled with unfledged cushats, young wild duck taken' 
 in defiance of the Acts of Parliament from the bog, 
 and succulent young squirrels from the plantation. 
 Add to all the legitimate spoils of the rod, the whit- 
 lings and bull trout, and even salmon, killed by the 
 father ; the yellow and speckled trout, the perches, 
 eels, and small jack, taken by the boys with rough 
 wands and tailor's thread, and crooked pins ; and, as 
 must be added, a quantity of illegitimate booty from 
 gun and snare, consisting mostly of rabbits, with a few 
 hares, and an occasional pheasant or partridge ; and 
 it will be understood why food is so abundant in the 
 house of a man oftener seen at the public-house than 
 at his work. Yet were the household removed to 
 town it would speedily be submerged among 'the 
 lapsed masses.' 
 
 The avocations of city and commercial life blind 
 those who pursue them to their dependence on and 
 alliance with Nature. It makes them forget that all 
 their great offices, and shops, and bazaars, ships, rail- 
 ways, and canals, their companies, and mart and 
 exchanges, are but complications and compoundings 
 of man's simple and primitive calling, to sow the seed 
 and reap the harvest. In the hazy thin autumnal 
 sunshine, he who looks on a quiet rural landscape will 
 hardly avoid feeling with renewed freshness the force 
 of this strong elemental truth. Look down on that 
 brown white field wherefrom the high-piled cart has 
 borne the last dry shocks of wheat ; in one corner of it
 
 Little Dues of Corn 1791 
 
 a flock of pigeons is greedily feeding on the dropped 
 grain, one amorous cock bird alone neglecting it to 
 flirt his tail and blow out his crop and bow and coo 
 to an assiduous hen ; in another there is a band of 
 gleaners equally industrious, traversing the land with 
 bent backs and downcast eyes, foot by foot and ridge 
 by ridge, wretched and poverty-struck old women for 
 the most part, gathering like the bird a precarious- 
 sustenance from the land, like the semi-dormant 
 animals laying up a little store for the winter. To- 
 me that natural and simple process is typical and 
 emblematic of all human industry. In the case of the 
 poor gJeaner the problem is as simple as may be, for 
 it is only how to keep body and soul together in the 
 hard times that are coming ; the only miracle is that 
 the preservation of life should concern her at all, since 
 continued existence means for herself so many more 
 days of care, and want, and pain ; yet as long as the 
 dying spark shows a gleam of red she will nurse and 
 fan it more carefully than the imaginative young girl 
 to whom the years that are to come melt into a bright 
 landscape of flowery meadow where she is to wander 
 happily culling bud and blossom. Her aged friend 
 has tested and destroyed that hallucination. The sky 
 lowers and storms blow on the last black stage of the 
 journey, yet she would not shorten it by an inch, and 
 nevertheless when the end does come, will lie down> 
 as happily as a child going to bed, in the quiet hostelry 
 of death. Without knowing why, she is as obedient
 
 1 80 Autiimn 
 
 as a soldier to the laws that govern life. Nature 
 gave her a jewel to guard, and she watched over it 
 vigilantly and well, like a dog that guards his master's 
 coat as long as a particle of strength remained, and 
 when the Giver asked it back she willingly made the 
 surrender. 
 
 The man who is able to give his cheque for thou- 
 sands has no higher task, though he has so bombasted 
 and inflated it that recognition is hardly possible. 
 Unborn generations are a care to him as though he 
 would fain live the lives of his issue. Like a man 
 that is insane, he has conjured up around him a circle 
 of dark cares that are as fatal to pleasure as the hor- 
 rible menacing shapes that mow at the old woman. 
 It is, I think, in the sober mean, that has extreme 
 wealth on one side and dire poverty on the other, that 
 the most rational form of life is. One would hardly 
 desire to fritter away the small allowance of time in 
 the distracting cares of wealth, and still less in that 
 naked and rude poverty wherein it is a cause for soli- 
 citude lest even the little due of wheat should fail. 
 But of two evils the latter is the more supportable.
 
 WINTER 
 
 MEMORIES 
 
 BEFORE the lamps are lighted on a Winter night, 
 while yet the distant woods are visible in the last 
 streaks of daylight, and the blackening train of crows 
 are hurrying to cold perches on the oaks, when a 
 breeze that is herald of storm begins to moan in the 
 shrubbery and about the chimney stacks, and when 
 one is wearied with out-of-door exercise, the blazing 
 fire and its shadows offer a pressing invitation 
 
 To muse and brood and live again in memory 
 
 With those old faces of our infancy 
 
 Heaped over with a mound of grass 
 
 Two handfuls of white dust shut in an urn of brass. 
 
 It is, I confess, only an idler's amusement, for strong 
 and ambitious minds at such moments live far more in 
 the future than in the past. Scott has told us how 
 during early life he was in hours like these a dreamer 
 of strange adventures wherein he was always hero, and 
 it was on such a night that ' with an elder sister's air *
 
 1 82 Winter 
 
 Coila passed into ' the auld clay biggin ' and bound 
 her favourite's head with holly. Indeed, there is hardly 
 anything sweeter to hear of than the hope and fancy of 
 a fair young ambition ; for in that airy and graceful 
 form it is more beautiful than any realised career. It is 
 pleasanter, more stirring and suggestive, and far more 
 profitable (except to the cynic) to picture the eager 
 boy student Carlyle breathing as his inmost desire the 
 hope of literary fame than to hear the aged and un- 
 happy philosopher of Chelsea vituperating the 'goose- 
 goddess ' whose favours he had found so unreal. What 
 a. contrast there is between the gentle aspirant of Coate, 
 out-of-elbows, out-of-luck, confidently foreseeing a 
 laurel crown, and the dying celebrity wistfully living 
 .again the hours from which his dreams had been an 
 escape. 
 
 Life rigidly confined to the present would be un- 
 bearable. On a journey what an exquisite and 
 romantic charm resides in the landscape before us ; 
 how the lakes gleam and nestle among the woods, 
 how silvery white the streams, what a glory on the hill- 
 tops ! When we approach the magical beauty fades 
 away. The cold ripples of the water, the bleak grass 
 of the mountain, alone of all the hazy ineffable charm 
 remain to mock enthusiasm. We look behind, and lo ! 
 the last gleam has settled there. Every common 
 hedgerow and tree, the winding road, the copse in the 
 hollow, the spinney on the hillside, have been arranged 
 into a picture that makes you grieve for having left
 
 Memories 183 
 
 a land so fair. In youth fantastic lights and signals 
 are seen beckoning us to strange and undiscovered 
 countries which most of us strive in vain to reach, 
 though we may win near enough to see that the 
 glamour was a mere effect of shade and distance, and 
 the land is one where no pleasure is. Thenjwe learn 
 how we have gone forth from a kingdom of romance, 
 whose beauty is now revealed with such vivid and intense 
 brilliance as makes every little blue flower and every 
 happy moment of it shine as they did on opening sense. 
 As the future narrows to a thin and diminishing space 
 between us and the dark ledge that borders life, the 
 wayfarer is concerned, not with the black abysmal 
 mystery he is approaching, but with things that have 
 long gone by, incidents on the sunny highway of his 
 early journey. The unbidden memories that throng in 
 on a Winter twilight are they that come again in the 
 Winter of old age. 
 
 Were it possible, nothing could be more suggestive 
 than to compare the detailed map and history of a 
 patriarch's life with the savings from it caught by the 
 sieve of memory. The choice is as arbitrary as that 
 of the jackdaw, who stores a useless tuft of horsehair 
 as carefully as a purloined jewel. Some men may, 
 indeed, by concentrating the mind upon a single train 
 of thought, partly modify the natural eclecticism of 
 recollection so that a Napoleon dies adream of battle 
 and a Goethe asking for more light, while there are 
 those who weep over the evil they have done and those
 
 1 84 Winter 
 
 who rejoice over the good ; but when I think over the 
 incidents and scenes that come back often and involun- 
 tarily, I find no preponderance either among those 
 that were full of joy or pregnant with sorrow, that 
 were absolutely trivial or intensely interesting. There 
 is something from each, and all are now raised to an 
 equal importance, all bathed in the same mild light, all 
 enhaloed with the same quiet and pleasing melancholy. 
 The grassy cradle among the hills whereon one 
 summer day the beauty of earth first dawned on me 
 is not a whit more vividly remembered than a non- 
 significant village scene that for no discoverable reason 
 the mind holds fast a pouring rain, a tame magpie 
 washing itself in a pool, a girl's voice singing ' Villikins 
 and his Dinah.' 
 
 So too with faces. On no principle of selection, 
 but, as would appear, from the simple operation of 
 chance, a thousand have faded away for one that is 
 added to the mental picture gallery. An early play- 
 mate is forgotten, and the face of a stranger of which 
 the merest glimpse has been caught in a crowded street 
 is treasured for ever. In my case the apostolic features 
 of an old grey clergyman when they reappear always 
 bring with them the stolid face and cunning eyes 
 half-concealed by the dinted white hat partly tilted 
 over them of a rascal horsey poacher, and those of 
 a one-legged drunken saddler who was an adept at 
 dressing fly- hooks. Memory has no care to keep her 
 figures intact, and of many preserves only one charac-
 
 Memories 185 
 
 teristic, leaving the remainder all blurred and defaced. 
 She paints the cast in a man's eye, or a limp in his 
 gait, his favourite dress or his spectacles ; and the re- 
 mainder is vague or non-existent. Her atelier is hung 
 round with hundreds of unfinished drawings, although 
 one or two are complete to the last detail ; could we 
 learn of any man precisely how much of the humanity 
 about him has been gathered and remembered, the 
 knowledge would be worth many chapters of bio- 
 graphy. 
 
 Of one's lifetime there are slices that might as well 
 never have been lived. ' Idle time ran gadding by,' 
 and the Hours, each with a smile or a sigh, tripped 
 past and were gone irrecoverably ; they flitted over 
 from the dark army of them before to the equally dark 
 army behind, and left no sign to distinguish them from 
 the host wherewith they mingled. But others almost 
 yield us a taste of eternity ; for having come they 
 abide with us for ever. Memory of the many April 
 days I have known has taken one and preserved every 
 detail of its sunny scene big white-edged clouds you 
 would almost think at anchor, the fleecy columns of 
 smoke curling slowly up from red-tiled farmhouses, 
 the barn fowls' distant peaceful crowing, bare land 
 where the horses were at plough and came tramping, 
 champing up to the half-sprouted hedge, along the roots 
 of which tender young grass mingled with the withered 
 stalks of last year, and the lark sang high above the 
 ploughshare, while his fieldmates were calling and
 
 1 86 Winter 
 
 building as they do only in Spring. So, too, of Autumn 
 days she has taken one, and at will causes the faint 
 sunlight to fall again on low fields with mist rising 
 from them, and the glassy river wandering between 
 hazy meadows, while an idle cawing, and lowing, and 
 bleating speak the fatness and content of the ingather- 
 ing. And no happy event of maturity lives with a 
 vigour so pure and sweet as the early and trivial 
 triumphs of childhood. The glad tension of nerve 
 and brain when my first big fish made the reel sing 
 as he dashed headlong across the stream repeats, and 
 repeats, and repeats itself; so does the breezy May 
 morning whereon I learned to shoot, and the troubled 
 sleep of the succeeding night, when thejgun still went 
 off in dreamland, and young rooks with'a tremble and 
 a flutter of their black wings dropped through the green 
 foliage on the grass. 
 
 From the earth, too, memory has chosen specks 
 and spots for preservation. Into the oblivion where 
 all the dead hours are,, she has thrust towns and 
 streets, railways and shops, but has engraven the 
 grassy sloping hills, clear tidepools, and blue flashing 
 .seas, and trembling rivulets, and green nooks, and 
 sedgy river-banks. From the gliding stream of hours 
 she has stayed this and that, and married to each 
 scene its appropriate moment, so that in the life I 
 live over again, action, place, and time all fused in 
 one form for me a conception and foretaste of eternity. 
 What I have had a deep and true consciousness of
 
 Memories 187 
 
 once, is it not mine for ever ? Memory, that survives 
 everything else, will it not survive the grave also? 
 In this idle hour by the firelight I live, not as the 
 beasts in moments that like grains of wheat in a mill- 
 hopper are flung from the future into the present, and 
 without stoppage borne into the past, but as the Gods, 
 for Time stops when that which has gone by is still 
 being lived. 
 
 But, nay, that is only a vain and arrogant fancy. 
 Even as I write, the shadows have closed over the 
 hill and the pine-trees ; the neighbouring oaks are 
 invisible ; night, stormy, dark and starless, has fallen 
 on the lone fields ; the lights come in, and the wind 
 that I did not hear before roars loud and dismal ; 
 and while in fancy I have been living in the past, lo ! 
 the stealthy moments have seized the chance of rush- 
 ing from the emptying to the filling portion of my 
 life, and because I have lived with the risen spirits of 
 hours past, these that even now are passing are 
 numbered with them that can have no resurrection, 
 for of them I have no memory. 
 
 VILLAGE HEATHEN 
 
 IN these days it is not uncommon to hear parsons 
 and statesmen bewailing the relapse of rural England 
 into Paganism. But, lest you fancy I am going to
 
 1 88 Winter 
 
 plunge into these acrimonious discussions, and dis- 
 course of the Bible in schools, the waning influence 
 of squire and parson, and the spread of free thought, 
 let me say at once that the heathen I speak of are 
 those of the preceding generation residing in our out- 
 of-the-way northern villages. There was always a 
 kind of outcast population who, for all the civilisation 
 they knew or practised, might as well have been 
 African savages or South Sea barbarians. England 
 did not produce the like, except in the lowest purlieus 
 and thieving kens of London. The only difference 
 was that they were less given to vice, and more 
 harmless. You could laugh at their eccentricities, 
 and not feel you were encouraging iniquity. When 
 a man and a woman felt an inclination for each other 
 I do not say fell in love, because the expression 
 was too fine and grand for their simple vocabulary 
 they simply went together, without the offices either 
 of registrar or priest. Till the time when one or 
 both went to the workhouse which, as far as I recol- 
 lect, was the end of all my favourite heathens they 
 were tolerably faithful to one another. The man 
 beat the woman just as if he had been her husband, 
 and she slanged and scolded him for getting drunk 
 and spending the money, exactly the same as if she 
 had been his wife. When children came they were 
 not christened, and I fancy the names, or rather ' to- 
 names,' Bob's Dick, and Sal's Nance, or Jenny's Mag, 
 were not formally given, but simply 'growed' to
 
 Village Heathen 189 
 
 them ; but they were fed sometimes, they had a share 
 of such food and clothes as were in the family, and 
 learned to fight, and drink, and swear, sooner than 
 any of their contemporaries. 
 
 Talking of clothes reminds me of old Isaac Hall, 
 who certainly was as typical an example as could be 
 found of the village heathen. Unlike the rest, how- 
 ever, he had never formed any feminine tie, but lived 
 all by himself in a dilapidated hut beside the stable, 
 his livelihood being made with a horse and cart, with 
 which he led coals, and lime, and one thing and 
 another. He confessed to being no hand at the 
 needJe, and when his coat, as would happen at times, 
 grew so ragged that the wind threatened to blow the 
 pieces asunder, he would offer a ' lift ' to any ancient 
 dame desirous of reaching the little market town, on 
 condition that she would mend his garment by the 
 way. How we children used to laugh as they went 
 past Isaac on the ' limmer,' driving the slow and 
 aged black horse, the old woman, in spectacles, sitting 
 on a bunch of straw, industriously stitching away at 
 his coat. Everybody used to laugh at his unconsci- 
 ously droll sayings. When he and a few boon 
 companions, after much deliberation, ventured on a 
 first ride in a railway train, ' Sit fair in the middle, 
 lads, or then she's sure to cowp,' was his grave warn- 
 ing. Although he did not live more than twelve 
 miles from the sea, he was at least fifty before he 
 -ever got a view of it. ' Like a muckle green field o'
 
 1 90 Winter 
 
 turmits wi' bits o' white gowan here an' there,' was 
 his description of it. Between the curate and him 
 there used to be many curious passages. ' I wish 
 you good evening,' the polite clergyman would say, 
 and Isaac would reply, ' Drumly a bit/ or ' Wettish 
 like ' ; for the village heathen will exchange a remark 
 about the weather, but he knows nothing of courteous 
 expressions of ceremony like ' Good-morning,' or 
 4 Good-bye.' Farewells and greetings are not in his 
 vocabulary. And still Isaac was very kindly. Once 
 the parson determined to get him to church, and 
 calling at the wretched little cottage, sat on a stool 
 for two hours talking theology that was quite utterly 
 beyond the carter's comprehension. ' I grieve sin- 
 cerely for your soul,' at last said the priest in a 
 voice that throbbed with emotion and despair. Old 
 Isaac felt that something was wrong, though he could 
 not exactly say what. Puzzled as to what could be 
 amiss with the curate, he took, his short black cutty 
 from his mouth, rubbed the stern back and forward 
 on his waistcoat sleeve, and handing it to his visitor, 
 answered kindly, ' Have a draw of that, mister it's 
 grand for the stamach ! ' An act of civilisation that 
 he did not learn till his dying day was the very 
 simple ceremony of shaking hands. Village heathen 
 meet and part without it indeed, one comes and 
 another goes away without farewell or greeting of 
 any kind. On the rare occasions whereon Isaac saw 
 two people pump-handling one another's arms, I have
 
 Village Heathen 191 
 
 seen his grey eyes shine with the most obviously 
 keen curiosity and bewilderment, as if it were some- 
 thing he could not comprehend 
 
 On Sundays the average heathen goes neither to- 
 church nor meeting-house firstly, because he has no 
 clothes fit to be seen in ; and, secondly, because he 
 has no inclination. Thirdly, as he most likely was 
 very drunk on Saturday night, and not improbably is 
 suffering from the effects of a fight, he is glad to take 
 a longer sleep than usual. Then his horse's ' graith,' 
 as he calls the harness, not improbably wants mend- 
 ing or seeing to, and the rest of the time flies all too 
 swiftly. If it is a fine sunny day he can sit for hours 
 on a grey stone, doing and saying nothing, his 
 battered eld hat tipped slightly over his eyes, the clay 
 pipe never, except it needs refilling, taken from his 
 mouth. Very likely the noise of the organ in church 
 or the rise and fall of Presbyterians singing psalms is 
 quite audible, but he does not listen, and I doubt if 
 the golden hours that ceaselessly trip past bring to 
 his vacant mind a thought or idea. Should it be wet 
 the heathen gather together in the house, and if after- 
 wards somebody's poultry gets stolen or the stable of an 
 enemy is set on fire, village gossip is not slow to trace 
 the plot to that meeting. For if there are thieves or 
 incendiaries in the village, it is in that class they are 
 to be found. 
 
 Many extraordinary stories are told of their death- 
 beds, but they are not very trustworthy. The majority
 
 192 Winter 
 
 die as they have lived. ' If I mun dee, I mun dee,' is 
 their fatalistic creed, and, as a matter of fact, what 
 with weariness, and old age, and sickness, and pain, 
 there are very few who, when the time comes, have 
 either fearful or rebellious thoughts about the change 
 that looks so dreadful from a distance. To show the 
 stubborn recklessness with which some of these men 
 front the last great enemy, it may be worth while to 
 tell a tale of which I can vouch for the truth of every 
 detail. Harry Gibson was a horse coper in a little 
 border village, and had been known all his life for a 
 hard striker, a deep drinker, a warm friend, but an 
 unforgiving, resolute enemy. His time came at last, 
 however, and Harry lay down on the chaff bed from 
 which he was never to rise again. Now the Presby- 
 terian minister of the place was a good and pious 
 man, who was deeply grieved with the ways of the 
 little heathen colony in his midst, and though Harry 
 never had darkened the door of the meeting-house, he 
 determined to go up and offer him some consolation. 
 He was received more frankly than he had expected, 
 and Harry offered no objections to the visit. It was 
 the preacher who furnished us with an account of the 
 interview that followed. ' Well, Henry, I suppose 
 you know you are dying ? ' began the minister, after 
 some kindly preliminaries. ' Aye, I ken,' surlily 
 quoth the sick man. ' And I hope you are prepared 
 for the awful change ? ' went on his visitor. ' What's 
 that ? ' queried Harry. ' Well, are you at peace with
 
 Village Heathen 193 
 
 all men ? ' ' Sartainly.' ' Have you forgiven your 
 enemies ? ' ' Sartainly.' ' Then, Harry, you must 
 do still more than that you must pray for them.' 
 Here the dying man, who was breathing heavily, grew 
 uneasy and perplexed. ' What, pray for Jack Tod 
 him as lamed my dog ? ' he feebly inquired. ' Yes,' 
 went on the good priest, ' you must pray even for 
 John.' Harry was growing weaker every moment. 
 It was some time before he replied, but when he did 
 it was with unexpected energy. ' I pray, then,' he 
 
 cried, ' that the may go to hell.' And with that 
 
 he turned his face to the wall, nor spoke again till he 
 died. 
 
 Very different from this was the departure of old 
 Isaac Hall. He was taken with heart disease, that 
 gradually reduced his strength, and as he grew weaker 
 and weaker it happened that I was nearly the only 
 person he would see. Going back and forward to the 
 old place, I had got into the habit of carrying snuff 
 or tobacco to him, and sitting on his old broken three- 
 legged table and listening to his yarns about old 
 things and old ways. It was a difficult matter to get 
 him to see the doctor, who, as it chanced, was a com- 
 panion of mine, and on no account whatever would 
 he take to bed. As to parsons, he never had admitted 
 one to his presence, except the afore-mentioned curate, 
 and he having left the district the old pagan would 
 suffer no other to make his acquaintance. On the 
 last morning of his life I went down to the cottage 
 
 O
 
 194 Winter 
 
 about 10 o'clock. Isaac had managed to get up and' 
 crawl to his chair by the fireside. An empty basin 
 showed that he had consumed the food made for him 
 by a kindly neighbour. The doctor came in just 
 behind me. ' This is about the last on't,' remarked 
 his patient with a wan and feeble smile. After one or 
 two questions, the physician informed him as gently 
 as he could that probably before the sun that now was 
 shining in at the window could wear round to the 
 gable he would have passed into the long sleep. 'Um,' 
 said the old man, but he did not abate a jot of his 
 usual cheerfulness. ' I'd like a draw first,' he said, 
 and produced the black cutty from his pocket and 
 asked me to fill it. The doctor gave a signal that 
 meant ' Humour him ; it doesn't make a bit of differ- 
 ence,' and I took out my own pouch, thinking some- 
 thing lighter than his own would be the best. But he 
 rejected it firmly. Irish roll he had smoked all his 
 life and Irish roll he would end with, and he fumbled 
 in his pocket till out came the tin box, by pressing 
 the lid of which he was used to cut off exactly a pipe- 
 ful. When he had done that he handed the box to 
 me. ' You'll keep that,' he said, ' to mind you of ould 
 Isaac.' The doctor lit the pipe and handed it to him, 
 and as he tried to get one or two puffs with his rapidly 
 failing breath, asked if he wouldn't like to live his 
 time over again. ' No,' answered Isaac. ' You see 
 the cartin' trade's about done since them railways 
 started, and Black Jock ' (that was the name of his
 
 Village Heathen 195 
 
 horse) ' is as hard up as I am. I s'pose he'll be for the 
 knackers now.' ' Would you not like to be strong 
 and young again, like you were when you fought " The 
 Pilgrim " at the Blue Bell ? ' 'Aye, aye,' returned he,, 
 while a pleasant gleam came in his face. ' I gave 
 you a fine job to cure him. That wasn't the only 
 time when I made broken bones for you to set. But 
 it was a cursed hard winter,' he went on, ' and many's 
 the hungry belly I had. No, no, I don't want my 
 time back again.' Then he quietly laid his pipe or* 
 its old stone by the fire, and muttering, ' The cartin' 
 trade's fair done. I think I'll have a bit sleep,' dropped 
 off into a doze from which he never awoke. It was 
 thus the pagans of village, and farm, and homestead 
 lived, thus they died ; but even those who derived 
 amusement from the ways of them will hardly regret 
 that the spread of education and other civilising influ- 
 ences are gradually removing them from the country. 
 Pagans of a new kind will doubtless succeed them,, 
 but they cannot be quite as heathenish as the old. 
 
 WINTER SCENERY 
 
 ONE most majestic expression of English landscape 
 is visible only in the depths of a winter fog. When 
 snowy fields, and grey hillside, and black river are 
 shrouded in darkness : when from your midday 
 
 o 2
 
 1 96 Winter 
 
 window you may not discern the garden laurels, far 
 less the white fringes worked round the green leaves 
 of them by the frozen mist then is there a journey I 
 better love to make than to sit reading and shuddering 
 by the light of a morning lamp. It is to the brow of a 
 rocky escarpment, on clear days overlooking a fertile 
 and well-peopled champaign. At starting you have 
 to feel your way among the trees of the long planta- 
 tion, much as Thoreau used to guide his steps o' nights 
 by touching the Walden firs ; but as the path rises, 
 the heavy thickness thins away, and the brown boughs 
 overlaid with frostwork and populous with forlorn 
 and fluttering birds come plainer and plainer into 
 view till, at last, on the edge of the Roman Camp at 
 the top, you stand in brilliant sunshine under a sky 
 of clearest blue. Even in summer it is a place of 
 fancies ; for (geologists will tell you) these frowning 
 cliffs once overlooked a mighty sea ; sea-gull and 
 cormorant fished where is now a sleepy pinewood ; 
 seaweed and tangle swayed to the tide where the 
 corn now nods in August and in spring the wild- 
 flowers bloom. And look you to-day how Nature is 
 mocking the present with a fanciful image of the past ! 
 Village, and town, and hamlet are as if submerged 
 in some weird, phantasmal ocean. What in summer 
 were purple mountains are low grey shores. Under 
 a gentle haze the level and desolate waste, where no 
 ship sails, is heaving in billows, and on the coast of 
 many a little bay and inlet the dark waves break into
 
 Winter Scenery 197 
 
 spray. You listen for the roar of the breakers and 
 the sea-mew's cry ; but this ghost of a dead sea gives 
 you no answer back. Silently the wind blows on its 
 dark bosom, and it is rocked into storm without a 
 sound. On cliff and promontory the waves are broken 
 noiseless. It is hard to realise that under their com- 
 motion engines are puffing, horses are pacing and 
 hauling, and there sweats a force of moiling and toiling 
 men. 
 
 It would almost seem as if in winter Nature lulled 
 her children to sleep, that for a season she may let 
 her fancy roam its fill. Easily as a housewife reorders 
 her ferniture she thrusts up an island through the sea, 
 she sends the waters rushing over a continent, she 
 adds you a city to the ocean floor, she makes a lake 
 give up her acres to the plough. Yet there are times 
 (and especially I think in winter) when, like a crone 
 that crouches, mumbling old memories, at the fire, 
 she recalls her prowess in the past. Perhaps it were 
 better for some if they had never revolted from her 
 mesmerism. Man is not wholly absolved from it. 
 Cold that stills the bird and casts the reptile into 
 trance cold that slays plant and insect, and banishes 
 butterfly and swallow is the nepenthe of life. It does 
 not make you loiter in the greenwood, or by the river, 
 as in the languid hours of summer ; but it predisposes 
 to reverie in tune with the dead or the dreaming world. 
 In summer, you love the fields for the promise of 
 harvest, and your heart fills with natural happiness ;
 
 198 Winter 
 
 but you love them in winter wholly for the beauty of 
 the passing pageant, and in the face of the fierce and 
 bitter cruelty abroad. There is not a bird nor a beast 
 that goes untortured. Mark how the lonely migrant 
 hurries through the keen air with a complaint like the 
 noise of bending ice under the curling-stone ! With 
 what a languid play of his heavy, wide-feathered 
 wings does the rook come home at dusk to his cold 
 perch ! Gallant looks the fox as, just when stars are 
 paling before the faint daylight, he leaps the farm- 
 yard wall ; but not because he is at truce with the 
 kennelled hounds is he so bold : like every other 
 living thing he is gripped by hunger. ' Void venir 
 rhiver tueur de pauvres gens' True in a measure of 
 human life, that verse is absolutely true of life without 
 the pale. 
 
 As if to intensify the horrors of the frost, the artist 
 ceases not from plying brush and chisel. The snow- 
 flakes that hide the last particles of food from the 
 birds and drive the poor hares from open to covert, 
 float gracefully down the ' aer bruno,' till earth lies en- 
 folded in a wrap of peerless down. The hillside, last 
 May a marvel of green and gold, now wears a grey 
 beyond limning ; and not even when the first leaves 
 drooped from the birch, and the chestnut-flowers told 
 their loves to the breeze, did the forest show fairer 
 than now, with his wilderness of brown stems and 
 white bewildering boughs. He is peopled with rovers 
 driven in from the dead, white fields, yet is he a
 
 Winter Scenery 199 
 
 -wretched home for them. Puny tits, feathery bunches 
 no bigger than a pigeon's egg, hang on to the lower 
 side of the snowy twigs, and peck for dear life some liv- 
 ing atom from the bark ; a few small seeds are left, and 
 flights of greenfinch chaffer and fight for them ; and 
 where jay or blackbird has scratched up a heap of 
 dead leaves the robin and his fellow-choristers quest 
 diligently for a dinner. And as the hard weather 
 grows harder, even the flitting wren is grudged her 
 tiny rations, as you gather from her pained and anxious 
 song. 
 
 And still the cruel freak ends not. In the hard 
 frost ..scarce a whisper passed to the willow from the 
 stiff, dry riverside grasses ; but a wind gathers in the 
 north, and roars through the tossing oaks and quiver- 
 ing beeches till they moan again, swinging the myriads 
 of black sleepers in their shelter. But he is never so 
 frightfully frolic as in the free open, where he wreathes 
 the snow into drifts and garlands, and builds him 
 castles and towers as if to mock the doings of 'earth 
 going upon the earth.' And in this deadly extrava- 
 ganza not the slightest heed has he nor any of his 
 playmates for the sacredness of life. The mountain 
 sheep are buried, the hungry stag and his wild com- 
 panions are driven down to the poacher : where he 
 falls the wretched human wanderer is hushed in death. 
 It is done with no set purpose, no deliberate ferocity. 
 The storm passes, the grey clouds are rent, and pre- 
 sently quiet stars shine brilliant on the furrowed snow
 
 200 Winter 
 
 and the twinkling icicles. The sea's fury is soothed and 
 stilled, his clamour subsides, his breakers turn wavelets,, 
 and his dead are laid gently on his frozen beach. There 
 they rest peacefully enough : peacefully as the birds 
 you find frozen to the twig whereon they perched. 
 In thawing-time the little corpses tumble off; and 
 the tale of tiny things gone out of life that is told by 
 the melting snow on moor and meadow is more or less - 
 hideously complete. 
 
 Yet who curses Nature for cruel ? Ourselves are 
 part of her ; and be her mood what it may, ourselves 
 are more closely in sympathy with her, our mother, 
 than with any of her victims. In truth, the East has 
 no deeper fatalism than burns in us Westerns. As 
 no man rebels against death, so neither is there any 
 revolt against the accomplishment of the Hand of 
 God. The sublime tempest strews the coast with 
 wrecks : the beautiful lightning is Death's messenger ; 
 Winter, with his dreams and his sleep, his voice of 
 lamentation and his mortal visitations of frost and 
 storm, is a weird and gruesome bedfellow. And as 
 you watch the shy woodlanders adventuring to the 
 very doorstep, and the wretched hare so beside himself 
 with want that he will rush upon death for a mouth- 
 ful from your garden, a sense of pity and wrath will oft- 
 times menace that spirit of acquiescence and devout- 
 ness in which is the best and sanest habit of living 
 life can ever achieve. For without death there can be 
 no living, for Death and Life are not mortal enemies
 
 Winter Scenery 20 r 
 
 as poets have feigned, but sister influences. Perhaps, 
 indeed, they are one, and only their names are dif- 
 ferent. 
 
 NORTHUMBRIAN GUISARDS 
 
 THE rustics of East Anglia, Dr. Jessopp tells us, are 
 forgetting how to laugh, and whoever has gone much 
 in country ways knows that the wisest denizen of the 
 fields is becoming the saddest. Lapse of time affects 
 no other animal in the same way. The lark sings as 
 merrily, the young lambs play as sportively to-day as 
 they did when fields were tended by thralls of the 
 early Saxons, but the generations of man are not all 
 equally joyful ; for some live in peace, and others 
 under the shadow of war, one basks in contentment 
 and the next is made unhappy by new ambitions. 
 
 It is by no means asserted that in the good old 
 times life was one long scene of merriment ; that the 
 rude forefathers of the hamlet were always jocund as 
 they drove their teams afield, or the milkmaid blythe 
 as she carried home her brimming pail, or that health 
 and plenty continually cheered the labouring swain. 
 But undoubtedly there was greater fun among them 
 than there is now, and for an obvious reason. The 
 rustic of our time looks townward for his amusements. 
 Cheap trips have carried him to the beach, the pier, 
 and the promenade ; to the low drinking-bar and the
 
 2O2 Winter 
 
 cheap music-hall ; he is familiar with topical songs 
 and street catchwords ; his ideals are Cockney. Pre- 
 viously he had to depend on himself and his neigh- 
 bour for pastime, and instead of saving for an 
 annual excursion, he invented pastimes for home ; 
 and as these usually left him with a clear head and 
 easy conscience, they shed over his life a mild radiance 
 such as does not dwell with the memory of a town 
 spree, and its subsequent headaches and muddlement. 
 But the young rustic dressed in ready-made shoddy, 
 and feeling himself quite as ' modern ' and fin de siecle 
 as the sickliest decadent who flourishes the poor 
 phrase, looks with as superior a contempt upon ancient 
 customs as he does upon the outfit of hodden grey, 
 cut and sewn for his grandfather by the village tailor. 
 Thus nearly all the pleasant usages that edged the 
 dull circle of labour with brightness are becoming 
 obsolete. Youths are married, and no one ropes them ; 
 children are born and no labouring cake prepared ; 
 christenings and funerals occasion less and less feast- 
 ing. No one now goes a-mothering, or keeps cider 
 mass, or blesses the spring appletrees. A steadily 
 decreasing number keep the feast days of Lent, and 
 eat their pancakes and fry their carlins, pluck the 
 catkins duly from the willow to wave on Palm Sunday, 
 and beg their pace eggs on Easter Day. Where they 
 do the ancient observances are forgotten. Lincoln- 
 shire ploughmen still on Twelfth Day carry round the 
 bedizened coulter as the Pagans did, but without the
 
 Northumbrian Gmsards 203 
 
 appropriate dancing and mummery ; the Scottish 
 hind lets his children seek their hogmanaye, but he 
 has forgotten the petitionary songs of the daft days 
 as completely as his English brethren their old dance 
 round the maypole, and their skill with the quintain. 
 It is not only so, but the farm labourer of to-day, in- 
 stead of taking pleasure simply as his ancestors did, 
 makes a droll and monkey-like imitation of fashion- 
 able diversions. His grandmothers, when they were 
 young, met on winter nights for a quilting party, or 
 other purpose of helping the poor or newly married, 
 and made their needles fly like lightning in order to 
 get scon done, that when their lads came to take them 
 home they might still have a spare hour or two during 
 which they would merrily dance in the candle-lighted 
 barn to the fiddling of the village musician. Instead 
 of this our swains, three or four times per annum, pro- 
 duce a subscription ball that if they were wits would 
 be accepted as the caricature of a fashionable 
 assembly. 
 
 Among the children alone is there to be found 
 any considerable trace of the merry-makings where- 
 with the long dark hours of winter used to be sped in 
 the country. In one or two out-of-the-way places 
 you still may find a mangled version of the Christmas 
 mummer's play that once was prevalent over all the 
 country. As soon as November comes they begin to 
 hollow out the turnip lanterns they take to light them 
 in the dark nights through the long dark woods, over
 
 204 Winter 
 
 clayey bottoms and along sheep-tracks that wind 
 amid whin and thorn-bushes, which they would in 
 nowise face save in company and with a candle, for 
 steam-engine and schoolmaster have not yet quite 
 banished the bogle from the mire, the wraith from the 
 stream, the ghost from wood and ruin ; yet one would 
 think they are more likely to inspire fear than to feel 
 it, so hobgoblin-like are they in their strange habili- 
 ments. The lanterns form the least important part of 
 the outfit ; wooden swords must be made, pasteboard 
 helmets manufactured, fierce moustachios twined from 
 horsehair, old shirts begged as surplices, and distinc- 
 tive ornaments invented for each character ; and there 
 is on a minor scale as much quarrelling over the parts 
 as there is over the cast for a new piece in a fashion- 
 able theatre. 
 
 The words form a strange conglomeration, for in 
 ages of decay all the elements of yule-tide laughter 
 have been blent into one confused story, but perhaps 
 the record of a single representation without comment 
 on the bald, fragmentary and corrupted text will best 
 show how minstrelsy and mummery, the miracle-play 
 and the carol engrafted on a Pagan custom have each 
 lent something to the guisarding. Fancy, then, the 
 big kitchen of a homely Northumbrian farmhouse a 
 few days before Christmas, a bunch of mistletoe 
 already above the door ; sprays of holly with red 
 berries on the wall ; in the great arm-chair a jolly 
 farmer past middle-life and grown a trifle too corpu-
 
 Northumbrian Guisards 205 
 
 lent, yet with big voice as cheery, grey eyes as keen 
 as ever ; a delight yet a terror to the rosy-faced maids. 
 Our host is a lover of old times, old faces and old 
 customs, and at hirings it is a common remark that 
 there is never a vacant place here unless someone 
 dies. But though the guisards are sure of a hearty 
 welcome, it is only after much pushing and urging 
 that the chubby boy, who is the Bessie, shyly ventures 
 into the middle of the hall, reciting : 
 
 Redd sticks, redd stools, 
 
 Here comes in a pack of fools ; 
 
 A pack o' fools behind the door, 
 
 Step in, St. George, and clear the way. 
 
 - 
 
 The familiar lines are scarcely heard amid the 
 farmer's loud laughter and the giggling of the girls : 
 Bessie is so strange and fantastic a figure ; for the 
 child, unconsciously following a custom as old as the 
 Roman Saturnalia, has made a rude attempt to dis- 
 guise his sex, and with the great ' ugly ' of a field- 
 worker on his head, and a home-made broom in his 
 hand, wears a cast-off petticoat belonging to his sister, 
 while the Marchioness herself never had so smudged 
 a face. I am sure his predecessors at the Feast of 
 Fools, the Lord of Misrule and the Abbot of Unreason, 
 bore themselves more confidently. Yet he is all we 
 have left of a character that has probably been repre- 
 sented in England since the days when Druids feasted 
 at the fruit time of their sacred berry, and ' Bessie ' 
 reproduces what seems to have been among early
 
 206 Winter 
 
 races regarded as the crowning humour of disguising 
 sex, a humour still in favour by-the-by with the 
 Lincolnshire devotees of Ceres. 
 
 With the entry of the next character Paganism 
 disappears. Over this one's clothes is cast a white 
 shirt, which probably is a heritage from the time when 
 the miracle-play with all its seeming foolery and irre- 
 verence was played in church by mummers who put 
 on sham priestly vestments. St. George has also a 
 wall-paper helmet on his head, and a thick cudgel 
 which we are to fancy a spear in his hand, and on his 
 face are false whiskers, the effect of which is en- 
 hanced by a lavish use of burnt cork. In a treble 
 that would fain be a thundering bass, he boldly 
 advances, exclaiming : 
 
 Here comes in St. George, 
 Who never came before : 
 He will do the best he can, 
 And the best can do no more. 
 
 The thing being English, there must, of course, be 
 a fight, and old folks remember when all the seven 
 champions of Christendom came in and showed some 
 pretty play at single-stick, but time has hopelessly 
 muddled the business, and in some districts the patron 
 Saint is a Crusader and kills a Turkish knight, while 
 the foe appointed for him to-night is, with a fine dis- 
 regard of the unities, Goliath the giant, as if this were 
 a miracle-play and George were David. The Philis- 
 tine is the biggest boy and the most fiercely whiskered.
 
 Northumbrian Guisards 207 
 
 Reckless of dates and the invention of gunpowder, 
 he boldly proclaims : 
 
 Here comes in Goliath, 
 Goliath is my name, 
 A sword and pistol by my side, 
 I hope to win the game. 
 
 To be literal, he has a rusty side-arm which has 
 lost its flint and of which the hammer is broken, 
 while he clanks by his side a wooden sabre, across the 
 top of which for a hilt he has, with a tenpenny nail, 
 fastened a piece of wood. It would seem that Time 
 has worn away all the unessential portions of the 
 sharp colloquy that follows, for it is a model of brevity 
 and point : 
 
 ST. GEORGE : The game, Sir, the game, Sir ! 
 
 It's not within your power : 
 
 I'll hack you into inches 
 
 In less than half an hour. 
 GOLIATH (scornfully) : You, Sir ? 
 ST. GEORGE (confidently} : Yes, I, Sir. 
 GOLIATH : Pull out your sword and try, Sir. 
 
 Then they fall to with a rattle of sticks, but the 
 fight is a mere pretence, for since the fathers have 
 been prohibited from cracking pates at fair or market 
 for half a crown or a new hat, there has been none 
 to teach youngsters the principles of fence. So the 
 Philistine drops without being smitten. Likely 
 enough one or other would appear to have had better 
 reasons for falling in the olden time, as the victorious 
 champion, in apparent forgetfulness of his assumed 
 character, wails forth :
 
 208 Winter 
 
 Alas ! Alas ! What have I done, 
 I've gone and killed the farmer's son. 
 Round the kitchen, round the hall, 
 Is there a doctor to be found at all ? 
 
 Now enters the comic man of the company, the 
 traditionary quack of the middle ages, the typical 
 charlatan, such as Le Sage and Moliere drew, the sort 
 of person who, in the time of Edward 1 1. wrapped the 
 Prince of Wales in red cloths to cure him of small-pox, 
 and who prescribed powdered beetles and crickets as 
 a remedy for the stone. A wisp of straw has been 
 thrust between his jacket and his back to represent 
 a hump, his well-combed beard fastened with twine, 
 once adorned a white horse's tail, he carries his 
 father's long crook and advances with a hirple, glancing 
 to right and left like a magpie searching for carrion. 
 Thus he speaks : 
 
 DR. BROWN : Here comes in old Doctor Brown 
 The best old doctor in the town. 
 ST. GEORGE : How do you know you are the best old doctor in 
 
 the town ? 
 
 DR. BROWN : By my travels, Sir. 
 ST. GEORGE : How far have you travelled ? 
 DR. BROWN : From Russia to Prussia, from France into Spain, 
 
 And back to old England again. 
 ST. GEORGE : What can you cure ? 
 
 I will not set down his list of diseases. It was pro- 
 bably framed in days when plain speech was common 
 alike in hall and cottage, but to-day it makes the very 
 servant girls hide their faces, seeing which, St. George, 
 with more chivalry than he is aware, hastily interrupts 
 with the question :
 
 Northumbrian Guisards 209 
 
 Can you cure a dead man ? 
 DR. BROWN : Yes, I have a little boxy, 
 They call it hoxy-poxy, 
 Put a little to his nose, 
 And a little to his chin, 
 Rise up, Jack, and let us hear you sing. 
 
 Whereupon the dead man, who has lain somewhat 
 uncomfortably on the sandy floor, eagerly watching 
 the signal for his resurrection, springs hastily to his 
 feet, dusts his white shirt, and breaks forth into 
 melody as thus : 
 
 Once I was dead, but now I am alive, 
 
 Blessed be the happy man that made me to revive. 
 
 There should now follow tricks and jugglery and 
 tumbling, with quips and quiddities and clowning, of 
 which our boys know nothing, but all ranging them- 
 selves round the kitchen begin a kind of choral 
 dialogue that seems but a scrap and fragment of what 
 it should be. It runs thus : 
 
 ST. GEORGE : Who lives in that red-tiled house over yonder ? 
 CHORUS : You go and ask, and you'll soon find the owner. 
 ENSEMBLE : The ducks and the geese 
 How they do swim over ! 
 
 ST. GEORGE : How deep is that pond over yonder ? 
 CHORUS : Fling in a stone and you'll soon find the bottom. 
 
 ENSEMBLE : The ducks and the geese, &c. 
 
 It is unadulterated nonsense, yet we are all in the 
 spirit of it, and the farmer's voice is loudest in the 
 final ' do swim over.' Now follow songs, but as they 
 are common and modern, ' Robin Tamson's smiddie,' 
 ' There's queer folk in the shaws,' &c., it is needless to 
 
 p
 
 2io Winter 
 
 write them down. The last one* is evidently an old 
 favourite, however : 
 
 Blinkin' Jock the cobbler, 
 
 He had a blinkin' eye, 
 
 He sold his wife for forty pounds, 
 
 And what the worse was I ? 
 
 And now the entertainment is nearly over, but, 
 like a missionary meeting, it ends with a collection. 
 The smallest boy in the company now steps out with 
 a tin box in his hand, and standing in the middle, 
 while many coppers and one or two pieces of silver 
 are dropped into it, says : 
 
 Ladies and gentlemen, all at your ease, 
 
 Give to the Guisards just what you please. 
 
 Here comes I, little Johnny Jack, 
 
 Wife and family at my back ; 
 
 My family's large though I am small, 
 
 And so a little helps us all. 
 
 Roast beef, plum pudding, strong beer and mince pie, 
 
 Who loves these better than Father Christmas and I ? 
 
 A mug of Christmas ale will make us merry and sing, 
 
 Some money in our pockets will be a very fine thing. 
 
 So, ladies and gentlemen, all at your ease, 
 
 Give the Christmas Guisards just what you please. 
 
 While this is going on the turnip lanterns are 
 being relit, the Champion, the doctor and Goliath 
 seize their sticks and all prepare for a tramp across 
 the fields in the frosty starlight to the next farmhouse, 
 but the cook sees that they do not walk on empty 
 stomachs. 
 
 In a few more years the play that is already so 
 corrupted that the text used in Cornwall or the Mid-
 
 Northumbrian Guisards 2 1 1 
 
 lands hardly shows an affinity to this, will be al- 
 together forgotten. Yet I for one do not believe that 
 any amusement to which the poor of towns have 
 access is productive of more pleasure than this and. 
 other simple country pastimes. Nevertheless, a time 
 is likely to come when their loss will be regretted* 
 Even now the towns cannot support all those who 
 crowd into them, and when the rustic rediscovers his 
 home he will miss the amusements that have grown 
 obsolete. 
 
 POACHERS 
 
 AMONG the amusing characters gradually disappear- 
 ing out of village life, one who is greatly missed is the 
 merry, old-fashioned moucher. It is not that fewer cases 
 come before the magistrates, or that game is safer, but 
 the business is done in a different style, mostly by 
 roughs from town, whose object is pure gain. But 
 the pleasant, impudent veteran who poached, in part 
 out of principle, as holding that there could be no 
 property in wild life, and in part from relish of a good 
 dinner, but still more from a passionate love of sport 
 and the enjoyment derived from pottering about in the 
 open air among the woods and by the river, has passed 
 away. His doings were laughed at nearly as much in 
 the hall as in the public-house. I remember once 
 being present while a well-known poacher was being 
 cross-examined as a witness in a bad case of incen- 
 
 p 2
 
 212 
 
 Winter 
 
 diarism, about which he had been first to give the alarm. 
 * But what were you doing in the wood ? ' asked the 
 lawyer. ' I was following my vocation,' he replied so 
 simply that the very judge smiled. The late Captain 
 Craven, of Brockhampton Park, used to tell a story 
 illustrating in the same way a frankness that might 
 easily be mistaken for ' cheek.' A notorious poacher, 
 who had been the plague of the estate for a long time, 
 disappeared, and was not seen for months, till one day 
 he accosted Captain Craven in Cheltenham, but he 
 scarcely was recognisable, gaol and hospital and disease 
 had so changed and oldened him before his time. 
 The odd plea which he advanced for requiring help 
 was that he could not ' carry on the old trade, being too 
 bad with the rheumatics to lie out noiv.' ' I told him 
 he was a damned scoundrel, and gave him half a 
 crown,' was invariably the close of the narrative. 
 
 But by far the most amusing poacher I ever knew 
 lived in a little Northumbrian village, where his doings 
 still are talked of as if they had occurred only yester- 
 day. Once he fell very ill, and, greatly to his surprise, 
 for he never went to church, discovered a great friend 
 in the parson, soup, wine, chicken, and all sorts of 
 delicacies being sent him. In process of time he 
 recovered, and very soon appeared at the door of the 
 clergyman's house, asking to see him. Being shown 
 into the library, he began to fumble in the huge bag- 
 like pocket of his coat, and eventually flinging down 
 two brace of partridges and a pheasant, he exclaimed,
 
 Poachers 
 
 213 
 
 ' 'e was verra gud to me when I was bad, and as long- 
 as there's a hare or a burrd on the estate 'e shanna 
 want for them ! ' But he was made almost too much 
 of at the hall, where one of the young ladies was his 
 devoted friend. She was extremely fond of a joke r 
 and would worm out of Andrew where on a certain 
 night he was going to poach, then she would tell the 
 keeper, and then make the muddle still greater by ex- 
 plaining to Andrew what she had done, and advising 
 him to take a new direction. For his part, he seemed 
 to have a kind of proprietarial pride in the fields. 
 On going his rounds he would mend a broken fence or 
 gate, t>r clear off the weeds that threatened to choke a 
 youngtree. So fardidthis go that he resented the intru- 
 sion of other poachers as vigorously as if he were the 
 owner. The poor harmless fellow died at a green old 
 age, and it is to the credit of those among whom he 
 lived that never once was he inside a gaol. Not that 
 he considered that a piece of good luck ; for it came 
 about in this way. The keeper was well aware from 
 his experience that his master never would prosecute 
 Andrew, so whenever he got hold of him among the 
 covers or preserves his plan was simply to take off his 
 coat and give the poacher a sound thrashing. As long 
 as the latter retained his vigour he thought this an 
 easy way of getting off, especially if, as sometimes 
 happened, he had not very much the worst of the en- 
 counter ; but he grew feeble as he advanced in years, 
 and the other, who was younger, had so decidedly
 
 2 1 4 Winter 
 
 the advantage, there was no pleasure in it. When 
 Andrew was getting bent and grey he used to tell me 
 he would far rather go to prison than undergo the 
 periodical beating to which he was occasionally sub- 
 ject, despite all the craft he was master of. However, 
 he had become used to the treatment, and made no 
 public complaint. It was a tacit bargain that he 
 should purchase his sporting rights with sore bones. 
 Once or twice, indeed, he expostulated with ' Velve- 
 teens,' who was really a reasonable and good-natured 
 fellow, but without effect. 'Man,' he would say to 
 him, ' it's poor work for you to hit an a'd failed man 
 like me. It's no as if I was young and yebble.' It 
 wasn't a bit of use. ' You should bide oot 'o the 
 grunds, then, if you dinna like your wages,' would be 
 the inexorable reply, as the keeper cut and stripped 
 the hazel rod or ash sapling with which in later times 
 the castigation was inflicted. 
 
 Poaching, however, is usually transacted by 
 characters of a much more desperate caste. Yet some- 
 times the very worst of them will display a sense of 
 rough humour. Not many years ago, for example, a 
 gang of men were one night netting the Tweed, when 
 a water-bailiff, unluckily for himself, happened to come 
 on them. Being anxious to go on with their sport 
 they did not very well know what to do. It would 
 have been easy to duck him in a pool or terrify him 
 off the ground, but that would only have been the 
 means of his getting assistance. A very singular plan
 
 Poachers 2 1 5 
 
 was finally suggested. Close to them was an immense 
 rabbit-hole, probably enlarged by a fox. Into this 
 they thrust his head as far as ever it would go, till, in 
 fact, only his legs protruded. Between these they ran 
 in a sheep stake, so that it was impossible for him to get 
 out or to make any noise to attract attention. There 
 he had to lie and shiver with cold, while his tormentors 
 calmly went on with their job, laughing at the trick as 
 they did so. He was found next morning by a shep- 
 herd, who, when he saw what he took to be a dead 
 man's feet sticking out of the earth, was so unnerved 
 as hardly to be able to relieve him. 
 
 One of the most notable river poachers I ever 
 knew was Mark Smith. What a splendid athlete he 
 was may be judged from one of his most famous feats. 
 At half-past eight o'clock, on a night in early winter, 
 he was caught in the act by two keepers, who, to their 
 own satisfaction, identified their man. Nevertheless, 
 at the sessions, to which he was duly summoned, he 
 established an alibi by proving that before 10 o'clock 
 he was drinking and quarrelling in the public-house 
 of a village fifteen miles off was, in fact, so drunk 
 that the landlord refused to serve him. He had, 
 aided by a short cut or two, run the distance. Water- 
 bailiffs generally came to grief if they meddled with 
 him. The story of those who captured him was that 
 he had been on the opposite side of a river across 
 which it was necessary to carry him in a boat. At 
 the deepest portion of the stream, however, getting
 
 2 1 6 Winter 
 
 his feet against one side of the vessel and his back 
 against the other, he exerted his strength to such 
 effect that the timbers gave way, and the entire crew 
 found themselves struggling in the water, a situation 
 wherein they were more anxious about their own 
 lives than the safety of the prisoner. On land Mark 
 was quite as successful as on the water. By nicely 
 calculating his raids, he over and over again spoiled 
 what everybody thought would be an excellent day's 
 sport ; the pheasants and partridges that were to have 
 tested the ability of the gunners often being in the 
 hands of the cadger, who received Mark's spoil while 
 beaters were vainly trying to put them up from the 
 cover or the turnips. 
 
 He and the friend or two who aided him were full 
 of ingenuity. Sometimes just about the pairing sea- 
 son he would take a little red bantam cock, armed 
 with a long sharp spur, to the side of a plantation. 
 It knew its business well, and would at once crow a 
 defiance to everything within hearing. But the cock 
 pheasant, which is a very pugilistic bird, would not 
 endure this for a moment. He straightway sallies out 
 and offers battle to the stranger, with the consequence 
 that in two rounds he is knocked out of time or killed 
 outright by the trained fighter, whose master, in less 
 time than it takes to say, drops the corpse into his 
 big pocket, and encourages his champion to a new- 
 encounter. Mark used always to carry a pocketful of 
 grain or other bird food about with him when he went
 
 Poachers 2 1 7 
 
 abroad, teaching partridges and pheasants to feed in 
 particular spots, where, choosing a windy day on which 
 sound would not travel far, he killed them in open 
 daylight. Nevertheless, in spite of his knowingness, 
 he could not escape the usual fate. He took to drink- 
 ing badly, and had no money to pay his fines, and 
 so had to go to prison frequently, and after every spell 
 came out more of a desperado and less his own 
 athletic self. Then he began to nourish feelings of 
 revenge against the keeper who had oftenest been 
 instrumental in his capture. Finally they met and 
 had a fatal quarrel. The last I heard of Mark was 
 that he was doing a long term for manslaughter. 
 
 Of all the poachers who once lived in the district 
 where these examples mostly are taken from, and who 
 used to fight and play quoits and get drunk in the 
 yard of the Black Bull, one only is left. He goes by 
 the nickname of Sodger Whiff, because he was once 
 in the army, and in his cups he tells the story of an 
 engagement he was in, when, as he invariably tells his 
 auditors, ' The gun went off whiff! ' The rustics all 
 laugh when he comes to that bit, because they expect 
 it. What he is most expert at is making an excuse 
 when he is caught. Does the owner of preserved 
 water come upon him using salmon roe, of the pre- 
 paration of which he still holds the secret, he so plaus- 
 ibly recounts the story of some great pike which he is 
 anxious to kill for the good of the fishing that as likely as 
 not he gets a present of tackle, or some drink money
 
 2i8 Winter 
 
 instead of the punishment that would be meted out to 
 .another. Once he laughed a certain nobleman, who is 
 also a renowned sailor, out of the judicial temper in the 
 same way. ' Sodger ' had been caught at the corner of 
 a preserve netting pheasants. ' Man Whiff/ said the 
 gamekeeper who took him, ' I'm sorry to meet you 
 here.' ' Dod, but I'm sorrier to meet you,' returned 
 the other. ' I doot you'll have to gaun up to the 
 castle,' went on the keeper. ' Houts, no,' replied the 
 poacher, ' that's far owre fine a place for me.' To the 
 castle he had to go, however, and 'Whiff' was shown 
 into the library that chamber of horror for culprits. 
 At that time the nobleman I have referred to was stay- 
 ing with his aunt, who was the owner of the estate. 
 When he came down Sodger was standing rapt in an 
 ecstasy before one of the pictures. ' Now, what have 
 you been doing ? ' asked his interlocutor sternly. 
 The prisoner made no direct reply, but with a hardly 
 noticeable glance out of the corner of his cunning grey 
 eye, struck an attitude of admiration, and exclaimed, 
 ' Lord, isn't that grand ! ' At a repetition of the 
 question he merely changed his position, and before 
 the portrait of an eighteenth-century dame cried out, 
 ' Dod, hinny, but that's a rare picter. Now I warrant 
 they would pay a five-pun note for that one.' ' Will 
 you answer my question ? ' said the impatient noble- 
 man, but, ' By George, here's a grander one still,' 
 cried the poacher, and went off into another rhapsody. 
 -So he continued till, perhaps, thinking the game might
 
 Poachers 219 
 
 be carried too far, he turned with a face of demure 
 simplicity, and said, ' Poaching, did you say ? Odd, I 
 had forgotten about it looking at them bonny picters. 
 Well, I'm here to answer you. But could that leddy 
 in the bonny dress,' pointing to the handsomest face 
 on the walls, ' be your mother, sir ? Dod, she's awful 
 like you.' It was of no use. The catechism was 
 given up in despair. With a solemn warning and a 
 horn of beer Sodger Whiff was sent back scatheless. 
 
 A WINTERS TALE 
 
 IN the straggling, forlorn, unbeautiful Northumbrian 
 village of Blackford there was, half a century ago, 
 only one comfortable-looking building. It was none 
 of the dwellings of the coal and lime carters, the 
 hedgers and ditchers, or the drainers, who formed the 
 bulk of the population ; for the low, drooping roofs of 
 their cottages, mended here and there with tarpaulin, 
 spoke too eloquently of damp, draught, and over-pres- 
 sure ; it was not the red-tiled croft-house inhabited by 
 Willie Allan, the clever, lazy, kindly, cock-fighting, 
 dog-fancying, boxing, wrestling, swimming, bee- 
 keeping tenant of the little farm, for bachelordom and 
 neglect had combined with Willie's devotion and 
 hobbies of one kind and another to create of it and its 
 surroundings an embodiment of picturesque disorder ; 
 it was not the great austere-looking square-built
 
 220 Winter 
 
 Presbyterian meeting-house with its prison-like walls 
 and narrow windows ; far less was it the slated, 
 shabby-genteel manse, for in cold weather the effect 
 of the whitewash upon it was to threaten the spectator 
 with a fit of the ague. No ; on any gusty day in 
 November, when the very trees on the hill-tops seemed 
 to have turned their shivering backs to the breeze 
 that whistled through their branches and plucked off 
 their red-tinted leaves, while inferior houses looked 
 almost as though crouching to escape the blast or to 
 be facing it in haggard despair, the Red Lion Inn 
 alone, with its comfortable overcoat of impervious 
 thatch, stood quiet and composed, and towards evening 
 the ruddy glare of its kitchen fire pressingly invited 
 the toil-worn cottars to forsake their scolding wives 
 and brawling children, their scanty fires and draughty 
 houses, and enjoy its comfortable warmth. And often 
 at the same time there would be a light at one of the 
 two attic windows that peered out from the roof like 
 a pair of open grey eyes from under lids of thatch. 
 For one of these attic rooms was the favourite resort 
 of Adam Black, the thriving publican of Blackford. 
 Hither at night would he often resort, if business was 
 dull down below, to smoke his pipe, to think over his 
 plans, and to calculate his ingoings and outgoings ; for, 
 as he would sometimes remark, ' It took a deal of 
 worry for a man as could neither read nor write to 
 keep a true reckoning,' and Adam's natural abilities 
 had not been brightened up by education.
 
 A Winters Tale 221 
 
 That did not hinder him from being greatly liked 
 and respected in Blackford. The worst that could be 
 said about him was, that he was rather hard, and, as a 
 matter of fact, there was little softness in his nature, 
 though he never failed to greet his customers with a 
 smile and jest ; and if the smile was a little mechanical 
 and the jest the worse for wear, it mattered little to 
 quiet country folk who were not ashamed to laugh at 
 the twentieth repetition of a witticism. And it was 
 everywhere agreed that he kept a model public-house, 
 never, for instance, allowing any fighting to go on in a 
 conspicuous place, but forcing the combatants to have 
 it out, if they really meant business, in a secluded 
 back-yard where they could black each other's eyes 
 with the most perfect safety and comfort. Any man 
 might go to the Red Lion with the assurance that he 
 would not be made a fool of. Adam knew the 
 drinking capacity of every full-grown male in the 
 neighbourhood of Blackford, and would let none 
 transgress his limit, or, if an accident did happen, 
 managed everything in the quietest possible way. 
 And besides, the villagers all knew him to be, in their 
 own language, as game as a bantam. At times Adam 
 might, in bargain-making, show himself not over- 
 scrupulously above-board, and, generally speaking, 
 what he could get he took, but he steered clear of 
 paltry meannesses, and he was known to be stubbornly 
 faithful to all his friends ; a man, on the whole, with a 
 conscience not too troublesome, but far from dead.
 
 222 Winter 
 
 In domestic life Adam was a martinet. He ruled 
 his son Aleck, his red-haired servant Bet, and even 
 his niece Kitty, with a rod of iron. Prompt, quick 
 cheerful obedience was the law of the household. 
 Only Kitty, besides being the smartest, prettiest, and 
 cleverest girl in Blackford, was so wayward and 
 spirited that not even her uncle, who liked her 
 better than he liked anybody else in the world, was 
 able to keep her entirely under control. 
 
 It was a great grief to Adam when he found out 
 that Kitty was in a mood to throw herself away upon 
 Willie Allan. Not that he disliked Willie, nobody 
 could do that, but he thought him unlikely to be a good 
 husband, i.e., a thriving one, able to keep his family 
 comfortable ; for he never gave his mind to his busi- 
 ness, but wasted his time over what Adam sometimes 
 called his menagerie, for the croft-house was almost 
 a Noah's Ark in its way. The chance visitor was 
 certain to find at every season of the year a litter of 
 pups before the kitchen fire, and an old owl and still 
 more ancient magpie carried on an unceasing struggle 
 for the favourite perch above the kitchen clock. What 
 had once been the best bedroom was converted into 
 a flight for canaries, and there were always hanging 
 about cages containing finches, linnets, thiushes, 
 blackbirds, and even sparrows, for Willie was a noted 
 experimentalist in the art of crossing, and could show 
 an assortment of the most strangely marked hybrids. 
 The garden was stocked with bees and the barn with
 
 A Winters Tale 223, 
 
 Russian rabbits, twenty different kinds of fancy poultry 
 were allowed to spoil the crops, and the dovecot was 
 inhabited by as many varieties of pigeons. In the 
 pigsty he had a tame badger, and there was a litter of 
 foxes in one outhouse and an otter in another. What- 
 ever had life had a deep interest for Willie, as it had 
 had a deep interest for his father before him ; for, as 
 well may be imagined, these tastes were inherited. 
 But he gratified them at the expense of agriculture. 
 Everybody said the croft would pay splendidly to 
 a man who knew how to work it, but the Allans 
 were not likely to make a fortune there or anywhere 
 else. 
 
 It was, therefore, not without reason that Adam 
 was set against his niece taking up with Willie ; he 
 considered it would be throwing herself away. And 
 he thought himself possessed of a powerful instru- 
 ment for enforcing his own view, for he had full 
 command of Kitty's little fortune something like 
 a hundred pounds left her by her father, Adam's 
 elder brother, who had preceded him in the occupation 
 of the Red Lion. Whatever it amounted to, it was 
 all in the big box that stood in Adam's favourite attic 
 room, for he had a deep-rooted suspicion of banks, 
 and, like many other country folk of that time, held 
 that his savings could not be safer than under his own 
 lock and key. 
 
 ' If you marry Allan,' he said to Kitty, and she 
 knew that no nice scruples about right and wrong
 
 224 Winter 
 
 would hinder him from keeping his word, 'not a 
 penny will you get from me.' 
 
 The truth was that he had quite another scheme 
 in his head. Why should Kitty look beyond his son 
 Aleck ? True, they were cousins, but the prejudice 
 against cousins marrying was not strong in the neigh- 
 bourhood, and then what advantages there were ! 
 Kate was a splendid manager, and Aleck, though he 
 had not his father's spirit and cleverness, was a hard 
 worker and very careful, too careful, some people said, 
 for, whereas his father was only keen and saving, he 
 was as mean and hard as a miser. But in match- 
 making these are not defects to make a party in- 
 eligible, and, best of all, thought Adam, 'there'll be 
 no need to divide the money.' And accordingly he 
 spared no effort to enforce his will, so that poor Kitty 
 had a hard time of it, what with her uncle's threats 
 and the no more agreeable persuasions of her money- 
 grubbing suitor. Yet she was far too spirited to 
 yield, and in her inmost mind was resolved to have 
 both the sweetheart and the money, for who needed it 
 if not careless, squandering Willie ? 
 
 It was no fault in her eyes that her lover cared 
 nothing whatever for her fortune, though she would 
 scold and rate him well for his indifference. One 
 winter night as she was returning from a neighbouring 
 village about three miles off, to which she had been 
 sent by her uncle, Willie quite accidentally met her, 
 and they had a happy walk homeward along a lane
 
 A Winters Tale 225 
 
 on the snow covering of which the moonlight fell fair 
 and softly, making the hard wheel-tracks glitter and 
 silvering the half-black, half-whitened hedgerows. 
 Willie never before had seemed so true and earnest 
 and loyal as Kitty poured into his ear the story of 
 her persecution. 
 
 ' Never mind, lass,' he said, ' let him keep the 
 money. I've little, but I'm not in debt, and if you'll 
 but promise to come to the Croft, I'll yes Kitty 
 I'll sell every live thing I have and work day and 
 night for you.' 
 
 ' No, no, Will, there's no need for that ; but do you 
 think I'll give up my rights to please that wretch 
 Aleck ? It's just what he wants for me to marry you 
 and leave everything to him ; and, do you know, I've a 
 good mind to take him at his word just out of spite. 
 That's the worst I could do to him.' 
 
 ' Whist, whist ! ' Willie interrupted her with, 
 ' You're jokin', lass, but I dinna like it. Say anything 
 but that. You would never leave me fora bit dirty gold.' 
 
 ' Would I not ? ' queried Kitty, who was an in- 
 corrigible tease. ' You'll maybe see me make a run- 
 away match of it ; aye, and glad you would be after 
 awhile to get quit of me ; but here's the door. If I'm 
 not away I'll maybe be in the wood on Sunday night/ 
 and she was off, leaving Willie to go home so thought- 
 ful that he quite forgot to feed his tame fox until 
 wakened in the night by its yelping, a thing that had 
 never happened in his life before. 
 
 Q
 
 226 Winter 
 
 Business was very dull in the Red Lion next 
 afternoon, and Adam retired to his attic room,. where 
 Kitty had a cheerful fire, before which she sat knit- 
 ting. Meg, the celebrated black-and-white grey- 
 hound, of which Adam was very proud, stretched 
 its aristocratic body out on the rug, while beside it 
 reclined a very different-looking dog. Its rough, 
 short, curly hair was that of a terrier, but its long face 
 and limbs and slender contour demonstrated its rela- 
 tion to the breed of which Meg was a pure and 
 beautiful specimen. Jack, as he was called, was the 
 very mongrel for a poacher. 
 
 Adam's conversation did not relate to his hounds, 
 however, but to his son. He spoke about Willie Allan 
 with a moderation and impressiveness his niece had 
 not expected to find. 
 
 'Bairn,' he said, 'ye'll rue a lifetime if ye marry 
 a man like that. It might be fine for a twelvemonth, 
 but after that he'll get worse than ever, and the work 
 and anxiety '11 all fall on you. Better take a man like 
 Aleck, that you can depend on to keep you comfort- 
 able, than one like Allan, that'll expect you to take 
 care o' him.' 
 
 ' Ah,' replied Kitty, ' had Aleck been the man his 
 father is, I would never have looked to another ; but I 
 cannot trust him.' 
 
 ' That's where you're wrong, lass. Sandy's a well- 
 bred lad both on the mother's side and the father's. 
 There's not a better bred lad in Blackford, and blood
 
 A Winters Tale 227 
 
 is sure to tell. He may be quiet, but he's game, 
 I warrant you. I could trust him with all I 
 have.' 
 
 ' You'd better not, uncle ; and as to breeding, do 
 you mind Meg's last pups that you expected to be so 
 good and still had to drown, for, says you, she's bred 
 back ? Well, I think Sandy's been bred back, and 
 that's why I want nothing to do with him.' 
 
 ' No, no, Kitty. If Aleck was what you say I 
 would have kicked him to the door sooner than let 
 him marry you. But he's a true lad for all his back- 
 wardness, and has a strong notion for you a strong 
 notion for him,' Adam repeated. 
 
 'But if Aleck was a bad, treacherous man, and 
 didn't care a bit for me, would you leave me free to 
 take anybody I like ? ' queried Kitty. 
 
 ' Sartainly, sartainly,' answered her uncle. 
 
 'Well, if I thought his blood as good as his 
 breeding I would take him to-morrow,' began Kitty ; 
 but she stopped, for Adam was not listening. Some- 
 thing had caught his eye outside, and a stranger to 
 his habits might have thought him rapt in con- 
 templation of the winter sunset's reddened clouds 
 or the snowy landscape. The window commanded a 
 view of a forty-acre field which stretched away from 
 the village gardens to a great thick wood, from which 
 it was separated by a brook. In the very middle of 
 it stood a solitary tree, the boughs of which shone 
 like dark tracery in the evening light. ' Look 
 
 Q 2
 
 228 Winter 
 
 yonder,' said Adam, pointing to the foot of this tree. 
 A timid, limping, hungry hare, probably tempted by 
 the remembrance of the vegetables it had sometimes 
 on moonlight nights found in the gardens, was making 
 towards them in little starts and runs followed by stops, 
 during which it would sit with its long ears pricked 
 up to listen to or scent danger. Could any Blackford 
 man look on that sight unmoved? It might have 
 made the old minister himself turn poacher, and the 
 temptation was quite too strong for Adam. The very 
 dogs, by the eager way in which they started up to 
 follow him, seemed to see a chance of sport in his 
 looks. 
 
 He was no sooner gone than Kitty did a very 
 curious thing. Running to her own apartment, she 
 quickly produced a biggish bunch of old keys, and 
 began trying the lock of Adam's chest until she got 
 one to fit. Then she opened it and looked in. But 
 no pile of gold met her eye. Adam had a second box 
 within the big one, and it, too, was locked. Kitty did 
 not seem at all disappointed. Without touching any- 
 thing in the box, she let the lid fall, carefully locked 
 it and put her keys back where she had found them. 
 
 Had Willie Allan been there to watch her next 
 proceedings, he would have been hurt and surprised ; 
 for the little flirt, after smartening herself up before the 
 mirror, proceeded to the kitchen, where Aleck was 
 busy polishing the harness of the doctor's horse, which 
 happened to be kept at the Red Lion. Ensconcing
 
 A Winters Tale 229 
 
 herself snugly in the arm-chair in the corner, she 
 plainly said, by look and movement, ' Come, woo me.' 
 Though Aleck was in the mood to respond, he pos- 
 sessed none of that spirit of gallantry which ought to 
 have made him quick to take the hint. Kitty's eyes 
 were beginning to twinkle with amusement at her and 
 his own embarrassment, when luckily Adam looked in 
 with the hare, but he forgot all about Jack's perform- 
 ance in his pleasure at seeing the cousins so friendly. 
 
 ' Ah ! ' he cried, ' but you are two sly ones court- 
 in' like that whenever the old man's back is turned,' 
 and in great glee he went away and left them. 
 
 ' What do you think of that, now ? ' said Kitty, 
 laughing. 
 
 ' I wish it was true,' said Aleck. 
 
 ' That is because you're a fool,' said Kitty. ' What 
 on earth should we be sweetheartin' for ? What kind 
 o' life would you live here if you were married, Sandy ? 
 As long as Adam Black's here and that may be 
 twenty years yet Adam Black will be master. And 
 as for you, you'll toil and moil and mourn till the grey 
 hairs come, and you'll get his money when you're past 
 enjoying it. That's the look-out for a woman with a 
 notion of you, my lad.' 
 
 ' I'll not deny you've hit it, Kitty. It's a poor spec 
 at the best, keeping a country public ; the hinds haven't 
 the money to spend. If I had father's savings now, I 
 wouldn't bide here past the term. I'd get a place 
 nearer the pits ; them's the lads to spend ! '
 
 230 Winter 
 
 ' If I were a man like you, Aleck, do you know 
 what I'd do ? I would make a big try to get these 
 same savings and bolt ; if you were quick and clever 
 enough they'd never catch you, and you could change 
 your name and get a new start.' 
 
 ' Ah, I've thought o' that, but the old one's ower 
 cunnin'. I believe he wears the key of the big chest 
 always round his neck.' 
 
 ' If that's all your trouble, I know where to get a 
 key. But would you not be frightened, Aleck ? Folk 
 might call it robbery.' 
 
 ' That wouldn't be true. The money is mine as. 
 much as his, for I've worked hardest for it, and there's 
 a lot of it yours, Kitty, and he wouldn't make much 
 noise about it. He wouldn't disgrace the name by 
 making it a by-word, and he liked you so much that 
 he wouldn't seek to get you into bad trouble. There 
 would be murder, though, if he got hold of us himself.' 
 
 That was the way in which the elopement was 
 planned. During the next few days the cousins were 
 in almost constant conversation, and even shrewd 
 Adam was deceived, and thought, poor man, that his 
 niece had given up Willie Allan, not from any 
 mercenary motives, but because of the weighty advice 
 he had given her. Never had he felt more serenely 
 happy than on the next Sunday afternoon. The hare 
 had been cooked exactly to his liking the fore part 
 in soup, the back part in a pie and after a dinner 
 that might have pleased an emperor, followed by a
 
 A Winters Tale 231 
 
 taste of his fine old brandy brandy kept for the ex- 
 clusive use of the fox-hunting squires who would 
 sometimes lunch at the Red Lion when their meet was 
 in the neighbourhood he sallied forth for his usual 
 Sunday afternoon walk, pipe in mouth and Jack and 
 Meg at his heels. 
 
 ' If you want a bit sport,' said Kitty to him, aside, 
 as he was going out, ' take a turn in the forty-acre 
 about dusk.' He had no chance of asking her mean- 
 ing, for there were others about, but he said to 
 himself, ' Ah, she's a sharp one, is Kit. That means 
 another good dinner or I'm cheated/ and went his 
 way. 
 
 No sooner was he gone than a tremendous bustle 
 began in the public-house, although it was shut on 
 Sundays. Aleck did not know what to take and what 
 to leave. 
 
 ' It's four weary miles we have to walk into Scot- 
 land,' said Kitty, ' so the less we have to carry the 
 better, Aleck that box '11 be a weight to take in itself, 
 lad.' 
 
 ' We'll have plenty of time, though. Bet can say 
 we've gone for a walk, and he'll be as pleased as Punch. 
 Have you opened the chest ? ' 
 
 ' Yes,' said Kitty, ' it's all right. The only pity is 
 I could not open the little box, and you'll have to take 
 it with us.' 
 
 Darkness was just falling when the two fugitives 
 emerged from the Red Lion. The peaceful villagers
 
 232 Winter 
 
 were all within doors, for it was bitterly cold and the 
 sharp north wind had begun to drive stray flakes of 
 snow in front of it. Which way should they take ? 
 There could be no doubt of that : down the hill by the 
 foot-road, across the brook by the single-plank bridge, 
 through the wood until the highway was reached, and 
 then a bold push to get across the Border. Many a 
 Northumbrian lad and lass in the old time had trudged 
 .to the altar in that style, but few of the gallants 
 carried a treasure with them such as was under Aleck's 
 arm. Many a sharp look they cast on all sides lest 
 there should be any suspicious witness of their flight, 
 but not a soul did they see, and the friendly snow 
 dropped softly on their treacherous footprints. Not 
 a word did either say till they reached the old willow 
 near which the brook was crossed by a trembling plank. 
 Then Kitty grew nervous. 
 
 ' I'm frightened to cross the burn,' she said ; ' go you 
 first.' 
 
 ' Be quick, then,' he answered, 'and I'll hold it;' 
 and getting swiftly to the other side he seized the end 
 of the unsteady bit of wood. But instead of following 
 at once, Kitty screamed, ' Here is Jack, your father 
 must be chasing us.' Aleck stood undecided a 
 moment, then dashed the frail bridge into the water. 
 ' Hide where you can,' he shouted ; ' he can't jump the 
 burn, and I'll make off with the money.' 
 
 ' Oh, he'll kill me ! ' pleaded the girl. ' Don't run 
 away from me, Aleck ! '
 
 A Winters Tale 233 
 
 'You shouldn't have been so slow,' he retorted, 
 with the box already under his arm. 
 
 ' Stop, you blackguardly thief ; stop, I say,' hoarsely 
 shouted his father, running up from where he had 
 been looking after some rabbits. But the son turned 
 in terror and fled. Not far, however, for a new-comer 
 appeared on the scene. Willie Allan, true to his ap- 
 pointment with Kitty, though he hardly expected to 
 see her, emerged from the wood. 
 
 ' Holloa,' he said, placing himself in front of the 
 runaway. ' What's up ? ' 
 
 ' Fell him dead ! ' yelled Adam. 
 
 ' Let him go,' said Kitty, but so softly that her 
 lover could not make out what she said. 
 
 ' You'd better turn back,' he said to Aleck ; but the 
 fugitive, brought to bay, was desperate. 
 
 ' Let me be,' he said, ' or by I'll stab you,' 
 
 drawing a clasp-knife from his pocket. 
 
 ' You scoundrel ! ' cried the other in a white heat, 
 ' would you commit murder ? ' 
 
 Willie was credited with possessing more ' science ' 
 than any other man in Blackford, and where will you 
 find good boxing if not in North Northumberland ? 
 He made a feint, and the vengeful blade glittered in a 
 momentary streak of moonlight, but to no purpose, 
 for a side-leap carried its object out of reach, and 
 Willie landed a left-hander likeahorse's kick just above 
 the right eye of his opponent, who fell all his length 
 on the snow and in a trice was divested of his knife,
 
 234 Winter 
 
 which Willie threw contemptuously into the brook. 
 ' Get up and fight like a man,' he said ; but Aleck was 
 beaten. Adam was in ecstasies, 
 
 ' Bring the box round, lad ; never mind that villain.' 
 Willie lifted it, but on feeling the weight ' Xo, no.' he 
 replied, ' he can take it back himself. Take it up and 
 wade,' he said, ' and if you drop it or try any tricks I'll 
 bray your head into putty.' 
 
 * Let me cany it round by the big bridge ? f 
 besought the now thoroughly cowed Sandy. 
 
 ' Xo, by Heaven ! ' said the other, ' through the burn 
 you go ; ' and, willing or not, he forced him to ford the 
 current which a moment after he cleared in a running 
 leap. 
 
 What is it all about?' he then found time to 
 ask. 
 
 'You've stopped a bit ugly work, I'm thinking/ 
 said Adam, upon whom the full extent of the crime 
 began to dawn as he dimly recognised the shape, size, 
 and weight of his money-box in the clouded, uncer- 
 tain light ' These two have been trying to rob me.' 
 
 ' Xever,' said Willie. ' Kitty, you wouldn't do- 
 thatr 
 
 1 Come up and make sure,' said Adam. 
 
 With that they all began silently to retrace their 
 steps, only Kitty slipped away in front as if to avoid 
 embarrassing questions. Willie was very thoughtful. 
 Just as they were coming to the door he said to Adam,. 
 in a low, troubled voice, which he tried hard to make
 
 A Winters Tale 235 
 
 indifferent, ' Look here, Adam ; you haven't lost any- 
 thing by this row, and there isn't much use in expos- 
 ing her, is there ? ' 
 
 ' No,' was the reply, ' but since they're so fond I'll 
 make them marry and set up house by themselves/ 
 With that they entered the kitchen, where Aleck, all 
 shivering with his bath, deposited the box on the floor. 
 A cheerful firelight showed Kitty, not as might have 
 been expected, with abashed countenance and the 
 demeanour of a culprit awaiting justice, but with 
 heightened colour and sparkling eyes, far bonnier 
 than ever, as her old lover could not help thinking. 
 
 '.There's your true blood,' she said to Adam, but 
 pointing to his son, ' and this has been a fine night's 
 work for him. It began with robbing you that's done 
 so much for him, then the sweetheart that liked him 
 so well as to run away with him he left on the wrong 
 side o' the burn, and then to draw his knife on an 
 honest man ! You'll never seek to make me wed him 
 now ! ' 
 
 ' That you shall, you shameless hussy,' broke out 
 her uncle. 'You're not fit for Allan and I'm sure, 
 from what I've seen this night, he wouldn't look at a 
 thief.' 
 
 ' No, I couldn't do that,' said Willie, ' but there's 
 no need for me here,' and he was about to leave 
 when he was stopped by a burst of mischievous 
 laughter. 
 
 ' It's Bet's box,' she said. ' Bet's box ! ' said Aleck,
 
 236 Winter 
 
 and ' Bet's box,' echoed Adam and Willie. ' Aye, Bet's 
 box,' said Kitty. 
 
 ' Sure enough it's not my box,' said the uncle, drag- 
 ging it into the light. ' It's the same size, but not 
 the colour, but whatever is making it so heavy ? ' 
 
 That was soon discovered. The red-headed ser- 
 vant girl came forward with a smile on her gaping 
 mouth that suggested the part she had taken in the 
 trick. ' There's a stone of shot,' she said, ' and there's 
 the horse-shoes from the back yard, and there's the 
 rusty keys that used to lie in the stable, and there's 
 my old petticoats stuffed in to keep them from 
 jingling, and,' she added, ' the weights and the flat- 
 iron.' 
 
 ' By George ! ' said Willie, ' he must have meant 
 to start a pack. Would you have stabbed me to save 
 that dirt ? ' 
 
 ' He didn't know what it was,' answered for him 
 Kitty. ' I just wanted to try his mettle, so I put this 
 box in the room of the other one and it's back in its 
 place now, neither touched nor opened.' 
 
 ' I'm glad of that, lass,' said the old publican ; and 
 though there was not much in the words there was a 
 something in the voice that made them sink deep ; ' it 
 would have been a bad day for me when I found you 
 turning against me ; but Willie, lad, if you want to 
 catch this skittish filly you'd better be quick. Down 
 to the minister's you go to-morrow and get your 
 names asked ; and as for you, you lubberly simple,
 
 A Winters Tale 237 
 
 after making a fool of yourself like that what's to come 
 of you ? ' 
 
 ' Marry him to Bet,' suggested Kitty. 
 
 ' The very ticket ! ' returned her uncle. ' Will you 
 have him, Bet ? ' 
 
 ' Aye, that will I,' said the laconic maid. 
 
 ' You'll go down to the minister's as well, then/ 
 said Adam to Aleck ; ' and now, lass, bring us a drop 
 o' that brandy, and put the kettle on and bring the 
 sugar, and we'll christen the bargain.' 
 
 So a few weeks afterwards there were two wed- 
 dings in Blackford, and when the lads of the village 
 ' roped ' Willie Allan he gave them a whole half-sove- 
 reign to drink, and was therefore allowed to enter the 
 croft-house with a thunderstorm of cheers ; but when 
 they did the same thing to Aleck he morosely cut 
 the rope with a knife, and that is why he has been so 
 unlucky ever since ; for if you go to Blackford now you 
 will find the croft-house to be the neatest, prettiest, 
 nicest house there, while ever since old Adam's death 
 the Red Lion has been so squalid and dirty and dis- 
 reputable that the Marquis has serious thoughts of 
 taking away the license and turning it into a butcher's 
 shop. 
 
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 ... In short, " Thyrza " is a book of unusual literary merit.' MORNING POST. 
 
 NEW; GRUB STREET. 
 
 'Mr. Gissing's writing is bright and strong, his humour is delightful, and his satire 
 is easy and yet restrained.' SPEAKER. 
 
 ' Mr. Gissing has produced a very powerful book. . . . Full of clever touches on 
 literary and social matters.' SATURDAY REVIEW. 
 
 'The book is decidedly forcible, and, to a great extent, the result of experience.' 
 
 ATHENAEUM. 
 
 ' Mr. Gissing's new book is the best bit of work he has donesince " Thyrza." In none 
 of his recent novels has there been such reality of feeling, such pathos, such careful yet 
 broad analysis of character. Mr. Gissing's characters are real living men and women ; 
 they are drawn with great skill, sympathy, and truth.' GUARDIAN. 
 
 London: SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 Waterloo Place.
 
 NOVELS BY THE AUTHOR OF 'MEHALAH.' 
 
 fcp. 8vo. Pictorial boards, 2s. each; or limp red cloth, 2s. 6d. each* 
 
 MEHALAH : 
 
 A STORY OF THE SALT MARSHES. 
 
 ' The book is one of the most powerful that has, so far as we know, appeared for many 
 years. It will remind many readers of Emily Bronte's wonderful story, "Wuthering 
 Heights," and indeed in some respects it is even more powerful.' SCOTSMAN. 
 
 ' " Mehalah " is far above the ordinary level of novels. The writer possesses strength, 
 and strength is one of the rarest qualities in modern fiction.' DAILY NEWS. 
 
 ' A bit of real romance : original, violent, powerful, novel both in place and circum- 
 stance, and peculiarly impressive.' TRUTH. 
 
 JOHN HERRING: 
 
 A WEST OF ENGLAND ROMANCE. 
 
 'Among most novels of the day " John Herring " is a very considerable work indeed, 
 'nd both deserves and will receive proportionate attention.' PALL MALL GAZETTE. 
 
 ' Far, very far, above the level of ordinary novels.' ACADEMY. 
 
 'A powerful and interesting novel. The English is admirable ; there is great freshness 
 and vigour" in the descriptions of scenery and character, and in the narrative there is 
 -abundance of invention, and many of the situations are extremely dramatic. ... A book 
 of unusual originality and power. TIMES. 
 
 COURT ROYAL. 
 
 " Court Royal " is among the few novels of our time that deserve, and will probably 
 obtain, life beyond its day. Intellect, knowledge, fancy, and humour have gone to its 
 making, and thought besides.' GRAPHIC. 
 
 ' The story holds the reader under a spell which is unbroken from first to last.' 
 MORNING POST. 
 
 ' It is difficult to say which is the most striking feature of this remarkable and welcome 
 novel the quaint humour, the consummate power, or the freshness.' VANITY FAIR. 
 
 THE GAVEROCKS. 
 
 ' Marked by the vigour of style, the freshness of invention, and the dramatic power 
 which have gained this talented writer his reputation.' SCOTSMAN. 
 
 ' A tale of vivid and well-sustained interest.' GUARDIAN. 
 
 'The story is one of deep human interest, while the intensity of its local colouring 
 enhances its intrinsic merit.' MORNING POST. 
 
 RICHARD ICABLE, 
 
 THE LIGHTSHIPMAN. 
 
 ' A novel essentially readable, and full of life and colour.' DAILY TELEGRAPH. 
 ' The story has a strong interest, which is likely to prove enduring. It is as good as 
 .anything this powerful writer has produced.' SCOTSMAN. 
 
 London : SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 Waterloo Place. 
 
 R
 
 WORKS BY F. ANSTEY. 
 
 POPULAR EDITION. Crown 8vo. 6s. 
 CHEAP EDITION. Crown 8vo. limp red cloth, 2s. 6d. 
 
 THE TALKING HORSE; 
 
 AND OTHER TALES. 
 
 From THE SATURDAY REVIEW. 'A capital set of stories, thoroughly clever 
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 From THE ATHENAEUM. 'The grimmest of mortals, in his most surly mood, 
 could hardly resist the fun of " The Talking Horse." ' 
 
 POPULAR EDITION. Crown 8vo. 6s. 
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 THE GIANT'S ROBE. 
 
 From THE PALL MALL GAZETTE. 'The main interest of the hook, which is 
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 when every page threatens to bring down doom on the head of the miserable Mark. 
 Will he confess ? Will he drown himself ? Will Vincent denounce him? Will Caffyn 
 inform on him? Will his wife abandon him? we ask eagerly as we read and cannot 
 cease reading till the puzzle is solved in a series of exciting situations.' 
 
 POPULAR EDITION. Crown 8vo. 6s. 
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 THE PARIAH. 
 
 From THE SATURDAY REVIEW. 'In "The Pariah "we are more than ever 
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 makes the author's writings such extremely entertaining reading. There is not a dull 
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 VICE VERSA; 
 
 OR, A LESSON TO FATHERS. 
 
 From THE SATURDAY REVIEW.' If ever there was a book made up from 
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 and serious book, in the reading of which a sober man may laugh without shame from 
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 A FALLEN IDOL. 
 
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 ex -butler who has turned policeman, are figures whom it is as pleasant to meet as it is 
 impossible to forget. 1 
 
 London: SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 Waterloo Place.
 
 The 'MOLLY BAWN' SERIES of POPULAR NOVELS. 
 
 Works by the Author of 'MOLLY BAWN,' 'GREEN PLEASURE 
 
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 PHYLLIS : A NOVEL. 
 
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 love with her. Higher praise we surely cannot give.' ATHENAEUM. 
 
 'AIRY FAIRY LILIAN.' 
 
 'A delightful story, cast in the same mould as its predecessors. The characters are 
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 MRS. GEOFFREY. 
 
 'A prettier or more readable story than "Mrs. Geoffrey" nobody need wish to meet 
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 ROSSMOYNE. 
 
 'Monica Beresford is a very pretty example of Irish naivetf dissociated from shille- 
 laghs ; and there is true humour in the conception of Kit, her sister.' ACADEMY. 
 
 DORIS. 
 
 ' ' ' Doris " is a clever story of a marriage of convenience The dialogue is good, 
 
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 Marquis (himself a clever portrait) are diverting.' ACADEMY. 
 
 GREEN PLEASURE AND GREY GRIEF. 
 
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 PORTIA. 
 
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 'be applied the epithet of " charming."' MORNING POST. 
 
 BEAUTY'S DAUGHTERS. 
 
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 COURT JOURNAL. 
 
 FAITH AND UNFAITH. 
 
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 ' Distinctly superior to three-fourths of the fiction published.' ACADEMY. 
 
 LADY BRANKSMERE. 
 
 insational to suit the most ardent admirers of fie 
 :>f admiration." COURT JOURNAL. 
 
 LOYS, LORD BERRESFORD, and other Tales. 
 
 ries which cannot fail to be popular. The 
 two are especially racy and piquant.' Ao 
 
 UNDER-CURRENTS. 
 
 'Altogether as enjoyable as one is accustomed to expect from the clever author of 
 Molly Bawn."' SCOTSMAN. 
 
 London : SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 Waterloo Place. 
 
 '. . . Sufficiently sensational to suit the most ardent admirers of fiction, and yet contains 
 nuch that is worthy of admiration." COURT JOURNAL. 
 
 1 A collection of stories which cannot fail to be popular. There is something good i 
 1 of them, and one or two are especially racy and piquant.' ACADEMY.
 
 ILLUSTRATED EDITION OF THE 
 
 LIFE AND WORKS OF CHARLOTTE BRONTE 
 
 (CURRER BELL) AND HER SISTERS 
 
 EMILY and ANNE BRONTE 
 
 (ELLIS AND ACTON BELL). 
 
 In Seven Volumes, large crown 8vo. handsomely bound In cloth,, 
 price 5s. each. 
 
 1. JANE EYRE. By CHARLOTTE BRONTE With Five Illustrations. 
 
 2. SHIRLEY. By CHARLOTTE BRONTE. With Five Illustrations. 
 3 VILLETTE. By CHARLOTTE BRONTH. With Five Illustrations. 
 
 4. THE PROFESSOR, and POEMS. By CHARLOTTE BRONTH. With Poems by her 
 
 Sisters and Father. With Five Illustrations. 
 
 5. WUTHERING HEIGHTS. By EMILY BRONTE. AGNES GREY. By ANNS 
 
 BRONTE. With a Preface and Biographical Notice of both Authors by CHARLOTTE 
 BRONTfi. With Five Illustrations. 
 
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 * The Volumes are also to be had in small post 8vo. limp green cloth, 
 
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 price Is. 6d. each. 
 
 ILLUSTRATED EDITION OF- 
 
 MRS. GASKELL'S NOVELS AND TALES. 
 
 In Seven Volumes, bound in cloth, each containing Four Illustrations, 
 price 3s. 6d. each. 
 
 CONTENTS OF THE VOLUMES: 
 
 VOL. I. WIVES AND DAUGHTERS. 
 VOL. II. NORTH AND SOUTH. 
 
 VOL. III. SYLVIA'S LOVERS. 
 VOL. IV. CRANFORD. 
 
 Company Manners The Well of Pen-Morpha-The Heart of John Middleton-Traits, 
 and Stories of the Huguenots Six Weeks at Heppenheim The Squire's Story 
 Libbie Marsh's Three Eras Curious if True- The Moorland Cottage The Sexton's 
 Hero Disappearances Right at last The Manchester Marriage Lois the Witch The 
 Crooked Branch. 
 
 VOL. V. MARY BARTON. 
 
 Cousin Phillis My French Master The Old Nurse's Story Bessy's Troubles at Home 
 Christmas Storms and Sunshine. 
 
 VOL. VI. RUTH. 
 The Grey Woman Morton Hall Mr. Harrison's Confessions Hand and Heart. 
 
 VOL. VII. LIZZIE LEIGH. 
 
 A Dark Night's Work Round the Sofa My Lady Ludlow An Accursed Pace The 
 Doom of the Griffiths Haifa Lifetime Ago The Poor Clare The Half- Brothers. 
 
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 London : SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 Waterloo Place.
 
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 Each Work complete in One Volume, crown 8vo 
 price Six Shillings. 
 
 DARK : a Tale of the Down Country. By Mrs. STEPHEN BATSON. 
 GRANIA : the Story of an Island. By the Hon. EMILY LAWLESS. 
 A WOMAN OF THE WORLD. By F. MABEL ROBINSON. 
 THE SLAVE OF THE LAMP. By HENRY SETON MERRIMAN. 
 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE. By Mrs. HUMPHRY WARD. 
 THE WHITE COMPANY. By A. CONAN DOYLE. 
 THE NEW RECTOR. By STANLEY J. WEYMAN. 
 NEW GRUB STREET. By GEORGE GISSING, Author of ' Demos' &c. 
 EIGHT DAYS. By R. E. FORREST, Author of ' The Touchstone of 
 
 Peril.' 
 A DRAUGHT OF LETHE. By ROY TELLET, Author of 'The 
 
 Outcasts ' &c. 
 
 THE RAJAH'S HEIR. By a New Author. 
 THE PARIAH. By F. ANSTEY, Author of ' Vice Versa ' &c. 
 THYRZA. By GEORGE GISSING, Author of ' Demos ' &c. 
 THE NETHER WORLD. By GEORGE GISSING, Author of 'Demos' c. 
 ROBEKT ELSMERE. By Mrs. HUMPHRY WARD. 
 RICHARD CABLE : the Lightshipman. By the Author of ' Mehalah ' &c. 
 THE GAVEROCKS. By the Author of ' Mehalah,' 'John Herring,' &c. 
 DEMOS : a Story of Socialist Life in England. By GEORGE GISSING. 
 A FALLEN IDOL. By F. ANSTEY, Author of ' Vice Versa ' &c. 
 THE GIANT'S ROBE. By F. ANSTEY, Author of ' Vice Versa ' &c. 
 OLD KENSINGTON. By Miss THACKERAY. 
 THE VILLAGE ON THE CLIFF. By Miss THACKERAY. 
 
 FIVE OLD FRIENDS AND A YOUNG PRINCE. By Miss 
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 TO ESTHER, and other Sketches. By Miss THACKERAY. 
 BLUEBEARD'S KEYS, and other Stories. By Miss THACKERAY. 
 
 THE STORY OF ELIZABETH ; TWO HOURS ; FROM AN ISLAND. 
 
 By Miss THACKERAY. 
 
 TOILERS AND SPINSTERS. By Miss THACKERAY. 
 
 MISS ANGEL ; FULHAM LAWN. By Miss THACKERAY. 
 
 MISS WILLIAMSON'S DIVAGATIONS. By Miss THACKERAY. 
 
 MRS. DYMOND. By Miss THACKERAY. 
 
 LLANALY REEFS. By Lady VERNEY, Author of Stone Edge ' &c. 
 
 LETTICE LISLE. By Lady VERNEY. With 3 Illustrations. 
 
 London: SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 Waterloo Place.
 
 ' A perfect 
 
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 TITLES OF THE VOLUMES. 
 
 VANITY FAIR. 2 vols. 
 
 The HISTORY of PENDENNIS. 2 vols. 
 
 The MEMOIRS of BARRY LYNDON : 
 Little Dinner at Timmins's. 
 
 The NEWCOMES. 2 vols. 
 
 The HISTORY of HENRY ESMOND. 
 
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 The GREAT HOGGARTY DIAMOND. 
 The HISTORY of the NEXT 
 FRENCH REVOLUTION. CRUI K- 
 SHANK and LEECH. COX'S 
 DIARY. The BEDFORD ROW 
 CONSPIRACY. 
 
 MAJOR GAHAGAN. The FATAL 
 BOOTS. MEN'S WIVES. The 
 SECOND FUNERAL of NAPO- 
 LEON. 
 
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 The FOUR GEORGES; and The 
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 DENIS DUVAL; and MISCELLA- 
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 POEMS BY ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. 
 
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 POCKET VOLUME OF SELECTIONS FROM 
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 LIFE AND WORKS OF CHARLOTTE BRONTE 
 
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 TENANT of WILDFELL HALL.-LIFE of CHARLOTTE BRONTE. 
 
 MRS. GASKKLL'S WORKS. 
 
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 TITLES OF THE VOLUMES : -WIVES and DAUGHTERS. -NORTH and SOUTH. 
 -SYLVIA'S LOVERS.-CRANFORD, and other Tales. -MARY BARTON, and 
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 THIS EDITION CONTAINS ALTOGETHER 1,773 ILLUSTRATIONS BY 
 
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 LUKE FILDES, A.R.A. 
 Lady BUTLER (Miss Eliza- 
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 GEORGE DU MAURIER. 
 RICHARD Dovuft. 
 FREDK. WALKER, A.R.A. 
 GEORGE CRUIKSHANK. 
 
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 LINLEY SAMBOURNE. 
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 CHARLES K.BENB. 
 R. B. WALLACE. 
 
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 H. FURNISS. 
 
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 VANITY FAIR. Illustrated by the 
 
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 PENDENNIS. Illustrated by the Author. 
 
 2 VOlS. 
 
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 RICHARD DOYLE. 2 vols. 
 
 THE ADVENTURES OF PHILIP. 
 
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 CORNHILL TO CAIRO. Illustrated by 
 the Author, J. P. ATKINSON, and W. J. 
 WEBB. 
 
 CHRISTMAS BOOKS. Illustrated by 
 
 the Author and RICHARD DOYLE. 
 
 THE BOOK OF SNOBS ; SKETCHES 
 
 AND TRAVELS. Illustrated by the 
 
 Author 
 
 PARIS SKETCH BOOK; LITTLE 
 
 TRAVELS & ROADSIDE SKETCHES. 
 Illustrated by the Author.T. R. MACOUOID, 
 andj. P. ATKINSON. 
 
 THE YELLOWPLUSH PAPERS ; 
 
 THE FITZHOODLE PAPERS ; COX'S 
 DIARY; CHARACTER SKETCHES. 
 Illustrated by the Author and GEORGE 
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 TICAL REVIEWS. Illustrated by the 
 Author, GEORGE CRUIKSHANK, JOHN 
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 THE MEMOIRS of BARRY LYNDON ; 
 
 THE FATAL BOOTS. Illustrated by 
 
 GEORGE CRUIKSHANK and w. RALSTON. 
 
 tINE: a Story; MEN'S 
 THE BEDFORD ROW CON- 
 SPIRACY. Illustrated by the Author. L. 
 FILDES, A.R.A., and R. B. WALLACE. 
 
 BALLADS : THE ROSE AND THE 
 
 RING. Illustrated by the Author, Lady 
 BUTLER ( Miss Elizabeth Thompson , 
 GEORGE DU MAURIER, JOHN COLLIER, 
 H. FURNISS, G. G. KILBURNE, M. FITZ- 
 GERALD, and J. P. ATKINSON. 
 ROUNDABOUT PAPERS. To which 
 
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 NAPOLEON. Illustrated by the Author, 
 CHARLES KEENE, and M. FITZGERALD. 
 
 THE FOUR GEORGES, and THE 
 
 ENGLISH HUMORISTS OF THE 
 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. Illustrated 
 by the Author, FRANK DICKSEE, LINLEY 
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 F. BARNARD. 
 LOVEL THE WIDOWER; THE 
 
 WOLVES AND THE LAMB; DENIS 
 DUVAL. Illustrated by the Author and 
 FREDERICK WALKER. To which is added 
 an Essay on the Wri 
 THACKERAY, by LESLI 
 
 MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS, 
 
 SKETCHES, AND REVIEWS. With Illus- 
 trations by the Author. 
 
 CONTRIBUTIONS TO 'PUNCH.' 
 
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 By the same Author. 
 
 THE EARLY LIFE OF SAMUEL ROGERS. Large post 8vo. i2s. 6d. 
 London: SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 Waterloo Place.
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 
 Los Angeles 
 This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. 
 
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