"An Iberian," I returned.

She laughed and said: "This makes the third time I have been called an Iberian, so perhaps it is true, and I'm curious to know what an Iberian is, and why I'm called an Iberian. Is it because I have something of a Spanish look?"

I answered that the Iberians were the ancient Britons, a dark-eyed, brown-skinned people who inhabited this country and all Southern Europe before the invasion of the blue-eyed races; that doubtless there had been an Iberian mixture in her ancestors, perhaps many centuries ago, and that these peculiar characters had come out strongly in her; she had the peculiar kind of blood in her veins and the peculiar sort of soul which goes with the blood.

"But what a mystery it is!" she exclaimed. "I am the only small one in a family of tall sisters. My parents were both tall and light, and the others took after them. I was small and dark, and they were tall blondes with blue eyes and pale gold hair. And in disposition I was unlike them as in physique. How do you account for it?"

It was a long question, I said, and I had told her all I could about it. I couldn't go further into it; I was too ignorant. I had just touched on the subject in one of my books. It was in other books, with reference to a supposed antagonism which still survives in blue-eyed and dark-eyed people.

She asked me to give her the titles of the books I spoke of. "You imagine, I daresay," she said, "that it is mere idle curiosity on my part. It isn't so. The subject has a deep and painful interest for me."

That was all, and I had forgotten all about the conversation until some time afterwards, when I had a letter from her recalling it. I quote one passage without the alteration of a syllable:

"Oh, why did I not know before, when I was young, in the days when my beautiful blue-eyed but cruel and remorseless mother and sisters made my life an inexplicable grief and torment! It might have lifted the black shadows from my youth by explaining the reason of their persecutions—it might have taken the edge from my sufferings by showing that I was not personally to blame, also that nothing could ever obviate it, that I but wasted my life and broke my heart in for ever vain efforts to appease an hereditary enemy and oppressor."

Cases of this kind cannot, however, appear conclusive. The cases in which mother and daughters unite in persecuting a member of the family are not uncommon. I have known several in my experience in which respectable, well-to-do, educated, religious people have displayed a perfectly fiendish animosity against one of the family. In all these cases it has been mother and daughters combining against one daughter, and so far as one can see into the matter, the cause is usually to be traced to some strangeness or marked peculiarity, physical or mental, in the persecuted one. The peculiarity may be a beauty of disposition, or some virtue or rare mental quality which the others do not possess.

It would perhaps be worth while to form a society to investigate all these cases of persecution in families, to discover whether or not they afford any support to the notion of an inherited antagonism of dark and light races. The Anthropological, Eugenic and Psychical Research Societies might consider the suggestion.



XXXI

THE RETURN OF THE CHIFF-CHAFF

(SPRING SADNESS)

On a warm, brilliant morning in late April I paid a visit to a shallow lakelet or pond five or six acres in extent which I had discovered some weeks before hidden in a depression in the land, among luxuriant furze, bramble, and blackthorn bushes. Between the thickets the boggy ground was everywhere covered with great tussocks of last year's dead and faded marsh grass—a wet, rough, lonely place where a lover of solitude need have no fear of being intruded on by a being of his own species, or even a wandering moorland donkey. On arriving at the pond I was surprised and delighted to find half the surface covered with a thick growth of bog-bean just coming into flower. The quaint three-lobed leaves, shaped like a grebe's foot, were still small, and the flowerstocks, thick as corn in a field, were crowned with pyramids of buds, cream and rosy-red like the opening dropwort clusters, and at the lower end of the spikes were the full-blown singular, snow-white, cottony flowers—our strange and beautiful water edelweiss.

A group of ancient, gnarled and twisted alder bushes, with trunks like trees, grew just on the margin of the pond, and by-and-by I found a comfortable arm-chair on the lower stout horizontal branches overhanging the water, and on that seat I rested for a long time, enjoying the sight of that rare unexpected loveliness.

The chiff-chaff, the common warbler of this moorland district, was now abundant, more so than anywhere else in England; two or three were flitting about among the alder leaves within a few feet of my head, and a dozen at least were singing within hearing, chiff-chaffing near and far, their notes sounding strangely loud at that still, sequestered spot. Listening to that insistent sound I was reminded of Warde Fowler's words about the sweet season which brings new life and hope to men, and how a seal and sanction is put on it by that same small bird's clear resonant voice. I endeavoured to recall the passage, saying to myself that in order to enter fully into the feeling expressed it is sometimes essential to know an author's exact words. Failing in this, I listened again to the bird, then let my eyes rest on the expanse of red and cream-coloured spikes before me, then on the masses of flame-yellow furze beyond, then on something else. I was endeavouring to keep my attention on these extraneous things, to shut my mind resolutely against a thought, intolerably sad, which had surprised me in that quiet solitary place. Surely, I said, this springtime verdure and bloom, this fragrance of the furze, the infinite blue of heaven, the bell-like double note of this my little feathered neighbour in the alder tree, flitting hither and thither, light and airy himself as a wind-fluttered alder leaf—surely this is enough to fill and to satisfy any heart, leaving no room for a grief so vain and barren, which nothing in nature suggested! That it should find me out here in this wilderness of all places—the place to which a man might come to divest himself of himself—that second self which he has unconsciously acquired—to be like the trees and animals, outside of the sad atmosphere of human life and its eternal tragedy! A vain effort and a vain thought, since that from which I sought to escape came from nature itself, from every visible thing; every leaf and flower and blade was eloquent of it, and the very sunshine, that gave life and brilliance to all things, was turned to darkness by it.

Overcome and powerless, I continued sitting there with half-closed eyes until those sad images of lost friends, which had risen with so strange a suddenness in my mind, appeared something more than mere memories and mentally-seen faces and forms, seen for a moment, then vanishing. They were with me, standing by me, almost as in life; and I looked from one to another, looking longest at the one who was the last to go; who was with me but yesterday, as it seemed, and stood still in our walk and turned to bid me listen to that same double note, that little spring melody which had returned to us; and who led me, waist-deep in the flowering meadow grasses to look for this same beautiful white flower which I had found here, and called it our "English edelweiss." How beautiful it all was! We thought and felt as one. That bond uniting us, unlike all other bonds, was unbreakable and everlasting. If one had said that life was uncertain it would have seemed a meaningless phrase. Spring's immortality was in us; ever-living earth was better than any home in the stars which eye hath not seen nor heart conceived. Nature was all in all; we worshipped her and her wordless messages in our hearts were sweeter than honey and the honeycomb.

To me, alone on that April day, alone on the earth as it seemed for a while, the sweet was indeed changed to bitter, and the loss of those who were one with me in feeling, appeared to my mind as a monstrous betrayal, a thing unnatural, almost incredible. Could I any longer love and worship this dreadful power that made us and filled our hearts with gladness—could I say of it, "Though it slay me yet will I trust it?"

By-and-by the tempest subsided, but the clouds returned after the rain, and I sat on in a deep melancholy, my mind in a state of suspense. Then little by little the old influence began to re-assert itself, and it was as if one was standing there by me, one who was always calm, who saw all things clearly, who regarded me with compassion and had come to reason with me. "Come now," it appeared to say, "open your eyes once more to the sunshine; let it enter freely and fill your heart, for there is healing in it and in all nature. It is true the power you have worshipped and trusted will destroy you, but you are living to-day and the day of your end will be determined by chance only. Until you are called to follow them into that 'world of light,' or it may be of darkness and oblivion, you are immortal. Think then of to-day, humbly putting away the rebellion and despondency corroding your life, and it will be with you as it has been; you shall know again the peace which passes understanding, the old ineffable happiness in the sights and sounds of earth. Common things shall seem rare and beautiful to you. Listen to the chiff-chaff ingeminating the familiar unchanging call and message of spring. Do you know that this frail feathered mite with its short, feeble wings has come back from an immense distance, crossing two continents, crossing mountains, deserts illimitable, and, worst of all, the salt, grey desert of the sea. North and north-east winds and snow and sleet assailed it when, weary with its long journey, it drew near to its bourne, and beat it back, weak and chilled to its little anxious heart, so that it could hardly keep itself from falling into the cold, salt waves. Yet no sooner is it here in the ancient home and cradle of its race, than, all perils and pains forgot, it begins to tell aloud the overflowing joy of the resurrection, calling earth to put on her living garment, to rejoice once more in the old undying gladness—that small trumpet will teach you something. Let your reason serve you as well as its lower faculties have served this brave little traveller from a distant land."

Is this then the best consolation my mysterious mentor can offer? How vain, how false it is!—how little can reason help us! The small bird exists only in the present; there is no past, nor future, nor knowledge of death. Its every action is the result of a stimulus from outside; its "bravery" is but that of a dead leaf or ball of thistle-down carried away by the blast. Is there no escape, then, from this intolerable sadness—from the thought of springs that have been, the beautiful multitudinous life that has vanished? Our maker and mother mocks at our efforts—at our philosophic refuges, and sweeps them away with a wave of emotion. And yet there is deliverance, the old way of escape which is ours, whether we want it or not. Nature herself in her own good time heals the wound she inflicts—even this most grievous in seeming when she takes away from us the faith and hope of reunion with our lost. They may be in a world of light, waiting our coming—we do not know; but in that place they are unimaginable, their state inconceivable. They were like us, beings of flesh and blood, or we should not have loved them. If we cannot grasp their hands their continued existence is nothing to us. Grief at their loss is just as great for those who have kept their faith as for those who have lost it; and on account of its very poignancy it cannot endure in either case. It fades, returning in its old intensity at ever longer intervals until it ceases. The poet of nature was wrong when he said that without his faith in the decay of his senses he would be worse than dead, echoing the apostle who said that if we had hope in this world only we should be of all men the most miserable. So, too, was the later poet wrong when he listened to the waves on Dover beach bringing the eternal notes of sadness in; when he saw in imagination the ebbing of the great sea of faith which had made the world so beautiful, in its withdrawal disclosing the deserts drear and naked shingles of the world. That desolation, as he imagined it, which made him so unutterably sad, was due to the erroneous idea that our earthly happiness comes to us from otherwhere, some region outside our planet, just as one of our modern philosophers has imagined that the principle of life on earth came originally from the stars.

The "naked shingles of the world" is but a mood of our transitional day; the world is just as beautiful as it ever was, and our dead as much to us as they have ever been, even when faith was at its highest. They are not wholly, irretrievably lost, even when we cease to remember them, when their images come no longer unbidden to our minds. They are present in nature: through ourselves, receiving but what we give, they have become part and parcel of it and give it an expression. As when the rain clouds disperse and the sun shines out once more, heaven and earth are filled with a chastened light, sweet to behold and very wonderful, so because of our lost ones, because of the old grief at their loss, the visible world is touched with a new light, a tenderness and grace and beauty not its own.



XXXII

A WASP AT TABLE

Even to a naturalist with a tolerant feeling for all living things, both great and small, it is not always an unmixed pleasure to have a wasp at table. I have occasionally felt a considerable degree of annoyance at the presence of a self-invited guest of that kind.

Some time ago when walking I sat down at noon on a fallen tree-trunk to eat my luncheon, which consisted of a hunk of cake and some bananas. The wind carried the fragrance of the fruit into the adjacent wood, and very soon wasps began to arrive, until there were fifteen or twenty about me. They were so aggressive and greedy, almost following every morsel I took into my mouth, that I determined to let them have as much as they wanted—and something more! I proceeded to make a mash of the ripest portions of the fruit mixed with whisky from my pocket- flask, and spread it nicely on the bark. At once they fell on it with splendid appetites, but to my surprise the alcohol produced no effect. I have seen big locusts and other important insects tumbling about and acting generally as if demented after a few sips of rum and sugar, but these wasps, when they had had their full of banana and whisky, buzzed about and came and went and quarrelled with one another just as usual, and when I parted from them there was not one of the company who could be said to be the worse for liquor. Probably there is no more steady- headed insect than the wasp, unless it be his noble cousin and prince, the hornet, who has a quite humanlike unquenchable thirst for beer and cider.

But the particular wasp at table I had in my mind remains to be spoken of. I was lunching at the house of a friend, the vicar of a lonely parish in Hampshire, and besides ourselves there were five ladies, four of them young, at our round table. The window stood open, and by-and-by a wasp flew in and began to investigate the dishes, the plates, then the eaters themselves, impartially buzzing before each face in turn. On his last round, before taking his departure, he continued to buzz so long before my face, first in front of one eye then the other, as if to make sure that they were fellows and had the same expression, that I at length impatiently remarked that I did not care for his too flattering attentions. And that was really the only inconsiderate or inhospitable word his visit had called forth. Yet there were, I have said, five ladies present! They had neither welcomed nor repelled him, and had not regarded him; and although it was impossible to be unconscious of his presence at table, it was as if he had not been there. But then these ladies were cyclists: one, in addition to the beautiful brown colour with which the sun had painted her face, showed some dark and purple stains on cheek and forehead—marks of a resent dangerous collision with a stone wall at the foot of a steep hill.

Here I had intended telling about other meetings with other wasps, but having touched on a subject concerning which nothing is ever said and volumes might be written—namely, the Part played by the bicycle in the emancipation of women—I will go on with it. That they are not really emancipated doesn't matter, since they move towards that goal, and doubtless they would have gone on at the same old, almost imperceptible rate for long years but for the sudden impulse imparted by the wheel. Middle-aged people can recall how all England held up its hands and shouted "No, no!" from shore to shore at the amazing and upsetting spectacle of a female sitting astride on a safety machine, indecently moving her legs up and down just like a man. But having tasted the delights of swift easy motion, imparted not by any extraneous agency, but—oh, sweet surprise!—by her own in-dwelling physical energy, she refused to get off. By staying on she declared her independence; and we who were looking on—some of us—rejoiced to see it; for did we not also see, when these venturesome leaders returned to us from careering unattended over the country, when easy motion had tempted them long distances into strange, lonely places, where there was no lover nor brother nor any chivalrous person to guard and rescue them from innumerable perils—from water and fire, mad bulls and ferocious dogs, and evil-minded tramps and drunken, dissolute men, and from all venomous, stinging, creeping, nasty, horrid things—did we not see that they were no longer the same beings we had previously known, that in their long flights in heat and cold and rain and wind and dust they had shaken off some ancient weakness that was theirs, that without loss of femininity they had become more like ourselves in the sense that they were more self-centred and less irrational?

But women, alas! can seldom follow up a victory. They are, as even the poet when most anxious to make the best of them mournfully confesses:

variable as the shade By the light quivering aspen made.

Inconstant in everything, they soon cast aside the toy which had taught them so great a lesson and served them so well, carrying them so far in the direction they wished to go. And no sooner had they cast it aside than a fresh toy, another piece of mechanism, came on the scene to captivate their hearts, and instead of a help, to form a hindrance. The motor not only carried them back over all the ground they had covered on the bicycle, but further still, almost back to the times of chairs and fans and smelling-salts and sprained ankles at Lyme Regis. A painful sight was the fair lady not yet forty and already fat, overclothed and muffled up in heavy fabrics and furs, a Pekinese clasped in her arms, reclining in her magnificent forty-horse-power car with a man (Homo sapiens) in livery to drive her from shop to shop and house to house. One could shut one's eyes until it passed— shut them a hundred or five hundred times a day in every thoroughfare in every town in England; but alas! one couldn't shut out the fact that this spectacle had fascinated and made captive the soul of womankind, that it was now their hope, their dream, their beautiful ideal—the one universal ideal that made all women sisters, from the greatest ladies in the land downwards, and still down, from class to class, even to the semi-starved ragged little pariah girl scrubbing the front steps of a house in Mean Street for a penny.

The splendid spectacle has now been removed from their sight, but is it out of mind? Are they not waiting and praying for the war to end so that there may be petrol to buy and men returned from the front to cast off their bloodstained clothes and wash and bleach their blackened faces, to put themselves in a pretty livery and drive the ladies and their Pekinese once more?

A friend of mine once wrote a charming booklet entitled Wheel Magic, which was all about his rambles on the machine and its effect on him. He is not an athlete—on the contrary he is a bookish man who has written books enough to fill a cart, and has had so much to do with books all his life that one might imagine he had by some strange accident been born in the reading-room of the British Museum; or that originally he had actually been a bookworm, a sort of mite, spontaneously engendered between the pages of a book, and that the supernatural being who presides over the reading-room had, as a little pleasantry, transformed him into a man so as to enable him to read the books on which he had previously nourished himself.

I can't follow my friend's wanderings and adventures as, springing out of his world of books, he flits and glides like a vagrant, swift- winged, irresponsible butterfly about the land, sipping the nectar from a thousand flowers and doing his hundred miles in a day and feeling all the better for it, for this was a man's book, and the wheel and its magic was never a necessity in man's life. But it has a magic of another kind for woman, and I wish that some woman of genius would arise and, inspired perhaps by the ghost of Benjamin Ward Richardson in his prophetic mood, tell of this magic to her sisters. Tell them, if they are above labour in the fields or at the wash-tub, that the wheel, without fatiguing, will give them the deep breath which will purify the blood, invigorate the heart, stiffen the backbone, harden the muscles; that the mind will follow and accommodate itself to these physical changes; finally, that the wheel will be of more account to them than all the platforms in the land, and clubs of all the pioneers and colleges, all congresses, titles, honours, votes, and all the books that have been or ever will be written.



XXXIII

WASPS AND MEN

I now find that I must go back to the subject of my last paper on the wasp in order to define my precise attitude towards that insect. Then, too, there was another wasp at table, not in itself a remarkably interesting incident, but I am anxious to relate it for the following reason.

If there is one sweetest thought, one most cherished memory in a man's mind, especially if he be a person of gentle pacific disposition, whose chief desire is to live in peace and amity with all men, it is the thought and recollection of a good fight in which he succeeded in demolishing his adversary. If his fights have been rare adventures and in most cases have gone against him, so much the more will he rejoice in that one victory.

It chanced that a wasp flew into the breakfast room of a country house in which I was a guest, when we were all—about fourteen in number, mostly ladies, young and middle-aged—seated at the table. The wasp went his rounds in the usual way, dropping into this or that plate or dish, feeling foods with his antennae or tasting with his tongue, but staying nowhere, and as he moved so did the ladies, starting back with little screams and exclamations of disgust and apprehension. For these ladies, it hardly need be said, were not cyclists. Then the son of the house, a young gentleman of twenty-two, a footballer and general athlete, got up, pushed back his chair and said: "Don't worry, I'll soon settle his hash."

Then I too rose from my seat, for I had made a vow not to allow a wasp to be killed unnecessarily in my presence.

"Leave it to me, please," I said, "and I'll put him out in a minute."

"No, sit down," he returned. "I have said I'm going to kill it."

"You shall not," I returned; and then the two of us, serviettes in hand, went for the wasp, who got frightened and flew all round the room, we after it. After some chasing he rose high and then made a dash at the window, but instead of making its escape at the lower open part, struck the glass.

"Now I've got him!" cried my sportsman in great glee; but he had not got him, for I closed with him, and we swayed about and put forth all our strength, and finally came down with a crash on a couch under the window. Then after some struggling I succeeded in getting on top, and with my right hand on his face and my knee on his body to keep him pressed down, I managed with my left hand to capture the wasp and put him out.

Then we got up—he with a scarlet face, furious at being baulked; but he was a true sportsman, and without one word went back to his seat at the table.

Undoubtedly it was a disgraceful scene in a room full of ladies, but he, not I, provoked it and was the ruffian, as I'm sure he will be ready to confess if he ever reads this.

But why all this fuss over a wasp's life, and in such circumstances, in a room full of nervous ladies, in a house where I was a guest? It was not that I care more for a wasp than for any other living creature—I don't love them in the St. Francis way; the wasp is not my little sister; but I hate to see any living creature unnecessarily, senselessly, done to death. There are other creatures I can see killed without a qualm—flies, for instance, especially houseflies and the big blue-bottle; these are, it was formerly believed, the progeny of Satan, and modern scientists are inclined to endorse that ancient notion. The wasp is a redoubtable fly-killer, and apart from his merits, he is a perfect and beautiful being, and there is no more sense in killing him than in destroying big game and a thousand beautiful wild creatures that are harmless to man. Yet this habit of killing a wasp is so common, ingrained as it were, as to be almost universal among us, and is found in the gentlest and humanest person, and even the most spiritual-minded men come to regard it as a sort of religious duty and exercise, as the incident I am going to relate will show.

I came to Salisbury one day to find it full of visitors, but I succeeded in getting a room in one of the small family hotels. I was told by the landlord that a congress was being held, got up by the Society for the pursuit or propagation of Holiness, and that delegates, mostly evangelical clergymen and ministers of the gospel of all denominations, with many lay brothers, had come in from all over the kingdom and were holding meetings every day and all day long at one of the large halls. The three bedrooms on the same floor with mine, he said, were all occupied by delegates who had travelled from the extreme north of England.

In the evening I met these three gentlemen and heard all about their society and congress and its aim and work from them.

Next morning at about half-past six I was roused from sleep by a tremendous commotion in the room adjoining mine: cries and shouts, hurried trampings over the floor, blows on walls and windows and the crash of overthrown furniture. However, before I could shake my sleep off and get up to find out the cause, there were shouts of laughter, a proof that no one had been killed or seriously injured, and I went to sleep again.

At breakfast we met once more, and I was asked if I had been much disturbed by the early morning noise and excitement. They proceeded to explain that a wasp had got into the room of their friend—indicating the elderly gentleman who had taken the head of the table; and as he was an invalid and afraid of being stung, he had shouted to them to come to his aid. They had tumbled out of bed and rushed in, and before beginning operations had made him cover his face and head with the bedclothes, after which they started hunting the wasp. But he was too clever for them. They threw things at him and struck at him with their garments, pillows, slippers, whatever came to hand, and still he escaped, and in rushing round in their excitement everything in the room except the bedstead was overthrown. At last the wasp, tired out or terrified dropped to the floor, and they were on him like a shot and smashed him with the slippers they had in their hands.

"And you call yourselves religious men!" I remarked when they had finished their story and looked at me expecting me to say something.

They stared astonished at me, then exchanged glances and burst out laughing, and laughed as if they had heard something too excruciatingly funny. The elderly clergyman who had been saved from the winged man- eating dragon that had invaded his room managed at last to recover his gravity, and his friends followed suit; they then all three silently looked at me again as if they expected to hear something more.

Not to disappoint them, I started telling them about the life and work of a famous nobleman, one of England's great pro-consuls, who for many years had ruled over various countries in distant regions of the earth, and many barbarous and semi-savage nations, by whom he was regarded, for his wisdom and justice and sympathy with the people he governed, almost as a god. This great man, who was now living in retirement at home, had just founded a Society for the Protection of Wasps, and had so far admitted two of his friends who were in sympathy with his objects to membership. As soon as I heard of the society I had sent in an application to be admitted, too, and felt it would be a proud day for me if the founder considered me worthy of being the fourth member.

Having concluded my remarks, the three religious gentlemen, who had listened attentively and seriously to my praises of the great pro- consul, once more exchanged glances and again burst out laughing, and continued laughing, rocking in their chairs with laughter, until they could laugh no more for exhaustion, and the elderly gentleman removed his spectacles to wipe the tears from his eyes.

Such extravagant mirth surprised me in that grey-haired man who was manifestly in very bad health, yet had travelled over three hundred miles from his remote Cumberland parish to give the benefit of his burning thoughts to his fellow-seekers after holiness congregated at Salisbury from all parts of the country.

The gust of merriment having blown its fill, ending quite naturally in "minute drops from off the eaves," I gravely wished them good-bye and left the room. They did not know, they never suspected that the amusement had been on both sides, and that despite their laughter it had been ten times greater on mine than on theirs.

I can't in conclusion resist the temptation to tell just one more wasp incident, although I fear it will hurt the tender-hearted and religious reader's susceptibilities more than any of those I have already told. But it will be told briefly, without digression and moralisings.

We have come to regard Nature as a sort of providence who is mindful of us and recompenses us according to what our lives are—whether we worship her and observe her ordinances or find our pleasure in breaking them and mocking her who will not be mocked. But it is sad for those who have the feeling of kinship for all living things, both great and small, from the whale and the elephant down even to the harvest mouse and beetle and humble earthworm, to know that killing—killing for sport or fun—is not forbidden in her decalogue. If the killing at home is not sufficient to satisfy a man, he can transport himself to the Dark Continent and revel in the slaughter of all the greatest and noblest forms of life on the globe. There is no crime and no punishment and no comfort to those who are looking on, except some on exceedingly rare occasion when we receive a thrill of joy at the lamentable tidings of the violent death of some noble young gentleman beloved of everybody and a big-game hunter, who was elephant-shooting, when one of the great brutes, stung to madness by his wounds, turned, even when dying, on his persecutor and trampled him to death.

In a small, pretty, out-of-the-world village in the West of England I made the acquaintance of the curate, a boyish young fellow not long from Oxford, who was devoted to sport and a great killer. He was not satisfied with cricket and football in their seasons and golf and lawn tennis—he would even descend to croquet when there was nothing else— and boxing and fencing, and angling in the neighbouring streams, but he had to shoot something every day as well. And it was noticed by the villagers that the shooting fury was always strongest on him on Mondays. They said it was a reaction; that after the restraint of Sunday with its three services, especially the last when he was permitted to pour out his wild curatical eloquence, the need of doing something violent and savage was most powerful; that he had, so to say, to wash out the Sunday taste with blood.

One August, on one of these Mondays, he was dodging along a hedge-side with his gun trying to get a shot at some bird, when he unfortunately thrust his foot into a populous wasps' nest, and the infuriated wasps issued in a cloud and inflicted many stings on his head and face and neck and hands, and on other parts of his anatomy where they could thrust their little needles through his clothes.

This mishap was the talk of the village. "Never mind," they said cheerfully—they were all very cheerful over it—"he's a good sports- man, and like all of that kind, hard as nails, and he'll soon be all right, making a joke of it."

The result "proved the rogues, they lied," that he was not hard as nails, but from that day onwards was a very poor creature indeed. The brass and steel wires in his system had degenerated into just those poor little soft grey threads which others have and are subject to many fantastical ailments. He fell into a nervous condition and started and blanched and was confused when suddenly hailed or spoken to even by some harmless old woman. He trembled at a shadow, and the very sight and sound of a wasp in the breakfast room when he was trying to eat a little toast and marmalade filled him, thrilled him, with fantastic terrors never felt before. And in vain to still the beating of his heart he would sit repeating: "It's only a wasp and nothing more." Then some of the parishioners who loved animals, for there are usually one or two like that in a village, began to say that it was a "judgment" on him, that old Mother Nature, angry at the persecutions of her feathered children by this young cleric who was supposed to be a messenger of mercy, had revenged herself on him in that way, using her little yellow insects as her ministers.



XXXIV

IN CHITTERNE CHURCHYARD

Chitterne is one of those small out-of-the-world villages in the south Wiltshire downs which attract one mainly because of their isolation and loneliness and their unchangeableness. Here, however, you discover that there has been an important change in comparatively recent years—some time during the first half of the last century. Chitterne, like most villages, possesses one church, a big building with a tall spire standing in its central part. Before it was built there were two churches and two Chitternes—two parishes with one village, each with its own proper church. These were situated at opposite ends of the one long street, and were small ancient buildings, each standing in its own churchyard. One of these disused burying-places, with a part of the old building still standing in it, is a peculiarly attractive spot, all the more so because of long years of neglect and of ivy, bramble, and weed and flower of many kinds that flourish in it, and have long obliterated the mounds and grown over the few tombs and headstones that still exist in the ground.

It was an excessively hot August afternoon when I last visited Chitterne, and, wishing to rest for an hour before proceeding on my way, I went to this old churchyard, naturally thinking that I should have it all to myself. But I found two persons there, both old women of the peasant class, meanly dressed; yet it was evident they had their good clothes on and were neat and clean, each with a basket on her arm, probably containing her luncheon. For they were only visitors and strangers there, and strangers to one another as they were to me—that, too, I could guess: also that they had come there with some object— perhaps to find some long unvisited grave, for they were walking about, crossing and recrossing each other's track, pausing from time to time to look round, then pulling the ivy aside from some old tomb and reading or trying to read the worn, moss-grown inscription. I began to watch their movements with growing interest, and could see that they, too, were very much interested in each other, although for a long time they did not exchange a word. Presently I, too, fell to examining the gravestones, just to get near them, and while pretending to be absorbed in the inscriptions I kept a sharp eye on their movements. They took no notice of me. I was nothing to them—merely one of another class, a foreigner, so to speak, a person cycling about the country who was just taking a ten minutes' peep at the place to gratify an idle curiosity. But who was she—that other old woman; and what did she want hunting about there in this old forsaken churchyard? was doubtless what each of those two was saying to herself. And by-and-by their curiosity got the better of them; then contrived to meet at one stone which they both appeared anxious to examine.

I had anticipated this, and no sooner were they together than I was down on my knees busily pulling the ivy aside from a stone three or four yards from theirs, absorbed in my business. They bade each other good day and said something about the hot weather, which led one to remark that she had found it very trying as she had left home early to walk to Salisbury to take the train to Codford, and from there she had walked again to Chitterne. Oddly enough, the other old woman had also been travelling all day, but from an opposite direction, over Somerset way, just to visit Chitterne. It seemed an astonishing thing to them when it came out that they had both been looking forward for years to this visit, and that it should have been made on the same day, and that they should have met there in that same forsaken little graveyard. It seemed stranger still when they came to tell why they had made this long-desired visit. They were both natives of the village, and had both left it early in life, one aged seven, the other ten; they had left much about the same time, and had never returned until now. And they were now here with the same object—just to find the graves, unmarked by a stone, where the mother of one of them, the grandparents of both, and other relatives they still remembered had been buried more than half a century ago. They were surprised and troubled at their failure to identify the very spots where the mounds used to be. "It do all look so different," said one, "an' the old stones be mostly gone." Finally, when they told their names and their fathers' names—farm-labourers both—they failed to remember each other, and could only suppose that they must have forgotten many things about their far-off childhood, although others were still as well remembered as the incidents of yesterday.

The old dames had become very friendly and confidential by this time. "I dare say," I said to myself, "that if I can manage to stay to the end I shall see them embrace and kiss at parting," and I also thought that their strange meeting in the old village churchyard would be a treasured memory for the rest of their lives. I feared they would suspect me of eavesdropping, and taking out my penknife, I began diligently scraping the dead black moss from the letters on the stone, after which I made pretence of copying the illegible inscription in my notebook. They, however, took no notice of me, and began telling each other what their lives had been since they left Chitterne. Both had married working men and had lost their husbands many years ago; one was sixty-nine, the other in her sixty-sixth year, and both were strong and well able to work, although they had had hard lives. Then in a tone of triumph, their faces lighting up with a kind of joy, they informed each other that they had never had to go to the parish for relief. Each was anxious to be first in telling how it had come about that she, the poor widow of a working man, had been so much happier in her old age than so many others. So eager were they to tell it that when one spoke the other would cut in long before she finished, and when they talked together it was not easy to keep the two narratives distinct. One was the mother of four daughters, all still unmarried, earning their own livings, one in a shop, another a sempstress, two in service in good houses, earning good wages. Never had woman been so blessed in her children! They would never see their mother go to the House! The other had but one, a son, and not many like him; no son ever thought more of his mother. He was at sea, but every nine to ten months he was back in Bristol, and then on to visit her, and never let a month pass without writing to her and sending money to pay her rent and keep a nice comfortable home for him.

They congratulated one another; then the mother of four said she always thanked God for giving her daughters, because they were women and could feel for a mother. The other replied that it was true, she had often seen it, the way daughters stuck to their mother—until they married. She was thankful to have a son; a man, she said, is a man and can go out in the world and do things, and if he is a good son he will never see his mother want.

The other was nettled at that speech. "Of course a man's a man," she returned, "but we all know what men are. They are all right till they pick up with a girl who wants all their wages; then everyone, mother and all, must be given up." But a daughter was a daughter always; she had four, she was happy to say.

This made matters worse. "Daughters always daughters!" came the quick rejoinder. "I never learned that before. What, my son take up with a girl and leave his old mother to starve or go to the workhouse! I never heard such a foolish thing said in my life!" And, being now quite angry, she looked round for her basket and shawl so as to get away as quickly as possible from that insulting woman; but the other, guessing her intention, was too quick for her and started at once to the gate, but after going four or five steps turned and delivered her last shot: "Say what you like about your son, and I don't doubt he's been good to you, and I only hope it'll always be the same; but what I say is, give me a daughter, and I know, ma'am, that if you had a daughter you'd be easier in your mind!"

Having spoken, she made for the gate, and the other, stung in some vital part by the last words, stood motionless, white with anger, staring after her, first in silence, but presently she began talking audibly to herself. "My son—my son pick up with a girl! My son leave his mother to go on the parish!"—but I stayed to hear no more; it made me laugh and—it was too sad.



XXXV

A HAUNTER OF CHURCHYARDS

I said a little while ago that when staying at a village I am apt to become a haunter of its churchyard; but I go not to it in the spirit of our well-beloved Mr. Pecksniff. He, it will be remembered, was accustomed to take an occasional turn among the tombs in the graveyard at Amesbury, or wherever it was, to read and commit to memory the pious and admonitory phrases he found on the stones, to be used later as a garnish to his beautiful, elevating talk. The attraction for me, which has little to do with inscriptions, was partly stated in the last sketch, and I may come to it again by-and-by.

Nevertheless, I cannot saunter or sit down among these memorials without paying some attention to the lettering on them, and always with greatest interest in those which time and weather and the corrosive lichen have made illegible. The old stones that are no longer visited, on which no fresh-gathered flower is ever laid, which mark the last resting-places of the men and women who were once the leading members of the little rustic community, and are now forgotten for ever, whose bones for a century past have been crumbling to dust. And the children's children, and remoter descendants of these dead, where are they? since one refuses to believe that they inhabit this land any longer. Under what suns, then, by what mountains and what mighty rivers, on what great green or sun-parched plains and in what roaring cities in far-off continents? They have forgotten; they have no memory nor tradition of these buried ones, nor perhaps even know the name of this village where they lived and died. Yet we believe that something from these same dead survives in them—something, too, of the place, the village, the soil, an inherited memory and emotion. At all events we know that, wheresoever they may be, that their soul is English still, that they will hearken to their mother's voice when she calls and come to her from the very ends of the earth.

As to the modern stones with inscriptions made so plain that you can read them at a distance of twenty yards, one cultivates the art of not seeing them, since if you look attentively at them and read the dull formal inscription, the disgust you will experience at their extreme ugliness will drive you from the spot, and so cause you to miss some delicate loveliness lurking there, like a violet "half hidden from the eye." But I need not go into this subject here, as I have had my say about it in a well-known book—Hampshire Days.

The stones I look at are of the seventeenth, eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries, for even down to the fifties of last century something of the old tradition lingered on, and not all the stones were shaped and lettered in imitation of an auctioneer's advertisement posted on a barn door.

In reading the old inscriptions, often deciphered with difficulty after scraping away the moss and lichen, we occasionally discover one that has the charm of quaintness, or which touches our heart or sense of humour in such a way as to tempt us to copy it into a note-book.

In this way I have copied a fair number, and in glancing over my old note-books containing records of my rambles and observations, mostly natural history, I find these old epitaphs scattered through them. But I have never copied an inscription with the intention of using it. And this for the sufficient reason that epitaphs collected in a book do not interest me or anyone. They are in the wrong place in a book and cannot produce the same effect as when one finds and spells them out on a weathered stone or mural tablet out or inside a village church. It is the atmosphere—the place, the scene, the associations, which give it its only value and sometimes make it beautiful and precious. The stone itself, its ancient look, half-hidden in many cases by ivy, and clothed over in many-coloured moss and lichen and aerial algae, and the stonecutter's handiwork, his lettering, and the epitaphs he revelled in—all this is lost when you take the inscription away and print it. Take this one, for instance, as a specimen of a fairly good seventeenth-century epitaph, from Shrewton, a village on Salisbury Plain, not far from Stonehenge:

HERE IS MY HOPE TILL TRVMP SHALL SOVND AND CHRIST FOR MEE DOTH CALL THEN SHALL I RISE FROM DEATH TO LIFE NOE MORETO DYE AT ALL

R HERE LIES THE BODY OF ROBET WANESBROVGH THE SD E O ED OF Y NAME W DEPART THIS R E LIFE DEC Y 9TH AODNI 1675

It would not be very interesting to put this in a book:

Here is my hope till trump shall sound And Christ for me doth call, Then shall I rise from death to life No more to die at all.

But it was interesting to find it there, to examine the old lettering and think perhaps that if you had been standing at the elbow of the old lapidary, two and a half centuries ago, you might have given him a wrinkle in the economising of space and labour. In any case, to find it there in the dim, rich interior of that ancient village church, to view it in a religious or reverent mood, and then by-and-by in the dusty belfry to stumble on other far older memorials of the same family, and finally, coming out into the sunny churchyard, to come upon the same name once more in an inscription which tells you that he died in 1890, aged 88. And you think it a good record after nine generations, and that the men who lie under these wide skies on these open chalk downs do not degenerate.

I have copied these inscriptions for a purpose of my own, just as one plucks a leaf or a flower and drops it between the pages of a book he is reading to remind him on some future occasion, when by chance he finds it again on opening the book at some future time, of the scene, the place, the very mood of the moment.

Now, after all said, I am going to quote a few of my old gleanings from gravestones, not because they are good of their kind—my collection will look poor and meagre enough compared with those that others have made—but I have an object in doing it which will appear presently in the comments.

Always the best epitaphs to be found in books are those composed by versifiers for their own and the reading public's amusement, and always the best in the collection are the humorous ones.

The first collection I ever read was by the Spanish poet, Martinez de la Rosa, and although I was a boy then, I can still remember one:

Aqui Fray Diego reposa, Jamas hiso otra cosa.

Which, translated literally, means:

Here Friar James reposes: He never did anything else.

This does well enough on the printed page, but would shock the mind if seen on a gravestone, and perhaps the rarest of all epitaphs are the humorous ones. But one is pleased to meet with the unconsciously humorous; the little titillation, the smile, is a relief, and does not take away the sense of the tragedy of life and the mournful end.

A good specimen of the unconsciously humorous epitaph is on a stone in the churchyard at Maddington, a small village in the Wiltshire Downs, dated 1843:

These few lines have been procured To tell the pains which he endured, He was crushed to death by the fall Of an old mould'ring, tottering wall. All ye young people that pass by Remember this and breathe a sigh, Lord, let him hear thy pard'ning voice And make his broken bones rejoice.

A better one, from the little village of Mylor, near Falmouth, has I fancy been often copied:

His foot it slipped and he did fall, Help! help! he cried, and that was all.

And still a better one I found in the churchyard of St. Margaret's at Lynn, to John Holgate, aged 27, who died in 1712:

He hath gained his port and is at ease, And hath escapt ye danger of ye seas, His glass is run his life is gone, Which to my thought never did no man no wronge.

That last line is remarkable, for although its ten slow words have apparently fallen by chance into that form and express nothing but a little negative praise of their subject, they say something more by implication. They conceal a mournful protest against the cruelty and injustice of his lot, and remind us of the old Italian folk-song, "O Barnaby, why did you die?" With plenty of wine in the house and salad in the garden, how wrong, how unreasonable of you to die! But even while blaming you in so many words, we know, O Barnaby, that the decision came not from you, and was an outrage, but dare not say so lest he himself should be listening, and in his anger at one word should take us away too before our time. It is unconsciously humorous, yet with the sense of tears in it.

But there is no sense of tears in the unconscious humour of the solemn or pompous epitaph composed by the village ignoramus.

A century ago the village idiot was almost always a member of the little rustic community, and was even useful to it in two distinct ways. He was "God's Fool," and compassion and sweet beneficent instinct, or soul growths, flourished the more for his presence; and secondly, he was a perpetual source of amusement, a sort of free cinema provided by Nature for the children's entertainment. I am not sure that his removal has not been a loss to the little rural centres of life.

Side by side with the village idiot there was the pompous person who could not only read a book, but could put whole sentences together and even make rhymes, and who on these grounds took an important part in the life of the community. He was not only adviser and letter-writer to his neighbours, but often composed inscriptions for their gravestones when they were dead. But in the best specimen of this kind which I have come upon, I feel pretty sure, from internal evidence, that the buried man had composed his own epitaph, and probably designed the form of the stone and its ornamentation. I found this stone in the churchyard of Minturne Magna, in Dorset. The stone was five feet high and four and a half broad—a large canvas, so to speak. On the upper half a Tree of Knowledge was depicted, with leaves and apples, the serpent wound about the trunk, with Adam and Eve standing on either side. Eve is extending her arm, with an apple in her open hand, to Adam, and he, foolish man, is putting out a hand to take it. Then follows the extraordinary inscription:

Here lyeth the Body Of Richard Elambert, Late of Holnust, who died June 6, in the year 1805, in the 100 year of his age. Neighbours make no stay, Return unto the Lord, Nor put it off from day to day, For Death's a debt ye all must pay. Ye knoweth not how soon, It may be the next moment, Night, morning or noon. I set this as a caution To my neighbours in rime, God give grace that you May all repent in time. For what God has decreed, We surely must obey, For when please God to send His death's dart into us so keen, O then we must go hence And be no more here seen.

ALSO

Handy lyeth here Dianna Elambert, Which was my only daughter dear, Who died Jan. 10, 1776, In the 18th year of her age.

Poor Diana deserved a less casual word!

Enough of that kind. The next to follow is the quite plain, sensible, narrative inscription, with no pretension to fine diction, albeit in rhyme. Oddly enough the most perfect example I have found is in the churchyard at Kew, which seems too near to London:

Here lyith the bodies of Robert and Ann Plaistow, late of Tyre, Edghill, in Warwickshire, Dyed August 23, 1728. At Tyre they were born and bred And in the same good lives they led, Until they come to married state, Which was to them most fortunate. Near sixty years of mortal life They were a happy man and wife, And being so by Nature tyed When one fell sick the other dyed, And both together laid in dust To await the rising of the just. They had six children born and bred, And five before them being dead, Their only then surviving son Hath caused this stone for to be done.

After this little masterpiece I will quote no other in this class.

After copying some scores of inscriptions, we find that there has always been a convention or fashion in such things, and that it has been constantly but gradually changing during the last three centuries. Very few of the seventeenth century, which are the best, are now decipherable, out of doors at all events. In an old graveyard you will perhaps find two or three among two or three hundred stones, yet you believe that two to three hundred years ago the small space was as thickly peopled with stones as now. The two or three or more that have not perished are of the very hardest kind of stone, and the old letters often show that they were cut with great difficulty. We also find that apart from the convention of the age or time, there were local conventions or fashions. In some parts of the South of England you find numbers of enormous stones five feet high and nearly as broad. This mode has long vanished. But you find a resemblance in the inscriptions as well. Thus, wherever the Methodists obtained a firm hold on the community, you find the spirit of ugliness appearing in the village churchyard from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards, when the old ornate and beautiful stones with figures of winged cherubs bearing torches, scattering flowers or blowing trumpets, were the usual decorations, giving place to the plain or ugly stone with its square ugly lettering and the dull monotonous form of the inscription. "To the memory of Mr. Buggins of this parish, who died on February 27th, 1801, aged 67." And then, to save trouble and expense, a verse from a hymn, or the simple statement that he is asleep in Jesus, or is awaiting the resurrection.

I am inclined to blame Methodism for these horrors simply because it is, as we know, the cult of ugliness, but there may have been another cause for the change; it was perhaps to some extent a reaction against the stilted, the pompous and silly epitaph which one finds most common in the first half of the eighteenth century.

Here is a perfect specimen which I found at St. Just, in Cornwall, to a Martin Williams, 1771:

Life's but a snare, a Labyrinth of Woe Which wretched Man is doomed to struggle through. To-day he's great, to-morrow he's undone, And thus with Hope and Fear he blunders on, Till some disease, or else perhaps old Age Calls us poor Mortals trembling from the Stage.

An amusing variant of one of the commoner forms of that time appears at Lelant, a Cornish village near St. Ives:

What now you are so once was me, What now I am that you will be, Therefore prepare to follow me.

No less remarkable in grammar as in the identical or perfect rhyme in the first and third lines. The author or adapter could have escaped this by making the two first the expression of the person buried beneath, and the third the comment from the outsider, as follows:

Therefore prepare to follow she,

It was a woman, I must say.

This form of epitaph is quite common, and I need not give here more examples from my notes, but the better convention coming down from the preceding age goes on becoming more and more modified all through the eighteenth, and even to the middle of the nineteenth century.

The following from St. Erth, a Cornish village, is a most suitable inscription on the grave of an old woman who was a nurse in the same family from 1750 to 1814:

Time rolls her ceaseless course; the race of yore That danced our infancy on their knee And told our wondering children Legends lore Of strange adventures haped by Land and Sea, How are they blotted from the things that be!

There are many beautiful stones and appropriate inscriptions during all that long period, in spite of the advent of Mr. Buggins and his ugliness, and the charm and pathos is often in a phrase, a single line, as in this from St. Keverne, 1710, a widow's epitaph on her husband:

Rest here awhile, thou dearest part of me.

But let us now get back another century at a jump, to the Jacobean and Caroline period. And for these one must look as a rule in interiors, seeing that, where exposed to the weather, the lettering, if not the whole stone, has perished. Perhaps the best specimen of the grave inscription, lofty but not pompous, of that age which I have met with is on a tablet in Ripon Cathedral to Hugh de Ripley, a locally important man who died in 1637:

Others seek titles to their tombs Thy deeds to thy name prove new wombes And scutcheons to deck their Herse Which thou need'st not like teares and vers. If I should praise thy thriving witt Or thy weighed judgment serving it Thy even and thy like straight ends Thy pitie to God and to friends The last would still the greatest be And yet all jointly less than thee. Thou studiedst conscience more than fame Still to thy gathered selfe the same. Thy gold was not thy saint nor welth Purchased by rapine worse than stealth Nor did'st thou brooding on it sit Not doing good till death with it. This many may blush at when they see What thy deeds were what theirs should be. Thou'st gone before and I wait now T'expect my when and wait my how Which if my Jesus grant like thine Who wets my grave's no friend of mine.

Rather too long for my chapter, but I quote it for the sake of the last four lines, characteristic of that period, the age of conceits, of the love of fantasticalness, of Donne, Crashaw, Vaughan.

A jump from Ripon of 600 odd miles to the little village of Ludgvan, near Penzance, brings us to a tablet of nearly the same date, 1635, and an inscription conceived in the same style and spirit. It is interesting, on account of the name of Catherine Davy, an ancestress of the famous Sir Humphry, whose marble statue stands before the Penzance Market House facing Market Jew Street.

Death shall not make her memory to rott Her virtues were too great to be forgott. Heaven hath her soul where it must still remain The world her worth to blazon forth her fame The poor relieved do honour and bless her name. Earth, Heaven, World, Poor, do her immortalize Who dying lives and living never dies.

Here is another of 1640:

Here lyeth the body of my Husband deare Whom next to God I did most love and fear. Our loves were single: we never had but one And so I'll be although that thou art gone.

Which means that she has no intention of marrying again. Why have I set this inscription down? Solely to tell how I copied it. I saw it on a brass in the obscure interior of a small village church in Dorset, but placed too high up on the wall to be seen distinctly. By piling seven hassocks on top of one another I got high up enough to read the date and inscription, but before securing the name I had to get quickly down for fear of falling and breaking my neck. The hassocks had added five feet to my six.

The convention of that age appears again in the following inscription from a tablet in Aldermaston church, in that beautiful little Berkshire village, once the home of the Congreves:

Like borne, like new borne, here like dead they lie, Four virgin sisters decked with pietie Beauty and other graces which commend And made them like blessed in the end.

Which means they were very much like each other, and were all as pure in heart as new-born babes, and that they all died unmarried.

Where the epitaph-maker of that time occasionally went wrong was in his efforts to get his fantasticalness in willy-nilly, or in a silly play upon words, as in the following example from the little village of Boyton on the Wylie river, on a man named Barnes, who died in 1638:

Stay Passenger and view a stack of corne Reaped and laid up in the Almighty's Barne Or rather Barnes of Choyce and precious grayne Put in his garner there still to remaine.

But in the very next village—that of Stockton—I came on the best I have found of that time. It is, however, a little earlier in time, before fantasticalness came into fashion, and in spirit is of the nobler age. It is to Elizabeth Potecary, who died in 1590.

Here she interred lies deprived of breath Whose light of virtue once on Earth did shyne Who life contemned ne feared ghostly death Whom worlde ne worldlye cares could cause repine Resolved to die with hope in Heaven placed Her Christ to see whom living she embraced In paynes most fervent still in zeal most strong In death delighting God to magnifye How long will thou forgett me Lord! this cry In greatest pangs was her sweet harmonye Forgett thee? No! he will not thee forgett In books of Lyfe thy name for aye is set.

And with Elizabeth Potecary, that dear lady dead these three centuries and longer, I must bring this particular Little Thing to an end.



XXXVI

THE DEAD AND THE LIVING

The last was indeed in essence a small thing, but was running to such a great length it had to be ended before my selected best inscriptions were used up, also before the true answer to the question: "Why, if inscriptions do not greatly interest me, do I haunt churchyards?" was given. Let me give it now: it will serve as a suitable conclusion to what has already been said on the subject in this and in a former book.

When we have sat too long in a close, hot, brilliantly-lighted, over- crowded room, a sense of unutterable relief is experienced on coming forth into the pure, fresh, cold night and filling our lungs with air uncontaminated with the poisonous gases discharged from other lungs. An analogous sense of immense relief, of escape from confinement and joyful liberation, is experienced mentally when after long weeks or months in London I repair to a rustic village. Yet, like the person who has in his excitement been inhaling poison into his system for long hours, I am not conscious of the restraint at the time. Not consciously conscious. The mind was too exclusively occupied with itself—its own mind affairs. The cage was only recognised as a cage, an unsuitable habitation, when I was out of it. An example, this, of the eternal disharmony between the busy mind and nature—or Mother Nature, let us say; the more the mind is concentrated on its own business the blinder we are to the signals of disapproval on her kindly countenance, the deafer to her warning whispers in our ear.

The sense of relief is chiefly due to the artificiality of the conditions of London or town life, and no doubt varies greatly in strength in town and country-bred persons; in me it is so strong that on first coming out to where there are woods and fields and hedges, I am almost moved to tears.

We have recently heard the story of the little East-end boy on his holiday in a quiet country spot, who exclaimed: "How full of sound the country is! Now in London we can't hear the sound because of the noises." And as with sound—the rural sounds that are familiar from of old and find an echo in us—so with everything: we do not hear nor see nor smell nor feel the earth, which he is, physically and mentally, in such per-period, the years that run to millions, that it has "entered the soul"; an environment with which he is physically and mentally, in such perfect harmony that it is like an extension of himself into the surrounding space. Sky and cloud and wind and rain, and rock and soil and water, and flocks and herds and all wild things, with trees and flowers—everywhere grass and everlasting verdure—it is all part of men, and is me, as I sometimes feel in a mystic mood, even as a religious man in a like mood feels that he is in a heavenly place and is a native there, one with it.

Another less obvious cause of my feeling is that the love of our kind cannot exist, or at all events not unmixed with contempt and various other unpleasant ingredients, in people who live and have their being amidst thousands and millions of their fellow-creatures herded together. The great thoroughfares in which we walk are peopled with an endless procession, an innumerable multitude; we hardly see and do not look at or notice them, knowing beforehand that we do not know and never will know them to our dying day; from long use we have almost ceased to regard them as fellow-beings.

I recall here a tradition of the Incas, which tells that in the beginning a benevolent god created men on the slopes of the Andes, and that after a time another god, who was at enmity with the first, spitefully transformed them into insects. Here we have a contrary effect—it is the insects which have been transformed; the millions of wood-ants, let us say, inhabiting an old and exceedingly populous nest have been transformed into men, but in form only; mentally they are still ants, all silently, everlastingly hurrying by, absorbed in their ant-business. You can almost smell the formic acid. Walking in the street, one of the swarming multitude, you are in but not of it. You are only one with the others in appearance; in mind you are as unlike them as a man is unlike an ant, and the love and sympathy you feel towards them is about equal to that which you experience when looking down on the swarm in a wood-ants' nest.

Undoubtedly when I am in the crowd, poisoned by contact with the crowd- mind—the formic acid of the spirits—I am not actually or keenly conscious of the great gulf between me and the others, but, as in the former case, the sense of relief is experienced here too in escaping from it. The people of the small rustic community have not been de- humanised. I am a stranger, and they do not meet me with blank faces and pass on in ant-like silence. So great is the revulsion that I look on them as of my kin, and am so delighted to be with them again after an absence of centuries, that I want to embrace and kiss them all. I am one of them, a villager with the village mind, and no wish for any other.

This mind or heart includes the dead as well as the living, and the church and churchyard is the central spot and half-way house or camping-ground between this and the other world, where dead and living meet and hold communion—a fact that is unknown to or ignored by persons of the "better class," the parish priest or vicar sometimes included.

And as I have for the nonce taken on the village mind, I am as much interested in my incorporeal, invisible neighbours as in those I see and am accustomed to meet and converse with every day. They are here in the churchyard, and I am pleased to be with them. Even when I sit, as I sometimes do of an evening, on a flat tomb with a group of laughing children round me, some not yet tired of play, climbing up to my side only to jump down again, I am not oblivious of their presence. They are there, and are glad to see the children playing among the tombs where they too had their games a century ago. I notice that the village woman passing through the ground pauses a minute with her eyes resting on a certain spot; even the tired labourer, coming home to his tea, will let his eyes dwell on some green mound, to see sitting or standing there someone who in life was very near and dear to him, with whom he is now exchanging greetings. But the old worn-out labourer, who happily has not gone to end his days in captivity in the bitter Home of the Poor— he, sitting on a tomb to rest and basking in the sunshine, has a whole crowd of the vanished villagers about him.

It is useless their telling us that when we die we are instantly judged and packed straight off to some region where we are destined to spend an eternity. We know better. Nature, our own hearts, have taught us differently. Furthermore, we have heard of the resurrection—that the dead will rise again at the last day; and with all our willingness to believe what our masters tell us, we know that even a dead man can't be in two places at the same time. Our dead are here where we laid them; sleeping, no doubt, but not so soundly sleeping, we imagine, as not to see and hear us when we visit and speak to them. And being villagers still though dead, they like to see us often, whenever we have a few spare minutes to call round and exchange a few words with them.

This extremely beautiful—and in its effect beneficial—feeling and belief, or instinct, or superstition if the superior inhabitants of the wood-ants' nest, who throw their dead away and think no more about them, will have it so—is a sweet and pleasant thing in the village life and a consolation to those who are lonely. Let me in conclusion give an instance.

The churchyard I like best is situated in the village itself, and is in use both for the dead and living, and the playground of the little ones, but some time ago I by chance discovered one which was over half a mile from the village; an ancient beautiful church and churchyard which so greatly attracted me that in my rambles in that part I often went a mile or two out of my way just for the pleasure of spending an hour or two in that quiet sacred spot. It was in a wooded district in Hampshire, and there were old oak woods all round the church, with no other building in sight and seldom a sound of human life. There was an old road outside the gate, but few used it. The tombs and stones were many and nearly covered with moss and lichen and half-draped in creeping ivy. There, sitting on a tomb, I would watch the small woodland birds that made it their haunt, and listen to the delicate little warbling or tinkling notes, and admire the two ancient picturesque yew trees growing there.

One day, while sitting on a tomb, I saw a woman coming from the village with a heavy basket on her head, and on coming to the gate she turned in, and setting the basket down walked to a spot about thirty yards from where I sat, and at that spot she remained for several minutes standing motionless, her eyes cast down, her arms hanging at her sides. A cottage woman in a faded cotton gown, of a common Hampshire type, flat-chested, a rather long oval face, almost colourless, and black dusty hair. She looked thirty-five, but was probably less than thirty, as women of their class age early in this county and get the toil-worn, tired face when still young.

By-and-by I went over to her and asked her if she was visiting some of her people at that spot. Yes, she returned; her mother and father were buried under the two grass mounds at her feet; and then quite cheerfully she went on to tell me all about them—how all their other children had gone away to live at a distance from home, and she was left alone with them when they grew old and infirm. They were natives of the village, and after they were both dead, five years ago, she got a place at a farm about a mile up the road. There she had been ever since, but fortunately she had to come to the village every week, and always on her way back she spent a quarter or half an hour with her parents. She was sure they looked for that weekly visit from her, as they had no other relation in the place now, and that they liked to hear all the village news from her.

All this and more she told me in the most open way. Like Wordsworth's "simple child," what could she know of death? But being a villager myself I was better informed than Wordsworth, and didn't enter on a ponderous argument to prove to her that when people die they die, and being dead, they can't be alive—therefore to pay them a weekly visit and tell them all the news was a mere waste of time and breath.



XXXVII

A STORY OF THREE POEMS

I wrote in the last sketch but one of the villager with a literary gift who composes the epitaphs in rhyme of his neighbours when they pass away and are buried in the churchyard. This has served to remind me of a kindred subject—the poetry or verse (my own included) of those who are not poets by profession: also of an incident. Undoubtedly there is a vast difference between the village rhymester and the true poet, and the poetry I am now concerned with may be said to come somewhat between these two extremes. Or to describe it in metaphor, it may be said to come midway between the crow of the "tame villatic fowl" and the music of the nightingale in the neighbouring copse or of the skylark singing at heaven's gate. The impartial reader may say at the finish that the incident was not worth relating. Are there any such readers? I doubt it. I take it that we all, even those who appear the most matter-of- fact in their minds and lives, have something of the root, the elements, of poetry in their composition. How should it be otherwise, seeing that we are all creatures of like passions, all in some degree dreamers of dreams; and as we all possess the faculty of memory we must at times experience emotions recollected in tranquillity. And that, our masters have told us, is poetry.

It is hardly necessary to say that it is nothing of the sort: it is the elements, the essence, the feeling which makes poetry if expressed. I have a passion for music, a perpetual desire to express myself in music, but as I can't sing and can't perform on any musical instrument, I can't call myself a musician. The poetic feeling that is in us and cannot be expressed remains a secret untold, a warmth in the heart, a rapture which cannot be communicated. But it cries to be told, and in some rare instances the desire overcomes the difficulty: in a happy moment the unknown language is captured as by a miracle and the secret comes out.

And, as a rule, when it has been expressed it is put in the fire, or locked up in a desk. By-and-by the hidden poem will be taken out and read with a blush. For how could he, a practical-minded man, with a wholesome contempt for the small scribblers and people weak in their intellectuals generally, have imagined himself a poet and produced this pitiful stuff!

Then, too, there are others who blush, but with pleasure, at the thought that, without being poets, they have written something out of their own heads which, to them at all events, reads just like poetry. Some of these little poems find their way into an editor's hands, to be looked at and thrown aside in most cases, but occasionally one wins a place in some periodical, and my story relates to one of these chosen products—or rather to three.

One summer afternoon, many years ago—but I know the exact date: July 1st, 1897—I was drinking tea on the lawn of a house at Kew, when the maid brought the letters out to her mistress, and she, Mrs. E. Hubbard, looking over the pile remarked that she saw the Selborne Magazine had come and she would just glance over it to see if it contained anything to interest both of us.

After a minute or two she exclaimed "Why, here is a poem by Charlie Longman! How strange—I never suspected him of being a poet!"

She was speaking of C. J. Longman, the publisher, and it must be explained that he was an intimate friend and connection of hers through his marriage with her niece, the daughter of Sir John Evans the antiquary, and sister of Sir Arthur Evans.

The poem was To the Orange-tip Butterfly.

Cardamines! Cardamines! Thine hour is when the thrushes sing, When gently stirs the vernal breeze, When earth and sky proclaim the spring; When all the fields melodious ring With cuckoos' calls, when all the trees Put on their green, then art thou king Of butterflies, Cardamines.

What though thine hour be brief, for thee The storms of winter never blow, No autumn gales shall scorn the lea, Thou scarce shalt feel the summer's glow; But soaring high or flitting low, Or racing with the awakening bees For spring's first draughts of honey—so Thy life is passed, Cardamines.

Cardamines! Cardamines! E'en among mortal men I wot Brief life while spring-time quickly flees Might seem a not ungrateful lot: For summer's rays are scorching hot And autumn holds but summer's lees, And swift in autumn is forgot The winter comes, Cardamines.

So well pleased were we with this little lyric that we read it aloud two or three times over to each other: for it was a hot summer's day when the early, freshness and bloom is over and the foliage takes on a deeper, almost sombre green; and it brought back to us the vivid spring feeling, the delight we had so often experienced on seeing again the orange-tip, that frail delicate flutterer, the loveliest, the most spiritual, of our butterflies.

Oddly enough, the very thing which, one supposes, would spoil a lyric about any natural object—the use of a scientific instead of a popular name, with the doubling and frequent repetition of it—appeared in this instance to add a novel distinction and beauty to the verses.

The end of our talk on the subject was a suggestion I made that it would be a nice act on her part to follow Longman's lead and write a little nature poem for the next number of the magazine. This she said she would do if I on my part would promise to follow her poem with one by me, and I said I would.

Accordingly her poem, which I transcribe, made its appearance in the next number.

MY MOOR

Purple with heather, and golden with gorse, Stretches the moorland for mile after mile; Over it cloud-shadows float in their course,— Grave thoughts passing athwart a smile,— Till the shimmering distance, grey and gold, Drowns all in a glory manifold.

O the blue butterflies quivering there, Hovering, flickering, never at rest, Quickened flecks of the upper air Brought down by seeing the earth so blest; And the grasshoppers shrilling their quaint delight At having been born in a world so bright!

Overhead circles the lapwing slow, Waving his black-tipped curves of wings, Calling so clearly that I, as I go, Call back an answering "Peewit," that brings The sweep of his circles so low as he flies That I see his green plume, and the doubt in his eyes.

Harebell and crowfoot and bracken and ling Gladden my heart as it beats all aglow In a brotherhood true with each living thing, From the crimson-tipped bee, and the chaffer slow, And the small lithe lizard, with jewelled eye, To the lark that has lost herself far in the sky.

Ay me, where am I? for here I sit With bricks all round me, bilious and brown; And not a chance this summer to quit The bustle and roar and the cries of town, Nor to cease to breathe this over-breathed air, Heavy with toil and bitter with care.

Well,—face it and chase it, this vain regret; Which would I choose, to see my moor With eyes such as many that I have met, Which see and are blind, which all wealth leaves poor, Or to sit, brick-prisoned, but free within, Freeborn by a charter no gold can win?

When my turn came, the poem I wrote, which duly appeared, was, like my friend's Moor, a recollected emotion, a mental experience relived. Mine was in the New Forest; when walking there on day, the loveliness of that green leafy world, its silence and its melody and the divine sunlight, so wrought on me that for a few precious moments it produced a mystical state, that rare condition of beautiful illusions when the feet are off the ground, when, on some occasions, we appear to be one with nature, unbodied like the poet's bird, floating, diffused in it. There are also other occasions when this transfigured aspect of nature produces the idea that we are in communion with or in the presence of unearthly entities.

THE VISIONARY

I

It must be true, I've somtimes thought, That beings from some realm afar Oft wander in the void immense, Flying from star to star.

In silence through this various world, They pass, to mortal eyes unseen, And toiling men in towns know not That one with them has been.

But oft, when on the woodland falls A sudden hush, and no bird sings; When leaves, scarce fluttered by the wind, Speak low of sacred things,

My heart has told me I should know, In such a lonely place, if one From other worlds came there and stood Between me and the sun.

II

At noon, within the woodland shade I walked and listened to the birds; And feeling glad like them I sang A low song without words.

When all at once a radiance white, Not from the sun, all round me came; The dead leaves burned like gold, the grass Like tongues of emerald flame.

The murmured song died on my lips; Scarce breathing, motionless I stood; So strange that splendour was! so deep A silence held the wood!

The blood rushed to and from my heart, Now felt like ice, now fire in me, Till putting forth my hands, I cried, "O let me hear and see!"

But even as I spake, and gazed Wide-eyed, and bowed my trembling knees, The glory and the silence passed Like lightning from the trees.

And pale at first the sunlight seemed When it was gone; the leaves were stirred To whispered sound, and loud rang out The carol of a bird.

THE END