How beautiful are birds, of God's sweet air Free denizens; no ugly earthly spot Their boundless happiness doth seem to blot. The swallow, swiftly flying here and there, Can it be true that dreary household care Doth goad her to incessant flight? If not How can it be that she doth cast her lot Now there, now here, pursuing summer everywhere? I sadly fear that shallow, tiny brain Is not exempt from anxious cares and fears, That mingled heritage of joy and pain That for some reason everywhere appears; And yet those birds, how beautiful they are! Sure beauty is to happiness no bar.

This has a fault that doth offend the reader of modern verse, and there are many of the eighty sonnets in the book which do not equal it in merit. He was manifestly an amateur; he sometimes writes with labour, and he not infrequently ends with the unpardonable weak line. Nevertheless he had rightly chosen this difficult form in which to express his inner self. It suited his grave, concentrated thought, and each little imperfect poem of fourteen lines gives us a glimpse into a wise, beneficent mind. He had fought his fight and suffered defeat, and had then withdrawn himself silently from the field to die. But if he had been embittered he could have relieved himself in this little book. There is no trace of such a feeling. He only asks, in one sonnet, where can a balm be found for the heart fretted and torn with eternal cares; when we have thought and striven for some great and good purpose, when all our striving has ended in disaster? His plan, he concludes, is to go out in the quiet night-time and look at the stars.

Here let me quote two more sonnets written in contemplative mood, just to give the reader a fuller idea not of the verse, as verse, but of the spirit in the old squire. There is no title to these two:—

I like a fire of wood; there is a kind Of artless poetry in all its ways: When first 'tis lighted, how it roars and plays, And sways to every breath its flames, refined By fancy to some shape by life confined. And then how touching are its latter days; When, all its strength decayed, and spent the blaze Of fiery youth, grey ash is all we find. Perhaps we know the tree, of which the pile Once formed a part, and oft beneath its shade Have sported in our youth; or in quaint style Have carved upon its rugged bark a name Of which the memory doth alone remain A memory doomed, alas! in turn to fade.

Bad enough as verse, the critic will say; refined, confined, find—what poor rhymes are these! and he will think me wrong to draw these frailties from their forgotten abode. But I like to think of the solitary old man sitting by his wood fire in the old house, not brooding bitterly on his frustrate life, but putting his quiet thoughts into the form of a sonnet. The other is equally good—or bad, if the critic will have it so:—

The clock had just struck five, and all was still Within my house, when straight I open threw With eager hand the casement dim with dew. Oh, what a glorious flush of light did fill That old staircase! and then and there did kill All those black doubts that ever do renew Their civil war with all that's good and true Within our hearts, when body and mind are ill From this slight incident I would infer A cheerful truth, that men without demur, In times of stress and doubt, throw open wide The windows of their breast; nor stung by pride In stifling darkness gloomily abide; But bid the light flow in on either side.

A "slight incident" and a beautiful thought. But all I have so far said about the little book is preliminary to what I wish to say about another sonnet which must also be quoted. It is perhaps, as a sonnet, as ill done as the others, but the subject of it specially attracted me, as it happened to be one which was much in my mind during my week's stay at Norton. That remote little village without a squire or any person of means or education in or near it capable of feeling the slightest interest in the people, except the parson, an old infirm man who was never seen but once a week—how wanting in some essential thing it appeared! It seemed to me that the one thing which might be done in these small centres of rural life to brighten and beautify existence is precisely the thing which is never done, also that what really is being done is of doubtful value and sometimes actually harmful.

Leaving Norton one day I visited other small villages in the neighbourhood and found they were no better off. I had heard of the rector of one of these villages as a rather original man, and went and discussed the subject with him. "It is quite useless thinking about it," he said. "The people here are clods, and will not respond to any effort you can make to introduce a little light and sweetness into their lives." There was no more to be said to him, but I knew he was wrong. I found the villagers in that part of the country the most intelligent and responsive people of their class I had ever encountered. It was a delightful experience to go into their cottages, not to read them a homily or to present them with a book or a shilling, nor to inquire into their welfare, material and spiritual, but to converse intimately with a human interest in them, as would be the case in a country where there are no caste distinctions. It was delightful, because they were so responsive, so sympathetic, so alive. Now it was just at this time, when the subject was in my mind, that the book of sonnets came into my hands—given to me by the generous caretaker—and I read in it this one on "Innocent Amusements":—

There lacks a something to complete the round Of our fair England's homely happiness A something, yet how oft do trifles bless When greater gifts by far redound To honours lone, but no responsive sound Of joy or mirth awake, nay, oft oppress, While gifts of which we scarce the moment guess In never-failing joys abound. No nation can be truly great That hath not something childlike in its life Of every day; it should its youth renew With simple joys that sweetly recreate The jaded mind, conjoined in friendly strife The pleasures of its childhood days pursue.

What wise and kindly thoughts he had—the old squire of Norton! Surely, when telling me the story of his life, they had omitted something! I questioned them on the point. Did he not in all the years he was at Norton House, and later when he lived among them in a cottage in the village—did he not go into their homes and meet them as if he knew and felt that they were all of the same flesh, children of one universal Father, and did he not make them feel this about him—that the differences in fortune and position and education were mere accidents? And the answer was: No, certainly not! as if I had asked a preposterous question. He was the squire, a gentleman—any one might understand that he could not come among them like that! That is what a parson can do because he is, so to speak, paid to keep an eye on them, and besides it's religion there and a different thing. But the squire!—their squire, that dignified old gentleman, so upright in his saddle, so considerate and courteous to every one—but he never forgot his position—never in that way! I also asked if he had never tried to establish, or advocated, or suggested to them any kind of reunions to take place from time to time, or an entertainment or festival to get them to come pleasantly together, making a brightness in their lives—something which would not be cricket or football, nor any form of sport for a few of the men, all the others being mere lookers-on and the women and children left out altogether; something which would be for and include everyone, from the oldest grey labourer no longer able to work to the toddling little ones; something of their own invention, peculiar to Norton, which would be their pride and make their village dearer to them? And the answer was still no, and no, and no. He had never attempted, never suggested, anything of the sort. How could he—the squire! Yet he wrote those wise words:—

No nation can be truly great That hath not something childlike in its life Of every day.

Why are we lacking in that which others undoubtedly have, a something to complete the round of homely happiness in our little rural centres; how is it that we do not properly encourage the things which, albeit childlike, are essential, which sweetly recreate? It is not merely the selfishness of those who are well placed and prefer to live for themselves, or who have light but care not to shed it on those who are not of their class. Selfishness is common enough everywhere, in men of all races. It is not selfishness, nor the growth of towns or decay of agriculture, which as a fact does not decay, nor education, nor any of the other causes usually given for the dullness, the greyness of village life. The chief cause, I take it, is that gulf, or barrier, which exists between men and men in different classes in our country, or a considerable portion of it—the caste feeling which is becoming increasingly rigid in the rural world, if my own observation, extending over a period of twenty-five years, is not all wrong.



Chapter Eleven: Salisbury and Its Doves

Never in my experience has there been a worse spring season than that of 1903 for the birds, more especially for the short-winged migrants. In April I looked for the woodland warblers and found them not, or saw but a few of the commonest kinds. It was only too easy to account for this rarity. The bitter north-east wind had blown every day and all day long during those weeks when birds are coming, and when nearing the end of their journey, at its most perilous stage, the wind had been dead against them; its coldness and force was too much for these delicate travellers, and doubtless they were beaten down in thousands into the grey waters of a bitter sea. The stronger-winged wheatear was more fortunate, since he comes in March, and before that spell of deadly weather he was already back in his breeding haunts on Salisbury Plain, and, in fact, everywhere on that open down country. I was there to hear him sing his wild notes to the listening waste—singing them, as his pretty fashion is, up in the air, suspended on quickly vibrating wings like a great black and white moth. But he was in no singing mood, and at last, in desperation, I fled to Salisbury to wait for loitering spring in that unattractive town.

The streets were cold as the open plain, and there was no comfort indoors; to haunt the cathedral during those vacant days was the only occupation left to me. There was some shelter to be had under the walls, and the empty, vast interior would seem almost cosy on coming in from the wind. At service my due feet never failed, while morning, noon, and evening I paced the smooth level green by the hour, standing at intervals to gaze up at the immense pile with its central soaring spire, asking myself why I had never greatly liked it in the past and did not like it much better now when grown familiar with it. Undoubtedly it is one of the noblest structures of its kind in England—even my eyes that look coldly on most buildings could see it; and I could admire, even reverence, but could not love. It suffers by comparison with other temples into which my soul has wandered. It has not the majesty and appearance of immemorial age, the dim religious richness of the interior, with much else that goes to make up, without and within, the expression which is so marked in other mediaeval fanes—Winchester, Ely, York, Canterbury, Exeter, and Wells. To the dry, mechanical mind of the architect these great cathedrals are in the highest degree imperfect, according to the rules of his art: to all others this imperfectness is their chief excellence and glory; for they are in a sense a growth, a flower of many minds and many periods, and are imperfect even as Nature is, in her rocks and trees; and, being in harmony with Nature and like Nature, they are inexpressibly beautiful and satisfying beyond all buildings to the aesthetic as well as to the religious sense.

Occasionally I met and talked with an old man employed at the cathedral. One day, closing one eye and shading the other with his hand, he gazed up at the building for some time, and then remarked: "I'll tell you what's wrong with Salisbury—it looks too noo." He was near the mark; the fault is that to the professional eye it is faultless; the lack of expression is due to the fact that it came complete from its maker's brain, like a coin from the mint, and being all on one symmetrical plan it has the trim, neat appearance of a toy cathedral carved out of wood and set on a green-painted square.

After all, my thoughts and criticisms on the cathedral, as a building, were merely incidental; my serious business was with the feathered people to be seen there. Few in the woods and fewer on the windy downs, here birds were abundant, not only on the building, where they were like seafowl congregated on a precipitous rock, but they were all about me. The level green was the hunting ground of many thrushes—a dozen or twenty could often be seen at one time—and it was easy to spot those that had young. The worm they dragged out was not devoured; another was looked for, then another; then all were cut up in proper lengths and beaten and bruised, and finally packed into a bundle and carried off. Rooks, too, were there, breeding on the cathedral elms, and had no time and spirit to wrangle, but could only caw-caw distressfully at the wind, which tossed them hither and thither in the air and lashed the tall trees, threatening at each fresh gust to blow their nests to pieces. Small birds of half a dozen kinds were also there, and one tinkle-tinkled his spring song quite merrily in spite of the cold that kept the others silent and made me blue. One day I spied a big queen bumble-bee on the ground, looking extremely conspicuous in its black and chestnut coat on the fresh green sward; and thinking it numbed by the cold I picked it up. It moved its legs feebly, but alas! its enemy had found and struck it down, and with its hard, sharp little beak had drilled a hole in one of the upper plates of its abdomen, and from that small opening had cunningly extracted all the meat. Though still alive it was empty as a blown eggshell. Poor queen and mother, you survived the winter in vain, and went abroad in vain in the bitter weather in quest of bread to nourish your few first-born—the grubs that would help you by and by; now there will be no bread for them, and for you no populous city in the flowery earth and a great crowd of children to rise up each day, when days are long, to call you blessed! And he who did this thing, the unspeakable oxeye with his black and yellow breast—"catanic black and amber"—even while I made my lamentation was tinkling his merry song overhead in the windy elms.

The birds that lived on the huge cathedral itself had the greatest attraction for me; and here the daws, if not the most numerous, were the most noticeable, as they ever are on account of their conspicuousness in their black plumage, their loquacity and everlasting restlessness. Far up on the ledge from which the spire rises a kestrel had found a cosy corner in which to establish himself, and one day when I was there a number of daws took it on themselves to eject him: they gathered near and flew this way and that, and cawed and cawed in anger, and swooped at him, until he could stand their insults no longer, and, suddenly dashing out, he struck and buffeted them right and left and sent them screaming with fear in all directions. After this they left him in peace: they had forgotten that he was a hawk, and that even the gentle mousing wind-hover has a nobler spirit than any crow of them all.

On first coming to the cathedral I noticed a few pigeons sitting on the roof and ledges very high up, and, not seeing them well, I assumed that they were of the common or domestic kind. By and by one cooed, then another; and recognizing the stock-dove note I began to look carefully, and found that all the birds on the building—about thirty pairs—were of this species. It was a great surprise, for though we occasionally find a pair of stock-doves breeding on the ivied wall of some inhabited mansion in the country, it was a new thing to find a considerable colony of this shy woodland species established on a building in a town. They lived and bred there just as the common pigeon—the vari-coloured descendant of the blue rock—does on St. Paul's, the Law Courts, and the British Museum in London. Only, unlike our metropolitan doves, both the domestic kind and the ringdove in the parks, the Salisbury doves though in the town are not of it. They come not down to mix with the currents of human life in the streets and open spaces; they fly away to the country to feed, and dwell on the cathedral above the houses and people just as sea-birds—kittiwake and guillemot and gannet—dwell on the ledges of some vast ocean-fronting cliff.

The old man mentioned above told me that the birds were called "rocks" by the townspeople, also that they had been there for as long as he could remember. Six or seven years ago, he said, when the repairs to the roof and spire were started, the pigeons began to go away until there was not one left. The work lasted three years, and immediately on its conclusion the doves began to return, and were now as numerous as formerly. How, I inquired, did these innocent birds get on with their black neighbours, seeing that the daw is a cunning creature much given to persecution—a crow, in fact, as black as any of his family? They got on badly, he said; the doves were early breeders, beginning in March, and were allowed to have the use of the holes until the daws wanted them at the end of April, when they forcibly ejected the young doves. He said that in spring he always picked up a good many young doves, often unfledged, thrown down by the dawn. I did not doubt his story. I had just found a young bird myself—a little blue-skinned, yellow-mouthed fledgling which had fallen sixty or seventy feet on to the gravel below. But in June, he said, when the daws brought off their young, the doves entered into possession once more, and were then permitted to rear their young in peace.

I returned to Salisbury about the middle of May in better weather, when there were days that were almost genial, and found the cathedral a greater "habitacle of birds" than ever: starlings, swifts, and swallows were there, the lively little martins in hundreds, and the doves and daws in their usual numbers. All appeared to be breeding, and for some time I saw no quarreling. At length I spied a pair of doves with a nest in a small cavity in the stone at the back of a narrow ledge about seventy feet from the ground, and by standing back some distance I could see the hen bird sitting on the nest, while the cock stood outside on the ledge keeping guard. I watched this pair for some hours and saw a jackdaw sweep down on them a dozen or more times at long intervals. Sometimes after swooping down he would alight on the ledge a yard or two away, and the male dove would then turn and face him, and if he then began sidling up the dove would dash at and buffet him with his wings with the greatest violence and throw him off. When he swooped closer the dove would spring up and meet him in the air, striking him at the moment of meeting, and again the daw would be beaten. When I left three days after witnessing this contest, the doves were still in possession of their nest, and I concluded that they were not so entirely at the mercy of the jackdaw as the old man had led me to believe.

It was, on this occasion, a great pleasure to listen to the doves. The stock-dove has no set song, like the ringdove, but like all the other species in the typical genus Columba it has the cooing or family note, one of the most human-like sounds which birds emit. In the stock-dove this is a better, more musical, and a more varied sound than in any other Columba known to me. The pleasing quality of the sound as well as the variety in it could be well noted here where the birds were many, scattered about on ledges and projections high above the earth, and when bird after bird uttered its plaint, each repeating his note half a dozen to a dozen times, one in slow measured time, and deep-voiced like the rock-dove, but more musical; another rapidly, with shorter, impetuous notes in a higher key, as if carried away by excitement. There were not two birds that cooed in precisely the same way, and the same bird would often vary its manner of cooing.

It was best to hear them during the afternoon service in the cathedral, when the singing of the choir and throbbing and pealing of the organ which filled the vast interior was heard outside, subdued by the walls through which it passed, and was like a beautiful mist or atmosphere of sound pervading and enveloping the great building; and when the plaining of the doves, owing to the rhythmic flow of the notes and their human characters, seemed to harmonize with and be a part of that sacred music.



Chapter Twelve: Whitesheet Hill

On Easter Saturday the roadsides and copses by the little river Nadder were full of children gathering primroses; they might have filled a thousand baskets without the flowers being missed, so abundant were they in that place. Cold though it was the whole air was laden with the delicious fragrance. It was pleasant to see and talk with the little people occupied with the task they loved so well, and I made up my mind to see the result of all this flower-gathering next day in some of the village churches in the neighbourhood—Fovant, Teffant Evias, Chilmark, Swallowcliffe, Tisbury, and Fonthill Bishop. I had counted on some improvement in the weather—some bright sunshine to light up the flower-decorated interiors; but Easter Sunday proved colder than ever, with the bitter north-east still blowing, the grey travelling cloud still covering the sky; and so to get the full benefit of the bitterness I went instead to spend my day on the top of the biggest down above the valley. That was Whitesheet Hill, and forms the highest part of the long ridge dividing the valleys of the Ebble and Nadder.

It was roughest and coldest up there, and suited my temper best, for when the weather seems spiteful one finds a grim sort of satisfaction in defying it. On a genial day it would have been very pleasant on that lofty plain, for the flat top of the vast down is like a plain in appearance, and the earthworks on it show that it was once a populous habitation of man. Now because of the wind and cloud its aspect was bare and bleak and desolate, and after roaming about for an hour, exploring the thickest furze patches, I began to think that my day would have to be spent in solitude, without a living creature to keep me company. The birds had apparently all been blown away and the rabbits were staying at home in their burrows. Not even an insect could I see, although the furze was in full blossom; the honey-suckers were out of sight and torpid, and the bloom itself could no longer look "unprofitably gay," as the poet says it does. "Not even a wheatear!" I said, for I had counted on that bird in the intervals between the storms, although I knew I should not hear his wild delightful warble in such weather.

Then, all at once, I beheld that very bird, a solitary female, flittering on over the flat ground before me, perching on the little green ant-mounds and flirting its tail and bobbing as if greatly excited at my presence in that lonely place. I wondered where its mate was, following it from place to place as it flew, determined now I had found a bird to keep it in sight. Presently a great blackness appeared low down in the cloudy sky, and rose and spread, travelling fast towards me, and the little wheatear fled in fear from it and vanished from sight over the rim of the down. But I was there to defy the weather, and so instead of following the bird in search of shelter I sat down among some low furze bushes and waited and watched. By and by I caught sight of three magpies, rising one by one at long intervals from the furze and flying laboriously towards a distant hill-top grove of pines. Then I heard the wailing cry of a peewit, and caught sight of the bird at a distance, and soon afterwards a sound of another character—the harsh angry cry of a carrion crow, almost as deep as the raven's angry voice. Before long I discovered the bird at a great height coming towards me in hot pursuit of a kestrel. They passed directly over me so that I had them a long time in sight, the kestrel travelling quietly on in the face of the wind, the crow toiling after, and at intervals spurting till he got near enough to hurl himself at his enemy, emitting his croaks of rage. For invariably the kestrel with one of his sudden swallow-like turns avoided the blow and went on as before. I watched them until they were lost to sight in the coming blackness and wondered that so intelligent a creature as a crow should waste his energies in that vain chase. Still one could understand it and even sympathize with him. For the kestrel is a most insulting creature towards the bigger birds. He knows that they are incapable of paying him out, and when he finds them off their guard he will drop down and inflict a blow just for the fun of the thing. This outraged crow appeared determined to have his revenge.

Then the storm broke on me, and so fiercely did the rain and sleet thrash me that, fearing a cold soaking, I fled before it to the rim of the plain, where the wheatear had vanished, and saw a couple of hundred yards down on the smooth steep slope a thicket of dwarf trees. It was, the only shelter in sight, and to it I went, to discover much to my disgust that the trees were nothing but elders. For there is no tree that affords so poor a shelter, especially on the high open downs, where the foliage is scantier than in other situations and lets in the wind and rain in full force upon you.

But the elder affects me in two ways. I like it on account of early associations, and because the birds delight in its fruit, though they wisely refuse to build in its branches; and I dislike it because its smell is offensive to me and its berries the least pleasant of all wild fruits to my taste. I can eat ivy-berries in March, and yew in its season, poison or not; and hips and haws and holly-berries and harsh acorn, and the rowan, which some think acrid; but the elderberry I can't stomach.

How comes it, I have asked more than once, that this poor tree is so often seen on the downs where it is so badly fitted to be and makes so sorry an appearance with its weak branches broken and its soft leaves torn by the winds? How badly it contrasts with the other trees and bushes that flourish on the downs—furze, juniper, holly, blackthorn, and hawthorn!

Two years ago, one day in the early spring, I was walking on an extensive down in another part of Wiltshire with the tenant of the land, who began there as a large sheep-farmer, but eventually finding that he could make more with rabbits than with sheep turned most of his land into a warren. The higher part of this down was overgrown with furze, mixed with holly and other bushes, but the slopes were mostly very bare. At one spot on a wide bare slope where the rabbits had formed a big group of burrows there was a close little thicket of young elder trees, looking exceedingly conspicuous in the bright green of early April. Calling my companion's attention to this little thicket I said something about the elder growing on the open downs where it always appeared to be out of harmony with its surroundings. "I don't suppose you planted elders here," I said.

"No, but I know who did," he returned, and he then gave me this curious history of the trees. Five years before, the rabbits, finding it a suitable spot to dig in, probably because of a softer chalk there, made a number of deep burrows at that spot. When the wheatears, or "horse-maggers" as he called them, returned in spring two or three pairs attached themselves to this group of burrows and bred in them. There was that season a solitary elder-bush higher up on the down among the furze which bore a heavy crop of berries; and when the fruit was ripe he watched the birds feeding on it, the wheatears among them. The following spring seedlings came up out of the loose earth heaped about the rabbit burrows, and as they were not cut down by the rabbits, for they dislike the elder, they grew up, and now formed a clump of fifty or sixty little trees of six feet to eight feet in height.

Who would have thought to find a tree-planter in the wheatear, the bird of the stony waste and open naked down, who does not even ask for a bush to perch on?

It then occurred to me that in every case where I had observed a clump of elder bushes on the bare downside, it grew upon a village or collection of rabbit burrows, and it is probable that in every case the clump owed its existence to the wheatears who had dropped the seed about their nesting-place. The clump where I had sought a shelter from the storm was composed of large old dilapidated-looking half-dead elders; perhaps their age was not above thirty or forty years, but they looked older than hawthorns of one or two centuries; and under them the rabbits had their diggings—huge old mounds and burrows that looked like a badger's earth. Here, too, the burrows had probably existed first and had attracted the wheatears, and the birds had brought the seed from some distant bush.

Crouching down in one of the big burrows at the roots of an old elder I remained for half an hour, listening to the thump-thump of the alarmed rabbits about me, and the accompanying hiss and swish of the wind and sleet and rain in the ragged branches.

The storm over I continued my rambles on Whitesheet Hill, and coming back an hour or two later to the very spot where I had seen and followed the wheatear, I all at once caught sight of a second bird, lying dead on the turf close to my feet! The sudden sight gave me a shock of astonishment, mingled with admiration and grief. For how pretty it looked, though dead, lying on its back, the little black legs stuck stiffly up, the long wings pressed against the sides, their black tips touching together like the clasped hands of a corpse; and the fan-like black and white tail, half open as in life, moved perpetually up and down by the wind, as if that tail-flirting action of the bird had continued after death. It was very beautiful in its delicate shape and pale harmonious colouring, resting on the golden-green mossy turf. And it was a male, undoubtedly the mate of the wheatear I had seen at the spot, and its little mate, not knowing what death is, had probably been keeping watch near it, wondering at its strange stillness and greatly fearing for its safety when I came that way, and passed by without seeing it.

Poor little migrant, did you come back across half the world for this—back to your home on Whitesheet Hill to grow cold and fail in the cold April wind, and finally to look very pretty, lying stiff and cold, to the one pair of human eyes that were destined to see you! The little birds that come and go and return to us over such vast distances, they perish like this in myriads annually; flying to and from us they are blown away by death like sere autumn leaves, "the pestilence-stricken multitudes" whirled away by the wind! They die in myriads: that is not strange; the strange, the astonishing thing is the fact of death; what can they tell us of it—the wise men who live or have ever lived on the earth—what can they say now of the bright intelligent spirit, the dear little emotional soul, that had so fit a tenement and so fitly expressed itself in motions of such exquisite grace, in melody so sweet! Did it go out like the glow-worm's lamp, the life and sweetness of the flower? Was its destiny not like that of the soul, specialized in a different direction, of the saint or poet or philosopher! Alas, they can tell us nothing!

I could not go away leaving it in that exposed place on the turf, to be found a little later by a magpie or carrion crow or fox, and devoured. Close by there was a small round hillock, an old forsaken nest of the little brown ants, green and soft with moss and small creeping herbs—a suitable grave for a wheatear. Cutting out a round piece of turf from the side, I made a hole with my stick and put the dead bird in and replacing the turf left it neatly buried.

It was not that I had or have any quarrel with the creatures I have named, or would have them other than they are—carrion-eaters and scavengers, Nature's balance-keepers and purifiers. The only creatures on earth I loathe and hate are the gourmets, the carrion-crows and foxes of the human kind who devour wheatears and skylarks at their tables.



Chapter Thirteen: Bath and Wells Revisited

'Tis so easy to get from London to Bath, by merely stepping into a railway carriage which takes you smoothly without a stop in two short hours from Paddington, that I was amazed at myself in having allowed five full years to pass since my previous visit. The question was much in my mind as I strolled about noting the old-remembered names of streets and squares and crescents. Quiet Street was the name inscribed on one; it was, to me, the secret name of them all. The old impressions were renewed, an old feeling partially recovered. The wide, clean ways; the solid, stone-built houses with their dignified aspect; the large distances, terrace beyond terrace; mansions and vast green lawns and parks and gardens; avenues and groups of stately trees, especially that unmatched clump of old planes in the Circus; the whole town, the design in the classic style of one master mind, set by the Avon, amid green hills, produced a sense of harmony and repose which cannot be equalled by any other town in the kingdom.

This idle time was delightful so long as I gave my attention exclusively to houses from the outside, and to hills, rocks, trees, waters, and all visible nature, which here harmonizes with man's works. To sit on some high hill and look down on Bath, sun-flushed or half veiled in mist; to lounge on Camden Crescent, or climb Sion Hill, or take my ease with the water-drinkers in the spacious, comfortable Pump Room; or, better still, to rest at noon in the ancient abbey—all this was pleasure pure and simple, a quiet drifting back until I found myself younger by five years than I had taken myself to be.

I haunted the abbey, and the more I saw of it the more I loved it. The impression it had made on me during my former visits had faded, or else I had never properly seen it, or had not seen it in the right emotional mood. Now I began to think it the best of all the great abbey churches of England and the equal of the cathedrals in its effect on the mind. How rich the interior is in its atmosphere of tempered light or tender gloom! How tall and graceful the columns holding up the high roof of white stone with its marvellous palm-leaf sculpture! What a vast expanse of beautifully stained glass! I certainly gave myself plenty of time to appreciate it on this occasion, as I visited it every day, sometimes two or three times, and not infrequently I sat there for an hour at a stretch.

Sitting there one day, thinking of nothing, I was gradually awakened to a feeling almost of astonishment at the sight of the extraordinary number of memorial tablets of every imaginable shape and size which crowd the walls. So numerous are they and so closely placed that you could not find space anywhere to put your hand against the wall. We are accustomed to think that in cathedrals and other great ecclesiastical buildings the illustrious dead receive burial, and their names and claims on our gratitude and reverence are recorded, but in no fane in the land is there so numerous a gathering of the dead as in this place. The inscription-covered walls were like the pages of an old black-letter volume without margins. Yet when I came to think of it I could not recall any Bath celebrity or great person associated with Bath except Beau Nash, who was not perhaps a very great person. Probably Carlyle would have described him as a "meeserable creature."

Leaving my seat I began to examine the inscriptions, and found that they had not been placed there in memory of men belonging to Bath or even Somerset. These monuments were erected to persons from all counties in the three kingdoms, and from all the big towns, those to Londoners being most numerous. Nor were they of persons distinguished in any way. Here you find John or Henry or Thomas Smith, or Brown, or Jones, or Robinson, provision dealer, or merchant, of Clerkenwell, or Bermondsey, or Bishopsgate Street Within or Without; also many retired captains, majors, and colonels. There were hundreds more whose professions or occupations in life were not stated. There were also hundreds of memorials to ladies—widows and spinsters. They were all, in fact, to persons who had come to die in Bath after "taking the waters," and dying, they or their friends had purchased immortality on the walls of the abbey with a handful or two of gold. Here is one of several inscriptions of the kind I took the trouble to copy: "His early virtues, his cultivated talents, his serious piety, inexpressibly endeared him to his friends and opened to them many bright prospects of excellence and happiness. These prospects have all faded," and so on for several long lines in very big letters, occupying a good deal of space on the wall. But what and who was he, and what connection had he with Bath? He was a young man born in the West Indies who died in Scotland, and later his mother, coming to Bath for her health, "caused this inscription to be placed on the abbey walls"! If this policy or tradition is still followed by the abbey authorities, it will be necessary for them to build an annexe; if it be no longer followed, would it be going too far to suggest that these mural tablets to a thousand obscurities, which ought never to have been placed there, should now be removed and placed in some vault where the relations or descendants of the persons described could find, and if they wished it, have them removed?

But it must be said that the abbey is not without a fair number of memorials with which no one can quarrel; the one I admire most, to Quin, the actor, has, I think, the best or the most appropriate epitaph ever written. No, one, however familiar with the words, will find fault with me for quoting them here:

That tongue which set the table on a roar And charmed the public ear is heard no more. Closed are those eyes, the harbingers of wit, Which spake before the tongue what Shakespeare writ. Cold is that hand which living was stretched forth At friendship's call to succor modest worth. Here lies James Quin, deign readers to be taught Whate'er thy strength of body, force of thought, In Nature's happiest mood however cast, To this complexion thou must come at last.

Quin's monument strikes one as the greatest there because of Garrick's living words, but there is another very much more beautiful.

I first noticed this memorial on the wall at a distance of about three yards, too far to read anything in the inscription except the name of Sibthorpe, which was strange to me, but instead of going nearer to read it I remained standing to admire it at that distance. The tablet was of white marble, and on it was sculptured the figure of a young man with curly head and classic profile. He was wearing sandals and a loose mantle held to his breast with one hand, while in the other hand he carried a bunch of leaves and flowers. He appeared in the act of stepping ashore from a boat of antique shape, and the artist had been singularly successful in producing the idea of free and vigorous motion in the figure as well as of some absorbing object in his mind. The figure was undoubtedly symbolical, and I began to amuse myself by trying to guess its meaning. Then a curious thing happened. A person who had been moving slowly along near me, apparently looking with no great interest at the memorials, came past me and glanced first at the tablet I was looking at, then at me. As our eyes met I remarked that I was admiring the best memorial I had found in the abbey, and then added, "I've been trying to make out its meaning. You see the man is a traveller and is stepping ashore with a flowering spray in his hand. It strikes me that it may have been erected to the memory of a person who introduced some valuable plant into England."

"Yes, perhaps," he said. "But who was he?"

"I don't know yet," I returned. "I can only see that his name was Sibthorpe."

"Sibthorpe!" he exclaimed excitedly. "Why, this is the very memorial I've been looking for all over the abbey and had pretty well given up all hopes of finding it." With that he went to it and began studying the inscription, which was in Latin. John Sibthorpe, I found, was a distinguished botanist, author of the Flora Graeca, who died over a century ago.

I asked him why he was interested in Sibthorpe's memorial.

"Well, you see, I'm a great botanist myself," he explained, "and have been familiar with his name and work all my life. Of course," he added, "I don't mean I'm great in the sense that Sibthorpe was. I'm only a little local botanist, quite unknown outside my own circle; I only mean that I'm a great lover of botany."

I left him there, and had the curiosity to look up the great man's life, and found some very curious things in it. He was a son of Humphrey Sibthorpe, also a great botanist, who succeeded the still greater Dillenius as Sherardian Professor of Botany at Oxford, a post which he held for thirty-six years, and during that time he delivered one lecture, which was a failure. John, if he did not suck in botany with his mother's milk, took it quite early from his father, and on leaving the University went abroad to continue his studies. Eventually he went to Greece, inflamed with the ambition to identify all the plants mentioned by Dioscorides. Then he set about writing his Flora Graeca; but he had a rough time of it travelling about in that rude land, and falling ill he had to leave his work undone. When nearing his end he came to Bath, like so many other afflicted ones, only to die, and he was very properly buried in the abbey. In his will he left an estate the proceeds of which were to be devoted to the completion of his work, which was to be in ten folio volumes, with one hundred plates in each. This was done and the work finished forty-four years after his death, when thirty copies were issued to the patient subscribers at two hundred and forty guineas a copy. But the whole cost of the work was set down at 30,000 pounds! A costlier work it would be hard to find; I wonder how many of us have seen it?

But I must go back to my subject. I was not in Bath just to die and lie there, like poor Sibthorpe, with all those strange bedfellows of his, nor was I in search of a vacant space the size of my hand on the walls to bespeak it for my own memorial. On the contrary, I was there, as we have seen, to knock five years off my age. And it was very pleasant, as I have said, so long as I confined my attention to Bath, the stone-built town of old memories and associations—so long as I was satisfied to loiter in the streets and wide green places and in the Pump Room and the abbey. The bitter came in only when, going from places to faces, I began to seek out the friends and acquaintances of former days. The familiar faces seemed not wholly familiar now. A change had been wrought; in some cases a great change, as in that of some weedy girl who had blossomed into fair womanhood. One could not grieve at that; but in the middle-aged and those who were verging on or past that period, it was impossible not to feel saddened at the difference. "I see no change in you," is a lie ready to the lips which would speak some pleasing thing, but it does not quite convince. Men are naturally brutal, and use no compliments to one another; on the contrary, they do not hesitate to make a joke of wrinkles and grey hairs—their own and yours. "But, oh, the difference" when the familiar face, no longer familiar as of old, is a woman's! This is no light thing to her, and her eyes, being preternaturally keen in such matters, see not only the change in you, but what is infinitely sadder, the changed reflection of herself. Your eyes have revealed the shock you have experienced. You cannot hide it; her heart is stabbed with a sudden pain, and she is filled with shame and confusion; and the pain is but greater if her life has glided smoothly—if she cannot appeal to your compassion, finding a melancholy relief in that saddest cry:—

O Grief has changed me since you saw me last!

For not grief, nor sickness, nor want, nor care, nor any misery or calamity which men fear, is her chief enemy. Time alone she hates and fears—insidious Time who has lulled her mind with pleasant flatteries all these years while subtly taking away her most valued possessions, the bloom and colour, the grace, the sparkle, the charm of other years.

Here is a true and pretty little story, which may or may not exactly fit the theme, but is very well worth telling. A lady of fashion, middle-aged or thereabouts, good-looking but pale and with the marks of care and disillusionment on her expressive face, accompanied by her pretty sixteen-years-old daughter, one day called on an artist and asked him to show her his studio. He was a very great artist, the greatest portrait-painter we have ever had and he did not know who she was, but with the sweet courtesy which distinguished him through all his long life—he died recently at a very advanced age—he at once put his work away and took her round his studio to show her everything he thought would interest her. But she was restless and inattentive, and by and by leaving the artist talking to her young daughter she began going round by herself, moving constantly from picture to picture. Presently she made an exclamation, and turning they saw her standing before a picture, a portrait of a girl, staring fixedly at it. "Oh," she cried, and it was a cry of pain, "was I once as beautiful as that?" and burst into tears. She had found the picture she had been looking for, which she had come to see; it had been there twenty to twenty-five years, and the story of it was as follows.

When she was a young girl her mother took her to the great artist to have her portrait painted, and when the work was at length finished she and her mother went to see it. The artist put it before them and the mother looked at it, her face expressing displeasure, and said not one word. Nor did the artist open his lips. And at last the girl, to break the uncomfortable silence, said, "Where shall we hang it, mother?" and the lady replied, "Just where you like, my dear, so long as you hang it with the face to the wall." It was an insolent, a cruel thing to say, but the artist did not answer her bitterly; he said gently that she need not take the portrait as it failed to please her, and that in any case he would decline to take the money she had agreed to pay him for the work. She thanked him coldly and went her way, and he never saw her again. And now Time, the humbler of proud beautiful women, had given him his revenge: the portrait, scorned and rejected when the colour and sparkle of life was in the face, had been looked on once more by its subject and had caused her to weep at the change in herself.

To return. One wishes in these moments of meeting, of surprise and sudden revealings, that it were permissible to speak from the heart, since then the very truth might have more balm than bitterness in it. "Grieve not, dear friend of old days, that I have not escaped the illusion common to all—the idea that those we have not looked on this long time—full five years, let us say—have remained as they were while we ourselves have been moving onwards and downwards in that path in which our feet are set. No one, however hardened he may be, can escape a shock of surprise and pain; but now the illusion I cherished has gone—now I have seen with my physical eyes, and a new image, with Time's writing on it, has taken the place of the old and brighter one, I would not have it otherwise. No, not if I could would I call back the vanished lustre, since all these changes, above all that wistful look in the eyes, do but serve to make you dearer, my sister and friend and fellow-traveller in a land where we cannot find a permanent resting-place."

Alas! it cannot be spoken, and we cannot comfort a sister if she cannot divine the thought; but to brood over these inevitable changes is as idle as it is to lament that we were born into this mutable world. After all, it is because of the losses, the sadnesses, that the world is so infinitely sweet to us. The thought is in Cory's Mimnernus in Church:

All beauteous things for which we live By laws of time and space decay. But oh, the very reason why I clasp them is because they die.

From this sadness in Bath I went to a greater in Wells, where I had not been for ten years, and timing my visit so as to have a Sunday service at the cathedral of beautiful memories, I went on a Saturday to Shepton Mallet. A small, squalid town, a "manufacturing town" the guide-book calls it. Well, yes; it manufactures Anglo-Bavarian beer in a gigantic brewery which looks bigger than all the other buildings together, the church and a dozen or twenty public-houses included. To get some food I went to the only eating-house in the place, and saw a pleasant-looking woman, plump and high-coloured, with black hair, with an expression of good humour and goodness of every description in her comely countenance. She promised to have a chop ready by the time I had finished looking at the church, and I said I would have it with a small Guinness. She could not provide that, the house, she said, was strictly temperance. "My doctor has ordered me to take it," said I, "and if you are religious, remember that St. Paul tells us to take a little stout when we find it beneficial."

"Yes, I know that's what St. Paul says," she returned, with a heightened colour and a vicious emphasis on the saint's name, "but we go on a different principle."

So I had to go for my lunch to one of the big public-houses, called hotels; but whether it called itself a cow, or horse, or stag, or angel, or a blue or green something, I cannot remember. They gave me what they called a beefsteak pie—a tough crust and under it some blackish cubes carved out of the muscle of an antediluvian ox-and for this delicious fare and a glass of stout I paid three shillings and odd pence.

As I came away Shepton Mallet was shaken to its foundations by a tremendous and most diabolical sound, a prolonged lupine yell or yowl, as if a stupendous wolf, as big, say, as the Anglo-Bavarian brewery, had howled his loudest and longest. This infernal row, which makes Shepton seem like a town or village gone raving mad, was merely to inform the men, and, incidentally, the universe, that it was time for them to knock off work.

Turning my back on the place, I said to myself, "What a fool I am to be sure! Why could I not have been satisfied for once with a cup of coffee with my lunch? I should have saved a shilling, perhaps eighteen-pence, to rejoice the soul of some poor tramp; and, better still, I could have discussed some interesting questions with that charming rosy-faced woman. What, for instance, was the reason of her quarrel with the apostle; by the by, she never rebuked me for misquoting his words; and what is the moral effect (as seen through her clear brown eyes) of the Anglo-Bavarian brewery on the population of the small town and the neighbouring villages?"

The road I followed from Shepton to Wells winds by the water-side, a tributary of the Brue, in a narrow valley with hills on either side. It is a five-mile road through a beautiful country, where there is practically no cultivation, and the green hills, with brown woods in their hollows, and here and there huge masses of grey and reddish Bath stone cropping out on their sides, resembling gigantic castles and ramparts, long ruined and overgrown with ivy and bramble, produce the effect of a land dispeopled and gone back to a state of wildness.

A thaw had come that morning, ending the severest frost experienced this winter anywhere in England, and the valley was alive with birds, happy and tuneful at the end of January as in April. Looking down on the stream the sudden glory of a kingfisher passed before me; but the sooty-brown water-ouzel with his white bib, a haunter, too, of this water, I did not see. Within a mile or so of Wells I overtook a small boy who belonged there, and had been to Shepton like me, noticing the birds. "I saw a kingfisher," I said. "So did I," he returned quickly, with pride. He described it as a biggish bird with a long neck, but its colour was not blue—oh, no! I suggested that it was a heron, a long-necked creature under six feet high, of no particular colour. No, it was not a heron; and after taking thought, he said, "I think it was a wild duck."

Bestowing a penny to encourage him in his promising researches into the feathered world, I went on by a footpath over a hill, and as I mounted to the higher ground there before me rose the noble tower of St. Cuthbert's Church, and a little to the right of it, girt with high trees, the magnificent pile of the cathedral, with green hills and the pale sky beyond. O joy to look again on it, to add yet one more enduring image of it to the number I had long treasured! For the others were not exactly like this one; the building was not looked at from the same point of view at the same season and late hour, with the green hills lit by the departing sun and the clear pale winter sky beyond.

Coming in by the moated palace I stood once more on the Green before that west front, beautiful beyond all others, in spite of the strange defeatures Time has written on it. I watched the daws, numerous as ever, still at their old mad games, now springing into the air to scatter abroad with ringing cries, only to return the next minute and fling themselves back on their old perches on a hundred weather-stained broken statues in the niches. And while I stood watching them from the palace trees close by came the loud laugh of the green woodpecker. The same wild, beautiful sound, uttered perhaps by the same bird, which I had often heard at that spot ten years ago! "You will not hear that woodland sound in any other city in the kingdom," I wrote in a book of sketches entitled "Birds and Man", published in 1901.

But of my soul's adventures in Wells on the two or three following days I will say very little. That laugh of the woodpecker was an assurance that Nature had suffered no change, and the town too, like the hills and rocks and running waters, seemed unchanged; but how different and how sad when I looked for those I once knew, whose hands I had hoped to grasp again! Yes, some were living still; and a dog too, one I used to take out for long walks and many a mad rabbit-hunt—a very handsome white-and-liver coloured spaniel. I found him lying on a sofa, and down he got and wagged his tail vigorously, pretending, with a pretty human hypocrisy in his gentle yellow eyes, that he knew me perfectly well, that I was not a bit changed, and that he was delighted to see me.

On my way back to Bath I had a day at Bristol. It was cattle-market day, and what with the bellowings, barkings, and shoutings, added to the buzz and clang of innumerable electric tramcars and the usual din of street traffic, one got the idea that the Bristolians had adopted a sort of Salvation Army theory, and were endeavouring to conquer earth (it is not heaven in this case) by making a tremendous noise. I amused myself strolling about and watching the people, and as train after train came in late in the day discharging loads of humanity, mostly young men and women from the surrounding country coming in for an evening's amusement, I noticed again the peculiarly Welsh character of the Somerset peasant—the shape of the face, the colour of the skin, and, above all, the expression.

Freeman, when here below, proclaimed it his mission to prove that "Englishmen were Englishmen, and not somebody else." It appeared to me that any person, unbiassed by theories on such a subject, looking at that crowd, would have come to the conclusion, sadly or gladly, according to his nature, that we are, in fact, "somebody else."



Chapter Fourteen: The Return of the Native

That "going back" about which I wrote in the second chapter to a place where an unexpected beauty or charm has revealed itself, and has made its image a lasting and prized possession of the mind, is not the same thing as the revisiting a famous town or city, rich in many beauties and old memories, such as Bath or Wells, for instance. Such centres have a permanent attraction, and one who is a rover in the land must return to them again and again, nor does he fail on each successive visit to find some fresh charm or interest. The sadness of such returns, after a long interval, is only, as I have said, when we start "looking up" those with whom we had formed pleasant friendly relations. And all because of the illusion that we shall see them as they were—that Time has stood still waiting for our return, and by and by, to our surprise and grief, we discover that it is not so; that the dear friends of other days, long unvisited but unforgotten, have become strangers. This human loss is felt even more in the case of a return to some small centre, a village or hamlet where we knew every one, and our intimacy with the people has produced the sense of being one in blood with them. It is greatest of all when we return to a childhood's or boyhood's home. Many writers have occupied themselves with this mournful theme, and I imagine that a person of the proper Amiel-like tender and melancholy moralizing type of mind, by using his own and his friends' experiences, could write a charmingly sad and pretty book on the subject.

The really happy returns of this kind must be exceedingly rare. I am almost surprised to think that I am able to recall as many as two, but they hardly count, as in both instances the departure or exile from home happens at so early a time of life that no recollections of the people survived—nothing, in fact, but a vague mental picture of the place. One was of a business man I knew in London, who lost his early home in a village in the Midlands, as a boy of eight or nine years of age, through the sale of the place by his father, who had become impoverished. The boy was trained to business in London, and when a middle-aged man, wishing to retire and spend the rest of his life in the country, he revisited his native village for the first time, and discovered to his joy that he could buy back the old home. He was, when I last saw him, very happy in its possession.

The other case I will relate more fully, as it is a very curious one, and came to my knowledge in a singular way.

At a small station near Eastleigh a man wearing a highly pleased expression on his face entered the smoking-carriage in which I was travelling to London. Putting his bag on the rack, he pulled out his pipe and threw himself back in his seat with a satisfied air; then, looking at me and catching my eye, he at once started talking. I had my newspaper, but seeing him in that overflowing mood I responded readily enough, for I was curious to know why he appeared so happy and who and what he was. Not a tradesman nor a bagman, and not a farmer, though he looked like an open-air man; nor could I form a guess from his speech and manner as to his native place. A robust man of thirty-eight or forty, with blue eyes and a Saxon face, he looked a thorough Englishman, and yet he struck me as most un-English in his lively, almost eager manner, his freedom with a stranger, and something, too, in his speech. From time to time his face lighted up, when, looking to the window, his eyes rested on some pretty scene—a glimpse of stately old elm trees in a field where cattle were grazing, of the vivid green valley of a chalk stream, the paler hills beyond, the grey church tower or spire of some tree-hidden village. When he discovered that these hills and streams and rustic villages had as great a charm for me as for himself, that I knew and loved the two or three places he named in a questioning way, he opened his heart and the secret of his present happiness.

He was a native of the district, born at a farmhouse of which his father in succession to his grandfather had been the tenant. It was a small farm of only eighty-five acres, and as his father could make no more than a bare livelihood out of it, he eventually gave it up when my informant was but three years old, and selling all he had, emigrated to Australia. Nine years later he died, leaving a numerous family poorly provided for; the home was broken up and boys and girls had to go out and face the world. They had somehow all got on very well, and his brothers and sisters were happy enough out there, Australians in mind, thoroughly persuaded that theirs was the better land, the best country in the world, and with no desire to visit England. He had never felt like that; somehow his father's feeling about the old country had taken such a hold of him that he never outlived it—never felt at home in Australia, however successful he was in his affairs. The home feeling had been very strong in his father; his greatest delight was to sit of an evening with his children round him and tell them of the farm and the old farm-house where he was born and had lived so many years, and where some of them too had been born. He was never tired of talking of it, of taking them by the hand, as it were, and leading them from place to place, to the stream, the village, the old stone church, the meadows and fields and hedges, the deep shady lanes, and, above all, to the dear old ivied house with its gables and tall chimneys. So many times had his father described it that the old place was printed like a map on his mind, and was like a picture which kept its brightness even after the image of his boyhood's home in Australia had become faded and pale. With that mental picture to guide him he believed that he could go to that angle by the porch where the flycatchers bred every year and find their nest; where in the hedge the blackberries were most abundant; where the elders grew by the stream from which he could watch the moorhens and watervoles; that he knew every fence, gate, and outhouse, every room and passage in the old house. Through all his busy years that picture never grew less beautiful, never ceased its call, and at last, possessed of sufficient capital to yield him a modest income for the rest of his life, he came home. What he was going to do in England he did not consider. He only knew that until he had satisfied the chief desire of his heart and had looked upon the original of the picture he had borne so long in his mind he could not rest nor make any plans for the future.

He came first to London and found, on examining the map of Hampshire, that the village of Thorpe (I will call it), where he was born, is three miles from the nearest station, in the southern part of the county. Undoubtedly it was Thorpe; that was one of the few names of places his father had mentioned which remained in his memory always associated with that vivid image of the farm in his mind. To Thorpe he accordingly went—as pretty a rustic village as he had hoped to find it. He took a room at the inn and went out for a long walk—"just to see the place," he said to the landlord. He would make no inquiries; he would find his home for himself; how could he fail to recognize it? But he walked for hours in a widening circle and saw no farm or other house, and no ground that corresponded to the picture in his brain.

Troubled at his failure, he went back and questioned his landlord, and, naturally, was asked for the name of the farm he was seeking. He had forgotten the name—he even doubted that he had ever heard it. But there was his family name to go by—Dyson; did any one remember a farmer Dyson in the village? He was told that it was not an uncommon name in that part of the country. There were no Dysons now in Thorpe, but some fifteen or twenty years ago one of that name had been the tenant of Long Meadow Farm in the parish. The name of the farm was unfamiliar, and when he visited the place he found it was not the one he sought.

It was a grievous disappointment. A new sense of loneliness oppressed him; for that bright image in his mind, with the feeling about his home, had been a secret source of comfort and happiness, and was like a companion, a dear human friend, and now he appeared to be on the point of losing it. Could it be that all that mental picture, with the details that seemed so true to life, was purely imaginary? He could not believe it; the old house had probably been pulled down, the big trees felled, orchard and hedges grabbed up—all the old features obliterated—and the land thrown into some larger neighbouring farm. It was dreadful to think that such devastating changes had been made, but it had certainly existed as he saw it in his mind, and he would inquire of some of the old men in the place, who would perhaps be able to tell him where his home had stood thirty years ago.

At once he set about interviewing all the old men he came upon in his rounds, describing to them the farm tenanted by a man named Dyson about forty years ago, and by and by he got hold of one who knew. He listened for a few minutes to the oft-repeated story, then exclaimed, "Why, sir, 'tis surely Woodyates you be talking about!"

"That's the name! That's the name," he cried. "Woodyyates-how did I ever forget it! You knew it then—where was it?"

"I'll just show you," said the old man, proud at having guessed rightly, and turning started slowly hobbling along till he got to the end of the lane.

There was an opening there and a view of the valley with trees, blue in the distance, at the furthest visible point. "Do you see them trees?" he said. "That's where Harping is; 'tis two miles or, perhaps, a little more from Thorpe. There's a church tower among them trees, but you can't see it because 'tis hid. You go by the road till you comes to the church, then you go on by the water, maybe a quarter of a mile, and you comes to Woodyates. You won't see no difference in it; I've knowed it since I were a boy, but 'tis in Harping parish, not in Thorpe."

Now he remembered the name—Harping, near Thorpe—only Thorpe was the more important village where the inn was and the shops.

In less than an hour after leaving his informant he was at Woodyates, feasting his eyes on the old house of his dreams and of his exiled father's before him, inexpressibly glad to recognize it as the very house he had loved so long—that he had been deceived by no false image.

For some days he haunted the spot, then became a lodger at the farm-house, and now after making some inquiries he had found that the owner was willing to sell the place for something more than its market value, and he was going up to London about it.

At Waterloo I wished him happiness in his old home found again after so many years, then watched him as he walked briskly away—as commonplace-looking a man as could be seen on that busy crowded platform, in his suit of rough grey tweeds, thick boots, and bowler hat. Yet one whose fortune might be envied by many even among the successful—one who had cherished a secret thought and feeling, which had been to him like the shadow of a rock and like a cool spring in a dry and thirsty land.

And in that host of undistinguished Colonials and others of British race from all regions of the earth, who annually visit these shores on business or for pleasure or some other object, how many there must be who come with some such memory or dream or aspiration in their hearts! A greater number probably than we imagine. For most of them there is doubtless disappointment and disillusion: it is a matter of the heart, a sentiment about which some are not given to speak. He too, my fellow-passenger, would no doubt have held his peace had his dream not met with so perfect a fulfilment. As it was he had to tell his joy to some one, though it were to a stranger.



Chapter Fifteen: Summer Days on the Otter

The most characteristic district of South Devon, the greenest, most luxuriant in its vegetation, and perhaps the hottest in England, is that bit of country between the Exe and the Axe which is watered by the Clyst, the Otter, and the Sid. In any one of a dozen villages found beside these pretty little rivers a man might spend a month, a year, a lifetime, very agreeably, ceasing not to congratulate himself on the good fortune which first led him into such a garden. Yet after a week or two in this luxurious land I began to be dissatisfied with my surroundings. It was June; the weather was exceptionally dry and sultry. Vague thoughts, or "visitings" of mountains and moors and coasts would intrude to make the confinement of deep lanes seem increasingly irksome. Each day I wandered miles in some new direction, never knowing whither the devious path would lead me, never inquiring of any person, nor consulting map or guide, since to do that is to deprive oneself of the pleasure of discovery; always with a secret wish to find some exit as it were—some place beyond the everlasting wall of high hedges and green trees, where there would be a wide horizon and wind blowing unobstructed over leagues of open country to bring me back the sense of lost liberty. I found only fresh woods and pastures new that were like the old; other lanes leading to other farm-houses, each in its familiar pretty setting of orchard and garden; and, finally, other ancient villages, each with its ivy-grown grey church tower looking down on a green graveyard and scattered cottages, mostly mud-built and thatched with straw. Finding no outlook on any side I went back to the streams, oftenest to the Otter, where, lying by the hour on the bank, I watched the speckled trout below me and the dark-plumaged dipper with shining white breast standing solitary and curtseying on a stone in the middle of the current. Sometimes a kingfisher would flash by, and occasionally I came upon a lonely grey heron; but no mammal bigger than a watervole appeared, although I waited and watched for the much bigger beast that gives the river its name. Still it was good to know that he was there, and had his den somewhere in the steep rocky bank under the rough tangle of ivy and bramble and roots of overhanging trees. One was shot by a farmer during my stay, but my desire was for the living, not a dead otter. Consequently, when the otter-hunt came with blaze of scarlet coats and blowing of brass horns and noise of barking hounds and shouts of excited people, it had no sooner got half a mile above Ottery St. Mary, where I had joined the straggling procession, than, falling behind, the hunting fury died out of me and I was relieved to hear that no quarry had been found. The frightened moorhen stole back to her spotty eggs, the dipper returned to his dipping and curtseying to his own image in the stream, and I to my idle dreaming and watching.

The watching was not wholly in vain, since there were here revealed to me things, or aspects of things, that were new. A great deal depends on atmosphere and the angle of vision. For instance, I have often looked at swans at the hour of sunset, on the water and off it, or flying, and have frequently had them between me and the level sun, yet never have I been favoured with the sight of the rose-coloured, the red, and the golden-yellow varieties of that majestic waterfowl, whose natural colour is white. On the other hand, who ever saw a carrion-crow with crimson eyes? Yet that was one of the strange things I witnessed on the Otter.

Game is not everywhere strictly preserved in that part of Devon, and the result is that the crow is not so abhorred and persecuted a fowl as in many places, especially in the home counties, where the cult of the sacred bird is almost universal. At one spot on the stream where my rambles took me on most days a pair of crows invariably greeted my approach with a loud harsh remonstrance, and would keep near me, flying from tree to tree repeating their angry girdings until I left the place. Their nest was in a large elm, and after some days I was pleased to see that the young had been safely brought off. The old birds screamed at me no more; then I came on one of their young in the meadow near the river. His curious behaviour interested me so much that I stood and watched him for half an hour or longer. It was a hot, windless day, and the bird was by himself among the tall flowering grasses and buttercups of the meadow—a queer gaunt unfinished hobbledehoy-looking fowl with a head much too big for his body, a beak that resembled a huge nose, and a very monstrous mouth. When I first noticed him he was amusing himself by picking off the small insects from the flowers with his big beak, a most unsuitable instrument, one would imagine, for so delicate a task. At the same time he was hungering for more substantial fare, and every time a rook flew by over him on its way to or from a neighbouring too populous rookery, the young crow would open wide his immense red mouth and emit his harsh, throaty hunger-call. The rook gone, he would drop once more into his study of the buttercups, to pick from them whatever unconsidered trifle in the way of provender he could find. Once a small bird, a pied wagtail, flew near him, and he begged from it just as he had done from the rooks: the little creature would have run the risk of being itself swallowed had it attempted to deliver a packet of flies into that cavernous mouth. I went nearer, moving cautiously, until I was within about four yards of him, when, half turning, he opened his mouth and squawked, actually asking me to feed him; then, growing suspicious, he hopped awkwardly away in the grass. Eventually he permitted a nearer approach, and slowly stooping I was just on the point of stroking his back when, suddenly becoming alarmed, he swung himself into the air and flapped laboriously off to a low hawthorn, twenty or thirty yards away, into which he tumbled pell-mell like a bundle of old black rags.

Then I left him and thought no more about the crows except that their young have a good deal to learn upon first coming forth into an unfriendly world. But there was a second nest and family close by all the time. A day or two later I discovered it accidentally in a very curious way.

There was one spot where I was accustomed to linger for a few minutes, sometimes for half an hour or so, during my daily walks. Here at the foot of the low bank on the treeless side of the stream there was a scanty patch of sedges, a most exposed and unsuitable place for any bird to breed in, yet a venturesome moorhen had her nest there and was now sitting on seven eggs. First I would take a peep at the eggs, for the bird always quitted the nest on my approach; then I would gaze into the dense tangle of tree, bramble, and ivy springing out of the mass 'of black rock and red clay of the opposite bank. In the centre of this rough tangle which overhung the stream there grew an old stunted and crooked fir tree with its tufted top so shut out from the light by the branches and foliage round it that it looked almost black. One evening I sat down on the green bank opposite this tangle when the low sun behind me shone level into the mass of rock and rough boles and branches, and fixing my eyes on the black centre of the mass I encountered a pair of crimson eyes staring back into mine. A level ray of light had lit up that spot which I had always seen in deep shadow, revealing its secret. After gazing steadily for some time I made out a crow's nest in the dwarf pine top and the vague black forms of three young fully fledged crows sitting or standing in it. The middle bird had the shining crimson eyes; but in a few moments the illusory colour was gone and the eyes were black.

It was certainly an extraordinary thing: the ragged-looking black-plumaged bird on its ragged nest of sticks in the deep shade, with one ray of intense sunlight on its huge nose-like beak and blood-red eyes, a sight to be remembered for a lifetime! It recalled Zurbaran's picture of the "Kneeling Monk," in which the man with everything about him is steeped in the deepest gloom except his nose, on which one ray of strong light has fallen. The picture of the monk is gloomy and austere in a wonderful degree: the crow in his interior with sunlit big beak and crimson eyes looked nothing less than diabolical.

I paid other visits to the spot at the same hour, and sat long and watched the crows while they watched me, occasionally tossing pebbles on to them to make them shift their positions, but the magical effect was not produced again.

As to the cause of that extraordinary colour in the crow's eyes, one might say that it was merely the reflected red light of the level sun. We are familiar with the effect when polished and wet surfaces, such as glass, stone, and water, shine crimson in the light of a setting sun; but there is also the fact, which is not well known, that the eye may show its own hidden red—the crimson colour which is at the back of the retina and which is commonly supposed to be seen only with the ophthalmoscope. Nevertheless I find on inquiry among friends and acquaintances that there are instances of persons in which the iris when directly in front of the observer with the light behind him, always looks crimson, and in several of these cases the persons exhibiting this colour, or danger signal, as it may be called, were subject to brain trouble. It is curious to find that the crimson colour or light has also been observed in dogs: one friend has told me of a pet King Charles, a lively good-tempered little dog with brown eyes like any other dog, which yet when they looked up, into yours in a room always shone ruby-red instead of hyaline blue, or green, as is usually the case. From other friends I heard of many other cases: one was of a child, an infant in arms, whose eyes sometimes appeared crimson, another of a cat with yellow eyes which shone crimson-red in certain lights. Of human adults, I heard of two men great in the world of science, both dead now, in whose eyes the red light had been seen just before and during attacks of nervous breakdown. I heard also of four other persons, not distinguished in any way, two of them sisters, who showed the red light in the eyes: all of them suffered, from brain trouble and two of them ended their lives in asylums for the insane.

Discussing these cases with my informants, we came to the conclusion that the red light in the human eye is probably always a pathological condition, a danger signal; but it is not perhaps safe to generalize on these few instances, and I must add that all the medical men I have spoken to on the subject shake their heads. One great man, an eye specialist, went so far as to say that it is impossible, that the red light in the eye was not seen by my informants but only imagined. The ophthalmoscope, he said, will show you the crimson at the back of the eye, but the colour is not and cannot be reflected on the surface of the iris.



Chapter Sixteen: In Praise of the Cow

In spite of discontents I might have remained to this day by the Otter, in the daily and hourly expectation of seeing some new and wonderful thing in Nature in that place where a crimson-eyed carrion-crow had been revealed to me, had not a storm of thunder and rain broken over the country to shake me out of a growing disinclination to move. We are, body and mind, very responsive to atmospheric changes; for every storm in Nature there is a storm in us—a change physical and mental. We make our own conditions, it is true, and these react and have a deadening effect on us in the long run, but we are never wholly deadened by them—if we be not indeed dead, if the life we live can be called life. We are told that there are rainless zones on the earth and regions of everlasting summer: it is hard to believe that the dwellers in such places can ever think a new thought or do a new thing. The morning rain did not last very long, and before it had quite ceased I took up my knapsack and set off towards the sea, determined on this occasion to make my escape.

Three or four miles from Ottery St. Mary I overtook a cowman driving nine milch cows along a deep lane and inquired my way of him. He gave me many and minute directions, after which we got into conversation, and I walked some distance with him. The cows he was driving were all pure Devons, perfect beauties in their bright red coats in that greenest place where every rain-wet leaf sparkled in the new sunlight. Naturally we talked about the cows, and I soon found that they were his own and the pride and joy of his life. We walked leisurely, and as the animals went on, first one, then another would stay for a mouthful of grass, or to pull down half a yard of green drapery from the hedge. It was so lavishly decorated that the damage they did to it was not noticeable. By and by we went on ahead of the cows, then, if one stayed too long or strayed into some inviting side-lane, he would turn and utter a long, soft call, whereupon the straggler would leave her browsing and hasten after the others.

He was a big, strongly built man, a little past middle life and grey-haired, with rough-hewn face—unprepossessing one would have pronounced him until the intelligent, kindly expression of the eyes was seen and the agreeable voice was heard. As our talk progressed and we found how much in sympathy we were on the subject, I was reminded of that Biblical expression about the shining of a man's face: "Wine that maketh glad the heart of man"—I hope the total abstainers will pardon me—"and oil that maketh his face to shine," we have in one passage. This rather goes against our British ideas, since we rub no oil or unguents on our skin, but only soap which deprives it of its natural oil and too often imparts a dry and hard texture. Yet in that, to us, disagreeable aspect of the skin caused by foreign fats, there is a resemblance to the sudden brightening and glory of the countenance in moments of blissful emotion or exaltation. No doubt the effect is produced by the eyes, which are the mirrors of the mind, and as they are turned full upon us they produce an illusion, seeming to make the whole face shine.

In our talk I told him of long rambles on the Mendips, along the valley of the Somerset Axe, where I had lately been, and where of all places, in this island, the cow should be most esteemed and loved by man. Yet even there, where, standing on some elevation, cows beyond one's power to number could be seen scattered far and wide in the green vales beneath, it had saddened me to find them so silent. It is not natural for them to be dumb; they have great emotions and mighty voices—the cattle on a thousand hills. Their morning and evening lowing is more to me than any other natural sound—the melody of birds, the springs and dying gales of the pines, the wash of waves on the long shingled beach. The hills and valleys of that pastoral country flowing with milk and honey should be vocal with it, echoing and re-echoing the long call made musical by distance. The cattle are comparatively silent in that beautiful district, and indeed everywhere in England, because men have made them so. They have, when deprived of their calves, no motive for the exercise of their voices. For two or three days after their new-born calves have been taken from them they call loudly and incessantly, day and night, like Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted; grief and anxiety inspires that cry—they grow hoarse with crying; it is a powerful, harsh, discordant sound, unlike the long musical call of the cow that has a calf, and remembering it, and leaving the pasture, goes lowing to give it suck.

I also told him of the cows of a distant country where I had lived, that had the maternal instinct so strong that they refused to yield their milk when deprived of their young. They "held it back," as the saying is, and were in a sullen rage, and in a few days their fountains dried up, and there was no more milk until calving-time came round once more.

He replied that cows of that temper were not unknown in South Devon. Very proudly he pointed to one of the small herd that followed us as an example. In most cases, he said, the calf was left from two or three days to a week, or longer, with the mother to get strong, and then taken away. This plan could not be always followed; some cows were so greatly distressed at losing the young they had once suckled that precautions had to be taken and the calf smuggled away as quietly as possible when dropped—if possible before the mother had seen it. Then there were the extreme cases in which the cow refused to be cheated. She knew that a calf had been born; she had felt it within her, and had suffered pangs in bringing it forth; if it appeared not on the grass or straw at her side then it must have been snatched away by the human creatures that hovered about her, like crows and ravens round a ewe in travail on some lonely mountain side.

That was the character of the cow he had pointed out; even when she had not seen the calf of which she had been deprived she made so great an outcry and was thrown into such a rage and fever, refusing to be milked that, finally, to save her, it was thought necessary to give her back the calf. Now, he concluded, it was not attempted to take it away: twice a day she was allowed to have it with her and suckle it, and she was a very happy animal.

I was glad to think that there was at least one completely happy cow in Devonshire.

After leaving the cowkeeper I had that feeling of revulsion very strongly which all who know and love cows occasionally experience at the very thought of beef. I was for the moment more than tolerant of vegetarianism, and devoutly hoped that for many days to come I should not be sickened with the sight of a sirloin on some hateful board, cold, or smoking hot, bleeding its red juices into the dish when gashed with a knife, as if undergoing a second death. We do not eat negroes, although their pigmented skins, flat feet, and woolly heads proclaim them a different species; even monkey's flesh is abhorrent to us, merely because we fancy that that creature in its ugliness resembles some old men and some women and children that we know. But the gentle large-brained social cow that caresses our hands and faces with her rough blue tongue, and is more like man's sister than any other non-human being—the majestic, beautiful creature with the juno eyes, sweeter of breath than the rosiest virgin—we slaughter and feed on her flesh—monsters and cannibals that we are!

But though cannibals, it is very pleasant to find that many cowmen love their cows. Walking one afternoon by a high unkept hedge near Southampton Water, I heard loud shouts at intervals issuing from a point some distance ahead, and on arriving at the spot found an old man leaning idly over a gate, apparently concerned about nothing. "What are you shouting about?" I demanded. "Cows," he answered, with a glance across the wide green field dotted with a few big furze and bramble bushes. On its far side half a dozen cows were, quietly grazing. "They came fast enough when I was a-feeding of 'em," he presently added; "but now they has to find for theirselves they don't care how long they keeps me." I was going to suggest that it would be a considerable saving of time if he went for them, but his air of lazy contentment as he leant on the gate showed that time was of no importance to him. He was a curious-looking old man, in old frayed clothes, broken boots, and a cap too small for him. He had short legs, broad chest, and long arms, and a very big head, long and horselike, with a large shapeless nose and grizzled beard and moustache. His ears, too, were enormous, and stood out from the head like the handles of a rudely shaped terra-cotta vase or jar. The colour of his face, the ears included, suggested burnt clay. But though Nature had made him ugly, he had an agreeable expression, a sweet benign look in his large dark eyes, which attracted me, and I stayed to talk with him.

It has frequently been said that those who are much with cows, and have an affection for them, appear to catch something of their expression—to look like cows; just as persons of sympathetic or responsive nature, and great mobility of face, grow to be like those they live and are in sympathy with. The cowman who looks like a cow may be more bovine than his fellows in his heavier motions and slower apprehensions, but he also exhibits some of the better qualities—the repose and placidity of the animal.

He said that he was over seventy, and had spent the whole of his life in the neighbourhood, mostly with cows, and had never been more than a dozen miles from the spot where we were standing. At intervals while we talked he paused to utter one of his long shouts, to which the cows paid no attention. At length one of the beasts raised her head and had a long look, then slowly crossed the field to us, the others following at some distance. They were shorthorns, all but the leader, a beautiful young Devon, of a uniform rich glossy red; but the silky hair on the distended udder was of an intense chestnut, and all the parts that were not clothed were red too—the teats, the skin round the eyes, the moist embossed nose; while the hoofs were like polished red pebbles, and even the shapely horns were tinged with that colour. Walking straight up to the old man, she began deliberately licking one of his ears with her big rough tongue, and in doing so knocked off his old rakish cap. Picking it up he laughed like a child, and remarked, "She knows me, this one does—and she loikes me."



Chapter Seventeen: An Old Road Leading Nowhere

So many and minute were the directions I received about the way from the blessed cowkeeper, and so little attention did I give them, my mind being occupied with other things, that they were quickly forgotten. Of half a hundred things I remembered only that I had to "bear to the left." This I did, although it seemed useless, seeing that my way was by lanes, across fields, and through plantations. At length I came to a road, and as it happened to be on my left hand I followed it. It was narrow, worn deep by traffic and rains; and grew deeper, rougher, and more untrodden as I progressed, until it was like the dry bed of a mountain torrent, and I walked on boulder-stones between steep banks about fourteen feet high. Their sides were clothed with ferns, grass and rank moss; their summits were thickly wooded, and the interlacing branches of the trees above, mingled with long rope-like shoots of bramble and briar, formed so close a roof that I seemed to be walking in a dimly lighted tunnel. At length, thinking that I had kept long enough to a road which had perhaps not been used for a century, also tired of the monotony of always bearing to the left, I scrambled out on the right-hand side. For some time past I had been ascending a low, broad, flat-topped hill, and on forcing my way through the undergrowth into the open I found myself on the level plateau, an unenclosed spot overgrown with heather and scattered furze bushes, with clumps of fir and birch trees. Before me and on either hand at this elevation a vast extent of country was disclosed. The surface was everywhere broken, but there was no break in the wonderful greenness, which the recent rain had intensified. There is too much green, to my thinking, with too much uniformity in its soft, bright tone, in South Devon. After gazing on such a landscape the brown, harsh, scanty vegetation of the hilltop seemed all the more grateful. The heath was an oasis and a refuge; I rambled about in it until my feet and legs were wet; then I sat down to let them dry and altogether spent several agreeable hours at that spot, pleased at the thought that no human fellow-creature would intrude upon me. Feathered companions were, however, not wanting. The crowing of cock pheasants from the thicket beside the old road warned me that I was on preserved grounds. Not too strictly preserved, however, for there was my old friend the carrion-crow out foraging for his young. He dropped down over the trees, swept past me, and was gone. At this season, in the early summer, he may be easily distinguished, when flying, from his relation the rook. When on the prowl the crow glides smoothly and rapidly through the air, often changing his direction, now flying close to the surface, anon mounting high, but oftenest keeping nearly on a level with the tree tops. His gliding and curving motions are somewhat like those of the herring-gull, but the wings in gliding are carried stiff and straight, the tips of the long flight-feathers showing a slight upward curve. But the greatest difference is in the way the head is carried. The rook, like the heron and stork, carries his beak pointing lance-like straight before him. He knows his destination, and makes for it; he follows his nose, so to speak, turning neither to the right nor the left. The foraging crow continually turns his head, gull-like and harrier-like, from side to side, as if to search the ground thoroughly or to concentrate his vision on some vaguely seen object.

Not only the crow was there: a magpie chattered as I came from the brake, but refused to show himself; and a little later a jay screamed at me, as only a jay can. There are times when I am intensely in sympathy with the feeling expressed in this ear-splitting sound, inarticulate but human. It is at the same time warning and execration, the startled solitary's outburst of uncontrolled rage at the abhorred sight of a fellow-being in his woodland haunt.

Small birds were numerous at that spot, as if for them also its wildness and infertility had an attraction. Tits, warblers, pipits, finches, all were busy ranging from place to place, emitting their various notes now from the tree-tops, then from near the ground; now close at hand, then far off; each change in the height, distance, and position of the singer giving the sound a different character, so that the effect produced was one of infinite variety. Only the yellow-hammer remained constant in one spot, in one position, and the song at each repetition was the same. Nevertheless this bird is not so monotonous a singer as he is reputed. A lover of open places, of commons and waste lands, with a bush or dwarf tree for tower to sit upon, he is yet one of the most common species in the thickly timbered country of the Otter, Clyst, and Sid, in which I had been rambling, hearing him every day and all day long. Throughout that district, where the fields are small, and the trees big and near together, he has the cirl-bunting's habit of perching to sing on the tops of high hedgerow elms and oaks.

By and by I had a better bird to listen to—a redstart. A female flew down within fifteen yards of me; her mate followed and perched on a dry twig, where he remained a long time for so shy and restless a creature. He was in perfect plumage, and sitting there, motionless in the strong sunlight, was wonderfully conspicuous, the gayest, most exotic-looking bird of his family in England. Quitting his perch, he flew up into a tree close by and began singing; and for half an hour thereafter I continued intently listening to his brief strain, repeated at short intervals—a song which I think has never been perfectly described. "Practice makes perfect" is an axiom that does not apply to the art of song in the bird world; since the redstart, a member of a highly melodious family, with a good voice to start with, has never attained to excellence in spite of much practising. The song is interesting both on account of its exceptional inferiority and of its character. A distinguished ornithologist has said that little birds have two ways of making themselves attractive—by melody and by bright plumage; and that most species excel in one or the other way; and that the acquisition of gay colours by a species of a sober-coloured melodious family will cause it to degenerate as a songster. He is speaking of the redstart. Unfortunately for the rule there are too many exceptions. Thus confining ourselves to a single family—that of the finches—in our own islands, the most modest coloured have the least melody, while those that have the gayest plumage are the best singers—the goldfinch, chaffinch, siskin, and linnet. Nevertheless it is impossible to listen for any length of time to the redstart, and to many redstarts, without feeling, almost with irritation, that its strain is only the prelude of a song—a promise never performed; that once upon a time in the remote past it was a sweet, copious, and varied singer, and that only a fragment of its melody now remains. The opening rapidly warbled notes are so charming that the attention is instantly attracted by them. They are composed of two sounds, both beautiful—the bright pure gushing robin-like note, and the more tender expressive swallow-like note. And that is all; the song scarcely begins before it ends, or collapses; for in most cases the pure sweet opening strain is followed by a curious little farrago of gurgling and squeaking sounds, and little fragments of varied notes, often so low as to be audible only at a few yards' distance. It is curious that these slight fragments of notes at the end vary in different individuals, in strength and character and in number, from a single faintest squeal to half a dozen or a dozen distinct sounds. In all cases they are emitted with apparent effort, as if the bird strained its pipe in the vain attempt to continue the song.