BY
W. H. HUDSON
1923
J. M. DENT & SONS LTD.
LONDON & TORONTO
PARIS: J. M. DENT ET FILS
All rights reserved
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
INSCRIBED TO
SIR EDWARD AND LADY GREY
NORTHUMBRIANS
WITH HAMPSHIRE WRITTEN IN THEIR HEARTS
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I.
Autumn in the New Forest—Red colour in mammals—November mildness—A house by the Boldre—An ideal spot for small birds—Abundance of nests—Small mammals and the weasel's part—Voles and mice—Hornet and bank-vole—Young shrews—A squirrel's visit—Green woodpecker's drumming-tree—Drumming of other species—Beauty of great spotted woodpecker—The cuckoo controversy—A cuckoo in a robin's nest—Behaviour of the cuckoo—Extreme irritability—Manner of ejecting eggs and birds from the nest—Loss of irritability—Insensibility of the parent robins—Discourse on mistaken kindness, pain and death in nature, the annual destruction of bird life, and the young cuckoo's instinct.
CHAPTER II.
Between the Boldre and the Exe—Abuse of the New Forest—Character of the population—New Forest code and conscience—A radical change foreshadowed—Tenacity of the Forest fly—Oak woods of Beaulieu—Swallow and pike—Charm of Beaulieu—Instinctive love of open spaces—A fragrant heath—Nightjars—Snipe—Redshanks—Pewits—Cause of sympathy with animals—Grasshopper and spider—A rapacious fly—Melancholy moods—Evening on the heath—"World-strangeness"—Pixie mounds—Death and burial—The dead in the barrows—Their fear of the living.
CHAPTER III.
A favourite New Forest haunt—Summertide—Young blackbird's call—Abundance of blackbirds and thrushes, and destruction of young—Starlings breeding—The good done by starlings—Perfume of the honeysuckle—Beauty of the hedge rose—Cult of the rose—Lesser whitethroat—His low song—Common and lesser whitethroat—In the woods—A sheet of bracken—Effect of broken surfaces—Roman mosaics at Silchester—Why mosaics give pleasure—Woodland birds—Sound of insect life—Abundance of flies—Sufferings of cattle—Dark Water—Biting and teasing flies—Feeding the fishes and fiddlers with flies.
CHAPTER IV.
The stag-beetle—Evening flight—Appearance on the wing—Seeking a mate—Stag and doe in a hedge—The plough-man and the beetle—A stag-beetle's fate—Concerning tenacity of life—Life appearances after death—A serpent's skin—A dead glow-worm's light—Little summer tragedies—A snaky spot—An adder's basking-place—Watching adders—The adder's senses—Adder's habits not well known—A pair of anxious pewits—A dead young pewit—Animals without knowledge of death—Removal of the dead by ants—Gould's observations on ants.
CHAPTER V.
Cessation of song—Oak woods less silent than others—Mixed gatherings of birds in oak woods—Abundance of caterpillars—Rapacious insects—Wood ants—Alarm cries of woodland birds—Weasel and small birds—Fascination—Weasel and short-tailed vole—Account of Egyptian cats fascinated by fire—Rabbits and stoats—Mystery of fascination—Cases of pre-natal suggestion—Hampshire pigs fascinated by fire—Conjectures as to the origin of fascination—A dead squirrel—A squirrel's fatal leap—Fleas large and small—Shrew and fleas—Fleas in woods—The squirrel's disposition—Food-hiding habit in animals—Memory in squirrels and dogs—The lower kind of memory.
CHAPTER VI.
Insects in Britain—Meadow ants—The indoor view of insect life—Insects in visible nature—The humming-bird hawk-moth and the parson lepidopterist—Rarity of death's-head moth—Hawk-moth and meadow-pipit—Silver-washed fritillaries on bracken—Flight of the white admiral butterfly—Dragon-flies—Want of English names—A water-keeper on dragon-flies—Moses Harris—Why moths have English names—Origin of the dragon-fly's bad reputation—Cordulegaster annulatus—Calopteryx virgo—Dragon-flies congregated—Glow-worm—Firefly and glow-worm compared—Variability in light—The insect's attitude when shining—Supposed use of the light—Hornets—A long-remembered sting—The hornet local in England—A splendid insect—Insects on ivy blossoms in autumn.
CHAPTER VII.
Great and greatest among insects—Our feeling for insect music—Crickets and grasshoppers—Cicada anglica—Locusta viridissima—Character of its music—Colony of green grasshoppers—Harewood Forest—Purple emperor—Grasshoppers' musical contests—The naturalist mocked—Female viridissima—Over-elaboration in the male—Habits of female—Wooing of the male by the female.
CHAPTER VIII.
Hampshire, north and south—A spot abounding in life—Lyndhurst—A white spider—Wooing spider's antics—A New Forest little boy—Blonde gipsies—The boy and the spider—A distant world of spiders—Selborne and its visitors—Selborne revisited—An owl at Alton—A wagtail at the Wakes—The cockerel and the martin—Heat at Selborne—House crickets—Gilbert White on crickets—A colony of field crickets—Water plants—Musk mallow—Girl buntings at Selborne—Evening gatherings of swifts at Selborne—LocustidÆ—Thamnotrizon cinereus—English names wanted—Black grasshopper's habits and disposition—Its abundance at Selborne.
CHAPTER IX.
The Selborne atmosphere—Unhealthy faces—Selborne Common—Character of scenery—Wheatham Hill—Hampshire village churches—Gilbert White's strictures—Churches big and little—The peasants' religious feeling—Charm of old village churches—Seeking Priors Dean—Privett church—Blackmoor church—Churchyards—Change in gravestones—Beauty of old gravestones—Red alga on gravestones—Yew trees in churchyards—British dragon-tree—Farringdon village and yew—Crowhurst yew—Hurstbourne Priors yew—How yew trees are injured.
CHAPTER X.
Wolmer Forest—Charm of contrast and novelty in scenery—Aspect of Wolmer—Heath and pine—Colour of water and soil—An old woman's recollections—Story of the "Selborne mob"—Past and present times compared—Hollywater Clump—Age of trees—Bird life in the forest—Teal in their breeding haunts—Boys in the forest—Story of the horn-blower.
CHAPTER XI.
The Hampshire people—Racial differences in neighbouring counties—A neglected subject—Inhabitants of towns—Gentry and peasantry—Four distinct types—The common blonde type—Lean women—Deleterious effects of tea-drinking—A shepherd's testimony—A mixed race—The Anglo-Saxon—Case of reversion of type—Un-Saxon character of the British—Dark-eyed Hampshire people—Racial feeling with regard to eye-colours—The Iberian type—Its persistence—Character of the small dark man—Dark and blonde children—A dark village child.
CHAPTER XII.
Test and Itchen—Vegetation—Riverside villages—The cottage by the river—Itchen valley—Blossoming limes—Bird visitors—Goldfinch—Cirl bunting—Song—Plumage—Three common river birds—Coots—Moor-hen and nest—Little grebes' struggles—Male grebe's devotion—Parent coot's wisdom—A more or less happy family—Dogged little grebes—Grebes training their young—Fishing birds and fascination.
CHAPTER XIII.
Morning in the valley—Abundance of swifts—Unlikeness to other birds—Mayfly and swallows—Mayfly and swift—Bad weather and hail—Swallows in the rain—Sand martins—An orphaned blackbird—Tamed by feeding—Survival of gregarious instinct in young blackbirds—Blackbird's good-night—Cirl buntings—Breeding habits and language—Habits of the young—Reed bunting—Beautiful weather—The oak in August.
CHAPTER XIV.
Yellow flowers—Family likeness in flavours and scents—Mimulus luteus—Flowers in church decoration—Effect of association—Mimulus luteus as a British plant—A rule as to naturalised plants wanted—A visit to Swarraton—Changes since Gilbert White's day—"Wild musk"—Bird life on the downs—Turtle-dove nestlings—Blue skin in doves—A boy naturalist—Birds at the cottage—The wren's sun-bath—Wild fruits ripen—An old chalk pit—Birds and elderberries—Past and present times compared—Calm days—Migration of swallows—Conclusion.
HAMPSHIRE DAYS
CHAPTER I
Autumn in the New Forest—Red colour in mammals—November mildness—A house by the Boldre—An ideal spot for small birds—Abundance of nests—Small mammals and the weasel's part—Voles and mice—Hornet and bank-vole—Young shrews—A squirrel's visit—Green woodpecker's drumming-tree—Drumming of other species—Beauty of great spotted woodpecker—The cuckoo controversy—A cuckoo in a robin's nest—Behaviour of the cuckoo—Extreme irritability—Manner of ejecting eggs and birds from the nest—Loss of irritability—Insensibility of the parent robins—Discourse on mistaken kindness, pain and death in nature, the annual destruction of bird life, and the young cuckoo's instinct.
Here, by chance, in the early days of December 1902, at the very spot where my book begins, I am about to bring it to an end.
A few days ago, coming hither from the higher country at Silchester, where the trees were already nearly bare, I was surprised to find the oak woods of this lower southern part of the New Forest still in their full autumnal foliage. Even now, so late in the year, after many successive days and nights of rain and wind, they are in leaf still: everywhere the woods are yellow, here where the oak predominates; the stronger golden-red and russet tints of the beech are vanished. We have rain and wind on most days, or rather mist and rain by day and wind with storms of rain by night; days, too, or parts of days, when it is very dark and still, and when there is a universal greyness in earth and sky. At such times, seen against the distant slaty darkness or in the blue-grey misty atmosphere, the yellow woods look almost more beautiful than in fine weather.
The wet woodland roads and paths are everywhere strewn, and in places buried deep in fallen leaves—yellow, red, and russet; and this colour is continued under the trees all through the woods, where the dead bracken has now taken that deep tint which it will keep so long as there is rain or mist to wet it for the next four or five months. Dead bracken with dead leaves on a reddish soil; and where the woods are fir, the ground is carpeted with lately-fallen needles of a chestnut red, which brightens almost to orange in the rain. Now, at this season, in this universal redness of the earth where trees and bracken grow, we see that Nature is justified in having given that colour—red and reddish-yellow—to all or to most of her woodland mammals. Fox and foumart and weasel and stoat; the hare too; the bright squirrel; the dormouse and harvest-mouse; the bank-vole and the wood-mouse. Even the common shrew and lesser shrew, though they rarely come out by day, have a reddish tinge on their fur. Water-shrew and water-vole inhabit the banks of streams, and are safer without such a colour; the dark grey badger is strictly a night rover.
Autumn in the New Forest
Sometimes about noon the clouds grow thin in that part of the sky, low down, where the sun is, and a pale gleam of sunlight filters through; even a patch of lucid blue sky sometimes becomes visible for a while: but the light soon fades; after mid-day the dimness increases, and before long one begins to think that evening has come. Withal it is singularly mild. One could almost imagine in this season of mist and wet and soft airs in late November that this is a land where days grew short and dark indeed, but where winter comes not, and the sensation of cold is unknown. It is pleasant to be out of doors in such weather, to stand in the coloured woods listening to that autumn sound of tits and other little birds wandering through the high trees in straggling parties, talking and calling to one another in their small sharp voices. Or to walk by the Boldre, or, as some call it, the Lymington, a slow, tame stream in summer, invisible till you are close to it; but now, in flood, the trees that grow on its banks and hid it in summer are seen standing deep in a broad, rushing, noisy river.
The woodpecker's laugh has the same careless happy sound as in summer: it is scarcely light in the morning before the small wren pours out his sharp bright lyric outside my window; it is time, he tells me, to light my candle and get up. The starlings are about the house all day long, vocal even in the rain, carrying on their perpetual starling conversation—talk and song and recitative; a sort of bird-Yiddish, with fluty fragments of melody stolen from the blackbird, and whistle and click and the music of the triangle thrown in to give variety. So mild is it that in the blackness of night I sometimes wander into the forest paths and by furzy heaths and hedges to listen for the delicate shrill music of our late chirper in the thickets, our Thamnotrizon, about which I shall write later; and look, too, for a late glow-worm shining in some wet green place. Late in October I found one in daylight, creeping about in the grass on Selborne Hill; and some few, left unmarried, may shine much later. And as to the shade-loving grasshopper or leaf cricket, he sings, we know, on mild evenings in November. But I saw no green lamp in the herbage, and I heard only that nightly music of the tawny owl, fluting and hallooing far and near, bird answering bird in the oak woods all along the swollen stream from Brockenhurst to Boldre.
This race of wood owls perhaps have exceptionally strong voices: Wise, in his book on the New Forest, says that their hooting can be heard on a still autumn evening a distance of two miles. I have no doubt they can be heard a good mile.
A house by the Boldre
But it is of this, to a bird lover, delectable spot in the best bird-months of April, May, and June that I have to write. The house, too, that gave me shelter must be spoken of; for never have I known any human habitation, in a land where people are discovered dwelling in so many secret, green, out-of-the-world places, which had so much of nature in and about it. Grown-up and young people were in it, and children too, but they were girls, and had always quite spontaneously practised what I had preached—pet nothing and persecute nothing. There was no boy to disturb the wild creatures with his hunting instincts and loud noises; no dog, no cat, nor any domestic creature except the placid cows and fowls which supplied the household with milk and eggs. A small old picturesque red-brick house with high-pitched roof and tall chimneys, a great part of it overrun with ivy and creepers, the walls and tiled roof stained by time and many-coloured lichen to a richly variegated greyish red. The date of the house, cut in a stone tablet in one of the rooms, was 1692. In front there was no lawn, but a walled plot of ground with old, once ornamental trees and bushes symmetrically placed—yews, both spreading and cypress-shaped Irish yew, and tall tapering juniper, and arbor vitÆ; it was a sort of formal garden which had long thrown off its formality. In a corner of the ground by the side of these dark plants were laurel, syringa, and lilac bushes, and among these such wildings as thorn, elder and bramble had grown up, flourishing greatly, and making of that flowery spot a tangled thicket. At the side of the house there was another plot of ground, grass-grown, which had once been the orchard, and still had a few ancient apple and pear trees, nearly past bearing, with good nesting-holes for the tits and starlings in their decayed mossy trunks. There were also a few old ivied shade-trees—chestnuts, fir, and evergreen oak.
Best of all (for the birds) were the small old half-ruined outhouses which had remained from the distant days when the place, originally a manor, had been turned into a farm-house. They were here and there, scattered about, outside the enclosure, ivy-grown, each looking as old and weather-stained and in harmony with its surroundings as the house itself—the small tumble-down barns, the cow-sheds, the pig-house, the granary with open door and the wooden staircase falling to pieces. All was surrounded by old oak woods, and the river was close by. It was an ideal spot for small birds. I have never in England seen so many breeding close together. The commoner species were extraordinarily abundant. Chaffinch and greenfinch; blackbird, throstle and missel-thrush; swallow and martin, and common and lesser whitethroat; garden warbler and blackcap; robin, dunnock, wren, flycatcher, pied wagtail, starling, and sparrow;—one could go round and put one's hand into half a dozen nests of almost any of these species. And very many of them had become partial to the old buildings: even in closed rooms where it was nearly dark, not only wrens, robins, tits, and wagtails, but blackbirds and throstles and chaffinches were breeding, building on beams and in or on the old nests of swallows and martins. The hawfinch and bullfinch were also there, the last rearing its brood within eight yards of the front door. One of his two nearest neighbours was a gold-crested wren. When the minute bird was sitting on her eggs, in her little cradle-nest suspended to a spray of the yew, every day I would pull the branch down so that we might all enjoy the sight of the little fairy bird in her fairy nest which she refused to quit. The other next-door neighbour of the bullfinch was the long-tailed tit, which built its beautiful little nest on a terminal spray of another yew, ten or twelve yards from the door; and this small creature would also let us pull the branch down and peep into her well-feathered interior.
Abundance of nests
It seemed that, from long immunity from persecution, all these small birds had quite lost their fear of human beings; but in late May and in June, when many young birds were out of the nest, one had to walk warily in the grass for fear of putting a foot on some little speckled creature patiently waiting to be visited and fed by its parents.
Nor were there birds only. Little beasties were also quite abundant; but they were of species that did no harm (at all events there), and the weasel would come from time to time to thin them down. Money is paid to mole-catcher and rat-catcher; the weasel charges you nothing: he takes it out in kind. And even as the jungle tiger, burning bright, and the roaring lion strike with panic the wild cattle and antelopes and herds of swine, so does this miniature carnivore, this fairy tiger of English homesteads and hedges, fill with trepidation the small deer he hunts and slays with his needle teeth—Nature's scourge sent out among her too prolific small rodents; her little blood-letter who relieves her and restores the balance. And therefore he, too, with his flat serpent head and fiery killing soul, is a "dear" creature, being, like the poet's web-footed beasts of an earlier epoch, "part of a general plan."
The most abundant of the small furred creatures were the two short-tailed voles—field-vole and bank-vole; the last, in his bright chestnut-red, the prettiest. Whenever I sat down for a few minutes in the porch I would see one or more run across the stones from one side, where masses of periwinkle grew against the house, to the other side, where Virginia creeper, rose, and an old magnolia tree covered the wall. One day at the back of the house by the scullery door I noticed a swaying movement in a tall seeded stem of dock, and looking down spied a wee harvest-mouse running and climbing nimbly on the slender branchlets, feeding daintily on the seed, and looking like a miniature squirrel on a miniature bush.
Just there, close to the door, was a wood-pile, and the hornets had made their nest in it. The year before they had made it in a loft in the house, and before that in the old barn. The splendid insects were coming and going all day, interfering with nobody and nobody interfering with them; and when I put a plate of honey for them on the logs close to their entrance they took no notice of it; but by-and-by bank-voles and wood-mice came stealing out from among the logs and fed on it until it was all gone.
I was surprised, and could only suppose that the hornets did not notice or discover the honey, because no such good thing was looked for so close to their door. Away from home the hornet was quick to discover anything sweet to the taste, and very ready to resent the presence of any other creature at the table.
Hornet and bank-vole
At the riverside, a few hundred yards from the house, I was sitting in the shade of a large elm tree one day when I was visited by a big hornet, who swept noisily down and settled on the trunk, four or five feet above the ground. A quantity of sap had oozed out into a deep cleft of the rough bark and had congealed there, and the hornet had discovered it. Before he had been long feeding on it I saw a little bank-vole come out from the roots of the tree and run up the trunk, looking very pretty in his bright chestnut fur as he came into the sunlight. Stealing up to the lower end of the cleft full of thickened sap he too began feeding on it. The hornet, who was at the upper end of the cleft, quite four inches apart from the vole, at once stopped eating and regarded the intruder for some time, then advanced towards him in a threatening attitude. The vole was frightened at this, starting and erecting his hair, and once or twice he tried to recover his courage and resume his feeding, but the hornet still keeping up his hostile movements, he eventually slipped quietly down and hid himself at the roots. When the hornet departed he came out again and went to the sap.
Wishing to see more, I spent most of that day and the day following at the spot, and saw hornet and vole meet many times. If the vole was at the sap when the hornet came he was at once driven off, and when the hornet was there first the vole was never allowed to feed, although on every occasion he tried to do so, stealing to his lower place in the gentlest way in order not to give offence, and after beginning to feed affecting not to see that the other had left off eating, and with raised head was regarding him with jealous eyes.
Rarely have I looked on a prettier little comedy in wild life.
But to return to the house. There was quite a happy family at that spot by the back door where the hornets were. A numerous family of shrews were reared, and the young, when they began exploring the world, used to creep over the white stone by the threshold. The girls would pick them up to feel their soft mole-like fur: the young shrew is a gentle creature and does not attempt to bite. Some of the more adventurous ones were always blundering into the empty flowerpots heaped against the wall, and there they would remain imprisoned until some person found and took them out.
One morning, at half-past four o'clock, when I was lying awake listening to the blackbird, a lively squirrel came dancing into the open window of my bedroom on the first floor. There were writing materials, flowers in glasses, and other objects on the ledge and dressing-table there, and he frisked about among them, chattering, wildly excited at seeing so many curious and pretty things, but he upset nothing; and by-and-by he danced out again into the ivy covering the wall on that side, throwing the colony of breeding sparrows into a great state of consternation.
Drumming of woodpecker
The river was quite near the house—not half a minute from the front door, though hidden from sight by the trees on its banks. Here, at the nearest point, there was an old half-dead dwarf oak growing by the water and extending one horizontal branch a distance of twenty feet over the stream. This was the favourite drumming-tree of a green woodpecker, and at intervals through the day he would visit it and drum half a dozen times or so. This drumming sounded so loud that, following the valley down, I measured the distance it could be heard and found it just one-third of a mile. At that distance I could hear it distinctly; farther on, not at all. It seemed almost incredible that the sound produced by so small a stick as a woodpecker's beak striking a tree should be audible at that distance.
It is hardly to be doubted that the drumming is used as a love-call, though it is often heard in late summer. It is, however, in early spring and in the breeding season that it is oftenest heard, and I have found that a good imitation of it will sometimes greatly excite the bird. The same bird may be heard drumming here, there, and everywhere in a wood or copse, the sound varying somewhat in character and strength according to the wood; but each bird as a rule has a favourite drumming-tree, and it probably angers him to hear another bird at the spot. On one occasion, finding that a very large, old, and apparently dying cedar in a wood was constantly used by the woodpecker, I went to the spot and imitated the sound. Very soon the bird came and begun drumming against me, close by. I responded, and again he drummed; and becoming more and more excited he flew close to me, and passing from tree to tree drummed at every spot he lighted on.
The other species have the same habit of drumming on one tree. I have noticed it in the small spotted, or banded, woodpecker; and have observed that invariably after he has drummed two or three times the female has come flying to him from some other part of the wood, and the two birds have then both together uttered their loud chirping notes and flown away.
On revisiting the spot a year after I had heard the green woodpecker drumming every day in the oak by the river, I found that he had forsaken it, and that close by, on the other side of the stream, a great spotted woodpecker had selected as his drumming-tree a very big elm growing on the bank. He drummed on a large dead branch about forty feet from the ground, and the sound he made was quite as loud as that of the green bird. It may be that the two big woodpeckers, who play equally well on the same instrument, are intolerant of one another's presence, and that in this case the spotted bird had driven the larger yaffle from his territory.
Our handsomest bird
One of the prettiest spots by the water was that very one where the spotted bird was accustomed to come, and I often went there at noon and sat for an hour on the grassy bank in the shade of the drumming-tree. The river was but thirty to forty feet wide at that spot, with masses of water forget-me-not growing on the opposite bank, clearly reflected in the sherry-coloured sunlit current below. The trees were mostly oaks, in the young vivid green of early June foliage. And one day when the sky, seen through that fresh foliage, was without a stain of vapour in its pure azure, when the wood was full of clear sunlight—so clear that silken spider webs, thirty or forty feet high in the oaks, were visible as shining red and blue and purple lines—the bird, after drumming high above my head, flew to an oak tree just before me, and clinging vertically to the bark on the high part of the trunk, remained there motionless for some time. His statuesque attitude, as he sat with his head thrown well back, the light glinting on his hard polished feathers, black and white and crimson, the setting in which he appeared of greenest translucent leaves and hoary bark and open sunlit space, all together made him seem not only our handsomest woodpecker, but our most beautiful bird. I had seen him at his best, and sitting there motionless amid the wind-fluttered leaves, he was like a bird-figure carved from some beautiful vari-coloured stone.
The most interesting events in animal life observed at this spot relate to the cuckoo in the spring of 1900. Some time before this Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace said, in the course of a talk we had, that he very much wanted me to find out exactly what happened in a nest in which a young cuckoo was hatched. It was, I replied, an old, old story—what could I see, supposing I was lucky enough to find a nest where I could observe it properly, more than Jenner, Hancock, Mrs. Hugh Blackburn, and perhaps other writers, had told us? Yes, it was an old story, he said, and he wanted it told again by someone else. People had lately been discrediting Jenner's account, and as to the other chief authority I had named, one writer, a Dr. Creighton, had said, "As for artists like Mrs. Blackburn, they can draw what they please—all out of their own brains: we can't trust them, or such as them." Sober-minded naturalists had come to regard the habit and abnormal strength attributed to the newly-hatched cuckoo as "not proven" or quite incredible; thus Seebohm had said, "One feels inclined to class these narratives with the equally well-authenticated stories of ghosts and other apparitions which abound."
Since my conversation with Dr. Wallace we have had more of these strange narratives—the fables and ghost stories which the unbelievers are compelled in the end to accept—and all that Dr. Jenner or his assistant saw others have seen, and some observers have even taken snapshots of the young cuckoo in the act of ejecting his fellow-nestling. But it appears from all the accounts which I have so far read, that in every case the observer was impatient and interfered in the business by touching and irritating the young cuckoo, by putting eggs and other objects on his back, and by making other experiments. In the instance I am about to give there was no interference by me or by the others who at intervals watched with me.
A cuckoo in a robin's nest
A robin's nest with three robin's eggs and one of the cuckoo was found in a low bank at the side of the small orchard on 19th May, 1900. The bird was incubating, and on the afternoon of 27th May the cuckoo hatched out. Unfortunately I did not know how long incubation had been going on before the 19th, but from the fact that the cuckoo was first out, it seems probable that the parasite has this further advantage of coming first from the shell. Long ago I found that this was so in the case of the parasitical troupials of the genus Molothrus in South America.
I kept a close watch on the nest for the rest of that afternoon and the whole of the following day (the 28th), during which the young cuckoo was lying in the bottom of the nest, helpless as a piece of jelly with a little life in it, and with just strength enough in his neck to lift his head and open his mouth; and then, after a second or two, the wavering head would drop again. At eight o'clock next morning (29th), I found that one robin had come out of the shell, and one egg had been ejected and was lying a few inches below the nest on the sloping bank. Yet the young cuckoo still appeared a weak, helpless, jelly-like creature, as on the previous day. But he had increased greatly in size. I believe that in forty-eight hours from the time of hatching he had quite doubled his bulk, and had grown darker, his naked skin being of a bluish-black colour. The robin, thirty or more hours younger, was little more than half his size, and had a pale, pinkish-yellow skin, thinly clothed with a long black down. The cuckoo occupied the middle of the deep, cup-shaped nest, and his broad back, hollow in the middle, formed a sort of false bottom; but there was a small space between the bird's sides and the nest, and in this space or interstice the one unhatched egg that still remained and the young robin were lying.
During this day (29th) I observed that the pressure of the egg and young robin against his sides irritated the cuckoo: he was continually moving, jerking and wriggling his lumpish body this way and that, as if to get away from the contact. At intervals this irritation would reach its culminating point, and a series of mechanical movements would begin, all working blindly but as surely towards the end as if some devilish intelligence animated the seemingly helpless infant parasite.
Of the two objects in the nest the unhatched egg irritated him the most. The young robin was soft, it yielded when pressed, and could be made somehow to fit into the interstice; but the hard, round shell, pressing against him like a pebble, was torture to him, and at intervals became unendurable. Then would come that magical change in him, when he seemed all at once to become possessed of a preternatural power and intelligence, and then the blind struggle down in the nest would begin. And after each struggle—each round it might be called—the cuckoo would fall back again and lie in a state of collapse, as if the mysterious virtue had gone out of him. But in a very short time the pressure on his side would begin again to annoy him, then to torment him, and at last he would be wrought up to a fresh effort. Thus in a space of eight minutes I saw him struggle four separate times, with a period of collapse after each, to get rid of the robin's egg; and each struggle involved a long series of movements on his part. On each of these occasions the egg was pushed or carried up to the wrong or upper side of the nest, with the result that when the bird jerked the egg from him it rolled back into the bottom of the nest. The statement is therefore erroneous that the cuckoo knows at which side to throw the egg out. Of course he knows nothing, and, as a fact, he tries to throw the egg up as often as down the slope.
The process in each case was as follows: The pressure of the egg against the cuckoo's side, as I have said, was a constant irritation; but the irritability varied in degree in different parts of the body. On the under parts it scarcely existed; its seat was chiefly on the upper surface, beginning at the sides and increasing towards the centre, and was greatest in the hollow of the back. When, in moving, the egg got pushed up to the upper edge of his side, he would begin to fidget more and more, and this would cause it to move round, and so to increase the irritation by touching and pressing against other parts. When all the bird's efforts to get away from the object had only made matters worse, he would cease wriggling and squat down lower and lower in the bottom of the nest, and the egg, forced up, would finally roll right into the cavity in his back—the most irritable part of all. Whenever this occurred, a sudden change that was like a fit would seize the bird; he would stiffen, rise in the nest, his flabby muscles made rigid, and stand erect, his back in a horizontal position, the head hanging down, the little naked wings held up over the back. In that position he looked an ugly, lumpish negro mannikin, standing on thinnest dwarf legs, his back bent, and elbows stuck up above the hollow flat back.
Once up on his small stiffened legs he would move backwards, firmly grasping the hairs and hair-like fibres of the nest-lining, and never swerving, until the rim of the cup-like structure was reached; and then standing, with feet sometimes below and in some cases on the rim, he would jerk his body, throwing the egg off or causing it to roll off. After that he would fall back into the nest and lie quite exhausted for some time, his jelly-like body rising and falling with his breathing.
These changes in the bird strongly reminded me of a person with an epileptic fit, as I had been accustomed to see it on the pampas, where, among the gauchos, epilepsy is one of the commonest maladies;—the sudden rigidity of muscle in some weak, sickly, flabby-looking person, the powerful grip of the hand, the strength in struggling, exceeding that of a man in perfect health, and finally, when this state is over, the weakness of complete exhaustion.
I witnessed several struggles with the egg, but at last, in spite of my watchfulness, I did not see it ejected. On returning after a very short absence, I found the egg had been thrown out and had rolled down the bank, a distance of fourteen inches from the nest.
The young cuckoo appeared to rest more quietly in the nest now, but after a couple of hours the old fidgeting began again, and increased until he was in the same restless state as before. The rapid growth of the birds made the position more and more miserable for the cuckoo, since the robin, thrust against the side of the nest, would throw his head and neck across the cuckoo's back, and he could not endure being touched there. And now a fresh succession of struggles began, the whole process being just the same as when the egg was struggled with. But it was not so easy with the young bird, not because of its greater weight, but because it did not roll like the egg and settle in the middle of the back; it would fall partly on to the cuckoo's back and then slip off into the nest again. But success came at last, after many failures. The robin was lying partly across the cuckoo's neck, when, in moving its head, its little curved beak came down and rested on the very centre of that irritable hollow in the back of its foster-brother. Instantly the cuckoo pressed down into the nest, shrinking away as if hot needles had pricked him, as far as possible from the side where the robin was lying against him, and this movement of course brought the robin more and more over him, until he was thrown right upon the cuckoo's back.
Instantly the rigid fit came on, and up rose the cuckoo, as if the robin weighed no more than a feather on him; and away backwards he went, right up the nest, without a pause, and standing actually on the rim, jerked his body, causing the robin to fall off, clean away from the nest. It fell, in fact, on to a large dock leaf five inches below the rim of the nest, and rested there.
After getting rid of his burden the cuckoo continued in the same position, perfectly rigid, for a space of five or six seconds, during which it again and again violently jerked its body, as if it had the feeling of the burden on it still. Then, the fit over, it fell back, exhausted as usual.
I had been singularly fortunate in witnessing the last scene and conclusion of this little bloodless tragedy in a bird's nest, with callow nestlings for dramatis personÆ, this innocent crime and wrong, which is not a wrong since the cuckoo doesn't think it one. It is a little curious to reflect that a similar act takes place annually in tens of thousands of small birds' nests all over the country, and that it is so rarely witnessed.
Marvellous as the power of the young cuckoo is when the fit is on him, it is of course limited, and when watching his actions I concluded that it would be impossible for him to eject eggs and nestlings from any thrush's nest. The blackbird's would be too deep, and as to the throstle's, he could not move backwards up the sides of the cup-like cavity on account of the smooth plastered surface.
After having seen the young robin cast out I still refrained from touching the nest, as there were yet other things to observe. One was the presence, very close to the nest, of the ejected nestling—what would the parents do in the case? Before dealing with that matter I shall conclude the history of the young cuckoo.
Having got the nest to himself he rested very quietly, and it was not till the following day (1st July) that I allowed myself to touch him. He was, I found, still irritable, and when I put back the eggs he had thrown out he was again miserable in the nest, and the struggle with the eggs was renewed until he got rid of them as before. The next day the irritability had almost gone, and in the afternoon he suffered an egg or a pebble to remain in the nest with him without jerking and wriggling about, and he made no further attempt to eject it. This observation—the loss of irritability on the fifth day after hatching—agrees with that of Mr. Craig, whose account was printed in the Feathered World, 14th July, 1899.
The young cuckoo grew rapidly and soon trod his nest into a broad platform, on which he reposed, a conspicuous object in the scanty herbage on the bank. We often visited and fed him, when he would puff up his plumage and strike savagely at our hands, but at the same time he would always gobble down the food we offered. In seventeen days after being hatched he left the nest and took up his position in an oak tree growing on the bank, and there the robins continued feeding him for the next three days, after which we saw no more of him.
I may add that in May 1901 a pair of robins built on the bank close to where the nest had been made the previous year, and that in this nest a cuckoo was also reared. The bird, when first seen, was apparently about four or five days old, and it had the nest to itself. Three ejected robin's eggs were lying on the bank a little lower down.
It is hardly to be doubted that the robins were the same birds that had reared the cuckoo in the previous season; and it is highly probable that the same cuckoo had returned to place her egg in their nest.
The end of the little history—the fate of the ejected nestling and the attitude of the parent robins—remains to be told. When the young cuckoo throws out the nestlings from nests in trees, hedges, bushes, and reeds, the victims, as a rule, fall some distance to the ground, or in the water, and are no more seen by the old birds. Here the young robin, when ejected, fell a distance of but five or six inches, and rested on a broad, bright green leaf, where it was an exceedingly conspicuous object; and when the mother robin was on the nest—and at this stage she was on it a greater part of the time—warming that black-skinned, toad-like, spurious babe of hers, her bright, intelligent eyes were looking full at the other one, just beneath her, which she had grown in her body and had hatched with her warmth, and was her very own. I watched her for hours; watched her when warming the cuckoo, when she left the nest and when she returned with food, and warmed it again, and never once did she pay the least attention to the outcast lying there so close to her. There, on its green leaf, it remained, growing colder by degrees, hour by hour, motionless, except when it lifted its head as if to receive food, then dropped it again, and when, at intervals, it twitched its body as if trying to move. During the evening even these slight motions ceased, though that feeblest flame of life was not yet extinguished; but in the morning it was dead and cold and stiff; and just above it, her bright eyes on it, the mother robin sat on the nest as before, warming her cuckoo.
How amazing and almost incredible it seems that a being such as a robin, intelligent above most birds as we are apt to think, should prove in this instance to be a mere automaton! The case would, I think, have been different if the ejected one had made a sound, since there is nothing which more excites the parent bird, or which is more instantly responded to, than the cry of hunger or distress of the young. But at this early stage the nestling is voiceless—another point in favour of the parasite. The sight of its young, we see, slowly and dumbly dying, touches no chord in the parent: there is, in fact, no recognition; once out of the nest it is no more than a coloured leaf, or a bird-shaped pebble, or fragment of clay.
It happened that my young fellow-watchers, seeing that the ejected robin if left there would inevitably perish, proposed to take it in to feed and rear it—to save it, as they said; but I advised them not to attempt such a thing, but rather to spare the bird. To spare it the misery they would inflict upon it by attempting to fill its parents' place. They had, so far, never kept a caged bird, nor a pet bird, and had no desire to keep one; all they desired to do in this case was to save the little outcast from death—to rear it till it was able to fly away and take care of itself. That was a difficult, a well-nigh impossible task. The bird, at this early stage, required to be fed at short intervals for about sixteen hours each day on a peculiar kind of food, suited to its delicate stomach—chiefly small caterpillars found in the herbage; and it also needed a sufficient amount by day and night of that animal warmth which only the parent bird could properly supply. They, not being robins, would give it unsuitable food, feed it at improper times, and not keep it at the right temperature, with the almost certain result that after lingering a few days it would die in their hands. But if by giving a great deal of time and much care they should succeed in rearing it, their foundling would start his independent life so handicapped, weakened in constitution by an indoor artificial bringing up, without the training which all young birds receive from their parents after quitting the nest, that it would be impossible for him to save himself. If by chance he should survive until August, he would then be set upon and killed by one of the adult robins already in possession of the ground. Now, when a bird at maturity perishes, it suffers in dying—sometimes very acutely; but if left to grow cold and fade out of life at this stage it can hardly be said to suffer. It is no more conscious than a chick in the shell; take from it the warmth that keeps it in being, and it drops back into nothingness without knowing and, we may say, without feeling anything. There may indeed be an incipient consciousness in that small, soft brain in its early vegetative stage, a first faint glimmer of bright light to be, and a slight sensation of numbness may be actually felt as the body grows cold, but that would be all.
Mistaken kindness
Pain is so common in the world; and, owing to the softness and sensitiveness induced in us by an indoor artificial life—since that softness of our bodies reacts on our minds—we have come to a false or an exaggerated idea of its importance, its painfulness, to put it that way; and we should therefore be but making matters worse, or rather making ourselves more miserable, by looking for and finding it where it does not exist.
The power to feel pain in any great degree comes into the bird's life after this transitional period, and is greatest at maturity, when consciousness and all the mental faculties are fully developed, particularly the passion of fear, which plays continually on the strings of the wild creature's heart with an ever varying touch, producing the feeling in all degrees from the slight disquiet, which is no sooner come than gone, to extremities of agonising terror. It would perhaps have a wholesome effect on their young minds, and save them from grieving over-much at the death of a newly-hatched robin, if they would consider this fact of the pain that is and must be. Not the whole subject—the fact that as things are designed in this world of sentient life there can be no good, no sweetness or pleasure in life, nor peace and contentment and safety, nor happiness and joy, nor any beauty or strength or lustre, nor any bright and shining quality of body or mind, without pain, which is not an accident nor an incident, nor something ancillary to life, but is involved in and a part of life, of its very colour and texture. That would be too long to speak about; all I meant was to consider that small part of the fact, the necessary pain to and destruction of the bird life around them and in the country generally.
Annual bird-mortality
Here, for instance, without going farther than a hundred yards from the house in any direction, they could put their hands in nests in trees and bushes, and on the ground, and in the ivy, and in the old outhouse, and handle and count about one hundred and thirty young birds not yet able to fly. Probably more than twice that number would be successfully reared during the season. How many, then, would be reared in the whole parish! How many in the entire New Forest district, in the whole county of Hampshire, in the entire kingdom! Yet when summer came round again they would find no more birds than they had now. And so it would be in all places; all that incalculable increase would have perished. Many millions would be devoured by rapacious birds and beasts; millions more would perish of hunger and cold; millions of migrants would fall by the way, some in the sea and some on land; those that returned from distant regions would be but a remnant, and the residents that survived through the winter, these, too, would be nothing but a remnant. It is not only that this inconceivable amount of bird life must be destroyed each year, but we cannot suppose that death is not a painful process. In a vast majority of cases, whether the bird slowly perishes of hunger and weakness, or is pursued and captured by birds and beasts of prey, or is driven by cold adverse winds and storms into the waves, the pain, the agony must be great. The least painful death is undoubtedly that of the bird that, weakened by want of sustenance, dies by night of cold in severe weather. It is indeed most like the death of the nestling, but a few hours out of the shell, which has been thrown out of the nest, and which soon grows cold, and dozes its feeble, unconscious life away.
We may say, then, that of all the thousand forms of death which Nature has invented to keep her too rapidly multiplying creatures within bounds, that which is brought about by the singular instinct of the young cuckoo in the nest is the most merciful or the least painful.
I am not sure that I said all this, or marshalled fact and argument in the precise order in which they are here set down. I fancy not, as it seems more than could well have been spoken while we were standing there in the late evening sunlight by that primrose bank, looking down on the little flesh-coloured mite in its scant clothing of black down, fading out of life on its cold green leaf. But what was said did not fail of its effect, so that my young tender-hearted hearers, who had begun to listen with moist eyes, secretly accusing me perhaps of want of feeling, were content in the end to let it be—to go away and leave it to its fate in that mysterious green world we, too, live in and do not understand, in which life and death and pleasure and pain are interwoven light and shade.
CHAPTER II
Between the Boldre and the Exe—Abuse of the New Forest—Character of the population—New Forest code and conscience—A radical change foreshadowed—Tenacity of the Forest fly—Oak woods of Beaulieu—Swallow and pike—Charm of Beaulieu—Instinctive love of open spaces—A fragrant heath—Nightjars—Snipe—Redshanks—Pewits—Cause of sympathy with animals—Grasshopper and spider—A rapacious fly—Melancholy moods—Evening on the heath—"World-strangeness"—Pixie mounds—Death and burial—The dead in the barrows—Their fear of the living.
Between the Boldre and the Exe, or Beaulieu river, there is a stretch of country in most part flat and featureless. It is one of those parts of the Forest which have a bare and desolate aspect; here in places you can go a mile and not find a tree or bush, where nothing grows but a starved-looking heath, scarcely ankle-deep. Wild life in such places is represented by a few meadow-pipits and small lizards. There is no doubt that this barrenness and naked appearance is the result of the perpetual cutting of heath and gorse, and the removal of the thin surface soil for fuel.
Those who do not know the New Forest, or know it only as a collecting- or happy hunting-ground of eggers and "lepidopterists," or as artists in search of paintable woodland scenery know it, and others who make it a summer holiday resort, may say that this abuse is one which might and should be remedied. They would be mistaken. What I and a few others who use their senses see and hear in this or that spot, is, in every case, a very small matter, a visible but an infinitesimal part of that abuse of the New Forest which is old and chronic, and operates always, and is common to the whole area, and, as things are, irremediable. To discover and denounce certain things which ought not to be, to rail against verderers, who are after all what they cannot help being, is about as profitable as it would be to "damn the nature of things."
It must be borne in mind that the Forest area has a considerable population composed of commoners, squatters, private owners, who have inherited or purchased lands originally filched from the Forest; and of a large number of persons who reside mostly in the villages, and are private residents, publicans, shopkeepers, and lodging-house keepers. All these people have one object in common—to get as much as they can out of the Forest. It is true that a large proportion of them, especially those who live in the villages, which are now rapidly increasing their populations, are supposed not to have any Forest rights; but they do as a fact get something out of it; and we may say that, generally, all the people in the Forest dine at one table, and all get a helping out of most of the dishes going, though the first and biggest helpings are for the favoured guests.
New Forest conscience
Those who have inherited rights have indeed come to look on the Forest as in a sense their property. What is given or handed over to them is not in their view their proper share: they take this openly, and get the balance the best way they can—in the dark generally. It is not dishonest to help yourself to what belongs to you; and they must live—must have their whack. They have, in fact, their own moral code, their New Forest conscience, just as other men—miners, labourers on the land, tradesmen, gamekeepers, members of the Stock Exchange, for instance—have each their corporate code and conscience. It may not be the general or the ideal or speculative conscience, but it is what may be called their working conscience. One proof that much goes on in the dark, or that much is winked at, is the paucity of all wild life which is worth any man's while to take in a district where pretty well everything is protected on paper. Game, furred and feathered, would not exist at all but for the private estates scattered through the Forest, in which game is preserved, and from which the depleted Forest lands are constantly being restocked. Again, in all this most favourable country no rare or beautiful species may be found: it would be safer for the hobby, the golden oriole, the hoopoe, the harrier, to nest in a metropolitan park than in the loneliest wood between the Avon and Southampton Water. To introduce any new species, from the biggest—the capercailzie and the great bustard—to the smallest quail, or any small passerine bird with a spot of brilliant colour on its plumage, would be impossible.
The New Forest people are, in fact, just what circumstances have made them. Like all organised beings, they are the creatures of, and subject to, the conditions they exist in; and they cannot be other than they are—namely, parasites on the Forest. And, what is more, they cannot be educated, or preached, or worried out of their ingrained parasitical habits and ways of thought. They have had centuries—long centuries—of practice to make them cunning, and the effect of more stringent regulations than those now in use would only be to polish and put a better edge on that weapon which Nature has given them to fight with.
This being the conclusion, namely, that "things are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be," some of my readers, especially those in the New Forest, may ask, Why, then, say anything about it? why not follow the others who have written books and books and books about the New Forest, books big and books little, from Wise, his classic, and the Victoria History, down to the long row of little rosy guide-books? They saw nothing of all this; or if they saw un-pleasant things they thought it better to hold their tongues, or pens, than to make people uncomfortable.
I confess it would be a mistake, a mere waste of words, to bring these hidden things to light if it could be believed that the New Forest, in its condition and management, will continue for any length of time to be what it is and has been—just that and nothing more. A district in England, it is true, but out of the way, remote, a spot to be visited once or twice in a lifetime just to look at the scenery, like Lundy or the Scilly Isles or the Orkneys. But it cannot be believed. The place itself, its curious tangle of ownership—government by and rights of the crown, of private owners, commoners, and the public—is what it has always been; but many persons have now come to think and to believe that the time is approaching when there will be a disentanglement and a change.
A change foreshadowed
The Forest has been known and loved by a limited number of persons always; the general public have only discovered it in recent years. For one visitor twenty years ago there are scores, probably hundreds, to-day. And year by year, as motoring becomes more common, and as cycling from being general grows, as it will, to be universal, the flow of visitors to the Forest will go on at an ever-increasing rate, and the hundreds of to-day will be thousands in five years' time. With these modern means of locomotion, there is no more attractive spot than this hundred and fifty square miles of level country which contains the most beautiful forest scenery in England. And as it grows in favour in all the country as a place of recreation and refreshment, the subject of its condition and management, and the ways of its inhabitants, will receive an increased attention. The desire will grow that it shall not be spoilt, either by the authorities or the residents, that it shall not be turned into townships and plantations, nor be starved, nor its wild life left to be taken and destroyed by anyone and everyone. It will be seen that the "rights" I have spoken of, with the unwritten laws and customs which are kept more or less in the dark, are in conflict with the better and infinitely more important rights of the people generally—of the whole nation. Once all this becomes common knowledge, that which some now regard as a mere dream, a faint hope, something too remote for us to concern ourselves about, will all at once appear to us as a practical object—something to be won by fighting, and certainly worth fighting for.
It may be said at once, and I fancy that anyone who knows the inner life of the Forest people will agree with me, that so long as these are in possession (and here all private owners are included) there can be no great change, no permanent improvement made in the Forest. That is the difficulty, but it is not an insuperable one. Public opinion, and the desire of the people for anything, is a considerable force to-day; so that, inspired by it, the most timid and conservative governments are apt all at once to acquire an extraordinary courage. Sustained by that outside force, the most tender-hearted and sensitive Prime Minister would not in the least mind if some persons were to dub him a second and worse William the Bastard.
The people in this district have a curious experiment to show the wonderful power of the Forest fly in retaining its grasp. A man takes the fly between his finger and thumb, and with the other hand holds a single hair of a cow or horse for it to seize, then gently pulls hair and fly apart. The fly does not release his hold—he splits the hair, or at any rate shaves a piece off right down to the fine end with his sharp, grasping claw. Doubtless the human parasite will, when his time comes, show an equal tenacity; he will embrace the biggest and oldest oak he knows, and to pluck him from his beloved soil it will be necessary to pull up the tree by its roots. But this is a detail, and may be left to the engineers.
Overlooking Beaulieu
Beyond that starved, melancholy wilderness, the sight of which has led me into so long a digression, one comes to a point which overlooks the valley of the Exe; and here one pauses long before going down to the half-hidden village by the river. Especially if it is in May or June, when the oak is in its "glad light grene," for that is the most vivid and beautiful of all vegetable greens, and the prospect is the greenest and most soul-refreshing to be found in England. The valley is all wooded and the wood is all oak—a continuous oak-wood stretching away on the right, mile on mile, to the sea. The sensation experienced at the sight of this prospect is like that of the traveller in a dry desert when he comes to a clear running stream and drinks his fill of water and is refreshed. The river is tidal, and at the full of the tide in its widest part beside the village its appearance is of a small inland lake, grown round with oaks—old trees that stretch their horizontal branches far out and wet their lower leaves in the salt water. The village itself that has this setting, with its ancient watermill, its palace of the Montagus, and the Abbey of Beaulieu, a grey ivied ruin, has a distinction above all Hampshire villages, and is unlike all others in its austere beauty and atmosphere of old-world seclusion and quietude. Above all is that quality which the mind imparts—the expression due to romantic historical associations.
Swallow and pike
One very still, warm summer afternoon I stood on the margin, looking across the sheet of glassy water at a heron on the farther side, standing knee-deep in the shallow water patiently watching for a fish, his grey figure showing distinctly against a background of bright green sedges. Between me and the heron scores of swallows and martins were hawking for flies, gliding hither and thither a little above the glassy surface, and occasionally dropping down to dip and wet their under plumage in the water. And all at once, fifty yards out from the margin, there was a great splash, as if a big stone had been flung out into the lake; and then two or three moments later out from the falling spray and rocking water rose a swallow, struggling laboriously up, its plumage drenched, and flew slowly away. A big pike had dashed at and tried to seize it at the moment of dipping in the water, and the swallow had escaped as by a miracle. I turned round to see if any person was near, who might by chance have witnessed so strange a thing, in order to speak to him about it. There was no person within sight, but if on turning round my eyes had encountered the form of a Cistercian monk, returning from his day's labour in the fields, in his dirty black-and-white robe, his implements on his shoulders, his face and hands begrimed with dust and sweat, the apparition on that day, in the mood I was in, would not have greatly surprised me.
The atmosphere, the expression of the past may so attune the mind as almost to produce the illusion that the past is now.
But more than old memories, great as their power over the mind is at certain impressible moments, and more than Beaulieu as a place where men dwell, is that ineffable freshness of nature, that verdure that like the sunlight and the warmth of the sun penetrates to the inmost being. Here I have remembered the old ornithologist Willughby's suggestion, which no longer seemed fantastic, that the furred and feathered creatures inhabiting arctic regions have grown white by force of imagination and the constant intuition of snow. And here too I have recalled that modern fancy that the soul in man has its proper shape and colour, and have thought that if I came hither with a grey or blue or orange or brown soul, its colour had now changed to green. The pleasure of it has detained me long days in spring, often straying by the river at its full, among the broadly-branching oaks, delighting my sight with the new leaves
                                against the sun shene,
Some very red, and some a glad light grene.
Love of open spaces
Yet these same oak woods, great as their charm is, their green everlasting gladness, have a less enduring hold on the spirit than the open heath, though this may look melancholy and almost desolate on coming to it from those sunlit emerald glades with a green thought in the soul. It seems enough that it is open, where the wind blows free, and there is nothing between us and the sun. It is a passion, an old ineradicable instinct in us: the strongest impulse in children, savage or civilised, is to go out into some open place. If a man be capable of an exalted mood, of a sense of absolute freedom, so that he is no longer flesh and spirit but both in one, and one with nature, it comes to him like some miraculous gift on a hill or down or wide open heath. "You never enjoy the earth aright," wrote Thomas Traherne in his Divine Raptures, "until the sun itself floweth through your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars, and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world."
It may be observed that we must be out and well away from the woods and have a wide horizon all around in order to feel the sun flowing through us. Many of us have experienced these "divine raptures," this sublimated state of feeling; and such moments are perhaps the best in our earthly lives; but it is mainly the Trahernes, the Silurist Vaughans, the Newmans, the Frederic Myers, the Coventry Patmores, the Wordsworths, that speak of them, since such moods best fit, or can be made to fit in with their philosophy, or mysticism, and are, to them, its best justification.
This wide heath, east of Beaulieu, stretching miles away towards Southampton Water, looks level to the eye. But it is not so; it is grooved with long valley-like depressions with marshy or boggy bottoms, all draining into small tributaries of the Dark Water, which flows into the Solent near Lepe. In these bottoms and in all the wet places the heather and furze mixes with or gives place to the bog myrtle, or golden withy; and on the spongiest spots the fragrant yellow stars of the bog asphodel are common in June. These spots are exceedingly rich in colour, with greys and emerald greens and orange yellows of moss and lichen, flecked with the snow-white of cotton-grass.
Here, then, besides that cause of contentment which we find in openness, there is fragrance in fuller measure than in most places. One may wade through acres of myrtle, until that subtle delightful odour is in one's skin and clothes, and in the air one breathes, and seems at last to penetrate and saturate the whole being, and smell seems to be for a time the most important of the senses.
Among the interesting birds that breed on the heath, the nightjar is one of the commonest. A keen naturalist, Mr. E. A. Bankes, who lived close by, told me that he had marked the spot where he had found a pair of young birds, and that each time he rode over the heath he had a look at them, and as they remained there until able to fly, he concluded that it is not true that the parent birds remove the young when the nest has been discovered.
I was not convinced, as it did not appear that he had handled the young birds: he had only looked at them while sitting on his horse. The following summer I found a pair of young not far from the same spot: they were half-fledged and very active, running into the heath and trying to hide from me, but I caught and handled them for some minutes, the parent bird remaining near, uttering her cries. I marked the spot and went back next day, only to find that the birds had vanished.
Snipe: Redshank
The snipe, too, is an annual breeder, and from what I saw of it on the heath I think we have yet something to learn concerning the breeding habits of that much-observed bird. The parent bird is not so wise as most mothers of the feathered world, since her startling cry of alarm, sounding in a small way like the snort of a frightened horse, will attract a person to the spot where she is sheltering her young among the myrtle. She will repeat the cry at intervals a dozen times without stirring or attempting to conceal the young. But she does not always act in the same way. Sometimes she has risen to a great height and begun circling above me, the circles growing smaller or larger as I came nearer or went farther from the spot where the young were lurking.
