Chapter I: FLUNG myself on the heath outside the house just now, with my friend (1)

the Editor. He edits a London literary journal, and disbelieves in everything. He is critical and sceptical. When he inherits glory (as he surely must do in time, for his is the noblest and purest and best of souls at bottom, in spite of its gruffness), I believe he will gaze about him at the golden floor and the walls of chrysoprase, and murmur to himself, “Humph! Not all it’s cracked up to be!” Yet he is as tender as a woman, and as simple as a child; though he has found out the fact that the world is hollow, and that the human doll is stuffed with sawdust.

We lay beside a clump of tall flaming rose-bay—fire-weed, as they call it over yonder in America. There, in the great woodlands, on whose lap I was nursed, a wandering child of the primeval forest, you may see whole vast sheets of that flamboyant willow-herb covering the ground for miles on bare glades in the pinewood. Most visitors fancy it gets its common American name from its blaze of colour; and, indeed, it often spreads like a sea of flame over acres and acres of hillside together. But the prosaic backwoodsman gave it its beautiful title for a more practical reason: because it grows apace wherever a forest fire has killed out and laid waste the native vegetation. Like most of the willow-herbs, it has a floating seed winged with cottony threads, which waft it through the air on pinions of gossamer; and thus it alights on the newly burnt soil, and springs up amain after the first cool shower. Within twelve months it has almost obliterated the signs of devastation on the ground under foot; only the great charred stems and gaunt blackened branches rise above its smiling mass of green leaves and bright blossoms, to tell anew the half-forgotten tale of ruin and disaster.

Here in England the rose-bay is a less frequent denizen, for it loves the wilds, and feels most at home in deep rich meadow bottoms unoccupied by tillage. Now, in Britain these conditions do not often occur since the Norman conquest; still, I have seen vast sheets of its tall pink pyramids of bloom at John Evelyn’s Wootton; while even up here, on our heathery uplands, it fights hard for life among the gorse and bracken. Its beautiful spikes of irregular flowers, wide open below and tapering at the top into tiny knobs of bud, are among the loveliest elements in the natural flora of my poor three acres.

We were lying beside them, then, out of the eye of the sun, under the shadow of one bare and weather-beaten pine-tree, when talk fell by chance on the small brown lizards that skulk among the sandy soil of our hilltop. I said, and I believe, that the lizard population of the British Isles must outnumber the human by many, many millions. For every sandy heath is just a London of lizards. They pullulate in the ling like slum-children in Whitechapel. They were about us, I remarked, as thick as Hyde Park demonstrators; only, instead of demonstrating, they prefer to lie low and conceal their identity. The policeman hawks and the owls on night duty have taught them that wisdom—stern Draconian officers of nature’s executive, who know no gentler punishment than the death penalty for the slightest misdemeanour.

The Editor smiled that sceptical smile which is the terror of young contributors of Notes on Novels. He rejected the lizards like unsuitable copy. He didn’t believe in them. He doubted there were any on the heath at all. He had walked over square miles of English moorland, but never a lizard had he seen, out of all their millions. Imagination, he observed, was an invaluable property to poets and naturalists. It was part of their stock-in-trade. He didn’t seek to deprive them of it. As Falstaff says, a man may surely labour at his vocation.

I was put on my mettle. For once in my life, I did a rash thing; I ventured to prophesy. “If you wish,” I cried, “I’ll catch a lizard, and show you.” The Editor’s face was a study to behold. Phil May would have paid him ten guineas for the copyright. “As you like,” he answered grimly. “Produce your lizards.”

Fortune favours the brave. But I confess I trembled. Never before had I bragged; and now I wondered whether Fortune or Nemesis would carry it. ’Twas two to one on Nemesis. Yet the gods, as Swinburne tells us in “Les Noyades,” are sometimes kindly. We lay still on the heather—still as mice—and waited. Presently, to my great and unexpected joy, a sound as of life!—a rustling among the bilberry bushes! One sharp brown head, and then another, with beady black eyes as keen as a beagle’s, peeped forth from the miniature jungle of brake and cross-leaved heath in the bank beside us. I raised my lids, and looked mutely at the Editor. He followed my glance, and saw the tiny lithe creatures glide slowly from their covert, and crawl with heads held slyly on one side, and then on the other, into the open patch, on which we lay like statues. How they listened and looked! How they raised their quaint small heads, on the alert against the first faint breath of danger! I sat still as a mouse again, holding my breath in suspense, and waiting anxiously for developments. Then a miracle happened. Miracles _do_ happen now and again, as once at Bolsena, to convince the sceptical. My hand lay motionless on the ground at my side. I would not have moved it just then for a sovereign. One wee brown lizard, gazing cautiously around, crept over it with sly care, and, finding it all right, walked up my sleeve as far as the elbow. I checked my heart and watched him. Never in my life before had such a thing happened to me—but I did not say so to the sceptical Editor; on the contrary, I looked as totally unconcerned as if I had been accustomed to lizards taking tours on me daily from my childhood upward. “Are you convinced?” I asked, with a bland smile of triumph. Even the Editor admitted, with a grudging sniff, that seeing is believing.

And, indeed, there _are_ dozens of lizards to the square yard in England, though I never before knew one of them to assail me of its own accord. I have caught them a hundred times by force or fraud among the heaths and sand-pits. The commonest sort hereabouts is the dingy brown viviparous lizard, which lays no eggs, but brings forth its young alive, and tends them like a mother. It is an agile, wee thing, that creeps from its hole or nest during the noontide hours, and basks lazily in the sun in search of insects. But let a fly come near it, and quick as lightning it turns its tiny head, darts upon him like fate, and crunches him up between those sharp small teeth with the ferocity of a crocodile. We have sand-lizards, too, a far timider and wilder species; they bite your hand when caught, and refuse to live in captivity at the bottom of a flowerpot like their viviparous cousins. These pretty wee reptiles are often delicately spotted or banded with green; they lay a dozen leathery eggs in a hole in the sand, where the sun hatches out the poor abandoned little orphans without the aid of their unnatural mother. Still, they are much daintier in their colouring than the more domestic brown kind; and, after all, in a lizard I demand beauty rather than advanced moral qualities. I may be wrong; but such is my opinion. It is all very well to be ethical at Exeter Hall; but too sensitive a conscience is surely out of place in the struggle for life on the open moorland.

XVI.
THE CHRYSALIS YEAR.

IN warm spots under hedges, I see, the first spring insects now begin to appear, timidly and tentatively, from the shelter of their cocoons. Some few of them, indeed, like the lady-birds, the wasps, and the bumble-bees, have struggled through the winter in the winged or perfect form, having hibernated among warm moss or under the bark of trees in favoured situations. These adventurous kinds passed through their larval and pupal stages last year, and a tithe of them live on with difficulty through the winter frosts, to become the mothers and founders of fresh insect communities as April comes round again. But by far the greater number eat and grow as grubs or caterpillars through the summer months, and when autumn approaches turn into cocoons or chrysalides, to lie by for the winter in a snug retreat, well wrapped up in a warm silky or woollen coverlet, and protected underground from snow or hoarfrost. As soon as cold weather approaches, these prudent insects retire from public life, cease from active pursuits, melt themselves up into a sort of organic pulp, lose almost every distinguishable organ or feature, and remain dormant, in a state of indefinite protoplasm, which gradually takes shape again as moth, beetle, or butterfly. Mummies we sometimes call them, but they are not even mummies, for they lose almost entirely their form and limbs; they tide over the winter for the most part in an all but structureless mass, which yet encloses the potentiality of rebuilding in due course the shape and members of the ancestral insect. Slowly new limbs grow out within the protecting chrysalis case, wings bud from the side, and the grub or caterpillar changes by degrees into the totally unlike image of the beetle or butterfly. As soon as warmer weather sets in, the winged forms emerge with the first sunny day from their broken shell. I have seen nettle-butterflies abroad in a spell of genial warmth in the last week of January; a brimstone has been tempted forth to seek his lady-love on St. Valentine’s Day; and fritillaries are abundant in early March sunshine. Lesser insects, whose names are enshrined in scientific Latin alone, often emerge from their mummy-cases even earlier than these familiar and conspicuous lepidoptera.

The moment they peep forth, lo and behold! they find the plant world, for its part, ready decked to greet them. The very same morning that sees the first butterfly and the first bee on the wing, sees also the first crocus opening wide its shining cup in the full sun to woo them. The brimstone is no sooner out than the coltsfoot and the celandine and the bulbous buttercup spread their gold to allure him. And has it ever struck you that the plants, no less than the animals, pass through the winter period in the chrysalis condition? This is no mere figurative flower of speech; it is the scientific statement of a real and profound analogy. During the summer months the leaves of the crocus, the tulip, and the hyacinth have been eating and laying by, exactly as the caterpillar did, to provide material for next year’s flowering season. When winter blows cold, the leaves die down—the plant, as it were, retires underground into its bulb, like the caterpillar into the cocoon, and there remains, formless and organless, a mere pupa-like potentiality of future buds and blossoms. But when warm weather recurs, the bulb once more begins to germinate: it takes fresh form as a vigorous flower-head. Observe, too, that the flowering stem, like the winged stage of the insect, is the sexual epoch of the plant, an avatar told off, as the butterfly by the caterpillar, to produce the seeds which are the eggs of the species. In each case a certain definite period of time is passed in laying by material, in eating and storing only; then comes a quiescent epoch of rest and rebuilding; and this again is followed by a mature stage of marriage and reproduction. Notice, too, in either instance, that the reproductive stage is more beautifully formed and more attractively coloured than the mere accumulative and storing mechanism.

What is thus true of the crocus and of the butterfly is true, to a great extent, of all plants and animals in temperate or cold climates. They enter every winter into a chrysalis stage, from which in early spring they emerge once more, still more beautiful than before, freshly adorned for the mating and nesting period. Trees lose their leaves, and withdraw their protoplasmic and starchy material in a shapeless mass into the permanent tissues; but they hold it there, ready to manufacture it once more into bright green foliage and tasselled catkins, into blushing apple-blossoms, or tall spikes of horse-chestnut flower, or pink bloom of elms, with the first spring sunshine. Squirrels hibernate; moles sleep away the dead of winter; frogs retire to the depths of ponds; slugs bury themselves in the soil; dormice doze in well-lined crannies among the boles of hazels. Many species only tide over the cold weather, indeed, in the most potential form, as eggs or seeds; they are annuals, like the poppy or the aphides of roses. In such cases the whole race is represented for some months by its germs alone: one generation never sees or knows the existence of another. In other instances, somewhat higher, the species survives as pupa or as bulb, adult, no doubt, though in a relatively formless or indefinite shape, yet ready to come forth full-fledged and perfect at the first faint breath of returning summer. Still other kinds, again, struggle through as mature and fully formed insects, or birds, or mammals, and as evergreen trees or shrubs, though they live for the most part a life of low grade, and on accumulated materials. Nature is almost dormant in our zone through the winter months; life is then one vast and varied chrysalis.

XVII.
A SUMMER STROLL.

MY friend the Poet and I walk the world together on somewhat different principles. It is a fixed belief of his that illusion is far more beautiful than reality. He likes to see the distant hills through some dim veil of mist; he likes to believe the skylark feeds on dew and sunshine, and he is revolted when I explain to him, in spite of Shelley, the actual staples of its unromantic diet. To him, it seems, everything loses just half its beauty when he knows all about it. Analysis, he says, is destructive of pleasure. Only in an imagined and unrealized world can he find the pure elements that delight his fancy.

But to me the actual world as it stands is beautiful. I love to descry the very contour of the hills; I love to watch from afar the saucer-shaped combes on the flanks of the South Downs, when the afternoon light floods and bathes them in its glory. Illusion to my mind is less lovely than reality. Nothing on earth seems more beautiful than Truth. I love to catch her face behind the clouds that conceal her.

And now it is the plain unvarnished Truth I am going to give you in this Moorland Idyll. I am going to tell you just what we saw to-day, without one episode or incident save what really occurred to us. I could not make that stroll more exquisite than I found it, if I tried till Doomsday. It was an idyll of real life. May many more so come to me!

We strayed together—the Poet, Elsie, Lucy, and myself—across the moor to Highfield, in search of strawberries. Highfield lies some two miles off, at the beginning of the valley; a lost old-world farm, in a dell of the moors, with a market-garden. You poor Londoners, when you go to buy strawberries, go to buy them prosaically at a commercial fruiterer’s in a noisy street; but we moorlanders go with our basket in our hands to some lonely grange across the heather-clad upland. The first part of our walk lay high over the ridge, where the heath was burnt in the Jubilee year by the great fire; you can still plainly mark the point up to which the flames made a clear sweep of the heather, and the point where they left off, held in check by the beaters. For heather is really a forest-tree of some fifty years’ growth; and the waste where the fire raged is still covered to this day with a shorter crop of young seedling gorse and ling and whortleberry, while the older vegetation unburnt beyond rises tall and bush-like. The blasted part, too, shows by far the finest and deepest purple of any; not because the flowers are really bigger or thicker, but because where the plants are still short the Tyrian purple of the Scotch heather is seen to greatest advantage; whereas, when they rise higher, the Scotch heather is overtopped by the bushier and coarser and taller-growing ling, with its somewhat insipid pale pink blossoms. The Poet thinks the fire makes the heath burn brighter. I think myself it keeps the ling lower.

Anyhow, that spur is one blaze of glory. Not a spot on the moor flares so splendid a purple. We passed through it, single file, by the narrow footpath, where the ling rises knee-high on either side, and the little brown lizards dart wildly to their holes at first sound of a footfall. Along the ridge, past the broom-bushes, now hanging with silvery pods, we continued on the path till we reached the white beam-tree. There the trail diverges a little suddenly to the left; a cock-pheasant broke with a shrill cry on the wing; his whirr as he rose startled the shallow valley. A wood-pigeon, alarmed at his alarm, flapped afield from the pinewood; the low cooing of his fellows from the larches beyond died away at the sound of his warning signal. Then we turned into the middle trail, where it dips towards the lowland.

All at once Elsie started, and gave a little cry—“A fox! a fox!” And, sure enough, there was one. He ran on before us, with his red brush depressed, fifty yards or more along the path on the open. Seldom have I caught a longer or clearer view of him unhunted in England. We were but ten yards behind, and had fairly surprised him. However, he took his discovery like a gentleman, and instead of skulking away to right or left, where the heath rose high, he ran on along the open, so as to give us a fine stare at him. Lucy, who is a visitor, unused to country ways, save as townsfolk know them, had never seen a live fox in the wild state before, and the incident charmed her. He was so lithe and red, and he ran so well, with his sharp head held low, and with the wild air of his species.

By the chestnut plantation, where a grassy little lane dips close between the trees, cropped and cut for hop-poles, we began to descend in real earnest to the valley. A rabbit just dashed across the sward on the slope of path; his twinkling white tail scarce betrayed him for a moment. Two hawks hovered above, but held off for fear of us. Rustlings in the fallen foliage beneath the sapling chestnuts to right and left gave sign of other rabbits, unseen, but scurrying burrow-ward. As we reached the open we disturbed a young covey of nursling partridges. Most of them disappeared after their prudent mother before we could catch a glimpse of them; but one poor little chick, belated and terrified, darted with its tiny half-naked wings erect in an agony of alarm in the opposite direction. It found covert in the chestnuts, its tiny heart throbbing. Alas, that it should have conceived at so early an age so justly unfavourable an idea of humanity!

Beyond the plantation we turned aside into a field, and oh! such a field! Have I words to picture it? It had been sown for grass; but no grass was there. “Bad season,” says the farmer. “Thank Heaven for these slovenly farms,” says the botanist. Blue cornflowers grew in it, thick as stars in heaven; and huge spikes of viper’s bugloss as tall as a man’s waist and more lovely than a turquoise. Who shall describe their hue, their form, their fashion? A great spotted stem, like a lizard’s skin, green flecked with russet brown, and uncanny to look upon; on either side, long twisted spirals of red-and-blue blossoms, each curled like a scorpion’s tail, very strange and lurid. The individual blossom is bright blue, when fully opened, with crimson stamens; the buds are deep red; the dead flowers dry violet. Altogether, a most weird and witch-like plant. I think one might use it with great advantage for incantations and sorcery. The Poet decided to try its effect next time he would rid himself of a discarded lady-love. We plucked great armfuls, and carried them along with us as far as Highfield. Other flowers were there, too, of less poetic interest—bright yellow corn-marigolds, and scented white campion; scarlet poppies by the score, with waving panicles of not a few tall grasses. We gathered of them all, and they stand before me now, gladdening my eyes as I write, in the coarse red pots of plain Hampshire earthenware.

They had no strawberries left, after all, at Highfield. We had our walk for nothing—if that be nothing! So we used the empty basket to carry back our trophies. But, returning by the lane, we filled our vacant arms once more with foxgloves; and the fox himself crossed our path for a second again at the self-same turning, without seeking to reclaim them. Even the Poet admitted we had saved one day from Time’s devouring maw. And that’s how we live, up here in the moorland.

XVIII.
A MOORLAND FIRE.

THE frosts of last winter—that terrible, pitiless winter—killed down two-thirds of the gorse in England; and now that summer has come again, the dry brown branches stand bare and leafless in mute accusation in every moor and common in the country. Only an exceptionally hardy bush here and there puts forth, in a straggling and tentative fashion, a few timid shoots, or struggles ineffectually into feeble bloom on a protected bough or so. The bumble-bees wander about, disconsolate, like the hungry sheep in “Lycidas,” and are not fed; thousands and thousands of them have died this spring from so unexpected a failure of their staple food-stuff. Honey and pollen have been quoted for the bees at starvation prices. We have natural selection here on a large scale in actual action before our very eyes: only the hardiest furze-bushes have this year survived the bitter frost; only the busiest, strongest, and most enterprising bumble-bees are now surviving the serious loss of their accustomed provender. Even heather has suffered much, which is a surprising fact, for heather belongs to a high sub-arctic type, that spreads in both its familiar British forms far north into Scotland, Scandinavia, and even Russia; while gorse, a shrub of much more southern and western nature, is rare in the Highlands, unknown in Norway or Sweden, and, in its smaller form, at least, incapable of enduring the severe winters of Germany to the east of the Rhine.

As a consequence of this dryness and deadness of the gorse, and to some extent of the heather-tops, heath fires have raged this spring in England with a fierceness and commonness I have never seen equalled. Every year, of course, especially about Eastertide, when furze and heather are normally at their driest, owing to the winter sleep, heath fires are frequent enough in times of drought on all sandy moorlands; but, as a rule, they cease altogether for the year when the gorse begins to burgeon and the heath to send up its long green summer shoots. As the sap mounts in the plants, and the spiky leaves grow green, the amount of moisture in stem and branches suffices to preserve the commons and moors from the danger of burning. This summer, however, the dead dry gorse-bushes catch a spark like tinder; and in the district where I live, among pines and heather, we have been nightly surrounded for many weeks by constant heath fires. Sometimes, perhaps, they are kindled of malice prepense, or out of pure boyish mischief; more often, however, I fancy they are due to mere human carelessness in flinging down a match among the arid fuel. A bicyclist’s cigarette thrown lightly by the roadside, a labourer’s pipe turned out casually upon the footpath—any such small thing is enough to set it going; and once lighted, the flames spread before the wind with astonishing rapidity, licking up with their fiery tongues whole leagues of dry gorse, and leaping with frantic glee and in crackling haste from bough to bough of the pines and hollies.

It is a strange sight, indeed, to see at night one of these lurid deluges, sweeping onward irresistibly, amid clouds of smoke and loud snapping of boughs, on its work of devastation. Terrible as it all is, it is yet beautiful while it lasts: the red sibilant flames, the fierce glare on the sky, the beaters beating it down on its leeward edge with branches of pine-trees, and silhouetted in black against the bright glow of the fire, all unite to make up a weird and intensely impressive picture. But to the beasts and birds whose home is on the moor, it is a cataclysm inexpressible, appalling, unthinkable. Lizards run before the advancing phalanx of flames in trembling terror till it catches them by the hundred, and calcines them as they run into fine white ashes; rats squeal from their holes in the bank with piteous screams of agony, as they are slowly roasted alive by the remorseless inundation; rabbits wait in silence in their stifling burrows, and are burned without one sound, for, true to their instincts, they prefer to meet death in their own scorching homes, rather than expose themselves to the dogs who follow every fire, and pounce with mad joy on hapless creatures that run for dear life from its devouring onslaught.

Next day—ah! next day—the area over which the flames have swept is pitiful to behold: blackened soil, charred bushes, naked boughs of burnt fir-trees. Among them, one morning, I saw a poor belated squirrel, exposed on the open, and picking his way painfully over the smoking ground. Beneath his paws the loose black peat still smouldered sullenly. With dazed and doubtful steps, like a stupefied thing, he picked his way among the burning tufts. He had lost his mate, no doubt—his mate, and his little ones. The whole world he knew had been blotted out and effaced in one wild half-hour of indescribable terrors. Now he walked gingerly on tip-toe over the burning soil, as you and I might walk over the ashes of Mayfair if a fissure eruption had spread hot sheets of lava above the site of London. Just such a catastrophe to my squirrel was that awful night’s work. He was stunned and mazed by it. I thought, indeed, for a time, he was half dead and roasted, till a dog ran after him; then, quick as lightning, he darted up a charred tree, and looked down from the bare boughs upon his baffled pursuer. But none of the usual sly triumph was there in his look; the manifold experiences of that deadly night had killed all slyness and all archness out of him for ever. He wandered like a ghost among the blackened branches; his universe was gone; his life was blasted. I never saw a more pathetic sight, nor one that brought home to me in sadder colours the ruthlessness of nature.

XIX.
THE ARCADIAN DONKEY.

ON the slope by the mountain-ashes, where the ridge curves downward into the combe with the plantation of young larch-trees, I met Peter Rashleigh leading his donkey—_Arcades ambo_. “Jenny looks fat enough, Peter,” I said with a nod as I passed on the narrow footpath; “and yet there isn’t much grass up here for her to feed upon.” “Lard bless your soul, sir,” Peter answered with an expansive smile, “grass ain’t what she wants. It don’t noways agree with her. She’s all the better with bracken and furzen-tops. Furzen-tops is good, like mobled queen.” And I believe he was right, too. Jenny’s ancestors from all time have been unaccustomed to rich meadow-feeding, and when their descendants nowadays are turned out into a field of clover they overeat themselves at once, and suffer agonies of mind from the unexpected repletion.

All the dwellers on our moor, in like manner, are poor relations, so to speak, as the donkey is to the horse. They are losers in the struggle for life, yet not quite hopeless losers; creatures that have adapted themselves to the worst positions, which more favoured and successful races could not endure for a moment. The naked Fuegian picks up a living somehow among snow and ice on barren rocks, where a well-clad European would starve and freeze, finding nothing to subsist upon. Just so on the moor; heather, furze, and bracken eke out a precarious livelihood on the sandy soil, where grasses and garden flowers die out at once, unless we artificially enrich the earth for them with leaf-mould from the bottoms and good manure from the farmyards.

More than that, you may take it as a general rule that where grass will grow there is no chance for heather. Not that the heather doesn’t like rich soil, and flourish in it amazingly—when it can get it. If you sow it in garden borders, and keep it well weeded, it will thrive apace, as it never throve in its poor native loam, among the stones and rubble. But the weeding is the secret of its success under such conditions. It isn’t that the heather won’t grow in rich soil, any more than that beggars can’t live on pheasant; but grasses and dandelions, daisies and clovers, can easily give it points in such spots, and beat it. In a very few weeks you will find the lowland plants have grown tall and lush, while the poor distanced heather has been overtopped and crowded out by its sturdier competitors. That is the reason why waterside irises, or Alpine gentians, will grow in garden beds under quite different circumstances from those under which we find them in the state of nature; the whole secret lies in the fact that we restrict competition. Cultivation means merely digging out the native herbs, and keeping them out, once ousted, in favour of other plants which we choose to protect against all their rivals. In rich lowland soils the grasses and other soft succulent herbs outgrow such tough shrubs as ling and Scotch heather. But in the poverty-stricken loam of the uplands, the grasses and garden weeds find no food to batten upon; and there the heather, to the manner born, gets at last a fair field and no favour. It is adapted to the moors, as the camel is to the desert; both have been driven to accommodate themselves to a wretched and thirsty environment; but both have made a virtue of necessity, and risen to the occasion with commendable ingenuity.

Everything about the heather shows long-continued adaptation to arid conditions. Its stems are wiry; its leaves are small, very dry, uninviting as foodstuffs, curled under at the edge, and so arranged in every way as to defy evaporation. Rain sinks so rapidly through the sandy soil the plant inhabits that it does its best to economize every drop, just as we human inhabitants of the moorland economize it by constructing big tanks for the storage of the rain-water that falls on our roof-trees. Warping winds sweep ever across the wold with parching effect; so the heather makes its foliage small, square, and thickly covered by a hard epidermis, as a protection against undue or excessive dryness. It aims at being drought-proof. Its purple bells, in like manner, instead of being soft and fleshy, as is the case with the corollas of meadow-blossoms like the corn-poppy, or woodland flowers like the wild hyacinth, are hard and dry, so as to waste no water; dainty waxen petals, like those of the dog-rose or the cherry-blossom, would wilt and wither at once before the harsh, dry blasts that career unchecked over the open moorland. Yet the heather-bells, though quite dead and papery to the touch, are brilliantly coloured to attract the upland bees, and form such wide patches of purple and pink as you can nowhere match among the largely wind-fertilized herbage of the too grass-green water-meadows. Upland conditions, indeed, always produce rich flowers. The most beautiful flora in Europe is that of the Alps, just below the snow-line; it has been developed by the stray Alpine moths and butterflies. Larger masses of colour are needed to attract these free-flying insects than serve to catch the eyes of the more business-like and regular bees who go their rounds in lowland districts.

Is not the donkey himself a product of somewhat similar conditions? Oriental in his origin, he seems to be merely the modern representative of those ancestral horses which did not succeed in the struggle for existence. Every intermediate stage has now been discovered between the true horses, with their flowing tails and silky coats, and the true donkeys, with their tufted tails and shaggy hair, the middle terms being chiefly found in the northern plains of Asia. Now, our horses, I take it, are the descendants of those original horse-and-donkey-like creatures which took to the grassy meadows, and so waxed fat, and kicked, and developed exceedingly; while our donkeys, I imagine, are the poor, patient offspring of those less lucky brothers or cousins which were pushed by degrees into the deserts and arid hills, and there grew accustomed to a very sparse diet of the essentially prickly and thorny shrubs which always inhabit such spots, just as gorse and heather inhabit our British uplands. That is why the donkey thrives so excellently to this day on thistles and nettle-tops: they represent the ancestral food of his kind for many generations. Certainly, at the present time, wherever we find horses wild it is in broad, grass-clad plains, or steppes, or pampas; wherever we find donkeys, or donkey-like animals, wild, it is among desert or half-desert rocks, and on arid hillsides. It would seem as though the horse was in the last resort a donkey grown big and strong by dint of good living and free space to roam over; while the donkey, on the other hand, is in the last resort a horse grown small and ill-proportioned through want of good food and insufficient elbow-room. It is noteworthy that in small islands, like the Shetlands, small breeds of horses are developed in adaptation to the environment; though, the food being still good pasture in a well-watered country, they retain in most respects their horse-like aspect. But a vengeance o’ Jenny’s case! I have wandered far afield from Peter Rashleigh’s donkey, to have got so soon into evolutionary biology!

XX.
A LIFE-AND-DEATH STRUGGLE.

IT isn’t often a man can stand at his own drawing-room window and be the interested spectator at a combat of wild beasts, where one antagonist not only conquers, but also fairly devours the other! Yet such Roman sport I have just this moment been unlucky enough to witness. Unlucky enough, I say, because the victor did not first kill and then eat his victim, as any combatant with a spark of chivalry in his nature would have done, but slowly chewed him up alive before my eyes, with no more consideration for the feelings of the vanquished than if the unfortunate creature had been a vegetable. I don’t mean to pretend it was tiger _versus_ cobra. The assailant was a thrush, the defender an earthworm. Now, thrushes, we all know, are sweet songsters when they have dined. Has not George Meredith hymned them, as Shelley the skylark? But if you want to see the poetry taken clean out of a thrush, just watch him as he catches and devours an earthworm! The poor unsuspicious annelid, feeling the joy of spring stir in his sluggish veins, comes to the surface for a moment in search of those fallen leaves which form the staple of his blameless vegetarian diet. No mole shakes the earth; the sod is fresh and moist; here seems a propitious moment for an above-ground excursion. So the earthworm pokes out his head and peers around him inquiringly; peers, I venture to say, blind beast though he be, because his method of feeling his way and exploring by touch is so human and inquisitive. But embodied Fate is on the watch, silent, keen-eyed, immovable; and no sooner does that slimy soul poke his nose above the ground than the thrush is upon him, quick and deadly as lightning. In one second the creature feels himself seized by one of his scaly rings, held fast in an iron vice, and slowly chewed piecemeal with the utmost deliberation. He wriggles and squirms, but all in vain; the thrush munches calmly on, now with this side of his bill, now that, drawing the worm ring by ring from the soil to which he desperately clings, and enjoying him as he goes with most evident gusto.

Both are intruders here. When first we came to our hilltop there were no thrushes and no earthworms, no house-martins and no sparrows. But the building of one simple red-tiled cottage set up endless changes in the fauna and flora. A whole revolution was inaugurated over a realm of three acres. The house-martins were the first to come; they settled in before us. Ancestral instinct has taught them to know well that where a house is built there will be eaves to nest under, and people will inhabit it, who throw about meat and fruit, which attract the flies; and flies are the natural diet of house-martins. The sparrows came next; but the thrushes loitered longer. And the manner of their coming was after this fashion—

The powers that be had decided on a tennis-lawn. Previously nothing but heather and gorse spread over the hilltop; that is the native vegetation of this light sandstone upland. But in order to have tennis you must needs have a sward; so, much against the grain, we grubbed up wild heath enough to make a court, and sowed it for a tennis-lawn. Grass cannot grow, however, on such poor light soil as suits heather best, so we imported a few cartloads of mould and manure from a farm in the valley. With the mould came worms, who, finding a fair field, began to be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth with laudable rapidity. Few or no earthworms live in the shallow sand of the open moor; and, though a mole or two can just eke out a precarious living here and there in the softer and grassier hollows—I see their mounds every day as I cross the common—worms are not nearly abundant enough to tempt the epicurean and greedy thrushes from the shelter of the valley. For the mole, you see, goes out hunting underground on the trail of the earthworm; but the thrush must needs depend upon the few stray stragglers which come to the surface morning and evening.

No sooner had worms begun to make castings on the lawn, however, than some Columbus thrush discovered a new world was opened to him. He and his mate took formal possession of the patch of green, which they hold as their own, using it regularly as a private hunting-ground. Every other tennis-lawn in the neighbourhood similarly supports its pair of thrushes, as (according to the poet) every rood of ground in England once “maintained its man.” One of our neighbours has three lawns, terraced off in steps, and each has been annexed by a particular thrush family, which holds it stoutly against all comers. It is a curious sight in spring, when the nestlings are young, to see the parent birds going carefully over the ground—surveying it in squares, as it were—the cock a little in front, the hen hopping after him at some distance on one side, and making sure that not an inch of the superficial area remains unhunted. They eat many snails, too, breaking the shells against big stones; and they hunt for slugs now and then in the moist ditch by the roadway. While the nestlings are unfledged the industry of the elder birds is ceaseless; for they lay in early spring, and have to rear their young while food is still far from cheap or abundant. And, oh! but it is a gruesome sight to see them teaching the young idea of their kind how to tackle a worm—how to drag him from his burrow, ring after ring, as he struggles, to chop him up and mangle him till resistance and escape are absolutely hopeless, and then to devour him piecemeal. But in autumn the fierce heart of the carnivore softens; worms being then scarce, he condescends to berries.

XXI.
THE SHRIKE’S LARDER.

YES; there is no denying it—this is a shrike’s larder! The poor small beasts impaled here must have been hung upon thorns by that cruelest of executioners. The hoard belongs, I think, to a red-backed shrike, whom I have seen more than once flitting through the trees of this copse on the hillside; for the great grey shrike has gone long since—he comes to us only as a winter visitor in the hardest seasons—while woodchats and smaller grey shrike hardly occur at all in this out-of-the-way district. Indeed, the red-backed bird is the only true-born Briton of the entire family; he alone nests and rears his young here regularly. Butcher-birds, the gamekeepers call them, and well they deserve the title; for they catch and spit alive on the thorns of their larder all the bumble-bees and beetles, all the field-mice and robins they can swoop down upon and surprise from their bosky ambush. Cruel and ruthless birds, they seize whatever they can hold; but, instead of killing and eating their prey at once, they keep it deliberately alive as long as possible, on the stout thorn of a sloe-tree. Look at that poor shrew-mouse, for example, wriggling feebly on his stake, which the cunning bird has so managed to intertwine among the twigs as to make escape impossible; he must have been hanging there in torture for a week by his look, but the shrike will not eat him till the last possible moment, unless so minded. And that poor lizard, again, with his wonderful tenacity of life; he may have been impaled for a fortnight, yet the skin on his ribs still rises and falls with a faint breathing action. More merciful than nature, we will put him out of his pain; though, after all, what good have we done by it? The shrike will catch another to replace him.

We talk of beautiful instincts and beautiful adaptations, so I suppose we may also talk of hateful ones; and this instinct of the shrike’s is decidedly hateful. Yet such conduct is the rule in the world of animals: each species thinks only of its own comfort and pleasure; none takes the slightest heed of the pains of others. As Tennyson put it long ago—

“Nature is one with rapine, a harm no preacher can heal;
The mayfly is torn by the swallow, the sparrow spear’d by the
shrike,
And the whole little wood where I sit is a world of plunder and
prey.”

Assuredly no creature is worse in this respect than our red-backed butcher-bird. Yet he is a handsome wretch, for all that, especially in his beautiful and delicate spring plumage, when he first returns to us from his African winter quarters—chestnut and reddish brown above, melting into dainty grey-blue about the head and neck, not unrelieved by bold patches of pure black and pure white on the tail and forehead. Moreover, strange to say, he is an accomplished musician. But there is an ugly look about him, none the less, for all his fine song and all his fine feathers. He has a cruel, falcon-like expression of face; and any one who has ever seen him engaged in calmly spiking a harvest-mouse or a frog on a thick spine of blackthorn, without the faintest regard to his helpless victim’s writhing, cannot fail to recognize the evil element in his eye, whenever he gives one the rare chance of viewing him.

Old-fashioned ornithologists used to think the shrikes were related to the birds of prey; and, indeed, they do somewhat resemble the smaller hawks in external features. But the likeness is purely superficial and adaptive—curved bill, strong talons, hard bristles on the beak, the keen eye of the hunter: it is the kind of similarity that must always exist among animals whose mode of life is closely similar. We know nowadays that structure depends upon habit, not habit upon structure. If you take to earning your living by rapine, you will acquire certain traits of strength and keenness inevitable in predatory forms; and that is why the shrikes, which are related by descent to the wrens and thrushes, have grown to resemble in external conformation the sparrowhawks and kestrels.

On the rare occasions when you do catch sight of a shrike, he is usually seated, half in ambush, on some perch in a tall hawthorn, or even openly on the telegraph-wires that cross a patch of likely hunting country. There he peers about and watches with his keen hazel eyes till mouse, frog, or lizard, bee, beetle, or dragon-fly, stirs in the meadow beneath him. Then, swift as thought, he swoops down upon his quarry from his invisible seat, not hovering and casting a telltale shadow like the hawk, but waiting his chance unseen under cover of the thicket. His favourite food, indeed, consists of bees and other soft-bodied insects; these he generally eats at once, returning forthwith to his perch and his peering. But if he catches any bigger prey, such as a frog, a field-mouse, a tomtit, or a partridge chick, he flies off with it to the larder, and there spears the wretched victim on a stout sharp spine, to devour it at his leisure. Even beetles and dragon-flies he will sometimes keep in stock, especially if his appetite is assuaged for the moment. Nevertheless, the butcher-bird is in the main an insect-eater; he is commonest on warm sandy soils, like that of these Surrey moors, where bumble-bees and cockchafers abound, and enable him to make an easy living. Indeed, all beasts and birds are mostly regulated in their distribution by the abundance or scarcity of their food or prey. Shrikes have, doubtless, no native objection to cold thick clay, as such; but bees being rare on moist soils, and field-mice or lizards still rarer, the shrike learns to avoid damp, chilly bottoms as herbivores avoid a dry desert country.

XXII.
NESTS AND NO NESTS.

STROLLING across the moor in the sunshine to-day, past the lonely pine where the night-jar sits crooning to his lady-love in the twilight, I came suddenly across his grey mate herself, and saw her flutter up sleepily in dazed surprise from the bare ground where she was sitting. As she flapped her mottled wings and sailed slowly away, like a blinking owl disturbed in the daytime, I noticed that I had lighted unawares upon her nest, or rather, her eggs, for she lays them on the open, without bed of any sort. I left them untouched, for I am no collector. A few minutes later, I came abreast of the low cliff where the sand-martins have established their twittering colony. The soft yellow sandstone that forms the cutting is honey-combed with their tunnels; and as I leaned on my stick and looked, I saw the busy brown birds gliding in and out, with their long curved flight, and carrying back mouthfuls of gnats and mayflies to their fledgelings in the burrows. It was beautiful to watch them swooping in great arcs over the gorse and bracken, and then darting straight, with unerring accuracy, to the mouth of their tunnels. They alight at the very door with all the skill of born pilots, never missing or overshooting the mark by one inch, but steering upon it so truly that they look as though failure or miscalculation were impossible.

These two little episodes coming together set me thinking; ’tis a bad habit one indulges in when one walks too much alone in the open. In towns one doesn’t think, because the shop-windows, and the horses, and the noise, and the people, and the omnibuses distract one; but in the country, one gives way a great deal too readily to what Plato calls the “divine disease” of thinking. I began to philosophize. How curious, I said to myself, that we have but five kinds of bird in England that hawk on the wing after insects in the open; and of all those five, not one builds a proper respectable nest, woven of twigs and straws, like a sparrow or a robin! Every one of them has some peculiar little fancy of his own—goes in for some individual freak of originality. The night-jar, which is the simplest and earliest in type of the group, lays its eggs on the bare ground, and rises superior in its Spartan simplicity to such petty luxuries as beds and bedding. The swift, that ecclesiologically-minded bird, which loves the chief seats in the synagogue, the highest pinnacles of tower or steeple, gums together a soft nest of floating thistle-down and feathers, by means of a sticky secretion from its own mouth, distilled in the last resort from the juices of insects. The swallow and the house-martin, again, make domed mud huts, and line them inside with soft floating material. Finally, the sand-martin excavates with its bill the soft sandstone of cliffs or roadside cuttings, and strews a bed within for its callow young of cotton-grass and dandelion parachutes.

Why this curious variety among themselves, and this equally curious divergence from the common practice of bird-kind in general? Clearly, thought I, it must bear some definite relation to the habits and manners of the birds which exhibit it. Let me think what it means. Aha, aha, eureka! I have found it! The insect-hawking birds are not a natural group; by descent they have nothing at all to do with one another. Closely as the swift resembles the swallow in form, in flight, in shape of bill, in habits and manners, we now know that the swift is a specialized woodpecker, while the swallow and the martins are specialized sparrows. (I use both words, _bien entendu_, in quite their widest and most Pickwickian evolutionary acceptation.) The swift and the night-jar belong to one great family of birds; the swallow, the house-martin, and the sand-martin to another. The likeness in form and in mode of flight has been brought about by similarity in their style of living. Two different birds of two different types both took, ages since, to hawking after flies and midges in the open air. Each group was thus compelled to acquire long and powerful wings, a light and airy body, a good steering tail, a wide gape of mouth, and a rapid curved flight, so as to swoop down upon and catch its petty prey unsuspected. So, in the long run, the two types which hawk most in the open, the swifts and the swallows, have grown so like that only by minute anatomical differences can we refer the remoter ancestry of one species to the woodpeckers and humming-birds, and the remoter ancestry of the other to the tits and sparrows.

How does their manner of life affect their mode of nesting, however? Indirectly, in this way. Birds that live largely off seeds and fruits and hard-shelled beetles, have hard short beaks to grind their food with, and sit much in thickets, scrub, or hedgerows. But birds that hawk on the wing after small soft flies must have wide soft bills, and a gaping mouth; they can hardly perch at all on trees or bushes, and their feet are too weak to be of much use for walking. Indeed, if a swift once alights on the ground, he can scarcely get up again, so difficult is it for the long wings to work in a narrow space, and so slight a power of jumping have the feeble little legs. Hence it follows that birds of the hedgerow type can readily build nests of twigs and straws, which they gather as they perch, or seek on the ground; and they are enabled to weave them with their hard bills and active feet; while birds of the hawking type cannot pick up sticks or gather straws on the ground, and have beaks quite unadapted for dealing with such intractable materials. The consequence is they have been compelled to find out each some new plan for itself, and to build their nest out of such stray material as their habits permit them.