Chapter III: A Roman Brook (1)

The brook has forgotten me, but I have not forgotten the brook. Many faces have been mirrored since in the flowing water, many feet have waded in the sandy shallow. I wonder if any one else can see it in a picture before the eyes as I can, bright, and vivid as trees suddenly shown at night by a great flash of lightning. All the leaves and branches and the birds at roost are visible during the flash. It is barely a second; it seems much longer. Memory, like the lightning, reveals the pictures in the mind. Every curve, and shore, and shallow is as familiar now as when I followed the winding stream so often. When the mowing-grass was at its height, you could not walk far beside the bank; it grew so thick and strong and full of umbelliferous plants as to weary the knees. The life as it were of the meadows seemed to crowd down towards the brook in summer, to reach out and stretch towards the life-giving water. There the buttercups were taller and closer together, nails of gold driven so thickly that the true surface was not visible. Countless rootlets drew up the richness of the earth like miners in the darkness, throwing their petals of yellow ore broadcast above them. With their fulness of leaves the hawthorn bushes grow larger--the trees extend farther--and thus overhung with leaf and branch, and closely set about by grass and plant, the brook disappeared only a little way off, and could not have been known from a mound and hedge. It was lost in the plain of meads--the flowers alone saw its sparkle.

Hidden in those bushes and tall grasses, high in the trees and low on the ground, there were the nests of happy birds. In the hawthorns blackbirds and thrushes built, often overhanging the stream, and the fledglings fluttered out into the flowery grass. Down among the stalks of the umbelliferous plants, where the grasses were knotted together, the nettle-creeper concealed her treasure, having selected a hollow by the bank so that the scythe should pass over. Up in the pollard ashes and willows here and there wood-pigeons built. Doves cooed in the little wooded enclosures where the brook curved almost round upon itself. If there was a hollow in the oak a pair of starlings chose it, for there was no advantageous nook that was not seized on. Low beside the willow stoles the sedge-reedlings built; on the ledges of the ditches, full of flags, moor-hens made their nests. After the swallows had coursed long miles over the meads to and fro, they rested on the tops of the ashes and twittered sweetly. Like the flowers and grass, the birds were drawn towards the brook. They built by it, they came to it to drink; in the evening a grasshopper-lark trilled in a hawthorn bush. By night crossing the footbridge a star sometimes shone in the water underfoot. At morn and even the peasant girls came down to dip; their path was worn through the mowing-grass, and there was a flat stone let into the bank as a step to stand on. Though they were poorly habited, without one line of form or tint of colour that could please the eye, there is something in dipping water that is Greek--Homeric--something that carries the mind home to primitive times. Always the little children came with them; they too loved the brook like the grass and birds. They wanted to see the fishes dart away and hide in the green flags: they flung daisies and buttercups into the stream to float and catch awhile at the flags, and float again and pass away, like the friends of our boyhood, out of sight. Where there was pasture roan cattle came to drink, and horses, restless horses, stood for hours by the edge under the shade of ash trees. With what joy the spaniel plunged in, straight from the bank out among the flags--you could mark his course by seeing their tips bend as he brushed them swimming. All life loved the brook.

Far down away from roads and hamlets there was a small orchard on the very bank of the stream, and just before the grass grew too high to walk through I looked in the enclosure to speak to its owner. He was busy with his spade at a strip of garden, and grumbled that the hares would not let it alone, with all that stretch of grass to feed on. Nor would the rooks; and the moor-hens ran over it, and the water-rats burrowed; the wood-pigeons would have the peas, and there was no rest from them all. While he talked and talked, far from the object in hand, as aged people will, I thought how the apple tree in blossom before us cared little enough who saw its glory. The branches were in bloom everywhere, at the top as well as at the side; at the top where no one could see them but the swallows. They did not grow for human admiration: that was not their purpose; that is our affair only--we bring the thought to the tree. On a short branch low down the trunk there hung the weather-beaten and broken handle of an earthenware vessel; the old man said it was a jug, one of the old folks' jugs--he often dug them up. Some were cracked, some nearly perfect; lots of them had been thrown out to mend the lane. There were some chips among the heap of weeds yonder. These fragments were the remains of Anglo-Roman pottery. Coins had been found--half a gallon of them--the children had had most. He took one from his pocket, dug up that morning; they were of no value, they would not ring. The labourers tried to get some ale for them, but could not; no one would take the little brass things. That was all he knew of the Caesars: the apples were in fine bloom now, weren't they?

Fifteen centuries before there had been a Roman station at the spot where the lane crossed the brook. There the centurions rested their troops after their weary march across the downs, for the lane, now bramble-grown and full of ruts, was then a Roman road. There were villas, and baths, and fortifications; these things you may read about in books. They are lost now in the hedges, under the flowering grass, in the ash copses, all forgotten in the lane, and along the footpath where the June roses will bloom after the apple blossom has dropped. But just where the ancient military way crosses the brook there grow the finest, the largest, the bluest, and most lovely forget-me-nots that ever lover gathered for his lady.

The old man, seeing my interest in the fragments of pottery, wished to show me something of a different kind lately discovered. He led me to a spot where the brook was deep, and had somewhat undermined the edge. A horse trying to drink there had pushed a quantity of earth into the stream, and exposed a human skeleton lying within a few inches of the water. Then I looked up the stream and remembered the buttercups and tall grasses, the flowers that crowded down to the edge; I remembered the nests, and the dove cooing; the girls that came down to dip, the children that cast their flowers to float away. The wind blew the loose apple bloom and it fell in showers of painted snow. Sweetly the greenfinches were calling in the trees: afar the voice of the cuckoo came over the oaks. By the side of the living water, the water that all things rejoiced in, near to its gentle sound, and the sparkle of sunshine on it, had lain this sorrowful thing.

MEADOW THOUGHTS

The old house stood by the silent country road, secluded by many a long, long mile, and yet again secluded within the great walls of the garden. Often and often I rambled up to the milestone which stood under an oak, to look at the chipped inscription low down--"To London, 79 Miles." So far away, you see, that the very inscription was cut at the foot of the stone, since no one would be likely to want that information. It was half hidden by docks and nettles, despised and unnoticed. A broad land this seventy-nine miles--how many meadows and corn-fields, hedges and woods, in that distance?--wide enough to seclude any house, to hide it, like an acorn in the grass. Those who have lived all their lives in remote places do not feel the remoteness. No one else seemed to be conscious of the breadth that separated the place from the great centre, but it was, perhaps, that consciousness which deepened the solitude to me. It made the silence more still; the shadows of the oaks yet slower in their movement; everything more earnest. To convey a full impression of the intense concentration of Nature in the meadows is very difficult--everything is so utterly oblivious of man's thought and man's heart. The oaks stand--quiet, still--so still that the lichen loves them. At their feet the grass grows, and heeds nothing. Among it the squirrels leap, and their little hearts are as far away from you or me as the very wood of the oaks. The sunshine settles itself in the valley by the brook, and abides there whether we come or not. Glance through the gap in the hedge by the oak, and see how concentrated it is--all of it, every blade of grass, and leaf, and flower, and living creature, finch or squirrel. It is mesmerised upon itself. Then I used to feel that it really was seventy-nine miles to London, and not an hour or two only by rail, really all those miles. A great, broad province of green furrow and ploughed furrow between the old house and the city of the world. Such solace and solitude seventy-nine miles thick cannot be painted; the trees cannot be placed far enough away in perspective. It is necessary to stay in it like the oaks to know it.

Lime-tree branches overhung the corner of the garden-wall, whence a view was easy of the silent and dusty road, till overarching oaks concealed it. The white dust heated by the sunshine, the green hedges, and the heavily massed trees, white clouds rolled together in the sky, a footpath opposite lost in the fields, as you might thrust a stick into the grass, tender lime leaves caressing the cheek, and silence. That is, the silence of the fields. If a breeze rustled the boughs, if a greenfinch called, if the cart-mare in the meadow shook herself, making the earth and air tremble by her with the convulsion of her mighty muscles, these were not sounds, they were the silence itself. So sensitive to it as I was, in its turn it held me firmly, like the fabled spells of old time. The mere touch of a leaf was a talisman to bring me under the enchantment, so that I seemed to feel and know all that was proceeding among the grass-blades and in the bushes. Among the lime trees along the wall the birds never built, though so close and sheltered. They built everywhere but there. To the broad coping-stones of the wall under the lime boughs speckled thrushes came almost hourly, sometimes to peer out and reconnoitre if it was safe to visit the garden, sometimes to see if a snail had climbed up the ivy. Then they dropped quietly down into the long strawberry patch immediately under. The cover of strawberries is the constant resource of all creeping things; the thrushes looked round every plant and under every leaf and runner. One toad always resided there, often two, and as you gathered a ripe strawberry you might catch sight of his black eye watching you take the fruit he had saved for you.

Down the road skims an eave-swallow, swift as an arrow, his white back making the sun-dried dust dull and dingy; he is seeking a pool for mortar, and will waver to and fro by the brook below till he finds a convenient place to alight. Thence back to the eave here, where for forty years he and his ancestors built in safety. Two white butterflies fluttering round each other rise over the limes, once more up over the house, and soar on till their white shows no longer against the illumined air. A grasshopper calls on the sward by the strawberries, and immediately fillips himself over seven leagues of grass-blades. Yonder a line of men and women file across the field, seen for a moment as they pass a gateway, and the hay changes from hay-colour to green behind them as they turn the under but still sappy side upwards. They are working hard, but it looks easy, slow, and sunny. Finches fly out from the hedgerow to the overturned hay. Another butterfly, a brown one, floats along the dusty road--the only traveller yet. The white clouds are slowly passing behind the oaks, large puffed clouds, like deliberate loads of hay, leaving little wisps and flecks behind them caught in the sky. How pleasant it would be to read in the shadow! There is a broad shadow on the sward by the strawberries cast by a tall and fine-grown American crab tree. The very place for a book; and although I know it is useless, yet I go and fetch one and dispose myself on the grass.

I can never read in summer out-of-doors. Though in shadow the bright light fills it, summer shadows are broadest daylight. The page is so white and hard, the letters so very black, the meaning and drift not quite intelligible, because neither eye nor mind will dwell upon it. Human thoughts and imaginings written down are pale and feeble in bright summer light. The eye wanders away, and rests more lovingly on greensward and green lime leaves. The mind wanders yet deeper and farther into the dreamy mystery of the azure sky. Once now and then, determined to write down that mystery and delicious sense while actually in it, I have brought out table and ink and paper, and sat there in the midst of the summer day. Three words, and where is the thought? Gone. The paper is so obviously paper, the ink so evidently ink, the pen so stiff; all so inadequate. You want colour, flexibility, light, sweet low sound--all these to paint it and play it in music, at the same time you want something that will answer to and record in one touch the strong throb of life and the thought, or feeling, or whatever it is that goes out into the earth and sky and space, endless as a beam of light. The very shade of the pen on the paper tells you how utterly hopeless it is to express these things. There is the shade and the brilliant gleaming whiteness; now tell me in plain written words the simple contrast of the two. Not in twenty pages, for the bright light shows the paper in its common fibre-ground, coarse aspect, in its reality, not as a mind-tablet.

The delicacy and beauty of thought or feeling is so extreme that it cannot be inked in; it is like the green and blue of field and sky, of veronica flower and grass blade, which in their own existence throw light and beauty on each other, but in artificial colours repel. Take the table indoors again, and the book; the thoughts and imaginings of others are vain, and of your own too deep to be written. For the mind is filled with the exceeding beauty of these things, and their great wondrousness and marvel. Never yet have I been able to write what I felt about the sunlight only. Colour and form and light are as magic to me. It is a trance. It requires a language of ideas to convey it. It is ten years since I last reclined on that grass plot, and yet I have been writing of it as if it was yesterday, and every blade of grass is as visible and as real to me now as then. They were greener towards the house, and more brown-tinted on the margin of the strawberry bed, because towards the house the shadow rested longest. By the strawberries the fierce sunlight burned them.

The sunlight put out the books I brought into it just as it put out the fire on the hearth indoors. The tawny flames floating upwards could not bite the crackling sticks when the full beams came pouring on them. Such extravagance of light overcame the little fire till it was screened from the power of the heavens. So here in the shadow of the American crab tree the light of the sky put out the written pages. For this beautiful and wonderful light excited a sense of some likewise beautiful and wonderful truth, some unknown but grand thought hovering as a swallow above. The swallows hovered and did not alight, but they were there. An inexpressible thought quivered in the azure overhead; it could not be fully grasped, but there was a sense and feeling of its presence. Before that mere sense of its presence the weak and feeble pages, the small fires of human knowledge, dwindled and lost meaning. There was something here that was not in the books. In all the philosophies and searches of mind there was nothing that could be brought to face it, to say, This is what it intends, this is the explanation of the dream. The very grass-blades confounded the wisest, the tender lime leaf put them to shame, the grasshopper derided them, the sparrow on the wall chirped his scorn. The books were put out, unless a screen were placed between them and the light of the sky--that is, an assumption, so as to make an artificial mental darkness. Grant some assumptions--that is, screen off the light--and in that darkness everything was easily arranged, this thing here, and that yonder. But Nature grants no assumptions, and the books were put out. There is something beyond the philosophies in the light, in the grass-blades, the leaf, the grasshopper, the sparrow on the wall. Some day the great and beautiful thought which hovers on the confines of the mind will at last alight. In that is hope, the whole sky is full of abounding hope. Something beyond the books, that is consolation.

The little lawn beside the strawberry bed, burned brown there, and green towards the house shadow, holds how many myriad grass-blades? Here they are all matted together, long, and dragging each other down. Part them, and beneath them are still more, overhung and hidden. The fibres are intertangled, woven in an endless basket-work and chaos of green and dried threads. A blamable profusion this; a fifth as many would be enough; altogether a wilful waste here. As for these insects that spring out of it as I press the grass, a hundredth part of them would suffice. The American crab tree is a snowy mount in spring; the flakes of bloom, when they fall, cover the grass with a film--a bushel of bloom, which the wind takes and scatters afar. The extravagance is sublime. The two little cherry trees are as wasteful; they throw away handfuls of flower; but in the meadows the careless, spendthrift ways of grass and flower and all things are not to be expressed. Seeds by the hundred million float with absolute indifference on the air. The oak has a hundred thousand more leaves than necessary, and never hides a single acorn. Nothing utilitarian--everything on a scale of splendid waste. Such noble, broadcast, open-armed waste is delicious to behold. Never was there such a lying proverb as "Enough is as good as a feast." Give me the feast; give me squandered millions of seeds, luxurious carpets of petals, green mountains of oak leaves. The greater the waste, the greater the enjoyment--the nearer the approach to real life. Casuistry is of no avail; the fact is obvious; Nature flings treasures abroad, puffs them with open ups along on every breeze, piles up lavish layers of them in the free open air, packs countless numbers together in the needles of a fir tree. Prodigality and superfluity are stamped on everything she does. The ear of wheat returns a hundredfold the grain from which it grew. The surface of the earth offers to us far more than we can consume--the grains, the seeds, the fruits, the animals, the abounding products are beyond the power of all the human race to devour. They can, too, be multiplied a thousandfold. There is no natural lack. Whenever there is lack among us it is from artificial causes, which intelligence should remove.

From the littleness, and meanness, and niggardliness forced upon us by circumstances, what a relief to turn aside to the exceeding plenty of Nature! There are no bounds to it, there is no comparison to parallel it, so great is this generosity. No physical reason exists why every human being should not have sufficient, at least, of necessities. For any human being to starve, or even to be in trouble about the procuring of simple food, appears, indeed, a strange and unaccountable thing, quite upside down, and contrary to sense, if you do but consider a moment the enormous profusion the earth throws at our feet. In the slow process of time, as the human heart grows larger, such provision, I sincerely trust, will be made that no one need ever feel anxiety about mere subsistence. Then, too, let there be some imitation of this open-handed generosity and divine waste. Let the generations to come feast free of care, like my finches on the seeds of the mowing-grass, from which no voice drives them. If I could but give away as freely as the earth does!

The white-backed eave-swallow has returned many, many times from the shallow drinking-place by the brook to his half-built nest. Sometimes the pair of them cling to the mortar they have fixed under the eave, and twitter to each other about the progress of the work. They dive downwards with such velocity when they quit hold that it seems as if they must strike the ground, but they shoot up again, over the wall and the lime trees. A thrush has been to the arbour yonder twenty times; it is made of crossed laths, and overgrown with "tea-plant," and the nest is inside the lath-work. A sparrow has visited the rose-tree by the wall--the buds are covered with aphides. A brown tree-creeper has been to the limes, then to the cherries, and even to a stout lilac stem. No matter how small the tree, he tries all that are in his way. The bright colours of a bullfinch were visible a moment just now, as he passed across the shadows farther down the garden under the damson trees and into the bushes. The grasshopper has gone past and along the garden-path, his voice is not heard now; but there is another coming. While I have been dreaming, all these and hundreds out in the meadow have been intensely happy. So concentrated on their little work in the sunshine, so intent on the tiny egg, on the insect captured on the grass-tip to be carried to the eager fledglings, so joyful in listening to the song poured out for them or in pouring it forth, quite oblivious of all else. It is in this intense concentration that they are so happy. If they could only live longer!--but a few such seasons for them--I wish they could live a hundred years just to feast on the seeds and sing and be utterly happy and oblivious of everything but the moment they are passing. A black line has rushed up from the espalier apple yonder to the housetop thirty times at least. The starlings fly so swiftly and so straight that they seem to leave a black line along the air. They have a nest in the roof, they are to and fro it and the meadow the entire day, from dawn till eve. The espalier apple, like a screen, hides the meadow from me, so that the descending starlings appear to dive into a space behind it. Sloping downwards the meadow makes a valley; I cannot see it, but know that it is golden with buttercups, and that a brook runs in the groove of it.

Afar yonder I can see a summit beyond where the grass swells upwards to a higher level than this spot. There are bushes and elms whose height is decreased by distance on the summit, horses in the shadow of the trees, and a small flock of sheep crowded, as is their wont, in the hot and sunny gateway. By the side of the summit is a deep green trench, so it looks from here, in the hill-side: it is really the course of a streamlet worn deep in the earth. I can see nothing between the top of the espalier screen and the horses under the elms on the hill. But the starlings go up and down into the hollow space, which is aglow with golden buttercups, and, indeed, I am looking over a hundred finches eagerly searching, sweetly calling, happy as the summer day. A thousand thousand grasshoppers are leaping, thrushes are labouring, filled with love and tenderness, doves cooing--there is as much joy as there are leaves on the hedges. Faster than the starling's flight my mind runs up to the streamlet in the deep green trench beside the hill.

Pleasant it was to trace it upwards, narrowing at every ascending step, till the thin stream, thinner than fragile glass, did but merely slip over the stones. A little less and it could not have run at all, water could not stretch out to greater tenuity. It smoothed the brown growth on the stones, stroking it softly. It filled up tiny basins of sand and ran out at the edges between minute rocks of flint. Beneath it went under thickest brooklime, blue flowered, and serrated water-parsnips, lost like many a mighty river for awhile among a forest of leaves. Higher up masses of bramble and projecting thorn stopped the explorer, who must wind round the grassy mound. Pausing to look back a moment there were meads under the hill with the shortest and greenest herbage, perpetually watered, and without one single buttercup, a strip of pure green among yellow flowers and yellowing corn. A few hollow oaks on whose boughs the cuckoos stayed to call, two or three peewits coursing up and down, larks singing, and for all else silence. Between the wheat and the grassy mound the path was almost closed, burdocks and brambles thrust the adventurer outward to brush against the wheat-ears. Upwards till suddenly it turned, and led by steep notches in the bank, as it seemed down to the roots of the elm trees. The clump of elms grew right over a deep and rugged hollow; their branches reached out across it, roofing in the cave.

Here was the spring, at the foot of a perpendicular rock, moss-grown low down, and overrun with creeping ivy higher. Green thorn bushes filled the chinks and made a wall to the well, and the long narrow hart's-tongue streaked the face of the cliff. Behind the thick thorns hid the course of the streamlet, in front rose the solid rock, upon the right hand the sward came to the edge--it shook every now and then as the horses in the shade of the elms stamped their feet--on the left hand the ears of wheat peered over the verge. A rocky cell in concentrated silence of green things. Now and again a finch, a starling, or a sparrow would come meaning to drink--athirst from the meadow or the cornfield--and start and almost entangle their wings in the bushes, so completely astonished that any one should be there. The spring rises in a hollow under the rock imperceptibly, and without bubble or sound. The fine sand of the shallow basin is undisturbed--no tiny water-volcano pushes up a dome of particles. Nor is there any crevice in the stone, but the basin is always full and always running over. As it slips from the brim a gleam of sunshine falls through the boughs and meets it. To this cell I used to come once now and then on a summer's day, tempted, perhaps, like the finches, by the sweet cool water, but drawn also by a feeling that could not be analysed. Stooping, I lifted the water in the hollow of my hand--carefully, lest the sand might be disturbed--and the sunlight gleamed on it as it slipped through ray fingers. Alone in the green-roofed cave, alone with the sunlight and the pure water, there was a sense of something more than these. The water was more to me than water, and the sun than sun. The gleaming rays on the water in my palm held me for a moment, the touch of the water gave me something from itself. A moment, and the gleam was gone, the water flowing away, but I had had them. Beside the physical water and physical light I had received from them their beauty; they had communicated to me this silent mystery. The pure and beautiful water, the pure, clear, and beautiful light, each had given me something of their truth.

So many times I came to it, toiling up the long and shadowless bill in the burning sunshine, often carrying a vessel to take some of it home with me. There was a brook, indeed but this was different, it was the spring; it was taken home as a beautiful flower might be brought. It is not the physical water, it is the sense or feeling that it conveys. Nor is it the physical sunshine; it is the sense of inexpressible beauty which it brings with it. Of such I still drink, and hope to do so still deeper.

CLEMATIS LANE

Wild clematis grew so thickly on one side of the narrow lane that the hedge seemed made of it. Trailing over the low bushes, the leaves hid the hawthorn and bramble, so that the hedge was covered with clematis leaf and flower. The innumerable pale flowers gave out a faint odour, and coloured the sides of the highway. Rising up the hazel rods and taller hawthorn, the tendrils hung downwards and suspended the flowers overhead. Across the field, where a hill rose and was dotted with bushes--these bushes, too, were concealed by clematis, and though the flowers were so pale, their numbers tinted the slope. A cropped nut-tree hedge, again, low, but five or six yards thick, was bound together by the bines of the same creeping plant, twisting in and out, and holding it together. No care or art could have led it over the branches in so graceful a manner; the lane was festooned for the triumphal progress of the waggons laden with corn. Here and there, on the dry bank over which the clematis projected like an eave, there stood tall campanulas, their blue bells as large as the fingerstall of a foxglove. The slender purple spires of the climbing vetch were lifted above the low hushes to which it clung; there were ferns deeper in the hedge, and yellow bedstraw by the gateways. A few blackberries were ripe, but the clematis seemed to have overcome the brambles, and spoilt their yield. Nuts, reddened at the tip, were visible on the higher hazel boughs; they were ripe, but difficult to get at.

Leaving the lane by a waggon track--a gipsy track through a copse--there were large bunches of pale-red berries hanging from the wayfaring trees, or wild viburnum, and green and red berries of bryony wreathed among the branches. The bryony leaves had turned, some were pale buff already. Among the many berries of autumn those of the wayfaring tree may be known by their flattened shape, as if the sides had been pressed in like a flask. The bushes were not high enough for shadow, and the harvest sun was hot between them. The track led past the foot of a steep headland of the Downs, which could not be left without an ascent. Dry and slippery, the short grass gave no hold to the feet, and it was necessary to step in the holes cut through the turf for the purpose. Pushed forward from the main line of the Downs, the buff headland projected into the Weald, as headlands on the southern side of the range project into the sea. Towards the summit the brow came out somewhat, and even the rude steps in the turf were not much assistance in climbing this almost perpendicular wall of sward. Above the brow the ascent became easy; these brows raised steeper than the general slope are often found on the higher hills. A circular entrenchment encloses the summit, but the rampart has much sunk, and is in places levelled. Here it was pleasant to look back upon the beech woods at the foot of the great Downs, and far over the endless fields of the Weald or plain. Thirty fields could be counted in succession, one after the other, like irregular chess-squares, some corn, some grass, and these only extended to the first undulation, where the woods hid the fields behind them. But beyond these, in reality, succeeded another series of fields to the second undulation, and still a third series to the farthest undulation visible. Yet farther there was a faint line of hills, a dark cloud-like bank in the extreme distance. To the right and to the left were similar views. Reapers were at work in the wheat below, but already much of the corn had been carried, and the hum of a threshing engine came up from the ricks. A woodpecker called loudly in the beech wood; a "wish-wish" in the air overhead was caused by the swift motion of a wood-pigeon passing from "holt" to "hurst," from copse to copse. On the dry short turf of the hill-top even the shadow of a swallow was visible as he flew but a few yards high.

In a little hollow where the rougher grasses grew longer a blue butterfly fluttered and could not get out. He was entangled with his own wings, he could not guide himself between the grass tops; his wings fluttered and carried him back again. The grass was like a net to him, and there he fluttered till the wind lifted him out, and gave him the freedom of the hills. One small green orchis stood in the grass, alone; the harebells were many. It is curious that, if gathered, in a few hours (if pressed between paper) they become a deeper blue than when growing. Another butterfly went over, large and velvety, flying head to the wind, but unable to make way against it, and so carried sidelong across the current. From the summit of the hill he drifted out into the air five hundred feet above the flowers of the plain. Perhaps it was a peacock; for there was a peacock-butterfly in Clematis Lane. The harebells swung, and the dry tips of the grass bent to the wind which came over the hills from the sea, but from which the sun had dried the sea-moisture, leaving it twice refined--once by the passage above a hundred miles of wave and foam and again by the grasses and the hills, which forced the current to a higher level, where the sunbeams dried it. Twice refined, the air was strong and pure, sweet like the scent of a flower. If the air at the sea-beach is good, that of the hills above the sea is at least twice as good, and twice as strengthening. It possesses all the virtue of the sea air without the moisture which ultimately loosens the joints, and seems to penetrate to the very nerves. Those who desire air and quick recovery should go to the hills, where the wind has a scent of the sunbeams.

In the short time since ascending the slope the definition of the view has changed. At first it was clear indeed, and no one would have supposed there was any mist. But now suddenly every hill stands out sharp and definite; the scattered hawthorn bushes are distinct; the hills look higher than before. From about the woods an impalpable bluish mistiness that was there just now has been blown away. The yellow squares of stubble--just cleared--far below are whiter and look drier. I think it is the air that tints everything. This fresh stratum now sweeping over has altered the appearance of the country and given me a new scene. The invisible air, as if charged with colour, has spread another tone broadly over the landscape. Omitting no detail, it has worked out afresh every little bough of the scattered hawthorn bushes, and made each twig distinct. It is the air that tints everything.

While I have been thinking, a flock of sheep has stolen quietly into the space enclosed by the entrenchment. With the iron head of his crook placed against his breast, and the handle aslant to the ground, the shepherd leans against it, and looks down upon the reapers. He is a young man, and has a bright intelligent expression on his features. Alone with his sheep so many hours, he is glad of some one to talk to, and points out to me the various places in view. The copses that cover the slopes of the hills he calls "holts"; there are three or four within a short distance. His crook is not a Pyecombe crook (for the best crooks used to be made at Pyecombe, a little Down hamlet), but he has another, which was made from a Pyecombe pattern. The village craftsman, whose shepherd's crooks were sought for all along the South Downs, is no more, and he has left no one able to carry on his work. He had an apprentice, but the apprentice has taken to another craft, and cannot make crooks. The Pyecombe crook has a curve or semicircle, and then opens straight; the straight part starts at a tangent from the semicircle. How difficult it is to describe so simple a matter as a shepherd's crook! In some way or other this Pyecombe form is found more effective for capturing sheep, but it is not so easy to make. The crook he held in his hand opened with an elongated curve. It appeared very small beside the ordinary crooks; this, he said, was an advantage, as it would hold a lamb. Another he showed me had the ordinary hook; this was bought at Brighton. The curve was too big, and a sheep could get its leg out; besides which, the iron was soft, and when a sheep was caught the iron bent and enlarged, and so let the sheep go. The handles were of hazel: one handle was straight, smooth, and the best in appearance--but he said it was weak; the other handle, which was crooked and rough-looking, was twice as strong. They used hazel rods for handles--ash rods were apt to "fly," i.e. break.

Wages were now fifteen shillings a week. The "farm hands"--elsewhere labourers--had fifteen shillings a week, and paid one shilling and sixpence a week for their cottages. The new cottages that had been built were two shillings and sixpence a week. They liked the old cottages best, not only because they were cheaper, but because they had larger gardens attached. It seemed that the men were fairly satisfied with their earnings; just then, of course, they were receiving much more for harvest work, such as tying up after the reaping machine at seven shillings and sixpence per acre. Clothes were the heaviest item of expenditure, especially where there was a family and the children were not old enough to earn anything. Except that he said "wid" for with--"wid" this, instead of with this--he scarcely mispronounced a word, speaking as distinctly and expressing himself as clearly as any one could possibly do. The briskness of manner, quick apprehension, and directness of answer showed a well-trained mind. The Sussex shepherd on this lonely hill was quite the equal of any man in his rank of life, and superior in politeness to many who move in more civilised places. He left me to fetch some wattles, called flakes in other counties; a stronger sort of hurdles. Most of the reaping is now done by machine, still there were men cutting wheat by hand at the foot of the hill. They call their reaphooks swaphooks, or swophooks, and are of opinion that although the machine answers well and clears the ground quickly when the corn stands up, if it is beaten down the swaphook is preferable. The swaphook is the same as the fagging-hook of other districts. Every hawthorn bush now bears its red berries, or haws; these are called "hog-hazels." In the west they are called "peggles." "Sweel" is an odd Sussex word, meaning to singe linen. People who live towards the hills (which are near the coast) say that places farther inland are more "uperds "--up the country--up towards Tunbridge, for instance.

The grasshoppers sang merrily round me as I sat on the sward; the warm sun and cloudless sky and the dry turf pleased them. Though cloudless, the wind rendered the warmth pleasant, so that the sunbeams, from which there was no shade, were not oppressive. The grasshoppers sang, the wind swept through the grass and swung the harebells, the "drowsy hum" of the threshing engine rose up from the plain; the low slumberous melody of harvest time floated in the air. An hour had gone by imperceptibly before I descended the slope to Clematis Lane. Out in the stubble where the wheat had just been cut, down amongst the dry short stalks of straw, were the light-blue petals of the grey field veronica. Almost the very first of field flowers in the earliest days of spring, when the rain drives over the furrow, and hail may hap at any time, here it was blooming again in the midst of the harvest. Two scenes could scarcely be more dissimilar than the wet and stormy hours of the early year, and the dry, hot time of harvest; the pale blue veronica, with one white petal, flourished in both, true and faithful. The gates beside the lane were not gates at all, but double draw-bars framed together, so that the gate did not open on a hinge, but had to be drawn out of the mortices. Looking over one of these grey and lichened draw-bars in a hazel hedge there were the shocks of wheat standing within the field, and on them a flock of rooks helping themselves freely.

Lower in the valley, where there was water, the tall willow-herbs stood up high as the hedges. On the banks of a pool water-plantains had sent up stalks a yard high, branched, and each branch bearing its three-petalled flower. In a copse near the stems of cow-parsnip stood quite seven feet, drawn up by the willow bushes--these great plants are some of the largest that grow in the country. Goatsbeard grew by the wayside; it is like the dandelion, but has dark spots in the centre of the disc, and the flower shuts at noon. The wild carrots were forming their "birds' nests"--so soon as the flowering is over the umbel closes into the shape of a cup or bird's nest. The flower of the wild carrot is white; it is made up of numerous small separate florets on an umbel, and in the centre of these tiny florets is a deep crimson one. Getting down towards the sea and the houses now I found a shrub of henbane by the dusty road, dusty itself, grey-green, and draggled; I call it a shrub, though a plant because of its shrub-like look. The flowers were over--they are a peculiar colour, dark and green veined and red, there is no exact term for it, but you may know the plant by the leaves, which, if crushed, smell like those of the black currant. This is one of the old English medicinal plants still in use. The figs were ripening fast in an orchard; the fig trees are frequently grown between apple trees, which shelter them, and some of the fruit was enclosed in muslin bags to protect it. The fig orchards along the coast suggest thoughts of Italy and the ancient Roman galleys which crossed the sea to the Sussex ports. There is a curious statement in a classic author, to the effect that a letter written by Julius Caesar, when in Britain, on the Kalends of September, reached Rome on the fourth day before the Kalends of October, showing how long a letter was being carried from the South Coast to the centre of Italy, nineteen centuries ago.

NATURE NEAR BRIGHTON

"As wild as a hawk" is a proverbial comparison, but kestrels venture into the outskirts of Brighton, and even right over the town. Not long since one was observed hovering above a field which divides part of Brighton from Hove. The bird had hardly settled himself and obtained his balance, when three or four rooks who were passing deliberately changed their course to attack him. Moving with greater swiftness, the kestrel escaped their angry but clumsy assaults; still they drove him from the spot, and followed him eastwards over the town till out of sight--now wheeling round, and now doing their utmost to rise higher and get the advantage of him. Kestrels appear rather numerous in this vicinity. Those who have driven round Brighton and Hove must have noticed the large stables which have been erected for the convenience of gentlemen residing in streets where stabling at the rear of the house is impracticable. Early in the year a kestrel began to haunt one of these large establishments, notwithstanding that it was much frequented, carriages driving in and out constantly, hunters taken to and fro, and in despite of the neighbourhood being built over with villas. There was a piece of waste ground by the building where, on a little tree, the hawk perched day after clay. Then, beating round, he hovered over the gardens of the district, often above the public roads and over a large tennis lawn. His farthest sweep seemed to be to the Sussex County Cricket field and then back again. Day after day he went his rounds for weeks together, through the stormy times of the early months, passing several times a day, almost as regularly as the postman. He showed no fear, hovering close to the people in the roads or working in their gardens. All his motions could be observed with facility--the mode of hovering, which he accomplished easily, whether there was a gale or a perfect calm; indeed, his ways could be noted as well as if it had been by the side of the wildest copse. One morning he perched on a chimney; the house was not occupied, but the next to it was, and there were builders' workmen engaged on the opposite side of the road; so that the wild hawk, if unmolested, would soon become comparatively tame. When the season became less rigorous, and the breeding time approached, the kestrel was seen no more; having flown for the copses between the Downs or in the Weald.

The power of hovering is not so wonderful as that of soaring, which the hawks possess, but which is also exhibited by seagulls. On a March morning two gulls came up from the sea, and as they neared the Downs began to soar. It was necessary to fix the gaze on one, as the eyes cannot follow two soaring birds at once. This gull, having spread his wings wide, swept up the dean, or valley, with great speed, and, turning a large circle, rose level with the hill. Round again he came, rising spirally--a spiral with a diameter varying from a furlong to a quarter of a mile, sometimes wider--and was now high overhead. Turn succeeded turn, up, up, and this without a single movement of the wings, which were held extended and rigid. The edge of the wing on the outer side was inclined to the horizon--one wing elevated, the other depressed--as the bird leaned inwards like a train going round a curve. The plane of the wings glided up the air as, with no apparent diminution of speed from friction, the bird swiftly ascended. Fourteen times the bird swept round, never so much as moving his wings, till now the gaze could no longer distinguish his manner of progress. The white body was still perceptible, but the wings were indistinct. Up to that height the gull had not assisted his ascent by flapping, or striking the air in any way. The original impulse, and some hitherto unexplained elasticity or property of air, had sufficed to raise him, in apparent defiance of the retardation of friction, and of the drag of gravitation. This power of soaring is the most wonderful of the various problems of flight being accomplished without effort; and yet, according to our preconceived ideas, there must be force somewhere to cause motion. There was a moderate air moving at the time, but it must be remembered that if a wind assists one way it retards the other. [Footnote: See the paper on "Birds Climbing the Air"] Hawks can certainly soar in the calmest weather.

One day I saw a weasel cross a road in Hove, close to a terrace of houses.

It is curious that a seagull can generally be observed opposite the Aquarium; when there is no seagull elsewhere along the whole Brighton front there is often one there. Young gulls occasionally alight on the roof, or are blown there. Once now and then a porpoise may be seen sunning himself off a groyne; barely dipping himself, and rolling about at the surface, the water shines like oil as it slips off his back.

The Brighton rooks are house birds, like sparrows, and perch on the roofs or chimneys--there are generally some on the roof of the Eglise Reformee Francaise, a church situated in a much-frequented part. It is amusing to see a black rook perched on a red tile chimney, with the smoke coming up around him, and darkening with soot his dingy plumage. They take every scrap thrown out, like sparrows, and peck bones if they find them. The builders in Brighton appear to have somewhat overshot the mark, to judge from the number of empty houses, and, indeed, it is currently reported that it will be five years before the building speculation recovers itself. Upon these empty houses, the hoardings, and scaffold-poles, the rooks perch exactly as if they were trees in a hedgerow, waiting with comic gravity to pounce on anything in the gardens or on the lawns. They are quite aware when it is Sunday--on week-days they keep at a fair distance from workmen; on Sundays they drop down in places where at other times they do not dare to venture, so that a glove might be thrown out of window among them. In winter and spring there are rooks everywhere; as summer advances, most leave the town for the fields.

A marked sign of spring in Brighton is the return of the wheatears; they suddenly appear in the waste places by the houses in the first few days of April. Wheatears often run a considerable distance on the sward very swiftly, usually stopping on some raised spot of the turf. Meadow-pipits are another spring bird here; any one going up the Dyke Road in early spring will observe a little brown bird singing in the air much like a lark, but more feebly. He only rises to a certain height, and then descends in a slanting direction, singing, to the ground. The meadow-pipit is, apparently, uncertain where he shall come down, wandering and irregular on his course. Many of them finish their song in the gardens of the Convent of the Sacred Heart, which seem to be a refuge to birds. At least, the thrushes sing there sweetly--yellowhammers, too--on the high wall. There is another resort of birds, opposite the Convent, on the Stanford Estate, on which persons are warned not to shoot or net small birds. A little shrubbery there in April and May is full of thrushes, blackbirds, and various finches, happily singing, and busy at their nests. Here the birds sing both sides of the highway, despite the reproach that Brighton is bare of trees; they pass from the shrubbery to and from the Convent gardens.