C. J. Cornish

“ The arms are stretched wide apart, the thumbs and fingers are spread, and grasp each fold of the coat with the anxious care of one who thinks that a slip will cause a fall of a hundred feet, and the soft body and tail half envelop the limb down which they are descending, fitting to the surface like some warm enveloping boa. As soon as it reaches the hay-pile in its cage the lemur instantly burrows, its long tail vanishing like a snake, and in a minute it is once more asleep, and unconscious of the world. ”

“ The sight is as pretty as our woods can show. Down below the red coats of the master and huntsman move up the rides, and the heads and sterns of the broad line of hounds, now all clean and bright after brushing through the wood, rise and fall, appear and vanish, as they leap over or thrust through the low slop and brambles. In front, where a goyle runs up to a hollow of the hill, the ground has been cleared of wood, and the forest of tall teazle-tops is full of goldfinches, flying from seed-head to seed-head, too tame to mind the noise or care for anything but their breakfast. ”

“ Yet the conditions of submarine motion are so favourable, that the speed of the bird below the surface is three or four times greater than that gained by equally rapid movements of the feet when it has risen and is swimming on the top. The lustre of the feathers in the clear water, the cloud of brilliant bubbles which pour from the plumage, like the nebulous train of a comet, as the bird rushes through the water, and the sapphire light of the large blue eye, make the cormorant’s fishing one of the prettiest aquatic exercises in the world. ”

“ THE ANTIQUITY OF RIVER PLANTS
In the still gossamer weather of late October, when the webs lie sheeted on the flat green meadows and spools of the air-spiders' silk float over the waters, the birds and fish and insects and flowers of the best of England's rivers show themselves for the last time in that golden autumn sun, and make their bow to the audience before retiring for the year. All the living things become for a few brief hours happy and careless, drinking to the full the last drops of the mere joy of life before the advent of winter and rough weather. ”

“ Family life in the wild boars’ quarters is harmonious and amusing. For the first month the little orange-striped pigs depend on their mother for food, and take no notice either of visitors or of each other. Each roams about by itself in the most independent fashion, or drops down to sleep on its stomach, with its legs stretched straight out before and behind, like a kneeling elephant in miniature. ”

“ Meadow vetchling, and the tall meadow crowfoot, with rich yellow blooms and dainty leaves, are set off by the pinks of the clover and the crimson of stray sainfoin clusters. All these blossoms with the various flowers of the grasses, tend to ripen and come to perfection together, the heats of June bringing the whole multitude on together as in a natural forcing-pit. It is then that the mowing grass is said to be "ripe," when all the blossoms are shedding their pollen, and giving hay-fever to those who enter the fields. ”

“ One slips back into the wood, the other canters to the fence, rising the hill, looks out, whisks his brush and is off--across the turf, over the fifty-acre field of growing wheat, and away to the back of the hills. Half the pack are running the first fox, who has slipped back to the river, but with the other half every one gets clear off, and does his best over the awful ground. The mud explodes like shells as the hoofs crush into it, but somehow every one is across and away, and on to the green road and a line of sainfoin much sooner than could be expected. ”

“ For if, on the one hand, the creatures so far share the blessings of the golden age that they entertain a liking rather than a fear of man, and have no dread of a possible enemy behind the mask of music, many of them are no strangers to such forms of it as are produced by the harmony of a band which plays there weekly in summer evenings. To those creatures which have lived for years in that part of the Gardens near the band-stand, the sound of music is no new thing; and it was possible that they might be as indifferent to its strains as an organ-grinder’s monkey to the music of the street. ”

“ Up the valley of the Pang, you may see acres of poppies on a fallow as scarlet as a field-marshal's coat, and not one in the meadows by the stream. Even before the sheltering grass stems shoot upward and around them, drawing all the flower-life skywards as trees draw other trees upright towards the light, there are plants which are found only growing in the meadows, springing from the turf carpet, and happy in no other setting. Chief of these are the wild daffodils or Lent-lilies, the ornaments of old orchards and of the green meadows of Devon and the Isle of Wight. ”

“ If it is not fed when it stretches out its imperious little hand, it flies into a passion at once, making ugly faces, shaking the bars of its cage, and uttering shrill bat-like cries; for the squirrel-monkey is by no means the silky little pet which it appears, but a bold, carnivorous little creature, though its prey is only butterflies and the insects of the Guiana forest. ”

“ The hope of reclaiming land from the waves exercises a peculiar fascination over most minds. It presents itself in more than one form as a most desirable activity. It is something like creation--a form of making earth from sea. The clothing of the fringe of ocean's bed with herbage, the reaping of a harvest where rolled the tide, the barring out of the dominant sea, the vision, not altogether illusive, of planting industrious and deserving men on the ground so won, all these are alluring ideas. ”

“ The golden and sea-eagles never present so fine an appearance as in these bright winter days. Those who see them with their wings and tails ragged and broken in the summer and early autumn, would hardly recognize them in their compact and close-set winter plumage, as they scream aloud in the frosty air, and fly to and fro in their large aviary on pinions undisfigured by a single broken feather. ”

“ Just before hay-time, the crowning glory of the Thames-side flats is given by the flowers growing in the grass. Their setting, among the uncounted millions of green grass stems, appeals not only by the contrast of colour, but by the sense of coolness and content which these sheltered and softly bedded blossoms suggest. The meadows which they adorn are best-loved of all the fields of England; but they would never be as dear to Englishmen as they are were it not for the flowers which deck them. The blossoms and plants found in the tall grasses differ from those on lawns and grazing pastures. ”

“ The Gayal, an immense bison from the jungles of Assam, with a coat as smooth and sleek as the bison’s is shaggy and unkempt, drinks the iced water in its pen, and stamps the frozen ground—while the steam rises from its 5broad nostrils into the cold English air—with all the vigour of a shorthorn bull in a Surrey straw-yard; and the wild swine, whether from India or Europe, are equally indifferent to the weather. ”

“ White water-crowfoot, water-soldier, and arrowheads will form the fringe of the pool. But the crowning floral honour of the brook garden is in the irises set in and beside its waters, chief among which are the glorious irises of Japan-- purple, blue, rose-colour, and crimson--the pink English flowering rush, big white mocassin flowers, New Zealand flax, and pink buckbean, and bog arum. The great white arum of the greenhouse is quite hardy out of doors if it is planted eighteen inches below water, and blossoms in the brook. ”

“ The darters, though resembling the cormorant rather than the penguin in using their feet only for propulsion, are so clearly a survival of some ancient type, with their long snaky necks and pointed mandibles, and meagre membranous wings, that the imagination travels back at once to the steamy forests and swamps, and fish and saurian-haunted waters of some antediluvian epoch. The appearance of these creatures below water is even stranger than when perched on the bank above. Like the cormorant they swim with the feet only, and with the same rapid mechanical alternate movements of each. ”

“ The grayling fisherman on the Northern streams has the water ousels for his constant and charming companions, true to the mountain river as in the days of Merlin and Vivien, busy as big black-and-white bees as they flit up-stream and down-stream, flying boldly into the waterfalls, dropping silently from mossy stones into the clear brown eddies, singing when the sunbeams shine and warm the crag-tops, and even floating and singing on the water, like aquatic robins. ”

“ Yet there are probably twenty people in this country who have eaten canvas-backed duck for one who has ever tasted swan, or rather cygnet, the finest water-fowl for the table alike in size and flavour, a bird easy to rear, most prolific, rivalling even the breast of a teal, without the fatal drawback of that excellent little bird, that no one has ever been able to get enough of it. ”

“ It has pulses, throbbing like the ebb and flow of blood. Its dancing bubbles, rising and bursting, image emotion. It is the only water always clear and sparkling. Streams gather mud, springs dispel it. They come pure from the depths, and never suffer the earth to gather where they leap from ground. They are the brightest and the cleanest things in Nature. From all time the polluter of a spring has been held accursed.
One of the sources of the Thames was a real spring, rising from the earth in a meadow, until the level of the subterranean water was reduced. ”