Gordon Stables

“ He doesn’t care where he flies to, and when he does spring away into infinity he can’t have the slightest notion where he will land. What a happy-go-lucky kind of life! What a merry one! He toils not, neither does he spin; he travels where and when he pleases; there is food for him wherever he goes, and nothing to pay for it. A short life, you say? There is no one can prove that, for one hour may seem as long to him as a year to you or to me. To be sure a bird may bolt him, but then he dies in the sunshine and it is all over in a moment. ”

“ Before us, beneath us, and on every side, is spread out one of the fairest landscapes in all the wild romantic North. Woods and water, hills and dales, stretch away as far as the eye can reach. Yonder is the wimpling Ury, meandering through the peaceful valley to join the winding Don. Near its banks stands, or lies, or rather lies and sleeps, and seems to dream, the village of Inverurie. Very blue are the roofs of its houses in the surrounding greenery, very white are its granite walls, and its spires and steeples look like snow or marble in the autumn sunshine. ”

“ My Woodland Study in Summer. It is an open glade in the middle of a pine-wood. Not all green and level is this glade, with trees standing round in a circle, like the clearings in forests of the Far West, which I used to read of in the novels of Cooper and that so bewitched me when a boy. No, for judging from the rough and rutty pathway that leads up to it, and from the numerous banks and hillocks in it, there can be no doubt that, in far distant days of the past, gravel must have been dug and carted hence.
The wood itself—glade and all—stands on a hill. ”

“ The snow has melted on the roofs, but the dripping water has frozen into a network of crystal on the rose-bushes that cling around the verandah. It has mostly melted off the tall lindens also, only leaving pieces here and there that look for all the world like a flock of strange big birds.
Everything is beautiful—but all is silent, all is sad.
The sun goes down in a purple haze, looking like a big blood orange; and an hour afterwards, when the stars come out, there is all along the horizon a long broad band of rose tint, shading upwards into yellow, and so into the blue of the night. ”

“ The nearer trees, just beyond the field down there where the sheep are feeding, the stately ashes, the spreading elms and planes, and the towering poplars, stand out green and clear in the sunshine; but the hills beyond the valley of the Thames and the trees along its banks have a blotted, blurred, and unfinished look about them, but are very charming to behold nevertheless, all the more in that, here and there, you catch glimpses of the silvery river itself, reflecting the glorious sunshine.
Down yonder is the road that leads past my pine-wood. ”

“ The horses were sleek and fat, Hurricane Bob spent most of his time either lying among rugs on the coupé with the children, or tumbling on the daisied sward, while the cat did nothing but sing and look complacent. We human beings were so happy, we could even afford to laugh and be gay when thunders rolled, when gales of wind blew and rocked the caravan as if she had been a ship at sea, or when the rain came down in torrents. ”

“ There are some of an allied species, but so very very tiny that when they get on to my manuscript while I am writing, they are as bewildered as I have been before now on an Arctic ice-field. Perhaps they get a kind of snow-blind. At all events they feel their way about, and if they chance to come to a word I have just written, they dare not cross it for fear of getting drowned—every stroke of my pen is to one of these wee mites a blue rolling river of ink. So they’ve got to walk round. ”

“ Linnets build every year in the laurels close by the dog-kennel: robins feed with the dogs, and some older sparrows know names that we have given them, and come to be fed. No need to hang up boxes for them to build in—we live in the bush; but in summer-time they have a bath on the back lawn, and it is a sight to see them in the early morning. Thrushes, blackbirds, finches, sparrows, starlings—they all agree as well as if they had learned Watts’ hymns, and laid them all to heart. ”

“ Suppose that you had stood on the deck of our brave yacht and looked around; you would have seen that the whole bay was frozen over with thick black ice. No need for boats now, we could skate to the shore. Behind us, seaward, across the month of the bay, stretched a rugged wall of serrated icebergs; on each side of the bay were the ice-clad rocks; shoreward, as you turned your eye, there was first the Innuit village, then the land rose gradually upwards, a snow-clad valley rock-bound, till, in the far distance, behold a vast, towering mountain of ice. ”

“ Sir John soon after attacked and burned the mansion or castle of Balquhain, and Sir Andrew Leslie, in revenge, sallied down from his fortress and laid waste the lands of the Forbeses with fire and sword. So much for the Fair Maid of Kemnay, and here is the village itself. High up on a table-land it is situated, among pine-woods and quarries, every house is a charming cottage, built of the whitest of granite. Surely poverty is unknown in such a place, and people here must live for a century at the very least! ”

“ The banks or hillocks in my woodland study—among which you may wander as in a labyrinth, lose your way, and finally perhaps, much to your surprise, find yourself back again at the very place whence you started—are clothed with tall furze-bushes; their yellow blossoms have faded and fallen, and downy seed-pods that crackle in the sunshine, as they split and scatter their seeds, have taken their place, but the beauty of these blossoms is hardly missed, for over and through the dark-green furze the brambles creep and trail, dotting them over with clusters of pink-white bloom. ”

“ Towards this town then, one day, a big wolf was journeying. It was summer then, the sun shone bright, clouds were fleecy, and the sky was blue, and the plain all round him was bright with the greenery of grass and dotted with wild flowers. But neither the beauty of the day, nor the loveliness of the scenery, had any effect on the gaunt and ugly wolf. Not being good himself, he could see no goodness in Nature. ”

“ The leaves are still on the bramble-bushes, so dear to school-children when autumn days ripen the big luscious-looking black and bronze berries. The leaves also closely cover yonder little beech-trees. The furze is of a dark olive-green colour, covered here and there with patches of white, where the hoar-frost lodges, and with spots of brightest yellow when the blossoms still flourish. There are buds on the leafless twiglets of the oak, though the tree still soundly sleeps, and the ground is everywhere covered with moss and broken mast. ”

“ The whole world is robed in its winding-sheet. The earth looks dead. To-day is but the ghost of yesterday. The leafless elms, the lindens and the oaks are trees of coral, the larches and pines mere shapes of snow shadowed out with a faint green hue beneath.
And the birds! Well, the thrush still sings. What a world of hope the bird must carry in his heart! But the blackbird flies now and then through the snow-clad shrubbery with sudden bickering screams that startle even the sparrows. ”

“ Half an hour afterwards, Maggie May, Bob, and I were on the braes above Balhaggarty. We lay ourselves down on a sweet mossy bank, bedecked with many a wild flower; peacock butterflies are floating in the sunshine, and great velvety bees make drowsy music in the air; and not far off, on a branch of a brown-trunked fir-tree, cock-robin is singing his clear, crisp little song. ”

“ The tourist, at all events, feels swallowed up as soon as he has entered. The long avenue that lies before him is one of the most remarkable in Scotland. It is on moss you are walking, at each side are trees—larches, spruces, and firs, as straight as arrows, and fully one hundred and twenty feet in height, the stems of which two men can hardly touch fingers round. To your right, dimly seen, is the roaring Don, beyond it cliffs and braes, covered with forest and fern, heather and blaeberries. ”

“ I live in one of the prettiest and leafiest nooks of tree-clad Berkshire. The village that adjoins me nestles among trees; the gardens all about the houses are masses of shrubbery and flowers; stone fences are utterly unknown; there are hedges everywhere. Our trees are wide-spreading oaks and planes, drooping acacias, leafy lindens, elm, ash, willow, poplar, and what not.
Up the lordly line of splendid poplar-trees that bound my cosy little paddock the green ivy grows, and here sparrows dwell in hundreds. I do not shoot my wild birds, nor do my children chase and frighten them. ”

“ But we dearly love Berkshire for all that, love its rolling meadows, its fields of waving corn, the trees that go sweeping over its round hills like cloudlands of green; its placid river, its quiet streams, where the glad fish leap in spring and summer; love its birds, love its beasts, all the way up from the timid wee field-mouse to the saucy fox who leads so merry a life in the woods; and love its people, its peasantry—honest and true are they, sometimes rough, but always right. ”

“ At no great distance we can hear the sharp “Yap! yap! woo-oo” of a shepherd’s collie. No mistaking it. It cannot be a fox, and there are no wolves about.
I take my bearings by a star that shines over the place from which the barking appeared to come, and Bob and I make straight in that direction. To our great joy and relief, we presently emerge from among the black-branched uncanny trees, and on the moor, at no great distance, see a light streaming from the open door of a hut. ”

“ It is a day that would make a man of ninety years of age feel life in every limb. Was ever sky so bright before I wonder, was ever sea so warm, so soft, so smooth—was ever air so fresh and balmy? The very sea-birds seem to have gone to sleep, and to be dreaming happy dreams, as they float, rising and falling on the gently heaving water. ”

“ The winter came on, and a wild, bitter winter it was, with high, icy, east winds, sleet and snow. I happened to be passing one day near to the cottage where Dave’s master dwelt, and, hearing a mournful whine issuing from a shed, I peeped in. There lay poor dog Dave, and a pitiable sight he was, and no sign of either water or food was to be seen. My heart bled for the creature. Bad enough he was in all conscience, but to make him suffer thus was revolting. I got little satisfaction at first from his cruel master, who told me he had no time to attend properly to a dog on chain. ”

“ Once a week, at least, a gale of wind might be blowing, hundreds of miles away from where we were—it was always calm in the pack—then the great waves would come rolling in beneath the ice, though of course we could not see them, lifting up the giant bergs, packing and pitching the light bay-ice over the heavy, and grinding one against the other or against our seemingly doomed ship with a shrieking, deafening noise, that is quite indescribable. ”

“ I have a great many wild-bird friends. There are several sparrows visit me every day, at and in my wigwam, or garden study. One comes to name. That name is “Weekie!” I heard his little wife call him “Weekie” one day, so the name has stuck to him. We have been friends for years, Weekie and I. He is bold and pert, but affectionate. He roosts in winter among the creepers on my wigwam, and steals morsels of my manuscripts to help in building his nest in summer.
So there is something in pet names at all events. I daresay most of my readers would think that “Dumps” was a queer name to give a pony. ”

“ There is an immense Newfoundland lying not far from me while I write, an animal who by reason of his beauty, his bounding independence, and his very roguishness, takes all hearts by storm. His name was originally “Robin;” that soon came down to honest simple “Bob.” He is known in what is called the canine world as “Hurricane Bob,” he being a show dog. He derives the sobriquet “Hurricane” from the mad way he rushes round his own paddock when he first gets out of a morning. With his long black hair floating in the wind, he is hardly visible as he races round and round about you. ”

“ On this grand gipsy-tour of ours we had reason to be thankful every day for a good many things. First and foremost, that our horses were so sturdy, strong, and willing; that the great caravan itself was so comfortable, and the smaller one so snug, and both so delightfully and artistically fitted up, that they looked more like the saloon and cabin of some beautiful yacht than the homes of amateur gipsies. ”