Grant Allen

“ All is arid and parsimonious, as in some Highland cottage. Our daintily bred foxgloves, decayed gentlewomen, stunted and dwarfed in that inhospitable soil, can scarce find nutriment in the thirsty sand to send up a feeble parody of their purple spikes; in long droughts they droop and fail for lack of a drop of water. You must make a deep pocket of garden mould in the midst of the heath if you want them to thrive; and even then, unless you keep constantly cutting down the heather and gorse about them, they are overtopped and outlived by the native vegetation. ”

“ How close it keeps to the earth! how exquisitely the leaves fit in with one another, like a living mosaic! That is why the ivy-leaf is shaped as we know it, with re-entrant angles, very abrupt and deep-lobed. The plant, as a whole, crawls snake-like over the ground in shady spots, or climbs up the face of stony cliffs, or mantles walls and ruins, or clambers boldly over the trunks of trees—which last, though its most conspicuous, is not by any means its commonest or most natural situation. ”

“ What survives of it now in its prime—for it is still a young tree, as trees go on our upland—is at best but a maimed and mutilated relic. From its babyhood upward it has suffered, like man, an eternal martyrdom. It began life as a winged seed, blown about by the boisterous wind which shook it rudely adrift from the sheltering cone of its mountain-cradled mother. Many a sister seed floated lightly with the breeze to warm nooks in the valley, where the tree that sprang from it now grows tall and straight, and equally developed on every side into a noble Scotch fir of symmetrical dimensions. ”

“ These gnarled hard lives, as people think them, are gilded brightest by the glow and fire of love; these poorest of earth’s children are made richest at last in the holiest and best of her manifold blessings. It was nothing to you, I know, my tree, that the fire which swept over the heath some five years since charred all your lower branches and killed half your live bark; you had courage to resist and heart to prevail; and though those poor burnt boughs are dead and gone for all time, you still put forth smiling bundles of green needles above quite as bravely as ever. ”

“ There the hedgehog skulks, and the field-mouse hides, and the sparrow builds her nest, and the slow-worm suns himself; there the rabbit burrows, and the thrush sits mocking, and the dormouse dreams, and the lizard lies in wait for the dancing midges. All the waste richness of the field finds its rest at last by the roots of the whitethorn, to reappear in due time as red campion and herb-robert, as faint-scented may and tall military spikes of purple foxglove. ”

“ THE FROZEN POND. The pond on the moor is frozen over. What an epoch in the history of all its inhabitants! For they are not mostly long-lived creatures, these pond-dwellers; a summer forms an appreciable part of their short existence. Theirs is but a precarious life at the best of times; they have always to steer close between the Scylla of drought and the Charybdis of freezing. Half their days are spent in enforced seclusion. In the summer the pond, which is their universe, is apt to dry up and fail them; in winter it stands its even chance of freezing solid and entombing them. ”

“ Nay, more, the fresh young life of the new year has even begun in part to show itself already. Autumn, not spring, is the real season of seedlings. Cast your eyes on the bank by the roadside yonder, and what do you see? The ground is green with tiny baby plants of prickly cleavers and ivy-leaved veronica. The seeds fall from the mother-plant on the soil in August, sprout and germinate with the September rains, and have formed a thick carpet of spring-like verdure by the middle of October. ”

“ But when you sow or transplant these lush herbs of the hedgerow on to the bare and open heath, they come into competition at once with other and far hardier upland bushes. The plants of the moor are indeed unlike such pampered odalisques of the deep banks and rich lowlands. Stern children of the heights, their stems are hard and wiry, their leaves small and dry; their flowers feel like tissue-paper; their growing shoots have none of that luxuriant tenderness, that translucent delicacy, which characterizes the long sprays of hedgerow dog-rose and hedgerow bramble. ”

“ Stone-loach flit down stream like rapid shadows when you lift the bigger pebbles, under which they lie skulking. As for caddis-worms and water-spiders and the larvæ of dragon-flies, they are there by the hundred; while the full-blown insects—living flashes of light, as Tennyson calls them—poise their metallic blue bodies for a second over the ragged-robins that grow in the boggy hollows, and then dart away like lightning to the willow-herb in the distance. It is a world apart, this wee world of the streamlet; it has its own joys, its own fears, its own tragedies. ”

“ 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. ”

“ So long as the flowers continue to bloom, you see no leaves; whence it comes about that many people know well the blossoms of coltsfoot in spring, and the foliage in summer, without having the faintest idea that they belong to one another. But if you keep your eye on the place where the yellow stars arose, after the flowers have withered and the white heads have blown away in copious flights, their wee feathery fruitlets, you will see by-and-by some big broad angular leaves, very thick and noticeable, rising high into the air from the same buried rootstock in the self-same position. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Nor does our winter leave us wholly leafless. Even in England we have a fair sprinkling of native-born evergreens. And I really don’t know that I would wish them more frequent; for nothing can be more monotonous, more sickly sweet, than the unvarying green of tropical forests; while the grateful contrast of drooping birch twigs or big-budded bare oak branches with the dark and sombre verdure of our northern Scotch firs, is in itself one of the chief charms of English winter. ”

“ Few British birds, indeed, show higher and closer adaptation to special conditions than our dreamy night-jars, essential insect-hawkers of the dusk on open and treeless uplands. Their large and mysterious eyes, their gaping mouths, their straining fringe of bristles, their delicate owl-like plumage, their swift and silent flight, their agile movements, their eerie cry, their curious love-sick nature—all mark them out as marvellously modified nocturnal variants on the general type of the swifts and trogons. ”

“ We, your human neighbours, lie abed in our snug cottage, and tremble at the groaning and shivering of our beams, and silently wonder in the dark amid the noise how much of our red-tiled roof will remain over us by morning. (Five pounds’ worth of tiles went off, I recollect, in last Thursday week’s tempest.) But you, on your open hilltop, feel the fierce cold wind blow through and through you; till all the buds on your south-western face are chilled and killed; while even the others, more sheltered on the leeward side, have got nipped and checked, so that they develop irregularly. ”

“ A FLIGHT OF QUAILS. It is one of the wonders and delights of the moorland that here alone Nature pays the first call, instead of demurely waiting to be called upon. Near great towns she is coy; and even in the fields that abut on villages, she shows but a few familiar aspects; while aloof on the open heath she reveals herself unreservedly, like a beautiful woman to her chosen lover. She exhibits all her moods and bares all her secrets. ”

“ Each such rosette springs in April from a buried rootstock, which, in loose loamy soil, like that of these Surrey moors, is often intricate; it burrows in and out with strange instinct among the dry sand and stones, in search of such rare moisture as it can manage to find for itself. But though water is scarce, access to light and air is easy; so the large round leaves, lying close on the bare ground, get sunshine in abundance, and feed to their hearts’ content upon their proper food—the carbon in the atmosphere—while vegetation around is still low and backward. ”

“ While dense masses of foliage clothe and obscure the boughs with their gay greenery we can gain but a rough idea of the underlying structure. But just as a Leonardo or a Luca Signorelli must needs pry beneath skin and muscle to discover the actual framework and bony supports of the body, so the lover of the trees desires from time to time to catch some glimpse of the very limbs and joints of oak or maple—to get rid of the green covering in favour of the naked underlying reality. ”

“ When spring returns the squirrel emerges, a sadder and decidedly a thinner beast. But there are now no nuts, no seeds, no grains; so he takes, against his will, to the young bark and tender shoots of the trees around him. About the same time, too, the squirrel’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love; the young of last year’s brood begin to mate themselves. ”

“ The harebell, on the contrary—the oread of its race—is a denizen of the open, wind-swept uplands; it loves the moors and heaths, the bare hilly pastures; and it has learnt in consequence to bend lightly before the breeze, springing up again as those invisible feet pass on, which gives it its familiar slenderness and elegance. The hanging domes of the flowers are entered from below by bumble-bees, which are strong enough to push aside the fringed and close-set teeth that edge the base of the stamens, put there on purpose to baffle less useful honey-thieving visitors. ”

“ But if you dwell by choice for her sake in her chosen haunts, your devotion touches her: she will show you life enough—rare life little dreamt of by those who tramp the dead flags of cities, where no beast moves save the draggled cab-horse. For you, the curlew will stalk the boggy hollows; for you, the banded badger will creep stealthily from his earth and disport himself at dusk among his frolicsome cublets; for you, the dappled adder will sun his zigzag spots, and dart his tremulous tongue, all shivering and quivering ”

“ It showers down upon us with lavish profusion. The male birds rise emulously, singing as they go, and displaying with pride their powers of song and flight before their mates and their rivals. Often they join battle at their giddy height for some coveted mate, and fight it out in the sky; she sits demure below on the dewy grass meanwhile, watching their deeds of prowess, listening to their bursting hearts, and ready to bestow herself, like ladies at a tournament, on the lover who proves himself the stoutest and the worthiest. ”

“ Indeed, it is pleasant for the evolutionist to think that the whole course of the world’s evolution has been in one constant stream towards beauty and sweetness—towards lovelier plumage, daintier spots and dapplings, more graceful antlers, more waving crests, diviner song, intenser colour and scent of flowers. The subtlest perfumes belong to the newest types and families of blossom; the mellowest notes belong to the newest types and families of birds; the highest beauty belongs to the newest and most spiritual races of civilized humanity. ”

“ 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 ”