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• 01 - The First Month - January - Part 1

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  Section 1 of A Country Calendar This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. A Country Calendar by Ticknor Edwards The first month, January Part 1 A night of stark, relentless frost, and a grey, quiet dawn, and the old river, deep in its jungle of yellow reeds, droning invisibly by. There was no sound of moving water when I first reached the ancient towpath, green with moss and overarched with brambles, where Neverhoof had rung for a generation back. It was at the top of the tide, and the whole river was encased in ice, an inch thick it might have been.

  But the tide had turned with the dawn, and soon, out on the open riverway, between the barricades of reeds, the solid floor of crystal began to sag and crack, then to break up into great jagged slivers that reared and turned turtle as they sank. And now the old droning travel song of the river had begun again in the torpid air, as the current drew steadily seaward, its sullen flow already lower by a yard or more. I looked back at the still clouded eastern sky. It was no ordinary quest that had drawn me abroad so early on that iron-bound morning. Once before, but once only in all my life, the same happy chances had fallen together. A night of hard frost, high tide at dawn, an hour or two of freezing grey air, and then brilliant sunshine, with the expected miracle of music sure to follow. So it had all come to pass again, all but the glowing warmth of sun that was to let loose upon the earth such a melody as nature scarce contrives by any other means.

  Though the ice upon the open water was long since swept away, that within the reeds was still intact, held up in mid-air by the myriad stems, a level of shining crystal making a thin white line in the yellow that could be traced up the riverway for half a mile. Nothing was wanting now but the releasing sunbeams for the ice-bell music to begin. It came at length just as it had come before. The clouds rent and soared asunder, and the strong sunlight poured through upon the frozen earth. In a little while there was a flash from the dense reed thicket as a great glittering triangle of ice broke away from its support and fell, striking the water below with a clear cymbaline note. Another followed, this time a little farther up the river reach, and then another farther still.

  Presently, with the ever-mounting sun, the flakes of crystal began to fall, no longer singly, but in twos and threes together, none alike in size, so that the music was for ever running up and down the scale, peeling out in wondrously subtle harmonies, growing soft or strangely loud in turn as the sun chanced to dislodge the resonant fragments far or near. At last the whole riverway rang to a wild sweet strain such as one may rarely hear and treasure in memory, yet never credibly tell the half of its utter wildness and sweetness. For a long hour the close-knit, sturdy reeds poured out their siren music on the sunny air. Even when the last clear silvery note seemed to have come and gone, and there was nothing left but the old interminable ripple song of gliding waters, every breath of wind that chanced to steal across the river flats, found in the sunless steeps of the reeds, still another bell to chime.

  Those who habitually lie late of winter mornings often lose what amounts to a real compensation, a complete set-off of benignity to days even of the dirtiest weather. So frequently a day that proves unutterably bad in the traditional sense has the fairest beginning, and there goes with us, through the long dreary hours, such a memory of beauty that its worst malevolences are robbed of harm. Days of raging winter wind begin often in crystal-clear serenity, a white still dawn, silent but for a single bird-voice ringing afar off in the misty wood. The white morning looks forth under a brow of heavy scowling black, and great dark clouds squat along the earth-line, inert, full-fed, ominous. But all is so still, and the growing light of such a silvery purity of promise, that one goes abroad, ready almost to sing for joy with the solitary bird.

  Then, in a moment, it seems, and springing up from nowhere, the wind is tearing the treetops and moaning round the eaves. Little fearsome eddies of dead leaves dance at the village corners. The black cloud-brow to eastward shuts down, and the light goes out. All day long the north-west wind raids the world with ceaseless charge and counter-charge of thunderous cavalry under a leaden sky. But in every pause of the guile we can hear the thrush still valorously singing.

  The darkest hour yet holds for us its saving memory of silver-dawning light. Days of relentless drenching rain and gloom are perhaps hardest to bear, of all forms of dirty weather in the barren winter-time. And yet such days nearly always begin with some index of infinite beauty never to be forgotten, some rare and fleeting yet unequivocal expression of ultra-human hope and thought. As I sit writing now, close under the old dim pattering bullseye panes, with hardly light enough to see, though the hour is verging on towards noon, it is not the dismal weeping day that lives for me, but its lurid and lovely beginning.

  I saw the muffled winter darkness change to a star-gemmed dawn, rich night-blue overhead, the pure colour failing and fading beneath until it merged into the snow-white glittering eastern wall. But what I could not yet see, so delicate and tender of touch had been its penciling, was the screen of pale cloud-ripples with which the whole heaven was secretly overspread. It was scarce more obvious to an unexpected eye than writing in invisible ink. Wavering, watery ripples they were, an endless array of them, yet so fine and so translucent that I should never have guessed their presence but for the final and informing stroke now swiftly dealt to the picture by the master hand. The sun never showed himself. The rain had whelmed the whole world in drab within a few short minutes.

  But just for an instant one broad, splendid crimson ray shot up from the earth-line, like acid thrown upon the ink, and every ripple above was suddenly rimmed with tense fire, a Niagara of burning roses quenched in a moment by the deluge of the winter rain. Though in the shade of the hedgerow every blade of grass is still white with frost, all sign of it has vanished from the open field. The turf, wonderfully fresh and green under its thick cover-lid of water-drops, glitters and glows in the resplendent morning sun with a thousand rainbow hues. The rich colours forever changing as the drops run together until each grass-bent droops under the weight of a single scintillating crystal suspended at its tip. And just as the untrammeled morning sunshine has turned the whole meadow into one vast, coruscating avalanche of gems, so the light seems to have set free in the encircling woodlands a flood of birdsong indescribably full and sweet.

  The thrushes lead the major contribution to this symphony, rippling joyous cascades from the song-thrushes and a steady chorus from the missiles that make up in volume what it lacks in timbre. But the robins and whinnying tits and twinking chaffinches are almost as ubiquitous. The robin's clear undulating song fills in all the pauses in the general rondolead, and whenever an actual break comes in this bright cresting surface of the morning's music, the ear goes down gratefully into the deeps, the soft low crooning of wood doves and crafty guttural of magpies and distant organ clamour from innumerable rooks. Only the blackbird seems able to resist the lure of the sunshine on this first magnificent morning of New Year's promise after the long wintry spell of gloom and rain.

  Of course there has been the usual crop of letters to the journals telling of blackbird song heard indisputably all the winter through, but these testimonies must be received with diffidence, even with incredulity. When in wintry days the King Merle overcomes, or momentarily forgets, his traditional silent pose and breaks out his spinnaker of incomparable melody, there can be no question about the song. It can come from only one throat. In quality, ceaseless variation of phrase, and that effect producibly by what can alone be described as conscious artistry, the blackbird stands easily first among our native singing birds. If he were to tune up this moment in the midst of all the jubilation of birdsong ringing the old meadow about under the January sun, there could not be an instant's real doubt as to the identity of the singer. But the truth, as all country dwellers know, is that, in certain of his least exalted moods, the blackbird has a close, almost a slavish imitator.

  The mistlethrush's monotonous refrain, of a desperate sameness alike in shine or storm, mild or rigorous times, is readily to be mistaken by an inattentive ear for an odd fragment of the blackbird's tuneful minstrelsy. Long before sunrise, the robins were singing in the garden, and the sparrows chippering merrily in the ivy under the eaves. In the oak-wood, behind the little thatch-mushroom dwelling, a thrush had been piping ever since the first silver thread of dawn wavered in the eastern sky, and innumerable wrens were busy far and near with their quiet, blithe, twittering music, a tiny, inconsiderable rill of sweet notes underlying all the rest and filling all the pauses. Coming out into the deserted village street on such a warm, still January morning, just as the first clear sunbeam shoots across the housetops, a broad, level scarf of dusty, dusky gold slung from hill to hill, you cannot but be forced back to the old, wondering thought. How it is possible for anyone to live in the country for long without coming to disbelieve altogether in winter as a season of dearth and death.

  Go where you will on such a morning. You are met at every turn of the way with plain refutation of the ancient theory. Overhead, in the wooded lane, the beaches are full of brown spearhead buds, waiting, seemingly, but for the first strong day of sunshine to unfurl them into green leaf. The horse chestnut buds stand up erect in the morning light, brilliant and glistening with new sap. The hazels are crowded with catkins, some of them a full inch long already. The wayside banks under the hedgerows teem with new green life, fresh young sprays of cranes-bill and bed-straw and stinging nettle, whirls of jagged dandelion leaves with here and there a yellow tassel of bloom opening in their midst, ground-saw almost in full flower, a glint of white dead nettle in a favoured corner, one blue eye of Veronica wide open in a still more shaded nook, and the wanton beauty of the mosses and lichens must be seen to be believed.

  All moss and lichen life is nearing the supreme vigour of its growth at this time. The rich gem-like verdure of the mosses lends an opulence to the grasses of every pasture and spreads its living emerald over every woodland track. The lichens on the tree trunks are weaving New Year's patterns of grey and green and gold, delicate laminae of one pure quiet colour upon the other. Exquisite seashell-like forms group together and endlessly reproduced as flowers in a garden bed, and all softly aglow and instinct with their weird uncanny life drawing its sustenance, it would seem, entirely from the air. Here is an old flint-wall smothered with bright-hued lichens, and giving back the level of morning sunlight in such a glory of colour as makes the eye flinch and turn for alleviation to the dun-brown earth below. In the bright winter sunshine the evergreen trees and shrubs of the hedgerow stand out in bold relief among their deciduous fellows.

  The light is absorbed and lost in the maze of bare twigs and branches of Hawthorne, Elder, Briar, but Privet and you and Holly stop and throw back the level beams in a thousand generous hues of life. The great sprawling bramble-bushes intercept every ray with their curtains of dappled green. The ivy, enveloping the tree trunks overhead, not only catches and holds the winter sunlight, but it draws down to itself the colour of the sky. Its uppermost glossy leaves have a soft blue sheen upon them, much like the bloom of ripe sloughs. This reflecting, reduplicating power of evergreen growths in sunshine lends sparkle and life to the dreariest stretch of the sodden way.

  What the countryside owes in winter to the unfailing verdure of these plants is scarcely to be overestimated. To move abroad, finding fresh living greenery wherever one goes, is to forget the winter and be perpetually reminded of the imminence of spring. The plants that carry their leaves only in summertime are but fair-weather friends. Ivy and holly, fir and bramble, spreading their richly sombre growths amidst the winter frosts and snows, these are the true standby of hard times. Never is the gorse so cheering and companionable as now, when it clothes itself in a myriad needles of green, with a yellow-winged blossom poised on every prickly spray.

  For the gorse is not only evergreen, it is evergold. Save for a week or two in the sultriest heats of summer, there is hardly a day of the year when its flowers cannot be found in plenty. In late January now, one can come upon whole bushes smothered in golden bloom, shining from afar like flame. But the chiefest and cheeriest of evergreen growths is the common grass of field and wayside. Leaves may come and leaves may go, but the common grass of the wayside goes on for ever.

  So that it have air and light and a little moisture, its greenness is perennial, unvarying, inevitable. All the so-called evergreens have a period in each year when their greenness is but a name. Every true leaf has a definite limit to its life, whether it be borne by deciduous tree, or by holly, bramble, or needle-leafed pine. It is the nature of all leaves to decay and fall at some time or other, and we look upon ivy and holly as evergreen plants, only because their leaves are shed piecemeal and out of the common season. But the wonder of the evergreen grass-blade is that it has no seasonal decay and fall.

  Every blade is just a green ribbon flowing ceaselessly up from the earth. Cattle browse upon it, rabbits nibble it away, the winter frosts and scorching heats of summer brown it at the tip. But its fountain of green life springs eternally below, and so there is always the common grass year in and year out, green and gladdening for ever. We know of oaks and yews traditionally hundreds of years old, but who shall tell the age of the common grass of the fields? So that you live near an oak-wood you need no calendar to tell that the winter has passed its nadir, and the New Year's life is already strong on the wing.

  But a week ago the whole wood was carpeted with rich sienna of fallen leaves, burning up into tiger-stripes of pure orange, where the sunlight struck across the winding glades. Today the leaves have all vanished, as if by magic. The crowding tree trunks stand upon an unbroken plane of green, thick matted ivy-growth, with the freshness and sparkle of spring already upon it, each shining leaf a looking-glass for the new risen sun. It is no magic indeed. The dead oak-leaves are still there, deep down under the glittering cover-lid of the ivy. But wind and rain of past days and nights have beaten them to earth, while leaving untouched the supple, upstanding ivy-sprays.

  Look where you will. Nothing of the brown December pall of cast foliage remains in the woodland deep.

• 02 - The First Month - January - Part 2

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  SECTION II. OF A COUNTRY CALENDAR by TIGNER EDWARDS. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. THE FIRST MONTH. JANUARY. PART II.

  In the Hazel Cops there is just as sure a token of the lengthening hours. December's sombre purple is gone from the maze of slender bells. There the catkins are swelling and drawing out their grey-green winter dress, taking to itself a delicate rose, the very colour of rejuvenation. Leaf buds and female flower buds show full and round and intensely green.

  Millions of swelling buds and lengthening catkins, catching the morning sun, overcome the purple of the stems, and bring to the wood a mistiness that is a real foreshadowing of April days. On the Downs, for many a week to come, the wind will dictate the season. Winter or spring, or even a fitful precious moment of pure summer, is January's tile,

  as the wind blows west or east. But nothing can hold back the blossoming of the gorse on these first days of the sun's turning. Icy blast or iron frost or grey rain torrent, shadow or shine, it is all one to the hardy gorse.

  It goes doggedly on with its joyous New Year's alchemy. Today the south-west wind came up warm and free with the amber dawn, and all day long the great cloud shadows have been chasing each other over hill and dale of sun-steeped green. It has been a day of tolling sheep-bells and caroling larks, grey hours and golden hours,

  and ever the song and buffeting strength of the wind. All that can be seen and felt on any day in winter. But not the living gold of the gorse-breaks, as they glow up now like sudden beacon-fires, and blot out again as swiftly when the great cloud-argusses drive across the sun, every stitch set to the breeze.

  Today the downland lark began his New Year's song. Not the brief disjointed strain of winter. The sudden music cast recklessly aloft into the frozen silence or whistling hubbub of the northern blast, when the bird breaks cover almost from under your feet, and cuts a swift tangent slantwise upon the wind, singing valorously as he goes.

  Not that which is over in a moment. Song and lightning sweep upward, ending together, but a fathom or two overhead, the lark dropping like a black stone silently to the safe shelter of earth again. But this is his veritable New Year's song, with the leisurely blitheness of spring in it.

  The song that begins with his first wing-beat and lifts in a wide spiral of music, getting higher and higher with every moment, the little fluttering atom of joy and energy creating an atmosphere of soft, tranquil melody as he soars. But even now, when the south wind scumbles hill and dell with violet haze, and the noontide sun strikes hot on your cheek, though it is only January, the lark does not attempt too

  high a flight. Watching him as he mounts steadily upward, you soon get dazzled with the pure light and lose him altogether. But you know he is still soaring, for ever the song quietens as it recedes into the blue. There comes a moment at last when a change dawns in the music.

  It has grown suddenly louder and clearer. The singer has turned and is coming down again, not by the winding aerial stare that took him aloft, but straight down now, swift and true as the falling stone, yet ever caroling as he falls. The lark's spring flight, brief though it is, moves to music from beginning to end.

  The glad song ripples on to the very moment the singer touches earth, going out then suddenly as the flame of a torch cast into water. If you wait a minute or two, he will be up again, telling the same blithe tale to the mist-veiled skies and all the morning through while the sunbeams last. But there is no need to tarry, he is only one of a thousand.

  You can trudge on, mile after mile, over these rolling Sussex Highlands and have your fill of lark music every step of the way. Lark song above and ever the quiet voice of the wind about your feet. The sound of the wind on the downs is always close to earth, a sobbing cadence in the dry grass-bents, or a low, slow, rhythmic note in the firs-breaks, islanding the greenswad

  everywhere, a sound curiously like the murmur of summer seas. Today, only the lightest sepher breathes from the south. Down in the valley, not a twig in the highest treetop moved in the calm morning light. The smoke went straight up from the cottage chimneys. But on the downs there is always moving, living air.

  And now, as you halt a while in one of the deep sunny bays of the Gorse thicket, the soft voice of it creeps in your ears like the lilt of low tide ripples on a summer shore. You shut the eyes a moment is wondrously to favour the illusion. The hot sun pouring on the uplifted face, overhead an unceasing carillon of larks, and close to the feet this strangely sweet insistent murmur lifting and falling.

  It needs but the crying of ocean birds and a sharp salt fragrance in the air to bring back all a lifetime's memories of summer holidays spent by the sea. As I drew nigh to the clearing in the heart of the wood, a green woodpecker got up from the bracken and went looping off out of sight amid the crowding trees. Seen from the rear, his dull tarnished jerkin was scarce visible in the attenuated light.

  But he turned in mid-air just before he disappeared, and then his yellow rump and gold-green flanks made quite a gleam of colour for the moment. A little while after, he started rapping among the old trees below the hill, trying first one, and then another, a sharp, dry, monotonous sound going off at intervals like a minute-gun. It was the only clear, differentiable note that would vex the stillness of the woodland

  morning clearing all the dim, grey, windless morning through. But the quiet in the deep wood itself was very far from being silence. This arid, pointed noise of the yaffle's business continually breaking upon the ear, through all other sounds into a sort of unregarded background while it lasted. It is strange how deserted the wood seemed, as my tread first crisped and crackled in

  the dry bracken of their shadowy glades, and how full of life and sound they are now. Hardly a moment goes by, but some small bird flits across the path from bush to bush. Another maze of dark branches overhead, of a thousand shades of green and brown and purple, really, but all bewitched into a cold black retina against the sky. This is pervaded with quiet twitterings and incessant scurrying of wings.

  Long-tailed tits drift in little companies from treetop to treetop, playing like kittens as they go. Winneying ox-eyes swing themselves about giddily from twig to twig, and the soft notes of blue tits, only to be described as a sort of musical kiss, creeps in the ear at every turn. The chaffinches love the woodland deeps on these mild, still winter mornings.

  Their cheery call-note follows the wanderer from end to end of the wood, and the warm break in the frosty weather has brought the first authentic token of spring with it, the chaffinches' resumption of true song. This bubbling lay of the chaffinch, commonly regarded as a mere string of bright notes, and varying alike in number and vehemence of delivery, is nevertheless the only song

  of wild bird that marks indubitably winter's approaching end. The English winter is actually but a two-month season. November, with its sky-load of ruddy leafage, belongs of right to autumn, and no one with eyes and ears could place February's ever-growing music and elm's thick with purple blossom among the winter months of dearth and death.

  But it is the chaffinch alone who first heralds the truth of all this. Today he has begun to waft his silver bubbles up into the mild, quiet air of wood and field. The song is still playing bubbles alone as yet. When they come audibly to earth, when the song finishes with the still-missing final triplet of flashing sound, then, and not till then, spring's heyday will be here.

  Though the flock was so far away that the drifting sheep looked only like dots on the green hillside, the clamour of the bells and the shepherd boy's lusty song came over to me strangely loud and clear on the slow, keen air. It could scarcely be called wind for this breezy country, yet, wandering over the lonely, silent sweep of downland under the inky pall of sky, the air had so chill a touch that

  I was forced to keep briskly moving. Only when I reached the great gorse break at the head of the coom and got deep into one of its sheltering bays could I halt with any comfort. But then it was pleasant and cosy enough. The biting wind fell like a shot bird.

  It still kept up its weird, dirge-like note in the thicket behind me, but the dense, matted billows of gorse cresting overhead had suddenly robbed it of all power to harm. I shared my gold-draped nook with a cloud of tiny midges that would have been instantly wafted to perdition out on the bare upland. Dew-drops hung trembling from all the grass-blades around my feet, intensely brilliant points

  of silver-white that would have been shaken to earth at their first gathering, had the chill flood of wintry air but an instant's chance with them. A rabbit scuttled off at my earliest approach, racing away to cover in the next gorse patch, and a pair of magpies did the same, filling the black sky with incessant sardonic chuckles until sound and sight of them were lost altogether over the far crest of the hill.

  Dark hurrying heaven above, with scarce more light in it than the sad green gloom of interminable and hollow beneath, solitude and a sense of banishment from the warm hub-heart of the world, that one only gets on these downs in winter, or in the midst of fathomless trackless seas, where a white fleck of top gallant or stain of smoke on the horizon is a whole week's prime event.

  And yet, content and enduring pleasure of life bestowed on every sense, for all it be but a moment's good, paid for by the hour-long journey out and home through the whistling icy air. The cheery fellowship of the midges, idly playing about my ears, squandered gold of gorse, all but taking the place of sunshine, not a green prickly spray in view, but was

  loaded with yellow butterfly forms, each again burdening the still air with a fragrance sickly sweet. The dirge of the harmless wind behind and around me, the far-off clamour of the sheep bells, and, sweeter, more uplifting than all, the voice of the shepherd boy, the fresh young voice peeling out above all other sounds in the desolate morning, careless, jolly, full

  of a childlike, unthinking, unstudied heart's content. Through the woodland break at the edge of the steep you look out over hill and dale of darkling arable to the far-off line of ghostly glimmering sea. The plough teams are out and busy on the shrouded upland. You can count half a dozen of them, near and far.

  The ploughman's lusty voices and merry jingling of the harness drift over to you faintly on the slow moving air. But the wind, what there is of it, comes from the fateful east. All the life and lustre, all the rich aerial blues that belong to western weather, have vanished from the landscape.

  Everything is grey and dour to the far horizon. Even the clouds of gulls circling and crying in the wake of every plough look dreary, cold. At these times, when the east wind impels its cheerless, sombre mood upon all the countryside, turning the sky into a leaden pool and the woods into blotches of ink, the eye unconsciously

  enhances the value of the minutest scraps of colour that chance by the way. The lichens on the tree trunks, grey and unmarked in sunny weather, now stand out with a living, arresting green. The red on a robin's breast, as he flits across the field of view, has all the warning brightness of a danger signal.

  Between the stones of the path, the little gold-green moss tufts that you have so often trodden unseeingly glitter underfoot now like gems. And every time the glance returns to these things, after wandering a while over the drab upland and leaden sky, their value is redoubled. The crimson of this bramble-leaf, suspended by the way, has ceased to be mere colour and

  turned into a tongue of quivering flame. It is the same with the sounds of the countryside as with its colours when the east wind blows. Though the robin keeps up his uneasy journeying to and fro, he is mute save for a faint half-hearted trill or two. A day or two ago, when the south wind still held, the thrushes sang all day long, and

  the little ox-eyes were conning over some of their most winsome notes, seesaw music that belongs of right to April. But today the thrush gave up within an hour of dawn, and the tits are as silent as they are invisible. A jay calls harshly.

  The scornful chatter of a magpie breaks out now and again in the woodland deep. A yaffle tries his bill once or twice on some decaying branch, a muffled, hopeless sound. The wind sighs and droops, and sighs again. The day is out of heart, and all things with it. All things, that is to say, other than human, all linked up with the human scheme.

  For the voices of the ploughmen, urging their smoking teams, come over to you, cheery and stalwart as ever. The harness goes on with its merry tune. And now, from the hidden dell below you, there lifts something that is the very presentment of joyousness.

  The hedge-trimmers have been at work there since daybreak, and now they are burning their clippings. Over against the dark hillside there rises a solid column of wood-smoke that spreads out at once into gargantuan billows. A wave upon wave of pure radiant cobalt blue, startling in its sheer intensity of colour.

  Such a blue, you think to yourself gratefully, as might put an Italian lake in summertime to shame. And for those unaccustomed to woodland walks so early in the year, the abundance of insect life abroad during these mild breaks in the frosty weather is always an astonishing thing. At every sunny corner in the green glades there are clouds of midges filling the air

  with tiny silver flashes from their myriad wings. The extent of the spider population, alive and alert at this time, can be gauged by looking across the hazels against the sun, when every purple wand will be seen to be cabled and girded to its fellows in all directions by lines of gleaming spider silk. During the sunniest hours there is often the rich, soft hum of bees upon the air, and you

  are puzzled to know what a hive-bee can be doing in a wood in wintertime, until you see one drink at a dew-drop, then rise and soar away straight for home. But it is after dark when the woodland tracks are haunted by a ghostly company of little pale-winged moths that the woods can be most profitably visited. These moths, indeed, have been flying the whole winter through, whenever the nights

  were warm and still enough. Where they get to during the really cold spells is something of a mystery. Probably they lie up in the crevices of the likened bark of trees, or hide in the deep carpet of fallen leaves, or shelter amidst the tangle of ivy and couch-grass underlying every wayside bush.

  As you thread the woodland way by the light of a lantern, something that you think can only be a falling leaf comes sidling and swaying into view. In a moment it passes outside the dim yellow circle of light, but as swiftly returns, this time rising as well as falling. Once or twice the moth comes so close to the lantern that you even mark the colour of its

  wings. Okra, with a lurid ruddy tinge in it, like dying fire. This is one of the larger moths of winter-time, and one of the most plentiful. You come upon them at every turn of the path, if the night be really warm, and the curious thing about them is that they appear to be wholly indifferent to the light you carry.

  There is a small and paler moth plentifully abroad at this time, which blunders against the lantern in the traditional way of all night-flying insects. But this dusky fire-winged moth, if not actually blind, shows no sort of recognition of the light. It will wander casually across the zone of illumination from darkness to darkness, and

  back again as unconcernedly. Or turning away, will sail steadily off down the yellow beam as upon a river of light, until you lose it altogether in the gloom of the wood. End of section two.

• 03 - The Second Month - February - Part 1

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  III. It is February. A chill-grey dawn no longer silences the birds. Cold or warm, rain or shine, the day starts with the same glad medley of woodland music. Song-thrush and missal, wren and robin, contending jubilantly together so that there is an almost unbroken stream of rich sound flowing over the awakening world. Sooner or later, too, sometimes before the light is strong enough to reveal his identity to the eye, a blackbird starts tuning up

  in the spinny beyond the garden close. It always seems as if, by common consent, the other songbirds, quietened their intermingled strains, directly the blackbird starts in with his peerless recitative, just as the opera chorus is subdued to a mere undertow of sound when the prima donna takes the stage. All through the day the clear mellow warble will break in, time and again, upon the general woodland theme, and for the moment you will

  to nothing else. It may be the last note that stills with the last fading amber glimmer of evening. You may carry its serene slow sweetness with you into the land and nod, and weave it like magic thread of gold into your dreams of spring. It is February, and the hazel woods are hanging out their new green gossamer robes to dry in the sun and hurrying freshets off western wind. In this steep hillside wood how many millions of new

  blown catkins are there dangling now in the breeze to give the wood its present radiant illusion of verdure, a fresh greenness of life nothing like the greenness of new spring leaves, but just as it were, vivid emerald green sunlight turns suddenly full upon the maze of sombre wintry twig and stem, and on a nearer vision these wonderful hazel woods of February are seen to be full of light of a wholly different colour. Here and there

  amidst the crowding lambs-tails there shines up a speck of burning crimson, a tiny torch of intense crimson flame that fairly dazzles the eye for all its minuteness. And now you come to divine the reason for all this eager shimmering and shaking out of green tresses in the new spring sunlight and urging western breeze. Until the night dews are dried out of the downy catkins they cannot shed their fertilising pollen dust upon the living rubies

  below. The October nut harvest wholly depends upon the temper of the weather in these and weeks. If cool, moist, sunless times prevail, the frilled brown nuts that should stud the hazel branches in the autumn, ready for the rooks and village children and squirrels, will be few and far between. But there is little fear of that on present showing. Wield your stick anywhere now among the catkin-laden boughs as you thread the narrow woodland path

  and see how, with every blow, you send a little green cloud of dust soaring away into the dim labyrinth of the wood. In the dripping quiet of the hazel wood the robin's song rings out strangely sweet and clear. Yesterday, on the soft, sunny spring morning, the thrushes were paramount in the wood. Their glad symphony easily overbore the robin's tender diffident refrain. But you can never count on the song thrushes. Today, though it seems perfect singing

  weather for any wild birds loving the warm times, their careless rippling music is curiously absent. The robins have the sowsing morning almost to themselves. If you have any lingering remnant of belief in that palpable fiction, of it being still winter when February is You have but to take the path through the hazel cops on any such warm cascading morning as this. The winter purple of the bare hazel wands has entirely gone, and the whole wood

  is clad in a living green. Other woods don their spring garment of verdure by easy stages, and by a process that is yet scarce in sight of beginning. The new hazel leaves, indeed, are still only in the promise of swelling bud. But the full-grown catkins are here by the thousand thousand. Every bush is laden with their gold-green light, each catkin a little pendent streak of intense colour, and all slanting the one way in the gentle

  air, so that, as you press on down the winding path, there seem to be two kinds of rain falling about you, the relentless grey torrent from the weeping heaven, and a magic rain of emerald light. The ceaseless ronderlaid of red-breast song, and the living green of the hazels, and now in one of the dimmest corners of the wood you come unawares upon a sight that serves to drive the very thought of winter back, as it were, into remoter stages. The great

  oaks that here and there stretch their gaunt bare branches over the wilderness of hazel stand each on a little patch of shining cloth of gold. The aconites are in full flower, tiny globes of yellow, each poised on the top of a ragged umbrella of fresh young leaves. But the new foliage is almost lost under the sheen of the blossom, and its vivid hue sobered by the grey of the clinging rain. Only the tight-closed yellow flowers seem

  to ward off the water-drops and gather to themselves all the light that filters through. But there is a more potent sign still that winter is over, and the spring getting into its lordly, high-striding mood. Southward the hazel copse ends abruptly at the steep bank by the river, and here, in a little sheltered nook where every sunbeam of the day is caught and held, a whole garden has sprung up amidst the pile-chalk rubble of the river's brink.

  It is gold again, but of a different mintage. The gleaming amber stars of the Coltsfoot are set so closely side by side that, from a distance, they swamp the white glare of the chalk altogether with their runlets and pools of gold. And in the deep bay on the verge of the wood, open to the whole day's sunshine, Spring ever gets a first sure foothold long before she is able to wander abroad in the open lanes and fields. Though the rough,

  yet kindly, south-west wind is surging in the treetops behind, and driving a flustered of cloud-forms held to scouter before it over the blue sky, here in the sunny hollow there is scarce enough air to swing the hazel catkins that fill the walls of the deep curving bay with thousands of tiny tangents of gold-green light. The fresh bright colour of the catkins in the untrammeled midday sun is past all belief. It is not mere colour. It is a dazzling

  glory, pure sunshine turned into glowing emeralds whose myriad facets give back not only their own intrinsic hue, but the sunshine's living tincture of gold. To this light-riddled sheltered nook come always the first flowers of Spring. Already there is blue-eyed Veronica shining in the dew-soaked grass that hems in its winding moss-grown ways, and primroses lurk under the greening bramble breaks, not single furtive blossoms cowering timorously here and there

  the dead bracken as one sees in the open clearings now, but bold upstanding flowers half a dozen together, making a glow of sulphur light wherever one looks. Tufts of silver chervil lift a foot or more above the grass, and pink and white dead-nattles bejewel the way at every step. The little crimson-tipped daisies throng the beaten track. One can hardly help treading on them. Broad disks of golden dandelion show like dropped moidos amidst the green. When

  the wind is up and doing blusterously, all insect life vanishes from the open country, but here in the sun-steeped cleft of woodland the still air is alive with the glint of tiny wings. At every turn of the path you brush through a cloud of dancing gnats. Now and then an old familiar note falls upon the ear as a hive-bee lifts from the crowding grass-bents underfoot and soars away singing into the blue. There is no doubt of her destination.

  You can follow her with the eye through the sunny air, going straight in the direction of the village. It is a comfortable thought that the hive-bees know of this flowery nook and are already garnering its early sweets. But of a truth, it is not nectar for the honey-brewing that bees seek on these first spring-like days in February. Though there is flower-shine enough in the little-favoured nook, the time for sweet-gathering is not yet. These wandering

  bees are out for water alone. In the open the fierce wind and sun together soon dry up the morning dews or drive them to thirsty earth. But in the sheltered corners February dew lies late and the wise honey-bee knows where to look for it. Red skies in the morning do not invariably foretell rain. The misty water-logged red that comes with earliest break of dawn, suffusing the whole heaven in a lurid, swampy radiance, yet vanishing

  with the first direct sun-beam, is often the herald of a cloudless day. The true red that goes before rain is nearly always late in coming, and the last thing it suggests to an unobservant eye is the imminence of wet weather. The morning breaks crystal clear, a sky of wonderful, almost uncanny purity and depth of blue behind a trellis of troubled grey, an infinity of dapples and flecks and sagging, wavering cloud-lines covering the

  whole eastward view right up to the zenith, yet all touched in, tenderly, delicately, as with the finest sable-point held in a master's hand. And then the red that means rain, the true shepherd's warning, may come in either of two ways. Perhaps in a moment, as it seems, when a great and angry light breaks up from below, as if the door of some raging fiery furnace of the underworld has been thrown open, when the whole wide fantracery of eastward cloud

  lights up into a griddle of ruddy flame, and hill and dale beneath it are swept with a sudden smoulder of crimson. Or it may come by imperceptible degrees, earth-line and endless reiteration of grey cloud slowly changing into one vast shining rose garden, where every blossom is a clear-cut jewel set in enamel of a richer, deeper blue and more crystalline texture than ever. But whether sudden or slow, the real portent in the red of morning skies depends on this

  excessive clarity of atmosphere, or the reverse which accompanies it. The ruddiest sunrise, so that it be misty and far off, and the earth below, reluctant to let go the grizzly hues of night, may well turn to day-long brilliance. But a red morning that draws down to the hills, hills sharp-defined and seemingly scarce at an arm's stretch, and all set beneath a blue translucent and pure as molten amethyst, has the very sound of the rain already in its slow,

  inconstant breath. In a little while an ominous array of cloud-tops begins to peer over the horizon wall, and it may well be that you never see the sun for all the lurid signs of its coming. The long cloud-bank steadily lifts and overspreads the sky. The wind is crying in the tree-tops, and the first swift scatter of the torrent is on the pane. In summertime wet weather has little power to silence the birds. But, thus early, a drenching morning is often a silent one,

  or at least its music brought down to a single jolly yet monotonous refrain. Leaning from the casement now, under the pouring eaves, you can distinguish only the one voice far and near, the mistlethrushes calling to each other across the rain-blurred valley. It is a wild, un-wrecking sort of song, with little of artistry and less of real tunefulness in it. But you soon learn to love the Stormcock for his invincible optimism, in and out of season.

  He just keeps the sopping February morning on the hither side of gloom. Around the village next morning the cocks were crowing long before the first amber tinge of coming day showed in the east, and while the stars were still bright in the blue wall of the western sky. It was a beautiful sound, very serene and clear and a little awe-inspiring, as I looked out as I looked out from the cottage window and watched the silent frost-bound darkness

  slowly yielding to the coming day. I waited for the song-thrushes to begin in the wood hard by, and the missiles to follow a moment later with their bold insistent clarion, as they have done on every warm, free morning of late, with perhaps a phrase or two of blackbird music afterwards, as the first level sunbeam thrust through the pine-clad sierra of the eastward hill. But no other note of bird broke the radiant stillness.

  This soft, mysterious symphony of cock-crow journeyed the round of the village minute after until broad day glittered upon everything, and the white thatchers began to steam on their sunny sides, and here and there from a cottage chimney a plume of blue wood smoke lifted into the torpid golden air. And then at last another and a deeper sound grew into the shimmering quietude of the morning. Dim and far off at first, it soon developed into a mighty clamour as a great

  army of rooks swept by overhead, darkening the blue with their close-packed throng. There were hundreds of them, it seemed, all calling to each other as they went, and making straight for the high-lying arable lands among the hills. As they passed over the village, the sound of their going attained a surprising volume, a babel of rich, husky, sonorous tones, blend with an interminable yelping chorus,

  like a pack of hounds in full cry. But it was all over in a moment or two. Black streaming host and resounding travel song died away together in the far distance. The risen sun was already hot on the face, and though the robins were awake and caroling in every spinny, the thrushes held mute as ever. These brief returns of wintry times in the midst of the ardours of mounting February always strangely silenced the thrushes.

  It is past midday now, and not one has ventured a note all the sun-flooded morning through. Every time the northeast wind begins to blow, the advancing spring seems to drop and take cover, like storming troops in the open when the guns get on their range. All colour vanishes from the landscape. The blue sky is hidden by a pall of desolate grey. The violet blots out from the distant hills. Wood and field take on a dismal miasma of gloom.

  The trees turn black as ink. The river, stemming sullenly on between its barricades of last year's reeds, might be a river of lead. In a moment the world seems back again into dreary drab December. The thing to do on a walk in the country at these times of seeming retrogression is to shun all extended views, and let eye and ear busy themselves only with the minutiae of the season. Though the treetops look sombre and lifeless enough against the frowning heaven,

  seen one upon the other from the midst of the wood, they reveal a beautiful mirage of richly contrasting hues. The elms are already thick with purpling bud, the ashes full of black velvet bobbins threading the wilderness of smoke-grey stems. Oak and beech are laden to the skies with knots and spearheads of tawny brown. In the copses the black thorns are covered with tiny virgins that soon will show a flush of rosy life, and in a few short weeks will be breaking into

  snowy crests of blossom down every laneside and over the hedgerows bordering every field. The service trees are showing leaves already an inch long, and elder and honeysuckle are bursting everywhere into fresh green spray. Down in the grass below a hundred different growths are springing into new life. Herb-robert and sink-foil, bed-straw and ground-ivy, wild parsley, daisy, coltsfoot, dandelion, all things that, with the return of the warm south-western airs,

  will be spangling the laneside verges of March with living silver and gold. End of section 3

• 04 - The Second Month - February - Part 2

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  Section 4 of A Country Calendar by Tickner-Edwards. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Second Month, February. Part 2. Through the carpet of dead brown leaves underfoot, the dog's mercury is throwing up a myriad leafy hands, each holding a bunch of tendrils like clustered strings of beads. But the primroses give the dominant and indomitable note to the scene. One can scarce move without treading

  on their dense whirls of fresh young foliage all closely intermingled with gleaming sulphur buds, thousands upon thousands of them in the vast clearing, with here and there already a full-blown flower. Half a day's real spring weather would spread the whole hillside with shining cloth of gold. Below in the village Songthrush and Robin and Missal poured forth a steady torrent of

  upon the sunny air. But as you drew up the steep chalk lane that led to the downs, this ringing chorus gradually failed, until at last you could detect only one clear note very faint and far behind you, the call of a mistlethrush perched on the highest branch of the churchyard elms. This last token of the lowland haunting-birds died away as you gained the summit of the

  green shoal-back hill and began to descend into the wide coom beyond. Suddenly you seemed to have plunged into a great silence. An unbroken arc of blue above, and limitless array of rolling hill and dale still white with the night frost, yet a whiteness that was breaking everywhere into cascades of iridescent water-drops and letting the rich colour of the grass heave through in waves of glowing emerald under the hot morning sun.

  And yet, even on these windless February mornings there is no real silence on the downs. The ear soon gets tuned to their quiet key, and by little and little, as your steady stride brings you into the heart of their green solitudes, you begin to wonder at all you hear. The singing is coming up amongst these white-capped highland wastes as surely as in the warm tree-cumbered valleys, yet without their disturbing stress and sense of change. The downland larks have

  been singing all the winter through, as they are singing now, but today the song is quieter because the singers are higher in the blue. The old brief furtive snatches of music are gone, and now you may listen to a single unholting cadence for three or four minutes at a stretch. Yet to divide the song of one lark from another at this season needs a keen and accustomed ear. The silence that seemed to fall about you as you came over the green barrier of

  hilltop reveals itself now as just a firmament of lark-song, remote as the frail shadowy cloud-forms shaped like beckoning hands that dim the far-the-most blue. On the south downs, although mid-February has passed, sheep-bell music still mingles with this unceasing ripple of lark-song and the new spring call of the peewits. The lambing-yards down at the home farms are beginning to fill, and the surrounding pens already contain their close-packed throngs

  of forward ewes. Albeit the main part of each flock still spends the day browsing among the hills, and the soft slow chime of the bells comes over to you unremittingly on the calm morning air. In a week or two at most this perambulating symphony will draw to an end, and the last you be safely folded close to the lambing-yard to wait the fulfilling of her days. There will come a time when you will trudge over these hills in the sunniest, most songful weather,

  yet with a vague, undefinable sense of loss, and then, perhaps on some wind-wild March morning, will come rehabilitation in the sweetest downland note of all the year. The glad clamour of ewes and lambs together blends with the familiar age-long tolling of the bells. Though one may have witnessed the coming of blossom-time to the elms every February for a score of years, it never comes but as a surprise. A week ago the great trees flanking

  the roadside showed the same bare attenuation of branch and twig as all their fellows of the woodland, but a few more days of temperate western air have wrought an almost startling in the prospect. Now the elms stand up against the grey, quiet sky nearly as thick with purple blossom as they will be with green leaves in June. Elm-trees in full flower under sunshine are gorgeous enough, but the sun lifts the whole countryside into a universal splendour,

  and the glow of the elm blossom is only one radiant zone among many. The force of contrast is lost. But on this dim, quiet morning the elms alone draw the glance. Looking up the grove from the valley, the eye is led from crest to crest until it stops baffled against a towering cliff of crimson, rich, imperious colour, smouldering against the grey still heaven with all the sullen, solemn beauty of dying fire. And as the elm blossom came, so it will go.

  Its lurid purple will block the skies while February lasts, and then the colour will suddenly vanish. The treetops will clear and lighten. A steady rain of green will begin to fall, an infinity of tiny verdant spangles sifting delicately down, day and night, until all the woodland ways are covered as with emerald foam. Later this flotsam and jetsam, the cast sepals of the flowers, will change its hue to tawny brown,

  and the March winds will pile it up in the corners like drifts of rusty snow. Then this astonishing tree will have a further wonder to reveal. As it donned its royal garb, beginning with purple crown, then flowing robes, and finally sandals of the same rich hue, now it takes to itself its summer drapery of green foliage on the inverse plan. First its great bowl bursts into minute green leaf. The tears of slender branches,

  standing out here and there from the rugged stem, light up one by one with the same glow of sappy life. The lowermost boughs are reached and lost in the rising tide of new colour. Presently you see the elm tops thickening again, and the first few days of April sunshine will see all their dark framework lost in an ever-gathering mist of green. And yet for all its beauty, perhaps because its beauty is well nigh its only use,

  the elm is a doomed tree in England. Year by year the numbers of giant elms in the country steadily diminish, and none are planted in their stead. Other forest trees are safe from extinction, whether we plant them or not, for they will always perpetuate their kind from chance seedlings. But the elm never seeds. Perhaps this rising generation will be the last to know the loveliness of elm blossom flooding the whole countryside with living purple in early

  spring. All the bright still morning through, the bees have been stampeding to and fro between the hives and the blossoming elm trees in the lane, each bringing home a double load of pollen attached to her thighs. The lumps of pale grey matter, most of them so big and heavy that the bee can scarce drag them into the hive. Surely today this is the busiest spot in the village, the old bee garden. Now and again as you watch, one comes tumbling down out of the blue sky with her

  panniers full of pollen-like beads of shining gold, proving that she has been prospecting by the riverside and has chanced upon an early tuft of willow bloom. Already the willows are crowded with bursting buds. In a week or two, if the warm bright weather holds, they will be in full flower, and then the sunny air above the garden will be one vast chute down which the willow gold will pour all day long as into a king's treasury. These first real strenuous days of work for the bees

  in late February reveal to the watcher many curious things. Though there is ever this winged multitude lancing out and home, frantically intent on the hive's provisioning, there are many other worker bees who find more than enough to do at home. The broad sloping threshold of each hive is covered with a busy throng, every bee engaged on some particular enterprise. Obviously there is a sort of general spring cleaning in progress.

  Countless small scraps of rubbish are being dragged out and tumbled over the edge of the alighting board. The ground below is littered with a fine drift of yellow atoms for a yard away from each hive. All the combs within are being cleaned up and got ready for the coming season's work. The rims of the brood cell strengthened with wax, the winter accumulation of debris on the hive floor scavenged out, dead bees borne forth on the shoulders of those who fulfil the

  office of undertakers to the community. The dead bees, however, are never left in the vicinity of a healthy hive. All other useless or unwanted matter is merely cast away clear of the entrance, but the dead are carried off to safe sanitary distance. You can see the undertaker bee flying straight away through the sunlight with her gruesome birthing, perchance towards some burial place long traditional with the race.

  But perhaps the most interesting thing now to be witnessed in the bee garden is the first resumption of the unique ventilatory system practised by the hives. Already, for an hour or so at the warmest time of the day, you can see half a dozen bees or more anchored in a row in open order with their heads towards the hive entrance, all vigorously fanning their wings. The effect of this is to draw the vitiated air from the hive, and in the height of

  summer the whole flight board may be covered with these ventilating bees, creating together an outward current of air strong enough, as may be easily proved, to extinguish a candle flame. Away in the deep downland coom, lying between one great shoalback hill and another, there is no sound upon the still air but the song of the larks. Down in the village, when I left it under the first clear sun-glow of the morning,

  the birds were singing with an amazing force and sweetness. Songthrush and Mistlethrush, Robin and Wren and Chaffinch, Starling and Dunnock, all uniting their music in one rippling cascade of sound. But as I climbed the steep lane to the downs, one by one the glad voices were left behind. Standing now in the wide green hollow amidst the hills, miles away from any human settlement, there is nothing but lark song above and below.

  It is only in solitary treeless spaces, such as these high-lying wastes of the Sussex Downs, that one gets to know anything of the Skylark and his true ways. In the lowlands he is never visible but as a flickering black speck against the sky, or dropping like a stone to earth, where he is at once swallowed up by the rank herbage of the field. But here, on the crisp short downland turf, his whole life, aloe and aloft, is open to scrutiny,

  and one soon finds out many unexpected things about him. That the Skylark sings at times, when perching or resting on the ground, is known to all who consistently watch the wildlife of the countryside. In these early days, brief stanzas of the song can often be heard lifting from earth, and the bird seen swelling his throat and bristling his crest behind some grass tussock, or even when making his favourite

  swift scurry from one green ridge to another. But it is not this alternation of venue in song which chiefly impresses an observer of Skylark ways at this season. It is the extraordinary numbers of these birds congregating on the Downs at the present time, and the gay companionableness of the life they lead. Today the green solitary coom seems full of larks. On every hand, in the still sunlight, the gleam of their wings is incessant. They are like a bevy of children

  just let out of school, running to and fro, and pirouetting in the air two and three together, darting off a while in long ascending tangents up into the blue sky, caroling as they go, or chasing one another from crest to crest of the greenswad just clear of the surface with all the sure intrepidity of hunting swallows. But comparison with the flight of other birds, perhaps almost without exception, is stultified by any near study of the skill and power of the

  Skylark on the wing. Especially it is the Skylark's faculty for intricate swift manoeuvre at close quarters that most excites the wonder. Now and then a couple of them will lift into the air and describe together a sort of intertwined whirling double spiral, whose velocity baffles the keenest eye. Probably a first abolition of the great spring love rivalry that is to build for the coming April days, their firmament of song. In country houses, on these warm still

  February evenings, as one sits reading or writing by lamplight, the quiet of the room is sure to be broken sooner or later by a shrill sound going to and fro in the air, the high fine wavering note of a mosquito, perhaps two or three together, restlessly voyaging about. These early mosquitoes are nearly always specimens of the true malaria carrying anopheline gnat, which contrary to the general belief is one of the commonest of British species. There are about 20 kinds of biting gnats

  which pass with us under the common name of mosquito and all hibernate in some form or other. Of the three British malaria gnats, only the spot-winged variety, by far the commonest of all, seems to pass the winter invariably as perfect insect, and of these the gravid females alone survive. They hang up in the dark corners of cottage rooms and especially the cobweb ceilings of stables and outhouses. Any dim, neglected nook where the besom is not likely to disturb them.

  The little company that is shrilling about your room is nearly certain to be composed entirely of spot-winged anophelines, roused on their winter retirement by the new warmth of the February night, and frantically bent on securing the blood draught now necessary, not so much for their own sustenance as for the development of the eggs that in a few short weeks they will be laying on the sedgy waters of some neighbouring pond or sluggish stream.

  These mosquito eggs are well worth the trouble of looking for and should be sought among the half-submerged grasses close under the banks. The eggs of the malaria gnat are dropped upon the water singly, tiny, black, elongated objects like minute oat-grains that immediately join themselves together tip-to-tip or side-by-side in all manner of curious and intricate geometrical patterns, often covering a square inch or more of the water surface with a fine dark network

  whose quaint fanciful beauty must be seen to be realised. This adhesion and interlocking of the eggs serves to prevent their being scattered by the violence of the mimic storms that assail their resting places every time the wind blows or the rain beats down, where otherwise they might be carried into midstream and become an easy prey to the first hungry stickleback that happens by. But even then, these wonderful eggs of the malaria mosquito have every chance of survival

  for their mysterious work of plaguing humankind. Each is fashioned exactly like a lifeboat, up-curved prow and stern, double side floats and all. It is practically impossible to swamp and sink them by the most vigorous splashing. Every year millions of malaria-carrying mosquitoes are bred in this country, and though the terrible scourge of malaria is almost extinct among us, it is only the vigilance of our sanitarians that holds the menace at nought.

  Later, in the stillness of the starlit night, a brown wood owl came calling over the village, so near at length that I roused and went to the window in the hope of a glimpse of him. But though the hollow wild note seemed to pass and repass continually within a yard or two, and now and again the dull reverberation of his flight was plainly audible, he kept so craftily within cover of the trees that nothing of him was ever to be seen. As he wheeled invisibly to and

  fro, filling the grey dark with his hollow melody, his mate in the distant woodland answered him cry for cry. He drew off at last, and I listened until the two voices met afar off in equal strength, dwindling away at last together into the silence of the hills. Then a sort of strangled bubbling note sounded up in the churchyard, and I knew the old barn owl that lives in the tower was also on the wing. He too made the circle of the village, but farther afield,

  not drawing a trail of weird song behind him in the manner of the wood owl, but, as it were, blazing the aerial track here and there with shrill catches of stifled melody as he sped. Hardly had he started on his tour of the meadows when the little brown owls, the Frenchies, began in the gardens round about. There is nothing owl-like in their strident note. It is just a medley of harsh, jangling tones, each bird calling apparently for his own content,

  with none of the deliberate companionable give and take so characteristic of the larger owls. But the hubbub goes as abruptly as it comes. One minute the gardens rang with the sharp, fierce note, and the next there seemed no living creature stirring under the whole mute starlit heaven. That was the moment chosen for the first uplifting of a voice, which, to the lifelong dweller in a sheep-farming country,

  is perhaps the sweetest of all sounds of spring. It came from the hillside over against the village, where the shepherds had been building their new lambing-yard this fortnight back, the first cry of the first new-born lamb, a long drawn-out, yammering note lifting into the starshine, almost human-like in its telling plaint of helplessness and need. For though, according to the old South Down tradition, the earliest lambs are not due in the world

  until St. Valentine's Day, there are always one or two in every flock who declare for the great adventure of life well before the allotted time. In a few weeks from now, the vast yellow straw castle of a lambing-pen upon the hill will be filled with crying lambs and their vociferously anxious mothers, and no one in the village will be able to sleep at nights. you

• 05 - The Third Month - March - Part 1

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  March, with its chill, grey days alternating with days of genial, sunny warmth and calm, gives to the years' advance an illusion of discontinuity. The spring seems to come by fits and starts. When the sun shines and the warm west wind harps in the treetops, and all the distant hills are afloat in violet haze, one seems to be standing breast-high in a swift, onrushing torrent of new light and life. But the wind

  chops round to the north, and in a single night all is changed. A nipping air keens under a drab and sullen heaven. The glad, day-long ripple of birdsong dies down to a few whimpering, fearsome notes. Looking away over the dim, receding mist of meadows to the far-off woods, all seems black and lifeless as a winter's day. At these times it is good to turn away from this apparent general retrogression of things and let the

  eye keep to nearer aspects, judge the current of the year's progress by the straws that move steadily with it, rather than by the back-driving ruffles borne of contrary winds. The blackthorn blossom is one of the most comforting standbys for a dull, chill day. All the lanes are full of it now. The hedgerows are lighting up fast with its sweet, starry inflorescence and myriad opening buds. From the first the blackthorn has taken no count

  of ups and downs of weather. Warmth or cold, rain or shine, it has been pushing unconcernedly forward to its final grand display. In a week or two the hedgers bordering every field and lane will be hung far and near with garlands of snowy blackthorn bloom, like so many waiting brides. And then, if another cold snap intervene, people will go about buttoned up and shivering, telling each other that it was only to be expected. The blackthorn blossom always brings

  winter back again. Belief in the sure recurrence of this so-called blackthorn winter has become an article of faith with nearly all rural folk. And yet it is based wholly upon a falsity, a strange misreading of the traditions come down from ancient times. The phrase blackthorn winter had its origin really in a poetic fancy, such as was common enough in the old rich-visioned illiterate ages of the English countryside, a supposed resemblance of the full-flowered

  thorn bushes to growths laden with snow. It had nothing to do with any untimely recrudescence of wintry weather at the season of the blackthorn's fairest perfection, even if that were a tradition borne out by the fact. As like as not, when the blackthorns have reached the zenith of their bridal beauty, the chill north wind will return, and the wealth of snowy blossom may be hidden under real snow. But that will be a mere mischance, rare enough as any attentive

  observation carried over many years will easily prove. Yet the inconsistency, if it come, must be reckoned to the weathers, never to the blackthorn's charge. Every year in spring's unfailing calendar the first blackthorn flower comes true to the week, almost to the day, of its appointed time. A rose-red dawn, yet with all the soft pure colour low in the cloudless western sky, and only the merest slur of daffodil in the brightening east. What poet has ever dared

  to flout convention by putting such a sunrise into rhyme? And yet that was nature's way this still March morning. As I went over the frosty meadow, bruising a footprint trail of vivid emerald into the silvery white, my shadow stretched a full hundred feet before me. Not a grey shadow as at broad day, but one intensely blue with the rich royal blue drawn down from the crystalline sky above. And on either side of this ever-lengthening

  receding track of azure lay a glistening plain of hoarfrost warmed here and there with a ruddy fleck from the west. The rich red light held until the lifting sun had cleared the wood-top and swamped the world in molten gold. The spring morning seemed to come at last suddenly, like the breaking of flood-gates of light. The dawn was not the beginning of the day, but only an ineffectual alien thing swiftly superseded, and now forgotten as the strong

  March sun bordered the earth and put the lingering wintry frost to the knife. It is on such a morning that one begins to hear strange notes in wood and field. It is not that new songs have already come to the awakening countryside, but that the old songs change. The old accustomed musicians of field and wayside turn new pages of the score. Most of the chaffinches still keep on with their truncated winter melody, the clear run

  of silver notes with the little final flurry of bright sound typical of summer as yet left out. But today the chaffinches' full measure of music has been ringing in every hedgerow, and the yellow-hammers have been drawing out their wheezy sweetness almost to the wanted length of summer days. All the common singing birds are showing in their music this authentic trait of March. Longer and longer with every day sounds the ring-dove's

  crooning note in the quiet and stillness of the budding wood. The blackbird often sings now for an hour on end, not the single desultory warble that one hears in warm bright breaks of February, but the sustained leisurely symphony running on with scarcer pause half the sun-steeped morning through. But the most arresting note of these ever-mounting March days is one that comes from the little song thrush, though many would be ready to deny its true source, so curiously it

  variances it with the common trend of the thrush's lay. Right in the midst of his liveliest, most careless stanzas, he falls into a plaintiff, pensive mood. And then, sweet and low and slow, comes this astonishing sound that at once recalls something you have not heard these nine months back, the famous keening part of the song of the nightingale. There has been no doubt about the blackbird for a week past. He has been singing rain or shine

  at every evening's close. And now he is just beginning to tune up with each dawn, a steady, tranquil flow of clean-stopped notes as from the lower register of a great concert flute. It is by three almost unique traits that one infallibly singles out the blackbird's music from the rest. By its quality, first of all, there is no other voice of bird with just the same deep mellow serenity of tone. Once familiarly known, it can never be confused with songs of lesser

  worth. And then, by its easy, effortless power, its rich, deliberate contralto, once the blackbird starts into the nightly symphony, it rests the major role from all other birds, pour forth as lusty a measure as they may. And supremely, by its musician skill, its verve, attack, its wise employment of caesura and refrain, its unending veriformity, its deft use of telling reticence and interval, the blackbird is no mere songster,

  but an accomplished instrumentalist. In this trait alone, he stands apart from all other wild birds, not even excepting the nightingale. In quality and power, the nightingale is unapproachable in her way. The purity and forceful sweetness of her few notes outrival even those of the blackbird in his finest fetal. But the nightingale is just a singing bird, and not a very proficient one at that. The blackbird plays upon an instrument of priceless worth, with finished, delicate art.

  Listening to him now, in the golden, stormy tag end of a day that has been all song and sun and driving rain from its first red unravelling, you wonder how it could be possible for anyone familiar with his matchless artistry to bring to it a moment's doubt. The mistlethrush's vapid undulating song, so frequently mistaken for early blackbird music, ranks indeed almost the last among songs of English wild birds. It has a certain resemblance

  to a single one of the blackbird's least exalted strains, a sort of half-hearted desultory tuning up in which he sometimes indulges, sufficient, perhaps, to account for, if scarce to excuse, the common error. But there comparison lags hopelessly behind. The missile has but the one wavering, monotonous quatrain of notes, though he seems ever trying to make up by industry what he lacks in quality and power. His is a case of desperate attempt

  to justify undeserved reputation. To read some of the old textbook eulogies on the mistlethrush's song is indeed inevitably to wonder if the same bird can possibly be meant. And then there is the woodlark's song, which, now beginning in those odd shy nooks of tree and compass meadow or heathland so capriciously favoured by the bird, is seldom recognised by any but habitual dwellers amidst country scenes. All songs of the air are commonly

  set down to the skylark, if indeed the chance wanderer in remote rural districts even knows that there is more than one English wild bird with the romantic and deeply mysterious habit of scaling the blue ethereal heights when the impulseful music-making seizes him. But the little woodlark, though it is classed by the textbooks among the rarer British birds, may often be heard from the beginning of March towards high summer, and again in the earliest

  days of autumn, right through to the first winter frost. And probably, if the song were diligently sought by one familiar with it, there would be found scarce a mild, bright interval in all the winter, but had its woodlark music tempering the more forceful, more rollicking chorus of the skylarks with its quicker, sweeter strain. The song is just a rich, subdued flow of mellow notes that have a peculiar penchant towards running together into phrases, some of these often

  curiously reminiscent of the songs of other small birds. It is distinguishable from the skylark song mainly by this variable trait, and the fact that, though smaller and quieter, it is on all occasions more continuous. Another characteristic of the woodlark is the habit traditionally ascribed to it of remaining aloft on summer nights singing continuously, sometimes for hours together. There are many old and experienced students of bird life who confirm this ancient

  reputation of the woodlark, but many more still, equally credible, who deny it as an unsubstantiated legend. This variance in testimony is probably due, like so many other conflictions of opinion in matters relating to wildlife, to the very local character of the bird, both in incidents and habits. In this southeastern county the little brown woodlark with his stumpy tail and rather bat-like flickering method of flight is by no means a common bird, and after dark I have heard him

  singing but once in a lifetime. But down in the west country there appears to be no doubt of him as a serenader. Going abroad one still summer night in quest of nightingales, I stood for a long hour under the star-gemmed blue, listening spellbound to a harmony of such unearthly sweetness, and so remote that it seemed to come from the very stars themselves. To watch day by day the progress of life and green growth in wood and field, and to miss nothing of

  moment, is a task that sooner or later baffles the keenest and most diligent of eyes and ears. Every day, almost every hour now, seems to bring something new. This grey, dim March morning after the tearing southwestern guile, the most conspicuous change is in the buds on the blackthorn, each full and green now, and pointing for white flower, where a few days back the crowding stems showed only buds a quarter the size, and of a tender rose-red hue, just a minute coral-like incrustation,

  thickening the maze of sombre twigs. By the gate that leads to the wood, the slow has decked itself over with silver blossom and unfurling green leaf. The honeysuckle that entwines everything above and below in the wood forms running lines and chains of new growth, knots and tassels of vivid green that make the green of the hazel catkin look already stagey and old. The elders have almost done with spring. A week of the mounting March sunshine has brought them out into a wealth of

  verdure that is scarce believable, though one stands in the midst of them, noting how the green gloom typical of summer woodlands already colours the ground beneath. Grey and dim and surpassingly still the morning seems after the termagant southwestern guile. You come out of the wood and stand a moment on the brink of the steep hillside looking out over the water meadows and watching the peewits at their ceaseless aerial dance. Here again is

  something different from yesterday, the new queer tumbling manoeuvre in mid-air and ringing urgent quality in the plover's peevish self-compassionate refrain that belong of right only to the heyday of the mating season. And now a chaffinch sitting in the budding hawthorn hard by suddenly gives over his eternal twink-twinking and breaks into his full summer song. The chaffinches have been singing for weeks past, but their pal-mal music has always stopped short

  of the final hurried carillon of sweet notes. Now the song is poured out again and again to its very end, the merry bubbling song that seems set in the hedgerows as counter-foil to nightingale sadness. At the sound the bush where the minstrel hides himself grows in fancy white with the promise of May. You no longer have to peer about for primroses as you thread the woodland ways, glad here and there to detect a pale star glimmering amidst the brown litter of last

  year's leaves. The russet floor of the wood has gone, hidden under the new green carpet of dog's mercury, and the thought of March primroses as solitary lights twinkling in a waste of darkness is forgotten, much as you lose the conception of single sunbeams in the glow of high noon. It is an all but universal light now, this of the primroses. Where there were single blooms only a few days back, now there are hundreds. Not indeed massed together and

  overriding everything as in April, but flowing away on all sides in a mottled attenuated pattern of softly shining sulphur, reminding you strangely of the yeasty ocean foam that marbles the green valleys between sea and sea. In the sunny woodland clearing the primroses crowd so thick upon the path that one can scarce move without crushing them under the tread. Almost as plentiful are the white anemones, every blossom stealthily quivering though hardly a breath stirs in their

  sun-flooded retreat. The bluebells too are beginning to lift their curving spires of azure here and there, high above all other woodland flowers, and trailing ground ivy wantons everywhere, decking the old grey beach stalls with knots and festoons of purple light. But the primroses easily outshine all the rest. As far as the sight can penetrate between the crowding stems, the whole wood is floored with their pale sulphur-yellow, marked here and there

  with a dash of living, burning gold, where a clear beam of sunshine has thrust itself down through the maze of budding twigs. Every springtime the village children come to this wood to gather primroses. The wood which dwells in such profound green solitude all the rest of the year has seldom a day now without its snooping forms and murmur of human voices. And yet of all the many primrose gatherers, how many really know the full beauty and mystery of this queen of woodland

  flowers? For, besides the beauty, there is a mystery about the primrose. Though very few ever notice the fact, there are two distinct kinds of wild primroses growing indiscriminately together in every wood. Take any bunch picked at random and, examining it closely, you will not be long in remarking a very curious thing. While some flowers have their central tubes closed by a little feathery whorl of pale yellow, just as many more show the tube quite open,

  except that a slender shaft topped by a translucent green globe stands just within. But this is not all. If you pull a flower of each sort apart, you will make another discovery. The two forms of primroses do not really differ. They are the same flower. It is only a matter of inversion of parts. The primroses with their mouths closed by the feathery tuft have the lance with the green knob upon it inside the hollow shaft, though wholly out of reach and

  view. While those from whose open mouths the globe-tipped lance protrudes are also furnished with the cluster of pale yellow anthers, but these are enclosed and out of sight beneath. This strange dual provision in the primrose of the apparatus for fertilisation has long puzzled many, and the true explanation of it is probably still to be sought. The suggestion that it is an ingenious arrangement whereby all kinds and sizes of insects are rendered available

  in the work of fertilisation will not hold in the face of one yet more curious fact. Look about you now in the primrose wood where there is an incessant, drowsy murmur of bees all round you, and you will not see a single bee visit the yellow primrose blooms. They are scrambling everywhere in the white anemone flowers and the bluebells and the purple ground ivy, but the whole world of insect life seems to leave the primroses severely to themselves.

  This, however, is not entirely so. The primroses are fertilised by insect agency, but as far as naturalists can discover, by one creature alone. Wandering in the woods on any sunny morning you are pretty sure to come across this creature, the primrose sprite, as he is fancifully called by the little circle of nature-lovers in southern England, among whom the writer is glad to claim fellowship. He is a bright brown fluffy fly,

  not unlike a bumblebee, except that he has a long and conspicuous proboscis, which he carries before him much as an elephant carries his trunk. You are sure to notice him by his shrill and busy hum, and his habit of hovering in mid-air just over the primrose. Into the depths of whose tube he will presently thrust his long spear up to the hilt for a moment, and then dart busily away to the next flower. And, as far as is known, the primroses depend

  for their fertilisation entirely upon this single winged furry atom. But why should the primroses present these two distinct forms of internal construction when their purpose seems to be the attraction of only one creature in all the throng? The question sounds natural enough, and yet, as all close observers of wildlife know, it is against the spirit of nature to expect to trace in any one form or process

  a single purpose alone, or indeed any direct utilitarian purpose. If the flower of a plant existed solely to attract fertilising insects, a daub of strong-loaded sweets on a spot of white were all that would be necessary to bring them to the feast. Materially, vegetable life would be just as useful to animal life if only one plain form of inflorescence had been created, instead of the myriad forms that now crowd every

  field and lane-side and woodland view. You cannot explain the existence of beauty in the world on the score of utility without arraigning the whole scheme of squandered loveliness in colour and scent and intricate design and endlessly varied music flowing breast-high to our very doors to-day. And so it were but ungrateful folly to wonder overmuch at the existence of two kinds of primroses shining in the fresh woods when one would seem to be enough.

  It is all one to the primrose sprite, but to the infinite mind there is no such number as one. Deep between banks shining with gold of salondine, the stream winds invisibly by. So quiet and slow is the crystal-clear water that, even when kneeling amidst the soft flower-jammed verdure of the bank and peering down into its glassy depths, one cannot make sure by sight or hearing that the water moves at all. Only the long green wavering fronds of weed, anchored to

  the bottom, all slant one way, revealing the trend of the current. The bright March morning is full of tokens of the year's reawakening life, but nowhere more bountifully than in the sunken deeps of the stream. Every moment a gleaming silver bubble breaks away and rises through the crystal water, showing where some long-embedded hibernating creature is rousing and getting ready for its

  coming summer life on wings. The ferny jungle of submerged growth that flanks this central open way is full of sticklebacks, the males already gay with their breeding colours, scarlet and green and pale sea blue, a fainter echo of the kingfisher's plumage, the little swift-winged creaking-voice bird that, a moment ago, drew a streak of emerald fire across the stream. These tiny freshwater fish, with their brilliant seasonal colours

  and formidable array of dorsal spines, must not be confounded with the minnows, which are true river fish, never seen in these Lilliputian waters. The minnow is just a sliver of living silver, mild and timorous of nature, seldom met with but when heading upstream safely with its kind. The stickleback, which only haunts inland threads of water, the smaller streams and running ditches,

  leads a sturdy, aggressive, independent life, ever at war with its fellows, one of the fiercest, most pugnacious creatures, perhaps, in all the wilds. Looking down now into the polluted water, one can see the male sticklebacks, each lurking within his own green-shadowed vastness in the dense thicket of weed, or cruising about in the open sunlit way, obviously spoiling for a fight. When two meet, there is first the slow, crafty

  manoeuvring for place advantage, and then, of a sudden, a perfect whirly-gig of onslaught and countercharge, until one, beaten at length, breaks away and flees for shelter to his own shadowy den. But for all his love of strife, the male stickleback is really the most domesticated of creatures. The female seems to do little else but lay eggs, and that only under sheer compulsion. It is the male alone who builds the nest and drives his reluctant mate into it, keeping her

  there until she has done her duty, and the male solely it is who hatches the eggs and fends for the young. End of section 5

• 06 - The Third Month - March - Part 2

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  There is no whiteness to be compared with the intense white lustre of the willow buds sunlit against the blue morning sky. The path follows the riverside, with the pollard willows on the one hand crowding down to the water's edge, and on the other the hazel copse full of green lambs-tails all slanting the one way on the soft March breeze.

  Beyond the hazels the elmwood rears its towering cliff of purple blossom against the azure of the far-off hills, and beyond the hills great clouds stoop along the horizon in a shadowy legion, their sunny sides white as driven snow. But there is nothing I know or can conceive of with which to compare the whiteness of the new buds on the willows, stretching their myriad slender stems aloft against the blue

  in the pure vernal light, each stem freddled thick with the bursting cocoons that seem made of glittering silver wire infinitely fine. These are the half-open male flowers of the willow, and it has been good to watch them develop through these last days of generous warmth and light. Next a row of full brown buds close set alternately up every stem, and then each bud unfolding

  at its apex and letting a softly shining pearl slip through, a veritable pearl at the beginning, but changing almost within the hour to a tuft of pure floss silk. Another day's sun, and each silken cocoon has broadened and lengthened until it all but touches its fellow next above on the string. Yet another day, and the cocoons have doubled their girth and taken to themselves a mysterious

  tender flush of green deep down under their silken coats, the hidden, chilly glow-worm radiance that is the secrets of their intense and utter whiteness. And every stem is covered at last from end to end with one continuous glitter. The whole tree looks like a wide mesh trammel made out of knotted silver cords, indescribably soft yet brilliant against the blue.

  And tomorrow's sun will see another bewildering change, each cocoon flaring up into yellow and doubling its size in a single morning. Already the rich colour flames here and there amidst the silver. A few more days of unclouded sunlight and all the whiteness will be gone. The river will flow through an arcade of golden blossom to the song of countless golden

  bees. Yet the song will not be greatest where the sheen of the willows is of the brightest hue. It is from these trees bearing the brilliant male catkins of the willow that the hives draw their chief supplies of early pollen. But the famous willow honey comes almost wholly from the female, the pistol bearing trees.

  There are nearly as many of them thronging the riverside, but the female willow catkins, at their ripest, only dress the tree in sober, inconspicuous green. The buds are smaller, and the silk-sheathed cocoons are full of one colour from the very first, a sad sage-green hue that ends by swamping out the whiteness of the silk altogether. One never sees the female willow until one is brought wonderingly to a halt beneath it

  by reason of the resounding music overhead. Drowsing and dreaming by, through its thicket of reeds and overshadowing glory of willow bloom, the river is a voice and nothing more. You hear the wash of the current driving steadily, strongly, seaward, and now and then an eddy fills up with a note like the sudden clang of a silver bell.

  But you cannot get a glimpse of the hurrying stream, here from the green flower-germed river path, peer as intently as you will. The jungle of yellow-grey reeds and the gold-tressed willows crowding down to the water's edge shut all from the view. But there comes to the riverside at this season a richer, fuller song than any due to the

  brimming river's flow. The mountains of golden willow bloom have drawn to themselves seemingly every winged atom of the countryside, hive-bees by the thousand, great black and amber-bodied bumbles, blue-flies and butterflies, humming gnats and midges, every flying creature born in time to share in this first nectar banquet of the spring.

  For once there will be full-flowered palm branches in plenty for the churches this favourable year, yet there will be country folk rejoicing tomorrow who never think of Palm Sunday in connection with an early willow-blossoming time. To all beekeepers, the coming of the willow bloom in abundance means an end to foreboding as to the welfare of their hives.

  Exceptionally mild winters, such as the one now happily over, are a doubtful blessing to all country interests, but especially to that of honey-craft. Mild weather keeps the bees seasonably dormant, lying snugly together in the cosy cluster, when they need only the barest minimum of food. But continually recurrent spells of warmth, luring the bees out to fly, rapidly deplete

  the winter provender. For weeks past, the bee-men of the villages have been eking out the natural stores of their hives by administration of sugar syrup, some of the old-fashioned ones making it of beer instead of water, giving it to the bees in troughs fashioned out of split elder-wands, and pushing these through the hive-doors stealthily by night.

  All have been anxiously watching for the first great loads of yellow willow pollen to be brought home by the early foraging bees. And now the golden tide has set in doubtfully at last. Looking across from the bee-garden towards the river this sunny noontide, you could see a faint misty level in the air, thousands of bees passing back and forth over the same

  narrow aerial road. There are many early pollen-bearing plants which provide food for the hives, but practically only one, the yellow cocooned goat-willow, which gives solid food and nourishing drink as well. Yet it is not the so-called palm-willow, the male tree of the species carrying the loads

  of golden blossom from which the nectar is derived. This comes almost entirely from the female willow, which bears but a lean and dingy inflorescence, albeit making up in attractiveness of scent what it lacks in hue. Coming over the grey upland in the teeth of the northern guile, every step of the way had to be fought for, grimly, determinedly, with head lowered and body bent to the blast.

  Yet here, in the deep wood, there is scarce a breath stirring. The mighty torrent of ice-cold, ice-pure air storms harmlessly by overhead. The treetops send down a wild stentorian bellow, but only the gentlest zephyr fans the cheek here on the steep hillside, looking away through the trellis of lichen stems over greening copse and checkerboard of meadow and corn land to the far-off glittering line of southern

  sea. To be lying comfortable and warm on an ivy bank, with primroses and violets scenting the air about me, and a quiet ripple of wild birdsong far and near, would have been an unthinkable possibility a while ago. But on these resounding, blustering days of winter, that come like sudden guerrilla raids

  the advancing host of spring, it is no good to hug by the fireside, blenching at the roar of the wind in the chimney and the rattle of the hail on the plain. In the true country, at the weather's worst, there are always serenity, shelter, even warmth to be found out of doors by those who know where to seek for them. And the deep heart of the woodland is made for such days as these, for fugitive man,

  as well as for timorous wild thing. I stretch at my ease in the warm soft ivy growth, still a little blown after the long tussle against the wind. A wren is singing in the brambles hard by, the song an amazing volume of sound for so small a creature.

  Robin and mistlethrush, great tits, linets, chaffinches, all add their notes to the general quiet symphony. The larks were singing every foot of the way across the desolate upland, and there is one at her music-making now, high over the meadow beneath the wood. Hearing an instant's lull of the blast, her sweet pure voice peals out and is silenced

  again by the swiftly recurring roar in the treetops, as though one had suddenly opened and closed the door of a concert-hall. The north wind ever brings with it a drab and lowering sky, a ceaseless array of dun clouds careering before the guile in helpless, reckless velocity. Cloudland at these times has none of the piled-up, toppling immensity of form that one sees with

  heavy southwestern weather. The clouds that charge by all day long on the northern blast are little more than in coate masses, separate, yet ever overlapping and parting again, so that seldom a minute goes by without the blink of a merry blue eye somewhere in the sombre canopy or a spot of gold leaping from hilltop to hilltop below.

  These solitary zones of sunlight wandering, here and there over the grey face of earth, are really the peculiar sign-manual of the north wind. When the south-wester blows, it is under a blue firmament strewn with driving cloud-packs. The world below is a sun-steeped plain over which the grey cloud-shadows sweep. But with the north wind, the world is a grey world, searched here and there by travelling

  beams of sunshine. It is not the shadow that moves, but the light. Over the water-meadows comes a new sound today, the shrill, yet softly plaintive whistle of the redshanks, who have come back at last to their old breeding-quarters among the sedges and glittering pools of the riverside meads.

  The redshank, with his bright, neat plumage of white and grey, and pipe-stems of legs of a ruddy orange dangling beneath him as he flies, is an object that arrests the glance the moment he lifts out of the crowd of dingier-coated birds, green plovers, rooks, jackdaws and the like, that in March haunt these riverside flats. But it is not so much the sight of him as he flits ceaselessly from spot to spot, dutifully

  followed by his mate, that brings the step to such a wandering halt. The spring call, it might almost be described as a song, of the redshank, is like nothing else on earth, penetrating, yet never loud, high-pitched, yet of an extraordinarily sweet and solemn tunefulness, deliberate, almost slow, yet with a sense of the resistless joy and youth in all things in its tone.

  It seems to be the very voice of the wayward March morning, the north-west wind wreathing the blue sky with smoke-pearl haze, the stealthy amber sunlight coming and going, the tranquil song of the river, deep hidden in its jungle of yellow reeds, glad light of willow bloom overhead, with its roistering bees, and gold of primrose and coltsfoot and starry selendine strewing the path under one's loitering, luxurious tread.

  The redshank seems to take all in as he leads his mate on these ceaseless, spearing flights to and fro over the glittering swampy levels, and to give all forth again in the one softly reiterated song. It is not unbridled fancy alone that ascribes to the songs of birds each its expression of racial temperament, or even of individual momentary mood.

  Those who look upon birdsong as merely the outcome of rivalry, defiance, the marital instinct must be endowed with a strange obliquity of ear. It is scarcely possible to live much in the country, and yet to deny a human-like meaning, often homely and elemental enough, but just as often mystic, exalted to every sound of wildlife that one hears in wood and field.

  Robins will sing to each other across a garden, like two sad and soured old dames exchanging condolences between cottage doors. Starlings with their plebeian, self-satisfied chatter on the roof-tree convey the like fat vacancy in sunshine as a mere material good that one finds in the crowded rows of deck-chairs on the front of a seaside town.

  But what of the skylark's music that will carry the dullest human heart aloft with it right up against the blue floor of heaven, or the nightingale's tender plaint with its reminder of eternity, in that it makes vocal the quiet of summer starlit nights? So with this wild free note of the redshanks coming over the water-meadows on the wings of the north-west wind, and bringing the very spirit of the earth's rejuvenation with it,

  a vision of death as but the matrix of life, of the seed that is not quickened, except it die. All along the sunny sheltered bank, in the lee of the oak-wood, red deadnettle makes a rosy glow under the sweet still morning light. From the deeps of the wayside grass blue veronica looks forth here and there, some of the flowers a full half-inch across.

  Amid the old tarnished winter grass thousands of new green growths are springing up. Starry bed-straw and crumpled ground-ivy, spear-like leaves of stitch-wort, stinging nettle coming up in solid blocks of green among last year's dung-dry stalks, and whirls of wild arum leaves flaunting their glossy verdure in the strong March sun. Now and then, but always modestly at the foot of the bank, gold-eyed daisies grow two and

  two together like bridal pairs, some all shining white, and some with their undersides gaily tipped with carmine. Southward it is all open country, the firs clad heath stretching away under the rich sun-glow of the still March morning, until green and gold are lost together in shining tremulous haze.

  To wander about this favoured spot of earth, now that the year is buoying up on its first real freshet of new life, is to move in a veritable land of hope and glory. The heath is ringing with birdsong far and near. Larks, a whole battalion of them, are at their ancient sweet contention up in the blue, and every bush and break has its clear-throated minstrel. The footfall is so completely muffled in the deep mossy sward as you loiter through the

  gilded corridors of the heath that it is possible to approach almost within a hand-stretch of any of the singers. And this is the only true way of learning all that is to be learnt about the songs of English wild birds. They must be studied at close quarters. Nearly every singing bird fills up the seeming gaps in his music with little low flourishes of grace notes that

  are lost to any distant hearing. Song-thrush and blackbird and all the tits are specially remarkable for this trait. Even the common wood pigeon, whose voice heard across the wood is but a desultory reiteration of a single tone, will reveal to the listener near at hand a truly astounding complication in her erstwhile simple seeming music. What afar off appeared merely as a halt, a bar's rest in the refrain, is now observed

  to be filled by a clucking sound, quick and soft and shrill, a sort of sudden surprised ejaculation as little like the rest of the wood dove's call as could possibly be conceived. Sitting aloft in the greening hedgerow on the sunny side of the lane, the thrush has set herself to music-making worthy of the day. There is scarce any British song-bird whose voice varies so subtly according to weather and season as the little mavis. All

  the winter through she has been pouring out her glad careless trilettes of sweet sound, each phrase repeated three or four times over before going on to the next, and the brighter the sunlight the greater the pace and power of her delivery. But now with the warm glamorous spring mornings the song of the mavis has taken to itself a serenity and a deliberateness of a piece with the balmy western air and the fresh bursting greenery of all things.

  It no longer breaks upon the ear like handfuls of small gold and silver change recklessly cast down through the sunshine. At last it is an ordered and connected theme, not so much melody as recitative, a kind of epic in tone of the thronging March days. At this season too there reawakens in the song-thrush a very curious habit observable little or not at all during other times of her minstrelcy. For all its very formity of note the song

  of the mavis seldom entrenches on those of other birds. Ordinarily it maintains its own distinct qualities. There is no confounding typical mavis music with that from throat of any other bird. But on these days in late March, especially on bright warm mornings, the thrush continually interrupts her normal song with snatches of astonishingly accurate mimicry. Coming down the lane a while ago I heard, as I thought, a red shank whistling

  in the meadow hard by. There was no mistaking the note, a soft melancholy pipe that would have been dispiriting but for its tender plaintive sweetness. But drawing nigh to the spot I had at length to learn that it was no red shank at all. The sound came directly from above my head where never a red shank could be. It was made by a thrush perched in full view on a budding ash branch. I could see the bird's throat swelling to the strain.

  And a moment later she fell back upon one of the most characteristic of thrush phrases, the wonderful summer note of the mavis, heard now indeed for the first time this year, a sudden tinkling freshet of sound that can only be described as like the sound of a crystal ball tumbling down a silver stair. But the most amazing achievement of the song thrush in mimicry of other birds will be heard in early April, just before the nightingale is

  due. Then the low, slow, tremulous, sorrowing note for which the nightingale is famous will often be met with in the country lanes, deceiving all but the most experienced ear. Yet it is not alone the fact of its being merely a thrush singing that will be so remarkable, as the truth that the bird must only be recalling a memory of the sound from the summer before. She could not have heard the note for nine or ten months back. To live in a south down

  village now is to be, willy-nilly, a creature of one idea. The sheep will not let you forget their existence for a moment, day or dark. Whether it be dawn or sunny noon, amber eventide, or the frosty stillness of starlit night, the same rich wavering organ-peel of sound lifts into the skies from the lambing-pens far and near. And all the talk of the village is about the lambs, how the luck of each farm is going, whether twos and threes are scarce

  or plentiful this year. What the mortality has been among ewes and lambs? Will the crisp, bright weather endure to bless and aid the hard-worked shepherds? But though the villagers of the famous south down sheep-farming country team with such gossip all day long, and night all day, this rich voice of the lambing-yards pervades the air, you must climb the green precipitous heights of the downs and spend an hour or two in one of the busy lambing-pens

  if you would get a real insight into what is doing. As you win your way slowly up the steep chalk track, the communal voice of the fold gets louder and louder until at last you are moving in a very babel of deep, luxurious sound. The way leads first between vast rectangles of green sward crowded with sheep, some of the hurdled spaces filled with ewes whose essay in motherhood is as yet only prospective, other where the earliest sheep and most forward

  lambs have been turned out of the pen weeks ago, the happy mothers drowsing contentedly in the sunlight, the youngsters careering about often in little frolicsome herds of a score together like kittens at play. But the strenuous life and ear-splitting hubbub of the whole gargantuan business concentrates within the lambing-yard itself. What strikes one particularly about these south-down lambing-pens is the elaborate skill and labour so obviously

  spent in their construction. They are veritable fortresses against wind and weather. The whole is enclosed in a high stockade generally consisting of bails of straw laid together like bricks, one upon the other, and reinforced by hurdles, with towering battlements of reeds above all. Reeds brought from the riverside in huge bundles and stood on end where their plumey tops make a beautiful mauve grey fringe against the azure of the sky. Hard against the inner side

  of this stockade, the whole place is ringed with separate little chambers, roofed and walled by hurdles cosily plaited with yellow straw. The central enclosed space is crammed full of waiting sheep at their full time, and littered knee-deep with the same golden hewed wheat and straw in which the shepherd and his underlings are incessantly moving about, caring for the ewes, or picking up the shivering, yammering newborn lambs by

  all four feet to a single handful, and bearing them off, followed by their bleating, anxious mothers to the nearest vacant stalls. And so it fares on day and night for long weeks together, until the last lamb is won, or lost, to the fold. Though the sun is down and the evening star bright in the sky, the plovers are still calling over the meadows. It is a weird sound, this spring love song of the green plover, Pee-Wit, Lapwing, Warp, or by

  whatever other name you know him. If it were possible to convey any real notion of call of wild bird in humanly utterable syllables, it might be done in the plover's case by ween, ween, moo, moo, ween. Sound and movement are very intricately blended in the production of the one weird effect. It is an inexpressibly mournful cry for all its mirthful underflow. It wheels round the darkening sky above your head, incessantly changing its tone and volume

  and direction. And then it is not wholly a voice. The shrill dirge-like jollity suddenly stills in midair, and the bird cuts a swift circle close by your ear in the deepening ruddy light, carrying on the symphony by wing-beat alone. This throbbing unearthly music of the plover's wings swishing by through the gloaming, the bird itself almost invisible against the gathering blue dark night is enough to frighten any overfanciful child. It is hard to believe

  that you have not been narrowly missed by some passing projectile when one of the tumbling wheeling crew takes a wider, nearer sweep and swoop upon you than the rest. But the minotry music goes as swiftly as it comes. Throbbing, sobbing away over the misty vacuity of meadows, it is swallowed up in the quiet of the evening. Far above, against the strengthening starshine, the old uncanny melody breaks out again, travelling hither and thither as though

  a whole company of broom-riding witches were at their unholy gambles round the sky. The moon is up now, just clear of the hill-top, not appearing at all like the moon, but more like a great dim golden porthole in the blue. Moon and stars look tranquil enough up there in the remote crystalline heaven, but there is no rest upon earth with the spring fever gripping every creature alive. In the woods the great brown owls are winding their hunting

  horns and the white owls are beating the riverside spinnies, keeping track of each other with their stifled gurgling cry. And the little brown owls, the Frenchies, are mewing like cats in every hedgerow of field or lane. But these are cries of the night, common except in their number and intensity to every season. Down on the river flats there is a chorus now, which you shall hear only when the English spring is at its first real flush of life.

  In this one sedgy water-logged meadow there must be hundreds of frogs, each pouring out his rich harmonious love-call upon the teeming night.

• 07 - The Fourth Month - April - Part 1

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  Over the daisy-field the swallow is skimming in the glad April sunshine, flying as no other bird can fly, in great sure sweeps of a velocity unsuspected until one tries vainly to follow her with the eye, to and fro unceasingly, sometimes covering well nigh half the meadow at a single lightning curve, now pulling up stock still in mid-air for an instant space, then off again in a new direction, passing the bewildered onlooker so narrowly that the

  sound of her wings is like the swish of a whiplash just shaving the ear. And every time she turns, pivoting sharply on the tip of one long sickle-shaped pinion, the sun catches her brand new plumage, and in a moment the bird is gone. What one sees is a shaftless arrowhead of glittering blue steel, a chevron of dazzling dwindling colour, speeding away over the vast gleaming plains of daisy-white. In these magnificent April days, when the

  of new growth and life is welling high over all the earth, one is hard put to it trying to keep pace with the tumultuous onrush of things, to eke out the hours of daylight long as they are so that nothing may go unmarked in wood or lane or field. Yet the task is all but hopeless. One new loveliness follows so swiftly upon another all through each thronging day that a single pair of eyes or ears cannot take in half the season's surging avalanche

  of beauty. Yesterday it was the larch wood, the winter-long dark deadness of matted boughs suddenly riddled with fresh green and gemmed with living crimson. And today, just as the morning star was beginning to pile in the one silver of earliest dawn, a cuckoo, the first of the season, set up her familiar chime in the cliff of elms beyond the dusky garden close. I was out of bed and peering forth under the eaves for a glimpse of the singer,

  scarce awake as yet, and hardly knowing whether the song were reality or dream. Infinitely quiet and somnolent the village looked in the grey dim light, the stars still bright above, a wisp of morning air faintly astir in the highest treetops, the night-mists yet hugging close to wood and field, the sparrows just commencing to roast in the ivy of the old cottage wall, not a sound as yet of any other waking bird near or far.

  And this clear, sweet note, essential voice of the dawning summertime, giving out its echo music to the listening hills. I was still intent upon cuckoos and keeping ear alert for more of the blithe twin melody, as hours later I came over the daisy-field and chanced upon this other sight, the steel blue glitter of April's first swallow, resplendent in her new spring garb.

  If the swallows are here, the house-martins cannot be long in coming now. And at next break of day, just as the blue-dark sky behind the morning star began to show a leavening of opal and the little attic room to fill with a stealthy light, there came a sound outside the window that drew me from my bed as swiftly as would a cry of fire. The martins were back at last. Against the paling darkness I could see a score of them

  eddying to and fro and making sudden dips under the eaves as they passed and re-passed. And all the while each tiny fluttering black atom was pouring forth a glad, quiet song, a rich, soft staccato melody. The many small voices blent into one joyous flow of sound that had in it the very essence of all the summer days gone by. Though I crowded head and shoulders out of window, the better to achieve a view of them,

  this seemed to give them no anxiety. They took not the slightest notice of my presence, but obsessed for the moment only by the joy of being back again in their old nesting quarters after the long night flight. They kept up their giddy aerial dance and triumphant chorus unconcerned, now and again, one of them hurling itself by within an ace of me in its wheeling flight. The great object of this manoeuvre was evidently to make sure that the little

  mud coracles under the roof edge, which they had abandoned in the autumn, were serviceable for further use. Each was now visited by the pair to whom it obviously belonged, and careful inspection of it made within and without. The birds came in turn, alighting with sharp impact on the rough surface of the old flint wall, and clinging there in the first grey gleam of imminent sunshine, spruce and neat in their new black and white garb. Some of

  the old nests were still sound as ever. The birds slipped into the narrow entrances and sat there a while with heads protruded, and forever keeping up the glad contented song. Other of the nests were completely broken away and fallen, leaving only a semi-circular mark of clay upon the wall. The owners of these clung to the rough flint facing hard by, apparently in no wise disconcerted, nor even halting for an instant in their jubilant

  homing song. But some few of the nests put forth an ominous sign. Grass stuck out from the entries, and the sight at once drew from their owners a curious note of angry alarm. You cannot live long in a country house without coming to love sparrows, and to be glad to share with them your ivied home. But when you are also a lover and harbourer of house martens, the sparrows set you somewhat in a dilemma. For though they are ready and competent

  nest builders for themselves, if need be, they like nothing better than to appropriate for the purpose an empty martens nest. And this, when the rightful owners return, means certain strife. It will not come just yet. Every morning for a week, perhaps, the martens will carry out a reconnaissance in force, before actually making a serious bid for repossession. But then the matter invariably ends in the one way. There is a furious melee during

  which the disputed nest is scattered to dust and the intruders driven off, whereupon the martens set themselves busily to work on a new nest. The gladness and relief of all wildlife at the passing of the east wind is plain today in every sight and sound of the countryside. Yesterday the morning broke in whistling, chill, unkindly gloom, and scarce a note of bird mingled with the hoarse voice of the wind that was tearing through the fresh spring

  greenery of the hedgerows and laying the dandelions low in the sodden bedraggled wayside grass. But today all is changed. A gentle breeze is coming up, like balm from the south. Every moment the soft veil of mist to the eastward is thinning before the sun, and a golden light beginning to crest the hilltops and search the valleys between. The blue has got back to all the shadows and the long-lost murmur of the bees to the morning air.

  Looking forth over the dew-white lawn towards the orchard close where the beehives stand, I can see a little streak of misty radiance pointing away from each hive. Thousands of crystal wings flashing to and fro on the same aerial path between the garden and the yellow-flowered rape field under the hill. But it is the wild birds that chiefly contribute the joyful keynote to the morning. Hardly has the quiet night rimmed the world with

  a faint grey promise of dawn, when a very cataract of music bursts from the darkness of wood and field about the village. It is always the blackbird who takes the leading role in these daybreak choruses at seasons of suddenly returning warmth. At other times the blackbirds are curiously tardy of song, leaving the day's overture to lesser minstrels. Often, indeed, keeping silence until the first woodland ebullition has died down to a few

  desultory notes, and then beginning the mellow deliberate recitative that is the true authentic voice of April days. Yet this morning it was the clear silver clarion of a blackbird that first woke the dawn, and ever since blackbird music has easily over-borne all other tones. The song thrushes, after the initial glad torrent of sound, fell strangely silent as the sun clambered up clear of the morning mist and got his earliest real grip of earth.

  But the blackbirds keep on with all their original force and sweetness. As they began, so they will continue. It will be a day of mearl music right through to ruddy evening's close. In their way too, the rooks herald these resumptions of warm times after spells of wintry cold, with just as evident a feeling. Yesterday the rooks flew for the most part silent, or with an occasional angry disgusted core. But listen to them now in the western

  mildness and sunshine as they sail over against the fast clearing blue of the April sky. The whole air resounds with their deep rich jubilations. Looking up the winding river-way where, on either bank, ash and alder, willow and reed and thorn, crowd down to the water's edge, you see the flowering willows marking the vista everywhere with turrets of shining gold. At last the chill north wind has gone, and the hive-bees are able to get across the open

  fields to the river for this, their first real taste of vernal sweets. Yet it is not to the conspicuous masses of golden willow catkins that the majority of bees are wending. These have their singing multitudes of pollen gatherers from the hives, deep-throated bumblebees, and even a torto-shelled butterfly or two twirling gorgeously amidst the yellow cocoons. But for every hive-bee working on the big showy male catkins of the willows, there are

  at least a score rifling the dingy grey-green inflorescence of the female trees. If this were not manifest to the eye, the ear alone would reveal the fact. As you pass along the river bank, every tree sends out its own rich reverberant note of music on the sun's steeped air. But the willows and sallows bearing the lean, scarce, noticeable female catkins give forth an infinitely louder serenade. Here, where the river makes a sharp bend and a stream

  comes tumbling and frothing into it from the hills, the willows have made generous growth, lifting a mountain of yellow blossom against the blue April sky. It is rare to find a day in spring when the sounds of the countryside owe nothing to treetop melody of wind or rustle of stirring air in bush or break. But today the air seems still as the pent-air of a crypt. You look upward through the gold-threaded arabesque of willow-bells to the sky, dappled

  over with flecks of glistening white cloud. Not a single amber bobbin moves except when a bee puts her weight upon it. The clouds seem as motionless as painted clouds in a picture sky. At first the willow song appears to be a continuous monotone of tuneful, dreamy sound, though you know the bees are incessantly coming and going as the leaping water comes and goes. Wings and ripples always changing, yet ever the same glad, quiet song. But presently

  you solve the riddle of its siren power on heart and mind. It is not one, but a blend of a myriad varying subtle tones. The humming wings of the hive-bee contribute only a minor part of her music. In addition to these, she possesses a whole panpipe series of instruments upon which she can play at will. Ten thousand tiny orchestras are massed to produce this wonderful willow song. Though the treetops resound with the north wind's thunderous

  fury, here below in the green woodland ways scarce a blade of grass moves in the dim, quiet light. As I came over the chain of meadows, leaning a slant against the buffeting gale, the whole world looked black and dreary under the pitiless avalanche of icy air, and the wood itself seemed darkest and least hospitable of all. But once within the shelter of the crowding trees the whole spirit of the morning changed. For all the grey gloom and wintry

  cast of things outside, here was April, in hiding indeed, yet living and real. Primroses, anemones, violets, bordered the pathside, and spread away in pools and runlets of soft sheeny colour, wherever I could follow them through the dusky woodland deeps. Far ahead on the mossy way there were bevies of rabbits playing. A pair of jays swept past me, the blue gems on their pale brown coats scintillating as they went. At a crook of the path a cock

  pheasant came suddenly into view, gorgeous in his tawny and damber. He saw me almost before I saw him, and got up with a whir and clatter of wing, startlingly loud even in that turbulence of overstriding wind and lashing tree-top. His shrill trumpeting cry held on unchecked until it was lost in the general far-off hubbub of the gale. And then a woodpecker began to call from the top of an old beach, standing alone in a little clearing hard by

  the way. In a week or two from now Cuckoo and Nightingale and all the rest of the migrant singing birds will be plentiful with us, and we shall think no more of the green jerkened yaffle and his merry note. But it is doubtful whether there be a voice of bird that so subtly interprets the spirit of the English spring, as does this wild free hailing call, heard, as I heard it then, from the midst of the budding April woods. Now the cry has lost

  almost all its scornful quality. It is louder than ever, indeed, but it has taken to itself a rich bell-like tone and has become almost a song. It rings out now from the summit of the old decaying beech-tree for a long unholting minute. An instant's pause, and the wild halloo peels out again high above the surge and sob of the careering wind. All the morning through, and maybe for the whole months to come, you will hear this wonderful new love

  call of the green woodpecker in the woods, until the last bird has found a mate. Over there, sitting on the hawthorn spray in the full light of the April sun, and pouring out an almost unceasing rivulet of music, one little plump grey and brown bird seems easily to dominate all other minstrels. The thorn-tree rears its labyrinth of fresh young foliage in the centre of the wide solitary heath, ringed about with woodlands, and glowing everywhere

  with pure shining gold of gorse, the rich colour so intensified by the resplendent morning sun that, on coming first out of the green twilight of the woods, one can scarce look upon its glory for more than a few moments together. The whole heath is jubilant with birdsong, thrush and blackbird and willow wren, and a numberless host of finches and crickets, uniting their voices in one inextricable medley of joyous sound. Yet all these are

  forgotten when once the onlooker realises what bird it is that sits alone on the green hawthorn spray. The sweet wild notes of the nightingale, with their amazing strength and matchless purity of silver tone, lift above all other sounds and hold the ear as no other song of bird has power to do. One stands under the thorn-tree watching her throat swelling to the music and marvelling that so small a creature can produce so great a volume of

  sound. And to the chance sojourner, hearing the nightingale thus for the first time, whether of a life or a season, this is always the most notable characteristic of the song. If such an one expect from the nightingale consummate art and intricacy of melody, or indeed any but the simplest range of tone, disappointment is ever in store. The nightingale is no great executant, nor does her song possess more than a few notes united in still fewer phrases,

  wherewith to create its charm. But in its sheer strength, its crystal clarity, its exquisitely modulated pace and stress, the song stands alone. There is first the low, lingering melancholy plaint, uttered as though it were torn from the very heart of the bird in exceeding sorrow and unrest, and then a sort of sudden, reckless, unpremeditated abandonment to the grief that fills her, a tumultuous outpouring of the ineffably sweet liquid tones stemming out

  upon the sunshine as if its cataract of harmonious dola would never cease. There is also a quick reiterated chime, a kind of shake in the music that lends telling hiatus to the more sustained connected part of the song. And there is an occasional deep vibratory note as from a resonant wooden rattle which some benighted ornithologist has had the temerity to call the nightingale's croak. But that is all. Those who speak or write about the song as a piece of incomparable

  natural artistry betray alike a slavish adherence to false poetic convention and ignorance of the fact. In the labyrinth of greening hazel bells, the willow warbler is of all birds the most difficult to see. His lithe slimness, his swift, quiet movements, his sober, dungreen dress, so exactly according with the hues of his environment, camouflage him effectually in the brightest sun. But under today's gloom and steady downpour, the keenest eye may range

  the woodland isles for him in vain, though the ever-hurrying sweetness of his music leavens the dim air far and near. The willow warbler's minstrelsy easily holds the wood today against that of all other birds. When, an hour ago, a watery tinge of sunshine stole across the dell, it roused the moping thrushes to an instant's light-heartedness and set the chaffenship desperately to work at making up arrears of song. A blackbird afar off tried over a few

  of his most complicated phrases. The wood dove, who thinks it is always evening, began his crooning lullaby. The yaffle called the rainbird, but who should be called the sun? bird, for it is always these fleeting glimpses of sunlight in selsing times that draw from him his lustiest merriment. A yaffle made the whole circle of the wood, tree by tree, laughing ironically as he looped his clumsy way along. But the light failed, and the steady

  patter-song of raindrops began again on the young April leaves. One by one the fair-weather crew was silenced. All drew out once more into the single, tender, diffident refrain. The willow wren is one of three small dingy green birds that come to us in early spring and are hard to distinguish from each other, save by their notes. Willow wren, wood wren, chiff-chaff, all are much of a size, and of the same sober garb and quick flitting habits,

  and all three nest in the same odd nooks close to the ground. The chiff-chaff's note is as much like his common country name, repeatedly intoned as it is possible for humanly uttered words to represent song of bird. But no one has ever tried to set words to the willow warbler's evasive melody. It has a certain kinship with the chaff-inch's song, in that it is a single number reiterated again and again, with telling pauses in between. Chaff-inch

  music, however, has a definite, un-varied quality. One always knows what is coming when the chaff-inch begins. But the willow warbler's song can hardly be described in the same way as the expression of a sudden, un-premeditated, half-incredulous wonder at the beauty of things. There is nothing of the chaff-inch's cocksure-ness and rollicking content and pride of life about its hesitant, almost timorous sound. There is nearly nothing of the chaff-inch's

  cocksure-ness and pride of life about its hesitant, almost timorous sound. There is neither time nor measure in the willow wren's music, nor any set compliment of crotchets and quavers. It is nothing but a sudden glad outpouring, all done in delicate grace notes, light as thistle-down, a half-whispered, almost awestricken exclamation, as though uttered in very wonder at the loveliness of bursting bud and pure austerity of woodland light.

  And the song is a song that never finishes. The chaff-inch brings his performance to an end with a fine, dynamic clash of notes. The willow warbler's song fails at its highest silvery crest and dies away in ever-quietening, broadening ripples. Listen as intensely as you will. You never know when the music is really done. Coming from the open heath with its flood of song and sunshine into the dimness and quiet of the bluebell wood is like passing

  into the shadowy precincts of a cathedral aisle. Out on the heath the April sun beats down upon a wilderness of yellow gorse and snowy blackthorn, and fresh young grass of a greenness beyond all belief, islands and promontories of shining gold and silver set in an emerald sea. But here in the wood scarcer beam can penetrate the thick vault of mingled larch and beech and pine. The sombre canopy and the crowding grey stems beneath soften

  the noonday glare into a twilight that at first seems chilly, almost eerie in its secret soberness. You have left all the resounding chorus of the heath-loving birds behind. A sudden hush has fallen about you as though great cathedral doors had been swiftly, noiselessly closed in your rear the moment you entered the wood. Even in such a solitude and shady temperate quiet the true bluebells come with each ear to their fullness of beauty, and

  you cannot really know bluebells until you seek them in such a place. Holiday folk who go only to the sun-swept woodland clearings for this shyest and wildest of wildflowers never behold one tithe of their true loveliness. They spend an hour in the midst of a vivid incandescence of cold colour, carry back to their suburb an armful of ragged vegetation, and think they have imported true bluebell sweetness into the dust of the town. But the

  bluebells of the open clearings, or even of the thin, light-ridden wayside woods, have nothing of the true bluebell sweetness and mystery about them. Sunshine is no more a friend to them than it is to the elfin loveliness of hoarfrost, as the lusty breath of it dispels the frail delicacy of the one, so it dissipates the staid pure subtlety of the other. And bluebells cannot be gathered any more than you can gather iridescent ocean foam. Their

  charm is inseparable from their environment. A bunch of bluebells in a table-vase is of all things the most pathetic and pitiable. You have brought but a blotch of fussy, staring colour from the woodland deeps. The spirit of the flowers has evaded you. They are no more bluebells. This wodge of smalt frippery that you hold in your hand, then is the delce of wet brine on your fingers the living, trembling, rainbow foam flowers of the sea.

• 08 - The Fourth Month - April - Part 2

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  Section 8 of A Country Calendar by Tickner-Edwards. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Fourth Month, April, Part 2. There are not many real bluebell woods, even in southern England, the bluebell's authentic To come to their true perfection, the flowers need a location of age-long neglect and oblivion, just a tangle of wild forest growth untouched and forgotten for generations, such as you have chanced upon today.

  And even so, you must go deep into the grey, quiet heart of the wood before you are in the true bluebell land. The broad forest road that tunnels straight ahead, flanked by giant beech trees, has only a sparse fringe of cobalt to its brown, leaf-strewn way. But stop where you will now, and in any direction, under the soaring rooftop of verdure, you may look out upon a sight that will glow in the memory to your dying day. Though the wood is so dense and dark above, and such a sober twilight broods around you, it is wonderful how far and how clearly you can see between the crowding stems. And wherever you turn your eyes now, they rest upon nothing but a floor of living azure, one unbroken level of softly luminous colour broadening out on all sides between the trees.

  Vista upon vista of softly radiant light as of a sea of molten amethyst flowing away into the dim distance and ever darkening until you cannot tell whether you are looking upon the blue of bluebells or only the sulky indigo of imprisoned air blocking the farthest woodland deeps. This is the true bluebell land, and it is worth tramping many a weary mile to see. But today you have come upon it in only one of its many phases. On dead calm April mornings such as this, the bluebell wood is in its soberest and sadist, perhaps its most mystic mood. You can wander by the Ar together and hear not a sound but the stealthy scamper of a squirrel far up in the dim labyrinth of treetops, and see not a bell move of all the myriads around you, save when its lip is pulled down by a passing bee. But tomorrow the merry south wind may be drawing wisps of silver gossamer a-thwart the sky, and setting the whole woodland roof in a fluster of singing.

  It will be a mighty wind indeed that can break through that barrier and ruffle the calm ocean of slumbering blue beneath. Here in the inmost secret heart of the wood not a breath stirs, perhaps for weeks together. Nevertheless, windy days bring to the most sheltered reaches in bluebell land an illusion of stirring life such as words are powerless to depict. As you stand in the midst of the hushed incense-burden solitude, looking away down one of its fairest isles, your ears are full of the surging song of the wind in the treetops, but no other sound or sign reaches you of the rollicking tumult that you left on the heath. Yet now and again the wind cleaves the dense forest canopy above and lets a single sunbeam through. Slowly the ray travels like a ship's searchlight across the field of view, and then it ceases to be mere sunshine. Now it is a hovering, bright-veined spirit, a living thing, the collective, corporate entity of all the bluebells that ever shone in this forgotten Eden, moving over the face of the deep.

  Coming to the anemone wood in the level golden sunlight of early morning, you can see the flowers literally waking one by one. At first, beneath the budding hazels, there is nothing but green, soaring green of dog's mercury and the crowding anemone plants and low-lying green of moss that sheaths the woodland floor everywhere with its softly glistening silk. The anemone flowers are all tight-closed as yet, their pink undersides scarce visible except as a dim, rosy warming of the verdure clothing ridge and dell as far as eye can reach. But as the sun lifts, tiny white banners begin to unfurl and twinkle like stars in the veering western air. Thin silvery crests break out upon the highest ridges near and far. In an hour or two, these have swelled to mounting white billows of blossom, and the shadiest dells are alight with living foam.

  In woods where the primroses and wind-flowers grow thick together, a very different change is wrought by each day's ascending sun. With the fall of dusk, the anemones close their shining petals, but the primroses stare open-eyed at the stars all night long, and thus the callow morning sunbeams find them, one limitless, unbroken spread of cloth of gold, of a splendour past all imagining. Come again at noon, and the rich colour has all but vanished. The larger, loftier blooms of anemone have diluted it almost to extinction. Though the primroses are still there, more of them than ever, the whole wood stands in a lake of silver-tinged but with the faintest orient tone. It is strange how silent and bereft of insect-life these anemone woods remain, until the sun has whitened their dim depths with the opened blossoms, and then how swiftly the wing-music grows.

  It is always the bumblebees that first begin their deep, sonorous bluster in the silent glades. The hivebees, for all the ancient maxim, are incorrigible liar-beds, never leaving the warm cluster at home until the sun has drunk up the night dews from the flowers they love. But once out and about, they soon spread the whole countryside with their tuneful murmur, and here, in the anemone and primrose wood, you can marvel at what seems a very mysterious thing. Though, to human eye, the primroses, with their glowing sulfur rays, look by far the most attractive, you soon realise that none of them is ever visited by the bees. Hivebees pass the primroses disdainfully by, though almost every anemone flower has its winged singer chanting at its silver portal.

  The truth is that the sweets of the primrose are placed at the bottom of its deep central tube, far beyond reach of the hivebee's tongue, while the windflower nectar is easily accessible to all. Coming into the primrose wood from the firs-clad downs with their glory of golden blossom, everything seems for the moment colourless, chill or steer, and yet there is almost as much sunshine in the wood as out on the open hills. The crowding ash stoles, each rearing a thicket of smooth grey branches against the sky, are still as leafless as in January. Not one of the coal-black buds has stirred as yet to the touch of the April sun. The pale woodland flooring of primroses stretches away on all sides, only the purer and sweeter for the arabesque of dark shadow upon it. But you wonder what has happened to the sunbeams that, a minute back, burned so fiercely about you in the gorse breaks as though you were forcing a path through a prairie fire.

  Thus for a few moments only. And then the eye, cleansed and relieved from its hour-long surfeit of colour as you trudged mile after mile over the glowing hills, gets at last the true keynote of the place. The primroses lose their moony pallor. The reticulation of dark shadow, thrown by the ash-wands, warms into a tender penciling, blue as the April sky above. All sorts of vivid, minor growths start into view, as though they had there and then sprung from the soil. Intensely brilliant spots of amber, where the selondine shine among their whirls of glossy green. Early spires of bluebell, blue now as they ever will be, but as yet tight girt and drooping like whiplashes in the dew-soaked grass. Violets, thousands of them, lying in pools or running in seams here and there through the marbled waste of primrose yellow.

  You see now that the apparent coldness of the primrose wood when you first struck into it was but a tripping of the eye, an illusion, due to this intermingling wealth of violets, one rich hue killing the other. The effect of certain coloured flowers on the quality of sunlight is something of a mystery, and white flowers are the most puzzling of all. Blackthorn blossom never shows more than the dead whiteness of paper or snow under the brighter sun. New-blown hawthorn is a living, buoyant white until the bees get to work upon it, and then it is dead in an hour. Meadow sweet in the bulk defies the most resplendent noon, though its plumey inflorescence isolated seems as white as anything on earth, and a field of daisies is never other than pure, intense white, whether in shade or shine. Something of this, no doubt, is due to texture, the one flower absorbing, the other repelling the sunbeams.

  The colours of the anthers of these white flowers must also influence the quality of light given back to the eye. In the hawthorn these are pink, and in the blackthorn orange. Yet why should the yellow anthers of the blackthorn degrade the whiteness of the flower, while the daisy has a brilliance in violet, despite its broad golden heart? The green path runs between river and meadow, soft as velvet to the tread. Screened by the overarching willow bells, you can walk here a whole morning through, hardly perceived by the wildlife around you, yet seeing all the best that young April has to show. The cold wind and drab hurrying sky have gone at last, the sun burns in a cloudless heaven, and the distant hills have got back their shimmer of blue. Everything in feathers is rejoicing. Out over the meadows, peewits are tumbling about in midair with their weird cry, like a cork being wrenched out of a tight bottleneck.

  As they wheel to and fro, their wings make a rhythmic sobbing sound. Cold black and snowy white, they seem, as they gamble together in the brave morning light. You wonder by what aberration of fancy the peewits could ever have come by their other name of green plover. But looking again, as each bird turns away from the sun, the sombre parts of its plumage shine out with a rich iridescent emerald, bright as anything in a peacock's coat. This spring love-play of the peewits over the meadow is just a whirl of soot and snow, with a flash of green fire in between, and ever the swishing sobbing melody. All the birds seem to come at some time or another to the river. That was a flock of fieldfares, a dozen or more, scrambling over from tree to tree a while ago, their dove-grey heads oddly contrasting with their dingy, thrush-like bodies, and their queer chatter reminding one of the market jargon of some foreign town. There are more hens hiding in the riverside reeds. Every now and again one calls to another in that shrill, low, cautious way of theirs. Once, far away, amidst the general ringing chorus, an owl cries, though it is broad noon.

  But this is the little brown owl that hunts by day as much as by night, and instantly the cry is answered from the leafy depths of an old ivy-tod close by you. But the thing you will most vividly remember of all the sights and sounds on this first real April morning, after the long days and nights of wintry chill, is the coming of the kingfisher to his favourite pool by the waterside. You hear a high, sharp creaking note, at first a far off, yet growing rapidly louder and nearer. Then there drops into the cool, clear shadow under the willow bells what looks literally like a spot of sapphire flame. The dazzling brilliance of a kingfisher, thus suddenly drawing to rest on his favourite watch-tower, usually a branch overhanging the water, cannot easily be described. He has a knack of picking out a perch right in the path of what is perhaps the only sunbeam that has pierced the matted roof.

  And there he sits, ostensibly unconcerned with anything but his own magnificence, preening his feathers and twirling himself gorgeously in the beam, this way and that, until, without a moment's warning, he plunges, quenching his light in the pool below. If you go to the honeybee on these bright, chill spring mornings for an inspiration towards early diligence, disappointment will attend you. Though from the first gleam of daylight the village gardens have been ringing with gladness of birdsong, the hives are still strangely quiet, for all the sun has been up these three hours past. Now and then a solitary bee comes out upon her doorstep, stops a moment to rub her great eyes free of the hive twilight, then lances straight away into the blue, and other single bees are continually homing. But despite the mid-Victorian moralists, there is no very early general activity in a bee garden, either at this or any other season. The early bird may be justified in rising betimes, but the busy bee knows her business too well to leave the cosy indoor cluster until the sun has warmed the oozy margin of the stream and dried the pollen in the golden willow catkins.

  Water is a daily vital need for the nurture of the young bee grubs now maturing by the thousand within the hives, and some few of the most daring among the older worker bees run the gauntlet out and home for these necessary supplies with the first gray of the chilliest dawns in spring. But pollen, like the mowing grass, cannot be garnered until the night-dews are off it. The main army of pollen-seekers will not be on the move for another hour or more. Come again to the bee garden when the sun is high and the day wearing on towards noon, and you shall look on at a very different scene. In April the rich deep labour song of the hives can be heard a hundred paces down the lane. The sunny air is full of sparks of flying crystal, gossamer lines of speeding light as the bees go to and fro between the riverside willows and the old bee garden under the hill. The willow pollen, with its brilliant yellow, is by far the most plentiful and most resplendent of all the loads that the worker bees are carrying in upon their thighs.

  Almost as plentiful is the pale sulphur-hued pollen that they are fetching in from the flowering box-edge hard by, and repeatedly one sees loads of soft clear grey being dragged in amidst the throng, showing that many a bee has been out among the woodland violets. Pollen from the gorse, you know by its dingy yellow-brown shade, like stale mustard. And now and then a bee comes blundering down from the skies, hauling behind her a pair of enormous amber globes. How she contrived to get them home from the marsh marigold beds by the riverside is a mystery. It is not only wild weather at sea that brings the gulls inland. When the floods are out over the riverside meadows, they come in by thousands and lighten the gloomiest landscapes with incessant whirl and flutter of snowy wings. Gloomy it is today, for all the month is April, with a bitter cold northeast wind raging in the treetops and cutting up the mile-wide surface of flood-water into little cat's paws and angry crests of foam. Through the screen of alder that skirts the river-path you can reconnoiter this great invading host from the seas, and mark how ingeniously each bird quarters his ground. For ground it is, despite the unbroken glittering water-stretch.

  Nowhere is their swimming depth even for a gull. Each is just wading breast-high in the wind-ruffled shallows, all heads kept warily to the breeze. Every now and again, for no humanly apparent reason, the steady low clamour of the feeding throng breaks suddenly into a wild, weird chorus, and the whole company lifts on the wing, eddying and circling sky-high for a moment, then as suddenly drifting to earth again. Against the steep wooded hillside that looks almost black in the one afternoon light, they seem like a cloud of snowflakes harried by a winter blast. The northeast wind sends down a savage roar from the riverside oaks. Overhead vast dark masses of cloud drive by helplessly on the termagant breeze. The cheerless jargon of the gulls, and incessant scuffling and rasping of the flood-water far and near, complete the wintry despondent picture. Instinctively you turn up your coat-collar, sardonically remembering how you used to hearten yourself with visions of springtime in past dreary December hours.

  And yet, for those to whom understanding brings a wise, inviolable content with all things English, these days of chill, resounding gloom that are creviced in between days of April glory are full of the true spirit of spring. The uproar of the northeast guile at this season is but stage thunder, the dais ex machina in the winter piece obvious at every turn. The fallacy in these cold interludes of the English April lies in taking too comprehensive an outlook. When the sun shines, and the south wind silvers the blue, it is good to go gaping about at the whole gay universe. But these harsh, sad, bollying days are sent us to drive eye and ear to the lovely, lowly details of earth. Leave the gulls to their crying between grey, hopeless heaven and darkling mead, and look at the dandelions that throng the pathside, how they make their own sunshine, and how each is a sufficient world for a score of creeping things.

  Mark how the blackthorn's myriad gleaming silver buds seem made for windy days. How, though the whole bush swings to and fro in the guile, not a blossom stirs from its appointed place amidst its fallows. Stoop down and take a draught of the sweetness of the cuckoo flowers dimming the water's edge with a hovering lilac mist. And if that be not enough, lift eyes and ears to the raving treetops, and try to make out who the minstrels are that clash tiny crystal symbols together so incessantly and so intrepidly. The harder the wind blows, the more valorously the ox-eyes sing. Securely sheltered from the wind by the steep bank, not a ripple breaks the shining surface of the pond. Spread with a green veneer of duckweed, and lost at its margins in a tangle of herbage, the pond receives the whole force of the April sun, And the air above is full of the glitter of insect wings, and a high, fine note as from a single harp-string eternally throbbing. The sheltered, wood-locked stretch of water stands in the heart of a district in southern England, famous for its malaria from time immemorial.

  And now, though the ague has gone, the insect that conveyed it is as plentiful as ever. If you can tell the true malaria mosquito from the harmless grey gnats that make up the bulk of the singing aerial throng, you may mark down a score of them passing and repassing between the blue sky and the surface of the water in every five minutes or so. When, during the latter years of the war, malaria soldiers were being invalidated home to England at the rate of five hundred a week, most of them scattering broadcast through our villages, a fact then wisely concealed, but which may now be safely disclosed, There was a real danger that our home mosquitoes may become reinfected and the ancient dreaded scourge revived in the land. But now that the peril is overpassed, one may bring the old serene interest to bear on this as on all other insect life, and there are few among the winged atoms of the countryside capable of exciting more wonder than the malaria mosquito. Only the females survive the winter, not hibernating like the queen wasps, but hanging up in the cobwebbed corners of warm, dim stables and the like, until the spring sun draws them forth to lay their eggs in the clear breaks in the weed-strewn surface of the pond.

  You can find them now by the hundred, minute dark objects like black oatseeds clinging together end to end and side by side, and making wonderfully intricate and beautiful patterns of triangles and stars and oblongs that cover with their delicate sombre lacework inches square of the pond. Splash the water and the pattern is dissipated, but in a moment it gathers again, every seed riding safe and high above the mimic storm. You cannot sink or swamp the eggs of the malaria mosquito, because each egg is built exactly like a lifeboat, sheared for and aft and equipped at the sides with hollow glass-like floats. The eggs of the common grey gnat are equally invulnerable to the weather, although individually they have little buoyancy and no special floating apparatus at all. The mother gnat ingeniously assures their safety by gluing them together side by side and end down as she lays them, thus gradually building up a little craft, again after the true lifeboat principle, which the roughest wind and the heaviest downpour are powerless to harm.

• 09 - The Fifth Month - May - Part 1

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  Every May the Buttercups and Daisies put up the same desperate fight for the mastery of the Meadows. The Daisies are always first in the field. Long before a single Buttercup is showing amidst the fresh young grass, the Daisies have overrun the meadow with their gleaming white, so that, in the moist dowels and on the crests where they crowed obliquely to the eye, their silvery lustre wholly blots

  out the green. But it is only for a time. The Buttercups, though they are late in starting, soon get under way with a will. The plants grow taller and throw out side branches, each bearing numerous flowers, whereas every Daisy blossom must spring afresh from the soil. And the inevitable soon happens. The meadow's silver underfrock is at last hidden beneath its mantle

  of flowing gold. It is with the common Buttercups and Daisies as with all common things. Very little about them is commonly known. How many of the thousands now who daily tread these wonderfully complex and beautiful flowers into the dust ever think of looking on them for a moment or trying to guess their reason of being? And yet the most casual scrutiny of either cannot fail to reveal a host of

  curious or debatable things. To take one point among the many, each flower draws its petals together at night, but each in a different fashion. The Daisy makes a tight, impenetrable bunch of its silver rays. That being done, the flower is practically invisible even in earliest dusk. For now it has only the crimson under-tips of its petals showing, red, which is the hardest of all colours to see in the night. And to make assurance doubly sure,

  the Daisy pulls up its green sepals like a coat-collar, still further concealing its whereabouts. Thus a whole crowded field of Daisies will virtually disappear within an hour of sundown, leaving scarce a trace. The Buttercup never really closes, it just sets its golden door invitingly ajar. Moreover, though the glassy inner surfaces of its calyx are hidden, the yellow velvet outer sides seem to gather the faint light and to shine

  with a redoubled force. The one flower appears to woo the night-flying insects, while the other repels them with all its power and art. The conclusion would seem to be that, flower nectar being generated mainly at night, the Daisy is told off to reserve its sweets for some creature of the sunshine who would otherwise go lacking. And this indeed is confirmed by observation. At least there is a tiny day-loving blue-black fly with stubby body and long crystal

  iridescent wings, plentiful always upon the Daisies, but seldom seen on other flowers. Even though it has been raining steadily since dawn, dense fine rain sifting down from a silver-grey sky all the morning long, there has never been a moment without its dim half-promise of sunshine almost as cheering as the sun itself. The air is so still and so generously warm, and so pregnant with the sharp fragrance of the teeming sodden earth. Thrush and blackbird

  and cuckoo are singing with an ungrudging lavishness of merry music that assuredly they could not better were they piping the praises of a May morning of flawless sunshine. And yet the rain keeps inveterately on. The silvery rifts that are forever showing in the grey formless heaven fade and brighten and fade again. The patter of the warm raindrops on the fresh young leaves slows now and then to an intermittent tattoo, yet never wholly

  ceases. And a moment later the torrent is giving forth its old drumming, drowsy melody. You know of old these selsing May days with their ceaseless mock auguries of fair weather. It will be song of rain and a thousand glad songs of nesting wild bird from cascading wooden garden all day long until the dark. It is on such a morning, standing under the sweet brier canopy of the cottage door and looking out towards the leafing orchard, that

  one first notices two things belonging of right to April, but which in the present laggard season are given to May. The earliest ruby glint of apple bloom and a sound that ever comes with it. The call note of the bullfinches lured down from their woodland haunts to this, their most coveted feast. There is no mistaking the bullfinches pipe. It is just like a quick low breath across the top of a key, endlessly repeated as the bird systematically quarters

  the green apple thicket, scattering debris of torn bud as he goes. There is a pair of bullies now at their fell work before my very eyes. The male with his full deep scarlet glowing like a danger signal even in this grey light, and the female almost as conspicuous in her sober garb because of its cunningly contrasted hues. The sight brings back to the mind a very old and vexed problem. Whether the quest of the bird be primarily insect

  food or no. The fact remains that, in its ruthless search, hundreds of the fruit buds are incidentally destroyed. Would these buds have turned to red-cheeked apples if the red marauder had been driven off betimes? There is but one humanely practical answer to the question. Violence against the birds is proved futility, even if it were conceivable. The only thing is to suffer them gladly, and experience demonstrates the natural truth that there

  are always apples enough when autumn comes, despite the bullfinches toll. A comparison of one wild bird's song with another is of little service towards identification with those to whom both songs are unknown. It would be strange to the rural dweller if it were not a fact so familiar that nine out of ten visitors to the countryside cannot distinguish the nightingale's song. And it is very little help to the recognition of the black-capped's

  music to speak of that bird as the mock nightingale, after the manner of most textbooks, even if there were any truth in the similitude. The black-capped song is a continuous warble, quietly and evenly uttered, of a sweet wild purity of tone, full of exquisite modulations, and of compass nothing less than astonishing. Yet the song is poured forth with such a steady flow, and the effortless notes follow one another so quickly that none but the most

  accustomed ear can detect its extraordinary range of tone. On the other hand, the nightingale song has little extent of scale, and no continuity or rhythm at all. It is not so much a song as a recitative, a group of melodious statements limited to three or four at most, uttered in orderly succession, with periods of silence following each phrase. The nightingale's power to charm lies wholly in the quality of her silver pipe, and the cleverly varied

  pace and pitch of her delivery. Her few notes are matchless in their sweet crystal pure tone, and the forcefulness or restraint, the hurry or lingering reluctance with which they are alternately delivered. Moreover, her trick of singing at night when all other birds are silent steals a march on the fancy, and wins her more perhaps than her due, as when one takes a single, simple, else unregarded flower into a dim, plain room, and becomes suddenly

  wonder-stricken at its discovered beauty. The nightingale sings anywhere, everywhere, as often as not close to human dwellings. To hear black-cap music, one must seek out the shyest, most secret woodland nooks. And now a comparison with the songs of two other of our English wild birds may indeed serve, albeit ever so imperfectly, to guide an unfamiliar ear. Awake with the first grey forewarning of light on a fair May dawn, and listen to

  the blackbird. Note how his mellow, clear voice travels to and fro over a good octave in the scale. Mark its easy power and calm, almost indolent tranquillity. Then wait until the morning chorus of the birds has died down to a single, high, fine note. It is always the wren, the smallest of the homestead singing birds, that brings to a close the daybreak symphony, a quiet, silver-sweet song, now hurried, now slow, ever holding on for minutes

  together, yet only upon the one stop of her tiny flute. And now picture to yourself a song with all the range and quality of the blackbirds, but with the wren's speed and soft, quiet continuity, and carry the vision with you to the wood. It will be strange if you do not hear the very note deep in the green mist of May-tide leaf about you. And that, for a wager, will be a black-cap singing.

  Coming over the meadow through the level sunlight of early morning, the rich yellow of the buttercups spreads the whole field with shimmering, misty cloth of gold. But now, returning the same way at high noon, a curious change is upon everything. Though the midday sun is still sun, pours down out of a cloudless sky at its strongest and fiercest, the meadow has lost its dominant golden hue. Looking across it from where you stand in the spot of blue

  shadow thrown by the solitary thorn bush, the whole field has taken to itself a mysterious whiteness of a brilliance infinitely greater, indeed, than the early buttercup shine. Yet white withal, a living, silver-pure lustre just warmed with a sort of afterthought of palest amber as of sunlight on alpine snows. Thus, twice in the day by the clock at this time of imminent summer, the buttercups and daisies alternate their opposing rains. It

  will be all over in a week or so when the taller growing buttercups will have overreached the lowlier daisies and the meadow will be one sheet of day-long gold. But for the moment the two are still much of a height. Only the daisies need the full sunbeams to keep them awake and wide-eyed, while the buttercups are golden inside and out and forever shining. An open daisy is almost the whitest, most conspicuous thing that grows. But with the

  first leavening of evening light it furls its gleaming petals, leaving only their dull red under-tips in view, and these again are still further dimmed by the tight-drawn calyces of green. One can stand looking over the meadow as the gloaming steels on and watch the daisies vanishing crest by crest and shadowy seam after seam. And while the chills of evening drive the daisies into what is virtual invisibility, the deepening amber light of sundown only

  serves to intensify the brilliance of the buttercup gold. The whole strange and startlingly swift effect is just like what happens when a coloured glass is drawn across the limelight in a theatrical fairy scene. It is the daisies seemingly that bring the swallows to the meadow, for there were none in the early morning as I passed by. The truth is, of course, that the whitening of the meadows and drying of the dew learthither the midges and other crystal-winged

  atoms on which the swallows feed. Now the whole wide glittering flowery waste is marked over with skimming swallows, their vivid steel-blue plumage glinting out as they pass and repass like flying chevrons of flame. A little higher in the serene, sun-steeped air, the martins are wheeling and eddying about in their spruce fresh black-and-white garb, and higher still there are countless swifts, either at work or play, it is too far off to determine, weaving

  a coal-black pattern against the blue. The swift is always black in the brightest light. There is only one scent on the countryside now. It pours in at the window on the first morning air. It meets you in every lane and meadow-path. Great aerial zones of its sweetness hover at the village street corners in the stillness of amber evening. Going out into the bee-garden under the star-gem summer dark and stooping down to the threshold of any of the murmurous

  hives, you detect at once the same incense streaming hot and fragrant through the squad of fanning bees at every portal, the smell of hawthorn nectar brewing in tens of thousands of tiny vats within to make the finest honey in the world. It is good to know that, come next winter, the wild birds will have no lack of food, for a good hawthorn honey year, saved by a strange mischance of weather, is sure to bring a plentiful whore-harvest in its

  train. That it has come so late in the season is its most favourable portent. Bee-masters can recall famous hawthorn years, whose precocious wealth of blossom has exceeded this, but flowers do not always mean honey. The May before its time, and biting winds to keep the bees at home, rob not only honey-makers and honey-lovers, but deprive the hedgerows of their autumn scarlet. He was of a strange looking-glass turn of mind who originated the old saying

  about plentiful berry harvests presaging hard winters. The hard winter may or may not follow, but hawthorn, and indeed almost all other berries, turn out many or few strictly in accord with the mood of weather prevailing at fruit-setting time of the bygone spring. Yet it is for what is perhaps a higher use than its utility that the May blossom appeals to nearly all. A single rare flower, if beautiful as well as rare, may bring its finder a thrill

  of pleasure, to which few would care to deny a real usefulness. But mere quality is not everything. Quantity plays a definite part in the effect of beauty on the human mind. It is not for nothing that nature spends herself so prodigally in this time of upsurging summer, limitless sunshine and flower-shine, endless song of bird and bee from dawn to dark, thousands upon thousands of varied lovely forms of leaf and blade and stem. And now the hawthorn,

  with its simple unit of five white petals infinitely multiplied, until a whole kingdom is checker-bordered with silver and swept with a very tidal bore of fragrance that all must breathe. Where the bluebells grow thickest and wildest, in the old neglected wood of mingled beech and pine, only a stray beam or two of the midday sun can struggle through. Bluebells, to be really wild, must be out of the domain of the expert wood-reeve. Scientific

  forestry spells ruin to all woodland wildflowers, but to the bluebell most surely of all. Air and sun, good drainage and growing space, the conditions that make for sound, hard, marketable timber, as certainly mean extermination to all shade-loving flowers. But the old beech and pine wood is governed by one of the ancient, let alone school, happily still rife in our midst. It has not rung to the stroke of axe or billhook for generations, and the bluebells

  fill all its dusky deeps with their glimmering azure light. You may go to the country year after year in May, frequenting the open coppices and wandering by the hour together through a land choked with bluebells under whose limitless sun-flooded radiance the eye fairly pauls. But all the subtle secret charm of real bluebell woods is dependent on their owners' saving grace of negligence and its resulting sunless gloom and beautiful austerity of decay. In

  this old wood, where the black pine tops and new beech and foliage unite in one impenetrable roofing far above, the outer glory of Maytide light and life has but the feeblest echo. There is some mysterious quality in new-fledged beech leaves that winnows from the sunshine all its golden warmth of hue. A water-white obscurity broods in the hollow glades of the old wood, and a quietude that seems to belong to another world. But the whole wood is filled

  from end to end with the true wild bluebell blue, a softly shimmering azure, not lying in one textureless level, but stretching away on all sides in wave upon wave of pure, chill, incandescent colour, with dells of duskier blue between, and here and there a leaping foam fleck of pale sapphire where a ghostly beam of sunlight steals across the way. Yet the quietude that ever dwells about these old neglected haunts of the true wildling

  bluebell is very far from being silence. There is a continual murmur of ring doves high up in the forest roof, and just as unceasing, a carillon of robin music pervading the dim pent-air far and near. In the ever-mounting chorus of bird voices during the past few weeks, one has failed to notice the gradual cessation of the robin song about the lanes and fields. But the red-breast has not stilled his pipe for the season. He has only changed

  his venue. And here he is in the wild wood, his slender, tender, temperate refrain, all of a piece with his new surroundings. If colours have their counterpart in music, then the robin's quiet and quaint recitative is just the cool aloofness of bluebells done into song. The bumblebees make up the triodion of woodland sounds, typical of bluebell times. Of hivebees there are but a few stray loiterers here and there. To see bluebells at their

  best one must not see them in the open clearings. There they make a riotous splendour indeed. The eye fairly aches with the throbbing intensity of their mass luxuriance under the full May sun. The sight of an open glade of bluebells, a broad highway of almost fierce colour dwindling away into one far-off thread of pure flame, is enough to make the doubtiest-hearted sketcher throw down his pallet in despair. But wherever art blenches before nature, it is always because

  some condition humanly fictile has intervened. Bluebells were never meant thus to receive the sun's full partisanship in their growth. They were intended to thrive and shine despite the sober asceticism and grayness and chill of the deep woods. Prosperity works only evil upon them. The impetus given to this fairest of flowers to override the tepid woodland half-lights, bereft of its natural drag when copsecutter and tree-felling gang sweep away

  all between forest floor and sky becomes the chief instrument of their undoing. Bluebells growing out in the open take on a palpitating brilliance of colour, but they lose their subtlety. The hot sun strangles their sweetness and straightens out the delicate drooping poise of their stems until they look like a field of perky blue stubble. The light robs them of their individuality and aloofness, and levels all down into one meaningless

  watch-it smear. It is not easy nowadays to find a wood where bluebells are allowed to grow under their most favouring conditions of age-long oblivion and neglect. I know one alone in a whole familiar countryside, and I have just got back from it as I write, back over downland hill and dale glowing with gold of firs, and through home meadows spangled with gleaming daisy white. The daisies that, for all their golden hearts and rosy underskirts,

  are the whitest things beneath a summer sky. Yet, though I have been trudging an hour since amid all this dazzling supremacy, the cool and secret twilight of the bluebell wood still hold me to the core. Miles away it all is now, and yet the hushed, spacious dimness and solitude of the wood of crowding larch and beech and pine still lie like a deep sea over and around me. My slow wandering footsteps yet make that soft rhythmic sound as of ebbing

  and swelling waters in the carpet of last year's leaves. The bluebells still stretch away on all sides, flowing over every bank and filling every dell in a hundred receding vistas of azure light. And yet it is not the name of the flower, nor any conception of a vast and lovely inflorescence that lingers in the mind with such an aftermath of delight. Bluebells seen in their natural haunts and in their native habit of growth seem somehow

  mysteriously to lose their identity as flowers and to become just an expression of beautiful colour, formless as the unclouded blue of the sky. Of all other wildflowers, the memory retains some starry likeness or thought of rosette or garland, linked up inseparably with their beauty of hue. But the mind goes back to bluebells as it recalls a note of music, flower form and vibrating string alike, forgotten in the colour and sound to which

  they have given being.

• 10 - The Fifth Month - May - Part 2

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  Section 10 of A Country Calendar by Ticknor Edwards. This LibriBox recording is in the public domain. The Fifth Month, May, Part 2. It is the turtle dove that brings us all to our senses again in these intoxicating hours of spring. With the year's full flood tide of song and sunshine and living growing colour running high over the earth, the lover of the English countryside, even the most sedately disciplined, is apt to let go a little of the old sane guide ropes

  and yield to the universal impulse that sends staid elderly kine stampeding across the flower-strewn meadows and the swifts screaming round the village rooftops and the larks rejoicing up into the blue. Every azure cleft of wood and hill has its chiming cuckoos. All the spinnies and hedgerows ring with blackbird music at its most complicated tunefulness. A galaxy of jubilant sound from chaffinch, willow wren, thrush and nightingale and missal overloads the sun-riddled perfumed air.

  The fields are white with daisies and the lanesides sheathed in solid gold of dandelion and kelslip and starry selendine. All the trees, to their highest fingertips, are bursting into mist of young green leaf. It is all too much for the soberest, most pedestrian nature. One feels a sort of shame to be merely looking on at it all, to have contributed nothing to the Maytide pageant of loveliness, of living colour and scent and music.

  Only to possess it, yet to be answerable for none of its beauty. A sort of grateful shame, blend with a longing to add of one's own ever so little to its magnificence, if only so much as a single one of the countless humming-nats or the myriad flaunting green leaves. And then, in the deep of the adjacent pine-wood, the turtle-dove begins her leisurely gentle strain. There is no sound of a wild woods at this berserk time of gathering summer,

  so steadying, so calming to overwrought human sense, as the rhythmic call of the turtle-dove drifting out of the cool, dark-centred pine-wood, like the voice of some aromite chanting from his hidden cell. At once, all the glittering, resounding vehemence of the morning seems to quieten down into a splendour of serenity, such as one deems eternally existing in the infinite changeless blue space itself.

  You can listen to the note of the turtle-dove by the hour together, and never weary of its tranquil commentary. Even out-and-out sun-worshipper as you are this morning, it may lure you from the brightest scene into the chill austerity of the pine-wood, to track the sound down through the dim glades until, far above against the green woodland roof, you may spy out the bird keeping harmonious watch and ward over the few bare sticks she calls her nest.

  In the sunny stillness of the morning, the turtle-dove's soft music seems more in tune with the May-tide spirit of abounding light and life than voice of any other bird. Sitting on the wayside bank in the lee of the pine-wood, you can hear her rich, quiet note somewhere in the fragrant darkness behind you, dwelling on the dim air with all the solemn rhythm of a tolling bell. It is not really dark in the pine-wood.

  Thread your way in a fathom or two between the close crowded stems that stand knee-deep in bracken and sprawling bramble, and let the eye grow accustomed to the attenuated light, and you soon realise how independent of intensity is the effect of radiance and sparkle in a natural scene. It is all a question of contrast. In a minute or two, the ruddy grey stems begin to glow. The black rooftop changes to a vault of living green, with here and there a ragged rent of sky of almost blinding blue.

  The woodland floor of bracken and bramble is like a threshing floor, loaded with wine-red spillicans of coral studded with emeralds, ready for some fairy flail. Go out again into the dazzling sunshine of the lane, and the darkness gathers once more behind you. But now you know why the turtle dove eschews panegyric, and why her song is so meat, so grateful, for all the squandered light and loveliness of the day. It is the point of view that counts. The rollicking chaffinches sing to urge the sun to ever greater and greater fierceness.

  With the chaffinches, as with certain human temperaments, more of a good thing seems manifestly better than enough. But it is the soul of tranquillity in a fine May morning, wherein lies its real charm and tempering power to hearts overtried and warn a little threadbare in the ruck of the world. The turtle dove's slow, quiet music serves to bring back this oft-forgotten thing to mind. The May sun pours from a serene and cloudless sky. The chaffinches applaud its every beam with explosive energy.

  A yellow hammer nods in the break, rousing sufficiently now and then to sing a bar or two of his wheezy, sleepy, sweet refrain. Mistlethrushes keep on with their single, reiterated phrase, just the same song with which they met February snow and buffeting gales. Exuberance, somnolence, insensibility, the turtle gently counters all with her low, slow, pondering strain. And now there comes in the pintops a sound that makes the heart leap with its sudden and utter unexpectedness, with all a sound alike loved and old familiar. Country life far inland has this inevitable deprivation that it knows and owes nothing to the sea.

  There are no salt breezes, nor still nights full of ocean murmur, no fields dressed with seaweed giving out to the hot sun its sharp, breath-catching sweetness, no white seabirds following the ploughs, and so the pine woods have been given to serve alike for antidote as for lenity. The sound of air moving through the pine trees is the very sound of the sea, whether in hurricane or time of gentle breezes. This passing glow of wind overhead that has so suddenly brought you out of Maytide dreams, where it came from is a mystery on so calm a morning, is the very voice of ripples lapping weed-tressed rocks on a summer strand. As I came through the beech wood this morning, just when the first level golden beams of sunshine were beginning to thrust between the crowding stems, a squirrel got up from the path almost under my feet.

  So quietly was I going over the thick soft carpet of last year's leaves that he had not detected my approach, it seemed, until I was almost upon him. But then he was off with the speed of light, and up the nearest tree trunk, scolding harshly as he went. Even when he had gained secure haven in the fork of a bough some thirty feet above my head, he did not abate one jot of his clamorous vehemence. He crouched there, peering down at me with his glittering beady black eyes, his long ears bristling erectly parallel, his great bushy wiry tile lashing furiously from side to side. He was evidently very angry at my intrusion on his woodland solitude, but alarmed even more than I rate.

  Ceaselessly his harsh cry hurtled out overhead, waking all the echoes of the glade, and his tail wagged to and fro, making a continual flash of bright rich tawny in the sunbeam that was trying to lasso him. Thus the squirrel and I remained staring at one another for a good five minutes at a stretch. And then, by little and little, his sharp outcry began to soften and to slow its pace. The swinging tile described an ever smaller and smaller arc in the yellow sun glow. At length he seemed altogether to throw me off his mind as something too remote for further vigilance.

  He turned himself about and began to wander through the treetop world of the wood. Unseen now, or at least wholly unregarded, I followed him through perhaps a dozen trees. This aerial perambulation of the squirrels is one of the most fascinating, as well as puzzling, things to watch. It is the nearest thing to flying, surely, ever achieved by wingless creature. The squirrel has nothing but his long streaming tile and his powerful limbs to carry him through the air.

  And yet he performs the most astonishing feats of progression, so swiftly withal that the most practised eye can scarce take in his method or means. One sees him glide out to the tips of the most slender branchlets and flow away through the air to the outstretching boughs of neighbouring trees, boughs just as slender and frail, and yet neither sinking perceptibly under his weight, which must be considerable. And then his actual path through the air varies in mysterious fashion. Sometimes it is parabolic, a mounting and subsiding curve from point to point, the normal course of a leap,

  but as often as not the parabola is inverted, thus apparently defying all known laws governing a projected weight. More astonishing than all is the fact, verifiable by anyone who will go to the nearest wild wood, that the squirrel's aerial line of progression from tree to tree frequently has a crooknet. He has the power of turning in mid-air. The secret of all this, of course, lies in his immensely long bushy tail,

  which combines in itself the functions of kite tail, rudder and aeroplane, while he can glide out almost to the ends of the slenderous branches before kicking off, because he gathers two or three together with arms and legs as he goes, and so gives them momentarily the united sustaining strength of the proverbial bundle of sticks. Full and clear from the heart of the greenwood came the cuckoo's song,

  just the pair of reiterated chiming notes that seemed to lend a rhythm to the hot May sunshine sweltering down from a sky of cloudless blue. To one unlearned in musical technique, the pure, quiet song sounded exactly like this. The interval between the notes was constant and seemingly faultless. The pitch as true as two notes stopped on a well-mounted concert flute, and the birds seemed to take a delicate artistic pleasure in delivering each note true and clean.

  I stood for long minutes together in the solitary sun-barred woodland glade, listening and wondering, and never once did the song perceptibly vary in pace or interval or timbre. I was just moving on, thinking to myself that here at least was one beautiful sound of summertime that I had fully taken in, when another cuckoo began to sing in a glowing gold-green elm-top, scarce twenty yards away. Its first clear strain brought me up every stitch back.

  All country dwellers know that the cuckoo's changes are not invariably rung on the same notes in the stave. Between one bird and another there is often a difference of half a tone or more, but here was one exhibiting a hitherto unheard-of depth of register. My first cuckoo was still singing, and presently the two songs fell into almost regular alternation. The dullest ear could not fail to realise what a happy chance had befallen.

  Indubitably, the second song was just two notes lower in the clef. And now, with heart-knocking and ears astray, I waited for what I knew might conceivably come to pass. The higher note, possibly from a younger bird, gradually shortened its interval, and the two songs drew together at length overlapping until there was but a single song drifting down from the sunny blue, a triple measure extraordinarily tuneful in its novelty.

  The three notes following each other in perfect time. So the duet lasted, it seemed, through half a dozen repetitions. And then the slow old cuckoo fell to the rear, as I hoped he might, and the expected climax came. For half a minute, perhaps, the two songs, one on either side of me,

  chimed out in ideal synchronisation, treble and tenor together, the two perfect chords filling the green woodland dale with such a joyous seesaw harmony as I had never yet listened to in a whole long country life. Since that hour, I have been to the cuckoo wood many times, in the hope of catching the two players again in sympathetic mood.

  But, though I have heard the two songs separately at different times, they have never resumed their happy concord, and perhaps never will. Yet experiences akin to this, being unique in the sense that they almost never repeat themselves, are common enough with the habitual wanderer in country ways. I have seen a rabbit come out of its burrow, apparently moved by nothing but sheer kindness,

  to stop a fight between two blackbirds throw herself between the combatants, scattering them right and left. And I have stood on a seashore and had a dogfish get out of the water and literally walk on its fins to my feet. But one scarcely tells these things expecting to be believed. Where the little hill stream takes its last sparkling resounding leap into the river, the bank is gay with forget-me-not blue.

  One can scarce thrust a fingertip between the crowding blossoms. They overrun the bank and pour down beneath almost to the water's edge, where their shining azure is taken up and carried onward by the mirrored azure of the sky, until it breaks and vanishes into the green gloom of the willow woods beyond. The stream is the only noisy energetic thing amidst the sunny sloth of the May morning.

  Not a leaf stirs in the highest treetops. In the spinnys, though there is a ceaseless underflow of birdsong, the general effect on the air is one of a strange, almost somnolent quiet. The river moves with scarcer sound, just a glittering gun-brown level of waters gliding silently by. But far behind me, where it first breaks from the foot of the wooded steep,

  I can hear the stream coming and talking as it comes. Here it check at the rocky, ferny ridge, hidden deep in the older copse. Here its bright note of relief as it winds free, and its pearling, contented murmur through the sedgy ground beyond, until, here at the cleft in the bank, it comes singing into full sunlight,

  and takes its final plunge into the river. The wonder of this water music is not so much its beauty, but its waywardness. The clear voice, or rather whole choir of voices, is forever changing its pitch and volume, and running up and down the scale. When one considers that every gill of water comes over the same bed,

  meets with the same obstructions, the same dips and twists and turns, and finally tumbles over the same mimic precipice into the same watery deep, it is more than strange that its voice should not keep to one set formula of tone. But there never was natural running water that sped at the same gait for two minutes together. There is always the pulse of the great, unquiet earth throbbing in its flow.

  Watch the surface of the steadiest, most tranquil stream against some fixed gauge, such as a bridge-peer or bulk of timber, and you will see how inconstant is its level, how the water seems to tilt this way or that, ever so little indeed, but enough to upset any cocturity of view as to the invariableness in natural law. The more one studies the sounds made by moving water, sea sounds as well as the sounds of river and stream,

  the more of mystery seems to gather about their origin. Mere gravity does not explain the half of them. Only by an effort of will, hardly to be distinguished from stupidity, can one lay to the credit of dead, inert matter the production of such subtle and meaning blends of harmonious sound. But if water music be taken as, in part at least, born of impulses above and beyond its visible source,

  then the mystery is explained, and left a deeper mystery than ever. Where the old green cart-track makes a sudden bend between its tarring hedgerows just by a little sparkling sedgy pool, a nightingale sits and sings in the sweet May morning light. The song is no continuous outpouring, as with most other English wild birds. The nightingale singing is never an obsession with her.

  She just tunes up whenever the impulse seizes her, and seems to get as much satisfaction from her silences as her song. All the morning through she has been sitting in her silver-budded hawthorn bower, letting off, as it were, minute guns of melody, long rills of sweet, quiet sound, and sudden cymbal clashes, and low, slow, sorrowful chains of notes, infinitely distressed and tender, paid out upon the waiting air, moment after moment, as though the linked, lovely anguish harmonized, would never cease.

  And then at last silence, a silence that, in the outset, you spend on breathless tiptoe, a gog with wonder and delight, feverishly eager for the minstrel to begin again. Still silence, and now you are steadying, cooling down into a little season of impatient waiting. Another long minute, perhaps, she holds you at this ear-stretch of expectancy, and again the lingering, sorrowful plaint welling out upon the midgethronged perfumed air, as though torn from the very heart of the bird. And yet, though in its peerless quality of tone, its attack, its telling, timely reticences, the Nightingale's Lay is comparable to nothing else in the world.

  It would be but throwing a slavish sop to convention if we affected to regard it as, musically, a piece of competent artist's work. So considered, the Nightingale, at her very best, is easily surpassed by half a dozen of the commoner British birds. Blackbird, Song Thrush, Skylark, even the perennial Tuneful Robin, give us every hour of the summer's day music that is far more account than anything we hear from Nightingale-haunted groves. This little grey minstrel with the silver flute from overseas, so be lauded of the ancient poetic schools, is indeed but a poor technician. But with this reservation honestly made and allowed, the Nightingale's music cannot be ranked too high for its quality alone.

  Its unique crystal clarity of tone is well nigh startling, even when heard on a fine May morning, when every rude of the flower-spangled earth and every fathom of blue sky overhead has its exulting singer. But at night, when all rivals are mute, and there is but this one sweet voice echoing across the lonely moonlit vale, its effect is one of almost uncanny beauty. If the cold white purity of summer moonlight could be expressed in music, here it is in a wild bird's song. Thank you.

• 11 - The Sixth Month - June - Part 1

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  No flower of the wayside varies so little in the date of its first appearance as the common dog rose. Looking back through a pile of nature notebooks covering a period of more than 30 years, I find the average date has proved the sixth or seventh day in each month of June. At least this has been the mean time in the green nook of southern country where my caravan has rested for half a lifetime back.

  In the famous fair weather year of 1921, the first wild rose is chronicled as shining in a thicket by Arran River no earlier than June 3. And now, after a spring almost unparalleled for cold and gloom, it looks as if the roses would be out much to the same time. In the same coppice overshadowing the brown water, still now at the top of the tide, the briars are full of green antlered buds, one or two already loosening and pointing red.

  Before a week has journeyed by, the wild roses, true sign manual of summer tide, may be garlanding every field and lane. With the passing of the hawthorn bloom and the coming of the roses, one must put away the last thought of spring. Yet until the rose-blood actually breaks and summer bursts upon us, there is something abroad in the green ways of every English countryside scarcely to be matched for loveliness all the long year through.

  The hawthorn, at first in myriad silver bud, and then in mountainous upheaval of snowy blossom, easily rests the melody from all lesser flowery growths even in the flower-burdened month of May. To watch the buds unfold, hiding all the greenery of the hedgerow under their spreading petals in a single day of sunshine, is to stand breathless in the very torrent deeps of the year's beauty. Masses of pure white flowers, whatever they be, lack commonly an indefinable something of charm

  to the worshipper of life as a thing precious in itself, apart from its manifestation in beauty of colour and form. But the fresh and full-blown hawthorn creates none of this feeling. The whiteness of the May is redeemed from the chill of the whiteness of other flowers by the sweet rose-red of its anthers. At its first opening, each silver cup is full of these, giving to the whole bush, the whole countryside indeed, the authentic hue of warm abounding life,

  for all its whiteness remains of the same unsullied purity as ever. Thus the hawthorn holds the tune against the whole flower choir of the spring, as a peerless prima donna will hold it against an entire operatic chorus and orchestra. But then comes this wonderful thing now showing in every hedgerow while we are waiting for the roses. The hawthorn, in the fading flower of its glorious beauty, does not pale into dun decay,

  but seems only to enter upon a lovelier phase of life than ever. Look along the winding sun-barred alley of the river path, and where a week ago you beheld only shining splendour of white, now all is of a rich coraline colour. It is as though a cloud of sunset glory lay caught in the tangle of summer green. It is the roses that make the summer, or at least bring summer to its first fresh fullness. So long as the wild roses are only in the stage of myriad

  green-tined bud, summer is still short of entire fulfilment. But now, looking across the flowery checkerboard of meadows under the sweet dune sunlight, far into the shimmering blue aerial distance, one can see roses, roses all the way, flushing the hedgerows as with the glory of dawn. Here in the old neglected grazing meadow, where year by year brier and bramble have gained surer and wider hold, until now the pasture is little more than a network of green tracks

  amidst a wilderness of tangled bright-hued growth. Here on the old grazing land the roses seem to lord it over everything. There are long binds of them arching across the close nibbled ways and barricading the paths breast-high at every step. And overhead they meet and interlock their loveliness, so that one can walk for yards together under a rosy roof. Skirting the meadow on the sunny side, you move in a sort of cloister where the brier branches,

  springing from the hedgetop and overreaching your head, droop down in one continuous curtain of bejeweled greenery, so dense that scarce a beam of the midday sun can struggle through. But here and there a break comes in the canopy above. The unclouded sky of June seen thus almost startles one with the intensity, the dominant dazzling stare of its blueness. Wandering out in the open, you seldom look at the sky directly overhead. And when you do turn the glance thither,

  the eye is led from brightness to greater brightness, and so insensibly prepared for the stupendous depth and power of the zenithian summer blue. But here, looking upward from the hedgerow shade through that dim rose-gem shaft of greenery, the eye is taken unawares and unready. For a moment the vivid incandescent glare of this rose-framed spot of far-blue heaven is almost too great to be borne. It is the pink, the true rose-coloured roses that the bees love

  most of all. Not for their nectar, indeed, though that is often worth the fetching after warm, still, dewy nights, but for their abundance of pollen. Today, all the sunny morning through, it has been pouring into the hives like a shower of gold. Away in the beech-wood, the sound of the rain on the fresh young summer leaves is the true water music. But for the fact that it comes from high overhead in the matted wood-top,

  it might be the sound of a brook hard by, rippling over its stony bed, a steady tenor undertone, with now and again a sudden clash of sweet sound as a floor of wind shakes the green forest tresses free of their watery load. Days of unremitting rain in the country have never the depressing gloomy quality of rainy days in towns. There is the same dull, low light, indeed. In the beech-wood now, one can scarce make out the path between the crowding

  tree trunks fifty yards ahead. But there is nothing of gloom, no presage of imminent disaster burdening the dim air. The whole idea of wet weather being bad weather is but a figment of the town-harried brain. On such days as these, one cannot stay out in the drenching woods and lanes for long without realising how gladly the birds and all wild creatures herald the advent of warm, continuous rain in summertime. Wherever your footsteps lead, you walk amidst one unending

  peon of rejoicing. The birds that sing in rain or shine are urged to redoubled efforts. But it is the thrushes, robins and wrens, birds that fall strangely mute under the first real summer heat and glow, that are brought back to all their old jubilation of song by rainy days in June. The beech-wood rings from end to end with jolly, careless thrush music. Every bush one passes by gives out the tender plait of a red-breast or the slender,

  silver-rill of sound which marks the wren's unvarying mood of simple, blithe content. Wood-pigeons fill the twilight glades with their slumberous song, that queer soft medley of entreaty and expostulation. And now and then one of them goes off straight up through the green forest roof with noisy clatter of wing, suggesting the crash of a stone hurled through window-glass.

  The turtledoves have measured every moment of the dripping grey light since dawn with their tolling tremolo of music. As you wander on through the cascading alleys of the wood, you leave one environment of dove-song only to draw within range of another. The one grows still behind you, and the next creeps into hearing on the path ahead. You are never free of the rich, soft, corrugated sound in the mile-long stretch of the sombre way,

  and when you gain the open meadows beyond, it is the turtledove's solemn, contented strain that seems to follow you farthest, the deep-pitched sounds carrying better than the shrill ones, as they always do through the water-shrouded air. The ring-dove crooning in the deep oak wood by the riverside on the drowsy golden afternoon seems to voice the very spirit of high summer. It is not mere tranquillity and content,

  like the blackbird song, nor the pure rejoicing at the beauty and fullness of things like the thrushes, nor a happy careless rhapsody such as the lark is forever flinging into summer skies. It is all these and something more, the dynamic quietude that dwells in utmost power and speed. The ring-dove's slow, strong, steady music creeps out to you from the deep wood like the sound of a great spinning-top, quietest and least mobile when at its highest velocity.

  And so it is with the summer, now that June is getting into its blithest, lordliest stride. Steady and full and slow, the serene deep song stems out upon the sunlight, calling to you to stop your restless feet for a while and look about at the squandered loveliness of all things. One never pauses enough on a country walk at this thronging time, nor indeed at any season, but now the very prodigy of wonder and beauty on every side

  impels one to look close, to take in the little in full, rather than be forever nibbling at vastness. Amid the tangle of rich, lush growth by a riverside in June, there is study for an hour within easy arm's stretch, golden iris with its mysterious, fascinating complication of bloom, the unfolding of the hogweed buds, each stem loaded with bulky green portmanteaus packed with a magician's whole stock in trade, wild galdor roses covering the break with shining

  white horseshoes of blossom, flowers that are not flowers at all, but merely baits, counterfeits to lure the insects towards the true blossoms within. The real task is to learn something fully and finitely about any single thing in the multitude. Wild hoppines are clambering everywhere, ascending through every bush and soaring six or eight feet sheer up through the empty air until they grip the pendant oak bells far above. Every year one passes by and marvels at the

  swinging green cables of the hop. It would be good to go home today knowing certainly how the slender flaccid stems contrive to lift themselves. The truth is the whole plant is fashioned for the attainment of this one object. From its very birth the hoppine has a twist in its nature. Directly its green snake head pierces the sod, it begins to revolve. Not only does the stem twist of itself in growing, but its apex is bent to one side like the blade of a golf club, and this

  describing a spiral as it goes takes a turn round every other growth it touches. And there is no going back nor letting go for the hoppine when once it has got a grip. The entire stem is covered with sharp retrosed spines, claws that readily allow forward movement through the densest labyrinth, but never yield a hair's breadth of way once gained. Yet it is when the hop has reached the summit of the bush that these combined twisting and

  clinging powers come into fullest play. A single vine could rise scarce an inch, but a dozen or more, growing and twining solidly together, weld themselves into a column that can defy the roughest wind. The green reeds by the riverside are the truest gauge of summer's progress. So long as you can see any of last year's dead dry wands topping the barricade of Virger,

  so long you know that the great worldwide ocean of life and green growth is yet short of its utmost reach, there are still flowers to come that are yet only in the bud, still new songs to gladden the ear, greater fullness of sun glow, skies of deeper blue, and scents that are still buttessences imprisoned in cells of life, perchance yet under the clod. But the old done reeds that have whistled in so many winter winds are nearly hidden now. Standing on the

  riverbank and looking away over the plain of quivering sun-steeped emerald, you can scarce see one skeleton finger pointing to the sky. Summer is well nigh at its zenith of growth and beauty. The dense reed jungle is a finished work at last, and all the wild creatures that live in it and live by it are filling its shimmering deeps with sounds of love and chase and war. That sudden penetrating cry, shrill and loud while it lasts, yet ever at once cautiously

  suppressed, is the note of a moor hen calling her chicks in from the open tideway where they have heedlessly ventured, to the safe green gloom of the reeds. Now and again in the short quiet of the morning a clear ringing sound breaks out at the foot of the bank, or you hear a laboured stealthy splashing coming nearer and nearer deep in the sun-fretted green. The one is a water-voll taking a frightened header into the current. You will see nothing of him, for he will hug the bottom

  a dozen yards maybe, before his sodden sleekness glints once more in the light of day. But rare luck may bring you a sight of the otter as he fares heavily along, working through the flotsam and jetsam that the river casts up between bank and reeds. It is hard work, this, and every minute or two he must stop for breath and a swift look round to gauge his venue. And then, for an instant, you get full view of him, a great ragged, dripping head, uplifted,

  fierce as a tiger's, and bulky, coarse furred body, half submerged, holding on to a snag with his powerful dog-like feet. He stays just long enough to fix so much about him in your mind. Then he is gone with a plunge and dash of sparkling spray. Deep hidden in its jungle of reeds, the river glides invisibly by. You would never guess you were close to a river, but for the slow, quiet sound of its flowing. Standing by the pathside on the hot June morning,

  just within the shadow brink of the wood, you look out over what seems a solid plain of sunlit green, a shimmering, whispering level of verdure stretching away a hundred yards perhaps, until it brings up against more woods topped by a line of distant hill so blue with the blue of summer air that you scarce know whether it be earth or sky. But midway over this sunny province of reed tops comes a break, a wavering seam that marks the

  river's course. And now and again, as a deeper breath draws out of the self, the green reeds part for a moment and show you the sun-spangled floor of waters driving merrily by. But it is only an instant splash. The little cat's paw of a breeze passes on. The reeds draw together again into a solid rampart of greenery. There is ever the quiet ripple song upon the air, but it is Vox et Priteria near hill, a voice and nothing more.

  The river's never-ending song, drowsy and sweet and slow, and the rich labour chant of countless bees. And, far overhead, so many larks caroling, such a quiet, blithe continuity of music up aloft in the violet sky that you are almost constrained to think the very sunbeams must be singing as they fall. And now, from the rustling deep of green reeds, there comes over to you a voice, old familiar with all given to riverside wanderings in summertime, but welcome ever,

  the lay of the little sedge-bird, restlessly flitting from place to place as she sings. Sedge-warblers bring to the riverside a quality of music that is found, perhaps, only in the song of one other bird. Yet the human-like tinge about the robin song is but a half-hearted repining, the sort of plaintive prettiness of disillusionment that comes to certain gentle shrinking feminine natures born for the open air,

  but side-tracked for life into the grey street crevices of a town. The sedge-warbler's song has nothing of this devoid resignation to fate about it, though it has all its invincible beauty of tone. Every note, tuneful as it is, sounds like a protest against something or other. No single item of creation, you would think, as you listen, is quite good enough for the little sedge-bird.

  Poured forth almost continuously upon the fragrant, sun-steeped air, and plentifully garnished as it is with little flourishes of pure delight, its prevailing spirit is one of damaging comparison to things that are from things that were, or might have been. You listen to its chiding, fretful sweetness with pleasure, fretful sweetness with pleasure, but with more pleasure still turn ear again to the

  crooning doves in the wood behind you. There is a deep cleft in the bank a little way onward, where a brook comes winding down amidst the riverside pastures to join the mother stream. Leaning presently over the moss-grown coping of the foot-bridge under which the water passes, you get a glimpse through a sort of tunnel-tube of green leaves, half reality, half reflection, at the sun-bright river beyond, the only spot within a mile, perhaps, where the river is clearly

  visible. The willows crowd thick together here, forming a dense roof of sun-windowed foliage above, with the same rich, dim arabesque of gold and green re-echoed in the water below. Farther out beyond the willows, the brook, flowing through its deep chasm riverward, reflects only blue sky. And then, at the break in the reeds, the little stream vanishes into the foaming, eddying breadth of the river, a side-path of temperate azure, cut at right angles by a great

  main street of glittering, speeding light. This spot, when you have once found it, is sure to lure you irresistibly at any time of the year, but especially on these resplendent summer days. The little quiet overshadowed creek, full of the pearling undertone of the brook, and sober, quivering half-lights countered by the eager brightness, the forceful song of the river below holds out the best of good fellowship with both arms. But when the time is due,

  you will come here for reflections in the literal meaning of the word. In still water, you get a topsy-turvy presentment of wood and hill in perfect replica. Its value lies in its desperate exactness, the stark and dead verity of a photographic print. Only in unruffled yet moving water do you get reflections wherein are also revelations of new loveliness that the direct eye cannot take in. Looking downward upon it now from the mossy parapet of the bridge,

  you straightway enter a world of enchantment, something fashioned out of the fairy stuff of dreams. All is clearly pictured below. The matted rooftop of willow bells and sunbeams, warp of green and weft of shining gold, the lichen-stained buttress of the bridge, the roses and white elder-desks peering over, trailing binds of bryony threaded with a myriad stars, the glow of orange lilies at the green tunnel's mouth where the mirrored sky begins,

  the blue sky itself, here no longer an intolerable incandescence but just a calm and grateful depth of turquoise buoying up a single silver fleck of summer cloud. And all are in subtle mystic motion, not wind-stirred, not a line of their image broken, but made living things by this magic looking glass of the stream.

• 12 - The Sixth Month - June - Part 2

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  HIDDEN DEEP IN THE TOWERING HORTHORN THAT OVERHANGS THE RIVER THERE IS A BLACKBIRD SINGING, SINGING THE SUMMER EVENING TO ITS TRANQUIL CLOTHES. With the lowering sun, the day-long breeze has dropped to the gentlest zephyr, and that only in the highest treetops. Close to earth not a leaf moves. The failing, fading hawthorn flowers still shed their petals ceaselessly upon the trodden way, but it is no longer

  of rosy spangles driving across the view. Now the tiny flecks of coral let go their anchorage above in intermittent twos and threes, sidling diffidently down in the serene amber light, as though they feared the impact of their fall would break the spell of utter quietude upon everything. For with the coming of sunset all the birds have fallen strangely mute in the spinneys, all but this one blackbird hiding in the thorn-tree by the river, and

  he putting forth but half his power of song. Yet it is just at these rare times when the great summer medley of bird-voices fails unaccountably at evening's close. Fails, maybe, under some hint of impending storm, that the blackbird has heard at his best. Listen to the soft unhurried melody as it stems out upon the calm evening air from the depths of the thorn-bush overshadowing the brimming stream. Every note is in concord with the spirit of the time.

  The song is a steady onward flow of ever-varied sound, no phrase repeated, and all the notes stopped clean and true as on a well-mounted flute. It is full of grace notes and little swift asides of tender recitative, but keeps wonderful time withal. And now and then a pause comes in the music, either a break, a sudden damming up in the flood of bland harmonious sound, or a gradual lapse into silence so that the intensest listener scarce

  knows when the song is done. Whether it be deliberate or merely instinctive, there is no denying to the blackbird's music the elements of a work of art. A long June day of rollicking wind and sun and driving mist of hawthorn petals colouring the air and littering all the ways as with stammered snow. And now, at even, the wind has gone and all the world mute at the bottom of a lake of fiery amber, and the one lone singer paying out, link by

  link, from his ambush of dying blossom, a chain of undying song. Across the shining plain of meadow the swallows are playing like gulls over a summer sea. From your cool green nook in the hedgerow you look out over what is very like a stretch of low tide shallows heaving under the stress of a breeze, below beyond below of snow-white marguerite for foam, and wide slanting zones where the rose-red sorrel plumes and crowding buttercups and

  chervil blend their rich hues into a simulation of what Homer must have beheld when he sang of wine-coloured seas. Close at hand the luxuriant meadow growth is still made up to the eye of a myriad flowers. But a little way out the whiteness of the great oxide daisies runs into pure froth of churned and sunlit waters, and the tender rose-red and glittering yellow into an underflow that in the distance becomes a shimmering formless haze of bronze under

  the soft dune light. And ceaselessly the swallows wheel and sway to and fro, now touching a crest of blossom with a wing-tip as the low skimming gulls at sea scatter the white ocean foam, now lifting and soaring into the eye of the sun, each bird as it turns looking like a shaftless arrowhead of glittering blue steel. But the white marguerites and crimson turrets of sorrel and flaunting buttercup gold are only the surface of things, the wave-tops

  and cascading foam of this ocean of meadow growth. Near at hand you peer down into a coolness of verdure as into the depths of a translucent sea, and at every level there is some new thing of beauty. Just beneath the plantains lift their mauve grey heads amid a jungle of flowering grasses, a hundred different kinds and no two the same in colour or form. Deeper still there are the hawk-weeds, gold again but not polished metal like the

  buttercups. The hawk-weed is just a tassel made of amber velvet shreds. Then comes a stratum of pink, trumpet bells and green heart-shaped leaves of lily-bind clambering everywhere through the labyrinth of stems. Right below, at the bottom of the meadow-sea, there are the little daisies, thousands upon thousands of them, just like white pebbles sunk in ocean deeps, and with them a wealth of blue veronica. The whole dim floor of the meadow

  is covered with their tender cloistered blue. The sun lifts behind you. The shadow of the great thorn-hedge draws closer and closer in over the shining plain. Overhead the bees are humming busily in the mountain of white hawthorn bloom, and now a land-rail begins her dry monotonous plain as she threads her way invisibly through the green grass steeps. If you keep quite quiet and still, the note may draw so near that at last it sounds almost

  under your feet. But you may never see the bird, though you will hear the restless arid song daily, perhaps the whole summer through. Across the fields, in the stillness of the golden evening, come the voices of the hay-carriers taking up their last loads. The farmer here does things in the old-fashioned way, and haying time on the remote farmstead is still a season of pleasant sights and sounds. First the quiet musical note of the mowing machine,

  as it journeys round the meadow, laying the tall grass low in a beautiful concentric patter of grey on green, like watered silk. And then the day-long murmur of the hay-makers, everyone in the village, young or old, pressed into the service, turning the recumbent swathes, or tossing them up like green ocean spray in the sunshine, or gathering them into long windrows side by side, ready for the carriers. And now at last the great wains lumbering

  and creaking into the meadows as soon as the sun has drunk up the morning dew, and the pitchers falling resolutely to work against time. For this is a serious business, getting the hay harvest in, and the rick safely thatched, and it is curious to mark how the general desultory talk among the labourers ceases now. All the holiday spirit has vanished, and with it the merry rallying and bandying about of rough chaff. The only sounds that

  reach the ear from the meadows now are the rumble of the wagons passing from Haycock to Haycock, and the warning call of the drivers just before they move on their teams. All day long these sounds have been breaking a silence that now, in the deepening summer twilight, has taken to itself a solemn, even a portentous quality. Straining the eye across the shore meadow in the ever-gathering dusk, soon you can make out the loading wagons only

  as vague bulks of darkness scarce discernible in the amber gloom. But the alert forceful sounds of the work still impress and charm. But on the other side of the hill they carry the hay in the new fashion by means of the mechanical loader. It is quicker, and that is all in its favour that the most unconscionable advocate of machinery in agriculture can advance. Hay carrying in this wise is bereft of all its ancient seamliness and charm, to say nothing

  of its music. And even the farmers who employ the method for its celerity admit its wastefulness. Machine lifted hay does not bind well in the load, and much of it shakes off in transit to the rickyard. Stark and still under the sweet dune sunlight the meadow lies within its ring of towering hedgerow, like a deep-boosomed inland mirror. On such still, sultry mornings, just when

  the meadow grass has reached its zenith of growth and loveliness, and just before the mowers are due to begin their fell work, it is good to stand under the shade of the great spreading briar-tree and look away over the sunny diaper of living hues. Each of the myriad points of colour distinct near at hand, but all merging a little way onward into one diaphanous rosy haze. Summer has nothing fairer to show than the common meadow grass seen thus under

  still sunlight at its fullness of beauty. But it is not mere colour gloriously illuminated. The meadows at this time have a mysterious softly glistening silken sheen, the cause of which is not evident until one looks close among the crowding blossoms and green translucent stems. This enticingly beautiful effect is due, as one now sees, to innumerable clots of shining white foam clinging everywhere amidst the labyrinth of flower and grass-head,

  giving to the whole meadow, though it is past noon on a hot summer's day, the appearance of being still drenched with early morning dew. One would be glad to believe that this frog-spit, or froth-spit, was serving its chief end in thus giving a crowning touch of diamond-like sparkle to the meadow's lake of living wine. But the little stubby creature with a transparent green body, a snout like a sperm-whale, and protruding eyes of vivid

  crimson, which constructs these clots of glistening foam amid the meadow-grass, has a very different object in its enterprise. You cannot study the thing for long without being forced to admit rather a sinister motive for all this crystal bubble-blowing in field and wayside, now evident at every step of a country walk. The discovery will soon be made that the masses of white foam enveloping almost every stem in the thicket are really traps for unwary

  insects as cunningly devised as any spider-web. The spider spreads her silken net in the hedgerow to ensnare flying insects. The cicada-grub that builds the froth-snare is after only crawling game. All growths in this season have a wandering population of minute wingless creatures. The cicada waits until the sunshine has lured these aloft from their homes in the brown earth, and then cuts off their retreat by blowing a collar of glutinous bubbles round

  the stem. Wandering over the downs in the hazy sun-gold of one still June morning, a lark broke singing from the rough tussock grass almost under my feet. I brought up stock still, straining eyes and ears after the ever-mounting singer. At first the song was strangely loud and jubilant and clear. Though every fluttering wing-beat carried him surely upward, his progress was deliberate enough at the beginning. He seemed to be in some doubt as to his true

  path, for all he had, the whole heaven to his minstrelsy. He veered indecisively this way and that, trying, as it were, the buoyancy of the air. At length he appeared to find what he sought, and began the wide upward-spiral flight which is always the lark's method of soaring on calm days. Up and up he went, the music quietening more and more until there was nothing visible of the bird but a flickering tiny dark speck in the blue, and nothing left

  of the song but its shriller tones, and these only to be discerned at intensest air-stretch. Finally, both song and singer faded away together into the misty violet of the summer sky. It could have been but a few seconds only, yet it seemed long minutes before the wild sweet joyous trill peeled out once more infinitely faint and far above. By little and little the divided cadences strengthened and drew together into the old connected flow of jubilant

  sound. Now my eye caught and lost and caught again the minute black fluttering point in the silvery azure. Steadily but surely the atom of twinkling darkness grew and the music gathered. The lark came down not as he had mounted in a wide ever-ascending coil of flight, but in long sheer drops and slanting tangents that bore him now swiftly, boldly earthward, his song swelling into all its old grand strength as he fell.

  At last the bird came to a halt in mid-air, poised a moment singing his hardest, then swooped suddenly to earth, music and flutter of dark wings vanishing together as the flame of a torch is quenched when cast into a pool. Thus perhaps the commonest and least regarded, yet almost the most wonderful, of country sights and sounds. For why should the lark alone soar to sing? Birdsong, ringing amidst the fresh young greenery of wood and hedgerow,

  is self-explained. The sociable and affectionate creatures that produce it are at the glad summit of their life's connubial business. The wonder, indeed, would be if nesting-time were a time of songless woods and fields. But why should this one bird alone, before he can give his whole heart up to his singing, be impelled ever to seek the solitude of the skies?

  Dancing along into the deep, sunny cleft of the lane, the air is full of the sound of insect life. The wayside flowers are thronged with butterflies and bees. But it is the winged atoms which never seem to settle anywhere, the clouds of dancing gnats and midges and the shrilling hover-flies that make up the steady undertone of the morning's music. The hum of the bees, in the last red-tinged glory of the May and in the roses, for all

  its volume, is but local, a sound of earth. You draw into its range or leave it behind you as you move. The true aerial music of summer comes from the gnats. It is everywhere and nowhere, in shade or sun, the dominant authentic voice of the season. But there are countless tiny fragments of life forever voyaging in the air of a summer's day which contribute nothing to this melody, for the simple reason that they have no wings. Stretch a hand aloft

  at almost any moment in a country walk today, and it will be strange if you do not bring down one of these mysterious travellers. The little shining brown spider which you now find scurrying over your hand is close akin to the gossamer spiders, who, in default of wings, construct for themselves veritable airships of silk, woven so fine that they seem more like films of bluish-white mist than floating spider webs. This is the true

  gossamer, the phil de viège, of which one sees on rare occasions and states of the weather such incredible abundance veering in the calm sky. The little spider now upon your fingertip weaves no web, but she contrives an aerial travelling chariot, almost as wonderful. Watch her now, making preparations to resume her interrupted flight. Standing with head towards the prevailing wind and the hind part of her body elevated, she begins to pay out a strand

  of silk upon the slow drifting current, so fine that you can scarcely see it, even against the light. Every moment or two she stops to try the thread and see if it has yet sufficient carrying force. Once she swiftly hauls back a few inches of it and tests it again, this probably because it has caught somewhere. She does not want a bridge, but a ship. The sudden gathering in process pulls or breaks the strand free. As she works, you can tell

  the direction the line is taking by the ever-varying cant of her body sideways or upwards, though you can see her kite string only when it reflects the sun, and a swift bright tangent flashes out across the green of the foliage or blue of sky. At last, ever trying the line each few seconds, the little spider decides that her aeroplane is ready. You see her body pointing directly upward now, denoting that the line is pulling towards the skies, and that is

  evidently her chosen way. Suddenly she stoops and cuts the line away from beneath her, and off she goes straight up into the sunshine, so swiftly that the eye can scarce follow for more than an instant her rocket-like flight. The old country cross-road is still spared the modern outrage of Macadam and Tar, but it is and always will be the nearest road from town to town, and all the motor traffic in a hurry chooses the risk of its winding

  tree-locked ways. Every few minutes a great car comes hurtling by, trailing behind it a cloud of dust that has scarce time to settle before another whirling white billow lifts into view at the far crook of the descending way. The hedgerows and grassy verges are smothered thick with this dust, the pallid accretion of many rainless days. From every leaf and twig and blade the natural hues have been blotted out until all is as colourless as

  the wreath on a wedding cake. And yet the wayside flowers themselves seem to shine out with a lustre wholly undiminished. Though the leaf sprays on the arches of brier, weighed down with their wealth of roses, are white as the way they shadow, the roses look as fresh and sweet as ever. The little trumpet bells of lilybind that throng the choked bleached grass below pour down in their thousands upon the very wheelway, and from a little distance

  might be pink milk newly spilled in the gutter. Yellow vetchers gleam everywhere, bright as fresh minted gold. Mallows flaunting their purple satin against the ghostly grey of the hedgerow, each blossom softly a glitter as though just washed with morning dew. Crumpled bramble bloom of a whiteness pure as a summer cloud, looking just as remotely unsmirchable by earthly dust as such a cloud itself. Silver weed that is ever cool and sober-tinted like

  green growth seen in moonlight, white enough now under the universal pool, yet throwing off coruscations of lemon-hued stars seemingly without a speck of the common defilement. But it is the wayside poppies that appear to triumph most completely over this modern presentment of the Vesuvian avalanche of dust. They are so quick and brief of life, here today and gone to-morrow, that the dust has little time to work them ill. All down the

  dwindling vista of the road they flare up amidst the cloying whiteness like warning lamps in a fog. In single specks of vivid scarlet, in twos and threes, in whole sheets of intense, palpitating colour, the poppies lord it over the dust and all kindred lesser growths alike. Their brilliance is so clear-cut, so arresting, so splendid, that one is almost tempted to regard the manifest conceit as sober fact, and look close to see whether

  the churned-up particles of road-metal really do fall on leaf and flower together as common sense dictates. Even then you cannot be sure of the truth. Look as intensely as you may, the fact cannot be made so obvious as wholly to set aside the fancy. A strong glass even will not resolve the point. The regal purity of the poppies, the sweet rose-pink freshness of mansling lily-bind and mallow drapery straight from fairy loom, and all set in this dead-white

  welter of clinging flint-atoms, it would be good to believe the flowers inviolate in this way, good to believe that nature had deemed it worthwhile to outwit modernity even in such a little thing as the plague of motor-dust.

• 13 - The Seventh Month - July - Part 1

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  XIII. Part 1. In the old sweet briar by the cottage door a dunnock has built his nest. Every morning, well before sunrise, he flits across to the elder bush, and sits there singing by the hour together, a pleasant, voluble song with neither beginning nor end to it, just a glad outpouring of his little soul's content at sunshine and the cool of green leaves. But

  long before the dunnock begins in the garden below, the Martins are awake and busy. All along under the eaves their little mud dwellings cling, partly to the old flint wall and partly to the ancient thatch. In summertime this Martin colony is never really silent. Waking at any hour of the night, I can hear the low, whispering plaint of the fledglings, with now and again the old bird's crooning lullaby note, always with a ring of sleepy expostulation

  in it. And before the eastern skyline has begun to show the first pale promise of dawn, the male birds are off and away on the hunt. You can hear them scuffle out of the nest and kick off from the wall one after the other, with a sound strangely distinct in the quiet of the last summer dark. I know it is the male birds who go off first, because the same thing happens in the early nesting time, when the hens sit close. Quite obviously,

  it is the male bird then who is out and about so early, and incessantly to and fro with food for his brooding mate. Every time he brings her provender, he clings a moment to the wall and sings a bar or two of his quaint chuckling melody, then off once more on his busy foray. The Martins are early astir on these brave summer mornings, but the woodlark is earlier still. Woodlarks are curiously local in their habits, and so pass for rare

  birds. Probably also their song is confused with that of the skylark by inattentive observers. There is little question, however, that the woodlark is earliest of all among our morning songsters, for on warm still nights he makes sure of being first to sound the revally by never going to bed at all. Country folk, gamekeepers and the like, whose business carries them much abroad at nights, are all familiar with the woodlark's plaintive song. Perhaps there

  is nothing among all the sounds of the wilds possessed of quite the same appealing affecting cadence as the song of the woodlark heard far overhead against the starshine of a still summer's night. The song has none of the blithe abandon of the skylark's music, nor its romantic virility and verve. It is just a steady continuity of sweet, quiet notes, often so faint and attenuated in volume that one must stand and listen at ear's stretch to take in all its

  serene loveliness and delicate repining diminuendo of phrase. Yet, once heard, it can never be forgotten. Those unfortunates who have gone through the mill of wakeful nights in cities with their terrible recurrent chimes, and so have learned to associate sleeplessness with all baneful, unblessed noises, should come and try a forced vigil in this green nook of English country where woodlarks abound. So still was the cloudless summer morning

  that the marksman's old device for trying the wind, a moistened finger held aloft, scarce revealed the direction of the languid sultry air. Over the green wheat, riddled with poppy scarlet, the swifts and martins played, and here and there a lark hovered low like a kestrel, motionless but for its fluttering brown wings. As I took a path down the hillside, a turtle dove lifted from the deep of the corn, and a thrush ran on before me through the winding

  shadowy crevice in the green. Deeper and deeper grew the wheat, waist high at first, and thrilled through and through with poppy scarlet and crowding hawkweed blooms like great ragged yellow dandelions, each shining like a little sun. Deeper and ever deeper into the green jungle of corn as down into a deep green sea, until at last I found myself moving in a strange, immured silence, the thronging wheaters all but meeting overhead, all the world hidden

  and mute save for the one unending tumult of lark song far above in the blue. It is the larks that really preserve for the English summer its abiding youth, when almost every other singing bird is silent in wood and field. From mid-July onward until the second week in August, when the robins are due back in their old haunts round about the village gardens, there is scarce any but the skylark to sustain the ancient tradition of England's being a perennially

  song-blessed land. But one needs to get away from the laneside woods and hedges full of the busy joyous tweeting of the young fledglings, the very volume of which serves to give to the summer's morning an illusion of song. Get away into some such isolated nook as this, the deep mid-ocean of the wheat, whose dense thicket cuts off all other sounds but the one quiet persistent symphony from above. Most familiar, perhaps, of all our country

  song-stars, there are yet few who listen to the skylark year in and year out, remembering always what an unfathomable mystery this airborne music really is. Almost the commonest incident in a countryman's day, winter or summer, is to hear the silver ripple of the skylark's song pouring down with the sunbeams, and to know that all the grand sweet strength of the music comes from one tiny flickering black atom scarce discernible against the remoter blue. Alone amongst all our wild birds

  the lark must ever soar to sing. But why, unless it be for human pleasure, not the wisest of us can say. Lying in the thick grass under the hedgerow, you look up through a sort of wide old-fashioned chimney-flu of greenery starred with roses, until the furthermost roses embed themselves like a pattern in enamel in the blue of the summer sky. Thus, quiet and inert in the deep herbage, it is not long before you lose all count and significance with the wildlife around

  you. The turtle dove, who stilled her drowsy music when you first came along, has begun again in the oak-top hard-by. There is no sound so restful, so wholly in tune with the spirit of a calm summer's morning as the turtle dove's note. She sits in full view on one of the highest branches just within the green shade, letting her measured chime drift out upon the sunny air, a single tone sedately uttered at regular intervals with a tremulous quality like the

  shake on a violin. Close by, a yellow hammer has an echo of the same leisurely, well-nigh-somnolent spirit in his refrain. He begins with a sudden merry jingle, but always ends on a wheezy note long drawn out and dying away at last as though he had fallen asleep as he sang. As summer wends on, all the birds that haunt the hedgerows by country lanes seem to acquire this deliberate quality in their music. Though the number of the singers

  and the volume of their song have not greatly diminished, the pace of their delivery has perceptibly slowed down. There is a blackbird whistling now, dwelling on each note so long and putting in so many queer roundabout phrases that you hardly know it for the old dynamic melody that urged along the blithe April days. Even the thrushes are turning their romping country jigs into minuets and their allegroes into andantes. You feel the same slothful, un-enterprising spirit

  yourself lying here under the roses by the laneside instead of being alert and eager for the hills. But it is with feathered life as with humankind. Neither the young birds nor the children share the immobility of their elders in sultry summer times. The air is full of the shrill, chirping chorus of innumerable fledglings hidden away in the green deeps. Young birds keep mostly under cover while their wings are growing, but as soon as the flight feathers are anyhow strong

  enough to support their weight from bush to bush, or even carry them unharmed to the ground, all the anxious ex-postulation of the parents will not prevail to keep them in safe cover. A little ball of dun-brown fluff has just slanted down through the sunshine across your field of view and come to roost on a low jutting bramble branch on the other side of the lane. It is a young goldfinch, as you guess when the mother bird follows a moment later,

  and begins a frantic appeal to the twittering youngster for instant return to the secure haven of the rose bush whence it came. And then you are witness of one of the prettiest sights in all these thronging summer days. Incessantly the mother bird flits to and fro, calling to her chick and imploring it to follow her. For a long while, thoroughly alarmed at its venture, it does nothing but keep up a timorous twitter. At length courage and capability seem to return

  together. From the depths of its fluffy brown coat, two shining yellow veins spread out like breaking spinakers, and, like a great golden butterfly, it lifts and is gone. The yellow hammer, sitting in the lane-side hedge amongst the roses, seem to voice the drowsy spirit of the summer's afternoon more nearly than any other bird. The wheezy, indolent sweetness of his song drifted out upon the torrid air, like oozing poppy-honey that brings slumber with its sweetness.

  There was something infinitely rest-impelling about the strain, and I stopped at the nearest gap in the hedgerow to lean upon the old lichen-gilded gate, the better to enjoy the sound. Before me was the oat-field, a vast sunlit plain of shimmering, whispering green, over which innumerable swallows and martens played, chippering blithely as they went. And behind me was the beech-wood, with its squabbling jays and crooning turtledoves,

  and now and again the merry twink of a chaff-inch or a robin-slender tender lay. Once or twice a blackbird tuned his mellow pipe in the riverside alders beyond the field, and a hedge-sparrow tried over a bar or two of his cascading, over-brimming melody. But none of these were sustained songs. The old day-long unholting rondelade of spring and early summer had failed and gone with the cuckoo's chime a fortnight back.

  Though July is yet full of bird-music, the summer silence is slowly but inexorably gathering. All these songs were but intermittent breaks in the quietude that has been settling over the countryside for weeks past. They served to dispel the silence for the moment. But it came welling back directly the music ceased. Only the Yellow Hammer's song, the string of hurried monotones, and then the one sweet long-drawn-out somnolent stress of melody,

  seemed to be an alien to the summer's drowsy spell. Yet when the heat declined and the sun was yellowing in the high west, there came a sudden harking back to the old mirthful dominant spirit. The swifts got up into the blue heaven and went tornadoing round in a berserk company, filling the serene golden air with their weird wild hunting song.

  An evening symphony, brief indeed, yet akin to the old sundown chorus of June, lifted up from wood and meadow far and near. There were larks caroling overhead in the blue gloaming, long after the quiet of night had fallen. And then came that most authentic voice of sultry summer nights, the shrill, high, cheering song of the night jars as they clung lengthwise to the lowest pine boughs, or chevied one another in wheeling flight between the crowding stems.

  I turned homeward at last, sated with melody, only to lie awake half the murmurous, fragrant night, listening to the owls in the wood hard by the house, and the comfortable wheat-wheating of the young martins in their mud-cradles under the eaves. In wildflower land July is the month of purple, and all the hills and lanes are running high with the colour royal. Tall fox-gloves lean against the hedgers, some of them lifting their rose-red

  spires athwart the summer blue above. Violet-hued tears clamber everywhere through the greenery. Below there are crimson knapweeds and thistles of every tint of mauve, and mellow blooms like countless shreds of deep pink satin caught in the break. Where there is open wasteland, the rose-bay willow herb is just getting into its finest fetal. Thickets of pure, fair carmine, the slender feathery wands all drooping one way under the stress of the gentle

  breeze. Truest purple of any is the great cranesbill, now to be found decking the roadside verges sometimes for miles with scarce a break, the flowers standing singly or in clusters of two or three at most, yet seen in a vista, clothing the whole wayside with a mist of regal colour as far as eye can stretch. But to witness the real triumph of July as the veritable purple month, one must go to the moorlands, not indeed for the heather. That is still short of its full

  blossoming time, but for the heaths, the plants bearing innumerable elongated bell-like flowers so often mistaken for the true heather, in the one of a peculiarly intense dynamic shade of magenta, in the other of crimson, soft and pure, though sometimes pale as a damask rose. The true heather, regarded from the standpoint of beauty, is an altogether inferior growth, its flowers minute and trifling and spiky, and of no brilliance at all. But the heaths,

  now in their utmost glory of blossom, give such a surfacing splendour of colour as can be seen nowhere else, perhaps in any land, east or west. Wandering over the heath-clad hills at this time, the least impressionable of travellers must be struck by their utter squandered magnificence of beauty, while a few may also mark something strange as well as beautiful about them. There is, of a truth, a steady low song of bees upon the air, yet nothing like the huge volume

  of sound one might expect. Moreover, looking closely, one may discover that very few of the bees are visiting the gorgeous heath-flowers. The vast majority are busying themselves only with the grey wild sage growing in between. The fact is, the hive-bees have, ages ago, found out that though so brilliantly attractive in hue, the heath-flowers yield but feeble, washy sweets, and so most of them wait until the true heather spreads its dingy,

  arid purple over hill and dale. And then one can trudge from zone to zone of resounding organ music where the ground is draped with but a faded, furtive, yet honey-drenched growth, passing across acres of prodigal, barren resplendence, where scarcer sound frets the torrid languor of the summer's day. Taking the footpath through the clover fields in this, their heyday of blossom, one unversed in honey-bee lore, is more than likely to hesitate when but a little way over

  the wide snowy expanse, and then incontinently to turn and flee. For the roar of the bees in a great field of Dutch clover just at its prime of flower is something that might well give pause to the hardiest if he did not know that a hive-bee never uses her sting save in actual or supposed defence of her person or home. Away foraging from the hive, she is the most innocuous of creatures. Though at the present moment there are enough bees in the clover fields hereabout

  to put a whole army out of action, that army might march through them now and never suffer a single sting. But bee-masters do not need to go into the fields to learn where their winged millions are seeking the raw material for honey-making. The loads of pollen which at all times a certain proportion of the flying bees bring back to the hives are sure indication of the source which is being exploited for the time being. In early spring when the willows begin to

  bloom by the riverside these airborne argusies are laden with pure gold. A little later pollen of a rich deep yellow-brown commences to flow in and one knows that the bees are rifling the gorse bloom. The time of Hawthorne is signally marked by a sudden and almost total change of the pollen loads to one uniform dingy white, for when the may is out every bee must forget all else and go to sip at its myriad brimming cups. Then follows a time when no special nectar-yielding

  plant seems to be flowering on the grand scale, for the pollen packs show incessant diversity of colour. Evidently the foragers are trying all round, shafts sinking at a venture everywhere in the hope of striking a main reef. But at last as June draws on to its close earlier or later, according to the season, the characteristic yellowish-white of the Dutch clover pollen begins to appear on the busy thresholds of the hives. In a day or two there will be nothing

  else coming in and the entire bee garden will be in a feverish uproar of work. Innumerable thousands upon thousands of bees, lancing to and fro between the hives and the clover fields whitening the landscape far and near. Seinfoyn follows hard upon the heels of clover. You can always tell when this magnificent honey is brewing in the hives, for if the hillside over against the village were not flushing rosy red in the summer sun, and if the new honeycombs were not changing their

  hue from snow-white to a delicate lemon shade, there is the Seinfoyn pollen tumbling all day long into the hives, looking exactly like pellets of old yellow wax. It is not hard to guess how the bee-masters of ancient times came by their notion about beeswax being gathered from flowers. Even on the calmest days full-blown poppies are never still for a moment of time. The tears, amidst which the poppies grow, are locked together in one solid tangle of purple and

  green. It takes half a guile to set them swinging. But the poppies above, no matter how thick they stand, are ever in incessant motion, though a wetted finger held aloft to test the wind, after the manner of the old prize marksman may fail to reveal the slightest drift of air. The poppies, with every stitch of red silk spread to the summer sky at the tips of their slender green masts, seem to create for themselves a contention of wandering zephyrs. Looking out

  over the vast field of sunlit scarlet from the shade of the old hedgerow elm, you can see every blossom quivering and swaying always, until, on the far hillside, the flicker and glow of their rich mast colour is all but lost in the tremulous blue haze of summer air. But it is the tears alone that the humblebees and hivebees are searching so busily, and that have brought to the field its deep throbbing murmur of insect life. The honeybee works upon poppies freely enough when

  the mood takes her, and gathers from them largesse of pollen of a sombre green hue. You can see it pouring into the hives for days together during certain breaks in the nectar flow from more important crops. But today, humble and hivebee alike are passing the poppies by. They are concentrating their forces wholly upon the tares, and the thicket of green frond and purple raceme is in an uproar of reverberating music. Yet how many are there among all,

  daily using this path by the tear-field, who note one strange thing about the horde of winged plunderers chanting at their feet? Even old experienced bee-masters on being interrogated as to the composition of honey will answer unhesitatingly for the most part that honey is made by the bees out of nectar gathered from flowers. But this is not always the case. Very good honey, and plenty of it,

  comes from these purple tares that the flock-masters grow annually for sheep-feed by the hundred acre. Yet look as closely as you will today. You will not see a single hivebee on any of the tear-blossoms, though the humble bees are incessantly rifling the tender purple sprays. The truth is, the honeybee has no power to prize open the tight-girt tear-flowers, even if her tongue were then long enough to reach their guarded swedes.

  But nature has made special and ingenious provision for preventing the hivebee going empty away. At the base of each leaf-stalk on the tear-plant there is a little green fin or frill with a sunken ruddy brown spot in its centre. This spot is really a valve through which the sweet essences of the plant are continually oozing, and hither the astute hivebee comes unerringly, ignoring the more attractive blossoms on the way.

  As I passed along I saw that the hedge round the cottage garden was dense and high, so that from the lane-side nothing but the tops of the enveloped apple-trees could be seen. On the other side of that impenetrable screen of flower and leaf a wild, weird symphony was lifting into the blue sky, a rich, deep organ-peel of sound that I knew could come from nothing else but swarming bees, and high above this sustained

  booming note an incessant shrill clamour as of beaten metal rent the sunny air. After some frantic but fruitless prospecting I found a thin spot in the hedge at last, and thrust head and elbows through. The little garden was full of flowers, resplendent in the morning sun. Amidst these innumerable old-fashioned hives of straw were dotted about like golden mushrooms under the checkered shade of the trees.

  All set in a mist of scintillating wings. And by the cottage door, framed in roses, stood a hale old woman lusterly beating with a great door-key upon a gleaming copper pan. For all I had read and believed about bee-ringing as a long discredited myth, there seemed no doubt of the siren power of the music here. Even as I watched, one of the apple-bells hard by began to droop under the weight of

  its gathering host. Within a few short minutes all the flying bees had joined the cluster, hanging motionless in the sunshine like a mass of shimmering brown seaweed, and the wild, weird song had died away. you

• 14 - The Seventh Month - July - Part 2

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  WANDERING ALONG THE SEA-SHORE THESE SALTREE SUMMER DAYS, ONE OFTEN CHANCES UPON WHAT ARE COMMONLY CALLED JELLYFISH, NEWLY STRANDED BY THE TIDE. SEEN THUS OUT OF THEIR NATURAL ELEMENT, THERE IS LITTLE SUGGESTION OF LIFE AND BEAUTY ABOUT THEM, MERE INERT FORMLESS LUMPS OF TRANSPARENT MATTER, WITH PERHAPS A TOUCH OF DIMM COLOUR ENCLOSED IN THEIR QUAKING CRYSTAL DEPTHS. COMING BY A FEW HOURS LATER, ONE CAN FIND SCARCE A TRACE OF THEM.

  THEY SEEM TO BE MADE OF LITTLE ELSE THAN WATER. THE HOT SUN HAS REDUCED THE LARGEST OF THEM TO NO MORE THAN A GLISTENING STAIN UPON THE SAND. BUT IF YOU TAKE BOAT ON SOME CALM, SUNNY MORNING AND PULL OUT A LITTLE WAY OVER THE SHALLOWS OF THE BAY WHERE THESE JELLYFISH OR SWIMMING MEDUCIE LOVE TO CONGREGATE, YOU GET A HOLY DIFFERENT NOTION OF THEIR PLACE IN THE SCILE OF BEING.

  LETTING THE BOAT DRIFT WITH THE TIDE AND PEERING DOWN INTO THE CLEAR, STILL WATER, YOU MAY SEE MANY OF THEM AT VARIOUS DEPTHS, EITHER VOYAGING SINGLY OR PLAYING A BELT, TWO OR THREE TOGETHER EXACTLY LIKE BUTTERFLYS DALIING ALONG THE FLOWERY VIRG OF A COUNTRY LANE. NOR IS THE ASSOCIATION OF BUTTERFLYS AND FLOWERS WITH THESE PUZZLING CREATURES OF THE SEA HOLY A FANCYFUL ONE. THE SWIMMING MEDUCIE, SO PLENTIFUL NEAR OUR COAST AT THIS TIME,

  POSSESS A BEAUTY OF COLOUR AND FORM AND MOTION LITTLE SUSPECTED BY ONE WHO HAS SEEN THEM ONLY STRANDED AND HELPLESS ON THE SHORE. MOST ARE BELL-LIKE IN SHAPE, AND THE PICULIAR SWINGING MOVEMENT BY WHICH THEY ACHIEVE PROGRESS THROUGH THE WATER IS CAUSED BY THE WINNOWING OF INNUMERABLE ARMS THAT PROTRUDE FROM THE CAVITY BENEATH, INCESANTLY WAVERING TO AND FRO, OBVIOUSLY IN SEARCH OF FOOD. BY FAR THE COMMONEST OF THESE MEDUCIE DISPLAYS WITHIN ITS CRYSTAL BELL

  THREE RINGS OF SHINING PURPLE SET OFF BY A BUNCH OF MILK WHITE STREAMERS BELOW. ANOTHER FAIRLY COMMON SPECIES IS LIKE A BIG GLASS MUSHROOM WITH AN EDGING OF LACEWORK IN VIVED PRUSSIAN BLUE. ALL THESE, THOUGH GENERALLY SHUNNED BY BATHERS, ARE PERFECTLY HARMLESS. THE TRUE STINGING JELLYFISH, OR AT LEAST THE ONLY MEMBER OF THE GENUS ACCREDITED WITH MISCHIEF IN THESE NORTHERN WATERS, IS PERHAPS THE HANSOMEST OF ANY. UNLIKE THE OTHERS, HIS JELLY IS NOT

  CRYSTAL WHITE AND CLEAR, BUT OF A PALE CLOUDY STRAW COLOUR STARRED AND STRIATED WITH VANDYKE BROWN. MORE OVER, HE IS FURNISHED WITH A NUMBER OF REALLY WICKED LOOKING TENTACLES, WHILE FROM THE RIM OF HIS YELLOW BELL, LONG THREAD-LIKE PROCESSORS SPREAD ROUND HIM IN THE WATER WHEREVER HE GOES. PEERING DOWN NOW INTO THE STILL, SUNLIT SHALLOWS, YOU SEE THEM ALL COME WAVERING BY IN TURN, WITH THAT SINGULAR BUTTERFLY-LIKE GATE WHICH IS SO SUGGESTIVE OF LEISURELINESS AND JOLLITY.

  AND YET THE SWIMMING MAJUCI ARE MUCH LESS LIKE BUTTERFLYS THAN DETACHED LIVING WANDERING FLOWERS. STANDING ON THE LOW-TIED SANTS JUST AT THE FOOT OF THE STEEP SHINGLE BEACH AND LOOKING LANDWOOD, THE YELLOW HORN-POPPIES MAKE A CREST OF PURE GOLD AGAINST THE BLUE OF THE NORTHERN SKY. THE INTENSE BLUE OF THE SUMMER AIR AND THE SUNLIT YELLOW OF THE FLOWERS SEEM TO ACT AND REACT UPON ONE ANOTHER, SO THAT THE EYE CAN SCARCE ENDURE THEIR BRILLIANCE.

  THE POPPIES CROWDING TOGETHER LOOK LIKE TONGUES OF FLAME OVERREACHING THE WEED-STRUNE RIDGE FROM SOME HIDDEN FIRE BEYOND, AND THE WIND ROCKS AND SWAYS THE VIVID MASSES OF COLOUR SO THAT THE ILLUSION OF A RAGGED FLICKERING LINE OF FLAME IS ALL BUT COMPLETE. IN THE HOLO WAY BETWEEN THE HEAT SHINGLE AND THE LOW-RED SANSTONE BANK BEYOND, ALL MANNER OF SEA-LOVING GROWTHS FLOURISH.

  THE YELLOW HORN-POPPIES, ROOTED SEEMINGLY IN NOTHING BUT STONES, STAND UP AMID A TANGLE OF SAPPY GREEN LEAVES. THERE ARE WHOLE STRETCHES OF THE SHINGLE ALL BUT HIDDEN UNDER WHITE OF MILF-OIL, WITH ITS FERNY FOLEAGE AS FRESH AS IF IT Grew IN A SHELTERED INLAND LANE. THE BITTERSWEET THAT LOVES A COUNTRY HEDGEROW IS AS PLENTIFUL HERE WHERE THE SALT SEA SPRAY

  OF EVERY STORM DRIVES OVER IT AS IT IS WHERE IT DRINKS ONLY DEW AND RAIN FROM THE SKIES. ONLY IT HAS GIVEN OVER ITS GENERIC HABIT OF CLIMBING. IT SPRALLS EVERYWHERE OVER THE STONES, LAYING ITS GARLANS OF DEEPLY LOAD LEAVES FLAT UPON THE WAY, AND SHEDDING ITS PURPLE STARS SO BOUNTERFULLY THAT ONE CAN SCARCE STIRR WITHOUT CRUSHING THEM UNDERFOOT. A STRANGE FLOWER GROWS IN PREFUSION HERE THAT IS SELDER MET WITH MUCH BEYOND FLOOD-TIED MARK.

  THIS IS THE SEA HOLLY, ABSOLUTELY NAMED SO FAR AS ITS PRICKLY FOLEAGE GOES, BUT MUCH LIKE A PLUME THISSLE IN RESPECT OF ITS BLOSSOM. THE SEA HOLLY IS COUNTED AMONG THE RARER PLANTS, BUT THOUGH IT IS NEVER EASY TO FIND, IT IS COMMON ENOUGH IF ONE KNOWS WHERE TO LOOK FOR IT. THE BRIGHT, PURE, COBALT BLUE OF ITS FLOWERS SHINE AMONG THE ROUGH NOTGRASS HERE,

  LIKE FALLEN FLEX OF THE SUMMER SKY. BUT THE STRANGEST OF ALL PLANTS IN THIS WILD SEA GARDEN MUST BE LOOKED FOR IN THE CREVICES OF THE SANDSTONE BANK THAT CUTS IT OFF FROM THE GLOWING CORNFIELDS BEYOND. THE SAMPHIRE, SAN PIERRE, SANT PETERS PLANT, IS PERHAPS MORE ACKIN TO SEAWEED THAN ANYTHING ELSE INHABITING THE DRY EARTH.

  IT IS JUST AN ENDLESS CORAL-LIKE RAMIFICATION OF THICK FLESHY TUBES, BRIGHT YELLOW-GREEN IN COLOUR, AND WITH A RANK SMELL LIKE CRUDE KEROSINE. GOING DOWN THROUGH THE OATFIELD ON THE STILL SUNNY MORNING IS LIKE WAIDING OUT THROUGH A CALM SUMMER SEA. ONE GETS DEEPER AND DEEPER WITH EVERY MOMENT INTO COOL, TRANSLUCENT GREEN. AT FIRST THE POPPIES HOLD THEIR OWN TRIUMPHANTLY. THE GLOW OF THEIR SUN-FLOODED SCARLET LIGHTS UP

  THE CORNFIELD EVERYWHERE, AND WITH THEM IS GOLD OF CHARLOCK AND WHITE CAMPION BELLS, WITH AN UNDERTOE OF BUTTERCUP AND BLUE VERONICA AND PALE RED PIMPERNELL BENEATH. BUT THIS IS ONLY IN THE SHALLOWS ON THE CREST OF THE GENTLY SLOPING FIELD. WITH EVERY STEP DOWNWARD NOW THE CORN LIFTS HIGHER AND THE POPPIES GROW SCARCER. AT LAST ONLY BY STANDING ON TIPTOE AND CRANING THE NECK can one see over the sun-steeped whispering

  level of green. Oats at full growth and in full green air give forth a quiet stealthy sound at all times, even on the calmer summer days, when the wheat fields lie stark and mute under the torrid noonday glare. The wheat bears its fruit in solid upstanding pods, every one apart from its neighbour, but the oat plant carries its berries on slender many branch-sprays that touch fingertips everywhere across the whole vast plain of the field. The faintest drift of air that will not move a leaf

  in the highest tree-tops is enough to set the oat-sprays whispering and conspiring secretly together. Now as you stand overhead and ears in the dense green thicket you can hear tiny rills of sound breaking out on all sides, a sort of dry husky tinkling music coming and going mysteriously under the silence of the summer noon. Full-standing barley also has its intrinsic note, seemingly quite independent of any movement in the air, but it is the wind,

  and the more the merrier, that brings to barley its main charm. One needs to be on a hill-top on a breezy day, overlooking the barley fields to realise all their beauty at these times, the wonderful wave patterns that are for ever coming and going, waves of light and waves of shadow following each other across the field in ceaseless procession, and all done in shimmering green floss silk. Not in mere beauty of sound, nor in a lovely

  changing visage of form and colour, does the full-grown wheat make its chief appeal. But in the multitudinous winged life which it lures to itself at this season. Corn of whatever kind has its flowering time, and this is the time of flowering for the wheat. Every fat green ear has thrown out an infinity of buffued pollen tabs that now are loading the air with a fragrance exactly like the hot sweet tangy smell of new-baked bread.

  It is this that draws the thousands of tiny atoms of insect-life thronging the sunshine far and near, and these again that draw the swallows. Standing now in the deep of the wheat field as you stood a while ago among the oats, every moment you flinch at the lightning swoop of a swallow passing, it seems, within a hair's breadth of the face. Passing out of the wheat field to sit under the hedgerow, we are facing the full summer sun, but not a ray of it enters our

  cool retreat. The fierce light stops short of the longest stretch of leg amongst us, for the densely matted growth of elder and briar reaches out a couple of yards or more just overhead, making a rim of blue dusk all along the sunny side of the field. It is the hour of the leaveners, and only those who have worked in a hay-field from dawn till near upon midday of a hot summer's morning know what the call to this brief ten minutes of rest and

  refreshment means to tired and thirsty men. One moment they were scattered, singly for the most part, throughout the vast sun-baked field, pronging over the swathes in the hollows where the teder could not dip for them, or gathering the hay into wind-rows ready for the carrying or mounted two together on the summit of some perambulating mountain of shuddering green, desperately trying to stow the hay that the mechanical loader was pouring relentlessly

  down upon their heads. But at the first dantorian call of the old foreman, every man forsook his job and made straight for the cool blue haven of the hedge. The great stone jar was hauled dripping out of the stream, haversacks opened, and the crisp quaint Sussex tongues fell to wagging with a will. For nowadays, with so much speeding up machinery and farming, there is little chance of talk in

  working hours. It is one man to a machine that does the work of six, and so hours of solitude for everyone. When eleveners and all the other welcome breaks in the long day's task come round, the modern farmhands are as ready for talk as children escaped from the silence and restraint of school. It is only on the downs or like open treeless spaces that windy weather can be also serene, quiet weather. Though a stiff breeze is blowing from the south-west, here in the heart of

  the Sussex Highlands there is a quietude abroad that one never gets down on the wooded plains, where every tree and bush lends a noisy turbulence to the blast. To know the wind for what it really is, an essentially silent thing, you must come up here on the green bare hilltops. There is a low surging song amidst the grass-bents round your feet, and a seashell murmur in the air. But the great torrent of air, careering over thirty visible miles of lowland with its far-off

  rim of silver sea, is in itself as silent as the grave. Windy weather is true Kestrel weather. On days of calm, the Kestrel hawk finds his traditional manoeuvre of searching his hunting grounds from a lookout post in the skies a laborious occupation. There is not a moment's rest in it. His wide veins must be forever beating the air, or he falls like a stone. But in these boisterous times the Kestrel can stop up aloft as long as he will with little or

  no apparent effort. With head to the breeze and wings and tail outspread, he can hold himself fixed to one spot in the blue for a long half minute together, or indefinitely so, by help of an occasional lazy quiver of the wing. But Kestrels are not always watching for prey when they are engaged in hovering, whether in calm or rampant times. In the early mornings they are keen enough they are keen enough on their quarry, and they search the low-lying meadows for food during most

  of the day. But on summer evenings, especially when the warm sal-wester blows, Kestrels have a way of disappearing from their lowland haunts and going off to the hills for social intercourse and recreation. In his day's business, necessarily a solitary bird, the Windhover undoubtedly has this very human-like attribute of seeking the society of his kind after working hours. This evening, as I came over the green waste of downland hills in the level golden light,

  leaning back a slant in the arms of the guile, I counted no fewer than eleven Kestrels all in one small space of blue sky. The whole company was hovering at various heights, each bird now still as a black chevron inked upon paper, or now moving wings and tail together with a curious spluttering action that maintained or regained altitude without sending the bird forward one jot. Every now and again one or another of the company suddenly broke the ranks with a wide sweep

  backward and downward, then a lightning vertical plunge, a veritable nose-dive straight to earth. The alighting of a Kestrel upon the ground is one of the prettiest pieces of air technique to be witnessed even among the birds, who took to flying a few eons in advance of man. The nose-dive is continued at full speed until, one would say, within ten or twelve inches of the ground. And then, head and tail are flung upward and wings outstretched. In the merest fraction of time,

  utmost velocity is checked to a gentle, almost imperceptible, subsiding motion as of thistle-down. Stepping into the little boat and turning her off the brimming, sun-flooded river and letting her glide deep into the waterside reeds, you come to rest at last in a green cloistered gloom that for a moment seems almost darkness compared with the boundless light of the open river-way. The song of the sedge-warbler, sweet though it sounds as one is pulling by on the glittering tide,

  takes on a new meaning when one follows the bird thus into her dim, quiet concert hall, and she is singing within an ace of the air. No foliage conceals so thoroughly as the slender spear-leaves of the reeds, infinitely multiplied lines of green light and green shadow criss-crossing together on every hand, and you need not hope for more than a brief glimpse of the singer though you watch the morning through. But she sees you sure enough, and the rustling,

  tearing entry of the boat, though this sound lasts but a moment, seems only to have urged her to a more melodious vehement than before. The song, almost continuous hitherto, pulls fast and furiously through the thicket now, and if it holds for a moment one can usually start it again by taking a grip of the nearest reeds and shaking them. Even when going by on the river path, the mere casting of a stone into the dense reed jungle will often draw a peal of

  the sweet, sulky, voluble music if there be sedge-warblers hiding anywhere within the break. But it is not alone the sedge-bird song that draws the lover of wildlife to the riverside at this season. Yesterday, pulling up one of the sunniest reaches of old Arran River just at the top of the tide, I marked a pair of tiny pale brown birds restlessly flitting in and out of the break. They were reed-warblers, as I knew at once by their plumage and their

  desultory arid song, and it was evident that their nest must be no great way off. Turning the boat's prowl into the little bay in the dense reed thicket where the birds were going to and fro so busily, I soon made out the nest. It was a very curious nest, in a very unusual situation. Reed-warblers almost invariably hang their little grass pocket that serves them for home and nursery, well up in the reeds out of reach of the highest tide.

  But this pair had made a mistake, which, but for the timely exercise of ingenuity, might easily have led to disaster for all their hopes. The nest had been started on the orthodox plan, the material being woven round four or five of the reed stems, binding all firmly together. It must have been almost finished before the birds discovered that they had built too low, and the nest must be inevitably submerged at each spring tide.

  What the builders then did to remedy their mistake could be traced in the peculiar form of the finished structure. It was virtually a two-storied nest. Even now the lower story was dragging in the stream, but there was no fear for the upper part. The tide had reached highest flood mark, and well the birds knew it. I put my hand in and could feel a clutch of well-grown fledglings warm and dry within. As July draws to its end and the upland flowers

  become scarcer, the wilderness of Blossom by the riverside only seems to grow more luxuriant and to take to itself richer, more varied hues. Most plentiful among waterside flowering plants at this time is the meadow sweet, with its soft, white, feathery blooms and delicate almond scent. But though the meadow sweet throngs the river bank wherever you go, its pale, misty inflorescence does not draw the eye like other growths. One never notices a single frond of meadow sweet.

  Even when the river runs through a whole wide province of it, the meadow sweet lends but an undertone to the picture, a textual scumbling of light spread abroad. It would seem but to enhance the power and richness typical of every flower bred and born in the fullness of summer heat. All the riverside flowers of late July are set in this pervading environment of the meadow sweet. The willow herb above everything, fairy goblets of carmine incredibly fresh looking and

  bright, each with a little Maltese cross of silver poised within its crimson cup. With the meadow sweet again, one unbroken, softly shimmering stretch of it, turrets of tansy break up here and there, strong green columns topped with smouldering beacon fires, knobs of tight clustered flowers giving out a glow as from red-hot brass. Another turn of the river path brings more of the meadow sweet's subservient medium into view.

  A whole jungle of meadow sweet on either flank of the river, and everywhere above its filmy deeps nodding heads of thistle, move with a rosy glint in them that catch the light and shine as cut amethysts when the bumblebees pull them down, releasing them like sprinkles as they hum off to the next living gem. And now, white upon white, the great bindweed bells with their trails of green heart-leaves

  stretching from stem to stem in the thicket, taught as a ship's rigging. But the whiteness of the bindweed is as that of pure day, while the whiteness of the meadow sweet, with which it mingles, is no more than a moony pallor strangely at odds with the spirit of the fervid summer noon. And indeed, it is at night alone that the meadow sweet, for all its limitless abundance, achieves any sort of leading role in the flower pageantry of the season.

  Come to the riverside on a still, moonlit night at this time, and the whole scene is changed. Willow herb and tansy, golden ragwort and bindweed and purple thistle, all have mysteriously vanished in the colour-destroying moonbeams. But the meadow sweet has suddenly taken to itself a new magic of light. It is no longer a vague, scarce perceived background for the gay-robed multitude of summer flowers. Under the white radiance of the moonshine, the river flows by

  through a fairyland of blossom whiter and brighter than anything the day can show. Every frond of meadow sweet now is a torch burning with a white-hot, sparkling lustre that outvise the very moon herself. Its scent has quadrupled in intensity and pungent sweetness. All the pale moths of the countryside, it seems, have come to drink at its myriad brimming cups. End of section 14

• 15 - The Eighth Month - August - Part 1

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  Section 15 of A Country Calendar by Tickner-Edwards. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Eighth Month, August, Part 1. In the hazelwood the broad green rundle leaves, matted and interwoven above and on all sides, cut off the summer sunlight as no other foliage seems to do. Though the morning is fair, here in the deep of the wood there is little more than a sombre

  green twilight abroad. A curious sense of being indoors falls upon one directly the wood is gained, and a strange aquietude. The rollicking south-west wind that pursued one over the meadow is suddenly left behind. Scarcer breath stirs under the dense vault of leafage, and such a solitude dwells there that the step falters on the dim path as it might on entering the soundless gloom of a

  cathedral isle. To get the spirit of remote woodland life in summertime one must first idle away a good half-hour in some such haunt as this, and then the place begins to reveal itself in its true guise. Its solitude, indeed, becomes only more profound as the moments went on, but the seeming gloom changes to a pure clear light, subdued yet abundant for its purpose.

  The quietude, at first almost oppressive, turns to a veritable atmosphere of sweet soft sound. One realises that these hazel woods, far from being deserted by wildlife, are the chosen resort of a host of living creatures who love to be alone at certain times in the year. That is the keynote of the place. Wherever a crevice in the woodland roof lets through

  a sliver of the golden light, there you will find innumerable flies quarrelling shrilly together, but all other creatures seem to avoid the company of their species. A single wood pigeon is calling somewhere overhead. A solitary jay flits away up the green shadowy path before you, but his harsh cry brings no answering note. Little restless birds pervade the thicket invisibly, ever moving ahead of you as you go, and ever giving forth, as they

  flit on, one slow monotonous plaintive note, the very voice of solitariness. The moths and butterflies, pallid flickering spots in the dim glade, pass and reparsingly. Even the flowers of the pathside, creeping jenny and rock-rose and silverweed, have ceased to bloom in the old, crowded, elbowing, companionable way. Here and there an isolated bell shows itself in the grass, its tiny light held primly aloof from its fallows. But there are no brimming

  pools and runlets of rich colour, such as marked the woodland tracks in bygone hours of May. All this has a sobering, even rather a chilling, effect on one coming straight to the woods from the elter glow and glory of an August morning. But it has its use. One almost ventures to say its design in the scheme of summer beauty. There is this peculiarity about hazel woods. One never knows at what turn, in the densest, gloomiest way,

  one may not come upon some little clearing intensely flower-bright and ringing with birdsong and chant of bees. And then all the riotous profusion of summer growth comes flooding back to the eye, cleansed and prepared and eager to feast upon bright colour again after the darkness and austerity of the wood. Though the summer blue still glows in the sky, and it is real summer sunshine that floods the flowery lanes and fields, every day now brings

  sure token of the change that is nigh. The dew lies later and later, even on the fairest mornings. The Martins are beginning to ease their day-long aerial gambols, and to congregate idly on the sunny sides of the village rudes, where they make twinkling spots of black and white amid the smears of lichen gold and grey and vivid emerald of the clinging mosses. This morning, though the Robbins and the Wrens were at their old conspiracy of summer song

  in every glowing garden, there was suddenly a note upon the air that, for the moment, carried one irresistibly onward into mid-December, the shrill hubbub of a flock of starlings, only a score or two, indeed, but still pregnant sign of what is coming, drifting from tree to tree down the Elm-barried lane. Down by the river there is even more certain portent of the year's impending change. The south-west wind is still at last. In the waterside spinnies

  the great white bindweed bells hang motionless in the sun, and the shining carmine florets of willow-herb stand up against the blue distance of wooded hill and dial, as still as gems set in smolt enamel. The tide is at the full, and no sound of moving water breaks the utter quietude of the slothful golden noon. And yet the air is riddled through and with a stealthy low rustling note from the great barricade of reeds flanking the river

  on either side. There is none familiar with river-country, but knows of old the voice of wind in green reeds. Yet this is no sound borne of moving air, nor yet of water flowing through the myriad harp-string stems of the great reed jungle. Air-voice it must be, unless the quivering purple plumes that top the green reeds everywhere have, indeed, some mystic power of utterance of their own. Probably the sober fact is that there is drifting air

  abroad not to be discerned by human sense, but which these delicately poised fronds of the reed's ripe inflorescence are tuned to receive and interpret into the incessant low sibilant note now vexing the silence of the summer noon. As the summer wends on, the riverside path gets more and more densely overgrown. Now, in mid-August, one can scarce cleave away through the thicket of flower-cumbered greenery. It is not easy to tell of its beauty,

  this solitary winding track, with its long arcades of cool blue gloom, one stretching interminably beyond the other, lit here and there with zones of sunshine like golden beads upon an azure string. But every yard of the way, shadow or shine, is overburdened, smothered with blossom. Stopping at any point and looking backward or forward, one sees only a vista of rich colour, bright even in the regions of profounder shadow, but of a glory unimaginable

  where the resplendent August sunlight floods down through gaps in the ramparts of green. The vivid carmine of Willow Herb gives the dominant note to the summer symphony of colour, and rose-red valerian, which is almost as plentiful. The two crowd down together to the water's edge in great overrunning masses, billows of colour that break against the green barricade of reeds as ocean waves against a cliff. And all are festooned and interlaced

  with great bindweed, the snow-white trumpet bells carried ever onward, like flocks of glistening wind-borne foam, until they are flung into the reeds. You can see hundreds of them clinging and glimmering far within the jungle deeps. Here and there, where the dense growths of Willow Herb and valerian are interrupted, those strife lifts its purple torches sheer from the water's brink. Horse-ment makes

  a soft pale sheen of mauve all along the bank, and water mausotus, the true forget-me-not of the old German love-story, wantons in between. On the other side of the path the hedgerow is thronged with white wild clematis and pink bramble bloom and knots of gelderberries already flushing scarlet, and binds of bryony fruit like cherries strung together, yellow, red and green. But here, as everywhere, the great white bindweed bells overrun all. They

  seem to shine with a light of their own making, in the deepest, shadiest nooks burning with only the more intense and incandescent luster for the gloom that surrounds them, and in the full sunshine with all the eye-aching splendour of alpine snows. Coming down through the clover fields a while back, I wondered how even the south-down shepherding country could produce so many butterflies, clouds of them at every step, so that there

  seemed a gay fluttering wing for each cloverhead of the myriads sensing the summer air. Here on the river path there are more butterflies, yet of a different order, not flying sparks of colour as in the clover fields, but great stately things, slow of movement and sombre of hue, lending the touch of motion, a stir of life, to the quiet bright scene, intensely quiet for all its dynamic fullness of high summer, such a quiet as comes to a spinning

  top at utmost speed. There is no sound of the countryside so restful, so healing, to tired nerves, as the drowsy music of bees in heather. Lying in the little dell in the heart of the purple-clad moorlands, you hear the note all around you, soft, insistent, lifting and falling like the sound of waves by a summer sea. The august sun beats hot upon you where you lie. Overhead arches a

  sky of unsullied blue. The west wind has scarce strength enough to twirl a leaf in the clump of silver birches that peer at you over the crimson brim of your retreat. Far away, on the utmost limit of ear-stretch, you can just catch the laugh of a yaffle in the deep wood, and rarely a lark sings a stanza or two somewhere up in the remotest reaches of the blue. But there is no other sound in all the wide expanse of heather-clothed hill and dale. The bees

  have it all to themselves. Yet, for all its drowsy tunefulness, the sound of bees in heather does not set you slumbering. It will rob you of all initiative for bodily movement. Make you forget the holiday tramp of twenty miles a day which you had designed so confidently in your dusty study at home. Hold you spellbound, dreaming by the hour together, here in the little sun-flooded hollow where the sound is loudest and richest. But it will not

  lure you to sleep. Rather, it will rouse in you a mental alertness, a curiosity all the more intense for the bodily inertia that goes with it. For there is much more to learn from this siren song of the bees in the heather than you guessed when you threw knapsack and staff aside a moment ago, and flung yourself down in the gold-green hollow of mossy turf, upholstered in crimson, like a bed prepared for a king. Letting your glance wander idly about you,

  you soon mark a whole sheaf of curious things. To begin with, the fact soon dawns upon you that it is not the most gorgeously draped growths that's the bee's favour. The thicket at your elbow, which is just one intense, eye-aching glare of purple flowers, has scarce a bee upon it. A little farther away, a great clump of bell-like flowers, paler in hue, yet of the same dominant richness of colour, is only occasionally visited by the chanting company. The main volume of music

  comes, as you now make out, from a species of plant almost sombre in appearance, that even under the full light of the summer sun, gives back only a dim, attenuated flush of pink. You sit up and begin to look more narrowly at these things. The honeybee is no fool, you know of old. Her wisdom is beyond all questioning. If she neglects these magnificent arrays of palpitating colour, and busies herself with the humbler, dingier growths,

  it is because she has good reason for it. And with the help of a pocket-glass, at the expense of a little trouble, you can soon wrest from her a secret that is veritably as old as the hills. First pluck a spray of the dingy growth. You see it is smothered with little pink spiky blossoms, fair enough in themselves. The apparent dinginess of the whole plant is due to the minuteness of its flowers and the sombre green of its leaves. Yet this is the true heather, or ling, from which

  the famous heather honey comes, and you will not wonder that the bees love it, when once the glass has revealed to you the abundance and easy accessibility of its sweets. Now pull a tuft of another sort, that which throws up from the root a forest of single stems, each stem bearing at regular intervals of half an inch or so four leaves crosswise, and carrying at its apex a cluster of perhaps a dozen bell or pitcher-shaped flowers. This is not heather at all, nor is it its

  first cousin, the rich vivid purple growth, whose lavishness of beauty so far out vie all the rest. These two plants are heaths, and you always know heath from heather by its bell-like blossoms. The old song about heather bells is but the product of harmonious ignorance. The heather has no bells, but just the tiny spiky florets you have just seen. There is heath honey indeed. The bees make it in July mostly, for the heaths are in full flower

  well before the true heather begins. But once the ling harvest is ready, the wise honeybee scorns all lesser sources of provender. If you had come to the purple moorlands a fortnight back, you would have seen bees in plenty working upon the heaths. And then, even now indeed, for there are always a few whimsical bee-souls who persist in keeping to the early inferior brand. You could have noted two remarkable things. First that, despite the asseverations of certain

  importers of foreign bees to the contrary, the nectar at the base of the purple heath bell is just reachable by the tongue of an ordinary English hivebee, although it is somewhat of a stretch. Secondly, that's by no possibility can the English or any other hivebee reach down to the sweet lying at the bottom of the bell of the cross-leaved heath. Stretch her tongue as she may, for the simple reason that the bell is far too deep. Yet the bee gets the nectar all the same.

  And how? Turn the glass upon her, and you will see. She makes no attempt to rifle the blossom at its mouth as she would do with the purple heath bell, but goes straight to a little crescent-shaped puncture in the corolla close to its base, and therefrom drinks her fill at her ease. Where the two field paths cross, and a yard or so of the beaten track does double duty, the turf is worn away, laying bare the chalky undersoil. Over this white patch in the green

  a cloud of gnats is playing. There are very few elsewhere in the field. But here, all the summer morning long, hundreds of them have been dancing in the sunlight. I came by half a dozen times, perhaps, and always found them hovering over the same bright spot of ground. Gnats will do the same thing over linen that has been laid out on a grass plot to dry, or even over a spot in a meadow where daisies are growing close-knit together,

  making a continuous silvery sheen amidst the sward. The explanation is probably that these light patches on the earth are mistaken by the insects for pools of water, or at least the resemblance is strong enough to waken the old primeval instinct of their kind to hover above ponds and sluggish streams. One often speaks thus of gnats playing or dancing together, without meaning more than, as in this case, that a cloud of them has been seen hovering in company

  in one small space of air. But do insects never play in the literal sense of the word? Here at least is something difficult to describe as other than an organised insect game. Upon the broad oozy margin of the pond, on this hot and gusty summer's morning, a very curious thing is taking place. The flat, wet space of earth at the waterside is thronged with queer-looking flies, engaged in what appears exactly like a hotly contested belt

  of cross-touch between two differently apparelled teams. Though all are winged alike, white-edged wings with black tips, about equal proportions of the host have their thoracers glittering gold or vivid emerald green. The whole company keeps up an incessant hopping and twirling movement, and the game seems to be for a fly of one colour to touch another of the opposing hue, the latter either skilfully evading the attempt or passing on the issue, exactly as children do

  in the ancient pastime. None of the flies gets on the wing, this apparently being against the laws of the game. All is done by leaps and sudden flanking movements, and it is impossible to disregard the obvious fact that the sport is infused throughout with a rough yet good-humoured jocularity, strangely reminiscent of the sports of men. And there is a still further point of resemblance. Just as a whole, moiling, scurrying football field is brought to a sudden dead halt

  by the referee's whistle, so the green and gold-clad insect players are subject to temporary halts in their game. It is the whistling summer wind that is the referee in their case. When a gust of it swoops down on their playground, all are perfectly still in a moment, holding on to the sodden surface until the breeze has passed. To find the path over the sea marshes through the dense white morning mist is neither an easy nor an adventuresome thing.

  A false or hasty step is very likely to precipitate the wayfarer over head and ears into any one of the innumerable winding dikes that, in clear weather, may be seen tracing zigzags of molten silver everywhere through the breast-high green. The only safe procedure is to feel for the worn footway carefully at every step, and even this is not always possible. Sometimes the only thing is to halt and keep stock still for long minutes together until the direction of the

  beaten way is momentarily revealed. For though the whole worldwide low-lying marshland and sea with high shingle bank between is utterly lost in the shining white vacuity of the morning, you soon realise that the in-driven sea mist is not all of equal density. It lies in slowly moving strata, some thick and impenetrable to sight as bails of Whitney blanket fleece, some of so gauzy a texture that rarely a glint of dyke or a yard or two of water-logged verger may be dimly seen.

  To win away into the heart of these Dorset sea marshes thus, with the first practicable light of the shrouded summer's morning, is to gain entry to a new world little suspected by those who hug close to the haunts of men. No sign of living creature can be made out, yet the muffled air around me is instinct with the murmur of busy waking life. Hither, at the red close of every day, countless flocks of gulls come in from the sea to roost

  among the thick grass-bents. They are rousing now as the fog begins to lighten overhead, and with every minute more and more of them are getting on the wing, calling to each other through the silvery void or splashing invisibly around me in the sedgy pools. Every now and then a different cry goes by above, something like the comfortable disjointed chippering of swallows in the air, but somewhat harsher, and I know the little turns are up and

  doing. That slow plaintiff note, indescribably sweet and solemn, peeling out far to the right hand and immediately answered as far again to the left, is the call of a redshank to his straying mate. In every thicket of reeds I pass, some wild thing is stirring on its day's new business, and there is scarce a moment but one takes to the water with clear, ringing musical plunge. Once I stop where the sedges are almost waist high about the path, and the glittering formless

  miasma enclosing everything seems denser than ever, pull up short because a very torrent of shrill contentious voices is bearing down upon me, and I fear to crush some heedless creature underfoot. The mountain freshet of sound, shrill voice and whir and beat of wings, hurtles about my feet for a moment, then is suddenly still. The next moment I am straining ear and eye upward, this last baffling wonder forgotten in something more wonderful yet.

  Serene and joyous and ineffably remote, the first lark has begun his morning carol, and I know that far above the mist dungeon sea marshes there are sunshine and summer skies of blue.

• 16 - The Eighth Month - August - Part 2

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  At last, summer sun over a summer sea, with the tide all but at the full, and the south winds stripping the foam from the wave crests, and carrying it in shuddering iridescent clots far up the steep shelving beach. This is the hour when the terns begin their daily hunt along the water's edge. You can see them half a mile away down the pebbly shore, looking like a cloud of snowflakes whirling in the sunshine, and hear their shrill high voices

  borne over to you in a medley of faint broken sound through the rhythmic surge of wind and sea. But as they draw nearer, you make out that they are not really moving in close company. The little white gulls are spread out in fairly open order over a long stretch of the shore, flying some eight or ten feet above water level, and each narrowly scrutinising the surface beneath him as he slowly fares along. This daily flight of the terns, just as the

  tide is reaching its full, makes one of the prettiest sights to be met with on a seashore ramble at this time of the year. Sea birds as a rule, though they have forceful dexterity of movement, exhibit little grace or comeliness of gait, but the tern is as skilful and dainty on the wing as any swallow. And he adds to it all, something that perhaps no other sea bird has the world over, a pleasant reiteration of notes that might almost be called a song. Here again,

  the tern reminds one curiously of the swallow. His voice has a like volubleness and continuity. It is the same chattering refrain upon the sun's steep summer air. Only it lacks the swallow's comfortable sweetness, and this of necessity. For a sea bird's voice must ever be harsh and shrill to contend with the clamour of the sea. Every now and then the watcher may see one bring up stock still in the sunshine, or save a backward quivering motion of the wings.

  Now he looks, but in snow-white miniature, exactly like a hovering kestrel hawk, his forked tail bent under him, his beak pointing straight down. So still he keeps for the moment that you can mark the cruel, crafty eyes under the jet-black pole, eyes that can pierce the water-deeps as the kestrels the tangle of meadow grass and sedge, and then up go his wings, their sharp points meeting over his back, and down he drops like

  a falling stone, vanishing after his sighted quarry into the trough of foam marbled swaying green. One of the strangest sights to be met with at this time by holiday wanderers along our wilder and less frequented sea-coasts, such as those of Devon and Cornwall, is a group of cormorants engaged in drying, or rather draining, their wings. Ranged in open order along some narrow rocky ledge of the cliff overhanging the water, the big, sombre, rakish-looking birds stand on

  tiptoe, lean long necks and heads craned aloft, and great veins outstretched to the uttermost, quivering and dripping in the sunshine. They look like a company of fantastically clad water-mountabanks lifting arms together before making a simultaneous plunge into the sea. There is no particular reason why the cormorants and their smaller replicas, the shags, should take all this trouble to free their wings from the salt water after every dive,

  seeing that they are in and out of the sea constantly all the summer morning through. The Razorbills and Gillimots, who undoubtedly use their wings as propellers when swimming under water, exhibit nothing resembling this peculiar trait, while the cormorants and shags move beneath the surface entirely by means of their webbed feet. The wings, so sedulously cared for when the birds are out of the water, are always held closely folded to the body

  throughout the whole time of submersion, or, at least, that is the general consensus of opinion among all who have been able to observe the act. But it is far from easy to learn anything at first hand about the doings of this alert and wary fisher fowl. Many of the commonly accepted facts about them are traditional, handed down from generation to generation among the seacoast dwellers from the remote time when cormorant flying was an established and popular sport.

  In bygone centuries, cormorants were trained to catch fish just as the peregrine falcon was trained for the chase in the covets and fields. Rich and poor seem alike to have been addicted to this useful pastime of cormorant flying. Even kings of England, notably James I, had each his royal master of the cormorants. Both cormorants and shags appear invariably to swallow their prey whole immediately after

  landing it. Some old Devon fishermen assert that this was done while the bird is still under water. But a little careful watching soon reveals the truth that the small dabs and place, which constitute the main part of the cormorant's diet, are frequently brought to the eerie before being consumed. Then, however, there is no doubt of the way in which the catch is disposed of. It is taken down at a single gulp. Mid-August wanderings on the countryside

  commonly bring one face to face with what proves to most a startlingly unexpected sight. Where all the woods and lanes are still in their full opulence of summer greenery, a sudden turn of a leafy corner may bring into view a wayfaring tree loaded to the summit with scarlet fruit. Scarlet is the only word indeed for these heaped clusters of wayfaring berries, but the word is pitifully inadequate to convey any real notion of their intensely vivid hue.

  Seen in the mass, it comes nearer to a true blood red than, perhaps, the colour of any other growing thing. Yet, for all its splendour, it must not be mistaken for the colour of ripeness. Ripe wayfaring berries are black as jet. Each oval fruit, in turn, makes a sudden change of hue. It is an incessant game of rouge et noir in the hedgerows, and the moment the fruit is ripe, it must be eaten by the birds, or it quickly shrivels and rots away.

  The process is already in full activity, though no other wild fruit is yet within measurable distance of the edible stage. Examined closely, each head of clustered fruit is seen to be half glittering scarlet and half intense black. The interplay upon the eye of the two strongly contrasted shades, explaining no doubt the gorgeous impression caused on first sight of the tree. Those whose pleasure it is to look on at the pageant of wild growth year by year

  are little likely to fall into error here, but the chance sojourner on the countryside often confuses the wayfaring tree with the dogwood, and even with the service tree. The latter is really akin to the rowan, and is readily distinguishable by its deeply cleft leaves. There is some reason for confounding the other two, as both have a downiness of leaf and stalk in the younger shoots, and their foliage is much of the same character,

  but the berries of the dogwood are of an uniform dingy hue. Its real value to the lover of brilliant colour lies in its extraordinarily beautiful autumnal tints, the leaves failing and fading through an infinite gradation of red and purple tones. A peculiarity of the wayfaring tree is that, though its leaves are still as green as ever at this time, it has already made notable advance in its preparation for next year's growth.

  At the apex of every leaf and fruit-laden branch there is a fat grey woolly bud, with a pair of erect leaves elongated, but tightly furled as yet, above and below. When the wheat was still green and full of poppy scarlet and cornflower blue, and riddled through and through with the summer sun, it seemed that sheer dominant intensity of colour could be carried to no further pitch, either by nature or device of man.

  But now, when it stands ripe and ready for the sickle, thirty acres of it filling the valley between wood and wood, all that pales into insignificance. Under the fierce glow of the August sun, the colour of fully ripened wheat is literally more than human eye can long endure. The poppies and cornflowers are still there, crowding the burning amber deeps with a more vivid luster than ever. But their light is utterly quenched in the greater light from the myriad

  sun-burnt wheaten stems, such a lambent splendour of colour as one might conceive given off by some gargantuan crucible full to the brim with red-hot gold. Those who are beginning to deplore the imminent end of summer, and effect to regard the countryside now as but a declining radiance day by day, are merely letting old conventions blind them to the true facts. Though the colours of the year's maturity are on the wane, the richer hues of its fruition are only just nearing their

  full loveliness. The devotee of bright colour in the mass can roam hill and dale at this time, and find more than ever for his delight and solace. When these provinces of glowing corn are swept away, there are the lanesides and riversides, downs and purple moorlands, all running sky-high with new treasure of living beauty, authentic to summer's end. Every stream has its fringe of crimson loose strife and sweet fresh carmine of willow herb,

  and every highway its garland of yellow ragwort, stretching sometimes for unbroken miles. But it is the by-roads and unfrequented lanes that serve more completely than all else to dissipate the old illusion that the passing of summer means the beginning of the end to all things possessed of the loveliness of life, rather than what it really is, but a change from glory to glory. The hedgerows are more burdened with beauty than ever.

  The great bindweed swings its snow-white bells in every gap, and the little lily bind makes a broad flange of pink and silver to the beaten track like milk and wine spilt in the dust. Marjoram that ever waits for the ripening of the corn before breaking into blossom is filling the sunshine of all the lanes with cresting rosy foam. Long curving stems of sulphur-hued mullein stand up in the tangle of wayside growth like spurts of pure flame, and all the bramble breaks

  are thick-sewn with living jewellery, the flowers set so close together that it is hard to thrust a fingertip between. A thing that you can very easily pass by, that is familiar indeed perhaps not to one in a thousand, is the way the common stinging nettle contrives to fertilise its flowers. This is brought about neither wholly by the wind, as with the hazel, nor by the direct indispensable agency of insects as in so many other plants. It is true that all sorts of creeping

  and flying atoms throng the nettle thickets at blossoming time, and by these the fertilising process is undoubtedly expedited and rendered more complete. But if need be, the nettle plant can see to the matter quite well on its own account, without any adventitious aid. If you go to a nettle patch on any warm, still day in August and watch carefully, you will soon notice a truly astonishing thing. The nettle stems are all about of a height,

  each topped with a spray of dull purplish-green flower buds. The green of the leaves and this dingy inflorescence unite in a plane of tangled growth, stretching maybe half a dozen yards between the lane-side and the hedgerow. And over the entire breadth of this plane of nettle tops, little white puffs of what looks exactly like far-off battle smoke are incessantly breaking out in the sunshine and drifting dwindling away into nothing on the faintly moving breeze.

  If you could suppose yourself on a hilltop looking down upon a wide green coppice valley, wherein a brisk engagement between artillery was in progress, here in miniature is exactly what you would see. A broad sunlit expanse of wooded country with but the one sign of the deadly business going forward. Guns and gunners alike invisible in the deep cover, and only the quick short bursts of smoke showing at intervals here and there in the smiling

  peaceful green. And now look closer into the maze of nettle blooms and try to make out precisely what is happening. The queer curved many branch sprays are thick-studded with flower buds, some as yet only tiny green knobs, some all but ready to burst. Among them here and there is a full-blown flower, scarce larger than the buds indeed, yet wide open now and enshrining a little whirl of yellow anthers. While you are staring into the green jungle, noting all this,

  the spurts of mimic cannon smoke are breaking out all round your zone of sight far and near. It may be a minute or so before the eye catches one of the nettle guns exactly on the instant of its firing. The gun may go off of its own accord, or some wandering insect may set its trigger free. But sooner or later, if you have come at the right time, verging on towards noon, the nettles will yield up to you their secret.

  You will see the bud split asunder, spreading its four yellow fingers out like a suddenly unclasped fist, and the little cloud of pollen dust goes sailing off to vanish instantly in the mazy verdant deeps. As the corn yields up its green hue of life and takes on the yellow tinge of coming harvest, so the wild birds cease to sing. The two processes are so gradual as to be almost imperceptible until each is complete. And then there comes a morning in early August

  when one is awakened, not by a glad ripple of music, but by a strange quietude below in the dew-drenched garden. Looking forth under the fringe of glittering diamond drops that tremble along the eaves, one sees a hillside of pure gypsy gold heat up and radiant in the morning sun. The wheat is ready for the sickle. Mother Earth has done her part, and, resting at last, all living things seem to rest with her. There is a quiet, chippering undertone in the garden close,

  and a sleepy hum of bees in the plain of rosy Seinfoyn beyond. But in the whole wide valley that lies between the village and the golden hill, scarce another sound breaks the morning stillness. Far away on the upland to the north, where they are mowing crimson trefoil, you can hear the machine men against the skyline calling to their teams. And yet it is going very wide of the truth to speak of this time of summer quietude among the birds as silence.

  There is no real silence anywhere or at any time on an English countryside, and even now hardly an hour goes by but some bird or other remembers bygone times and ventures a bar or two of its old familiar music. Today, while the morning was still young, a willow warbler came and sang in the clump of silver birches by the laneside. Larks had been up and caroling over the village on and off the whole day through. Scarce an hour but the ring dove in the little oak wood

  beyond the garden has been measuring the moments with her drowsy chime. Even when there was no actual song, such an universal chirruping and exchange of call notes filled the sultry summer air far and wide that the general remission of music among the commoner songbirds at this time brings with it little sense of loss. One thing that is almost due now, coming indeed ever with a shock of regret to the true bird-lover,

  is the final departure of the swifts. At this season of calm bright evenings one has grown so used to seeing a great company of swifts charging round the blue sky with their weird resounding chorus that summer seems no longer summer without them. When they go, as may happen any day now, a real break comes in the year's melody. But it is only the heaviness that endures for a season. The joy of the morrow's morning may well be a whole new avalanche of robin song.

  When the wild free hunting chorus of the swifts stills in the evening sky it is well nigh infallible token that this so-called summer silence is nearing its end. With the return of the robins from the deep woods to the habitations of men there can be no more thought of silence among our songbirds. It almost seems as if the robins waited until the last echo of the swifts' jubilant concerto died away, and then started as with one accord on their homeward trek.

  The week that is now ending, earlier perhaps in some favoured districts and still not yet in others, but notably this past week for most localities, has brought to the countryside a general resumption of robin song. The return of the robins to their old haunts round about the villages marks unerringly the dividing line between summer and autumn. The little wrens have been singing freely at all times of day for a fortnight past,

  but there is nothing seasonal in the song of the wren. Whether in April or November it is just the same slender, sibilant, cascading note and endlessly reiterated monotone that would soon grow irksome but for its unfailing brightness, the simplest and cheeriest of all English wild bird songs. Robin music is very far from simple, and what brightness it possesses is little more than afterglow, more remembrance than real effulgence. Saving the blackbirds and the nightingales,

  the robin song, though in a very different spirit, comes nearer to a human quality of expression than any other. Yet it deals only with the half-lights, the sober, reflective side of things. Go out now into a village garden, or, better still, the adjacent woodlands on any of these crisp, glamorous, dew-soaked mornings, and, though the calendar tells you it is still high summer, note the unmistakably autumnal ring in every stanza of the robin song.

  It is no mournful music, this of the robin. The old conventional idea of autumn as a season of decay and sadness, if it were ever more than a sick town fancy, has no warrant to country eyes and ears kept honestly open in these frank days. With the passing of summer the failure of pot geraniums on a London windowsill may well bring sad thoughts of dearth and death to come, but autumn in the country is no more than a breathing spell, the year's unbuckling of its armour between

  one exploit and another, just a brief halt at a journey's end, to count up the gains of one venture brought to ripe issue, as setting forth reacoutred and ready for the next. And this is the spirit that infuses the robin song when, as August passes its meridian, the ruddy breasts begin to show again in the depths of hedgerow green, picked out by the level sunbeams of morning and evening, and the old quaint halting melody returns. The blackbird voices the energy

  and momentum of young life, the up-and-doing and daring spirit. The nightingale takes to herself all the emotional and sentimental paraphernalia, but the robin calls a welcome halt to both. Youth is not all, or even the greater part of life, either to humanity or to seasons, and those well on towards the grand climacteric of their days, who find autumn sweeter with every year that glides by, grow to welcome the return of the robin song at this time, with ever greater

  and greater pleasure. For these the secret of its charm lies in its undisturbing tranquil beauty, without effort or aspiration, like the music that still throbs in bells long after the eager clappers are at rest. The little robins, singing in the garden close, sweeten every hour of sunshine for the village-dweller today. It is only when the robins get back, as they always do at this time of year, from the solitary woodlands to their old haunts among men, and their tender winsome

  song begins once more to pervade the gardens, that one realises how quiet the village has been these many weeks back. All through July and now far into August one has been able to detect scarce sound of bird about the house, save the chippering song of martins under the eaves, and the noisy contention of sparrows in the old ivied walls. But the long summer silence has broken at last. Yet there is no disguising the fact that the robin's tuneful diffident refrain

  has nothing in it akin to summer tide. Overhead an almost tropic sun still lords it in the blue, but the robins are back in the village gardens from their long sojourn in the woods, and there is no blinking the truth. The summer is very near its close. Old conventions often die hard. Many go on thinking, and some few writing, of the nightingale as exclusively a night song-star, and of the red-breast as unvarying herald of winter frosts

  and snows. But, as all country folk know, the nightingale sings as much by day as by night, and the rigours of winter are the robin's chief aversion. In fact, the red-breast has an inveterate dislike of all extremes. He is a singer of the half-moods, the temperate golden mean of life. Listen to him now in the shady deeps of the orchard close. Every note of the song breathes of autumn, its tranquillity, its assured achievement, its fullness of content.

  It is rather recitative than melody, soliloquy more than communicated phrase. The robin just sits in his green dim apple-bower, conning over to himself the sum of the year's award of things, and finds some so good that his song must break forth in little swift rills of joy, and others so debatable as to need but sober undertone, with more than a tinge of melancholy. Yet it is all so sweet and fresh, so unstudied, that one reaches out sudden welcoming arms to

  autumn, and the heart falls singing with the bird. End of section 16

• 17 - The Ninth Month - September - Part 1

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  The sound of rain on September leaves is quite different from that on the fresh young foliage of early summer. Here in the wood the steady downpour makes near at hand a dry hard pattering note, merging afar off into a general crisp whispering hubbub, more like the voice of wind in ripe oats than a sound of falling water. It lacks the music inherent in all young life. Though the

  wood is still green, and will scarce show a blemish of autumnal hues until October is done, the leaves have lost their suppleness and sappy permeation. The raindrops fall upon them as upon sculptured leaves of stone, and with as little responsiveness. And as it is with the rain over woodlands in early autumn, so it is with the light. The old translucence of the summer leaves is gone. The woods will never be so dark in all the year as they are now, towards the sundown of

  the long-drenching September day. Even in the open rides there is but a dim half-light abroad, and threading your way through the labyrinth of densely overshadowed tracks, you constantly come upon long winding stretches where deep night seems to have settled down already. These dark blind regions in the wood are strangely, almost uncannily, silent and bereft of life. Instinctively you hurry through them, tripping at every step, and when the gloom begins to lighten ahead of you

  once more, and the scurry of a rabbit sounds in the undergrowth, ear and eye greedily sees upon these as they would upon the voice and glance of a friend. Coming out of the wood at last onto the broad hillside, you look across a valley grey and blurred with rain to the far horizon, where in happier times the sun would be setting red among the pine tops. There is no sunlight now, nor hope of sunlight. Yet as the dusk draws on, a curious change in the quality of the light begins to assert

  itself. The rain drums down harder than ever. The sky is as densely overcast as it has been any moment since the sousing dawn. But by infinite degrees, and in no quarter more than another, the whole drab lowering heaven has suffused with a delicate rosy glow. Green of grass and woodland fails and fades into this soft resplendence. The hillside flowers, white yarrow and lemonweed and purple scabious, take to themselves the same pale orient tinge. The brooks, checkerboarding the grassy

  levels, turn to threads of shining coral. Even the rain reddens as it falls. Something there is about these wet autumn days ending in such a light, something of the quality of pure elation, for as the light comes, the wood behind you, so glumly mute a moment ago, breaks into sudden song. The ring doves fall to crooning, and the moping robins set up a glad ripple far and near. A green woodpecker loops by, mocking yet obviously sympathising with the general exultation. The

  distant rookery raises a merry clamour. Though the light endures but a moment or two, the dismal spirit of the day is gone. Next morning, out in the open fields, the morning was dim enough under the steady rain and grey, quiet sky. But here in the beechwood there is gloom that might almost be a laggard remnant of the night. And yet it is possible to see wonderfully far on every hand. In beechwoods the trees do not crowd together, nor is there ever more than sparsest undergrowth.

  The grey, smooth stems stand wide apart on a bare floor, spread somberly with last year's leaves, and overhead the trees link their living foliage together, so that the wood is like a vast hollow shell of matted leafage, through which the light filters, changing the very air to liquid emerald, as though one were walking at the bottom of a deep green sea. So it is all the summer long, and so it is to-day, despite the drab pool of sky and drizzling rain above. Only there lies in wait

  for you this autumn morning such a surprise, such a shock of splendid colour, as is met with at this time of year alone, and then only by the inveterate wanderer abroad in all weathers. Turning a corner of the path, you come suddenly upon a spot where there is a break in the woodland canopy, and the sombre way lies open to the sky. Almost at your very feet there gleams a broad, intensely brilliant patch of ruddy golden light, so vivid, so dazzling, that you half believe you

  have chanced upon a spurt of subterranean fire. But it is neither fire nor errant sunbeam, equally impossible on such a weeping, shrouded day. It is merely the first fresh clot of fallen leaves, and the beach is ever the earliest to give this warning note of the imminent autumnal change. Often it is but a single tree in the whole wood that begins the conflagration. Hidden by its fellows, it gradually bronzes over, unseen by human eye, until it stands clad from head to foot

  in burning gypsy gold. And then the glittering spangles commence to fall, and ever reddening where they gather under the white steep shaft of daylight, form at length this resplendent burst of colour. Ever the beaches first. And then little flares of yellow begin to mark the lanesides where the hedge maples grow, and the brambles turn crimson, and the hazel leaves rim and blotch with purple-brown. After these the elm grove starts its aerial alchemy. Then the

  birches sprinkle their green robes with amber sequins, and the sycamores light their scarlet beacons in every wood. Last of all, the oaks, just smouldering sullenly away into grim, wintry, nakedness brown, leaf by leaf. Until but a few days back the lane, with its high hedgerows and overspreading oaks, seemed the quietest spot on earth. You trod the green-grown solitary track, passing from long zone to zone of grey shade through slants of hazy midget-haunted sunshine,

  and heard no more than a single trill from a robin, or a bar or two of silvery soliloquy from a hiding wren. But today all that is changed. The slender music of the wren and red-breast is there still, but it is obliterated, forgotten, in the new great song that is lifting from the mountains of blossoming ivy in the hedgers, and from every green-swaddled tree-trunk by the way. With the earliest glimpse of morning light, the first honey-bees were out and busy in the

  ivy-bloom. And now, at sunny midday, there is a veritable tornado of music from end to end of the lane. And not only hive-bees literally by the thousand thousand. There are blue-flies and green-flies, humble-bees and wasps and butterflies and horse-voiced aerostalus, a horde of winged jostling creatures in amber and pearl and steely green or blue and glittering black, and every tiny nameless thing that can fly or climb high enough to take its share in the

  ivy-feast. Standing midway in the length of sun and shadow-barred lane, one sees that the whole erstwhile-green barricades of ivy-smothered hedgerow are coloured with the open flowers as though it had been raining gold-dust all night long. It is good on a country ramble to come by chance upon this amazing sight, and be reminded that autumn has its genesis of life as well as spring. But it is better still to have been familiar with it of old and have expected,

  watched, its coming these many weeks back. A strange old plant is the ivy-green in nothing stranger than in the time and manner of its blossoming. When the suns of April are urging all other growths into a glory of colour and procreative life, the old ivy drowses by the wayside, dingy and dry and inert save in the shedding of its used-up winter leaves. All the summer long it resists the call of the sunniest hours. But when September arrives, the true

  springtime flood of growth and life returns to the countryside in this late blossoming of the rare old ivy green. Everywhere beneath its mantle of sombre, shiny foliage, clusters of minute green knobs appear. These grow apace and spread, lengthening their stalks until each cluster looks like a pincushion stuck full of pins with monstrous heads. Now these flower-bud nurseries stand out above the old leaves and become the most conspicuous growth of the hedgerow. Finally, each green knob

  splits at its apex. Five little segments fold back like an opening star trap, letting five buff-tipped anthers spring into the light and disclosing a yellow-green oval fairly dripping with sweets. In a single morning, the colour of the whole lane is changed from green to gold. The Kaleidoscope. It's got the name from a first vision of it one fair September morning long ago, and ever after, at this time of year, its changing splendour of colour and life recalls

  the Trumpery metaphor. It is just a bit of narrow lane skirting the foot of a great shoalback hill on the brink of the Sussex Downs. On the one hand, a towering hedge cuts off all view of the lowlands. On the other, the flower-gem swadd springs sheer from the edge of the white chalk track and sweeps away, soaring until it brings up suddenly far aloft against the intense blue of the southern sky. It is the bank under the hedgerow where the whole morning sunshine seems to

  have collected that gives the place its trivial, unsufficing name. Up in the high hedge there are wreaths of blossoming clematis and pink bramble bloom, and strings of briony berries like cherries, green and yellow and red, and great alcoves full of ripe wayfarer fruit burning like Moses' bush in the sun. Below these, but still higher than a man's head, stand sulfur spires of mullen and a very thicket of hemp agrimony, the most beautiful growth of the waysides to-day, ripple upon ripple

  of breaking rosy foam. Then comes the marjoram, deep rich magenta purple in the clustered buds, but the open flowers making a soft amethystine mist all along the bank. Lower still, crimson calamint and violet hair-bell, ragwort and yarrow and white archangel, napweed, mallow, chamomile. But these are all abiding things. Though they are forever trembling and bending in the stir of western air, you can look upon their loveliness for as long as you will.

  It is the butterflies that give the elusive, kaleidoscopic quality to this shy nook of country lane. In sober truth, there are thousands of them foregathered at this, the great annual luftrest of their kind. Looking down the lane, you can see their brilliant colours lifting and falling in the sunshine, just as though the flowers themselves were getting incessantly upon the wing. Gorgeous red admirals and peacocks with their gay heraldry of crimson and tawny

  velvet set with mother of pearl, tortoiseshells flashing their burnished copper mirrors from every head of dandelion, brimstone sailing by like magic carpets of cloth of gold, great white butterflies breaking out snowy spinnakers all around you and furling, spreading them again as swiftly as you look, and amidst all a sort of undertow of tender shimmering azure, the little blue butterflies more plentiful than any, forever dimming the bright eyes of

  golden ragwort and ruby kalamint with their cold pure hues. This yellow ragwort, which all through July and August has been flooding the wayside and woodland clearings, is nearing the end of its beauty. The centre of each high poised glowing nebula of blossom is slowly whitening as the earliest flowers to bloom ripen their seed pods, every seed equipped with its own little floss silk parachute ready to drift away on the passing breeze. The ragwort is typical of a kind of

  flowers with a very singular trait. To the naked eye, each spreading umbil consists of a multitude of single flowers of quite simple construction, a central dome surrounded by a ring of bright yellow daisy-like rays, each ragwort bloom at first glance looking exactly like a common field daisy but done all in gold. Daisy and ragwort indeed have a near kinship in the fact that, with each, the flower is not what it seems to the casual eye, a separate simple star-like form,

  but in reality it embodies a hundred or more distinct individual flowers in one. Though a spirit of seemingly reckless, spendthrift prodigality infuses nearly all that nature does, ragwort and daisy and the like will be gotten of mother earth in one of her rare penurious moods. A hundred of their flowers must be content to proffer a single chalice between them for all it be of fine gold. The thing cannot easily be made out unless a strong glass be

  brought to bear on one of these curious flowers. The daisy is the most typical. It is the daisy's golden eye which is the true daisy, or rather the multitude of them. The banner of shining white petals is only a show sign hung out to lure the wing to pass by. Under the glass, the daisy's eye is seen to be made up of innumerable buds massed together side by side, each of which in turn expands into a five-petalled yellow blossom centred by a golden

  pollen rod, the whole curiously like the male vegetable marrow flower in miniature. These buds are continually opening, blooming a while, then fading away into done shreds. The operation begins at the circumference and works steadily inward, the central buds being the latest to develop. In warm bright weather, the flowers may come into maturity in quick succession. Cold and gloom, especially in the daisy which shuts up at the least chill,

  may indefinitely protract the process. But the strange thing is that the encircling whirl of petals keeps its shining freshness for so long as, but no longer then, its attractive work is needed. When the last bud has opened and has been duly fertilised, the rings of gold or silver fail and fall. Seen from the village in the grey, still September morning, the greyest, most ejected region in the whole glum landscape is the far-off sagging line of the downs.

  To go thither in search of colour and life seems the least promising enterprise in the world, but the downland is full of unexpected things. The flowers that love these high-lying wastes, though each is but a minute replica of its great, flaunting fellows of the lowlands, of the lowlands, make up by sheer numbers what they lack in size. Those who come to the Sussex Downs at the end of summer and see them in the distance so bare and grey are always astonished

  at the real richness and vividness of growth with which hill and dial are spread. Once the first great shoalback hill is passed, the wanderer finds himself in a veritable arcanum of loveliness. The barren, sun-burnt cast, which, from below, the downs appear to wear, is now seen to be only a blend of every conceivable living colour. Except for the heather and the harebells there are scarce any unfamiliar to the lowland dweller.

  The deep, soft grass is studded thick with pink and white clover, golden hawkbit, an infinity of daisies and even buttercups, pale mauve of scabius, glowing purple of knapweed and star thistle, yarrow white and red, dandelions in plenty still, and a little white umbel, more ubiquitous than any, each of its trim disks a study in delicate reticent grace. All familiar hedgerow flowers, nothing of mountain strangeness about them,

  yet each but a half the size of its valley prototype, and all shorn of their long stems, set deep in the sheltering grass-bents, harmless of the rough winds. So hidden that you seem to be carrying a charmed circle of flower-shine as you move. A dozen yards ahead, the brown upstanding grasses hide all from the view. But the true downland flowers of autumn, the blue harebells and rose-red heather, these uplift themselves everywhere in bold beauty

  and colour the landscape wherever one looks. The grey light has no more power to dim the crimson of the heather than it can quench the murmur of its countless besieging bees. While the heather honey-flow lasts and the autumn chills forbear, neither shade nor shine can still the rich labour chant of the hive-bees, even in determinedly shawry weather. So that it be warm, the heather is never without its singing host. But the harebells are for the butterflies

  alone, and most of all for the little blue butterflies that swarm upon the downs at this season. Not one visible now. Where they get to on grey days such as these, or even when a bit of cloud gets into the sun's eye for a moment, is a mystery. But the drab mantle of the sky is wearing thin already. A long curving silvery rent shows in it to windward, or at least in that direction where the wind would be if there were any perceptible air astir. In an hour, perhaps,

  the sun and the butterflies will be out together, and then you will see these frail blue harebells doing strange things. For it will be just as though they had taken to themselves wings, flitting hither and thither in the sunshine. So exactly alike are the azure flowers and the flecks of living azure that share their being. On the grey still September morning, with the sheep and cattle lying down in the fields,

  and but a stray robin or two breaking the autumnal quietude with his slender plainte, it is almost startling to come upon a cloud of swarming ants at some odd turn in the lane. Loitering under the hedgerows, you suddenly find yourself enveloped by an aerial host of what you take to be midgers. The air is misty and dim with their incredible numbers. They spread from about the level of your shoulders to the highest spray in the hedge-top, thousands upon thousands of

  minute dark-winged forms. These are the little black ants, using their newly begotten soaring powers in the most thrilling adventure of their lives, the great annual mating flight of their kind. Hitherto they have been nothing but lowly toilers upon earth, their most daring enterprise, the ascent of a grass-blade or a wandering cruise up a tree-trunk in search of aphid juice. But now, for a short half-hour, there has come to them a mysterious dual gift,

  both the desire and the means to fly. The books on entomology give us the why and the wherefore of this curious habit of the ants in a few terse, confident lines. But it is wonderful how much more there is to learn if an ordinary pair of eyes be carried abroad and turned upon the matter. First, it is seen that these ant-swarms are always hovering in the lee of some thick, high bush, and this even on the calmest days. Then there is definite order observable in the

  proceeding, for all it seem at first glance but a chaotic whirl of adventitious atoms. The swarm preserves a distinct and characteristic shape in mid-air, a long oval pointed at the top, which is next the bush. Though each ant is flying in its own circle, and these inextricably mingled, there is a common progress upward, and the pace of flight increases as the highest zone is reached. Where the cloud of circling insects almost touches the green elder

  spray, the speed of their intertwining movements wholly baffles the eye. They make together but a grey blur in the air, and every fraction of a second a pair can be seen to lock and fall, making a dark wavering vertical streak upon the grey. But the most curious thing is yet to tell. All the black ant-swarms I have ever seen have been accompanied by a smaller swarm of true midges of infinitely tinier form. These midges constitute a sort of advance guard for the ants,

  hovering just between the highest point of the ant swarm and the adjacent foliage, hundreds of them, indeed, being clustered thick upon the leaves. Bee-masters aver that the honeybees, when swarming, always send out scouts to select a gathering point in advance. Do the midges scout for the ants? End of section 17

• 18 - The Ninth Month - September - Part 2

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  Across the sunny woodland ride, from gloom to gloom, tumbling helter-skelter out of darkness into light and back into darkness again, went the rat and weasel, locked together in a deadly embrace. Though I saw them but a moment, I knew it was a weasel who had the rat in grip, by the flash of white, showing now and then as the pair rolled madly over and over. And no mistaking the low scream of mingled fury, terror and pain that had so suddenly rent

  the woodland quietude. No other creature but a rat, least of all a great grey buck rat like this one, would have had quite the same power of putting so many various meanings into one shrill outcry, choked and broken as it was. But the little tragedy was all over in a second or two. The harsh, stifled sound and the gruesome sight vanished together into the deep of the wood. I stood looking at the empty space of sunlit green across which the pair had charged,

  pondering many things. First, as to why gamekeepers wage such ruthless war indiscriminately upon weasel and stoat alike, seeing that it is the stoat only their kind need fear. But every year the harmless weasels, harmless that is to say so far as game is concerned, can be seen on the keeper's gibbet by the dozen. In reality, the weasel is a creature that all gamekeepers should preserve rather than seek to exterminate. Its food consists almost entirely of vermin,

  rats and mice, moles, no doubt many of the smaller wild birds. But it is the rarest thing to find it preying upon game or rabbits. The larger, stronger, fiercer stoat is the real depredator of the covert and warrens, and will even raid domestic poultry runs or attack a hair in its form. Weasel and stoat are easily to be distinguished even when only a momentary glimpse of them be obtained. First, there is the marked difference in size. The weasel,

  who had fastened its deadly grip upon the rat in the wood, was actually smaller than its prey, though of greater length in its snake-like flexible body. Then the throat and underparts of a weasel are pure white, while in the stoat these are of a dull, dirty, sulphur yellow. Finally, there is the general colour, a sort of mahogany brown, rich in the weasel but much dingier in the stoat, and the fact that the stoat has a black tip to its tail,

  the tail of the weasel being throughout of the same chestnut hue as its lithe little body. At this time of year it is strange how all the owls get down to the villages on dark, still nights, especially those following days of raging wind. The stifled, bubbling screech of the barn owl can be heard indeed at most seasons, if one chances to be lying awake. And so that the air be warm, the little owl, the Frenchie of the gamekeepers,

  is never silent for long, day or night. But as September draws on, the great brown owl, at all other times a devotee of the remote woodland, comes in from his solitary haunts at each fall of darkness, and cries about the chimney tops by the hour together, mingling his weird wailing song with all the rest. And yet this nightly chorus of the owls, typical of the waning season, is in the aggregate far from being a dispiriting, melancholy sound.

  The barn owl's long, low, strangled note has a touch of grim, inveterate ferocity about it. But the little owl's sharp, shrill call, echoed and re-echoed across the gardens under the tense darkness, strikes the air almost with a tinge of careless mirth, for all the little Frenchie bears the worst name for indiscriminate slaughter of any, by reason of his habit of ranging the woods and fields at all hours of the day, as well as

  after dark. The call of the great barn owl, even when heard thus in the small hours of the autumn night, brings no lugubrious feeling with it. The note is a serious, even solemn refrain, but its undeniably tuneful quality just keeps it on the hither side of mournfulness. To speak of the wood owl's cry as a beautiful sound would be perhaps overstraining fancy. Yet it has strength and a stern sort of sweetness that sets one eagerly listening,

  even though it be the cause of unwelcome vigils at the end of tired days. Lying thus in the still midnight hour, and drowsily harkening to this owlet clamour far and near, the question is sure to thrust itself upon one. Why do these creatures, gifted so wonderfully by nature with the power of noiseless aerial progression, yet take so much care to herald their comings and goings in this way? One would think the first hoot of an owl a mile off

  would serve to drive to safe cover the whole countryside of furred and feathered things. The truth seems to be that, while all this bandying to and fro of call notes between foraging mate and mate fulfils some necessary though inscrutable end, it does not really interfere with good hunting. The note may warn, yet it may give no inkling of the direction whence danger is coming. A wild creature will seldom flee until it has made sure of the road

  to safety, and the hardest thing in the world, to a human ear at least, is to judge the direction, or even distance, of an owl's call at night. It may well be that all this nocturnal hubbub but throws the quarry into a state of transfixed alertness. What time the great-eyed, soundless terror swoops down on whom he will. Peeling out suddenly over the valley in the grey quiet of the windless dawn, the thrush's song comes like a herald of a loved yet long absent

  friend's return. Ever since summer failed, almost the only bird voice in the countryside has been that of the robin. The spinnies and lanes have been full of robin music, but the tender, leisurely refrain savours too much of autumn decline. On his resumption of song in the late September of each year, the thrush, with a single ringing clarion peal at dawn, seems to change the whole order of things. Thus early in the season his song lasts but a moment

  or two. It is as though suddenly remembering himself after his long moping summer silence, he had got out the neglected silver pipe from its forgotten corner, and in no wise intending to play as yet, nevertheless sent a breath through the dusty keys as promise of melodious days in store. He may not tune up again for a week to come, or tomorrow's light may grow to a perfect salvo of his stirring, revivifying music. But sooner or later now he will settle down to his

  grand role of winter's chief musician in good earnest. Little as it seems generally to be known, the close of January ever finds the thrushes in full imperious song. The mistlethrush, on the other hand, is only occasionally heard until the old year is near its end. His reputation as a songster is something of a mystery to the country dweller unversed in the conventions of the older bird books. How, indeed, the missile ever rose to

  the degree of a singing bird in the estimation of any is a puzzle, seeing that his performance is little more than the wearisome reiteration of a single rather vapid phrase. Such as it is, however, there is plenty of it once it starts, and it gains immeasurably by the fact that the mistlethrush sings apparently without any regard to wind and weather. Cold or warmth, storm or shine, he carries on indomitably, nor seeks to shelter himself from the elements,

  no matter how unfriendly they may be. In this thoroughly British trait lies perhaps the secret of his common repute as musician otherwise unexplainable. But the sensitiveness of the little song thrush to the mood of the times is a still finer and more valued thing to one used to being abroad on the green countryside at all seasons. His song grows to be an index of the beatitudes of rural life. When the darkness begins to fall outside the lattice and one can just make

  out the flickering bats against the grey east, it is good to learn that the western wind still holds by the fact that a song thrush is merrily tuning up below in the garden. And the dawn that breaks austerely quiet and chill and crystal clear, save for a half-hearted robin or timorous wren to welcome it, holds no surprises or regrets. One would as soon expect to see roses in the snow as to hear a song thrush on a nipping roar nor western morning.

  Wandering over the downs on any of these sunny, still September days, one is sure to come upon a bird that at once arouses curiosity. Though it has no arresting brilliance of hue, as seen threading warily through the long dew-diamonded grass or perching on bramble or juniper, foreigner is written plain on every feather. Its colours, as visible then, are but sober greys and browns, yet the bird wears them in such clear-cut contrast

  and in so outlandish, so harlequin a fashion, that a traveller is inevitably reminded of eastern lands and their flitting, chattering crew. And when this queer little fowl gets on the wing, as he will instantly do if the observer make but the slightest movement or sound, the association becomes still more complete. For as he speeds away from you, flying in loops like a finch or woodpecker, his tail-covets gleam up in the morning sun white as

  snow. One of the strangest things about these wheat ears, now so common singly upon the downs just before their migratory southward flight, is that, though all the old country books speak of incredible numbers being trapped by the shepherds on the Sussex Highlands every autumn, one never sees flocks of wheat ears, hardly ever more than two or three together at most. And yet, that they still exist, probably in as great numbers as of old,

  is patent to anyone accustomed to roam these high-lying, lonely wastes in the fall of the year. The explanation, of course, lies in the fact of the markedly unsociable, solitary habits of the race at these times. Nature seems to spread them out over the land, as dust dropped upon water spreads, each atom shunning its immediate fellows. And a stranger thing still is that the self-downed shepherd, who appears to have changed not a jot

  in any other respect, perhaps for centuries past, has certainly given up almost entirely now a pursuit that, only a couple of generations back, must have brought in a considerable revenue to his class. Wheat ear trapping today is not only an obsolete calling, it is well nigh a lost art. For all the wheat ear still loves to explore any dark and secret cleft in the sward, as he did of yore. How to construct the little tunnels under the turf, and in what subtle fashion

  to lay the horse-hair nooses that ensnared the burrowing birds, you shall not gain knowledge of nowadays in half a life's diligent inquiry among the oldest shepherds of the time. If the coming winter prove a long and rigorous one, it is fairly certain that there will be something very like famine among the wild birds of the land. Look where one will in southern England now, the signs portending hard times are all too evident. The hawthorn fruit,

  which forms the main part of the berry crop, is almost a total failure. With September more than half done, the hedgerows should be already flashing scarlet under their load of fruit. But in a whole day's tramp, through any typical stretch of country, you will hardly find a dozen bushers fully laden with the fast ripening hoars. Of the second principal source of winter provender for the feathered creatures of the countryside,

  the hips or roseberries, little that is more reassuring can be said. As a generous estimate, the visible crop is scarce half what it should be in normal years, and for this we have to thank the cold, wet weather which prevailed in June, when most of the roses were blowing. The holly is in slightly better case. Nearly all the bushers show a sprinkling of pale red berries, sparse though it is. But none have the tight

  clustered wealth of coral fruit sheathing the whole stem and mounting high in every bush, so characteristic of good holly years. The danger of all this to our native wild birds lies not so much in the probability of lean days to come with themselves alone dependent on the home store, as in the well nigh certain event of the berry shortage being prevalent in other countries, thus causing a larger seasonal influx than ever of foreign birds. In some winters,

  these migrants from the north west come over in incredible hosts and sweep the land bare of food wherever they pass. With their home resources for themselves alone, however meagre these may be, and however protracted and severe the winter, our native birds will at least have a chance. But any overplus of foreign starlings in their midst is sure to precipitate disaster. Luckily, or providentially, there is something to set in the hither scale. Never, perhaps,

  did the ivy show greater promise for a superabundant harvest of its queer-looking greenish fruit. No more than promise as yet, indeed, for the ivy is still only just verging on its flowering time. But every swathed tree skull and mantled hedge and wall is fairly smothered with ivy buds, already throwing out a furtive golden anther or two. It wants but a few days' warm sunshine to bring all out into a glory of yellow blossom, burdening the air with

  a scent of honey and luring every bee and wasp and butterfly of the countryside to the bountiest feast. Harvest is finished on the upland farm, and in every field the jingling ploughs are out breaking the stubbles under the soft autumn sunshine. All but on the ten-acre, the last spit of cultivatable land glowing afar off like a tongue of fire, hard against the misty blue wall of the Downs. A strange colour truly for a field in mid-September. Yet there is only one English

  wildflower that can set a whole hillside aflame at this or any season. Coming to the ten-acre, after a long tramp through dew-drenched lane and footpath, you stand on the brink of the remote solitary field at last, and look out over the scantiest crop of oats that ever I beheld. Corn, which is not worth the reaping, and now never will be reaped, yet which is full of a glad compensation to all but the farmer, a beautiful scarlet underflow of poppies,

  rich as on any summer's day gone by. Early as you have come to this forlorn and lovely outpost of human effort, a host of wild creatures are here before you. The upper part of the field is black with rooks and doors, scrabbling busily amidst the lean yellow swathes, and filling the air with an unceasing clamour, the deep horse note of the rooks playing bass to the jackdaw's high yelping chorus. The smaller birds are here in numbers past all belief, every sparrow of the

  countryside seemingly, starlings by the hundred together, linets, chaffinches, siskins, greenfinches, pigeons, and here and there a white wing lifts in the glowing prospect, telling that even the great herring gulls find here something to their taste. Through the hubbub of rook and door and the shrill medley of lesser voices comes now and again the trumpet of a pheasant and the wheezy call of partridge hiding under the scarlet and gold. All this high-lying southern country is overrun with

  hares and it would be strange if the derelict Oatfield had none to show today. When the ploughs come at last to turn all under, poppies and abortive crop alike, hares in plenty are sure to get up out of their forms almost from under the horse's very feet and go racing off like the wind. There is a hare now but a dozen yards away, moving in the dense poppy growth. You cannot see him, but you know he is there, for between every mouthful as he feeds his black ear-tips are

  thrust high aloft searching the air for sounds of danger. Yet he is not battening upon the oats like the rest of the wild things about him. He has come to the field lured by the same sight that's brought yourself thither, only to gratify another and more material need. To the hare a fresh young poppy is at all times an irresistible dainty. Presently as he ventures out upon a bare spot of ground you mark his peculiar method of devouring them. It is just like the

  ancient children's game of bop-cherry. He bites the green poppy stem off close to the root and then sits up contentedly chewing it in until the flower, gradually approaching his mouth, at a sudden sidelong gulp, finally disappears. Coming down the green ride through the hazelwood you would have known that there were others here before you, even if there had been no far-off murmur of children's voices upon the air.

  The jays would have revealed that fact clearly enough. Incessantly their single harsh warning cries ring to and fro in the dim, quiet glades, and whenever you catch sight of one of the birds he is going at full speed, alarmed yet angry at what he evidently deems an unwarrantable invasion of his rights. Jays, when not moved by a common danger, seem to spend most of the hours of daylight quarrelling. If you manage to get near a party of them and the sound of their strife

  continues, it is the surest sign that they still believe themselves alone in the wood. In this southern county nutting time seems to get earlier every year. The ancient village rule used to be that the nuts were left until the blackberries were done, but already there are coming in as many baskets heaped up with what looks like pale green foam, as there are baskets sombre and dripping with the luscious bramble fruit. Old and young alike are off to the woods

  nutting, but the children make the best gatherers. A hazelnut always hides under a leaf, and thus is most readily seen from below. The Saturday school holiday brings the young voices betimes into the woodland solitudes, and the jays have not had a word amiss since dawn. The big hazelnuts, pale greenish-white, blotched with rose, and each set in a dainty antlered cup of emerald, make lure enough for anyone on this soft September morning.

  But there is a new wonder, as well as a new beauty, in the woods today. Coming to them with thoughts bent only on the season as a time of fruition, of the earth's autumnal rest from labour, one is startled to find, not autumn, and all it conventionally stands for, but the vigorous life of spring already actively in train. Every hazel leaf now has a next season's bud swelling green at the base of its stalk, starving the old leaf of sap, and steadily,

  inexorably, pushing it off the main twig. And the catkins, the male hazel flowers that in February will fill the woods with a shower of verdant light, these show everywhere in the labyrinth of branches overhead. Pendulous green lobes, three or four together, some fully an inch long, though still tight closed, a few, indeed, already loosening and lengthening perilously unmindful of the coming winter days. It is always the crowded, mutually protecting hazels that first give the

  quietest thus to the ancient illusion of autumn as a season only of decline and death. But once the truth has been forced upon you of the fat green hazel buds and swelling catkins in September, you look about wherever you go, and soon realise that the same impulse is upon all growing things. One year's brimming chalice of life drained, nature begins to fill again with the old rich wine without a moment's pause. End of Section 18

• 19 - The Tenth Month - October - Part 1

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  When the sea-fog is up amongst the hills, And all the dull quiet morning through, The village roofs and treetops are lost in a thick white canopy, The never-ceasing song of the wrens in the gardens Just saves the day from being one Of dispiriting gloom. Today the October dawn was a full hour behind its time,

  But the wrens had taken no count of that. In the muffled twilight, long before the robins had plucked up heart, Or the rooks stirred in their airies, There was a wren singing amidst the dripping apple bells under my window, As though it were a summer's day. It is in its inviolability of type, Its constancy rather to a temperament

  Than a season, that the value of the wrens' song chiefly lies. As the darkness slowly lightened, I lay and listened to the song, And wondered where its blithe content came from In all that chilly shrouded void. Minute after minute the song stemmed on in the silence, No mellow clear pipe tuned with subtle artistry, Nor, indeed, anything in it that could be

  called music. But just a sweet whispered babbling, A running on of slender silver tones, The one tripping the other up ceaselessly, A never-ending succession of odds and ends of simple pleasant sound, Like the low talk of the water-brooks. All the songs of English wild birds May be said to have some more than fanciful

  kinship or other with human feeling, If only lovers of the countryside could as to the precise tendency. But there need be little variance of opinion As to where the song of the wrens is to be placed. You cannot listen to the wren year in and year out,

  In storm or shine, easy times or adverse times, Without linking her up inevitably with the sort of simple human nature Whose instinct is to make the best and brightest of things. The robin is hard to daunt. There are few times of year, Except in the parching heats of summer,

  When his quaint recitative fails in the hedgerow. Yet, though he is no fair-weatherer song-star, The robin's hardy-hood is more than half self-conscious pose, And he ever contrives to put a touch of gentle, fictal melancholy Into his gayest measure. He will not own that art can ever tolerate a happy ending,

  Even to the merest trifling stanza of his lay. But the wren's song is all serene, contented jollity, Though it be on so minute and unassuming a scale. Heard in the gloom of the chilly fog-bound morning, It brings a catch to the heart that is almost repentance

  At dour thoughts too ready in recrimination of the absent sun. Out there in the cold, bedraggled and hungry, Shelterless among the soaking apple-bells, The very air but a less ponderable form of water, Still she sings and sings again, filling the wan, shrouded, moping world With her little bright shreds and tatters of music,

  As a darkened chamber will be filled with golden dust-moats By a penetrating beam of light. Coming out upon the hillside in the first clear light of dawn, And looking eastward, I could see nothing of the valley For the dense ground-mist lying far below me like a lake of milk,

  With here and there the highest treetops sharply piercing its level of formless white. The day was breaking in a flood of silvery light Streaming up behind a trellis of deep grey cloud That covered the whole eastern sky. Strong, fine, wavering parallels of smoke-pearl grey

  Silhouetted upon the shining horizon wall. The light strengthened. Slowly, here and there, in the steep, dark griddle of cloud, There came a spot of tender rose. Almost imperceptibly, these touches of soft, stealthy colour

  Grew and multiplied until every cloud-bar stood rimmed beneath With vague rosy dapples of light. Then, with a curious suddenness, these myriad spots of faint colour Glowed up everywhere into clear, soft crimson, Dying the whole heaven in a fiery luster

  And changing the lake of milk-white mist below Into a lake of rich red wine. Just for one radiant, transforming moment. And then the whole eastern sky as suddenly paled down again Into sober, sombre grey upon silver

  With the one central, ever-strengthening zone of gleaming, snow-pure white. But red sky in the morning does not always mean a rainy day to follow. The rule has one exception, invariably, as far as I know, And this is when the morning red is followed by a clear yellow sunrise, The red rain-roses nullified by the true sun-flowers of gold.

  Thus it came about this silent, shrouded autumn morning. Presently, far behind the smoke-grey trellis of eastern cloud, A sudden fleck of amber showed in the silver void. Another and another fleck shot into view Until the whole east was gloriously littered with them

  As by innumerable floating golden feathers. And the snow-pure, ultimate air, warmed into azure, Scarce discernible at the earth-line, but tenderly deep above. Then I saw that a second vertical grill of cloud, Almost the exact counter-point of the first, yet infinitely more remote,

  Stood in the heaven, and that the sudden shoal of amber sun-beams Had been caught in this as in a trammel-net suspended in the far-off skies. Moment after moment the glory grew above and below. The fog-bound earth took the fever of it from the golden morning And lit up beacon-fires on every hill.

  The tree-clumps, standing breast-high in the midst of the valley, Turned to golden islands in a golden sea. Behind me, in the dew-drenched wood, A wren began her simple, twittering melody As though to shame the silence of greater singers.

  A line of black rooks swept noisily across the resplendent sky. The first direct ray of sunshine struck over the shrouded valley, Drawing, as it seemed, an instant deep note from something behind me. Turning, I saw a great ivy-tod in full bloom, Already besieged by countless insects,

  All steeped in the gorgeous sunflower hue, In the golden blossom, golden bees making gold instead of honey. There is only one time in all the year When the country lanes are thronged with flowers, And yet almost destitute of the murmur and glitter of insect life.

  As you stand looking down the long, winding vista of Elm-fringed road, Its green verges still bright as ever with yarrow and scabius, Purple knapweed and golden chamomile, Not a butterfly stirs from end to end, Nor a bee drones in the wayside blossom.

  A week ago the lane was alive with every sort of minute winged creation, But today, though the morning is just as sunny and mild and still, All have mysteriously vanished. These past warm days have brought the ivy of the whole countryside Into full bloom, and butterflies and bees,

  With every tiny atom that can fly or crawl, Have hastened to the feast. And yet, though the flowery borders of the lane are mute for a season, There is a richer volume of music than ever resounded overhead. As you wander through the sun-barred way,

  Every ivy-clad elm-trunk that you pass Hums like a telegraph post in a guile. Where several trees stand close together, The sound attains a surprising depth and intensity. The whole mass of ivy is covered with gold-green clusters of blossom,

  Each besieged by a scrambling horde. Honeybees and wasps mainly, Black and yellow-furred bumblebees by the score, Great shining blue-bottles, Weaned for the nonce of their passion towards carrion,

  Hundreds of creatures whose existence you never even dreamed of, Flies with bodies of checkered mother-of-pearl, Flies half crimson and half shimmering emerald, Lean, elongated creatures like threads of green or amber knitting-silk, And, mingling with awe, great gorgeous butterflies,

  Torto-shells and painted ladies and red admirals, Their brilliant wings showing in the sunlight Like the sails of a fleet of pleasure-yachts Veering together over a sparkling summer sea. Yet there is a vain of sombre, even tragic,

  Circumstance about this vision of stirring life and prosperity Which the time of the ivies blooming Brings to the countryside with every October. As the crowd of insects hustles together, contending for the sweets, The sepals and anthers of the flowers are disengaged,

  And a fine green drift continuously floats down through the sunny air. Four yards round each tree, The roadway is soon littered deep with these particles, But many of them are caught by the spider webs that fill the hedgerows underneath. Every web now, at ordinary times almost invisible,

  Stands out the most conspicuous object of the laneside. When the heavy autumn dews load the spider webs with glittering water beads, Each bead a warning signal that the silliest midge can understand. The spiders must feign go hungry until the sun has drunk the webs dry, Bringing back their invisibility and usefulness together.

  But this clinging litter from the ivy spoils the webs forever as an effective snare. There is nothing for it but to wait fasting, Till the shower is over for the day, And then to cut the useless combered net adrift and weave anew. When the May blossom season has been particularly fine,

  It is sure to bring a wonderful berry harvest in its train, And the hedgerows today are flushed with a richer, deeper red Than any but the oldest of us can match from memory. But the hawthorn fruit, for all its exceptional abundance, Makes up only half the brave show.

  The hips are almost as plentiful, and even brighter a few. The holly everywhere is full of great clusters of berries, Just reaching their authentic shade of true vermilion. Black bryony drapes the hedge with scarlet and green, While the red bryony hangs out necklaces like threaded cherries,

  Ranging from pale yellow to deepest claret. The nightshade berries, softest and richest red of all, Glow in every thicket, and up against the blue sky There are showers of rose-pink spindle-fruits, Like cleft satin cushions with a bead of vivid orange

  Nestling in the heart of each. The old saying that an abundant berry harvest means a hard winter to come Is, in common experience, just as often refuted as confirmed by fact. But whether the wild bird's larder be well or ill provided, The season severe or mild, there is sure to be enacted

  One very interesting manoeuvre during the lean months to come. Though the whole winter's store is now visibly thrown open, And every creature free to squander the good things as it will, The supply is never actually thus dissipated, But is always carefully husbanded, rationed out, as it were, by the plants themselves.

  The secret lies partly in the fact that the berries ripen successionally, And partly in their varying degrees of attractiveness to the birds. The hawthorn, however, is an exception to this law. The whole Mayberry harvest of a district seems to arrive at edible condition At much the same time, and rapidly disappears,

  Being as much wasted as consumed by the feathered flocks That are now beginning to range the countryside everywhere. But the berries next in favour with the birds, the great scarlet hips, Worn off the voracious, improvident crew by a very ingenious device. Though all take on the hue of ripeness from the beginning,

  Each berry preserves an adamantine quality, impregnable to the strongest spill, Until the moment of full maturity is reached, When the whole fruit suddenly softens into a juicy pulp. Thus, a regular proportion of the roseberries is daily released for consumption Throughout the entire winter.

  The holly-bushes keep themselves in reserve as a late supply On a different but equally effective plan. As holly-berries are fairly soft at all times, and of so conspicuous a colour, They would fall an early prey to the hungry hordes, Except for the fact that, though nutritious, they are decidedly unpalatable.

  Holly-berries are only eaten by birds as a last resort. In the same way, we owe the plenitude of buried mistletoe at Christmas To the fact that this wild fruit is of such an obstinately glutinous nature That none of the smaller birds can deal with it, nor, indeed, any of the larger, Except it be swallowed whole.

  End of section 19

• 20 - The Tenth Month - October - Part 2

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  Section 20 of A COUNTRY CALENDAR by Tickner-Edwards. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Tenth Month, October, Part 2. Against the old cider-house was reared a very mountain of apples, no less, and wagons were continually arriving, bringing more and more.

  It was apple-harvest time, and every able-bodied soul on the farmstead was out in the orchards helping to gather in the fruit. There are many things about Devonshire cider-making, at least the old-fashioned way of it, that strike the unconversant looker on with wonder, even perhaps with a little dismay. This ancient crushing-house, in use at the apple-farm for generations, manifestly harbours

  the accumulated litter and dusty cobwebs of ages. The pulping gear and vats and troughs are black with long service. The old stone and thatch building is dark and dank as the grave. Also the apples are left to lie under the trees too long, one would say, after picking. The most casual glance detects a large proportion of rotting fruit among them, and, undeniably,

  a vast deal of earth and odd debris gets carried in with them to the crush. But the scene in the old cider-house is picturesque enough. In one shadowy bay a placid old horse is trudging eternally round in a circle, communicating the necessary motion to the crushing gear. Above the mill is a great square aperture in the wall through which pours a constant

  thudding torrent of apples thrown in from the mountain heap outside. The ancient machinery makes an incessant grinding, creaking tumult, and the horse's hooves a low thunder on the earthen floor. The air of the place is heavy with sweet, tense vapour from the fermenting cider in the long row of vats.

  Within there is an unending deep, slow burr of devin tongues, and without a cackle of paltry and lowing of kine in the adjacent farmyard, all just as it has been perhaps for unnumbered centuries gone by. Tucked away in some dim, steamy, fragrant corner of the building, out of the way of the busy throng, where I have inveigled the old farmer into a few moments' talk, I soon

  begin to learn things about apples and cider-making I had little dreamed of before. The quality of devin cider, he tells me, has been deteriorating for many years past, and must still further decline in the future. The reason for this is that the old small cider apples, the butterboxes and smack-my-girdles and beckington greys, and all the rest of the ancient sorts, are steadily going out

  of cultivation. As the old trees wear out or fall, only the larger table-apple kinds are being planted in their place, as it pays much better to grow these, seeing that they fetch four times the market price. Eventually the small, heavy-cored cider apples must become extinct, and the cider will be

  made chiefly from windfalls and throw-outs of the larger varieties. The quality of cider, it seems, depends on the cause. The more cause that go into the mash, the choicer the cider will be, so the devin cider of the future will bear no comparison with the older brew. There are two strange sounds breaking the quiet of the riverside woods today.

  The one is a crisp, low, sibilant note, endlessly yet intermittently repeated, and, though so subdued, yet curiously distinct in the hush of the keen, bright, frosty morning. The soft, rustling tones come and go, now singly one after the other, true as the beat of a clock, and now in urging, overtripping medleys of quiet sound, as if a sudden flow of wind were sweeping the tangle of foliage, though not a breath of air moves under the

  violet sky. The frost of a single night has worked this strange thing upon the ash-trees, as hard frost always does, coming thus early in the season. Yesterday the trees stood up here and there in the woodland, clothed to their summits in verdure, fresh almost as in its summer prime.

  Today the great ash-sprays, albeit green as ever, are breaking away wholesale and falling to earth with that curious rustling sound to be heard now, near and far, in every wood. In a few days the ashes will have shed their whole garniture of leaves. The other sound which so strangely breaks in upon the hush and stillness of the riverside wood is very different in character.

  The sound is like the incessant ringing of innumerable tiny bells. It is heard only by the waterside, where the great oaks stretch their mammoth branches far out over the river's glassy flow. Like the sound of the falling ash-sprays, it comes by fits and starts, and then in whole torrents of plashing sound together, and again in single rhythmic tones, as though the river

  were one vast campanile and a solitary ringer forever passing idly from chord to chord. What he stands listening to now, in the sunny quiet of the autumn morning, may well puzzle one unused to being out of doors in the country at all seasons, unless he has learned to take into account what sudden changes these first sharp October frosts work upon all growing things.

  And here is one of the simplest, yet most telling, in nature's mysteries of music. Clear and sweet in the calm morning air the melody ripples on, every varying its pace and depth and quality, and until one actually goes to the river's brink and sees the fat green acorns incessantly dropping, each as it touches the water, striking out its own pure sweet note, it is hard to believe that such a bewilderingly beautiful effect can

  be wrought by so slight a means. The overnight's frost has loosened the full-grown acorns in their cups. That is all. And now, under the touch of the sunshine, they are letting go their last frail anchorage and giving the drowsy old river a song for its day-tide dreams.

  In the hedgerows now the spiders are all in pairs, every spinning Jill with her courting Jack hovering somewhere in the leafy background, though often hard to see. You may know the male spider by his longer, leaner body, his bristly, roofless legs, and the curious fact that he carries before him a pair of curved, club-ended feelers for all the world as if he were equipped for a boxing match.

  And for him it is indeed an unpeaceful, often perilous business, this annually recurring impulse of his to go a courting. Whether it be true or not that the female spider brings the honeymoon to a close by devouring her mate, I do not know. I have never witnessed the act.

  But it is true enough that, at this time, the females are all in a moodish, overwrought state, and the males, though incontrollably obsessed of a desire for their company, are nevertheless filled with an unmistakable dread. Wandering along the hedgerow on any of these calm, sunny autumn mornings, you see plenty of the female spiders, who alone spin the webs, sitting motionless in the centre of

  their snares. But the males are not easy to discover on a casual survey. Yet, with a little patient watching, one will presently be observed, moving cautiously from his ambush under a leaf, and setting one foot timorously on the outermost strand of the web.

  Though his touch is so light, the female at once shows her knowledge of his advent by a start, and a sort of bridling movement, but otherwise as yet retains her inert, indifferent mean. Venturing over the net by slow degrees, each step obviously as much impeded by abject fear as impelled by desire, the male draws near, until at last, becoming suddenly bold, he

  makes a little headlong rush towards the coveted prize. Then one of two things immediately happens. Either the female turns upon the intruder like a very tigress, and he is off again into ambush with the speed of light, or she herself flees, leading him a giddy, tortuous dance the surrounding foliage that may last for minutes together.

  But it always seems to end in one way. Sooner or later the pursuing male tires and falls to the rear, stopping at last dead beat, and going usually to crouch under the nearest leaf. The female stops also, and thus they remain for another minute or so eyeing each other from afar.

  Presently you note that the female spider is getting restive. She gives herself a coquettish twirl or two, and then gently creeps towards her suitor. He now in his turn playing the chilly, indifferent game, but evidently watching her approach with the same apprehension leavening his desire. She draws so near as almost to touch him, when suddenly she whirls round, and in a moment

  they are off once more together on the old, interminable love-chase. If one lives near to wood or forest, sound sleep is not easy to come by on these still October nights. There are so many furred or feathered creatures alert and calling to each other far and near, and the voices one hears on warm nights differ essentially from those that keep one waking

  on nights of chill. Warm nights in October are generally cloudy and impenetrably dark, while cold nights are often crystal clear. If you did not feel the warm air stealing over the face as you lie listening near the open window, you would know the mild western weather is still held by the fact that the

  little brown owls are challenging each other everywhere round the old house. Day or night the cry of the little owl is a sure index of the times. Where he gets to in frostbound seasons is hard to say, but his shrill, wild note that echoes so continuously round the village gardens on these tepid, muggy nights is almost never heard in weather that is cold and clear.

  On frosty nights of flinching starshine or stark serenity of moonlit chill, it is the great brown owl alone that fills the autumn quiet with her hollow music. Of all leery sounds that ever came from throat of bird, this is the most arresting. Traditional representations of the cry do not help one much in conveying an impression of it.

  The ancient toot-toot-woo is hopelessly far from the truth. The brown wood owl's note is more like the winding of a great hunting-horn, loud and wild and free, yet full of a winsome, deliberate harmony, sustained, maybe, for hours together. The night that is just gone rang with the fearsome, sweet, unhurried sound from its first darkness through to earliest blink of dawn.

  Now and again, too, a curlew went over with her weird, harsh, jangling cry. And once a far-away, whimpering chorus grew into earshot, and across the moon's dim, half-averted face, incredibly far above, a line of dark form sped like a flight of shaftless arrowheads, wild geese perhaps on their remote annual trek to the meers of some remote and unknown land.

  But the strangest sound of all on these tense, breathless autumn nights is the calling of the red deer in the forestland beyond the thread of glittering silver that marks the river's course. At any other time of year one may wander through the leafy fastnesses for miles, and get no more than a glimpse of the herd careering over the next hill.

  But this is the time of the roaring, the brief love-making season for the red deer, and one goes to the forest at one's peril. The hinds are harmless enough, huddled together timorously here and there in the open glades. But the stags are all mad with jealousy, spending every moment of daylight and darkness bellowing savage defiance at each other from opposing hillcrests.

  Away on the hill farm the threshing mill has been humming all day long, and now in the serene golden light of evening the deep, quiet voice of it holds the ear as persistently as ever. Looking up towards the farm, you note that the three or four corn-ricks silhouetted against the sky for weeks past have vanished, all but a single inconsiderable stump, and that

  a great mountain heap of straw has risen hard by. Obviously the hired threshing gang is working late so as to finish the job before dusk, and be off to the next farm with the earliest gray of morning. It is the fashion to deplore the use of power mechanism in agriculture as destructive of the old aesthetic country spirit. But in this regard the steam threshing machine, at least,

  has given more than it has taken away. When they are threshing at the hill farm on these bright, still autumn days, the whole village is pervaded by a soft, continuous music of a siren-like charm impossible to resist. Hour after hour the rich, quiet, solemn voice dwells on, unceasing, yet ever varied in pitch

  and tone and volume, rising now into a grand, sweet organ-peel, and now subsiding into a low, mellow, tenor note with the whisper of the wind in it, though not a breath moves under the violet sky. And through it all the engine beats steady time, a measured throb that ever breaks the music into low ripples as it comes stealing down the green hillside.

  And now and again, bringing the artistic caesura into the line, a sudden high note as of a vast sheet of silver foil incontinentally shaken, the song of the great, flapping, erratic leather belt linking up the two monstrous machines. The evening light droops dimmer and more richly golden. In the east the night blue is climbing up the steep of the sky, and one bright flinching star-point has already broken through.

  Over darkling meadow and wood and down and indescribable unearthly stillness broods. You come out into the deserted village street and look towards the hilltop, where the white plume of steam from the busy engine is alone discernible under the failing light. In the intense quietude the song of the threshing machine seems louder and clearer than ever. But you know, with darkness so near, there can be only a few more sheaves to put through

  the mill. And then must come what you have been waiting for, what indeed any true country lover would wait a long hour to hear. Sweet as is the song of the threshing mill heard all through a calm, sun-bright October day, it is its last drawn-out appeal that sums up, interprets its whole mysterious beauty. And now this comes to you over the intervening zone of owl-haunted wood and field. First

  you see the steam shut off, and then the whole contrivance begins to slow down to a halt. Every stage in this deliberate process is marked by a change in the rich tranquil symphony. Note by note, each tone quieter and more leisurely, the music falls through an entire double octave of the scale, until it dies away at last in the profoundest, softest bass. End of Section 20

• 21 - The Eleventh Month - November

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  XXI. November. In the calm November sunshine it is difficult to believe that only yesterday the northeast wind was roaring in the treetops under a bleak drab sky, and the air full of careering snowflakes or icy sleet that drove upon the face like scraps of jagged iron. Only the bare ash trees stand in the wood to-day, mute witnesses of the wintry raid gone by.

  It is doubtful whether one in a score, even among country folk bred and born, has ever seen the ash in its full autumnal dress. Pass beneath any of the naked trees to-day, and you tread ankle-deep in fallen leaf-sprays of richer seaweed brown. A tree clad in that softly lurid colour would arrest the eye in any prospect, even in red

  November. But it is nearly always in this wise with the ash. For weeks past the oak woods have been bronzing, and the beaches taking on a warm russet, and the maples flushing scarlet, and the alms hanging out banners of gold. Only the ash of all forest trees has withstood October's insidious alchemy, and has kept

  its green summer robe in violet to the last. But there comes the inevitable cold snap as November draws on. The first sharp frost begins the work, and the rough wind does the rest. One morning the ash stands green as in days of June. The next, every spray is cast to earth, littering the whole wagon-way inches deep in emerald.

  But the green road lasts only an hour or two. This mild still morning, when the sunshine lies like liquid amber in all the crevices of the hills, and the thrushes are beginning to remember old songs, the fleeting colour has already vanished. Bare grey branches stretch overhead against the blue sky, every slender twig beaded thick

  with coal-black buds. When the hot sun of noon has contrived to rouse the slumbering zephyrs, you shall hear the authentic voice of winter again, the song of the wind through naked bells, while yet no other tree has let fall a tithe of its ruddy foliage. But of a truth, red November makes good its right to the ancient name only in a single

  season here and there within a decade. All depends on the weather. If the rough gales and the frosts forbear, the beech-woods will burn on for weeks to come, and every elm will be aflame to light the woodland way. In certain favoured seasons a few of the more sheltered oaks and most of the young beech-saplings

  will retain their whole panoply of brown leaves all the winter through. And strong winds, so that the frosts abstain, will not balk November of its traditional colouring. Every morning now, the first token of wildlife for stir in the world is the clamour of the rooks as they drift over the sleeping village, hundred strong high up against the misty November

  sky. Coming out into the garden to look up at them in the first silvery gleam of dawn, you find it hard to distinguish in the outset exactly what is going forward. Though the whole vast multitude is gradually veering towards the eastward light, the birds individually seem to be facing and moving always.

  A flutter of a wing is to be seen. The whole ceaseless gyration of the throng is maintained almost entirely by slow circles and spirals performed by each bird, the combined effect being that of an intricate dark pattern woven upon the faint frosty blue of the sky. And all the time this strange sound, so deliberate, yet so forceful, fills the air.

  The common purpose, whatever it be, voiced by this great surging melody. As you stand listening and wondering at the depth and volume of the sound, and the immensity of the streaming host, sight and sound pass over together. Within a minute or two both have dwindled away into the far silence of the lowlands, and the sun pours over the hilltop.

  The milk-white autumn morning is suddenly transfixed by a thousand flashing golden swords. This great travel song of the rooks marks the beginning of every day of open weather in November. But it is not a sunrise chorus alone. Scarce an hour of the day goes by without the like scene being enacted.

  The whole countryside seems to be swept by these wandering battalions of the skies, nearly always soaring at a great height and coming from no point of the compass in particular, observing the same strange method of advancement, a steady gradual progress of the entire company in one definite direction, yet incessant variance in individual flight, so that, at all times, a good half of the throng may be circling and swaying on an opposite course.

  So long as the mild November weather lasts, the whole rook population of the country seems to be restless and capriciously astir as bees at swarming time. Though, far below in the valley, the white sea fog still hides all the village but its glittering steeple vein from view, here in the heart of the Downs the calm clear morning sunshine is filling the dew-drenched grass with a myriad burning points of rainbow light.

  Those who know Downland only in summertime never really see it in all its subtle beauty and mystery. It is in winter, and then only on these rare days of utter calm following frosty nights, that one gets to know what space and altitude, limitless sunshine and blue sky, unbroken day-long solitude, mile upon mile of green hill and dale, every dew-soaked tussock, a

  whirling kaleidoscope of shining gems, air like wine, and interminable strains of sweet, pervading earth and heaven, can together signify in the solace and refreshment of weary workaday men. But it is the music of the Downs in wintertime, the song of the larks and the quiet tolling of the sheep-bells far and near, that chiefly ministers to the need of one escaped from

  the grey street crevices of a city. The skylark's song in winter is none of the exalted qualities of summertime. You do not stand for long minutes together, straining sight and hearing up into the remote blue regions of space, hearkening and wondering how such a very cascade of song could come from so tiny a singer.

  And on such days as this the lark seldom ventures far from the green earth. His winter song is but a moment's melody. You see a sudden dark, flickering atom sidling up a few yards into the sunlight, and hear an instant's music flung with merry abandon into the crisp, keen air. But the next instant the lark drops like a stone, and the song is done.

  Yet in a moment another minstrel has taken up the strain. All the morning through, and hour by hour, if you will, you can time your step to its jolly roundelay. The sheep-bells further a different human need. The

  Small wonder that shepherds are, tribally, ruminative placid folk, seeing that their lives are passed in such an environment of aerial music. Listen to the drowsy symphony now, as the flock drifts slowly across the coom from hill to hill, half a mile from where you stand. Though the sheep look only like tufts of grey thistle down upon the green, every sound they

  make is clearly borne up to you through the serene, pure air. The quiet music lifts and falls, now in grand sweet chords, high or low, as the great iron weather-bells or the little tinkling bronze castlings happen to chime together, and now in long wavering rills of soft notes chasing each other up and down the skyele. South-down bell music is the very charmstuff against all civic fret and care.

  Strangers traversing the village street, if it be noon and the winter's day sunny and still, seldom get past the corner by the bee-garden without stopping short to gaze about them wonderingly. There is a mysterious sound upon the air, a rich, insistent, throbbing music that might be the droning of one of the great pedal-pipes of a cathedral organ heard afar, but where

  it comes from is hardly ever guessed. The old lichen-walled wall, with its coping of gold-green moss, cuts off all view of the hives with their winged legions out for their daily noontide cleansing flight. Generally, after a long but fruitless peering about for a solution of the mystery and a final questioning stare at the blue sky, the stranger passes on.

  Lured up-street may be by the welcoming sign of the inn, yet as often assuredly by the siren chime of the smithy anvil, the only other sound that breaks the silence of a winter's day. Bee-masters have this great good thing conceded by providence to their ancient calling. On almost any day in winter, if the sun shines bright and the hives are in a sheltered nook,

  they have only to loiter out into their bee-gardens to bring back summer's most joyous music at a stroke. It is not for nothing that the honeybee, almost alone among winged insects, has been denied the boon of hibernation. She lies up quietly enough, sometimes for weeks on end, during the worst inclemencies of frost.

  The whole winter through, save in abnormally mild seasons, every hive is as still as a catacomb, except at this magic noontide hour on days of sunny calm. And then an astonishing thing suddenly comes to pass. One moment the drowsy golden silence of the bee-garden seems as profound, as inviolable, as though the village lay full five-fathom down at the bottom of a golden sea.

  And the next moment it is as if a revali-trump had sounded simultaneously in every bee-dwelling to rouse the slumberers. Shining brown atoms of life begin to appear on each threshold, and crystal veins are everywhere unfurled. A thousand harp-strings begin to sound as one.

  In a few short minutes every hive is the centre of a little, hovering, swirling cloud of misty light, made up of the scintillations from innumerable wings, and the song has grown to a very hurricane of music. If the limpid glory of the morning endure, the symphony holds on at its fullest perhaps of an hour, and then it dies gradually down until the last of the airy roisterers has

  got back snug and warm to the cosy cluster within the hive. But if the sunlight be dimmed, even though only for an instant, the song is like to end almost as abruptly as it started. The old quietude comes back to the bee-garden, treading hard upon the heels of its loudest, most joyous strain.

  The morning sunbeams, slanting across the lane, turn the hedgerow into one long heaving billow of silver light. Wild clematis, or old man's beard, so little regarded in summertime, is easily the dominant note among wayside vegetation in November. The berries of thorn and briar and holly glow with rich colour, and the autumn leaves, fallen,

  falling, or still holding to their frail anchorage aloft, steep the countryside in a mirage of gold. But it is all only reflected, borrowed glory. Only clematis alone seems to give out light of itself. With its pale green wreaths of foliage and inconspicuous blossom, you have passed this

  way a hundred times, giving it scarce a glance. But now, in its full winter garb, it overrides everything. From end to end of the lane, all colour, even the brightest, goes down before its dazzling snow-pure luster. The privet is another of the common lane-side plants which are seldom noticed in the throng

  and press of summer, yet which, in autumn, take to themselves predominant traits. In the privetberry, the quality that makes you stop to look at its prim glittering clusters now is probably unique. One speaks of the sloe as a black fruit, but it is really blue. The blackberry, even at its ripest, is no more than a deep purple.

  But the privetberry is blackness, pure, unqualified, perhaps the blackest thing in living creation on this side of the world. The close-knit pyramids of berries make spots of unfathomable darkness set in the labyrinth of sunlit amber and russet and crimson, with all the telling effect of the old-time patch on a lady's face.

  But perhaps the most curious instance of this autumnal exaltation of summer's unconsidered things is to be found in the spindle-tree. The spindle, with its attenuated structure, its light and diffident foliage, and flowers of meanly meagre stamp, passes absolutely unnoticed even in a crowd of the humblest woodland growths.

  Yet, look at it now, lighting up the whole thicket as with rose-red flame. Each tiny floret of dingy white, scarce marked in the springtime, has changed into a pentiform casket covered with pink satin, and this, springing open like a star trap, has pushed forth five great ovules of vivid orange, orange and rich rose-red, the whole tree standing out a mass of colour where a few months back its very existence was known only to a few

  wood-haunting moths and bees. There's the song-thrush singing, perched on the outermost twig of the elm branch over reaching the lane, a coal-black spot on the grey November sky. He has been sitting there and singing in desultory fashion all the dim, quiet morning through, now and then flying off for a minute or two, but always returning sooner or later to the same lofty perch, and

  beginning again the same soft, deliberate melody. Song-thrush music in November has little resemblance to the rippling, careless, joyful song of April days. The singer is only just getting back to his work after the long summer and autumn silence, and as yet he lacks artistic confidence and verve. A minute ago a missile-thrush tuned up in the riverside alders, and his song, though

  brief, was in no wise different from that of any other time. Just the same hailing, undulating sound, four or five notes of indifferent quality following each other in the silence same vapid fashion, and endlessly reiterated, whether the month be December or May. But the music of the song-thrush, more perhaps than that of any other bird, is curiously affected by times and seasons.

  On these brooding, silent days in late autumn, when the face of winter is beginning to show grisly and dour through the fast thinning woods, the thrush gives over much of his characteristic love of repetition, a mere heterogeneous piling up of melodious sounds, and his song becomes a real, connected and ordered theme. Listen to him now, as he sits motionless on his solitary perch under the gloom and quiet

  of the windless morning. From afar the song seemed to be a succession of isolated stanzas, going off like minute-guns in the muffled, dead-still air. But standing close under the elm branch, where he perches, you soon find out that these intervals are seldom really mute. There is a little soft, inward song with almost a blackbird quality of sedateness that thrushes

  in November love to alternate with their louder, more authentic strains. If the bird were not there plain to your eyes, and unmistakably a song-thrush, you might humour the fancy that a blackbird was breaking the hitherto inviolable tradition of his race, and altruistically tuning his pipe to suit the need of lean times, and not, as he ever does, merely gilding the refined gold of summer's season.

  This quiet, deliberate melody of the song-thrush, characteristic of the times, is well worth study, for it is incomparably the finest thing he does. You may never hear the beginning of the song, so softly is it uttered, but it grows and gathers in the still air with an indescribably winning insistence. Sweet, silver-bright stanzas following each other like the slowly paid-out beads of a rosary, each bead of rarer craftsmanship than the

  last. As the days shorten, the songs of the thrushes lengthen. From the single, rare note heard on some warm, showery daybreak at the beginning of the month, and then not again, perhaps for days together, the song-thrush's clear pipe soon becomes an integral part of the morning's melody.

  To one abroad on these mist-shrouded November dawns, when nothing of earth or sky can be seen but a shining white vacuity above and below, and nothing heard at first but the steady drip of moisture from the waterlogged trees. It is almost startling to hear the thrush set up her merry tune. She makes no preamble, but suddenly hurls a silver javelin of song across the lane, and follows it by another and another until the whole silent

  valley echoes to the music. A wren is sure to come next with her simple, high-pitched, twittering refrain, and then the robins join in, one by one, quietly and, as it were, under their breath. Mavis and Wren and Robin first, and then, almost always, the shrill, uncanny cry of a little brown owl, either ending or beginning his foray, for he hunts by day as well as

  by night. The wailing staccato travels round meadow and wood, heaving in the glittering miasma of the morning a strange ventriloquial quality, so that one can never be sure of its distance or direction. Wings begin to whistle and cluck and wheeze in the deep of the wood, and in the hedgerows as you go along innumerable tiny wings are astir amidst the incessant pattering cascade

  of water drops. In summertime the road through the wood is a white road, rippling away between verges of mossy green overhung with flowers of every conceivable hue. Flower-cumbered sunshine and flower-thronged shade, until, afar off, it narrows to a mere silver thread where it tops the hill and comes to a sudden end against the blue.

  But now, as you stand looking through the tunnel of beech wood with the Elm Grove beyond, to the faraway brightness of the open lane, you mark how all its whiteness has vanished under a thick carpet of fallen leaves. Red in the beech wood, gold under the elms, and gold again on the open road, but of a sadder, quieter tinge, where the shrill, in constant wind, is stripping the fading maple leaves from the hedgers and wafting them like yellow

  butterflies across the way. Once these early keen autumnal frosts have fastened their grip upon the greenery of wood and hedgerow, it is wonderful how swiftly the autumn colours come. Far and near the country seems already to have broken out into a vast spreading conflagration. Zones of sheer flame, where the great topping elms fill the valleys, and whole provinces of sullen, smouldering

  fire, where the beech woods climb the steeps. Loitering through the old lane, where the great beaches crowd about it most densely, you gaze up and see myriads of red leaves blotting out all vision of the sky, and millions more underfoot, every slow step drawing from them a soft, sibilant music that is the very voice of glad retrospect on summer's greenness, and gladder harking forward to summer's yet

  to come. All about you the dim air is full of sidling, eddying, but ever descending disks of ruddy light, the red rain of the falling leaves. But whether falling, or fallen, or still holding valiantly aloft, for every red leaf there is a new-born bud up there, packed full of promise for next year's life, its swelling growth, indeed, the true cause of each autumn's

  leaf fall. It is difficult to realise this fact, with an icy wind incessantly calling, calling, change and decay on all around icy. The north wind is always for dirges and requiems, in or out of season. But once grasped, all taint of sadness is banished from autumn forever. The scenery is being shifted upon the earth's stage. That is all. Summer's great act is

  ended. The autumnal hues are but a gorgeous drop scene, let down for a little space to dazzle and draw the eye, while the stage is cleared for the next act in nature's eternal pageant play.

• 22 - The Twelfth Month - December - Part 1

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  In the dripping apple-bell outside the cottage window a starling sat singing his queer song of dawn. Very black and wet he looked against the glimmering silver foil of the morning sky. Just a bedraggled silhouette of a bird, but half awake from his winter-roosting place in the ivy under the eaves. Lying in the grey darkness of the little room, I had heard him go scrambling and rustling out, heard the

  short quick whir of his wings as he flew the yardle sow to the apple-tree, and the sharp impact of his feet on the cascading bough. He was silent a while, and then the curious, pondering recitative began. Its first note brought home to me the welcome truth. The long, pitiless frost had broken at last. A moment later I was thrusting head and shoulders through the little window, drawing in deep draughts of the precious, soul-warming western

  air. Prolonged, in veterate frosty weather, silences nearly all the birds supposed to sing the winter through. I had not heard a thrush for a fortnight, and only an occasional half-hearted trill from Wren or Robin, if the prospitant sun contrived a gleam or two at high noon. But to hear the starling's rare song, and that at first grey light of dawn, could be token only one event. With something of the bird's own gratefulness

  and joy at the return of warm, life-favouring weather stirring within me, I knelt at the little casement, drinking in balm of air and balm of living music to my heart's content. To speak of the starling as a singing bird may well excite the wonder of those who know him in springtime only as the clucking, whistling proletarian of the rooftops, or in winter sweeping across the countryside in incredible hoards with wild discordant cry. But there

  are starlings and starlings, and many a sweet song some of them give at times. The one in the sodden apple thicket under my window began his lay this morning with a low, lingering, inward note strangely reminiscent of the nightingale's familiar keening phrase, the slow tolling of a single deep, quiet bell that always goes before the sudden, obligatory part of the famous symphony. Then he set to work on a piece inimitably his own, a jumble

  of rather reedy tenor notes, picked seemingly at random up and down the scale. It was truly a song nevertheless, and the secret of its fascination lay in its epic power of voicing the common joy of all living moving things at the break in the long frost, the happy birds calling to each other now across the lanes and fields in ever-increasing medley, the song of running water once more, and again the call of the ploughmen to their jingling

  teams. And all through the long, dark, drenching morning a thrush has sung near my open window, the pure sweet notes beating time for the runnel music of the pouring eaves. A country lover housebound by such a Noah's flood of steadily cascading water, and oppressed, even a little appalled by the unending gloom, cannot quite make out at first what the thrush has got to be so merry about, why he sits in the dripping hedgerow caroling out his song hour

  after hour, as though it were a morning in May. The rain drives straight down through the windless torpid hour. You cannot see beyond the end of the village street, wood and field and distant hills, all alike whelmed in a formless mist of water. The very treetops near at hand are lost in the grey, overlooming pool, and yet the thrush pipes on gaily, even rapturously, his clear, crystal-bright song annihilating the gloom and sadness of the

  morning, as though he were put there designedly to shame your pessimistic mood, and turn your leaden, lagging pinpoint into gold as it drives across the page. And that, assuredly, is as it should be. We get but half the good from a country life, from a deliberate attempt to restore correspondence between human life and that which is called nature, if we do not realise how all natural things, including elemental humankind, work together for mutual

  aid and furtherance. The man who treads on a daisy without a pang at heart, he who can tramp the purple moorlands all day long, and see nothing but a little white ball and a distant flag, who can run his boat into a green reed-bower by the riverside, and see nothing but a little white ball and a distant flag, who can run his boat into a green reed-bower by the riverside, and, lying in leaf-windowed summer sunlight, dream only of stops and

  shares, or he who, listening to a nightingale in the sweet June darkness, does not get a new notion from the sound, or learn something from the scent of wild roses, or the lazy crackle of bursting gauze-pods on sweltering summer days, that man is, of all others, to be pitied. Willfully or ignorantly he has disregarded things that, it is hard to believe, were but

  set in his path fortuitously. The story of Pippa's random song, and this thrushes careless piping in the gloom and downpour, surely, in their outcome, betray to us the inmost meaning of what we so strangely miscall happy chance. Wild birdsong and the clear runnel music from the pouring eaves all day through until the dark. And now, with the fall of night, both have ceased together, and another voice begins to creep into the drenched solemn

  stillness out of doors. There seems always something eerie, inopportune, about the wind that slumbers by day, but wakes and flies abroad like an owl at night. Normal effort and alertness appear to belong by right to daylight's hours. But nature ever defies our anthropomorphic imputation of proprieties, and now the wind is getting up with a will. Only a faint crepitation at first in the highest treetops. Within an hour the sound of it has

  grown into a steady organ-peel, a rich reverberating harmony that draws you out into the darkness of the garden to listen, as relistlessly as though you were a ship with all sail spread before the blast. Wind in winter trees has none of the sibilant otio's quality of summertime. The bare treetops are like so many strung harps, each twig adding its own clear note to the symphony. This is just a great strong voice hallowing in the night, an alarm to

  be out and doing. Winter winds have always this urging call to action in their sound, infinitely disquieting to certain natures, especially after dark. But perhaps of all songs of the open air, that of the sea lays a more intimate stress than any upon human hearts. Never ceasing, ever changing, the sound of the sea, to those who dwell by it, becomes a real, though often unrealised, factor in every mood of life.

  Everything in nature has a dominant, but never a single purpose. Sunshine has a myriad uses beyond its principal one of light giving. Seeds nourish the birds as well as propagate their kind. The loveliness of a wild-fly generates loveliness in the mind of the human observer, though its main purpose is to draw to it the fertilising bee. And so, when sun and moon and wind unite to stir the ocean into cloud-making, and thence to its chief end of irrigating

  the earth, there is added to us this great good thing, a constant, yet beautifully inconsistent music, which, whether he will or no, whether he receive it consciously or unconsciously, impels every man to life giving, creative thought. Little Paul Dombey, sitting in his invalid chair by the seashore and trying to make out what it is the wild waves are always saying, is a type of the many who realise that there is some further, finer meaning

  in this eternal ocean melody that peels along our coasts. True musical art makes the hearer forget the music in the reverie it awakens, and this is the quality which is ever present in the song of the sea, giving it its main significance and worth. In calm or storm there is something in it that answers to every human mood, and perhaps it is its innate joyness, its invisible optimism that holds the secret of its fascinating power. The downs on these

  sunless, windless winter days have a charm known to few, because few ever go to them at this season. Seen from the wooded, cultivated lowlands, they look so mournful and so desolate just a grey, misty, sagging line of hills, far aloft and scarce discernible against the kindred grey of the December sky. On the rich alluvial plain below, one thinks, there are at least hedgerows full of bright-hued berries and silver sheen of clematis. Woods already

  purple and russet with promise of a new year's life. Sondthrushes and mistles and red-brass caroling all day long. But what can there be on those bare, deserted heights other than negation of life, snark silence, cheerless solitude? Well, choose the greyer, smokier and gloomier morning and set off up the old chalk lane that leads to the downs. The first thing you realise after gaining the hilltop and journeying a while over the wide table-land

  beyond is that the air has lost its torpidity. There is nothing that can be called wind, yet you move in an atmosphere that is broad awake, full of an indescribable zest and savour, instinct with the very spirit of free, joyous life. And then this greyness and silence and dour, forsaken look which the downs bore, viewed from below, let eyes and ears record the honest truth of what lies now about your path. There is no thrush and robin music which

  would be as unmeat here as in mid-ocean, for in its way, Downland is as alien to a conventional countryside as it is to the deep sea. But the downs have a melody all their own, year-long indeed, except in the brief season of lambing-time when the ewes are down in the farm-staddings. All round you, as you stand in the wide green solitude, the sheep-bells are giving forth their sweet tranquil note. Though there are peewits winding their shrill horns in every

  coom and jays and magpies and furschats in every gorse-patch by the way, you neither want nor heed their busy symphony. The sheep-bells are enough. Distance blends the whole volume of sound from each flock into a single, low, soft clamour, lifting and falling, stopping and going on again by turns. But, drawing nearer, you soon realise what ceaseless variety in pitch and tone these old Sussex sheep-bells can encompass, and how truly they interpret

  the spirit of the scene in which their music is made. Almost, it seems, as if the bellweathers worked in concert designedly. There comes a deep tolling note, measured and slow, from a single bell far up on the hillside, then a tender chord from several smaller bells together. The sound echoed from group to group of the slowly browsing sheep, as if the bells themselves were travelling the still air and chiming as they went. Finally comes a long

  wavering reel of sound that grows into a veritable storm of music as the whole flock, moved by some common impulse, sweeps down the coom together. A moment later, all are still again, and the single, deep-throated bell has the morning to itself once more. Away from the downs in the white wilderness of the wood, the light is so dim that one can scarce make out the path a dozen yards ahead. A single night of frost and fog, and all the newfound

  light-riddled bareness of the winter wood is gone once more. The hoarfrost has gathered incredibly thick upon every twig and branchlet overhead, and upon every bramble and privet spray and stem of grass beneath. The very leaves of autumn covering the path are changed to disks of pure white velvet. The sheathing frost has doubled and trebled the girth of everything living or dead, stopping the light on every hand and blocking out all vision

  of the sky, so that, just for this one white, silent, shrouded hour, the wood has got back in all its depth and fullness a ghostly semblance of its summer gloom. Snow clogs and malforms, imposing a ruthless deadweight of white upon everything. But the hoarfrost only beautifies whatever it overlays, and its magic touch brings to all alike the illusion of a delicate, lovely inflorescence. They are true flower-forms, these spreading stars and Maltese crosses

  and multiple rosettes, into which the frost has transmuted every twig and leaf and grass-blade and sprig of herbage in the old wood. But the seeming utter whiteness of it all has no existence in truth. It is but the phantasm of an eye unversed in the discrimination of minutely associated points of colour. Looking closely, you will soon find out that, in itself, hoarfrost has no whiteness other than the whiteness of scintillating diamond dust, a

  myriad infitesimal sparks of colour, each intensely brilliant atom lost in the glory of its fellows, crimson annihilating emerald, the turquoise obliterating the violet and gold. A still more curious trait in the nature of these hoarfrost effects is the method by which their bewildering beauty and veriformity are brought about. Nothing is merely enlarged by the dense secretion of the frost. All is recreated into something new and strange.

  There is no simple envelopment. The hoarfrost takes twig or leaf or grass-blade merely as foundation, starting point, from which is evolved a fairy structure, wholly alien, it may be, to the thing that gave it initial being. The secret of this original creative power of the hoarfrost lies in the fact that it grows by incessantly adding to itself tiny microcosmic cubes and prisms of ice. The wonderful frost flowers are built up in this way exactly

  as a house is built up of brick or stone. From the steep riverside bank nothing of the water can be seen for the dense intercepting jungle of reeds. Piled gun-brown in colour and all of a height, the reeds stretch away under the still December sunshine in one unbroken receding level that brings up at last against the oak-wood on the farther side of the river, as they see is stopped by beetling cliffs. It is one of those rare times when the garrulous

  reeds may be said to be silent for once, as well as still. In the green summertime, though not the faintest breath of air is moving under heaven, there is never absolute silence in the reed-thicket. It is as if the mere fact of all that congregated verdant growth and rich, sappy life made a sound of its own just discernible to human ear. But in the slumber time of winter still days are really silent days in these mimic forests of reeds. Standing

  on the high bank and looking out over the wide sunlit expanse, I could detect not the slightest sound, strain the ear as I would, nor mark the merest deflection in any of the myriad close-knit stems. The utter silence and the stillness, dwelling on minute after minute at length, took to themselves an oppressive, almost an uncanny, cast. But these times of perfect, unleavened stillness out of doors seldom endure for long. If the season be winter

  and the hour verging on towards noon of a sunny day, they may last only a minute or two, and then end as suddenly as they began. It is not often that one hears the wind stop dead, fall like a shot bird, as I heard it a short ten minutes ago. Still more hourly does it come within one's experience to hear it reawaken as suddenly sound and motion spring up together, rise in a moment, visible and vocal, like a lark leaving the clod and lifting

  her sudden music to the skies. Yet so it happened to-day, as I stopped to look over the vast dun-plane of riverside reeds, wondering at their silence and stark immobility under the yellow winter sun. I saw and heard the wind returning long before its first rough breath struck upon the cheek. Far away over the soft filmy level a voice was suddenly upraised in the silence, and a deep cleft as suddenly came in the brown. The hurrying, hustling

  channels of shadow, lighter and darker by turns, began to chase each other impetuously forward. Little eager whirlpools appeared between the furrows and spun round together in a giddy dance, and great sombre chasms opened in their path, ruthlessly engulfing them. The brown reed ocean began to fall into seething sierras of wave-crests with deep surging hollows between, and all came driving relentlessly onward until at last the reed

  rampart close by broke under the onslaught and came shattering down about my ears.

• 23 - The Twelfth Month - December - Part 2

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  In the village garden, under the bright noon sunshine, singing thrushes and singing bees make the day more like a day in early summer than one at the very nadir of the year. Those who think of beehives as dead, silent things throughout the long English winter are always astounded at the busy life abroad at every break in the frosty weather. For there is no true hibernation in hive life. The bees merely get together between the combs

  in a solid phalanx, with their precious queen in their midst, and there they slumber contentedly through the long frostbound days and nights, rousing ever so little now and then to take what food is necessary to sustain life. So long as the cold endures, the bee garden is silent enough, save for the merry thrush music in the leafless boughs. But with the first breath of southern air, that so often comes up like new life in the darkness of the winter's night when a change is

  brewing, a mysterious sound can be heard along the row of hives. Wandering out into the garden then, under the flinching silver of the stars, the night air strikes almost hot upon your cheek, and you bring up, stock still, at the wonderful new sound that is thrilling in the darkness, as though a great harp string had been touched ever so gently by an invisible hand. All bee-masters know the sound and the cause of it. Every bee in the garden, and there may be

  ten thousand or more to a hive, is suddenly awake and stirring and telling all her bedfellows that the cold is gone, and the long-awaited turn of the days is here at last. And now, under the warm still light of cloudless noon, the whole garden is full of scintillating wings, and the morning overladen with a soft, drowsy melody. There is, indeed, no busy, purposeful coming and going as in summer days, no ceaseless streams of bees pouring from the hives and away under the blue sky towards the

  blossoming clover fields, and no opposing streams of home-wending bees so heavily burdened with nectar and golden pollen that they can scarce drag themselves into the hives. The activity today is merely for exercise, recreation, bodily easement. If you watch a single bee just emerging from her dwelling, you will see that she does not lance straight off into the skies, as she would do if the honey-harvest of summer were at its full

  gathering. She just lifts herself sedately into the air, and, turning, hovers a while with her head to the hive, as though taking careful stock of it. And then she will sail off into the aerial throng, making half a dozen deliberate circles and spirals, then a wide, desultory sweep or two round the garden, finally returning to the hive and running in at once, as if glad to get back to its cosy warmth and gloom. Then there are the winter moths. To carry a lantern into the woods

  on any of these mild and muggy winter nights is to get a glimpse into a phase of wildlife that the most diligent quest has never yet robbed of all its mystery. Richness of colour and grace of form in insect, bird or flower are wonderful enough in summer's broad day. Yet their existence is at least understandable, if only on the old rash conjecture as being for human ennoblement or delight. But why should the blind winter dark be sewn thick with living gems of

  beauty, winged wandering jewels that pass and repass through the yellow lantern glow, shining hovering specks of colour, fiery amber or dusky gold or pale moony silver grey, more lustrous than all? Such a thought must occur to the least imaginative on coming by lamp-light into a wood on any of these tepid muffled winter nights and observing the many moths abroad. Without the lantern the darkness would be complete. The link-bearer is engulfed,

  encased in it as a worm that has eaten its way into the heart of a bale of black velvet. And, as is the darkness, so the silence. Though afar off, the wailing note of an owl vexes the secret deep of the wood, and rarely a breath of night wind draws across the highest treetops. The whole wide valley of a forested land seems entirely mute. Coming to a halt at length, the rhythmic surge of my feet through the fallen leaves dies down,

  and there gathers about me in a moment a silence that is almost fearsome in its profundity. I can hear my own heart beating and the tick of my watch in its fob. And then, long before the little careering atom of smouldering bronze draws into the magic circle of the light, a dull, thrumming note grows on the air. It is a December moth, a female, plainly by her size and breadth of wing, swinging gaily through the golden patch

  in the Sumerian darkness, back and through again, ever with the same jaunty, errandless gate, and presently others with her, until the whole circle of light is alive with tiny, veering flecks of topaz and amber and sheeny moonstone, and the air throbs with a sound as of elfin music, for all it is but just within the stretch of the intensest air. There are other winter moths that may soon be chanced upon in the deep woods and tree-girt lanes,

  and these strange are still in their habit of life, though, so far as my knowledge takes me, it is only the gloaming winged December, and perhaps only the female at that, which gives out this ineffably soft murmur as it goes. Such moths as the Dunred Herald, and that known as the Early, may be already on the wing in certain favoured districts, lured from the chrysalid stage out of due season by the strangely

  clement times. But the lantern will draw only the fluttering, blundering males, for the astonishing reason that it is the males alone which fly. The females of all this mysterious family are equipped with only the merest travesty for wings, entirely useless in flight, and pass their lives hiding among the twigs of the hedgerows or in crevices of the bark of trees. Now and again, as I pass along, the light of the lantern just catches on the holly berries.

  It is certain now that there will be no lack in English homes, or need be none, at least, of bright-buried holly for the garland-making at Christmas. And it is equally certain that many people, whose only acquaintance with holly is an indoor one at this season, will be noticing how much of its green glossy foliage is without the usual spines. The holly's overflowing horn of plenty this December is due indirectly to the long-continued mildness of the times.

  When winter sets in very early, and with unusual severity, the stores of rose and mayberries on the countryside are prematurely exhausted, and the birds must come to the attractive yet ill-flavoured holly or starve. But in seasons of mild open weather, such as has been experienced lately, especially in good blossom years like the present, the plenitude of hips and whores, supplemented by the fact that mild winters delay the crowding of the normally

  insectivorous birds to the hedgerows for food, has almost wholly kept the holly berries from depredation. Sometimes, however, it happens that the holly will bear its scarlet load of fruit untouched till well into December. And then, the hard frost suddenly setting in, Christmas finds the holly berries all but gone, the garland-makers bereft of their chief supplies. The absence of prickly leaves, which will probably be observed on some of the most

  richly and profusely buried holly bells gathered for decoration this year, is explained by the circumstance that the older trees have borne exceptionally well this season on their upper branches, so well, in fact, that it has been worthwhile to climb for their treasure of densely clustered fruit. If the holly is not a tree that thinks, it is not easy to understand its plan of life in regard to this question of spined and unspined foliage. The whole plant,

  bark and leaf and tender twig, is good to eat, as most four-footed creatures know. The young holly saplings have a perilous time of it in natural, unprotected situations, not a tithe of them ever reaching maturity. But where one has chance to attain such girth and height as to defy the bark-nibbling rabbits, it is only to find itself beset with new dangers. Browsing animals would soon strip it of its fleshy succulent leaves if it did not put on this formidable

  armament of prickles. Yet, and here is where the holly tree seems to make a reasonable proposition of life as opposed to an instinctive one, it grows these prickly defences only to the height normally reached by its larger, hungry foes. Above that line, the leaves swiftly lose their sharp, strong barbs, and the upper regions of growth bear only smooth, unspined foliage, though there the brilliant-hued berries make a braver show than ever. White fog and a white seashore,

  and the sullen waters whispering afar off invisibly on the brink of the low tide sands. To realise the utter solitude of the place, one must be here alone on the shrouded winter's morning, alone amidst the white silence above and below. Lifeless, colourless, formless, mute, but for the one soft, crisping murmur stealing over to you through the void. Walking just where the steep shingle bank and the rippled sandy levels meet, your footsteps make not the slightest

  sound in the snow. No single cry of bird nor audible token of other life reaches the air. The dim air is as still as the age-long imprisoned air of a crypt. You seem to be alone on the whole wide earth. And then the rapt intensity of silence breaks with such a sudden crash and commotion as sends your heart leaping into your cap with the utter surprise of it all. Yet by reason of such a simple, ordinary thing, no more than a hare hiding among the low tide rocks.

  What he was doing there on such a morning passes all conjecture. But now, startled at your approach, he is up and off with the speed of light along the precipitous shore, scattering pebbles and snow together uproariously as he goes. To the eye, through the dense white mist, he is lost almost in a moment. But the clatter of his sudden flight can be followed, ever diminishing, until, perhaps half a mile away, the straining air loses it finally.

  The silence shuts down again over the scene as solidly as ever. White fog looming over a white seashore, and the sullen waters lisping afar off, unseen on the brink of the low tide sands. But these portentous phases of the season, albeit seemingly so lasting and profound, are scarce ever more than the passing mood of an hour. Even as you stand wondering, and a little awed at the blind hush on everything about you,

  a change comes in the lilt of distant watersong. The tide has turned, and the first in-driving ripples are beginning to add their eager bell music to the old, quiet, lisping, listless strain. And now you can just discern a lightning of the fog around you, a gradual thinning and cleaving far and near, above and below. In a little while, the irregular line of shingled shore to east and west becomes dimly perceptible. A few more minutes, and, looking seaward, you can make out the new foam of

  oncoming waters, each white curve driving in a little nearer than its fellow before. Out now over the sloppy, glittering, weed-tressed sands to the very brink of the waters, but just in time to note their intense deep green under the newfound light, before the wreaths of white vapour overhead rend and sweep asunder. Suddenly before you a resplendent golden pathway of sunbeams is laid upon the green,

  stretching right from your very feet to the remote horizon line, the dim blue trysting place of sky and sea. It is not the green earth alone which has her seasons. Spring and summer, autumn and winter, are as indubitably written month by month in the skies. The variances of light and cloud effect in winter, contrary to the general belief, tend in the main not towards turbulence and gloom, but rather towards harmony and serenity

  of hue and form, as all know well who study the skies year in and year out. Calm days at this season, and they are many, seldom pass into other than nights of star-jammed or moonlit calm. Pure tranquillity done in silver point on azure. And the few really boisterous winter days, days of resounding wind and black storm cloud driving helter-skelter over the world, commonly end in a sundown that is just formless,

  tinctured radiance and nothing more. Not a breath of air moving now, nor a trace of cloud showing between darkling earth and darkling sky. But the day's end most thoroughly characteristic of this spirit of serenity and concord marking the English winter is the kind which so often brings what is called threatening weather to a close. The morning light comes late, and in a seemingly tentative diffident way. All day through great vague masses of cloud

  stand about in the sky, shifting their station scarce a jot from hour to hour, one would say. But for the ever-waxing and waning sunshine abelt one's path, the incessant dimming and brightening of the distant hills. But at the sunset hour all the dubiety of the elements banishes, suddenly knit, as it were, into one set purpose of wonder weaving. The clouds in the east endlessly divide themselves into ribbons and ripples and trailing garlands and festoons,

  all sharply delicately carved out of alabaster and laid upon a field of polluted air intensely blue above but shading down towards the earth line into soft pure green. And every fleck of cloud from horizon to zenith is steeped through and through not with mere colour of fine gold but with an intolerable glory of golden flame. And each resplendent plume or cresting wavelet of fire has all its edges clear cut against the living amethyst or emerald of far the most space.

  There is not a trace of sullying, incongruous shadow or of cooler colour in the whole magnificent array of the sky, nor of one hue merging into another, just a bewilderingly beautiful crazy pattern of molten amber upon burning blue, all alike in its sheer intensity with the coal-black sierra of wooded earth line losing itself beneath in a sombre scumbling of rose. THE END OF TWELVE GLAD MONTHS

  END OF SECTION 23 END OF A COUNTRY CALENDAR BY TICKNER REDWOODS