Part 10

Before the frost began the water was over the garden, and even on the cottage floor. And now, though the house is clear, the ice stretches away almost from the threshold, as far as the eye can see over the level country. It would be hard to picture a scene more absolutely desolate. On the skyline to the southward, just seen through the wintry haze, is a long line of low bluehills, with patches of snow on them dimly showing. Over a dark belt of fir trees to the eastward rises the Tor of Glastonbury, snow covered, too, for once. And right to the bases of the hills, over field after field, stretches for miles the great white plain, broken only by lines of pollard willows, by tall aspens and clumps of alder; with patches of furze that look strangely out of place rising up through the ice, with here and there a gate, half-hidden, with haystacks standing forlorn upon the wintry level, and, sadder still, with cottages that, long since rendered uninhabitable by the water, are now completely surrounded by the ice.

In that cottage, some hundred yards farther on, whose walls have settled so much in the soft peat that there is not a straight line in all its primitive architecture, the water is still nine inches deep in all the rooms. The tenant of it is that moor man standing yonder, lending a helping hand to the skaters preparing for the ice. A picturesque figure, whose old brown coat, with its endless varieties of shade would delight the soul of an artist. You can understand why he wears boots up to his knees when you learn that every day, from the beginning of December until a fortnight since, he waded to his door through more than a foot of water. He is better off since the frost, for now he can slide in.

A characteristic touch about these cottages is the store of winter fuel, the stacks of peat heaped against the wall. Almost more characteristic still is the quaintly-shaped boat, flat-bottomed, sharp at both ends, that you see in so many gardens; for not only are floods here far too common, but the innumerable ditches make convenient waterways for bringing home grass or peat.

A strange silence broods over the landscape. No birds are visible save the few that hang about the outbuildings. The flocks of gulls and the few ducks that were here before the floods were frozen have all disappeared. Multitudes of skylarks, too, passed over when the snow set in, but they soon vanished. This was once a great country for wild-duck. Twenty years ago there were four decoys almost in sight from this cottage. Now they are all drained--"let off" as the moor folk put it. The only sound besides the low lament of the wind among the alders, the plaintive protests of the heifers in the byres, and the laughter and voices and occasional clink of steel where the skaters are preparing for work, is a strange, hollow, booming sound under the ice, or the sharper crash when it gives way because the water has gone from under it. It is strange to see great sheets of ice caught in the bushes or among the alder stems, feet above the general level.

It is a wintry wind that sweeps over the frozen marshes. But here, in this sunny corner, with a heap of dry peats to sit on, in the shelter of a stable on whose door is nailed a lucky horseshoe, there is the warmth of very summer.

But hark, the ring of skates upon the ice! And see, the skaters are leaving their little camping ground just outside the garden. Already there are moving figures far out on the frozen meadows. As you watch them start, some bold and fearless, as to the manner born, some doubtful and hesitating, and hardly venturing to lift their feet, you might almost read something of their story in their very movements.

That tall figure yonder, so absolutely at home upon his skates, had more time in one long Canadian winter to learn the art he practises so well than most of us get in a lifetime. And to one who, in a forced march across the Dominion in the dead of winter, has tried in vain to sleep on the snow with the thermometer forty degrees below zero, and who has put down his boiling can of grog to take it up next minute frozen solid, cold like this is nothing. And you might have known that the stalwart skater further out, whose wife is the most graceful among many graceful figures in the moving throng, gained his first experiences on skates in latitudes where the frost sometimes holds unbroken for twelve long dreary weeks.

The frozen-out moor men are ready enough to volunteer assistance. And as the day wears on it is really marvellous to see with what dexterity they carry cups of tea to the skaters; while their dogs, with an eye to biscuits, make friends with each little group in turn. A kindly race, these Somerset folks, sunny of face, and pleasant of speech, in spite of the hard times, and the enforced idleness and the bitter weather. But they hold strong views as to the incapacity of engineers who fail to guard against such floods as this. "What be the use," said one, "of they Drainage Commissioners, what charges we two and eightpence poundage for keeping the water off of we? This here flood have lasted since before Christmas. Here be the rent going on all the time, and the land won't be no use till May."

Pleasant it is to watch from this sheltered corner the evolutions of the skaters. The wind that blows so keen over the miles of frozen marshland, and that lends a heightened colour to their glowing faces, cannot reach you here. Pleasant, too, is the scent of the hay and the breath of cattle from the byres. But pleasanter still is the ingle nook within the cottage, in a tiny room, so low that the beam across its ceiling is a trap for even the shortest of the group on the old settle, by the fragrant fire of peat. By such a fire it was that Alfred sat. Yet there is a long gap between the half-shaped bow of the old story and the gun, ancient as it is, hanging yonder on the wall; and if there are cakes about this hearth, you will not hear the tall, blue-eyed, winsome damsel who dispenses them

"... scold with kindling eye, In good broad Somerset,"

as the neatherd's wife, a thousand years since, scolded the Royal fugitive in these very marshes.

WINSCOMBE: A CAMP OF REFUGE

On the edge of a broad valley in the Mendips, on the gentle slope of a line of low green hills, there stands a quiet hamlet, almost hidden now among its clustering trees. At the foot of the slope, standing some way back from the village street, is a white-walled cottage, whose lawns and garden grounds only a slender fence divides from the fields that fringe the village.

On one side of the garden runs a narrow lane, losing itself presently in the meadows, a quieter backwater of the quiet village life, in whose old walls and deep-browed hedgerows many birds find lodging. On the other side, beyond a row of picturesque old sheds and ruinous old buildings, with brown roofs of thatch and crowns of thick-growing ivy, stretch the bird-haunted aisles of an orchard. The nuthatches love its cavernous trees. Its shades are musical, long before the dawn, with the songs of thrush and blackbird, of redstart and willow-wren. Among the old buildings tits and wagtails and robins hide their nests in crannies of the crumbling masonry.

But to the garden itself, islanded by lanes and meadows, with its trees and shrubs, its broad thickets of laurel and rhododendron and arbutus, the birds come as to a Camp of Refuge. In the tall evergreen above the gate, wreathed in a great bower of ivy, blackbirds even now are feeding their young. There are nests in the lilacs, in the laurels, in the hedges, in the trellis on the wall.

Through the open windows the warm air brings all pleasant scents and sounds. The low of cattle, on distant farms, the mellow chiming of the old church bells, the rich strains of thrush and blackbird, the sweet song of the swallow, clink of oxeye, call of cuckoo, jay's harsh cry, and wood-pecker's light-hearted laughter, mingle with the perfume of the roses and the woodruff. The swallows that sing on the brown gable of the barn beyond the precincts may have their nests plundered by prowling schoolboys. The hollow trees in the orchard, the chinks in the old wall of the lane, are not wholly safe from the village birds'-nester. But here is sanctuary inviolate, from which no bird was ever driven.

Year after year the fly-catchers repair their nest in the plum tree trained against the wall. No hand disturbs the martins that build under the broad eaves. No sweet singer ever here paid with his life the penalty of his taste for cherries.

Here no blackbird ever suffered for his raids upon the strawberry beds. This garden is to him the garden of the laureate:

"The espaliers and the standards tall Are thine; the range of lawn and park; The un-netted black-hearts ripen dark, All thine, against the garden wall."

Here the bullfinch may pillage at his will. The only unpardonable crime that even the house-sparrow can commit is to take wrongful possession of a martin's nest. Even then the culprit has never suffered anything but reproaches. Even when, with its own untidy heap of hay and feathers, it has blocked up a rain-water pipe, the disaster that it caused was not held warrant for eviction. And never surely were there sparrows quite so bright of plumage--so glossy their sleek heads, so rich their chestnut feathers, so stainless the white bars across their wings.

Here, too, in the hard winter weather, the birds have learnt by long experience to come as for corn in Egypt. The missel-thrush and the nuthatch, the marsh-tit and the oxeye, know well the brilliant berries they may plunder at their will from the tall Irish yew before the window. In the very bearing of the birds that haunt the garden, of the robin and the sparrow and the song-thrush, that in hard times come to the very window to be fed, with firm faith in their gentle almoners, you may read the confidence born of long experience, the result of years of welcome and protection.

The fly-catcher brooding on her nest, her glossy head just showing over the rim of the little cradle she has slung between the plum-tree and the wall, watches your approach without the least alarm. And as you stroll between the borders, bright with thickets of peonies, covered with great rose-like blooms, with their flags and pansies and pale yellow poppies, and with all their hundred flowers, she will flicker lightly by to her favourite resting-place on the rose-hung arch over the garden path, or to the handle of the walking-stick set upright in the grass for her sovereign pleasure, or to the leafless laurel bough that, while shears and pruning-knife are merciless to every other dead wood in the garden, is spared for her sake alone.

Watch her for a moment. See how she turns her head this way and that, keeping a sharp look-out for passing fly or beetle. See how suddenly she darts from her watch tower, how she hovers for a moment in the air, with faint click of her sharp bill, flying lightly back, perhaps beating her prey against the bough a time or two before she swallows it. There is a saying here that fortune hangs on giving shelter to the flycatcher:

"If you scare the flycatcher away, No good luck will with you stay."

But there is no thought of fortune, good or ill, mingled with the kindly care that has made for so many years a sanctuary of this quiet spot. The very cat seems to have learnt that--under the eyes of the family at least--there is close time here, all the year round, for every bird that flies.

When Jock is lying at the door, stretched out at length in the sunshine, you may see a thrush alight within a yard of him, the picture of righteous indignation, feathers ruffled, wings adroop, and storm and scold and flutter and gesticulate; while he, his conscience pricked perhaps--who knows?--by the remembrance of an early breakfast some fine morning among the lilac bushes, when that brood of young thrushes disappeared so strangely, blinks with affected sleepiness at his fierce little accuser. She has even been seen to perch upon his back, when he, as if remembering some previous engagement, stretched himself, and yawned, and meekly walked away.

At the far end of the lawn, in a nook between the meeting lines of hedge-row, stand four sheltering elms, joining their heads in a green canopy, cool and restful. From the seat beneath them you look out over a broad meadow to the misty hills. The long grass is bright with myriad flowers, with lotus and hawkweed, and with yellow crowns of dandelion, whose silvery parachutes now and then sail over, sinking slowly down the summer air. Somewhere in the grass, that in a few short weeks will fill the house with the sweet incense of the hay, a corncrake is calling. It is a strange note, harsh and unmusical always; heard at night, sometimes irritating beyond words to paint; yet here, and now, a pleasant country sound.

You may watch the shrike yonder, perched motionless on his favourite hawthorn, in whose shadow his mate is doubtless already brooding on her eggs. You may listen to the goldfinch singing in the green mist of meeting branches overhead; see the grey cuckoo alight on the topmost crest of the great elm that towers above the meadow; watch the busy starlings as they pass and repass with hurried flight. And, as through the great masses of lilac, now beginning to abate their rare perfume, you catch glimpses of hills and meadows, of the white houses of the village, with its orchards and its elms, and, crowning these, the grey tower of the church, looking down like a watchful sentinel on the hamlet lying at its feet, you feel it was to no fairer spot than this that the poet called his friend, when he sang:

"Or if thou tarry, come with the summer. That welcome comer Welcome as he. When noontide sunshine beats on the meadow A seat in shadow, We'll keep for thee."

WINSCOMBE: A MIDSUMMER MEADOW.

The whirr of the iron mower has ceased at length. Hour after hour the clashing blades swept in still narrowing circles round and round the spacious meadow. Now the last swath has fallen. Now in the centre of the field the machine stands silent; the tired horses taking toll of the sweet grass that is strewn about their feet.

The men lie motionless, their sunburned faces buried in the fragrant coolness. A few short hours ago this broad field was a sea of nodding grasses, whose tasselled points lent soft and changing tints of purple to the long waves that betrayed the light movements of the air. Sheets of great moon-daisies whitened it. Here it was golden with dyer's weed and lingering buttercups; and there it was crimson with fiery touches of red sorrel. Under the hot noonday sun each waft of air that stirred across it was fragrant with mingled perfumes, of the scent of hawkweed and lotus and sweet clover blooms. Its cool depths were stirred by honey-hunting bees. Wandering butterflies floated over it. Burnet moths in black and crimson sailed across it on their silken wings. Now the close shaven sward is strewn with drying grass and fading flowers. Bee nor butterfly will visit it more. To-morrow night not a touch of colour will remain of all its mingled beauty, ruined now past all hope; not a petal of its oxeye daisies, not a hawkweed unwithered, not a lingering clover bloom.

The hour is late. Along the low hills that bound the valley hangs the haze of sunset. There is a faint flush of rose colour on the soft clouds that drift slowly overhead. The air is still filled with fragrance. Instead of the sweet incense of the clover, there is the scent of new-mown hay.

For the breath of the lost flowers of the meadow there are all the perfumes of the one garden that gives upon the field--of roses all in bloom on arch and trellis, of clumps of tall sweet peas, white and red and rich imperial purple, of the delicate wild pinks, rooted at will in the old garden wall. And, although the last blossom has faded from the hawthorns round the meadow, slowly, and as with reluctance, delicate dog-roses are scattered broadcast all along the hedge-rows, and the woodbine sprays are rich already with pale sweet clusters.

This is a flowery haytime. Surely there was never more lavish wealth of roses on the hedges, nor can one even fancy broader sheets of oxeye daisies in the mowing grass.

Along the hedges the machine has left a fringe of tall grasses still unmown. And this green jungle, and the broad thickets behind it, are all astir with birds, some of them gaining now their first experiences of the great green world--a world of warmth and beauty, such as rarely, even in the noon of summer, greets the young children of the air. Linnets and finches, thrushes and blackbirds, and a host of other wingèd toilers of the field, are busy among the fallen swaths--not plundering the seeds, but seeking treasure-trove of slugs and wire-worms, and all the myriad creatures whose haunts the fall of the grass forest has laid bare.

Here forages a troop of starlings; the old birds in dark and glossy plumage, the young brood in sober, unpretending brown. Now a little cloud of martins wheel over the meadow, fluttering down to hover above the grass with soft, sweet notes. Now a singing swallow floats along. And now on dark wings a troop of swifts sail swarming down the field--labourers in man's service one and all.

On the end of a dead ivy branch that stands out of the garden hedge sits a solitary flycatcher; a small grey figure that, in her shape and attitude, is like no other bird that haunts the precincts. She is silent for the most part, only uttering now and then a weak, half querulous note, that is answered by notes weaker and more querulous from the heart of the thick laurel near. Again and again she takes short flights into the air across the garden, and even a dozen yards or more out over the grass, fluttering in the air a moment, and then lightly flitting back to her perch on the dead ivy stem, or to the rail that parts the garden from the meadow.

In a plum tree on the cottage wall, half hidden among clustering roses, is the empty nest from which the grey youngsters hiding now among the bushes have but just spread wings to fly. For once they tried their powers too soon. They ventured over the edge of their small nursery on wings not yet strong enough for flight, and they were found one morning on the ground among the stocks and poppies and sweet-williams underneath the nest, while the anxious parents, with plaintive cries, fluttered over them with vain attempts at rescue.

The fall had been fatal to one of the little aeronauts, but three were rescued, and, in a small basket filled with hay, were slung close up under the deserted nest. They made no effort to get back to their old quarters, but sat content on the edge of the basket, three little odd owl-like figures; while the old birds, their minds at rest again, foraged for them all day, from dawn till dark, chasing moths and flies along the garden paths, in vain attempts to satisfy their insatiable needs.

Under the eaves above the flycatcher's tree there is a martin's nest. At least, martins built it, but there was a dispute this year about the tenancy. It is not a new nest. It is in fact a tenement of many years' standing. And while two rival couples of martins were still discussing the question of proprietorship, a pair of prowling house sparrows stepped in and took possession. Perhaps they were the arbitrators--who knows?

And now these house sparrows, bent on fitting a warmer lining to their stolen habitation, cast covetous glances on the young flycatchers' basket, and when the parent birds were away--sometimes even under their very eyes--the unscrupulous brigands carried off the hay by handsful.

Fine fellows, these country sparrows: so very different from their grimy, scurrilous, soot-stained cousins of the city streets, with even a note of music on their ready tongues, and with plumage of such pure white and velvety black, of such rich warm tones of chestnut, that you would say they were among the handsomest of birds, might perhaps even go the length of wondering what strange species they might be.

And now the men, rising reluctantly from their lair among the grass, unship the long blades of the machine. It goes slowly jingling up the field, and through the gate at the far end, ready for more mowing on the morrow.

The sun low down in the west, showing for a brief space through the trees his face of fiery gold barred with the dark branches, throws far across the grass the shadows of a group of tall elms out in the meadow, whose green heads tower a hundred feet into the clear, pale blue. Motionless they stand, or seem to stand. The light wafts of scented air may flutter the leaves upon their lofty crests, but have no power to sway their giant branches. From far up among their green crown of foliage floats a goldfinch's song--a pleasant sound, a note of summer and green fields and open country. Pleasant, too, is the slow clink of a whetted scythe, sounding faintly from a distant meadow, where some tired haymaker, perhaps for the last time in the long summer day, is putting a better edge upon his worn old blade.

Along the hedge yonder a man is finishing off the ragged edges the machine has left, and the swish, swish of the grass that falls before his sweeping strokes has almost as sweet a sound to-night as the vesper of the song-thrush over there, high up among the branches of a hedgerow elm.

The gentle nurse of the foundling flycatchers is moving slowly across the meadow, the light of sunset on her white dress, sweet face, and graceful figure. She is carrying a great handful of oxeye daisies, gleaned from the new-mown hay--adding now a tall spray of quaking grass, now a leaf of bright red sorrel, and looking now and then with wistful eyes at the flowers for whose brief life she thus provides a little longer span. The sun is down. The long day's work is ended. In the combe yonder, the little sleepy hollow that dies away among the quiet hills, the purple shadows deepen, and the last faint lingering glow fades slowly from the cliffs along its southern verge.

No clink of scythe-blade now, no sound of toil. The last note of labour and of daylight is the shouting from some distant farm, where the last load is being cheered into the stack-yard. A restless corncrake cries among the long grass of the next meadow that stands waiting for the scythe. Far off among the elms beyond the church an owl hoots. It is the hour of rest; the hour when, over the blue vault above,

"... The brooding twilight Unfolds her starry wings, And warm hearts bless with tenderness The peace that evetide brings:"

--the peace of God, for this broad hollow in the hills. Slowly on the quiet landscape falls the restful stillness of the summer night.

WINSCOMBE: HARVEST HOME.

It is strange to sit, this bright September morning, under the shadow of a noble row of limes, and listen to the whirr of the iron mower as it rattles round and round the wide meadow yonder. It is late for haymaking. Among the branches overhead are the red and gold of autumn, and the grass at the feet of the old trees is strewn with withered leaves. These fly-catchers that flit across the lawn and sail back to their stations along the fence will soon be leaving us. It cannot be long before the chiff-chaffs, now calling so blithely in the limes, are silent. The clear, sweet singing of the robins is far more in keeping with the spirit of autumn, than the sound of the machine. But the rain and the sun between them have brought a noble aftermath to gladden the hearts of the farmers, whose case will, after all, not be quite so evil as they feared.