Wild Life in a Southern County. Richard Jefferies

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СКАЧАТЬ interwoven. The resemblance to the pattern of four rushes which the country children delight to plait together as they wander by the brooks is so close as almost to suggest the derivation of the art of weaving rushes, flags, and willows by the hand. The sheep grazing at will in the coombe eat off the herbage too closely to permit of many flowers. Where the springs join and irrigate a broader strip there grows a little watercress, and some brooklime, said to be poisonous and occasionally mistaken for the cress; a stray cuckoo-flower shows its pale lilac petals in spring, and a few bunches of rushes are scattered round. They do not reach any height or size; they seem dry and sapless, totally unlike the tall green succulent rush of the meadows far below.

      A water-wagtail comes now and then; sometimes the yellow variety, whose colour in the spring is so bright as to cause the bird to resemble the yellowhammer at the first glance. But besides these the spring-head is not much-frequented by birds; perhaps the clear water attracts less visible insect life, and, the shore of the stream being hard and dry, there is no moisture where grubs and worms may work their way. Behind the fountain the steep green wall of the coombe rises almost perpendicularly—so steep as not to be climbed without exertion. At the summit are the cornfields of the level plain which here so suddenly sinks without warning. The plough has been drawn along all but on the very edge, and the tall wheat nods at the verge. From thence a strong arm might send a flat round stone skimming across to the other side of the narrow hollow, and its winding course is apparent.

      Like a deep groove it cuts a channel up towards the hills, becoming narrower as it approaches; and the sides diminish in height, till at the neck a few rails and a gate can close it, being scarcely broader than a waggon-track. There, at the foot of the down, it ends, overlooked by a barn, the home of innumerable sparrows, whose nests are made under the eaves, everywhere their keen eyes can find an aperture large enough to squeeze into.

      Looking down the steep side of the coombe, near the bottom there runs along a projecting ledge, or terrace, like a natural footway. On the opposite side is another corresponding ledge, or green turf-covered terrace; these follow the windings of the valley, decreasing in width as it diminishes, and gradually disappearing. In its broadest part one of them is used as a waggon-track, for which it is admirably adapted, being firm and hard, even smoother than the bottom of the coombe itself. If it were possible to imagine the waters of a tidal river rising and ebbing up and down this hollow these ledges would form its banks. Their regular shape is certainly remarkable, and they are not confined to this one place. Such steep-sided narrow hollows are found all along the edge of this range of downs, where they slope to the larger valley which stretches out to the horizon. There are at least ten of them in a space of twelve miles, many having similar springs of water and similar terrace-like ledges, more or less perfect. Towards the other extremity of this particular coombe—where it widens before opening on the valley—the spring spreads and occupies a wider channel, beside which there is a strip of osier-bed.

      When at the fountain-head, and looking down the current the end of the coombe westwards away from the hills seems to open to the sky; for the ground falls rapidly, and the trees hide any trace of human habitation. The silent hills close in the rear, capped by the old fort; the silent cornfields come to the very edge above; the silent steep green walls rise on either hand, so near together that the swallows in the blue atmosphere high overhead only come into sight for a second as they shoot swiftly across. In the evening the red sun, enlarged and bulging as if partly flattened, hangs suspended, as it seems, at the very mouth of the trough-like hollow. It is natural in the silence and the solitude for thoughts of the lapse of time to arise—of the endless centuries since, by some slow geological process, this hollow was formed. Fifteen hundred years ago the men of the camp above came hither to draw water; still the spring oozes and flows, and the sun sinks at the western mouth. So too, doubtless, the sun shone into the hollow in the evening cycle upon cycle ere then.

      Up the blade of grass here a tiny white-shelled snail has crawled, feeling in its dull, dim way that evening is approaching. The coils of the little shell are exquisitely turned—the workmanship is perfect; the creature within, there can be no question, is equally perfect in its way and finds a joy in the plants on which it feeds. On the ground below, hidden among the fibres near the roots of the grass, lies another tiny shell; but it is empty, the life that once animated it has fled—whither? Presently the falling dew will condense upon it, and at the opening one round drop will stand; after awhile to add its mite to the ceaseless flow of the fountain. Could any system of notation ever express the number of these creatures that have existed in the past? If time is measured by the duration of life, reckoned by their short spans eternity upon eternity has gone by. To me the greatest marvel is the countless, the infinite number of the organisms that have existed, each with its senses and feelings, whose bodies now help to build up the solid crust of the earth. These tiny shells have had millions of ancestors: Nature seems never weary of repeating the same model.

      In the osier-bed the brook-sparrow chatters; there, too, the first pollard willow stands, or rather leans, hollow and aged, across the water. This tree is the outpost of a thousand others that line the banks of the stream for mile after mile yonder down in the valley. How quickly this little fountain grows into a streamlet and then to a considerable brook!—without apparently receiving the waters of any feeders. In the first half-mile it swells sufficiently, if bayed up properly, to drive a mill—as, indeed, many of the springs issuing from these coombes do just below the mouth. In little more than a mile, measuring by its windings, it becomes broad enough to require some effort to leap it, and then deepens into a fair-sized brook.

      The rapidity of the increase is accounted for by the fact that every field it passes whose surface inclines towards it is a watershed from which an unseen but considerable drainage takes place. When no brook passes through the fields the water stands and soaks downwards, or evaporates slowly: directly a ditch is opened it fills, and the effect of a stream is not only to collect water till then unseen, but to preserve it from evaporation or disappearance into the subsoil. Probably, if it were possible to start an artificial stream in many places, after a while it would almost keep itself going at times, provided, of course, that the bottom was not porous. Below the mouth of the coombe the water has worn itself a channel quite six feet deep in the chalk—washing out the flints that now lie at the bottom. Hawthorn bushes bend over it, and great briars uncut since their first shoot was put forth; the elder, too, grows luxuriously, whose white flowers, emitting a rich but sickly odour, the village girls still gather to make elder-water to remove freckles. These bushes hide the deep gully in which the current winds its way—so deep that no cattle can get down to drink.

      A cottage stands on the very edge a little further along; the residents do not dip their water from the running stream, but have made a small pool beside it, with which no doubt it communicates, for the pool, or ‘dipping-place,’ is ever full of cool, clear, limpid water. The plan is not without its advantages, because the stream itself, though usually clear, is liable to become foul from various causes—such as a flood, when it is white from suspended chalk, or from cattle higher up above the gully coming to slake their thirst and stirring the sandy grit of the bottom. But the little pool long remains clear, because the water from the stream to enter it has to strain itself through the narrow partition of chalky rubble.

      So limpid is the current in general, that the idea of seeing trout presently when it shall widen out naturally arises. But before then the soil changes, and clay and loam spoil the clean, sandy, or gravelly bottom trout delight in. In one such stream hard by, however, the experiment of keeping trout has been tried, and with some success: it could be done without a doubt if it were not that after a short course all the streams upon this side of the downs enter the meadows, and immediately run over a mud bottom. With care, a few young fish were maintained in the upper waters, but it was only as an experiment; left to themselves they would speedily disappear, and of course no angling could be thought of.

      On the opposite side of the range of hills, where they decline in height somewhat, but still roll on for a great distance, the contrary is the case. The springs that run in that direction pass over a soil that gives a good clear bottom, and gradually assume the character of rivers; narrow, СКАЧАТЬ