COUNTRY LIFE
The Aura of England
On coming to England, in the grip of an acute frost, straight from the tropics, I was reminded of the verdict of an Australian who came recently to live in England. He said to me : " I hate your climate ; but I've never been well before." It is almost a universal feeling, in the country parts at any rate, of this blessed island, that frost, that seasonable frost is good for man and plant and the land. In the English Riviera of Cornwall and some other South-Western places apple trees canker for want of frost. " The trees never go to sleep," as a grower once said to me. "Without frost the land does not crumble into the perfect seed-bed." Without frost the wheat grows "winter-proud "—a glorious farmers' phrase--and eventually suffers, along with premature unchecked buds. Even the returned traveller who has been sitting astride the equator and desires to put his head under his wing, like the robin in the snow, tingles to .a livelier vigour ; and wonders whether in all his travels among new and luxurious scenes he has seen anything lovelier than the hoar-frost on a " bull- finch " hedgerow, or the filigree silhouette of an elm tree against the western sky. England has an " aura " of its very own ; and if you wish to see the perfection of sunset colours the very best place (in my experience at least) is Lingay Fen, where the skating championships were held last week.
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Gulls and Ships
A novelist of high quality, anxious for perfect accuracy in minor details, once wrote to ask me how far from land gulls accompanied a ship. A recent experience suggests that the question is more complicated than it sounds. The answer depends much on whether the ship is moving eastwards or w:stwards. One of the. differences that strikes the traveller between South Arreriea and Europe is the paucity of gulls in the west. The great clamorous, unfrightened flocks which give tongue like a park of hounds round the harbours of Lisbon and Liverpool or where not, have rare parallels in South America. The battalions dwindle to single spies. But you see them farther out to sea in the west and if you cross the Pacific the lesser albatross, the master artist at gliding, pays no heed whatever to the proximity of land. A quaint little incident, illustrating the excellent intelligence department of the gull, was observed the other day from an easterning steamer. It had been met by a flock of gulls, which acted as a bodyguard. Suddenly, and with one accord, the flock made off and not one bird was left. They made perfectly straight for a larger and more elaborate boat, at the moment only visible to those with glasses. Some passenger suggested that the deserting was due to pure snobbery. But the bigger the boat the greater the amount of refuse food is probably a sound deduction. " The voice of the stomach " speaks intelligently.
Argentine Flowers
Most English countrymen who go far afield are struck by the small interest shown in local flowers and birds and minor animals.. Newfoundland and Western Australia are two of the places where I found it difficult to get any information whatever about the local flowers, which are magnificent in both places—the spring flowers in the country round about Perth and the autumnal beauties that decorate the most barren places in the interior of Newfoundland, round Grand Falls, for example, and along the River of Exploits. This deficiency is emphasised if the population is of a Latin rather than a Saxon race. Argentina, where I spent nearly four weeks, is rich in flowers, birds and insects. In none of the three departments of natural history is information easily available, and the absence of local interest is wholly remark- able. Some of the trees, for example, that queer shade-giving tree, the Ombu, and some of the birds have become familiar to British readers through the books of W. H. Hudson, whose Far Away and Long Ago has become a classic that will surely maintain its place indefinitely. Now the name of Hudson is widely known and respected in South. America—in Uruguay and Paraguay as well as in Argentina. One of the smaller tributes to his memory is the naming of a small railway station after him ! But Hudson has no successor, and even his delightful book on Argentine birds is not complete or nearly up to date. Nor is there any popular parallel in regard to Argentine botany. Fortunately for the common English visitor some of the most frequent of the wild flowers are familiar to us as garden plants. Towards the hills near Cordoba the zinnia, in considerable variety of shade, is thick on the ground and seemed to multiply as you reached stonier and higher ground. It was peculiarly astonishing to English eyes to find a generous display of these zinnias among granite blocks glistening with facets of Mica and bushes of " Christ's thorn," a daintily leaved bush with pairs of V-shaped thorns two to three inches in length and very stout and very sharp. The only other flower just there was one of the spider-worts with twin petals many times larger and much brighter than the humble plant we know. More brilliant and not un- common in similar places on the same granite slope was the scarlet verbena, with rarer examples of the white and (I was told) of a blue species.
Singing Beetles
Births made cheerful noises in such places : but the master sound, at any rate when the sun was well up, always came from a species of Cicada. Every thornbush was decorated with this big, queer, brown, broadwinged insect. You would have said that the chorus was from a hundred, even a thousand, instruments, but the noise each made was strangely ventri- loquial and very loud. Half a dozen would have given the impression of a score or two. Each one so quivered and shook with the vigour of his mechanical vibration that the wings kept " shifting the sun anew," and little sparks of light were lit and relit among the thorns. The wings, reflecting the sun, played the part of the discs of mica on the granite. Ilow they sparkle on the Wicklow Hills beyond Dublin us on the ranges to the West of Cordoba. Yet brighter gleams decorate the night. The fireflies arc legion. One is a modest creature carrying like, as was said of a man of genius, a " fire in the belly." The other much more splendid and various courses through the night like a meteor. I caught examples of both. The bigger beast carries three lamps, of which the two circular discs above the eyes are the more brilliant. If you place one on a page of a printed book in a dark room you may read your text quite easily. I do not know whether the object of the lights has been fully determined. With our own glow-worm (which in my experience is rather rarer than it once was) the light is a sexual signal. The two searchlights above the eyes have certainly a different use and purpose.
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Fireflies and Others
A great naturalist said of Mrs. Bright wen, who wrote most charmingly of her own observations : What a pity that all her discoveries had been made before ! " Ile was speaking with more admiration than perhaps the sarcasm would suggest. I made one little discovery in Argentine, that is doubtless open to the same satire. We were watching the fireflies round about two deodars in the garden of an estancia. One light, as it seemed to me, was like the face of the Cheshire cat in Alice. It kept appearing and dis- appearing in the same place. On investigation it was found that the light, which could be switched on or off at pleasure, was suspended by a silken thread from an arm of one of the deodars. It belonged not to an insect but a spider. Does it snare its prey by pretending to be a fly ? It was of moderate proportions, at any rate in comparison with the Tarantula spider of which we found several specimens. * * * *
Hired Cows
Some while ago I called attention to a curious new develop- ment in farming economics in England. It becomes common for farmers who are short of capital to buy their milch cows on the instalment principle ; and organisations for this sort of sale have been set up and flourish. From a country rectory in Cambridgeshire comes a quaint and interesting historical note on the hiring of cows. In the year 1090 a well-wisher to the church bequeathed a number of cows for the upkeep of the church. These cows were to he hired out at such and such rents but the testator made this thoughtful proviso, that " during the time the said cows went dry " the rent was
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