CORRESPONDENCE.
SPRING ON THE NORTH DOWNS.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE " Brzorma."]
Stu,—It is a wonderful stretch of country, this high belt which runs far east and west outside the southmost fringe of the great Metropolis. Again and again the lover of Nature returns to find in these rolling hills, and wind-swept heaths, these secluded commons and silent fir-groves, a kind of attraction entirely lacking in other parts of Eng- land, very beautiful though they be. There is an air of old- world loneliness about it all; so near it is to the strenuous life of the great city whose smoke-pall hangs day and night over the river valley to the north ; and yet so utterly remote in every important respect. It is here that one may still walk for hours through open field and moorland and meet only the shepherd. It is here that some of the rarest wild birds of England still find seclusion and sanctuary. Four
great railway systems burrow through the land, but the muffled shriek of the locomotive rises from the deep cutting as from a world with which we have neither dealings nor communication. The trains stay not here ; they hurry on as through a wilderness ; they are bound for the distant plains beneath the horizon, for the towns and cities of men which lean against the southern sea.
To-day the spring air is pleasant and warm in the sheltered combes. The early violets, and even occasional primroses, shine with unusual colour in the sunny spaces beneath the bare, wind-swept hedgerows where the dark uncropped sloe-bushes are already breaking into white. Down in the valley below, where the tall trees rise round the farm buildings, the elms seem transfigured. In the distance they look as if a purple light had fallen upon them : it is the flushing of the myriad buds already swelling as the soft spring air draws the life-giving sap upwards into the branches and the smallest twigs. The long clean pastures slope away on every side, rolling now upwards in rounded shoulders, dipping now away into deep combes where the long shadows of the early year still rest upon the land. From the copse on the hillside the clear piping notes of the thrush fall strangely loud on the ear : Be-quick, be-quick ! Cherry- dew, cherry-dew ! the notes come down the breeze. Nearer, from a dark holly-tree which stands like a sentinel in the hedge, the rich, melancholy warble of the blackbird seems to suggest a joy too chastened after winter sorrows to readily find vent in boisterous song. The tinkle of the sheep-bell, mingled with the smell of sheep, comes down from above. The shepherd is moving the wattles to form another pen ; you watch him as he works on and on, -slow, stolid, untiring, unthinking. Like all that have remained on the land, he belongs to another age and another world. AEI you climb higher the air comes sweet and dry from off the land; over the chalk, the peat, and the moorland, through the pines, the dead bracken, and the dry heather it has come. On the other side of the hedge the ploughman is breaking the upland pasture; the patient team plods slowly up the steep furrow, the rooks rising lazily in front only to take up position again in the fresh-opened earth behind.
On the further side of the field, is the spot where in May last the nightingales sang against each other under the stars. It is all silent now ; the birds will not arrive for some weeks yet. Part of the copse has been cut down in the winter, and the dark earth is bare save in the great green patches where the wild hyacinths, already in brief possession, will soon cover it with fragrant blue. The bare ash and hazel poles are ready stacked, bound in bundles according to size. A few shapely oaks have been left standing, but others have beeu felled, and the trunks lie prostrate, bare and bleached, for the bark has been stripped off for the Bermondsey tanneries. We are out again on the upland pastures, where the larks congregate in summer, and the melancholy call of the lapwing haunts the ear in winter. The former have already returned after their winter migration, and the air is full of the sound of song overhead. Ever and anon the loud droning hum of the early insect comes out of the sunny dis- tance to die away again into silence. The young grass is already green and crisp, its smooth clean surface still unseason- ably untidy with many a bedraggled thorn-bush dropped here by jealous hands in the autumn to wreck the night-poacher's net.
Where the ground slopes into the hollow at the other side the willows are already aglow and fragrant with early cat- kins. Here the great humble-bee queens, sole representa- tives now of all their kind in the land, are early at work, filling the air with their drowsy music. You stoop under the drooping bushes ; it is a bed of shingle underneath, but it has held the water in a large shallow pool, into which the willows dip their branches. At the other end, where tufts of last season's rushes rise withered and sodden from the peaty bottom, the water is ruffled as if a storm had raised it into miniature waves. A subdued sound comes across the pool, a confused gurgling, croaking, and splashing. A nearer view, and the pond is seen to be thickly inhabited beneath the surface. Yet it is neither fish nor fowl that trouble the waters ; it is a great army of frogs come here to spawn. Fer nights and days, through all obstacles, from far and near, the fever of spring in their cold veins has urged the Batrachians, after their winter sleep, towards this lonely trysting place. No thought of food have they as yet; the fierce heat and lust of life is upon them. It is one of the most wonderful sights of the spring. Many are spent and dead in the midst of so much life, their bleached bodies showing clearly through the water against the dark bottom. The newly deposited spawn forms great banks in places ; it occupies small apace at first, but it soon absorbs great quan- tities of water, swelling out into large masses of transparent jelly, studded, as it were, with dark shot-grains.
But the air grows chilly apace. The short spring day in already closing in, and the sun has disappeared long ago behind the shoulders of the hills. We are back again on the long white road which winds downwards to the valley. No man meets us ; no sound falls on the ear save still the tinkle of the sheep-bell in the distance, and now the shrill cackle of the blackbird seek- ing a roosting place for the night. The fresh, keen air and the long hours on the wind-swept uplands have made us con- scious of other wants, and the red light of the little lonely railway-station looms out at last a welcome signal in the waning day. We have reached the bourne of another world separated from that out of which we have come by an entire epoch of human evolution.—I am, Sir, Jtc.,
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