COUNTRY LIFE
The English Village
The English village is enjoying a vogue—in literature— that is beyond all precedent ; and this vogue has extended beyond the Atlantic -and brought some surprising conse- quences. One of the loveliest villages I know used to be obscure as the violet by the mossy stone, and it lurks in a county that has generally been passed over by the tourist, partly because it is very small, partly because its scenery is unexciting, partly because its chief historic buildings are comparatively humble. This county of Huntingdon does not figure conspicuously in the lists of places which the tourist from America or elsewhere is advised to visit. A year or two ago a writer described it as a county where the by-roads lead nowhither, and the Great North Road is solely a road of passage, inviting to excess of speed. Lately students of English rural life have rediscovered such lovely villages as Houghton and FIemingford, which have come almost to rival Broadway or Ewelme ; and their fame has been so far- flung that the threat has been heard of the complete trans- ference of a characteristic mill and cottage to the United States.
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Native Colours Such beautiful things would not, I think, keep the charac- teristics of their beauty, on alien ground. They will not bear transference even from one part of England to another. In my own neighbourhood a glorious Tudor house has been set' tip, brick by brick and beam by beam, exactly as it was in its forrrier place. The savour has quite departed. It Maintains hardly more of its old pride than the relics of the statue of' King Osymandias. The charm of the English 'village is its rightness. It has grown out of the soil. The Cotswcild houses are lovely because the roofs are made of the Stuff of the Cotswold Hills. They are of the colour of the Country. The steep thatched roofs of Huntingdonshire belong to' districts famous for the strength of their "bean and wheat " tilths. The strong straw came from the nearest farms as the stronger reeds of Norfolk from the nearest Broad. The aesthetic value of local material is incredible. lathe slate districts of Wales the solid slate tombstones are as proper as marble is improper. Even the stiffest, most formal silhouettes are not ugly. They keep a sort of fitness. It is the chief merits of hand-made tiles that they take the colour of the place to which they are transferred. They are- subdued' to the local weather, and perhaps the local moss and lichen. It is a natural question which is the most beautiful of English villages ; but there is no answer because you cannot compare Norfolk thatch with Cotswold stone. Each is right in one place and wrong in another. You can only, ask, which is the most right ? In this respect Bradford- on-Avon comes to my mind's eye as more persuasively emergent from its own soil than any place I ever saw. Its dispel is a 'thousand years old, and its tithe barn mediaeval and immense, but those grey houses on the hillside are better still ; they might be caves that had risen above the surface.
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Fog v. Instinct This eccentric winter has had a queer influence on many birds, including what a mediaeval chronicler called the savoury and eccentric snipe. December days have been dark, and some birds seem to have a particular dislike of darkness, though a great deal of migration is done by night. In some districts, where generally they are frequent enough, snipe and woodcock are as yet rarities. It has been alleged by some authorities that the woodcock waits for a bright moonlit night for his westerly journeying. How true this is I do not know ; but it seems to be true that the migration across the North Sea at any rate is arrested by weather of cloud and mist. The old theory that birds possess "a sixth sense" has been revived of late with some extra precision. This sense is said to consist of an awareness of the dictates of terrestrial magnetism, whatever that may be. They certainly have instinctive perceptions beyond our understanding ; but they are utter fools in fog nevertheless. They lose their way ; they fly aimlessly round about the beams of the lighthouses. Even our home birds fly with diffidence. Perhaps the great- eyed woodcock- and snipe are rather more dependent on clear
sight than some other birds. The woodcock sometimes almost suggests a bat, so quickly does it dip and turn as if it did not see the obstructing bough till the last moment.
Premature Flowers
A certain contempt for the wintry season is usual in many of our garden plants and some wild ones, especially the white dead nettle, and this year is no exception. A good many blossoms remain over from their proper season ; but the mark of the year is the absurdly early flowering of the plants that are generally supposed to wait for the new year. The loveliest of these—and perhaps the most eccentric in its dates—is iris stylosa. It opened its first blossoms in one garden—and that North of London—in the first week of December. A little vase of this pale Iris and of the yellow naked-flowered jessamine are as eloquent of spring, though spring is remote, as the first vase of primrose and violet, both of which are now in blossom. The iris was antici- pated—and by many weeks—by those two winter-loving viburnums, one evergreen, one deciduous, qualified as Fragrans and Tinus. How many people tell you that Viburnum Cartesii is a better thing that Viburnum Fragrans ; but this early, this premature sweet-scented blossom is, I think, superior merely by the gift of its earliness. Carlesii is later and less prone, I think, to these capricious bouts of energy. Almost all the tribe are desirable : the two common sorts and Tomentosum and Tomentosum Ric-alum and that slightly tender, though robust in appearance, Viburnum Rhilidophyllum, with leaves like a loquat and a flower- head as big as the elder's.
Punctual Swallows
Every year there reaches me an account of the habit of swallows at a Californian Mission. It reached me again this week, "advantaged," as they used to say, by a very charming letter. These swallows, so it is firmly and repeatedly alleged, arrive at the mission on St. Joseph's Day, March 19th, and depart on October 23rd, the day of St. Juan who is patron saint of the mission. The latest account refers especially to their punctual departure last October when they set forth on their long southerly migration to South America. The habit has been established, it is said, for seventy years. The swallows are said to number some thousands. It would be worth the while of a committee of naturalists of repute to make scientific examination of this "miracle of the swallows," as the sudden migration is called.
Winter Nests One detail of the report of the latest departure—and it comes direct from the Mission—is that these thousands of swallows are described as deserting their nests ; since swallows have several broods in the year—I have known of four in one year in one nest—most of them will have had no concern with the nest weeks or even months before their departure. How very few birds use their nests again after the young have once flown ! Swallows doubtless are one of the very few exceptions ; but only the last brood of young return to the nest to roost. I have known jenny wrens to crowd into an old nest when the weather was cold ; but the experi- ence is a solitary one. You have to go to the squirrel or the dormouse to find appreciation of the nest as a place of refuge not as a nursery. On this subject evidence is wanted. Do squirrels make special winter dreys, or do they shelter ever in the breeding drey, which, so far as my knowledge goes, is usually too populous to suggest comfort for its larger inmate A London Bird
A note about the fondness of finches for Finchley has brought a strange little coincidence. One Finchley resident writes to say that he used to see a spotted woodpecker in his garden regularly ; but it deserted him. Another resident in the same happy neighbourhood tells me that one of the regular visitors to his garden is a spotted woodpecker. It looks as if this bird, whose species is rare in London, had changed his taste in gardens. Or are there numbers of wood- peckers, as of finches, at Finchley? W. BEACH THOMAS.
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