THE ENGLISH MONSOON.
THE English monsoon, deferred to an unusually late season, came this week in the form of a deluge of rain lasting twenty-four hours, and worked an instan- taneous change in the earth and sky, refreshing the first,
and filling the latter with forms of cloud and vapour to which we had been long unused. These first autumn storms, which always mark the close of our summer, are followed later by the greater rains of opening winter, but are entirely different from them in character. The cold rains later in the year are destroyers of animal life, and injurious even to vegetation, killing off the last of the summer flowers, deluging the land surface, and providing the store of water for the coming year at the cost of present discomfort and inconveni- ence to man and beast. The first autumn rains, on the contrary, are refreshing and restorative, like the Indian mon- soon, the prelude to another brief season of reproductive effort of Nature, which we call St. Luke's Summer, a time when flowers blossom once more with deeper and more lovely hues, when the late broods of red admirals, peacocks, and humming-bird moths appear, when the hum of insects is heard again, and the grass on our lawns, just dotted with golden leaves, turns to a green so emerald, deep, and true that it is matched at no other season and in no other land.
The parallel between our autumn monsoon and the opening of the Indian rains was more close and natural in the present year than in most English seasons. In India the monsoons bring life in their train, almost instantaneously. The tendrils of plants climb so fast that they may almost be seen growing, heat and moisture together summon the ants, the dragonflies, the butterflies, and the fireflies forth from earth and tree, many birds build and lay their eggs, and the rivulets fill with water, and the water with little fishes. The date of the English monsoon is uncertain. Normally, the first rains fall in early September or in late August, to be followed by a spell of calm and a warm, not "chill," October, enriched and glorified by the timely moisture. Sometimes our monsoon coincides with violent equinoctial gales, when its results are disastrous. It is on record that one autumn, we think in the " seventies," the rains began in late August and never ceased till the end of October. The harvest was never properly gathered, corn sheaves stood in the shocks in the fields with their bases in flooded water, and a farmer informed the writer that on one of the rare days dry enough for carting wheat he stooped and drank water from a farrow in the harvest field. In 1895 our monsoon set in with great violence on Sep- tember 1st, and continued for a fortnight. Deluges of rain fell, with a high temperature, great sagging clouds hung all day long over the fields, waterspouts might be seen daily drooping from the cloud-edges, with wriggling tails seeking to join some other water surface below, when they would, if over the sea, have turned into the aqueous columns which wreck ships, and the stream of bird migration was almost entirely arrested, causing them to collect in vast flocks, waiting for fair weather. This season the undue postponement of the rains, and the heat and drying winds of August and September, had made the land almost sick of summer. In the Eastern Counties the small streams were completely dried up, and chickens were dusting where the water used to run. Nearly all the field ponds were dried too, and the fish either dead or buried in the mud. Worms had disappeared for many weeks, and the thrushes spent the whole day seeking for food on the parched lawns. There was practically no insect life in the grass, and no spiders, beetles, ants, grasshoppers, or daddy-lonn,-..legs for the birds to feed upon. The toads were all hibernating, and the wasps, which found no fruit and no spiders to eat outside, came into the houses in swarms to seek food, the flies did the same, and bats came into the rooms at night, possibly in search of the latter, for there seemed the same dearth of moths by night as of other insects by day. Even butterflies were scarce, and humble - bees were lying dead everywhere. The moles either came to • the surface because they found the earth too hard to bUrrow in, or descended into the banks of the few ponds and ditches where water remained. In the general clearing out of the dried-up moats and fishponds, when the accumulated mud of years was dug out and carted on to the land, the moles were found working in numbers just below the soil where the moist mud still left a chance of worm-catching. In the fields all the clover and lucerne was cut and eaten by the horses and cattle, and the stubbles were covered with drifting dust. The garden borders, instead of being gay with flowers, showed brown leaves, earth, and only a sprinkling
of attenuated blossoms. It was the very end and climax of the " dry season." Even the partridges, which ought to have sheltered in the green ,root-crops during the midday hours, were roaming from dawn to dusk On the stubbles, probably in search of the insect food which was barely obtainable.
The Ain was heralded by the voices of the cattle, which bad starved on short commons for four months, and smelt the coming moisture from afar. When the first intermittent showers fell such an odour of fresh earth arose as might have rejoiced the nostrils of a Titan. The birds flew out, and spread their wings in the welcome drops, and as the showers cleared burst in unison into song ; for though our birds do not begin to build at the coming of the English monsoon, the pairing instinct is again aroused, and the contests of song, and in some cases of actual warfare, begin again. The robins plucked up their courage first (they had been too starved before to sing), the thrushes and hedge-sparrows followed, and the starlings flew up on to every roof and barn, and whistled in ecstasy. Before this they had been the only birds which ever seemed to find food on the lawns, pulling out some species of fat white grub which the thrushes were unable to find.
The Indian field naturalist " Eha," in a chapter dealing in detail with the effects of the monsoon on animal life, notes that " in the halls of the white ants there is eager excitement, for the young queens of the future, in their long and gauzy wings and bridal veils, are crowding to the door, as each one starts on her long and hazardous journey in quest of a new home." On our lawns at home almost the same thing happened in the colonies of garden ants. From the short and still brown turf the winged ants emerged within an hour of the rains ceasing, conducted by the workers, who afterwards brought up to the surface all the cast shells of the eggs of the larvae, and left them lying like spilled and broken pearl barley on the ground. Then quietly as apparitions appeared the toads that had "sweated under cold stones" for weeks foodless, and sat immovable with glittering eyes in the track of the hesitating, bewildered, debutantes ants. They hopped not, neither did they wink, but waited till a plump and winged ant wandered within range, and then shot out a long pink tongue which fetched the ant into their mouths with a snap, and all the while gazed stolidly at the far horizon, as though averse to dwell on the pettiness of practical life on a minor and cooling planet.
The result of twenty-four hours of this autumn rain upon vegetation was evident after a single day of sun. The grass became compact like plush; the tiny clovers in it rose up and stood shoulder to shoulder; all the late garden flowers, the geraniums, tea roses, Michaelmas daisies, violet °menses, asters, and fuchsias began to blossom afresh or renewed their colours with richer, deeper hues ; the " catch crops " of mustard in the fields grew two or three inches; and the meadows were studded with rings of white button- mushrooms, and turned from brown to green. Best of all, the wells and ponds began to fill again, and the springs to run, if only in tiny trickles. The cleansing work of the first English monsoon is not its least important function. It washes the earth and trees clean of all the dust of summer, and prevents its becoming a source of infection or contagion, like the dust of South Africa and Egypt, and so saves us from such epidemics, great and small, as a long hot summer might bring at its close, even in temperate England.
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