FROM A HERTFORDSHIRE COTTAGE.*
WHEN a book opens at random at an essay on "The Ways of Wasps," and the author states that you may put your face within a foot of the entrance to a neat, and the wasps flying about outside will take no notice of you, it is fairly safe to conclude that the author has something to say. Mr. Beach Thomas has more than something to say; he is a very persistent and ingenious observer, and he has the ability of grouping his facts in graceful language. His outlook is described in the title of the book, From a Hertfordshire Cottage. and from his cottage he studies the ways and wills of birds and beasts and flowers, of the growth of mushrooms and lichens, of clouds dying and being born. Here and there he writes a little uneasily, as when, for instance, be begins a chapter with so forced a sentence as : "At the coming of the primroses our world moves rapidly to a divine event, which is never far off." But his more usual mood is an easy movement among outdoor things, watching and chronicling ; and on occasion he seta down a passage of real beauty, like the chapter on " kecksies," which is full Of the scent and warmth of a midsummer night among flowers. He has felt and written of a sense hard to describe who asks of the air of midnight : "Is there any hour in the year when the world so closes us in, so folds us round in its own element ? Our body's contact with the air is for once as sensible as water about the diver's body." Somewhere else he writes of the pleasure of the touch of ripened wooden fruit, "when we can slip nuts from their tasselled shucks, acorns from their sockets, and chestnuts from their woollen wrappers." The pleasure is that of an observer capable of feeling and interpreting in full measure,—a pleasure which belongs some- where, too, to the vigorous health that blows through the book like a wind. It is Mr. Thomas's best mood, and be is to be envied the courage of his convictions as to what should be the duty, on occasion, of the rightly observant naturalist. Wasps are insects which he evidently takes pleasure in watching; be admires their amazing vitality. "Wasps have a capacity for recovery comparable with their muscular power. They will soon wake from a strong dose of chloroform. Half- an-hour after you have immersed a neat of suffocated wasps in a bucket of water live wasps will begin to crawl up the side of the pail." That is one of Mr. Thomas's experiments ; another is an even director method of dealing with them. The idea being to discover whether the door of a wasps' nest is guarded by particular wasps detailed for the duty, Mr. Thomas's method appears to have been to make "any sudden movement directly in front of the door," and then wait to see what happened. Apparently the result is usually the same. "One, two, or three wasps will come out, not deliberately, crawling well to the front before flying, but as if the flight were begun within. The impetus is astounding, the line of flight as straight as a bullet ; and so far as my experience goes the charger always takes exposed skin for his mark." The passage is an interesting comment on the writer's just claim, in an introductory chapter, that the unforgivable thing in writing of life out of doors is "a willingness to say more than you see." It is exactly this sense of truth, of an honest determination to put all his facts in exactly the light register, which ought to absolve Mr. Thomas from any stray charge of having made his book a little duller by a slight over-emphasis of dates. He is continually speaking of "the summer of 1906" or "the season of 1907" as having been distinguished for this or that, and perhaps he 'could have • From a Hertfordshire Cottage. By W. Beach Thomas, London : Alston Divers. 13s. 611 made the book a little more coherent if he had written more vaguely and generally .of many summers and seasons. But, on the whole, his alteration of what, in its original form, presumably was "the past season" or "the present summer," is pleasingly honest. It would have been better if his prods had been a little more carefully read for misprints ; but that is a minor fault in a book breezy with the air of woods in May, of curious lore of clouds and winds, and, above all, of thought and work at first hand.
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