In the West Country

A cool and quiet spot. Like the poet who found it pleasant, through the loopholes of retreat, "To see the tumult and not feel the stir," we too, from the kindly shadow of these great chestnut trees, can look out on the woodland in its pride of summer glory, with its flowers and its fragrance and its greenness, nor feel the heat and glare and the pitiless weight of the sunshine.

Day after day, week after week, there has been

Yet perhaps the full beauty of such weather, its wealth of flowers and foliage, its abundance of bird and insect life, above all its half-tropic heat, is for the country rather than the town. Among stone walls and pavements summer days are too often weariness, and summer nights but stifling. In the country the glare of noon is tempered by cool winds, softened by grass and foliage. There, too, the hot air of night is sweetened with the breath of honeysuckle and jasmine; and through wide open windows the scent of the roses floats up to us

If the town is close and sultry, woodland and green lane are at their best and sweetest. In the country at any rate—

Though the flowers of May have passed into a proverb, it is June after all that gives to the fields and by ways their crowning grace and beauty. May draped all the trees with fresh young foliage, deepened April's mist of bluebells, and whitened the hedge-rows with blossoming hawthorn. May was a month of broad effects and lavish colouring. Here she silvered a whole field with daisies, as with a light fall of snow. And here, like a cunning alchemist, she changed with her buttercups the green of a rich pasture-land to a blaze of living gold. But there is yet more of beauty in the fields of June. Even in the Tropics, travellers tell us, there is nothing so superbly beautiful as an English midsummer meadow—whether an upland pasture, with its hawkweed and lotus, its scented grasses and sweet clover blooms; or a low-lying field along some loitering stream, where, in the swampy soil, among the tasselled sedges, spring fiery spikes of orchis, foamy meadow-sweet, and tall flower-de-luce.

If June is the most flowery of months, May is certainly the most musical. The days are drawing near when there will settle on the green world of woods and lanes and meadows the silence of the summer. The grey dawn is still almost as full as ever of sweet sounds. The songs of thrush and blackbird are still glorious in the evening twilight. Wren and robin still sing to us at intervals from dawn to sunset. But through the long hours of daylight we miss already the notes of many a wandering singer, for whom June is the limit of the season. Already the cuckoo's voice is breaking. We have but another week, at the farthest, of the nightingale's song. His is a superb and matchless melody. Many a time, it is true, have the notes of thrush or blackcap, or even of sedge-warbler, been mistaken for it. Sweet singers, all of them. Yet it is strange that anyone who has ever fairly listened to the chief of song could confuse with his magnificent strains the note of the most musical of thrushes.

But it is to singers less skilled and less famous than the nightingale that the woodland owes its greatest charm: light wingèd dryads of the trees, without whose songs and call notes, and mere life and movement, the lover of Nature thinks that "summer is not summer, nor can be." The willow-warbler's song, a little careless cadence of soft notes that at intervals seems to filter lightly down among the branches, is the very soul of sunshine and sweet air. The wood wren's call is like no other sylvan sound. Its plaintive, long-drawn, monotonous notes, often growing louder towards the close, are sometimes so sonorous and far-reaching that it is hard to credit they can come from so diminutive a singer. His actual song is a little gush of simple notes again and again repeated, from his perch on the end of some leafless bough high up among the trees. It is not remarkable for melody, though now and then there is a very real touch of sweetness in it, and after the first rather deliberate beginning it is so hurried as to give the listener the impression that the bird is trying to crowd twenty notes into a single beat.

The whitethroat is another hasty singer, but he has a greater gift of music, and his manner of singing—sometimes taking short flights into the air the while, and then diving back into the thicket—his quick movements, the almost luminous whiteness of his swelling throat, rank him among the most charming of woodlanders. Yet his haunt is rather on the skirts of the wood than in the heart of it. He is still more a roadside singer, and greatly given to building his frail nest of grass in the thorny depths of some old hedge-row, or even among the nettles on the bank.

But of all the sylvan minstrels the blackcap has, after the nightingale, the most silvery tongue, and we hear so much more of him in the country generally—not only is he more widely distributed, but he sings again when his brood are fledged and flown, which the nightingale never does—that to most of us he is much the more familiar, perhaps we might even say he is more highly prized than the acknowledged chief of song himself. Watch him now, before household cares have for the time taken up all his care and attention. See him balanced, with his breast of tender grey, his black crest slightly lifted, on a spray of briar that, swaying underneath his weight, trembles with the energy of his wild and mellow notes—now clear and loud, and reaching, it may be, far beyond the limits of the wood; now tender and soft and low, and low and lower yet, until at a yard's distance hardly heard. A beautiful song. A song that to White of Selborne, as doubtless to many a Nature lover since his day, always brought back with its wild sweetness the lines of Amien's song:

A bird flies into the tree near by. A blue-tit, smartest of his race. He stands a moment on the edge of a hole in the level bough, looks round twice, then dives in and disappears. And out of that stronghold of his, snugly lined with moss, and hair, and feathers, he will not stir for you or any man. But yonder is a figure, in a tree some twenty yards away, from which perhaps even the bold blue-tit would fly in terror. A lithe brown creature is climbing leisurely out of a hole high up in the trunk—a weasel, searching for eggs, no doubt. Up the tree he goes, more lightly even than a squirrel, right to the very topmost branches. Now down he comes again, head first, and makes his way to another tree. As he canters lightly through the long grass he pauses now and then to rear on his hind legs and peer sharply round over the green jungle, looking for the moment, quite bird-like. Two more trees he climbs, searching every likely spot among the boughs, prying into every hole and cranny—clearly a birds'-nester born. A master of woodcraft, too, for when you move nearer for a better view, he vanishes. He is there all right, lying close behind some branch, no doubt; but he is as completely screened from sight as if he wore the magic cap of Perseus. He is a tiny figure at the most. The birds take no notice of him. The yellow-hammer goes on with his sleepy tune, and the greenfinch in the elm above him with his yet sleepier drawl, while a linnet in the tree near by sings undisturbed his sweet and dainty song, that in itself is like a gleam of sunshine.

The whole woodland is astir with life and movement and sweet sounds of song. Look at that bullfinch yonder, balanced on a spray of woodbine, that swings lightly beneath his weight. Leaning forward a little, with his black head turned slightly on one side, he picks off, as if in pure mischief, the dainty tufts that cluster on the branches near him, while the ruined leaves fall in a very shower. A beautiful figure. There is not in Nature a hue more lovely than the exquisite flush of crimson on his breast. Close by him, as if by way of foil to his perfect beauty, sit two sober-clad companions, dull and grey and colourless, yet to the full as mischievous as he.

Sunny spaces in the wood are filled with hovering insects, whose tiny figures rise and fall like motes in the warm air; beetles for the most part, not flies; small, black, long-bodied beetles, the very same that give us such annoyance by getting in our eyes in the twilight.

Butterflies cross and recross the clearing—some so brilliant in their whiteness that they almost suggest yet brighter gleams of sunshine. Some, again, are dark and sombre, and like patches of moving shadow. Now one brave in black and scarlet flashes past. Now one on wings of golden brown sails leisurely along. And some there are, small, sylph-like figures, that float lightly by, as blue as the unclouded heaven overhead. Some moths, too, are abroad, even at this hour and in this fierce sunshine—moths clad in the very softest tints, the most ethereal tones of fawn and grey, of brown and yellow. Some are without a mark on their pure colouring, and some are daintily pencilled with shell-like lines and bars. To and fro in the sunbeams, whose misty shafts slant through the thickets, hover a crowd of winged things—of great bees, black or yellow or tipped with fiery red, flies of many hues, beetles light and dark—and the sound of their multitudinous wings seems to fill the hot summer air. Insects make up no small part, perhaps even the larger part, of the life of the woodland.

The woods just now are swarming with caterpillars, many of which, perhaps even the majority, belong to the class called geometers, from the curious way in which they move along, arching their bodies in a fashion that reminds the observer of a man measuring a distance by "spanning" it with his hand. A much more curious point about them is their wonderful mimicry of the twigs of the tree on which they live: a fact which has earned for them the name of "stick" caterpillars. Their skins are the colour of the bark, their bodies have knots and markings exactly like twigs. And when one of them waits motionless, standing erect on its hinder set of feet—an attitude it can preserve for hours together, it looks so like a piece of stick that even a naturalist has related how he was about to prune a twig from one of his fruit trees, and had even touched it with his knife before he saw that it was not vegetable at all, but one of these "stick" caterpillars. One cannot help wondering if birds are taken in too.

The curious movements of these geometers are due to their comparatively scant supply of legs. There is an amusing ballad called "The Bishop and the Caterpillar," which describes, after the manner of "Ingoldsby," how a great dignitary of the Church inspected a village school. The children acquitted themselves well:—

The gratified examiner, declaring that it was only fair for the scholars to have their turn, proposed they should question him. A small boy in the audience, unawed even by a Bishop, instantly

Here was a poser indeed. Kings of Israel, now, his lordship might have known; very likely the date of the Second Punic War; perhaps even some of the counties of England. But caterpillars were beyond his ken. It was to no purpose that he privately invoked, under cover of making a speech, the aid of the rector, of the curates, of the schoolmaster. Not one of them knew. In vain was the beadle sent out in hot haste to interrogate passers-by. He returned disconsolate, and whispered to the anxious Bishop "Nobody knows." In the end the questioner himself supplied the information, and

It rather spoils the point of the story that, although caterpillars have indeed, on one-half of the body, the six legs of the perfect or winged condition, most of them have ten more, very substantial ones too, on the other half, making not six, but sixteen. Some, indeed, have only fourteen; while these geometers are driven to adopt the attitudes they do because they have to shuffle along as best they can, on no more than ten legs altogether.

There are few points of brighter colour among the world of green. Not many brilliant flowers grow well in the very heart of the woods. Along the paths there is a fringe of hawkweed and crowfoot and yellow cistus. And where the sunlight is less broken by the trees there are patches of red lychnis and tall crowns of white cow parsley. In the clearings strawberries run riot, in flower still, but with scantier harvest than usual of the small sweet fruit, in whose pleasant flavour is a dash of woodland wildness. There is honeysuckle everywhere, trailing on the ground, creeping among the bushes, and climbing up out of the green tangle, laying hold of trees and saplings to help it to the light. And as it climbs it twines with fatal clasp about the friendly stems, slowly tightening its embrace, sometimes cutting deep into the wood, sometimes even killing the branch outright, and going up until at times a green canopy of it crowns boughs thirty feet above the ground, while its flowery clusters scent the woodland. And as evening darkens, "What time the blackbird pipes to vespers from his perch," when the heat of the long summer day gives place to the cooler, sweeter air of night, the fragrance grows until the whole glade is conscious of its subtle charm. Briar bushes there are in plenty, and some of them are lightly set with delicate blossoms. But the dog-roses are at their best, not here, but on the skirts of the wood, where the long, swaying sprays are crowded with those sweetest flowers of June.

But the glory of the woodland is in its trees; in its sturdy oaks, and stately beeches, its old Scotch firs and graceful larch trees. There is no season when the larch is without some charm. It is beautiful in the springtime, when its sprays are set with exquisite red blossoms, like fairy jewel-work. It is beautiful when among soft tufts of green the brown cones harden in the pleasant sun of May. It is beautiful now, when the flowing, feathery plumes wear the soberer hue of summer. Nor is the beauty greatly less when, in the chill autumn days, that hue changes slowly into yellow. Nor is it wholly lost, even in the dead of winter, when, in the frosty sunshine, the bare boughs seem to glow like gold against the pale blue sky.

The mist of bluebells, that lingered here so late, has vanished. The fiery spikes of early orchis are all spent and faded. The 'lords and ladies' have given place to little clusters of green berries, that these sunny days will swiftly ripen to red beads of coral. Yet there are other flowers, with even more of beauty, that love the greater heat of summer. Few are more lovely than the white butterfly orchis; fewer still more fragrant. It has allies that mimic with marvellous faithfulness the forms of bees and flies and spiders. They are plants of the heath, of the sunny meadow, and the open hill. But here is one, perhaps the least striking of the clan, that will flourish in the shadow, and that grows well even here in the half twilight of the trees. The quiet-coloured petals of the tway-blade are not like fly or bee or any insect. Each floweret on its plain, unscented spike is the little green figure of a man, a man with outstretched arms. One might almost fancy that the plant was copying shapes long lost to our dulled vision; that this quiet nook was not alone

but that it was peopled still by the green-clad gnomes of old belief; that these woodland aisles were even now a place

It is the heavy rain no less than the chilly air, the wet days as well as the frosty nights, which have earned for October its added name, and which mark this month so clearly as the real end of a season. We often get a long spell of warm weather in September; it may linger even over the opening of October; but it is October that sets for good and all its fiery seal upon the ruins of the summer. Yet October has been a delightful month; a month of golden dawns, bright days, and fiery sunsets. And it is closing with quiet moonlight nights under whose gauzy veil the landscape lies transfigured, and far hills show faintly as through mists of dreamland. This is St. Martin's Summer:

The colours of the leaves, that so long seemed cold and sullen, are swiftly changing in the sharpening air of night. Among the tattered foliage there broaden, day after day, gleams of that fiery splendour that in a few weeks will flare through the length and breadth of the woodland, like the afterglow of summer. The few last leaves of the wild cherry shine like fire in the coppice, and the horse chestnuts in the meadow are all gold from base to crown. Dead leaves lie thick upon the rustling pathway, where brown of oakleaf, crimson of beech, russet of maple, and gold of elm, lends each its own particular note of colour to the splendid carpet; while the foliage of the sycamore, still clinging to its brilliant stalks, is painted with such varied tints, such greens and browns, such inky blacks and flaming yellows, that one might almost fancy some young dryad had been wandering through the woodland with her brush and had tried her colours on the leaves.

So bright the days have been, so warm is the lingering sunshine, that even the thrush has been trying over his old sweet songs, yet to airs so quiet and subdued that they seemed but a reverie of springtime. All day the robin sings. He is the minstrel of the autumn. Now when other birds are silent his voice rings clear through the deserted woods, and we realise more fully how passing sweet are his familiar melodies.

There are few signs of life among the autumn trees. The jays wrangle as they gather the acorns, and at times a troop of fieldfares chatter as they pass. But the sounds of the October woodland are the patter of falling leaves—now filling the air like rain, and now whirled along the path in fiery eddy; the rush of the wind among the rocking tops; and now and then the creak of branches interlocked, that chafe and fret almost with a cry of pain, such as in old days, ere Pan was dead, startled the woodcutter on the slopes of Apennine.

We wander in the woods, however, with senses unattuned to sights and sounds about us. Had we but eyes we could not fail to see some life stirring even now. Were our ears but trained aright we should be aware of ceaseless sounds of movement. The birds are here, had we but the gift to see them. If no ringdove coos in the shadow of the pines, we may hear as our footsteps rustle on the leafy ways, the crash of wings among distant branches. If no woodpecker's shout breaks in upon the stillness, we may watch the silent figure of the forester in green close crouched against the giant elm. If no magpie chatters in the tree-tops we may at least catch a glimpse of black and white plumage as the wary old campaigner dives into the thickets. This old fir just off the pathway, with its close growing foliage and its canopies of ivy and woodbine, is a screen at once from the wind and the keen eyes of the woodlanders. In its shadow we may stand aside and watch the life of the woods go by, perhaps even overhear some of the secrets of the

Jays, that just now were busy over the acorns, are moving leisurely down the slope, absorbed in gossip, wholly unconscious of any spectator of their movements. There is a wide difference between the quick, impetuous actions of a startled jay, on the look-out for danger, and his lazy, loitering manner when he is quite at his ease, and thinks no one is watching him. Now, as they come nearer, they break into a chorus of loud, harsh notes, mingling with their own wild sylvan speech scraps borrowed from magpie and missel-thrush. Now one mimics the hoarse cry of a crow just sailing over. Now they all join in a babel of odd, inarticulate, indescribable sounds. Still nearer they come. Suddenly one alights close by, three yards off at farthest. He is off again in a moment, too scared to speak. Here comes another. He, too, settles near, but notices nothing. What a handsome fellow he is! What a splendid touch of blue there is in his wing—a blue such as no sapphire or lapis or turquoise could really rival for a moment. His crest is slightly lifted; the sunlight glistens on his polished bill. Easily he sways on a tall ash sapling, looking idly round. Suddenly he starts—is gone. One by one his comrades reach the tree. One after one the startled birds take wing again and vanish in the thickets. The rustle of their quick movements dies away. Their clamorous cries grow fainter, and then cease. Silence settles down once more—the silence of a sleep.

The sharp touch of winter in October has changed the whole face of things. Cold and wind and wet have set their mark alike on woodland and on garden border. Everywhere there is change. The birds of summer have all left us. No bee or wasp is stirring. In this pallid sunshine are no gnats to poise in cloudy column. No moths hover on quivering wings among the ruined flowers. Of the shy four-footed creatures of whose lives we know so little, some are still broad awake and busy, caring nothing for the cold; but some have already entered on their winter sleep. The dormouse is rolled in his snug ball of moss, the hedgehog is buried in his bed of leaves. Grass-snake and viper have crawled away into warm hiding places in banks or among the roots of trees. The frog has buried himself in his cold bed of mud at the bottom of the pond. The toad has squeezed his burly figure into a hole in a tree stump, or under some sheltering stone. It is the fondness of the toad for hiding in holes and corners—not only in winter, but to some extent all the year—which has given rise to so many marvellous tales of the discovery of toads in the heart of trees or in solid blocks of marble. Toads may often be found in holes. But never yet was one found living in any cavity whatsoever where there was no communication with the outer world, no chink through which insects might make their way after the manner of the fly into the parlour of the spider.

Long before the frosts of October, and while the weather was still warm and sunny, snails were to be seen collected in hundreds on the fences of fields and lanes—on their way, no doubt, to winter quarters. Though whether they expected to find suitable lodgings up there at the tops of the palings, or whether they were only sunning themselves for the last time before crawling down to earth to bury themselves in the holes into which the posts were driven, is perhaps less clear.

Some few snails are provided already with close-fitting doors. Others will seal up their gates with a temporary barricade, behind which they will sleep until the trumpet-call of spring shall break on their dull senses. Do they dream, these snails? Do visions of plump cabbages and brilliant dahlias flit through their molluscous minds? Do they in slumber enjoy again the midnight raid upon the marrow-bed, or cry havoc on the choicest lilies of the garden?

There is a strange stillness in the woods these autumn days; a mournful silence, as of regret for the lost summer. The birds are quiet; the insects, whose life and beauty lent so much to the brightness of the summer, are dying in the sharpening air, or are creeping away to hide themselves for the winter. October is a fatal month for the lower forms of life. The different species of our native insects are numbered by tens of thousands, and of the myriads of these with which the air of August, and even of September, teemed, only a few, a very few, will survive the chillier dawns and sunsets of this month, which marks the limit of their lives. At the best their lives are brief. The lives of insects, in their perfect condition, are more often numbered only by months, or even weeks: while the little sad-coloured stone-flies that haunt the banks of streams, entering on their last stage without mouths, spend only a few days of strange existence; and there are other flies which, born after sunset and dying before sunrise, never see the full light of day at all.

Those insects which survive the winter do so as a rule by retiring into the shelter of buildings, into crevices in walls, or into hollow trees, and there remaining, motionless and apparently lifeless, all through the cold season, coming out again at the return of spring. Some butterflies are especially fond of taking up their quarters for the winter in the roofs of houses; and the cornices of unoccupied rooms seem particularly favourite resting-places. There is a case on record in which a Small Tortoiseshell butterfly, having entered a church during service-time one Sunday in August, settled calmly on a rafter over the heads of the congregation, closed its wings, and then and there took up its quarters for the season. It was happily beyond the reach of the verger's broom, though under the eyes of the clergyman,—himself a naturalist, and there it hung, week after week, all the winter through. At length, on a warm Sunday in May, after a sleep of just nine months' duration, the little creature opened its wings again and fluttered down from its perch, "apparently as fresh in colour and condition as if just out of the chrysalis".

In the same way another of the race flew into a sitting-room in a little country town, one day during the hot weather of September, and finally established itself in the cornice, where for six long months it hung motionless. One fine morning in the following March it was fluttering at the window. The sash was lifted. The little creature dashed out into the sunshine, almost with the speed of a swallow.

A striking feature of the autumn garden some years is the multitude of sober-coloured moths hovering among the flower-beds, morning, noon, and night. The moths themselves not only do no harm in the garden, but are of no small service to the gardener by carrying pollen on their tufted heads from flower to flower, and thus unconsciously fertilising many a blossom that might otherwise have borne no seed at all. But it is quite otherwise with the caterpillars, insignificant but noxious little grubs, which, in some seasons, appear in such hosts as to devastate whole fields. In Germany it has been found necessary to use a machine, drawn by horses, to sweep up these caterpillars, which are collected from it in sacks and then destroyed.

The perfect insect, the commonest perhaps of all the moths, is a beautiful little creature, though there is nothing striking in its colouring. It is known as the "Silver Y," from a conspicuous mark on each of its front wings. Its scientific name of "Gamma" has been given to it from another and more learned reading of the letter.

It has been found very difficult to bestow a rational English "popular name" on each of the two thousand species of moths that inhabit these islands. Some of the names, indeed, appear almost, if not quite, meaningless, while some, on the other hand, are highly appropriate. The Humming-bird Hawk moth is marvellously like the bird whose name it bears, as every one must admit who watches it poise with outstretched trunk before a flower, on wings that move so swiftly that they show like a halo round it. Two other Hawk moths are called Elephants, but this is because of the strange-looking head of the caterpillar, which can be extended like a sort of dwarf proboscis. Another moth, the Death's Head, bears a skull and cross-bones on its back.

The moths of the large class known as Geometers are so called because the caterpillars, as they loop themselves along, have the air of measuring the space they traverse, as a man might span it with his hand. The Tiger is a moth of brilliant colouring. The Widow and the Old Lady are clad in sombre hues. The Quakers are mostly dressed in soft shades of sober brown, while the sixteen varieties of Footmen wear among them almost as many varieties of livery.

Such names might, indeed, give rise to misconception. We can well understand the feelings of the old market-woman who, toiling up the steep path through the wood with her eggs and butter, overheard a party of schoolboys talking over their captures of the day. We can picture her dismay as she heard one youngster describe how he had chased a small Elephant through the wood, and just missed capturing a Tiger. We can imagine her alarm at hearing another boy boast of having killed two Quakers and a Footman. And how, at a distant shout from another member of the party that he had just knocked down an Old Lady, she dropped her basket and fled for her life.

But of all the signs in Nature's calendar that mark, like figures on a dial, the movement of the seasons, there is none more certain, none more full of mournful augury, than the passing of the birds.

Their going is secret, silent; they vanish unseen and unheard. We have learnt much in recent years with regard to migration. With one single exception, we know where every one of the summer migrants goes to rear its brood. The haunt of one only—the curlew-sandpiper—still defies discovery. But there is as much cause for wonder as ever that the stork and the swallow observe the time of their coming. And how some birds contrive to find their way over vast stretches of unbroken sea is as great a mystery as when Anacreon saw the

or when the Hebrew watched the wandering hawk stretch her wings toward the south.

Among the few sounds that break the stillness of the autumn night is a faint and hurried cry, that at times may be heard out of the darkness—the note of some bird passing over unseen. It is the cry of the redwing—a feeble note, and yet the very trumpet-call of coming winter. In the spring the sight of the first swallow raises hopes of better times, of sunshine and warm weather. In autumn this voice calling out of the dark is a warning that cold and hunger are driving the redwing from its Northern home, that the Arctic night is settling down among the Norway hills.

Vast indeed is the array of these feathered fugitives. And if most of us see but little of plover or wild duck, of goose or swan or sandpiper, we may perhaps hear them as they pass. Often in the silence of these autumn nights, or even when the wind is blowing, we may hear the swift flight of the mallard overhead, or the musical voices of plovers; perhaps at times the trumpet-notes of geese, or even the whistling of the whooper's wings. Now and then, too, there floats down out of the starlit stillness the wild call of some unknown bird, the voice of some nameless stranger crying in the dark:

The traveller who at this season of the year is whirled along the iron highway of the northern part of Somersetshire will perhaps be led to form but a poor opinion of West Country scenery, for he sees little from the rail of the heath-covered heights of Exmoor, of the wooded glens of Quantock, or of the green heart of Mendip. The line is laid for many miles across a wide stretch of low-lying moorland—so low that it would be flooded each high tide were it not for the old sea wall by the shore. There are parts of the monotonous expanse that may well remind the wayfarer of the opening lines of one of Ingoldsby's ballads:

There are indeed parts of this great plain that are almost absolutely bare of timber save for a few scanty rows of pollard willow trees. There are hardly any hedge-rows, there are few gates, and fewer stiles. The cottages are far apart, built only on the low risings—once islands in the Severn sea, which the moorfolk fondly call "hills," because they are not "drownded out" in flood time.

Yet there is one striking difference. The Somersetshire marshes—far more level than the green waves of the great Wiltshire Down—are cut up by a network of innumerable ditches, narrow indeed, yet not always easily passed, as the little army of King Monmouth proved only too well. These "rhines," as they are called in the West Country, take the place of hedge-rows, and serve also to drain away into the sluggish moorland stream the water which in rainy seasons would collect on the low ground. Turf Moor is a strange looking country, with its interminable stacks of black peat, its great hollows from which turf has been taken, its miles of straight-cut dykes by which the water is drained away into the rivers. The sombre hue of the great plain is relieved by picturesque groups of turf-cutters, by dense masses of noble Scotch firs—trees that flourish well in the peaty soil—and by an occasional belt of coppice that runs in among the peat workings—a jungle of reeds and bulrushes, of bracken and tall royal fern, a sort of No-Man's Land, a very paradise for beast and bird.

The moormen happen on strange things sometimes when they are digging in the peat. It is no very rare thing for the turf-cutter's tool to clash on pottery or rude weapons far below the present level of the moor. Some years since a bow was thus discovered, whose once heavy yew wood was so altered by its long soaking that it was as light as cork. At one place an iron anchor was found, at another the paddle of an old canoe.

There is a tradition in the marshes that, years ago, whenever after a dry summer the water was low in one of the great rhines, a boat became visible, embedded in the bank. "Squire Phippen's Big Ship," as it was called, has long been lost sight of, but in more recent times another canoe has been found on the moor, which happily has met with the attention it deserves.

Some labourers who had been employed every autumn to clear out the rhines on Cranhill Moor, near Glastonbury, had often been inconvenienced at one point by what they thought was the trunk of an old tree—such as are frequently found buried in the peat. The place was pointed out to a local archæologist, Mr. Arthur Bulleid, of Glastonbury, and he saw at once that the supposed tree-trunk was an old British canoe, in splendid preservation, most skilfully worked out of a single log. The end which had projected from the bank is damaged by the spades with which the labourers had repeatedly in past years tried to cut it away, but the rest is uninjured. This curious old craft is flat-bottomed, and pointed at each end, just as are the boats that still navigate the rhines of the district. It measures about seventeen feet in length, is perhaps thirty inches broad, and ten or eleven inches deep.

This canoe might have continued for years a mere obstacle to the clearing of the rhine—now a small ditch, but once a navigable water-way—were it not that the whole district was interested in the recent discovery of an ancient British village, of which it is safe to say that few things of more importance have rewarded recent archæological research in this country.

The ancient Lake Dwellings of Switzerland and Northern Italy, though our knowledge of them is not yet half-a-century old, are familiar wherever Archæology is studied. In the forty years which have elapsed since they were first examined, it has been found that there are many places, even now, where huts, constructed on the same plan, are still in use. Such dwellings exist in the shallows along the Amazon and the Orinoco. Travellers have described them, as they are at this moment, in Borneo and New Guinea. Cameron found them in the heart of the Dark Continent. To this very day Roumelian fishermen inhabit huts built on piles over the water, in the same spot where, twenty-five centuries ago, the children of the Paeonian Lake Dwellers were, according to Herodotus, tied by the leg to prevent them falling into the water.

But, long before the discovery of the Swiss Lake Villages in 1853, another somewhat similar form of primitive habitation was known, confined, as far as can be at present ascertained, to countries inhabited by Celtic races. This was the Crannog, or Marsh Village, from the Celtic word crann, a tree—not built on piles in the water, but on platforms of timber laid over brushwood arranged on the soft soil of a morass. The existence of such dwellings had long been known, but little attention was paid to them before the famous researches of Keller, in Switzerland. Modern Archæologists have, however, explored at least a hundred of these Villages in Ireland, and about half that number in Scotland; and many most interesting remains have been recovered from them.

The Scotch and Irish Crannogs appear to belong to the Iron Age. Implements of the more primitive materials have, it is true, been found in them, but they were not such as were in use in the Bronze or Stone Ages. They differ both in shape and in the style of their ornamentation. A few stone celts have been found in Irish Crannogs, but no object belonging to a time earlier than the Age of Iron has yet been met with in the Marsh Villages of Scotland. The metal objects are, as a rule, characteristic of the period between the 9th and the 12th centuries, though we have evidence that some of the Irish Crannogs were in use long after that time. Allusions to them frequently occur in the old writers. We learn from "The Annals of the Four Masters" that the historic Crannog of Lough Gabhor—the first that was examined in Ireland—was burnt A.D. 848, and again, by the Danes, in 933. An account, written at the time, of the expedition sent by Queen Elizabeth to put down the rebel Earl of Tyrone, describes a Crannog in County Down, which "was seated in the midst of a great bog, and no way accessible but through thick woods, hardly passable. It had about it two deep ditches, both encompassed with strong pallisadoes, a very high and thick rampart of timber, and well flanked with bulwarks. For defence of the place, forty-two musqueteers and some twenty swordsmen were lodged in it." This was in 1602. Later still, Sir Felim O'Neill, who had headed the rebellion of 1641, was captured in a Crannog, in 1642.

Until recent years no Crannog had been found in this country. The discovery of a very extensive Settlement of this kind, in the turf moor near Glastonbury, is thus an event of great Archæological interest, which is much increased by the fact that, whereas the remains found in the Scotch and Irish Crannogs point to a period so recent as from the ninth to the seventeenth centuries, the Marsh Village discovered in Somersetshire has yielded, so far, no object which appears to be so late even as the Roman occupation.

But these broad flats on Turf Moor, their patches of coppice, the edges of the green "droves," the waste lands where turf has been cut, and which have been left to recover themselves by the rest and growth of perhaps half a century, even the very ditches of the moor, are in summer-time a happy hunting-ground for the naturalist.

The plants of these monotonous marshes, the birds, the beasts, the insects, have a character of their own. In summer-time the meadows that stretch from rhine to rhine are crimson with orchis and clover, with sheep sorrel and ragged robin, are golden with flower-de-luce, whitened with tall oxeye daisies and soft tufts of cotton grass. Now the whole moorland is sobered to a dull, monotonous hue of mingled browns and greys tinged with a sad-coloured note of green. The rhines that to-day are but straight-cut belts of water, with no beauty and hardly more of interest, were filled then to the very brim with sedges and iris and tall stems of flowering rush. Along their hedges grew teazels and skullcap and comfrey, and down their steep banks the moneywort poured its lavish streams of gold. Few plants of any sort are to-day visible in the water. But the still depths were covered then with a green film of weed, crossed and re-crossed with a very labyrinth of tracks, where rat or moorhen or water-rail had cut its devious way. Here grew the arrow-head, with its beautiful white flowers. Here floated the star-like blossoms of the frogbit. And here the bladderwort, that now rests unseen on the mud at the bottom, buoyed up by multitudinous little floats of air, lifted its exquisite spike above the surface.

The busy life that in the summer filled these interminable ditches has ebbed away. The green jungle of flags and water plants where the sedge warbler sang—not from dawn till nightfall only, but from sundown till the east was grey—is gone. The reeds among whose slender stems the warbler wove her exquisite nest are beaten down. The peewits who reared their scanty broods among these open meadows are here still. Even the quails that hid their beautiful eggs among the summer clover may still be couching in the withered grass; and water-rails find shelter still among the brown and broken reeds.

The banks are honeycombed with the burrows of water-rats—as most people call them. Beautiful creatures, not really rats at all, and having little in common with their evil-minded, mischievous, objectionable namesakes. Their habit of burrowing is perhaps their one fault, and has more than once helped to break down the bank of a river here, and so deluge the moors with miles of tawny water. Water-rats are out at all times, all the year, except in the very coldest weather. But twilight is their favourite hour. Then as you steal quietly along by the bank you may watch the soft brown balls of fur crouched on the narrow fringe of shore; may envy their incomparable feats of diving; may follow their course by a slight ripple on the surface as they swim to some secret hiding place. The owls know their habits well. This very month a barn owl was seen in the twilight, flying over the moor on its soft and soundless wings. Suddenly it swooped below the bank of a rhine, reappearing a moment later with a water-rat in its claws. Scared by a shout, it dropped its prey, but the rat, though warm, was stone dead.

Much less often seen are the water-shrews, whose frolics you may watch in broad daylight if you are so very fortunate as to come upon a party of them at play, swimming round and round like the tiny beetles that spin in mazy circles on the surface. The water itself is, in the summer-time, crowded with life. Over the surface skim rowing-flies and water-spiders. Under it a countless crowd of creatures live out their little day—beetles and water-scorpions, active little boatmen that paddle up and down with dexterous oars, caddis larvæ carrying about with them their houses built of grains of sand, or scraps of reed, or of a multitude of tiny shells. Shells there are everywhere, small some of them, but even the very smallest revealing under the microscope forms as marvellous as that of the nautilus itself. Slender newts, too, swarm in the still water, and great black tritons, the terror of the moorfolk, in whose eyes even the viper is hardly more venomous.

Not to every one is it given to appreciate the beauty and the wonder of the inhabitants of this happy hunting-ground. In such a paradise two naturalists had been hard at work through a hot summer afternoon. They were stretched contentedly by the roadside, when a burly, red-faced farmer driving by drew rein, and seeing their nets upon the grass asked them what sport they had had, and if it was eels or flounders they had been catching. They proceeded to explain. "Oh, bitles," said the farmer, somewhat contemptuously. "And what be they vur, then?" This was a more difficult point. It was not at all easy to make him see that there could be any use in hoarding up such "common ornery rubbish" as that. Butterflies, now, he could understand, or "bird eggs." He himself had collected "bird eggs" when he was a boy. But "bitles! Well," said he at last, "good day. I must be gwine"; and he drove slowly off. He had not got more than fifty yards along the road, however, when he pulled up again, and turning half round in his seat, called out, "Hi! but I can't think what ee can want they bitles vur!"