Two “hedgers and tiners,” demolishing a bank of earth at Turner’s Corner as I walked along the Headley Road this morning, came, to their great surprise and no little horror, on a coiled and twisted colony of hibernating adders. I paused in my stroll for ten minutes to watch the unearthing. It was a curious sight; the lithe and sinuous creatures, recognizable at once as genuine vipers by the zigzag pattern of dark diamond-shaped spots down their glossy green backs, lay curled and entwined with one another in snaky amity, fast asleep past waking, and completely filling up, as with a living mass of inextricable knots, the curves and crannies of the underground hole where they had taken refuge. They were there, of course, for their little winter siesta, which occupies them for a trifle of six months at a sitting. I pleaded hard for their lives with the men, explaining most earnestly that they would do much more good than harm, from the point of view of those whose talk is of beeves, and who regard standing corn as the one really sacred object in this beautiful universe. But I need hardly say my special pleading proved of no avail; the hedgers chopped them up fine before my eyes with their murderous spades, on the familiar antique principle of “larning them to be adders.” Poor helpless creatures, expiating thus unaware the delicta majorum! They would have killed more mice in a week than the men could catch in a summer; but they were snakes for all that, and your rustic hates and shrinks from snakes, et dona ferentes.

The adder’s siesta is just as much a part of his fixed yearly cycle as the fall of the leaf is to the tree, or migration towards warmer lands is to the swallow or house-martin. Snakes can’t migrate; because, of course, they’ve got no wings to migrate with; and being chilly creatures, evolving little animal heat of their own from their sluggish circulation, and warmed by the sun alone into spasmodic activity, they are compelled to bury themselves in holes in the ground, where they lie close to all others of their species that they can find, so as to utilize in common, by mutual aid, whatever trifle of bodily warmth they possess between them. Indeed, a snake, like a tree, can only be said really to live for half its lifetime; the other half these Persephones of the north spend underground in the torpid condition. The heart almost entirely ceases to beat; the lungs cease to act; sensation is suspended; and the animal dozes away his time unconsciously till the summer warmth of the surface soil begins once more to revive him. Then he ventures forth timorously from his hole on some bright May morning, to see how things are progressing in the upper world; and meeting, peradventure, some belated shrew-mouse or some early spring chicken, makes a dash at it at once with what life he has left in him, strikes it with his poison-fang, and, swallowing it whole, straightway regains fresh fuel for the battle of existence.

Adders were always friends of mine. They are numerous hereabouts, on our heathy uplands; and for my own part, I do my best to protect and preserve them. For we have not so many wild creatures left in England that we can afford to despise any lingering element of our native fauna. Besides, they do next to no practical harm; occasionally, indeed, they may spring at a dog who provokes their otherwise placid and meditative tempers by treading on them in the heather; and they will still more rarely make a dash at a man who incautiously handles them; but as a rule they are timid and rather sluggish creatures, much more likely to take fright and flee when discovered than to turn and rend one. I come across them frequently on basking paths among the heath in summer; they lie sunning themselves on the warm sand; but when I endeavour to rouse them to resistance by poking at them with my stick, they refuse, as a rule, to show fight, and after a few minutes of hesitation and lazy reluctance to move, they retire in high displeasure to their home among the bracken. Never once have I known them try actively to resent my intentional intrusion on their post-prandial reflections.

We have but two kinds of snakes, all told, in England, popular prejudice to the contrary notwithstanding. One of them is the harmless and pretty ring-snake, easily distinguished by the absence of the rhomboidal zigzag markings; the other, who may as easily be recognized by their presence, is the venomous adder, known also under his frequent alias as the viper, and often supposed to be two distinct creatures. In reality, one reptile doubles the parts, as an actor would say, being but a single snake under two disguises. The adder is remarkable for bringing forth its young alive, instead of hatching them out of eggs, like most typical serpents; and the very name viper is short for vivipara. As for the blind-worm, or slow-worm, who is also one animal masquerading under two aliases, he must not be considered a snake at all, being a legless lizard, who tries deceptively to pass himself off in serpent’s clothing. Nay, he is not even, strictly speaking, legless, for he has rudimentary limbs, with bones to match, though they never quite succeed in pushing themselves through the scaly integument. He is a lizard, in short, arrested on his road to complete serpenthood. Neither the ring-snake nor the blind-worm is in the slightest degree dangerous; but when in doubt as to whether a particular crawling animal is an adder or otherwise, it would be safer to give him—and yourself—the benefit of the doubt, by abstaining from handling him. The poison-fangs of the viper are two in number, set in the upper jaw; they are hollow, perforated, and erectile at will by the muscles of the animal. Their poison is secreted by a gland at the back, which communicates through a tube with the canal in the fang; and it is not really so very venomous. But if you provoke an adder overmuch, and he sees a chance of remonstrating with you, I do not deny that he will throw back his smooth head, erect his angry fangs, dart quickly forward, and express his disagreement by inflicting a bite upon the offender’s trousers. In this he acts much as you and I would do if he were a man and we were adders. Put yourself in his place, and you will think less ill of him.

It is one of the wonders and delights of the moorland that here alone Nature pays the first call, instead of demurely waiting to be called upon. Near great towns she is coy; and even in the fields that abut on villages, she shows but a few familiar aspects; while aloof on the open heath she reveals herself unreservedly, like a beautiful woman to her chosen lover. She exhibits all her moods and bares all her secrets. This afternoon, late, we were lounging on the low window-seat by the lattice that gives upon the purple spur of hillside, when suddenly a strange din as of half-human voices aroused our attention. “Look, look!” Elsie cried, seizing my arm in her excitement. And, indeed, the vision was a marvellous and a lovely one. From the lonely pine-tree that tops the long spur above the Golden Glen, a ceaseless stream of brown birds seemed to flow and disengage itself. It was a living cataract. By dozens and hundreds they poured down from their crowded perch; and the more of them poured down, the more there were left of them. What a miracle of packing! They must have hustled and jostled one another as thick on the boughs as swarming bees that cling in a cluster round their virgin queen; while as for the ground beneath, it seethed and swelled like an ant-heap. For several minutes the pack rose from its camp, and fluttered and flowed down the steep side of the moor toward Wednesday Bottom, flying low in a serried mass, yet never seeming to be finished. They reminded me of those cunning long processions at the play, when soldiers and village maidens stream in relays from behind the wings, and disappear up the stage, and keep moving eternally. Only that is clever illusion, and this was reality.

“Lonely,” people say! “No life on the hilltop!” Why, here was more life at a single glance than you can see in a whole long week in Piccadilly; an army on the march, making the heather vocal with the “wet-my-feet, wet-my-feet” of ten thousand voices!

But you must live in the uplands to enjoy these episodes. Nature won’t bring them home to you in the populous valleys. A modest maid, she is chary of her charms; you must woo her to see them. She seldom comes half-way to meet you. But if you dwell by choice for her sake in her chosen haunts, your devotion touches her: she will show you life enough—rare life little dreamt of by those who tramp the dead flags of cities, where no beast moves save the draggled cab-horse. For you, the curlew will stalk the boggy hollows; for you, the banded badger will creep stealthily from his earth and disport himself at dusk among his frolicsome cublets; for you, the dappled adder will sun his zigzag spots, and dart his tremulous tongue, all shivering and quivering; for you, the turbulent quail will darken the ground in spring, or spread cloud-like over the sky on cloudless summer evenings.

And what poetry, too, in their sudden entrance on the scene, dropped down from heaven, one would think, as on Israel in the wilderness! Small wonder the marvel-loving Hebrew annalist took those multitudinous birds for the subject of a miracle. But yesterday, perhaps, they were fattening their plump crops among the vine-shoots of Capri, the lush young vine-shoots with their pellucid pink tendrils; and to-day, here they are among the dry English heather, as quick and eager of eye as by Neapolitan fig-orchards. Swift of flight and patient of wing, they will surmount the Apennines and overtop the Alps in a single night; leave Milan in its plain and Lucerne by its lake when the afterglow lights up the snow on the Jungfrau; speed unseen in the twilight over Burgundy or the Rhineland; cross the English Channel in the first grey dawn; and sup off fat slugs before twelve hours are past, when the shadows grow deep in the lanes of Surrey. Watt and Stephenson have enabled us poor crawling men to do with pain and discomfort, at great expense, in the chamber of torture described with grim humour as a train de luxe, what these merry brown birds, the least of the partridge tribe, can effect on their own stout wings in rather less time, without turning a feather. If you watch them at the end of their short European tour from Rome to England at a burst, you will find them as playful and as bickering at its close as if they had just gone out for an evening constitutional.

Quails are the younger brothers of the partridge group; but, unlike most of their kind, they are gregarious and migratory. They spend their winters in the south, as is the wont of fashionable invalids, and come northward with the spring, in quest of cooler quarters. Myriads of them cross the Mediterranean from Africa with the early sciroccos, and descend upon Calabria and the Bay of Naples in those miraculous flights which Browning has immortalized in “The Englishman in Italy.” Quail-netting is then a common industry of the country about Sorrento and Amalfi; thousands of the pretty little gray-and-buff birds are sent to market daily, with their necks wrung, and their beautiful banded heads, “specked with white over brown like a great spider’s back,” all dead and draggled. Many of the flocks stop on during the season among the vineyards in Italy; but other and more adventurous hordes, tired of southern slugs and fat southern beetles, wing their way still further north, to Germany, Scandinavia, England, and Scotland. At one time they were far from uncommon visitors in our southern counties; but brick and mortar have disgusted them, and their calls are nowadays liker to angels’ visits than in the eighteenth century. Yet a few still loiter through the winter in Devonshire or Kerry; while in summer they still reach to the Orkneys, Shetland, and the Outer Hebrides.

Beautiful as quails are, both to look upon and to eat, they are not personally amiable or admirable creatures. Their character is full of those piquant antitheses which seventeenth-century satire delighted to discover in the human subject. They are gregarious, but unsociable; fond of company, yet notoriously pugnacious; abandoned polygamists, with frequent lapses into the strictest monogamy; fighters destitute of the sense of honour; faithless spouses, but devoted, affectionate, and careful mothers. I fancy, too, they must have a wonderful instinct in the matter of commissariat, increased, no doubt, by ages of strategical evolution: for it can be by no means easy to find supplies for so large an army on the march; yet quails seem always so to time their arrival at each temporary stopping-place as exactly to fall in with some glut in the insect-market. Only a few days before they came here, for example, not a beetle was to be seen upon the parched-up heath; but day before yesterday it rained insects, so to speak; and last night one could hardly take a step down the Long Valley without crushing small beetles underfoot, against one’s will, by the dozen. The quails must somehow have got wind of the fact that there was corn in Egypt, be it by scent, or scouts, or some mysterious instinct; and here they are to-night, swarming up in their thousands, to enter into possession of their ancestral heritage. You should see them wage war on the helpless longicorn! I hope they will nest here, as it is amusing to watch them. Each little Turk of a husband keeps a perfect harem of demure brown hens, looking slily askance from the corners of their eyes, and watches over them close by with all the jealousy of a Mahmoud or a Sultan Soleyman. The rival who tries to poach on his lordship’s preserves has, indeed, a hard time of it; he will retire, well pecked, from his rash encounter. Quails, in fact, are still in the Mohammedan stage of social evolution, while our more advanced and enlightened English partridges have attained already to a civilized and Western domestic economy.

Yes: these bare boughs, I take it, are not all pure loss. They have their consolations; they have their artistic and intellectual value. They show us, after all, the true inwardness of the tree; they enable us to realize, as none could otherwise do, the infinite diversity of architecture and ground-plan in the design and execution of the forest denizens. While dense masses of foliage clothe and obscure the boughs with their gay greenery we can gain but a rough idea of the underlying structure. But just as a Leonardo or a Luca Signorelli must needs pry beneath skin and muscle to discover the actual framework and bony supports of the body, so the lover of the trees desires from time to time to catch some glimpse of the very limbs and joints of oak or maple—to get rid of the green covering in favour of the naked underlying reality. So only can one enjoy the delicate lissom twigs of the silver birch, etched in tender grey against the hard blue sky; so only can one observe the forked upright branches of the Lombardy poplar, like natural candelabra, in striking contrast with the long hanging boughs of the weeping-willow, divided and subdivided into pendulous twigs, and losing themselves at last in fine spray of living threads, like a wind-driven cataract. Every kind of forest-dweller has thus its own special beauty of architectural plan; and every one of them can be realized in all its naked grace and variety of outline only when relieved of the glorious green weight that so richly concealed it.

And bare boughs are instructive, too, as well as beautiful. They suggest to one the endless vicissitudes and cataclysms in the history of growth; they show us how the knotted trunk acquires its final form, and by what course of evolution branch added to branch builds up at last the whole noble shape of the buttressed beech or the spreading horse-chestnut. Take, for example, our dear old friend the ash. In summer you can hardly discern through a canopy of green the outline of his bent boughs, curved downwards by their own weight of heavy feathery foliage, each leaf a little branch with numerous spreading leaflets. But when autumn comes, and the heavy leaves drop off one by one, you get revealed at once the peculiar beauty of his mode of growth—that delicious combination of angular and curved form which makes the ash the acknowledged king of the winter woodland. All the branches dip gracefully in a long arch towards the end, and then rise again with an abrupt curve; this hooked type of terminal bough being so distinctive and so well marked an ashy feature that you can tell an ash by it afar off in its wintry nakedness as you whirl by in a train at a mile’s distance, especially if it happens to be silhouetted against the sky on a bare ridge or hilltop. The growth of the oak, on the other hand, so gnarled and irregular, is quite equally characteristic; while the disposition of the buds soon reveals the fact that this very irregularity itself owes its origin in the last resort to a survival of the fittest among many abortive branches. For the oak tries, as it were, to grow symmetrically like a conifer; but frost and wind play such havoc with its delicate young shoots that it never succeeds in realizing its ideal, but grows habitually distorted against its will by external agencies.

Nor does our winter leave us wholly leafless. Even in England we have a fair sprinkling of native-born evergreens. And I really don’t know that I would wish them more frequent; for nothing can be more monotonous, more sickly sweet, than the unvarying green of tropical forests; while the grateful contrast of drooping birch twigs or big-budded bare oak branches with the dark and sombre verdure of our northern Scotch firs, is in itself one of the chief charms of English winter. During the Tertiary period, indeed, our English woods were full of large-leaved evergreens of the southern types—camphors and cinnamons, and rhododendrons and liquidambars; but with the coming on of the Great Ice Age those lush southern forms were driven southward for ever, leaving us only the Scotch fir, the yew, and the juniper, with a few broader-leaved kinds of shiny evergreen, of which holly, ivy, and box are the most familiar examples. These, with the exotic laurels and aucubas, the daphnes and the laurustinuses, are quite enough to diversify pleasantly our northern scenery. Then our recent acquisitions of exotic conifers, like the Douglas pines, the sequoias, and the beautiful glaucous firs, “the greenest of things blue, the bluest of things green,” which now abound in plantations, have done much to redeem the surviving reproach of the glacial epoch.

Not that any of these plants are really evergreen in the stricter sense that most people imagine. All our foliage alike is, strictly speaking, annual, and all alike deciduous; but while oaks and beeches shed their dead leaves in our climate in autumn, pines, firs, and hollies retain theirs on the tree till the succeeding spring, and then let them drop quietly off, unperceived amid the pale glory of the fresh green foliage. The larch is a well-known example of a conifer which behaves in this respect like the oak or the birch; while its ally, the spruce-fir, keeps on the dead or dying leaves through the winter months, and then shuffles them off unobtrusively as the new foliage develops. The evergreens get the advantage of utilizing any stray scrap of winter sunshine; but then they have to protect their living green material with a thick coat of glazed outer cells; the deciduous trees, on the other hand, withdraw all the living protoplasm in autumn into the live layer of the bark, drop the dead skeletons of the leaves on the ground, and utilize the protoplasm afresh for the formation of young leaves when spring comes round once more in due season. Nothing is lost; everything is economized, hoarded, and finally used up again.

He was an airy, fairy orange-tip. He had just emerged from the chrysalis, and stood poised for a moment, like a hesitating Psyche, on the flat-topped blossoming branches of a big white cow-parsnip. For the most part, he sat there, irresolute, plimming his untried wings, and half opening them tentatively from time to time, as if wondering to himself how the dickens they got there. And well might he wonder; for remember, he was bred a common green caterpillar. Never till this moment did it dawn across his mind that such a motion as flight could exist in the universe. So there he sat still, uncertain what strange change had come over him unawares. Six well-formed legs, in place of the creeping suckers on which he crawled in his youth; and what could these thin vans mean—these light and airy vans, that moved so dubiously on his soft woolly shoulders?

While his wings remained erect and closed, the under surface alone showed; and that was chequered green and white, like the flowers he sat upon. Indeed, so exactly did groundwork and insect harmonize with one another in hue and markings, that even a quick eye might easily have passed my orange-tip by unnoticed, were it not for the quivering movement of those uncertain wings, whose opening and shutting betrayed him, as I passed, to my scrutinizing survey. And this in itself was odd. For “How did he know,” thought I—“he who till lately was but a small green grub, feeding on the lush leaves and stems of cresses—that he ought now to make straight, on his emergence from the chrysalis, for this white-flowered cow-parsnip; which, indeed, is the favourite perching-place of all his race, and which effectually conceals him from the prying eyes of birds that fain would prey upon him, yet of whose very existence he, a crawling caterpillar, was till this moment ignorant? Surely that shows in his small brain some curious pre-existent picture, as it were, of this unknown cow-parsnip—a picture which enabled him to recognize it offhand when seen, and to steer for it at once with unerring instinct.”

As I watched, the timid creature, feeling his wings at last, made up his tiny mind to spread those untried vans, and venture into the unknown on the undreamt-of pinions. So he opened them wide, and displayed himself in his glory as a full-fledged orange-tip. His colours were still quite fresh, his feathery scales unspoiled by rain, or wind, or enemies. I gazed at him in delight, with sympathetic joy for his pure joy of living, as he unfolded those white wings, with their brilliant orange badge and their fringe of dark purple. For a second or two he darted off in the brilliant sunshine, rejoicing; he seemed to learn, as he went, to recall of a sudden some dim but recurring ancestral memory. All at once, as he fluttered somewhat doubtfully in mid-air, he caught sight from afar of a female brimstone. “Will he chase her?” I thought to myself; though, indeed, I knew well, had I chosen to recollect it, that inherited instinct is far too strong in these little creatures to admit for a moment such egregious errors. Our great Bashaw just glanced at her with unobservant eye; no gleam of recognition lighted up the tiny face. He passed on without one word; not a curve of the feeble flight; not a divergent pirouette of the orange-tipped pinions. Then a Clouded Yellow floated past, pursued by two rivals of her own swift-winged race. They are the fleetest of our butterflies. My orange-tip just glanced at them as who should say, “Strange that insects of taste should put up with such colouring. Why, she’s almost pure white. I wouldn’t look twice at her.” The words had scarcely thrilled through his fatuous little brain when up loomed from windward a small yellowish butterfly, not wholly unlike himself: green and white underneath, fringed with black above, but without the orange spot which made my lord so attractive. In a second I recognized her: it was a female orange-tip—a virgin female. But, quicker far than myself, her natural master had seen her and known her instinctively as the mate predestined for him. Hi, presto! as I looked, all the world was one maze; the pretty things were at once in the thick of their courtship.

And what a courtship that was! How dainty! how ethereal! He, rising on the breeze and displaying with pride his beautiful orange tips; she, coquetting and curvetting, dancing coyly through the air, now pretending to fly away, now affecting disdain, now returning to his side, now darting off on light wings just as he thought he had captivated that capricious small heart of hers. So they continued for ten minutes their dainty aërial minuet; and when last I caught sight of them they were still circling undecided above the sprays of wild rose in the hedgerow by the valley.

A familiar country sight. And yet, great heavens, what a miracle! For bethink you that that orange-tip was born and bred a small green-and-white caterpillar. He did not know, as you and I do, that his father and mother were orange-tip butterflies. He never saw or knew them. They were dead and gone before he emerged from the egg; and when he came out into the world, he met none of his own kind, save, it may be, some other small green-and-white caterpillars. His sole business in life was to gorge himself with cresses. At last, one fine day, when he had eaten his soul’s fill, some inner impulse seized him. He began to transform himself, half unconsciously to his own mind, into a boat-shaped chrysalis. There he lay as in a mummy-case, melting slowly away into organic pulp, and growing again by degrees into a full-formed butterfly. All his organs changed; strange legs and wings budded out on him incontinently. Yet even when he emerged once more from the mummy-case, he had no intuitive knowledge of himself as a male orange-tip. Still less had he any distinct conception of the female of his species. But, as he floated about on his untried wings, he took no notice at all of any other butterflies, till the moment a mate of his own appeared upon the scene, and then he instantly and unerringly recognized her. The sole explanation of this marvel, it seems to me, lies in the fact that his nervous system has in it by inheritance a form or mould—if I may be allowed so material a metaphor—into which the image of his own kind and of his own mate falls and fits exactly. The moment that mould is completely filled and satisfied, the creature that fills it he loves as instinctively as Miranda loved Ferdinand, the first human being she had ever beheld save her father, Prospero.

And what is thus true of the butterfly is true, I believe, mutatis mutandis, of all of us. On the human brain there is impressed by anticipation a blank form or model of the human face and the human figure. Our central type of human beauty is thus found for us by nature and ancestral experience: the nearer a man and a woman approach to that central type, the more beautiful, on the average, other things equal, do normal judges consider them. I do not doubt, of course, that many other and more general elements come in to complete the developed concept. White teeth, rosy cheeks, bright eyes, delicate curves, have of themselves a certain intrinsic and universal æsthetic value as colour and lustre, as shape and softness. But dainty pink is not so beautiful on the nose as on the cheeks or lips; nor are curves as desirable in the lines of the spine as in the external contour. Indeed, even expression itself has its stereotyped value; for a baby in arms will smile responsive to a smile from its nurse, and will cry at a frown, independently of experience.

The pond on the moor is frozen over. What an epoch in the history of all its inhabitants! For they are not mostly long-lived creatures, these pond-dwellers; a summer forms an appreciable part of their short existence. Theirs is but a precarious life at the best of times; they have always to steer close between the Scylla of drought and the Charybdis of freezing. Half their days are spent in enforced seclusion. In the summer the pond, which is their universe, is apt to dry up and fail them; in winter it stands its even chance of freezing solid and entombing them. To meet these two extreme contingencies, all the world of the pond has had to accommodate itself to the possible chances of its fickle environment. The newts, for example, come here to breed every spring. They must needs do so, indeed, because their young have gills like a salmon or a herring, and can only breathe in their earlier stages the diffuse oxygen held in suspension in water. Newts, in fact, start in life as fish, but develop, half-way through, into lizard-like animals with lungs and legs, because of the annual drying up of their native waters. All higher life, indeed, was originally aquatic; it is only just because ponds dry up in summer that the ancestors of beasts and birds and reptiles ever ventured on dry land, at first for a brief excursion, and afterwards for a permanence. We are all in the last resort the descendants of amphibians. There are two kinds of newt in this pond, each with its own peculiar plan for meeting the difficulty of winter quarters. The great crested newt, who is the most confirmed water-haunter of the two, retires to the mud at the bottom of the pond in late autumn, and there lies torpid as long as the frost lasts, returning to the surface to breathe when the weather improves again. But the smaller newt, a more adventurous soul, goes ashore in summer, when the pond dries up, and stops there for the winter, lurking in long grass at the bottoms of ditches, or hiding in caves and damp vaults or cellars.

There are no fish in the pond, of course, because it is not permanent; it dries up in August. But there are frogs and tadpoles by the thousand in due season; and, what is odder still, the frogs are there now, though you cannot see them. Indeed, frogs and newts are merely slight variations on the fishy type, evolved to meet this very want and to fill this very place in the economy of nature: practically speaking, they are fish which turn at last into terrestrial reptiles. During the earlier spring days, when the ponds are full, the parents lay their spawn among the sunk leaves of water-weeds; and soon the tadpoles emerge from their jelly-like eggs, and swarm at the edge in a seething black mass of bustling and jostling life. Then, as the pond gets low, and breathing becomes difficult, they proceed by degrees to drop their gills, and develop the rudimentary swim-bladder into a pair of true lungs. Soon four weak little legs with sprawling fingers bud out at their sides; and, hi, presto! they hop or crawl ashore as full-fledged air-breathers. At this point grave differences appear between them. The newts retain their tails through life, but the more advanced frogs drop or absorb theirs, and assume the shape of thorough-going land animals. In winter, however, the frogs return once more to the pond, and bury themselves in the oozy mud at the bottom, often huddled together in close-packed groups, for warmth and company. At first sight you might think they would be warmer on dry land; but this is not so, for they have little animal heat of their own, being cold-blooded creatures, and they would therefore get frozen whenever the surface temperature fell below freezing-point. But the pond seldom or never freezes solid; in other words, the degree of cold at the bottom never goes down to freezing; and so the frogs are comparatively safe in the mud of the bed. If you dig in the ooze in winter, you may turn up whole spadefuls of frogs and great crested newts in certain cosy corners, lying torpid and half dead, but waiting patiently for the returning sun of spring to warm them. So that even the frozen pond has a great deal more life in it than the casual townsman would at first imagine.

As for the snails and beetles, and other small fry of the pond, they mostly retire, like their enemies the frogs, to the depths for protection. The summer is their life; winter to them is merely a time to be dozed through and tided over. Many of the shorter-lived kinds, indeed, die out altogether at the first touch of autumn, leaving only their eggs or their pupæ to represent them through the cold season. In these cases, therefore, we might almost say that the species, not the individual, lies dormant through the winter. It ceases to exist altogether for the time, and is only vouched for by the eggs or spawn, so that each generation knows nothing by sight of the generation that preceded it.

But when spring comes round again, there is a sudden waking up into spasmodic activity on the part of the pond and all its inhabitants. The season has set in, and life is to the fore again. The greater newt, in imitation of the poet’s wanton lapwing, “gets himself another crest,” and adorns his breast with brilliant spots of crimson and orange. The mating proceeds apace; frogs pair and spawn; the water swarms once more with layer upon layer of wriggling black tadpoles. Now the great pond-snail floats at the top, and lays its oblong bunch of transparent eggs; now the water-crowfoot flowers; the diver beetles disport themselves amain; strange long-legged beasts that walk the water like insect Blondins, begin to stalk the surface on their living stilts; and dancing little “whirligigs,” who skim the pond, coquette and pirouette in interlacing circles. All nature is alive. Winter is forgotten; eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, are the order of the day in pond and hedgerow. Then the crested newt proceeds to devour his smaller relative, and the tadpole to elbow his neighbour out of existence; and all goes merrily as wedding bells in the world of the pond—till winter comes again.

More than once in these papers I have mentioned, as I passed, the wind-swept and weather-beaten Scotch fir on which the night-jar perches, and which forms such a conspicuous object in the wide moorland view from our drawing-room windows. I love that Scotch fir, for its very irregularity and rude wildness of growth; a Carlyle among trees, it seems to me to breathe forth the essential spirit of these bold free uplands. Not that any one would call it beautiful who has framed his ideas of beauty on the neatness and trimness of park-like English scenery; it has nothing in common with the well-grown and low-feathering Douglas pines which the nursery gardener plants out as “specimen trees” on the smooth velvety sward of some lawn in the lowlands. No, no; my Scotch fir is gnarled and broken-boughed, a great gaunt soldier, scarred from many an encounter with fierce wintry winds, and holding its own even now, every January that passes, by dint of hard struggling against enormous odds with obstinate endurance. Life, for it, is a battle. And I love it for its scars, its toughness, its audacity. It has chosen for its post the highest summit of the ridge, where north-east and south-west alternately assault it; and it meets their assaults with undiminished courage, begotten of long familiarity with fire and flood, with lightning and tempest.

Has it never occurred to you how such a tree must grow? what attacks it must endure, what assaults of the evil one it must continually fight against? Its whole long life is one endless tale of manful struggle and dear-bought victory. What survives of it now in its prime—for it is still a young tree, as trees go on our upland—is at best but a maimed and mutilated relic. From its babyhood upward it has suffered, like man, an eternal martyrdom. It began life as a winged seed, blown about by the boisterous wind which shook it rudely adrift from the sheltering cone of its mountain-cradled mother. Many a sister seed floated lightly with the breeze to warm nooks in the valley, where the tree that sprang from it now grows tall and straight, and equally developed on every side into a noble Scotch fir of symmetrical dimensions. But adventures are to the adventurous; you and I, my tree, know it. You were caught in its fierce hands by some mighty sou’wester, that whirled you violently over the hilltop till you reached the very summit of the long straight spur; and there, where it dropped you, you fell and rooted in a wind-swept home on a wind-swept upland. Your growth was slow. For many and many a season your green sprouting top was browsed down by wandering cattle or gnawing rabbits; you had some thirty rings of annual growth, I take it, in your stunted rootstock, just below the level of the soil, before you could push yourself up three inches towards the free and open air of heaven. Year after year, as you strove to rise, those ever-present assailants cropped you close and stunted you; yet still you persevered, and nathless so endured, till, in one lucky season, you made just enough growth, under the sun’s warm rays, to overtop and outwit their continual aggression. Then, for a while, you grew apace; you put forth lush green buds, and you looked like a sturdy young tree indeed, with branches sprouting from each side, when, with infinite pains, you had reached to the height of a man’s shoulder.

But your course was still chequered. Life is hard on the hilltops. You had to stand stress and strain of wind and weather. Like every other tree on our open moor, I notice you are savagely blown from the south-west; for the south-west wind here is by far our most violent and dangerous enemy, blowing great guns at times up the narrow funnel-shaped valleys, and so much more to be dreaded than the bitter north-east, which is elsewhere so inhospitable. “Blown from the south-west,” we say as a matter of course in our bald human language; and so indeed it seems. I suppose most casual spectators who look upon you now really believe it is the direct blowing of the wind that so distorts and twists you. You and I know better. We know that each spring, as the sap rises in your veins, you put forth afresh lush green sprouts symmetrically from the buds at your growing points; and that if these sprouts were permitted to develop equally and evenly in every direction, you would have grown from the first as normally and formally as a spruce-fir or a puzzle-monkey. But not for us are such joys. We must grow as the tempests and the hail-storms permit us. Soon after you have begun each year to put forth your tender green shoots comes a frost—a nipping frost—whirled along on the wide wings of some angry sou’wester. We, your human neighbours, lie abed in our snug cottage, and tremble at the groaning and shivering of our beams, and silently wonder in the dark amid the noise how much of our red-tiled roof will remain over us by morning. (Five pounds’ worth of tiles went off, I recollect, in last Thursday week’s tempest.) But you, on your open hilltop, feel the fierce cold wind blow through and through you; till all the buds on your south-western face are chilled and killed; while even the others, more sheltered on the leeward side, have got nipped and checked, so that they develop irregularly. It is this lawless checking of growth in your budding and sprouting stage that really “blows you on one side,” as we roughly state it. Only on your sheltered half do you ever properly realize the ground-plan of your nature. Your growth is the resultant of the incident energies. And that, after all, is the case with most of us; especially with the stormy petrels of our human menagerie.

Yet even to you, too, have come the consolations of love. “Not we alone,” says the poet, “have yearnings hymeneal.” Late developed on your cold spur, checked and gnarled as you grew, there came to you yet a day when your branches burgeoned forth into tender pink cones, with dainty soft ovules, all athirst for pollen; while on your budding shoots grew thick rings of rich stamens, that flung their golden powder adrift on the air with a lavish profusion right strange in so slenderly endowed an economy. But it is always so in nature. These gnarled hard lives, as people think them, are gilded brightest by the glow and fire of love; these poorest of earth’s children are made richest at last in the holiest and best of her manifold blessings. It was nothing to you, I know, my tree, that the fire which swept over the heath some five years since charred all your lower branches and killed half your live bark; you had courage to resist and heart to prevail; and though those poor burnt boughs are dead and gone for all time, you still put forth smiling bundles of green needles above quite as bravely as ever. It was nothing to you that the great storm of last autumn rent one huge branch in twain, and tore off a dozen lesser arms from your bleeding trunk in a wild outburst of fury. The night-jar now sits and croons to you every evening in the afterglow from those self-same stumps; and struggling sheaths of young buds push through on the blown boughs that just escaped with their lives the fury of the tempest. No wonder the Eastern fancy sees curled dragons in the storms that so rend and assail us; but we like them, you and I, for the sake of the breadth, the height, the air, the space, the freedom. What matters it to us though fire rage and wind blow, so long as they leave us our love in peace, and permit us to spread our sheltering shade over our strong young saplings? The hilltops are free: the hilltops are open: from their peaks we can catch betimes some crimson glimpses of the sunrise and the morning.

So, now, my Scotch fir, gnarled and broken on the ridge, you know how I love you, and why I sympathize with you.

See what a beautiful creeping spray of ivy—dark green, with russet veins—from the ground beneath the copse here! How close it keeps to the earth! how exquisitely the leaves fit in with one another, like a living mosaic! That is why the ivy-leaf is shaped as we know it, with re-entrant angles, very abrupt and deep-lobed. The plant, as a whole, crawls snake-like over the ground in shady spots, or climbs up the face of stony cliffs, or mantles walls and ruins, or clambers boldly over the trunks of trees—which last, though its most conspicuous, is not by any means its commonest or most natural situation. It is a haunter of the shade; therefore it wants to utilize to the uttermost every inch of space and every ray of sunlight. So it clings close to the soil or to its upright support, and lays its leaves out flat, each occupying its own chosen spot of earth without encroaching on its neighbour’s demesne, and none ever standing in the light of another. That shows one at once the secret reason for the angular foliage: it is exactly adapted to the ivy’s habitat. All plants which grow in the same way, half trailing, half climbing, have leaves of similar shape. Three well-known examples, each bearing witness to the resemblance in their very names, are the ivy-leaved veronica, the ivy-leaved campanula, and the ivy-leaved toad-flax. Or look once more at the pretty climbing ivy-leaved geranium or pelargonium, so commonly grown in windows. Contrast all these angular leaves of prostrate creepers with the heart-shaped or arrow-headed foliage of the upright twining or tendril-making climbers, such as convolvulus, black bindweed, black bryony, and bittersweet, and you will recognize at once how different modes of life almost necessarily beget different types of leaf-arrangement.

Nay, more. If you watch the ivy itself in its various stages, you will see how the self-same plant adapts its different parts from time to time to every variation in the surrounding conditions. Here in the copse, left to itself, as nature made it, it spreads vaguely along the ground at first with its lower branches, developing small leaves as it goes, narrow-lobed and angular, which are pressed flat against the soil in such a way as to utilize all possible air and sunshine. They cover the ground without mutual interference. And they are evergreen, too, so as to make the best of the scanty light that struggles through the trees in early spring and late autumn, while the oaks and ashes are all bare and leafless. But the main stem, prying about, soon finds out for itself some upright bank or trunk, up which it climbs, adhering to its host by the aid of its innumerable short root-like excrescences. Here its foliage assumes still the same type as on the ground, but is not quite so closely appressed to the support, nor yet so sharply angular. The mode of the mosaic, too, has altered a little to suit the altered circumstances; the leaves now stand out more freely from the stem, yet in such a way as not to interfere with or overshadow each other. By-and-by, however, the ivy, as it grows, reaches the top of the bank, or some convenient flowering place on the friendly trunk; and then it begins to send up quite different blossoming branches. These rise straight into the air, without support on any side; unlike the creeping stems, they are stout enough and strong enough to stand alone—to bear their own weight and that of the prospective flowers and berries. Besides, they wish to be seen from all sides at once, so as to attract from far and near a whole circle of amicable birds and insects. And now observe that on these upright flowering branches the shape of the leaves changes entirely, so that you would hardly recognize them at first sight for ivy. They stand round the branch on all sides equally, and therefore have no longer any need to fit in and dovetail with one another. Each leaf is now somewhat oval in form, though sharply pointed; there are no more lobes or angles; and the outline as a whole is far fuller and usually unbroken. Yet they still avoid standing in one another’s light, and are so arranged in spirals round the stem as to interfere as little as possible with one another’s freehold.

The little yellowish-green flowers which top these branches appear in late autumn. They are not particularly conspicuous, and their petals are insignificant; yet they distil abundant honey on a disk in the centre, and they breathe forth a curious half-putrescent scent, which seems highly attractive to many carrion flies and other foul feeders. Hence you will find that butterflies seldom or never visit them; but they are frequented and fertilized by hundreds of smaller insects, for whose sake the copious honey is stored on the open disk, where it is easily accessible to even the stumpiest proboscis. Ivy, in short, is a democratic flower: it lays by no rich store of secret nectar in hidden recesses, like the honeysuckle or the nasturtium, where none but the Norman-nosed aristocrats of the insect world can reach it; it is all for the common plebs. “A fair field and no favour” is the motto it acts upon. When the berries have been thus fertilized, they lie by over winter, slowly ripening and swelling, to blacken at last in the succeeding summer. The ripe fruit is then eaten by birds, such as hawfinches and certain of the thrush tribe, which disperse the hard nut-like seeds undigested. Black or dark blue are rare colours for flowers, but common for fruits; partly perhaps because birds are less fond of bright reds and yellows than the æsthetic insects; but partly also because such dusky hues are readily seen on a tree or bush against the snows of winter, the grey brown of late autumn, or the delicate wan green of early spring foliage.