Field and Hedgerow | Page 7

hover-flies come to them; the heath and common, the moor and forest,
the hedgerow and copse, are full of insects. They rise under foot, they
rise from the spray brushed by your arm as you pass, they settle down
in front of you--a rain of insects, a coloured shower. Legion is a little
word for the butterflies; the dry pastures among the woods are brown
with meadow-brown; blues and coppers float in endless succession; all
the nations of Xerxes' army were but a handful to these. In their
millions they have perished; but somewhere, coiled up, as it were, and
sealed under the snow, there must have been the mothers and germs of
the equally vast crowds that will fill the atmosphere this year. The great
bumble-bee that shall be mother of hundreds, the yellow wasp that shall
be mother of thousands, were hidden there somewhere. The food of the
migrant birds that are coming from over sea was there dormant under
the snow. Many nations have a tradition of a former world destroyed by
a deluge of water, from the East to the West, from Greece to Mexico,
where the tail of a comet was said to have caused the flood; but in the
strange characters of the Zend is the legend of an ark (as it were)
prepared against the snow. It may be that it is the dim memory of a
glacial epoch. In this deep coombe, amid the dark oaks and snow, was
the fable of Zoroaster. For the coming of Ormuzd, the Light and Life
Bringer, the leaf slept folded, the butterfly was hidden, the germ
concealed, while the sun swept upwards towards Aries.
There is nothing so wearying as a long frost--the endless monotony,
which makes one think that the very fault we usually find with our
climate--its changeableness--is in reality its best quality. Rain, mist,
gales--anything; give us anything but weary, weary frost. But having
once fixed its mind, the weather will not listen to the usual signs of
alteration.
The larks sang at last high up against the grey cloud over the
frost-bound earth. They could not wait longer; love was strong in their
little hearts--stronger than the winter. After a while the hedge-sparrows,
too, began to sing on the top of the gorse-hedge about the garden.

By-and-by a chaffinch boldly raised his voice, ending with the old story,
'Sweet, will you, will you kiss--me--dear?' Then there came a hoar-frost,
and the earth, which had been black, became white, as its evaporated
vapours began to gather and drops of rain to fall. Even then the
obstinate weather refused to quite yield, wrapping its cloak, as it were,
around it in bitter enmity. But in a day or two white clouds lit up with
sunshine appeared drifting over from the southward, and that was the
end. The old pensioner came to the door for his bread and cheese: 'The
wind's in the south' he said, 'and I hopes she'll stay there' Five dull
yellow spots on the hedge--gorse bloom--that had remained unchanged
for so many weeks, took a fresh colour and became golden. By the
constant passing of the waggons and carts along the road that had been
so silent it was evident that the busy time of spring was here. There
would be rough weather, doubtless, now and again, but it would not
again be winter.
Dark patches of cloud--spots of ink on the sky, the 'messengers'--go
drifting by; and after them will follow the water-carriers, harnessed to
the south and west winds, drilling the long rows of rain like seed into
the earth. After a time there will be a rainbow. Through the bars of my
prison I can see the catkins thick and sallow-grey on the willows across
the field, visible even at that distance; so great the change in a few days,
the hand of spring grows firm and takes a strong grasp of the hedges.
My prison bars are but a sixteenth of an inch thick; I could snap them
with a fillip--only the window-pane, to me as impenetrable as the
twenty-foot wall of the Tower of London. A cart has just gone past
bearing a strange load among the carts of spring; they are talking of
poling the hops. In it there sat an old man, with the fixed stare, the
animal-like eye, of extreme age; he is over ninety. About him there
were some few chairs and articles of furniture, and he was propped
against a bed. He was being moved--literally carted--to another house,
not home, and he said he could not go without his bed; he had slept on
it for seventy-three years. Last Sunday his son--himself old--was carted
to the churchyard, as is the country custom, in an open van; to-day the
father, still living,