The Life of the Fields | Page 5

a whole handful of
flowers, and yet they do not weary the eye. Oak follows oak and elm
ranks with elm, but the woodlands are pleasant; however many times
reduplicated, their beauty only increases. So, too, the summer days; the
sun rises on the same grasses and green hedges, there is the same blue
sky, but did we ever have enough of them? No, not in a hundred years!
There seems always a depth, somewhere, unexplored, a thicket that has
not been seen through, a corner full of ferns, a quaint old hollow tree,
which may give us something. Bees go by me as I stand under the
apple, but they pass on for the most part bound on a long journey,
across to the clover fields or up to the thyme lands; only a few go down
into the mowing-grass. The hive bees are the most impatient of insects;
they cannot bear to entangle their wings beating against grasses or
boughs. Not one will enter a hedge. They like an open and level surface,
places cropped by sheep, the sward by the roadside, fields of clover,
where the flower is not deep under grass.

II

It is the patient humble-bee that goes down into the forest of the

mowing-grass. If entangled, the humble-bee climbs up a sorrel stem
and takes wing, without any sign of annoyance. His broad back with
tawny bar buoyantly glides over the golden buttercups. He hums to
himself as he goes, so happy is he. He knows no skep, no cunning work
in glass receives his labour, no artificial saccharine aids him when the
beams of the sun are cold, there is no step to his house that he may
alight in comfort; the way is not made clear for him that he may start
straight for the flowers, nor are any sown for him. He has no shelter if
the storm descends suddenly; he has no dome of twisted straw well
thatched and tiled to retreat to. The butcher-bird, with a beak like a
crooked iron nail, drives him to the ground, and leaves him pierced
with a thorn; but no hail of shot revenges his tortures. The grass stiffens
at nightfall (in autumn), and he must creep where he may, if possibly
he may escape the frost. No one cares for the humble-bee. But down to
the flowering nettle in the mossy-sided ditch, up into the tall elm,
winding in and out and round the branched buttercups, along the banks
of the brook, far inside the deepest wood, away he wanders and
despises nothing. His nest is under the rough grasses and the mosses of
the mound; a mere tunnel beneath the fibres and matted surface. The
hawthorn overhangs it, the fern grows by, red mice rustle past.
It thunders, and the great oak trembles; the heavy rain drops through
the treble roof of oak and hawthorn and fern. Under the arched
branches the lightning plays along, swiftly to and fro, or seems to, like
the swish of a whip, a yellowish-red against the green; a boom! a
crackle as if a tree fell from the sky. The thick grasses are bowed, the
white florets of the wild parsley are beaten down, the rain hurls itself,
and suddenly a fierce blast tears the green oak leaves and whirls them
out into the fields; but the humble-bee's home, under moss and matted
fibres, remains uninjured. His house at the root of the king of trees, like
a cave in the rock, is safe. The storm passes and the sun comes out, the
air is the sweeter and the richer for the rain, like verses with a rhyme;
there will be more honey in the flowers. Humble he is, but wild; always
in the field, the wood; always by the banks and thickets; always wild
and humming to his flowers. Therefore I like the humble-bee, being, at
heart at least, for ever roaming among the woodlands and the hills and
by the brooks. In such quick summer storms the lightning gives the
impression of being far more dangerous than the zigzag paths traced on

the autumn sky. The electric cloud seems almost level with the ground
and the livid flame to rush to and fro beneath the boughs as the little
bats do in the evening.
Caught by such a cloud, I have stayed under thick larches at the edge of
plantations. They are no shelter, but conceal one perfectly. The
wood-pigeons come home to their nest trees; in larches they seem to
have permanent nests, almost like rooks. Kestrels, too, come home to
the wood. Pheasants crow, but not from fear--from defiance, in fear
they scream. The boom startles them, and they instantly defy the sky.
The rabbits quietly feed on out in the