Afoot in England

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The birds that lived on the huge cathedral itself had the
greatest attraction for me; and here the daws, if not the most
numerous, were the most noticeable, as they ever are on
account of their conspicuousness in their black plumage, their
loquacity and everlasting restlessness. Far up on the ledge
from which the spire rises a kestrel had found a cosy corner
in which to establish himself, and one day when I was there a
number of daws took it on themselves to eject him: they
gathered near and flew this way and that, and cawed and cawed
in anger, and swooped at him, until he could stand their
insults no longer, and, suddenly dashing out, he struck and
buffeted them right and left and sent them screaming with fear
in all directions. After this they left him in peace: they
had forgotten that he was a hawk, and that even the gentle
mousing wind-hover has a nobler spirit than any crow of them
all.

On first coming to the cathedral I noticed a few pigeons
sitting on the roof and ledges very high up, and, not seeing
them well, I assumed that they were of the common or domestic
kind. By and by one cooed, then another; and recognizing the
stock-dove note I began to look carefully, and found that all
the birds on the building--about thirty pairs--were of this
species. It was a great surprise, for though we occasionally
find a pair of stock-doves breeding on the ivied wall of some
inhabited mansion in the country, it was a new thing to find a
considerable colony of this shy woodland species established
on a building in a town. They lived and bred there just as
the common pigeon--the vari-coloured descendant of the blue
rock--does on St. Paul's, the Law Courts, and the British
Museum in London. Only, unlike our metropolitan doves, both
the domestic kind and the ringdove in the parks, the Salisbury
doves though in the town are not of it. They come not down to
mix with the currents of human life in the streets and open
spaces; they fly away to the country to feed, and dwell on the
cathedral above the houses and people just as sea-birds
--kittiwake and guillemot and gannet--dwell on the ledges of
some vast ocean-fronting cliff.

The old man mentioned above told me that the birds were called
"rocks" by the townspeople, also that they had been there for
as long as he could remember. Six or seven years ago, he
said, when the repairs to the roof and spire were started, the
pigeons began to go away until there was not one left. The
work lasted three years, and immediately on its conclusion the
doves began to return, and were now as numerous as formerly.
How, I inquired, did these innocent birds get on with their
black neighbours, seeing that the daw is a cunning creature
much given to persecution--a crow, in fact, as black as any of
his family? They got on badly, he said; the doves were early
breeders, beginning in March, and were allowed to have the use
of the holes until the daws wanted them at the end of April,
when they forcibly ejected the young doves. He said that in
spring he always picked up a good many young doves, often
unfledged, thrown down by the dawn. I did not doubt his
story. I had just found a young bird myself--a little
blue-skinned, yellow-mouthed fledgling which had fallen sixty
or seventy feet on to the gravel below. But in June, he said,
when the daws brought off their young, the doves entered into
possession once more, and were then permitted to rear their
young in peace.

I returned to Salisbury about the middle of May in better
weather, when there were days that were almost genial, and
found the cathedral a greater "habitacle of birds" than ever:
starlings, swifts, and swallows were there, the lively little
martins in hundreds, and the doves and daws in their usual
numbers. All appeared to be breeding, and for some time I saw
no quarreling. At length I spied a pair of doves with a nest
in a small cavity in the stone at the back of a narrow ledge
about seventy feet from the ground, and by standing back some
distance I could see the hen bird sitting on the nest, while
the cock stood outside on the ledge keeping guard. I watched
this pair for some hours and saw a jackdaw sweep down on them
a dozen or more times at long intervals. Sometimes after
swooping down he would alight on the ledge a yard or two away,
and the male dove would then turn and face him, and if he then
began sidling up the dove would dash at and buffet him with
his wings with the greatest violence and throw him off. When
he swooped closer the dove would spring up and meet him in the
air, striking him at the moment of meeting, and again the daw
would be beaten. When I left three days after witnessing this
contest, the doves were still in possession of their nest, and
I concluded that they were not so entirely at the mercy of the
jackdaw as the old man had led me to believe.

It was, on this occasion, a great pleasure to listen to the
doves. The stock-dove has no set song, like the ringdove, but
like all the other species in the typical genus Columba it has
the cooing or family note, one of the most human-like sounds
which birds emit. In the stock-dove this is a better, more
musical, and a more varied sound than in any other Columba
known to me. The pleasing quality of the sound as well as the
variety in it could be well noted here where the birds were
many, scattered about on ledges and projections high above the
earth, and when bird after bird uttered its plaint, each
repeating his note half a dozen to a dozen times, one in slow
measured time, and deep-voiced like the rock-dove, but more
musical; another rapidly, with shorter, impetuous notes in a
higher key, as if carried away by excitement. There were not
two birds that cooed in precisely the same way, and the same
bird would often vary its manner of cooing.

It was best to hear them during the afternoon service in the
cathedral, when the singing of the choir and throbbing and
pealing of the organ which filled the vast interior was heard
outside, subdued by the walls through which it passed, and was
like a beautiful mist or atmosphere of sound pervading and
enveloping the great building; and when the plaining of the
doves, owing to the rhythmic flow of the notes and their human
characters, seemed to harmonize with and be a part of that
sacred music.

Chapter Twelve: Whitesheet Hill

On Easter Saturday the roadsides and copses by the little
river Nadder were full of children gathering primroses; they
might have filled a thousand baskets without the flowers being
missed, so abundant were they in that place. Cold though it
was the whole air was laden with the delicious fragrance. It
was pleasant to see and talk with the little people occupied
with the task they loved so well, and I made up my mind to see
the result of all this flower-gathering next day in some of
the village churches in the neighbourhood--Fovant, Teffant
Evias, Chilmark, Swallowcliffe, Tisbury, and Fonthill Bishop.
I had counted on some improvement in the weather--some
bright sunshine to light up the flower-decorated interiors;
but Easter Sunday proved colder than ever, with the bitter
north-east still blowing, the grey travelling cloud still
covering the sky; and so to get the full benefit of the
bitterness I went instead to spend my day on the top of the
biggest down above the valley. That was Whitesheet Hill, and
forms the highest part of the long ridge dividing the valleys
of the Ebble and Nadder.

It was roughest and coldest up there, and suited my temper
best, for when the weather seems spiteful one finds a grim
sort of satisfaction in defying it. On a genial day it would
have been very pleasant on that lofty plain, for the flat top
of the vast down is like a plain in appearance, and the
earthworks on it show that it was once a populous habitation
of man. Now because of the wind and cloud its aspect was bare
and bleak and desolate, and after roaming about for an hour,
exploring the thickest furze patches, I began to think that my
day would have to be spent in solitude, without a living
creature to keep me company. The birds had apparently all
been blown away and the rabbits were staying at home in their
burrows. Not even an insect could I see, although the furze
was in full blossom; the honey-suckers were out of sight
and torpid, and the bloom itself could no longer look
"unprofitably gay," as the poet says it does. "Not even a
wheatear!" I said, for I had counted on that bird in the
intervals between the storms, although I knew I should not
hear his wild delightful warble in such weather.

Then, all at once, I beheld that very bird, a solitary female,
flittering on over the flat ground before me, perching on the
little green ant-mounds and flirting its tail and bobbing as
if greatly excited at my presence in that lonely place. I
wondered where its mate was, following it from place to place
as it flew, determined now I had found a bird to keep it in
sight. Presently a great blackness appeared low down in the
cloudy sky, and rose and spread, travelling fast towards me,
and the little wheatear fled in fear from it and vanished from
sight over the rim of the down. But I was there to defy the
weather, and so instead of following the bird in search of
shelter I sat down among some low furze bushes and waited and
watched. By and by I caught sight of three magpies, rising
one by one at long intervals from the furze and flying
laboriously towards a distant hill-top grove of pines. Then I
heard the wailing cry of a peewit, and caught sight of the
bird at a distance, and soon afterwards a sound of another
character--the harsh angry cry of a carrion crow, almost as
deep as the raven's angry voice. Before long I discovered the
bird at a great height coming towards me in hot pursuit of a
kestrel. They passed directly over me so that I had them a
long time in sight, the kestrel travelling quietly on in the
face of the wind, the crow toiling after, and at intervals
spurting till he got near enough to hurl himself at his enemy,
emitting his croaks of rage. For invariably the kestrel with
one of his sudden swallow-like turns avoided the blow and went
on as before. I watched them until they were lost to sight in
the coming blackness and wondered that so intelligent a
creature as a crow should waste his energies in that vain
chase. Still one could understand it and even sympathize with
him. For the kestrel is a most insulting creature towards the
bigger birds. He knows that they are incapable of paying him
out, and when he finds them off their guard he will drop down
and inflict a blow just for the fun of the thing. This
outraged crow appeared determined to have his revenge.

Then the storm broke on me, and so fiercely did the rain and
sleet thrash me that, fearing a cold soaking, I fled before it
to the rim of the plain, where the wheatear had vanished, and
saw a couple of hundred yards down on the smooth steep slope a
thicket of dwarf trees. It was, the only shelter in sight,
and to it I went, to discover much to my disgust that the
trees were nothing but elders. For there is no tree that
affords so poor a shelter, especially on the high open downs,
where the foliage is scantier than in other situations and
lets in the wind and rain in full force upon you.

But the elder affects me in two ways. I like it on account of
early associations, and because the birds delight in its
fruit, though they wisely refuse to build in its branches; and
I dislike it because its smell is offensive to me and its
berries the least pleasant of all wild fruits to my taste. I
can eat ivy-berries in March, and yew in its season, poison or
not; and hips and haws and holly-berries and harsh acorn, and
the rowan, which some think acrid; but the elderberry I can't
stomach.

How comes it, I have asked more than once, that this poor tree
is so often seen on the downs where it is so badly fitted to
be and makes so sorry an appearance with its weak branches
broken and its soft leaves torn by the winds? How badly it
contrasts with the other trees and bushes that flourish on the
downs--furze, juniper, holly, blackthorn, and hawthorn!

Two years ago, one day in the early spring, I was walking on
an extensive down in another part of Wiltshire with the tenant
of the land, who began there as a large sheep-farmer, but
eventually finding that he could make more with rabbits than
with sheep turned most of his land into a warren. The higher
part of this down was overgrown with furze, mixed with holly
and other bushes, but the slopes were mostly very bare. At
one spot on a wide bare slope where the rabbits had formed a
big group of burrows there was a close little thicket of young
elder trees, looking exceedingly conspicuous in the bright
green of early April. Calling my companion's attention to
this little thicket I said something about the elder growing
on the open downs where it always appeared to be out of
harmony with its surroundings. "I don't suppose you planted
elders here," I said.

"No, but I know who did," he returned, and he then gave me
this curious history of the trees. Five years before, the
rabbits, finding it a suitable spot to dig in, probably
because of a softer chalk there, made a number of deep burrows
at that spot. When the wheatears, or "horse-maggers" as he
called them, returned in spring two or three pairs attached
themselves to this group of burrows and bred in them. There
was that season a solitary elder-bush higher up on the down
among the furze which bore a heavy crop of berries; and when
the fruit was ripe he watched the birds feeding on it, the
wheatears among them. The following spring seedlings came up
out of the loose earth heaped about the rabbit burrows, and as
they were not cut down by the rabbits, for they dislike the
elder, they grew up, and now formed a clump of fifty or sixty
little trees of six feet to eight feet in height.

Who would have thought to find a tree-planter in the wheatear,
the bird of the stony waste and open naked down, who does not
even ask for a bush to perch on?

It then occurred to me that in every case where I had observed
a clump of elder bushes on the bare downside, it grew upon a
village or collection of rabbit burrows, and it is probable
that in every case the clump owed its existence to the
wheatears who had dropped the seed about their nesting-place.
The clump where I had sought a shelter from the storm was
composed of large old dilapidated-looking half-dead elders;
perhaps their age was not above thirty or forty years, but
they looked older than hawthorns of one or two centuries; and
under them the rabbits had their diggings--huge old mounds and
burrows that looked like a badger's earth. Here, too, the
burrows had probably existed first and had attracted the
wheatears, and the birds had brought the seed from some
distant bush.

Crouching down in one of the big burrows at the roots of an
old elder I remained for half an hour, listening to the
thump-thump of the alarmed rabbits about me, and the
accompanying hiss and swish of the wind and sleet and rain in
the ragged branches.

The storm over I continued my rambles on Whitesheet Hill, and
coming back an hour or two later to the very spot where I had
seen and followed the wheatear, I all at once caught sight of
a second bird, lying dead on the turf close to my feet! The
sudden sight gave me a shock of astonishment, mingled with
admiration and grief. For how pretty it looked, though dead,
lying on its back, the little black legs stuck stiffly up, the
long wings pressed against the sides, their black tips
touching together like the clasped hands of a corpse; and the
fan-like black and white tail, half open as in life, moved
perpetually up and down by the wind, as if that tail-flirting
action of the bird had continued after death. It was very
beautiful in its delicate shape and pale harmonious colouring,
resting on the golden-green mossy turf. And it was a male,
undoubtedly the mate of the wheatear I had seen at the spot,
and its little mate, not knowing what death is, had probably
been keeping watch near it, wondering at its strange stillness
and greatly fearing for its safety when I came that way, and
passed by without seeing it.

Poor little migrant, did you come back across half the world
for this--back to your home on Whitesheet Hill to grow cold
and fail in the cold April wind, and finally to look very
pretty, lying stiff and cold, to the one pair of human eyes
that were destined to see you! The little birds that come
and go and return to us over such vast distances, they perish
like this in myriads annually; flying to and from us they
are blown away by death like sere autumn leaves, "the
pestilence-stricken multitudes" whirled away by the wind!
They die in myriads: that is not strange; the strange, the
astonishing thing is the fact of death; what can they tell
us of it--the wise men who live or have ever lived on the
earth--what can they say now of the bright intelligent spirit,
the dear little emotional soul, that had so fit a tenement and
so fitly expressed itself in motions of such exquisite grace,
in melody so sweet! Did it go out like the glow-worm's lamp,
the life and sweetness of the flower? Was its destiny not
like that of the soul, specialized in a different direction,
of the saint or poet or philosopher! Alas, they can tell us
nothing!

I could not go away leaving it in that exposed place on the
turf, to be found a little later by a magpie or carrion crow
or fox, and devoured. Close by there was a small round
hillock, an old forsaken nest of the little brown ants, green
and soft with moss and small creeping herbs--a suitable grave
for a wheatear. Cutting out a round piece of turf from the
side, I made a hole with my stick and put the dead bird in and
replacing the turf left it neatly buried.

It was not that I had or have any quarrel with the creatures
I have named, or would have them other than they are
--carrion-eaters and scavengers, Nature's balance-keepers and
purifiers. The only creatures on earth I loathe and hate are
the gourmets, the carrion-crows and foxes of the human kind
who devour wheatears and skylarks at their tables.

Chapter Thirteen: Bath and Wells Revisited

'Tis so easy to get from London to Bath, by merely stepping
into a railway carriage which takes you smoothly without a
stop in two short hours from Paddington, that I was amazed at
myself in having allowed five full years to pass since my
previous visit. The question was much in my mind as I
strolled about noting the old-remembered names of streets and
squares and crescents. Quiet Street was the name inscribed on
one; it was, to me, the secret name of them all. The old
impressions were renewed, an old feeling partially recovered.
The wide, clean ways; the solid, stone-built houses with their
dignified aspect; the large distances, terrace beyond terrace;
mansions and vast green lawns and parks and gardens; avenues
and groups of stately trees, especially that unmatched clump
of old planes in the Circus; the whole town, the design in the
classic style of one master mind, set by the Avon, amid green
hills, produced a sense of harmony and repose which cannot be
equalled by any other town in the kingdom.

This idle time was delightful so long as I gave my attention
exclusively to houses from the outside, and to hills, rocks,
trees, waters, and all visible nature, which here harmonizes
with man's works. To sit on some high hill and look down on
Bath, sun-flushed or half veiled in mist; to lounge on Camden
Crescent, or climb Sion Hill, or take my ease with the
water-drinkers in the spacious, comfortable Pump Room; or,
better still, to rest at noon in the ancient abbey--all this
was pleasure pure and simple, a quiet drifting back until I
found myself younger by five years than I had taken myself to
be.

I haunted the abbey, and the more I saw of it the more I loved
it. The impression it had made on me during my former visits
had faded, or else I had never properly seen it, or had not
seen it in the right emotional mood. Now I began to think it
the best of all the great abbey churches of England and the
equal of the cathedrals in its effect on the mind. How rich
the interior is in its atmosphere of tempered light or tender
gloom! How tall and graceful the columns holding up the high
roof of white stone with its marvellous palm-leaf sculpture!
What a vast expanse of beautifully stained glass! I certainly
gave myself plenty of time to appreciate it on this occasion,
as I visited it every day, sometimes two or three times, and
not infrequently I sat there for an hour at a stretch.

Sitting there one day, thinking of nothing, I was gradually
awakened to a feeling almost of astonishment at the sight of
the extraordinary number of memorial tablets of every
imaginable shape and size which crowd the walls. So numerous
are they and so closely placed that you could not find space
anywhere to put your hand against the wall. We are accustomed
to think that in cathedrals and other great ecclesiastical
buildings the illustrious dead receive burial, and their names
and claims on our gratitude and reverence are recorded, but in
no fane in the land is there so numerous a gathering of the
dead as in this place. The inscription-covered walls were
like the pages of an old black-letter volume without margins.
Yet when I came to think of it I could not recall any Bath
celebrity or great person associated with Bath except Beau
Nash, who was not perhaps a very great person. Probably
Carlyle would have described him as a "meeserable creature."

Leaving my seat I began to examine the inscriptions, and found
that they had not been placed there in memory of men belonging
to Bath or even Somerset. These monuments were erected to
persons from all counties in the three kingdoms, and from all
the big towns, those to Londoners being most numerous. Nor
were they of persons distinguished in any way. Here you
find John or Henry or Thomas Smith, or Brown, or Jones, or
Robinson, provision dealer, or merchant, of Clerkenwell, or
Bermondsey, or Bishopsgate Street Within or Without; also many
retired captains, majors, and colonels. There were hundreds
more whose professions or occupations in life were not stated.
There were also hundreds of memorials to ladies--widows and
spinsters. They were all, in fact, to persons who had come to
die in Bath after "taking the waters," and dying, they or
their friends had purchased immortality on the walls of the
abbey with a handful or two of gold. Here is one of several
inscriptions of the kind I took the trouble to copy: "His
early virtues, his cultivated talents, his serious piety,
inexpressibly endeared him to his friends and opened to them
many bright prospects of excellence and happiness. These
prospects have all faded," and so on for several long lines in
very big letters, occupying a good deal of space on the wall.
But what and who was he, and what connection had he with Bath?
He was a young man born in the West Indies who died in
Scotland, and later his mother, coming to Bath for her health,
"caused this inscription to be placed on the abbey walls"!
If this policy or tradition is still followed by the abbey
authorities, it will be necessary for them to build an annexe;
if it be no longer followed, would it be going too far to
suggest that these mural tablets to a thousand obscurities,
which ought never to have been placed there, should now be
removed and placed in some vault where the relations or
descendants of the persons described could find, and if they
wished it, have them removed?

But it must be said that the abbey is not without a fair
number of memorials with which no one can quarrel; the one I
admire most, to Quin, the actor, has, I think, the best or the
most appropriate epitaph ever written. No, one, however
familiar with the words, will find fault with me for quoting
them here:

That tongue which set the table on a roar
And charmed the public ear is heard no more.
Closed are those eyes, the harbingers of wit,
Which spake before the tongue what Shakespeare writ.
Cold is that hand which living was stretched forth
At friendship's call to succor modest worth.
Here lies James Quin, deign readers to be taught
Whate'er thy strength of body, force of thought,
In Nature's happiest mood however cast,
To this complexion thou must come at last.

Quin's monument strikes one as the greatest there because of
Garrick's living words, but there is another very much more
beautiful.

I first noticed this memorial on the wall at a distance of
about three yards, too far to read anything in the inscription
except the name of Sibthorpe, which was strange to me, but
instead of going nearer to read it I remained standing to
admire it at that distance. The tablet was of white marble,
and on it was sculptured the figure of a young man with curly
head and classic profile. He was wearing sandals and a loose
mantle held to his breast with one hand, while in the other
hand he carried a bunch of leaves and flowers. He appeared in
the act of stepping ashore from a boat of antique shape, and
the artist had been singularly successful in producing the
idea of free and vigorous motion in the figure as well as of
some absorbing object in his mind. The figure was undoubtedly
symbolical, and I began to amuse myself by trying to guess its
meaning. Then a curious thing happened. A person who had
been moving slowly along near me, apparently looking with no
great interest at the memorials, came past me and glanced
first at the tablet I was looking at, then at me. As our eyes
met I remarked that I was admiring the best memorial I had
found in the abbey, and then added, "I've been trying to make
out its meaning. You see the man is a traveller and is
stepping ashore with a flowering spray in his hand. It
strikes me that it may have been erected to the memory of a
person who introduced some valuable plant into England."

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