THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF ILLINOIS 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 570 
 
MARCH WINDS 
 
 AND 
 
 APRIL SHOWERS. 
 
MARCH WINDS 
 
 AND 
 
 APRIL SHOWERS: 
 
 BEING 
 
 NOTES AND NOTIONS ON A FEW 
 CREATED THINGS. 
 
B7 tt » «rf * y 
 
 MAR 3 1913 
 
5"7 0 
 
 JREMOTE STORAGE 
 
 TO 
 
 NATHANIEL OGLE, ESQ. 
 
 THIS LITTLE VOLUME 
 
 l8 Snsctibtlf, 
 
 WITH SINCERE RESPECT AND ESTEEM, 
 
 BY ITS AUTHOR. 
 
 250595 
 
 5 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 Of those by whom this volume may be taken up, 
 some may feel disposed to lay it down in disfavour of 
 its name. What will they say to it? Something 
 perhaps like this — " March Winds and April 
 Showers f How absurd a title for a book ! or how 
 presumptuous ! What possibly, or impossibly, can 
 be its meaning? These are days of daring second 
 hardly to the days of Babel. Lightning is made to 
 wait upon our will — philosophers have schemed to 
 bring down rain at pleasure. But the Winds — the 
 viewless, the unshackled Winds ! Can we be holding 
 a sample of them here ? Has a convenient comple- 
 ment been stolen from the treasures of creation, to 
 be bound, not as of old, in bags ^olian, but in 
 boards and lettered cloth? When we open, will a 
 liberated breeze play gambols in our hair, or a blast 
 meet us in the teeth ? It would not seem so. We 
 must apply then, we suppose, some figurative mean- 
 ing to the Winds that are lurking in these leaves 
 of print. Perhaps their author would have us to 
 
viii 
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 infer that influences are breathed from out them 
 gentle as Spring zephyrs — powerful as equinoctial 
 gales. A modest intimation, truly ! 
 
 Then what are we to make of " Showers f Are 
 we handling a pocket-volume of imprisoned rain, to 
 distil in drops, perhaps, from the corner of each page? 
 Only pleasant this, and hardly, on a thirsty day of 
 Summer. Or (more inviting) are we to look upon 
 a set of illuminated margins, aqua-tinted in colours 
 drawn down from rainbows, and made fast on paper? 
 Who knows what photographic processes have here 
 produced ? But no ; we look in vain for such pris- 
 matic painting. These leaves owe no adornment to 
 the pencils of the sun moistened in the palette of an 
 April sky. So, then, the "Showers'' of this volume 
 are no more meteoric than its " Winds.'' They are 
 metaphoric all. A notion, doubtless, is meant to be 
 conveyed that these pages are not dry ; that they are 
 replete, on the contrary, with moisture genial and 
 refreshing as that imparted to the earth by Summer 
 Showers. Perhaps, too, it is hinted in the compass 
 of a word, that we shall find them lighted up by 
 gleams of humour and plays of fancy resembling the 
 sunshine of an April day. " Pretty well this for pro- 
 mise and pretension !" 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 ix 
 
 Book of ours — it is in this way, like enough, that 
 thy title may be questioned. It may be thought to 
 mean nothing, or to intimate too much. Yet it 
 is in no spirit of presumption that we have given 
 thee thy name. It has been chosen as adapted to 
 thy subjects and expressive of thy design, with a 
 consciousness, the while, that it is far above thy 
 handling and performance. 
 
 First, for thy subjects. These have been drawn 
 chiefly from the magazine of Nature. Amongst 
 them. Leaf and Flower (products of Spring), Bird 
 and Insect (animals of air), have places of pre- 
 eminence. Out of place they are not with March 
 Winds and April Showers, coming with them, and 
 in some sort of them. 
 
 Secondly, for thy design. Herein, truly, we would 
 have thee in thy narrow field of moral influence 
 imitate the Winds and Showers in their world-wide 
 sphere. The minds and hearts of thy readers are 
 thy trees — to stir — thy soil — to penetrate. Through 
 the powerful media supplied by Nature we would 
 have thee do thy weak endeavour to rouse and 
 purify as the invigorating Winds ; refresh and soften 
 as the genial Showers. If in this thou art successful, 
 in however small a measure, thou wilt have earned 
 
X 
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 some title to thy name — some title, but not a right 
 complete. For that, thou must perform thy part in 
 a higher mission, an ultimate vocation, which is told 
 by every breeze, made manifest in every shower. 
 When winds are stirring in the trees, trees and 
 winds mingle their voices in praise of Him who made 
 them. When showers wet the earth, and sunshine 
 comes to dry them, earth sends up her incense and 
 displays her brilliants in honour of the Season's God. 
 
CONTENTS AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 Title-page Vignette. 
 
 The Winds, and an April Shower breaking into Sunshine, 
 a breeze from the West drjdng up her tears. 
 
 I. Rambles in the Gardens of Ampliitrite . . p. 1 
 Vignette. 
 
 Sea Nymph mourning over her Marine flowers in their 
 desertion by the tide (p . 5) . Foreground — various Zoophytes, 
 comprising Sea-anemones (pp. 14, 21), Sea-nettles (p. 7), 
 Sea-pen (p. 36), the Sea-pine (p. 28), and other Corallines. 
 
 Tail Piece. 
 
 Naiad writing with a luminous Sea-pen (p. 36) on the 
 frond of a fucus. 
 
 II. Late Awakings 43 
 
 Vignette. 
 
 Scene on Hadley Common (p. 62). Foreground — foUage, 
 flowers, and fruit of the bending Bittersweet, with leaves of 
 Woodbine, one marked by the white track of a leaf-mining 
 larva (p. 70). 
 
 Tail Piece. 
 
 Sleeper" or Dormouse in its Winter bed (a ball of woven 
 grass), wakened towards Sunset by an Owl, personifying 
 Time. 
 
xii 
 
 CONTENTS AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 III. Hedges in Winter p. 73 
 
 Vignette. 
 
 Objects common upon leafless hedges. To the right — on a 
 branch of Hawthorn an egg-bracelet of the Lackey Moth 
 (p. 94). On the same, the bark- built structure of a Moth 
 Caterpillar (p. 93) — also, in the centre, a deserted Cocoon 
 formed by the larva of a Hawthorn Saw-fly (p. 86). The 
 eggs in a row upon the Hazle are those of a Moth (97) — 
 others minute and black (supposed of Aphides) are embedded 
 in a white substance shown encircling a twig of Eglantine 
 (p. 96). 
 
 Tail Piece. 
 
 Spring looking through the veil of Winter, the lace-work of 
 a skeleton leaf. 
 
 lY. A Rummage in the Stone Cabinet . . . .100 
 Vignette. 
 
 A supposed scene at an early epoch of the Tertiary period — 
 a Crocodilian Eeptile and a Tapir in the water and bordering 
 swamp (p. 106). Foreground — blocks of stone with imbedded 
 relics of fossil insects. To the right, a specimen of Lathrobium, 
 the head of a Dragon-fly (Libellula) appearing below. In 
 the centre, a Cuckoo-spit Froghopper {Tettigonia spumaria) 
 (p. 149) — beneath, cases of Caddis-worms (Phryganea) 
 (pp. 112, 155). To the left, a wing-case, and wing of Beetles 
 (p. 124). 
 
 Tail Piece. 
 
 A Cricket {Acheta) pointing out to a Butterfly the superior 
 antiquity of its birth. The same exhibited in a genealogic 
 tree, whereon the insect order Orthoptera (the most ancient 
 
CONTENTS AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 Xlll 
 
 yet discovered), and to which the Cricket belongs, is placed at 
 bottom (pp. 124, 147, 162). 
 
 Vignette. 
 
 The Elra Pollard, ''Old Heavy-top" and Cottage under it 
 (pp. 166, 168). In the foreground, to the right, a Hedge- 
 Sparrow, with her nest in occupation of a young Cuckoo. 
 
 Tail Piece. 
 
 The Elm Pollard Old Dry-bones," with Harry, the idiot, 
 in his mock purple and paper crown — the relics of the dis- 
 covered skeleton his ball and sceptre (p. 215). 
 
 VI. Voices in the Air concerning the World's. 
 
 Vignette. 
 
 A view of the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park. Foreground 
 — a Hedge-rose, with Bee and Wasp discussing the merits of 
 the World's Show (p. 236). 
 
 Tail Piece. 
 
 The quarters of the Globe, in their Human representatives, 
 looking with exclusive complacency at the Crystal Palace of 
 '51 (p. 219). Bird and Insect reproving their self- laudation. 
 
 Bees and Comb represent the insect artificers of Europe. 
 
 Silkworm Moths and Cocoons, of Asia. 
 
 Termites, and their structures, of Africa. 
 
 The Oriole and her nest, the Bird architecture of America. 
 
 V. The Two Elm Trees 
 
 p. 164 
 
 Show 
 
 217 
 
^' For Nature here 
 Wanton' d as in her prime, and play'd at will 
 Her virgin fancies, wild above rule or art. " 
 
 Milton. 
 
I. 
 
 EAMBLES IN THE GAEDENS OF AMPHITEITE. 
 
 PART I. — A FABLE OF THE SEA. 
 
 " Huge ocean shows within his yellow strand 
 A habitation marv^ellously planned 
 For life to occupy." Southey. 
 
 There once lived a certain Nereid, who was one of the 
 sweetest creatures in the whole world of waters. 
 
 She was fair as a rosy-tinted pearl, graceful as a 
 waving fucus, sportive as a dolphin, tender-hearted as 
 a seal, sensitive as a sea-pen, that beautiful zoophyte 
 which shrinks into the sand on the slightest touch of 
 rudeness. She was one of Amphitrite's favourite 
 attendants, and might be seen occasionally in that bevy 
 of beauty which was used to float round the shelly car 
 
 VOL. I. B 
 
2 RAMBLES IN THE GARDENS OF AMPHITRITE. 
 
 of the ocean queen. She, however, cared but little to 
 glitter in the brilliant galaxy which, on these occa- 
 sions, would illuminate, as with a " girdle of VenUwS,''* 
 the surface of the sea. She loved far better to 
 wander in its quiet depths — to bound with light foot 
 and lighter heart over its plains of sand — to climb its 
 smooth or rugged mountains — to thread the mazes of 
 its waving forests, or meditate within its coral caves ; 
 but, above all, did she delight herself in the gardens 
 of living flowers which enamel the beds of ocean. 
 Never was poet, florist, or honey-bee more devoted to 
 the " buds and bells'' of earth than our beautiful 
 Nereid to the buds and bells of the sea. Buds and 
 bells ? they were these to her, and more. They were 
 stars — stars of every magnitude and every hue — 
 single, or arranged in brilliant constellations of a 
 thousand varied and graceful forms. Some were fixed 
 on rocky bases, some wandered in erratic motion, 
 others were set as studs on stem and branch and 
 foliate expansion, and all, as in scintillating motion, 
 were for ever shooting forth or withdrawing their 
 many-coloured rays. These were enough to make a 
 firmament within the waters, and as the changeful 
 light shot through and the sounding sea broke over 
 
 * Berse — one of the phosphorescent Medusae. 
 
A FABLE OF THE SEA. 
 
 3 
 
 them, these stars of the deep would seem to our 
 gentle sea-nymph to smile and sing for joy. Then 
 she together with them, and if for lack of knowledge 
 her morning and her evening hymns were raised to 
 Neptune, it was to Neptune as Creator that she sung. 
 
 The marine parterres wherein the Nereid thus 
 delighted were scattered far and wide ; but the chief of 
 her gardens were situate in tropic oceans where, as 
 with the flowers of tropic lands, her floral favourites 
 were of the gayest and the richest. Let them grow 
 where they might, these star-like flowers required 
 little, if any, culture, and displayed in their economy 
 a high degree of independence. Some of them not 
 only planted, but would transplant themselves, re- 
 moving from one situation to another. It had 
 happened, also, that when the admiring sea-nymph 
 would have plucked a flower, the blossom, perhaps, of 
 a rich anemone or elegant campanularia, to promote 
 it to a place in her bosom or her hair, it had shrunk 
 ungratefully from her touch, showing plainly that it 
 liked not to be handled; and so the Nereid, who 
 always herself shrunk from giving pain, or even its 
 semblance, to anything in all the sea, had long for- 
 borne an attempt even to detach her flowers from 
 their beds or stalks. She had been content thence- 
 
 B 2 
 
4 RAMBLES IN THE GARDENS OF AMPHITRITE. 
 
 forward to bedeck her flowing tresses with less 
 sensitive productions, shore-frequenting flowers of 
 the land, or, more often, the flowerless but many- 
 coloured and graceful, and often scented growths that 
 men call sea- weeds. 
 
 We may be sure, nevertheless, that certain cares of 
 tenderness were bestowed on her favourite productions 
 by their gentle mistress, who could hardly otherwise 
 have loved them quite so well. 
 
 Her delicate operations in marine horticulture 
 must remain hidden mysteries of the deep; but there 
 is little doubt of her having somehow lent support 
 against angry waves and sweeping currents to such of 
 her sea-flowers as were weak and fragile. Their 
 habitudes were infinitely varied. It was the delight 
 of some to face the sunny south, the mood of others 
 to confront the gloomy north. Some sought the 
 shelter of submerged grottos, others seemed to glory 
 in exposure to the driving surges, their pliant 
 branches following the movement of the waters; 
 some took up their stations in the deep, deep sea; 
 while others lingered near the shore as if wishing to 
 desert their native element. And then that element, 
 as if in revenge, would sometimes abandon them, 
 leaving them exposed upon their rocky bases — at 
 
A FABLE OF THE SEA. 
 
 5 
 
 first full-blown and vigorous, as if laughing at the 
 waves in their retreat, then shrinking for lack of 
 moisture and shrivelling sometimes even unto death. 
 This to the tender Nereid was a grief, the only trouble 
 that had mingled hitherto with the pleasures of her 
 cherished flower-gardens; and sometimes, when the 
 yellow sands were lying bright and dry under a 
 summer moon, her graceful form would be seen 
 amidst the rocks, bending over them in tenderness 
 and sorrow. Well might she sorrow to behold her 
 darling flowers withered and dying under the cold 
 gaze of that pitiless Diana (cause of all they suffered), 
 and she only able to water them from a deserted 
 scallop-shell or from the fountains of her eyes. This 
 was the first, but it was not the only distress that our 
 Nereid was destined to endure on account of her sub- 
 marine parterres. The second and much the sorest 
 arose out of the following cause. 
 
 There was a certain hoary Triton with whom the 
 sea-nymph, beloved by all, was an especial favourite. 
 This old Triton was something of a philosopher, 
 thence, almost of necessity, something of a naturalist. 
 He had always had a taste for study, study of the 
 beautiful and wonderful in the ocean-world about 
 him. He had also picked up a few submerged 
 
6 RAMBLES IN THE GARDENS OF AMPHITRITE. 
 
 treasures of terrestrial knowledge, as these, with the 
 volumes that contained them, had been deposited by- 
 shipwreck on the sandy shelves of the deep. From 
 this marine library he had learnt more than even 
 from observation of the history and habits of sea- 
 flowers — the flowers that "painted with delight'' the 
 gardens and existence of the beautiful Nereid. To 
 her, his attentive and inquiring pupil, he was always 
 proud to impart of his pearls of knowledge, and in a 
 luckless hour he told her more about the economy of 
 her flowers than it seemed good for her to know. He 
 told her that they were not in reality flowers at all, 
 but animals — creatures that lived by the death of 
 others as much as the voracious shark and war-like 
 sword-fish. She learnt (appalling fact !) that the 
 graceful bells of her favourite campanularise were but 
 so many stomachs for digestion of living prey — their 
 seeming stamens but so many arms employed chiefly 
 for its seizure ; that, with the flower-cups of her 
 darling May-blossom, with her blossoms all, whether 
 seated stemless on the rock, borne on branching 
 growth, or set on leaf-like expansion, it was much 
 the same. They bloomed only to devour, and 
 flourished only by destruction. Or if she looked at 
 them as stars, all — the largest and the least, the 
 
A FABLE OF THE SEA. 
 
 7 
 
 single and the congregate — shot forth their lustre 
 with no milder purpose. Their discs were* nothing 
 but voracious mouths, their rays the grasping arms 
 that waited on their appetite. And what even her 
 filmy, floating, fairy-like Medusae,* those sportive 
 lovers of calm and sunshine, sea-rainbows by day, 
 sea-lightning by night, what even these but a multi- 
 tude of very Gorgons, with shield-like orbs and snake- 
 like filaments to coil about their victims ? 
 
 Poor little Nereid ! She would have given the 
 largest pearl that ever gemmed her tresses to have 
 unlearned her little knowledge about the products of 
 her loved parterres. But how was it that, with all 
 her notice of them, she had not made earlier 
 acquaintance with those unseemly habitudes that 
 marred their beauty ? How, for example, could she 
 have gazed so often and so long at her favourite 
 anemones, and never have detected one amongst 
 them in the act of engulphing a shell-fish, or a tiny 
 crab, as a boa-constrictor might engulf a fawn? 
 
 Some such phenomenon it is likely she had seen, but 
 having no natural eye for anything but the graceful 
 and beautiful — no natural apprehension for anything 
 but the tender and the good, she thought (there's not a 
 
 * Known as sea-nettles, jelly-fish, &c. (Acalephse.) 
 
8 RAMBLES IN THE GARDENS OF AMPHITRITE. 
 
 doubt of it) that the great sea-flower could only be fold- 
 ing the little fish in a loving embrace, and that the little 
 fish could only be nestling in the heart of the great 
 sea-flower, as a bee nestles in the heart of a land 
 anemone or a rose. Well, through whatever medium 
 (a sunny one it is certain) the Nereid had looked 
 hitherto on all belonging to her beds of bloom, the 
 bright investiture was rent asunder. A cloud had 
 come over her starry firmament and darkened all her 
 pleasant places. Her gardens had lost their gaiety — 
 her coral groves their grace — her coral caves their 
 peaceful quietude, for all alike were beset, in their 
 animal flowers, with devouring mouths ; all therefore 
 were instinct with murder. 
 
 The good old Triton was quite unconscious of the 
 mischief he had wrought. What to his sensitive 
 young pupil was a discovery full of wonder and 
 dismay, was to him a marvel replete only with admi- 
 ration. The world of water is pre-eminently a preying 
 world. The Triton himself might not have been 
 altogether a vegetarian, and it is impossible to assert 
 that nothing of a character less vegetable than an 
 edible sea-weed ever passed the lips of the gentle 
 Nereid. Be this as it might, she had always shrunk from 
 the preying monsters of the deep (preyers unmistak- 
 
A FABLE OF THE SEA. 
 
 9 
 
 able) to turn with fondness to the few amongst its 
 finny tribes of gentler habitudes, above all to her 
 flowers of the sea— copies, as she thought them in all 
 but perfume, of the flowers of the land. What of 
 these latter should the sea-nymph know? Much, 
 through her lingerings by the enamelled shores that 
 she haunted chiefly for their sake, and much through 
 her lavings in the perfumed waves which had bor- 
 rowed of their sweetness. 
 
 The Nereid was in no haste to say a word of her 
 distress to him who had so innocently caused it, but 
 somehow or another the Triton was not long in finding 
 out that his favourite had ceased to take pleasure in 
 her gardens of delight. He afterwards discovered 
 why. Then, to do him justice, the sage of the sea 
 did his best to heal the wound he had unwittingly 
 inflicted. He mustered all his philosophy to prove 
 that it was very good for the living things of the 
 deep, even to its flowers, to live on one another. 
 " Look you,'' said he, as he one day sat, the Nereid 
 beside him, on a rock beneath the waves velvetted by 
 moss-like sea-weeds. "Look you at the creatures 
 round about us ; see the fishes (birds of our watery 
 firmament) — some showing darkly as they cleave the 
 liquid azure — some flashing like jewelled arrows as 
 
10 RAMBLES IN THE GARDENS OF AMPHITRITE. 
 
 they dart through the cloudy depths — others illu- 
 mining with their scaly lustre the thickets of waving 
 algae and branching corals, through which they pene- 
 trate. See some of them with forms of elegance and 
 fair proportion — gentle of aspect — smooth of skin ; — 
 some hideous and huge-headed, gxim and grotesque — 
 bristling with spines and seemingly with terror. A 
 few, even of the fiercest-seeming, arrest their course 
 to feed upon the feathery or flag-like weeds about 
 them ; but how many more, and those of the least 
 ferocious aspect, are in pursuit of others smaller and 
 weaker than themselves. See how the latter are 
 momently disappearing, engulphed by their devouring 
 jaws !" 
 
 The tender-hearted Nereid cared not to look atten- 
 tively on that to which even use had failed to reconcile 
 her, and raised her " Venus's Fan''* to shield her eyes 
 from the unwelcome spectacle ; but the large hand of 
 the old Triton put it gently aside. 
 
 " Nay, my sweet pupil,'' he continued, " look 
 round again. Amidst the endless variety about us, take 
 note of one thing most worthy noting. Of all these 
 creatures consuming, or to be consumed, there is not 
 one but what we see in fullest enjoyment of life and 
 
 * Gorgonia flabellum. 
 
A FABLE OF THE SEA. 
 
 11 
 
 vigour. Look as we may, no form of disease or death 
 or disfiguring decay meets and offends our sight ; and 
 why, — but because by that wise and kind provision 
 whose workings so distress thee, disease and visible 
 death are for ever being swallowed up of life. What 
 if these bulkier animals had no destroyers yet more 
 bulky to consign them at once to death and burial? 
 Why, this pleasant world of ours (in spite of every 
 other agency that tends to make it pure) would be 
 turned into a world of poison. And what if the 
 myriads of lesser creatures, even the countless monads 
 (the motes in our watery beams), were to have no con- 
 sumers, they would, dying, corrupt the waves around 
 us. Such useful consumers are the animal flowers 
 of your gardens — such the flowers that bestud the 
 expansion of your fan.'' 
 
 The Nereid at these words nearly let drop the 
 screen of coralline that had been lowered from her 
 face, but by an effort she retained it in her grasp, waved 
 it quickly as if to scatter all disturbing prejudices 
 amidst the wide waters, then steadied it on her 
 knee, and looked up over it at her old instructor. 
 
 " Then quarrel not,"' he resumed, for this, with 
 your long-loved favourites. As innocent of all ill- 
 doing, with as little lust of ferocity as these waving 
 
12 RAMBLES IN THE GARDENS OF AMPHITRITE. 
 
 sea-weeds draw nutriment from the rock and refresh- 
 ment from the water, do they absorb into themselves 
 the forms of being destined to support them, existences 
 that pass from life with perhaps as little pain as is 
 felt by the lifeless elements on their absorption into 
 the tissue of a vegetable leaf. Loathe them, I say, no 
 longer, my sweet pupil, but love as hitherto your 
 flowers of the sea. Like the preying monsters of the 
 deep they do but nature's bidding, and nature does 
 the bidding of her God (a greater than Neptune), 
 who orders all things well.'' 
 
 The wisdom of the marine philosopher might have 
 sounded but as folly in the ears of the scientific of the 
 earth ; the end of his lecture would have sounded ag 
 heresy in the ears of his brother Tritons of the sea ; 
 but it was rewarded by a radiant smile from the eyes 
 above the " Venus's Fan." The gloom had passed 
 like a summer cloud from the features of the beautiful 
 Nereid, and the flowers of her parterres — the stars of 
 her lower heaven — were shining out on her as bright 
 as ever. 
 
EAMBLES IN THE GARDENS OF AMPHITEITE. 
 
 PART II. — FLOWERS OF THE SEA. 
 
 Animate flowers of the briny deep 
 
 That raise in life their during monuments." 
 
 Montgomery. 
 
 Amongst the admirers and gatherers of ocean flowers, 
 a few, perhaps, may have partaken of the Nereid's 
 consternation on first discovering their preying pro- 
 pensities. They may have regarded with excusable 
 distaste, or mexcusable displeasure, their unfloral 
 habitudes, reflected only in the vegetable kingdom by 
 the dogs'-bane, the dionea, and a few other Aj-catch- 
 ing, if not, as conjectured, ^j-feeding, plants. 
 
 We can at least answer for ourself, that on detection 
 of their economy, their beauty, or their beauty's charm, 
 did, for a season, almost vanish in our sight, even as 
 the form and colours of a rainbow-tinted Medusa,* 
 when taken out of sunshine and salt-water. 
 
 Well do we remember, for it made one of the epochs 
 
 * Sea-nettle, jelly-fish. Class Acalephe. 
 
14 RAMBLES IN THE GARDENS OF AMPHITRITE. 
 
 of our childhood, our first meeting with a sea-ane- 
 mone,* on a little black rock under the grea1> white 
 rocks on the beach at Hastings. Yes — well do we 
 remember all that belonged to that memorable ren- 
 contre — our shout of joy at beholding the flower (one 
 of reddish purple) in all its radiate glory — our eager 
 attempt to gather it — our wonder and disappointment 
 when it shrank from our touch into a little cone of 
 jelly — our trembling and half reluctant mode of 
 operation when (prompted by our companion, an 
 older and more experienced gatherer), we detached it 
 with a knife from its broad seat upon the rock — our 
 persuasion that it would never blow again — our de- 
 light at seeing it re-expand in all its splendour in a 
 basin of salt water — a blue basin with a yellow rim. 
 
 And then the experiments which, in conjunction 
 with our experimenting friend, we proceeded to per- 
 form upon that unfortunate (or favoured) specimen of 
 the genus Actinia! The numerical processes, the di- 
 vision, the subtraction, the multiplication, of which it 
 was made the subject I Oh, that wonderful flower of 
 the ocean, and the flowers that we caused to spring 
 from it in the blue basin ! 
 
 These, and their thousand similitudes in the blue 
 
 * Actinia. Class Polypifera ; Order Helianthoida. 
 
FLOWERS OF THE SEA. 
 
 15 
 
 sea, how they took for awhile possession of our fancy 
 to the exclusion of the pebbles, and the shells, and the 
 sea-weeds, which had been heretofore our joy by day, 
 our dream by night. But there was no mystery (so to 
 our simple ignorance it seemed) in them. A pebble 
 was a pebble, a shell a shell, a weed a weed, and 
 nothing more (oh ! the childish notions !) but a sea 
 anemone was a flower, and not a flower — an animal, 
 and not like an animal. It was one and it was many 
 — it was many and it was one. It was, in short, a 
 mystery, and as lon^ as we beheld it living and ex- 
 panding upon water only, it was a mystery of beauty. 
 But good-bye to the beauty, though the marvel was 
 redoubled, when we saw, on the rock, a giant anemone 
 engulf a crab, and saw, in the blue basin, the queen 
 of our collection, a perfect grandiflora, swallow a piece 
 of raw beef supplied to it by our experimenting friend. 
 A flower and raw beef ? Monstrous association ! The 
 beautiful flower-cup a devouring stomach ; the elegant 
 petals nothing but entrapping claws ! 
 
 Our favourites lost their favour. The monster 
 anemones in the blue basin were left to die of want, 
 unpitied ; the monster anemones on the black rock 
 might, for us, stick there for ever, while we turned 
 with renewed pleasure to the innocent pebbles, and 
 
16 RAMBLES IN THE GARDENS OF AMPHITRITE. 
 
 shells, and sea-weeds that never caught crabs nor 
 bolted coUops of raw beef ! 
 
 Well, we were young then, and sensitive, perhaps 
 sentimental. What we are now we are not called 
 upon to say. Enough that we admire again the 
 flowers of the sea, though free to confess that we 
 should love them more entirely if their habits were in 
 all respects as beautiful as those of the flowers of the 
 earth. 
 
 But cannot we give a thought or a word to these 
 living gems of ocean but what it must relate to their 
 devouring mouths ? Hardly ; seeing that a mouth is the 
 conspicuous, the central, the characteristic, the general 
 — we may call it the only feature in the circular faces 
 of those strange, eyeless, noseless, earless^ headless 
 creatures that compose the lowest division of the ani- 
 mated world, the Eadiata. Ah ! with this descriptive 
 appellation, Radiata, the wondrous productions of 
 which it is inclusive appear to us suddenly in 
 another and brighter light. They are no longer 
 animals, nor flowers, but stars. The mouth, or flower- 
 cup, changes to a central disc ; the arms, or petals, to 
 diverging rays; and we forget, for a moment, that the 
 discs are to devour, the rays to reach, a living prey. 
 This is not to be forgotten long; but even under their 
 
FLOWERS OF THE SEA. 
 
 17 
 
 animal, that is to say, their least agreeable aspect, 
 these remarkable forms of being present traits much 
 more pleasing and quite as curious as their devouring 
 organs and propensities. That we may bring these 
 also into notice, let us turn again in our rambling way 
 to a few of these wonderful Radiata — only to a few 
 familiar members of the class Polypifera, to which 
 belong sea anemones, corals, madrepores, and allied 
 productions of general recognition, as zoophytes, or 
 animal flowers. 
 
 Why, in the first place, are these things called poly- 
 pifera? They are so classed as being made up of, or 
 owing their origin to, polypes. A sea-anemone is a 
 great single polype, known as such to almost everyone, 
 and corals, &c. are polypiferous products, which, but 
 for the polypes, single or congregate, that live in them, 
 would have never been. 
 
 But besides these polypes, big and little, solitary 
 and associate, of the sea, there is a certain little polype 
 of fresh water, which, because its habitat is easy to 
 find, and its structure easy to comprehend, is often 
 adduced as an explanatory type of polypes in general. 
 Let us, therefore, after the lead of leading naturalists, 
 take a preliminary look at this little A of the polype 
 alphabet. 
 
 VOL. I. C 
 
18 RAMBLES IN THE GARDENS OF AMPHITRITE. 
 
 We repair to a pond, a streamlet, or a ditch, and 
 there, on an aquatic weed, discover a little, green, 
 transparent object. In shape it may be like a tube, 
 or more resembling a full sack. Perhaps it is attached 
 to the plant by one end, and as humbly quiescent as 
 if it were no better than the plant itself ; or perhaps 
 it is asserting its right to the rank of animal by a sort 
 of looping progression like that of a looping caterpillar. 
 We take the weed and its animated pendant home, and 
 put them, with water, in a tumbler. The animal, not 
 relishing disturbance, has most likely shrunk by this time 
 into a short body, not unlike a little bell-flower, with 
 eight scallops on the edge of its corolla. Left to itself, 
 the bell lengthens again into a tube, while the projec- 
 tions round its mouth extend into slender filaments, 
 which begin waving about in all directions. For what 
 purpose? Not, depend upon it, for idle exercise or amuse- 
 ment. Like the arms of the blind Polyphemus, these 
 arms of the headless hydra are in search of prey. Their 
 use is made sensibly apparent to the luckless water- 
 worms or other minute swimmers, which they lay hold 
 of and convey into the open mouth of the tube, which 
 now becomes again a well-stuffed sack. Of these prey- 
 catching appendages (call them what we will), the 
 length in one species of fresh-water polype is prodi- 
 
FLOWERS OF THE SEA. 
 
 19 
 
 gious; as wonderful as the dexterity with which, after 
 the manner of a fly-fisher, they are employed. Whether 
 long or short, these lines can be indrawn at pleasure ; 
 and when it is the will of their possessor to walk from 
 leaf to leaf of its aquatic garden, they can be used as 
 legs or grasping arms. By help of these, and that of 
 a sucker at its nether end, the polype is enabled to 
 effect its looping progression. 
 
 This polype of the pond is called a hydra, not for 
 its many heads, seeing that like others of its tribe it 
 cannot boast of one, but for its hydra-like power of 
 reproducing and multiplying the body and members 
 it does possess. The hydra's mode of propagation, 
 when left to nature, is by means of little buds or off- 
 sets, which, as they drop from the parent trunk, 
 become each a perfect polype, as with some vegetable 
 buds (those of the Begonia radicans) which fall into 
 the earth and become each a perfect plant. In this 
 mode of increase the animal flower is most apparent ; 
 but it is by a manner of multiplication quite out of 
 nature's common course that the peculiar nature of 
 the hydra (whence its name) is so strangely exem- 
 plified. 
 
 The facts connected with this power of repro- 
 duction were deemed, on first observance, more 
 
 c 2 
 
20 RAMBLES IN THE GARDENS OF AMPHITRITE. 
 
 marvellous than fable. They were discovered in the 
 year 1745-6. Then were polypes sent by naturalists 
 of all nations to each other as subjects for experiment. 
 Then did the structure of polypes excite as much 
 interest in the world of, European science as the 
 venture of Charles Edward in the world of European 
 politics. Well it might! That, so called, great 
 rebellion was a mere nonentity — a thing of quite 
 easy extermination as compared with that inextermi- 
 nable little being w^hich the fresh-water polype was 
 proved to be. With the cutting off of some scores of 
 Highland heads, and the cutting in pieces of some 
 hundreds of Highland and Lowland bodies, the 
 social hydra (hardly a hydra at all) was extinct ; 
 while the water-hydra, carved piecemeal, was found 
 to exist (resuscitate) not merely as one, but as perhaps 
 a score, perhaps a hundred — to the number, in short, 
 of the portions into which it had been divided. 
 
 Let us see how this hydra-form marvel has been 
 treated by a Hercules of modern science. 
 
 " A minute globular cell is typical,'' says he, of 
 the common germ from which all organic fabrics pro- 
 ceed. All animals and plants, therefore, may be 
 regarded as definite aggregations of cells endowed 
 with specific properties in the various types, and sub- 
 
FLOWERS OF THE SEA. 
 
 21 
 
 jected to a never varying law of development ; and 
 in animals as well as plants there are certain kinds in 
 which their entire organization consists of but a 
 simple cell (the monads), and others in which each 
 individual is but a cluster of such cells arranged in a 
 definite manner. These mere aggregates of cells 
 perform all the functions of animal life ; viz., the 
 maintenance of a particular form for a certain period ; 
 the elaboration of materials of support from food ; 
 locomotion, and the perfection of the species. Hence 
 these animals, like the simple plants, may be divided 
 without losing their vitality, and every part become 
 a perfect individual. To this class belongs the hydra, 
 and the above exposition of its structure renders the 
 production of several animals from the vivisection of 
 one individual perfectly intelligible.''* 
 
 To return from the little polype of the pond to our 
 great polype of the ocean, the sea-anemone. Let us 
 look comparatively at their resembling and their 
 differing features. Answering to the hydra's elastic 
 tube is the anemone's soft, cylindrical bell or body. 
 In the centre of the latter's upper surface, as at the 
 free end of the former, is the mouth, and round it, 
 corresponding to the fishing lines of the hydra, and 
 
 * Mantell. Wonders of Geology" and ^'Thouglits on Animalcules." 
 
22 RAMBLES IN THE GARDENS OF AMPHITRITE. 
 
 employed for the same purpose, are a number of 
 tentaculse (sometimes a hundred) indrawable at plea- 
 sure. As the eight-armed pygmy of the pond can 
 stuff into its elastic pouch a tiny aquatic great in pro- 
 portion to itself, so the hundred-armed Briareus of 
 the sea makes nothing of gorging a moUusk or Crus- 
 tacea of superior magnitude, of which the shell or 
 shield is afterwards rejected. These are some of the 
 accordances ; now for some of the differences betwixt 
 the little polype of fresh, and the great polype of salt- 
 water. 
 
 In lieu of the dropping buds by which the animal 
 flower of the pond perpetuates its race, the great 
 anemone of the sea is furnished within the circum- 
 ference of its flower-cup with ovaries containing ova 
 or germs, which as such, or in a more developed form, 
 are seen to issue from its floral centre. 
 
 In the matter of locomotion the little looper of the 
 pond is a more active, if not a more efficient machine 
 than the sitter on the rock. The latter is not, though, 
 a perfect fixture. Its feelers^ finders, holders, do not 
 wait wholly on the w^ants of appetite, for when 
 the actinia takes it into — we cannot say its head — 
 but its stomach — to walk below the waves, it can 
 detach itself from its stone seat, sink to the bottom. 
 
FLOWERS OF THE SEA. 
 
 23 
 
 turn itself inside out, and lo ! the arms converted into 
 legs, serve to carry it whither it would go. 
 
 There are other characteristics of an animal de- 
 scription which belong to these flowers of the sea. 
 Sensitive exceedingly, they seem as if provided with 
 specific organs of the senses ; eyeless, a strong light 
 is said to incommode them ; earless, a noise startles 
 them ; tasteless, they dislike and die in fresh water ; 
 on a touch they shrink, or ply their tubular arms as 
 squirts supplied by an internal reservoir ; under 
 extremes of heat and cold they perish, and escape 
 from the grip of winter by leaving the shore for 
 deeper and, then, warmer waters. 
 
 In power of reproduction these large polypes of the 
 deep are only a little, if at all, behind the lesser 
 polypes of the pond; cut them length-wise, cross- 
 wise, any-wise, each part becomes a perfect whole ; 
 and if in detaching one of them from its seat ever so 
 small a portion of the old base remains behind, this 
 fragment will grow, and put forth the parts of an 
 entire thing. In some cases they would seem, like 
 the roots of sin, inexterminable by human poAver.* 
 
 "We have been looking at the actinia chiefly as an 
 
 * See Hughe's Natural History of Barbadoes," for description 
 of a species which reappeared after boring and completely crushing. 
 
24 RAMBLES IN THE GARDENS OF AMPHITRITE. 
 
 animal ; let us view it now more especially as a flower. 
 In one agreeable habitude see how it resembles some of 
 the less questionable subjects of Flora's reign. Like the 
 bright pimpernel and cheerful daisy it opens its arms 
 and heart for reception of fine weather, telling surely 
 the approach of sunshine. Then for aspect, what can 
 be more flower-like than that which sea anemones 
 present, especially in warmer latitudes than ours ? 
 
 Behold or fancy the rocks on retirement of the tide 
 studded by their flower cups, purple striated with 
 green, with their hundred petals " purple, violet, blue, 
 pink, yellow, and green, like so many flowers in a 
 meadow/'* Or imagine a group of the actinia plumosa, 
 each with its five-lobed corolla of purest white, each 
 beset with innumerable petals ; or the^rimson glory 
 of the actinia J ordaica planted like a show of double 
 carnations on the shores of the Mediterranean. 
 
 There are other sea-flowers allied to the sea- 
 anemone which consist each of a large single polype 
 surrounded by a gelatinous substance. These, though, 
 instead of being attached by soft suckers to the 
 foreign basis of a rock, have strong bases of their own 
 which secreted (as bone) from the softer parts, serve 
 them as skeletons or supports. 
 
 Of this description are the beautiful lamellated 
 
 * Lamouroux. 
 
FLOWERS OF THE SEA. 
 
 25 
 
 corals known as sea-pinks,* and sea-mushrooms,t the 
 former found in our own seas, the latter common in 
 tropic oceans and cabinet collections. In the latter 
 few can have failed to notice them imder the form of 
 white fungus-shaped bodies covered with vertical 
 plates radiating from the centre to the circumference. 
 Each of these is the isolated cell of a polype, which 
 when living (the floral star of its gelatinous hemi- 
 sphere) may have rivalled in brilliancy of colour the 
 most vivid of marine anemones or most glowing of 
 terrestrial asters. 
 
 But some of these round massive lamellated corals 
 are the product and abode not of one large, but of an 
 associate company of lesser polypes. Of this sort are 
 the astrea and pavonia, which on stony bases, sculp- 
 tured with many lamelliform cells, present, when 
 living, splendid constellations of stellular and florate 
 forms of varied colours. 
 
 Amongst these hemispheric productions of associate 
 polypes is the brainstone,J a round white coral of 
 which a large and choice specimen has arrested many 
 an eye and footstep in that maze of scientific order, 
 the British Museum. A maze of natural order 
 (most orderly) is exhibited on the surface of the coral 
 itself. From the innumerable stellate fissures disposed 
 
 * Caryophyllia. + Fungia. X Meandria. 
 
26 KAMBLES IN THE GARDENS OF AMPHITRITE. 
 
 in rows betwixt its meandering ridges proceeded once 
 an assemblage of short-armed polypes. These (each in 
 their generation) invest with life and motion the entire 
 mass, which, as they drop off, grows by their deposits. 
 
 There is a singular fitness (so it strikes us) a fitness 
 emblematic as well as of outward comparison in this 
 coral's name of brainstone. It has been assigned to 
 it as bearing superficially some structural resemblance 
 to the brain — this in its cabinet condition of desiccated 
 deadness. But let fancy restore it to its animated 
 state. See it then (through the polypes that bestud 
 it) eager for acquirement, busy in formation, figuring 
 not unaptly a brain in working activity. Look at the 
 character of its living forms — stellate, florate, fugitive 
 — images of the brain's living thoughts — and how 
 well does the coral's self-secreted, abiding basis (its 
 monumental effigy) represent the abiding memorial 
 which living thoughts are competent to erect and 
 leave behind them ! 
 
 The similitude might be stretched further and not 
 perhaps over-strained. What without the brain's 
 productions in their aggregate and transmission from 
 age to age would be the existing world of mind? 
 And what without products coralline amassed through 
 countless generations, would be the existing world of 
 
FLOWERS OF THE SEA. 
 
 27 
 
 matter — the world of it at least in which we live? 
 It would be less by a considerable fraction than it is 
 at present, less by many and mighty masses of the 
 limestone rock which encrust so large a portion of 
 the globe, and which consist chiefly of coralline 
 remains, less also by the coral reefs and islands 
 rising now from out our modern seas, and composed 
 principally of the massive products, brainstone and 
 the like that we have just been noting. 
 
 It is in especial through the agency of these, and 
 of agents even more minute, working continually 
 under cover of the deep, that we recognise the ordering 
 of the mighty Architect who hath "founded our 
 earth upon the seas," and is still " preparing it upon 
 the floods/' 
 
 The order to which these circular corals belong has 
 been named helianthoida, from the general resem- 
 blance of their floral forms to a sunflower, and their 
 polypes are called actiniform, from their likeness to 
 the actinia or sea-anemone. Wonderful and beautiful 
 are they all, these marine globosities ! They want 
 only, what is hardly consistent with their rotund 
 solidity, elegance and grace. For these we must turn 
 to the coralline productions of another order,* 
 
 * Asteroida. 
 
28 RAMBLES IN THE GARDENS OF AMPHITRITE. 
 
 branching, jointed, flexible, foot -stalked, presenting 
 in their general outline, as well as in their stellate 
 blossoms, even closer similitudes than the above of 
 vegetable forms. 
 
 Almost every sea-beach rambler, on the coasts 
 especially of Kent and Sussex, must have often 
 picked up shells or bits of broad fucus, on which have 
 appeared, as if growing out of them, elegant jointed 
 sprays of a light brown colour, each consisting of a 
 central stalk with two opposite rows of short branches 
 diverging obliquely from it. These we have taken a 
 hundred times, and so perhaps have a hundred other 
 people, for specimens of a delicate sort of sea-weed ; 
 but the production is no sea-weed, nor any member 
 of the vegetable kingdom, though it is called a sea- 
 pine.* It is in fact a branching coralline, an assem- 
 blage of little tubes united together, with openings at 
 their ends for the protrusion of the polypes they 
 enclose, and by which they have been produced. 
 These polypes-|- are hydraform, much resembling, 
 that is, our little hydras of the pond, only that instead 
 of being wholly soft in substance, and independent in 
 structure, they have each a horny case or sheath. 
 These cases are connected, as the buds upon a plant, 
 
 * Sertularia. f Of the Order Hydroida. 
 
FLOWERS OF THE SEA. 
 
 29 
 
 by stems and branches, each animal being further 
 linked to its associates bj^ a channel of communication 
 passing through each case. 
 
 For all their minuteness and innocent plant-like 
 aspect, desperate carnivori are these compound hydras 
 of the sea ; not a whit less greedy than that green 
 dragon the hydra of fresh water. 
 
 Now for a few more coralline productions, chiefly 
 of the branching character, but more showy and of 
 more universal recognition than this sea-weed-seeming 
 sea-pine. 
 
 First, for the one most commonly, if not most 
 thoroughly known of all, the common red coral. Red 
 Coral! As we write the words what a shoal of 
 remembrances and images are called up in a moment 
 
 from the vasty deep'' of memory, as well as ocean ! 
 First, out of the deep of infancy, or its shallow, all 
 through a succession, flowing over it, of life's later 
 currents — the smooth and clear, the troubled and 
 turbid, the deceitful and dark, comes floating to the 
 top, and dancing and tinkling on the waves, a coral 
 and bells — the very coral which, if we cannot quite 
 remember having, we are quite sure we must have 
 had. Next, rises the coral necklace, our own identical 
 first and only coral necklace, and with it the image of 
 
30 RAMBLES IN THE GARDENS OF AMPHITRITE. 
 
 the good grandmother, who fastened it for the first 
 time around our neck. Respectable shade, canst 
 thou forgive us for thus setting thee afloat, spectacles 
 and all, upon a sea (compound of memory and salt- 
 water) like a half-clothed sea-nymph, a disreputable 
 syren, or a fish-tailed mermaid ! 
 
 After that coral necklace come a succession of 
 mind's eye pictures that concerned it, and grew out 
 of it with our mind's growth. 
 
 There is the ocean bed strewed with bright red 
 berries, as our childish fancy imaged it when told 
 that the " berries'' of our necklace came from under 
 the sea. Next, there is the submarine grove of 
 glowing scarlet, as imagination sketched it when we 
 learnt further that our beads had been cut out of 
 branches that grew at the bottom of the ocean. 
 
 Following on this, we see the branching sprays 
 chosen from a wintry copse and dipped in sealing- 
 wax varnish, red and black, with which, in our 
 earliest days of experiment, we tried to imitate the 
 corals of the deep. 
 
 Next, up starts a group of coral insects'' — crea- 
 tures of fancy, resembling somewhat flies or bees, and 
 like bees working their hardest to build up habitations 
 of coral, as bees of wax, to branch into groves and 
 
FLOWERS OF THE SEA. 
 
 31 
 
 unite into rocks and islands — an image this that came 
 with what we thought a wonderful increase of know- 
 ledge, but only to vanish like the rest with better 
 teaching. 
 
 And now, with insight perhaps only a little clearer 
 into the mysteries of coral groves and (so-called) 
 " coral insects/' they appear to us under another and 
 different aspect. Their branches, as they grow under 
 the waves, are no longer red and bare, but invested 
 (as by bark) with a bluish, fleshy clothing, studded 
 with flower-like, star-like forms. It is in these we see 
 now the coral " insects'' (properly polypes), each in its 
 separate cell, set in the fleshy substance covering the 
 branches. These latter, which serve as an internal 
 skeleton to support the whole, are red and stony, and 
 are a secretion (no fabrication) of the resident animals. 
 
 These associate polypes, held together by the 
 branches of their family-tree, and communicating 
 through the soft tissue which invests it, are, when 
 expanded, of a very star-like form. Like others of 
 the same order,* they are eight-rayed, and the rays 
 are foliate rather than round and slender like the 
 numerous tentaculae of the sea-anemone. Their 
 colour, like the rind from whence they issue, is blue. 
 
 * Asteroida, 
 
32 RAMBLES IN THE GAUDENS OF AMPHITRITE. 
 
 When the sea, in warm latitudes, is reddened, as one 
 reads of, by coral branches, it is only as a battle-field 
 might be whitened with men's bones; for with their 
 living investiture life has departed from all these 
 ruddy skeletons. Their fleshy covering and besetting 
 polypes having gone the way of all flesh, have left 
 behind, not as a useless memorial of themselves, but 
 as a useful support to those that come after, *Hhe 
 relics of their bones/' These continue to increase 
 through the added deposits of existing generations, 
 and, like the workings and deposits of human society, 
 all serve as a basis for those of successive ages. 
 
 The coral-tree attains its height — a dwarfish stature 
 of about a foot — after eight or ten years of accumu- 
 lative growth. Then death, hitherto dividing with 
 life the dominion of its branches, gains ascendancy, 
 and, by help of assistant agencies, soon brings it to 
 decay. Like a sturdy, dwarfish oak-tree, refusing to 
 bend before the fury of the blast, the little stony 
 coral-tree has refused, thus long, to bend before the 
 fury of the waves. But the waves at last complete its 
 ruin, tear it from its base, cast it on shore, faded, 
 mutilated, and soon bereft of all vitality, reduce it to 
 fragments, and consign it finally to the great store- 
 house of the deep. 
 
FLOWERS OF THE SEA. 38 
 
 The stony branches of the red coral, when bereft of 
 their living investiture, are quite smooth, the cells of 
 the polypes being no deeper than the soft substance 
 in which they are embedded. But it is not thus with 
 various other habitations of coral-forming creatures. 
 We have seen it otherwise in the sea mushroom and 
 other large round single polyparia; and it is other- 
 wise in the arborescent productions called madrepores. 
 In these, the laminated cells, which are numerous, 
 and either large or very small, according to the species, 
 are of the same stony substance as the branch itself, 
 which they continue, therefore, to stud with star or 
 flower-like forms — these remaining after death as 
 sculptured ornaments on monumental remains. In 
 respect of colour, a monumental effigy affords as good 
 a notion of the complexion while in life of the departed 
 dead as do cabinet madrepores in their naked white- 
 ness of the vivid colours, greens, reds, blues, yellows, 
 pinks, and purples which once adorned them — their 
 beauty half hidden, half revealed under the waving 
 veil of ocean. 
 
 These branching corals — madrepores and millepores 
 — ^various in form and in colour, may be looked on as 
 the flowering shrubs of oceanic gardens. In these 
 gardens of enchantment how one longs to wander (if 
 
 VOL. I. D 
 
34 RAMBLES IN THE GARDENS OF AMPHITRITE. 
 
 one could wander at one's ease), as one reads of them 
 in tales of voyagers or divers, to whom glimpses of 
 the submarine paradise have been vouchsafed ! Such 
 partial revealments of the world beneath the waters 
 are given, perhaps, to us self-appropriating men of 
 earth, to remind us that nature is not a painter, and 
 an architect, and a landscape gardener entirely for us, 
 or in scenes to us accessible. Or perhaps they are 
 afforded as incentives to make ourselves, by scientific 
 re-creation, or for it, animals more amphibious than 
 we are at present. Who can tell but that by aid of 
 pneumatic appliances as yet unthought of, the terra 
 (almost) incognita beneath the sea may become to us 
 an acquired territory of occupation ? We are making 
 already highways for transit of our messages (our 
 minds) through the briny deep. By-and-by (who 
 can doubt it?) we shall be making highways for transit 
 of our bodies through the same watery medium, or 
 railways on the terra firma under it. 
 
 Then shall we be building Crystal Palaces under 
 the waves, retreating to submarine villas from sum- 
 mer's heat and winter's cold — tropic fervours and 
 polar freezings. Then ^hall we have opportunities for 
 exploring, not in haste, but at leisure, the hills and 
 valleys, grottos and caverns, groves and gardens of the 
 deep. 
 
FLOWERS OF THE SEA. 
 
 35 
 
 Then will fields new and wider than all dry land 
 a^fords us be opened for exercise of our prerogative as 
 lords of creation. Then shall we be tamers of " all 
 the things in the sea.'' Then shall we put not merely 
 our hooks in the noses, but our bridles in the mouths 
 of the monsters of the deep, making the swift and 
 beautiful our arrowy coursers, the strong and hideous 
 our drudging beasts of burthen. Then perhaps shall 
 we interrupt leviathan in his floundering pastime, not 
 merely as now, to put into his flesh thorns of agony, 
 but that we may put upon his back a marine state 
 howdah, of triple elephantine size; the same to be 
 mounted on state occasions, the first, a submarim 
 procession to commemorate man's completed dominion 
 over, and under, the sea ! But stay — we are getting 
 perhaps beyond our depth — below, at all events, the 
 level of our corals, whose builders never, it is said, exist 
 at a greater distance from the surface than that of 
 about a hundred feet. 
 
 The corals which owe their origin to the star-shaped 
 polypes of the order asteroida, present infinite variety 
 in the texture of their bases as well as in their form 
 and colour. In the common red and white coral, and in 
 various madrepores, we have seen the support or skele- 
 ton to be stony. It is the same, only outward instead of 
 
 D 2 
 
36 RAMBLES IN THE GARDENS OF AMPHITRITE. 
 
 inward, in that beautiful structure, the " organ-pipe,''^ 
 with its red upright tubes united by a succession of 
 horizontal floors. The uppermost of these, while 
 occupied by the living tenants, presents a stellular 
 constellation of vivid green. 
 
 The axis is also stony, though flexible at either 
 end, in the stem or quill of the sea-pen,* with its barbs 
 beset with polypes, through motion of which it is im- 
 pelled partly at its own pleasure through the deep. 
 Thus studded with star-like gems, which are some- 
 times, like stars, luminous at night, is not this a pen 
 fit for the handling of a sea queen? An implement, 
 too, not more elegant than economic, shedding its 
 living lustre, to the saving of midnight oil, on broad- 
 sheet fronds of a]g9e, the paper unwrought, untaxed, 
 of marine philosopher and sea-nymph blue. This 
 luminous pen-natula is suggestive. Among the curi- 
 osities of modern art, one has seen or heard of pen- 
 holders and pencil-cases surmounted by microscopic 
 watches — might they not be capped as usefully by 
 tiny lamps of instantaneous ignition, for pocket and 
 pillow purposes? They might prove a pretty acquisi- 
 tion, in especial to the poet and the painter, in 
 
 * Pennatula. 
 
FLOWERS OF THE SEA. 
 
 37 
 
 nocturnal wanderings under sky unlighted by a moon, 
 or in chamber unillumined by a patent night-light. 
 A humble hint this to future exhibitors of future 
 palaces of crystal. 
 
 It is stone, also, that forms a portion of the articu- 
 lated stem of that gorgonian coral called the Isis. In 
 this, however, the calcareous only alternates with a 
 horny substance, so as to make the branches jointed 
 and leave them flexible. 
 
 Other gorgonias of every hue and form of branching, 
 some upright, some drooping, possess interior skeletons 
 of substance wholly homy. 
 
 Of this description are the stems and reticulate 
 expansions known commonly as sea-fans.* In the 
 cabinet specimens of this beautiful production, the 
 dark horny stem is often seen incrusted with a broAvn 
 substance (once bright yellow). This is a sort of bark 
 to the fleshy covering which enveloped, while in life, 
 the skeleton of horn. 
 
 Of neither a stony nor a horny, but of a spongy 
 texture are the skeletons of the alcyona, common 
 polypifera of the same order, known most commonly, 
 at least to mariners, as " dead men's fingers'' — a name 
 
 * Gorgonia Flabellum. 
 
38 RAMBLES IN THE GARDENS OF AMPHITRITE. 
 
 one shudders at, associate as it comes with grasping 
 hands of the drowning and swollen fingers of the 
 drowned, and it is a name which gives also a general 
 notion of the form displayed with some variations by 
 these spongy corallines. The polypes of these alcyona 
 issue from little protuberances on the spongy mass 
 into which they can entirely withdraw; the protuber- 
 ances themselves, almost disappearing on great con- 
 traction. In this shrunken condition they are often 
 left by the retreating tide, but on restoration to salt 
 water (to a sea even within the crystal compass of a 
 goblet) the absorbing texture swells into its pristine 
 size, the eminences on its surface regain their height, 
 and, re-issuing from their summit, appear the vanished 
 polypes. These spread ou^ their radiate appendages, 
 and then the whole looks again, as under the waves, 
 a fingered form alive with moving efflorescence. 
 Though spongy, these alcyona, be it noted, are not 
 sponges, zoophytes which, though in some points 
 resembling them, have not a place amongst the 
 polypifera. 
 
 Only those who have never in their lives picked 
 up a shell or noted a bit of sea-weed can be 
 unacquainted by sight with a certain extraneous 
 
FLOWERS or THE SEA. 
 
 39 
 
 adjunct* often found attached to both — as often as 
 parasites to pomp, fortune-hunters to heiresses, rust 
 to iron, moss to bark and stones. This adherent sub- 
 stance appears to the unaided and unexamining eye 
 but a whitish incrustation covering portions of the 
 shell or sea-weed it invests. On close inspection its 
 texture appears reticulate or lace-like, and viewed 
 obliquely seems sometimes beset with little hairs. A 
 fragment magnified assumes another aspect. It looks 
 then like a piece of honeycomb, only that the close- 
 set cells are without hexagonal angles, and we discover 
 the hairs to be a number of transparent filaments 
 proceeding from the mass. It is only when this com- 
 pound structure is restored, living, to its native ele- 
 ment, and still subjected to microscopic scrutiny, that 
 its true nature is revealed. Then appear the forms 
 of life which have originated and still pervade it, and 
 in its polype occupants, each a tube set round with 
 longish tentacles, we recognise again our star-like 
 flower-like animals of the Kadiata. Now, these 
 minute insignificances, so dependent not only on 
 each other but on all sorts of other things, would not 
 anybody suppose them to be the very lowest of the 
 
 * Flustra. 
 
40 RAMBLES IN THE GARDENS OF AMPHTTRITE. 
 
 group they belong to ? Yet is it far otherwise, for, 
 instead of being the lowest, these tiny polypes of the 
 Flustra (for that is the name of this curious pro- 
 duction) are among the highest of the polype race. 
 They are furnished with organs more complete and 
 complex than those of the most magnificent sea 
 anemone or sea-mushroom that ever expanded its 
 disc below the wave. One of the marks of superiority 
 belonging to these flustrites and others of their order 
 is the possession of cilia or hair-like filaments which 
 fringe their arms. These appendages serve an im- 
 portant use — that of producing currents in the water, 
 which currents serve in turn to bring microscopic prey 
 into the very mouths of our almost microscopic 
 carnivori. 
 
 Of three progressive groups into which the poly- 
 pifera have been divided, namely, hydra-like, flower- 
 like, and moss-like animals, the last, however lowly in 
 name, ranks first, and it is to this that the polypes of 
 the flustra, the adherent incrusting flustra, appertain. 
 
 In this production, curious as common, we look on 
 a perfect galaxy of stellate forms so minute as (like 
 the worlds of the Milky Way) to wear hardly to the 
 unaided eye the appearance of stars at all. Under 
 
FLOWERS OF THE SEA. 
 
 41 
 
 this, their aspect of almost indiscernible minuteness, 
 these associate beings, though not, as we have seen, 
 of lowest rank, may make perhaps not unfitly the 
 last object of these rambling remarks on radiate 
 polypes. 
 
 Of the radiates we shall now, at all events, take 
 leave, though leaving unnoticed many stars among 
 them even of the first magnitude. 
 
 In each of their three characters as animals, flowers, 
 stars, these radiates of the deep seem to take leave of 
 us with three distinct whispers, audible through the 
 murmur of the waves. 
 
 They say, as animals, " You look down on us (and 
 justly) as among the lowest of living creatures, made 
 up nearly, as you describe us, of mouth and stomach. 
 Yet, do we not eat only, we move and multiply, suffer 
 pain, feel pleasure, take heed to self-preservation, even 
 as you. Highest of the animals you must do more, 
 or you hardly rise above us 
 
 They say, as flowers, " See how we clothe with 
 grace and rainbow colours the ocean cavern and the 
 barren rock. Perform a part like ours in adornment 
 of your earth. By cheerful kindliness of heart be as 
 flowers on its rugged steeps and in its darkest places/' 
 
42 RAMBLES IN THE GARDENS OF AMPHITRITE. 
 
 And hark to what they say as stars, " From us, the 
 lowly stars of the deep, look up to the stars on high. 
 See something more than an apparent similitude 
 between us. Our offices are resembling. They wrap 
 in glory the course of the Creator in the heavens. We 
 paint it with beauty as He walks in the paths of the 
 sea I'' 
 
II. 
 
 LATE AWAKINGS. 
 
 ''We might have been!" — L. E. L. 
 
 In a sheltered wood which used to be a favourite 
 resort of our childhood we remember having, one 
 winter's day, picked up a ball of woven grass which 
 mightily excited our wonder and curiosity. Having 
 a vague notion that it was made up within of a some- 
 thing different to what appeared without, it is only 
 surprising that we did not pull it to pieces forthwith, 
 to discover what that something was. Such, un- 
 doubtedly, was our ultimate design. Why it was 
 postponed we cannot say now, and possibly could not 
 have told then ; perhaps we wanted to keep in store 
 
44 
 
 LATE AWAKINGS. 
 
 the anticipated pleasure of discovery, as children (some 
 of them) will put by sugar-plums. 
 
 Be this as it may, we v/ere conveying the hidden 
 treasure homewards (the hand that grasped it waxing 
 warmer every moment under the combined excite- 
 ments of haste, expectation, and noon-day sunshine)^ 
 when we felt the globe of grass in heaving motion, 
 and heard issue from it a small shrill cry. We will 
 not affirm, at this distance of time, that the cry was 
 unanswered by a scream. We only remember clearly 
 that down went the ball on the path before us, but 
 that being sandy and soft, it seemed none the worse 
 for its fall. We were not certainly in as great a hurry 
 to raise as we had been on finding to pick it up ; for 
 our suspicions touching the contents of that mys- 
 terious ball tended to the notion that the mystery 
 within it must be a mystery of life, and life veiled in 
 mystery has always something awful about it even to 
 the apprehension of a child. However, after a short 
 contention, cin:iosity conquered fear, and the thing 
 continuing to lie as motionless on the path as inno- 
 cent bundle of dry grass ever lay, we carefully lifted 
 it from the ground, and ran home with it at the 
 utmost of our short-legged speed. Not Atlas tired of 
 a world's weight could lay it down with greater satis- 
 
LATE AWAKINGS. 
 
 45 
 
 faction than did we our globe of grass as we set it on 
 the table before our nursery fire. Presently it began 
 again to heave, and not one but many feeble cries 
 proceeded from within. Bold now in the fortress of 
 home — ^bolder still in presence of another face, ex- 
 pectant as our own, looking on to watch the issue, we 
 proceeded to lay open the light brown sphere, when lo ! 
 in its centre appeared its tenant and fabricator, none 
 other than a half-awakened, half-thawed dormouse. 
 It was still rolled in a furry ball as round nearly as 
 the grassy case which had encircled it; its nose 
 between its paws, its bushy tail over its head. By 
 degrees, however, as the poor sleeper waxed warmer 
 and warmer, crying all the while louder and louder, 
 it uncurved its spine, stretched out its limbs, and 
 expanded its little pinky feet in what appeared to be 
 the agonies of waking ; extasies they surely were not ; 
 ours were the extasies to see it thus or anyhow 
 reviving. We had had dormice before, brought us by 
 the village boys who caught them, but this was the 
 first found thus — the first of our own finding ; so to 
 us it was a golden dormouse, and the little grass 
 globe with its single inhabitant as a Columbian world 
 of our own discovery. With a world of pride, there- 
 fore, we consigned it to its cage — a proper cage, with 
 
46 
 
 LATE AWAKINGS. 
 
 wire-arched hall and wooden dormitory. In the 
 latter we laid it on its disordered bed, and then set 
 out in the dining-hall an alluring repast of nuts and 
 apples. Alluring did it prove, for we had soon the 
 infinite delight of seeing our captive issue furtively 
 from under the raised portcullis betwixt his two 
 apartments, no longer a half-alive, rigid, frigid, 
 miserable, crying object, but as soft, warm, lively, 
 large and bright-eyed a little animal of the genus 
 mus as was ever clothed in short brown fur, to sit up 
 on end squirrel fashion, drill nut-shells with his yellow 
 incisors, and cleverly empty them through the holes 
 of his own boring. 
 
 Poor little drowsy devil ! We wonder if we gave 
 thee compensation in that winter feast, and many fol- 
 lowing, for the somnolent enjoyment of thy winter 
 bed, or for the painful transitionary state attendant 
 on thy forced awaking ? Painful that assuredly was, 
 but whether entirely from being forced may admit of 
 doubt. Perhaps all wakings after a long-protracted 
 slumber may partake of pain. Sleep, after having got 
 a strong hold and a long, may always require a rough 
 shake to shake it off. 
 
 The bear hugged by Morpheus in a grip tight as 
 his own — the bat which the same poppy-crowned 
 
LATE AWAKINGS. 
 
 47 
 
 deity has taken and hung up for the winter by the 
 hooks of his leathern wings — the toad, awakened by 
 the knock of pickaxe or of hatchet on the wall of his 
 chamber in solid rock or solid wood, where he has 
 slumbered for perhaps a score, perhaps a century of 
 years — none of these perhaps slip into the sensations 
 of their living life with as much ease and comfort as 
 may the same creatures after a mere blinking doze 
 upon a summer's day. We may, at all events, hazard 
 the conjecture that Nature exacts something of a 
 penalty for long indulgence even of her own per- 
 mission ; but leaving this as regards the above and 
 other of the " seven sleeping'' animals, we may 
 descant with a little more assurance on the same sub- 
 ject as regards the animal, man. 
 
 Amongst us is waking, even in general (we merely 
 speak now of waking from sleep of the body), a 
 pleasant process ? Judging from our own experience, 
 we should hardly say so. It would seem to us, on the 
 contrary, that the waking moment, or moments, are 
 generally the least agreeable of the twenty-four hours 
 — or of the twelve or fourteen rather — of our daily 
 conscious life. If that moment comes too soon, i. e. 
 after a short and broken slumber, it comes from some- 
 thing wrong about us in mind or body ; therefore, 
 
48 
 
 LATE AWAKINGS. 
 
 with a correspondent feeling. If it comes too late, i.e. 
 after an over-long repose, it brings its penalty of 
 headaclie and confusion. If it comes at the end or 
 in the midst of a pleasant dream, it snatches one from 
 Paradise. If under infliction of a frightful vision or 
 oppressive nightmare, it finds and leaves one (for a 
 season) in a panic purgatory. When one first awakes 
 after some occurrence particularly pleasant, ten to one 
 if the agreeable incident has not been put out of one's 
 head or heart by the intervening hours of forgetful- 
 ness ; but when, per contra, one first wakes after some 
 sad calamity, there it is to stare one in the face the 
 moment one opens one's eyes upon the morning light 
 or darkness, and before one has had time to arouse 
 one's slumbering forces of resistance or submission. 
 So, at least, we have always found it. Nay, more. In 
 the absence of anything unusual, pleasant, or the 
 reverse, in the common course of our always chec- 
 quered days, we have generally found that a black 
 square is the first to meet our waking eye. We have 
 even gone to sleep looking almost to dazzlement on a 
 white or bright one, and yet its gloomy opposite has 
 been the first to greet us coldly in the morning. 
 
 We are only speaking, be it remembered, of our 
 own experiences, and these 'may be founded on some 
 peculiarity of temperament or constitution. 
 
LATE AWAKINGS. 
 
 49 
 
 But there are first awakings from other than from 
 bodily sleep of which these remind us — wakings from 
 the somnolence of dormant senses, slumbering facul- 
 ties, congealed hearts. These are likely to be painful 
 in proportion to the hour of life's day at which (if 
 ever) they happen to occur, and to the duration of the 
 slumber they succeed. Such can hardly indeed be 
 said to take place in life's morning, the wakings of 
 those " sweet hours of early prime'' being natural and 
 gradual, as new perceptions, with all their attendant 
 pleasures, open like spring leaves, accompanied or 
 followed by spring flowers. The wakings we have 
 now in mind are such as are likely to be forced upon 
 us, perhaps at some one moment of our middle day or 
 evening life. Suppose that, roused by the general 
 stir and bustle of progression, we then awake and find 
 ourselves left with only laggard companions far 
 behind — suppose that, pricked by accidental contact, 
 whether in book or converse, with minds that have 
 not so slumbered, we wake and shudder at the blank 
 presented by our own — suppose that, struck by some 
 strong or beautiful appeal of nature uttered by herself 
 or conveyed through the tongues of her increasing 
 company of inspired interpreters, we awake and 
 wonder that we have been blind and deaf till now to 
 
 VOL. L E 
 
50 
 
 LATE AWAKINGS. 
 
 all her marvels, her sweet and deep discoursings — or 
 suppose last, but oh ! not least, that the " small still 
 voice,'' never silent, is heard at last within us, and we 
 start and wake, perhaps from a dead inactive slumber, 
 perhaps from a feverish dream of busy, vain, unsatis- 
 fying, worldly life, and catch a realising glimpse of a 
 life beyond, to which a life like that is not the path 
 or portal. 
 
 Awakings such as these may arouse to proper pur- 
 pose, but they are just as likely to make us go to 
 sleep again in the very deadness of despair, to oppress 
 our every sense with the weight of wasted years, and 
 to cause our hearts to sink within us under the same 
 burthen. . . . Well, that burthen is a heavy one, and 
 we must lay it down or still do nothing. But how 
 shall we be quit of it ? What, in its heaviest aspect 
 (that of grievous sin against the Great Giver of the 
 talents), shall be done with it ? We must lay it down, 
 this sin of a dead life, heavy in proportion to its sort 
 of deadness and to wasted opportunities, at the feet of 
 Him who has promised to give us rest. As a wrong 
 done to ourselves, we must also lay aside this weight 
 of wasted years, nor suffer it to hang, torpedo-like, 
 upon the vital energy which, weak already through 
 disuse, has need of all its forces for repairing effort. 
 
LATE AWAKINGS. 
 
 51 
 
 Instead of dwelling bitterly on what " we migJtt have 
 been," let us be doing bravely to become the best we 
 can be yet. Instead of standing, hands folded, to 
 look back upon the waste behind where should have 
 been a cultivated garden, let us with hand and heart 
 work our hardest on the bit of unreclaimed ground 
 yet left of our allotment. That, on culture, may still 
 yield abundantly. How abundantly who can tell? 
 A woodland ramble may herein bring us thoughts of 
 encouragement. We look upon an oak luxuriant in 
 maturity, upon another green in old age ; but their 
 trunks are more or less unsound. Within them we 
 might seek in vain for the due number of those con- 
 centric circles which should have marked their years 
 of growth. These are deficient, perhaps through 
 shallowness or poverty of surrounding soil, perhaps 
 through want of assimilating power in the trees them- 
 selves. But, though the woody fabric be thus imper- 
 fect, branch and leaf continue to put forth. So with 
 us, the solid tissue which years of intellectual progress 
 should have formed may be deficient, perhaps through 
 meagreness of mental nutriment, more likely through 
 absence of mental effort in our hours of morning or of 
 prime. These may have gone by for ever. Truly, 
 what " we might have been'' we can never be ; but 
 
 E 2 
 
52 
 
 LATE AWAKINGS. 
 
 while, like the tree in wood deficient, our root is in 
 earth, our watering from above, we may yet resemble 
 it in the power to throw out shoots of strength and 
 verdure, and rejoice in a sense of reinvigorated life. 
 
 It is not possible, neither desirable, that our first 
 awakening from a sleep of supineness should be other 
 than attended with real suffering, as the first awaken- 
 ing of our dormouse from his torpor of benumbment 
 with apparent pain. Something like hard struggling 
 and pitiful crying must wait upon our rousing as on 
 his ; but struggling and crying over, let us, like him, 
 begin to open and discuss our nuts. These, our nuts, 
 what and where are they? Let us ask rather, "what 
 and where are they not?'' They are the things of 
 providence, the things of nature, each with shell and 
 kernel; some, perhaps many, easily accessible, but 
 which we in our slumber have suffered to lie around 
 us unobserved. 
 
 But suppose us to have awoke at last to some of 
 these unregarded things ; to the nuts, let us say, which 
 nature presents to us in her common objects — we 
 know them to be clustering about us; but what, 
 we are ready to exclaim, is now the use of that? 
 Our unaccustomed sight is no longer apt for their 
 discernment, our unexercised arm wants strength 
 
LATE AWAKINGS. 
 
 53 
 
 and dexterity to bring them within reach. We have 
 failed to make our own by appropriate study any 
 assisting implement (the hooked stick) which should 
 aid our efforts to obtain them ; and if, after a sort, 
 obtained, we possess not the acute perceptions (the 
 incisors of our dormouse) which usage should have 
 sharpened to bore shells and draw out kernels. 
 
 Thoughts something like these must be the hand- 
 maidens, rude, but honest, attendant on our late 
 awakings. Their services may not be welcome — what 
 should be their help we may convert to hindrance; 
 but rather let us accept their stirring aid, and thus 
 assisted, make haste to dress ourselves anew for the 
 new days yet before us, no longer (be they few or 
 many) to be days of darkness. 
 
 Herein it is not from imagination that we write. 
 An egregious sleeper have we been, and something 
 have we known of late awaking — painful, partial, yet 
 oh, how fraught with succeeding pleasures, of which 
 in our slumbers we had never dreamt ! 
 
 Our earliest years, with many following, were spent 
 in the country — in a home county, rich in beautiful 
 scenery, and in the gifts (some rare) of plants, insects, 
 fossils. Scenery always must have influence, however 
 insensibly exerted, upon growing minds, and doubtless 
 
54 
 
 LATE AWAKINGS. 
 
 the chalky hills and verdant meadows of our native 
 place left their impression upon something within us 
 deeper than our senses. As for the productions of 
 that pleasant spot of earth, its " painted populace'' 
 and possessions, insects, plants, fossils, nothing did 
 we know or care to learn about them. 
 
 And how was this? Were we constituted an 
 anomaly of our kind ? a young animal of the human 
 race without inquisitiveness ? Had our inquiring pro- 
 pensities (if possessed) found other food than that of 
 which nature is purveyor? or had we no conductor, no 
 guide (either of flesh and blood, or of paper and print) 
 to lead us early to her table? There were not, 
 certainly, in our days of childhood the innumerable 
 alphabets to nature's language, and ladders to her 
 learning, such as now crowd even to incumbrance the 
 nursery bookcase and the opening mind. We had 
 not these, but then we were not without something of 
 the sort, their precursors and their models. We 
 " might have been" led to look betimes into some of 
 the wonders of nature and eke of art by the pleasant 
 dialogues of the family of Harcourt.* Besides these, 
 we possessed (a mother's legacy, and consecrated by 
 her own early use) those volumes of delightf in which 
 
 * By Lucy Aikin. f ^'Evenings at Home," by Mrs. Barbauld. 
 
LATE AWAKINGS. 
 
 55 
 
 " Eyes and no Eyes'' holds an awakening place. 
 These were enough to have opened ours to many of 
 the unnoted things about us, but opened they were 
 not. So from the days when we sat upon the grass, 
 making daisy chains and acorn teacups, even to the 
 days, and far beyond them, when " we might have 
 been'' examining the structure of compound flowers 
 or tracing the development of the oak from the acorn, 
 we went on enjoying the country, it is true, but only 
 according to the capabilities of a butterfly or a kid. 
 
 We basked in the sunny meadows, scaled the chalky 
 hills, animal spirits wide awake, mental faculties 
 slumbering as soundly all the day as did, when night 
 came, the frame they slept in. Ah! that frame was 
 rocked then by those ministers to Morpheus, Youth, 
 Health, Happiness; with us, alas! his ministers by 
 day as well as night. But the time came (and to us it 
 came early), when youth, health, and happiness began 
 to fade together; and then did we feel first a want of 
 something beyond merely animal enjoyment of a 
 country life. We had never had a childish companion 
 of our childhood, and it so happened that we had no 
 young companions of our youth — no familiar ac- 
 quaintances except the woods, and hills, and meadows ; 
 and these, which had so long sufficed us, began some- 
 
56 
 
 LATE AWAKINGS. 
 
 how to grow dull associates, till we came at last to 
 wander amongst them, dead to all, even their external 
 influences, asleep in self-hood, and dreaming over 
 certain domestic trials of our appointed lot, magni- 
 fied and distorted, like well-known faces in an uneasy 
 vision of the night. 
 
 Our family elders were old-school people, in the 
 ^ense especially of setting their faces against education 
 for the million; also, of looking on their own and 
 everybody's as quite completed on the day (whether 
 fifty years ago or five) when they turned their backs 
 on their respective academies. 
 
 Standards there were, however, of a more intellec- 
 tual stamp, under the shade (or the light) of which we 
 had sat from childhood. These were the standards of 
 a family library, which were never grafted, by the 
 way, with new slips from that tree of growth pro- 
 digious — the literature of the day. Of its most 
 tempting fruits we nevertheless loved to imbibe the 
 juices through their rinds of gilded calf or Russia; but 
 at the time we began to tire of our purposeless summer 
 rambles, we began to nod over our aimless readings 
 by the winter fireside. The only rills from the Nile 
 of modern literature which were used periodically to 
 reach our home, were a daily paper, sole study of the 
 
LATE AWAKINGS. 57 
 
 r 
 
 head of the house, and the Penny Magazine, taken in 
 by the housemaid. Ah! Betty, now we come to 
 think of it, it was perhaps to thee, to thy turn for 
 " scholardship,'' to thy pennyworths of popular instruc- 
 ^ tion, so freely and so proudly imparted unto us, that 
 we were indebted mainly for our first awaking to 
 some of the objects of untiring interest tiiat lived and 
 moved around us. Those attractive articles of Knight 
 and the Society, descriptive of plants, and four-footed 
 beasts, and feathered fowl, with their bold effective 
 woodcuts, were always the first we turned to in each 
 welcome number. These did not, it is true, send us 
 with prying purpose to the hedges and the woods, but 
 they led us to disturb the dust of another, to us, new, 
 department of our old library. Richardson's and 
 Fielding's anatomy of the heart was abandoned 
 for the venerable Grew's '^Anatomy of Plants;" the 
 flowing numbers of Pope for the zoological pages of 
 the pleasant Pennant ; the old-fashioned portraitures 
 of the " Spectator'' for the obsolete articles on natural 
 science in a voluminous Encyclopaedia, one of the 
 fathers of its race. The most that we seemed to gain 
 from these our idle, immethodical, impractical book- 
 explorings in a new direction, was a little revived 
 interest in reading itself, and with this a vague im- 
 
58 
 
 LATE AWAKINGS. 
 
 pression that we had been born perhaps with some- 
 thing of a natural taste for natural history, or what is 
 usually (but too exclusiv^ely) so called. Ah! sighed 
 we, if we had but taken up in time any one of its 
 branches, " we might have been/' perhaps a botanist, 
 an entomologist, a geologist (who knows?) and in 
 course of so becoming, many an hour, now lost for 
 ever, might have brought us its pleasures and left us 
 its profits in possession ! 
 
 About this time there fell into our hands Reaus- 
 seau's Letters on Botany. We began to read them 
 simply as a book, by the window or the fireside. Not 
 thus could we have travelled far on the path, how- 
 ever flowery, traced by the ardent worshipper of 
 nature for his lady friend. We speedily discovered 
 that, to make these letters of introduction available 
 at Flora's court, they must be, like other credentials, 
 actually presented, and that after the manner intended 
 and directed by their writer. That they must be 
 taken, in short, as our guide, companion, and familiar 
 friend, into Flora's own dominions, into garden, field, 
 and woodland. Thus employed, we found in that 
 little volume the thing we had so long been wanting. 
 It served as a talisman of enchantment to arouse us 
 from our unobservant sleep of years. Through its 
 
LATE AWAKINGS. 
 
 59 
 
 assistance, we acquired at last that pearl of price — a 
 practical pursuit. Curiosity was stirred by the won- 
 ders and mysteries of floral structure. Activity aroused 
 for search of floral specimens; perception exercised to 
 determine orders, classes, species. An attempted 
 Hortus-Siccus became to us a living garden of delight, 
 albeit as sorry a display of brown, and shrivelled, and 
 mildewed specimens as ever tyro collector got together 
 for his pains. But what was the loss of paper, of 
 patience, sometimes (seemingly) of time? We had 
 gained, not, indeed, what was ever likely now (what- 
 ever " might have been'') to make us a botanist, but 
 what sufficed to enrol us at once as a pupil in nature's 
 own school — a school for adults as well as infants. 
 
 Flowers, which had been heretofore objects to us of 
 sense only, of sight, and smell, became thenceforward 
 objects of thought, of search, inquiry, fancy; and 
 under this, their novel aspect, all the old friends of 
 our daily walks — woods, fields, lanes, hills, and 
 hedges, put on new faces, which, in their ever- 
 changing features, were never to grow^ dull and 
 inanimate again. 
 
 People may talk as they will about the untiring 
 delightsomeness of the country in its general and out- 
 ward asT)ect; but when confined to one retired spot, 
 
60 
 
 LATE AWAKTNGS. 
 
 we come to cross the same fields, follow the same roads 
 a,nd lanes, look at the same prospects day by day and 
 year by year, with no objects to arrest our attention 
 by the way, or tempt us to diverge from the beaten 
 track, the charms of the country ivill pall, and a 
 country walk become a dull affair, or a thing of mere 
 animal enjoyment. It was meant to be so, to drive 
 us to dissatisfaction with the mere eye-pleasing, health - 
 serving attributes of the natural world, hence, to seek 
 in them the inherent qualities of mind-pleasing which 
 they so pre-eminently possess. 
 
 It is only minds of the lowest stamp, and of the 
 highest, that are content, for long, with nature in her 
 generals; the former in their apathy and drowsy 
 deadness, the latter in their powers of imagination, 
 combination, comparison, by aid of which every 
 natural object, be it general or particular, becomes 
 suggestive of ideas, out of, and beyond the pale of 
 nature's own dominion. 
 
 But minds of medium and commonplace order 
 must, as we believe, be apt to tire of nature in her 
 outward aspects, where she is their constant and their 
 sole companion. To such then the value is incalcu- 
 lable of a sense awakened to her inward worth, to a 
 desire for acquaintance with some of her particulars — 
 
LATE AWAKINGS. 61 
 
 her specific objects — to a pursuit of her, in short, in 
 some one of her multifarious paths. 
 
 Pursuits such as these, whether after plants or 
 other creations of the Great Creator, possess with a 
 thousand recommendations this advantage. They 
 have their adaptations to the humour of almost every 
 day and mood. They have their exciting searches 
 and their pleasant findings, their curious examinations, 
 their isolated facts, all affording easy and amusing 
 exercise when the mind is indolent, perhaps depressed; 
 when it is in no condition for effort, excursion, or 
 combination, mental processes for which, nevertheless, 
 we are meantime laying up material. Many are the 
 days on which we may find amusement in seeking 
 for a plant, an insect ; in examination of a leaf, a 
 flower, or a beetle's wing, when the beauty of the 
 varied foliage, the enamelled meadows, the glorious 
 sky, may appeal to us in vain. Yet will the influence 
 of nature in her general aspects gain, not lose, in their 
 power over us, by improved acquaintance with her 
 features in detail. Even while engaged in the study 
 of her minutise her tout ensemble may be working 
 insensibly upon us ; or, if for awhile we may seem 
 absorbed in scrutiny of parts, we shall turn thence 
 with heightened, if not new enjoyment to the whole. 
 
62 
 
 LATE AWAKINGS. 
 
 Let us conclude with a single instance of the way 
 in which some of the most common objects in our 
 country-walks appear under new aspects, are dressed 
 in new beauty, acquire new life, inspire new interest 
 by bestowal on them of something more close than 
 general observation. 
 
 We will imagine a pretty bit of rural scenery, or 
 take one rather from memory's sketch-book. Let it 
 be a scene near the village of Hadley, in the vicinity 
 of Barnet. 
 
 If, reader, you have ever visited that romantic 
 locality you can hardly have failed to admire in par- 
 ticular that portion of it called the Common. If you 
 have loitered there on a summer's evening you will 
 say, perhaps, that you could never tire of the scene 
 there presented. You cannot have forgotten it. You 
 must remember surely how you entered on it from 
 the village by a white toll-like gate, but free of toll, 
 except for a levy on the hearts of the charitable ; the 
 gatherer, an aged woman, who on sunny days is always 
 seated on her rush-bottomed chair beside the path- 
 way, ready, with palsied hand, to open for the 
 passers-by, and curtsey for the penny, and smile for 
 the pleasant word that may be given her on passing. 
 The gate behind us, we come to a corner of the 
 
LATE AWAKINGS. 63 
 
 Common here bounded by two roads diverging at 
 right angles, and leading the one to Enfield, the 
 other to the retired village of Cockfoster. On our 
 left stands the church with its ancient " ivy-mantled" 
 tower (a beacon-tower) with lofty elms surrounding 
 and surmounting it, the pretty cottage parsonage just 
 below. On our right is a noble pollard (an elm also), 
 its head a grove of branches, its hollow trunk a 
 capacious cavern. A large clear pond (in its centre a 
 little green island crowned by a weeping willow) 
 occupies the angle of the Common. This Common 
 presents us, by the way, with no wide expanse, only 
 two slips of heathy ground, bordered on one side by 
 the diverging roads, and bounded on the other by a 
 wood of oak and beech, which opens in green vistas 
 to blue distances beyond. All this, you who are 
 acquainted with the spot, will readily recall ; and 
 surely you must remember in especial how those 
 belts of verdant turf and purple heath are prettily 
 studded by numerous clumps of hawthorn, black- 
 thorn, eglantine, and holly. If you have ever seen 
 them, as we have, white with May-flowers, or pink 
 with briar-roses, you cannot have forgot them, or the 
 frequent pools of water which reflect their summer 
 bloom. 
 
64 
 
 LATE AWAKINGS. 
 
 If these and other features of this pretty landscape 
 are yet mirrored on your mind, it must needs retain 
 also the images of various moving forms in absence of 
 which the picture would lack of life, if not complete- 
 ness. You must remember the ducks and ducklings 
 in the willow pond, sailing round its central islet, or 
 busy in the weeds that fringe it. The geese on the 
 common, with their broods of every age, size, and 
 shade of plumage, from down of soft bright yellow to 
 feathers of the parental white and grey, the young 
 huddled for the most part lazily together, the old 
 quietly cropping the grass, or noisily stretching 
 out their long necks in defiance and defence — the 
 rough ponies and skeleton horses always at grass or 
 work — the smooth, plumper bits of horse-flesh just 
 turned out for an hour's graze, which they turn into 
 an hour's frolic, chasing and biting one another in the 
 exuberant delight of well-fed freedom — the quiescent 
 cows grazing, ruminating, and whisking their tails as 
 they stand in the pond or pools of water — the boys 
 filling their buckets from the boarded well — the rail- 
 way labourers returning worn and weary from their 
 over-straining toil — the youthful cricketers come out 
 joyfully from school or shop-board for the evening 
 game — the cuckoo shouting from the woods — the 
 
LATE AWAKINGS. 65 
 
 blackbird warbling from the churchyard or the 
 parsonage-garden — the woods reposing under a canopy 
 of summer clouds, light and motionless — clouds and 
 woods, both gilded by the beams of the declining sun, 
 here glowing on the tree-tops, there glancing on their 
 trunks, and checquering the umbrageous shadows by 
 streaks and patches of yellow light. This, or a scene 
 as beautiful, may have power to strike into the mind 
 so deeply by a first impression as never to be quite 
 effaced ; but it follows not, therefore, that such a pro- 
 spect, however varied both in itself and by changing 
 seasons, should never tire, seen day after day, month 
 after month, or year after year. We are pretty 
 certain that it would, with some, perhaps most people. 
 It would be so, at all events in our own case, with 
 any example of the rural or the picturesque viewed 
 only as a picture. 
 
 But suppose that instead of being presented with a 
 pleasing combination, such as constitutes a pretty 
 landscape, that, say, of Hadley Common, our eye was 
 restricted to one portiou of it ; confined to one of the 
 objects there assembled — one, for instance, of those 
 graceful clumps, or even a dozen of them, such as we 
 have seen studding the belt of turf above described. 
 To be condemned to look day after day upon nothing 
 
 VOL. I. F 
 
66 LATE AWAKINGS. 
 
 better than a bush! or a bit of greensward with a 
 dozen bushes on it! What a penance! Yes, a 
 penance truly for the eye that takes in nothing of the 
 bush but its general form and colour. Suppose, how- 
 ever, that for very lack of room to make excursions 
 the eye calls in the assistance of the mind, and the 
 two together begin to pry into that bush of com- 
 pounded growths with a view to analyse or distinguish 
 its component parts ; examined thus, let us see what 
 was noticeable in one of those clumps on Hadley 
 Common as it appeared on a J une evening some three 
 years since, and much doubtless as it appears now 
 under the renovation of the present summer. The 
 first thing that strikes us on consideration of this 
 sylvan group is a certain order in its wildness. Its 
 substantial bulk and body is made up of an aged 
 hawthorn, a picturesque relic of its once vigorous self, 
 a trim stiff young blackthorn, and a graceful briar- 
 rose, now in the beauty of its opening clusters. We 
 might liken the hawthorn to a decayed gentleman, 
 the blackthorn to a vulgar upstart, the eglantine to a 
 blooming fair one, halting perhaps betwixt the two, 
 and meanwhile smiling upon both. But we are not 
 poetising, only observing ; so let us be content to look 
 upon the shrubby trio as simply what they are — even 
 
LATE AWAKINGS. 
 
 67 
 
 viewed thus, we must perceive a purpose in their 
 association. They serve for mutual setting off, and 
 for mutual support. When the driving winds career 
 across the Common, the eglantine, the feebler of the 
 three, must find the profit of their paction. Then, if 
 these, the magnates of the bush, experience in thei- 
 union mutual benefit, how much more do they confer 
 it on the various smaller and weaker individuals, the 
 climbers and creepers which encompass and festoon 
 them ? These are the clustered woodbine, the green- 
 blossomed black briony, the elegant convolvulus, the 
 bending bitter-sweet ; while amidst and over all 
 (interlacing and embracing) are thrown the arms 
 (some, verdant green, some, wintry brown) of a prickly 
 pliant bramble — a bond at once soft and stringent to 
 bind the whole together — an emblem of the loving 
 duty which binds the members of a united family. 
 
 At the foot of this vegetable column spreads a 
 flowery pedestal. Here grow many familiars of the 
 wood and hedge-row, a variety of chickweeds, their 
 white star-like blossoms putting out the daisies, 
 the blue veronica, the pink herb Robert, the dog 
 violet, its light coloured scentless flowers succeeded 
 now by large green capsules. Here is a plant or two 
 besides, strangers truly unto us, subjects therefore for 
 
 F 2 
 
68 
 
 LATE AWAKINGS. 
 
 home scrutiny and our botanising box. Over and 
 above these, or over and helow them, foils and con- 
 trasts to their delicate beauty, ferns, and docks, and 
 nettles intrude here and there their coarser presences. 
 
 These, we believe, are all the vegetable growths 
 which in their combination constitute this common 
 clump; nay, but there are grasses, and mosses, and 
 lichens, and fungi, (how many is beyond our reckon- 
 ing ?) which we had almost overlooked. 
 
 Well, few or many, these and the rest are clearly 
 assembled for mutual service, and protection also, 
 doubtless for the pleasing of our eyes, and the employ- 
 ment of our thoughts. But is this all ? Hardly, for 
 the bush is attractive, evidently, in the eyes of other 
 creatures, and the secret of its attractive power is 
 sure to consist in use and pleasure likewise. We have 
 only to look closer into branch, and leaf, and blossom, 
 and behold a multitude of living witnesses in attesta- 
 tion of the fact. 
 
 Here amongst the branches of the blackthorn are a 
 few reduced entirely to skeletons ; on others are left 
 fragments only of dead and living leaves ; both dead 
 and living are wrapt in transparent filmy shrouds, in 
 which also their weavers are inclosed. These are 
 those great destructives, the little caterpillars of the 
 
LATE AWAKINGS. 
 
 69 
 
 little ermine moth. It is easy to know them, partly 
 by the work of their jaws (destructive and formative), 
 partly by the colour of their coats (grey and black), 
 as we see them (dimly discernible through their veil), 
 busy in the business of their lives, that of devouring 
 green leaves, and, fast as they eat, inclosing others to 
 be eaten within cover of their woven hammocks. 
 
 Besides these preyers upon leaves, we perceive 
 others of the insect crew, preyers upon lives, some, 
 however, glad to draw leaves into their service, to 
 assist them in the capture of their prey. Of such are 
 gaily coloured spiders, variegated green, and red, and 
 white, and brown ; some lurking in ambush beneath 
 foliage, or in leaf-constructed nests; others suspended 
 head downwards in the centre of their geometric webs, 
 more open, but not less cunning murderers. 
 
 Brilliant scorpion flies (black and gold), their day's 
 work of destruction over, their thirst of blood subsided 
 with the midday heat, have settled for repose in the 
 recesses of the foliage, but are betrayed to sight by 
 the glitter of their wings, as the low sunbeams pene- 
 trate their coverts. Except a belated bee, that just 
 settles for a rest, en passant, not an insect else can 
 we discern within this leafy harbour. Nay, but there 
 are small red beetles (weevils) with curious long 
 
70 
 
 LATE AWAKINGS. 
 
 probosci, on the dock ; and here are others, bearing a 
 family resemblance, but glittering in green and gold, 
 upon the branches of the blackthorn. 
 
 Here is a plant of woodbine, which we never saw till 
 now. What can have puckered so many of its tender 
 leaves into shapes of strange distortion? Ah! here 
 are the fairy Pucks to whom they owe disfigure- 
 ment. They are groups of little green-grey aphides 
 huddled together in hollows of the leaves (on their 
 under surface), which, with answering convexities 
 above, had never been but for these blighting varlets, 
 each with his pipe for sap extraction. 
 
 Others of these leaves, of the woodbine, are varie- 
 gated by meandering lines of white. Here again 
 insect marauders have been at their insidious work, 
 though in this case to beautify rather than deform. 
 These white and winding tracks are outward traces of 
 the inward presence of certain little worms or cater- 
 pillars, known as leaf miners. They are busy now in 
 perforation of their tunnels through the thickness of 
 the leaf, eating as they go the green pulp they ex- 
 cavate, the white membranes only (upper and lower) 
 being left behind. These tracks, which widen from 
 their commencement, end in an area wherein, in some 
 of them, we can discern, on holding the leaf up to the 
 
LATE AWAKTNGS. 
 
 71 
 
 light, a small brown body. By its barrel-like form it 
 must be the pupa or chrysalis, not of a moth, as with 
 leaf -miners is frequently the case, but of a fly, of what 
 sort precisely we cannot tell. Some of these leaves, 
 therefore, shall travel home along with our new-found 
 flowers. Then, in a few days, or a few weeks, we 
 shall see, doubtless, these sleeping miners (now in 
 their second stage) in a waking and a winged form. 
 
 So, we have found, we think, abundance of objects, 
 varied, beautiful, curious, interesting, in the boundaries 
 of a bush. An eye more observant, more instructed, 
 in other words, more early awakened and awake than 
 ours, might detect as many more. 
 
 A microscopic eye, i.e., an eye assisted by the 
 microscope, could multiply as well as magnify them a 
 thousand-fold. Then, if we take into account the 
 perpetual changes wrought in each of these varied 
 forms, whether of foliage, flowers, or insects, by the 
 influence of seasons or in the course of development 
 or decay, Ave shall find no bounds to the variety com- 
 prised in this little clump of nature's clubbing. 
 
 The expanse of surrounding scenery, the smooth 
 greensward, the heathy patches, the sparkling pools, 
 the woods, the woodland vistas, the blue distances all 
 disappearing, this cluster of common shrubs and plants 
 
72 
 
 LATE AWAKINGS. 
 
 left an isolated object on a level waste, it would suffice 
 to furnish of itself (as we hope has been already proved) 
 a fund of interest for country walks innumerable. 
 What, then, must be the riches, in amusive sources, of 
 the scene around, and of the extended tract in which 
 that scene is but a part? Exhaustless, truly, but only 
 to the eye and mind which have been awakened (late 
 or early) to some of the particulars lying (to the 
 unobservant) utterly hidden within the generals of 
 nature. 
 
III. 
 
 HEDGES IN WIJSTTEE. 
 
 " Hawthorn had lost his motley livery, 
 The naked twigs were shivering all for cold." 
 
 Sackville. 
 
 Nearly all rural objects have their winter aspects of 
 agreeability. Like people with remains of beauty, 
 they have something left of what belonged to them 
 in brighter seasons; or like people with more than 
 beauty to recommend them, they show themselves 
 possessed of that which is independent of seasons and 
 their change. The sky, in winter, has its glorious 
 
74 
 
 HEDGES IN WINTER. 
 
 sunsets; the hills, their blue remote; the fields, their 
 chasing lights and shadows; the waters, their bright- 
 ness and augmented fulness; the woods (their bareness 
 veiled by distance) still present masses to the eye on 
 which it can pleasantly repose ; while the trees, viewed 
 apart and near, exhibit, some of them, such grandeur, 
 some, such grace of outline, that we admire them in 
 absence of their summer drapery almost as we do a 
 beautiful statue that owes nothing to colour or to 
 clothing. Thus it is with sky, hills, fields, waters, 
 woods, and trees ; but what in winter can be said for 
 hedges? When Autumn in his last bluster, or Winter 
 in his first breathings, has stripped them, they (to most 
 of us) have lost all that served to make them beautiful 
 or bearable. A bit of hedge — a bit in particular of 
 well-trimmed hawthorn, shorn even in summer of all 
 its picturesque belongings, becomes in winter one of 
 the most ungraceful, uninteresting, drowsy, mono- 
 tonous, unpoetic bits of nature, or of art and nature 
 put together, that eyes can well find to look on. So, 
 at least, it would seem upon a superficial view. Such 
 a piece of quickset hedge is pre-eminently a piece of 
 " still life,'' a term much more applicable to a thing 
 of vitality and growth, without visible sign of either, 
 than to those faithful likenesses of carrots and cauli- 
 
HEDGES IN WINTER. 
 
 75 
 
 flowers, fish and game, pots and kettles, which go in 
 catalogues by that appellation. 
 
 We may see, perhaps, by-and-by, that a hedge in 
 winter, however " still,'' has, as a piece of life, more 
 tokens of vitality about it than is usually supposed. 
 It may hence be found as full of points of interest as 
 of prickles, which, like these, are made all the more 
 apparent by absence of leaves. 
 
 Not just yet, however, shall we invite our reader to 
 bear us company to the side, even the sunny side, of 
 a white or blackthorn fence, in dark December or 
 hoary January. We would deal with him rather as 
 the gently blending seasons deal with us, each intro- 
 ducing to her sister, and lingering by while first ac- 
 quaintanceship is made. 
 
 A poetess of modern time* declared her preference 
 of a hedge in autumn, with its fruits (hips, haws, 
 sloes, &c.), to a spring one with its flowers. According 
 to times and seasons, one's taste, one's humour, and 
 one's age, one may agree with or differ from this 
 opinion. Like the seasons themselves, all their cha- 
 racteristic features have their peculiar merits and 
 attractions. So, not to compare at all things that 
 cannot be improved, and that we cannot wish (if we 
 
 ^ The gifted L. E. L. 
 
76 
 
 HEDGES IN WINTER. 
 
 could) to depreciate by comparison, let us look simply 
 at that with which an Autumn hedge presents us. 
 
 Autumn, the evening of the year, is warm, like the 
 evening of the day, with glowing tints — purples, reds, 
 and yellows, as of a gorgeous sunset sky. Spread 
 broadly upon garden, glade, and grove, these vivid 
 hues are nowhere more concentrate than upon an 
 Autumn hedge. 
 
 If we view the seasons as painters, Autumn may 
 be looked upon as nature's Titian. When busy with 
 his colours, he would seem to use the hedges as his 
 palettes for first trial and arrangement of his varied 
 tints. With leaves that are deciduous, it is a law of 
 nature that the green should, in Autumn, " all turn 
 yellow/' Their organic structure is not such as 
 enables them to resist the agencies of dissolution 
 then abroad. But we must not look upon Autumnal 
 colours as all of Autumn's preparation, nor all the 
 painting of the season as the immediate production 
 of the season's pencil. 
 
 Autumn (viewed still as a painter) is indeed the 
 master-hand. His the works upon the largest scale, 
 but in the same magnificent studio, working beside, 
 and in harmony with his own colouring, is a large 
 company of little subordinates, whose productions 
 
HEDGES IN WINTER. 
 
 77 
 
 cover no inconsiderable portion of the reticulate can- 
 vass of the leaf. 
 
 With leaves as with pictures, the more highly they 
 are varnished the longer they last. The perennial or 
 evergreen owe their durability to their surface polish ; 
 and where this is broken, decay has found a loophole 
 large enough for entrance, though it be no bigger than 
 a pinhole. Minute fungi, wearing the appearance of 
 dark spots, often open a door in this way to premature 
 dissolution. It is thus with the laurel and the holly. 
 Thus also with the leaves of the sycamore and the 
 elm, so often studded in Autumn with dark-coloured 
 blotches, which have been aptly termed their " plague- 
 spots'' of destruction. 
 
 The above and other undermining agents of similar 
 description help to colour (or discolour) as well as to 
 destroy ; but the subordinate leaf-painters, to whom 
 more particular allusion has been made, are of the 
 animal, not vegetable kingdom. They consist, in 
 short, of those insect colourists who, finding in green 
 leaves their grounded canvass, employ on it as pencils 
 their suckers or their jaws. 
 
 These plied assiduously in abstraction of vegetable 
 juices, and in commingling them with animal acids, 
 often anticipate the course of change, and, when the 
 
78 
 
 HEDGES IN WINTER. 
 
 season of change comes, help considerably to produce 
 or heighten the yellows, reds, and browns which form 
 the predominant hues of autumnal tinting. 
 
 In the spotting of foliage as well as in its shading, 
 insects play an active part, and are almost sole per- 
 formers in the warpings, and curlings, and rollings, 
 and foldings (to say nothing of the consumings) of 
 which leaves are the devoted victims. Where these 
 operations are extensive, they suffice of themselves to 
 give an autumnal complexion to hedge and tree long 
 before the arrival of autumnal change and fall. 
 
 The autumn hedge is hardly richer in its gorgeous 
 drapery of leaves than in its glowing jewellery of 
 berries. Hips and haws (the Avinter bread-fruits of 
 the bird) overlay it with opaque masses of crimson 
 and bright scarlet. 
 
 Blackberries, richest of the fruits that are not to the 
 poor fruit forbidden, sprinkle it with green, red, and 
 purple in their triple and intermediate stages. 
 
 The woodbine, in its fruiting, adorns it with red 
 transparent beads — the cornelian, as the hip is the 
 coral of the hedge. Also transparent are the berries 
 of the climbing briony. Hanging in clusters on its 
 withered arms, and glowing so brightly beside its brown 
 and shrivelled leaves, they remind one of the jewels 
 
HEDGES IN WINTER. 
 
 79 
 
 which make age look older glittering on a withered 
 breast or wrinkled brow. With these, in clusters 
 also, appear the poison-berries of the bending bitter- 
 sweet, green, yellow, crimson, all contrasted alluringly 
 with its purple residue of graceful flowers. 
 
 Then lowest, if not last (for all their sounding 
 titles), are assemblages of " lords and ladies.''* They 
 have thrown aside their hoods, and in all their scarlet 
 bravery are peeping at us and at each other from 
 amidst the hedge-foot herbage. 
 
 Autumn and Pomona together may be looked on 
 as modellers and painters of the above productions ; 
 but besides these we are presented in an autumn 
 hedge with a variety of others — fruits, also, or looking 
 like them, with which neither Autumn nor Pomona 
 have much to do. These are the fictitious fruits 
 which have been pricked into existence by the magic 
 wand of the fairy gall-fly. In these, also, the hedge 
 owes a portion of enrichment to insect agency. Galls 
 jpar excellence, those of royal celebrity as apples of 
 the oak, show their ruddy ripeness perhaps in the 
 hedge itself, perhaps in the oak that overhangs it. 
 So with the minors that often accompany this major 
 of the gall family — the little berries of like features 
 
 * Arum, Cuckoo-pint, Wake Robin, &c. 
 
80 
 
 HEDGES IN WINTER. 
 
 and complexion, which either find a seat upon the 
 oak-leaves or hang like currants from the catkins ; 
 or wearing a semblance altogether different, transform 
 the budding shoots into lilliputian artichokes. 
 
 Other, the like fruits of mimicry, are alike common 
 on the lowlier and more shrubby growths of which a 
 hedge is usually composed. The thorn, the briar, the 
 maple, the willow, has each its peculiar excrescence of 
 this description. The briar-rose or eglantine has two. 
 Its branches (thanks to a gall-fly) are often ornamented 
 by tufts of flower-like crimson and moss-like structure ; 
 the rose bedeguar and the scarlet hip is not (to the eye) 
 the only fruit ever met with on the hedge-rose-tree. 
 
 If we look in autumn amongst its changing or 
 falling leaflets we shall be sure almost to find some 
 amongst them beset with berries. These, as well as 
 the mossy bedeguar, are galls, some as big as large 
 currants, others as little as pins' heads. Some, like a 
 currant, perfectly smooth, others betokening by thorns 
 the briary nature of the shrub they spring from, and 
 all tinged with red as a ripened peach or apple on its 
 sunny side. 
 
 These gall-fruits are common things, to be found 
 commonly on a variety of vegetable growths, from 
 the honoured oak to the scouted thistle and the 
 
HEDGES IN WINTER. 
 
 81 
 
 creeping ground ivy. Common as they are, they 
 are curious, admirable, beautiful. 
 
 They are curious as extraneous products put forth 
 by the powers of the plant in obedience to the re- 
 quisition of an animal agent. Curious, also, are 
 they, and wonderful as effects much more than (as 
 appears) commensurate with the cause of their pro- 
 duction. The awl of a tiny fly has only to pierce 
 a leaf, a stalk, a bud, a root, and forthwith appears 
 the semblance of a fruit, perfect in form and finish. 
 They are admirable in their purpose — that of con- 
 cealing and protecting the insect embryo, for insertion 
 of which the puncture is made, and around which, as 
 the pulp of an apple round its seeds, is wrapped the 
 fruity substance of the gall. And beautiful^ lastly, 
 these singular productions are, though some (not 
 overlooking) may have looked on them as nothing 
 better than warts and carbuncles on the face of 
 nature. To these, we can only say, " Go, look at them 
 again, and closer, as they appear upon an Autumn 
 hedge, varied and elegant in form, and coloured in 
 harmony with the sunset season of the year.'' 
 
 But we must linger no longer in its ruddy glow ; 
 for it was not in the year s sunset, but in the year's 
 
 VOL. I. G 
 
82 
 
 HEDGES IN WINTER. 
 
 night, that we proposed to gather specimens of " still 
 life" not unworthy contemplation. 
 
 A few wintry storms, a few December frosts, and 
 the skeleton boughs have nothing left on them but 
 fluttering rags. But their jewels are more lasting 
 than their drapery. These, for the most part, are 
 retained, though some (the leaf-galls in especial) are 
 lying with the leaves upon the ground. The night 
 of the year is, in short, closing in, and Winter fruits 
 in their ruddy ripeness may be likened now to the 
 streaks of crimson that linger in the west after de- 
 parture of the sun. Nor is this darkness of the vege- 
 table world without its stars. 
 
 What but stars are all its points of concentrated 
 indrawn vitality ? It is these as congregated (a few 
 of them) in the " still life'' objects of a Winter hedge, 
 that we are now about to look at. In their wintry 
 eclipse, they may seem to shine but dimly ; but they 
 will acquire brightness as we direct upon them the 
 telescopic eye of observation. 
 
 So, we have entered now — not, it must be owned, 
 abruptly — upon Winter. It is early (let us say in 
 drear December), and on a day which is not dreary, 
 we fix upon a sheltered lane for our field (path, 
 rather) of discovery. We are hedged in on either 
 
HEDGES IN WINTER. 
 
 83 
 
 side by hawthorn, hazle, bramble, and briar-rose. 
 We have been talking of Winter hedge-fruits as in 
 some sort lingerers, but here still (who would have 
 thought it ?) are Summer hedge-flowers, which much 
 more properly deserve the name. Some late-born 
 blossoms of the Kobert geranium are yet loitering 
 in this shady place. Budding and blowing out 
 of due time, they cannot boast the blooming rose- 
 colour of departed elders of their family. They are 
 pale, from absence of sun, and look paler from pre- 
 sence of their -Autumn leaves deeply dyed in crimson. 
 But flowers they are, and as such, in flowerless 
 December, are of the fairest and the dearest. Like 
 strains of midnight music, or like cheering thoughts 
 that will sometimes come across us in the hour of 
 most dark despondency, they seem sweeter and better 
 than the brighter visitors of brighter seasons. 
 
 A few leaves are left on the traihng branches of 
 the bramble. Some are yet green, and, though not 
 acknowledged evergreens, will, perhaps, live on 
 through Winter. We see a few amongst them 
 marked on their surface by meandering lines, white, 
 with a red suffusion on each side. These are the 
 tracks of leaf-mining caterpillars, which, as such, have 
 been bom upon the leaf, found subsistence within it, 
 
 G 2 
 
84 
 
 HEDGES IN WINTER. 
 
 and flown from out it in the shape of little moths, 
 moths which, if, instead of little, large, would be 
 ranked for their golden splendour as kings and queens 
 of mothdom. 
 
 Through the dropping of their green veil some 
 other features have become visibly prominent on 
 these bramble branches. They are features of de- 
 formity in the shape of unnatural and unsightly 
 bulgings — round or ovate excrescences — on the square 
 stems, from the size of a walnut to a hazel. 
 
 On cutting one open, we find it to be occupied by 
 little orange-coloured grubs, scattered throughout its 
 interior substance. These, in due season, will be 
 winged insects. Now, in their wingless stage they 
 are housed for the Winter in a habitation formed by 
 the injured vegetable at behest of its injurer, some 
 parent fly. 
 
 These, while embryo mischiefs in the form of eggs, 
 must have been inserted through punctures of parental 
 piercing in the yet green branch, and the insects will 
 issue forth in maturity through other punctures of 
 their own perforation. The excrescences of former 
 seasons, grown brown and hard, are often to be seen 
 thus bored as by an awl. 
 
 From the bramble, let us turn to a hawthorn, on 
 
HEDGES IN WINTER. 
 
 85 
 
 which not a leaf remains. Thus unclothed, it presents 
 a maze of thorny branches, and, what is better, a 
 sprinkle of farinaceous fruit, food for feathered 
 feeders, who might turn up their bills at it in 
 Summer, but to whom now it is as manna in the 
 wilderness. 
 
 And what if this leafless hawthorn could show us 
 only these, nothing but branch, and thorn, and fruit. 
 These even were enough (Imowing what is within 
 them, and will surely come out) to make us think, 
 admire, adore ! These gifts of their Fatherly 
 Creator to his feathered children — these fruits of the 
 thorn and briar, can we look upon them now in their 
 Winter ministration, and not remember how that in 
 their Summer flowering they were made to minister 
 to our delight ? Yes ; God, in the fervour of his love 
 to all his creatures, is as truly present in this wintry 
 May-bush as in the bush that shone with visible fire. 
 A heaven without an earth were not more impossible 
 for us than a Summer May-bush with its verdure, 
 sweetness, purity (a heavenly emblem), without a 
 Winter hawthorn, dark, thorny, intricate, an emblem 
 not altogether of the world, but of the paths that 
 cross it, leading — whither? Well, keep we to our 
 hawthorn, which, somehow, what with looking back 
 
86 
 
 HEDGES IN WINTER. 
 
 and looking forward, has almost lost its wintry aspect. 
 The hedge seems clothed again with leaves and ? 
 flowers — the birds are singing round us, or busy in 
 the branches, picking not hungrily at hips and haws, 
 but daintily at buds and caterpillars, while the latter 
 (greedy spoilers !) are as busy in their turn doing their 
 best, though to little purpose, to spoil the beauty of 
 the whole. 
 
 This in fancy ; but what in reality has become of 
 these insect-devourers of leaves ? Have they all been 
 devoured themselves by bird-devourers of the cater- 
 pillar crew ? or of those permitted to complete their 
 triple stages, has not one escaped the devourer of all? 
 
 Has Death, in his own proper person — doing his 
 own business — put an end to theirs? and swept off 
 with them every token that they once lived and 
 moved, and ate, and worked, and slept, upon this 
 their once green world, until they rose above it? So 
 it seems. It has been with these creeping things as 
 (except for a tombstone) it may be with the most of us. 
 
 Not a sign of life, past or present, can we discern 
 within this labyrinth of branches, thread it as we 
 may — up, down, in, out, backwards, forwards: stay, 
 our eye finds rest at last. It is upon an object 
 wherein (if we are not mistaken) a life of some 
 
HEDGES IN WINTER. 
 
 87 
 
 sort lies enclosed, boxed up for the Winter, like the 
 life of the hawthorn within its bark and buds. 
 
 Not dissimilar to bark in colour, nor seemingly in 
 texture, is the material of this (what are we to call 
 it?) cocoon, or case, or cell, which has somehow got 
 placed upon, and attached firmly to, one of the fur- 
 cate branches of the denuded thorn. The " article,'' 
 a very neat one — be it what it may — is about the 
 length of a thimble, and would be of thimble shape, 
 if thimbles were closed and rounded at each end. 
 If open at one, its circumference is a trifle too 
 small to admit the finger of any full-grown lady with 
 whom we are acquainted. 
 
 What can be this appendage to the hawthorn, 
 which, though so closely resembling and close-setting, 
 seems not of it? We have called it a cocoon, but 
 its material does not, as in the cocoon of the silk- 
 worm, and in those of most among its fellow-weavers, 
 consist of silk, wholly or in part. It looks more, as 
 we have said, as if formed of bark; and on touching 
 it, it feels as hard or harder. Supposing it of animal, 
 i.e., insect fabrication, how was it made, and where 
 its fabricator? The first we cannot tell, the last we 
 cannot see; but looking round for what is not dis- 
 cernible, we perceive a duplicate, nay, a triplicate, of 
 
88 
 
 HEDGES IN WINTER. 
 
 what is — one, two — more of these curious cases, and 
 one of them is open at one end, like a box or a 
 spectacle-case, of which the lid, fastened by a hinge, 
 is thrown backward. 
 
 It is empty, therefore reveals nothing of its origin 
 or occupant, in whom, if detected, we should have 
 found, doubtless, the maker of the case, either in its 
 own or in another form. 
 
 By help of a pocket penknife it were easy, per- 
 haps, to make the same discovery in" one of the 
 cocoons (so to call them) which have not been 
 opened. 
 
 But supposing it occupied as we conjecture, why 
 should we disquiet the poor sleeping mummy we 
 might bring to light? 
 
 It could tell us nothing of the way in which it 
 wrought its narrow house, or of the material pro- 
 vided for its use. Of these we shall obtain a better 
 notion by returning for a moment to the time of 
 leaves and leaf consumers. 
 
 At that season then, in the month of June, we 
 might have found on this hawthorn (and on any 
 other they may be found by any one) several crea- 
 tures of the caterpillar kind, distinguishable from the 
 common herd by the possession of curly tails, or tails 
 
HEDGES IN WINTER. 
 
 89 
 
 held in a coil, while they grasp with their six-clawed 
 feet the leaves they are greedily discussing. Their 
 hinder feet, which are clawless, are also more nume- 
 rous than most of the " spinning worms,'' whence 
 come moths and butterflies. Hence, and as assum- 
 ing, in maturity, another form (that of a saw-fly), 
 these are known amongst entomologists by the name 
 of pseudo-caterpillars — counterfeits of the true. 
 
 Like the true, they are numerously distributed on 
 various plants and trees, being as various themselves 
 in size and colour. There are saw-flies of the elm, 
 the willow, the currant, the rose, the turnip, and an 
 abundance of others, with their respective larvae; but 
 to confine ourselves now to the species which belongs 
 to the hawthorn, we may describe them as being, 
 when full-grown caterpillars, large for those of saw- 
 flies, but of size only middling as compared with 
 caterpillars in general ; smooth, of a bluish green, 
 looking as if powdered ; their heads somewhat large, 
 round, and of an orange-brown. By these tokens, as 
 well as by their being seen in general to cling to 
 branch and leaf by their fore-claws, while the rest of 
 the body is curled up into a scroll, any pryer into 
 Summer hedges may distinguish a false caterpillar of 
 the hawthorn saw-fly from the numerous others, false 
 
90 
 
 HEDGES IN WINTER. 
 
 or true, which are to be seen there picking up their 
 living out of leaves. 
 
 But what have those green, powdery, fleshy, ram- 
 bling marauders of the May-bush in its prime to do 
 with these brown, dry, dead-looking cocoons or cases 
 now attached to its wintry branches, with which in 
 colour, rigidity, and absence uf motion, they exactly 
 correspond? Everything; inasmuch as they were 
 their fabricators, and are now, in the same or another 
 shape, their occupants. The constructive process em- 
 ployed in formation of these weather-proof envelopes 
 is an *^art and mystery'' of their own; a manufac- 
 ture for which they possess a patent which requires 
 no protective law. Their material (as that of the 
 silk-worm) is self-elaborated, drawn from an internal 
 reservoir, but not, like the silk-worm's and other 
 spinners, in a thread. How they spread and mould 
 their raw material while yet pliable we do not 
 know, never having seen them at work, though we 
 have kept many for that purpose. The rogues have 
 defeated it by working while we slept. 
 
 The rapidity of their operations is surprising. We 
 have left over night several of these caterpillars full- 
 fed, and roaming restlessly among the leaves with 
 which their box was furnished. In the morning we 
 
HEDGES IN WINTER. 
 
 91 
 
 have only found for every creeping thing as many com- 
 pact cases, resembling exactly those upon this wintry 
 hedge, only lighter in colour and less hard in texture. 
 Wind and weather have been assistant here to 
 strengthen the fortifications designed to set them 
 at defiance. 
 
 The tenants of these abiding tenements are now, 
 beyond doubt, hibernating within them, awaiting the 
 gentler influence of Spring to give expansion (with 
 the opening leaves) to their four transparent wings. 
 When arrayed in these, the forthcoming insects are 
 likely enough to pass with the uninitiated for large 
 brown bees, a mistake the more excusable, inasmuch 
 as bees and saw-flies have a sort of relationship as 
 belonging to the same insect order. 
 
 In April they will come forth — but how ? — from 
 these entire, strongly-wrought envelopes, hard as 
 iron, tough as leather ! If we knew not, it would be 
 difiicult to guess, only be sure we might of this, that 
 the same protective Power which furnished material 
 and skill for construction of these Winter asylums, 
 would provide the means of quitting them when 
 converted into prisons by the Spring. 
 
 It proves accordingly that their occupants are 
 furnished with efficient tools (sharp-cutting jaws) for 
 
92 
 
 HEDGES IN WINTER. 
 
 cutting their way to daylight. Employing these with 
 marvellous skill and dexterity, the first act of each 
 saw-fly, on arriving at maturity, will be to make an 
 incision all round its case at a little distance from 
 one of its thimble-shaped ends, taking care to leave 
 uncut a narrow portion of the circle, the hinge of 
 the lid, which, on egress, it will raise and leave open. 
 It is thus we have just found it in the empty speci- 
 men, which must have been abandoned by its occupant 
 in the last or perhaps preceding Spring. A tangible 
 proof this of its wondrous strength and durability; for 
 though turned nearly black, it is perfectly uninjured, 
 even to the narrow slip which forms the hinge. 
 
 These cases of the saw-fly are worth the trouble of 
 cutting off and keeping till the time of April showers, 
 if only for a chance of seeing them cut open by their 
 pressing tenants. 
 
 The same insects are famous for their skill in 
 another branch of carpentry, for which they are pro- 
 vided with another tool, a saw. To this they owe their 
 name; and they are enabled by its help to cut grooves 
 in branch or leaf for secure deposit of their eggs. 
 
 But enough of saw-flies and their cases, which are 
 not, depend upon it, the only curiosities of this haw- 
 thorn cabinet. 
 
HEDGES IN WINTER. 
 
 93 
 
 As our eye runs exploringly over the thorny twigs, 
 we perceive on one of them a projection which 
 hardly wears the appearance of a natural growth. 
 A closer view shows it to be a structure, and almost 
 as plainly that it is (like the last) of insect fabrica- 
 tion. It is about half an inch in length, with three 
 sides : two long, converging ridge-like towards each 
 other, and at one end narrowing to a point ; and one 
 short, forming the base of the erection as it rises from 
 its site, the surface of the branch. 
 
 It is of the same colour as the bark, as well it may 
 be, for we find by our pocket-magnifier that bark is 
 the material of the structure. It must have been 
 taken from the hawthorn branch, and the builder 
 must have prepared it for his purpose by cutting into 
 little strap-shaped pieces. Of these, cemented or 
 wove together, the whole fabric is composed. On 
 one side of it is a narrow slit, through which its late 
 builder and occupant has doubtless made his exit. 
 To judge by comparison with resembling structures 
 not uncommon on the oak, we may venture almost 
 to assert that the maker and inhabitant of this for- 
 saken tenement was the barh-building caterpillar 
 of a little moth, which flew from out it on some 
 "balmy eve"' of Summer. 
 
94 
 
 HEDGES IN WINTER. 
 
 Have we exhausted now the curiosities of this 
 Winter May-bush? Nay, they seem hung about it 
 thick as Mayflowers, or as gifts upon a Christmas tree. 
 See here, clasped in manner of a bracelet round one 
 of the hawthorn's naked arms, are row upon row of 
 bead-like looking eggs, set fast together, and of such 
 a form as to fit like the key-stone of an arch: the 
 jewels these of a mother moth,* and germs of moths 
 to come, after the coming first of as many moth 
 caterpillars. These will issue each from its egg in 
 time precisely to meet and eat of the hawthorn 
 leaflets as they issue from the bud. 
 
 We have next — and also on the thorn — a cradle. 
 It is rocked by wintry blasts, and exposed uncur- 
 tained to wintry frosts ; but is, withal, so soft and 
 warm, as to protect uninjured the lives committed to 
 its keeping. These are latent, as in the bracelet, 
 within the shells of insect eggs. Their cradle is the 
 cocoon of the moth which laid themf — a curious 
 wingless specimen of moth maternity. As such it 
 was her shroud, and having for this purpose served 
 its turn, we see it converted here into a cradle-bed, 
 just as a cast-off* gown might be turned by a careful 
 mother into a cradle coverlet. 
 
 * The Lackey. 
 
 + The Vapourer. 
 
HEDGES IN WINTER. 
 
 95 
 
 Other objects and adaptations of different form and 
 description, but all (like these, redolent of May to 
 thought, if not to sense) we might yet find (if we 
 stayed to seek them) on this wintry May-bush. But 
 the May-bush has had for to-day enough of our 
 attention. Lest, therefore, we move to jealousy our 
 co-favourites of the hedge-row — the hazel and the 
 eglantine, here mingled with the thorn in friendly 
 union — let us bestow a look on them. They, too, 
 doubtless have their Winter objects, things extraneous 
 to their vegetable growth, but by relation and de- 
 pendency as much belonging to them as the leaves 
 and flowers they put forth or the fruits they bear. 
 
 First, for the eglantine or briar-rose. It is still 
 crowned with its glowing diadem of scarlet fruit, but 
 its jewels of insect origin, its ruddy-tinted leaf-apples, 
 have all fallen with its leaves. But, though the 
 leaves have rotted, the lives for whose support and 
 protection some amongst them have been made to 
 bring forth fruit, have not therefore been allowed to 
 perish. The pulpy globes have hardened and shrunk 
 into a crust around their occupants, who, thus de- 
 fended, find a Winter's bed upon the ground, whence 
 they will rise winged into the Spring or Summer air. 
 
 We see a moss-like tuft of the rose bedeguar still 
 
96 
 
 HEDGES IN WINTER. 
 
 attached to its branch of growth. The living assem- 
 blage of the interior is safe and warm, each individual 
 in its cell, and all protected by the woody walls of the 
 gall excrescence and the mossy thatch that roofs it over. 
 
 There are some amongst the branches of this 
 eglantine which are green as in the time of roses. 
 These younger and softer portions of the stem are 
 encased here and there by a whitish substance, which 
 bears some resemblance to a calcareous incrustation. 
 
 By our unaided sight we can discover nothing of 
 its true nature or texture. Let us consult upon the 
 subject our discerning friend in black, our pocket 
 magnifier. Ah ! it would seem now, in especial as 
 we raise a portion with our penknife, to be composed 
 of cottony or silky fibres. This tells us nothing cer- 
 tain about its origin. But what are these minute 
 grains, black and shining, dispersed through the sub- 
 stance, most thickly in the part adhering to the stem ? 
 
 Again we have stumbled, we suspect, upon insect 
 eggs and their Winter covering ; but of what exactly, 
 we confess our ignorance, unless (as we surmise) they 
 may be eggs of aphides. 
 
 Sweet eglantine ! we have paid thee, for the nonce, 
 our debt of notice, and been rewarded by this, to us, 
 new discovery, at present only half explored. 
 
HEDGES IN WINTER. 
 
 97 
 
 Now, good Hazel, for a look at thee. Where are 
 the jewels of life, if any, committed to thine arms for 
 the winter, and designed to be fostered by thy leaves 
 in spring. Ah I here we have them — eggs again — 
 insect eggs beyond a doubt, and a most beautiful 
 specimen of these beautiful productions.* They are 
 this time without either silken bed or cotton covering, 
 lying side by side in a row, some twenty of them on 
 a branch, with only such protection as is afforded by 
 
 * Insect eggs are found so frequently on winter hedges, and on 
 the trunks of leafless trees, — they are, in especial for the microscope, 
 such curious and pretty objects — their collection is so likely, more- 
 over, to prove the germ of a love, ever green, for pursuits that make 
 winter green also, that we shall append here a few general notices of 
 their form, colours, and places of deposit. 
 
 In shape the majority are oval, but many present wide and 
 remarkable deviations from this figure. Those of many butterflies 
 are globose, some are semi- globose, some conic, some cylindrical, 
 lenticular, circular, and often ribbed. Others are tarban-shaped, 
 melon- shaped, pear-shaped, barrel-shaped. Some are placed on long 
 straight foot-stalks ; others on short curved ones, hence called petio- 
 late. Some are eared, or furnished with appendages obHquely forked, 
 to prevent their sinking too deeply in the soft substance wherein 
 deposited. Others are crowned — surrounded, i. e. , at their upper end 
 with a circle of spines for support of the next laid egg ; a row of 
 these is not unlike a stalk of horsetailed grass. The surfaces of 
 insect eggs, though sometimes smooth, are almost as often adorned 
 by a variety of regularly sculptured patterns. Some display ribbings 
 that extend from pole to pole ; others, delicate filaments which show 
 the segments of the embryo ; others exhibit in relievo an assemblage 
 of cross lines, which look like a covering of network ; in others, these 
 lines are so curved as to resemble tiles ; while others, again, have 
 
 VOL. I. H 
 
98 
 
 HEDGES TN WINTER. 
 
 their shells and close adhesion to each other. Their 
 form is square, their colour greyish white. They have 
 size enough to make this obvious at a glance, and on 
 looking closer we can see in each of them a circular 
 depression in the middle of the upper side, and an- 
 
 their surfaces beset with knobs. In colour, there is usually less 
 variety in the eggs of insects than in those of birds. WHiite, yellow, 
 and green are the prevailing hues ; but amongst them are brown, 
 grey, black, pink, and some are strij)ed or banded. To the query, 
 where insect eggs are to be found ? we may reply — Generally on the 
 plants, shrubs, trees, the leaves, stems, trunks of those vegetable 
 productions on which their issue is designed to feed. Some are 
 scattered singly; others in groups, disposed sometimes carelessly, 
 sometimes with the greatest order and regularity, as in the hawthorn 
 bracelet and the hazel- row above noted. Some are destitute of 
 covering, being laid in warm weather, or made for resisting cold ; 
 others are carefully protected, in some cases with a coating of hairs 
 stripped (birdlike) by the mother insect from her own body. Some 
 are embedded in manure ; others inclosed in galls ; others in cells 
 built by parents or those who perform parental offices, as among 
 social bees or wasps. All are secured to their stations by a gummy 
 secretion. 
 
 It has been noticed as remarkable that only those butterflies and 
 moths of which the caterpillars subsist on perennial plants hybernate 
 as eggs or in the caterpillar form, the rest passing their winter almost 
 invariably in the chrysalidous state. This phenomenon finds its 
 natural cause in that the leaves of all annual plants appear later than 
 perennial ones. The winged insect quits the cover of its chrysalis 
 later than the caterpillar issues from the shell of the egg — and why ? 
 Because the moth or butterfly finds food only in flowers — the cater- 
 pillar only in leaves. 
 
 "Was it the vital energy of creative power, undirected by wisdom , 
 unmoved by benevolence ; or was it only accident that gave rise to 
 provisions such as these ? 
 
HEDGES IN WINTER. 
 
 99 
 
 other at one end. They are eggs, doubtless, of a 
 moth. To know more we must wait till spring or 
 summer, and to know anything even then must sepa- 
 rate them now from their foster tree, and take them 
 home, whither the lowering sun signals us to repair. 
 And long enough we have loitered (have we not ?) 
 beside a winter hedge to have proved it, only to the 
 superficial gaze, a thing of barrenness. 
 
 H 2 
 
IV. 
 
 A EUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET 
 (AETEE INSECT EELICS). 
 
 'Tis ill for man 
 To let the things that have been run to waste, 
 And in the unmeaning present sink the past." 
 
 C. Lamb. 
 
 All anglers know something, and all entomologists a 
 good deal, about those aquatic grubs called by the 
 former caddis or case-worms. 
 
 By sight they are known also — they or their cases 
 — to a great many other people, to people who, 
 without looking expressly after fishes or insects, have 
 been accustomed to look curiously through the trans- 
 lucent veil which half exhibits, half reveals the 
 
A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 101 
 
 treasures of the fresh water deep, or shallow. Now, 
 these are treasures, truly, to a little case-worm, when 
 it first emerges, caseless, from the egg-shell into its 
 watery world. A grain of sand, a minute shell, a 
 fragment of reed, stick, straw, or leaf then serves it (a 
 born artificer) as ready material, selected according to 
 specific skill, wherewith to construct itself a habi- 
 tation. We have said " construct,'' but the more 
 proper phrase would have been to fortify, inasmuch 
 as these extraneous articles, drawn together with silk 
 and compacted by natural cement, form only a 
 protective outwork to an inner tube spun of silk 
 entirely. 
 
 This case is, like the shell of a snail, transportable, 
 and its occupant, with tender body under cover, can 
 put forth safely, shoulders, head, and claws, all de- 
 fended by scale armour, to perambulate its submerged 
 territory in search of dainties or delight, terms 
 synonymous to a grub and to a gourmand. The 
 breathing organs of our little aquatic are gills, which, 
 though situate within its case, are brought in contact 
 by the insect's motion with the aerated water, which, 
 received at the front, is rejected at the hinder aper- 
 ture of its enclosing cylinder. Some of these caddis 
 cases wear an appearance of being wrought with 
 
102 A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 
 
 great regularity and exactness, one only of their varied 
 materials, as shells, sticks, leaves, being employed in 
 each. Sometimes, however, a great stone (great by 
 comparison)^ appears attached to the grains of sand 
 or minute shells which compose perhaps the main 
 work of the fabric, or ^ bit of light wood, or a hollow 
 straw is stuck in the midst of graver, heavier sub- 
 stances. This looks very much as if our little con- 
 structive had little eye to neatness in his work, or as 
 if even the rough encasement of his silken tube were 
 formed of accidental and self-adherent rather than of 
 selected and appropriated things. It would seem, 
 however, that where most carelessness apparently 
 exists, most carefulness is really exhibited. The big- 
 stone has, ten to one, or one to ten, been attached for 
 ballast, the bit of straw for buoyancy to supply the 
 defective weight or lightness of the case to which one 
 or other is appended. The employment of stones 
 entirely, in preference to shells or other lighter 
 articles, would seem adopted by the inhabitant of 
 rapid streams to meet the unpleasant contingency of 
 being, house and all, swept away by the current. 
 
 To conclude, after a less melancholy manner, the 
 biography of one of these little case-makers. Like 
 that of other insects of perfect transformation, the 
 
A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 103 
 
 history of its life is divided into three chapters — the 
 first, an epoch of labour and feeding ; the second, of 
 outward inactivity ; the third, of active enjoyment. 
 Well, let us suppose the first of these periods, that 
 of work and repletion, to he nearly over. Our 
 ingenious aquatic has made its case, ate its fill, and 
 travelled as far as behoved it for the latter most im- 
 portant purpose ; but ere the future caddis-^y ceases 
 to be a caddis-worm, it has one final operation to per- 
 form. It is about now to enter on a somnolent and 
 helpless state, and that in a world full, like others, of 
 liers-in-wait for the weak and the unwary. It is ex- 
 pedient, therefore, for safety as well as for seclusion, 
 that the narrow round-house, hitherto open at both 
 ends, should be securely closed. Now, then, comes 
 again into requisition our caddis-worm's supply of 
 silk. With this it spins a strong network over each 
 end of its tubular tabernacle, and then resigns itself 
 (how safely !) to the care and workings of nature. In 
 the putting off of an aquatic shape, and the putting 
 on of a form and parure suited to the air, that tender 
 nurse and tasteful tire-woman does the rest for it, her 
 little unconscious child protected meanwhile in the 
 ark she taught it to construct. For its egress thence, 
 in proper season, the same careful guardian fails not 
 
104 A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 
 
 to provide. She bestows on the object of her pro- 
 tection a pair of scissors, otherwise trenchant jaws, 
 which, with the superadded gift of how to use them, 
 enables the nascent case-fly to cut a way out through 
 the woven grating which shut it in. When out it is, 
 the new inhabitant of air (a sober- suited insect, with 
 brown, semi-transparent, moth-like wings) is known 
 ahnost as often by the name of May-Aj as of case-S.y. 
 It bears no external likeness to the bright ephemeron 
 (the sporter of a day) to which the latter appellation 
 more properly belongs, but in the histories of the two 
 is great resemblance. 
 
 Both are water-born (usually in Maj^) of eggs com- 
 mitted to the water's keeping. Both pass their 
 earlier stages in their native ponds or streamlets. 
 Both love to haunt upon the wing the waters of their 
 nativity, and to both, usually, these prove a grave as 
 well as birth-place, falling, as they both most often do, 
 into the gaping mouths of fishes. 
 
 As with house-building man, so with these case- 
 constructing insects — " their works survive them 
 and, long after the downy bodies and frail wings of 
 their developed forms are resolved into their native 
 elements, the late abodes of their immaturity are still 
 existent, if in quiet water resting in their places, or if 
 
A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 105 
 
 in a stream travelling onwards with the current. In 
 the course, however, of changing things, attrition, 
 concussion, a thousand accidents, a thousand influ- 
 ences, are apt to reduce these tenantless tenements, 
 strong as they are, to scattered fragments. 
 
 We sit beside a transparent stream, and see them 
 the sport of all its fluctuating moods and motions. 
 Some, dashed in their progress against grinding 
 stones, some buried under them, some half-sunken in 
 the bed of the torrent. Thus beholding them, can 
 we imagine that these houses of the insect, or some of 
 them, may continue when not a vestige will be left 
 upon earth's surface of the now standing houses, 
 palaces, and temples of men — of men who "think 
 their houses will continue fot ever, and call the lands 
 after their own names'' — when men, generation after 
 generation, will have been swept away by the stream 
 of Time, and Avhen even man's place may be occupied 
 by a race of higher beings, for whom this our old day 
 world with another new-day face may constitute a fit 
 abode. Is it possible that the tiny shells and scraps 
 and sand-grains of one of these little worm-wrought 
 fabrics can be holding together then? — to be disin- 
 terred, perhaps, with relics of our buildings and our 
 bones, and to be handled, looked at, thought about, 
 
106 A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 
 
 by geologists human, or superhuman, such as may 
 then knock for knowledge at the doors of the Stone 
 Cabinet. 
 
 The music of the brook has surely lulled us to 
 repose, and in a day-dream only can we be following 
 to such a sequence the current of advancing Time. 
 Well, if we dream, let us dream on — only let us fol- 
 low backwards instead of forwards the same stream of 
 Time, till it lands us at an epoch of the Past some- 
 where as distant from the Present as that in the 
 Future to which we have been advancing. 
 
 We are wandering beside a fresh-water expanse in 
 the primeval land of such an epoch. Water, morass, 
 and wood are the prevailing features of the country 
 round us, and the face they constitute is of a gloomy, 
 vapoury character. 
 
 The forest on our right looks mournful in pine and 
 cypress, weeps, as it nears the lake upon our left, in 
 an increasing growth of willows, and only smiles 
 rarely and transiently, as a sunbeam comes strug- 
 gling through the mist, and kisses the head of som.e 
 lofty poplar or graceful aspen, most cheerful indi- 
 viduals of all that woodland company, distinguished 
 from their sombre fellows by their light and fluttering 
 garments. 
 
A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 107 
 
 Though we know these foresters by name, they 
 seem to wear about them somewhat of an unfamiliar 
 air, and so do most other of the objects round us. 
 They are Hke, yet not like entirely, to such as we 
 have seen before. The ground is rich in verdure, but 
 it is a verdure rank and flowerless, less resembling an 
 enamelled carpet than a coarse green baize. Lofty 
 reeds and giant flags and rushes are abundant, and 
 these are not without their waving feathers and be- 
 studding blossoms. Now and then, too, we catch a 
 breath of floral fragrance wafted from afar; but the 
 air, so damp and heated, seems laden for the most 
 part with heavier and less agreeable odours. Once 
 only has a bee, or something like it, passed us on the 
 wing, and only once have we caught sight of an 
 unknown butterfly, resting on the fringed corolla of 
 as unknown a flag. There are swarms, though, in 
 plenty, and to spare, of gnats or gnat -like flies, and 
 their humming makes loud music as it mingles with 
 the chirp of the grasshoppers which animate the 
 ground. 
 
 Troops of wading birds are busy on the reedy 
 margin of the lake, and the sombre forest is not alto- 
 gether silent for want of bird discourse, scream, and 
 call, and chatter ; but never a note of song salutes 
 
108 A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 
 
 our ear, and now from the dark recesses of the wood 
 we hear the hooting of an owl, though the western 
 sky and meeting water are still ruddy with the glow 
 of sunset. 
 
 There is a rustle in the reeds beside us, and we 
 catch between them the sparkle of an eye, the bright 
 eye doubtless of a water-rat ; no, not exactly, only of 
 some rat-like animal. When shall we see a creature 
 or a thing that we are sure of having seen before ? 
 Thank Heaven, even now, for here comes at last an 
 old acquaintance, a dear familiar friend, a dog ap- 
 proaches, not though to us. He dashes to the water's 
 edge. In he plunges after that strange rat ; but the 
 rat is not more strange than he, that wild, wolfish- 
 looking dog, with his savage bark and unfamiliar 
 aspect. Now — stranger than both, strange entirely 
 — another quadruped issues from the wood, and comes 
 floundering and bathing in the lake. In size a horse, 
 in shape a hog : heavy, clumsy, round-footed, long- 
 snouted animal that it is. So we've enough truly, 
 and to spare, of living company, and yet we feel a 
 trifle lonely, for far or near, there is no discerning a 
 single fellow of our kind, nor yet a single token to 
 tell us that we are not the single man in this wide 
 
A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 109 
 
 world of wood, and swamp, and water. No guns are 
 waking the echoes and wounding the wild-fowl in the 
 forest; no baited lines are deceiving the fishes in the 
 lake ; though dragon-flies, strange as brilliant, have 
 darted past us, no net of gauze is waiting to arrest 
 them in their flight; while unmolested, alike by. angler 
 or by entomologist, case-flies innumerable are rising 
 from the cradles of their watery birth-place to take 
 their pleasure in the air. They are fairy case-flies, so 
 small and delicate. Their cradles must have cor- 
 responded. Even so. Here they are, cradles or 
 cases, to be seen in plenty near the margin of the 
 water. Let us examine this one, deserted by its 
 tenant. What a multitude of minute shells are 
 compacted together on its surface ! What numerous 
 sparks of life have been here cemented up, each 
 within its own tiny tabernacle turned into a tomb, 
 and all to make a fortress for this little constructive, 
 itself one of a multitude bestrewing, it is likely, 
 the entire bottom of this wide-spread lake ! . . . . 
 But, hark ! What's that rustle in the reeds — that 
 splashing in the water ? Heaven save us ! It's a 
 monstrous crocodile ! It sees us ! It glides towards 
 us ! It's close upon us ; death and burial in its 
 
110 A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 
 
 jaws! .... The caddis-case falls from our fingers; 
 our hair bristles ; our heart beats ; our eyes are 
 fixed. We try to call for help, though no human 
 help is near, is anywhere ; and in terror we awake, 
 wake from our dream of the far distant Past. 
 
 We are returned then from our long journey to the 
 remote country that lies behind the country of man. 
 We have alighted from our excursion train. Imagi- 
 nation, our locomotive, stands idle. We are at home 
 again in this our own day world, with the dear 
 familiar aspect it is wearing in this year of grace, and 
 bounty, and beauty, 1853. Here we are again, and 
 yet we have still within our sight, nay, within o*ur 
 fingers, the identical articles of insect fabrication, a 
 group of caddis-cases of the year — nobody knows 
 what — to behold which as tabernacles of life, we have 
 just been travelling backwards, nobody knows how 
 far. Their indwelling lives have been departed 
 nobody knows how long ; but here they are, these 
 habitations of the worm, transferred from the waters 
 of an antiquity beyond date to a drawer of the Stone 
 Cabinet, hence to their place within a modern cabinet 
 of wood. Yes; here we have, and hold them, these 
 relics of the insect, and possess in them memorials of 
 times which have no record but in these and resem- 
 
A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. Ill 
 
 bling tokens — material objects which act as springs to 
 set the mind in motion — sending it on travels to the 
 world's beginning, if not to the world's end ; putting 
 it on drawing inferences, painting pictures, collecting 
 facts; all, be it hoped, in due diffidence and doubt. 
 Apropos of humility and geological facts, think of 
 this (a fact open to little disputation), that on the 
 boasted score of ancestry, antiquity of birth, a worm 
 of the water, a fly of the air, beats us hollow — us 
 human upstarts, who can trace descent only up to 
 Adam — us insects of a day in comparison with a 
 May-fly, whose ancestors, or ancestral types, have 
 been exhumed from the indurated mud of fathomless 
 antiquity. 
 
 Let us refer now to the page of geology for the 
 time when about (within some countless ages) these 
 case-worms of ancient days lived, built, and died, 
 where they were buried, and are at present to be 
 found. 
 
 " In the country of Auvergne, a region of extinct 
 volcanoes, now so fertile as to be called the Garden 
 of France, there exist, under more recent deposits, 
 extensive strata of limestone and calcareous marl, 
 abounding in fresh-water shells, such as are known to 
 inhabit lakes and rivers.'' Some of these beds are 
 
112 A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 
 
 described as entirely made up of the fossil cases of 
 caddis-worms, which have been cemented together 
 by calcareous infiltration, and form a compact stone, 
 which is employed for building. The attached shells 
 are so minute that more than a hundred are attached 
 to a single case, and a cubic inch of the limestone 
 contains ten or twelve tubes.* We have only to 
 realise the superadded fact, that these fossil cases 
 once occupied, in repeated strata of five and six feet 
 thick, a plain of hundreds of square miles (the plain 
 of the Limoges), and then form, if we can, some faint 
 conception of the number of little animals by which 
 they were constructed ; of the number also, so many 
 times greater, of the lesser animals made to serve, 
 with their own tenements, the purpose of the insect- 
 builders, employers and employed being alike in- 
 habitants of that ancient lake, whose site is betokened 
 by their relics, f 
 
 We do not know that any remains of case-fiies in 
 maturity have been found amongst these countless 
 vestiges of their early labours, a circumstance that 
 might have happened through the fall of some of 
 
 * Mantell's ''Wonders of Geology." 
 + Scrope, "On the Geology of Central France," quoted by Dr. 
 Mantell. 
 
A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 113 
 
 them from air into water, and subsequent entomb- 
 ment with the cradles of their youth. Case-flies in 
 abundance have, however, been embalmed in amber, 
 an earlier production of the same times (the Tertiary), 
 to which belong the fresh-water deposits above de- 
 scribed. 
 
 Now these times of the Tertiary — comparatively 
 recent in the pre- Adamite history of earth — we shall 
 leave for the present, with all other of their insect- 
 remains, for, in this our search after them in the 
 stone cabinet, we purpose to begin, or begin again, 
 with its lower drawers — thence reascending, we shall 
 meet again in the upper with our opening subjects. 
 
 Behold us then at the lowest portion of earth's 
 crust ; lowest in original formation, highest, often, in 
 present position. Shall we grope for the objects of 
 our search within the granite? We might as well 
 cut open the bottom board of a cabinet of wood, with 
 a view to discover fresh insect specimens imbedded in 
 its substance, as seek for fossil remains of them within 
 that basal rock of the cabinet of stone. 
 
 Shall we examine to better purpose amongst those 
 primitive members of the rock family, sons of Father 
 Granite, stone of his stone, pupils of fire and water, 
 the Metamorphic? In these, bearing from scientific 
 
 VOL. I. 1 
 
114 A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 
 
 sponsors such rugged names as gneiss, and protogine, 
 and quartz, and schist, and hornblende, are we likely 
 to discover tokens of insect existence? Hardly. For 
 when these rigid primitives were in their uncon- 
 solidated youth, the world would seem to have been 
 little other than a "monster'' laboratory, wherein, 
 amidst gigantic chemistries (heating and fusing, and 
 cooling and pressing), one can hardly suppose either 
 place or entertainment for insect or other living com- 
 pany. It has been thought accordingly, and said, 
 that neither stone, nor slate, nor crystal, of those 
 early times had ever served for entombment of 
 organic remains ; or that if they had, these had all 
 become obliterated through fiery agency. Modern 
 science has found eyes, however, for deciphering of 
 another tale — a tale of vestiges of being, not that, 
 indeed, of animals of air — insects, but of animals of 
 water — infusorice, whose fire-proof shields or shells of 
 silex are supposed to have been detected even in 
 volcanic products. 
 
 Leaving these, at best but sterile primaries, we 
 come, ascending, upon a series of our cabinet 
 drawers (otherwise strata), in which we meet for the 
 first time with clear and cognisable relics of things 
 that lived and moved in a world of increasing, if not 
 
A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 115 
 
 commencing animation. In other words, we have 
 arrived at the rocks between primary and secondary, 
 termed transition ary, as mingling a mechanical 
 character of their own with the chemical character 
 of those below them. Within their slates and beds 
 of limestone are laid up remains of organisms not a 
 few, but they are such chiefly as belonged to plants 
 and animals of obscure and humble rank, appropriate 
 occupants of a world not as yet prepared or furnished 
 for " nobles of creation/' But insects, with exception 
 of Linnaean butterflies, are not nobles. Was not 
 that transitionary world furnished enough for them ? 
 Hardly, it would seem, or not suitably. The Flora of 
 those old times had her gardens chiefly under sea, 
 her parterres and shrubberies of graceful algae being 
 studded not with vegetable but with animal flowers, 
 sea lilies, sea anemones and the like ; while as for 
 such gardens as she had on land, they, it would seem, 
 were full mostly of ferns, and mare's-tails, and club 
 mosses ; flowerless productions, not now-a-days par- 
 ticularly or generally to the taste of insects ; some, 
 nevertheless, might have been denizens of those 
 most ancient cryptogamia, as of the cryptogamous 
 forests which came after them. It needs not, at all 
 events, to be inferred that insect eyes were not 
 
 I 2 
 
116 A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 
 
 opened on the light of Transitionary days, because 
 insect relics are not amongst the corals, crustaceans, 
 and moUuscans, which have been brought from the 
 darkness of transitionary rocks. 
 
 But with these Transitionaries, as well as with the 
 Primaries, we have now done, and have come upon 
 the Secondaries — strata numerous and varied — 
 drawers of the stone cabinet, rich indeed in " medals 
 of creation/' Some of these must surely be stamped 
 with insect impress, or present us with insect eiSEigies. 
 But oh ! these Secondary formations ! Their compre- 
 hensiveness is fairly overwhelming even in the 
 thought. To figure them in their strata upon strata, 
 deposits of sea, of river, and of land ! Or to view 
 them only in their groups — carboniferous, saliferous, 
 of the lias, of the oolite, of the Wealden, of the 
 chalk ! And then in these Titanic, time-built ceme- 
 teries, the multitudinous remains — the buried tokens 
 of the life of buried worlds — life in forms most 
 minute, most mighty, beautiful, horrible, wondrous, 
 monstrous, everything almost but human ! Where 
 now amidst all these relics of "pre-Adamites'' are we 
 to look for those of pre- Adamite insects — fanners of 
 air and creepers on earth, before earth was Edenised 
 for man's reception ? Let us renew our search which, 
 
A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 117 
 
 in orderly ascension, has brought us now to the 
 lowest of those great Secondary groups, the carboni- 
 ferous. Here, within beds of coal and shale, and 
 sand and lime-stones, what are the fossil treasures 
 which the labours of the miner have laid open? 
 They present to our admiring gaze a fossil her- 
 barium, such as for grandeur, beauty, and perfection, 
 has no equal amongst mineralised remains of vege- 
 table life. In these we see, and seem to see re- 
 vivified, the feathery foliage which waved or drooped 
 in the heated atmosphere of primaeval and prepa- 
 ratory times ; the times when forests, tropical in 
 aspect, prodigious in extent, world-wide in distri- 
 bution, were rearing their lofty heads and shedding 
 their leaves upon the ground, all in " sign of worship,'' 
 all in obedience to Him who bade them flourish and 
 bade them perish for supply of world-wide coal- 
 cellars, of which the key was destined to be ours. 
 Those grand old forests, so solitary, so silent, in 
 absence seemingly of bird, and beast-, and man, harbour- 
 ing at the utmost some monstrous toad-like reptiles, 
 would seem almost too grand and solemn for insect 
 occupancy — for the presence, at all events, of such 
 common little creepers and buzzers as now crawl or 
 flit across our paths. Such " minims of creation'' 
 
118 A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 
 
 could never surely have been its magnates, in absence 
 nearly of other terrestrials — " monarchs of" the little 
 " all/' each of them was able to " survey'' of the grand 
 all that stretched around them. But yet, when one 
 comes to think of it, plants and insects are of such 
 intimate relation, so made each for the other, that 
 one can hardly suppose a world of vegetables without 
 a world of insects in its umbrageous bosom. There 
 being such great vegetables (those tropical growths 
 of the carboniferous ages), the insects, if insects there 
 were, by which they were frequented, must surely 
 have been great also, of tropical size, or even of bulk 
 sufficient — 
 
 " With helmet heads and giant scales adorned" — 
 
 to have realized the poet's fancy ; in all, at least, save 
 the " unpeopling of earth," admitting them to have 
 had that nearly to themselves already. 
 
 Seriously, we might suppose that insect shapes of 
 gigantic magnitude, proportioned to vegetable forms 
 of gigantic growth, were likely to have fed upon the 
 foliage and lurked in the recesses of those tree-like 
 mosses, ferns, and mare's-tails, (to say nothing of the 
 fewer palms, coniferse, and cycadese), which composed 
 the forests of the coal. We may conclude, at all 
 
A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 119 
 
 events, that insects, mighty or minute, certainly- 
 existed in those ancient times, but is it to be equally 
 expected that they should have left behind them any 
 existent vestiges of their transient being ? 
 
 Is it probable that we may find in the carbonaceous 
 repository pieces even of beetle armour? remnants 
 even of ephemeral gauze? Nothing more likely, 
 inasmuch as laid up within the same receptacle are 
 remains innumerable, not only of arboraceous forms, 
 in substance much less enduring than insect mail, 
 but also of herbaceous expansions as delicate and 
 softer than an insect's wing. 
 
 Thus much for speculation on the probable — but 
 how proves it on inspection of the real ? Why that 
 together with remains of other animals, chiefly 
 marine, tenants once of the waters which submerged 
 those ancient forests, a few have been discovered of 
 their insect frequenters — of the first insects^ as far 
 as we know of, which made their appearance upon 
 earth. 
 
 How antique truly, how curious and precious, 
 must be these pre- Adamite sires of the insect race, 
 whether presented to us in petrified perfection, or 
 only as fragments of their former creeping or flying 
 selves. But where, in the name of wonder, are we 
 
120 A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 
 
 to discover such marvellous relics of the coal-com- 
 posing forests ? Have we ever met with, or are we 
 likely to find them in our coal-scuttles? Hardly. 
 In the interior of massive coal-blocks, whether in 
 coal-scuttle or in mine ? Nay, in those it is likely 
 we should seek them to as little purpose. 
 
 We may look till our eyes ache into a fragment of 
 the "best WalFs-end/' and look vainly for the 
 vegetable forms, or even vegetable tissues of those 
 primsGval growths to which it owes its substance. 
 They are quite obliterate in that bituminous mass. 
 Or take even a coal of stonier description, Welsh 
 perhaps, or of bordering extraction. In this, most 
 likely, are cells and vessels, and pellicles and fibres, 
 that tell where once was wood and once was leaf ; 
 but these, nevertheless, we may fail to discover, 
 unless the mass be sliced and magnified for exhibition 
 of its structure. Neither in this are we likely to dis- 
 cern an insect specimen. 
 
 But suppose our descent effected through the shaft 
 of a coal-mine. By the light of a miner's " Davy'' we 
 look enquiringly into the dark shining faces of the 
 giant blocks which wall its galleries, but their faces 
 are blank as regard the objects of our search. 
 
 We perhaps even look vainly for a single specimen 
 
A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 121 
 
 of those wondrous and graceful relics of the vegetation 
 of a departed world, of which descriptions have so 
 charmed us in the reading. Ah ! we exclaim, those 
 geologists, those subterranean explorers, must surely, 
 like travellers of superficial sort, be greatly given to 
 romancing ! 
 
 We shrug our shoulders, cast upwards a look of 
 disappointment, hardly brightened by a smile incredu- 
 lous, and stand amazed, admiring, ashamed for dis- 
 belief 1 
 
 The roof of our coal-pit gallery is of slaty clay, but 
 recently laid open to the lamp-light, and there, em- 
 bossed on its surface, and distinguished further from 
 the grounding rock by coaly blackness, we behold 
 indeed " a canopy of gorgeous tapestry,'' a mingled 
 tissue of " scaly stems, bending branches, delicate 
 foliage,'' which want nothing but the hues of life to 
 make them look as if the very life was in them !* 
 
 But, in all this display of vegetable forms, arrested 
 and stamped with perpetuity in their steps of growth, 
 we still look in vain for their supposed insect fre- 
 quenters, in like manner stayed and perpetuated in 
 their stages of existence. Nothing of the sort is to 
 be seen. Yet, from all that we have heard or read 
 
 * See Buckland, Bridgewater Treatise." 
 
122 A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 
 
 (and here Nature's own hand-writing, or hand-paint- 
 ing on the wall bids us to believe), such objects are 
 likely to be not far off. Let us resume our search, 
 and where these foliaceous ornaments are in less pro- 
 fusion, look closer into another compartment of our 
 slate-clay roof. It is inlaid, we see, with ribs of iron- 
 stone, and studded here and there with knobs of the 
 same material. These knobs or nodules may contain 
 something worth the trouble of breaking a few off, 
 and breaking into them, putting them to the ques- 
 tion of the hammer. Click 1 click ! One flies open, 
 and reveals its long-hid treasure, a fossil crab, or 
 something like one Click ! There goes another, 
 and displays a cone-like fruit. Courage ! We shall 
 come at last, perhaps, on an insect. Click ! click ! 
 Nothing here. Another ; not a thing ! But patience ! 
 Click, click, click ! Bravo ! At last we have it ! 
 Here is — yes — here is an insect — an insect body 
 
 boxed up in this iron coffin ever since Pshaw ! 
 
 we were going to say the days of Noah ! Out upon 
 us for our old-world, new world prepossessions ! 
 
 Well, and what may this patriarchal insect be ? It 
 would seem none other, nothing better than a common 
 cock-roach. Not a very counterpart of modern 
 "kitchen beetles but very like them, as like, per- 
 
A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 123 
 
 haps, as was Noah or Noah's wife to the cook or 
 kitchen-maid of modern times. 
 
 Now this imaginary picture of things in a coal- 
 mine is but a grouping of objects really to be found 
 in one department or another of the carboniferous 
 magazine. Insects, the first discovered, if not the 
 first progenitors of the insect race, are occasionally 
 met with, as well as fossil fruits, leaves, shells, and 
 crustaceans, enclosed within the nodules of iron-stone 
 so common with layers of the same, and vegetable 
 relics, in the coal-field strata — usually in the slate or 
 shale which form the roofs of seams of coal in course 
 of excavation. Cockroaches and locusts, supposed to 
 have been the first of insects, would seem to have left 
 the greatest number of remains. These iron-stone 
 mausoleums are tenanted, however, by insect dead of 
 higher rank, and (while living) of more brilhant pre- 
 tension, by none other than by members of the family 
 Cerculio,* related to those insect Esterhazys, the 
 diamond beetles of Brazil. Of these, several species 
 have been found in the iron-stone nodules of Coal- 
 brook Dale, and in one of the like receptacles the 
 wing of a large neuropterous insect, closely resembling 
 a species of living corydalis of Carolina, was discovered 
 
 * That of Weevils. 
 
124 A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 
 
 by Dr. MantelL* The Danby coal-pits, Yorkshire, 
 have likewise furnished specimens of beetle elytra or 
 wing cases, and we read of a fossil scorpion brought 
 to the light of these our days by the happy splitting 
 of a block of coal-shale in Bohemiaf 
 
 On the whole, however, insects would seem to have 
 been but few in the carboniferous epoch ; not at all 
 proportioned in numbers or in size to the luxurious 
 vegetation of the same period. A correspondence, 
 nevertheless, betwixt insect and vegetable life, as they 
 then existed, is observable, and has been thus noticed 
 by Professor Heer : — "The most ancient forests, com- 
 posed of tree ferns, club mosses, and equisetae (the 
 first of plants), were inhabited by locustse and blattae 
 (locusts and cockroaches), the first of insects — 
 and of these (orthopterse) we know at present of only 
 six species belonging to those most ancient times, in 
 which, indeed, insects seem to have been extremely 
 scarce ; nor need we wonder, if we consider that at 
 present, also, our lycopodise and equisetse (ferns, mare V 
 tails, and mosses) harbour no insects, and the filices 
 very few. The hosts of insects, therefore, that live on 
 
 * See Medals of Creation," v. ii. 575. 
 f Figured and described in Dr. Buckland's " Bridgewater 
 Treatise." 
 
A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 125 
 
 flowers and their honey, fruits and seeds, could not at 
 that time have been in existence, the vegetable world 
 being then destitute of flowers and fruits/'* This 
 latter observation must be taken with reserve, remains 
 of a few flowering trees having been found already 
 with those of the flowerless majority, to say nothing 
 of such as may be yet exhumed. Our acquaintance 
 with the clothing of the carboniferous earth would 
 seem, nevertheless, quite sufficient to account for the 
 rarity or absence of associate insects, such as feed on 
 flowers and fruits, and the abundance, comparatively, 
 of such as feed on leaves. In those times of foliaceous 
 abundance, leaf-devouring locusts and leaf or wood- 
 consuming beetles, must have banqueted jn clover, 
 while these, living or dead, must have furnished meat 
 "to the appetite's content'' of carnivorous or omni- 
 vorous cockroaches and other preyers on their kind. 
 
 We must bid adieu now to the carboniferous forests, 
 with their appropriate insects. And for all their 
 magnificent remains, and for all the living magnifi- 
 cence in which imagination can thence depict them, 
 who can issue from their gloomy, watery, silent 
 recesses without comparing them, and oh ! how much 
 to their disfavour ! with the dear green glades and 
 * ''On the History of Fossil Insects," by Professor Hear. 
 
126 A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 
 
 their insect frequenters of our own dear times and our 
 own dear land ? 
 
 How, amidst the stately gloom, and waving mono- 
 tony of pines, tree ferns, mosses, and mare Vtails, which 
 would have over-topped our oaks of ages, should we 
 miss the sweet and varied enrichments of our flower- 
 ing trees and flowering* shrubs, and the flowery 
 ground beneath them, serving all to "paint'' our 
 woods as well as " meadows with delight V And how, 
 too, should we miss the "vocal wings'' of the hum- 
 ming-bee, the noon-day flight of the woodland butter- 
 fly, the evening flitting of the woodland moth, with a 
 thousand other insect presences which, quarrel with 
 them as we may, afford us for the most part pleasant 
 company! Yes, we should miss them sadly, our 
 flowers and our flower-frequenters ! Then let us 
 prize them duly, and, thinking of the bloomless, 
 unripened Flora of these grand old feathery times, 
 pay double homage to the blooming, full-formed Flora 
 of our own — worship rather to our kind Creator, who 
 has so adorned and so enlivened this, his finished 
 world, for us, his favoured, but ah ! his graceless 
 creatures ! 
 
 Now, which drawers of the Stone Cabinet — which 
 layers of the stratified crust shall we rummage next 
 
A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 127 
 
 for records of insect history? We have ascended 
 from the carboniferous to the saliferous formations, 
 and behold us at the new red sandstone, with its 
 many-coloured marls, its salt and gypsum. 
 
 Let us see the prevailing character of the fossil 
 miscellanea laid up and laid open in these repositories, 
 inclusive of the uppermost, that triple group, yclept 
 the Trias. These treasures have been for the most 
 part " treasures of the deep,'' such as fish of the sea 
 and flowers of the sea, zoophyte lilies, holding in 
 their stony cups no honeyed wine, and offering no 
 insect harbourage. But of what sort of country and 
 of what inhabitants tell the terrestrial relics of the 
 coeval land ? They describe a country still warm, 
 and watery, and sombre in its clothing of yews and 
 dark coniferae. And as for its inhabitants, they tell 
 in particular of creatures very notable, to our notions 
 very horrible, withal " very good,'' very suitable to 
 the then hot, steamy, marshy fecundity of mother 
 earth. By the tokens of their bones and the tokens 
 of their " footsteps on the sands of time," is recorded 
 the appearance in those days, the first, as it would 
 seem, of reptiles, of those great frog-like reptiles 
 termed batrachians, the van of a reptilian army 
 which was coming to take undisputed possession of 
 
128 A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 
 
 the soil, and share with former tenants possession of 
 the sea. But we are looking for remains, not of 
 reptiles, but of insects, and what have they to do 
 with one another? Perhaps something, since rep- 
 tiles and insects are now-a-days rather intimately 
 connected in the way of swallowing and being swal- 
 lowed : witness basking lizard on the watch for 
 basking butterfly, or lurking toad on the look-out for 
 lurking spider. 
 
 Supposing, therefore, the gigantic labyrinthodonts 
 of the Triassic times to have had a correspondent 
 taste with their degenerate representatives of the 
 modern world, we might reasonably expect that 
 contemporary insects, numerous and perhaps of bulk 
 proportioned, would have lived and died for their 
 regalement. But suppositions are not facts, and 
 though the first of insect families, such as those of 
 cockroach and of locust, had their lives continued 
 through the Trias, they might not have figured in 
 the bills of batrachian fare — nor did they, that we 
 know of, exceed in magnitude their ancestors of the 
 coal. 
 
 Let us pursue our search. We are still in those 
 prodigious Secondaries, but, the Trias left behind, we 
 have now ascended to the lias, a marine group of 
 
A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 129 
 
 clays, shales, and limestones. With this, the lias, we 
 shall take leave to associate the formation next 
 above it, known as the J urassic ; perhaps better as 
 the oolite, from the egg-shaped bodies of various 
 sizes, of which its limestone is principally composed ; 
 marine themselves, these deposits abound chiefly in 
 marine remains, but associate with these are terres- 
 trial relics, transports of rivers and currents into con- 
 temporaneous seas. 
 
 Now, before looking closely into these varied 
 ddbris for the peculiar objects of our search, we 
 must needs take a brief and wondering, perhaps a 
 shuddering survey of the times of their accumulation, 
 the times of the lias and the oolite under their most 
 remarkable and striking aspect. 
 
 Let us glance at them as among periods pre- 
 eminent of the " age of reptiles,'' that age terrible to 
 picture, when their cold-blooded legions were actually 
 come to overspread the world, and lay their bones 
 within its sepulchres, to tell us (us, lords of creation) 
 that we are only their successors in the heritance of 
 earth, holding lordship less absolute and universal 
 than was theirs, over land and sea, and lake and 
 river. Then did those strange " fish lizards," ichthyo- 
 saurians and plesiosaurians, such as are now grinning. 
 
 VOL. I. K 
 
130 A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 
 
 harmless, in their dry bones from out glass cases, 
 cleave the liassic oceans with their dripping paddles, 
 fiUing their waters with death and terror. 
 
 Then, too, was the terrestrial reign of those " fear- 
 fully great lizards'' of the land, megalosaurians and 
 the like,crocodilians and their mailed compeers, spread- 
 ing carnage upon earth and in fresh water, as their 
 marine contemporaries in the seas. With the latter, 
 as separate altogether by habitat and habits from our 
 insect subjects, and with the former as doubtfully, 
 if at all connected, we have little to do here, except, 
 as we look back upon, to bless our stars that their 
 days and ours did not come together ! 
 
 There is, however, another family of contemporary 
 reptiles, much less great and fearful than the above, 
 and much more linked with the little animals of our 
 immediate notice. Associate with insects in life 
 (truly not in a loving or a lovely bond), as preyers 
 and preyed upon, in death they are not divided, the 
 remains of destroyers and destroyed being commonly, 
 yet remarkably, found associate in the same vaults 
 of the great stone cemetery, the same drawers of the 
 stone cabinet. 
 
 Flying dragons had their day in a world of reality 
 long (oh ! how long !) before they lived in fable, and 
 
A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 131 
 
 this is their picture as figured from their bones, and 
 drawn by the pen of a distinguished geologist.* 
 
 The flying or wing-fingered creatures, called ptero- 
 dactyles, are "unquestionably," says he, "the most 
 marvellous even of the wonderful beings which the 
 relics of the age of reptiles have enabled the palaeon- 
 tologist to reconstruct, and place before us in their 
 natural forms and appearance. With a head and 
 length of neck resembling those of a bird, the 
 wings of a bat, and the body and tail of an ordinary 
 mammalian, these creatures present an anomaly of 
 structure as unlike their fossil contemporaries as is 
 the duck-billed platypus, or ornithorhynchus, of Aus- 
 tralia, to existing animals. The skull is small, with 
 very long beaks, which extend like those of the 
 crocodile, and are furnished with upwards of sixty 
 sharp pointed teeth ; the orbit is very large, 
 rendering it probable that the animals were noc- 
 turnal, like other insectivora (feeders on insects). 
 The fore-finger is immensely elongated for the sup- 
 port of a membranous expansion, as in the bat 
 (and the impression of the wing membrane is pre- 
 served on the stone in some examples), and the fingers 
 terminated, as in that animal, by long curved claws. 
 
 * Mantell, ''Wonders of Geology/' v. ii. 762. 
 
 K 2 
 
132 A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 
 
 The size and form of the foot, leg, and thigh, show 
 that the pterodactyles were capable of perching on 
 trees, and of standing firmly on the ground, when, 
 with its wings folded, it might walk or hop like a 
 bird." 
 
 The size of the pterodactyle varies, in the eight or 
 nine species discovered, from the bulk of a snipe to 
 that of a cormorant. By the help of the long hooks 
 projecting from its wings, it had the power of climb- 
 ing trees, together with that of suspension from them. 
 From the length of its neck and the strength of its 
 jaws, it has been conjectured that fish captured after 
 the manner of our present sea-birds, might have 
 formed a portion of its prey ; though this, there is 
 little doubt, consisted principally of flying insects 
 visible to its great orbed eyes by night as well as day. 
 
 Very perfect examples of pterodactyles have been 
 found associate with the remains of dragon-flies and 
 other insects, in the lithographic stone of Pappen- 
 heim and Solenhofer, and in England their bones 
 have been obtained from the strata of Tilgate Forest, 
 the lias of Lyme Kegis, and the oolitic slate of 
 Stonesfield.^^ 
 
 Now, this oolitic slate forms a very note-worthy 
 
 * '^Med. Creation," vol. ii. 763. 
 
A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 133 
 
 leaf in the stone book of geological history, inasmuch 
 as it contains the earliest notice of mammalian 
 existence. Some scattered little jaw-bones, entirely 
 apart from all that once belonged to them, fleshless, 
 tongueless, but not toothless, sufficed to give full 
 assurance to the speller and reader, as well as putter 
 together, of osseous fragments, that certain small 
 quadrupeds of a higher order than the great domi- 
 nant reptiles, — that is, of the highest, did in those 
 oolitic times set their four feet upon the earth. 
 These little quadrupeds are pronounced further (all 
 by the evidence of their jaws) to have been marsupial 
 (like the modern opossum) and insectivorous, like the 
 anteater and hedgehog. The relics of these insect- 
 prey ers would have pretty well sufficed, of them- 
 selves, to have attested the contemporaneous exis- 
 tence of insect prey, had not a single vestige of the 
 latter ever been discovered. But it is far otherwise, 
 for in this very same Stonesfield slate appears a 
 quantity of detached wing-cases of beetles (bupres- 
 tidce) — not a scrap of them beside, save a leg only of 
 a solitary weevil (cerculio). 
 
 Besides these, numerous are the remains, and of a 
 description more entire, laid up within the oolitic, 
 but especially within the liassic rocks ; all serving to 
 
134 A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 
 
 prove indubitably that insect feeders of the corre- 
 spondent periods had ample store of live provisions. 
 
 We have seen how dragon-flies were entombed 
 with flying dragons (pterodactyles), and they would 
 seem, some of them, those dragon-flies of old, to have 
 been of a goodly size — big enough, when shorn even 
 of their nervous wings, to have furnished a tolerable 
 mouthful to a dragon of even cormorantish bulk. 
 
 A wing of such a dragon-fly — one which glittered 
 once in a liassic sun (now a fossil gem for perfect 
 preservation), is described as larger by a third than 
 any British species. 
 
 Through researches of indefatigable seekers a rich 
 and rare array of fossil insects, which lived at the 
 same period, have been transported to the cabinets 
 of the curious from the cabinet of stone, in especial 
 from a band of the lower lias which has been termed 
 insect limestone. 
 
 In scientific volumes* these are to be found 
 enumerated, described, and figured. Suffice it to 
 mention here, that besides the dragon-flies and 
 
 *■ See especially " History of all Fossil Insects in the Secondary 
 Remains," by the Rev. P. B. Brodie. Also, Dr. Buckland's 
 
 Bridge water Treatise;" and Fossil Insects of the Secondary 
 Formations of Britain," by Mr. Strickland. British Association 
 Reports for 1845." Mantell's ^'Medals of Creation/' vol. ii., from 
 570 to 584. 
 
A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 135 
 
 beetles above noticed, and in addition to the cock- 
 roaches, crickets, and locusts, whose primogenitors 
 were noticed in " the coal,'' appear flies, ants, ter- 
 mites, and numerous beaked insects, cicadse, and 
 bugs of water {Nepidoe) and of land (Gimicidce). 
 
 Now, these are common names, but were the 
 creatures to which we have appended them (all when 
 in life destitute of names at all) of common aspect ? 
 One would hardly expect it — hardly believe it — be 
 almost disappointed so to find it, after having been 
 filling our thoughts with images (not ideal) of co- 
 existent monstrosities ; monstrous toads, monstrous 
 in shape as size — " fearfully great lizards," saurians of 
 the swamp, such as would have made -a morsel of a 
 modern crocodile ; saurians of the sea, reptilians 
 stranger than seer of sea snakes, mermen, and mer- 
 maids ever yet described; gigantic, wingless birds, 
 to which the albatross, or Sindbad's roc, would seem 
 as wrens ; and flying dragons, such as, before their 
 bones were disinterred, must surely have visited, in 
 dreams, the inventors of fairy tale and fable. 
 
 Having our heads, we say, full as a fairy tale — a 
 Christmas pantomime — a German opera — of shapes 
 of strangeness, would it not seem strange, too, that 
 insects not strange at all, insects hardly distinguish- 
 able from such as are now to be seen somewhere 
 
136 A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 
 
 every Summer's day, should have been fellows of 
 those strange animals in a world of common occu- 
 pancy ? Yet so it would seem to have actually been. 
 A celebrated entomologist* has pronounced of the 
 relics from the "insect limestone of the lias, that 
 their forms resemble those of ordinary occurrence 
 and of a temperate climate, more, however, like that 
 of North America than Europe. The remains of 
 plants associate with those of insects denote a similar 
 temperature."' Whether both were drifted from afar, 
 or whether they are estuarine deposits formed under 
 such conditions of climate as their forms would indi- 
 cate, is a matter of scientific doubt, as yet an un- 
 solved enigma of the earth, a puzzle not rendered 
 less perplexing by the proximity of these terrestrial 
 relics to marine ones of a warmer latitude. 
 
 Amongst the vegetable remains of these forma- 
 tions are some of recent discovery, both of non- 
 flowering and flowering plants. Of the latter, ONE 
 seed serves to indicate the existence of the umbel- 
 liferous tribe; a bit of jointed stalk, of some other 
 exalted member of the vegetable kingdom, f A 
 
 * Westwood. 
 
 f '^On Bome Fossil Plants from the Lower Lias," by Professor 
 James Buckman. — Quarterly Journal of Geological Society^ March, 
 1850. 
 
A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 137 
 
 single seed! a single bit of stalk! so singularly 
 preserved to attest the antiquity, incalculable, incon- 
 ceivable, of their so ancient families. Amongst the 
 Secondaries still, we come next upon that assemblage 
 of clays, limestones, sand, and sandstones, termed the 
 Wealden. A formation this, rich in terrestrial and 
 fresh-water remains, pronounced to have been de- 
 posits of a vast estuary or delta. These relics 
 betoken a flora consisting of cone-bearing trees, 
 cypresses, ferns, and cycadeous plants, with a cor- 
 responding fauna of fresh-water fish, crustaceans, 
 moUusks, wading-birdSy and turtles; with last, not 
 least (for the age of reptiles was still in its fearful 
 prime), enormous saurians or dinosaurians, whose 
 forms (a mighty resurrection of dry bones) have been 
 recalled by the magician. Science, from their beds of 
 indurated clay. 
 
 Amongst these monsters of the marais, 
 lords of those ancient marshes, figures conspicuously 
 the iguanodon, a creature of appalling mag|it\ide, 
 
 only, as of herbivorous appetite, less dreadful 
 
 carnivorous compeers. 
 
 Amidst or above this reptilian phalanx the ptero- 
 dactyles, or flying dragons, still occupy a place, and, 
 as might hence have been expected, relics of insects. 
 
138 A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 
 
 their conjectured food, have been discovered not dis- 
 tant from their own.* Cockroaches and crickets 
 are, as in earher times, predominant ; associate with 
 dragon -flies, diamond beetles, frog -hoppers, and 
 aphides. Of these, the dragon-flies are somewhat 
 dragon-Hke in size ; but, in general, these insects of 
 the Wealden, like those of the oolite and the lias, are 
 small, and considered, like them, as natives of a 
 temperate clime. 
 
 At length we have arrived in our upward progress 
 at the last — the most recent of these numerous Secon- 
 daries — that formation so familiar as the cretaceous, 
 or the chalk. 
 
 What find we in these beds of limestone and asso- 
 ciate substances, once the bed of the vast chalk 
 ocean, now so frequently the cap of our breezy 
 do^TOS, and the facing of the white cliffs which look 
 down upon the oceans of our time? The uplifted 
 treasures of this upheaved depositary are chiefly, like 
 its origin, marine ; comprising remains of sea plants, 
 animals, and animal flowers. 
 
 These, curious and beautiful for variety of form, 
 are marvellous for variety of magnitude, presenting 
 
 * ''On Remains of Insects in the Wealden," by the Rev. P. B. 
 Brodie. — Geological Proceedings, vol. iii. 
 
A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 139 
 
 US with relics of gradationary bulk, from bones of 
 mighty saurians of the sea to microscopic shells of 
 ocean animalculse, such as often serve in their multi- 
 tude to make up the very substance of limestone 
 blocks and beds. 
 
 Amongst these gems antique of the great chalk sea, 
 tokens are not wanting of co- existent continents or 
 islands, shown by their remains to have afforded sup- 
 port to pines, palms, dragon-trees, tree-like lilies, 
 and cycadeous plants, confervae and naides, inhabiting 
 their fresh waters. 
 
 Chief frequenters of the land were reptiles still, 
 some of them rivalling in bulk their contemporaries 
 of the sea. Pterodactyles, or flying-dragons, still 
 haunted the shores after fishy spoil, or the forests 
 after insect prey, of which the presence is attested by 
 insect remains. Amongst the latter we may re-enu- 
 merate members of the most ancient families of cock- 
 roach, cricket, dragon-fly, and beetle ; with termites, 
 aphides, many of the gnat-like, but none of the flower- 
 sipping flies ; and neither bees nor butterflies,^ which, 
 be it observed, had yet (to all appearance) to make 
 their debut on a more ornamented stage of earth. 
 
 * See " History of Fossil Insects," by Professor Heer. — Quarterly 
 Journal of Geological Society, March, 1850. 
 
140 A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 
 
 Yes ; the sombre scenes of the sombre Secondaries 
 were without bees, without butterflies ; but now, 
 thank goodness ! (the goodness imparted to pro- 
 gressive earth), we are come upon the dawning of 
 a brighter day. We have left the Secondaries be- 
 hind, and have reached the Tertiaries, the epochs 
 bordering on our own; when the watery, weeping 
 earth began to dry her face in smihng earnest, and 
 dress and adorn herself anew for our reception. 
 
 The fossil records of these Tertiary formations tell 
 accordingly tales beautiful and wonderful of the 
 times of their deposit ; times of looking up and 
 looking on ; when water receded before land, fierce 
 reptiles before gentler quadrupeds, flying dragons 
 before flying birds, gloomy pines and giant ferns 
 before our favourites of the forest, flowerless plants 
 before the flowering, to bring in therewith the advent 
 of the bee and butterfly, heralds and harbingers, with 
 their vocal wings and painted banners, of the advent 
 of — monkey and of — man. 
 
 Now these pleasant changes, like most of the 
 changes of regenerating Nature, were brought about, 
 we may safely say, by slow degrees, though the rate 
 and number of the steps which wrought them mock 
 our reckoning. 
 
A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 141 
 
 In speaking of Tertiaries, we had in mind the three 
 successive periods, oldest, middle, newest {eocene , 
 miocene, pliocene), into which the Tertiary has been 
 divided, as into three stages of growing assimilation, 
 betwixt the world and its productions as they were, 
 to the world and its productions as they are. 
 
 But now to the drawers of our cabinet ; those 
 upper drawers to which we have at length attained. 
 We have left the chalk, theu, and are amongst the 
 Tertiary formations, an assemblage of marine and 
 fresh-water deposits (clays, sandstones, limestones, 
 marls, &c.), which occupy, in general, hollows or 
 basins in the former surface. Very rich are these 
 receptacles; richer than all that have gone be- 
 fore in organic treasures ; fossil tokens of increased 
 number and diversity in vegetable products and 
 animal forms, as earth acquired aptitude for their 
 support. These were, for the most part, of species 
 now extinct, though of generally growing resem- 
 blance to such as clothe and inhabit the world we 
 live in. As for our earth under its Tertiary aspects, 
 that in especial of its oldest or earliest period, it 
 would seem to have been a world still consisting 
 chiefly of water, wood, and swamp; still a world 
 somewhat lachrymose and dull ; yet a hazy morning, 
 
142 A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 
 
 but brightening more and more unto the perfect 
 day of man. The forests would seem to have still 
 waved darkly in pine, cypress, yew, and juniper; but 
 their gloomy monotony was being gradual^ broken 
 by the introduction of more cheerful wood-mates — 
 strangers then, now our beloved familiars — poplars, 
 willows, elms, oaks, beeches; while those venerable 
 antiques, ferns, mosses, mare's-tails, abating by de- 
 grees of their high pretensions, yielded to these new- 
 comers the rank of forest nobles, and became content 
 at last to embrace their trunks, or carpet the ground 
 beneath them. 
 
 And what were the living denizens by whom these 
 brightening forests, with the looking-up lands sub- 
 jacent, were inhabited ? These were becoming more 
 and more a mixed multitude. Their tribes — those 
 even which have left their records in their tombs — 
 who can number ? We, at least, must not attempt it. 
 Sufl&ce it for our purpose to take a look, en passant, 
 at some two or three leaders among types of the Ter- 
 tiary ; some remarkable as differing widely from the 
 animal patterns of our day or climate, others almost 
 as remarkable for their resemblance to the same. 
 
 Eeptiles, great and small, were yet abundant ; but 
 the age of reptile supremacy was gone by, replaced 
 
A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 143 
 
 by the dynasty of mammalian quadrupeds. This 
 commenced with a line of mild and mighty poten- 
 tates, whose bloodless reigns were to precede the 
 reigns of terror of feline and wolfish tyrants. 
 
 First came the times of tapirs. Then did anoplo- 
 therium, palseotherium, dinotherium (giant monarch 
 of gigantic pachyderms) roam in the forests, splash in 
 the marshes, bathe in the lakes and streams — in 
 forests and marshes where now, perhaps, roll our seas 
 and run our rivers ; lakes and streams in whose ancient 
 beds our cities and our houses are now, perhaps, dryly 
 and snugly seated. 
 
 Then came the time, too (but it was in the last of 
 the Tripartite tertiary), of that animal anomaly — 
 anomaly of anomalies — erium of eriums — the mega- 
 therium, whose form in its exhumed bones is yet 
 existent, and which lives still in its vivid picture by 
 the graphic Buckland. Yes, in that and its glass- 
 case* (a restored skeleton), has been seen by thou- 
 sands, and may be seen still, that " Behemoth of the 
 Pampas,'' that monster, armour-coated, giant-thighed, 
 yard-long footed, lengthy-clawed, compound of sloth, 
 anteater, and armadillo, which " could neither run, 
 leap, climb, nor burrow,'' which was yet able, by root- 
 
 * In the Hunterian Museum. 
 
144 A RUMMAGE TN THE STONE CABINET. 
 
 digging, to pick out a comfortable living in the 
 forests of its time, and which, safe in its strength and 
 panoply of bone, could have only died seemingly when 
 the day was come for its natural extinction as an 
 individual or a race.* 
 
 These and others of the company of animals which 
 composed the dramatis personce of the Tertiary- 
 stages, have long ago made their final exits from the 
 theatre of creation, while some are now playing their 
 parts, through modern representatives, amidst scenery 
 of old-world character in the worlds (American and 
 Australian) which we call the new. 
 
 But, besides the above, many of the four-footed 
 actors whose figures and performances are at present 
 most familiar, made their (supposed) first appearance 
 on those triple stages of the Tertiary. Of these, the 
 wolf, the fox, the squirrel, and the dormouse, prowled, 
 and hid, and leaped, and slumbered in the forests of 
 the eocene, while in the periods following (miocene 
 and pliocene), elephants and other existing pachy- 
 derms, cats large as lions, and other carnivori, then 
 gentle ruminants, ox, deer, and camel, gave token of 
 an increasing aptitude in mother earth for the dry- 
 nursing of entirely terrestrial children. 
 
 * Described by Dr. Buckland in Bridgewater Treatise." 
 
A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 145 
 
 In the Tertiaries, too, was the great advent of birds. 
 Their first, indeed, bears dateless date from the 
 coming of those great, "fearfully great,'' wingless 
 bipeds, which, as well as frightfully great reptile 
 quadrupeds, have " left their footprints on the sands 
 of time/' But in the Tertiary was the first acknow- 
 ledged arrival (as recorded by their bones) of a 
 winged host of our familiar fowl. Buzzard, owl, 
 woodcock, curlew, quail, and sea-lark are numbered 
 amongst the birds of the eocene ; and in measure as 
 Nature's board was heaped higher for their regale- 
 ment, new guests in garb of feathers, as in other 
 costume, came flocking in to share her bounty. 
 
 But it is time now to inquire something about the 
 new comers in garb of insect — coat of mail, robe of 
 down, drapery of gauze ; who, in proportion to the 
 increased abundance of their own appropriate viands, 
 arrived to fill their respective places at the same hos- 
 pitable table. 
 
 Two of the most distinguished strangers, bee and 
 butterfly, have been already noticed ; but of what 
 consisted the other additions to insect company which 
 came with the times of the Tertiary, or dropped in as 
 they advanced ? The inquiry can only be answered, 
 
 VOL. I. L 
 
146 A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 
 
 like all our questionings about the inhabitants of 
 buried worlds, by reference to the drawers of our 
 stone cabinet. 
 
 What find we of insect appertainment in that 
 at which we have arrived ? We find a multitude of 
 insect bodies embalmed, as if for our inspection, in 
 vegetable crystal ; we find, in other words, a quan- 
 tity of insects encased in amber, a production of the 
 eocene or earliest period of that tertiary epoch under 
 view. Amber, as all the world now knows or sup- 
 poses, is a fossilised resin, w^hich once exuded after 
 the manner of copal and other gums from its pro- 
 ducing tree, an extinct species of pine. It is most 
 abundantly found on the Prussian coast in Pome- 
 rania, either as washed up by the sea in detached 
 masses, or as imbedded in submarine strata of lignite 
 or brown coal, as well as itself a mineralised product 
 of pine forests. Other more fragmentary but less 
 altered relics of the same woods were laid up, like 
 their insects, within their amber, and serve to indicate 
 that their piniferous shades were variegated already 
 by oaks and beeches, with other of our Sylvan 
 favourites. The once living occupants of the vegetable 
 crystal are supposed to have found themselves 
 arrested by the gummy branches of the pines on 
 
A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 147 
 
 which they had alighted only to take rest, a flow of 
 the liquid resin serving then to consummate their 
 fate. If enveloped suddenly, the victims were left 
 by death perfect as in life, their delicate forms, and 
 even colours, unimpaired ; if slowly, Avith marks of 
 dissolution and decay, such as sometimes give a 
 mouldy aspect to their remains, and a dull one to 
 their otherwise transparent tombs. 
 
 Let us see now of what consist, in general, these 
 " insects of a day'' thus struck into " medals of cre- 
 ation/' They afford specimens of most, if not of all, 
 existing orders and genera, and present, says a noted 
 German entomologist,* " a conformity with existing 
 forms, even an identity in some species." " In 
 amber insects I have rarely," says the same author, 
 found a new or very dissimilar form. I am also of 
 opinion, with earlier observers, that they are not 
 those belonging to our latitudes, though some agree 
 perfectly therewith." 
 
 Their numbers are considerable, consisting almost 
 entirely of members of such families as live in 
 woods and trees. That most ancient of insect orders, 
 the Orthoptera, exhibits numerous amber-pent indi- 
 viduals — cockroaches, crickets, grasshoppers, and 
 
 * Dr. Burmeister in " Manual of Entomology." 
 
 L 2 
 
148 A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 
 
 locusts, descended from those which frequented the 
 forests of the coal. 
 
 The Neuroptera (an ancient order also) is well re- 
 presented, by dragon-flies and termites, many; by 
 lace-wing and ephemeral flies, a few. 
 
 Coleoptera abound; the beetles most abundant 
 being still, as in previous times, vegetable feeders,* 
 the carnivorous being as yet but few. 
 
 An abounding presence of Diptera in the amber 
 forests is attested by the innumerable two-winged 
 flies which amber has preserved. Amongst them are 
 bombylii, with a few other frequenters of flowers, 
 tipulse, or crane-flies, a scattered few; gnats without 
 number. 
 
 Beautiful cicadse, or tree-hoppers, bugs of land and 
 water, cocci and aphides, are among those of the 
 Hemiptera which were overwhelmed by gum-spouts 
 from the amber pines. 
 
 Of the Trichoptera are case -flies in abundance, ^ 
 sharers of their fate. 
 
 Of the Hymenoptera, most numerous of all, are 
 ancient representatives of that industrious family, 
 the family of ant. Ichneumons are few; bees few 
 and small — Burmeister had seen but one — but one ^ 
 
 * Cerculionidse and Chrysomelidae . 
 
A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 149 
 
 would suffice as well as a hundred to mark the cheer- 
 ful epoch of bee birth ! 
 
 Last,not least, come tokens of the lovely Lepidoptera. 
 Yes, in the times of amber, butterfly as well as bee had 
 come upon the earth — the brilliant butterfly and her 
 sober-suited sister, moth; for amongst amber gems 
 (of the rarest and the choicest) are numbered several 
 caterpillars, a large sphinx, and a few butterflies ! 
 
 But it is not only, or even chiefly, in amber that 
 insect specimens of the Tertiary periods have been 
 preserved. They have been encased as securely, if 
 less elegantly, in beds of calcareous marl, Tertiary 
 formations of more recent date than those which con- 
 tain relics of the amber forests. The quarries of Aix, 
 in Provence, are celebrated repositories for fossil in- 
 sects.* Of these, nearly seventy genera, besides 
 spiders, have been enumerated, some of them pre- 
 senting a remarkable identity with species existent in 
 the surrounding country. The two localities of Rado- 
 boj and (Eningen, on the banks of the Rhine, near 
 Constance, are also very fertile fields of fossil entomo- 
 logy. There have been collected from them examples 
 
 * Described and figured in a Memoir On the Freshwater For- 
 mation of Aix, in Provence/' by Mr. Lyell and Sir R. Murchison, in 
 Jamesons Edinhurgh Journal^ 1829. ^' List of Insects of Aix," by 
 Marcellede Serres. 
 
150 A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 
 
 of all the seven insect orders, only differing widely 
 in numerical proportions from those which now pre- 
 vail. Altogether, the species are very numerous, 
 nearly quadrupling, it is said, the number of those 
 discovered in all the preceding geological periods. 
 Those of imperfect transformation are more abundant 
 amongst them than those which undergo the perfect 
 or triple change; and even in the marls of the plio- 
 cene, or newest of the Tertiary periods, the recent 
 types of bee and butterfly have not been found of 
 frequent repetition. 
 
 Speaking of the few Tertiary butterflies which have 
 been brought to the light of this our day, It is re- 
 markable,'' says Professor Heer, "that two species 
 resemble such as are now native to the East Indies, 
 while one is comparable with our thistle butterfly 
 (qy. painted lady?) and another with our gras-sack- 
 tragen.'' " Only in the existing creation,'' observes 
 the same naturalist, " have butterflies been developed 
 in their full richness of form and colour; and this may 
 be the better understood, inasmuch as in the Tertiary 
 period the land was almost entirely occupied by 
 forests, and offered but few herbaceous plants with 
 flowers from which butterflies and bees could derive 
 nourishment. 
 
A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 151 
 
 For the same feason gnat-like flies, haunters of 
 damp places, often also of aquatic birth, would seem 
 to have abounded in that woody and still watery 
 world, while the brethren of their two-winged order, 
 which love to bask in sunshine and feed on fruits and 
 honey, were but few. Of these gnat-like flies of the 
 Tertiary, many are of such as live, while larvae, in 
 fleshy fungi, a fact which attests as plainly that fungi 
 grew within the forests of the tapir, the mastodon, 
 and megatherium, as if mushrooms from their ancient 
 woodlands had been preserved for countless ages, 
 together with their inhabitants, (insects of a day,) to 
 tell for themselves the tale of their existence of an 
 hour. 
 
 Cicadse, or tree- hoppers, are conspicuous amongst 
 the insects of (Eningen for beauty — dragon-flies* for 
 number, their aquatic larvae being amongst the most 
 common of these fossil forms. It has been noticed 
 that no gad-flies have been found amongst them, and 
 hence conjectured that these and the like parasitic 
 pests of warm-blooded animals belong only to modern 
 times. If these insect tapsters existed at all in the 
 days of those ponderous pachyderms, we may perhaps 
 suppose as fairly that their tapping apparatus must 
 
 * Libellulse. 
 
152 A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 
 
 have been, together with themselves, upon rather a 
 gigantic scale — for how else could they have drawn 
 the red wine from out the barrel bodies of their thick- 
 skinned victims? 
 
 Amongst contemporary beetles, the buprestidse 
 (large and handsome, like their tropic representatives 
 of modern days) held, as in times more ancient, a 
 place of prominence. 
 
 Abundant, also, as their foliaceous food, were 
 locusts : and abundant and remarkable for size were 
 termites; but more abundant than them all were 
 Ants. Other families of their order (Hymenoptera) 
 seemed comparatively few. Bees few, because of 
 the fewness of flowers. Ichneumons few, because of 
 the fewness of butterflies and moths, ichneumon 
 victims. 
 
 Be it noticed, by the way, of parasitic insects, that 
 though ichneumon parasites would seem to have been 
 thus rare, and gad-fly parasites not at all, the para- 
 sitic system would seem, nevertheless, to have arrived 
 at a complicated degree of atrocity even in those 
 times of the Tertiary, long before man, or the Devil, 
 had brought it to perfection ; for, amongst the fossil 
 remains we are now looking over, are those of certain 
 little parasites — preyers upon other parasites — ancient 
 
A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 153 
 
 representatives of a modern genus* of insects, which 
 pierce and deposit eggs in the larvae of those ichneu- 
 mons which do the same by the bodies of devoted 
 caterpillars.! 
 
 To return to Ants, and the astonishing abundance 
 of these little labourers in the Tertiary periods. While 
 there are now only about forty species in all Europe, 
 nearly a hundred have been discovered in the amber 
 and the marl — some of existent genera. At Radoboj, 
 stones have been found completely covered with them 
 — half-a-dozen species upon one slab, as if they had 
 just grouped themselves together for the convenience 
 of the future entomologist. 
 
 These fossil ants have elicited some interesting ob- 
 servations J — deductions of importance from very 
 trifling yet significant particulars. The following are 
 among them. Nearly all these insects are winged — 
 male or female — a fact thus accounted for. It Avas 
 only while disporting in the air that they could have 
 fallen thence into the water, incurring thus a fate 
 escaped by the steady, creeping, hard-working la- 
 bourers of their generation. The presence, in the 
 
 * Hemiteles. 
 
 f See " History of Fossil Insects," by Professor Heer. — Quarterly 
 Journal of Geological Society, March, 1850. 
 
 J By Professor Heer, On Fossil Ants." 
 
154 A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 
 
 entombed individuals, of their wings, which in ants 
 fall off almost at a touch, proves further, that their 
 covering up in mud must have been much more 
 sudden than would be the like catastrophe in our 
 lakes or ponds. The process of separation, hastened 
 by immersion, must else have occurred beforehand. 
 
 Several genera of the ant family, great and power- 
 ful destructives, confined now to tropical climates, 
 have been found in the grand insect and especially 
 formic mausoleums of QEningen and Kadoboj. The 
 larger number of these long-buried individuals belong, 
 however, to our more familiar formiculse, and afford 
 numerous examples of its two divisions, dwellers in 
 trees and dwellers and builders on the ground. Of 
 these, one species {F. Thetis) is supposed to have 
 occupied the cypresses of the ancient forests of OEnin- 
 gen, as its modern prototype (F. Herculanea), the 
 firs of modern Europe ; while another would seem to 
 have raised its populated mounds after the plan of 
 that well-known sylvan architect, the great wood ant 
 {F. Rufer) of our times and country. 
 
 These busy builders of remote antiquity — ants of 
 all sorts and sizes — would seem, in fact, to have 
 teemed about as abundantly on the Tertiary dry 
 land as did May or caddis-flies (while yet creeping 
 
A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 155 
 
 case-makers) in the fresh waters of the same epoch, 
 and in its Summer air when become idlers upon 
 wing. 
 
 Of the multiplicity of these latter in and about the 
 lakes of ancient time, our reader need hardly be re- 
 minded. If so, let him refresh his notion (such as he 
 can form) of their inconceivable numbers by refer- 
 ence to a former page, that descriptive of limestone 
 of Auvergne, little other than an aggregate of com- 
 pacted caddis-cases. 
 
 We have now come round, or more properly come 
 up, to our commencing subject. Of these, therefore, 
 we shall take leave, and the same (with a few gene- 
 ral observations) of all the insects of the stone 
 cabinet. 
 
 Some people, to whom these little perishable 
 things, petrified into permanency, may have become 
 only now objects of curiosity, may desire to know in 
 what state of preservation they are usually found. 
 The answer is, in all states, from fragmentary relics 
 to unimpaired entireness, and from colourless forms, 
 or even mere impressions of forms, to such as have 
 retained the hue and perfect finish which belonged 
 to them in life. This is most often the case with 
 those enclosed in amber. The marl-imbedded insects 
 
156 A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 
 
 of Aix are spoken of* as having, in general, retained 
 their horny integument, but with exchange of their 
 once respective colours for a uniform brown or black. 
 We learn, however, from another and no less depend- 
 able authority, f that some of them " appear as fresh 
 
 as if enveloped yesterday In some specimens 
 
 the claws are visible, and the sculpture, and even a 
 degree of local colouring, are preserved. The nerves 
 of the wings in the Diptera, and the pubescence on the 
 head, are distinctly seen.'' 
 
 In a small spider from the same locality are seen 
 the papillsB of the spinning organs, as protruded by 
 pressure ; while in a relic far more ancient — a fossil 
 scorpion — found in a bed of carbonized leaves, within 
 a tomb of coal-shale, " the head and eyes, one of the 
 jaws with teeth, and a portion of the skin, remain; 
 the horny covering still elastic and transparent/' 
 
 Among the " Medals of Creation" is also described 
 and figured a beautiful dragon-fly, from the litho- 
 graphic limestone of Solenhofen, in which the 
 neuroses of the wings are admirably preserved. The 
 same with the wing of an unique neuropterous insect 
 discovered by Dr. Mantell, in a nodule of ironstone 
 from Coalbrook Dale. 
 
 * By Dr. Burmeister. f Dr. Mantell. 
 
A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 157 
 
 It might naturally be expected that of all insect 
 remains, the enamelled plate armour of the mailed 
 beetle would be found to have best retained its pris- 
 tine polish; but it would not seem to have so proved. 
 It is otherwise, at all events, with the numerous 
 pieces of wing-armour laid up in the repository of 
 the Stonesfield slate, for in these the lustrous metallic 
 colouring of the buprestidan mail has been rusted by 
 the hand of time, or of chemical change, into a red- 
 dish brown, with a finely granulated surface.''* 
 
 Amongst the most precious gems of insect preser- 
 vation is a buprestes from Japan, converted into 
 chalcedony, even to the antennae and portions of the 
 legs.t 
 
 Many of the insect vestiges at OEningen are mere 
 impressions, but other of their remains are admir- 
 ably perfect, and exhibit the successive stages of 
 larva, pupa, and imago. The pupa of a dragon-fly 
 retains its mask ! 
 
 We see then that there is no want of clearness in 
 the insect type of the stone volume. Whether printed 
 in what we may call " black letter,'' or in brown, it 
 gives an accurate notion of what insects were before 
 
 * Medals of Creation," vol. ii. 579. 
 + Described by Dr. Buckland. 
 
158 A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 
 
 man was, and we hence find them to have borne, on 
 the whole, a great resemblance to the insects that 
 are, now man is. 
 
 In surveying rapidly the scenes of dateless anti- 
 quity which have seemed, through partial handling 
 of their relics, to rise around us, in their vast oceans, 
 their expansive lakes, their numerous rivers, their 
 prevailing swamps, and as prevailing forests ; amidst 
 their gigantic vegetation, amongst their monstrous 
 animals "fearfully great,'' or fearfully strange; we 
 appear, in truth, to have met with nothing so much 
 like in their looks, as well as names, to the things of 
 our present world as the insect inhabitants of worlds 
 extinguished but not obliterated. There are excep- 
 tions, however, to this prevailing rule of resemblance 
 betwixt the little articulates of primaeval and of 
 modern times. Amongst fossil insects only of the 
 Tertiary we are told* of termites— some, indeed, 
 like those now building in Brazil, but mostly of a 
 distinct and peculiar aspect; of gigantic wasps (fosso- 
 rial), of water beetles (hydrophili), gigantic too, and 
 of shape remarkable, unmatched by any living 
 species ; and of bees (new types of their time), 
 singularly different from any now known. 
 
 ^ By Heer. 
 
A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 159 
 
 This divergence from the forms of living proto- 
 types, or approach towards them, has been considered 
 (with insects as well as other animals) as dependent 
 in degree on the epoch of creation, each type com- 
 mencing with peculiar forms most foreign to those 
 now existent. In support of this theory are instanced 
 the mammalia of the Tertiary, and its fisii ; the former, 
 then new types, being very different from those that 
 now walk the earth; the latter (representatives of 
 types much more ancient) resembling nearly those 
 that now fill the waters. This rule, however, if rule 
 it be, would seem only to hold good with one of the 
 two Tertiary types of insects supposed new — the bee 
 and butterfly; for if the few bees of that time were 
 singularly different, the few butterflies of the same 
 would appear to have been singularly like our own. 
 
 Be this as it may, if some amongst the most ancient 
 of fossil insects — carboniferous cockroaches, for in- 
 stance, or carboniferous crickets — could issue living 
 from their iron coffins in the coal-measures to 
 take the places of their modern representatives on 
 kitchen floor or hearth, few people enough, perhaps, 
 would start at them as apparitions from another 
 world; and none, perhaps, but a scientific eye would 
 discern a shade of difference, excepting, perhaps, in 
 
160 A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 
 
 magnitude, betwixt the dragon-flies that chase the 
 butterflies of our summer days, and the dragon-flies 
 of the oolite or the lias of days when butterflies were 
 noty and when reptile dragons were, to pursue on 
 wings of leather the insect dragons upon wings of 
 gauze. 
 
 The order in which insects would appear to have 
 succeeded one another on the stages of earth has been 
 considered to support the theory of progressive ad- 
 vancement — a regular succession, that is, of higher or 
 more complex forms to the lower or more simple, 
 from the commencement of organic life to its state at 
 present. 
 
 Pages like these, so limited and so avowedly 
 superficial, are no paper fields for attack or defence 
 of those idols of their advancers — theories. Perhaps 
 it is not for us even to question whether any theories 
 based on geological data are at present strong enough 
 to stand firmly — so firmly as to do becoming battle 
 with each other. We would only mention the remark 
 that as regards insects and plants those " stubborn'' 
 forces, facts, would seem by no means all arrayed on 
 the side of progressive advancement. 
 
 Plants of the lower and non-flowering division 
 formed evidently the main tissue of earth's earliest 
 
A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 161 
 
 clothing, but neither was her garb destitute even then 
 of floral gems ; witness the flowering palms of carbo- 
 niferous ages, with the ericacese and umbelliferous 
 plants (as betokened by that single seed) of the lower 
 lias, while, as for insects — dragon-flies, and beetles? 
 creatures of high organism and the last, of perfect 
 transformation, though not the earliest, would seem 
 to have been among the earliest to appear. 
 
 We must really take leave now of our insect an- 
 cients, but not without a farewell bow of deference due 
 to the prodigious antiquity of their dateless origin; 
 nay, it becomes us on the like account to pay our 
 measure of respect to their descendants of our time. 
 
 Who that calls to mind his ancient ancestry can 
 fail to look upon the glass-winged dragon-fly as a 
 most illustrious as well as lustrous destroyer ? And 
 can we longer regard with contempt the cockroach 
 (alias " kitchen beetle'') when we bethink us of the 
 fathomless depths whence sprung his family-tree? — 
 the tree of Blatta — pre- Adamite Adam of the insect 
 race — occupier of a garden, flowerless or flowery, to 
 him, no doubt, an Eden, when kitchen-stuff was not, 
 and when beetle-traps and beetle-wafers were useful 
 articles of a future dim or invisible in the perspective 
 of countless ages ! 
 
 VOL. I. M 
 
162 A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 
 
 And thou, fireside familiar — cricket of the hearth, 
 (chosen type of our beloved self !) — thou also art 
 sprung of a family coeval almost, if not completely, 
 with that of the insect Adam. Thy chirp was doubt- 
 less audible (though sure it must have lacked of 
 cheeriness !) when hearths were not, except in the 
 stone repository, or in unconsolidated atoms ; materials 
 of future quarries, when fires were not, except in 
 earth's central furnace, or in the fiery volcano, illu- 
 mining the nightly darkness, which not one light of 
 man's invention (from torch of pine to lamp of argand) 
 had ever yet been kindled to dispel. Acheta ! we 
 need not blush at assumption of thy name, for what, 
 we say, is the family of earth or air (the families of 
 water are beneath our notice) which may be for anti- 
 quity above a match to thine? That, perchance, of 
 Blatta only. Truly, Acheta, it were scarce, in thee, 
 presumption, if from some Winter cell in lordly fire- 
 place thou wert to laugh to scorn the pride of poker — 
 surmounted, may be, by a lordly coronet. Nay, we 
 might even pardon thee if thou wert tempted in thy 
 Summer song to indulge thee in a merry jibe at 
 basking butterfly ; for he, verily, as compared with 
 thee, is but an insect of a day ! — a showy upstart, who, 
 for all his blazonry — for all the quarterings of his gor. 
 
A RUMMAGE IN THE STONE CABINET. 163 
 
 geous banners — is but descended from a stuck-up 
 family only less recent by a single epoch than the 
 family of man ! 
 
 M 2 
 
V. 
 
 THE TWO ELM TEEES. 
 A TALE FOE BIRDS'-NESTEKS. 
 
 ''You used me so 
 As that ungentle gull, the cuckoo's bird 
 Useth the sparrow." King Hemy IV. 
 
 There are no two individuals in the country parish 
 of Hazlewood more remarkable, or more remarkably 
 contrasted, than two centenarian, perhaps millena- 
 rian, elm trees, which stand (though one only may 
 be said to flourish) in that rural locality. Contrasts 
 as they furnish, they have yet their points of resem- 
 blance besides that of common elmhood. The trunks 
 of both are of enormous circumference though of mode- 
 
THE TWO ELM TREES. 
 
 165 
 
 rate height, being truncated at top, pollard fashion, 
 and both are cavernously hollow through the inroads 
 of decay. One of these vegetable giants stands in the 
 centre of a wood at about a mile's distance from the 
 village, and is a solitary of most forbidding aspect — 
 so, at least, the trees in its neighbourhood would seem 
 to think, standing as they do, one and all — the tender 
 in youth, the sturdy in prime, and the green in old 
 age — in a circle far aloof, leaving it alone in its cold 
 rigidity — brown, bare, and blasted. On the branches 
 which compose its scanty, irregular head is a patch 
 only here and there of sickly verdure, just to indicate 
 the presence of life, in its last stage of lingering 
 decay. 
 
 That elm is, in short, a sylvan portrait of stem, 
 unsocial, unloved, unloving age. The wild flowers, 
 and even the mossy turf, have retreated from its 
 vicinity to embrace in tenderness the feet of other 
 and more congenial members of the forest family; 
 and not alone do these, the little children of the wood- 
 land (inclusive of the familiar daisy), seem to regard 
 with awe, and keep at a respectful distance from 
 their great gaunt old neighbour ; but hardly less do 
 the children of the village, little and big, young and 
 old, keep aloof from its solitary neighbourhood, for 
 
166 
 
 THE TWO ELM TREES. 
 
 certain reasons, or for certain notions with which 
 reason has not much to do. These latter (call them 
 which we will) are founded on a singular incident 
 (to be related in due course) which has given to this 
 tree the name of " Old Dry-bones'" — a popular appel- 
 lation not adapted certainly to increase its popularity, 
 although one to which every year improves its title. 
 
 A character opposite altogether to that of this for- 
 bidding solitary of the wood has been acquired by its 
 brother elm of the village. As fine and flourishing a 
 tree of its years and kind as any in the country, it 
 stands metaphorically as well as bodily in the heart 
 of the hamlet, where it is the love and pride of young 
 and old. 
 
 It is true that not even the hollow " Dry-bones'' 
 has less of heart than this its fellow centenarian. 
 This is certainly no reason with a treCy although a 
 very good one with a man, for time having passed so 
 lightly over it. Stoutly, however, does it stand, and 
 green and cheerful is its aspect in spite, if not because, 
 of its hoUow-heartedness, and of all the moving 
 changes of which, in its life of centuries, it must have 
 been a witness. 
 
 There is nothing, indeed, of a sensitive or senti- 
 mental character exhibited by this leafy sire of the 
 
THE TWO ELM TREES. 
 
 167 
 
 village; it has the air only of a good-humoured 
 hospitable old fellow, ready to shelter under his 
 green canopy, or even receive within his wooden 
 walls, all unprovided travellers, glad of a retreat 
 from sunshine or from storm. Enough this to win 
 the passing love of strangers ; and as for neigh- 
 bours, the spreading roots of that old tree are not 
 more firmly imbedded in the ground than itself, root 
 and trunk, branch and leaf, in their reverence and 
 regard. With the aged it is the only thing about 
 them that looks exactly as it did when they were 
 young. How can they help loving it ? or the young, 
 to whom it is associate with more than half their 
 present happiness? To climb into its umbrageous 
 head — to crawl up and down the broad sloping plat- 
 form of its knobby spreading root, worn shining and 
 slippery by their little hands and knees — to squeeze 
 in and out through its hole of entrance — makes up a 
 prodigious portion of their Summer days' delight. 
 And then does the old village elm look most of all like 
 a hale, hearty, kind old man in his green old age, with 
 grandchildren climbing up his knee or nestling in 
 his bosom. A popular name attaches to this social 
 tree, as well as to its solitary brother, " Dry-bones.'' 
 It has been long known as " Old Heavy-top," from 
 
168 
 
 THE TWO ELM TREES. 
 
 the thickness, probably, of its spreading crown- 
 "Heavy- top'' wears not, however, the least appear- 
 ance of being top-heavy — an air wholly counteracted 
 by the extensive area of its visible root. 
 
 By the roadside, under the shadow of this old pol- 
 lard, under its very boughs, stands a thatched wooden 
 cottage, which we may call old too, though the tree 
 might laugh at the appellation. The tenement looks 
 as old, however, as tenement of boards and straw can 
 well be. As with cottages in general of ancient 
 English build, its upper projects beyond its lower 
 story, and is supported on a row of strong rough 
 wooden brackets. Over this, projecting again, comes 
 the deep roof of straw. The front casements are but 
 three, and these, as if afraid to show themselves, 
 nestle, one (the lower and larger) close to the door- 
 side — two (the higher and lesser) up into the roof, 
 where they are almost hidden in the thickness of the 
 thatch. To complete the outline of this humble 
 building as it at present stands, we may add that it 
 has hardly a right line left about it. The wooden 
 walls are out of the perpendicular ; their boarding 
 out of the horizontal; and as for colouring, it presents 
 a compound of all discolorations ; green is, however, 
 the prevailing tint — green mould bespreading door 
 
THE TWO ELM TREES. 
 
 169 
 
 and window-frame — green moss and house-leek be- 
 sprinkling the roof ; but then these greens are varied, 
 mellowed, and enriched by a thousand mingled hues. 
 Did we call them discolorations ? — these broideries 
 on a veil of nature's weaving — one of those curiously- 
 wrought veils which she loves to throw in tenderness 
 over the unsightly traces of decay. 
 
 This habitation is now tenantless, its last occupants 
 having deserted it, perhaps just in time, for a low 
 brick-built dwelling, on which, in its decrepitude, the 
 wooden fabric seems glad to lean. The door of the 
 old cottage is opposite the entrance into the old tree ; 
 the latter, raised on its rooty platform, standing 
 highest of the two. The footpath runs between, and 
 the road is bounded on the other side by the paling 
 of the churchyard. Glimpses of green graves and 
 white headstones are visible from the little casements, 
 which twinkle, now obscurely, once brightly, from 
 under their heavy brow of thatch; but the church 
 itself is almost intercepted by the branching head of 
 " Heavy-top.'' 
 
 There lived in this humble abode, when it was 
 comparatively new, a widow, named Dorcas Parsons. 
 Her calling and vocation are nearly described by 
 saying that she was, for many years, the useful woman 
 
170 
 
 THE TWO ELM TREES. 
 
 of the village — nay, of the parish. She was, in other 
 words, one of those important personages whose 
 ministrations (these in especial on occasions of life 
 and death) are, according to their spirit and mode of 
 exercise, as those of angels or of demons. 
 
 Now, a petticoated demon Dorcas certainly was 
 not We believe, on the contrary, that she was as 
 much of an angel as ever compounded caudle or 
 walked the earth in pattens — a better one, at all 
 events, than the heartless wooden cherub, now grown 
 grey, and green, and yellow, which hovers, hawk-like, 
 over her remains. These have been deposited just 
 within the churchyard paling, and still within the 
 shadow of the old elm tree, under which, in the 
 straw-roofed cottage, she had lived and died. Before 
 Mistress Parsons found repose in this quiet resting- 
 place, her cares and burthens, which had never, since 
 her days of merry maidenhood, been very light, had 
 waxed remarkably heavy. 
 
 -After having helped so many in the taking up or 
 the laying down of their respective loads of life, she 
 had latterly, poor soul ! found it no easy matter to 
 support her own, with certain superadded weights. 
 Through the early death of an only daughter, a 
 grandson, an idiot, also deaf and dumb, had been 
 
THE TWO ELM TREES. 
 
 171 
 
 thrown upon her care. From the time that he 
 became her mute companion, she had kept herself 
 and kept the child upon a parish dole of one- 
 and-sixpence weekly, the profits of a little trade in 
 threads, tapes, and lollipops, and the precarious pro- 
 ceeds of her services as nurse. This bravely and 
 cheerfully she had done, and was doing still, when 
 one night she was called upon all in a grand hurry 
 to do something besides that she had never dreamt 
 of. On that night, the March lion, though about to 
 depart, was in the ascendant. He roared in the 
 gusty fury of a north-east wind, and shook the foam 
 from his mouth in driving showers of sleet and snow. 
 So ill a wind on the eve of April Fool day was some- 
 thing in itself rather remarkable ; and it was made 
 further memorable in the village of Hazlewood by 
 what it brought — to some, losses, such as of tiles, 
 chimney-pots, and the like ; to our widow of the elm- 
 tree cottage a gain, not consequently a good. Dame 
 Dorcas had put up the shutters of her lower casement, 
 and would have been in bed but for the uproarious 
 wind, and but for the possessing thought that, because 
 it blew, and snowed, and sleeted, somebody would be 
 sure to send for her assistance, either in the leaving 
 or the entering on this stormy world. " It always 
 
172 
 
 THE TWO ELM TREES. 
 
 happened so! besides that old Master Smith was 
 very bad, and young Mrs. Hodge very near/' So, 
 when the embers of her wood fire had died and 
 turned white, she went up-stairs, laid out in readiness 
 her cloak and bonnet, and sat by the bedside of her 
 idiot boy. There he lay in tranquil slumber, but 
 hardly more quiet and serene than he was accustomed 
 to be in the happy fatuity of his waking hours. His 
 fair full face always looked better asleep and in bed 
 than at any other time, because then his eyelids con- 
 cealed the vacancy of his large blue eyes, and the 
 bed-clothes the disproportion of his head and body. 
 A smile, not of vacant expression, was on his coun- 
 tenance; and as his loving protectress sat and looked 
 at him, a sigh raised her neckerchief of yellow print. 
 " If he'd only'' (whispered she) but look as sensible 
 when he's not asleep !" And then — " Oh ! dearie me ! 
 How he reminds me now of her that's dead and 
 gone !" 
 
 Regrets and reflections such as these were suddenly 
 interrupted by the voice of the storm and the voices 
 that it raised. The little house rocked, and the little 
 casements rattled, and the rain and hail came patter- 
 ing, not so much against the windows, for they were 
 protected by the great elm, as upon the spreading head 
 
THE TWO ELM TREES. 
 
 173 
 
 of " Heavy-top'' itself. Under this pitiless infliction its 
 branches kept knocking violently on the cottage roof, 
 as if asking on the present occasion for a return of 
 the shelter they were accustomed to afford. In the 
 midst of all this pattering, and rattling, and roaring, 
 Dame Dorcas fancied that she heard, together with 
 the knocking on the house-top, another knocking at 
 the house-door — a voice, also, of wailing and moaning, 
 which was neither the voice of the wind nor the voice 
 of the old elm smarting under its fury. The listener's 
 thoughts reverted directly to " old Master Smith" 
 and " young Mrs. Hodge." She was going to question 
 the supposed messenger of one or other from the 
 window, when she bethought herself that if she opened 
 the casement it would fly out of her hand, or fly to 
 pieces in it ; and that, as for speaking or hearing, she 
 would only be talking and listening to the wind. So, 
 shading the candle with her apron, she crept down- 
 stairs and to the house-door. As she applied her ear 
 to its side crevice — for keyhole there was none — the 
 latch was moved impatiently, and the knocking re- 
 peated from without. Who are you ? What do you 
 want ? Is Master Smith took worse ? Is Mrs. Hodge 
 took ill were the responding queries from within. 
 The latch was again shaken, and a something unin- 
 
174 
 
 THE TWO ELM TREES. 
 
 telligible was uttered in a feeble, entreating voice — 
 the voice, for certain, of some weakly creature in 
 distress — that^ in a momentary lull of the storm, there 
 was no mistaking. 
 
 We have hinted already at a touch of the angelic 
 in the composition of Dorcas Parsons — at all events, 
 there was something about her of the next-coming 
 quality, the womanly ; so the voice of distress, though 
 it gave utterance to no distinguishable word, and was 
 almost drowned in the Babel of the elements, found 
 its way through the closed door, the nightcapped ear, 
 and down to the widow's very heart. A silly creature 
 Dorcas was, undoubtedly — that was proved by the 
 event. She had only just sufficient prudence to set 
 down her candle out of the way of the wind before 
 she opened the door. When it was opened, the be- 
 cloaked figure of a female tottered for a moment 
 betwixt the darkness without and the light within ; 
 then, as if too weak to stand at all before the blast 
 that followed her, fell forward on the threshold Of 
 what occurred afterwards we are but imperfectly in- 
 formed. Suffice it, that before the conclusion of that 
 blusterous night, a first breath had been drawn under 
 the rocking boughs of old Heavy-top,'^ under the 
 moss, and the house-leek, and the thatch of the elm-tree 
 cottage. That event has no record in the register of 
 
THE TWO ELM TREES. 
 
 175 
 
 Hazlewood parish ; but the part played in it, and 
 under its results, by Dorcas Parsons, is almost sure to 
 be entered on a page (a very fair one) of the register 
 on high. 
 
 If thus it be, it can never be said of the worthy 
 Dorcas and that ill wind that it did not blow her any 
 good. Nevertheless, incalculable was the mundane 
 mischief which befell her through the evil gift it 
 brought her. The mysterious advent of her new 
 nurse-child was, doubtless, explained in some way by 
 herself — in a hundred other ways by her neighbours. 
 Through none of these versions, not even her own, 
 did she gain what she really merited in the way of 
 good opinion ; while from other connected causes, she 
 lost what was much more substantial than opinion, 
 good or bad. With this additional burthen on her 
 hands at home, what could she continue to do or 
 make abroad ? Herein daft Harry, her little grand- 
 son, had been hitherto of little hindrance. If her 
 services were needed by day, she could leave him in 
 his happy harmlessness alone, or with a neighbour, 
 who was never loth to heed or have him. If she 
 were wanted by night, night and sleep shielded him 
 from harm. To make up for what she was fain to 
 relinquish, the widow enlarged a little on her trading 
 speculations, added a few groceries to her sweets, a 
 
176 
 
 THE TWO ELM TREES. 
 
 few calicoes to her threads and tapes ; but customers 
 did not increase in proportion to her stock. The 
 village dress-maker (Miss Cribb) insinuated that to 
 pay for such a " fine set up/' a whole halfpenny had 
 been put on a piece of tape, and a whole farthing on 
 a ball of cotton. " Besides/' said the cunning 
 fashioner of gowns and gossip, " that child wasn't 
 took in for nothing ; or if it was, and Mrs. Parsons 
 could keep two brats out of her own pocket, it was 
 mighty fine for her !" 
 
 ***** 
 We shall now take a story-teller's licence, and, leap- 
 ing over ten years, alight where we were, locally, at 
 their beginning. Here stands old " Heavy-top," not 
 a day older to all appearance than when we left him. 
 His heart may have got more hollow, but his head is 
 full and green as ever. Green is beginning to mottle 
 the thatch of the elm cottage, and grey more than to 
 mottle the once brown hair of Dorcas Parsons. Her 
 dumb grandson, the son of her departed daughter, and, 
 for all his dumbness, the son of her heart, has grown but 
 little in stature, and hardly more, as it would seem, 
 in wisdom, but the half-score years which at their 
 beginning found, and at their end have left, " daft 
 Harry" in a state of infancy, have brought to com- 
 
THE TWO ELM TREES. 
 
 177 
 
 parative maturity the infant gift wafted into the lap 
 of Dorcas by that stormy wind of March. If the 
 sparrow have cause to thank the cuckoo for deposit 
 of a stranger egg in her domestic circle — if the 
 mason mother bee owe a debt of gratitude to the 
 mother ichneumon for introduction to her nest of a 
 parasitic fry to consume her stores, and eat up her 
 offspring — then with equal reason might Dorcas Par- 
 sons have acknowledged obligation to that evil wind 
 for what it brought her ; and truly not unlike a 
 cuckoo was that brown, dark- eyed, sturdy urchin 
 who, however he came into the widow's hands, was 
 not to be speedily taken off them. Early did he begin 
 to play his cuckoo pranks, to peck pertly at the 
 gentle breast that brooded him, to chirp domineer- 
 ingly over the poor mute sparrow in whose nest he 
 had usurped a place. He exhibited, besides, another 
 most cuckoo-like propensity, a passion (seemingly 
 bom with him) for nest-appropriation, to be deve- 
 loped with his growth of muscle into hird^' -nesting. 
 While yet a baby, those large dark eyes of his were 
 for ever turned upwards. So indeed are very often 
 the eyes of common specimens of infant humanity ; 
 and hence, perhaps, have infant aspirations been sup- 
 posed to reach sometimes to the moon. But the 
 
 VOL. I. N 
 
178 
 
 THE TWO ELM TREES. 
 
 moon of our hero's infantile ambition was in a lower 
 sphere ; it was neither encrusted by volcanic moun- 
 tains, nor composed of "green cheese/' only of a 
 parcel of brown sticks ; at least it was affirmed by the 
 worthy Dorcas that the first thing he ever cried for 
 was a rook's nest — a newly built one, on the top of a 
 churchyard elm, opposite her cottage. The rogue 
 could climb as soon or sooner than he could walk, 
 and to climb up trees seemed as natural to him as to 
 a squirrel, only that it was to pull down nests instead 
 of nuts. 
 
 Of where the nest of every bird was to be found he 
 seemed to have also an intuitive knowledge. Work 
 she "never so wisely,'" not a feathered mother could 
 e»scape his searching eye. The "sight-eluding" cell 
 of the tiny wren did not elude him. Vainty for him 
 might she suspend a curtain for concealment of her 
 nursery. The magpie's chevaux-de-frise of thorns 
 was no fortification against his determined will and 
 unshrinking fingers. Other enemies might the wily 
 titmouse hiss away from the house in the wall where 
 she hid her little ones, but vainly might she simulate 
 the serpent's voice for him who was endowed with 
 the serpent's cunning. In only one place of refuge 
 was she secure from his rapacious hand. This was 
 
THE TWO ELM TREES. 
 
 179 
 
 when she happened to choose for her infant asylum a 
 cavity, not in a wall, but in a tree, for to the hollow 
 of a tree the daring depredator of feathered house- 
 holds evinced a peculiar and strange antipathy. 
 From introducing his arm, much more his body, into 
 one of these vegetable caverns, he seemed to shrink 
 with horror. That repugnance to the interior of trees 
 might (like his love of climbing them for birds' nests) 
 have been born with him, but the probability is that 
 it was derived, like most antipathies, from an early 
 impression. Dorcas Parsons, whose educational ca- 
 pabilities (none perhaps of the strongest) had been 
 severely tried by the young cuckoo of her nest, her 
 son of the March wind, had been accustomed to call 
 in, in aid of tongue, if not of rod, the assistance of 
 the old elm, " Heavy-top.'' With a ponderous chair, 
 sometimes a piece of board, set up before the hole of 
 entrance, its spacious cavity had been often made to 
 serve the purpose of a dark closet — and never did 
 dark closet do its work of infant terrificcttion to 
 better or to worser purpose. The wild, daring, obsti- 
 nate urchin, who would have laughed at the birch, 
 cowered at the elm., and would leave its damp, rugged 
 recess trembling, though tearless ; silenced, though 
 not subdued. 
 
 N 2 
 
180 
 
 THE TWO ELM TREES. 
 
 The ever busy Dorcas had derived equal assistance 
 from old " Heavy-top/' though after another manner, 
 in her maternal guardianship of " daft Harry/^ 
 Throughout the course of his never-ending infancy 
 that tree had been to him what his tongue, had it 
 been endowed with speech, could hardly have ade- 
 quately tol A It was by turns his play- room, his 
 palace, his hermitage — the last most frequently. 
 Hour after hour would he occupy its interior, seated 
 on the earthen floor — his eyes most often downcast 
 to the same. Sometimes, however, they were uplifted 
 towards a skylight aperture, whence he could look 
 upon a joyous group of leaves, laughing in the sun, 
 or dancing in the breeze ; and sometimes, idly busy, 
 he would employ himself, chalk in hand, in scrawling 
 devices, shapeless, and, to all appearance, meaningless 
 as his own silent fancies, on the wooden walls of the 
 vegetable rotunda — carved already by decay. These 
 were his harmless practices when alone, and with no 
 eye upon him but that of Dorcas — lifted often from 
 her bit of needlework — as she sat at the cottage 
 window, or the door — so handy, both of them, for 
 keeping a look-out on the open portal of the tree. 
 
 But it was not always thus alone with his im- 
 prisoned spirit that dumb, "daft Harry'' made the 
 
THE TWO ELM TREES. 
 
 181 
 
 hollow elm his lodge of occupation. Although by 
 nature for loneliness constructed, he was sometimes 
 the centre — ay, and the merry one, of a merry circle. 
 This was when a ring of laughing boys, and romping 
 girls, would dance around and around old " Heavy- 
 top,'' while Harry, seated within, as monarch of their 
 revels, would smilingly look out, as if in pleased 
 acceptance of their noisy homage. The most, indeed, 
 of the village children seemed to entertain a sort of 
 deference, as well as liking, for the one among them 
 who was not of them. They loved to make him 
 little offerings of their best, and did their best to 
 please and propitiate the harmless creature, who 
 often, when the oldest, was the greatest child in their 
 assemblies. It is true there were a few exceptions to 
 this general rule of kindliness. Amongst the brutal 
 and the careless, even the idiot boy might be said to 
 have foes, as well as friends, in the little world about 
 him — with which it was so little he could have to do. 
 But surely the helpless and the witless one was not 
 without a friend at home — in the active, daring, 
 cunning brother that the wind had brought him. It 
 has been said already, that the chirping cuckoo came 
 betimes to lord it over the mute sparrow. Neverthe- 
 less, the young cuckoo (Japhet, "Gipsy Japhet,'' as 
 
182 
 
 THE TWO ELM TREES. 
 
 he was called commonly) did sometimes befriend, 
 after a fashion, his elder, but weaker nest-mate. If 
 a jibe or a jeer, a box or a blow, were aimed at witless 
 Harry, by other tongue, or other hand than his, woe 
 (from him) and peril to the tongue or hand that 
 aimed them. 
 
 This was known to Dorcas Parsons, and hence she 
 consoled herself with the thought, that, though Japhet 
 committed a multitude of sins, he possessed, at least, 
 a single virtue, the which (poor good-natured soul!) 
 she tried her hardest to stretch into a cloak so big as to 
 cover the whole of his offences. But that birds-nesting 
 boy was, in truth, the plague and torment of her Ufa 
 He was for ever breaking through all her feeble efforts 
 at restraint — breaking her windows, as well as other 
 people's, to get at the clay-built sheds of swallows — 
 breaking into plantations and pleasure-grounds for ob- 
 jects innumerable of his darling pastime; in particular, 
 to pull down golden wren's nests from the pinnacles of 
 silver firs — breaking the Sabbath, to the breaking of 
 feathered hearts of all descriptions — breaking from 
 school — breaking his braces — breaking through, at 
 knee and elbow, the trousers and the jackets, which 
 Dorcas was, for ever, trying to keep entire. Through 
 these, and the like enormities, he was, for ever, tor- 
 
THE TWO ELM TREES. 
 
 183 
 
 menting, and getting the good woman into hot water ; 
 but though he was the thorn in her side, the bitter 
 in her cup, the consumer of her hard-earned substance, 
 in fine, let us repeat, the cuckoo of her nest, yet she 
 could forgive him all, bear with him, almost love him 
 because, as she thought, he was kind to poor " daft 
 Harry/' Let us see, for ourselves, to what extent this 
 kindness was displayed 
 
 It is again the 31st of March — the tenth anniver- 
 sary of that eve of April, made memorable to Dorcas 
 Parsons by the visitation it brought and the onerous 
 legacy it left her. As such, it is "Gipsy JaphetV 
 birthday — no day of jubilee, God wot! to her who from 
 his birth had tended him ; but, for all that, it is to be 
 kept — for it is a part of that good woman's religion, 
 to say nothing of her profession, that birthdays should 
 be chronicled. She happens herself to have had, in the 
 morning, a call from home ; but she has made a cake 
 for the boys, and Japhet is to stay at home from school, 
 for once, by permission, instead of, as usual, on French 
 leave ; and Harry (under his protection, for at any rate 
 he is good to Harry) is to go out into the woods and 
 gather pussy willow catkins, and lamb's-tails, and 
 primroses, and wood-anemones, and (the remainder is 
 Japhet's own completion to the prospectus for the 
 
184 
 
 THE TWO ELM TREES. 
 
 day) — and it is to be a grand match of birds-nesting — 
 all the crack nesters are to be of the party — he that 
 can take the greatest number is to be king of the day 
 (crowned king), and Japhet means of course to be 
 himself the wearer of the crown. 
 
 It is a bright Spring morning, bright and mild ; 
 March has prepared himself to meet April, and the 
 village children (the girls in their best, because of the 
 cake, the boys ixx their worst, because of the birds- 
 nesting) are trooping to the tree of tryst, old " Heavy- 
 top,'' to meet there " daft Harry'' and dark Japhet, 
 their bold, clever, imperious, unbeloved leader — their 
 leader in every mischief he chose to lead in, though 
 most commonly in that which was to be the sport in 
 hand. 
 
 While the group is growing round the door of the 
 thatched cottage, let us penetrate its interior, and see 
 how the hero of the day is preparing for the day's 
 performance. 
 
 Our peep behind the scenes is into a little back- 
 room (parlour and kitchen), shining with neatness 
 and the morning sun. Its only occupants are the 
 two boys and a tame caged linnet, Harry's favourite 
 bird, the only spared captive of all Japhet's nesting 
 spoils, hardly spared, at hard entreaty; for Japhet, 
 
THE TWO ELM TREES. 
 
 185 
 
 after the manner of many other heroes, loved to 
 destroy for destroying's sake. Harry, seated in his 
 wooden chair, is being laden for the nonce with the 
 trappings of royalty, for, according to programme, he 
 is to wear the crown in abeyance till fate or prowess 
 should determine its possessor. An old blue gown of 
 Dorcas Parsons' supplying the royal purple, robes his 
 weak and shrunken extremities ; an old white tippet, 
 studded with rook's feathers, serves as substitute for 
 ermine, and a fantastic crown of plaited straw is even 
 now being placed upon his head by the hand of his 
 dresser, whose dark eye sparkles with something other 
 and less pleasing than mere childish glee, as he 
 surveys with satisfaction the now nearly completed 
 puppet of his dressing-up. 
 
 But the poor mute puppet looks not so complacent 
 The straw circlet, made for the maker's self, is small 
 for the large circumference of its present wearer's 
 head, and presses on the narrow projecting forehead, 
 most prominent of all his flat features. He raises his 
 weak white hand to push back the irksome diadem, 
 and at the involuntary gesture the hand of his tire- 
 man, strong and brown, is raised, too, and falls (is it 
 possible ?) in a blow on the cheek of helpless royalty. 
 The stroke is followed by a deep flush, hiding the 
 
186 
 
 THE TWO ELM TREES. 
 
 score of fingers, on the fair pale face, a convulsive 
 twitch of the underhung mouth, a twinkle of the 
 large blue eye, then all again is passive as a waxen 
 image. The crown is replaced, and the weak white 
 hand is not raised again to remove its pressure. 
 King Harry is now in truth diverted from the 
 burthen of his crown. His attention is attracted to 
 his pet linnet, who, ever since the blow dealt his 
 master, has never ceased chirping and endeavouring 
 with all its little might to burst its bars, as if wanting 
 to fly to his support. 
 
 As we look round the little apartment, we see, 
 amongst other pendants on its whitewashed walls, a 
 bit of glazed and glaring royalty — a coloured print of 
 one of the Henrys or Edwards. 
 
 This would seem to have served as a pattern for 
 the mock regalia of the puppet king, for the king- 
 maker has ever and anon been casting his eyes 
 towards the make-believe portrait He proceeds now 
 to invest his image with the collar, formed not 
 unskilfully of row upon row of many-coloured birds'- 
 eggs ; then places in one hand the ball and cross (a 
 carved turnip with a wooden superfix), in the other a 
 wooden sceptre ; and behold the automaton complete ! 
 
 The cottage Warwick has yet, however, to secure 
 
THE TWO ELM TREES. 
 
 187 
 
 (as best he may) his cottage Harry on the throne. 
 With this intent he passes a stout waistband round 
 the royal robe, under the ermine tippet, and fastens 
 it to the back of the wooden chair. With a look of 
 triumph, Japhet then dashes to the besieged door, 
 and returns presently with four stout boys to be the 
 royal bearers, also two stout poles on which to hoist, 
 secure, and carry the throne and its occupant. On 
 the first attempt to lift him a sound, expressive of 
 terror, issues from poor Harry's lips. A look from 
 his young keeper checks its repetition, but not its 
 echo, a note of alarm from the tame linnet, who, as 
 its master is borne off, tries to follow, and, as he looks 
 back, looks eagerly after him with its bead-like eye. 
 But what signifies the alarm of two such helpless, 
 speechless creatures, to the headstrong, noisy young 
 animals who are lords over them ? So away they 
 go, and a deafening shout greets the appearance of 
 the king at the cottage- door. The king, too (poor 
 puppet 1) presently forgets his terror, forgets his bird, 
 and smiles graciously on his assembled subjects. 
 "Now, march forwards to the wood!'' cries Japhet, 
 but the royal bearers linger, for the king is pointing 
 towards old "Heavy-top," and making signs significant 
 that it is his royal pleasure to hold his first court 
 
188 
 
 THE TWO ELM TREES. 
 
 within that wooden palace of his pleasaunce. " Carry 
 him up ! up with him ! Set him in the tree ! We'll 
 have a dance all round him!'' cry a multitude of 
 childish voices. " No, no ; on to the wood shouts 
 Japhet, in a tone of anger and command: but his 
 command is set at nought ; the king is obeyed 
 (strange phenomenon 1) before the king-maker, and 
 Harry, in despite of his imperious Warwick, is 
 enthroned, throne and all, in the old elm, his sub- 
 jects dancing, singing, shouting round him, and he 
 (his troubles and his terrors all forgotten) dancing on 
 his throne with glee to see them. 
 
 Dark Japhet looked his darkest. His scowl would 
 have withered anything except the spring buds and 
 the spring-time joy about him. That he saw he could 
 not wither, so, not to witness it, he went back into 
 the cottage. Lest, perhaps, in spite of himself, he 
 should look out at the front window, he returned to 
 the little back room, and there stood the evil-hearted 
 boy biting his lips as he heard the merriment without. 
 At the first sound of his footsteps Harry's linnet 
 began, as it always did, to flutter, and now, as he was 
 standing before the cage, it beat itself against the 
 wires as madly as if glared on by a cat. The boy 
 looked up for a moment angrily, then his frown re- 
 
THE TWO ELM TREES. 
 
 189 
 
 laxed into a smile that looked a hundred times more 
 ominous. Smiling still, he reached down the cage — 
 took out the bird — its wings fluttering — heart beating 
 — and presently — smiling all the while — returned it 
 to its late abode — its wings motionless — its little heart 
 at rest for ever. 
 
 Then Japhet returned to his company. King 
 Harry, and his subjects too, had had enough by this 
 time of old "Heavy-top,'' and were ready now to 
 follow his lead, to march onwards to the wood. That 
 was to be the ground of action and of contest, whence 
 the greatest hero, he, in other words, who should carry 
 the greatest amount of misery into scenes of happi- 
 ness, was to return, in lieu of the harmless king pro 
 tempore, the acknowledged monarch of the day. The 
 march of the sylvan marauders is one we hardly care 
 to follow, albeit through as pleasant a mile of lane, 
 and field, and coppice as ever the sun got up to touch 
 with brightness, or as ever nesting boys got up to 
 clothe with mourning. 
 
 It were no pleasant noting to mark how their 
 dark shadows fell murderously on the fresh green 
 grass — how the dew-drops were polluted under 
 their feet, "swift to shed blood,'' — how, with the 
 morning hymn of nature rose jarringly the pitiless. 
 
190 
 
 THE TWO ELM TREES. 
 
 exultant shout, on a glimpse, through the almost 
 leafless branches, of some pains-wrought nursery, 
 doomed (for pleasure) to destruction. 
 
 It had been settled that the marauding army was 
 not to break its ranks till arrival at a spot in the 
 wood, which was to be a central station. Through 
 force of attractions by the way, more powerful than 
 rule or ruler, this order was hardly kept with military 
 strictness. "Without, however, any wide divergence 
 from its path, or falling-off of numbers, the party 
 reached its sylvan halting-place. This was an area 
 around the trunk of that notable elm tree, not of the 
 village, but the wood — the solitary forbidding elm 
 which, as contrasted with the social, hospitable 
 " Heavy-top,'' has been already sketched. 
 
 It was introduced at the beginning to our readers' 
 notice under the name of " Dry-bones," but, on the 
 day of the grand birds-nesting, it had yet to acquire 
 that more popular than pleasing appellation ; neither 
 was it at that period quite such an awful, repulsive, 
 spectral individual of a tree as it has since become. 
 Its trunk displayed then no outward sign of hollow- 
 ness, at least to an observer on the ground, and 
 though its head was thin and straggling, its verdure 
 looked, in Summer, tolerably healthy. There was 
 
THE TWO ELM TREES. 
 
 191 
 
 then, indeed, nothing very remarkable about this 
 forest patriarch, except its enormous girth and the 
 excessive length of a single arm which, stretched 
 heavenwards, seemed to bid defiance to the light- 
 ning and the blast, invoking their terrors all the 
 while. It had not then, however, warned off from 
 its vicinity either the wood flowers, or the bees, 
 butterflies, and children which wood-flowers always 
 draw around them. So the great elm of the wood 
 was then^ next to the great elm of the village, a 
 general favourite, and a favourite place of rendezvous, 
 as it was on that day — a day of jubilee, but not for 
 the poor little building and nursing birds. 
 
 Well, our party is arrived. The puppet king is 
 deposited together with his throne under the hardly 
 shady shadow of the tree. Here he is to be left with 
 a suitable body-guard — with the girls too tender, and 
 the boys too little for the sport in hand — while the 
 bold nesters hence dispersing are to return hither 
 each with his spoil. Here the trophies are to be 
 displayed, and he who can exhibit the largest 
 number is to be declared king, and invested with the 
 regalia stripped from the block that bears it. 
 
 The destroyers go crashing through the under- 
 wood like young tigers in a jungle, or glide, noiseless 
 
192 
 
 THE TWO ELM TREES. 
 
 as serpents, along its narrow paths. Woe to the 
 tender parents now, in the early dearth of insect 
 provender, seeking far and wide for the dainty 
 morsels which so many of their little ones are not to 
 taste again ! And woe to the tender nestlings, now 
 fed, and warm, and happy, soon to be famished, cold, 
 dying, or dead ! 
 
 Now the nesters are departed we can look with 
 pleasure at the group they have left behind — a 
 residue from which the stoniest materials have been 
 sifted. King Harry knows that they are gone, nor 
 does he seem to lament the diminution of his court. 
 Believed from the dark authoritative eye of his 
 tyrant vizier, he pushes back that irksome crown, and 
 looks smilingly about him. A pretty little girl is 
 sitting at his feet weaving a primrose chain, another 
 added to the dozen she has made already and hung 
 round the neck of the puppet potentate, over his 
 bird's-egg collar. And then, a little way off is a 
 great girl, with plenty to be sure, both big and little, 
 to assist her, unpacking from a basket and spreading 
 out upon the mossy turf a motley array of hetero- 
 geneous eatables — bread and cheese, and a pot of 
 treacle, and a can of beer, and a bottle of milk, and 
 another of cowslip wine — and (gem of the collation) 
 
THE TWO ELM TREES. 
 
 193 
 
 the Dorcas cake, from which latter, as well as from 
 the bread and cheese, some mighty segments had 
 been cut already to fortify the nesters on their foray. 
 At this April end of March there are not wanting 
 brimstone butterflies, and tortoiseshells, and early 
 whites, flitting here and there over the nearly leafless 
 copsewood. Neither are there wanting little boys 
 and girls to chase them, but with never a chance to 
 catch them, which makes it pleasant sport. And 
 other of the happy little children are busy on their 
 hands and knees, rooting, like little pigs, for earth- 
 nuts, or pulling up the new Spring " lords and ladies," 
 or plucking primroses and violets, and wood ane- 
 mones, and the golden celandine, and chatting and 
 laughing, and singing as gaily and as innocently as 
 if they belonged not to a birds'-nesting race. And 
 the little birds, meanwhile, are singing and flitting 
 round them as fearless and as free as if boys, and 
 butcher-birds, and hawks had no existence. 
 
 So passed the hours of the pleasant mid-day, but 
 as the sun declined the hilarity of the childish party 
 sank with it. The great girls got cold, and dull, and 
 tired ; the little ones sleepy, or fractious and un- 
 manageable, while the eldest child of the company, 
 the poor King Harry, grew restless, and looked 
 
 VOL. I. O 
 
194 
 
 THE TWO ELM TREES. 
 
 anxiously about, as if looking for somebody who was 
 not there. It might be for his stern grandee, his 
 cuckoo brother, or more likely for his kind old 
 grannie. She, for her part, was already on the look- 
 out for him, there where she was standing on the 
 rooty platform of old " Heavy-top,'' her spectacles 
 raised, her work in one hand, the other lifted to 
 shade her eyes from the low sunbeams, or to wipe 
 them from the moisture that would now and then 
 impede her sight. It was not the sunbeams that 
 were causing those salt drops to gather, but it was 
 the thought of the poor dead linnet (whatever could 
 have come to it ?) which she had put carefully away 
 that Harry might not see it when he came home. 
 At length shouts are heard approaching from various 
 quarters of the wood, and dashing through bush and 
 bramble, " Hip, hip, hurrah \" returns the first 
 nester. He throws five empty nests upon the 
 ground — two he keeps in hand — one, a hedge- 
 sparrow's, full of bright blue eggs; the other, a 
 thrush's, full of gaping, shivering, unfledged little 
 ones. The cradle lined so carefully with clay as 
 well as feathers, has been lined in vain for them. 
 The girls who gather round are all pity, it is true, 
 for the motherless brood, and some try their best 
 
THE TWO ELM TREES. 
 
 195 
 
 (but oh ! how vainly) to supply their mother's 
 place. 
 
 One by one the boys now come dropping in, each 
 with his quota of the day's spoil. What specimens 
 had they collected of patient toil and loving skill, 
 each after its kind so cunningly, so carefully, so fitly, 
 so elegantly wrought. But what to the spoilers 
 their beauty, their ingenuity, their adaptation, what 
 anything but their number ; and, in point of number, 
 the nester who had returned first carried it hollow 
 over his companions. The hero of the day (dark 
 Japhet) was, however, absent still, and the com- 
 petitors had yet to wait another hour looking for, 
 and dreading his return. Some of them began 
 prowling again in the adjacent coppice, in hopes of 
 adding to their acquisitions before he came. At 
 length, as the sun was nearly setting, he made his 
 appearance. He came in with no uproarious shout, 
 but there was a quiet sort of triumph in his dark 
 eye, and a confident compression of his thin lips. He 
 looked quite a Buonapartean hero. He had never 
 cared to bring either birds or eggs — all, quick or 
 quickening, had been dashed reckless on the ground. 
 He wanted only nests — ^nests suflficient to purchase 
 him a straw crown for an hour's wear — and he had 
 
 o 2 
 
196 
 
 THE TWO ELM TREES. 
 
 got them, so at least lie felt perfectly assured. 
 Taking them one by one from his pockets, he laid 
 them in a row upon the turf. They numbered 
 eight — and he looked round defyingly, as though to 
 say, " There now ! Who can beat me V Not a boy 
 there, could, and not one attempted rivalry, but 
 stood silent and crestfallen about him. 
 
 " But Willie has got seven — that I know — if not 
 more,'' cried a little girl, his sister, who was trying 
 to warm the shivering thrushes in her bosom. 
 " Here's one" — showing her chirping brood — " and 
 there's the other six," pointing to them as they lay 
 heaped together at her feet. " Willie brought them 
 in first, and gave them to me to keep while he went 
 into the woods again." 
 
 Seven isn't eight though — besides, there's not 
 six upon the ground — it's a lie!" cried Japhet, 
 angrily — but his words and looks were hardly heeded, 
 the attention of all being at that moment drawn off 
 to Willie himself. He was standing beside an old 
 oak-tree, not far off, one arm thrust into a hole in its 
 trunk, while he beckoned his companions with the 
 other. He was presently surrounded by the whole 
 group, with the exception of poor King Harry, who 
 attempting to follow had been tripped up by his 
 
THE TWO ELM TREES. 
 
 197 
 
 petticoat robes, and the king-maker, who, never 
 moving to raise him from the ground, stood sullenly 
 aloof. Those of the children that got nearest to the 
 old oak could hear very plainly a noise — a sort of 
 hissing and puffing, which proceeded from the hole 
 into which the nester's arm was plunged. " It's a 
 snake ! it's a snake I" cried at once half a dozen of 
 the listening party, and the girls, every one of them, 
 ran shrieking away, except Willie's sister, who laid 
 hold of his jacket to pull him from the tree. But 
 Willie was no such tyro in his profession as to be 
 frightened by a sound like that. He only thrust his 
 arm deeper into the cavity, and presently drew from 
 out it — not a speckled snake, nor a silvery adder — 
 but a curious longish bag, neatly woven with hair 
 and moss, and beautifully embroidered with many- 
 coloured lichens. Its only opening was a small hole 
 on one side, and from thence proceeded still, as the 
 boy triumphantly displayed it, a reiterated sound — 
 hiss ! hiss ! puff ! puff ! came louder and louder — 
 a demonstration clearly of anger and alarm from the 
 disturbed occupant of the suspended hammock. 
 Eage and stratagem were doing their utmost to 
 protect the weak from the power of the strong, but 
 they could no more. Terror overpowered both, and, 
 
198 
 
 THE TWO ELM TREES. 
 
 by terror driven, out darts from the hole a long- 
 tailed titmouse, leaving behind, not, happily, a help- 
 less brood, but a dozen or more of incipient nestlings 
 hidden in the egg-shell, and buried in a bed of 
 softest feathers. " This makes eight, at all events 1'^ 
 cried Willie, dashing forward to unite his new acqui- 
 sition to the heap of nests, together with the thrush's 
 in his sister's keeping. " That's as many as J aphet's/' 
 said many of the children, but in an under tone, 
 rejoicing in their hearts that the tyrant of their 
 sports was likely to come short of his anticipated 
 triumph. The nests were re-counted — eight exactly 
 taken by each — J aphet and Willie. 
 
 Numbers, as well as facts, are stubborn things, and 
 the hero bit his lips. " But it's not fair," said he ; 
 
 mine were got first, and I'm the winner." Not a 
 voice was raised, though, in support of his pretensions. 
 Willie was liked as much as Japhet was feared. 
 ^^Well," growled the disappointed claimant, "the 
 day's not near over (the sinking sun belied his as- 
 sertion), there's plenty of light to find another." So 
 saying, he cast his hawk's glance round and about, 
 but to no purpose, till, looking upwards, perhaps, 
 despairingly, his eye rested on the very highest of all 
 the objects then discernible beneath the sky — the 
 
THE TWO ELM TREES. 
 
 199 
 
 top, namely, of that long uplifted arm of the great 
 elm-pollard. Not another eye, perhaps, save his 
 own would have been able, in the fading light, to 
 detect anything at the end of the branch but a 
 tangled mass of branchlets ; but he had more than 
 the sight of a boy — the sight, as we have said, of a 
 hawk for a bird, of a cuckoo for a nest — and a nest 
 he accordingly perceived, seated amidst the forkings 
 at the bough's extremity. Another half-minute saw 
 him hanging, like a squirrel or a cat, betwixt that 
 coveted object and the ground, with several score of 
 eager eyes upturned to watch his progress. He was 
 half-way up the aspiring arm, which was bare of 
 branchlets nearly to its summit, when a large bird 
 (one of the stragglers, doubtless, of the morning's 
 rout) flew past, flapping her wings nearly in his face. 
 The startled climber slackened for a moment the grip 
 of hands and feet, and slid to the bottom of the giant 
 branch where it sprung from the knobby head of the 
 pollard trunk. Here he found a stand ; but, glancing 
 downwards at his feet, he perceived what the gazers 
 from below could not, that he was standing on the 
 edge of an abyss — a dark opening into the body of 
 the tree. The boy started, turned, and took a re- 
 newed grasp of the branch above him, made an- 
 
200 
 
 THE TWO ELM TREES. 
 
 other effort, but, as it seemed, a very feeble one, to 
 reascend, then muttering, " It's too dark now,'' let 
 himself drop down the rugged trunk upon the ground. 
 
 So the crown of straw was yet in abeyance. It 
 was to be awarded to him of the two foremost com- 
 petitors who should make ipiize first of a ninth bird's- 
 nest on the morrow. 
 
 The last tinge of red had by this time faded from 
 the western sky. The little army of nesters and its 
 great army of followers got under march for home. 
 King Harry — by the chances of the day, king to the 
 end of it — was reseated, resecured, upon his wooden 
 throne, and rehoisted on the shoulders of his bearers, 
 the king-maker walking moodily by his side. 
 
 Altogether, the nesting party, in its weary, dissatis- 
 fied return (how contrasted with its joyous, eager 
 setting forth !) was not without its moral to pic-nickers 
 and plunderers, big as well as little. 
 
 Just as the children arrived at the outskirts of the 
 wood, whom should they meet coming to look after 
 them but Dorcas Parsons, in a prodigious fuss, and 
 meaning to be in a prodigious passion at having to 
 look after them at all. And yet, when it came to the 
 point, she hardly knew how to be angry, or whom with. 
 It was clear she had only a right to scold her own 
 
THE TWO ELM TREES. 
 
 201 
 
 two boys; but, as to scolding dumb, "daft Harry,"' what 
 was the justice or the use of that, or even of looking 
 cross at him? a thing she could seldom find in her 
 heart to do — certainly not now, and when she was 
 thinking of his poor linnet, lying dead at home. Then 
 as for Japhet, there was never a bit of good in scold- 
 ing him — besides, it was his birthday — besides, with 
 all his faults, " he was kind to Harry'' — that she did 
 believe ; and now, as she saw him -walking so close 
 by his side, and heard that it was he who had dressed 
 him up so finely, all, as she was persuaded, to give 
 him pleasure, she felt that, instead of scolding, she 
 could kiss him. She had not, it is true, perceived 
 then, for it was too dark, the unlawful appropriation 
 of her blue gown, or how it had got rent and mangled 
 through its elevation into a royal robe. We cannot 
 say how the good woman demeaned herself under this 
 painful discovery when revealed to her by the light of 
 her dip candle. We only know that she set before 
 the boys a glorious supper, to which they did but 
 sorry justice, and gave to each of them a hearty kiss, 
 when they were both in bed in the little back chamber 
 behind her own. Into this dormitory we shall now 
 take leave to enter, but not so early by some several 
 hours as its youthful occupants. Relieved from the 
 
202 
 
 THE TWO ELM TREES. 
 
 burthen of royalty. King Harry is fast asleep. The 
 moon is shining through the casement on his face, 
 and, fair and placid, it is a face almost as childlike 
 now as on that night eleven years ago, which had 
 brought him, on the wings of the storm, his present 
 bed-fellow, the cuckoo brother of his then so peaceful 
 nest. Japhet is awake. He is sitting up in bed, 
 leaning on his elbow, and carefully scanning Harry's 
 countenance. Seeming satisfied at the result of his 
 scrutiny, he gets up softly, dresses himself, all but to 
 his shoes, with equally quiet caution, creeps round to 
 Harry's side of the bed, his steps noiseless but for the 
 creaking of the old uneven floor, looks again at the 
 sleeper sleeping on, stoops, touches with his lips the . 
 slumberer's forehead, and leaves upon it (is it possible?) 
 a drop that had hang sparkling in the moonlight on 
 his own dark eyelash. By some rod of mysterious 
 influence the rock is smitten. Japhet now approaches 
 the door betwixt the two chambers, which is not 
 quite closed — listens. All is silent but Dorcas Parsons' 
 clock — the clock whose white face is looking down 
 upon hers from the wall opposite her bed. 
 
 It is now striking twelve. The boy waits till the 
 last reverberation of the last stroke has died away, 
 then, all being silent as before, enters the adjoining 
 
THE TWO ELM TREES. 
 
 203 
 
 chamber. Here he lingers for a moment, whether to 
 look at the good Dorcas in her nightcap we cannot 
 say, then creeps more carefully than ever down the 
 stairs which lead direct into the little back room 
 below. He hurries through it, taking only one guilty 
 glance at the nail from which the cage of the dead 
 linnet has been taken. As little does he loiter in the 
 front apartment — only long enough to draw back as 
 softly as softly the bolt which, for protection of the 
 shop, has been added of late years to the lockless door. 
 Then lifting and letting fall the latch with equal 
 caution, he stands upon the pathway under the 
 chequered shadow of old " Heavy-top.'^ 
 
 There he only stays to put on the shoes which he 
 has brought down in his hand, and then away, away 
 by the bright moon-light, down the road, over the 
 fields, through the wood, on he runs till he finds him- 
 self under " Heavy-top's'' sylvan solitary brother, the 
 trysting-tree of the yester-morning's pastime. 
 
 How silent now and peaceful is the recent scene of 
 childish merriment and childish rivalry in evil. April 
 is arrived, and her advent is mild and gracious as 
 becomes a fair and gentle portress opening the gates 
 of Spring. Her breathings, too quiet to wave the 
 budding branches, just suffice to stir them and to 
 
204 
 
 THE TWO ELM TREES. 
 
 strew the ground with (earliest of April showers) the 
 golden scales cast from the buds in bursting. 
 
 But, though April has thus appeared with a placid 
 smile, she is giving token already of the tears that 
 are about to follow. Dark clouds are rising in the 
 west, and curtain the stars as they float slowly 
 upwards. The moon is still, however, at its brightest 
 and its highest It silvers the straggling head of the 
 great elm-tree, and reveals (ah, too clearly!) the 
 moss-wrought cradle enclosed in the branching fingers 
 of its giant arm. 
 
 IN one of our readers can require, we presume, to 
 be informed of what it was that had brought the 
 ambitious young nester to the spot where he was now 
 standing. He had planned to get there before any- 
 one was stirring. He had lain awake to get there, 
 and there he is, while Willie, his close competitor, 
 is sleeping as quietly in his bed as the half-fledged 
 family above in their high-hung hammock. There 
 (his prize) it hangs in sight, within easy reach of his 
 supple, vigorous limbs. Yet Japhet lingers at the 
 tree's-foot, perhaps to take breath, perhaps to take 
 heart, for he seems by his aspect to be somewhat out 
 of both. 
 
 At length, however, he begins to ascend, the scrape 
 
THE TWO ELM TREES. 
 
 205 
 
 of his nailed shoes against the rugged trunk harshly 
 audible amidst the quiet harmonies of night. His 
 breath, and strength, and courage, if at fault for a 
 moment, seem now entirely restored He has reached 
 the knobby circumference of the perforated trunk, 
 takes a grip, firm and cat-like, of the ascending 
 branch, and now, with never a frightened bird abroad 
 to startle him, not even a bat, a beetle, or a moth 
 there upon the wing to come across him, he wins his 
 way bravely upwards. The way is won ! 
 
 With a foot raised, and resting on a fork of the 
 lofty branch, he braces his left arm tightly round it, 
 raises his right, and — ah ! for the brooding mother ' 
 ah ! for the brooded little ones ! — has got them in his 
 clutch, and drags them from their place. Even 
 maternal watchfulness is now put off its guard. The 
 poor feathered parent, thus suddenly caught napping, 
 flies away before she well knows what she is about — 
 flies she knows not whither — only away, away 
 through the sky of night, from the deserted objects 
 of her love and care. But what of that ? Let her 
 go, the paltry little chaffinch, no matter where ! Our 
 hero, the king of birds'-nesters, has performed his 
 feat. No hand now can baulk him of the prize. No 
 head but his will be encircled by the crown of straw. 
 
306 
 
 THE TWO ELM TREES. 
 
 " Hurrah \" he shouts triumphantly, and glides like 
 lightning down the arm of the tree. 
 
 The curtain of cloud has by this time reached the 
 moon, and sudden darkness shrouds the further 
 descent of the successful climber. We can see no 
 more of him — can only hear a rustle and a clash of 
 boughs, a snap as of some dead and brittle branch. 
 A few other sounds, strange, undefined, and muffled, 
 and now all is silent — silent as when J aphet's foot- 
 steps first invaded the quiet of that moonlit scene. 
 * * * * ^■ 
 
 A singular occurrence took place in the village of the 
 elm-trees on the same first of April. Not an April- 
 fool was there made. All the children, young and 
 old, seemed to have forgotten the annual custom of 
 the day, so much were their attentions occupied by 
 the commencement of a nine days' wonder — a wonder 
 which began within the elm cottage and spread from 
 under the boughs of " Heavy-top to the furthest ex- 
 tremity of the hamlet. The wonder was — What had 
 become of Dorcas Parsons' Japhet ? Nobody knew, 
 and, though so many wondered, few cared except the 
 widow herself, who certainly had no great reason to 
 lament his absence. One only circumstance threw 
 what was supposed to be a glimmer of light on the 
 
THE TWO ELM TREES. 
 
 207 
 
 mystery of the boy's disappearance. On the night 
 or early morning of his departure, somebody, return- 
 ing from a fair, had seen a female gipsy loitering 
 under the boughs of " Heavy-top,'' and looking up at 
 the cottage casements. Perhaps it was a stretch of 
 ingenuity to connect this in nowise remarkable oc- 
 currence with the lad's fate, but to the ingenuity of 
 gossip it was very easy. 
 
 Besides, when gossip made the incident known to 
 Dorcas Parsons, it became to gossip perfectly clear 
 that she (the said Dorcas) never doubted but what 
 the coming of the woman and the going of the boy 
 had something (somehow) to do with one another. 
 
 Be this as it might, the widow was not inconsolable 
 for very long under the gain which (strange as it may 
 seem) she did at first persuade herself to be some- 
 thing of a loss. " Poor fellow," she would sometimes 
 say or sigh, " he was a sad little dog for mischief, 
 getting me for everlasting into trouble ; that there's 
 no denying; but then he was a great comfort and 
 quite a protector to poor Harry," which Harry, on 
 his part, was quite unable to gainsay. Times there 
 were, too, when the latter would really seem to miss 
 his dark-eyed companion, and look inquiringly about, 
 as if in search of him. Nevertheless, from the time 
 
208 
 
 THE TWO ELM TREES, 
 
 nearly of Japhet's disappearance, there commenced 
 visible improvement in Harry's looks and demeanour. 
 His glance grew freer, his cheek ruddier, his laugh 
 more frequent. The poor mute sparrow seemed, in 
 short, to have recovered room and liberty to plume, 
 and strut, and stretch his wings, now that his cuckoo 
 brother had taken flight from the invaded nest . . . 
 
 Once more let us return to the wood and to the 
 great solitary elm. Since the early April morning 
 when we were last in this same spot. Summer has 
 been twice here, twice has she apparelled the trees in 
 general in full suits of variegated green, and the old 
 pollard in such scanty drapery as has been its wear 
 for many a season. In other words, it is a year and 
 a quarter since Japhet disappeared. 
 
 The scene is of course more green and glowing 
 than on the day of the grand match of nesting. In 
 other respects one might almost, on a cursory glance, 
 fancy that day to have returned. Here is assembled 
 the same group nearly, of merry boys and girls, their 
 childish faces only (like the leaves and flowers) more 
 expanded. Here is the rude pic-nic spread upon the 
 turf — and here is King Harry in his robes and chair 
 of state, looking like ruler of the feast. His features 
 are still but little changed — his royal raiment hardly 
 
THE TWO ELM TREES. 
 
 209 
 
 changed at all — and no wonder! for, even to the 
 appropriated blue gown, it has been preserved care- 
 fully, just as it was new fangled by Japhet's fingers 
 (aye, and for Japhet's sake!) by the tender-hearted 
 Dorcas Parsons. She has now, for the first time since 
 the nester disappeared, permitted it to be brought 
 into the light of day. And why ? Because it is (not 
 Japhet's) but dumb Harry's day of birth. Therefore 
 it is that Harry has been reinvested with the 
 " purple" of cotton print — the " ermine'' of white 
 calico and rook's feathers, the crown of straw, the 
 collar of bird's-eggs — all just as they were before, 
 only that the sceptre, then a palm branch, because it 
 was Spring, is now a bulrush, because it is Summer ; 
 and that the ball is made of a new turnip, because 
 the old one is turned brown and shrivelled. 
 
 In the central object of this sylvan scene, namely, 
 the great oak pollard, the lapse of fifteen months has 
 wrought one noticeable change — like the hoUowness 
 of a hypocrite exposed through the imbecility of age, 
 the hoUowness of the tree has become apparent 
 through the progress of decay. An opening has 
 appeared at the bottom of the trunk ; it is only, 
 however, very recent, and not a creature (in the 
 human form) has crept yet through the newly opened 
 
 VOL. L P 
 
210 
 
 THE TWO ELM TREES. 
 
 portal — a portal, by the way, which looks somewhat 
 low and narroy/ for anything in that shape " divine/' 
 unless it were Oberon, his queen, or members of their 
 fairy train. To judge, however, from the condition 
 (all barkless and discoloured) of that portion of the 
 trunk which surrounds the orifice, it would be an 
 easy matter to enlarge it. Whether or not, it is 
 intended on the present occasion to make it a royal 
 entrance for a potentate more substantial than King 
 Oberon, to wit, King Harry. He it is who is to take 
 first possession of that unexplored recess, and, as 
 with the rotunda of old " Heavy-top,"' to keep state 
 within, while his satellites encompass him with re- 
 volving dance and revelry. 
 
 ^ En attendant this concluding ceremonial, right 
 merry in the greenwood are both king and court — 
 sceptre, ball, and diadem thrown aside upon the 
 grass, robe girt conveniently about him, dumb Harry, 
 with a little knot of followers, is taking his pleasure ; 
 pleased, to all appearance, as any child or bird of all 
 the company. Yes, he looks as happy as if, hke 
 them, he could express his happiness in prattle and 
 in song — as happy as if, like them, he could hear the 
 chorus of mingled voices which, from ground, tree, 
 and sky, are uniting in the hymn of praise — a hynni 
 
THE TWO ELM TREES. 
 
 211 
 
 in which (can we doubt it?) the speechless worshipper 
 is taking part. 
 
 Truly, aught but praise and happiness were out of 
 place in a season and a scene like this — here, where 
 are met together so many things of the loveliest, the 
 purest, the sweetest, the most joyous that earth is 
 blessed with. Bright sunshine, pleasant shade, flowers, 
 bees, butterflies, birds, children (gems of creation), 
 these are all here collected and enclosed in a cabinet 
 of living verdure. And (what is a very pleasant 
 feature of the scene) the children and the birds are 
 not met to-day to torment and be tormented — to 
 destroy and be destroyed, to be amused, the one 
 at expense of the other's misery. There is no match 
 of birds-nesting to mar this Summer holiday ; 
 nesters are of the party, but they are few, and nests 
 are few also, though birds in full feather are plentiful 
 as trees in full leaf. 
 
 There is plenty to do without invading the homes 
 of the helpless. Every creature here (not alone the 
 little sprig of humanity) is busy, as well as happy, 
 and busy, much after the same manner — a notable 
 evidence amidst a thousand, that all compose, or are 
 intended to do so, one great united family of the one 
 Great Father. We cannot follow the children as 
 
 p 2 
 
212 
 
 THE TWO ELM TREES. 
 
 they scatter through the wood, but, if we were able, 
 we should be certain to hear some singing, like the 
 birds — see others climbing, like the squirrels — others 
 sucking honey out of flower-cups and flagons, like 
 the butterflies and bees — others making mounds of 
 earth, or mimic houses of stones and sticks, building 
 up like the great wood ants about them — and others, 
 again, pulling down their own work, or the work of 
 others, like — nothing but their own little human 
 selves ! In these, their diversions manifold, we must 
 leave our holiday makers to themselves. Suffice it, 
 for conclusion of our story, that we meet them once 
 more as they reassemble round the great wood elm- 
 tree. 
 
 Here dumb Harry is to put on again "the King'' 
 and his regalia. The latter, in its added splendour, 
 gives sufiicient evidence that the wood flowers have 
 not all been plucked for nothing. The crown of straw 
 is enriched by a many-coloured garland of blue 
 veronica, and red cuckoo-flowers, and golden butter- 
 cups; and wreaths of the same are intermingled with 
 the rows of bird's-eggs in the collar. Even the trunk 
 of the old, rough, frowning elm has been made to 
 smile for the nonce in festoons of Summer flowers. 
 The mute idol, or seeming idol, of the day is now 
 
THE TWO ELM TREES. 
 
 213 
 
 prepared to enter into his new pagodal palace; but 
 his giddy followers have, till just this moment, entirely 
 forgotten that its entrance has yet to be prepared for 
 him. Two stout-armed urchins set to work vigorously 
 with sticks and stones to enlarge into a portal what 
 Time has only made a perforation ; but, for all the 
 fragile aspect of the surrounding trunk, it yields by 
 no means easily to their repeated blows. As stroke 
 follows upon stroke, the great vegetable shell returns 
 a hollow sound, repeated in hollow echoes. There is 
 something almost sepulchral in their tone, as if that 
 heavy hammering were to nail down some sylvan 
 giant in his coffin, or to exhume him from the same. 
 A sudden gloom has come over the scene, just now so 
 glowing, for the sun has sunk below the tops of the 
 surrounding trees, and left the area round the elm in 
 shadow. Only one gleam of yellow light finds 
 entrance; and, as it glances on the furrowed trunk of 
 the aged, half-dead pollard, and the flowery garland 
 that entwines it, they remind us of an aged, shrivelled 
 corpse, made hideous by a funeral wreath. 
 
 Stroke upon stroke the boys continue to batter on. 
 A rattle from within, as of falling fragments, responds 
 occasionally to their blows ; but the portal, though 
 enlarged, is still low and narrow. Well, low and 
 
214 
 
 THE TWO ELM TREES. 
 
 narrow it must remain, for the arms of the assailants 
 ache, and their patience, as well as the patience of 
 the lookers-on, is tired out. Besides, it is growing 
 late. It is time nearly to wind up the revels, and 
 the king of them must be satisfied, like kings before 
 him, to stoop for assumption of his seat of dignity. 
 He is nothing loth ; and, ball and sceptre thrown 
 aside upon the grass, he creeps, robed and crowned, 
 into the cavity of the tree. When seated in fashion 
 of an Indian potentate, his entire figure just illumined 
 by that sinking ray of sunlight is clearly exhibited 
 against the void behind, and the figure does well 
 enough for a centrepiece to the living circle which 
 begins to form. Its links of hand within hand are 
 soon complete, and mingled voices, shrill and loud 
 enough to waken the echoes of the wood and the 
 birds already roosting in its deep recesses, begin a 
 gleeful chorus. " Round and round the elm-tree" 
 shout the singers, and round and round wheel the 
 dancers, slow at first, then fast and faster, till in the 
 rapid whirl the central tree and seated figure seem 
 whirling too, then lose all form and feature. 
 
 Round and round still sing they — round and round 
 still go they ; but now, as tired voices and tired feet 
 begin to fail, slow and slower goes the circle, till the 
 
THE TWO ELM TREES. 
 
 215 
 
 rugged trunk and straw-crowned head are visible 
 again before the giddy gazers. But hark! What 
 rises so shrilly above the lowering song? The scream 
 of a frightened girl. And wherefore does the song 
 cease, while shriek upon shriek of childish voices 
 follow in its room? What means it? and why does 
 the circle break and fall to pieces, its disjointed links 
 all falling back, backwards to the very limit of the 
 copse-bound area, the elm only and its single occupant 
 left standing in the midst? 
 
 Now, whatever has the elm-tree done to cause this 
 panic? or what its royal occupant, to distance thus 
 abruptly his surrounding satellites? Only one of 
 them (the frightened girl) has seen, and few enough 
 of them can tell. As for poor King Harry, he knows 
 as little as any one about the electric shock, of which, 
 nevertheless, he has been conductor. Now he is 
 creeping quietly from out of his cavernous recess, only 
 with more embarrassment than on his entrance, be- 
 cause he is now encumbered with two additional 
 insignia of his mock majesty, the sceptre and the 
 ball. But how? Our eyesight surely, or the fading 
 light, deceives us, for he left them both upon the 
 grass, and there they are lying still — the turnip ball 
 and bulrush sceptre. Something, however, he has 
 
216 
 
 THE TWO ELM TREES. 
 
 got hold of to replace them — some fragments he must 
 have picked up amongst the rotting debris of the 
 elm's interior. Now — now, as he advances, holding 
 up so proudly his novel acquisitions, one in either 
 hand, we can distinguish plainly what all see now — 
 what the frightened girl saw first — the new ball and 
 new sceptre with which the elm has furnished him. 
 The ball is a human skull of small dimensions; the 
 sceptre, a corresponding arm-bone, with hand attached, 
 and the fleshless fingers are clutched still around a 
 bird's-nest — the lichen-covered nest of a chaffinch — 
 neat, firm, perfect as on that early dawn of April, 
 when it became the prize of the ambitious nester! 
 
VL 
 
 VOICES m THE AIE COJSTCEENING THE 
 WOELD'S SHOW. 
 
 Tout parle dans I'univers ; 
 II n'est rien qui n'ait son langue." 
 
 La Fontaine. 
 
 The Great Exhibition had been open for weeks — 
 months. All the novelties of the world, assembled 
 in an area of eighteen acres, were beginning to get 
 old, and the world was beginning to complain (what 
 a grumbling world it is !) that there was nothing new 
 left to look at betwixt the equator and the poles. 
 Everybody, in short, everybody, that is, in the shape 
 of man, woman, and child (saving the penniless who 
 
218 
 
 VOICES IN THE AIR 
 
 could not pay for peeping), had looked into the glass 
 show-box, looked at, or overlooked, everything therein, 
 and in every tongue there had been said about it 
 everything that man, woman, and child could possibly 
 say. 
 
 As human invention seemed exhausted in the 
 works under the crystal, so human speech seemed 
 fairly spent in the words that had been spoke con- 
 cerning them. Yet still the talk was of nothing else ; 
 and though one could hardly (with reason) grow 
 tired of looking at the world's performances, one 
 began to get weary (with reason, or without) of 
 hearing the world's incessant chatter about its own 
 doings. That began to sound vain-glorious, and as 
 if the world had forgotten that there were other 
 doings in the universe besides its own. Visitors, not 
 merely from foreign countries, but from foreign 
 worlds, seemed wanting to remind the earth of this 
 seemingly forgotten fact. One could hardly help 
 wishing for a few guests from some other planet — 
 from the glowing regions of Mercury or the sun- 
 remote climes of Saturn, to reprove the impertinent 
 egotism of the earth, assembled as one man, and also 
 to amuse us with a few observations, quite original, 
 on man's collected performances. 
 
CONCERNING THE WORLD^S SHOW. 219 
 
 Such visitors are not at all unlikely to be present 
 at exhibitions of futurity, for who can reasonably 
 doubt but that improved intercourse betwixt all the 
 nations of the world is leading the way to commenced 
 intercourse betwixt all the planets of the solar system ? 
 Just yet, however, it is early to expect anything of the 
 sort, and this was suggestive of the thought whether 
 there might not be upon the earth itself, or about 
 and above it, certain bodies, to say nothing of spirits, 
 whose voices, if they were but heard, might prove a 
 tolerable check to the mtolerable exclusiveness of 
 men of earth, serving to remind them that there is 
 some amount of skill and industry, even in their own 
 world, besides their own ; also an exhibition, always 
 on view, of industrial products stamped with the per- 
 fection towards which theirs are only creeping, and 
 without whose assistance their own vaunted show 
 would have been shorn of half its splendour. 
 
 " What I" exclaimed (so it seemed, in answer to our 
 musing) the voice of the nations united as one man — 
 a swollen, pufifed-up, compound individual, a man 
 made up of all men — " what, pray, and who but we 
 have had anything to do with this glorious, magnifi- 
 cent, incomparable thing of things ? Who but we, its 
 originators, artificers, exhibitors, spectators — who?'' 
 
220 
 
 VOICES IN THE AIR 
 
 Thus arrogantly queried (so it seemed in the hearing 
 of our fancy) this magniloquent representative of all 
 the nations of the earth, and he was answered to the 
 following purport by voices in the air. 
 
 VOICES OF THE BIRDS. 
 
 It was early morning — a morning in August, '51. 
 The sun was rising on the Crystal Palace, but neither 
 the world in London, nor the London world, nor the 
 London fog, had risen with the sun. All, therefore, 
 round and about it looked tolerably correspondent in 
 clearness and purity with the glittering edifice, its 
 sashes streaming with dew ; while drops of the same 
 (shed as if for very pity) were sparkling on the blades 
 of grass, few and foot-worn, surviving yet from the 
 trample of the world. 
 
 Not an animate thing was visible except the 
 wakeful birds, who were assembled in extraordinary 
 numbers and variety on the tops of the venerable 
 elms and plane-trees of the park — solid standards of 
 ages surrounding the glass-blown structure of a day ! 
 
 A Babel of biped tongues was proceeding from the 
 tree-top towers, which seemed, for the nonce, appro- 
 priated entirely as galleries for debate — not one left 
 as a gallery for music. Foremost and loudest amidst 
 
CONCERNING THE WORLD^S SHOW. 221 
 
 the din of chatter came the voices of a company of 
 rooks, who, with all the rest of the assembly, were 
 discussing (as was evident even by the turn of their 
 heads and the twist of their necks) the intent and 
 purpose of the monster building, whose glassy roof of 
 ridges lay like an undulating sea beneath them. The 
 building was clearly a prodigious eyesore in their 
 sight — an object of their excessive indignation. 
 " There ! exclaimed a sable orator amongst the 
 excited group, '^behold there a novel, an unprece- 
 dented, an unheard-of encroachment by our enemy, 
 man, on our prescriptive and long admitted rights ! 
 Those tree tops (and here the speaker inclined his 
 glossy poll towards the arched roof of the transept), 
 that group of elms free to us from generation to 
 generation — for meeting, for warring, for loving, for 
 building, for rearing — now wrested, every twig of them, 
 from the grasp of our claws, covered in by — what 
 shall we call it ? — a canopy of ice, or some mysterious 
 substance which deprives us entirely of our power — 
 our privilege of access ! That spot of turf, whereon, 
 for summers without number, we and our forefathers 
 have been accustomed to feed — to pick up on morn- 
 ings such as these the luscious dew-worms — to pull 
 out the chafer grubs — morsels of melting fatness ! 
 
222 
 
 VOICES IN THE AIR 
 
 That, our favourite piece of pasture, enclosed also in 
 this inexplicable manner from the tread of our accus- 
 tomed feet ! What, friends, shall we say to a pro- 
 ceeding such as this ? a demonstration of such glaring 
 hostility to the rights and liberties of rooks V 
 
 A show of great white beaks, and a double show of 
 great black wings, gaping and cawing, and shaking 
 and flapping in uproarious anger and applause, gave 
 answer to the orator's harangue. " Yes, my fellow- 
 sufferers,'' he continued in a voice of raven hoarse- 
 ness, and partaking of the raven croak, " yes, we see 
 before us, under our very noses, an audacious proof of 
 man's encroaching spirit ; but we see not all ! 
 
 " These very trees we sit on, and this trodden turf 
 beneath us, may be appropriated in like manner ; and 
 what, let me ask you, is the mysterious purpose of 
 that extraordinary erection? A something, depend 
 upon it, over and above the enclosure of our trees 
 and turf! A something yet more fatal to the 
 liberties, perhaps lives, of rookdom ! 
 
 " Let us rise, then, to a bird, and defeat the machi- 
 nations of these vile conspirators ! Let them shoot us 
 down, for sport, by scores — let them cut us up, for 
 pies, by dozens — let them rob us of our eggs by 
 hundreds, and pass them off for plover's — let them 
 
CONCERNING THE WORLD^S SHOW. 223 
 
 narrow, with bricks and mortar, tiie boundaries of our 
 fresh green fields and rich brown fallows — nay, let 
 them fell our trees with axes. To all these injuries 
 we must fain submit, as our ancestors have done 
 before us ; but in this way to rob us of our ground — 
 in this way to defraud us of our tree-tops ! Under a 
 cover like this to plot our ruin is an aggression so 
 new, so mysterious, so alarming, that we have not 
 the spirit of a flock of doves if we endure it ! 
 
 Most tremendous was the sensation that ran now 
 through the feathered assembly — most vociferous the 
 cawing, most furious the flapping. 
 
 It seemed as though the black phalanx was about 
 to light down bodily — plunge through the moveless 
 surface of the crystal sea, and whelm the treasures of 
 the mechanic deep in a vortex of fragments, feathers, 
 consternation, and confusion. Demonstration and 
 doing — threat and execution — are, however, very 
 different matters ; and while these big, burly birds 
 were still only cawing, and flapping, and looking down 
 destruction at the brittle expanse beneath them, 
 several "birdies small'' had time to put in their 
 small voices to more pacific purport — how soon heard 
 or heeded we are not competent to say. 
 
 A brooding^ chaffinch declared from behind a screen 
 
224 
 
 VOICES IN THE AIR 
 
 of elm trees^ that she believed the monster building 
 of their monster enemies to be nothing, after all, but 
 a new sort of nest. What else were all their houses, 
 and ^" for what (twittered she) but for the protection 
 of their tender young ones should any creature of 
 earth or air take the trouble of construction V 
 
 A nightingale from the groves of Kensington (one 
 who had sat up later than usual in the morning on 
 purpose to join the feathered conclave) gave her 
 harmonious support to the same simple, natural 
 opinion : — " It is assuredly,'' she warbled, " a nest — 
 one, in my opinion, made up of many, after the 
 manner of those emmet nurseries, a thousand times 
 bigger than their builders, with which I am particu- 
 larly well acquainted. These often take in the little 
 bushes, as this (to the just displeasure of Messieurs 
 Rook) includes those stately trees. Yes,'' concluded 
 the nightingale, as she looked on the glittering roof 
 of the palace, holding meanwhile a claw before her 
 eyes to shade them from the glare and unaccustomed 
 sunshine — " Yes, that is undoubtedly a monster man's 
 nest." 
 
 " Unless it is a monster bird-trap — a trap to catch 
 us all in ?" cried a starling, who had narrowly escaped 
 a machine of that description. 
 
CONCERNING THE WORLD^S SHOW. 225 
 
 " Or a monster cage — a cage to keep us in V softly 
 suggested a linnet, who (infected, perhaps, by foreign 
 communication) had just taken French leave of his 
 own. 
 
 Here a new speaker hopped confidently forward, 
 and began volubly to address the assembly, which, 
 inclusive even of the clamorous rooks, was struck 
 into silence by his imposing — in other words — self- 
 confident, self-important, strutting air. This indi- 
 vidual was a domesticated magpie, who, with minor 
 pilferings in the haunts of men, had stolen a large 
 parcel of human pretension, with a tiny scrap of that 
 much scarcer commodity, human knowledge. With 
 these he had picked up something (how could he help 
 it?) on the subject of the world's engrossing topic; 
 hence was able to throw a glimmer on the groping 
 suggestions of his simpler minded fellow birds. 
 
 " I can tell you,'' said he, pertly, with a shrug of 
 his feathers and a twist of his tail, " that you — none 
 of you — know anything whatever about what you are 
 talking of. I do. I think I should ! — living in society 
 where nothing else is talked about morning, noon, 
 and night ! That great upstart building that you, 
 Messieurs Rook, look on justly as a great encroach- 
 ment, and the devil knows what besides^ — that you, 
 
 VOL. I. Q 
 
226 
 
 VOICES IN THE AIR 
 
 Mother Chaffinch, take for a great nest — you. Sir 
 Starling, for a great trap — and you, Master Linnet, 
 for a great cage — is what they call a great Crystal 
 Palace, built for what they term a Great Exhibition/' 
 
 " A great what f repeated a thousand echoed and 
 re-echoed notes. 
 
 A Great Exhibition, Well might the term be 
 greatly puzzling to birds of every feather, involving 
 as it does an idea utterly beyond the pale of bird 
 comprehension in an unsophisticated state. The owl 
 of Minerva, unless at once enlightened and corrupted 
 by the wisdom of his mistress (a jealous exhibitor 
 against the hapless Arachne) would have been as 
 much in the dark about the meaning of that word as 
 the owl of Kensington, who sat on the present occa- 
 sion winking and blinking its great eyes under the 
 morning sun and over the crystal sea. 
 
 By dint, however, of a prodigious deal of chatter, 
 the tame magpie (that roguish, humanized fellow !) 
 contrived to instil into his feathered audience a few 
 notions almost as correct as his own relative to the 
 meaning of a Great Exhibition. 
 
 The wonderment of the birds was, nevertheless, 
 still vast — vast as the building below them — when 
 they came to understand something of the purpose it 
 
CONCERNING THE WORLD^S SHOW. 
 
 227 
 
 was built for. Most strange did it appear to them 
 that those great, multitudinous creatures now begin- 
 ning to gather round their edifice (and not looking 
 from the tree-tops so very great, after all), should 
 have come flocking from north, south, east, and west, 
 only just to exhibit to each other the fine things that 
 they or their fellows had been making. " J ust,'' said 
 the brooding chaffinch, " as if instead of working at 
 this nest here (oh, with how much pleasure !) for the 
 sake of nothing but my darling nestlings, I had 
 made it only to show to Neighbour Nightingale that 
 I could weave a fabric a great deal neater and 
 prettier than hers 
 
 " Or as if,'' chimed in the nightingale, who did 
 not, however, look best pleased at her friend's obser- 
 vation — " as if we were, say one in all our families, 
 to bring together each a specimen of our different 
 works only just to compare notes about them ! And 
 what would follow ? Nothing, depend upon it, but 
 jarring discords, because some impertinent arbiter — a 
 cuckoo, perhaps, who knows as much of building as 
 of singing — might happen to pronounce one better, 
 forsooth ! or handsomer than another ! What silly 
 creatures must those men be to act after such an 
 absurd, ridiculous manner !" 
 
 Q 2 
 
228 
 
 VOICES IN THE AIR 
 
 " Why/' said the magpie, with a knowing nod and 
 a look of patronising pity, over his puffed-out feathers, 
 on the growing assemblage below — "why, it does 
 seem silly; but then, poor things! there's this dif- 
 ference, let us remember, between us and them. Our 
 works are always perfection — couldn't be done better; 
 theirs, on the contrary, are very lame performances ; 
 and with all their vanity (of which, by the way, they've 
 a most disgusting share !) they're not without some 
 little notion that bunglers they are. Therefore, as I 
 understand, they're showing each other their trumpery 
 attempts, for the sake of what they call ' mutual im- 
 provement ;' though I'm rather of opinion, with my 
 friend the barn-door cock, that it's much more for 
 the sake of mutual rivalry." 
 
 The listening birds, who, except the escaped linnet, 
 had never, like the one that was speaking, been in 
 the intimate society of men, again looked sorely 
 puzzled ; but the magpie chattered on. " I don't," 
 said he, " after all, so entirely condemn the idea of 
 exhibition. There's something rather pleasant in 
 having one's performances admired — not by all the 
 world (that's vainglorious), but by a few of one's 
 intimate friends. True, improvement, with us, is out 
 of the question ; so, of course, is rivalry. But if we 
 
CONCERNING THE WORLD^S SHOW. 229 
 
 ever did think it worth our while to get up a little 
 native exhibition, just amongst ourselves, we might 
 make it, I am certain, a vastly pretty thing. I, for 
 example, could contribute an exceeding neat article — 
 something, in the way of nest-making, perfectly 
 unique. For compactness and elegance of form, for 
 softness and warmth of interior, my fabric might be 
 equalled ; but it would stand alone (I say it without 
 vanity) in the peculiar strength and ingenuity of 
 its outward defence — my chevaux-de-frise of thorns 
 Those men below have coarsely copied it in iron; 
 but it defies both imitation and attack. There's 
 nothing like it in the woods, and nothing to come 
 near it, 111 be bound, in the ' World's Show' — another 
 name those boasting monopolists have given to that 
 grand affair. Only set them to work upon a bit of 
 wool — a handful of feathers — a lock of hair — a bundle 
 of moss — a heap of thorns — and see the fine thing 
 they'd manage to turn out! Yes," concluded the 
 chatterer, after a pause to recover breath, if we 
 should have a show of our own, I shall certainly pro- 
 duce an article with which nothing can compete \" 
 
 " I don t know that,'' smartly chirped a goldfinch. 
 " I was once told, by a cousin who had been in cap- 
 tivity, that it is declared, even by our monster enemies 
 
230 
 
 VOICES IN THE AIR 
 
 (tolerable weavers themselves), that we goldfinches 
 are the very best that fly. Only, Mr. Magpie, look 
 fairly at one of our fabrics — a nest of apple-lichen — 
 so even, so compact, so strong, all interwoven with 
 finest hairs, and lined, not as commonly, with feathers, 
 but with thistle-down satin — a texture which we 
 alone know how to manufacture. Only look, I say, 
 impartially at a production such as this, and, if you 
 do not confess it equal to your own, you must say of 
 it, as of that, that there's nothing like it in yonder 
 Exhibition/' 
 
 " Now you speak of resemblance,'' said the brood- 
 ing chaffinch, "a new idea strikes me. You say. 
 Mistress Goldfinch, that yonder creatures pretend, 
 themselves, to the art of weaving, and that they par- 
 ticularly admire your skill in the same art. Now, 
 suppose they have got down yonder some specimens 
 of your beautiful work, and perhaps'' — (here the 
 bright eye of the chaffinch glanced with a little ex- 
 cusable pride at the curious fabric under her) — " and 
 perhaps some of mine. Often and often, when I've 
 got over the first distress and trouble of losing a 
 finished nest, my pretty eggs, perhaps, or my darling 
 nestlings — often have I sat and pondered till my 
 head sank under my wing about what could be the 
 
CONCERNING THE WORLD^S SHOW. 
 
 231 
 
 reason why birds are robbed by men ; but I think 
 now perhaps they may take our works to learn by, 
 and to — to what you call exhibit/' 
 
 " Very likely/' returned the goldfinch, ^' to exhibit 
 as their own/' 
 
 " Oh yes, as their own workmanship, nobody 
 else's,'' chimed in the magpie; "I know enough of 
 them to be sure of that!" 
 
 " It's too bad !" said the starling. 
 Too bad !" repeated first one, then another, then 
 a hundred of the assembled bipeds. Too — too bad !" 
 
 " Much too ! — much too !" echoed the cuckoo (idle 
 baggage I) from the Kensington Grove. 
 
 The rooks resumed their cawing and flapping with 
 redoubled fury; the very vSparrows shook the dust off 
 their wings in angry demonstration ; and if ever the 
 Paxton panes had reason to tremble at an impending 
 shower of hail, rain, cats, dogs^ they had cause now to 
 shake in their ribs of iron at the threatening storm 
 of birds, beaks, wings, and talons. At this moment, 
 sweet and clear above the angry clamour, was heard 
 the celestial song of a descending skylark. The up- 
 roar subsided with its gradual approach, and the 
 heavenly songster, arresting his downward flight (for 
 once) upon a lofty tree-top, directed his melodious 
 
232 
 
 VOICES IN THE AIR 
 
 strain to the indignant assemblage, under whose angry- 
 agitation even leaf and branch yet quivered. 
 
 "For what, my friends/' he warbled, "are you 
 making all this silly uproar? Wherefore thus fret 
 and fume against that upstart building and its 
 builders ? Even from this tree-top they seem not of 
 such vast importance; and if, with me, you could rise 
 above the clouds, you would consider them, as I do, 
 utterly beneath your notice. What to us the inclosure 
 of a tree or two — a paltry plot of turf — when every 
 waving forest, every verdant plain, is ours for provision 
 and for pleasure ! Leave, then, I implore you, yonder 
 crowd of creepers to their partial possessions — their 
 imperfect works — their painful failures — their am- 
 bitious strivings — their jealous competitions. These 
 are for men ! 
 
 " Let us enjoy, as hitherto, our more wide dominion ; 
 let us labour, as hitherto, only in the spirit of useful- 
 ness and affection; and be satisfied to produce, as 
 hitherto, works, each in their kind, all-perfect for 
 their intended purpose — all beautiful, after the beauty 
 of patterns, the gift to us of Heaven. These are for 
 birds r 
 
 The sweet monitory voice ceased, and the clamour 
 it had hushed was not again renewed. The rooks 
 
CONCERNING THE WORLD^S SHOW. 233 
 
 flew silently away to uninvaded pastures, and out of 
 the sight (half seen) of their incarcerated trees. The 
 humanized magpie, in default of flown-off listeners, 
 went to chatter of man's proceedings in other 
 feathered ears, to the corruption, perhaps, of other 
 feathered breasts. The goldfinch speeded off to seek 
 a mate to assist her in the weaving of a matchless 
 nest, perhaps through the magpie's or through man's 
 suggestion, with a view to exhibition. The gentle 
 chafiinch only nestled closer on her cherished eggs, 
 and cast her bright eye more watchfully downwards 
 on the motley groups which, as day advanced, were 
 seen flocking from all quarters towards the Crystal 
 Palace. 
 
 VOICES OF THE INSECTS. 
 
 It was high noon, and the voice of bird was suc- 
 ceeded in the Summer air by the voice of insect. 
 
 •Their hum was one of idleness, enjoyment, gossip 
 — an echo of the hum of humanity that rose to meet 
 it from the clustering swarms (not of workers) around, 
 and about, and within the great hive of glass. 
 
 It was not possible but that busy bees, curious flies, 
 prying wasps, intrusive gnats, and their hundred 
 cousins, must have obtained considerable insight into 
 
234 
 
 VOICES IN THE AIR 
 
 what had been so long going forward in every hole 
 and corner of the world, to be thence brought forward 
 into its broad daylight. It was to be expected, also, 
 that these insect pryers should have looked much 
 more knowingly than any other animals on the 
 labours and productions of that handed vertebrate — 
 man; inasmuch as these, whether wrought for the 
 World's Show, or only for the World's Use, bear, 
 many of them, a remarkable resemblance to their own. 
 This, moreover, is a fact on which insects, having no 
 eyelids, cannot shut their eyes, as they enter at work- 
 shop windows, hang suspended on factory beams, 
 creep through crannies into studios, laboratories, and 
 ateliers — a fact to which, in like manner, they were 
 wide awake as visitors to the Great Exhibition, taking, 
 as they did, free tickets for the Paxton Palace — flying 
 through its vistas — feeling its fabrics. And it is a 
 fact (for a fly) of inflating import. So, at least, it 
 would appear by the following discourse, interpreted 
 from the original hum of an insect group — one of the 
 multitudes assembled as aforesaid on a Summer noon- 
 day of the memorable " fifty-one.'' 
 
 " I suppose," said a dragon-fly, as he hung sus- 
 pended to a branch of eglantine, his pinions wide- 
 spread, and glittering like the surface of a pool 
 
CONCERNING THE WORLD^S SHOW. 
 
 235 
 
 below; "I suppose, Mistress Honey-bee, that you 
 have taken a look at the Grand Exhibition. What 
 do you think of it 
 
 " Think of it responded the bee, who was rest- 
 ing with her laden baskets in the heart of a briar- 
 rose. " Think of it ? Why, that it's nothing in the 
 world but a grand imposition — a passing-off of 
 stolen goods — materials and fabrics taken from us 
 with never so much as a civil acknowledgment.'' 
 
 A gleam of light, but not a spark of intelligence, 
 flashed from the two great and the three little eyes 
 of the green dragon-fly, as he looked with stupid 
 astonishment at the bee. With all his eyes, he was 
 quite in the dark as to the meaning of the little 
 labourer. How should he have been otherwise ? He 
 was not a working insect — not a constructive nor in- 
 genious insect — not an insect of taste for anything 
 beautiful in all the world, except for butterflies, and 
 for these only to devour, after he had stripped them 
 of all their beauty. He guessed, however, by the 
 contemptuous sound of the bee's voice, that she did 
 not think very highly of the affair in the Park, and, 
 with a certain consciousness of her superior judg- 
 ment, shaped his reply accordingly. 
 
 "As you say, madam, it's a poor affair — hardly 
 
236 
 
 VOICES IN THE AIR 
 
 worth a glance ; so I thought as I flew in a second 
 from one end to the other. The coup d'ceil is not 
 amiss — a medley of all colours, like a bed of flowers, 
 or what I confess I admire more, a flight of butter- 
 flies; but, as you were observing, it's altogether a 
 paltry thing/' 
 
 " I never said that,'' returned the bee, pettishly, 
 provoked with the dragon-fly for failing to compre- 
 hend her former observation. "It might be well 
 enough if it, were not as I tell you, a rank imposi- 
 tion — even the flowers — but I forget — flowers are 
 nothing to you, except as they serve to fatten butter- 
 flies. It's no use, indeed, any more talking — idling 
 my time here, (I've lost enough yonder at the 
 Exhi — Imposition !) when I ought to be busy at 
 home !" 
 
 And suiting the action to the word, our insect 
 ^'Deburah"* was preparing for flight, when a large 
 foundress wasp lighted down beside her. She felt in 
 nowise more disposed to delay her flight on account 
 of that always unwelcome proximity, and was just 
 upon the wing, when her waspish neighbour (in a 
 strain, however, of no waspish character) accosted and 
 arrested her. 
 
 * Indian name for the working bee. 
 
CONCERNING THE WORLD^S SHOW. 237 
 
 " Madam," said she, " I have heard, and entirely 
 agree with you in opinion concerning that shameless 
 show. I happened to drop in this morning, and the 
 first thing I lighted on was — would you believe it? — 
 a manufactured article of which I had believed my- 
 self and family exclusive patentees. It was a speci- 
 men of paper — mere rubbish as compared with mine 
 — a coarse paltry imitation, but paraded there for all 
 the world to look at as an original fabric 
 
 " Shameful ! shameful r exclaimed the bee, all 
 distrust of her companion melting like wax before 
 the warmth of a fellow feeling. " Most shameful ! 
 and now I'll tell you my discovery. To-day I paid a 
 visit — the first and last — to that upstart building — a 
 cheat of itself, looking like a great conservatory — a 
 so much better thing than it is. Well, under this 
 impression I took the trouble to go in, when the first 
 thing I saw, and the first you may be sure I flew to, 
 was a collection of many-coloured flowers. I lighted 
 on a single dahlia, thinking of course to get a load of 
 pollen and a lot of honey from its golden centre ; 
 but not a grain of pollen — not a particle of honey 
 was there ! The flower was a fabrication ! And 
 what do you think I detected it was made of? Why 
 of nothing more or less than wax — wax — the inimi- 
 
238 
 
 VOICES IN THE AIR 
 
 table substance which we — we bees — alone possess 
 the art of elaborating 
 
 " Dear madam/' returned the mother wasp, " now 
 is it possible ? And yet, after what I saw, it's nothmg 
 wonderful — only shocking ! so mean ! so deceitful ! 
 so unprincipled ! so dishonest ! so ! so ! — " 
 
 And here the humming gossips mingled hums 
 together, and fanned themselves furiously with their 
 transparent wings. " Well, madam,'' resumed the 
 bee, when a little cooled by the fanning operation, 
 "you may be sure after that I didn't stop much 
 longer, nor examine much further ; but I could see 
 with half an eye a whole heap of other things all 
 taken from what you and I have seen a hundred 
 times over in the factories of our own working com- 
 munities, or of individuals ; only of much coarser and 
 inferior descriptions. In short, the whole concern is 
 an infamous imposture ; a show of articles made of 
 our materials, or after our patterns, and passed off 
 (forsooth !) by those monsters of pretension as 
 nobody else's but their own !" 
 
 While the excited bee and wasp had been thus 
 comparing wrongs, a corpulent caterpillar, dropped 
 from the beak of a passing bird, had fallen upon the 
 briar-rose between the two gossips, where it had lain 
 a silent listener to their discourse. 
 
CONCERNING THE WORLB^S SHOW. 239 
 
 " I, too/' said she, " have looked in upon that fine 
 affair, naturally taking it, like Mistress Honey-bee, 
 for a great greenhouse. In, I say, I crept, but was 
 soon creeping out again, when I caught sight of some 
 flowers and a quantity of the finest, freshest looking 
 leaves I ever saw. After a laborious crawl, I managed 
 to get at what I took for a major convolvulus; but 
 when I attempted to gnaw a leaf of it, of what do 
 you think I found it was composed V 
 
 " Of wax said the bee. 
 
 " Of paper !" cried the wasp. 
 
 "No — of nothing but silk — silk — of which we 
 alone are spinners, and woven as ive, in our green 
 workshops are daily weaving it, and have woven it 
 ever since the world began.'' 
 
 At this new instance of fraudulent appropriation, 
 both wasp and bee renewed their angry fannings, but 
 the sound of these was soon overpowered by a 
 general buzz of indignation, proceeding from air, 
 earth, and water ; it seemed an united voice uplifted 
 by the elements themselves against the monopolist 
 glorifying of Creation's lord. 
 
 The Babel of insect myriads spread far and wide, 
 but it was soon silenced on the spot whence it began 
 by the authority of an Emperor moth. This royal 
 insect was once a royal weaver — a king of his craft. 
 
240 
 
 VOICES IN THE AIR 
 
 With imperial dignity he reproved the petty jealousy 
 of the three incensed artificers — bee, wasp, cater- 
 pillar — and the senseless clamour provoked by their 
 complaints. Then, with pride artistic, as once, him- 
 self, king of weavers, he ended by proposing an Exhi- 
 bition of the Industry of all Insects. 
 
 " It will be only,'' said the royal proposer, " a con- 
 centrate exhibition from that which we have always 
 on view in the great palace of the earth, with its 
 concave roof of sky over-arching, not a single group 
 of trees, but all the forests in the world. It is only 
 by thus assembling some few wonders of our skill 
 within a narrow compass that man (creeper as he is, 
 of contracted vision) will be enabled to do justice to 
 our works ; only thus can we compel him to confess 
 how little of original in material, fabrication, and in- 
 vention, belongs to what he calls his own.'' 
 
 Yes, yes ! an Insect Exhibition," cried the bee. 
 " An exhibition of our own !" echoed the wasp and 
 caterpillar, and a thousand accordances expressed by 
 vocal wings" or nodding antennae seconded the 
 proposal of the Emperor moth. But there were also 
 a thousand auditors who received it in silence — 
 amongst them our friend the dragon-fly — and some 
 ventured even to express dissent. 
 
CONCERNING THE WORLD^S SHOW. 
 
 241 
 
 " It would be idle/' hummed a drone. 
 
 " Impertinent/' buzzed a fly. 
 
 " Vain-glorious/' suggested a butterfly. 
 
 " It might cause irritation/' intimated a flea. 
 
 " There wouldn't be room in the air for the crowds 
 we should assemble/' observed a midge. 
 
 "Nor enough leaves on the trees for their con- 
 sumption/' added a cockchafer. 
 
 "A pestilence might ensue/' droned a burying 
 beetle. 
 
 " An awful mortality !" struck in the death-watch. 
 
 The above dissentients were, be it noticed, all 
 idlers. They consisted of such insects as had never 
 in their lives produced a thing worth looking at, and 
 were never likely so to do. The objectors, in general, 
 were of the same description. 
 
 The Diptera were divided. A multitude of idle 
 flies and lazy long-legs were against. The gnats 
 (most of them ingenious boat-builders) decidedly 
 favourable. 
 
 The Coleoptera were, to a beetle, adverse, except 
 the wood and type cutters, also a few weevils among 
 them who could make balls of lace-work, with others 
 who cut envelopes out of leaves. 
 
 The Hymenoptera, including bees, wasps, ants, 8.nd 
 
 VOL. 1. R 
 
242 
 
 VOICES IN THE AIR 
 
 saw-flies — first-rate artificers in masonry, carpentry, 
 wax-making, paper-making, moulding, varnishing, 
 were of course unanimous for exhibition. The gall- 
 flies (members of the same order) and makers of 
 mimic fruits and flowers taking the same side. 
 
 The Trichoptera — famous for ingenious shell-work 
 — and the Homoptera, for cutting in wood, were not 
 likely to offer opposition. 
 
 Amongst the Lepidoptera, the moths (those in par- 
 ticular who had served their time as tent-makers, 
 muff-makers, flask-makers, &c., and all as weavers) 
 were universally for — the butterflies generally against. 
 
 The Orthoptera, finally, represented by a multi- 
 tude of epicurean grasshoppers, sent up a noisy 
 protest from the ground against the project. 
 
 It was carried, however, by a show of wings, that 
 the Exhibition was to take place. An Executive 
 Committee was appointed for its management ; also, 
 a Royal Commission, headed of course by the proposer 
 of the undertaking, the Emperor moth. 
 
 Even then some slight discussion followed before 
 the separation of the winged assembly ; nor was it 
 wholly of harmonious character. 
 
 " I suppose,'' queried one of the late dissentients — 
 a chequered meat fly — " I suppose that we — that is, 
 
CONCERNING THE WORLD's SHOW. 243 
 
 you — will have to exhibit in the open air — hail, rain, 
 or sunshine? You can never get up anything like 
 that great safe yonder/' 
 
 " Can't we?'' returned both together from the eglan- 
 tine our friends, the wasp and bee — " Can't we?" 
 
 " Can't we?" echoed a carpenter-ant from the portal 
 of her excavated dwelling in an oak, and an ant- 
 mason from the roof of her earth-domed residence 
 below. 
 
 " We can build a palace of wax," resumed the bee. 
 
 " Of paper," observed the wasp. 
 
 "Of wood?" suggested the carpenter-ant. 
 
 " Of clay?" the mason. 
 
 " But how will it be glazed ?" demanded pertly a 
 common house-fly, one more conversant with windows 
 than with the art of making them. 
 
 " Why," returned a silkworm, escaped from a tray 
 of mulberry-leaves — " why, I've heard talk amongst 
 those imitators, of their sometimes making silk of 
 glass. Fine rubbish that must be ! But it puts me 
 upon thinking whether one might not make glass of 
 silk. I shall try experiments." 
 
 "So shall I," rejoined another ingenious artificer 
 (caterpillar of a saw-fly). " I make an article much 
 like glass already." 
 
 R 2 
 
244 
 
 VOICES IN THE AIR 
 
 " Well/' resumed the house-fly, with a flippant buzz, 
 " suppose your show-room made, I hardly know 
 what you have to show in it. For instance, in the 
 four grand departments (IVe picked up something, 
 you see, of what's going forward) — in the four de- 
 partments, what would you exhibit? Raw Materials, 
 say — what do you propose to show in these 
 
 "What?'' exclaimed at once a variety of voices; 
 " why, specimens of clays, sands, woods, bark, fibres, 
 leaves, mosses, seeds, gums, pollen, raw honey; these, 
 and a thousand other substances employed in our 
 various manufactures." 
 
 "But where," asked the objector, "your Ma- 
 chinery r 
 
 " We've our pumps, our pistons, our air-tubes, our 
 telescopes — our buoys, our boats, our balloons, our 
 machines for spinning and for weaving," returned 
 various individuals, insect possessors of the above 
 instruments. 
 
 " Your Manufactures^ though ?" persevered the 
 pertinacious fly. 
 
 " No lack of them," was the reply of artisans innu- 
 merable. " We've our wrought textures, of pure silk, 
 or curiously interwoven with other substances — our 
 laces, our cloths, our papers, our envelopes — also 
 
CONCERNING THE WORLD^S SHOW. 245 
 
 various articles by us alone prepared, as wax, gums, 
 dyes — all, as it would appear (as well as our tools 
 and weapons) appropriated without ceremony, and 
 now, forsooth, exhibited by man/' 
 
 " That's all well enough,'' said the oppositionist fly; 
 " but in Section 4 — Fine Arts — where's your pictures, 
 enamels, gilding, gems, sculpture ?" 
 
 To this the reply was not so ready. Presently, 
 however, a butterfly (a Painted Lady), who had been 
 gazing at her own reflection in a watery mirror, ex- 
 claimed with confidence, " Why, for pictures we have 
 only to exhibit ourselves. We'll supply mosaics — 
 our chrysalides will furnish gilding. As to enamels, 
 you, Mr. Rose-chafer, with some of your brother 
 beetles, might afford some very fair specimens — that 
 is, if you do not continue to set your faces against the 
 whole affair." 
 
 " I never approve certainly of what looks like 
 vanity," returned he of the rose, with a glance in the 
 butterfly's mirror at the golden reflexes of his emerald 
 wings, " but, as the thing's agreed on, I am' not the 
 one to ofl*er vexatious opposition." 
 
 " Nor I," said a crimson " Cardinal" 
 
 " Nor I," said a brilliant " Chrysomela." 
 
 "Nor I," said a sparkling "Cicindela;" and all 
 
246 
 
 VOICES IN THE AIR 
 
 nearly of the hitherto opposing Coleoptera became 
 warm supporters of the proposed Exhibition. 
 
 It was wonderful how many dissentients were found 
 to alter their tone after the butterfly's happy sugges- 
 tion. The fly, however, was not silenced. " WeVe 
 heard nothing yet,'' said he, " of your show of sculp- 
 ture.'' 
 
 A maternal moth here drew attention proudly to a 
 group of her eggs lying on a leaf ; they were richly 
 ornamented by an embossed pattern such as might 
 have been the work of a sculptor's chisel. Several 
 sister insects showed varieties of the same adornment 
 on the caskets which inclosed their treasures. Cer- 
 tain beetles then made a display of the ornamental 
 cases in which they kept their wings ; but the imper- 
 tinent fly could only murmur that "the insects," 
 he suspected, " like the English, wouldn't, in sculp- 
 ture, come out strong !" 
 
 Only a few more feeble objections were now as 
 feebly uttered by dark, ill-looking, indolent lurkers 
 in holes and corners, such as could neither make any- 
 thing to exhibit, nor flatter themselves that they were 
 objects for exhibition in their own persons. Amongst 
 these was a bloated cockroach, who, with other kitchen 
 offal, had picked up some kitchen talk on the uni- 
 
CONCERNING THE WORLD^S SHOW. 247 
 
 versal topic. " How do you propose/' he drawled out, 
 " to get over foreign contributions V 
 
 The " Emperor moth'" (the princely suggestor of 
 the plan) himself condescended to answer the objec- 
 tive query. He should avail himself, he said, of the 
 opportunity that now offered to hold parley on the 
 subject with many distinguished foreigners already in 
 the country. They had come over incog, with par- 
 ties from beyond sea — contributors or visitors to the 
 existent Exhibition. Of these insect strangers, some 
 had taken free passage in snug little cabins in planks 
 and masts — others had swung in hammocks of their 
 own weaving amidst sails and cordage — while others, 
 again, had found accommodation (bed and board) in 
 a variety of animal and vegetable products newly 
 imported by Exhibition voyagers. It was thus that 
 (making man and his winged ships subservient to 
 their purpose) they might communicate with the 
 insect people of shores beyond reach of their own 
 wings, and these, by the same means, would send 
 their contributions, or be transported themselves. 
 " I shall soon open,'' continued the Emperor, " a nego- 
 tiation with his Majesty the African King of Ter- 
 mites for a gang of his celebrated building slaves to 
 assist in the erection of an Industrial Palace. Its 
 
248 
 
 VOICES IN THE AIR 
 
 proportions, relatively, will as far exceed the dimen- 
 sions of yonder vaunted edifice, as its builders are (in 
 stature merely) vsuperior to us. Thus, my friends,'' 
 concluded the royal speaker, "shall we compel those 
 great, self-adulating animals to contribute, as servants, 
 to our design, and oblige them, as they look abashed 
 on the collected works of all insects, to abandon for 
 ever their pretensions to exclusive skill/' 
 
 An exultant hum, with a triumphant quivering of 
 wings, followed on the royal address, and the multi- 
 tudinous members of the aerial assembly broke up in 
 glittering dispersion. 
 
 VOICES OF THE FLOWEKS. 
 
 It was mid-day still, but, excepting the occasional 
 hum of a solitary bee, no insect voice broke the still- 
 ness of the air, now laden with the perfumed breath 
 of flowers. 
 
 And had the flowers — most graceful and artistic of 
 all earth's productions — never a voice themselves con- 
 cerning the Earth's Show ? — a very flower-bed of art, 
 wherein, from floral forms and floral colouring, was 
 derived the most of all its beauty. Where the vase, 
 where the salver, where the bell, the cup, the flagon, 
 
CONCERNING THE WORLD^S SHOW. 249 
 
 the candelabra, the epergne, the mounted jewellery, 
 the carvings and the mouldings? — where the da- 
 masked silks and stuffs, the gorgeous carpets, the 
 tasteful hangings, without the flowers and the foliage 
 suggestive of their forms — affording copies for their 
 enrichment — colours (in vegetable dyes) for their 
 adornment ? 
 
 The flowers, heaven clothed, heaven canopied, 
 heaven fed — with no earthly needs of being to excite 
 invention or fabrication — with no semblance of an 
 earthly passion, saving love, can express love only 
 in their sweet communings; and love (with pure 
 delight inseparable) was, accordingly, the burthen 
 of their breathings concerning the World's Show. 
 In language glowing as their colours, graceful as 
 their forms, did they offer to each other kind con- 
 gratulations. 
 
 " Behold,'' say they, " our fading hues reflected 
 more faithfully, preserved more enduringly, than they 
 have ever been before ! We are rescued from ephe- 
 meral frailty by the pencil and the loom ! 
 
 " Behold," say they, " our forms repeated more 
 truly, more tastefully — adopted more extensively 
 than, till now, the world has ever seen ! We are en- 
 
250 
 
 VOICES IN THE AIR 
 
 dowed with almost immortality by the mould and 
 chisel !" 
 
 It was to such a purport (their breathings wafted 
 on the winds) that the flowers, far and near — from 
 exotics under a tropic sun to exotics under the 
 crystal roof — held delighted intercourse. And for 
 those in the neighbourhood of the World's Show — 
 they, from the stately azaleas in the balconies of 
 Piccadilly to the humble daisies in the Park, looked 
 down or looked up with smiles (their sweetest and 
 their brightest) at the grandest of all floral exhi- 
 bitions, in the grandest of all the conservatories in 
 the world. 
 
 VOICES OF THE WINDS. 
 
 It was evening. The world's sun had set, and 
 the people of all nations, in garments of all colours, 
 had diverged, like so many prismatic rays from the 
 sun of art, the then central attraction of the world's 
 inhabitants. Their tongues of diverse sounding scat- 
 tered with them, the voices of the evening breezes 
 were left predominant to fill their places, and take 
 up the burthen of their discourse. For of what 
 but the World's Exhibition could the wandering 
 
CONCERNING THE WORLD^S SHOW. 251 
 
 winds (those world-wide travellers) be speaking or 
 be singing ? 
 
 " Where (said or sung they) but for us that glo- 
 rious building, with all its sea-borne, wind-borne 
 treasures — save for which itself had never been ? 
 
 " Where its productions of terrestrial growth but 
 for us who fanned them to maturity ? 
 
 " Where its productions of human skill but for us 
 who helped to give vigour to the minds — strength to 
 the hands that devised and formed them ?" 
 
 So said or sung the breezes as they passed refresh- 
 ingly through the smoke and dust-laden foliage of 
 the Park trees. Then they stayed their flight above 
 the Crystal Palace, and hovered, as with brooding 
 fondness, over the growths of strength and beauty 
 they had helped to perfect and to bring together. 
 
 VOICES OF THE SPIRITS. 
 
 It was night. Under a flood of summer moonlight 
 the Crystal Palace was again, as in the early morning, 
 clear, and cool, and radiant. The early birds — the 
 noon-day insects — the mid-day flowers — the all-day 
 multitude— the evening breezes — had gone to their 
 repose, and the only sounds rising from the earth 
 
253 
 
 VOICES IN THE AIR 
 
 were steps of midnight watchers, or steps, or wheels, 
 or shouts of midnight revellers. Heard above them, 
 though not so loud, were still, however, voices in the 
 air — voices not of earth. But even of these the dis- 
 course was again of nothing else but the Earth's Ex- 
 hibition. 
 
 The combined efforts of a world's inhabitants di- 
 rected, as never before, to a single and laudable end — 
 the combined produce of a world's soil thus, as never 
 before, brought together — the combined product of a 
 world's skill and industry displayed, as never before, 
 in peaceful emulation — things like these must have 
 made a worthy theme and worthy show for aerial, 
 even angelic spirits to discourse and look on. 
 
 Those voices of the night, coming as from the stars, 
 fell upon the ear "most musical," and, for awhile, 
 most rejoicingly, discussing with delight the beauties 
 of their theme; its elevating combinations of gran- 
 deur and beauty, grace and harmony — its moral ele- 
 ments of brotherhood and peace. Of these only for 
 awhile they held communion — those gentle spirits in 
 the air — and then was silence. 
 
 ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ 
 
 The voices came again, but low and sorrowful their 
 
CONCERNING THE WORLD^S SHOW. 253 
 
 tones; and isolated words, and broken sentences of 
 mourDful meaning, were scattered on the breeze of 
 night. 
 
 Partiality and favour — -jealous heart-burnings — self- 
 adulation — vain rivalry — misapportioned rewards — 
 sordid motives — poor toiling hands robbed of their 
 meed of gain and credit — poor aching hearts like to 
 break from neglect and disappointment — exclusive 
 praise to man, the appropriator and learner — forgetful- 
 ness of God, the Giver and the Teacher. These were 
 the things of which the spirits sadly whispered ; and 
 then did tears, such as angels weep, fall with the 
 night dews on the proud dome of the Crystal Palace. 
 Again was silence. * * * * 
 
 Then a voice, small, still — sweeter than all that 
 had gone before, pronounced the words, " Here we 
 only see progression ; hereafter, hence following, will 
 come perfection!' And then the angel spirits were 
 consoled, and the drops were dried through which, as 
 through a mournful mist, they had begun to look 
 upon the edifice below. 
 
 In that, the largest structure ever reared by human 
 hands, they saw, as at first, but clearer still, a mighty 
 temple. In all of its appropriated spaces they saw 
 
254 
 
 VOICES IN THE AIR. 
 
 but altars — in every choice production of nature and 
 of art they saw but offerings — returns of the richest 
 of His gifts to Him who gave alike the material and 
 the skill to use it. And then the voices of the spirits 
 rose higher and higher into heavenly music, and they 
 hymned together the wonders of the Crystal Palace 
 and the glory of the King of Kings. 
 
 Savill & Edwards, Printers, 4, Chandos-street, Covent-garden.