There Are The Seeds Of The Charlock And
The Thistle, And A Hundred Other Little Seeds, Insects, And Minute
Atom-Like Foods It Needs A Bird's Eye To Know.
They are never still, they
sweep up into the hedges and line the boughs, calling and talking, and
away again to another rood of stubble without any order or plan of
search, just sowing themselves about like wind-blown seeds.
Up and down
the day through with a zest never failing. It is beautiful to listen to
them and watch them, if any one will stay under an oak by the nut-tree
boughs, here the dragon-flies shoot to and fro in the shade as if the
direct rays of the sun would burn their delicate wings; they hunt chiefly
in the shade. The linnets will suddenly sweep up into the boughs and
converse sweetly over your head. The sunshine lingers and grows sweeter
as the autumn gives tokens of its coming in the buff bryony leaf, and the
acorn filling its cup. They are so happy, the birds, yet there are few to
listen to them. I have often looked round and wondered that no one else
was about hearkening to them. Altogether, perhaps, they lead safer lives
in England than anywhere else. We do not shoot them; the fowlers do
mischief, still they make but little impression; there are few birds of
prey, and there is not that fearful bloodthirstiness that makes a
tropical forest so terrible in fact, under its outward show of glowing
colour. There, with cruel hawks and owls, and serpents, and beasts of
prey, a bird's life is one long terror. They are ever on the watch here,
but they are not so fearfully harassed, and are not certain as it were
beforehand to be torn to pieces. The land is well cultivated, and the
more the culture the more the food for them. Frost and snow are their
greatest enemies, but even these do not often last a great while. It is a
land of woods, and above all of hedges, which are much more favourable to
birds than forests, so that they are better off in England than in other
countries. From the sowing to the reaping, the wheat-field gives a
constant dole like the monasteries of old, only here it is no crust, but
a free and bountiful largess. Then the stubble must be broken up by the
plough, and again there is a fresh helping for them. Brown partridge, and
black rook, and yellowhammer, all hues and degrees, come to the
wheat-field.
II.
Every day something new is introduced into farming, and yet the old
things are not driven out. Every one knows that steam is now used on the
farm for ploughing and threshing and working machinery at the farmstead,
and one would have thought that by this time it would have superseded all
other motive powers. Yet this very day I counted twenty great cart-horses
at work in one ploughed field. They were all in pairs, harnessed to
harrows, rollers, and ploughs, and out of the twenty, nineteen were
dark-coloured. Huge great horses, broad of limb, standing high up above
the level surface of the open field, great towers of strength, almost
prehistoric in their massiveness. Enough of them to drag a great cannon
up into a battery on the heights. The day before, passing the same
farm - it was Sunday - a great bay cart-horse mare standing contentedly in
a corner of the yard looked round to see who it was going by, and the sun
shone on the glossy hair, smooth as if it had been brushed, the long
black mane hung over the arching neck, the large dark eyes looked at us
so quietly - a real English picture. The black funnel of the steam-engine
has not driven the beautiful cart-horses out of the fields. They have
been there for centuries, and there they stay; the notched, broad wheel
of the steam-plough has but just begun to leave its trail on the earth.
New things come, but the old do not go away. One life is but a summer's
day compared with the long cycle of years of agriculture, and yet it
seems that a whole storm, as it were, of innovations has burst upon the
fields ever since I can recollect, and, as years go, I am still in the
green leaf. The labouring men used to tell me how they went reaping, for
although you may see what is called reaping still going on at
harvest-time, it is not reaping. True reaping is done with a hook alone
and the hand; all the present reaping is 'vagging,' with a hook in one
hand and a bent stick in the other, and instead of drawing the hook
towards him and cutting it, the reaper chops at the straw as he might at
an enemy. Then came the reaping machines, that simply cut the wheat, and
left it lying flat on the ground, which were constantly altered and
improved. Now there are the wire and string binders, that not only cut
the corn, but gather it together and bind it in sheaves - a vast saving in
labour. Still the reaping-hook endures and is used on all small farms,
and to some extent on large ones, to round off the work of the machine;
the new things come, but the old still remains. In itself the
reaping-hook is an enlarged sickle, and the sickle was in use in Roman
times, and no man knows how long before that. With it the reaper cut off
the ears of the wheat only, leaving the tall straw standing, much as if
it had been a pruning-knife. It is the oldest of old implements - very
likely it was made of a chip of flint at first, and then of bronze, and
then of steel, and now at Sheffield or Birmingham in its enlarged form of
the 'vagging' hook.
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