A Snake Or An Adder Would Have Begun To Move Away The Moment
Any One Stopped To Look At It; But The Slowworm Takes No Notice, And
Hence It Is Often Said To Be Blind.
He seems to dislike any sharp noise,
and is really fully aware of your presence.
Close by the mound, which
stands in a corner of the garden, there is a great bunch of blue comfrey,
to which the bees and humble-bees come in such numbers as to seem to
justify the idea that these insects prefer blue. Or perhaps the blue
flowers secrete sweeter honey. Every kind of wild bee as yet flying
visits this plant, tiny bees barely a quarter of an inch long, others as
big as two filberts, some a deep amber, some striped like wasps. A little
of Chaucer's May has come; now and then a short hour or two of sunshine
between the finger and thumb of the north wind. Most pleasant it is to
see the eave swallow dive down from the roof and rush over the scarcely
green garden - a household sign of summer. In the lane if you gather them
the young leaves of the sycamore have a fragrant scent like a flower, and
low down ferns are unrolling. On the low wall sits a yellow-hammer, just
brightly touched afresh with colour. Happy greenfinches go by, and it is
curious to note how the instant they enter the hedge they are lost now
under the leaves; so few days ago they would have been unconcealed. So
near is it to summer that the first thrush begins to sing at three
o'clock in the morning.
THE MAKERS OF SUMMER.
The leaves are starting here and there from green buds on the hedge, but
within doors a warm fire is still necessary, when one day there is a
slight sound in the room, so peculiar, and yet so long forgotten, that
though we know what it is, we have to look at the object before we can
name it. It is a house-fly, woke up from his winter sleep, on his way
across to the window-pane, where he will buzz feebly for a little while
in the sunshine, flourishing best like a hothouse plant under glass.
By-and-by he takes a turn or two under the centrepiece, and finally
settles on the ceiling. Then, one or two other little flies of a
different species may be seen on the sash; and in a little while the
spiders begin to work, and their round silky cocoons are discovered in
warm corners of the woodwork. Spiders run about the floors and spin
threads by the landing windows; where there are webs it is certain the
prey is about, though not perhaps noticed. Next, some one finds a moth.
Poor moth! he has to suffer for being found out.
As it grows dusk the bats flitter to and fro by the house; there are
moths, then, abroad for them. Upon the cucumber frame in the sunshine
perhaps there may be seen an ant or two, almost the first out of the
nest; the frame is warm. There are flowers open, despite the cold wind
and sunless sky; and as these are fertilised by insects, it follows that
there must be more winged creatures about than we are conscious of. How
strange it seems, on a bleak spring day, to see the beautiful pink
blossom of the apricot or peach covering the grey wall with
colour - snowflakes in the air at the time! Bright petals are so
associated with bright sunshine that this seems backward and
inexplicable, till it is remembered that the flower probably opens at the
time nearest to that which in its own country brings forth the insects
that frequent it. Now and again humble-bees go by with a burr; and it is
curious to see the largest of them all, the big bombus, hanging to the
little green gooseberry blossom. Hive-bees, too, are abroad with every
stray gleam of sun; and perhaps now and then a drone-fly - last seen on
the blossoms of the ivy in November. A yellow butterfly, a white one,
afterwards a tortoiseshell - then a sudden pause, and no more butterflies
for some time. The rain comes down, and the gay world is blotted out. The
wind shifts to the south, and in a few days the first swallows are seen
and welcomed, but, as the old proverb says, they do not make a summer.
Nor do the long-drawn notes of the nightingale, nor even the jolly
cuckoo, nor the tree pipit, no, nor even the soft coo of the turtle-dove
and the smell of the May flower. It is too silent even now: there are the
leading notes; but the undertone - the vibration of the organ - is but just
beginning. It is the hum of insects and their ceaseless flitting that
make the summer more than the birds or the sunshine. The coming of summer
is commonly marked in the dates we note by the cuckoo and the swallow and
the oak leaves; but till the butterfly and the bee - one with its colour,
and one with its hum - fill out the fields, the picture is but an outline
sketch. The insects are the details that make the groundwork of a summer
day. Till the humble-bees are working at the clover it is too silent; so
I think we may begin our almanack with the house-fly and the moth and the
spider and the ant on the cucumber frame, and so on, till, finally, the
catalogue culminates with the great yellow wasp. He is the final sign of
summer; one swallow does not make it, one wasp does. He is a connoisseur
of the good things of the earth, and comes not till their season.
On the top of an old wall covered with broad masses of lichen, the
patches of which grew out at their edges as if a plate had taken to
spreading at its rim, the tits were much occupied in picking out minute
insects; the wagtails came too, sparrows, robins, hedge-sparrows, and
occasionally a lark; a bare blank wall to all appearance, and the bare
lichen as devoid of life to our eyes.
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