Part 11

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. Yet there must have been something there for all these eager bills--eggs or pupae. A jackdaw, with iron-grey patch on the back of his broad poll, dropped in my garden one morning, to the great alarm of the small birds, and made off with some large dark object in his beak--some beetle or shell probably, I could not distinguish which, and should most likely have passed the spot without seeing it. The sea-kale, which had been covered up carefully with seaweed, to blanch and to protect it from the frost, was attacked in the cold dry weather in a most furious manner by blackbirds, thrushes, and starlings. They tore away the seaweed with their strong bills, pitching it right and left behind them in as workmanlike style as any miner, and so boring deep notches into the edge of the bed. When a blackbird had made a good hole he came back to visit it at various times of the day, and kept a strict watch. If he found any other blackbird or thrush infringing on his diggings, he drove him away ferociously. Never were such works carried on as at the edge of that seaweed; they moved a bushel of it. To the eye there seemed nothing in it but here and there a small white worm; but they found plenty, and the weather being so bitter, I let them do much as they liked; I would rather feed than starve them.

Down at the sea-shore in the sunny hours, out from the woodwork of the groynes or bulwarks, there came a white spotted spider, which must in some way have known the height to which the tide came at that season, because he was far below high-water mark. The moles in an upland field had made in the summer a perfect network of runs. Out of curiosity we opened some, and found in them large brown pupae. In the summer-house, under the wooden eaves, if you look, you will find the chrysalis of a butterfly, curiously slung aslant. Coming down Galley Hill, near Hastings, one day, a party was almost stopped by finding they could only walk on thousands of caterpillars, dark with bright yellow bands, which had sprung out of the grass. The great nettles--now, nothing is so common as a nettle--are sometimes festooned with a dark caterpillar, hundreds upon each plant, hanging like bunches of currants. Could you find a spot the size of your watch-seal without an insect or the germ of one?

The agriculturists in some southern counties give the boys in spring threepence a dozen for the heads of young birds killed in the nest. The heads are torn off, to be produced, like the wolves' of old times, as evidence of extinction. This--apart from the cruelty of the practice--is, I think, a mistake, for, besides the insects that injure crops, there are some which may be suspected of being inimical to human life, if not directly, indirectly; and if it were not for birds, we should run a very good chance of being literally eaten up. The difficulty is that people cannot believe what they cannot immediately see, and there are very few who have the patience or who feel sufficient interest to study minute things.

I have taken these instances haphazard; they are large instances, as it were, of big and visible things. They only give the rudest idea of the immensity and complexity of insect life in our own country. My friend the sparrow is, I believe, a friend likewise to man generally. He does a little damage, I admit; but if he were to resort to living on damage solely in his enormous numbers, we should not have a single flower or a single ear of wheat. He does not live by doing mischief alone evidently. He is the best scavenger the Londoners have got, and I counsel them to prize their sparrows, unless they would be overrun with uncomfortable creatures; and possibly he plays his part indirectly in keeping down disease. They say in some places he attacks the crocus. He does not attack mine, so I suspect there must be something wrong with the destroyed crocuses. Some tried to entice him from the flower with crumbs; they would perhaps have succeeded better if they had bought a pint of wheat at the seedsman's and scattered it. In spring, sparrows are not over-fond of crumbs; they are inordinately fond of wheat. During the months of continued dry, cold, easterly winds, which we have had to endure this season, all insect-eating birds have been almost as much starved as they are in winter when there is a deep snow. Nothing comes forth from the ground, nothing from the deep crannies which they cannot peck open; the larva remains quiescent in the solid timber. Not a speck can they find. The sparrow at such a time may therefore be driven to opening flower-buds. Looked at in a broad way, I am convinced he is a friend. I have always let them build about the house, and shall not drive them away.

If you do not know anything of insects, the fields are somewhat barren to you. The buttercups are beautiful, still they are buttercups every day. The thrush's song is lovely, still one cannot always listen to the thrush. The fields are but large open spaces after a time to many, unless they know a little of insects, when at once they become populous, and there is a link found between the birds and the flowers. It is like opening another book of endless pages, and coloured illustrations on every page.

Blessings on the man, said Sancho Panza, who first invented sleep. Blessings on the man who first invented the scarlet geranium, and thereby brought the Hummingbird moth to the window-sill; for, though seen ever so often, I can always watch it again hovering over the petals and taking the honey, and away again into the bright sunlight. Sometimes, when walking along, and thinking of everything else but it, the beautiful Peacock butterfly suddenly floats by the face like a visitor from another world, so highly coloured, and so original and unlike and unexpected. In bright painters' work like the wings of butterflies, which often have distinct hues side by side, I think nature puts very little green; the bouquet is not backed with maiden-hair fern; the red and the blue and so on have no grass or leaves as a ground colour; nor do they commonly alight on green. The bright colours are left to themselves unrelieved. None of the butterflies, I think, have green on the upper side of the wing; the Green Hairstreak has green under wings, but green is not put forward.

Something the same may be noticed in flowers themselves: the broad surface, for instance, of the peach and apricot, pink without a green leaf; the pear tree white, but the leaves come quickly; the apple, an acre of pink and white, with the merest texture of foliage. Nor are there many conspicuous green insects-the grasshopper; some green flies; the lace-fly, a green body and delicate white wings. With the wild flowers, on the contrary, there seems to come a great deal of green. There is scarcely a colour that cannot be matched in the gay world of wings. Red, blue, and yellow, and brown and purple--shaded and toned, relieved with dots and curious markings; in the butterflies, night tints in the pattern of the under wings, as if these were shaded with the dusk of the evening, being in shadow under the vane. Gold and orange, red, bright scarlet, and ruby and bronze in the flies. Dark velvet, brown velvet, greys, amber, and gold edgings like military coats in the wild bees. If fifteen or twenty delicate plates of the thinnest possible material, each tinted differently, were placed one over the other, and all translucent, perhaps they might produce something of that singular shadow-painting seen on the wings of moths. They are the shadows of the colours, and yet they are equally distinct. The thin edges of the flies' wings catch the sunbeams, and throw them aside. Look, too, at the bees' limbs, which are sometimes yellow, and sometimes orange-red with pollen. The eyes, too, of many insects are coloured. They know your shadow from that of a cloud. If a cloud comes over, the instant the edge of the shadow reaches the Grass moths they stop, so do some of the butterflies and other insects, as the wild bees remain quiescent. As the edge of your shadow falls on them they rise and fly, so that to observe them closely it must not be allowed to overlap them.

Sometimes I think insects smell the approaching observer as the deer wind the stalker. The Gatekeeper butterfly is common; its marking is very ingenious, may I say? regular, and yet irregular. The pattern is complete, and yet it is incomplete; it is finished, and yet it suggests to the mind that the lines ought to go on farther. They go out into space beyond the wing. If a carpet were copied from it, and laid down in a room, the design would want to run through the walls. Imagine the flower-bird's wing detached from some immense unseen carpet and set floating--it is a piece of something not ended in itself, and yet floating about complete. Some of their wings are neatly cut to an edge and bordered; of some the edge is lost in colour, because no line is drawn along it. Some seem to have ragged edges naturally, and look as if they had been battered. Towards the end of their lives little bits of the wing drop out, as if punched. The markings on the under wings have a tendency to run into arches, one arch above the other. The tendency to curve may be traced everywhere in things as wide apart as a flower-bird's wing and the lines on a scallop-shell.

I own to a boyish pleasure in seeing the clouds of brown chafers in early summer clustering on the maple hedges and keeping up a continual burring. They stick to the fingers like the bud of a horse-chestnut. Now the fern owl pitches himself over the oaks in the evening as a boy might throw a ball careless whither it goes; the next moment he comes up out of the earth under your feet. The night cuckoo might make another of his many names; his colour, ways, and food are all cuckoo-like; so, too, his immense gape--a cave in which endless moths end their lives; the eggs are laid on the ground, for there is no night-feeding bird into whose nest they could be put, else, perhaps, they would be. There is no night-feeding bird to feed the fern owl's young. Does any one think the cuckoo could herself feed two young cuckoos? How many birds would it take to feed three young cuckoos? Supposing there were five young cuckoos in the nest, would it not take almost all the birds in a hedge to feed them? For the incredible voracity of the young cuckoo--swallow, swallow, swallow, and gape, gape, gape--cannot be computed. The two robins or the pair of hedge-sparrows in whose nest the young cuckoo is bred, work the day through, and cannot satisfy him; and the mother cuckoo is said to come and assist in feeding him at times. How, then, could the cuckoo feed two or three of its offspring and itself at the same time? Several other birds do not build nests--the plover, the fern owl. That is no evidence of lack of intelligence. The cuckoo's difficulty, or one of its difficulties, seems to be in the providing sufficient food for its ravenous young. A half-fledged cuckoo is already a large bird, and needs a bulk of soft food for its support. Three of them would wear out their mother completely, especially if--as may possibly be the case--the male cuckoo will not help in feeding. This is the simplest explanation, I think; yet, as I have often said before, we must not always judge the ways of birds or animals or insects either by strict utility, or by crediting them with semi-supernatural intelligence. They have their fancies, likes and dislikes, and caprices. There are circumstances--perhaps far back in the life-history of their race--of which we know nothing, but which may influence their conduct unconsciously still, just as the crusades have transmitted a mark to our minds to-day. Even though an explanation may satisfy us, it is by no means certain that it is the true one, for they may look at matters in an entirely different manner from what we do. The effect of the cuckoo's course is to cause an immense destruction of insects, and it is really one of the most valuable as well as the most welcome of all our birds.

The thin pipe of the gnat heard at night is often alluded to, half in jest, by our older novelists. It is now, I think, dying out a good deal, and local where it stays. It occurred to me, on seeing some such allusion the other day, that it was six years since I had heard a gnat in a bedroom--never since we left a neighbourhood where there had once been marshy ground. Gnats are, however, less common generally--exclusive, of course, of those places where there is much water. All things are local, insects particularly so. On clay soils the flies in summer are most trying; black flies swarm on the eyes and lips, and in the deep lanes cannot be kept off without a green bough. It requires the utmost patience to stay there to observe anything. In a place where the soil was sand, with much heath, on elevated ground, there was no annoyance from flies. There were crowds of them, but they did not attack human beings. You might sit on a bank in the fields with endless insects passing without being irritated; but everywhere out of doors you must listen for the peculiar low whir of the stoat-fly, who will fill his long grey body with your blood in a very few minutes. This is the tsetse of our woods.

STEAM ON COUNTRY ROADS.

Losses year after year and increasing competition indicate that the crops now grown are not sufficient to support the farmer. When he endeavours, however, to vary his method of culture, and to introduce something new, he is met at the outset by two great difficulties which crush out the possibility of enterprise. The first of these--the extraordinary tithe--has already come into prominent notice; the second is really even more important--it is the deficiency of transit. An extensive use of steam on common roads appears essential to a revival of agricultural prosperity, because without it it is almost impossible for delicate and perishable produce to be quickly and cheaply brought to market. Railways, indeed, now connect nearly every town of any size whatever throughout the country with the large cities or London; but railways are necessarily built as lines of communication between towns, and not in reference to scattered farms. Upon the map the spaces between the various rails do not look very broad, but those white bands when actually examined would be found to be six, eight, ten, or even twenty miles wide. Nor are there stations everywhere, so that a farm which may be only six miles from the metals may be ten from the nearest platform. Goods trains do not, as in the United States, stop to pick up wherever there is material or produce waiting to be loaded; the produce has to be taken where the railway chooses, and not where it would suit the farmer's convenience. When at last the farmer's waggon reaches the station he finds no particular trouble taken to meet his needs; his horse and carters are kept hours and hours, perhaps far into the night, for a mere matter of a ton or two, nor is there any special anxiety shown to deliver his consignment early, though if it should not be moved from the companies' premises demurrage is charged. In short, the railway companies, knowing that the agriculturists until the formation of the 'Farmers' Alliance' were incapable of united action, have used them much as they liked. As for the rates charged, the evidence recently taken, and which is to be continued, shows that they are arbitrary and often excessive. The accommodation is poor in the extreme, the charges high, the speed low, and every condition against the farmer. This, in its turn, drives the farmer more into the hands of the middleman. The latter makes a study of the rail and its awkward ways, and manages to get the goods through, of course adding to their cost when they reach the public. Without the dealer, under present circumstances, the farmer would often find it practically impossible to get to markets not in his immediate neighbourhood. The rail and its awkward, inconvenient ways actually shut him off. In manufacturing districts the transit of iron and minerals and worked-up metal is managed with considerable ability. There are appointed to manage the goods traffic men who are alert to the conditions of modern requirements and quick to meet them. In agricultural districts the question often arises if there be really any responsible local goods managers at all. It seems to be left to men who are little more than labourers, and who cannot understand the patent fact that times are different now from what they were thirty years since, when they first donned their uniforms. The railways may bring their books and any number of their officers to prove that everything is perfectly satisfactory, but the feeling remains, nevertheless, that it is exactly the contrary.

Look at the map, and place the finger on any of the spaces between the lines of rail. Take, then, the case of a farmer in the midst of that space, not more than five or six miles from the metals, and able at times to hear the distant whistle of the engines, but not less than eight from a station. This present season he finds his wheat damaged by the rain after it was cut, and he comes to the conclusion that he must supplement his ordinary crops by some special culture in order to make his way. On the last occasion he was in a large city he was much struck by the quantity of fruit which he found was imported from abroad. The idea naturally occurs to him of setting aside some ten or twenty acres of his holding of four hundred or five hundred for the culture of fruit. He goes to his landlord, who is only too willing to give him every facility, provided that no injury be done to the soil. He faces the monstrous injustice of the extraordinary tithes, and expends fresh capital in the planting of various kinds of fruit.

In places at that distance from a station labour is dear relative to the low profit on the ordinary style of farming, but very cheap relative to the possible profits on an improved and specialised system. The amount of extra labour he thus employs in the preparation of the ground, the planting, cleaning, picking, and packing, is an inestimable boon to the humbler population. Not only men, but women and children can assist at times, and earn enough to add an appreciable degree of comfort to their homes. In itself this is a valuable result. But now suppose our enterprising farmer has the fortune to have a good season, and to see his twenty acres teeming with produce. He sets as many hands on as possible to get it in; but now what is he to do with it? Send it to London. That is easily said; but trace the process through. The goods, perishable and delicate, must first be carted to the railway station and delivered there, eight miles from the farm, at most inconvenient hours. They must be loaded into slow goods trains, which may not reach town for four-and-twenty hours. There is not the slightest effort to accelerate the transit, and the rates are high. By the time the produce reaches the market its gloss and value are diminished, and the cost of transit has eaten away the profit. The thing has been tried over and over again and demonstrated. One need only go to the nearest greengrocer's to obtain practical proof of it. The apples he sells are American. The farmers in New York State or Massachusetts can grow apples, pack them in barrels, despatch them two thousand eight hundred miles to Liverpool, and they can then be scattered all over the country and still sold cheaper than the fruit from English orchards. This is an extraordinary fact, showing the absolute need of speedy and cheap transit to the English farmer if he is to rise again. Of what value is his proximity to the largest city in the world--of what value is it that he is only ninety miles from London, if it costs him more to send his apples about ninety miles than it does his American kinsman very nearly three thousand?

As we have in this country no great natural waterways like the rivers and lakes of the United States, our best resource is evidently to be found in the development of the excellent common roads which traverse the country, and may be said practically to pass every man's door. Upon these a goods train may be run to every farm, and loaded at the gate of the field. This assertion is not too bold. The thing, indeed, is already done in a manner much more difficult to accomplish than that proposed. Traction engines, weighing many tons--so heavy as to sometimes endanger bridges, and drawing two trucks loaded with tons of coal, chalk, bricks, or other materials--have already been seen on the roads, travelling considerable distances, and in no wise impeded by steep gradients; so little, indeed, that they ascend the downs and supply farms situated in the most elevated positions with fuel. What is this but a goods train, and a goods train of the clumsiest, most awkward, and, consequently, unprofitable description? Yet it is run, and it would not be run were it not to some extent useful. Anything more hideous it would be hard to conceive, yet if the world patiently submits to it for the welfare of the agricultural community, what possible objection can there be to engines so formed as to avoid every one of the annoyances caused by it? It may be asserted without the slightest fear of contradiction that there are at least fifty engineering firms in this country who could send forth a road locomotive very nearly noiseless, very nearly smokeless, certainly sparkless, capable of running up and down hill on our smooth and capital roads, perfectly under control, not in the least alarming to horses, and able to draw two or more trucks or passenger cars round all their devious windings at a speed at least equal to that of a moderate trot--say eight miles an hour. Why, then, do we not see such useful road trains running to and fro? Why, indeed? In the first place, progress in this direction is absolutely stopped by the Acts of Parliament regulating agricultural engines. The Act in question was passed at a time when steam was still imperfectly understood. It was in itself a perfectly judicious Act, which ought to be even more strictly enforced than it is. But it was intended solely and wholly for the regulation of those vast and monstrous-looking engines which it was at once foreseen, if left to run wild, would frighten all horse traffic off the roads. The possibility of road locomotives in the reasonable sense of the term was not even in the minds of the framers. Yet, by a singular perversity, this very Act has shut off steam from one of its most legitimate functions.

It is quite possible that the depression of agriculture may have the effect of drawing attention to this subject, and if so it will be but tardy justice to the rest of society that the very calling whose engines now block the roads should thus in the end open them. We should then see goods trains passing every farm and loading at the gate of the field. Such a road goods train would not, of course, run regularly to and fro in the same stereotyped direction, but would call as previously ordered, and make three or four journeys a day, sometimes loading entirely from one farm, sometimes making up a load from several farms in succession. Besides the quick communication thus opened up with the railway station and the larger towns, the farmer would be enabled to work his tenancy with fewer horses. He would get manures, coal, and all other goods delivered for him instead of fetching them. He would get his produce landed for him instead of sending his own teams, men, and boys. In a short time, as the railways began to awaken to the new state of things, they would see the advantage of accommodating their arrangements, and open their yards and sidings to their competitor. In the case of long journeys, and with some kinds of goods, in order to save the cost of transhipment, it would be possible to transfer the bed of the road truck from its frame on to the frame of the railroad truck, so that the goods, with one loading, might pass direct to London. Our American cousins are quite capable of inventing a transferable truck of this kind. In return, goods loaded in London would never leave the same bottom till unloaded at the farmyard or in the midst of the village. For all long journeys the rails would probably always remain the great carriers, and the road trains serve as their most valuable feeders. When farmers found it possible to communicate with the cities at reasonable rates, and at reasonable speed, they would be encouraged to put forth fresh efforts, to plant vegetables, to grow fruit, to supplement their larger crops with every species of lesser produce. This, in its turn, would bring new traffic to the lines; for instead of one or two crops in the year only, there would be three or four requiring carriage. There would be then speedy results of such improved communication. One would be an increased value of land; the second, an increase in the number of small areas occupied and cultivated; the third, an increase in the rural population. A fourth would be that the incredible amount of money which is now annually transferred to the Continent and America for the purchase of every kind of lesser produce would remain in this country to the multiplication of the accounts at Post Office savings banks. Every one who possibly could would grow or fatten something when he could just put it on a road train, and send it off to market.

Two through passenger road trains a day, one in each direction, carrying light parcels as well, and traversing say forty or fifty miles or less, would probably soon obtain sufficient support, as they ran from village to village and market town to market town. At present, those who live in villages are practically denied locomotion unless they are well enough off to keep a horse and trap and a man to look after them. A person residing in a village must either remain in the village, or walk, or go by carrier. The carrier stops at every inn, and takes a day to get over ten miles. The exposure in the carrier's cart has been the cause of serious illness to many and many a poor woman obliged to travel by it, and sit in the wind and rain for hours and hours together. Unless they ride in this vehicle, or tramp on foot, the villagers are simply shut off from the world. They have neither omnibus, tramway, nor train. Those who have not lived in a village have no idea of the isolation possible even in this nineteenth century, and with the telegraph brought to the local post office. The swift message of the electric wire, and the slow transit of the material person--the speed of the written thought, and the slowness of the bodily presence--are in strange contrast.

When people do not move about freely commerce is practically at a standstill. But if two passenger road trains, travelling at an average speed of not more than eight miles an hour, one going up and the other down, and connecting two or more market towns and lines of railway, passed through the village, how different would be the state of things! Ease of transit multiplies business, and, besides passengers, a large amount of light material could thus be conveyed. There would be depots at the central places, but such trains could stop to pick up travellers at any gate, door, or stile. If the route did not go through every hamlet, it would pass near enough to enable persons to walk to it and join the carriages. No one objects to walk one mile if he can afterwards ride the other ten. Besides these through trains, special trains could run on occasions when numbers of people wanted to go to one spot, such as sheep or cattle fairs and great markets. Large tracts of country look to one town as their central place, not by any means always the nearest market town; to such places, for instance, as Gloucester and Reading, thousands resort in the course of the year from hamlets at a considerable distance. Such road trains as have been described would naturally converge on provincial towns of this kind, and bring them thrice their present trade. Country people only want facilities to travel exactly like city people. It is, indeed, quite possible that when villages thus become accessible many moderately well-to-do people will choose them for their residence, in preference to large towns, for health and cheapness. If any number of such persons took up their residence in villages, the advantage to farmers would of course be that they would have good customers for all minor produce at their doors. It is not too much to say that three parts of England are quite as much in need of opening up as the backwoods of America. When a new railroad track is pushed over prairie and through primeval woods, settlements spring up beside it. When road trains run through remote hamlets those remote hamlets will awake to a new life.

Many country towns of recent years have made superhuman efforts to get the railway to their doors. Some have succeeded, some are still trying; in no case has it been accomplished without an immense expenditure, and for the most part these railroad branches are completely in the control of the main line with which they are connected. In one or two cases progress has been effected by means of tramways, notably one at Wantage--an excellent idea and highly to be commended. All these are signs that by slow degrees matters are tending towards some such scheme as has been here sketched out. While local railroads are extremely expensive, slow in construction, and always dominated by main lines, and while tramways need rails, with the paraphernalia rails require, they have this drawback--they are not flexible. The engines and cars that run upon them must for ever adhere to the track: there may be goods, produce, ricks, cows, fruit, hops, and what not, wanting to be landed only a quarter of a mile distant, but the cars cannot go to the crops. The railroad is rigid, everything must be brought to it. From town to town it answers well, but it cannot suit itself and wind about from village to hamlet, from farm to farm, up hill and down dale. The projected road train is flexible and capable of coming to the crops. It can call at the farmer's door, and wait by the gate of the field for the load. We have lately seen France devote an enormous sum to the laying down of rails in agricultural districts, to the making of canals, and generally to the improvement of internal communication in provinces but thinly populated. The industrious French have recognised that old countries, whose area is limited, can only compete with America, whose area is almost unlimited, by rendering transit easy and cheap. We in England shall ultimately have to apply the same fact.

FIELD SPORTS IN ART.

THE MAMMOTH HUNTER.

The most ancient attempt to delineate the objects of sport in existence is, I think, the celebrated engraving of a mammoth on a portion of a mammoth's tusk. I call it an engraving because the figure is marked out with incised lines such as the engraver makes with his tool, and it is perfect enough to print from. If it were inked and properly manipulated it would leave an impression--an artist's proof the most curious and extraordinary in the world, for the block was cut with flint instruments by the Cave-men an incredible number of years ago, perhaps before England was separated from the Continent by the sea, while the two were still connected, and it was dry land where now the Calais-Douvres steams so steadily over the waves. But it would be an artist's proof with the lights and shades reversed, the lines that sketch the form of the mammoth would be white and the body dark, yet for all that lifelike, since the undulating indentations that represent the woolly hide of the immense creature would relieve the ground. This picture of a prehistoric animal, drawn by a prehistoric artist, shows that Art arose from the chase. Traced to the den of primeval man, who had no Academy to instruct him, no Ruskin to guide, and no gallery to exhibit in, it appears that Art sprang from nature, and not from science. His life was occupied with the hunt, and he represented that which filled his thoughts. Those who understand wild sports will not for a moment doubt that the mammoth was taken in pits or otherwise destroyed despite its huge strength; no matter if it had been twice as large, the cunning of man would have been equal to the difficulty. The mind is the arrow that slays the monster. The greater the danger the greater the interest, and consequently the more the imagination would dwell upon the circumstances of the chase. Afterwards resting in the cave round about the fire and thinking of the mighty work of sport which had been accomplished, the finger of the savage would involuntarily describe the outline of the creature so laboriously captured. His finger might describe it upon the scattered ashes whitening the ground beside him. Or it might describe the outline simply in the air. Speech in its inception was as much expressed by the finger as the tongue; perhaps the fingers talked before the mouth, and in a sense writing preceded language. Uttering the unpolished sound which in their primitive society indicated the mammoth, the savage drew rapidly a figure with his finger, and his companions read his meaning written in the air. To this day it is common for the Italian peasantry to talk with their fingers; a few syllables suffice, illustrated and emphasised by those dexterous hands. A more subtle meaning is thus conveyed than could be put in words. Some of the most ancient languages seem bald and incomplete, too rigid; they need intonation, as it were, to express passion or changes of emotion, and when written the letters are too far apart to indicate what is meant. Not too far apart upon the page, but far apart in their sense, which has to be supplied as you supply the vowels. In actual use such languages must have required much gesture and finger-sketching in the air. The letters of the Egyptians largely consist of animals and birds, which represent both sounds and ideas. Dreaming over the embers of his fire, the Cave-man saw pass before his mental vision all the circumstances of the chase, ending with the crash when the mammoth crushed into the pit, at which he would start and partially awake. Intentness of mind upon a pursuit causes an equivalent intentness of dream, and thus wild races believe their dreams to be real and substantial things, and not mere shadows of the night. To those who do not read or write much, even in our days, dreams are much more real than to those who are continuously exercising the imagination. If you use your imagination all day you will not fear it at night. Since I have been occupied with literature my dreams have lost all vividness and are less real than the shadows of trees, they do not deceive me even in my sleep. At every hour of the day I am accustomed to call up figures at will before my eyes, which stand out well defined and coloured to the very hue of their faces. If I see these or have disturbed visions during the night they do not affect me in the least. The less literary a people the more they believe in dreams; the disappearance of superstition is not due to the cultivation of reason or the spread of knowledge, but purely to the mechanical effect of reading, which so perpetually puts figures and aerial shapes before the mental gaze that in time those that occur naturally are thought no more of than those conjured into existence by a book. It is in far-away country places, where people read very little, that they see phantoms and consult the oracles of fate. Their dreams are real.

The mammoth came through his cave before the embers of his fire--the sleeping savage could touch it with his flint-headed spear--there was the crash as it fell into the prepared pit; he awakes, the dying embers cast shadows on the walls, and in these he traces the shape of the vast creature hastening away. The passing spirit has puffed the charred brands into a second's flame, and thus shadowed itself in the hollow of the cavern.

Deeper than the excitement of the chase lies that inner consciousness which dwells upon and questions itself--the soul of the Cave-man pondered upon itself; the question came to him, as he crouched in the semi-darkness, over the fire which he had stirred, 'Will my form and aerial shadow live on after my death like that which passed but now? Shall I, too, be a living dream?' The reply was, 'Yes, I shall continue to be; I shall start forth from my burial-mound upon the chase in the shadow-land just as now I start forth from my cave. I shall entrap the giant woolly elephant--I shall rejoice at his capture; we shall triumph yet again and again. Let then my spear and knife be buried with me, but chip them first--kill them--that I may use their spirit likenesses in the dream-chase.'

With a keen-edged splinter of flint in the daylight he incised the outlines of the mammoth upon a smooth portion of its tusk--its image was associated with his thoughts of a future life, and thus Art in its earliest inception represented the highest aspirations of man.

But could the ignorant savage of that long-lost day have been capable of such work? The lowest race of savages in Southern Africa--the Bushmen--go about with festoons of entrails wound around their loins. After a successful hunt--with the pit or poisoned arrows--they remove the entrails of the slain animal and wear them like coronals for present ornament and future regalement. These creatures are nevertheless artists. On the walls of caves they have painted the antelope and the lion in bright colours; they have not only caught the shape and hue of the animals about them, but their action and movement. The figures are in motion, skilfully drawn and full of spirit.