Hampshire, north and south—A spot abounding in life—Lyndhurst—A white spider—Wooing spider's antics—A New Forest little boy—Blonde gipsies—The boy and the spider—A distant world of spiders—Selborne and its visitors—Selborne revisited—An owl at Alton—A wagtail at the Wakes—The cockerel and the martin—Heat at Selborne—House crickets—Gilbert White on crickets—A colony of field-crickets—Water plants—Musk mallow—Cirl buntings at Selborne—Evening gatherings of swifts at Selborne—Locustid?—Thamnotrizon cinereus—English names wanted—Black grasshopper's habits and disposition—Its abundance at Selborne.  
 
 
In the last chapter I got away—succeeded in breaking away, would perhaps be a better expression—from that favourite hunting-ground of mine farther south; and the reader would perhaps care to know why a book descriptive of days in Hampshire should be so much taken up with days in one small corner of the county. Hampshire is not a very large county compared with some others: I have traversed it in this and in that direction often enough to be pretty familiar with a great deal of it, from the walled-round cornfield which was once Roman Calleva to the Solent; and from the beautiful wild Rother on the Sussex border to the Avon in the west. There is much to see and know within these limits: for all those whose proper study is man, his history and his works; and for the arch?ologist and for the artist and seekers after the picturesque, {154} there is much—nay, there is more to attract in the northern than in the southern half of the county. I, not of them, go south, and by preference to one spot, because my chief interest and delight is in life—life in all its forms, from man who "walks erect and smiling looks on heaven" to the minutest organic atoms—the invisible life. It here comes into my mind that the very smell of the earth, in which we all delight, the smell which fills the air after rain in summer, and is strong when we turn up a spadeful of fresh mould, which the rustic calls "good," believing, perhaps rightly, that we must smell it every day to be well and live long, is after all an odour given off by a living thing—Cladothrix odorifera. Too small for human eyes, which see only objects proportioned to their bigness, so minute, indeed, that millions may inhabit a clod no larger than one's watch, yet they are able to find a passage to us through the other subtler sense; and from the beginning of our earthly journey even to its end we walk with this odour in our nostrils, and love it, and will perhaps take with us a sweet memory of it into the after-life.
 
Life being more than all else to me, I am drawn to the spot where it exists in greatest abundance and variety.
 
I remember feeling this passion very strongly one day during this summer of 1902 after looking at a spider. It was an interesting spider, and I found it within a couple of miles of Lyndhurst, of all places; a spot so disagreeable to me that I avoid it, and {155} look for nothing and wish for nothing to detain me in its vicinity.
 
Lyndhurst
Lyndhurst is objectionable to me not only because it is a vulgar suburb, a transcript of Chiswick or Plumstead in the New Forest where it is in a wrong atmosphere, but also because it is the spot on which London vomits out its annual crowd of collectors, who fill its numerous and ever-increasing brand-new red-brick lodging-houses, and who swarm through all the adjacent woods and heaths, men, women, and children (hateful little prigs!) with their vasculums, beer and treacle pots, green and blue butterfly nets, killing bottles, and all the detestable paraphernalia of what they would probably call "Nature Study."
 
It happened that one day, a mile or two from Lyndhurst, going along the road I caught sight of a pretty bit of heath through an opening in the wood, and turning into it I looked out a spot to rest in, and was just about to cast myself down when I noticed a small white spider, disturbed by my step, drop from a cluster of bell-heath flowers to the ground. I stood still, and presently the spider, recovered from its alarm, drew itself up again by an invisible thread and settled down on the bright-coloured blossoms. Seating myself close by, I began to watch the strangely shaped and coloured little creature. It was a Thomisus—a genus of spiders distinguished by the extraordinary length of the two pairs of forelegs. The one before me, Thomisus citreus, is also singular on account of its colour—pale citron or white—and its habit of sitting on flowers. {156} This habit and the colour, we may see, are related. The citreus is not a weaver of snares, but hunts for its prey, or rather lies in wait to capture any insect that comes to the flower on which it sits. On white, yellow, and indeed on most pale-coloured flowers, it almost becomes invisible. On the brilliant red bell-heath blossom it showed plainly enough, but even here it did not look nearly so conspicuous as when on a green leaf.
 
Wooing spider's antics
I had observed this white spider before, but had always seen it sitting motionless in its flower; this one was curiously restless, and very soon after I had settled myself down by its side it began to throw itself into a variety of strange attitudes. The four long forelegs would go up all at once and stand out like rays from the round, white body, and by-and-by they would drop and hang down like two long strings from the flower. Pretty soon I discovered the cause of these actions in the presence of a second spider, less than half the size of the first, moving about close by. His smallness and hideling habits had prevented me from seeing him sooner. This small, active, white creature was the male, and though moving constantly about in the heath at a distance of half a foot from her, it was plain that they could see each other and also understand each other very well. As he moved round her, passing by means of the threads he kept throwing out from spray to spray, she moved round on her flower to keep him in sight; but though fascinated and drawn to her, he still dreaded, and was pulled by his fear and his desire in opposite ways. {157} The excitement of both would increase whenever he came a little nearer, and their attitudes were then sometimes very curious, the most singular being one of the male when he would raise his body vertically in the air and stand on his two pairs of forelegs. When very near, they would extend the long forelegs and touch one another; but always at this point when they were closest and the excitement greatest a panic would seize him, and he would make haste to get to a safer distance. On two such occasions she, as if afraid to lose him altogether, quitted her beloved flower and moved after him, and after wandering about for some time to no purpose, found another flower-cluster to settle on. And so the queer wooing went on, and seemed no nearer to a conclusion, when, to my surprise, I found that I had been sitting and lying there, with eyes close to the female spider, for an hour and a half. Once only, feeling a little bored, I gently stroked her on the back, which appeared to please her as much as if she had been a pig and I had scratched her back with my walking-stick. But no sooner had the soothing effect passed off than she began again watching the movements of that fantastic little lover of hers, who loved her for her beautiful white body, but feared her on account of those poison fangs which he could probably see every time she smiled to encourage him. At the end of my long watch the conclusion of the whole complex business seemed farther off than ever: fear had got the mastery, and the male had put so great a distance between them, and moved now {158} so languidly, that it seemed useless to remain any longer.
 
A little forest boy
I had not been watching alone all this time: when I had been about half an hour on the spot I had a visitor, a small miserable-looking New Forest boy; he came walking towards me with a little crooked stick in his hand, and asked me in a low, husky voice if I had seen a pony in that part of the Forest. I told him sharply not to come too near as his steps would disturb a spider I was watching. It did not seem to surprise him that I was there by myself watching a spider, but creeping up he subsided gently on the heath by my side and began watching with me. At intervals when there was a lull in the excitement of the spiders I could spare time for a glance at my poor little companion. He was probably eleven or twelve years old, but his stature was that of a boy of eight—a small, stunted creature, meanly dressed, with light-coloured lustreless hair, pale-blue eyes, and a weary sad expression on his pale face. Yet he called himself a gipsy! But the south of England gipsies are a mixed and degenerate lot. They are now so incessantly harried by the authorities that the best of them settle down in the villages, while those who keep to the old ways and vagrant open-air life are joined by tramps and wastrels of every shade of colour. This little fellow had little or no Romany blood in his watery veins.
 
He told me that his people were camping not far off, and that the party consisted of his parents with six (the half-dozen youngest) of their thirteen children. {159} They had a pony and trap; but the pony had got away during the night, and the father and two or three of the children were out looking for it in different directions. We talked a little at intervals, and I found him curiously ignorant concerning the wild life of the Forest. He assured me that he had never seen the cuckoo, but he had heard of its singular habits, and was anxious to know how big a bird it was, also its colour. In some trees near us a wood-wren was uttering its sorrowful little wailing note of anxiety, and when I asked him what bird it was, he answered "a sparrer." Nevertheless he seemed to feel a dim sort of interest in the spiders we were watching, and at length our intermittent conversation ceased altogether. When at last, after a long silence, I spoke, he did not answer, and glancing round I found that he had gone to sleep. Lying there with eyes closed, his pale face on the bright green turf, he looked almost corpse-like. Even his lips were colourless. Getting up, I placed a penny piece on the turf beside his little crooked stick, so that on awaking he should have a gleam of happiness in his poor little soul, and went softly away. But he was sleeping very soundly, for when after going a couple of hundred yards I looked back he was still lying motionless on the same spot.
 
But when I looked back, and when, regaining the road, I went on my way, and indeed for long hours after, I saw the boy vaguely, almost like a boy of mist, and was hardly able to recall his features, so faintly had he impressed me; while the spider on {160} her flower, and the small male that wooed and won her many times yet never ventured to take her, were stamped so vividly on my brain, that even if I had wished it I could not have got rid of that persistent image. It made me miserable to think that I had left, thousands of miles away, a world of spiders exceeding in size, variety of shape and beauty and richness of colouring those I found here—surpassing them, too, in the marvellousness of their habits and that ferocity of disposition which is without a parallel in nature. I wished I could drop this burden of years so as to go back to them, to spend half a lifetime in finding out some of their fascinating secrets. Finally, I envied those who in future years will grow up in that green continent, with this passion in their hearts, and have the happiness which I had missed.
 
I, of course, knew that it was but the too vivid and persistent image of that particular creature on which my attention had been fixed which made me regard spiders generally as the most interesting beings in nature—the proper study of mankind, in fact. But it is always so; any new aspect, form, or manifestation of the principle of life, at the moment it comes before the vision and the mind, is, to one who is not a specialist, attractive beyond all others.
 
But, after all is said and done, I have as a fact spent many of my Hampshire days at a distance from the spots I love best, and my subject in this chapter will be of my sojourn in that eastern corner of the county, in the village and parish which all {161} naturalists love, and which many of them know so well.
 
 
 
Visitors to Selborne
It is told in the books that some seventy or eighty years ago an adventurous naturalist journeyed down from London by rough ways to the remote village of Selborne, to see it with his own eyes and describe its condition to the world. The way is not long nor rough in these times, and on every summer day, almost at every hour of the day, strangers from all parts of the country, with not a few from foreign lands, may be seen in the old village street. Of these visitors that come like shadows, so depart, nine in every ten, or possibly nineteen in every twenty, have no real interest in Gilbert White and his work and the village he lived in, but are members of that innumerable tribe of gadders about the land who religiously visit every spot which they are told should be seen.
 
One morning, while staying at the village, in July 1901, I went at six o'clock for a stroll on the common, and, on going up to the Hanger, noticed a couple of bicycles lying at the foot of the hill; then, half-way up I found the cyclists—two young ladies—resting on the turf by the side of the Zigzag. They were conversing together as I went by, and one having asked some question which I did not hear, the other replied, "Oh no! he lived a very long time ago, and wrote a history of Selborne. About birds and that." To which the other returned, "Oh!" and then they talked of something else.
 
{162}
These ladies had probably got up at four o'clock that morning, and ridden several miles to visit the village and go up the Hanger before breakfast. Later in the day they would be at other places where other Hampshire celebrities, big and little, had been born, or had lived or died—Wootton St. Lawrence, Chawton, Steventon, Alresford, Basing, Otterbourne, Buriton, Boldre, and a dozen more; and one, the informed, would say to her uninformed companion, "Oh dear, no; he, or she, lived a long, long time ago, somewhere about the eighteenth century—or perhaps it was the sixteenth—and did something, or wrote fiction, or history, or philosophy, and that." To which the other would intelligently answer, "Oh!" and then they would remount their bicycles, and go on to some other place.
 
Selborne revisited
Although a large majority of the visitors are of this description, there are others of a different kind—the true pilgrims; and these are mostly naturalists who have been familiar from boyhood with the famous Letters, who love the memory of Gilbert White, and regard the spot where he was born, to which he was so deeply attached, where his ashes lie, as almost a sacred place. It is but natural that some of these, who are the true and only Selbornians, albeit they may not call themselves by a name which has been filched from them, should have given an account of a first visit, their impression of a spot familiar in description but never realised until seen, and of its effect on the mind. But no one, so far as I know, has told of a second or of any subsequent {163} visit. There is a good reason for this, for though the place is in itself beautiful and never loses its charm, it is impossible for anyone to recover the feeling experienced on a first sight. If I, unlike others, write of Selborne revisited, it is not because there is anything fresh to say of an old, vanished emotion, a feeling which forms a singular and delightful experience in the life of many a naturalist, and is thereafter a pleasing memory but nothing more.
 
Selborne is now to me like any other pleasant rural place: in the village street, in the churchyard, by the Lyth and the Bourne, on the Hanger and the Common, I feel that I am
 
In a green and undiscovered ground;
the feeling that the naturalist must or should always experience in all places where nature is, even as Coventry Patmore experienced it in the presence of women. He had paid more than ordinary attention to their ways, and knew that there was yet much to learn.
 
An owl at Alton
How irrecoverable the first feeling is—a feeling which may be almost like the sense of an unseen presence, as I have described it in an account of my first visit to Selborne in the concluding chapter in a book on Birds and Man—was impressed upon me on the occasion of a second visit two or three years later. There was then no return of the feeling—no faintest trace of it. The village was like any other, only more interesting because of several amusing incidents in bird-life which I by chance {164} witnessed when there. Animals in a state of nature do not often move us to mirth, but on this occasion I was made to laugh several times. At first it was at an owl at Alton. I arrived there in the evening of a wet, rough day in May 1898, too late to walk the five miles that remained to my destination. After securing a room at the hotel, I hurried out to look at the fine old church, which Gilbert White admired in his day; but it was growing dark, so that there was nothing for me but to stand in the wind and rain in the wet churchyard, and get a general idea of the outline of the building, with its handsome, shingled spire standing tall against the wild, gloomy sky. By-and-by a vague figure appeared out of the clouds, travelling against the wind towards the spire, and looking more like a ragged piece of newspaper whirled about the heavens than any living thing. It was a white owl, and after watching him for some time I came to the conclusion that he was trying to get to the vane on the spire. A very idle ambition it seemed, for although he succeeded again and again in getting to within a few yards of the point aimed at, he was on each occasion struck by a fresh violent gust and driven back to a great distance, often quite out of sight in the gloom. But presently he would reappear, still striving to reach the vane. A crazy bird! but I could not help admiring his pluck, and greatly wondered what his secret motive in aiming at that windy perch could be. And at last, after so many defeats, he succeeded in grasping the metal cross-bar with his {165} crooked talons. The wind, with all its fury, could not tear him from it, and after a little flapping he was able to pull himself up; then, bending down, he deliberately wiped his beak on the bar and flew away! This, then, had been his powerful, mysterious motive—just to wipe his beak, which he could very well have wiped on any branch or barn-roof or fence, and saved himself that tremendous labour!
 
It was an extreme instance of the tyrannous effect of habit on a wild animal. Doubtless this bird had been accustomed, after devouring his first mouse, to fly to the vane, where he could rest for a few minutes, taking a general view of the place, and wipe his beak at the same time; and the habit had become so strong that he could not forgo his visit even on so tempestuous an evening. His beak, if he had wiped it anywhere but on that lofty cross-bar, would not have seemed quite clean.
 
At Selborne, in the garden at the Wakes, I noticed a pair of pied wagtails busy nest-building in the ivy on the wall. One of the birds flew up to the roof of the house, where, I suppose, he caught sight of a fly in an upper window which looked on to the roof, for all at once he rose up and dashed against the pane with great force; and as the glass pane hit back with equal force, he was thrown on to the tiles under the window. Nothing daunted, he got up and dashed against the glass a second time, with the same result. The action was repeated five times, then the poor baffled bird withdrew from the contest, and, drawing in his head, sat hunched up for two or three minutes {166} perfectly motionless. The volatile creature would not have sat there so quietly if he had not hurt himself rather badly.
 
Cockerel and martin
One more of the amusing incidents witnessed during my visit must be told. Several pairs of martins were making their nests under the eaves of a cottage opposite to the Queen's Arms, where I stayed; and on going out about seven o'clock in the morning, I stood to watch some of the birds getting mud at a pool which had been made by the night's rain in the middle of the street. It happened that some fowls had come out of the inn yard, and were walking or standing near the puddle picking up gravel or any small morsel they could find. Among them was a cockerel, a big, ungainly, yellowish Cochin, in the hobbledehoy stage of that ugliest and most ungraceful variety. For some time this bird stood idly by the pool, but by-and-by the movements of the martins coming and going between the cottage and the puddle attracted his attention, and he began to watch them with a strange interest; and then all at once he made a vicious peck at one occupied in deftly gathering a pellet of clay close to his great, feathered feet. The martin flitted lightly away, and after a turn or two, dropped down again at almost the same spot. The fowl had watched it, and as soon as it came down moved a step or two nearer to it with deliberation, then made a violent dash and peck at it, and was no nearer to hitting it than before. The same thing occurred again and again, the martin growing shyer after each attack; then ot............