Page:Bird Haunts and Nature Memories - Thomas Coward (Warne, 1922).pdf/145

42 green wall with a patch of gold in spring, whilst in autumn the children find the old quarry a fruitful garden for blackberries. The men has her nest on the ivy-clad wall; the whitethroat and willow wren hunt for aphides on the broad sycamore leaves and fill the air with delicious music; the wasps have taken possession of the rotting thatch, and the air hums with the vibration of myriad other gauzy wings. The rabbit throws out the sandy earth, and the fox has safe shelter in a pile of broken rocks, useful for his home, it beneath the notice of man. The turtle-dove purrs in the birch, the woodpigeon coos in the beech; nightly the owl leaves his ivy-bower to hunt round the old quarry, whilst the bats dodge in and out amongst the branches. In the close summer days the hollow hums with insect life; millions of whirring wings produce a low but steady booming note, and in the evening the trees and bushes are haunted by the silently flying, ghostly moths. Nature has reclaimed her own.

Man must have stone and brick and coal; he can no longer exist in natural holes or beneath the uncertain shade of the trees. Yet the artistic eye is shocked by the damage and unsightly mess of the quarry, the mine, and the brickfield. Æsthetic taste rebels against the destruction of the picturesque, and demands that something must be done to stop the levelling of a Penmaenmawr, the quarrying of an Ailsa Craig, the mining in a Tilberthwaite Ghyll. Are these outraged champions of nature prepared to do without stone and metal? Let them wait. Let them look, for instance, at the Thames Embankment, and then visit the great quarry on Lundy Island, whence the stone came. Nature, there, has reasserted herself and reconstructed marvellous beauty. There is nothing sordid or unsightly in those tern and heather clad granite rocks, even if some show the tool-marks and drill-holes.