Page:ONCE A WEEK JUL TO DEC 1860.pdf/577

 . 17, 1860.] This absence of so many old acquaintance reminds us that we shall see the bat no more this year. It is hanging head downwards from the rafter of some barn or belfry, wrapped in its skinny wing. The snails and slugs have burrowed underground, and there are only two or three moths remaining. The moles are digging nests as fast as their clumsy ways permit. We begin to make much of the robin as he perches on the garden paling of every cottage we pass. He is still somewhat shy; but, before a month is over, he will be at our window, in a very confiding mood.

Some remnants of beauty hang round these cottages still. The Pyracantha makes a bright display of red berries beside the windows; and in the warmest corner, between the porch and the wall, one is sure to see either the last dahlia of the year, or a tall hollyhock. The China rose will show blooms till the snow comes, or after, for we have often seen a bud or bloom drooping under its burden of snow, and even (as I remember happened once) frozen into a glass dish in the drawing-room, and looking in no way the worse for its cold captivity. There is one sunny cottage where we look for trails of the Tropæolum canariense, on the front of the porch, among the ivy, long after it has gone to tatters elsewhere. The greatest profusion I have seen of that beautiful climber was on a porch near Bolton Abbey; and the latest is within a walk of my own house. These precious last flowers of the season endure into November, in sheltered nooks, even when frosts have blackened whole regiments of dahlias by the middle of September in exposed situations, in the same way that a tree may offer a theme to a moralising Lake poet, weeks after townsfolk suppose it a settled matter that every leaf in England that can fall has fallen. The late tourist who thinks October, and on into November, the best time for the dales, knows what it is to come upon one of those nooks in Borrowdale, or on the side of Scawfell, in which the wind seems never to stir, and where the birch or the ash or sycamore retains its leaves till something happens to push them off. The voices and the tread of travellers may do it; so the artist begs them to pass on quietly, and leave him to sketch the form and seize the colouring, and put the remarkable date below.

My girls have not admitted that the sketching season is over. They want to study the ramifications of the wood, knowing that without this they can no more draw trees than the figure-painter can draw his personages without having studied the anatomy of the human frame. One object in our noon walks, therefore, is to find the best hedgerow timber, and the finest single trees and groups that the woods afford. There are snug lanes and warm woodpaths where one may sit still for half an hour with impunity. Yet, how the shelter of the woods is gone! And with it, how much of their motion! And how the sound is changed! When the trees were in full leaf, opposing large masses to the winds, and swaying before the pressure with a sweeping roar, the hoarse tumult was wholly unlike the vibrating rise and fall of sound occasioned by the passage of the winds through unbending trees. It takes a much stronger gust to shake the forest trees now than in midsummer; and the music is less like the sweeping waves upon a shingly beach than the sea-organ which thrills one’s heartstrings when a squall overtakes a tight-rigged ship in the Atlantic. Pinewoods alone are constant to their winter music throughout the year. Every breeze that touches them strongly enough in any season wakens up millions of fairy harps, which, united, set the air trembling with the most moving harmony that Nature affords. Except in the north of Scotland, there is scarcely enough of pine forest for us to understand what this music may amount to; but travellers in the Carolinas or in Canada, or in Norway, or in the Baltic provinces of Russia, will bear out all that poets can say of the harp music of Nature’s orchestra.

While one daughter makes a study of a bare ash (for the oak she must wait till the spring buds push off the crisp russet leaves), the other dashes down upon paper the colouring of an ivy-clad trunk of an elm. It is, to be sure, a wonderful picture—the vivid green of the ivy leaf seen from behind, and the glitter of its front surface; the various browns of the stem; the russet fern growing out of the emerald moss in the fork; the grey tufts of withered weeds, and the red and yellow ground—these make a gay picture of gloomy November. The yew is another capital subject; but it is one of the commonest—its berries in relief against the dark foliage tempting the brush of the young artist as irresistibly as the beaks of hungry birds.

The most picturesque figure we meet in these rambles is, beyond all question, the ratcatcher. Jane has never quite got over the start given her by one of the brotherhood one afternoon, when, in the remotest part of a green lane, she was sitting wholly engrossed with her sketch. A heavy finger on her arm made her look up; and there stood the tall, brawny old fellow, looking down upon her with an exceedingly disagreeable grin. He had come up so softly on the grass, and had kept his dog so quiet, that he was like an apparition. She hoped he would pass on: but he had evidently no such intention. He pulled out of a dozen pockets as many rats, bloody about the muzzles, and opened out his store of gossip of the neighbourhood, laying his finger on her arm at every emphatic point. Her pencils were soon put by, and she was on her way to the nearest end of the lane, her new friend turning back with her, as if for the pleasure of conversation. She walked as fast as her beating heart would allow, while he, with his swinging stride, was perpetually on the point of getting before her. How she wished he would go forward! But he wanted to learn from her who lived here or there, and whether there were only ladies in yonder house, and whether the gentlemen in another were travelling or at home. I suspect he was amusing himself with the supposed fears of a young lady living in a lone house; for she evaded all his attempts to learn where she lived. She made a call in the village to escape him; but, just as she was turning in at the home gate in the dusk, her picturesque friend appeared at her elbow—wallet, dog, broad-brimmed, crooked hat and all, with rats on his arm and a straw in