Page:Once a Week June to Dec 1863.pdf/32

22 of feathers, and enjoying Milton or Shakespeare, it is an impossibility! As soon lie down under a street lamp and fancy oneself Endymion!

Most love we the parsonage lawn, emblem as it is of all that is most sacred in English domestic life. It may not always be as closely shaven as might be; for John has much to do, and its turn only comes with planting cabbages, ringing passing bells, and “sarving the pigs.” Daisies may fleck it here and there, but we forgive them, because they recall sundry scraps of Burns and Wordsworth. It is probably even trampled down in an unseemly manner at one corner, but “boys will be boys,” and sometimes cattle find the gate carelessly left open. At all events it is a thoroughly useful lawn, and thoroughly enjoyable at all times and seasons; whether in June, when the parson meditates on the bench under the limes, and the children play croquet, mingling their merriment with the cawing of sage jackdaws from the tower behind the shrubbery; or in January, when he walks on its sunny side, and catches the windy clamour of the rooks returning to their nesting trees; in grey dawn, when each blade of grass glitters with dew; in moonlight, when a hedgehog gloomily perambulates it, or rabbits skip across it to the pinks. The more it is studied, too, fresh delights reveal themselves. Are you in a serious mood?—pass over it to the rustic gate opening on the churchyard. There even the moss-grown sun-dial, with its homely motto, “pereunt et imputantur,” is in harmony with your thoughts. Are you glad?—skirt those cunningly-arranged tree stumps to the laburnums and lilacs, the roses and honeysuckles, of the inner garden; there the humming-bird hawk-moth poises itself over the blossoms like its tropical namesake, the pipit flits about from tree to tree, and all is life and animation. Would you moralise on the lawn’s green expanse with the great modern interpreter of nature?—learn, then, the secret of humility from the grass before you. Its very end is to be trodden under foot, and yet it rises stronger after it. Mow or roll it as much as you will, and it only sends up thicker shoots. Even in winter it is always green, always cheerful; type of perpetual youth and perpetual freshness, its very uniformity like a reflection of the unclouded sky above. Truly they were wise men, those old monks, who loved so much a spacious courtyard of grass!

A naturalist may spend many pleasant moments on his lawn. If an entomologist, he may find larvæ amongst the grass, or capture numerous moths and butterflies attracted thither by the neighbouring flowers. Thoroughly to enjoy a lawn, we should have bee-hives by it, for the sake of the perpetual murmur.

Much may be learnt from observing the habits of the earthworms which inhabit it, their seasons of appearing, &c. If vexed at the unsightly casts they leave on the turf, we can reflect how useful they are in dragging dead leaves underneath which would otherwise litter the grass. As if to compensate for the havoc they make with tender plants, they are admirable fertilisers of a lawn, constantly withdrawing the surface-earth and piercing the soil in all directions, so much so as in a few years entirely to change its surface.

Without worms in our lawns we should have no blackbirds or thrushes haunting them, and to most people birds are peculiarly associated with lawns. Watching their strange ways is an untiring source of quiet pleasure. You may sometimes observe in the West of England the green woodpecker fly flapping to your lawn (as the parrots fly in other lands), and watch its awkward movements on the unusual surface amongst its queer-looking brood, which have just lighted on the earth, for the first time, from the hole in the aged elm. Alarm them, and they are up the nearest tree in a trice, chattering with the squirrels.

it is on the lawn we welcome the redbreast in winter, and it is a favourite resort of many summer birds. A pair of chimney-swallows initiated their tender nestlings into the mysteries of fly-catching over our lawn, last summer. They took literally short “swallow-flights of song” over its surface, and then alighted altogether on the grass to rest a moment, and prevent the tyros feeling weary. It was a beautiful sight to see the old birds proudly puffing out their chestnut-coloured throats in the sunshine, and flirting their tails admiringly round their young hopefuls, evidently too scared on their part to enjoy it, much like small boys just emerging from a first swimming lesson, who shiver afterwards on the brink. At this moment we have a pet blackbird with white-barred tail-feathers hopping over it. Last winter a pair of magpies haunted it. Our Skye came trotting up it one morning with a large bone in his mouth, and (though he did not see us) with that downcast eye and hanging tail which unmistakably showed that he had stolen it from some housewife while salting her pig at the village. He was evidently not hungry, but (like every prudent dog) had an eye to next day: so, looking all round very cautiously, he slunk off to the edge and concealed it at a tree-root, scratching soil all over it, and then departed at his usual jaunty pace. But Nemesis was at hand. One of the magpies sat overhead, cunningly marking all his proceedings, and, directly he had turned the corner, summoned his mate. The two then descended, exhumed the dainty morsel, and picked it clean, while we sat in our study-chair thinking, “set a thief to catch a thief.” No one but Sir E. Landseer could do justice to the dog’s look on returning, and awaking to the foul treachery that had been done in his absence!

But here we must stop, and, to propitiate the reader, will end with a moral, which is that the common-place objects of daily life are just those which often sweeten it most. Homely enough, perhaps, but anything which attaches people more to home in these restless days is so much additional happiness. It is on the lawn in summer that

Wisdom doth live with children round her knees,

Books, leisure, perfect freedom, and the talk

Man holds with week-day man in the hourly walk

Of the world’s business.