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Page 18
Cookham houses are quaint, often timbered, frequently ivy-grown from
basement to roof. One imagines them assuming a half-sullen air at this
yearly breaking of their dreamy repose by incursions of parti-colored
hordes for whom life seems to hold but two supreme objects,--boats and
pictures.
The most picturesque feature of the place is the old church, set amid
tombs whose mossy and time-gnawed cherubs have exchanged grins for two
hundred years and more. The old flint tower is grave and grim, but
softened by a wonderful centuries old ivy in a veil of living green. A
pathetic interest to artists hallows the venerable church-yard. Here
sleeps Frederick Walker, a genius cut off before his meridian, and
resting now amid his kindred in a lowly grave, over which the Thames
waters surge every spring, leaving the grave all the rest of the year
the sadder for its cold soddenness and for the humid mildew and decay
eating already into the headstone, as yet but twelve years old. In the
church itself is Thorneycroft's mural tablet to the dead artist, a
portrait head of him who was born almost within the old church's shadow,
and whose pencil dealt always so lovingly with the poetic aspects of his
native region.
MARGARET BERTHA WRIGHT.
BIRDS OF A TEXAN WINTER.
White of Selborne was, on the whole, tolerably content to plunge his
swallows, or a good proportion of them, into the mud and deposit them
for the winter at the bottom of a pond. Professionally conservative, as
a fine old Church-of-England clergyman, though constitutionally
sceptical, as became one of the earliest of really observant
naturalists, he was loath to break flatly with the consensus of
contemporary opinion, rustic and philosophic, and found a _modus
vivendi_ in the theory that a great many, perhaps a majority, of the
swifts and barn-swallows did go to Africa. He had seen them organizing
their emigration-parties and holding noisy debate over the best time to
start and the best route to take. The sea-part of the travel was of
trifling length, and baiting-places were plenty in France, Spain, and
Italy. Sometimes, such was their power of wing, they were known to take
the outside route and strike boldly across the Bay of Biscay, for they
had alighted on vessels. Probably the worthy old man was reluctant to
wrench from the rural mind a harmless remnant of superstition,--if
superstition it might be called, in view of the fact that sundry
saurians and chelonians, held by classifiers to be superior in rank to
birds, do hibernate under water, and that, more marvellous than all, the
quarrymen of his day, like those of ours, insisted that living frogs
occasionally sprang from under their chisel, leaving an unchallengeable
impress in the immemorial rock. It must indeed have been up-hill work to
extinguish the old belief in the minds of men who had seen the
water-ouzel pattering in perfect ease and comfort along the floor of the
pellucid pool, and who had heard from their fisher friends from the
north coast of the gannets that were drawn up in the herring-nets.
Most of us, even _color chi sanno_, like to retain a spice of mystery in
our mental food. It may constitute no part of the nutriment, and may
often be deleterious, but it meets a want, somehow or other, and wants,
however undefinable, must be recognized. It is a spur that titillates
the absorbent surfaces and helps to keep them in action. It is a craving
that the race is never going to outlive, and that will afford occupation
and subsistence to a considerable class of its most intelligent and
respectable members until the year one million, as it has done since the
year one. The great mass of us like to see the absolute reign of reason
tempered by the incomprehensible, and are ever ready to lend a kindly
ear to men and things that humor that liking.
Where do all the birds, myriads in number and scores in species, go when
they leave the North in the winter? A small minority lags, not
superfluous, for we are delighted to have them, but in a subdued,
pinched, and hand-to-mouth mode of existence in marked contrast to their
summer life and perceptibly marring the pleasure of their society. They
flock around our homes and assume a mendicant air that is a little
depressing. Unlike the featherless tramps, they pay very well for their
dole; but we should prefer them, as we do our other friends, to be
independent, and that although we know they are but winter friends and
will coolly turn their backs upon us as soon as the weather permits. The
spryest and least dependent of them all, the snow-bird, who sports
perpetual full dress, jerks at us his expressive tail and is off at the
first thaw, black coat, white vest, and all. No tropics or sub-tropics
for him. He can stand our climate and our company with a certain
condescending tolerance so long as we keep the temperature not too much
above zero, but grows contemptuous when Fahrenheit grows effeminate and
forty. Nothing for it then but to cool off his thin and unprotected legs
and toes in the snows of Canada. "The white North hath his" heart. Our
winter is his summer. There is nothing in his anatomy to explain this
idiosyncrasy. His physical construction closely resembles that of his
insessorial brethren, most of whom go when he comes. He has no
discoverable provision against cold. Adaptation to environment does not
seem to cover his case. It does not cover his legs. They remain
unfeathered. We shudder to see his translucent little tarsi on top of
the snow, which he obviously prefers as a stand-point to bare spots
where the snow has been blown away. Compared with the ptarmigan and the
snowy owl, or even the ruffed grouse, all so well blanketed, he suggests
a survival of the unfittest.
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