A VILLAGE IN HAMPSHIRE 171 



As with landscape, so it is with individual trees, in- 

 dependently of what beauty of shape, colour or orna- 

 ment they may possess. There was a small juniper 

 in the churchyard where I spent many hours. The 

 church was indifferent, but the churchyard with its 

 noble yews (the pride of so many Hampshire churches), 

 its cedar, cypresses and soft turf had a real character 

 and peace of its own, and it was a pleasant thing to 

 look out from it away to the clear, intense purple of 

 the downs, foreboding storm. In this juniper a pair 

 of linnets had built their nest, and one day I found it 

 quite thronged with the minute, busy, dusky forms of 

 goldcrests, whose fever of restlessness relieved, without 

 marring, the calm of the place. The tree was alive 

 with them, and that common phrase must squeeze all 

 its juice out to express the sudden grace which fulfilled 

 that common tree, as a husbandman fulfills the earth. 1 



Swallows, when they begin to bustle into camp in 

 September for their long journey undergo a physio- 

 logical change which drags them out of routine. The 

 cries and songs of the little adventurers palmers for 

 the Holy Land (whither some of them actually go), 

 that have sung their farewells and travelled out their 

 courses so many thousand years before palmers were 

 and so many autumns since their voyagings were done 

 mark the first wrinkles in the year. The young are 

 being fed in the air, and here there is no antagonism 

 between the migratory and the domestic instincts. 



One day I witnessed the extraordinary spectacle of 

 a creeper going back for a yard on his tracks ! Dean 

 Inge declares, with sublime untruth, that " the normal 

 condition of every species is not progress but stationari- 

 ness," but I have been an eye-witness of a tree-creeper 

 revolution, as wonderful in its way to all who know 

 their creeper as the resurrections of the human spirit 

 from calamity and disintegration. 2 



1 They pair in January, but remain in flocks for some time. 

 The male displays before the female by running along a branch 

 with drooped wings and fanned tail. 



2 Once I actually saw a creeper go half demented, whirling 

 round and round a tree-bole in an ague of unrest. I should have 

 been hardly more surprised if the tree had taken to its heels. 



