POCKETS OF SPRING 93 



almost squeeze them back into their egg-shells with- 

 out harming them. Farther on, the plovers come 

 wheeling and screaming round us, and by their 

 mistaken anxiety make us see their tiny offspring 

 cowering close beside the road. Where straggling 

 pines dot a wild piece of heather, whose tufts of 

 cotton-grass proclaim its bogs to have been undrained, 

 curlew fly and shriek at unwonted intrusion on their 

 solitudes. 



Only in the water does spring seem to have gone 

 forward without regard to latitude. The trout 

 spawned here even earlier than in Hampshire, and 

 if we leave the lordlier domain of the beck and look 

 into the poor, scum-laden pond, we shall see that the 

 tadpoles are of the same magnificent dimensions they 

 have attained to in the south. In fact they seem 

 larger, as though they might be tadpoles that were 

 too late last year to become frogs, and had gone over 

 the winter into a second year. It has been so, and 

 there are even creatures that have given up the 

 perfect state altogether, and live, reproduce, and die 

 as tadpoles where once they blossomed into beings 

 apparently as superior as the butterfly is to the 

 caterpillar. But we are assured that these tadpoles 

 of the sub-moorland pond are the produce of this 

 spring's eggs. Their parents slept in the pond itself, 

 and were called betimes. The newts, on the other 

 hand, hibernate on dry land, and came into this 

 northern pond after we had bursting eggs in lowland 

 counties. Some of them may have slept in the grotto 

 of primroses, whose inhabitants escape the cold snaps 

 of April and May, and begin the year amid the 

 smiles of June. 



