LAND AND W .\ T E R . 
OPEN WEATHER. 
By J. D. Symon. 
Fobraar\' 3, 19 16. 
UNDER a climate that seems resolutely determined 
to deny us what is conventionally known as 
seasonable winter weather, we have almost 
forgotten what snow and frost were really like. 
They are rapidly becoming a myth, and might indeed 
liave passed out of remembrance were it not for the per- 
sistence of the tradition in the pages of illustrated journals 
and occasionally on a Christmas card. Elderly peoples 
remember or profess to remember long weeks of snow 
when skating was the daily pastime, and they tell wonder- 
ing children most enviable stories of parties on the ice, 
prolonging their exercise sometimes initil the small hours 
imder a wintry moon, and able to celebrate the season as 
the season should be celebrated until it reached its 
glorious and proper end on Twelfth-night. 
But for such winters we iiave almost ceased to hope. 
They have little snatches of that old-fashioned pleasure in 
!>cotland still, but in this 1-ondon latitude we have had no 
such good fortime since the January of 1895. The onset 
of that memorable frost had its herald in another now 
less familiar feature of Cockayne, to wit, a genuine 
" London particular." of which throat and eyes still 
retain a vivid and imwelcome memory. An age of 
electricity and the efforts of Sir William Richmond 
would seem to have had some effect, for the worst fog 
is certainly rarer nowadays. One may have missed 
more recent %nsitations, but that in question remains 
the finest example in a rather long private experience. 
Women at the Well. 
Jack Frost, playing the historian that bygone 
January, revived another incident of a still older London, 
for water had to be drawn from stand-pipes in the street, 
and therewith reappeared the ancient congregations of 
women at the well, who fell at once into the antique 
habit of their great grandmothers and made the occasion 
subser\'e the ends of gossip. For to the women of an 
earlier day the well was what the shop of Figaro was to 
their lords. Perhaps they missed this daily rendezvous 
when the thaw came, and may have thought more 
lightly of " every modern convenience," and counted the 
toil of water-carrying worth its added opportunities of 
exchanging the universal cordial of human-nature. 
But the glory of a wintry I^ondon has sadly declined 
since the brave days when Bob Cratchit went so gaily 
and so often down a slide in Cornhill. A slide in Cornhill ! 
Incredible ! Even 1895 hardly paralleled that giddy 
dissipation. To such delights the present generation is 
a stranger. It gives one more or less a shock to realise 
that that means twenty years of almost uniformly open 
weather in winter. It means also that to tho\isands of 
young people seasonable winter weather is merely hearsay, 
and to very little children it must seem like a fairy tale. 
In this connection there arises a point of some remark, 
which was made by an acute French journalist during that 
spell of skating which came to surprise Paris in the 
winter of 1013-14, as if to allow the city a moment of 
keener enjoyment before the dark days that were so near 
and so little suspected. All Paris, young and old. turned 
out to share it, and the excellent scribe, writing, I think, 
in the Figaro, called upon all men to behold a miracle. 
It was nearly twenty years since Paris had skated before, 
whence then had come the extraordinary proficiency 
which the younger people displayed in the art ? Certainly 
not from roller-skating, which is quite different. But the 
answer was. after all, not very far to seek, for it lay in 
Alpine Winter Sports for the well-to-do and for the less 
well-to-do in the exceeding ease with which a nation of 
accomplished dancers can learn to skate. Our discerning 
writer did not raise his point until the young people whoso 
grace and dexterity he so much admired had profited by 
quite a week's practice, and no doubt should King Frost 
graciously favour us in these ensuing days we shall sec 
a similar marvel on every skating pond. But pending 
such joys, we must make the best of our open weather. 
The mere term " open weather " has a peculiar 
charm, not to gardeners and masons alone. It is however, 
the gardener and the farmer who must have invented 
it, with a peculiar satisfaction, as they thought of ground, 
unfettered by lio^l, lying open to planting and sowing. 
.\nd to the mason, open weather means work, for in time 
of frost he dare not attempt to cut the stone. To the 
fox-hunter, open weather is the thing chiefly to be desired, 
with a southerly wind and a cloudy sky. 
Endless Delight. 
But to one who is no tiller of the soil, nor huntsman, 
nor mason, but a mere rambler about the countryside in 
the intervals of an entirely superlluous occupation, open 
weather is a thing of endless delight. Its charm lies to 
a great extent in its negation of what we fondly believe 
to be the characteristics of winter, although it is really 
high time that we revised our opinion on that point. 
But with some deep-rooted faith in the eternal unccrtaint \- 
of our climate, we assume that the last twenty years of 
open winters is only another if rather prolonged freak of 
the clerk of the weather, and will certainly be succeeded, 
before our time is out, by the bracing rigours of which our 
fathers have told us. 
In the open winter morning, when the quiet yellow 
sunlight, slightly watery perhaps, lies level over the fields 
and makes a golden filigree of the thin stems in the coppice, 
winter can put on the disguise of spring, so cunningly 
sometimes, perhaps so cnielly, that the foolish buds are 
tempted out untimely. On such days, despite the softness 
of the roads, it is good to make an early start, piously 
resolved to spend all the short light in the open air, with 
only a brief halt now and then at a wayside inn for homely 
countrj' fare, which must never be more elaborate than 
bread and cheese. .\t such times many tracks are for- 
bidden, for the floods may be out, and meadows which 
at other times offered the pleasantest of paths are now 
either under water, or so marshy that no going is possible. 
But the grateful sense of abundant moisture on the earth 
and in air is of the essence of these days of open weather, 
and where there has been overflow of the river or the 
brook, the landscape takes on a new character and reveals 
new tricks of light and shade, while a humid sweetness 
comes up from the land, telling of forces that are preparing 
in secret depths for the lush richness of June. 
Galdecott's Hunting Pictures. 
But none the less does open weather permit of drier 
and more bracing days than these. Then it is that stripped 
fields and trees give the setting for such hunting pictures 
asCaldecott used to draw. His hand, cunning as it was 
at the snowy landscape, with its good old-fashioned sug- 
gestions of warm cheer to follow for those who had to face 
the rigours of winter, had as deft a trick of suggesting 
winter without its conventional accompaniments. He 
caught the cold light on the lields with a delicate 
economy of means, a single flat wash of colour was sufli- 
cient to secure his effect, and there you had the very 
sotting and no other that called for the Three Jovial 
Huntsmen. 
Without breaking the spell of open weather, a fleeting 
touch of frost will often nip the air at sunset, and thus it is 
that the western lights are purely those of winter and not 
of borrowed spring. Your spring sunset is not counter- 
feited here, and the mild winter tinds in its suaset some 
assertion of that severer character which may or may not 
be a fable. There is no mistaking these wintry sunsets 
with their low-hung mists, their gorgeous trails of crimson 
reaching up into the earlier darkening sky ; there is no 
mistaking such for the longer lingering light of spring. 
Here at the end of the day is winter's self indeed, and 
were there no other sign to tell us the real name of the 
season, there is always the position of the sun. 
This sector of the horizon and no other is that of the 
wintry sunset, and in this no other season has part or 
lot. Not only our own consciousness may tell us this, 
but the sub-consciousness of generations back stirs in us 
and makes us feel, without dclinitc realisation, that here, 
whatever its disguise, however open the w-eather, is 
potentially the inhospitable season of the year. To-day 
it may be spring ; to-morrow icicles may hang by the wall 
and Dick the Shepherd blow his nail. 
16 
