style="font-size:15px;"> The adder’s siesta is just as much a part of his fixed yearly cycle as the fall of the leaf is to the tree, or migration towards warmer lands is to the swallow or house-martin. Snakes can’t migrate; because, of course, they’ve got no wings to migrate with; and being chilly creatures, evolving little animal heat of their own from their sluggish circulation, and warmed by the sun alone into spasmodic activity, they are compelled to bury themselves in holes in the ground, where they lie close to all others of their species that they can find, so as to utilize in common, by mutual aid, whatever trifle of bodily warmth they possess between them. Indeed, a snake, like a tree, can only be said really to live for half its lifetime; the other half these Persephones of the north spend underground in the torpid condition. The heart almost entirely ceases to beat; the lungs cease to act; sensation is suspended; and the animal dozes away his time unconsciously till the summer warmth of the surface soil begins once more to revive him. Then he ventures forth timorously from his hole on some bright May morning, to see how things are progressing in the upper world; and meeting, peradventure, some belated shrew-mouse or some early spring chicken, makes a dash at it at once with what life he has left in him, strikes it with his poison-fang, and, swallowing it whole, straightway regains fresh fuel for the battle of existence.
Adders were always friends of mine. They are numerous hereabouts, on our heathy uplands; and for my own part, I do my best to protect and preserve them. For we have not so many wild creatures left in England that we can afford to despise any lingering element of our native fauna. Besides, they do next to no practical harm; occasionally, indeed, they may spring at a dog who provokes their otherwise placid and meditative tempers by treading on them in the heather; and they will still more rarely make a dash at a man who incautiously handles them; but as a rule they are timid and rather sluggish creatures, much more likely to take fright and flee when discovered than to turn and rend one. I come across them frequently on basking paths among the heath in summer; they lie sunning themselves on the warm sand; but when I endeavour to rouse them to resistance by poking at them with my stick, they refuse, as a rule, to show fight, and after a few minutes of hesitation and lazy reluctance to move, they retire in high displeasure to their home among the bracken. Never once have I known them try actively to resent my intentional intrusion on their post-prandial reflections.
We have but two kinds of snakes, all told, in England, popular prejudice to the contrary notwithstanding. One of them is the harmless and pretty ring-snake, easily distinguished by the absence of the rhomboidal zigzag markings; the other, who may as easily be recognized by their presence, is the venomous adder, known also under his frequent alias as the viper, and often supposed to be two distinct creatures. In reality, one reptile doubles the parts, as an actor would say, being but a single snake under two disguises. The adder is remarkable for bringing forth its young alive, instead of hatching them out of eggs, like most typical serpents; and the very name viper is short for vivipara. As for the blind-worm, or slow-worm, who is also one animal masquerading under two aliases, he must not be considered a snake at all, being a legless lizard, who tries deceptively to pass himself off in serpent’s clothing. Nay, he is not even, strictly speaking, legless, for he has rudimentary limbs, with bones to match, though they never quite succeed in pushing themselves through the scaly integument. He is a lizard, in short, arrested on his road to complete serpenthood. Neither the ring-snake nor the blind-worm is in the slightest degree dangerous; but when in doubt as to whether a particular crawling animal is an adder or otherwise, it would be safer to give him – and yourself – the benefit of the doubt, by abstaining from handling him. The poison-fangs of the viper are two in number, set in the upper jaw; they are hollow, perforated, and erectile at will by the muscles of the animal. Their poison is secreted by a gland at the back, which communicates through a tube with the canal in the fang; and it is not really so very venomous. But if you provoke an adder overmuch, and he sees a chance of remonstrating with you, I do not deny that he will throw back his smooth head, erect his angry fangs, dart quickly forward, and express his disagreement by inflicting a bite upon the offender’s trousers. In this he acts much as you and I would do if he were a man and we were adders. Put yourself in his place, and you will think less ill of him.
VII.
A FLIGHT OF QUAILS
It is one of the wonders and delights of the moorland that here alone Nature pays the first call, instead of demurely waiting to be called upon. Near great towns she is coy; and even in the fields that abut on villages, she shows but a few familiar aspects; while aloof on the open heath she reveals herself unreservedly, like a beautiful woman to her chosen lover. She exhibits all her moods and bares all her secrets. This afternoon, late, we were lounging on the low window-seat by the lattice that gives upon the purple spur of hillside, when suddenly a strange din as of half-human voices aroused our attention. “Look, look!” Elsie cried, seizing my arm in her excitement. And, indeed, the vision was a marvellous and a lovely one. From the lonely pine-tree that tops the long spur above the Golden Glen, a ceaseless stream of brown birds seemed to flow and disengage itself. It was a living cataract. By dozens and hundreds they poured down from their crowded perch; and the more of them poured down, the more there were left of them. What a miracle of packing! They must have hustled and jostled one another as thick on the boughs as swarming bees that cling in a cluster round their virgin queen; while as for the ground beneath, it seethed and swelled like an ant-heap. For several minutes the pack rose from its camp, and fluttered and flowed down the steep side of the moor toward Wednesday Bottom, flying low in a serried mass, yet never seeming to be finished. They reminded me of those cunning long processions at the play, when soldiers and village maidens stream in relays from behind the wings, and disappear up the stage, and keep moving eternally. Only that is clever illusion, and this was reality.
“Lonely,” people say! “No life on the hilltop!” Why, here was more life at a single glance than you can see in a whole long week in Piccadilly; an army on the march, making the heather vocal with the “wet-my-feet, wet-my-feet” of ten thousand voices!
But you must live in the uplands to enjoy these episodes. Nature won’t bring them home to you in the populous valleys. A modest maid, she is chary of her charms; you must woo her to see them. She seldom comes half-way to meet you. But if you dwell by choice for her sake in her chosen haunts, your devotion touches her: she will show you life enough – rare life little dreamt of by those who tramp the dead flags of cities, where no beast moves save the draggled cab-horse. For you, the curlew will stalk the boggy hollows; for you, the banded badger will creep stealthily from his earth and disport himself at dusk among his frolicsome cublets; for you, the dappled adder will sun his zigzag spots, and dart his tremulous tongue, all shivering and quivering; for you, the turbulent quail will darken the ground in spring, or spread cloud-like over the sky on cloudless summer evenings.
And what poetry, too, in their sudden entrance on the scene, dropped down from heaven, one would think, as on Israel in the wilderness! Small wonder the marvel-loving Hebrew annalist took those multitudinous birds for the subject of a miracle. But yesterday, perhaps, they were fattening their plump crops among the vine-shoots of Capri, the lush young vine-shoots with their pellucid pink tendrils; and to-day, here they are among the dry English heather, as quick and eager of eye as by Neapolitan fig-orchards. Swift of flight and patient of wing, they will surmount the Apennines and overtop the Alps in a single night; leave Milan in its plain and Lucerne by its lake when the afterglow lights up the snow on the Jungfrau; speed unseen in the twilight over Burgundy or the Rhineland; cross the English Channel in the first grey dawn; and sup off fat slugs before twelve hours are past, when the shadows grow deep in the lanes of Surrey. Watt and Stephenson have enabled us poor crawling men to do with pain and discomfort, at great expense, in the chamber of torture described with grim humour as a train de luxe, what these merry brown birds, the least of the partridge tribe, can effect on their own stout wings in rather less time, without turning a feather. If you watch them at the end of their short European tour from Rome to England at a burst, you will find them as playful and as bickering at its close as if they had just gone out for an evening constitutional.
Quails are the younger brothers of the partridge group; but, unlike most of their kind, they
