From a Norfolk Farm

THE Denchmen (Danishmen) have returned across the North Sea to their pine forests, wherein they make their nests. That is the name they call the Gray or Hoody Crow on the north coast of Norfolk. It shows how slowly things have changed in this small remaining area of Old England. A thousand years and more have passed since the invaders came in their galleys, driving off the local inhabitants, aud settling on their farms. One of my neighbors came over (in the blood of his ancestors) about that time and is pure Dane to look at, ruddy of face, fair of hair, with the blue eyes of the northern peoples. His ancestor was a Dane. Flights of gray crows stippled the skies over the pennant of the ship that bore him to the rich isle in the West; every autumn since they have come again — and modern children, clasping cheap chain-store toys which might have been made in Burma, or Japan, look up and say, ‘The Denchmen are over in the woods again.’ Has there, in all the centuries between, occurred any essential change in the countryside — save for slightly improved housing, clothing, and (doubtfully) food?

The lark still sings as of olden time over the cornfields, the buds break out of the thorn trees, the wind of early spring blows with the very breath of ice from the polar fields beyond the sea. After five months of living in the English woods and fields, the gray crows slip away over the marshes, flying low, and so to the wave-tops and the long flight home again. Almost on the same day they leave, year after year. A week or two after they have gone, the flocks of rock doves, which have picked bare many of the clover fields of the district, follow after them; and the English ringdove, a bigger bird with white collar round his neck, has the woods to itself. On the first warm sunny day of the year the croodling of the male bird is heard from the pine trees; contrast to the passionate cooing of the turtledove which, at the beginning of May, flies here from the valley of the Nile.

The ringdove, or wood pigeon, is a heavy, stolid-looking bird. ‘Strong in the arm and thick in the head’ is the proverbial saying about the East Anglian laborer, that amalgam of the Nordic invaders with the Saxon, Norman, and Celtic strains; and strong in the wing and thick in the throat and crop might apply also to our native pigeons. I have seen them dragging themselves along the ground, unable to fly, their crops weighted down by a hundred and more acorns, each bird. They are amorous, and in a favorable season (which means food) lay and hatch out as many as six sets of twin white eggs on the rafts of twigs which serve as nests. Their thick feathers resist the charge of shot which the farmer sends after them, as with clovertight crops they circle the treetops before settling to roost. Their flesh is not easily digested by the human stomach. (English variety) unless eaten with stewed prunes.

The Abyssinian turtledove, whose passionate and rapid cooing throb sounds in early summer from the thorn brakes, is the Biblical dove. It is small, and beautifully hued, like the ashes of a mixed wood fire, brown, gray, and spotted white. It is a genuine lover; it travels far in its dream of the English spring, makes its slender nest, brings up its two dovelets, and then away again — before the anticlimax of leaves beginning to rust and the grass losing color. It is a poet, the soul of summer in its keeping. How far back to Solomon? A moment only: the same moment when ‘the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.’

HENRY WILLIAMSON