The Amateur Nature Lover - Page 2

round him for a zoological item. Underfoot the grass of
the down is recovering from the summer drought and growing soft and
green again, and plentiful little flattened snail shells lie about, and
here and there a late harebell still nods in the breeze. Yonder bolts a
rabbit, and then something whizzes by the amateur nature-lover's ear.

They shoot here somewhere, he remembers suddenly; and then looking
round, in a palpitating state, is reassured by the spectacle of a lone
golfer looming over the brow of the down, and gesticulating black and
weird against the sky. The Londoner, with an abrupt affectation of
nonchalance, flings himself flat upon his back, and so remains
comparatively safe until the golfer has passed. These golfers are
strange creatures, rabbit-coloured, except that many are bright red
about the middle, and they repel and yet are ever attracted by a devil
in the shape of a little white ball, which leads them on through toothed
briars, sharp furzes, pricking goss, and thorns; cursing the thing,
weeping even, and anon laughing at their own foolish rambling;
muttering, heeding no one to the right or left of their
career,--demented creatures, as though these balls were their souls,
that they ever sought to lose, and ever repented losing. And silent,
ever at the heel of each, is a familiar spirit, an eerie human hedgehog,
all set about with walking-sticks, a thing like a cylindrical
umbrella-stand with a hat and boots and a certain suggestion of leg. And
so they pass and are gone.

Rising, the amateur nature-lover finds he has been reclining on a
puff-ball. These puff-balls are certainly the most remarkable example of
adaptation to circumstances known to English botanists. They grow
abundantly on golf grounds, and are exactly like golf-balls in external
appearance. They are, however, Pharisees and whited sepulchres, and
within they are full of a soft mess of a most unpleasant appearance--the
amateur nature-lover has some on him now--which stuff contains the
spores. It is a case of what naturalists call "mimicry"--one of nature's
countless adaptations. The golf-player smites these things with force,
covering himself with ridicule--and spores, and so disseminating this
far-sighted and ingenious fungus far and wide about the links.

The amateur nature-lover passes off the down, and towards Banstead
village. He is on the watch for characteristic objects of the
countryside, and rustling through the leaves beneath a chestnut avenue
he comes upon an old boot. It is a very, very old boot, all its blacking
washed off by the rain, and two spreading chestnut leaves, yellow they
are with blotches of green, with their broad fingers extended, rest upon
it, as if they would protect and