Hampshire, north and south--A spot abounding in life--Lyndhurst--A white spider--Wooing spider's antics--A New Forest little boy--Blonde gipsies--The boy and the spider--A distant world of spiders--Selborne and its visitors--Selborne revisited--An owl at Alton--A wagtail at the Wakes--The cockerel and the martin--Heat at Selborne--House crickets--Gilbert White on crickets--A colony of field-crickets--Water plants--Musk mallow--Cirl buntings at Selborne--Evening gatherings of swifts at Selborne--Locustidæ--_Thamnotrizon cinereus_--English names wanted--Black grasshopper's habits and disposition--Its abundance at Selborne.
In the last chapter I got away--succeeded in breaking away, would perhaps be a better expression--from that favourite hunting-ground of mine farther south; and the reader would perhaps care to know why a book descriptive of days in Hampshire should be so much taken up with days in one small corner of the county. Hampshire is not a very large county compared with some others: I have traversed it in this and in that direction often enough to be pretty familiar with a great deal of it, from the walled-round cornfield which was once Roman Calleva to the Solent; and from the beautiful wild Rother on the Sussex border to the Avon in the west. There is much to see and know within these limits: for all those whose proper study is man, his history and his works; and for the archæologist and for the artist and seekers after the picturesque, { 154} there is much--nay, there is more to attract in the northern than in the southern half of the county. I, not of them, go south, and by preference to one spot, because my chief interest and delight is in life--life in all its forms, from man who "walks erect and smiling looks on heaven" to the minutest organic atoms--the invisible life. It here comes into my mind that the very smell of the earth, in which we all delight, the smell which fills the air after rain in summer, and is strong when we turn up a spadeful of fresh mould, which the rustic calls "good," believing, perhaps rightly, that we must smell it every day to be well and live long, is after all an odour given off by a living thing--_Cladothrix odorifera_. Too small for human eyes, which see only objects proportioned to their bigness, so minute, indeed, that millions may inhabit a clod no larger than one's watch, yet they are able to find a passage to us through the other subtler sense; and from the beginning of our earthly journey even to its end we walk with this odour in our nostrils, and love it, and will perhaps take with us a sweet memory of it into the after-life.