Showers in Harvest Time—Magnificent Sunset—Night
sometimes seeming not to descend but to ascend —Death
of M. Leverrier—The Discovery of Neptune—Pigeon cooing at Midnight—The
Owl at Noon—Cage-Birds singing at Night.
The weather
continues wonderfully fine for the season [October 1877], and with the
exception of the potato-lifting, all our harvest labours are at length
concluded. The ingathering has upon the whole been highly satisfactory,
far more so than any one could have had the courage to predict up to the
very advent of this our autumnal summer, which has already lasted just
thirty days, uninterruptedly sunny and dry, without any more serious
break than a mere passing shower, which invariably did more good than
harm. More good the reader exclaims interrogatively, how can a shower do
good, how can it be otherwise than harmful in harvest time? Patience,
courteous reader, and we shall explain. It is a case of something of
this kind. You are driving along the road; the horse in the shafts
before you is upon the whole a steady-going and willing animal enough,
but you have let him have it just his own way for the last half hour,
and dreaming, perhaps, of fresh fields and pastures green, he has for
the moment forgotten your existence, and begins to lag. His usual pace
of a good eight miles an hour is now hardly over five, and what in such
a case shall you do? You drop the lash gently across his flank, as light
and gently as falls the angler's cast on the waveless pool; you are too
much of a Christian and a gentlemen—the terms are or ought to be
synonymous—to do otherwise until it is absolutely necessary. Your horse
forgets his dream; becomes instantly alive to the work before him;
gathers himself together, and with a responsive toss of his head and a
lively play of ears, goes along at rather more than his average speed
until the next stage is reached; knowing full well that the hand that
laid on that serpent-like lash so tenderly, can lay it on in very
different fashion, hot and heavy enough when occasion calls. Or,
dropping metaphor, let us state the matter plainly, thus :—Here in
Lochaber, and we suppose it is just the same over all the Highlands,
when really fine weather comes, we are for the first few days up and
doing, busy enough. But as one fine day succeeds another, we are very
ready to fall into the error that after all it is best to take things
leisurely. Where's the need, we ask ourselves, for so much hurry and
bustle? The fine weather has lasted a week; it may last a month, is
indeed likely so to last; it is no more like rain to-day than it was
yesterday; and thus we lapse, often unconsciously, perhaps, into a
spirit of dilatoriness and procrastination, out of which only a lowering
sky, and a shower that for all we know may become a flood, can fairly
rouse us. You slept long, for instance, this morning; you dawdled over
your porridge and milk at breakfast time, and it is now noonday. But see
! the heavens yonder in the north-west are suddenly overcast; an ominous
gloom creeps over the Outer Hebrides; a few drops of rain have already
fallen, one on the back of your left hand, on which placing the index
finger of your right, you can find that it is wet, that it is rain; a
second on your cheek with a soft, tepid thud; and a third right into
your open, uplifted eye, and you straightway start into activity and
life. All hands on deck! is the cry. You rush into the field amongst the
stooks; you bustle about cheerily, and calling all hands into your
service, for idlers are now out of place, you cart and carry away as f&st
as-you can into your barn or stack-yard, and by sunset, so expeditiously
have you worked, that the field from head-rig to head-rig is but bare
and stookless stubble. It was after all but a passing shower; the gloom
has given place to cloudless blue; you have been cheated, so to speak.
But what matters it % Your crop is safely stacked or housed, and were it
not for the passing shower and temporary mid-day gloom, your stooks were
still alield, running a risk there was no reason they should run; and
so, good reader, you will understand how a slight shower in the season
of ingathering may not always be an evil, but a very good thing indeed;
and only a few such passing, labour-inciting showers have we known here
for a whole month, and that is
much to say when the month is to be counted from mid-September to
mid-October.
And, O gentle reader, we only wish you were with us here
to see for yourself, propriis
oculis, for
no pen can describe it, one or more of the many magnificent sunsets we
have, had in the course of this same bypast month of fine weather. The
sunsets of the equinoctial seasons, both vernal and autumnal, are almost
always beautiful, more particularly those of the autumnal equinox; but
never before, we think, have we seen them so startling, gloriously
beautiful, so gorgeously magnificent, as on several occasions lately. A
few evenings ago, as we were busy in our study, a young lady burst in
upon us in a state of great excitement, begging us to throw aside our
pen for a little, and come out to see the exceeding glory of the setting
sun. We readily complied of course, and taking the young lady by the
hand we made a race of it till we reached our "coigne of vantage," a
grassy green knoll, a favourite standpoint when any celestial phenomenon
of importance to the W. or
S.W. of us is to be observed. The scene, in truth, was indescribably
beautiful, and we stood in speechless admiration, not unmingled with
awe, in sight of the most glorious sunset our eyes ever beheld. Before
us lay the whole expanse of the Linnhe Loch, shimmering as if gently
aboil in a flood of pale golden light. Beyond, rose what seemed the one
vast unbroken range of the mountains of Ardgour, Kingerloch, and Morven,
bathed in a rich dark purple hue, that for the moment so thoroughly
obliterated every trace of their native ruggedness, that our companion
prettily observed, " Haven't you the idea, sir, as I have, that if one
were only near enough these beautiful mountains to pat them lovingly
with the hand, they would feel to the touch soft and warm as a roll of
velvet!" a thought, unconsciously perhaps, tinged with poetry, though
the woman pure and simple comes out very unmistakeably in the reference
to the "roll of velvet." In the far background, thirty miles away, rose
the glory and pride of Mull (Blackie's favourite island of all the
Hebrides), the huge mountains of Benmore and Ben-na-Bairnich, their base
and middle zones ink-black, their shoulders dark orange, here and there
curiously streaked with threads of pearly light, their summits and
sloping ridges fringed with living fire. Above, the whole western
heavens was full of vast continents, peninsulas, isthmuses, and islands
of cloud, all afire at their edges, with firths, ferries, and
Mediterraneans of liquid gold between. As the full-orbed sun, fiery and
red, slowly sank to the horizon, the clouds were rent asunder as if by
the very excellency of the glory that beat upon them; some of them
assuming fantastic shapes, in which a lively imagination had no
difficulty in tracing striking resemblances to the hugest animals of our
own and past ages, a monster saurian in sharply defined silhouette,
being so marvellously outlined that our fair companion sketched it on
the spot, as a memento of a sunset that neither of us is likely ever to
forget. As the sun's lower limb seemed just to touch and rest an instant
on the highest peak of the Kingerloch range, a large mass of cloud
immediately above him rapidly assumed a columnar shape, perpendicular to
the plane of the horizon, and, as the splendid orb dipped and
disappeared, this huge "pillar of cloud" became a perfect Ionic column,
sharply outlined, and admirably correct in all its proportions from base
to entablature, and all aglow with living fire; shaft and pediment with
richest crimson; frieze and architrave and cornice with the glow of
molten mettle at "white heat" as it issues from a blast furnace. There
was, truth to say, something terrible about the scene, a wild and weird
combination of the sublime and beautiful such as Edmund Burke never
beheld even in his dreams. It was impossible, in the presence of the
"terrible majesty" of that glory, to avoid thinking of the awfulness
that must appertain to a scene of which all of us shall one day he
spectators, when the "elements shall melt with fervent heat," and the
"earth also, and the works that are therein," shall be consumed with
fire. The succeeding afterglow of that same evening was singularly
beautiful. The mountains of Appin and Glencoe were for a time bathed
from their summits to their shoulders in the richest purple and gold,
making them look so soft and warm, that for the moment their actual
ruggedness was utterly forgotten, and one felt towards them a far
stronger and tenderer sentiment than mere admiration. And very
curiously, as we gazed, did the night immediately succeed the afterglow,
for of twilight there was none—there rarely is indeed in autumn, as the
old Highlanders were too observant not to notice, for what saith the old
and well-known rhyme!—
"Mar chlorich a ruith le gleann,
Tha feasgar fann, fogharaidh."
The meaning of which is, that no longer lasts the
autumnal twilight than it takes a stone to roll adown the mountain steep
into the glen below. We generally speak of the night's descending;
we say the falling night,
the darkness fell, &c.,
as if the darkness came down from above, and sometimes, doubtless, it
does seem so to fall —to descend like a curtain. On this occasion,
however, and frequently, we have noticed, in the autumnal season, the
night did not seem so much to descend as to ascend, like
an exhalation from out the entrails of the earth; the blackness of gorge
and corrie and glen slowly creeping upwards, banishing the gold and
purple as it ascended, just as you have seen the earth's shadow in an
eclipse of the moon obliterate the silvery radiance of the lunar
disc—finally reaching ridge and summit and loftiest peak, and lo, it was
night, the ruddy orb of Mars over the now ink-black top of
Buachaill-Etive putting the fact beyond all question; and, while our
fair companion went for a stroll along the beach, gaily singing a merry
roundelay as became her innocence and her years, we retired in a mood of
mind that, while it was pleasant upon the whole, had yet a tinge of
sadness about it, to our study and our books.
France has recently lost one of her greatest men by the
death of M. Leverrier, her distinguished astronomer, the most
distinguished astronomer, it is not too much to say, of the present
century. Many, indeed, achieved greater triumphs with the telescope, for
with the telescope Leverrier did comparatively little; it was as a mathematical astronomer
that he was unrivalled. He came first prominently into notice while
still a young man, with his cometary investigations, and his researches
into the motions of the planet Mercury, constructing tables by which
transits of the latter can be predicted with such absolute correctness
that the mean error never exceeds sixteen
seconds of
time. But it is with the discovery of the planet Neptune that
Leverrier's name is imperishably associated. The case briefly stated was
this :—It was found, after a time, that the planet Uranus,
discovered by Sir "William Herschel, did not actually follow the orbit
which theory had assigned to it. It had a mysterious trick of leaving
the computed track, and describing a greater orbit, if the law of
gravitation was to hold good, than the tables founded on that law
warranted. Astronomers were puzzled to account for the vagaries of an
orbit that, According to their theory, ought to he well-behaved, and
staid and steady-going as any other member of the solar system. "What
could the perturbations of Uranus mean? was the question asked; and at
the suggestion of his friend the distinguished Arago, Leverrier
undertook to answer it, and in due time did answer
it in such wise as filled the world with astonishment and admiration.
Resolutely grasping with his task, Leverrier laboured long and laboured
hard to resolve the mystery, and as a first step with this result, that
the problem was utterly unresolvable on any other conceivable theory or
conjecture than that another planet, albeit unknown to astronomers, and
hitherto as unsuspected as it was unseen, existed exterior to
Uranus, and that it was to the attraction or disturbing influence of
this hitherto undreamt-of orb that the perturbations and mysterious
vagaries of Uranus could alone be ascribed. A memoir stating the
conclusion arrived at, and all the calculations leading towards it, was
read before the Royal Academy of Sciences in June 1846, and the young
and daring astronomer straightway resumed his labours, of which the aim
was now to determine the elements of the orbit of the unknown planet, in
the existence of which he now believed as firmly as in that of the
visibly perturbed orb Uranus itself. The astronomical world shook its
head dubiously, and waited. Did such a planet really exist, and if it
did, could this daring Frenchman find it? M. Leverrier meantime laboured
on, and finally mastering every difficulty, he gave the computed plans
of orbit, the mass and natural position of his constructed world, if in
truth, that is, such a world existed. This was in a second memoir to the
Academy of Sciences on the last day of August 1846. Towards the end of
the following month (September 1846), Leverrier wrote to M. Galle, of
Berlin, requesting him to level the powerful telescope under his charge
at a particular point of the heavens, and there, in effect, said the
wonderful Frenchman, you will find the cause of the perturbations of
Uranus, a new and distant world, hitherto undreamt of and unseen by
mortal eye, but existing all the same. M. Galle, on the first favourable
opportunity, directed his telescope as requested, and there, within less
than a single
eye
of its computed place, and flinging hack its light from the enormous
distance of more than three billions of
miles, was the planet of Leverrier's analysis, with a diameter,
magnitude, and orbit all as calculated and predicted. It was a glorious
triumph, the most wonderful achievement in the annals of a science where
all is wonder.
Publicly and privately has this query been put to us—Is
it unusual to hear a pigeon cooing at midnight, and the owl hooting in
bright noonday? We answer very unhesitatingly that it is
unusual,
so unusual in the case of the owl at least, that in a quarter of a
century's familiar and friendly intercourse with our wild-birds under
all possible circumstances, we have never heard an owl hoot except "
darkling," as Milton has it, that is, from out the darkness or sombre
shade. Even at night, if the moon is shining bright, it never hoots from
a spot on which the moonbeams fall in full flood; it selects the deepest
shadow even in faint moonlight when uttering its eerie notes. It will
hoot in twilight, and it will hoot when the heavens are bright ablaze
with the most brilliant coruscations of the aurora, but never, so far as
our experience has extended, does it hoot in honest daylight or even in
moonlight, except when, as we have said, it is itself in deep shade. We
have kept pets of all our native species of owls, and most interesting
pets they make, and though, when angry or in any way out of sorts, it
will utter a ready hiss, ending in a curious rasping guttural, we have
never known it to hoot except in the darkness of night, and, more
rarely, in the dim, uncertain light of evening or morning twilight. The
cooing of a pigeon at midnight, while it may he said to be unusual, is
yet a thing that, under certain circumstances, may be heard at any time.
Many birds, captives in cage or aviary, frequently sing short and
incomplete strophes of their special song in the warm stillness of
summer nights, evidently in their dreams. Others, in their natural state
of freedom, about the time of the longest day, when there is hardly any
night in our latitudes, may he heard singing, generally unconnectedly,
and in a faint, uncertain key. The pigeon will coo at any time when
brooding, if rudely disturbed in any way, just as a brooding hen will purr and
scold if you annoy her or her nest at any hour of the day or night. The
cooing of a pigeon, therefore, at midnight is nothing very wonderful.
The hooting of an owl at noonday, however, is surprising, and a thing
which, although we live in a district where owls are plentiful, is
altogether unknown in our experience. |