Northern Spring

Whitsun was over; the glory of Kew’s bluebells and beechleaves withdrawn again; it was exceedingly hot, and the eve of the Derby. Summer had begun—south of the Border.

But in Edinburgh it was raining, a very cold and copious rain. It was raining in Perthshire too, and the mist filled Killiecrankie as the train ran through the tree-hung gorge. During the subsequent hour’s drive from his station in the open-sided charabanc the traveller was therefore a little too much concerned with keeping dry to discover that he had suffered a transportation in time as well as in space. Next morning the dizzying fact was revealed to him: he was back in Spring again; he was to see that ever-astounding miracle twice in one year.

Not indeed the struggle of Spring’s armies when her ‘ffet half falter’,[1] but their triumph. Here once more were the welcoming faces of primroses, and the bluebells standing up and laughing on the woodland slope. Hardy primroses, too, the Highland; would those yellow families of them which we know in the south, rivetted so securely and lavishly into the green hedgerows on the sunny side of the lane ever had chosen [sic] the home of some of these, down on the very shore of the windswept loch, among the sparse alders, where there were pebbles and to spare, but not a speck of visible earth? Over that ten miles of water the cold wind blew always from the high desolate moor beyond, and the twin snowy Watchers beyond again—blew the loch at times into such fury that it came tumbling in like a breaking sea. But the primroses, having planted their colonies at a sufficient distance from the water’s edge, were undismayed.

So were the cuckoos, of which there appeared to be scores. Perhaps, however, their almost blatant proclamation of their presence intimated not so much numbers as recent arrival; and it may be that in a land where they are sometimes spoken of as ‘cuckòos’[2] they feel that more is expected of them. Lochside and brae rang with their voices.

More visible than the cuckoos, though so very much smaller, were those self-reliant particoloured balls, the plover’s children, a perpetual fascination,[3] always busily pecking and running about in the short grass taller than themselves. The anxious but surely misguided mother seemed in every case to encourage her offspring to pick up their living at the edge of the field or the stretch of moorland nearest to the road; she as invariably signalized their otherwise hardly discernible presence by her own agitated behaviour. But she or inherited instinct had taught the animated balls after a little to become motionless at her warning cry, and it was not easy then to pick them out from their surroundings.

Dust and untimely heat in Oxford Street—and here from the bedroom window the whole soaring symmetry of the most beautiful mountain in Scotland,[4] powdered at the top with snow; the beechtrees along the burn bright with their first ravishing green, and even the unhappy larches fallen across the waterfall or the hill-crest—still living victims of the tremendous half hour of tempest eighteen months before—timidly putting forth their fairy needles. Only, away across the loch, the ancient pines of the Black Wood look as dark as ever. Yet, were one nearer to those descendants of the immemorial forest, one might see, perhaps, that even their old blood was responding to their thousandth spring.