Early Summer at the Cape.

IT is hard to realize when June mornings are upon us how different Nature is on the other side of the world in the southern hemisphere, where our spring is their autumn, our summer their winter, our vernal their autumnal equinox. How dull and strange and altogether meaningless must the songs and raptures of our poets in the growing season of the year sound to the ears of Colonists living in subtropical climates, where the harvest has just been ingathered, and hymns of thanksgiving sung! Here in rural England we nurse tenderly during the bleak days of February or March the welcome vision of the green blades of the wild arum, broadening slowly day by day in the land of winter desolation; we give a greeting to the humble celandine, and even to the plain dog's mercury as they peep timidly upon us from the hedgerows, and, when the sweet white violets and primroses look forth as modest children of the New Year from behind the drooping shields of the last year's bracken beds, we hymn our vernal odes. Not so abroad, and in such a climate as that of South Africa. There the skies seem alien, the plants strange, the climate different, and new stars look down night after night upon a new world, and, when we have said good-bye, regretfully perhaps, to Ursus major sinking slowly down upon the northern horizon, as the ship rushes southward, we have said good-bye to northern seasons, northern climates, northern twilight, and all the indescribable associations of a northern life. Nature henceforth will wear a different livery, her face will wear a different smile.

To the lover of English rural life the change in the bird-life of the South will be most marked. England is pre-eminently the land of bird-song; whilst at the Cape, as in many subtropical countries, there is scarcely a bird-note worth listening to for a

to us.

moment. There is the sweet twittering of the Cape canaries, pretty enough in its way; there is the cooing of the bush dove; there is the loud whistling challenge of the Fiscal or Butcher bird, and the call of the Bok-ma-kerie (an onomatopoeic word), the substitute for our thrush, and the hoarse guttural note of the Loeri, heard in the recesses of a distant kloof or combe, but no music anywhere. The golden cuckoo is a small and beautiful bird, with green and silky plumage, but his name belies him; never have I heard at the Cape the double note of the cuckoo so dear Swallows and swifts abound at the Cape, but both seem, like the spreos or starlings, to have lost their endearing ways and habits. Who, on a June night in England, does not listen with pleasure to the wild scream of ecstatic joy that comes from the swifts as they dive and sweep with incredible speed round an ancient tower or cliff where they have nested year after year? But the Cape swifts share not the summer madness and exhilaration. Perhaps there are no places for them to disport themselves such as they love, no towers or steeples, or "ancient solitary abodes," handed down from generation to generation as hereditary nesting-places. The house-marten and chimney swallow have forgotten in the South to be the confiding companions of man, and do not nest beneath the eaves and in the chimneys of straw-thatched cottages. As if a homing instinct had told them that the tender and remote North was the fitting place to build their nests after all, not here, where the Southern Cross holds sway. Well enough to spend a few summer months here, they might twitter to one another, but not for always! Even the Cape robin, which hops about on slender legs and peers curiously about with its bright little eyes, much after the fashion of his northern cousin, is comparatively mute here. In England the robin sings all the year round, and in quiet still days in winter, when the sun is out, he sings, we know, as merrily almost as in the summer. Nor can the stranger follow at first, whilst the seasons are still new to him, the yearly migration of birds in South Africa. Such migrations are carried out yonder as regularly and punctually as in England, and we must believe that many of our English migrants come from winter quarters in South Africa, although the line of Continental migration does not yet appear very clearly marked along the length of the Dark Continent. It is a strange instinct that sends so many thousands of birds northwards, ever northwards, to bill and coo and nest in the cold latitudes. Once my heart failed me in South Africa

when I shot a fern owl or night-jar as it flew dazed in the daylight from a rocky hiding-place,-just such a hiding-place as he loves in England. Often had I in times past listened to his quaint purring and churring on the heather hills of the old country, and could this, I thought, really be an English born and bred bird after all, crossing innumerable rivers, lakes, and forests to this sub-tropical land?

In England the spring is marked almost to the day by the notes of migratory birds coming in their allotted order. It is often easier to detect our little visitors by hearing their first few warblings than by sceing them. Here in English meadows, when the palm is in bloom and the catkins hang along the hedges, who does not wait anxiously for the first sweet refrain of the chiff-chaff? He is one of our first visitors, even when March winds are blustering. In Kaffirland, where the natives have killed every small bird with knob-keries (sticks) and stones, there is an oppressive and monotonous silence at all seasons of the year. No bird is there to tell us how the seasons are progressing; there is no music in the woods, no warbling and fluttering among the green leaves. In England, after the chiff-chaffs and willow-wrens, there follow in their nightly hosts the countless warblers, till some day in April "the Wandering Voice" is heard, that voice that gave to Wordsworth at Laverna a gratulation even better than that of nightingale or thrush. Presently one quiet night the fern owls will drop, wearied by their long sea-voyage, upon the green hill-sides of England they have known before, and in the luscious gloaming of a May or June evening tell us summer has fully come. One after the other these little immigrants mark our spring calendar; but in South Africa the lover of country sights and sounds, landing in a world of fresh flora and fauna, will stare in blank bewilderment and astonishment. Robert Browning sings,

"Oh, to be in England

Now that April's there,

And whoever wakes in England

Sees, some morning, unaware,

That the lowest boughs and the brush-wood sheaf

Round the elm-bole are in tiny leaf,

While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough

In England now!

And after April, when May follows,

And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows."

But all this to a Colonist born and bred in the country must

be meaningless when April marks with him the season of decay. To obtain the proper April associations, and realize that the "blossom of the almond-trees is April's gift to April's bees," he should change his nomenclature of the months, or read the seasons backwards. "Come out, 'tis now September," would be a spring rather than an autumn invocation, where Christmas Day is sometimes the hottest of the whole year, and "the leafy month of June" a winter month.

With the seasons coming and going in this topsy-turvy fashion it is clear that the words, phrases, similes, and illustrations of our northern poetry must be read and interpreted amongst all English Colonists in the southern hemisphere rather by the light of a sympathetic imagination than by actual experience. All those appeals in spring and summer to familiar sights and sounds upon which so many of our poets' brightest fancies are built, can have little or no force below the Equator Between us lie the Doldrums, and the strange regions of the south-east Trades, and the Roaring Forties, and the great barriers of space. Even along the same parallels, westward or eastward, the familiar species of birds will disappear, and others take their places. Mr. James Lowell, in his 'Study Windows,' writes a charming chapter on "My Garden Acquaintances," somewhat after the manner of Gilbert White's 'Natural History of Selborne,' on which, in fact, he bases the reason for his essay. But, as we read, how alien is the scenery! how strange the nomenclature! Who, in a popular sense, can know or care in England for the bobolink, the cross-bills, cedar-birds, cat-birds, yellow-birds, whip-poor-wills, and others? They evoke no

associations; they claim no sympathy. Virgil and Anacreon speak more plainly to us from the South than the American poets from the West. Spring comes up to us from the South and across the Mediterranean. The narcissus, violet, and jonquil, which we hear of as blooming along the Riviera, will presently bloom with us; and the spring notes of the Alps are, a little later on, our spring notes also. And when Horace alludes feelingly to the heat in the autumn of September hours, he alludes to a fact we all can appreciate. The songs of natural life and the music of nature vary according to latitude and longitude. More than any other poetry, that of England is strictly autochthonic, and smacks of the soil.

In the rendering of simple English and Scotch ballads the words often seem to lose their force abroad. In treeless, conti

nental and somewhat barren spaces in Africa and Australia, the songs that tell of island scenery, rough seas, and a sailor's life, must be scarcely intelligible to the Colonist born and bred there. The "Brave old Oak" is simply the rendering of a pleasing fancy in music; and if a young lady appeals pathetically to the "Wind of the Western Seas," or to the "Swallows flying South," in a country like the Cape Colony, where even in mid-winter swallows skim and hawk over the pools, neither the fact nor sentiment is true. In poetical phraseology some words by their use and association belong only to England and to a northern county. In hot and subtropical zones can the English Colonist understand all that is meant by the word "mere," when used by Tennyson, "loch," by Scott, "fell," by Wordsworth, "combe," by a West Country poet, together with all the peculiar and characteristic local colouring implied in each, without first having seen the hills and valleys and plains of the mother country? To give the strongest impression and to store up the strongest associations, the eye must have seen and the mind must have received on the spot. No skylark sings at the Cape in spring, and when the Colonist reads Shelley's masterpiece, with all its magic and descriptive rhythm, the words and phrasing may strike him as exquisitely musical, but the subtle sympathy with the poet from having seen as he has seen, and felt as he has felt, will be wanting. For the same reason, because he has never felt or known its breath coming softly and quietly one day after a frosty spell that has held earth enchained, Keats' "Ode to the West Wind" will fall flat. For the Colonist has never heard how :

"The azure sister of the spring shall blow
Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill,
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air),
With living hues and odours, plain and hill."

or how the nightingale

"In some melodious plot

Of beeches green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease."

So too the musk rose, "Mid-May's eldest child," and the "pastoral eglantine," and hawthorne are all strangers. True, it may be that there are other plants and other more magnificent flowers clustering in the wilderness, but no local name endears them, no sacred bard has sung of them. They perish in crowds