Pausing On The Summit To Consider Which Way I Should Go,
Inland, Towards Axminister, Or Along The Coast By Beer,
Seton,
Axmouth, and so on to Lyme Regis, I turned to have a last look
and say a last good-
Bye to Branscombe and could hardly help
waving my hand to it.
Why, I asked myself, am I not a poet, or verse-maker, so as to
say my farewell in numbers? My answer was, Because I am too
much occupied in seeing. There is no room and time for
'tranquillity,' since I want to go on to see something else.
As Blake has it: "Natural objects always did and do, weaken,
deaden and obliterate imagination in me."
We know however that they didn't quite quench it in him.
Chapter Nneteen: Abbotsbury
Abbotsbury is an old unspoilt village, not on but near the
sea, divided from it by half a mile of meadowland where all
sorts of meadow and water plants flourish, and where there are
extensive reed and osier beds, the roosting-place in autumn
and winter of innumerable starlings. I am always delighted to
come on one of these places where starlings congregate, to
watch them coming in at day's decline and listen to their
marvellous hubbub, and finally to see their aerial evolutions
when they rise and break up in great bodies and play at clouds
in the sky. When the people of the place, the squire and
keepers and others who have an interest in the reeds and
osiers, fall to abusing them on account of the damage they do,
I put my fingers in my ears. But at Abbotsbury I did not do
so, but listened with keen pleasure to the curses they vented
and the story they told. This was that when the owner of
Abbotsbury came down for the October shooting and found the
starlings more numerous than ever, he put himself into a fine
passion and reproached his keepers and other servants for not
having got rid of the birds as he had desired them to do.
Some of them ventured to say that it was easier said than
done, whereupon the great man swore that he would do it
himself without assistance from any one, and getting out a big
duck-gun he proceeded to load it with the smallest shot and
went down to the reed bed and concealed hiniself among the
bushes at a suitable distance. The birds were pouring in, and
when it was growing dark and they had settled down for the
night he fired his big piece into the thick of the crowd, and
by and by when the birds after wheeling about for a minute or
two settled down again in the same place he fired again. Then
he went home, and early next morning men and boys went into
the reeds and gathered a bushel or so of dead starlings. But
the birds returned in their thousands that evening, and his
heart being still hot against them he went out a second time
to slaughter them wholesale with his big gun.
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