Before visiting Selborne in October, it had seemed to me that hunting for this grasshopper was a most fascinating pursuit. It was very hard to find him by day, and when by chance you caught sight of him, sitting on a green leaf in the sun and looking like a small, very dark-coloured frog with abnormally long hind legs, it was generally in a bramble bush, into which he would vanish when approached too near.
When at Selborne, one evening I heard one singing among the herbage at the foot of the Hanger, and next morning I found one at the same spot--a female, sitting on a gold-red fallen beech leaf, her blackness on the brilliant leaf making her very conspicuous. A little later, when the wet weather improved, I found the grasshopper all about the village, and even in it; but it was most abundant near the Well Head and in the hedges between Selborne and Nore Hill. Here on a sunny morning I could find a score or more of them, and at dark they could be heard in numbers chirping in all the hedges.
The Selborne atmosphere--Unhealthy faces--Selborne Common--Character of scenery--Wheatham Hill--Hampshire village churches--Gilbert White's strictures--Churches big and little--The peasants' religious feeling--Charm of old village churches--Seeking Priors Dean--Privett church--Blackmoor church--Churchyards--Change in gravestones--Beauty of old gravestones--Red alga on gravestones--Yew trees in churchyards--British dragon-tree--Farringdon village and yew--Crowhurst yew--Hurstbourne Priors yew--How yew trees are injured.
It is a pleasure to be at Selborne; nevertheless I find I always like Selborne best when I am out of it, especially when I am rambling about that bit of beautiful country on the border of which it lies. The memory of Gilbert White; the old church with its low, square tower and its famous yew tree; above all, the constant sight of the Hanger clothed in its beechen woods--green, or bronze and red-gold, or purple-brown in leafless winter--all these things do not prevent a sense of lassitude, of ill-being, which I experience in the village when I am too long in it, and which vanishes when I quit it, and seem to breathe a better air. This is no mere fancy, nor something peculiar to myself; the natives, too, are subject to this secret trouble, and are, some of them, conscious of it. Round about Selborne you will find those who were born and bred in the village, who say they were never well until they quitted it; and some { 182} of these declare that they would not return even if some generous person were to offer them a cottage rent free. The appearance of the people, too, may be considered in this connection. Mary Russell Mitford exclaims in one of her village sketches that there was not a pretty face in the country-side. The want of comeliness which is so noticeable in the southern parts of Berkshire is not confined to that county. The people of Berkshire and Hampshire, of the blonde type, are very much alike. But there are degrees; and if you want to see, I will not say a handsome, nor a pretty, but a passably fresh and pleasant face among the cottagers, you must go out of Selborne to some neighbouring village to look for it.