Rustic Sounds and Other Studies in Literature and Natural History

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RUSTIC SOUNDS

Sounds are to me more reminiscent than sights; they bring back the sensations of childhood, and indeed all memories of my past life, in a way more touching and clear than what is seen.  Wendell Holmes claims the sense of smell as most closely associated with memory; for me, as I say, it is that of hearing.

In this paper I shall wander in imagination through the different seasons in the home of my youth, and let the recalled rustic sounds lead where they will.

To children there is something impressive and almost sacred in the changes of the seasons, in the onset of winter, or the clear approach of spring.  The first of these changes was heralded for me by the appearance of puddles frozen to a shining white; mysterious because the frost had drunk them dry in roofing them with ice, and especially delightful in the sharp crackling sound they gave when trodden on.  This was the noise of the beginning of winter.  Another winter memory is the humming whistle of the boys’ feet as they slid on the village pond, a remembrance that recalls my envious admiration of their heavily nailed boots, giving them an advantage in pace and a more noble style of sliding.

Another familiar sound was the wicked groaning crack that ran round the solitary pond on which we skated, as it unwillingly settled down to bear us on its surface.  It had a threat in it, and reminded us how helpless we were, that the pond-spirit was our master and had our lives in its grip.

Another winter note was the hooting of invisible owls, boldly calling to each other from one moonlit tree to another.  In the spring there was the querulous sound of the lambs, staggering half fledged in the cold fields among the half-eaten turnips beside their dirty yellow mothers.  Not the sheep of the Dresden shepherdess, but rather of the old man in As You Like It, who warns Rosalind that shepherding has its ugly side.  Yet it had something prophetic of more genial days.

As the sap began to rise in the trees my thoughts lightly turned to the making of whistles.  I was taught the mystery by a labourer in my father’s employ and never departed from his method.  The first thing was to cut a branch of some likely tree, a horse-chestnut for choice, severing it by an oblique cut, removing a ring of bark R and notching it at N.  The bark had then to be removed in one piece so as to make the tube of the whistle.  The first thing was to suck the bark and thoroughly wet it—a process I now believe to have been entirely useless.  The bark was next hammered all over with the haft of the knife, which was held by the blade.  Then when the inner layer of the bark was well bruised, it could be removed in one piece.  To effect this I was taught to hold it in my handkerchief, and after a twist or two, a delicious yielding was experienced and the bark slipped off.  The shiny white stick which remained in the other hand had to be cut in half, shaved in a particular way and again fitted into its bark tube.  Then came the exciting moment,—would the thing whistle?  The joy was short lived, and the whistles soon dried and shrank and ceased to satisfy the artist.  But it was always possible to make a new one.

Since the above description was written, there has appeared in The Times Literary Supplement (February 22, 1917, p. 90) a notice of the poems of a Canadian writer from which the reviewer quotes the following beautiful lines:

“So in the shadow by the nimble flood,
He made her whistles of the willow wood,
Flutes of one note with mellow slender tone;
(A robin piping in the dark alone).
Lively the pleasure was the wand to bruise,
And notch the light rod for its lyric use,
Until the stem gave up its slender sheath,
And showed the white and glistening wood beneath.
And when the ground was covered with light chips,
Grey leaves and green, and twigs and tender slips,” . . .

This could only have been written by one perfectly familiar with the art of whistle-making.  But it seems to have been misunderstood by the reviewer, who says that he “once came upon one of these small Æolian harps in a wooded isle in the ‘Land of Afternoon,’” . . . and decided “that it was a work of superstition by Indian hands.”  As an Æolian harp is a stringed instrument sounded by the wind, and a whistle belongs to the very distinct class of musical things sounded by human breath, I can only suppose that the reviewer has misunderstood the poem....