MOLES

I AM the man who hath seen a mole's eye glittering at him! Yes! It was on a day when we were on a roaming ramble in Roxburghshire, and sauntering about somewhere near Melrose. As we were peering about in a pleasant shady something or other, lo! I saw a mighty Scotchman plucking away from a moving piece of earth a tiny little human creature, dangerously full of curiosity, who was burning with a desire to find out what that diminutive earthquake meant. 'Coom awa'! coom awa'!' said the big giant [N.B. I do not pretend to be able to transliterate that barbaric dialect, the writing of which some deluded ones regard as a beautiful though difficult accomplishment]. 'Coom awa'! Et'll bite ye!' I made a grab at the embryo earthquake and clutched a baby mole! The giant, with all the signs of hysterical terror, started back, plucking the child from the impending perils that loomed so horribly near, but when he saw that I had the lovely little mole in my hand and was examining it minutely, was just a little reassured, and even bent over to look. Ah! weel noo!' said the giant in his barbaric and raucous form of speech, .es et verry ferocious?' I said 'No,' and I showed him the strange little animal, clothed in a beautiful silver grey satin. The orbit of its eye had not yet closed up, as the learned tell me it does soon after the young mole is born, and there was the bright little eye exposed to mine and glittering with a quite indescribable glitter as I gazed. Whether there was any 'speculation in those orbs' I will not undertake to say, but I feasted on the strange sight, which I suspect hardly one man in a hundred thousand in Great Britain has seen; and having finished with this atom of subterraneous life, I gently laid it down in the centre of the earthquake, watched it give a sly little wriggle, and bestowed upon it my blessing, thanking the powers that be that I was not a 'collector,' and that I did not go about slaying things to put their shrivelled carcasses in a glass case, and gloat over my skill in lessening the sum total of animal life, which I like to think has its rich abundance of enjoyment while it lasts. Why should we murder the poor moles? Why should we sanction the murder of them? Why should we not protest against their being massacred wholesale?

6

When I was a child my nurse used to make my flesh creep by threatening me, when I was naughty, that I should be put in the bury-hole and be dug up by the resurrection man, and have my teeth sold to the dentist, to make sets of 'em for the fine ladies!' To be dug up by a resurrection man was no uncommon thing in those days, or at any rate it had been common enough not very long before I was born, as a recent writer on this gruesome subject has shown. Of course a resurrection man was to my childish imagination the most grim of all conceivable ogres; but when it came to such frightful details of anticipation, as one may say, and I had to imagine the extraction of my teeth from my young jaw for trade purposes, and was moreover left quite uncertain as to whether this diabolical and ultradiabolical operation would be performed upon me alive or dead, can you wonder if I got to regard a resurrection man as a very prince of devils—an unearthly because an unearthing demon who would stop at nothing? But, when we come to reflect upon his crimes, is not a mole-catcher worse—very much worse- than the old-fashioned resurrection man? The old culprit at any rate waited to operate upon the buried dead: he waited till his victim was cold in his grave. The other traps the living and catches him in his infernally contrived snares when he is all alive, oh!' has no pity, no shame, no remorse, and, when all is said and done, makes a contemptibly small profit by his trade of murder.

The district in which I pass my lowly life is just now suffering for its sins in the way of mole-slaying, by the natural operation of the divine laws, which grind slowly, though they grind exceeding small. There is a deeply rooted superstition prevalent among the peasantry that moles are only mischievous and destructive vermin. Nay, there is a little bunch or collection of idle superstitions acting to the discredit of the moles-for instance, that they bring rain when it is not wanted; that they haunt the churchyards and prey upon our forefathers; that they cause tremendous floods by burrowing through great embankments that keep back the sea from lands that, but for those banks, would be submerged; that their earth putts (such is the pronunciation of that obscure expression) are poisonous to the soil around them; and other such slanderous and malignant accusations. For there were days when men believed in the devil very much more firmly, and, I may add, more intelligently and practically, than they believed in the Heavenly Father; when evil was far, far more present with them than good, when 'blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and fiery sands' were brought home to them with much more aggressive and unceasing menace and mischief than those gracious and beneficent forces which help to rid us of these manifestations of the malignity of matter; times when Nature was so tyrannous and man so weak, when the evil one was always haunting their infantine imaginations, and when

goodness was so very far away, had to be waited for so long, to be hoped for against hope, and was so very rare and so hard to find out-in those days men found that the easiest explanation of everything that happened to them was to say the devil did it. Everything that brought pain and loss and ruin came from the goblins that were grubbing and, growling in the bowels of the cruel earth, where Hate was king, restless for ever!

Meanwhile the best way to escape his ire

Was not to seem too happy!

So the poor little moles came in for their share of the blame that attached to all the things that were; and we, the heirs of all the ages, have an heritage of mischief from our distant progenitors, the gibbering bipeds with their haunting fears and rudimentary speech and 'foreheads villanous low.'

And now we are beginning to suffer for our misbeliefs. I know I speak for the unpitied. I belong to the unpitied classes; for who pities the parsons in what Donne calls 'the very country'? Yet our sorrows may come to extend even to you, you of the breed of Dives, who fare sumptuously every day. Would it be a small thing to you if you should find yourselves suddenly robbed of the joy of strawberry jam? Yet that is what we are coming to, perhaps much sooner than you know. We, the unpitied, have few luxuries left us, but among those few are our strawberry beds. In my humble way I am proud of mine. This year I had about one hundred and fifty square yards of strawberry beds in this garden of mine. A month ago the promise of a crop was so great, and the unripe fruit so splendid to look at, that I began to think I might turn an honest penny by them to help to pay, perhaps, a penny in the pound of my land tax. Alas! I have not had six strawberries to eat; the whole surface of the beds is one picture of devastation and repulsive rottenness. They have been consumed by millions of ground beetles, Ophonus ruficorius or Pteristochus vulgaris; it makes the smallest possible difference to me which, but some people do dearly love long names. These beetles are in my garden as common as dirt; they are winged things; they burrow in the ground, and there, it is said, they propagate their detestable progeny in the day time; in the night season they come up from their lairs and cover the surface of the beds till the foliage is overspread with them as by a quivering pall. Bring a lantern, and lo! they scuttle away. The fiends have one remnant of virtue left to them: they know what a guilty shame means. Creeping things they are not, for they run mutatis mutandis with the speed of antelopes when disturbed. The land is as the Garden of Eden before them; behind them a desolate wilderness.' Already in this district men have begun to call them locusts. This, to us, terrible scourge has come upon us as a veritable visitation. The market gardeners are

walking about with tears in their eyes. Some sanguine optimists are suggesting that the Lord Mayor-I mean the Lord Mayor-should at once set on foot a public subscription for all sufferers from the plague-except only the country parsons.

Some politicians suggest that we should move for a commission of enquiry. One man-you need not ask who-wrote up straight to the Royal Agricultural Society, and received by return of post a very interesting pamphlet, affording a vast deal of information on the subject of ground beetles in general and of these beetles in particular, by Mr. Cecil Warburton, which will delight the curious; but when it comes to deal with the remedies, alas! there are none that the gifted author of the pamphlet believes in. The real fact is that these locusts' are by nature carnivorous, and have suddenly given up eating other pests like themselves because they have increased so enormously upon their prey that they have been driven to devour fruits and even flowers now that they cannot find such flesh meat as they would dine upon if it were there. But there is another melancholy fact concerning them, and that is that these ground beetles, who have begun to eat up the fruits of the soil, and who by-and-by will return to their carnivorous habits by feeding upon babies in their cradles and the two-year-old little toddlers in their perambulators, have gone on increasing at an awful and inconceivable rate of geometrical progression, because their natural enemies, the moles, have been for a long time in this district undergoing a process of extermination; and what is to be the end of it all none can say.

And this brings me back to my moles. A mole is one of the most interesting and instructive of animals, if only you take the trouble to study him. We have had delightful monographs on the frog, on the crayfish, on the common domestic fly; but I know no satisfactory bookling on the mole. May I suggest that some gifted naturalist should set to work upon this subject and witch the world with the tale that he might unfold? There are those who assure us that the mole is a survival of the megatherium, and that he is the only living thing which still possesses a peculiarly formed finger on his broad hand, the only known analogue of a similar toe on the hind foot of the extinct glyptodon. Also it is certain that, though the mole has no external ears, yet no animal that we are familiar with has such exquisite sense of hearing. His sense of touch seems to be diffused over all the surface of his little body; and some of the learned assure us that those little eyes, which in the full-grown animal are hard to find, are furnished with a certain muscle which can be contracted or expanded at will, insomuch that your mole may just keep his eyes open or closed, according to circumstances-an invaluable accomplishment, such as courtiers, diplomatists, et hoc genus omne may be forgiven if, when they hear of, they too desire to have.

Then there are those marvellous fortresses, habitations, huntinggrounds, and the rest which the moles construct, and about which it is not my province to speak-the domed citadel, the tortuous galleries, the dormitory, the magazines of food, and the wells or reservoirs of water-yes! actually wells!—that they dig; and then the romance of their lives! their loves and wars and bloody battles, with the plentiful banquet and repast when the conqueror comes home, and where Mrs. Mole receives her lord to four-o'clock tea (some seriously insist that literally and punctually it is always at four o'clock), though, instead of muffins, there is a plate of skinned earthworms provided for her dainty lord-only as a treat, though! only as a treat!

The main point to be kept in view, however, in all this is that the voracity of the mole is prodigious. The number of wireworms found in a mole's stomach, as it has been reported to me, is almost incredible. The larvæ of beetles and other wild beasts hostile to man and enemies to human progress, civilisation, and culture that a hundred moles would consume in a year, they say, we could count by millions; and some calculators, great in mathematics, talk even of millions of millions. Certain it is that in the present depressed condition of agriculture it is difficult to estimate how much serious mischief is being done by exterminating one of the farmer's best and most influential friends-the mole. To wage a stupid and ignorant war against this beneficent ally of his is 'to give himself away' indeed.

What I want to know-speaking as a very humble enquirer, speaking as a poor down-trodden sufferer, speaking as an irritated Esquimaux or Greenlander might speak if, to his dismay, he arrived at that mountain-I forget where--on which the stunted brambles grow that afford the poor wretch his one annual treat of vegetable food, which gladdens his heart during his fortnight's holiday while he gorges himself with whale blubber and blackberries-speaking, I say, as that poor savage might be expected to speak who should find that that mountain of joy and hope had been devastated of all its stunted brambles by a convulsion of nature; what I want to know, and what I suspect others will soon be longing and asking eagerly to know, is, how can we get back our moles? How can we allure them hither? Can any one make it known to the moles that we have hereabouts such a wealth of ground beetles and wireworms as would suffice to fatten whole legions of moles for years? They shall not be molested (no pun, if you please!), but treated with the utmost respect and consideration; and already there is a talk of saddling the resurrection man with the expense of a heavy license duty, and of bringing in a bill for the protection of our best friends, the talpida. The pressing difficulty now, however, is, how to get back those, our benefactors, whom we have done our best to exterminate?

AUGUSTUS JESSOPP.