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Microsoft Azure in Action MEAP V06
1. Copyright_2023_Manning_Publications
2. welcome
3. 1_What_is_Microsoft_Azure?
4. 2_Using_Azure:_Azure_Functions_and_Image_Processing
5. 3_Using_Virtual_Machines
6. 4_Networking_in_Azure
7. 5_Storage
8. 6_Security
9. 7_Serverless
10. 8_Optimizing_Storage
MEAP Edition

Manning Early Access Program

Microsoft Azure in Action

Version 6

Copyright 2023 Manning

Publications
©Manning Publications Co. We welcome reader comments about anything in
the manuscript - other than typos and other simple mistakes.

These will be cleaned up during production of the book by copyeditors and

proofreaders.

https://livebook.manning.com/book/microsoft-azure-in-action/discussion

For more information on this and other Manning titles go to

manning.com
welcome
You are pretty special, you know that? You are one of the very first amazing
people to have a peek at my upcoming book, Microsoft Azure in Action. This
book isn’t like any other tech book. At least not entirely. It is a journey into
cloud computing where you are at the center. I am here to convey over 10
years of Microsoft Azure experience to you in a way that is free of jargon and
fluff.

I first started using cloud computing to explore a way to offload inconsistent

workloads to a service that could scale up and down at a moment’s notice.
Since then, the services on Azure have grown exponentially to include
machine learning, data analytics, big data, large security application and so
much more. However, at the core is still compute, networking and storage. It
is with explaining that foundation I start the book to make sure you also get
off on your cloud journey with the right tools from the start.

The book has four parts. Part 1 of the book introduces Azure to your world,
what are the benefits and advantages of cloud computing, as well as going
straight into building a photo resizing app with serverless. Yes, really. Part 2
is all about those fundamentals, and getting them nailed down, as the rest of
the book builds on them. Part 3 is managing data in all the various ways that
Azure offers (there are many flavors). Finally, part 4 is about DevOps,
security, and performance.

It will help if you have some understanding of scripting and coding

principles, but you don’t need any cloud computing knowledge. I wanted to
write a book that is both engaging and educational, caters for those that are
new to cloud, but also offers little details and tidbits to sweeten the taste for
those that might know a thing or two already.

Because your feedback is essential to creating the best book possible, I hope
you’ll be leaving comments in the liveBook Discussion forum. After all, I
may already know how to do all this stuff, but I need to know if my
explanations are working for you! In particular, I want to know if you are
enjoying yourself as you read through the chapters.

With cookies and hats.

- Lars Klint

In this book

Copyright 2023 Manning Publications welcome brief contents 1 What is

Microsoft Azure? 2 Using Azure: Azure Functions and Image Processing 3
Using Virtual Machines 4 Networking in Azure 5 Storage 6 Security 7
Serverless 8 Optimizing Storage
1 What is Microsoft Azure?
This chapter covers
Overview of Microsoft Azure
The benefits of using cloud computing and Azure
What you can and can’t do with Azure
How to interact with Azure services
Creating a free Azure account

Azure is a web-based platform consisting of hundreds of different services

that allows anyone, with any budget, to jump straight into creating and
publishing internet services and applications. Cloud services for computing,
networking and storage are readily available, as well as hundreds of services
that are built on top. These services can be used for simple tasks such as
hosting a web site or storing files, as well as incredibly complex tasks
analyzing vast amounts of data to send rockets into space and solve how
photosynthesis works. Everything on Azure is accessed via the Internet using
standard tools and protocols. Azure Virtual Machines running Windows
Server or Linux, and Azure Storage are two of the most used services on
Azure, and like most services on Azure they integrate with other Azure
services with relative ease.

Azure is available globally, which means Microsoft has built data centers in
many regions around the world. When you create an application, it doesn’t
matter if you create it in Australia or Norway[1]; It is the same approach and
commands you use. This makes it very simple to create products that are
close to your customers, but that scale globally.

At the time of writing this book, Azure has more than 65 regions each
containing 1-4 data centers for total of over 160 data centers. And it is
growing all the time. Some regions are restricted to government bodies and
their contractors, while operating in China has very special conditions. Figure
1.1 shows some of the current Azure regions available.
Figure 1.1: A selection of some of the many Azure Regions spanning the globe.

1.1 What is Cloud Computing

As you might have guessed, cloud computing does not actually include any
clouds. For the most parts cloud computing as a term is used to describe using
computing services on someone else’s server. More specifically, using
computing services on one of the major cloud computing platforms, such as
Azure or Amazon Web Services (AWS), or even on a private cloud.
The general term cloud computing is describing an abstraction of computing
resources. When you want to use a service on a cloud computing platform,
various layers of technology and implementation are abstracted away from
you. In general terms, services are divided in Infrastructure-as-a-Service
(IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Each
of the three types of as-a-Services abstracts some portion of the underlying
technology and infrastructure. IaaS abstracts the hardware layer and uses
virtualization to provide computing, networking and storage access to the
cloud computing user, you. PaaS further abstracts the operating system,
several maintenance tasks, software updates, patches, and more to provide a
development platform service. Finally, SaaS provides a “pay and play”
approach to using software that is hosted in the cloud. Everything, except
using the software, is abstracted away from the end user. These many layers
of abstraction are critical to cloud computing, and provides the real value to
developers, system administrators and other professionals creating
sophisticated and complex solutions. They only need to focus on the parts
that make their business case stronger, and not be tied up with what is often
known as “yak shaving”[2]. Figure 1.2 shows the relationship between IaaS,
PaaS and SaaS.

Figure 1.2: Cloud computing abstraction layers.

Once you know what services you need, how much data to store and how
your users are going to access your service, it is all available to you in what
seems like infinite amounts. You request a service or product, and it is served
up for you in minutes or even seconds. Need another virtual machine? No
problem. Need another 100GB of SQL Server storage? Certainly, ma’am.
You only pay for what you use, and everything is available at your fingertips.

To place Azure in the context of other cloud platforms, there are three main
types of clouds:

Public – Anyone can set up an account and use the services offered on a
public cloud. The common offerings are Azure, AWS and Google Cloud
Platform (GCP), among others.
Private – A company can create a private cloud, which is accessible only
to that company. They host their own hardware and abstraction layers.
Hybrid – Many companies, and especially government deparments, are
not ready to move to the cloud 100% and they will have some services
on-premises and some in the cloud. This is called a hybrid cloud
approach and mixes public and private clouds.

Azure is a public cloud offering, providing IaaS, PaaS and some SaaS
products, although you can also use Azure as part of a hybrid cloud setup.

1.2 Azure in the Real World

When you combine the right services, configure the applications just so and
deploy code and templates with success, Azure can do almost anything. You
can deploy applications securely, automate releases of new versions, get
notified of potential security breaches, store incredibly large amounts of data,
connect networks in different parts of the globe and so much more. Azure
won’t do your laundry though. Yet.

Let me show you some examples of using Azure that makes a lot of sense in
the real world.

1.2.1 Hosting a Web Application

One of the most common tasks is to host a web application. This could be a
niche site selling scented candles, or a popular high-traffic technology news
site.

Mr. Wayne has a small website that includes an online shop selling various
items, mostly black in color. The current setup for the website is hosted on
premises by Mr. Wayne, as shown in Figure 1.3.

Figure 1.3: Simple on-premises web hosting.

Business and traffic are booming, and Mr. Wayne needs to move the website
to the cloud, which can solve multiple current issues with the site.

Users visiting from far away destinations experience significant delays

in loading the site, and it is also slow to respond.
When there is a sale on the site, the traffic can become too much and the
site crashes. That makes Mr Wayne sad.
Any maintenance needed to fix the hardware, connection, site or
database currently has to be done by Mr. Wayne or a hired consultant.
This takes up a lot of time.
 The update of the website code is fragile, and backups are made
infrequently.

An example of how Mr Wayne can improve his business and web shop using
Azure services is shown in Figure 1.4.

Figure 1.4: Mr. Wayne’s cloud architecture.

This will partly solve the latency issue using Azure DNS (by resolving the
location of your site faster), peaks in demand can be managed by scaling the
App Service Plan horizontally (creating more computing instances), there is
no maintenance of hardware, and regular backups are made of the SQL
databases and App Service.

Using Azure, all of the above issues have been addressed and B. Wayne is
saving costs of owning hardware, managing internet connections and more,
on top. As his business grows, scaling the cloud architecture with it is vastly
easier. You will learn more about optimizing performance in Azure later in
the book as well.

1.2.2 Running a Hybrid Network

Natasha is managing the IT infrastructure for a medium sized business. The
file storage requirements for the business are starting to outpace the hardware
and network capabilities on premises. She wants to take advantage of Azure
and have both file storage and file backup in the cloud.

She configures an Azure Active Directory Connect sync service on premises,

which allows users and processes to authenticate with both the on-premises
domain controller and the Azure Active Directory tenant. An Azure tenant is
a dedicated and trusted Azure Active Directory's instance, and the first AAD
instance created for a new Azure account. She then creates the necessary
Azure File Shares in an Azure Storage account and configures the required
backup routines which are then handled by Azure. Natasha then installs
Azure File Sync agents on the on-premises servers that hosts the files needed
to be synchronized to Azure. The Azure File Sync agents will keep both on-
premises and Azure File Shares in sync at all times. Figure 1.5 illustrates
Natasha’s architecture.

Figure 1.5: Hybrid file synchronization setup.

This removes a lot of stress from Natasha’s world, and she is now ensured
regular backups of the company data. The security is handled implicitly by
Azure, through the Azure AD Sync process, only allowing authenticated and
authorized users to access the company files. As an added bonus, files can be
access both locally and in the cloud, as they are always in sync. This is a
common hybrid setup that takes advantage of the best of on-premises and
Azure.

As a result, Natasha has more time to focus on other projects. She is saving
part of her company budget, as she has avoided having to buy extra hardware
and instead only pay for the storage as it grows in size. She can now say with
confidence that company intellectual property is backed up and secured.

1.2.3 Mitigating Risks and Outages

Clark is a principal engineer and works for a rapidly expanding start-up. He
has been tasked with mitigating any risks for the company infrastructure
hosted on Azure. For a first phase, he will have to consider the load on the
system, any single points of failure, security and appropriate alerts.

Clark decides to design an architecture that has redundancy as one of its

primary building blocks. Using Azure services, this can look like Figure 1.6.

Figure 1.6: Redundant Azure architecture example.

While some services have built-in redundancy, such as Azure Storage, most
Azure services are designed to fit into a redundant architecture. Clark’s
solution uses elements that you will learn much more about later in the book
too.

Azure Traffic Manager: If the web front end becomes unreachable in

region 1, Traffic Manager will route new requests to region Z.
Load Balancer: If any of the virtual machines hosting the front-end
application stop responding, the load balancer distributes traffic to the
remaining healthy VMs.
Use multiple VMs to ensure there is always a machine serving the
application to the end user.
Use Azure SQL with replication between the instances to ensure data is
up to date, no matter which region and VM is serving the request.

With the solution in hand, Clark can now fly off like a bird. Or a plane.

1.2.4 Automating infrastructure with ARM templates

Carol is a system administrator for a company that is going through a
transformation phase to streamline their deployment processes with
automation. Part of the workflow requires virtual machines to be created and
destroyed very frequently, in order to test performance and scalability of
various applications. Currently, Carol and her team does this more or less
manually, which is boring, easy to get wrong and slow. Using automation,
Carol reckons they can be quick, accurate and have much more time for
office Skee-Ball. Carol is right.

She starts using Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates, which describes
resources with JSON syntax.
{
"$schema": "https://schema.management.azure.com/schemas/2015-01-01/deplo
"contentVersion": "1.0.0.0",
"parameters": {
"tagValues": {
"type": "object",
"defaultValue": {
"Environment": "<Prod>",
 "Projectid": "<1234>",
"Projectname": "<some name>",
"Subcontractor": "<some vendor>",
"Routineid": "<some number>",
"Routinename": "<some name>",
"Applicationname": "<some application name>"
}
},
"GalleryImageSKU": {
"type": "string",
"metadata": {
"description": "Image SKU."
},
"defaultValue": "2016-Datacenter"
},
"GalleryImagePublisher": {
"type": "string",
"metadata": {
"description": "."
},
"defaultValue": "MicrosoftWindowsServer"
},
… Much more

Using ARM templates as above, Carol can fine tune the deployment of the
VMs, which not only achieves her goals of less errors, speed and more time
free for other things, but also saves money on running unnecessary VMs, lets
her use source control to keep track of version history and integrate the VM
creation workflow with other functions in the business. Win.

1.3 Why move to cloud?

Usually, the first reason many companies starts to investigate a cloud
infrastructure on Azure is cost saving. And while you can definitely cut a lot
of expenses up front by using Azure, such as hardware and networking costs,
there are benefits that have a much greater significance in the long run. This
section covers some of the main benefits Azure provides, and at the same
time sets up some of the topics you will learn about later in the book.

1.3.1 Scalability
Imagine you have a website that runs on your on-premises web server. The
hardware is designed to handle a specific maximum capacity of traffic to the
website. This capacity can be limited by the CPU power, the amount of
RAM, how fast a network connection you have and much else. When the
server is maxed out, how do you ensure users of your Nicholas Cage meme
generator service can still use it? How can you manage seasonal patterns in
your traffic?

Scalability is the answer. There is a lot more on scaling your Azure

infrastructure later in the book, but for now let’s look at the concept of
scalability. While it is possible to ensure scalability on-premises, it can be an
increasingly costly affair as you buy more hardware and install more systems
to manage the new hardware. Not to mention, most of the time all that grunt
will sit idling, waiting for the next peak. Azure provides scalability as a core
principle of the platform. Auto-scaling using Virtual Machine Scale Sets
(Figure 1.7), as well as for App Services is a trivial process on Azure. You
only have to estimate average and peak workloads, then define thresholds for
when the scaling should occur and how many machine instances you want to
have as a minimum and maximum.

Figure 1.7: Azure Virtual Machine Scale Set – Autoscaling Settings

Where on-premises infrastructure makes scalability expensive and difficult to
manage, Azure makes it cost effective and trivial. Later in the book you will
learn about scale sets in particular, but also how scaling of Functions,
databases and traffic works. Stay tuned.

1.3.2 Reliability
Nothing can erode trust in your online services as much as reliability issues.
If your services are not responding, run out of storage space or lose network
connection, your users’ trust in your service will disappear faster than ice
cream on a hot summer day. When you use Azure to host your services,
reliability is part of the package you pay for. In this book you will learn how
to take full advantage of the cloud reliability using VMs, virtual networks,
caching data to speed up your applications, drilling into service logs and so
much more.

Azure services are at their core built for reliability. Azure regions are paired
to ensure business continuity and disaster recovery by being able to switch
from one to the other at short notice. Services are fault tolerant by using
availability zones for hardware failures, power outages and any other
gremlins that might rear their ugly heads. Azure Storage is resilient by design
and is at a minimum replicated three times within each region, even though
you just have one Storage account, but much more about storage and
availability zones later in the book. In a few chapters’ time you will also learn
about Cosmos DB and its geographic replication and reliability. That is one
of my favorite services.

1.3.3 Expanding Infrastructure

Rarely will an online service remain stagnant. Usually, they either grow or
die. When they do grow, it can be at an incredible speed that requires rapid
expansion of the IT infrastructure. Azure makes this much easier by solving
many common problems for expanding your computing and traffic capacity.

Tasks such as load balancing of traffic, replicating files, connecting a SQL

Server instance to Active Directory, creating Kubernetes clusters and much
more are done with only a click of a button. Managing your expanding
infrastructure is dealing with localities, configuration and customer
expectation, rather than plugging in more cables, buying hard drives,
installing software and patching servers.

Azure is expanding all the time and as the cloud platform grows, gets more
users and streamlines products and services, you will benefit from economies
of scale. Azure computing services, such as Virtual Machines, keep getting
cheaper, and it is the same with storage. This makes keeping up with your
product growth much more manageable.

Other services that support expanding infrastructure natively on Azure

include SQL Server, load balancing and Azure file storage. Those are
explained much more in due time later in the book.

1.3.4 Support
If a service on Azure isn’t performing, there is a bug in a feature, or you need
help with setting up a service, there are multiple ways you can get support.

Lodge a support ticket with Azure Support. Depending on your

subscription type, you can get more in-depth support, faster.
Use the Azure documentation[3] to troubleshoot and learn about the
services you need.
Engage with the millions of users of Azure through community forums,
such as the MSDN forum[4].
Use this book to guide you on your journey to efficient and sustainable
Azure usage.

Timely and well articulated support can often make the difference between
success and mediocrity. If you are stuck on a problem and waiting for help,
you want that support to be both quick and accurate. This book can form part
of the support network for your project by teaching you the best practices for
both individual services and complex architecture.

1.3.5 Compliance

Azure has 90[5] compliance certifications that cover a broad range of

countries, regions, industries and government regulations. For many
industries this makes a huge difference, as Azure has already done the hard
work for you.

The US Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP)

is a standard approach for assessing security in cloud computing platforms
and is mandated to use in the US. Azure has this certification, which makes it
much simpler for US government bodies to validate the security of Azure
cloud services.

To help financial institutions in the EU follow the European Banking

Authority (EBA) recommendations for cloud adoption, Azure complies with
the EBA guidelines. This ensures that banks using Azure in the EU comply
with audit, reporting, data residency and other specific requirements.

Because Azure complies with this wealth of guidelines and certifications,

industries can focus on their core business cases instead of red tape. This
makes it extremely attractive for many businesses and removes doubt for
many others, whether they should invest in cloud computing with Azure.

1.4 Costs
Costs in Azure, and cloud computing in general has a rumor of “blowing
costs out without you knowing”. You might have heard stories of Virtual
Machines racking up thousands of dollars in cost overnight, or some service
left running that ruins the company budget. Yes, it happens. No, it is not
common.

Throughout this book costs and pricing will be treated as a “fourth pillar” of
cloud computing, with compute, network and storage being the first three.
While you won’t learn about every single price and pricing tier, because
watching paint dry is more interesting, you will learn how to keep costs down
as we go through the wonderful world of cloud computing with Azure.

Cost saving is a definite plus for using Azure, so let’s go over some of the
ways Azure can be very cost effective and benefit you, your company and the
evil overloads.

1.4.1 Free account

Ahhh, free stuff. We all love some freebies, and Azure also offers a free
account to get started.

You get USD200 to spend on any Azure service you want, such as
 Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) or Azure Cognitive Services.
There are services that are free for twelve months, such as a 250GB
instance of SQL Server or 750 hours of use on certain Virtual Machines
instances.
And then there are services that are always free, which include Cosmos
DB free tier, 1 million requests every month for Azure Functions and 50
Virtual Networks.

With a free account you have access to enough services and resources that
you can build a prototype, try out an unfamiliar service or try out some of the
examples in this book. Later in this chapter you will learn how to create a free
Azure account.

1.4.2 PAYG
Pay as You Go (PAYG) is the most common, and most expensive, billing
model. As the name implies you pay for what you use, whether that is 24
minutes on a Virtual Machine, 300,000 RU/s on Cosmos DB or another App
Service Plan.

PAYG usage is billed monthly, and while it embodies the idea of cloud
computing and only paying for what you use, it is also the most expensive
way, when looking at cost per unit. For a lot of Azure services, PAYG is the
way you are billed for use, but some services have ways to make them
cheaper. Much cheaper. Read on.

1.4.3 Reserved instances

If you know that you are going to be using a VM for a longer period of time,
Azure offers reserved instances. As is often the case, you know a VM is
going to be used consistently, such as for production purposes, and you can
agree to use this VM for 1 or 3 years. You can reserve the instance, and by
committing Azure will give you a massive discount of up to 80%.

It’s like renting a car vs. leasing a car. If you rent a car, you pay a higher
daily price, but you only have it for a few days. The rental company needs to
set the price higher, as they might not know when the car will be rented
again, they have to clean it, and staff needs to manage it all. On the other
hand, if you lease a car, you commit to a much longer period of using the car,
often several years. Your daily cost is greatly reduced, and the car company
doesn’t need to clean it, it doesn’t sit idle, and less staff can manage it. The
same logic applies to Azure reserved VM instances.

1.4.4 Spot pricing

At the complete opposite end of the “how-long-do-I-need-the-VM-for”-o-
meter is Spot VM pricing. Azure infrastructure has a lot of free capacity for
compute power at any given moment. This is to make sure your service can
scale with traffic demand at a moment’s notice. While that compute power is
sitting there ready to swing into action, Azure will let you use it at up to 90%
off the regular VM price. “What is the catch?”, you might ask? At any point,
Azure can evict you from using the VM if the cloud platform needs the
resources. Evicted!

Spot VMs are excellent for interruptible processes, for testing and for
development. Azure will even tell you how likely you are to be evicted at
what times, to let you plan your use even better. Oh yeah, don’t use them for
any production purposes whatsoever. It’ll end in tears.

1.4.5 Billing
Billing of Azure services come in three delicious flavors:

Time: A VM is billed by the minute and a Container Instance is billed

by the second.
Traffic: Data sent from Azure to the Internet is billed in GB transmitted
(this is often called Internet Egress); Azure Functions is billed in number
of executions.
Storage: Azure Files and Azure Data Lake Storage are billed per GB
stored.

How does all this work together to form your invoice then? That is almost a
topic for a whole other book, as cloud computing invoices can be notoriously
difficult to decipher. Throughout the book we will continue to make billing
and pricing part of the discussion, as your manager will want to know what it
costs.

1.5 What are the alternatives?

“You should only ever use Azure for all your computing projects” ….is not
the way. Of course, there are alternatives to Azure, and it is important to be
aware of them to make an informed decision. If you are aware of the choices,
the solution you arrive at is often better.

1.5.1 On premises
While not a topic for this book, having on-premises infrastructure is a
solution that is right for many and has worked for decades. On-premises can
provide a number of benefits due to the greater control you have of especially
the physical premises and hardware.

Sovereignty of data can be very specific. You know exactly where your
data is stored, which is critical for legislation in some countries.
Security of hardware and software can conform easier to certain
company-specific requirements.
Existing investment in infrastructure could warrant use of this, as the
costs is low for new applications.

The move to cloud computing for more and more businesses means growth
for on-premises infrastructure is slowing down, especially brand-new freshly
smelling setups. Depending on where you get your statistics from, more than
90% of companies use a cloud platform in some way.

1.5.2 Other cloud providers

It may come as a surprise, but there are other cloud platform offerings! Yeah,
I know! Providers such as AWS and GCP provide very similar products and
services to Azure, at least at first glance. For a lot of greenfield projects,
choosing an alternate cloud provider can make sense, but for companies with
existing infrastructure, Azure is often a better fit.
This book doesn’t attempt to compare Azure to other cloud providers, but
neither does it pretend there aren’t any. I hope you’ve read this far and you
will join me to the end of the book, because you’ve decided Azure is the
cloud for you. We have cookies….

1.5.3 Multi-cloud approach

One of your marketing department’s favorite terms is “multi-cloud”. It makes
their brochures look informed and cutting edge. However, when you dig
through the glossy paper, there is a real solution underneath that does indeed
use multi-cloud.

Multi-cloud most often means “two clouds”. Every time a company decides
to use an additional cloud, they effectively double their investment.

You need to train engineers to use the new features, services, APIs and
technology.
You have to train architects in what the best practices are.
Managers must learn how the billing side of things work.
Quality assurance must understand the intricacies of services to test for
implementation flaws.
Security engineers need to understand vulnerabilities and weak points in
the cloud platform.

Once a company decides to invest in a second cloud (or third… or fourth?),

there are various approaches to the multi-cloud strategies.

Use a single cloud for a single product, or single technology branch.

Various products, or family of products, will all be using only a single
cloud each, but that choice may vary.
Major company infrastructure all use the same cloud for maintenance
and security reasons. Additional services and applications can choose a
cloud of choice.
Projects choose the combination of cloud products that they prefer. This
could be a single or multiple clouds.
Any combination of any of them.

One of the issues with multi-cloud can be that there isn’t a single entity inside
the organisation that is controlling what the strategy is and how to implement
it. Various departments can sometimes decide independently which cloud to
use for a project. Often this leads to a pile of cloud spaghetti that becomes
increasingly difficult to unravel and consume.

This isn’t to say there isn’t value in multi-cloud when managed and
implemented with care and thoughtful process. Many organisations
successfully implement a multi-cloud strategy, and benefit from a broader
selection of cloud services, cost benefits and innovation opportunities.

1.6 Interacting with Azure

Azure is only worth as much as what its users can get out of it. And you get
the most out of Azure by using the tools that are right for you, and that you
are comfortable with. There are a large number of Integrated Development
Environments (IDEs), console integrations and language libraries that all
work with Azure. And they all pass through the Azure Resource Manager,
which is a single layer that ensures all tools interact in the same way with
Azure. You will learn about some of this in greater details later in this book,
but for now let me introduce you to a few of the popular tools of the Azure
cloud.

1.6.1 Azure Portal

The very first stop for any Azure administrator, developer or professional in
general, is the Azure Portal (Figure 1.8).

Figure 1.8: Azure Portal

The Azure Portal is the most common tool to use when you get started with
Azure. In essence it is a website where you log in with your Azure
credentials, and you can then start ruling the worl… I mean, start using all
your Azure resources. It is a visual way to create, manage and organize all
your Azure things. You can see your invoices, your traffic, your scale set,
your storage accounts, and everything else you have hosted on Azure.

The Portal lets you investigate logs, set up alerts, monitor your security
posture, implement policies, manage users and so much more. Almost
everything you can do in Azure you can do in the Portal. The few exceptions
are services in preview, and specific features in non-native Azure services
such as Azure Container Instances and Azure Kubernetes Services.

A lot of the examples and tutorials in this book will be using the Azure Portal
too. It is an important tool, and Azure professionals use it. It isn’t the only
tool though.

1.6.2 Azure CLI

The Azure command line interface is just that: an interface for your favorite
command line tool, such as Bash. As the name implies, there are no visual
interactions or buttons you can click on. It is all white text on black
background. Or pink on white, or whatever color you choose, but no buttons!

Figure 1.9 Azure CLI – Listing App Service Plans

In Figure 1.9 you can see a typical Azure CLI command for listing all Azure
App Service Plans for a subscription.
az appservice plan list

Where the Azure Portal is visual and you click through sections of screens, or
panes as they are called, and forms, the CLI is direct and fast. Because of
these benefits, many Azure professionals will use the CLI day-to-day.

1.6.3 Azure PowerShell

If you think the Azure CLI is appealing, but want a sprinkling of scripting
and configuration, PowerShell is here. While you can use PowerShell as an
ordinary command line tool, the real power is two-fold.

1. Cmdlets (pronounced command-lets), which are specialized .NET

classes implementing a particular operation, such as creating a new
storage account or updating a user account. These work by accessing
data in different data stores, like the file system or registry.
2. The PowerShell scripting language that lets you create automated scripts
for performing batches of commands. These scripts can include cmdlets
as well as standard scripting commands.

Figure 1.10: PowerShell console.

Figure 1.10 shows how PowerShell can be used to list out 10 Azure cmdlets
with a single command. This approach can be used to automate, maintain,
create and update any part of Azure in a customized way.

PowerShell isn’t only for Azure though. It is a tool and platform that can be
used to manage Windows in general, and it runs on macOS and Linux
platforms too. You’ll get to use PowerShell throughout this book as well.

1.6.4 SDKs

Using the Azure CLI or PowerShell can fall short if you are wanting to
integrate Azure services and APIs with your own applications. While those
two tools are the preference of systems administrators for managing
infrastructure and spinning up new systems, developers prefer to use a
software development kit, commonly known as an SDK.

Writing code for an application or service that uses Azure cloud computing
means using the Azure SDK, which is available for .NET, Java, Python and
JavaScript to name the most common programming languages. The SDK is a
collection of libraries designed to make using Azure services in your
programs easy and smooth sailing. Cloud sailing. We will dig into the Azure
SDK and its use later in the book.

1.7 Creating an Azure account

Considering the majority of this book will give you an opportunity to learn
and try out Azure for yourself, let’s end this chapter by creating a brand new,
shiny, lemon scented Azure account. Go to azure.com, which will redirect
you to the current Azure landing page. On that click Try Azure for free,
Free account or the current similar button.

Figure 1.11: Azure landing page.

When you get to the actual signup page, you will be asked to create a new
Microsoft account, which will be your login for all the vast family of
Microsoft services on offer, not just Azure. If you need to, create a new free
outlook.com email address in the process (Figure 1.12).
Figure 1.12: Create a new Microsoft account.

Create a password (remember to use a password manager), or use the

passwordless approach, and your new account will be created. You will then
be asked for your personal details, which you must fill in to proceed (Figure
1.13).

Figure 1.13: Azure account creation.

In the process you will be required to authenticate your identity by phone and
you will have to provide a valid credit card. The card will not be charged,
unless you agree to pay for certain services, but it is needed to validate your
account (and that you aren’t Rob the Robot). Finally, you are good to go and
can use your new credentials to log into the Azure Portal at
https://portal.azure.com. Give it a go. It so pretty.

1.8 Summary
 Azure is applicable to real-world scenarios and can be effective and
desirable for a variety of projects and companies.
Scalability and reliability are two of the main factors that define Azure
and cloud computing in general.
Cost can be managed by using a combination of PAYG services,
reserved instances of VMs and spot pricing VMs.
Azure has services that are always free, such as Cosmos DB free tier, a
certain number of Azure Function executions and some Azure App
Service Plans.
The three types of computing relevant to Azure is cloud, on-premises
and multi-cloud.
The main ways to interact with Azure is using the Azure Portal, the
Azure CLI, PowerShell, or integrating with an Azure software
development kit.
You can create a free Azure account to get started trying out services
and features.
[1] Not all services are available in all regions.
[2]Any apparently useless activity which, by allowing you to overcome
intermediate difficulties, allows you to solve a larger problem.
[3] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/
[4] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/products/azure?product=all
[5] 16 February 2021
2 Using Azure: Azure Functions and
Image Processing
This chapter covers
Creating cloud infrastructure for an application
Exploring and creating integrated logic work flows
Interconnecting Azure services
Exploring a serverless architecture

Now that you have an idea why Azure is so popular and why it is a great
choice for computing infrastructure, let us dive into a practical example of
using Azure to solve a real problem of storing images from emails and
compressing them. We will keep it simple, but that doesn’t mean it will lack
in power and application options.

Note:

This example can be done entirely with the free subscription tier in Azure. It
is recommended to have a new Azure account for the free credits, hours and
services to still be available.

Relating knowledge to examples and implementations that are as close to real

world as possible is, in my humble opinion, the best way to learn a technical
topic, and cloud computing with Azure is no exception. In this chapter we
will build an application that follows just that principle.

2.1 Understanding the Problem

Imagine you are working for a company that sells photography and imaging
services. One of the products is a service that lets users send their images via
email for an online photo album. The online albums are growing in size as
images are getting bigger and bigger with modern camera technology. This in
turn means that the website showing the images in the photo albums is
getting slower and slower, as images gets larger and more of them needs to
load onto the website.

To solve this problem, you have been tasked with creating a process or
application that gets the images from the email account and gets them ready
for display on the website. This will include storing the images in both their
original and web-optimized formats. There are several project outcomes that
needs to be achieved:

Scaling of service to accommodate for increased traffic.

Cost effective.
Reduced maintenance, as the company has limited resources.
Robust and fault tolerant.

And while there are project goals to achieve, there are also some parts we
explicitly leave out. It is as important to know what not to include, as it is
what to include.

The album website, which already exists.

The email account setup and maintenance.
The logic for associating an email sender with an album.

Knowing what we know so far from chapter 1, this image optimization

project is a great fit for using Azure cloud computing.

2.2 Creating the Architecture

Before we start building, let’s look at the architecture for this new application
of fantastic wonderment. Or application of moderate image compression
logic at least. It is always a good idea to lay out the intended approach before
you start building an application. Often this step can identify any obstacles or
issues early. Figure 2.1 shows the architecture we will use to build the image-
and-album-compression-via-email application.

Figure 2.1: Application architecture overview

The first step is to hook into the arriving emails on the email service
Exchange Online. We won’t go through how to set up that service, but simply
assume emails arrive. In fact, this could be any email account, not just
Exchange. We will use a Logic App to “interrogate” the email account and
catch any attachments that arrive. One of my favorite services on Azure is
Logic Apps. It is a simple visual way to integrate a vast range of services
using logic constructs, such as conditional operators (and, or, else), loops and
comparisons. Logic Apps on Azure are incredibly powerful and you only
need a limited technical understanding of Azure to use them.

Attachments, which should be images, are then stored in Azure Blob Storage.
Blob storage is a versatile, ever expanding storage mechanism for storing
pretty much anything. It is a native part of an Azure storage account, and this
is where the images will live and the album website gets them from too.

Once there are new images in Blob storage, an Azure Function will be
triggered and process them, compress them, and store the compressed copy
back in Blob storage. That way both the original image is kept, as well as a
version that is more efficient to show on the website.
All of these Azure services will live in a resource group, which is a logical
container for any Azure service. Make sense? Alright, let’s start building with
cloud.

2.2.1 What is a resource group?

The first thing that any Azure project needs is one or more resource groups
(Figure 2.2). All resources on Azure must live inside a resource group, and
resource groups must live inside a single Azure subscription. They are a
logical container for your resources. They can be created in any geographical
Azure region, and they can hold up to 800 resources in general. Please don’t
have 800 though. That would most likely be a mess. Instead, resource groups
can be used to group resources by project, department, service, feature, or
any other way that make sense to you. When used appropriately, such as
grouping by project, resource groups can make your cloud life a whole lot
easier.

Figure 2.2: The first step is the resource group.

2.2.2 Creating a resource group

To start creating the application, first open up the Azure Portal and create a
new resource group as shown in Figure 2.3.

Figure 2.3: Go to the resource group section.

Click New to start creating a new resource group. This will open the resource
wizard, which is how most resources can be created in Azure.

Figure 2.4: Create a new resource group

Go through the wizard as shown in Figure 2.5 and fil in the values as you see
best. Follow a naming convention that works for you as well to get into the
habit of good naming of resources.[1]
Figure 2.5: Enter values for the resource group.

It doesn’t matter what name you give a resource group. They are all valid,
however it is recommended to decide on a naming strategy before you start. I
like using the format <project name>RG. This makes it instantly clear which
project I am dealing with and the kind of resource, which is a resource group
in this case. Often companies and teams will have a naming strategy they
follow for just these reasons.

The wizard experience is a taste for how resources are created through the
Azure Portal. As you will learn later in the book, whichever way you create
resources in Azure it is always done through the Azure Resource Manager.
You get the same result regardless of the tool you choose. For now, we’ll use
the Azure Portal wizard experience and click Review + Create when you
have filled in the details.

Figure 2.6: When validation has passed, you can create the resource group.
Finally, click the Create button as shown in Figure 2.6. This is the first step
done for pretty much any new project or logical group in Azure. The resource
group is a fundamental part of your Azure life, and you will create a ton of
them. As long as a ton is less than 800 resource groups, of course.

2.2.3 Blob storage – the basics

Alright, you got your toe slightly wet from creating a resource group in
Azure, so let’s jump all the way in and create our first service: a storage
account with a blob storage container inside it (Figure 2.7).
Figure 2.7: We are now creating the Storage Account and blob storage of the solution

It isn’t the most interesting or exciting service, but it is an integral part of a

lot of Azure architectures. Storage accounts in Azure are a bit of a Swiss
army knife. They have a bunch of tools packed up inside them, such as
containers, tables, queues, file shares, data migrations and much more. Later
in the book you’ll learn about storage in Azure in practical details, but for
now we just need a storage account to put the email attachments somewhere
for our service. Go to the Storage Accounts section of the Azure Portal using
the search bar.

2.2.4 Creating a storage account

You now have an overview of all the storage accounts available on this
tenant. A tenant is the entity that controls all your users, resources, and
applications when it comes to identity and access management on Azure.
There are different ways to create a storage account, but for now click on the
Create button as shown in Figure 2.8. You’ll find that services in Azure can
be created and found in multiple ways, and I will show you some of them
throughout this book.

Figure 2.8: Click Create to create a new container within the storage account

While clicking the “+ Create” button is a simple act, a lot goes on behind the
scenes throughout the wizard experiences. Part of the appeal of cloud
computing with Azure is the abstraction of “yak shaving”, which I mentioned
in the previous chapter. Tasks that have to be done before you get to the tasks
you really want to do.

Alright, time to go through another wizard and fill in the necessary values to
create a storage account as show in Figure 2.9. Go on, it’ll be a beauty.

Figure 2.9: Fill in the basic values for the storage account.
Random documents with unrelated
content Scribd suggests to you:
captured and sent to Winchester, his poor wife, with her baby in her arms,
set out on foot to visit him in gaol. It was a long tramp for her thus
burdened, and it was also in the depth of one of the coldest winters ever
known. She started early, but did not get to her destination until the
following morning, and not without suffering a fresh misfortune by the way.
Before dawn, when the cold was most intense, while walking over
Winchester Hill, her baby's nose was frozen; and though everything proper
was done when she arrived at the houses, it never got quite right. His
injured nose, which turns to a dark-blue colour and causes him great
suffering in cold weather, has been a trouble and misery to him all his life
long.

Story of the Newland, we know, was forgiven and returned to spend

horn-blower the rest of his life in his village, where he died at last of
sheer old age, passing very quietly away after receiving the
sacrament from the vicar, and in the presence of his faithful old wife and his
children and grandchildren.

After he was dead, two of his children—my informant, and that brother
who as a babe had travelled to Winchester in his mother's arms in cold
weather—talked together about him and his life, and of all he had suffered
and of his goodness, and in both their minds there was one idea, an anxious
wish that his descendants should not allow him to go out of memory. And
there was no way known to them to keep him in mind except by burying
him in some spot by himself, where his mound would be alone and apart.
Finally, brother and sister, plucking up courage, went to the vicar, the well-
remembered Mr. Parsons, who built the new vicarage and the church
school, and begged him to let them bury their father by the yew tree near
the porch, and he good-naturedly consented.

That was how Newland came to be buried at that spot; but before many
days the vicar went to them in a great state of mind, and said that he had
made a terrible mistake, that he had done wrong in consenting to the grave
being made there, and that their father must be taken up and placed at some
other spot in the churchyard. They were grieved at this, but could say
nothing. But for some reason the removal never took place, and in time the
son and daughter themselves began to regret that they had buried their
father there where they could never keep the mound green and fresh. People
going in or coming out of church on dark evenings stumbled or kicked their
boots against it, or when they stood there talking to each other they would
rest a foot on it, and romping children sat on it, so that it always had a
ragged, unkept appearance, do what they would.

It is certainly an unsightly mound. It would be better to do away with it,

and to substitute a small memorial stone with a suitable inscription placed
level with the turf.

CHAPTER XI
The Hampshire people—Racial differences in neighbouring counties—A neglected subject
—Inhabitants of towns—Gentry and peasantry—Four distinct types—The common
blonde type—Lean women—Deleterious effects of tea-drinking—A shepherd's
testimony—A mixed race—The Anglo-Saxon—Case of reversion of type—Un-Saxon
character of the British—Dark-eyed Hampshire people—Racial feeling with regard to
eye-colours—The Iberian type—Its persistence—Character of the small dark man—
Dark and blonde children—A dark village child.

The history of the horn-blower and his old wife, and their still living
aged children, serves to remind me that this book, which contains so much
about all sorts of creatures and forms of life, from spiders and flies to birds
and beasts, and from red alga on gravestones to oaks and yews, has so far
had almost nothing to say about our own species—of that variety which
inhabits Hampshire.

Racial If the critical reader asks what is here meant by "variety,"

differences what should I answer him? On going directly from any other
district in southern England to the central parts of
Hampshire one is sensible of a difference in the people. One is still in
southern England, and the peasantry, like the atmosphere, climate, soil, the
quiet but verdurous and varied scenery, are more or less like those of other
neighbouring counties—Surrey, Sussex, Kent, Berkshire, Wilts, and Dorset.
In general appearance, at all events, the people are much the same; and the
dialect, where any survives, and even the quality of the voices, closely
resemble those in adjoining counties. Nevertheless there is a difference;
even the hasty seers who are almost without the faculty of observation are
vaguely cognisant of it, though they would not be able to say what it
consisted in. Probably it would puzzle anyone to say wherein Hampshire
differed from all the counties named, since each has something individual;
therefore it would be better to compare Hampshire with some one county
near it, or with a group of neighbouring counties in which some family
resemblance is traceable. Somerset, Devon, Wilts, and Dorset—these
answer the description, and I leave out Cornwall only because its people are
unknown to me. The four named have seemed to me the most interesting
counties in southern England; but if I were to make them five by adding
Hampshire, the verdict of nine persons out of ten, all equally well
acquainted with the five, would probably be that it was the least interesting.
They would probably say that the people of Hampshire were less good-
looking, that they had less red colour in their skins, less pure colour in their
eyes; that they had less energy, if not less intelligence, or at all events were
less lively, and had less humour.

These differences between the inhabitants of neighbouring and of

adjoining counties are doubtless in some measure due to local conditions, of
soil, climate, food, customs, and so on, acting for long generations on a
stay-at-home people: but the main differences are undoubtedly racial; and
here we are on a subject in which we poor ordinary folk who want to know
are like sheep wandering shepherdless in some wilderness, bleating in vain
for guidance in a maze of fleece-tearing brambles. It is true that the
ethnologists and anthropologists triumphantly point out that the Jute type of
man may be recognised in the Isle of Wight, and in a less degree even in the
Meon district; for the rest, with a wave of the hand to indicate the northern
half of the county, they say that all that is or ought to be more or less Anglo-
Saxon. That's all; since, as they tell us, the affinities of the South Hampshire
people, of the New Forest district especially, have not yet been worked out.
Not being an anthropologist I can't help them; and am even inclined to think
that they have left undone some of the things which they ought to have
done. The complaint was made in a former chapter that we had no
monograph on fleas to help us; it may be made, too, with regard to the
human race in Hampshire. The most that one can do in such a case, since
man cannot be excluded from the subjects which concern the naturalist, is
to record one's own poor little unscientific observations, and let them go for
what they are worth.

Gentry and There is little profit in looking at the townspeople. The

peasantry big coast towns have a population quite as heterogeneous as
that of the metropolis; even in a comparatively small rural
inland town, like Winchester, one would be puzzled to say what the chief
characteristics of the people were. You may feel in a vague way that they
are unlike the people of, say, Guildford, or Canterbury, or Reading, or
Dorchester, but the variety in forms and faces is too great to allow of any
definite idea. The only time when the people even in a town can be studied
to advantage in places like Winchester, Andover, etc., is on a market day, or
on a Saturday afternoon, when the villagers come in to do their marketing. I
have said, in writing of Somerset and its people, that the gentry, the
landowners, and the wealthy residents generally, are always in a sense
foreigners. The man may bear a name which has been for many generations
in a county, but he is never racially one with the peasant; and, as John
Bright once said, it is the people who live in cottages that make the nation.
His parents and his grandparents and his ancestors for centuries have been
mixing their blood with the blood of outsiders. It is well always to bear this
in mind, and in the market-place or the High Street of the country town to
see the carriage people, the gentry, and the important ones generally as
though one saw them not, or saw them as shadows, and to fix the attention
on those who in face and carriage and dress proclaim themselves true
natives and children of the soil.

Even so there will be variety enough—a little more perhaps than is

wanted by the methodic mind anxious to classify these "insect tribes." But
after a time—a few months or a few years, let us say—the observer will
perceive that the majority of the people are divisible into four fairly distinct
types, the minority being composed of intermediate forms and of
nondescripts. There is an enormous disproportion in the actual numbers of
the people of these distinct types, and it varies greatly in different parts of
the county. Of the Hampshire people it may be said generally, as we say of
the whole nation, that there are two types—the blonde and the dark; but in
this part of England there are districts where a larger proportion of dark
blood than is common in England generally has produced a well-marked
intermediate type; and this is one of my four distinct Hampshire types. I
should place it second in importance, although it comes a very long way
after the first type, which is distinctly blonde.

Common This first most prevalent type, which greatly outnumbers

blonde type all the others put together, and probably includes more than
half of the entire population, is strongest in the north, and
extends across the county from Sussex to Wiltshire. The Hampshire people
in that district are hardly to be distinguished from those of Berkshire. One
can see this best by looking at the school-children in a number of North
Hampshire and Berkshire villages. In sixty or seventy to a hundred and fifty
children in a village school you will seldom find as many as a dozen with
dark eyes.

As was said in a former chapter, there is very little beauty or good looks
in this people; on the other hand, there is just as little downright ugliness;
they are mostly on a rather monotonous level, just passable in form and
features, but with an almost entire absence of any brightness, physical or
mental. Take the best-looking woman of this most common type—the
description will fit a dozen in any village. She is of medium height, and has
a slightly oval face (which, being Anglo-Saxon, she ought not to have), with
fairly good features; a nose fairly straight, or slightly aquiline, and not
small; mouth well moulded, but the lips too thin; chin frequently pointed.
Her hair is invariably brown, without any red or chestnut colour in it,
generally of a dull or dusty hue; and the eyes are a pale greyish-blue, with
small pupils, and in very many cases a dark mark round the iris. The deep
blue, any pure blue, in fact, from forget-me-not to ultramarine, is as rare in
this commonest type as warm or bright hair—chestnut, red, or gold; or as a
brilliant skin. The skin is pallid, or dusky, or dirty-looking. Even healthy
girls in their teens seldom have any colour, and the exquisite roseate and
carmine reds of other counties are rare indeed. The best-looking girls at the
time of life when they come nearest to being pretty, when they are just
growing into womanhood, have an unfinished look which is almost
pathetic. One gets the fancy that Nature had meant to make them nice-
looking, and finally becoming dissatisfied with her work, left them to grow
to maturity anyhow. It is pathetic, because there was little more to be done
—a rosier blush on the cheek, a touch of scarlet on the lips, a little
brightness and elasticity in the hair, a pencil of sunlight to make the eyes
sparkle.

In figure this woman is slim, too narrow across the hips, too flat in the
chest. And she grows thinner with years. The number of lean, pale women
of this type in Hampshire is very remarkable. You see them in every village,
women that appear almost fleshless, with a parchment-like skin drawn tight
over the bones of the face, pale-blue, washed-out eyes, and thin, dead-
looking hair. What is the reason of this leanness? It may be that the women
of this blonde type are more subject to poverty of blood than others; for the
men, though often thin, are not so excessively thin as the women. Or it may
be the effect of that kind of poison which cottage women all over the
country are becoming increasingly fond of, and which is having so
deleterious an effect on the people in many counties—the tea they drink.
Poison it certainly is: two or three cups a day of the black juice which they
obtain by boiling and brewing the coarse Indian teas at a shilling a pound
which they use, would kill me in less than a week.

Or it may be partly the poison of tea and partly the bad conditions,
especially the want of proper food, in the villages. One day on the downs
near Winchester I found a shepherd with his flock, a man of about fifty, and
as healthy and strong-looking a fellow as I have seen in Hampshire. Why
was it, I asked him, that he was the only man of his village I had seen with
the colour of red blood in his face? why did they look so unwholesome
generally? why were the women so thin, and the children so stunted and
colourless? He said he didn't know, but thought that for one thing they did
not get enough to eat. "On the farm where I work," he said, "there are
twelve of us—nine men, all married, and three boys. My wages are thirteen
shillings, with a cottage and garden; I have no children, and I neither drink
nor smoke, and have not done so for eighteen years. Yet I find the money is
not too much. Of the others, the eight married men all have children—one
has got six at home: they all smoke, and all make a practice of spending at
least two evenings each week at the public-house." How, after paying for
beer and tobacco, they could support their families on the few shillings that
remained out of their wages was a puzzle to him.

A mixed race But this is to digress. The prevalent blonde type I have
tried to describe is best seen in the northern half of the
county, but is not so accentuated on the east, north, and west borders as in
the interior villages. If, as is commonly said, this people is Anglo-Saxon, it
must at some early period have mixed its blood with that of a distinctly
different race. This may have been the Belgic or Brythonic, but as shape
and face are neither Celtic nor Saxon, the Brythons must have already been
greatly modified by some older and different race which they, or the
Goidels before them, had conquered and absorbed. It will be necessary to
return to this point by-and-by.

Side by side with this, in a sense, dim and doubtful people, you find the
unmistakable Saxon, the thick-set, heavy-looking, round-headed man with
blue eyes and light hair, and heavy drooping mustachios—a sort of
terrestrial walrus who goes erect. He is not abundant as in Sussex, but is
represented in almost any village, and in these villages he is always like a
bull-dog or bull-terrier among hounds, lurchers, and many other varieties,
including curs of low degree. Mentally, he is rather a dull dog, at all events
deficient in the finer, more attractive qualities. Leaving aside the spiritual
part, he is a good all-round man, tough and stubborn, one that the naturalist
may have no secret qualms about in treating as an animal. A being of strong
animal nature, and too often in this brewer-ridden county a hard drinker. A
very large proportion of the men in rural towns and villages with blotchy
skins and watery or beery eyes are of this type. Even more offensive than
the animality, the mindlessness, is that flicker of conscious superiority
which lives in their expression. It is, I fancy, a survival of the old instinctive
feeling of a conquering race amid the conquered.

Reversion of Nature, we know, is everlastingly harking back, but here

type in Hampshire I cannot but think that this type, in spite of its
very marked characters, is a very much muddied and
degenerate form. One is led to this conclusion by occasionally meeting with
an individual whose whole appearance is a revelation, and strikes the mind
with a kind of astonishment, and one can only exclaim—there is nothing
else to say—Here Nature has at length succeeded in reproducing the pure
unadulterated form! Such a type I came upon one summer day on the high
downs east of the Itchen.

He was a shepherd, a young fellow of twenty, about five feet eight in

height, but looking short on account of his extraordinary breadth of
shoulders and depth of chest. His arms were like a blacksmith's, and his legs
thick, and his big head was round as a Dutch cheese. He could, I imagined,
have made a breach in the stone wall near which I found him with his flock,
if he had lowered that hard round head and charged like a rhinoceros. His
hair was light brown, and his face a uniform rosy brown—in all Hampshire
no man nor woman had I seen so beautiful in colour; and his round, keen,
piercing eyes were of a wonderful blue—"eyes like the sea." If this poor
fellow, washed clean and clothed becomingly in white flannels, had shown
himself in some great gathering at the Oval or some such place on some
great day, the common people would have parted on either side to make
way for him, and would have regarded him with a kind of worship—an
impulse to kneel before him. There, on the downs, his appearance was
almost grotesque in the dress he wore, made of some fabric intended to last
for ever, but now frayed, worn to threads in places, and generally earth-
coloured. A small old cap, earth-coloured too, covered a portion of his big,
round head, and his ancient, lumpish, cracked and clouted boots were like
the hoofs of some extinct large sort of horse which he had found fossilised
among the chalk hills. He had but eleven shillings a week, and could not
afford to spend much on dress. How he could get enough to eat was a
puzzle; he looked as if he could devour half of one of his muttons at a meal,
washed down with a bucket of beer, without hurt to his digestion. In
appearance he formed a startling contrast to the people around him: they
were in comparison a worn-out, weary-looking race, dim-eyed, pale-faced,
slow in their movements, as if they had lost all joy and interest in life.

The sight of him taught me something I could not get from the books.
The intensity of life in his eyes and whole expression; the rough-hewn face
and rude, powerful form—rude but well balanced—the vigour in his every
movement, enabled me to realise better than anything that history tells us
what those men who came as strangers to these shores in the fifth century
were really like, and how they could do what they did. They came, a few at
a time, in open row-boats, with nothing but their rude weapons in their
hands, and by pure muscular force, and because they were absolutely
without fear and without compassion, and were mentally but little above a
herd of buffaloes, they succeeded in conquering a great and populous
country with centuries of civilisation behind it.

Talking with him, I was not surprised to find him a discontented man. He
did not want to live in a town—he seemed not to know just what he wanted,
or having but few words he did not know how to say it; but his mind was in
a state of turmoil and revolt, and he could only curse the head shepherd, the
bailiff, the farmer, and, to finish up, the lord of the manor. Probably he soon
cast away his crook, and went off in search of some distant place, where he
would be permitted to discharge the energy that seethed and bubbled in him
—perhaps to bite the dust on the African veldt.

This, then, is one of the main facts to be noted in the blonde Hampshire
peasant—the great contrast between the small minority of persons of the
Anglo-Saxon and of the prevalent type. It was long ago shown by Huxley
that the English people generally are not Saxons in the shape of the head,
and in all Saxon England the divergence has perhaps been greatest in this
southern county. The oval-faced type, as I have said, is less pronounced as
we approach the borders of Berkshire, and although the difference is not
very great, it is quite perceptible; the Berkshire people are rather nearer to
the common modified Saxon type of Oxfordshire and the Midlands
generally.

Dark In the southern half of Hampshire the dark-eyed, black-

Hampshire haired people are almost as common as the blonde, and in
people some localities they are actually in a majority. Visitors to the
New Forest district often express astonishment at the
darkness and "foreign" appearance of the people, and they sometimes form
the mistaken idea that it is due to a strong element of gipsy blood. The
darkest Hampshire peasant is always in shape of head and face the farthest
removed from the gipsy type.

Among the dark people there are two distinct types, as there are two in
the blonde, and it will be understood that I only mean two that are, in a
measure, fixed and easily recognised types; for it must always be borne in
mind that, outside of these distinctive forms, there is a heterogeneous crowd
of persons of all shades and shapes of face and of great variety in features.
These two dark types are: First, the small, narrow-headed person of brown
skin, crow-black hair, and black eyes; of this rarest and most interesting
type I shall speak last. Second, the person of average height, slightly oval
face, and dark eyes and hair. The accompanying portrait of a young woman
in a village on the Test is a good specimen of this type. Now we find that
this dark-haired, dark-eyed, and often dark-skinned people are in stature,
figure, shape of head, and features exactly like the oval-faced blonde people
already described. They are, light and dark, an intermediate type, and we
can only say that they are one and the same people, the outcome of a long-
mixed race which has crystallised in this form unlike any of its originals;
that the difference in colour is due to the fact that blue and black in the iris
and black and brown in the hair very seldom mix, these colours being, as
has been said, "mutually exclusive." They persist when everything else,
down to the bony framework, has been modified and the original racial
characters obliterated. Nevertheless, we see that these mutually exclusive
colours do mix in some individuals both in the eyes and hair. In the grey-
blue iris it appears as a very slight pigmentation, in most cases round the
pupil, but in the hair it is more marked. Many, perhaps a majority, of the
dark-eyed people we are now considering have some warm brown colour in
their black hair; in members of the same family you will often find raven-
black hair and brownish-black hair; and sometimes in three brothers or
sisters you will find the two original colours, black and brown, and the
intermediate very dark or brownish-black hair.
 A HAMPSHIRE GIRL

The brunette of this oval-faced type is also, as we have seen, deficient in

colour, but, as a rule, she is more attractive than her light-eyed sister. This
may be due to the appearance of a greater intensity of life in the dark eye;
but it is also probable that there is almost always some difference in
disposition, that black or dark pigment is correlated with a warmer, quicker,
more sympathetic nature. The anthropologists tell us that very slight
differences in intensity of pigmentation may correspond to relatively very
great constitutional differences. One fact in reference to dark- and light-
coloured people which I came upon in Hampshire, struck me as
exceedingly curious, and has suggested the question: Is there in us, or in
some of us, very deep down, and buried out of sight, but still occasionally
coming to life and to the surface, an ancient feeling of repulsion or racial
antipathy between black and blonde? Are there mental characteristics, too,
that are "mutually exclusive"? Dark and light are mixed in very many of us,
but, as Huxley has said, the constituents do not always rightly mix: as a
rule, one side is strongest. With the dark side strongest in me, I search
myself, and the only evidence I find of such a feeling is an ineradicable
dislike of the shallow frosty blue eye: it makes me shiver, and seems to
indicate a cold, petty, spiteful, and false nature. This may be merely a fancy
or association, the colour resembling that of the frosty sky in winter. In
many others the feeling appears to be more definite. I know blue-eyed
persons of culture, liberal-minded, religious, charitable, lovers of all men,
who declare that they cannot regard dark-eyed persons as being on the same
level, morally, with the blue-eyed, and that they cannot dissociate black
eyes from wickedness. This, too, may be fancy or association. But here in
Hampshire I have been startled at some things I have heard spoken by dark-
eyed people about blondes. Not of the mitigated Hampshire blonde, with
that dimness in the colour of his skin, and eyes, and hair, but of the more
vivid type with brighter blue eyes, and brighter or more fiery hair, and the
light skin to match. What I have heard was to this effect:

"Perhaps it will be all right in the end—we hope it will: he says he will
marry her and give her a home. But you never know where you are with a
man of that colour—I'll believe it when I see it."

"Yes, he seems all right, and speaks well, and promises to pay the
money. But look at the colour of his eyes! No, I can't trust him."

"He's a very nice person, I have no doubt, but his eyes and hair are
enough for me," etc., etc.

Even this may be merely the effect of that enmity or suspicion with
which the stranger, or "foreigner," as he is called, is often regarded in rural
districts. The person from another county, or from a distance, unrelated to
anyone in the community, is always a foreigner, and the foreign taint may
descend to the children: may it not be that in Hampshire anyone with bright
colour in eyes, hair, and skin is also by association regarded as a foreigner?

It remains to speak of the last of the four distinct types, the least
common and most interesting of all—the small, narrow-headed man with
very black hair, black eyes, and brown skin.

We are deeply indebted to the anthropologists who have, so to speak,

torn up the books of history, and are re-telling the story of man on earth: we
admire them for their patient industry, and because they have gone bravely
on with their self-appointed task, one peculiarly difficult in this land of
many mixed races, heedless of the scoffs of the learned or of those who
derive their learning from books alone, and mock at men whose documents
are "bones and skins." But we sometimes see that they (the anthropologists)
have not yet wholly emancipated themselves from the old written
falsehoods when they tell us, as they frequently do, that the Iberian in this
country survives only in the west and the north. They refer to the small,
swarthy Welshman; to the so-called "black Celt" in Ireland, west of the
Shannon; to the small black Yorkshireman of the Dales, and to the small
black Highlander; and the explanation is that in these localities remnants of
the dark men of the Iberian race who inhabited Britain in the Neolithic
period, were never absorbed by the conquerors; that, in fact, like the small
existing herds of indigenous white cattle, they have preserved their peculiar
physical character down to the present time by remaining unmixed with the
surrounding blue-eyed people. But this type is not confined to these isolated
spots in the west and north; it is found here, there, and everywhere,
especially in the southern counties of England: you cannot go about among
the peasants of Hampshire, Wiltshire, and Dorset without meeting examples
of it, and here at all events, it cannot be said that the ancient British people
were not absorbed. They, the remnant that escaped extermination, were
absorbed by the blue-eyed, broad-headed, tall men, the Goidels we suppose,
who occupied the country at the beginning of the Bronze Age; and the
absorbers were in their turn absorbed by another blue-eyed race; and these
by still another or by others. The only explanation appears to be that this
type is persistent beyond all others, and that a very little black blood, after
being mixed and re-mixed with blonde for centuries, even for hundreds of
generations, may, whenever the right conditions occur, reproduce the
vanished type in its original form.

Time brings about its revenges in many strange ways: we see that there
is a continuous and an increasing migration from Wales and the Highlands
into all the big towns in England, and this large and growing Celtic element
will undoubtedly have a great effect on the population in time, making it
less Saxon and more Celtic than it has been these thousand years past and
upwards. But in all the people, Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Dane, or what not,
there is that older constituent—infinitely older and perhaps infinitely more
persistent; and this too, albeit in a subtler way, may be working in us to
recover its long-lost world. That it has gone far in this direction in Spain,
where the blue eye is threatened with extinction, and in the greater portion,
if not all, of France, there appears to be some evidence to show. Here,
where the Neolithic people were more nearly exterminated and the remnant
more completely absorbed, the return may be very much slower. But when
we find, as we do in Hampshire and many other counties, that this
constituent in the blood of the people, after mixture for untold ages with so
many other bloods of so many conquering races, has not only been potent to
modify the entire population, but is able to reproduce the old type in its
pristine purity; and when we almost invariably find that these ancients born
again are better men than those in whom other racial characters
predominate—more intelligent, versatile, adaptive, temperate, and usually
tougher and longer lived, it becomes possible to believe that in the remote
future—there are thousands of years for this little black leaven to work—
these islands will once more be inhabited by a race of men of the Neolithic
type.

In speaking of the character, physical and mental, of the men of

distinctly Iberian type, I must confess that I write only from my own
observation, and that I am hardly justified in founding general statements
on an acquaintance with a very limited number of persons. My experience
is that the men of this type have, generally speaking, more character than
their neighbours, and are certainly very much more interesting. In recalling
individuals of the peasant class who have most attracted me, with whom I
have become intimate and in some instances formed lasting friendships, I
find that of twenty-five to thirty no fewer than nine are of this type. Of this
number four are natives of Hampshire, while the other five, oddly enough,
belong to five different counties. But I do not judge only from these few
individuals: a rambler about the country who seldom stays many days in
one village or spot cannot become intimately acquainted with the cottagers.
I judge partly from the few I know well, and partly from a very much larger
number of individuals I have met casually or have known slightly. What I
am certain of is that the men of this type, as a rule, differ mentally as widely
as they do physically from persons of other commoner types. The Iberian,
as I know him in southern and south-western England, is, as I have said,
more intelligent, or at all events, quicker; his brains are nimbler although
perhaps not so retentive or so practical as the slower Saxon's. Apart from
that point, he has more imagination, detachment, sympathy—the qualities
which attract and make you glad to know a man and to form a friendship
with him in whatever class he may be. Why is it, one is sometimes asked,
that one can often know and talk with a Spaniard or Frenchman without any
feeling of class distinction, any consciousness of a barrier, although the man
may be nothing but a workman, while with English peasants this freedom
and ease between man and man is impossible? It is possible in the case of
the man we are considering, simply because of those qualities I have
named, which he shares with those of his own race on the Continent.

I have found that when one member of a family of mixed light and dark
blood is of the distinctly Iberian type, this one will almost invariably take a
peculiar and in some ways a superior position in the circle. The woman
especially exhibits a liveliness, humour, and variety rare indeed among
persons born in the peasant class. She entertains the visitor, or takes the
leading part, and her slow-witted sisters regard her with a kind of puzzled
admiration. They are sisters, yet unrelated: their very blood differs in
specific gravity, and their bodily differences correspond to a mental and
spiritual unlikeness. In my intercourse with people in the southern counties
I have sometimes been reminded of Huxley and his account of his parents
contained in a private letter to Havelock Ellis. His father, he said, was a
fresh-coloured, grey-eyed Warwickshire man. "My mother came of
Wiltshire people. Except for being somewhat taller than the average type,
she was a typical example of the Iberian variety—dark, thin, rapid in all her
ways, and with the most piercing black eyes I have seen in anybody's head.
Mentally and physically (except in the matter of the beautiful eyes) I am a
piece of my mother, and except for my stature ... I should do very well for a
'black Celt'—supposed to be the worst variety of that type."

The contrast between persons of this type and Saxon or blonde has often
seemed to me greatest in childhood, since the blonde at that period, even in
Hampshire, is apt to be a delicate pink and white whereas the individual of
strongly-marked Iberian character is very dark from birth. I will, to
conclude this perhaps imprudent chapter, give an instance in point.

A dark village Walking one day through the small rustic village of
child Martyr Worthy, near Winchester, I saw a little girl of nine or
ten sitting on the grass at the side of the wide green roadway in the middle
of the village engaged in binding flowers round her hat. She was slim, and
had a thin oval face, dark in colour as any dark Spanish child, or any French
child in the "black provinces"; and she had, too, the soft melancholy black
eye which is the chief beauty of the Spanish, and her loose hair was
intensely black. Even here where dark eyes and dark hair are so common,
her darkness was wonderful by contrast with a second little girl of round,
chubby, rosy face, pale-yellowish hair, and wide-open blue surprised eyes,
who stood by her side watching her at her task. The flowers were lying in a
heap at her side; she had wound a long slender spray of traveller's joy round
her brown straw hat, and was now weaving in lychnis and veronica, with
other small red and blue blossoms, to improve her garland. I found to my
surprise on questioning her that she knew the names of the flowers she had
collected. An English village child, but in that Spanish darkness and beauty,
and in her grace and her pretty occupation, how very un-English she
seemed!

CHAPTER XII
Test and Itchen—Vegetation—Riverside villages—The cottage by the river—Itchen valley
—Blossoming limes—Bird visitors—Goldfinch—Cirl bunting—Song—Plumage—
Three common river birds—Coots—Moor-hen and nest—Little grebes' struggles—
Male grebe's devotion—Parent coot's wisdom—A more or less happy family—
Dogged little grebes—Grebes training their young—Fishing birds and fascination.

There are no more refreshing places in Hampshire, one might almost say
in England, than the green level valleys of the Test and Itchen that wind,
alternately widening and narrowing, through the downland country to
Southampton Water. Twin rivers they may be called, flowing at no great
distance apart through the same kind of country, and closely alike in their
general features: land and water intermixed—greenest water-meadows and
crystal currents that divide and subdivide and join again, and again separate,
forming many a miniature island and long slip of wet meadow with streams
on either side. At all times refreshing to the sight and pleasant to dwell by,
they are best

When it is summer and the green is deep.

Greens of darkest bulrushes, tipped with bright brown panicles, growing in

masses where the water is wide and shallowest; of grey-green graceful
reeds and of tallest reed-mace with dark velvety brown spikes; behind them
all, bushes and trees—silvery-leafed willow and poplar, and dark alder, and
old thorns and brambles in tangled masses; and always in the foreground
lighter and brighter sedges, glaucous green flags, mixed with great hemp
agrimony, with flesh-coloured, white-powdered flowers, and big-leafed
comfrey, and scores of other water and moisture-loving plants.

Through this vegetation, this infinite variety of refreshing greens and

graceful forms, flow the rapid rivers, crystal-clear and cold from the white
chalk, a most beautiful water, with floating water-grass in it—the
fascinating Poa fluviatilis which, rooted in the pebbly bed, looks like green
loosened wind-blown hair swaying and trembling in the ever-crinkled, swift
current.

Test and Itchen They are not long rivers—the Test and Itchen—but long
enough for men with unfevered blood in their veins to find
sweet and peaceful homes on their margins. I think I know quite a dozen
villages on the former stream, and fifteen or sixteen on the latter, in any one
of which I could spend long years in perfect contentment. There are towns,
too, ancient Romsey and Winchester, and modern hideous Eastleigh; but the
little centres are best to live in. These are, indeed, among the most
characteristic Hampshire villages; mostly small, with old thatched cottages,
unlike, yet harmonising, irregularly placed along the roadside; each with its
lowly walls set among gaily coloured flowers; the farm with its rural sounds
and smells, its big horses and milch-cows led and driven along the quiet
streets; the small ancient church with its low, square tower, or grey shingled
spire; and great trees standing singly or in groups or rows—oak and elm
and ash; and often some ivy-grown relic of antiquity—ivy, indeed,
everywhere. The charm of these villages that look as natural and one with
the scene as chalk down and trees and green meadows, and have an air of
immemorial quiet and a human life that is part of nature's life, unstrenuous,
slow and sweet, has not yet been greatly disturbed. It is not here as in some
parts of Hampshire, and as it is pretty well everywhere in Surrey, that most
favoured county, the Xanadu of the mighty ones of the money-market,
where they oftenest decree their lordly pleasure-domes. Those vast red-
brick habitations of the Kubla Khans of the city which stare and glare at
you from all openings in pine woods, across wide heaths and commons, and
from hill-sides and hill-tops, produce the idea that they were turned out
complete at some stupendous manufactory of houses at a distance, and sent
out by the hundred to be set up wherever wanted, and where they are almost
always utterly out of keeping with their surroundings, and consequently a
blot on and a disfigurement of the landscape.

Itchen Valley Happily the downland slopes overlooking these green

valleys have so far been neglected by the class of persons
who live in mansions; for the time being they are ours, and by "ours" I
mean all those who love and reverence this earth. But which of the two is
best I cannot say. One prefers the Test and another the Itchen, doubtless
because in a matter of this kind the earth-lover will invariably prefer the
spot he knows most intimately; and for this reason, much as I love the Test,
long as I would linger by it, I love the Itchen more, having had a closer
intimacy with it. I dare say that some of my friends, old Wykehamists, who
as boys caught their first trout close by the ancient sacred city and have kept
up their acquaintance with its crystal currents, will laugh at me for writing
as I do. But there are places, as there are faces, which draw the soul, and
with which, in a little while, one becomes strangely intimate.

The first English cathedral I ever saw was that of Winchester: that was a
long time ago; it was then and on a few subsequent occasions that I had
glimpses of the river that runs by it. They were like momentary sights of a
beautiful face, caught in passing, of some person unknown. Then it
happened that in June 1900, cycling Londonwards from Beaulieu and the
coast by Lymington, I came to the valley, and to a village about half-way
between Winchester and Alresford, on a visit to friends in their summer
fishing retreat.
A riverside They had told me about their cottage, which serves them
cottage all the best purposes of a lodge in the vast wilderness.
Fortunately in this case the "boundless contiguity of shade"
of the woods is some little distance away, on the other side of the ever green
Itchen valley, which, narrowing at this spot, is not much more than a couple
of hundred yards wide. A long field's length away from the cottage is the
little ancient, rustic, tree-hidden village. The cottage, too, is pretty well
hidden by trees, and has the reed- and sedge- and grass-green valley and
swift river before it, and behind and on each side green fields and old
untrimmed hedges with a few old oak trees growing both in the hedgerows
and the fields. There is also an ancient avenue of limes which leads
nowhere and whose origin is forgotten. The ground under the trees is
overgrown with long grass and nettles and burdock; nobody comes or goes
by it, it is only used by the cattle, the white and roan and strawberry
shorthorns that graze in the fields and stand in the shade of the limes on
very hot days. Nor is there any way or path to the cottage; but one must go
and come over the green fields, wet or dry. The avenue ends just at the point
where the gently sloping chalk down touches the level valley, and the half-
hidden, low-roofed cottage stands just there, with the shadow of the last two
lime trees falling on it at one side. It was an ideal spot for a nature-lover and
an angler to pitch his tent upon. Here a small plot of ground, including the
end of the lime-tree avenue, was marked out, a hedge of sweetbriar planted
round it, the cottage erected, and a green lawn made before it on the river
side, and beds of roses planted at the back.

Nothing more—no gravel walks; no startling scarlet geraniums, no

lobelias, no cinerarias, no calceolarias, nor other gardeners' abominations to
hurt one's eyes and make one's head ache. And no dog, nor cat, nor chick,
nor child—only the wild birds to keep one company. They knew how to
appreciate its shelter and solitariness; they were all about it, and built their
nests amid the great green masses of ivy, honeysuckle, Virginia creeper,
rose, and wild clematis which covered the trellised walls and part of the red
roof with a twelve years' luxuriant growth. To this delectable spot I returned
on 21st July to see the changeful summer of 1900 out, my friends having
gone north and left me their cottage for a habitation.
 "There is the wind on the heath, brother," and one heartily agrees with
the half-mythical Petulengro that it is a very good thing; it had, indeed, been
blowing off and on in my face for many months past; and from shadeless
heaths and windy downs, and last of all, from the intolerable heat and dusty
desolation of London in mid-July, it was a delightful change to this valley.

During the very hot days that followed it was pleasure enough to sit in
the shade of the limes most of the day; there was coolness, silence, melody,
fragrance; and, always before me, the sight of that moist green valley,
which made one cool simply to look at it, and never wholly lost its novelty.
The grass and herbage grow so luxuriantly in the water-meadows that the
cows grazing there were half-hidden in their depth; and the green was
tinged with the purple of seeding grasses, and red of dock and sorrel, and
was everywhere splashed with creamy white of meadow-sweet. The
channels of the swift many-channelled river were fringed with the livelier
green of sedges and reed-mace, and darkest green of bulrushes, and restful
grey of reeds not yet in flower.

Bird visitors The old limes were now in their fullest bloom; and the
hotter the day the greater the fragrance, the flower, unlike
the woodbine and sweetbriar, needing no dew nor rain to bring out its
deliciousness. To me, sitting there, it was at the same time a bath and
atmosphere of sweetness, but it was very much more than that to all the
honey-eating insects in the neighbourhood. Their murmur was loud all day
till dark, and from the lower branches that touched the grass with leaf and
flower to their very tops the trees were peopled with tens and with hundreds
of thousands of bees. Where they all came from was a mystery; somewhere
there should be a great harvest of honey and wax as a result of all this noise
and activity. It was a soothing noise, according with an idle man's mood in
the July weather; and it harmonised with, forming, so to speak, an
appropriate background to, the various distinct and individual sounds of
bird life.

The birds were many, and the tree under which I sat was their favourite
resting-place; for not only was it the largest of the limes, but it was the last
of the row, and overlooked the valley, so that when they flew across from
the wood on the other side they mostly came to it. It was a very noble tree,
eighteen feet in circumference near the ground; at about twenty feet from
the root, the trunk divided into two central boles and several of lesser size,
and these all threw out long horizontal and drooping branches, the lowest of
which feathered down to the grass. One sat as in a vast pavilion, and looked
up to a height of sixty or seventy feet through wide spaces of shadow and
green sunlight, and sunlit golden-green foliage and honey-coloured
blossom, contrasting with brown branches and with masses of darkest
mistletoe.

Among the constant succession of bird visitors to the tree above me were
the three pigeons—ring-dove, stock-dove, and turtle-dove; finches, tree-
warblers, tits of four species, and the wren, tree-creeper, nuthatch, and
many more. The best vocalists had ceased singing; the last nightingale I had
heard utter its full song was in the oak woods of Beaulieu on 27th June: and
now all the tree-warblers, and with them chaffinch, thrush, blackbird, and
robin, had become silent. The wren was the leading songster, beginning his
bright music at four o'clock in the morning, and the others, still in song, that
visited me were the greenfinch, goldfinch, swallow, dunnock, and cirl
bunting. From my seat I could also hear the songs in the valley of the reed
and sedge warblers, reed-bunting, and grasshopper-warbler. These, and the
polyglot starling, and cooing and crooning doves, made the last days of July
at this spot seem not the silent season we are accustomed to call it.

Of these singers the goldfinch was the most pleasing. The bird that sang
near me had assisted in rearing a brood in a nest on a low branch a few
yards away, but he still returned from the fields at intervals to sing; and
seen, as I now saw him a dozen times a day, perched among the lime leaves
and blossoms at the end of a slender bough, in his black and gold and
crimson livery, he was by far the prettiest of my feathered visitors.

Cirl bunting But the cirl bunting, the inferior singer, interested me
most, for I am somewhat partial to the buntings, and he is
the best of them, and the one I knew least about from personal observation.

On my way hither at the end of June, somewhere between Romsey and

Winchester, a cock cirl bunting in fine plumage flew up before me and
perched on the wire of a roadside fence. It was a welcome encounter, and,
alighting, I stood for some time watching him. I did not know that I was in
a district where this pretty species is more numerous than in any other place
in England—as common, in fact, as the universal yellowhammer, and
commoner than the more local corn-bunting. Here in July and August, in
the course of an afternoon's walk, in any place where there are trees and
grass fields, one can count on hearing half a dozen birds sing, every one of
them probably the parent of a nestful of young. For this is the cirl bunting's
pleasant habit. He assists in feeding and safeguarding the young, even as
other songsters do who cease singing when this burden is laid upon them;
but he is a bird of placid disposition, and takes his task more quietly than
most; and, after returning from the fields with several grasshoppers in his
throat and beak and feeding his fledglings, he takes a rest, and at intervals
in the day flies to his favourite tree, and repeats his blithe little song half a
dozen times.

The song is not quite accurately described in the standard ornithological

works as exactly like that of the yellowhammer, only without the thin,
drawn-out note at the end, and therefore inferior—the little bit of bread, but
without the cheese. It certainly resembles the yellowhammer's song, being a
short note, a musical chirp, rapidly repeated several times. But the
yellowhammer varies his song as to its time, the notes being sometimes fast
and sometimes slow. The cirl's song is always the same in this respect, and
is always a more rapid song than that of the other species. So rapid is it that,
heard at a distance, it acquires almost the character of a long trill. In quality,
too, it is the better song—clearer, brighter, brisker—and it carries farther;
on still mornings I could hear one bird's song very distinctly at a distance of
two hundred and fifty yards. The only good description of the cirl bunting's
song—as well as the best general account of the bird's habits—which I have
found, is in J. C. Bellamy's Natural History of South Devon (Plymouth and
London), 1839, probably a forgotten book.

The best singer among the British buntings, he is also to my mind the
prettiest bird. When he is described as black and brown, and lemon and
sulphur-yellow, and olive and lavender-grey, and chestnut-red, we are apt to
think that the effect of so many colours thrown upon his small body cannot
be very pleasing. But it is not so; these various colours are so harmoniously
disposed, and have, in the lighter and brighter hues in the living bird, such a
flower-like freshness and delicacy, that the effect is really charming.
 When, in June, I first visited the cottage, my host took me into his
dressing-room, and from it we watched a pair of cirl buntings bring food to
their young in a nest in a small cypress standing just five yards from the
window. The young birds were in the pinfeather stage, but they were
unfortunately taken a very few days later by a rat, or stoat, or by that
winged nest-robber the jackdaw, whose small cunning grey eyes are able to
see into so many hidden things.

The birds themselves did not grieve overlong at their loss: the day after
the nest was robbed the cock was heard singing—and he continued to sing
every day from his favourite tree, an old black poplar growing outside the
sweetbriar hedge in front of the cottage.

About this bird of a brave and cheerful disposition, more will have to be
said in the next chapter. It is, or was, my desire to describe events in the
valley at this changeful period from late July to October in the order of their
occurrence, but in all the rest of the present chapter, which will be given to
the river birds exclusively, the order must be broken.

Water-birds Undoubtedly the three commonest water-birds inhabiting

inland waters throughout England are the coot, moor-hen,
and dabchick, or little grebe; and on account of their abundance and general
distribution they are almost as familiar as our domestic birds. Yet one never
grows tired of seeing and hearing them, as we do of noting the actions of
other species that inhabit the same places; and the reason for this—a very
odd reason it seems!—is because these three common birds, members of
two orders which the modern scientific zoologist has set down among the
lowest, and therefore, as he tells us, most stupid, of the feathered
inhabitants of the globe, do actually exhibit a quicker intelligence and
greater variety in their actions and habits than the species which are
accounted their superiors.

The coot is not so abundant as the other two; also he is less varied in his
colour, and less lively in his motions, and consequently attracts us less. The
moor-hen is the most engaging, as well as the commonest—a bird
concerning which more entertaining matter has been related in our natural
histories than of any other native species. And I now saw a great deal of
him, and of the other two as well. From the cottage windows, and from the
lawn outside, one looked upon the main current of the river, and there were
the birds always in sight; and when not looking one could hear them.
Without paying particular attention to them their presence in the river was a
constant source of interest and amusement.

At one spot, where the stream made a slight bend, the floating water-
weeds brought down by the current were always being caught by scattered
bulrushes growing a few feet from the edge; the arrested weeds formed a
minute group of islets, and on these convenient little refuges and resting-
places in the waterway, a dozen or more of the birds could be seen at most
times. The old coots would stand on the floating weeds and preen and preen
their plumage by the hour. They were like mermaids, for ever combing out
their locks, and had the clear stream for a mirror. The dull-brown, white-
breasted young coots, now fully grown, would meanwhile swim about
picking up their own food. The moor-hens were with them, preening and
feeding, and one had its nest there. It was a very big conspicuous nest, built
up on a bunch of floating weeds, and formed, when the bird was sitting on
its eggs, a pretty and curious object; for every day fresh bright-green sedge
leaves were plucked and woven round it, and on that high bright-green nest,
as on a throne, the bird sat, and when I went near the edge of the water, she
(or he) would flirt her tail to display the snowy-white under-feathers, and
nod her head, and stand up as if to display her pretty green legs, so as to let
me see and admire all her colours; and finally, not being at all shy, she
would settle quietly down again.

Little grebes The little grebes, too, had chosen that spot to build on.
Poor little grebes! how they worked and sat, and built and
sat again, all the summer long. And all along the river it was the same thing
—the grebes industriously making their nests, and trying ever so hard to
hatch their eggs; and then at intervals of a few days the ruthless water-
keeper would come by with his long fatal pole to dash their hopes. For
whenever he saw a suspicious-looking bunch of dead floating weeds which
might be a grebe's nest, down would come the end of the pole on it, and the
eggs would be spilt out of the wet bed, and rolled down by the swift water
to the sea. And then the birds would cheerfully set to work again at the very
same spot: but it was never easy to tell which bunch of wet weeds their eggs
were hidden in. Watching with a glass I could see the hen on her eggs, but if
any person approached she would hastily pull the wet weeds from the edge
over them, and slip into the water, diving and going away to some distance.
While the female sat the male was always busy, diving and catching little
fishes; he would dive down in one spot, and suddenly pop up a couple of
yards away, right among the coots and moor-hens. This Jack-in-the-box
action on his part never upset their nerves. They took not the slightest notice
of him, and were altogether a more or less, happy family, all very tolerant of
each other's little eccentricities.

The little grebe fished for himself and for his sitting mate; he never
seemed so happy and proud as when he was swimming to her, patiently
sitting on her wet nest, with a little silvery fish in his beak. He also fished
for old decaying weeds, which he fetched up from the bottom to add to the
nest. Whenever he popped up among or near the other birds with an old rag
of a weed in his beak, one or two of the grown-up young coots would try to
take it from him; and seeing them gaining on him he would dive down to
come up in another place, still clinging to the old rag half a yard long; and
again the chase would be renewed, and again he would dive; until at last,
after many narrow escapes and much strategy, the nest would be gained,
and the sitting bird would take the weed from him and draw it up and tuck it
round her, pleased with his devotedness, and at the sight of his triumph over
the coots. As a rule, after giving her something—a little fish, or a wet weed
to pull up and make herself comfortable with—they would join their voices
in that long trilling cry of theirs, like a metallic, musical-sounding
policeman's rattle.

It was not in a mere frolicsome spirit that the young coots hunted the
dabchick with his weed, but rather, as I imagine, because the white
succulent stems of aquatic plants growing deep in the water are their
favourite food; they are accustomed to have it dived for by their parents and
brought up to them, and they never appear to get enough to satisfy them;
but when they are big, and their parents refuse to slave for them, they seem
to want to make the little grebes their fishers for succulent stems.

One day in August 1899, I witnessed a pretty little bird-comedy at the

Pen Ponds, in Richmond Park, which seemed to throw a strong light on the
inner or domestic life of the coot. For a space of twenty minutes I watched
an old coot industriously diving and bringing up the white parts of the stems
of Polygonum persicaria, which grows abundantly there, together with the
rarer more beautiful Lymnanthemum nymphoïdes, which is called Lymnanth
for short. I prefer an English name for a British plant, an exceedingly
attractive one in this case, and so beg leave to call it Water-crocus. The old
bird was attended by a full-grown young one, which she was feeding, and
the unfailing diligence and quickness of the parent were as wonderful to see
as the gluttonous disposition of its offspring. The old coot dived at least
three times every minute, and each time came up with a clean white stem,
the thickness of a stout clay pipe-stem, cut the proper length—about three
to four inches. This the young bird would take and instantly swallow; but
before it was well down his throat the old bird would be gone for another. I
was with a friend, and we wondered when its devouring cormorant appetite
would be appeased, and how its maw could contain so much food; we also
compared it to a hungry Italian greedily sucking down macaroni.

While this was going on a second young bird had been on the old nest on
the little island in the lake, quietly dozing; and at length this one got off his
dozing-place, and swam out to where the weed-fishing and feeding were in
progress. As he came up, the old coot rose with a white stem in her beak,
which the new-comer pushed forward to take; but the other thrust himself
before him, and, snatching the stem from his parent's beak, swallowed it
himself. The old coot remained perfectly motionless for a space of about
four seconds, looking fixedly at the greedy one who had been gorging for
twenty minutes yet refused to give place to the other. Then very suddenly,
and with incredible fury, she dashed at and began hunting him over the
pond. In vain he rose up and flew over the water, beating the surface with
his feet, uttering cries of terror; in vain he dived; again and again she
overtook and dealt him the most savage blows with her sharp beak, until,
her anger thoroughly appeased and the punishment completed, she swam
back to the second bird, waiting quietly at the same spot for her return, and
began once more diving for white stems of the Polygonum.

Never again, we said, would the greedy young bird behave in the
unmannerly way which had brought so terrible a castigation upon him! The
coot is certainly a good mother who does not spoil her child by sparing the
rod. And this is the bird which our comparative anatomists, after pulling it
to pieces, tell us is a small-brained, unintelligent creature; and which old
Michael Drayton, who, being a poet, ought to have known better, described
as "a formal brainless ass"!

Happy families To come back to the Itchen birds. The little group, or
happy family, I have described was but one of the many
groups of the same kind existing all along the river; and these separate
groups, though at a distance from each other, and not exactly on visiting
terms, each being jealous of its own stretch of water, yet kept up a sort of
neighbourly intercourse in their own way. Single cries were heard at all
times from different points; but once or two or three times in the day a cry
of a coot or a moor-hen would be responded to by a bird at a distance; then
another would take it up at a more distant point, and another still, until cries
answering cries would be heard all along the stream. At such times the
voice of the skulking water-rail would be audible too, but whether this
excessively secretive bird had any social relations with the others beyond
joining in the general greeting and outcry I could not discover. Thus, all
these separate little groups, composed of three different species, were like
the members of one tribe or people broken up into families; and altogether
it seemed that their lines had fallen to them in pleasant places, although it
cannot be said that the placid current of their existence was never troubled.

I know not what happened to disturb them, but sometimes all at once
cries were heard which were unmistakably emitted in anger, and sounds of
splashing and struggling among the sedges and bulrushes; and the rushes
would be swayed about this way and that, and birds would appear in hot
pursuit of one another over the water; and then, just when one was in the
midst of wondering what all this fury in their cooty breasts could be about,
lo! it would all be over, and the little grebe would be busy catching his
silvery fishes; and the moor-hen, pleased as ever at her own prettiness,
nodding and prinking and flirting her feathers; and the coot, as usual,
mermaid-like, combing out her slate-coloured tresses.

We have seen that of these three species the little grebe was not so happy
as the others, owing to his taste for little fishes being offensive to the fish-
breeder and preserver. When I first saw how this river was watched over by
the water-keepers, I came to the conclusion that very few or no dabchicks
would succeed in hatching any young. And none were hatched until August,
and then to my surprise I heard at one point the small, plaintive peep-peep
of the young birds crying to be fed. One little grebe, more cunning or more
fortunate than the others, had at last succeeded in bringing off her young;
and once out of their shells they were safe. But by-and-by the little
duckling-like sound was heard at another point, and then at another; and
this continued in September, until, by the middle of that month, you could
walk miles along the river, and before you left the sound of one little brood
hungrily crying to be fed behind you, the little peep-peep of another brood
would begin to be heard in advance of you.

Often enough it is "dogged as does it" in bird as well as in human affairs,

and never had birds more deserved to succeed than these dogged little
grebes. I doubt if a single pair failed to bring out at least a couple of young
by the end of September. And at that date you could see young birds
apparently just out of the shell, while those that had been hatched in August
were full grown.

Fishing-lessons About the habits of the little grebe, as about those of the
moor-hen, many curious and entertaining things have been
written; but what amused me most in these birds, when I watched them in
late September on the Itchen, was the skilful way in which the parent bird
taught her grown-up young ones to fish. At an early period the fishes given
to the downy young are very small, and are always well bruised in the beak
before the young bird is allowed to take it, however eager he may be to
seize it. Afterwards, when the young are more grown, the size of the fishes
is increased, and they are less and less bruised, although always killed.
Finally, the young has to be taught to catch for himself; and at first he does
not appear to have any aptitude for such a task, or any desire to acquire it.
He is tormented with hunger, and all he knows is that his parent can catch
fish for him, and his only desire is that she shall go on catching them as fast
as he can swallow them. And she catches him a fish, and gives it to him,
but, oh mockery! it was not really dead this time, and instantly falls into the
water and is lost! Not hopelessly lost, however, for down she goes like
lightning, and comes up in ten seconds with it again. And he takes and
drops it again, and looks stupid, and again she recovers and gives it to him.
How many hundreds of times, I wonder, must this lesson be repeated before
the young grebe finds out how to keep and to kill? Yet that is after all only
the beginning of his education. The main thing is that he must be taught to
dive after the fishes he lets fall, and he appears to have no inclination, no
intuitive impulse, to do such a thing. A small, quite dead fish must be given
him carelessly, so that it shall fall, and he must be taught to pick up a fallen
morsel from the surface; but from that first simple act to the swift plunge
and long chase after and capture of uninjured vigorous fishes, what an
immense distance there is! It is, however, probable that, after the first
reluctance of the young bird has been overcome, and a habit of diving after
escaped fishes acquired, he makes exceedingly rapid progress.

But, even after the completion of his education, when he is independent

of his parents, and quick and sure as they at capturing fishes down in their
own dim element, is it not still a puzzle and a mystery that such a thing can
be done? And here I speak not only of the little grebe, but of all birds that
dive after fishes, and pursue and capture them in fresh or salt water. We see
how a kingfisher takes his prey, or a tern, or gannet, or osprey, by dropping
upon it when it swims near the surface; he takes his fish by surprise, as a
sparrow-hawk takes the bird he preys upon. But no specialisation can make
an air-breathing, feathered bird an equal of the fish under water. One can
see at a glance in any clear stream that any fish can out-distance any bird,
darting off with the least effort so swiftly as almost to elude the sight, while
the fastest bird under water moves but little faster than a water-rat.

Fascination The explanation, I believe, is that the paralysing effect on

many small, persecuted creatures in the presence of, or
when pursued by, their natural enemies and devourers, is as common under
as above the water. I have distinctly seen this when watching fish-eating
birds being fed at the Zoological Gardens in glass tanks. The appearance of
the bird when he dives strikes an instant terror into them; and it may then be
seen that those which endeavour to escape are no longer in possession of
their full powers, and their efforts to fly from the enemy are like those of
the mouse and vole when a weasel is on their track, or of a frog when
pursued by a snake; while others remain suspended in the water, quite
motionless, until seized and swallowed.
 CHAPTER XIII
Morning in the valley—Abundance of swifts—Unlikeness to other birds—Mayfly and
swallows—Mayfly and swift—Bad weather and hail—Swallows in the rain—Sand-
martins—An orphaned blackbird—Tamed by feeding—Survival of gregarious instinct
in young blackbirds—Blackbird's good-night—Cirl buntings—Breeding habits and
language—Habits of the young—Reed-bunting—Beautiful weather—The oak in
August.

Swifts During the month of July the swift was the most
abundant and most constantly before us of all our Itchen-
valley birds. In the morning he was not there. We had the pigeons then, all
three species—ring-dove, stock-dove and turtle-dove—being abundant in
the woods on the opposite side of the valley, and from four o'clock to six
was the time of their morning concert, when the still air was filled with the
human-like musical sound of their multitudinous voices mingled in one
voice. An hour or two later, as the air grew warmer, the swifts would begin
to arrive to fly up and down the stream incessantly until dark, feasting on
the gnats and ephemeræ that swarmed over the water during those hot days
of late summer. Doubtless these birds come every day from all the towns,
villages, and farm-houses scattered over a very broad strip of country on
either side of the Itchen. Never had I seen swifts so numerous; looking
down on the valley from any point one had hundreds of birds in sight at
once, all swiftly flying up and down stream; but when the sight was kept
fixed on any one bird, it could be seen that he went but a short distance—
fifty to a hundred yards—then turned back. Thus each bird had a very
limited range, and probably each returned to his accustomed place or beat
every day.

These swifts are very much in the angler's way. Frequently they get
entangled in the line and are brought down, but are seldom injured. During
one day's fishing my friend here had three swifts to disengage from his line.
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