CHAPTER XI.

Then he goes back to his theory that everything happens by chance. So long as men believe that everything is done for them, progress is impossible. Once grasp the truth that nothing is done for man, and that he has everything to do for himself, and all is possible. Still, this is not a proof that chance rules the world. And, again, the fact that man, alone of created beings, is able to grasp this, or any other truth, is not that gift everything in itself?

"Nothing whatsoever is done for us. We are born naked, and not even protected by a shaggy covering. Nothing is done for us. The first and strongest command (using the word to convey the idea only) that nature, the universe, our own bodies give is to do everything for ourselves. The sea does not make boats for us, nor the earth of her own will build us hospitals. The injured lie bleeding, and no invisible power lifts them up. The maidens were scorched in the midst of their devotions, and their remains make a mound hundreds of yards long. The infants perished in the snow, and the ravens tore their limbs.Those in the theatre crushed each other to the death-agony. For how long, for how many thousand years, must the earth and the sea, and the fire and the air, utter these things and force them upon us before they are admitted in their full significance?"These things speak with a voice of thunder. From every human being whose body has been racked by pain, from every human being who has suffered from accident or disease, from every human being drowned, burned, or slain by negligence, there goes up a continually-increasing cry louder than the thunder. An awe-inspiring cry dread to listen to, which no one dares listen to, against which ears are stopped by the wax of superstition, and the wax of criminal selfishness:—These miseries are your doing, because you have mind and thought, and could have prevented them. You can prevent them in the future. You do not even try."It is perfectly certain that all diseases without exception are preventible, or if not so, that they can be so weakened as to do no harm. It is perfectly certain that all accidents arepreventible; there is not one that does not arise from folly or negligence. All accidents are crimes. It is perfectly certain that all human beings are capable of physical happiness. It is absolutely incontrovertible that the ideal shape of the human being is attainable to the exclusion of deformities. It is incontrovertible that there is no necessity for any man to die but of old age, and that if death cannot be prevented life can be prolonged far beyond the farthest now known. It is incontrovertible that at the present time no one ever dies of old age. Not one single person ever dies of old age, or of natural causes, for there is no such thing as a natural cause of death. They die of disease or weakness which is the result of disease, either in themselves or in their ancestors. No such thing as old age is known to us. We do not even know what old age would be like, because no one ever lives to it."

"These things speak with a voice of thunder. From every human being whose body has been racked by pain, from every human being who has suffered from accident or disease, from every human being drowned, burned, or slain by negligence, there goes up a continually-increasing cry louder than the thunder. An awe-inspiring cry dread to listen to, which no one dares listen to, against which ears are stopped by the wax of superstition, and the wax of criminal selfishness:—These miseries are your doing, because you have mind and thought, and could have prevented them. You can prevent them in the future. You do not even try.

"It is perfectly certain that all diseases without exception are preventible, or if not so, that they can be so weakened as to do no harm. It is perfectly certain that all accidents arepreventible; there is not one that does not arise from folly or negligence. All accidents are crimes. It is perfectly certain that all human beings are capable of physical happiness. It is absolutely incontrovertible that the ideal shape of the human being is attainable to the exclusion of deformities. It is incontrovertible that there is no necessity for any man to die but of old age, and that if death cannot be prevented life can be prolonged far beyond the farthest now known. It is incontrovertible that at the present time no one ever dies of old age. Not one single person ever dies of old age, or of natural causes, for there is no such thing as a natural cause of death. They die of disease or weakness which is the result of disease, either in themselves or in their ancestors. No such thing as old age is known to us. We do not even know what old age would be like, because no one ever lives to it."

This remarkable book is a record almost, if not quite, unique. The writer is not a man of science; he has not been trained in logic and dialectics, he is not a scholar, though hehas read much. But he can think for himself, and he has the gift of carrying on the same line of thought unwearied, persistent, like a bloodhound on the scent, year after year. And as a record it is absolutely true; there are no concealments in it, no affectations; it is all true. He has gone to Nature—the Nature he loves so well—for an answer to the problems that vex his soul. Nature replies with a stony stare; she has no answer. What is man? She cares nothing for man. Everything, so far as she knows, and so far as man is concerned, takes place by chance. Then he gets his Vision of the Perfect Soul, and it fills his heart and makes him happy, and seems to satisfy all his longings. And the old Christian teaching, the prayer to the Father, the village church and its services, the quiet churchyard—where are they? Out on the wild downs you do not see or hear of them at all. They are not in the whisper of the air, or in the rustle of the grass-blades; they are not in the sunshine; they are not in the cloud; they are not in the depths of the azure sky.

And so he concludes:

"I have only just commenced to realize the immensity of thought which lies outside the knowledge of the senses. Still, on the hills and by the sea-shore, I seek and pray deeper than ever. The sun burns southwards over the sea and before the wave runs its shadow, constantly slipping on the advancing slope till it curls and covers its dark image at the shore. Over the rim of the horizon waves are flowing as high and wide as those that break upon the beach. These that come to me and beat the trembling shore are like the thoughts that have been known so long; like the ancient, iterated, and reiterated thoughts that have broken on the strand of mind for thousands of years. Beyond and over the horizon I feel that there are other waves of ideas unknown to me, flowing as the stream of ocean flows. Knowledge of facts is limitless, they lie at my feet innumerable like the countless pebbles; knowledge of thought so circumscribed! Ever the same thoughts come that have been written down centuries and centuries."Let me launch forth and sail over the rimof the sea yonder, and when another rim arises over that, and again and onwards into an ever-widening ocean of idea and life. For with all the strength of the wave, and its succeeding wave, the depth and race of the tide, the clear definition of the sky; with all the subtle power of the great sea, there rises an equal desire. Give me life strong and full as the brimming ocean; give me thoughts wide as its plain; give me a soul beyond these. Sweet is the bitter sea by the shore where the faint blue pebbles are lapped by the green-gray wave, where the wind-quivering foam is loath to leave the lashed stone. Sweet is the bitter sea, and the clear green in which the gaze seeks the soul, looking through the glass into itself. The sea thinks for me as I listen and ponder: the sea thinks, and every boom of the wave repeats my prayer."Sometimes I stay on the wet sands as the tide rises, listening to the rush of the lines of foam in layer upon layer; the wash swells and circles about my feet, I lave my hands in it, I lift a little in my hollowed palm, I take the life of the sea to me. My soul rising tothe immensity utters its desire-prayer with all the strength of the sea. Or, again, the full stream of ocean beats upon the shore, and the rich wind feeds the heart, the sun burns brightly;—the sense of soul-life burns in me like a torch."Leaving the shore, I walk among the trees; a cloud passes, and the sweet short rain comes mingled with sunbeams and flower-scented air. The finches sing among the fresh green leaves of the beeches. Beautiful it is, in summer days, to see the wheat wave, and the long grass foam-flecked of flower yield and return to the wind. My soul of itself always desires; these are to it as fresh food. I have found in the hills another valley grooved in prehistoric times, where, climbing to the top of the hollow, I can see the sea. Down in the hollow I look up; the sky stretches over, the sun burns as it seems but just above the hill, and the wind sweeps onward. As the sky extends beyond the valley, so I know that there are ideas beyond the valley of my thought; I know that there is something infinitely higher than Deity. The great sun burning in the sky, thesea, the firm earth, all the stars of night are feeble—all, all the cosmos is feeble; it is not strong enough to utter my prayer-desire. My soul cannot reach to its full desire of prayer. I need no earth, or sea, or sun to think my thought. If my thought-part—the psyche—were entirely separated from the body, and from the earth, I should of myself desire the same. In itself my soul desires; my existence, my soul-existence is in itself my prayer, and so long as it exists so long will it pray that I may have the fullest soul-life."

"Let me launch forth and sail over the rimof the sea yonder, and when another rim arises over that, and again and onwards into an ever-widening ocean of idea and life. For with all the strength of the wave, and its succeeding wave, the depth and race of the tide, the clear definition of the sky; with all the subtle power of the great sea, there rises an equal desire. Give me life strong and full as the brimming ocean; give me thoughts wide as its plain; give me a soul beyond these. Sweet is the bitter sea by the shore where the faint blue pebbles are lapped by the green-gray wave, where the wind-quivering foam is loath to leave the lashed stone. Sweet is the bitter sea, and the clear green in which the gaze seeks the soul, looking through the glass into itself. The sea thinks for me as I listen and ponder: the sea thinks, and every boom of the wave repeats my prayer.

"Sometimes I stay on the wet sands as the tide rises, listening to the rush of the lines of foam in layer upon layer; the wash swells and circles about my feet, I lave my hands in it, I lift a little in my hollowed palm, I take the life of the sea to me. My soul rising tothe immensity utters its desire-prayer with all the strength of the sea. Or, again, the full stream of ocean beats upon the shore, and the rich wind feeds the heart, the sun burns brightly;—the sense of soul-life burns in me like a torch.

"Leaving the shore, I walk among the trees; a cloud passes, and the sweet short rain comes mingled with sunbeams and flower-scented air. The finches sing among the fresh green leaves of the beeches. Beautiful it is, in summer days, to see the wheat wave, and the long grass foam-flecked of flower yield and return to the wind. My soul of itself always desires; these are to it as fresh food. I have found in the hills another valley grooved in prehistoric times, where, climbing to the top of the hollow, I can see the sea. Down in the hollow I look up; the sky stretches over, the sun burns as it seems but just above the hill, and the wind sweeps onward. As the sky extends beyond the valley, so I know that there are ideas beyond the valley of my thought; I know that there is something infinitely higher than Deity. The great sun burning in the sky, thesea, the firm earth, all the stars of night are feeble—all, all the cosmos is feeble; it is not strong enough to utter my prayer-desire. My soul cannot reach to its full desire of prayer. I need no earth, or sea, or sun to think my thought. If my thought-part—the psyche—were entirely separated from the body, and from the earth, I should of myself desire the same. In itself my soul desires; my existence, my soul-existence is in itself my prayer, and so long as it exists so long will it pray that I may have the fullest soul-life."

There is a very delightful old story which used to be given to children, though I have not seen it for a long time in the hands of any children. It was called "The Story without an End." A child wandered among the flowers, who talked to him. That is the whole story. There were coloured pictures in it. The story began without a beginning, and it came to a sudden stop without an ending.

It is perhaps upon a reminiscence of this old story that Jefferies has based nearly all his own. They are very delightful, especially the shorter stories; but they seldom have any end. There is sometimes, but not often, a story; there is generally only a succession ofscenes—some delightful, all beautiful, and all original in the sense that nobody except Jefferies could possibly have written any of them. The child wanders. That is all. Some day, when the worth of this writer is universally recognised, these scenes and stories will be detached from the papers with which they are published, and issued in separate form, as beautifully illustrated as the art of the next generation—this will not take place for another generation—will allow.

For instance, Guido—they called him Guido because they thought that in childhood Guido the painter must have greatly resembled this boy—runs along the grassy lane at the top of a bank between the fir-trees till he comes to a wheat-field. Then he climbs down into this field, and sees the most wonderful things: lovely azure corn-flowers—"curious flowers with knobs surrounded with little blue flowers, like a lady's bonnet. They were a beautiful blue, not like any other blue, not like the violets in the garden, or the sky over the trees, or the geranium in the grass, or the bird's-eyes by the path." Thenhe wanders on, starting a rabbit, scaring a hawk, and listening to the birds. Presently he sits down on the branch of an oak, with his feet dangling over a streamlet. Then he remembers—children do remember things in the strangest way—that if he wants to hear a story, or to talk with the grass, he really must not try to catch the butterflies. So he touches the rushes with his foot, and says, "Rush, rush, tell them I am here." Immediately there follows a little wind, and the wheat swings to and fro, the oak-leaves rustle, the rushes bow, and the shadows slip forwards and back again. After this, of course, the nearest wheat-ear begins to talk. Now the wheat has been so long growing for the use of man that it has grown to love him. Think of that! And it pains the wheat to see so much misery and needless labour among the people. Of course, we cannot expect a wheat-ear to know that little boys do not understand the problems of poverty and labour.

"'There is one thing we do not like, and that is, all the labour and the misery. Whycannot your people have us without so much labour, and why are so many of you unhappy? Why cannot they be all happy with us as you are, dear? For hundreds and hundreds of years now the wheat every year has been sorrowful for your people, and I think we get more sorrowful every year about it, because, as I was telling you just now, the flowers go, and the swallows go, the old, old oaks go, and that oak will go, under the shade of which you are lying, Guido; and if your people do not gather the flowers now, and watch the swallows, and listen to the blackbirds whistling, as you are listening now while I talk, then Guido, my love, they will never pick any flowers, nor hear any birds' songs. They think they will, they think that when they have toiled, and worked a long time, almost all their lives, then they will come to the flowers, and the birds, and be joyful in the sunshine. But no, it will not be so, for then they will be old themselves, and their ears dull, and their eyes dim, so that the birds will sound a great distance off, and the flowers will not seem bright."'Of course, we know that the greatest part of your people cannot help themselves, and must labour on like the reapers till their ears are full of the dust of age. That only makes us more sorrowful, and anxious that things should be different. I do not suppose we should think about them had we not been in man's hand so long that now we have got to feel with man. Every year makes it more pitiful, because then there are more flowers gone, and added to the vast numbers of those gone before, and never gathered, or looked at, though they could have given so much pleasure. And all the work and labour, and thinking, and reading, and learning that your people do ends in nothing—not even one flower. We cannot understand why it should be so. There are thousands of wheat-ears in this field, more than you would know how to write down with your pencil, though you have learned your tables, sir. Yet all of us thinking, and talking, cannot understand why it is when we consider how clever your people are, and how they bring ploughs, and steam-engines, and put up wires along the roads to tell you thingswhen you are miles away, and sometimes we are sown where we can hear the hum, hum, all day of the children learning in the school. The butterflies flutter over us, and the sun shines, and the doves are very, very happy at their nest, but the children go on hum, hum inside this house, and learn, learn. So we suppose you must be very clever, and yet you cannot manage this. All your work is wasted, and you labour in vain—you dare not leave it a minute."'If you left it a minute it would all be gone; it does not mount up and make a store, so that all of you could sit by it and be happy. Directly you leave off you are hungry, and thirsty, and miserable like the beggars that tramp along the dusty road here. All the thousand years of labour since this field was first ploughed have not stored up anything for you. It would not matter about the work so much if you were only happy; the bees work every year, but they are happy; the doves build a nest every year, but they are very, very happy. We think it must be because you do not come out to us and be with usand think more as we do. It is not because your people have not got plenty to eat and drink—you have as much as the bees. Why, just look at us! Look at the wheat that grows all over the world; all the figures that were ever written in pencil could not tell how much, it is such an immense quantity. Yet your people starve and die of hunger every now and then, and we have seen the wretched beggars tramping along the road. We have known of times when there was a great pile of us, almost a hill piled up; it was not in this country, it was in another warmer country, and yet no one dared to touch it—they died at the bottom of the hill of wheat. The earth is full of skeletons of people who have died of hunger. They are dying now this minute in your big cities, with nothing but stones all round them, stone walls and stone streets; not jolly stones like those you threw in the water, dear—hard, unkind stones that make them cold and let them die, while we are growing here, millions of us, in the sunshine with the butterflies floating over us. This makes us unhappy; I was very unhappy this morningtill you came running over and played with us."'It is not because there is not enough: it is because your people are so short-sighted, so jealous and selfish, and so curiously infatuated with things that are not so good as your old toys which you have flung away and forgotten. And you teach the children hum, hum, all day to care about such silly things, and to work for them, and to look to them as the object of their lives. It is because you do not share us among you without price or difference; because you do not share the great earth among you fairly, without spite and jealousy and avarice; because you will not agree; you silly, foolish people to let all the flowers wither for a thousand years while you keep each other at a distance, instead of agreeing and sharing them! Is there something in you—as there is poison in the nightshade, you know it, dear, your papa told you not to touch it—is there a sort of poison in your people that works them up into a hatred of one another? Why, then, do you not agree and have all things, all the great earth can give you, just as we have thesunshine and the rain? How happy your people could be if they would only agree! But you go on teaching even the little children to follow the same silly objects, hum, hum, hum, all the day, and they will grow up to hate each other, and to try which can get the most round things—you have one in your pocket.'"'Sixpence,' said Guido. 'It's quite a new one.'"'And other things quite as silly,' the Wheat continued. 'All the time the flowers are flowering, but they will go, even the oaks will go. We think the reason you do not all have plenty, and why you do not do only just a little work, and why you die of hunger if you leave off, and why so many of you are unhappy in body and mind, and all the misery is because you have not got a spirit like the wheat, like us; you will not agree, and you will not share, and you will hate each other, and you will be so avaricious, and you willnottouch the flowers, or go into the sunshine (you would rather half of you died among the hard stones first), and you will teach your children hum,hum, to follow in some foolish course that has caused you all this unhappiness a thousand years, and you willnothave a spirit like us, and feel like us. Till you have a spirit like us, and feel like us, you will never, never be happy.'"

"'Of course, we know that the greatest part of your people cannot help themselves, and must labour on like the reapers till their ears are full of the dust of age. That only makes us more sorrowful, and anxious that things should be different. I do not suppose we should think about them had we not been in man's hand so long that now we have got to feel with man. Every year makes it more pitiful, because then there are more flowers gone, and added to the vast numbers of those gone before, and never gathered, or looked at, though they could have given so much pleasure. And all the work and labour, and thinking, and reading, and learning that your people do ends in nothing—not even one flower. We cannot understand why it should be so. There are thousands of wheat-ears in this field, more than you would know how to write down with your pencil, though you have learned your tables, sir. Yet all of us thinking, and talking, cannot understand why it is when we consider how clever your people are, and how they bring ploughs, and steam-engines, and put up wires along the roads to tell you thingswhen you are miles away, and sometimes we are sown where we can hear the hum, hum, all day of the children learning in the school. The butterflies flutter over us, and the sun shines, and the doves are very, very happy at their nest, but the children go on hum, hum inside this house, and learn, learn. So we suppose you must be very clever, and yet you cannot manage this. All your work is wasted, and you labour in vain—you dare not leave it a minute.

"'If you left it a minute it would all be gone; it does not mount up and make a store, so that all of you could sit by it and be happy. Directly you leave off you are hungry, and thirsty, and miserable like the beggars that tramp along the dusty road here. All the thousand years of labour since this field was first ploughed have not stored up anything for you. It would not matter about the work so much if you were only happy; the bees work every year, but they are happy; the doves build a nest every year, but they are very, very happy. We think it must be because you do not come out to us and be with usand think more as we do. It is not because your people have not got plenty to eat and drink—you have as much as the bees. Why, just look at us! Look at the wheat that grows all over the world; all the figures that were ever written in pencil could not tell how much, it is such an immense quantity. Yet your people starve and die of hunger every now and then, and we have seen the wretched beggars tramping along the road. We have known of times when there was a great pile of us, almost a hill piled up; it was not in this country, it was in another warmer country, and yet no one dared to touch it—they died at the bottom of the hill of wheat. The earth is full of skeletons of people who have died of hunger. They are dying now this minute in your big cities, with nothing but stones all round them, stone walls and stone streets; not jolly stones like those you threw in the water, dear—hard, unkind stones that make them cold and let them die, while we are growing here, millions of us, in the sunshine with the butterflies floating over us. This makes us unhappy; I was very unhappy this morningtill you came running over and played with us.

"'It is not because there is not enough: it is because your people are so short-sighted, so jealous and selfish, and so curiously infatuated with things that are not so good as your old toys which you have flung away and forgotten. And you teach the children hum, hum, all day to care about such silly things, and to work for them, and to look to them as the object of their lives. It is because you do not share us among you without price or difference; because you do not share the great earth among you fairly, without spite and jealousy and avarice; because you will not agree; you silly, foolish people to let all the flowers wither for a thousand years while you keep each other at a distance, instead of agreeing and sharing them! Is there something in you—as there is poison in the nightshade, you know it, dear, your papa told you not to touch it—is there a sort of poison in your people that works them up into a hatred of one another? Why, then, do you not agree and have all things, all the great earth can give you, just as we have thesunshine and the rain? How happy your people could be if they would only agree! But you go on teaching even the little children to follow the same silly objects, hum, hum, hum, all the day, and they will grow up to hate each other, and to try which can get the most round things—you have one in your pocket.'

"'Sixpence,' said Guido. 'It's quite a new one.'

"'And other things quite as silly,' the Wheat continued. 'All the time the flowers are flowering, but they will go, even the oaks will go. We think the reason you do not all have plenty, and why you do not do only just a little work, and why you die of hunger if you leave off, and why so many of you are unhappy in body and mind, and all the misery is because you have not got a spirit like the wheat, like us; you will not agree, and you will not share, and you will hate each other, and you will be so avaricious, and you willnottouch the flowers, or go into the sunshine (you would rather half of you died among the hard stones first), and you will teach your children hum,hum, to follow in some foolish course that has caused you all this unhappiness a thousand years, and you willnothave a spirit like us, and feel like us. Till you have a spirit like us, and feel like us, you will never, never be happy.'"

Was not that a fine talk for the child to have with the wheat-ear? And there is more of it, a great deal more in this story without an end which you will find in the book called "The Open Air."

Again, another boy—not Guido by any means, nor in the least like Guido—had been sent to gather acorns. He gathered a few, dropped them into his bag, and lay down in the warm corner by the root of the tree to sleep. There his grandmother found him, and there she beat him.

"A wickeder boy never lived: nothing could be done with the reprobate. He was her grandson—at least, the son of her daughter, for he was not legitimate. The man drank, the girl died, as was believed, of sheer starvation: the granny kept the child, and he was now between ten and eleven years old. She had done and did her duty, as she understood it. A prayer-meeting was held in her cottage twice a week, she prayed herself aloud among them, she was a leading member of the sect. Neither example, precept, nor the rod could change that boy's heart. In time perhaps she got to beat him from habit rather than from any particular anger of the moment, just as she fetched water and filled her kettle, as one of the ordinary events of the day. Why did not the father interfere? Because if so he would have had to keep his son: so many shillings a week the less for ale."In the garden attached to the cottage there was a small shed with a padlock, used to store produce or wood in. One morning, after a severe beating, she drove the boy in there and locked him in the whole day without food. It was no use, he was as hardened as ever."A footpath which crossed the field went by the cottage, and every Sunday those who were walking to church could see the boy in the window with granny's Bible open beforehim. There he had to sit, the door locked, under terror of stick, and study the page. What was the use of compelling him to do that? He could not read. 'No,' said the old woman, 'he won't read, but I makes him look at his book.'"The thwacking went on for some time, when one day the boy was sent on an errand two or three miles, and for a wonder started willingly enough. At night he did not return, nor the next day, nor the next, and it was as clear as possible that he had run away. No one thought of tracking his footsteps, or following up the path he had to take, which passed a railway, brooks, and a canal. He had run away, and he might stop away: it was beautiful summer weather, and it would do him no harm to stop out for a week. A dealer who had business in a field by the canal thought indeed that he saw something in the water, but he did not want any trouble, nor indeed did he know that someone was missing. Most likely a dead dog; so he turned his back and went to look again at the cow he thought of buying. A barge came by, and the steerswoman,with a pipe in her mouth, saw something roll over and come up under the rudder: the length of the barge having passed over it. She knew what it was, but she wanted to reach the wharf and go ashore and have a quart of ale. No use picking it up, only make a mess on deck, there was no reward—'Gee-up! Neddy.' The barge went on, turning up the mud in the shallow water, sending ripples washing up to the grassy meadow shores, while the moorhens hid in the flags till it was gone. In time a labourer walking on the towing-path saw 'it,' and fished it out, and with it a slender ash sapling, with twine and hook, a worm still on it. This was why the dead boy had gone so willingly, thinking to fish in the 'river,' as he called the canal. When his feet slipped and he fell in, his fishing-line somehow became twisted about his arms and legs, else most likely he would have scrambled out, as it was not very deep. This was the end; nor was he even remembered. Does anyone sorrow for the rook, shot, and hung up as a scarecrow? The boy had been talked to, and held up as a scarecrow all hislife: he was dead, and that is all. As for granny, she felt no twinge: she had done her duty."

"In the garden attached to the cottage there was a small shed with a padlock, used to store produce or wood in. One morning, after a severe beating, she drove the boy in there and locked him in the whole day without food. It was no use, he was as hardened as ever.

"A footpath which crossed the field went by the cottage, and every Sunday those who were walking to church could see the boy in the window with granny's Bible open beforehim. There he had to sit, the door locked, under terror of stick, and study the page. What was the use of compelling him to do that? He could not read. 'No,' said the old woman, 'he won't read, but I makes him look at his book.'

"The thwacking went on for some time, when one day the boy was sent on an errand two or three miles, and for a wonder started willingly enough. At night he did not return, nor the next day, nor the next, and it was as clear as possible that he had run away. No one thought of tracking his footsteps, or following up the path he had to take, which passed a railway, brooks, and a canal. He had run away, and he might stop away: it was beautiful summer weather, and it would do him no harm to stop out for a week. A dealer who had business in a field by the canal thought indeed that he saw something in the water, but he did not want any trouble, nor indeed did he know that someone was missing. Most likely a dead dog; so he turned his back and went to look again at the cow he thought of buying. A barge came by, and the steerswoman,with a pipe in her mouth, saw something roll over and come up under the rudder: the length of the barge having passed over it. She knew what it was, but she wanted to reach the wharf and go ashore and have a quart of ale. No use picking it up, only make a mess on deck, there was no reward—'Gee-up! Neddy.' The barge went on, turning up the mud in the shallow water, sending ripples washing up to the grassy meadow shores, while the moorhens hid in the flags till it was gone. In time a labourer walking on the towing-path saw 'it,' and fished it out, and with it a slender ash sapling, with twine and hook, a worm still on it. This was why the dead boy had gone so willingly, thinking to fish in the 'river,' as he called the canal. When his feet slipped and he fell in, his fishing-line somehow became twisted about his arms and legs, else most likely he would have scrambled out, as it was not very deep. This was the end; nor was he even remembered. Does anyone sorrow for the rook, shot, and hung up as a scarecrow? The boy had been talked to, and held up as a scarecrow all hislife: he was dead, and that is all. As for granny, she felt no twinge: she had done her duty."

There is another chapter among these papers which is a real story. It is, I am certain, a true story, because the plot is not at all in the manner of Jefferies. It is called, grimly, "Field Play." The "Story of Dolly" it should be called—of hapless Dolly—of Dolly the village beauty. Would you like to see how Jefferies can describe a beautiful woman?

"So fair a complexion could not brown even in summer, exposed to the utmost heat. The beams indeed did heighten the hue of her cheeks a little, but it did not shade to brown. Her chin and neck were wholly untanned, white and soft, and the blue veins roamed at their will. Lips red, a little full perhaps; teeth slightly prominent, but white and gleamy as she smiled. Dark-brown hair in no great abundance, always slipping out of its confinement and straggling, now on her forehead, and now on her shoulders, like wandering bines of bryony. The softest of brown eyes under long eyelashes; eyes that seemed to seeeverything in its gentlest aspect, that could see no harm anywhere. A ready smile on the face, and a smile in the form. Her shape yielded so easily at each movement that it seemed to smile as she walked. Her nose was the least pleasing feature—not delicate enough to fit with the complexion, and distinctly upturned, though not offensively. But it was not noticed; no one saw anything beyond the laughing lips, the laughing shape, the eyes that melted so near to tears. The torn dress, the straggling hair, the tattered shoes, the unmended stocking, the straw hat split, the mingled poverty and carelessness—perhaps rather dreaminess—disappeared when once you had met the full untroubled gaze of those beautiful eyes. Untroubled, that is, with any ulterior thought of evil or cunning; they were as open as the day, the day which you can make your own for evil or good. So, too, like the day, was she ready to the making."

The miserable, hapless fate of poor Dolly, the horrible tragedy of her life and death, is told with relentless truth and fidelity. InArcadia such things may happen, and, I suppose, do constantly happen. The story belongs properly to the chapter on English country life last quarter of the nineteenth century, which, when it is written, will, I think, be taken altogether from the works of Jefferies and Thomas Hardy.

"The Story of Bevis" is the story of Guido writ large. It is also the story of Jefferies himself as a boy. Observe, most writers of fiction, if they were proposing to write the story of a boy, would first create an imaginary boy, and then surround him with imaginary adventures, invented on purpose for that boy. Jefferies does nothing of the kind. It is not his method. He remembers his own boyhood—the most delightful part of it—when he played with his brother and his cousin upon the shores of the lake behind the farmhouse, and made his canoe, and paddled about the water exploring the creeks and islets, the bays and harbours of that wonderful coast. The boy, Bevis, is, in fact, himself. Therefore, he does all the things that Jefferies and his brother did in their boyhood. Beviseven makes a raft, and, when the raft is made, he sails down the Mississippi as far as Central Africa, where, of course, he encounters savages, and has to fight them. To discover an unknown island on such a voyage is an adventure certain to be met with. To build a hut, to provision a cave, and to dwell for a while upon that island is another adventure equally certain when one goes to Central Africa, and there is no reason at all why such a story should ever have any end. Consequently, there is none—only a full stop, and then a line with "Finis" written under it. In fact, there never was such a book of boy's make-believe. Observe, if you please, a thing which shows the real genius of the writer. It is that you feel, all the time you are reading the book, the village itself only a quarter of a mile from Central Africa. The bailiff, and the dogs, and the village lads are always coming across us in the midst of the Central African jungle in the most natural and absurd way. For boys, as Jefferies remembered, are never quite carried away by their own imaginations. There are many very fine passages inthe book, which has only one fault—it is three times as long as it should have been. The conception is delightful. In the execution the author has not known when to stay his hand. Perhaps one of those limitations of which I have spoken already was an imperfect faculty of selection. For boys, the story should have been compressed into one volume. One cannot understand, indeed, how his publishers consented to put forth the book in three-volume novel form. Nobody, after the first chapter, could possibly accept it as a three-volume novel. But it contains many very striking and beautiful and poetic pages.

For instance, Bevis watches the sunrise:

"The sun had not yet stood out from the orient, but his precedent light shone through the translucent blue. Yet it was not blue, nor is there any word, nor is a word possible to convey the feeling unless one could be built up of signs and symbols like those in the book of the magician, which glowed and burned to and fro the page. For the blue of the precious sapphire is thick to it, the turquoise dull:these hard surfaces are no more to be compared to it than sand and gravel. They are but stones, hard, cold, pitiful: that which gives them their lustre is the light. Through delicate porcelain sometimes the light comes, and it is not the porcelain, it is the light that is lovely. But porcelain is clay, and the light is shorn, checked, and shrunken. Down through the beauteous azure came the Light itself, pure, unreflected Light, untouched, untarnished even by the dew-sweetened petal of a flower, descending, flowing like a wind, a wind of glory sweeping through the blue. A luminous purple glowing as Love glows in the cheek, so glowed the passion of the heavens."Two things only reach the soul. By touch there is indeed emotion. But the light in the eye, the sound of the voice! the soul trembles and like a flame leaps to meet them. So to the luminous purple azure his heart ascended."

"Two things only reach the soul. By touch there is indeed emotion. But the light in the eye, the sound of the voice! the soul trembles and like a flame leaps to meet them. So to the luminous purple azure his heart ascended."

In "Wood Magic" Jefferies carries on the story of "Bevis" and of "Guido." Thecreatures all talk to the boy, which makes going into the fields and woods a much more delightful thing than it is to other boys, to whom they will not address one single word. There is a wicked weasel, for instance, caught in a gin, who tells such abominable lies as one may expect from a weasel. There is also a fable about a magpie and a jay, which fails, somehow, to arrest the reader. But when you have got through the business with the creatures—I do not care in the least for them unless Bevis is with them—you presently arrive at a most delightful chapter where Bevis is instructed by the wind. It is such a wise, wise wind, it knows so much. If Bevis will only remember the half of what the wind has taught him!

"'Bevis, my love, if you want to know all about the sun, and the stars, and everything, make haste and come to me, and I will tell you, dear. In the morning, dear, get up as quick as you can, and drink me as I come down from the hill. In the day go up on the hill, dear, and drink me again, and stay thereif you can till the stars shine out, and drink still more of me."'And by-and-by you will understand all about the sun, and the moon, and the stars, and the Earth which is so beautiful, Bevis. It is so beautiful, you can hardly believe how beautiful it is. Do not listen, dear, not for one moment, to the stuff and rubbish they tell you down there in the houses where they will not let me come. If they say the Earth is not beautiful, tell them they do not speak the truth. But it is not their fault, for they have never seen it, and, as they have never drank me, their eyes are closed, and their ears shut up tight. But every evening, dear, before you get into bed, do you go to your window—the same as you did the evening the Owl went by—and lift the curtain and look up at the sky, and I shall be somewhere about, or else I shall be quiet in order that there may be no clouds, so that you may see the stars. In the morning, as I said before, rush out and drink me up."'The more you drink of me, the more you will want, and the more I shall love you.Come up to me upon the hills, and your heart will never be heavy, but your eyes will be bright, and your step quick, and you will sing and shout——'"'So I will,' said Bevis, 'I will shout. Holloa!' and he ran up on to the top of the little round hill, to which they had now returned, and danced about on it as wild as could be."'Dance away, dear,' said the Wind, much delighted. 'Everybody dances who drinks me. The man in the hill there——'"'What man?' said Bevis, 'and how did he get in the hill; just tell him I want to speak to him.'"'Darling,' said the Wind, very quiet and softly, 'he is dead, and he is in the little hill you are standing on, under your feet. At least, he was there once, but there is nothing of him there now. Still it is his place, and as he loved me, and I loved him, I come very often and sing here.'"'When did he die?' said Bevis. 'Did I ever see him?'"'He died just about a minute ago, dear;just before you came up the hill. If you were to ask the people who live in the houses, where they will not let me in (they carefully shut out the sun, too), they would tell you he died thousands of years ago; but they are foolish, very foolish. It was hardly so long ago as yesterday. Did not the Brook tell you all about that?"'Now this man, and all his people, used to love me and drink me, as much as ever they could all day long and a great part of the night, and when they died they still wanted to be with me, and so they were all buried on the tops of the hills, and you will find these curious little mounds everywhere on the ridges, dear, where I blow along. There I come to them still, and sing through the long dry grass, and rush over the turf, and I bring the scent of the clover from the plain, and the bees come humming along upon me. The sun comes, too, and the rain. But I am here most; the sun only shines by day, and the rain only comes now and then.'"'There never was a yesterday,' whisperedthe Wind presently, 'and there never will be to-morrow. It is all one long to-day. When the man in the hill was you were too, and he still is now you are here; but of these things you will know more when you are older, that is if you will only continue to drink me. Come, dear, let us race on again.' So the two went on and came to a hawthorn-bush, and Bevis, full of mischief always, tried to slip away from the Wind round the bush, but the Wind laughed and caught him."A little further and they came to the fosse of the old camp. Bevis went down into the trench, and he and the Wind raced round along it as fast as ever they could go, till presently he ran up out of it on the hill, and there was the waggon underneath him, with the load well piled up now. There was the plain, yellow with stubble; the hills beyond it and the blue valley, just the same as he had left it."As Bevis stood and looked down, the Wind caressed him and said, 'Good-bye, darling, I am going yonder, straight across to the blue valley and the blue sky, wherethey meet; but I shall be back again when you come next time. Now remember, my dear, to drink me—come up here and drink me.'"'Shall you be here?' said Bevis; 'are you quite sure you will be here?'"'Yes,' said the Wind, 'I shall be quite certain to be here; I promise you, love, I will never go quite away. Promise me faithfully, too, that you will come up and drink me, and shout and race and be happy.'"'I promise,' said Bevis, beginning to go down the hill; 'good-bye, jolly old Wind.'"'Good-bye, dearest,' whispered the Wind, as he went across out towards the valley. As Bevis went down the hill, a blue harebell, who had been singing farewell to summer all the morning, called to him and asked him to gather her and carry her home, as she would rather go with him than stay now autumn was near."Bevis gathered the harebell, and ran with the flower in his hand down the hill, and as he ran the wild thyme kissed his feet and said, 'Come again, Bevis, come again.' At the bottom of the hill the waggon was loaded now;so they lifted him up, and he rode home on the broad back of the leader."

"'And by-and-by you will understand all about the sun, and the moon, and the stars, and the Earth which is so beautiful, Bevis. It is so beautiful, you can hardly believe how beautiful it is. Do not listen, dear, not for one moment, to the stuff and rubbish they tell you down there in the houses where they will not let me come. If they say the Earth is not beautiful, tell them they do not speak the truth. But it is not their fault, for they have never seen it, and, as they have never drank me, their eyes are closed, and their ears shut up tight. But every evening, dear, before you get into bed, do you go to your window—the same as you did the evening the Owl went by—and lift the curtain and look up at the sky, and I shall be somewhere about, or else I shall be quiet in order that there may be no clouds, so that you may see the stars. In the morning, as I said before, rush out and drink me up.

"'The more you drink of me, the more you will want, and the more I shall love you.Come up to me upon the hills, and your heart will never be heavy, but your eyes will be bright, and your step quick, and you will sing and shout——'

"'So I will,' said Bevis, 'I will shout. Holloa!' and he ran up on to the top of the little round hill, to which they had now returned, and danced about on it as wild as could be.

"'Dance away, dear,' said the Wind, much delighted. 'Everybody dances who drinks me. The man in the hill there——'

"'What man?' said Bevis, 'and how did he get in the hill; just tell him I want to speak to him.'

"'Darling,' said the Wind, very quiet and softly, 'he is dead, and he is in the little hill you are standing on, under your feet. At least, he was there once, but there is nothing of him there now. Still it is his place, and as he loved me, and I loved him, I come very often and sing here.'

"'When did he die?' said Bevis. 'Did I ever see him?'

"'He died just about a minute ago, dear;just before you came up the hill. If you were to ask the people who live in the houses, where they will not let me in (they carefully shut out the sun, too), they would tell you he died thousands of years ago; but they are foolish, very foolish. It was hardly so long ago as yesterday. Did not the Brook tell you all about that?

"'Now this man, and all his people, used to love me and drink me, as much as ever they could all day long and a great part of the night, and when they died they still wanted to be with me, and so they were all buried on the tops of the hills, and you will find these curious little mounds everywhere on the ridges, dear, where I blow along. There I come to them still, and sing through the long dry grass, and rush over the turf, and I bring the scent of the clover from the plain, and the bees come humming along upon me. The sun comes, too, and the rain. But I am here most; the sun only shines by day, and the rain only comes now and then.'

"'There never was a yesterday,' whisperedthe Wind presently, 'and there never will be to-morrow. It is all one long to-day. When the man in the hill was you were too, and he still is now you are here; but of these things you will know more when you are older, that is if you will only continue to drink me. Come, dear, let us race on again.' So the two went on and came to a hawthorn-bush, and Bevis, full of mischief always, tried to slip away from the Wind round the bush, but the Wind laughed and caught him.

"A little further and they came to the fosse of the old camp. Bevis went down into the trench, and he and the Wind raced round along it as fast as ever they could go, till presently he ran up out of it on the hill, and there was the waggon underneath him, with the load well piled up now. There was the plain, yellow with stubble; the hills beyond it and the blue valley, just the same as he had left it.

"As Bevis stood and looked down, the Wind caressed him and said, 'Good-bye, darling, I am going yonder, straight across to the blue valley and the blue sky, wherethey meet; but I shall be back again when you come next time. Now remember, my dear, to drink me—come up here and drink me.'

"'Shall you be here?' said Bevis; 'are you quite sure you will be here?'

"'Yes,' said the Wind, 'I shall be quite certain to be here; I promise you, love, I will never go quite away. Promise me faithfully, too, that you will come up and drink me, and shout and race and be happy.'

"'I promise,' said Bevis, beginning to go down the hill; 'good-bye, jolly old Wind.'

"'Good-bye, dearest,' whispered the Wind, as he went across out towards the valley. As Bevis went down the hill, a blue harebell, who had been singing farewell to summer all the morning, called to him and asked him to gather her and carry her home, as she would rather go with him than stay now autumn was near.

"Bevis gathered the harebell, and ran with the flower in his hand down the hill, and as he ran the wild thyme kissed his feet and said, 'Come again, Bevis, come again.' At the bottom of the hill the waggon was loaded now;so they lifted him up, and he rode home on the broad back of the leader."

There is one more story. I must not quote it, because it is too long, but I cannot pass it over in silence. It will be found in "Nature Round London." It is the story of a trout, and it has always filled me with the most profound and most sincere admiration. So little did Jefferies understand that he was here working out a picture of the most original kind, of the deepest interest, that he actually divides it in two, goes off to something else, and then returns to it. His inexhaustible mind scattered its treasures about as lavishly as Nature herself scatters abroad her flowers and her seeds, and with almost as little care about arrangement, selection, and grouping.

I think that I have never read, in all the sad chronicles of hapless authors, anything more pitiful than the history of the last years of this life so short, yet so rich in its sheaves of golden grain and piles of purple fruit. Everything possible of long-continued torture, necessity of work, poverty, anxiety, and hope of recovery continually deferred, are crammed into the miserable record which closes this volume.

Jefferies fell ill in December, 1881, five years and a half before the end. He was attacked by a disease for which an operation of a very severe and painful nature is the only cure. It is, however, one which, in the hands of a skilful surgeon, is generally successful. Horribleto relate, in his case, the operation proved unsuccessful, and had to be repeated again and again. Four times in twelve months the dreadful surgeon's knife was used upon this poor sufferer. For a whole year he could do no work at all. The modest savings of the preceding years were spent upon the physicians and the surgeons, and in the maintenance of his household, while the pen of the breadwinner was perforce resting. Before he was able to take pen in hand again, he was reduced to something approaching destitution. You shall read directly how, when he recovered, hope immediately returned, and he was once more happy in the thought that now he could again work, though it was to begin the world once more. Alas! the interval of hope was brief indeed. Another, and a more mysterious disease attacked him. He felt an internal pain constantly gnawing him; he could not eat without pain; he grew daily weaker; he was at last no longer able to walk; he could only crawl.

Henceforth his days and nights were a long struggle against suffering, with a determination, however, to go on with his work. Nothing more wonderful than the courage and resolution of this man. As in youth he had resolved to succeed somehow, though as yet ignorant of the better way, so now hewouldnot be beaten by pain. His very best work, the work which will cause him to live, the work which places him among the writers of his country, to be remembered and to be read long after the men of his generation are dead and forgotten, was actually done while he was in this suffering. The "Pageant of Summer," for example: well, the "Pageant of Summer" reads as if it were the work of a man revelling in the warmth of the quivering air; of a man in perfect health and strength, body and mind at ease, surrendered wholly to the influence of the flowers and the sunshine, at peace, save for the natural sadness of one who communes much with himself on change, decay, and death. And yet the "Pageant of Summer" was written while he was in deadly pain and torture. Again, between 1883 and 1886 he published those collections of papers called "Life in the Fields" and "The Open Air." He also wrote "Red Deer,""Amaryllis," and a quantity of papers which have yet to be collected and published. If, even for a moment, he had an interval of strength, his busy pen began again to race over the paper, hasting to set down the thoughts that filled his brain.

His disease was discovered, after a period of intense suffering, to be an ulceration of the small intestine. It was weakness induced by this disease, which caused other complications, under which he gradually sank.

I suppose that Jefferies could never be considered a strong man. As a boy, tall, active, nervous, he was muscularly weaker than his younger brother. At the age of eighteen he showed symptoms which caused fear of a decline. Perhaps his intense love of the open air indicated the kind of medicine which he most needed. When he could no longer go into the open air he died. Perhaps, too, the consciousness of physical weakness, the sense of impending early death, caused him to yearn with so much longing after physical perfection and the fuller life which he clearly saw was possible. Those who are doomed to die young—as has been often observed—have the deepest sense and the keenest enjoyment of life.

Still, though not a strong man, he was apparently a healthy man. He lived at all times a simple and a healthy life; there was nothing to show that he was going to be struck down by so cruel an illness.

The period of greatest suffering seems to have been in the year 1884. The weakness following it set in some time during the year 1885.

He writes to Mr. Charles Longman in May of the latter year:

"Your suggestion"—that he should write a year-book of Nature—"of a diary out of doors would no doubt make a good book, and I shall give serious thought to it. My great difficulty is the physical difficulty of writing. Since the spine gave way, there is no position in which I can lie or sit so as to use a pen without distress. Even a short letter like this is painful. Consequently, a vast mass of ideas go into space, for I cannot write them down."

In August he returns to the subject:

"Many thanks for your kind letter and interest in my weakness. I sometimes rather need moral support of this sort, for after so long the spirits show signs of flagging, and the way seems endless. Such sympathy, therefore, helps me very much.... I should have liked to have written the book you proposed. I made several attempts, but it never satisfied me. I am glad, at all events, that you have forgiven my unintentional nonfulfilment of the promise. Even yet, perhaps, I may do something in that direction. Professor Gamgee, under whom I have been lately, says that complete recovery would follow a few weeks' basking in South Africa, or, failing that, Southern Europe. There is plenty of energy in me still. I sometimes dream of using the rifle—a dream, indeed, to a man who can with difficulty drag himself across a field."

In June he writes to his friend, Mr. C.P. Scott, of theManchester Guardian:

"Since I last wrote to you I have been very seriously ill. The starvation went on and on, and no one could relieve it, till I had to stay in the bedroom, and finally went to bed, fainting nearly all day and night, and yet craving for food, half delirious, and in the most dreadful state. How I endured I cannot tell. At last I had Dr. Kidd down from London, and in forty-eight hours his treatment checked the disease. I got downstairs, next, out of doors in a Bath-chair, and now I can walk two hundred yards. But I am still the veriest shadow of a man—my nerves are gone to pieces—and he warns me that it will take months to effect a cure. Of that, however, he is certain. Under his advice I have left Eltham, and am staying here (Rotherfield, Sussex) till a cottage can be found for me near Tunbridge Wells.... My last piece of MS. appears inLongmanthis month, and I have now no more left, having exhausted all I wrote when able. At least, there remains but one piece—'Nature in the Louvre.' It is about a beautiful statue that interested me greatly, and which seems to have escapednotice in England. I think you would like the ideas expressed in it."

At this time it was suggested that he should make an application to the Royal Literary Fund. He writes both to Mr. Longman and to Mr. Scott in the strongest terms upon the subject. I do not, for my own part, in the least agree with Jefferies in his wholesale condemnation of that useful society, and therefore have the less hesitation in printing what he says of it:

'August 18, 1885."You have put before me a very great temptation. It is impossible for you to know how great, for there can be no doubt that it is the winter that is my enemy. Last winter I was indoors six months—in fact, it was eight before I really got out of doors, most of this time helpless, sitting in an easy chair before the fire, my feet on a pillow, and legs wrapped up in a railway-rug, up and down stairs on hands and knees, and unable even to dress myself. Even now it tears me to pieces evento walk a short distance. So that to pass next winter in warmth seems almost like life, besides the great possibility of complete recovery. There would be also the pleasure of the sights and scenes of Algiers or South Africa. In short, it has been a very great temptation, and I am sure it was most kind of you to think of me. But the Royal Literary Fund is a thing to accept aid from which humiliates the recipient past all bounds; it is worse than the workhouse. If long illness ultimately drove me to the workhouse, I should feel no disgrace, having done my utmost to fight with difficulties. Everyone has a right to that last relief. If this fund were maintained by pressmen, authors, journalists, editors, publishers, newspaper proprietors, and so on, that would be quite another matter. There would be no humiliation—rather the contrary—and in time one might subscribe some day and help someone else. It is no such thing. It is kept up by dukes and marquises, lords and titled people, with a Prince at their head, and a vast quantity of trumpet-blowing, in order that these people may say they are patronsof literature! Patrons of literature! Was there ever such a disgrace in the nineteenth century? Patrons of literature! The thing is simply abominable! I dare say if I were a town-born man I should not think so, but to me it wears an aspect of standing insult."No doubt we ought to combine—all who have ever touched a pen—then we could assist each other in a straightforward and manly way."The temptation to me is very great indeed, because there is no question that I have been slowly sinking for years for want of some such travel or stimulus working through the nervous system. But I have made up my mind to say no. I would rather run the risk of quitting this world altogether next winter than degrade myself in that way."I am trying all I can to move altogether to the neighbourhood of the sea. Possibly, even Dorset or Devon might answer; or, failing that, I may try to pay a short visit to Schwalbach, and see if the natural iron medicine of a mineral spring may do what compound physic cannot. But I fancy the sea residence would be preferable."Change is the only thing that as yet has affected me, which seems to point conclusively to an exhausted system rather than to disease."

'August 18, 1885.

"You have put before me a very great temptation. It is impossible for you to know how great, for there can be no doubt that it is the winter that is my enemy. Last winter I was indoors six months—in fact, it was eight before I really got out of doors, most of this time helpless, sitting in an easy chair before the fire, my feet on a pillow, and legs wrapped up in a railway-rug, up and down stairs on hands and knees, and unable even to dress myself. Even now it tears me to pieces evento walk a short distance. So that to pass next winter in warmth seems almost like life, besides the great possibility of complete recovery. There would be also the pleasure of the sights and scenes of Algiers or South Africa. In short, it has been a very great temptation, and I am sure it was most kind of you to think of me. But the Royal Literary Fund is a thing to accept aid from which humiliates the recipient past all bounds; it is worse than the workhouse. If long illness ultimately drove me to the workhouse, I should feel no disgrace, having done my utmost to fight with difficulties. Everyone has a right to that last relief. If this fund were maintained by pressmen, authors, journalists, editors, publishers, newspaper proprietors, and so on, that would be quite another matter. There would be no humiliation—rather the contrary—and in time one might subscribe some day and help someone else. It is no such thing. It is kept up by dukes and marquises, lords and titled people, with a Prince at their head, and a vast quantity of trumpet-blowing, in order that these people may say they are patronsof literature! Patrons of literature! Was there ever such a disgrace in the nineteenth century? Patrons of literature! The thing is simply abominable! I dare say if I were a town-born man I should not think so, but to me it wears an aspect of standing insult.

"No doubt we ought to combine—all who have ever touched a pen—then we could assist each other in a straightforward and manly way.

"The temptation to me is very great indeed, because there is no question that I have been slowly sinking for years for want of some such travel or stimulus working through the nervous system. But I have made up my mind to say no. I would rather run the risk of quitting this world altogether next winter than degrade myself in that way.

"I am trying all I can to move altogether to the neighbourhood of the sea. Possibly, even Dorset or Devon might answer; or, failing that, I may try to pay a short visit to Schwalbach, and see if the natural iron medicine of a mineral spring may do what compound physic cannot. But I fancy the sea residence would be preferable.

"Change is the only thing that as yet has affected me, which seems to point conclusively to an exhausted system rather than to disease."

To Mr. Scott he writes in a similar strain. It galls him to think of being "patronized," and, indeed, if that were the view taken by the council of the Royal Literary Fund, I, for one, should be the first to agree with him. But it is not. Jefferies was wrong about the supporters of the Fund which is, in fact, assisted by everybody who ever makes any success in literature, and by every writer of any distinction either in letters or in other fields. He adds, however, a paragraph in which I cordially agree, and to the carrying out of the suggestion contained in it some of us have, during the last three years, devoted a great deal of time and effort.

"We ought, of course, to have a real Literary Association, to which subscription should be almost semi-compulsory. We ought to have some organization. Literature is young yet—scarce fifty years old. The legal and medical professions have had a start of a thousand years. Our profession is young yet, but will be the first of all in the time to come."

He goes on to speak of his health:

"Ever since Christmas I have been trying to move to the sea-coast, but I cannot effect it. I cannot stick to work long enough to produce any result, the extreme weakness will not let me, so that I cannot do anything. Whatever I wish to do, it seems as if a voice said, 'No, you shall not do it. Feebleness forbids.' I think I should like a good walk. No. I think I should like to write. No. I think I should like to rest. No. Always No to everything. Even writing this letter has made the spine ache almost past endurance. I cannot convey to you how miserable it is to be impotent; to feel yourself full of ideas and work, and to be unable to effect anything; to sit and waste the hours. It is absolutely maddening."

In November he writes again. He is at Crowborough, where the fine air at first seemedto be restoring him. He could walk about in the field at the back of the house.

"Suddenly I went down as if I had been shot. All the improvement was lost, and now I have been indoors three months, steadily becoming weaker and more emaciated every day. It is, in fact, starvation. They cannot feed me, try what they will. No one would believe what misery it is, and what extreme debility it produces. The worst of all is the helplessness. Often I am compelled to sit or lie for days and think, think, till I feel as if I should become insane, for my mind seems as clear as ever, and the anxiety and eager desire to do something is as strong as in my best days. There is an ancient story of a living man tied to a dead one, and that is like me; mind alive and body dead. I fear that my old friends will give me up in time, because I cannot travel the path of friendship now, and the Cymric proverb says that it soon grows covered with briars."

A letter, dated June 19, 1886, is too sad tobe quoted. His dependence on others, even for the putting on of his clothes, his longing for the sea-coast, which he thinks is certain to do him good, his lament over the poverty which, through no fault of his own, has fallen upon him, fill up this melancholy letter. Day and night there is no cessation of pain.

Help of all kinds was forthcoming from friends whom one must not name: money, the offer of a house on the sea-coast; but there was the difficulty of travelling. How was he to be moved? This difficulty was got over, and he went to Bexhill for a time, returning to Crowborough in September. The sea had done him good. On the night of his return, he enjoyed a tranquil sleep for some hours, and awoke without pain.

Among the letters sent to me by Mr. Scott is one from a well-known physician who had been consulted on the case.

"There is no doubt," he says, "that there is some tuberculous affection of his lungs, though, so far as I have been able to makeout, this does not seem to be at all in an active state."The serious complaints which make his life a misery to him I believe to be purely functional. He strikes me as being a very marked example of hysteria in man, though in his case, as in many among women, the commoner phenomena of hysteria are absent. I am surprised to hear that he spoke warmly of my treatment, for he would not admit to his ordinary attendant, nor to me, that his symptoms had undergone any palliation whatever. He is prejudiced against any treatment, and the result, according to him, always agrees with his prediction."

"There is no doubt," he says, "that there is some tuberculous affection of his lungs, though, so far as I have been able to makeout, this does not seem to be at all in an active state.

"The serious complaints which make his life a misery to him I believe to be purely functional. He strikes me as being a very marked example of hysteria in man, though in his case, as in many among women, the commoner phenomena of hysteria are absent. I am surprised to hear that he spoke warmly of my treatment, for he would not admit to his ordinary attendant, nor to me, that his symptoms had undergone any palliation whatever. He is prejudiced against any treatment, and the result, according to him, always agrees with his prediction."

Evidently an extremely difficult and nervous patient to treat. But that might be expected. In October of 1886, Mr. Scott proposed to raise a fund among the friends and admirers of his works which should be devoted to sending him to a warmer climate. He consented, though with pain and bitterness of soul. "I have written," he says, "fourteen books." He enumerates them. "Scarcely anyone livinghas done so much." Yet he forgets to consider for how small and select an audience he has written. "All of them have been praised by the reviews. I cannot help feeling it hard, after so much work, to come to such disgrace." It was hard, it was cruelly hard. While the pensions of the Civil List—a breach of trust if ever there was one—are bestowed upon daughters of distinguished officers and widows of civil servants, such a man as Jefferies, for whose assistance the grant is yearly asked and voted, is left to starve. It is indeed cruelly hard on literature that the rulers of the country should be so blind, so deaf, so pitiless—so dishonest. They made Burns a gauger. Well: that was something. Could they not have made Jefferies a police-constable, for instance? They gave him nothing: it would have been useless to ask any Government to give anything: they wanted all the money for persons for whom it was never intended. There never has been—there is not now—not even at a time when Prime Ministers and ex-Cabinet Ministers write articles for monthly magazines, any Government which has had the least concernfor, knowledge of, or touch with, literature, or its makers. Authors must develop and increase their own Society, and then they will not have to ask the Government for any Civil Pension list at all, and ministers may go on asking for the grant for the support of science and letters, and giving it all to their own creatures, and to the daughters, widows, and sisters of officers. It is hard, it is cruelly hard, as Jefferies said: it is a hardship and a disgrace to all of us that such a man as Jefferies should "come to such disgrace."

Well, the fund was raised, quietly, among the private friends of its promoters. But it came too late for the Algerian or South African expedition. The sick man was sent, however, to the seaside; to a house at Goring, on the Sussex coast. From this place he wrote to Mr. Scott a little history of his illness, the nature of which I have already sketched. The description by a highly-sensitive man, then in a most nervous condition, of the horrible pain which he had been enduring is most terrible to read, and is altogether too terrible to be quoted. I dare not quote thewhole of this dreadful story of long-continued agony. Take, however, the end of it. At last his wounds were somehow made to heal.

"Now imagine my joy. The wounds were well at last. I was free. I could walk and sit—actually sit down. I could work. I was very faint and ill, but fresh air would soon set that right. All these expenses had swallowed up a large share of my savings, and I had practically to begin life again. But I did not mind that. I went to work joyously."Now judge again of my disappointment. Within two months—in February—I was seized with a mysterious wasting disease, accompanied by much pain. I gradually wasted away to mere bones. By degrees this pain increased till it became almost insupportable. I can compare it to nothing but the flame of a small spirit lamp continually burning within me. Sometimes it seemed like a rat always gnaw, gnaw, night and day. I had no sleep. Everything I ate or drank seemed to add fuel to the flame. The local doctors could do nothing, so I went to London again, and inthe course of the two years and more that it lasted I was under five of the leading London physicians. Altogether I had some forty prescriptions, and took something like sixty drugs, besides being put on diet. It was not the slightest use, and it became evident that they had no idea what was really the matter with me. The pain went on, burn, burn, burn. If I wrote a volume I could not describe it to you, this terrible scorching pain, night and day. There is nothing in medical books like it, except the pain that follows corrosive sublimate which burns the tissues. It was at times so maddening that I dreaded to go a few miles alone by rail lest I should throw myself out of the window of the carriage. I worked and wrote all this time, and some of my best work was done in this intense agony. I received letters from New Zealand, from the United States, even from the islands of the Pacific, from people who had read my writings. It seemed so strange that I should read these letters, and yet all the time, to be writhing in agony."At last, in April, 1885, nature gave way,and I broke down utterly, and could only lie on the sofa in a fainting condition. In a few days I became so helpless and weak that there appeared little chance of my living. Someone suggested that Dr. Kidd should be sent for. He came on Sunday morning, and found me nearly ended. I was fainting during the examination. He discovered that it was ulceration of the intestines. You know how painful an ulcer is anywhere—say on your lip—now for over two years this ulceration had been burning its way in the intestines."He put me on milk diet, malt bread, malt extract, malted food, meat shredded and pounded in a mortar, raw beef, and so on. In forty-eight hours the pain was better. For three weeks I improved and hoped. I think that had the diet been then altered to the ordinary food, I might have made a recovery; instead of which it was kept up for nine weeks, at the end of which I had lost all the improvement, and was so weak that I could but just crawl up and down stairs. I attribute my subsequent exhaustion to the continued useof milk, which has the effect of destroying nervous energy."'Oct. 22, 1886."I have been obliged to set all aside from extreme feebleness. During the last four weeks, indeed, the weakness and emaciation have become very great, so much so that I almost fancy the bones waste. But what I feel most is the loss of fresh air from inability to go out. The last two days have been dry, so that I have been able to get up and down by the house a little."Still, I should have managed somehow to write to you were it not for the great dislike I feel to this begging business. You must not take offence at this, though you may think me very foolish. I keep putting it off and putting it off, till now I suppose I must do it, or stay the winter indoors in helplessness. To-day I have written to obtain the information necessary to fill up the form you sent."In September, 1885, my spine seemed suddenly to snap. It happened in ten minutes—quite suddenly. It felt as if oneof the vertebræ had been taken away. It was no doubt a form of paralysis. I had to take to the sofa again, and was confined to the house for over seven months, quite helpless. I could not undress myself. At Christmas, other troubles set in; the local doctor gave me up. He told my wife that nothing could be done for me, and that the only hope was in my keeping in good spirits. The misery of that dreadful winter will never be forgotten. At length nature seemed to revive a little, and I got downstairs, and soon after Miss Scott came to see me, and you sent me to the sea. On returning from the sea I slowly lost ground again. In the summer I had an attack of vomiting blood—of itself enough to alarm most people. By October I was confined indoors again. At last I got down here."Besides all these sufferings I had another trial—a loss by death—one that I cannot dwell upon;"—it was the death of his youngest child—"but it broke me down very much."Of the loss of all my savings I need not say much. But it is difficult to begin theworld afresh"—alas! he was just about to end the world—"even with good health."With truth I think I may say that there are few, very few, perhaps none, living who have gone through such a series of diseases. There are many dead—many who have killed themselves for a tenth part of the pain—there are few living."My wearied and exhausted system constantly craves rest. My brain is always asking for rest. I never sleep. I have not slept now for five years properly, always waking, with broken bits of sleep, and restlessness, and in the morning I get up more weary than I went to bed. Rest, that is what I need. You thought naturally that it was work I needed; but I have been at work, and next time I will tell you all of it. It is not work, it isrestfor the brain and the nervous system. I have always had a suspicion that it was the ceaseless work that caused me to go wrong at first."It has taken me a long time to write this letter; it will take you but a few minutes to read it. Had you not sent me to the sea inthe spring I do not think that I should have been alive to write it."

"Now judge again of my disappointment. Within two months—in February—I was seized with a mysterious wasting disease, accompanied by much pain. I gradually wasted away to mere bones. By degrees this pain increased till it became almost insupportable. I can compare it to nothing but the flame of a small spirit lamp continually burning within me. Sometimes it seemed like a rat always gnaw, gnaw, night and day. I had no sleep. Everything I ate or drank seemed to add fuel to the flame. The local doctors could do nothing, so I went to London again, and inthe course of the two years and more that it lasted I was under five of the leading London physicians. Altogether I had some forty prescriptions, and took something like sixty drugs, besides being put on diet. It was not the slightest use, and it became evident that they had no idea what was really the matter with me. The pain went on, burn, burn, burn. If I wrote a volume I could not describe it to you, this terrible scorching pain, night and day. There is nothing in medical books like it, except the pain that follows corrosive sublimate which burns the tissues. It was at times so maddening that I dreaded to go a few miles alone by rail lest I should throw myself out of the window of the carriage. I worked and wrote all this time, and some of my best work was done in this intense agony. I received letters from New Zealand, from the United States, even from the islands of the Pacific, from people who had read my writings. It seemed so strange that I should read these letters, and yet all the time, to be writhing in agony.

"At last, in April, 1885, nature gave way,and I broke down utterly, and could only lie on the sofa in a fainting condition. In a few days I became so helpless and weak that there appeared little chance of my living. Someone suggested that Dr. Kidd should be sent for. He came on Sunday morning, and found me nearly ended. I was fainting during the examination. He discovered that it was ulceration of the intestines. You know how painful an ulcer is anywhere—say on your lip—now for over two years this ulceration had been burning its way in the intestines.

"He put me on milk diet, malt bread, malt extract, malted food, meat shredded and pounded in a mortar, raw beef, and so on. In forty-eight hours the pain was better. For three weeks I improved and hoped. I think that had the diet been then altered to the ordinary food, I might have made a recovery; instead of which it was kept up for nine weeks, at the end of which I had lost all the improvement, and was so weak that I could but just crawl up and down stairs. I attribute my subsequent exhaustion to the continued useof milk, which has the effect of destroying nervous energy."

'Oct. 22, 1886.

"I have been obliged to set all aside from extreme feebleness. During the last four weeks, indeed, the weakness and emaciation have become very great, so much so that I almost fancy the bones waste. But what I feel most is the loss of fresh air from inability to go out. The last two days have been dry, so that I have been able to get up and down by the house a little.

"Still, I should have managed somehow to write to you were it not for the great dislike I feel to this begging business. You must not take offence at this, though you may think me very foolish. I keep putting it off and putting it off, till now I suppose I must do it, or stay the winter indoors in helplessness. To-day I have written to obtain the information necessary to fill up the form you sent.

"In September, 1885, my spine seemed suddenly to snap. It happened in ten minutes—quite suddenly. It felt as if oneof the vertebræ had been taken away. It was no doubt a form of paralysis. I had to take to the sofa again, and was confined to the house for over seven months, quite helpless. I could not undress myself. At Christmas, other troubles set in; the local doctor gave me up. He told my wife that nothing could be done for me, and that the only hope was in my keeping in good spirits. The misery of that dreadful winter will never be forgotten. At length nature seemed to revive a little, and I got downstairs, and soon after Miss Scott came to see me, and you sent me to the sea. On returning from the sea I slowly lost ground again. In the summer I had an attack of vomiting blood—of itself enough to alarm most people. By October I was confined indoors again. At last I got down here.

"Besides all these sufferings I had another trial—a loss by death—one that I cannot dwell upon;"—it was the death of his youngest child—"but it broke me down very much.

"Of the loss of all my savings I need not say much. But it is difficult to begin theworld afresh"—alas! he was just about to end the world—"even with good health.

"With truth I think I may say that there are few, very few, perhaps none, living who have gone through such a series of diseases. There are many dead—many who have killed themselves for a tenth part of the pain—there are few living.

"My wearied and exhausted system constantly craves rest. My brain is always asking for rest. I never sleep. I have not slept now for five years properly, always waking, with broken bits of sleep, and restlessness, and in the morning I get up more weary than I went to bed. Rest, that is what I need. You thought naturally that it was work I needed; but I have been at work, and next time I will tell you all of it. It is not work, it isrestfor the brain and the nervous system. I have always had a suspicion that it was the ceaseless work that caused me to go wrong at first.

"It has taken me a long time to write this letter; it will take you but a few minutes to read it. Had you not sent me to the sea inthe spring I do not think that I should have been alive to write it."

Was there ever a more miserable tale of slow torture? Parts of it—the parts relating to his operations—I have omitted. Enough remains. Picture to yourself this tall, gaunt man reduced to a skeleton, not able to use his pen for more than a few minutes at a time, his spine broken down, spitting blood, lying back on the sofa, his mind full of splendid thoughts which hecannotput upon paper, dictating sometimes when he was strong enough, resolved on making money so as to save himself the "disgrace" of applying to the Literary Fund, full of pain by day and night, growing daily weaker, but never losing heart or hope—is there in the whole calamitous history of authors a picture more full of sadness and of pity than this?

He writes again on January 10, 1887. He is no worse. The letter is about money matters—that is to say, he has no money.

On February 2 he writes again. He has been able to dictate a little.

"I hope to be able to do more work after a time; when the weather becomes sufficiently warm for me to sit out of doors. With me the power to write is almost entirely dependent upon being out of doors. Confined indoors, I have nothing to write, and I cannot express my ideas if they do occur to me so boldly. You have no idea what a difference it makes. A little air and movement seem to brighten up the mind and give it play. I am in hope, too, that as the warmth comes on the sea will help me more. Up to the present the winter has gone well."

The last letter to Mr. Scott was written on March 23. He is pleased and surprised to hear that the fund raised for him amounts to so much. Perhaps it will enable him to go abroad presently. Meantime, he has had a relapse—an attack of hæmorrhage—"and then so feeble that I have not been able to dictate. This loss of time worries me more than I can tell you."

And so with thanks to this good friend, Richard Jefferies lays down his pen for thelast time. The busy hand which has written so much will write no more. He can no longer dictate. His very feebleness will soon be past, and he will be at rest, whether in the unconscious clay-cold rest of the dark grave, or in that better life of the Fuller Soul of which he had so great and glorious a Vision—who knoweth?

You have read the life of Richard Jefferies. You have seen how the country lad, ill-educated, slenderly provided with books or friends, formed in early life a resolution to succeed in letters. The resolution was formed when as yet he had no knowledge or thought of style. You have read how he fought long years against ill-success, against the ridicule and coldness of his friends, but still kept up his courage; how he did succeed at length, yet not at all in the way that at first he hoped. That way would have taken him along the paths trodden by those who write romances and stories to beguile their brothers and sisters, and to cheat them into forgetfulness of their disappointments and anxieties; that way, by which he wished to go, would haveled him quickly to the ease of fortune which at all times he ardently desired. It is foolish, and worse than foolish, to pretend that any man—even the best of men, even the most philosophic of men—desires poverty, which is dependence; therefore one does not blame this man for desiring fortune. The way, however, by which he succeeded was a far higher and a nobler way, though he understood not that at first.

You have seen, also, not only that his early life was that of an obscure reporter for a little country paper, but that his first ambition was altogether for the making of money rather than for the production of good work. The love of good work, as such, grew gradually in him. At first it is not apparent at all. At first we have nothing but a commonplace lad, poor, and therefore eager to make money, and fondly thinking that it can be made by writing worthless and commonplace stories. Nothing in his early life has been concealed. You have read his very words, where they could be recovered. They are in no way remarkable words; they are generally, in fact, commonplace.Nothing, except a steady and consistent belief in his own future, the nature of which he does not even suspect, reveals the power latent in his mind. There is nothing at all in these early utterances to show the depths of poetry in his soul. Nay, I think there were none of these depths in him at first. So long as he worked among men, and contemplated their ways, he felt no touch of poetry, he saw no gleam of light. Mankind seemed to him sordid and creeping; either oppressor or oppressed. Away from men, upon the breezy down and among the woods, he is filled with thoughts which, at first, vanish like the photographs of scenery upon the eye. Presently he finds out the way to fix those photographs. Then he is transformed, but not suddenly; no, not suddenly. When he discovers the Gamekeeper at Home, he begins to be articulate; with every page that follows he becomes more articulate. At first he draws a faithful picture of the cottager, the farmer, the gamekeeper, the poacher; the pictures are set in appropriate scenery; by degrees the figures vanish and the setting remains. But it isno longer the same; it is now infused with the very soul of the painter. The woods speak to us, through him; the very flowers speak and touch our hearts, through him. The last seven years of his life were full, indeed, of pain and bodily torture; but they were glorified and hallowed by the work which he was enabled to do. Nay, they even glorify and hallow all the life that went before. We no longer see the commonplace young country reporter who tries to write commonplace and impossible stories—we watch the future poet of the "Pageant of Summer" whose early struggles we witness while he is seeking to find himself. Presently he speaks.He has found himself; he has obtained the prayer of his heart; he has been blessed with theFULLER SOUL.

At the last, during the long communings of the night when he lay sleepless, happy to be free, if only for a few moments, from pain, the simple old faith came back to him. He had arrived long before, as we have seen, at the grand discovery: that the perfect soul wants the perfect body, and that the perfectbody must be inhabited by the perfect soul. To this conclusion, you have seen, he was led by Nature herself. Now he beheld clearly—perhaps more clearly than ever—the way from this imperfect and fragmentary life to a fuller, happier life beyond the grave. He had no need of priest; he wanted no other assurance than the voice and words of Him who swept away all priests. The man who wrote the "Story of My Heart;" the man who was filled to overflowing with the beauty and order of God's handiwork; the man who felt so deeply the shortness, and imperfections, and disappointments of life that he was fain to cry aloud that all happens by chance; the man who had the vision of the Fuller Soul, died listening with faith and love to the words contained in the Old Book.

What follows is written by his friend, Mr. J.W. North, who was with him during the last days.

"It was in the early summer, two or three months before his death, that I saw Jefferies forthe last time alive. He had then been living at Goring for some short time, and this was my first visit to him there. I was pleased to find that his house was far pleasanter than the dreary and bleak cottage which he had rented at Crowborough. It had a view of the sea, a warm southern exposure, and a good and interesting garden: in one corner a quaint little arbour, with a pole and vane, and near the centre a genuine old-fashioned draw-well. Poor fellow! Painfully, with short breathing, and supported on one side by Mrs. Jefferies and on the other by myself, he walked round this enclosure, noticing and drawing our attention to all kinds of queer little natural objects and facts. Between the well and the arbour was a heap of rough, loose stones, overgrown by various creeping flowers. This was the home of a common snake, discovered there by Harold, and poor Jefferies stood, supported by us, a yard or so away and peered into every little cranny and under every leaf with eyes well used to such a search until some tiny gleam, some minute cold glint of light, betrayed the snake. Weakness and pain seemed forgotten for the moment—alas! only for the moment. Uneasily he sat in the little arbour telling me how his disease seemed still to puzzle the doctors; how he felt well able in mind to work, plenty of mental energy, but so weak,so fearfully weak, that he could no longer write with his own hand; that his wife was patient and good to help him. He had nobody to come and talk with him of the world of literature and art. Why couldn't I come and settle by? There was plenty to paint. Though Goring itself was one of the ugliest places in the world, there was Arundel, and its noble park, and river, and castle close by. I must go and see it the very next day, and see whether I could not work there, and come back every day and cheer him. I was the best doctor, after all."Poor fellow! I did not then know or believe that he was so utterly without sympathetic society except his devoted wife. It was so. I am one of the dullest companions in the world; but I had sympathy with his work, and knowledge, too, of his subjects. Well, nothing would do but that I must go toArundel the next day, and Mrs. Jefferies must show me the town. 'He would do well enough for one day. A good neighbour would come in, and with little Phyllis and the maid he would be safe.'"Therefore we went to Arundel (a short journey by train), and on coming back found him standing against the door-post to welcome us."I have seldom been more touched than by my experience of that evening, finding, amongst other things, that he had partly planned and insisted on this Arundel trip to get us away so that he might, unrebuked, spend some of his latest hard earnings in a pint of 'Perrier Jouet' for my supper."Do you know Goring churchyard? It is one of those dreary, over-crowded, dark spots where the once-gravelled paths are green with slimy moss, and it was a horror to poor Jefferies. More than once he repeated the hope that he might not be laid there, and he chose the place where his widow at last left him—amongst the brighter grass and flowers at Broadwater."He died at Goring at half-past two on Sunday morning, August 14, 1887. His soul was released from a body wasted to a skeleton by six long weary years of illness. For nearly two years he had been too weak to write, and all his delightful work, during that period, was written by his wife from his dictation. Who can picture the torture of these long years to him, denied as he was the strength to walk so much as one hundred yards in the world he loved so well? What hero like this, fighting with Death face to face so long, fearing and knowing, alas! too well, that no struggles could avail, and, worse than all, that his dear ones would be left friendless and penniless. Thus died a man whose name will be first, perhaps for ever, in his own special work."'Monday, Aug. 15,"... I went yesterday, expecting once more to speak with him. I found him lyingdead, twelve hours dead. I saw him with Mrs. Jefferies and their little Phyllis. A pitiful sight to see them kiss the poor cold face! God help them! All through his lastdays his wife was with himday and night; a young country girl, who behaved nobly all through, was her only help.... His long, long illness of six years (four years before at Eltham he looked near death)—this long, wearisome time had almost persuaded many who knew him not intimately that his illness was partly imaginary. He proved it otherwise. A soldier who in health, high spirits, and excitement, rides to what appears certain death is called a hero: glory and honours are heaped upon him; but what is that compared with years of fighting without cessation, and theabsolute certaintyof defeat always present to the mind? I asked Mrs. Jefferies if he had made a will. She said: 'No; surely it would have been useless, we have nothing. A woman singly, strong as I am, could rough it; but if something can be done for the children—.' Something shall be done. I had to call at my framemaker's to put off an appointment. I told him roughly what had happened to me yesterday. He had never heard of Jefferies, and knew nothing of his work; but he said, 'I shall be glad if anything can be done ifyou will put us down for two guineas.' All those who are country born and bred, and have a heart inside their body, have always recognised and admired poor Jefferies' writing. Shall I say what I think andknow, that in all our literature until now he has never had a rival, and that it is most likely he will never be equalled? In a hundred years he will be only more truly appreciated than at present. The number of men who combine the love and the knowledge of literary work is more limited, perhaps, in this age than in any previous one. Few people, again, of intelligence and refinement of heart and mind live completely in the country, and much, very much of his work, will be always unintelligible to those who cannot exist in a country-house unless it is full of frequently-changing guests. I have been trying by a different art for thirty years—equal to almost the whole of his life on earth—to convey an idea to others of some such subjects, and I feel with shame that in the work of half a year I do not get so near the heart and truth of Nature as he in oneparagraph. With strict charge that it should not leave my hands, Mrs. Jefferies lent me the proof of an article which appeared inLongman's Magazinein spring, 1886. It was the very last copy he wrote with his own hand. Since then his wife wrote from his dictation. Read this quotation from it, which touched me greatly yesterday:"'I wonder to myself how they can all get on without me; how they manage, bird and flower, withoutME, to keep the calendar for them. For I noted it so carefully and lovingly day by day.'"And this:"'They go on without me, orchis-flower and cowslip. I cannot number them all. I hear, as it were, the patter of their feet—flower and buds, and the beautiful clouds that go over, with the sweet rush of rain and burst of sun glory among the leafy trees. They go on, and I am no more than the least of the empty shells that strew the sward of the hill.'"One thing I saw in one of his last note-books: 'Three great giants are against me—disease, despair, and poverty.'"One thing more. His wife said that their time had been for long spent in prayer together and reading St. Luke."Almost his last intelligible words were, 'Yes, yes; that is so. Help, Lord, for Jesus' sake. Darling, good-bye. God bless you and the children, and save you all from such great pain.'"He was buried at Broadwater, by Worthing, Sussex."In the gentlest, sweet, soft, sunny rain he was borne along the path to his grave in the grass, and when the last part of the service for the dead had been read, well and solemnly, and we turned away leaving him for ever on earth, the large tears from heaven fell thick and fast, and over and over again came to me the saying, 'Happy are the dead that the rain rains on.' The modest home-made wreath of wild wood-clematis and myrtle my wife hadsent pleased me by happy symbolism—for as the myrtle is, so will his memory be, 'for ever green.'"Mourn, little harebells, o'er the lea;Ye stately foxgloves fair to see;Ye woodbines hanging bonnilieIn scented bowers;Ye roses on your thorny tree,The first o' flowers."Mourn, Spring, thou darling of the year;Ilk cowslip-cup shall kep a tear;Thou Summer, while each corny spearShoots up its head,Thy gay, green, flowery tresses shearFor him that's dead.""J.W.N."

"Poor fellow! I did not then know or believe that he was so utterly without sympathetic society except his devoted wife. It was so. I am one of the dullest companions in the world; but I had sympathy with his work, and knowledge, too, of his subjects. Well, nothing would do but that I must go toArundel the next day, and Mrs. Jefferies must show me the town. 'He would do well enough for one day. A good neighbour would come in, and with little Phyllis and the maid he would be safe.'

"Therefore we went to Arundel (a short journey by train), and on coming back found him standing against the door-post to welcome us.

"I have seldom been more touched than by my experience of that evening, finding, amongst other things, that he had partly planned and insisted on this Arundel trip to get us away so that he might, unrebuked, spend some of his latest hard earnings in a pint of 'Perrier Jouet' for my supper.

"Do you know Goring churchyard? It is one of those dreary, over-crowded, dark spots where the once-gravelled paths are green with slimy moss, and it was a horror to poor Jefferies. More than once he repeated the hope that he might not be laid there, and he chose the place where his widow at last left him—amongst the brighter grass and flowers at Broadwater.

"He died at Goring at half-past two on Sunday morning, August 14, 1887. His soul was released from a body wasted to a skeleton by six long weary years of illness. For nearly two years he had been too weak to write, and all his delightful work, during that period, was written by his wife from his dictation. Who can picture the torture of these long years to him, denied as he was the strength to walk so much as one hundred yards in the world he loved so well? What hero like this, fighting with Death face to face so long, fearing and knowing, alas! too well, that no struggles could avail, and, worse than all, that his dear ones would be left friendless and penniless. Thus died a man whose name will be first, perhaps for ever, in his own special work."

'Monday, Aug. 15,

"... I went yesterday, expecting once more to speak with him. I found him lyingdead, twelve hours dead. I saw him with Mrs. Jefferies and their little Phyllis. A pitiful sight to see them kiss the poor cold face! God help them! All through his lastdays his wife was with himday and night; a young country girl, who behaved nobly all through, was her only help.... His long, long illness of six years (four years before at Eltham he looked near death)—this long, wearisome time had almost persuaded many who knew him not intimately that his illness was partly imaginary. He proved it otherwise. A soldier who in health, high spirits, and excitement, rides to what appears certain death is called a hero: glory and honours are heaped upon him; but what is that compared with years of fighting without cessation, and theabsolute certaintyof defeat always present to the mind? I asked Mrs. Jefferies if he had made a will. She said: 'No; surely it would have been useless, we have nothing. A woman singly, strong as I am, could rough it; but if something can be done for the children—.' Something shall be done. I had to call at my framemaker's to put off an appointment. I told him roughly what had happened to me yesterday. He had never heard of Jefferies, and knew nothing of his work; but he said, 'I shall be glad if anything can be done ifyou will put us down for two guineas.' All those who are country born and bred, and have a heart inside their body, have always recognised and admired poor Jefferies' writing. Shall I say what I think andknow, that in all our literature until now he has never had a rival, and that it is most likely he will never be equalled? In a hundred years he will be only more truly appreciated than at present. The number of men who combine the love and the knowledge of literary work is more limited, perhaps, in this age than in any previous one. Few people, again, of intelligence and refinement of heart and mind live completely in the country, and much, very much of his work, will be always unintelligible to those who cannot exist in a country-house unless it is full of frequently-changing guests. I have been trying by a different art for thirty years—equal to almost the whole of his life on earth—to convey an idea to others of some such subjects, and I feel with shame that in the work of half a year I do not get so near the heart and truth of Nature as he in oneparagraph. With strict charge that it should not leave my hands, Mrs. Jefferies lent me the proof of an article which appeared inLongman's Magazinein spring, 1886. It was the very last copy he wrote with his own hand. Since then his wife wrote from his dictation. Read this quotation from it, which touched me greatly yesterday:

"'I wonder to myself how they can all get on without me; how they manage, bird and flower, withoutME, to keep the calendar for them. For I noted it so carefully and lovingly day by day.'

"And this:

"'They go on without me, orchis-flower and cowslip. I cannot number them all. I hear, as it were, the patter of their feet—flower and buds, and the beautiful clouds that go over, with the sweet rush of rain and burst of sun glory among the leafy trees. They go on, and I am no more than the least of the empty shells that strew the sward of the hill.'

"One thing I saw in one of his last note-books: 'Three great giants are against me—disease, despair, and poverty.'

"One thing more. His wife said that their time had been for long spent in prayer together and reading St. Luke.

"Almost his last intelligible words were, 'Yes, yes; that is so. Help, Lord, for Jesus' sake. Darling, good-bye. God bless you and the children, and save you all from such great pain.'

"He was buried at Broadwater, by Worthing, Sussex.

"In the gentlest, sweet, soft, sunny rain he was borne along the path to his grave in the grass, and when the last part of the service for the dead had been read, well and solemnly, and we turned away leaving him for ever on earth, the large tears from heaven fell thick and fast, and over and over again came to me the saying, 'Happy are the dead that the rain rains on.' The modest home-made wreath of wild wood-clematis and myrtle my wife hadsent pleased me by happy symbolism—for as the myrtle is, so will his memory be, 'for ever green.'

"Mourn, little harebells, o'er the lea;Ye stately foxgloves fair to see;Ye woodbines hanging bonnilieIn scented bowers;Ye roses on your thorny tree,The first o' flowers."Mourn, Spring, thou darling of the year;Ilk cowslip-cup shall kep a tear;Thou Summer, while each corny spearShoots up its head,Thy gay, green, flowery tresses shearFor him that's dead."

"Mourn, little harebells, o'er the lea;Ye stately foxgloves fair to see;Ye woodbines hanging bonnilieIn scented bowers;Ye roses on your thorny tree,The first o' flowers.

"Mourn, Spring, thou darling of the year;Ilk cowslip-cup shall kep a tear;Thou Summer, while each corny spearShoots up its head,Thy gay, green, flowery tresses shearFor him that's dead."

"J.W.N."

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