72 Richard Jefferies. 



II. 

 THE EULOGY. 



The main facts of a somewhat uneventful life have already been 

 set forth in sufficient detail by Mr. Besantj and it is therefore un- 

 necessary to say much about them here. Thanks to the affection 

 ■with which Jefferies always regarded his native place^ we know far 

 more of his boyhood, and how it was spent, than we do of his 

 maturer years. Look at Bevis, at Amaryllis, at After London, at 

 The Story of My Heart, at the opening chapters of The Amateur 

 Poacher, to say nothing of a hundred casual allusions elsewhere. 

 All are full of those early days at Coate. Be the names of the actors 

 what they may — Bevis and Orion, Felix and Oliver — they are but 

 Richard Jefferies and his brother. Their whole out-of-door life is 

 spread out before us. Now they are canoe-building, now exploring 

 the wild jungles and desolate islands which their fancy pictured for 

 them on the broad reservoir near : now with a score of playmates, 

 ai'med with wooden swords and spears, they are acting over again 

 some old-world battle-scene ; and now the desire of rivalling Ulysses 

 seizes upon them, and with light heart and lighter purse they must 

 steal away over seas. 



All this time he was drinking in half unconsciously the influences 

 and the knowledge that would be of such importance to him a few 

 years hence. But those with whom he was brought into daily 

 contact knew little of the boy's inmost thoughts and cared less for 

 them. Our Wiltshire rustics have a fine contempt for what they 

 call " wonderments," and are not slow to express it : so you may be 

 sure that his odd unpractical ways brought down on him the charge 

 of " wondermenting," with all its direful consequences. 



But soon a change came over him. A new world — that of books 

 — was revealed to his wondering eyes. From reading he was not 

 long in passing to writing, and while still but a lad he found em- 

 ployment as a reporter and paragraph-writer for the Swindon and 

 Cirencester papers. Most of his work in those days was of course 

 of an utterly ephemeral character, and would now be impossible to 

 identify, even were it worth the trouble. In the summer of 1866 



