CHAPTER I. 



IN WHICH THE AUTHOR WALKS INTO THE 

 HEART OF RURAL ENGLAND. 



Nearly a hundred years ago a typical 

 Englishman was continually taking long rides 

 in rural England, recording what he saw and 

 what he felt. He became the author of that 

 remarkable work, Rural Bides, and was loved 

 and feared throughout the length and breadth 

 of our country. Some one has said of him that 

 he had the eyes of a poet ; but, unlike most 

 poets, he knew the value of a sheep to a shilling. 

 He rode about the countryside with an eye for 

 agricultural beauty : that is, beauty expressed 

 by fields of waving corn which arrest the eye 

 like a cloth of gold ; by cleanly hoed fields of 

 cabbages with their great white hearts enclosed 

 within their gorgeous green-blue leaves ; but 

 it was over a plant of swedes, or a flock of 



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