132 Autumn 



bulary, for your fatherhood is of things undone. Un- 

 painted pictures hang in your galleries, the halls of 

 your fancy are peopled with unsculptured statues, in 

 dreamland you have row upon row of unwritten books, 

 to each of which Time the reviewer is appending his 

 unerring verdict. 



If one ventures to remark that country life is 

 favourable for study, quotidian persons immediately 

 accept it as a commonplace. That fatuous person, 

 the professional nature lover, breaks out at once with 

 his ' picture,' his epithet and his catalogue : Ah, yes ; 

 one has Nature at first hand there. I lay down on a 

 bank of yellow broom. In the valley below, a tattered 

 bare-legged boy is guddling trout in the stony burn. 

 From the gnarled oak beside me, to a green elm on 

 the hill opposite, a cuckoo flew ringing his clear note. 

 A white-throated ousel skims down the stream and 

 lights on a boulder. Near the burn-side a wagtail 

 hops. On the mountain top a fresh breeze is wreath- 

 ing the mist into waving veils and spirals and so 

 on ad infinitum. It is a wholesome exercise in spring 

 to lie at a sunny dyke back, and hear lambs bleat and 

 birds whistle, while cattle low and the ploughman 

 cheerily speaks to his team as, champing their bits and 

 coming smartly over the headland, they snatch the 

 first tender buds from the hedge at which you are 

 lying ; but even a lazy man scruples to call the process 

 studying nature. 



There is no more fatal distraction of one's thoughts 



