204 Summer Studies of Birds and Books CHAP. 



when the rural population is being drained into 

 the towns, when the squire and the parson are going 

 down in the world, when leisure such as White 

 enjoyed is a rarity and almost a crime, and when 

 the study of economic problems should be driving 

 out of our heads the delights of wild nature or 

 of sport. But the Englishman has always been a 

 strange and self-contradictory creature. With all his 

 commercial instincts and his town -bred vulgarity, 

 his phases of stern Puritanism and political excite- 

 ment, he has never yet lost that love of the country 

 which is rooted in the life of the manor and the 

 village. Even with the American the same passion 

 still lives ; he took it with him to New England in 

 the seventeenth century, and the books of Mr. John 

 Burroughs and Miss Mary Wilkins have lately made 

 us aware how strongly it survives in him in the 

 nineteenth. 



Surely the spread of the factory system, and 

 the consequent growth of huge towns, has rather 

 strengthened than weakened this love of all things 

 rural. We pine for pure air, for the sight of 

 growing grass, for the footpath across the meadow, 

 for the stile that invites you to rest before you 

 drop into the deep lane under the hazels. But in 

 the last century there was no need to pine, when 

 there was hardly a town from which a man could 

 not escape into the fields when he would, without 



