hour and yet stop to lean over gates or sit on stiles, 

 like Matthew Arnold's * Scholar Gipsy,' watching 



"The springing pastures and the feeding kine.' 



' The Druid ' preferred ' Shanks's mare ' to any other form 

 of locomotion, and in many a glowing passage he has 

 described the delight he derived from tramping over 

 the country, especially in the early morning. His simple, 

 unaffected love of Nature breathes a fragrance of the 

 countryside through all his books, which is, to my think- 

 ing, one of their greatest charms. 



' The Druid's ' father, as I have already mentioned, was 

 so wroth at his son's abandonment of law for literature 

 that there was an estrangement between them. But there 

 was a little surprise awaiting the old gentleman One 

 morning he received by post a copy of ' The Law of the 

 Farm,' by Henry Hall Dixon, which both astonished and 

 delighted him, because it proved that his son had not 

 wholly neglected law for literature, but had brought the 

 two into happy combination in a work which still 

 remains the standard authority on the subject of which it 

 treats. The ' mollified parent ' showed his pleasure in 

 very practical fashion by promptly sending a cheque for 

 ;^I00 to his struggling son in Kensington. 



Unlike ' Nimrod,' who, as I have already stated, was 

 paid on an extravagant scale for his contributions, ' The 

 Druid ' was but poorly remunerated for his literary 

 work, considering the high quality of most of it. He 

 might have said with Dean Swift : — 



' I've often wished that I had clear 

 For life six hundred pounds a year,' 



for his income never quite reached that sum, and 

 frequently fell considerably below it. And yet the 



