146 FIELD AND HEDGEROW. 



of being able to read and write, and yet they do not 

 exercise it, except in a casual, random way. I for one, 

 when the public schools began all through the rural dis- 

 tricts, thought that at last the printing-press was going to 

 reach the country people. In a measure it has done so, 

 but in a flickering, uncertain manner ; they read odd 

 bits which come drifting to their homes in irregular ways, 

 just as people on the coast light their fires with fragments 

 of wreck, chance-thrown by the stormy spring-tides on 

 the beach. So the fire of the mind in country places is fed 

 with chips and splinters, and shapeless pieces that do not 

 fit together, and no one sits down to read. I think I see 

 two reasons why country people do not read, the first of 

 which, thanks be to Allah, will endure for ever; the 

 second may perhaps disappear in time, when those who 

 make books come to see what is wanted. 



First, nature has given them so much to read out of 

 doors, such a vast and ever-changing picture-book, that 

 white paper stained with black type indoors seems dry 

 and without meaning. A barnyard chanticleer and his 

 family afford more matter than the best book ever 

 written. His coral red comb, his silvery scaled legs, his 

 reddened feathers, and his fiery attitudes, his jolly crow, 

 and all his ways — there's an illustrated pamphlet, there's 

 a picture-block book for you in one creature only ! 

 Reckon his family, the tender little chicks, the enamelled 

 eggs, the feeding every day, the roosting, the ever-present 

 terror of the red wood-dog (as the gipsies call the fox) — 

 here's a Chronicon Nurembergense with a thousand wood- 

 cuts ; a whole history. This seems a very simple matter, 

 and yet it is true that people become intensely absorbed 

 in watching and living with such things. Add to these 

 the veined elms, whose innumerable branches divide like 

 the veins or the nerves of a physiological diagram, or like 



