12 THE LIFE OF RICHARD JEFFERIES 



as a journalist. From the London side, Swindon is a 

 woody hill, with a spire and the pepper-pot of a Corn 

 Exchange. It commands a fine country from this hill. 

 North-west is Highworth Hill, which should be seen when 

 the red dawn is elm-barred, for it is precipitous, and of a 

 rich blue and romantic texture unlike land, water, or 

 cloud. Due south is Barbury, and its beeches and a 

 meaning line of trees south-east of it. North-east are the 

 trees of Lydiard Tregoze and Purton, beyond the smoke 

 of New Swindon. South-east, from the footpath to Coate, 

 are Liddington Hill and the breasted Downs above 

 Wanborough. This path enters the fields by the lime- 

 shaded road — with old, mossy, slated, dependent houses, 

 high walls, and elms — that leads to The Lawn, the home 

 of the Goddards, lords of the manor, a heavy, rectangular, 

 mellow, but unimaginative house that has elm, wych-elm, 

 poplar, and oak about it, and swerving reaches of grass 

 and a dark, reedy water below. The Old Swindon church 

 of Holy Rood adjoins the house ; Richard Jefferies was 

 christened there early in 1849. Only the chancel remains, 

 the rest having been dismantled when it was superseded 

 by a large Gilbert Scott church better suited to the town. 

 The chancel is crowded with odds and ends of the dis- 

 mantling ; a faded hatchment and the startling inscrip- 

 tion, In Ccclo Quies ; memorials of Goddards, Homes, 

 Neates, Viletts, Brinds, an Aubrey. Under elms and 

 nettles are announced certain dead Goddards, Coventrys, 

 Noads, Tinsons, Hardings, Homes, Broadways, Lawrences. 

 The pillars of the old nave stand, but enveloped in ivy ; 

 there is a path of tombs betwixt them. The only sound is 

 the cracking shell of a snail which a thrush hammers on 

 a gravestone. Aubrey has described the place as it was ; 

 the youthful Jefferies moralized among its ruins in a 

 chapter on ' Ancient Swindon.' Below the churchyard 

 wall is a grassy depression, now a fowl-run, once the Old 

 Swindon mill-pond ; close by was the mill worked by 

 James Luckett Jefferies, Richard's great-uncle. 



The country which Jefferies knew intimately is of rather 



