22 THE LIFE OF RICHARD JEFFERIES 



fact, by ' S. Theobald, practical thatcher,' and dating 

 from the seventeenth century. At that corner there used 

 to be a ' catch-gate,' to catch those who entered the turn- 

 pike there, and so missed the gate at Liddington. The 

 farmhouses of Snodshill lie off the road on the other 

 side from Coate Farm ; there lived relations and friends 

 of Jefferies, and he knew all their fields as the birds know 

 them. 



Such, then, is the surface of this land, such the genial 

 reticence of its fat leazes, its double hedges like copses, 

 its broad cornfields, its oaks and elms and beeches, its 

 unloquacious men, its immense maternal Downs. Jef- 

 feries came to express part of this silence of uncounted 

 generations. He was, as it were, a rib taken out of its 

 side in that long sleep last disturbed by the cannon at 

 Aldbourne Chase. So rich did he find it that in ' Sport and 

 Science ' he wrote : ' There have been few things I have 

 read of or studied, which in some manner or other I have 

 not seen illustrated in this county while out in the fields.' 

 Like Thoreau, he calls his own land * an epitome of the 

 natural world, and ... if anyone has come really into 

 contact with its productions, and is familiar with them, 

 and what they mean and represent, then he has a know- 

 ledge of all that exists on earth.' 



