CHILDHOOD AT COATE FARM 37 



dream state with something like the vagne, universal con- 

 sciousness described in ' Bevis ' ; he* ' felt with his soul out 

 to the far-distant sun just as easily as he could feel with 

 his hand to the bunch of grass beside him ; he felt with his 

 soul down through into the eartli just as easily as he could 

 touch the sward with his fingers. Something seemed to 

 come to him out of the sunshine and the grass.' He was 

 physically sensitive, and not without a conscious indulg- 

 ence of this sensitiveness, if we may judge from the 

 passage in ' Bevis ' where his hero lies down and shuts 

 his eyes to think, and Mark gently tickles his forehead 

 and neck and hair and cheeks with a grass flower. ' Tell 

 me a story/ says Mark in one place ; ' Til tickle you, and 

 you tell me a story ;' and Bevis closes his eyes and begins 

 a tale. Thought and sensation were closely allied in 

 Jefferies at a much later time. 



But he must also have been a true, ferocious country 

 child, robbing birds'-nests freely — a thing he was eager to 

 pardon to the end — and willing to shoot the thrush, trap 

 the weasel, and smash the toad. Where men and children 

 are at close grips with Nature, and have to wrest a living 

 from the soil or the sea, there is apt to hide, like an im- 

 prisoned toad, at the very roots of their philosophy, if it 

 does not flap like a crow in the topmost branches, a feeling 

 that all the life that is not with them — as horse and sheep 

 and cow and sheep-dog are — is against them, rivalling 

 them in pursuit of food and warmth, robbing the drills 

 and taking a share of the waving corn and the glittering 

 harvest of the sea. Sometimes the toad, sometimes the 

 crow, this primeval gnome or puck, persisted in Jefferies' 

 mind for many years, if it evei forsook it. He arose out of 

 the earth, and he had its cruelty. He beat, or would have 

 beaten, the offending beast, much as Mark and Bevis 

 ' thrashed, thwacked, banged, thumped, poked, prodded, 

 kicked, belaboured, bumped and hit ' the donkey, ' work- 

 ing themselves into a frenzy of rage.'f It was * the same 

 Bevis who put an aspen-leaf carefully under the fly to 



* Wood Magic. f Bevis. 



