38 THE LIFE OF RICHARD JEFFERIES 



save it from drowning. The sky was blue and the even- 

 ing beautiful, but no one came to help the donkey.'* 

 With the village boys he caught the roach and miller's- 

 thumb, and robbed the moorhen's nest in the little brooks. 

 Consistent after a strange fashion with this hostility to 

 wild things was his instinct against petting them. He 

 kept silk-worms, having a mulberry-tree at hand ; but 

 ' all the grasses of the meadow/f he says, ' were my pets, 

 I loved them all ; and perhaps that was why I never had 

 a " pet," never cultivated a flower, never kept a caged 

 bird, or any creature. Why keep pets when every wild, 

 free hawk that passed overhead in the air was mine ? I 

 joyed in his swift, careless flight, in the throw of his 

 pinions, in his rush over the elms and miles of woodland ; 

 it was happiness to see his unchecked life. What more 

 beautiful than the sweep and curve of his going through 

 the azure sky ? These were my pets, and all the grass.' 

 Before he had any conscious thought it was a delight to 

 find the flowers and take them home, snapping off also 

 large green sprays and massy tree-bloom. Consistent, too, 

 is the way in which he saw, so as to remember for ever, 

 the yellow-hammer on the ash bough singing in the sim : J 

 ' This one yellow-hammer still sits on the ash-branch in 

 Stewart's Mash over the sward, singing in the sun, his 

 feathers wet with colour, the same sun-song, and will sing 

 to me so long as the heart shall beat.' 



Callous and sensitive, he was not only dreamy, but 

 fiery too, and the impatient irritability of Bevis comes 

 straight from life. Food, too, was sweet between his 

 teeth, or those ' cogs ' — ' indentations like a cogged 

 wheel ' round the loaf — stuck over with pats of fresh 

 butter would not have lingered so in memory, and, with 

 them, the apples up in the attic, of which he stole the 

 largest with great deliberation. Once, perhaps, the farm- 

 waggon must have taken him a long way by the south- 

 ward road over the Downs ; and he must have been told 



* Bevis. f ' Hours of Spring,' Field and Hedgerow. 



% ' Wild Flowers,' Open Air. 



