40 THE LIFE OF RICHARD JEFFERIES 



Papa says I cannot run about here much longer when it is 

 wet and dirty. I must go away to school.' 



When at home his schooling was irregular at first. 

 Staying at Sydenham for months at a time, it was im- 

 possible that his dreaming father should see that he went 

 to school as soon as he returned. But James Jefferies 

 used to read and explain Shakespeare and the Bible to the 

 children, and taught them what he knew of natural 

 history. Coate Reservoir, and the fields and farmyard, 

 trained and fed the child's eyes and ears in the course 

 of collecting the forty kinds of eggs which hung in the 

 summer-house. He inherited his father's handiness with 

 tools, and he may well have made a gun, as Bevis did, 

 with the blacksmith's help. That he fitted up one of the 

 craft on the Reservoir with sails is certain ; foi: I have met 

 ' Molly the milkmaid,' who stitched them after he had 

 cut them to the right shape. ' Everybody does everything 

 for you,' said Mark to Bevis ; and it seems as if the boy 

 had a sharp will that went straight to its end. ' Molly ' 

 did many things for him, and remembers driving a two- 

 pronged fork through an eel that she might skin it alive 

 at his request, for he had never seen that rite before. 

 His father taught him to swim, and the method, if it was 

 that described in ' Bevis,' could hardly have been bettered. 



What he could not get without money he usually had 

 to do without, and as a big boy he had to beg a good deal 

 for threepence. But at first that mattered little, as his 

 tastes were those of an ordinary boy, playing at marbles 

 when he was past eleven, begging fireworks from his aunt 

 when he was thirteen. 



In May, i860, he was at school, and ' in the Rule of 

 Three now, which I like very much.' This letter is 

 characteristic enough to quote :* 



' I suppose you have heard the cuckoo before this. 

 Last night three came up into a tree under which I was 

 standing. I have robbed 31 birds' eggs already, chiefly 

 thrushes. ... I have made a sundial, and I can tell the 



* To Mrs. Hani Id, May 7, i860. 



