CHILDHOOD AT COATE FARM 47 



they tried Liverpool, and spent all their money in tickets 

 to America which did not cover their food. They had to 

 return. Jimmy was soon off again, and never returned 

 to the old life, nor, perhaps, did Jefferies, in quite the old 

 way. The one has been in Australia these thirty years ; 

 Jefferies had set his foot on a road that was to lead to 

 at least as distant a land. 



This adventure — in or about 1864 — may have been 

 inspired by increasing difficulties at home. The place 

 was ' falling to decay, while at the same time it seemed to 

 be flowing with milk and honey.'* ' There are no wolves,' 

 he wrote, ' like those debt sends against a house. 'f The 

 food was good and plenteous, but there was no ready 

 money. The farm was not prospering. The cattle plague 

 came in 1865, after the three great corn harvests of 1863, 

 1864, and 1865. Though farmers' clubs were becoming 

 more and more active and numerous, and the progress in 

 agricultural machinery went rapidly on, Coate Farm and 

 the farmer, whose head wore a mark on the panel against 

 which it leaned to think, were none the better. Richard 

 had by this time left school for good, and though 

 he was reading, rambling, and thinking, he was earning 

 no money, except a few shillings for himself, made by 

 selling hares which he snared or shot. The long, idle lad 

 was beginning to be noticed for his idleness, his walks to 

 Marlborough Forest, his everlasting loafing with a gun. 

 Mr. Calley, at Burderop Park, used to say : ' That young 

 Jefferies is not the sort of fellow you want hanging about 

 in your covers.' His father felt that he had let his son 

 slip out of his knowledge, and used to point with disgust 

 to ' our Dick poking about in them hedges.' Nor would 

 he do any farm-work worth speaking of. In a later letter 

 he said that he had helped on the farm, and could lend a 

 hand at almost anything ; but the only work he cared to 

 do was that of chopping wood or splitting it with betel 

 and wedges to make posts and rails. The flint hauliers 

 on the Downs used to see him going about as if he were 



* After London. -j- Amaryllis at the Fair. 



