124 THE LIFE OF RICHARD JEFFERIES 



that pleasant time, which I still regret, I have corrected 

 my notes, and endeavoured to organize them by reading 

 the best books, I could find on such subjects, including 

 geology.' At first he was to have written the articles 

 for Mr. Crawfurd, and he goes on to suggest what he has in 

 mind. ' I should not,' he writes, ' attempt a laborious, 

 learned description, but rather choose a chatty style. 

 I would endeavour to bring in some of the glamour — 

 the magic of sunshine, and green things, and calm waters 

 — if I could.' That is what he did for the Pall Mali 

 Now at length he has aimed at something new and within 

 his reach. He has begun to pour out great and small, 

 good and indifferent, from his memory and his note- 

 books, the treasures of country-lore. He takes the 

 Burderop Woods and adjacent fields and ponds, the keeper 

 Haylock and his predecessor Rawlings, and their cottage 

 in Hodson Bottom, and, using them freely and minutely, 

 makes his first book out of them. He knows it all 

 perfectly well, and talks about it with a rich, quiet ease. 

 He gives information about an hundred things — about the 

 keeper and his ways, his dogs, his guns and implements, 

 his surroundings, the cottages, the trees, the wild animals, 

 the birds, the fish — and he gives enough to have led a 

 publisher to write and ask him for a history of shooting, 

 of which he was thinking years later, but wrote only a 

 chapter. ' The Gamekeeper ' is almost as informing as 

 ' Toilers of the Field,' yet were it shorn of everything 

 else it would not be half the book it is. For he gives his 

 information, and with it the spirit of his enjoyment of 

 those things. And a very simple enjoyment it is, for it 

 belongs to his youth and to only the simplest part of it. 

 He is the farmer's son who has knocked about with a 

 gun and seen the keepers and underkeepers a little m.ore 

 than usual, with a curiosity and memory far above the 

 common. His absolute familiarity with country life is 

 an essential, but it is the joy of that life which makes 

 his book a memorable one. Even the countryman 

 recognizes that, while to the townsman it is the sun and 



