FIRST COUNTRY BOOKS 129 



overcomes those disadvantages by its abundance. Jefferies 

 is now much less a sportsman and more a naturalist and 

 ruminating countryman. In its range of knowledge, as 

 of country, it is beyond ' The Gamekeeper.' Coate Farm 

 and fields, the Downs, the camp and its prehistoric de- 

 fenders, the springs and streams, sport, agriculture, the 

 ways of birds, beasts, fish, insects, and reptiles, the 

 atmosphere, village life, village architecture and in- 

 dustries, superstitions and religion, are described by one 

 who has hardly yet known life without these things. As 

 the work of patient eyesight, the many notes on clouds 

 and mists are more than respectable ; those, again, for 

 example, like the possible explanations of the rooks' line 

 of flight morning and evening, mark decidedly the 

 irruption of an imaginative intelligence into natural 

 history, which is so often in danger of falling into the 

 hands of mere takers of notes ; others are accurate and 

 simply made, as where he transcribes straight from his 

 Surbiton notes, and they can hardly make an appeal 

 except to the boy-naturalist and the townsman pleased to 

 hear about everything rural. The human characters are 

 slighter than in ' The Gamekeeper,' but more varied and 

 sympathetically handled. Not only is the book richer 

 in material than its predecessor — so rich that it must 

 have a considerable value as a mere record of a certain 

 time and place in English life — but the treatment is 

 richer, more genial and humane. The waggon's history 

 in the sixth chapter, for example, is a good thing. It has 

 a foundation of special knowledge, but not in the narrow 

 manner of a specialist ; and upon this foundation there 

 is the writer's experience of life. Thus it has the merit 

 of some ripe craftsman's talk and the permanence of 

 simple writing. The book is remarkable, too, for its 

 attitude towards animals. Jefferies finds that the ant 

 has not infallible instinct, but ' faculties resembling those 

 of the mind '; he infers that the rook knows that a walking- 

 stick is not a gun ; and he says : ' The longer I observe 

 the more I am convinced that birds and animals often 



