132 THE LIFE OF RICHARD JEFFERIES 



ance of those brief mystic moments may not yet have 

 come home to him, or he may have felt that the dreams 

 had no place in such a book. He remembers his shooting, 

 and bird-watching, and roaming, and his talks with 

 farmers, and sextons ; and he waits. 



' The Amateur Poacher,' consisting of articles from 

 the Pall Mall Gazette, and published in 1879, is on the 

 whole, as well as in the best of its parts, an advance from 

 ' The Gamekeeper ' and ' Wild Life.' Once more he is 

 at Coate Farmhouse and fields, Burderop, the Downs, 

 Wootton Bassett, and Marlborough, and this time as the 

 poacher or the not too scrupulous rambler with a gun. 

 He has the advantage now of writing frankly in the first 

 person about his own doings, and acknowledging several 

 ingenious village acquaintances. It is full of the life of 

 men whom he knew as he knew the fields — chiefly the 

 roguish and sporting side of them — but lively and faith- 

 ful, every word of it. Here first appears Molly the milk- 

 maid — the merry, hard-working maid at Coate Farm, 

 who used to say, when people laughed at Jefferies : ' Ah ! 

 you med laugh, but if you was inside Dick's yed for five 

 minutes you wouldn't want to get back into your own.' 

 He had described his birthplace inside and out in * Wild 

 Life,' but in a detached way ; he still made it his business 

 to inform, and he had not yet ventured to suppose that 

 people would follow him for his own sake. In ' The 

 Poacher ' he has at once by good fortune the confidence 

 to write about Coate Farm as his own home. The 

 result is that no boy, at least, can read the book and not 

 remember for ever the stuffed fox grinning up in the 

 garret ; the garret itself, its old pistols and legendary 

 skeleton ; the perch-fishing ; the gun. 



' There are days in spring when the white clouds go 

 swiftly past, with occasional breaks of bright sunshine 

 lighting up a spot in the landscape. That is like the 

 memory of one's youth. There is a long, dull blank, 

 and then a brilliant streak of recollection. Doubtless it 

 was a year or two afterwards when, seeing that the 



