FIRST COUNTRY BOOKS 139 



' Overhead light-grey clouds, closely packed but not 

 rainy, drifted very slowly before a N.E. upper current.'* 



Often the detail is neither finely wrought nor complete, 

 but it tells by its quantity, and by the rude spirit of life 

 in the whole. Of the man himself, little is yet revealed, 

 though much of his youth. He still accepts things just 

 as they are, enjoying their chance issues, as when Oby, 

 his fine for poaching paid, stands with tankard in hand 

 and touches his hat to the passing magistrate ' with a 

 gesture of sly humility.' Coming into contact with an 

 estate managed in a business-like way, he only reflects 

 that ' under the existing system of land tenure, an estate 

 cannot be worked like the machinery of a factory.' He 

 did not, I believe, do much, if any, shooting in Surrey, 

 but he was a sportsman nevertheless, from the way in 

 which he described the kind of shot that ' pleased me 

 most ' at a pheasant going so fast that the impetus 

 carried it dead many yards. Yet it is, perhaps, signi- 

 ficant that the book ends with the fine passage already 

 quoted — ' That watching so often stayed the shot that at 

 last it grew to be a habit : the mere simple pleasure of 

 seeing birds and animals, when they were quite uncon- 

 scious that they were observed, being too great to be 

 spoiled by the discharge ' — where he attributes his 

 pleasure in roaming with a gun not so much to the shoot- 

 ing as to the watching ; to the moving about in the 

 woods alone, walking ' with his hands in his boots,' 

 innocently rivalling the beasts in silence and skill ; to 

 the ' something which the ancients called divine ' that 

 is still to be found and felt in the sunlight and the pure 

 wind. 



' Round about a Great Estate ' was reprinted from the 

 Pall Mall Gazette in 1880. It is, I think, the pleasantest 

 of all his books to handle, shorter than the rest, the page 

 good and the type large — a book in almost its perfect 

 physical condition. It has two ludicrous irrelevancies, 

 yet I like it best of these four early books. The short 



* The Amateur Poacher. 



