140 THE LIFE OF RICHARD JEFFERIES 



preface marks the farthest intellectual advance which 

 Jefferies had yet made. He has given many notes on 

 the country life of the earlier half of the century, but, 

 he says, he would not wish it to continue or return : 



' My sympathies and hopes are with the light of the 

 future, only I should like it to come from nature. The 

 clock should be read by the sunshine, not the sun timed 

 by the clock. The latter is indeed impossible, for though 

 all the clocks in the world should declare the hour of 

 dawn to be midnight, the sun will presently rise just the 

 same.'* 



But this was written after the book itself, which is of 

 the same calibre as the other three. It could hardly 

 have been otherwise, for where he is not drawing upon 

 the same early period of his own life, he is drawing upon 

 the memories of much older people, of his father and 

 grandfather, of the farmers round about, of old Mrs. 

 Rawlings, perhaps of Miller Brind at Liddington. It is 

 not a novel, but it contains more human character than all 

 the earlier novels and more than ' The Amateur Poacher.' 

 Hilary Luckett is probably his father, with something 

 added from other men, perhaps from Andrew Baden of 

 Day House Farm, his wife's father. The faint, adorable 

 Cicely may be a compound or his ideal country maid. 

 As in ' The Amateur Poacher,' his characters are not 

 meant to be completed, and they are drawn in his most 

 genial mood, so that they are naturally idyllic. They are 

 met by accident in their farms or fields ; they talk and 

 stroll together ; and then the brooks and birds and fields 

 insensibly steal upon the human figures. Aaron, with 

 the old-fashioned wallet on his back, is John Brown the 

 milker, or perhaps Abner Webb. Old Aaron is Job 

 Brown, the man of the little Coate shop. The hedge- 

 carpenter and cobbler who used the bacon for soling 

 boots is Thomas Smith — or ' John Smith ' — who worked 

 at Day House Farm. The flint-haulier was one 

 Stephen Walker of Chisledon. Here is Mrs. Jefferies at 



* Round abont a Great Estate. 



