• NATURE NJi:AR LONDON ' 151 



rather inhuman for a time, for in Surrey he knew nobody, 

 though he saw ploughman and milker and harvester. 

 But he had to write, and the demand for his short country 

 papers having been established, he naturally kept to that 

 desultory form. He had made the discovery that it was 

 not necessary to go far into the country ' to fmd wild 

 birds and animals in sufficient numbers to be pleasantly 

 studied.' The subject would appeal to a London editor 

 and audience. The Standard, which had printed ' Hodge 

 and His Masters,' printed the papers collected under the 

 title of ' Nature near London ' in 1883. 



In these papers he is no longer the sportsman, and not 

 obviously the countryman. He is the man of sensitive 

 eyes and ears, the artist in a narrow sense. He describes 

 a place, or more often a series of places, along the paths 

 and roads of a day's walk at a particular season, with 

 digressions, as memory or the need of comparison prompts 

 him, to other seasons and places. There is no aim at 

 exact unity and consistency of subject and treatment. 

 He is always the walker, moving about and taking notes. 

 It is doubtful if the most careful resident observer could 

 follow him accurately in half the papers, which resemble 

 the record of an actual walk, closed up so as to avoid 

 barren stretches, and of whatever is seen and thought in 

 the course of the walk. In ' Heathlands ' the movements 

 of a colony of ants fill half the space given to the fir and 

 heath of Oxshott. This increasing attention to small 

 things may have come the more rapidly for his inability 

 to walk as far as he used to do. He was always a careful 

 watcher of the skies, and the Thames Valley and the 

 neighbourhood of London gave his eyes a fuller harvest 

 than ever. He hardly found a sufficient outlet for his 

 knowledge of the atmosphere, its colour and form. 

 Ruskin surpasses him in his effects, and yet has not 

 Jefferies' exquisite eye ; with no other writer can there 

 be any comparison for variety and delicacy in description 

 of the coloured air. Some papers, such as ' Nutty 

 Autumn,' * Wheatfields,' and ' A Barn,' have a unity of 



