SENTENCED TO DEATH 173 



duction to the ' Camelot ' edition of Gilbert White's 

 ' Selborne,' and finished it only a few months before 

 his death. Both parents and his sister and two 

 brothers survived him. His father lived to be eighty 

 years old, his mother almost as old ; the rest are still 

 alive. 



Jefferies' illness, by confining his physical activity and 

 putting a keener and more perilous edge upon his sensitive- 

 ness, threw him back still more upon himself. London 

 had probably done a little of the same work before. 

 Leaving the familiar Wiltshire country, he had to forsake 

 many habits of mind and body, and to descend into him- 

 self more and more. After the sundering of those old 

 associations and the contact with London came the 

 impulse which produced the ' Amateur Poacher ' and its 

 companion books. After the confinement, the misery, 

 the self-examination of his illness in 1881-83 came the long 

 series of sensuous and impassioned contemplative essays, 

 and ' The Story of My Heart,' ' The Dewy Morn,' ' After 

 London,' and ' Amaryllis at the Fair.' 



In 1882 he left Surbiton for the sea-air of West Brighton, 

 where he was living, at ' Savernake,' Lorna Road, in 

 December, and probably before that. The last two 

 chapters of ' Nature near London ' were composed among 

 these new surroundings. He was now once again within 

 reach of perfectly unspoilt country, above all, of the sea 

 and his natal air of the Downs. On the hills above Falmer, 

 Plumpton, and Fulking the grass was heaped with tumuli ; 

 the camps on these hills would recall those of Liddington 

 and Barbury ; the beauty of Mount Caburn, of Ditchling, 

 Firle, Wolstanbury, and Chanctonbury was the same in 

 kind as that of Hackpen, Whitehorse Hill, Wanborough 

 Downs, Martinsell, and Tan Hill ; below them, on the 

 north, lay the Weald, not unlike the low, fat, dairy country 

 of North Wiltshire, and on the south the sea, of which 

 he could only dream at Liddington. He had known 

 Sussex and the South Downs before in childish and later 

 visits to Eastbourne, Hastings, and Lewes ; and it was at 



