214 THE LIFE OF RICHARD JEFFERIES 



' Beauty in the Country ' he says that * it takes a hundred 

 and fifty years to make a beauty — a hundred and fifty 

 years out of doors. . . . All beautiful women come from 

 the country.' 



The Wind and the Wheat speak these same things in 

 ' St. Guide' Joy in Nature ' makes to-day a thousand 

 years long backwards and a thousand years long for- 

 wards.' The Wheat is glad to be cut down for men's 

 sakes, knowing its tribe cannot die, ' but there is one 

 thing we do not like, and that is all the labour and the 

 misery which ends in nothing, not even a flower.' The 

 Wheat goes on : 



All the thousand years of labour since this field 

 was first ploughed have not stored up anything for you. 

 It would not matter about the work so much if you were 

 only happy ; the bees work every year, but they are 

 happy ; the doves build a nest every year, but they are 

 very, very happy. We think it must be because you do 

 not come out to us and be with us, and think more as we 

 do. It is not because your people have not got plenty 

 to eat and drink — you have as much as the bees. Why, 

 just look at us ! Look at the wheat that grows all over 

 the world ; all the figures that were ever written in pencil 

 could not tell how much, it is such an immense quantity. 

 Yet your people starve and die of hunger every now and 

 then, and we have seen the wretched beggars tramping 

 along the road. We have known of times when there 

 was a great pile of us, almost a hill piled up ; it was 

 not in this country, it was in another warmer country, 

 and yet no one dared to touch it — they died at the 

 bottom of the hill of wheat. The earth is full of skeletons 

 of people who have died of hunger. They are dying now 

 this minute in your big cities, with nothing but stones all 

 round them — stone walls and stone streets ; not jolly 

 stones like those you threw in the water, dear — hard, 

 unkind stones that make them cold and let them die, 

 while we are growing here, millions of us, in the sunshine 

 with the butterflies floating over us. This makes us. 



