3o8 THE LIFE OF RICHARD JEFFERIES 



grown to the sound of music, ' John Brown is dead,' it 

 begins, and Richard Jefferies' father wrote in a copy of 

 the magazine where it first appeared : ' He was my milker 

 and workman for eighteen or twenty years, and was the 

 first man my son could remember. His father was Job 

 Brown.' Jefferies goes on to recall the cottage where 

 Brown lived, and the raised piece of wood across the door- 

 way over which he slipped on coming home in the even- 

 ing, and fell forward dead on the brick floor — ' hard to 

 fall on and die.' There, by the strong labourer's cottage, 

 the first violets came. He remembers John Brown's 

 strength, his mighty mowing. ' If a man's work that he 

 has done all the days of his life could be collected and 

 piled up around him in visible shape, what a vast mound 

 there would be beside some ! If each act or stroke was 

 represented, say, by a brick, John Brown would have 

 stood the day before his ending by the side of a monu- 

 ment as high as a pyramid. Then if in front of him could 

 be placed the sum and product of his labour, the profit to 

 himself, he could have held it in his clenched hand like a 

 nut, and no one would have seen it.'* He remembers, too, 

 this man's going off to Swindon with a wallet for the bread, 

 his tipsy gravity as he carried a yoke of milk, bathing 

 himself at length in it as he fell. They had small-pox in 

 the cottage near. ' That terrible disease seemed to quite 

 spoil the violet bank opposite, and I never picked one 

 there afterwards.' Nearly twenty years before Jefferies 

 had wanted to leave Coate because it was ' tainted ' by his 

 own iUness. It was John Brown's tall chimney that he 

 saw — and we can still see — coming home at all hours, a 

 comfortable sight when he still believed in ghosts. * The 

 ghosts die as we grow older ; they die, and their places 

 are taken by real ghosts.' The next cottage (going 

 towards Coate Farm) was Job Brown's, and he remembers 

 the little shopkeeper who ' had a way of shaking hands 

 with you with his right hand, while his left hand was 

 casually doing something else in a detached sort of way.' 



* 'My Old Village,' Field and Hedgerow. 



