76 THE SOUTH COUNTRY 



the life which he had to lead and which he foresaw for 

 me. He used to read to me, waking me up for the pur- 

 pose sometimes when he reached home late, or if he did 

 not do that rousing me an hour before breakfast. His 

 favourite books were The Compleat Angler and 

 Lavengro, the poems of Wordsworth, the diaries of 

 Thoreau and the Natural History of Selhorne. I remem- 

 ber crying — when I was twelve — with despair of human 

 nature's fickleness to think that White, even though he 

 was an old man, could have it in his heart to write that 

 farewell to natural history at the end of his last letter 

 to Barrington. My father read these books to me several 

 times in a sad, hoarse voice — as it seemed to me, though 

 when he paused he was happy enough — which 1 had often 

 great trouble to endure as I got older and able and willing 

 to read for myself. So full was I of a sense of the real 

 wild country which I had never seen — the Black Moun- 

 tains of Caermarthen I hardly recalled — that I became 

 fanciful, and despised the lavish creeper that hung like a 

 costly dress over the fence between our garden and the 

 next, because the earth it grew m was not red earth but 

 a black pasty compound, full of cinders and mortar and 

 decayed rags and kittens. I used to like to go to the 

 blacksmith's to smell the singeing hoof and to the tram- 

 stables and smell the horses, and see the men standing 

 about '\x\ loose shirts, hanging braces, bare arms, clay pipes, 

 with a sort of free look that I could not see elsewhere. 

 The navvies at work in the road or on the railway line 

 were a tremendous pleasure, and I noticed that the clerks 

 waiting for their trains in the morning loved to watch 

 these hulking free and easy men doing something that 



