146 FIELD AND HEDGEROW. 
of being able to read and write, and yet they do not 
exercise it, except in a casual, random way. I for one, 
when the public schools began all through the rural dis- 
tricts, thought that at last the printing-press was going to 
reach the country people. In a measure it has done so, 
but in a flickering, uncertain manner; they read odd 
bits which come drifting to their homes in irregular ways, 
just as people on the coast light their fires with fragments 
of wreck, chance-thrown by the stormy spring-tides on 
the beach. So the fire of the mind in country places is fed 
with chips and splinters, and shapeless pieces that do not 
fit together, and no one sits down to read. I think I sec 
two reasons why country people do not read, the first of 
which, thanks be to Allah, will endure for ever; the 
second may perhaps disappear in time, when those who 
make books come to see what is wanted. 
First, nature has given them so much to read out of 
doors, such a vast and ever-changing picture-book, that 
white paper stained with black type indoors seems dry 
and without meaning. A barnyard chanticleer and his 
family afford more matter than the best book ever 
written. His coral red comb, his silvery scaled legs, his 
reddened feathers, and his fiery attitudes, his jolly crow, 
and all his ways—there’s an illustrated pamphlet, there's 
a picture-block book for you in one creature only! 
Reckon his family, the tender little chicks, the enamelled 
eggs, the feeding every day, the roosting, the ever-present 
terror of the red wood-dog (as the gipsies call the fox)— 
here’s a Chronicon Nurembergense with a thousand wood-" 
cuts; a whole history. This seems a very simple matter, 
and yet it is true that people become intensely absorbed 
in watching and living with such things. Add to these 
the veined elms, whose innumerable branches divide like 
the veins or the nerves of a physiological diagram, or like 
