NATURE NOTES. 
ig5 
I had to go down a long passage and staircase, across the hall 
to the dining room, and he flew after me the whole way. All 
this he continued to do for two whole summers and winters, and 
every day he came would sing beautifully, often sitting on my 
lap to give us his little song. After the two years, to our great 
regret, we did not see him again. 
A. J. Kexrick. 
A BOOK FOR NATURE LOVERS. 
On Surrey Hills, by a Son of the Marshes. London : Blackwood, 1S91. 
[Svo, pp. vi. 301. Price 6s.] 
Those who regretted the early death of Richard Jefferies and who felt that his 
place would never be adequately filled, will turn with delight to the work of 
this new writer, on whom the mantle of the earlier observer seems to have fallen. 
“ Nearer sixty than fifty years of age," as he tells us — a life-long student of Nature, 
though but a recent writer — this “ Son of the Marshes ’’was a contemporary of 
Tefferies, whom he rightly styles “ one of the most minute and truthful observers 
that England has ever known.” 
But, admirer as he is, no one will accuse him of plagiarism. He is no servile 
copyist, and his style differs in many respects from that of the naturalist whose 
loss we mourned four years ago. His observations are to the full as accurate, but 
he presents them in a broader aspect. Jefferies’s work was as minutely accurate 
as a photograph ; the Marsh-son is more of an artist — or of an impressionist — and 
his pictures are larger. Jefferies wrote as the early Pre-Raphaelites painted ; his 
successor employs the pen as the later artists influenced by the work of the P. R. B. 
wield the brush. This is no dispraise of either. There are some who still cherish an 
affection for the early work of Millais, and Dante Rossetti, and of Matthew 
Lawless — the two last too soon taken from us — which they have never felt for their 
successors ; while many who bow at a more recent shrine recognise how much of 
its beaut}' is due to the earlier men. It is among those w'ho appreciate Jefferies 
that the “ Son of the Marshes ” will find his warmest admirers. 
In his choice of situation, the writer now under consideration — why does 
he not give us a name which he can have no reason for concealing ? — also recalls 
Tefferies to us. Nature Near London was, from its subject, one of the most 
interesting to us of all Jefferies’s books ; and in the present volume we do not 
stray beyond a home county, lingering about spots so easily accessible as Leith 
Hill. In the Surrey hills and valleys the writer, happy man ! has “spent the 
greater portion of his daily life in the open air,” during the forty years since he 
left his home in the North Kent marshes. Mr. Fowler says that Mr. Burroughs’s 
books impel him to take the next steamer to New York ; may it not be hoped 
that many will be stimulated, by the perusal of the volume now under considera- 
tion, to ramble among the easily-accessible woods of Surrey. “ They are over-nan 
in the summer months,” he says regretfully, “by men and women who enjoy 
themselves in various fashions, some of these by no means rural. The majority of 
these pleasure-seekers are like those who gaze at the exterior of a beautiful 
casket in total ignorance of the jewels within.” 
There are certainly wonderful and strange sights to be seen by any one who 
has eyes to see them and patience to watch them. Such was the parliament of 
starlings which I was privileged to see at Holm wood on a bright June rooming, 
three years ago — a parliament conducted apparently with at least as much order as 
that which meets at Westminster. Such are the traits of character in bird and 
beast and fish, which are scattered all through the Surrey Hills — both in 
Nature and in the book so-called. 
One noteworthy difference between the Marsh-son and his prototype is in the 
human interest which is as apparent in the former as it was absent from the latter. 
Jefferies liked to stroll out by himself and note quietly all that he saw. The 
