dew and the heat of the summer sun. The skeleton has disappeared, nothing but the bony casing of the head remains, with its dim suggestiveness of life, polished and smooth from the friction of the elements. Holding it in the hand, the shadow falls into and darkens the cavities once filled by the wistful eyes which whilom glanced down from the summit here upon the sweet cloverfields beneath. Beasts of prey and wandering dogs have carried away the bones of the skeleton, dropping them far apart; the crows and the ants doubtless had their share of the carcass." Alas, poor Yorick! Just here the mourning note is obvious; elsewhere it is a mere over-tone, as in this impression of a moment in an old village belfry: "Against the wall up here are iron clamps to strengthen the ancient fabric, settling somewhat in its latter days; and, opening the worm-eaten door of the clock-case - the key stands in it - you may study the works of the old clock for a full hour, if so it please you; for the clerk is away laboring in the field, and his aged wife, who produced the key of the church and pointed the way across the nearest meadow, has gone to the spring. The ancient building, standing lonely on the hill, is utterly deserted; the creak of the boards under foot or the grate of the rusty hinge sounds hollow and gloomy. But a streak of sunlight enters from the arrow-slit, a bee comes in through the larger open windows with a low inquiring buzz; there is a chattering of sparrows, the peculiar shrill screech of the swifts, and a jack-daw-jack-daw '-ing outside. The sweet scent of clover and

of mown grass comes upon the light breeze mayhap the laughter of haymakers passing through the churchyard underneath to their work, and idling by the way as haymakers can idle."

Another characteristic of Jefferies is his strongly developed sense of color, which leads him to dwell often upon the purely pictorial quality of the

smaller landscape which he knows best. It may be the mosaic of an orchard with its many-tinted fruits; or the simpler chromatic scale of a ripening meadow: "All the summer through fresh beauties, indeed, wait upon the owner's footsteps. In the spring the mowing-grass rises thick, strong, and richly green, or hidden by the clothof-gold thrown over it by the buttercups. He knows when it is ready for the scythe without reference to the almanac, because of the brown tint which spreads over it from the ripening seeds, sometimes tinged with a dull red, when the stems of the sorrel are plentiful. At first the aftermath has a trace of yellow, as if it were fading; but a shower falls, and fresh green blades shoot up."

It is impossible, in short, to read this book without being conscious of impact with a nature singularly susceptible to impression and rich in expression. It is to be hoped that many American readers who may have remained ignorant of Jefferies will make use of this volume to scrape acquaintance with him.

II.

Mr.

Within recent years several books have been produced in America which have done for one or another countryside much what Jefferies did for Wiltshire and Thoreau for Walden. Burroughs's A Year in the Fields,' so often reprinted, has been given another form. It is a record of what the seasons bring to an acute and genial observer on the Hudson. The book has the qualities of wholesomeness and simplicity which are so common in provincial writing, and which are not a little diverting to cosmopolitan critics. The reader, if he gives himself a chance, carries away a grateful sense of con1 A Year in the Fields. By JOHN BURROUGHS. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1903.

tact with air and soil, of having given the slip, for the moment at least, to everything silly and morbid and insin

cere.

Mr. Torrey's1 natural laboratory lies farther east, and his field is suburban rather than rural. The present notebook is frankly and agreeably Bostonian in flavor. Dr. Holmes would have delighted in it, not only for its neighborhood lore, but for its suave and unobtrusive humor, its irrepressible undercurrent of (shall we say) Waltonian moralizing. The present commentator has had some acquaintance with Mr. Torrey's work for a long time, but he has never been so much impressed with its mellowness and individuality as in reading this volume. He confesses to having proceeded from cover to cover at one sitting,- not a fair way to treat a book, but not a bad tribute to it. This series of papers is a record not only of natural things seen, but of a natural flow of thought and feeling. The author's habit of ruminative discursus accounts largely for his charm; and the New England reader, at least, will find nothing to balk at even in serious passages like this:

"A strange thing it is, an astonishing impertinence, that a man should assuine to own a piece of the earth; himself no better than a wayfarer upon it; alighting for a moment only; coming he knows not whence, going he knows not whither. Yet convention allows the claim. Men have agreed to foster one another's illusions in this regard, as in so many others. They knew, blindly, before any one had the wit to say it in so many words, that 'life is the art of being well deceived.' And so they have made you owner of this acre or two of woodland. All the power of the State would be at your service, if necessary, in maintaining the title."

1 The Clerk of the Woods. By BRADFORD TORREY. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1903.

It

Next to the Ground 2 is another book which should have a fair chance of survival among books of this order. gives a remarkably minute description of life, both natural and human, upon a large country place in Tennessee. It deals in an orderly but not mechanical way with methods of farming, with the habits of wild and domestic animals, with hunting, with trees and flowers, insects, local sounds and odors, with types of negro, poor white, and country gentleman. The author seems, indeed, the complete chronicler of the conditions of country life upon a large Tennessee estate. Her book, like all faithful studies of this sort which are fortunate enough to possess that rightness of expression which is called literary, is likely to appeal not less to outsiders than to Tennesseeans. Of natural history proper the chronicle contains not a little. It is all presented in a vigorous idiomatic style, a style full of local flavor, and embellished here and there with delightful provincialisms, or rather (for most of them are as old as Shakespeare) archaisms. Here is an interesting bit of wood-lore; the passage may serve as a fair example of the author's matter and man

ner:

"Trees felled as the new wood is hardening give the very best timber, provided the trunks are at once lopped of boughs and branches. Should they lie as they fall, with all their leaves and twigs, the wood becomes brash and

2 Next to the Ground. By MARTHA MCCULLOCH WILLIAMS. New York: McClure, Phillips & Co. 1902.

lifeless.

Whether wind - felled,

or ax-felled, the timber lasts twice as long as that cut in May or June. Big trees do not sprout after August cutting, and even tenacious shrubs like sassafras often die of it. Indeed, there is a short period in the month when woody things die almost at a touch. The stroke of an ax, a wheel jolting roughly over an exposed root, the wrenching of a branch, or a slight wound to the bark may be fatal then to the tallest, sturdiest oak. Greenly alive to-day, to-morrow it may be withered to the tip, and next week dry and dead."

On

The American desert has had more than one chronicler of late. Mrs. Austin does more than any one else has done to make us feel the personality of this Land of Little Rain,1 this Country of Lost Borders. Fiction has told us enough and more than enough of the mere horrors of desert experience. the other hand, Professor John Van Dyke not long ago constituted himself a sort of champion of the desert. He wished to make us understand, more than anything else, the physical beauty of these waste places. He spoke, however, rather as an enthusiastic visitor than as one who knew his subject from long and intimate experience. He had an æsthetic appreciation of desert landscape, and an intellectual appreciation of the grandeur of the wilderness as a symbol. Mrs. Austin unmistakably loves it for its own sake; it is part of her life. It has, no doubt, colored her way of thought and feeling; there is a touch of grimness in both, not coming quite to pessimism, not quite to stoicism, but suggesting them. A morbid impulse well under control, yet not without its reactions upon a style almost too fine, almost too tense: something like this, whether or not her theme is responsible for it, one cannot

1 The Land of Little Rain. By MARY AUSBoston and New York: Houghton, Mif

TIN.

flin & Co. 1903.

help feeling in Mrs. Austin's work. Several of these intimate interpretations (of which more than one originally appeared in the pages of the Atlantic) have to do with human life on the desert frontier. There is no attempt to make mannerly, or even to make picturesque, the rude conditions which the writer has to portray; but she does not find the life unintelligible: "It is pure Greek in that it represents the courage to shear off what is not worth while. . . . Here you have the repose of the perfectly accepted instinct which includes passion and death in its perquisites. I suppose that the end of all our hammering and yawping will be something like the point of view of Jimville. The only difference will be in the decorations."

III.

Footprints of Former Men in Far Cornwall 2 is a book of pure description and anecdote, and one of the most delightful among masterpieces of parochial literature. It was first published some thirty years ago. Its author, R. S. Hawker, was for a long time vicar of Morwenstow in Cornwall, a zealous local antiquary, who had, before turning his hand to prose, gained some repute as a ballad-writer. The combination of functions is significant, for in the present papers it is hard to say whether piety or fancy plays the greater part. By the confession of his editor, indeed, the Hawkerian fancy does not scruple now and then to assume the garb of fact. However, the point of fact is not the important one. The sketches are no doubt faithful enough to the detail of local color to which we moderns attach so much importance. For the rest, they possess a style so forcible, so quaint, so engaging, as to make one content to waive all possible

2 Footprints of Former Men in Far Cornwall. By R. S. HAWKER. London and New York: John Lane. 1903.

erend Mr. Hawker's professed purpose was to arrange and set down the legends about certain ancient Cornish worthies, which he found still current in his neighborhood. Many of them have to do with wrecks or castaways hurled upon the wild Cornish coast. There, for example, is the story of Cruel Coppinger, skipper of a Danish vessel driven ashore during a famous tempest. Never was there a more

dramatic entrance for a villain: "A crowd of people had gathered from the land, on horseback and on foot, women as well as men, drawn together by the tidings of a probable wreck. Into their midst, and to their astonished dismay, rushed the dripping stranger: he snatched from a terrified old dame her red Welsh cloak, cast it loosely around him, and bounded suddenly upon the crupper of a young damsel, who had ridden her father's horse down to the beach to see the sight. He grasped her bridle, and, shouting aloud in some foreign language, urged on the doubleladen animal into full speed, and the horse naturally took his homeward way." Cruel Coppinger appropriately marries the damsel, maltreats her and everybody else, his name becomes a byword throughout the countryside, and he finally disappears to a satisfactory accompaniment of thunder and lightning. The book is not all in this vein, be it understood. There are passages of measured description, records of personal experience, the varied annals of an ancient and in the main a quiet neighborhood.

Highways and Byways in South Wales1 is a book of a different kind, but of equal interest and charm. It is founded on local observation upon a larger scale; it covers a considerable sweep of country, and studies the personalities of ancient villages and streams

1 Highways and Byways in South Wales. By W. C. BRADLEY. New York: The Macmillan Co. 1903.

has produced similar volumes on North Wales and the Lake District, which have been extremely popular in England. The writer comes to his present task, therefore, not as an amateur observer, but as a trained and tested professional guide. We might expect the result to be equally edifying and tiresome, a heavy drag of text brightened here and there by a facetious anecdote, or a sally of guidebook sprightliness. But Mr. Bradley has an unusual endowment of virtues, the greatest of which is an unaffected love for his

theme. He has not gotten it up in a few months because there happened to be a market for the get-up. He is a student of Welsh topography, history, legends, literature, manners, and fish, of many years' standing; and he draws upon his various stores of learning with well-bred ease, never in the least emphasizing a point of erudition for the sake of display. "These pages, he

66

says, 'are intended for the armchair as well as for the traveler, a concession to the sedentary person which may relieve him of unnecessary shame in never having beheld South Wales or wished to behold it. He will get from this book all that other men's eyes can give him; for to the vivid descriptions of the text are added some illustrations by Mr. F. L. Griggs, which, for their suggestion of mass and color-value, and for their expression of light, are very remarkable.

Mr. Bradley's style is urbane, idiomatic, leisurely, now and then falling into a pleasant garrulousness. He never seems to have exhausted his subject; yet he knows when it is time to leave off. One has no sense of his being busy over his itinerary; it is easy traveling with him from first to last. It does not matter that the pages bristle with Welsh proper names which offer some obstruction to the Western eye. Bare feet can make a tolerable episode of a stubble field if they do not