Field And Hedgerow By Richard Jefferies




























































































 -  A barnyard chanticleer and his
family afford more matter than the best book ever written. His coral red
comb, his - Page 91
Field And Hedgerow By Richard Jefferies - Page 91 of 204 - First - Home

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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 woodcuts; 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 sprays of delicate seaweed slow turning from their winter outline to the soft green shading of summer; add to these the upspringing of the wheat and its slow coming to that maturity of gold which marks the fulness of the year; consider, then, the incomparable beauty of the mowing grass. Now remember that they live among these things, and by daily iteration the dullest mind becomes wrapped up in and welded to them. Black type on white paper is but a flat surface after these. Secondly, the books and papers themselves, made and printed in such enormous quantities, do not touch a country mind. They have such a cityfied air. Very correct, very scientific, and extremely well edited, but thin in the matter. Something so stagey - you may see it, for instance, in the books for children introducing fairies, which fairies have short skirts, and caper about exactly like a pantomime among stage frogs and stage mushrooms, and it is quite clear that the artist who drew them, and the author who wrote of them, actually drew their inspiration from the boards of a theatre. They have never dreamed among the cowslips of the real fields, they have never watched the ways of the birds from under an oak. Children instinctively see that these toy-books are not natural, and do not care for them; they may be illustrated in gold and colours, sumptuously got up, and yet they are failures. Children do not take these to bed with them. I have seen this myself; I bought so many books to please children, but could never do it till by chance some one sent a little American toy-book, 'The History of the Owl and his Little One, and the Manoeuvres of the Fox.' This had a little of the spirit of the woods in it, and was read and re-read for a year. Only the other day a lady was telling me much the same thing, how she had bought book after book but could never hit on anything to please her little boy, till at last she found an American publication, roughly illustrated, which he always had by him.

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