mountain track, every one who takes the right path seems to make the way clearer for those who follow; so may we also raise the profession we adopt, and smooth the way for those who come after us. Even for those who are not agriculturists, it must be admitted that the country has special charms. One, perhaps, is the continual change. Every week brings some fresh leat or flower, bird or insect. We sit quietly at home and Nature decks herself for us.
In truth we all love change. Some think they do not care for it, but I doubt if they know themselves.
"Not," said Jefferies, "for many years was I able to see why I went the same round and did not care for change. I do not want change; I want the same old and loved things, the same wild flowers, the same trees and soft ash-green; the turtle-doves, the blackbirds, the coloured yellow-hammer sing, sing, singing so long as there is light to cast a shadow on the dial, for such is the measure of his song, and I want them in the same place. Let me find them morning after morning, the starry-white petals radiating, striving upwards up to their ideal.
Let me see the idle shadows resting on the white dust; let me hear the humble-bees, and stay to look down on the yellow dandelion disk. Let me see the very thistles opening their great crowns—I should miss the thistles: the reed grasses hiding the moor-hen; the bryony bine, at first crudely ambitious and lifted by force of youthful sap straight above the hedgerow, to sink of its weight presently, and progress with crafty tendrils; swifts shot through the air with outstretched wings like crescent-headed, shaftless arrows darted from the clouds; the chaffinch, with a feather in her bill; all the living staircase of the spring, step by step, upwards to the great gallery of the summer, let me watch the same succession year by year."
"I went the same round."
After all, then, he did enjoy the change and the succession.
Kingsley, again, in his charming prose idyll, "My Winter Garden," tries to persuade himself that he was glad he had never travelled, "having never yet actually got to Paris." "Monotony," he says, is pleasant in itself; morally pleasant, and morally useful. Marriage is monotonous, but there is much, I trust, to be said in favour of holy wedlock. Living in the same house is monotonous; but three removes, say the wise, are as bad as a fire. Locomotion is regarded as an evil by our Litany. The Litany, as usual, is right. 'Those who travel by land or sea' are to be objects of our pity and our prayers, and I do pity them. I delight in that same monotony. It saves curiosity, anxiety, excitement, disappointment, and a host of bad passions."
But even as he writes one can see that he does not convince himself. Possibly, he admits, "after all, the grapes are sour;" and when some years later he did travel, how happy he was! At last, he says, triumphantly, at last we, too, are crossing the Atlantic. At last the dream of forty years, please God, would be fulfilled, and I should see (and happily not alone) the West Indies and the Spanish Main. From
