en familiar to him from boyhood. And to my mind it
is a small but significant sign of a rather lamentable movement--of
none other, indeed, than the "Rural Exodus," as Political Economists
call it--that each and every novelist of my acquaintance, while
assuming as a matter of course that his readers are tolerably familiar
with the London Directory, should, equally as a matter of course,
assume them to be ignorant of the commonest features of open-air life.
I protest there are few things more pitiable than the transports of
your Cockney critic over Richard Jefferies. Listen, for instance, to
this kind of thing:--

"Here and there upon the bank wild gooseberry and currant bushes
may be found, planted by birds carrying off ripe fruit from the
garden. A wild gooseberry may sometimes be seen growing out of
the decayed 'touchwood' on the top of a hollow withy-pollard.
Wild apple trees, too, are not uncommon in the hedges.

"The beautiful rich colour of the horse-chestnut, when quite ripe
and fresh from its prickly green shell, can hardly be surpassed;
underneath the tree the grass is strewn with shells where they
have fallen and burst. Close to the trunk the grass is worn away
by the restless trampling of horses, who love the shade its
foliage gives in summer. The oak apples which appear on the oaks
in spring--generally near the trunk--fall off in summer, and lie
shrivelled on the ground, not unlike rotten cork, or black as if
burned. But the oak-galls show thick on some of the trees, light
green, and round as a ball; they will remain on the branches
after the leaves have fallen, turning brown and hard, and hanging
there till the spring comes again."--_Wild Life in a Southern
County_, pp. 224-5.

I say it is pitiable that people should need to read these things in
print. Let me apply this method to some district of south-west
London--say the Old Brompton Road:--

"Here and there along the street Grocery Stores and shops of
Italian Warehousemen may be observed, opened here as branches of
bigger establishments in the City. Three gilt balls may
occasionally be seen hanging out under the first-floor windows of
a 'pawnbroker's' residence. House-agents, too, are not uncommon
along the line of route.

"The appearance of a winkle, when extracted from its shell with
the aid of a pin, is extremely curious.