thought hovering behind the sound.
How they kindle such a passage as this, where Jefferies again
brings before us his sense of past time!--

'But though so familiar, that spectral light in the silence has
never lost its meaning, the violets are sweet year by year
though never so many summers pass away; indeed, its meaning
grows wider and more difficult as the time goes on. For think,
this spectre of light--light's double-ganger--has stood by the
couch of every human being for thousands and thousands of years.
Sleeping or waking, happily dreaming, or wrenched with pain,
whether they have noticed it or not, the finger of this light
has pointed towards them. When they were building the pyramids,
five thousand years ago, straight the arrow of light shot from
the sun, lit their dusky forms, and glowed on the endless
sand....'

The whole essay is delicately perfect--as free from the spiritual
eloquence of the autobiography and from the rhetoric of the
agricultural papers as from the everyday atmosphere of earlier work
and the decoration of the first outdoor essays. It is pure spirit.
Take any passage, and it will be seen that in thought and style
Jefferies' evolution is now complete. He has mounted from being a
member of a class, at first undistinguishable from it, then clearly
more enlightened, but still of it, and seeing things in the same
way, up to the position of a poet with an outlook that is purely
individual, and, though deeply human, yet of a spirituality now
close as the grass, and now as the stars. The date of 'The Dawn' is
uncertain. It may have been 1883, the year of 'The Story of My
Heart,' or it may have been as late as 1885. This book, therefore,
contains, like no other single volume, the record of Jefferies'
progress during about ten of his most important years. It was not
for nothing that Jefferies, man and boy, had gone through the phases
of sportsman, naturalist, and artist, and always worshipper, upon
the hills, 'that he lived in a perpetual commerce with external
Nature, and nourished himself upon the spirit of its forms.' Air and
sun so cleaned and sweetened his work that in the end the cleanness
and sweetness of Nature herself become inseparable from it in our
minds.

CHOOSING A GUN

The first thought of the amateur sportsman naturally refers to his
gun, and the questions arise: What sort of a gun do I want? Where
can I get it? What price shall I pay? In appearanc