COUNTRY LIFE
An Autumn Legacy If anyone should wish to leave to a friend a sort of legacy he might perhaps do worse than give reasons for feeling that autumn days are the most cheerful as well as the loveliest of the year. They are certainly the most memorable for most countrymen. Perhaps it must be confessed that this feeling is strongest in those who have engaged in some form of sport. The humanitarian has without doubt the higher creed ; but intenser delight in the golden hours of autumn is found first among those who frequent woods and streams and fields as in some sort hunters. There lies one of the contradictions of human life. How many sportsmen undergo the conversion that overcame Richard Jefferies! His first books, and very good they
are, concern gamekeepers. His crowning work, The Story of My Heart, concluded in pure mysticism. So, if in less salient contrast, it is with multitudes of sportsthen, but most would confess that they owe their intimate knowledge and their affec-
tion to the zeal of their unregenerate days—to remembrance of an early meet, when the dew hung thick on the briars, to what Lord Grey called golden hours by a stream whose ceaseless ripples rocked the evening light, to walks by hedgerows, scarlet- leaved and crimson-berried, to hours of waiting on the brown moor, wild and mysterious and murmurous with strange sounds, to enchanted woods, carpeted with bright beech leaves and hung with an arras of flaming colours. It is better, perhaps, and much easier to remember than to moralise; but one little autumn moral may be allowed.
Through the dark misty air Down fall the summer leaves Till every bough is bare, Till frost and mould and dripping rains complete The beauty's ruin and the life's defeat ; And all life grieves.
Nay, nay ; not so Before the summer died We watched the bright buds grow, And flowering tokens on the hazel tell The promise of resurgent Eastertide; And all is well.
Previous page
