COUNTRY LIFE
NOBODY with two eyes in his head can travel the byroads of England without, I should have thought, being horrified at the enormous acreage of wasteland he encounters everywhere. What must thrifty Dutch, French- men, Danes and Switzers, enticed hither by Festival junketings, have thought of us as stewards of our home-estate ? Not Only the encroach. ment of the wild upon the domestic advertises itself, but untidy cultivation, indiscriminate felling, *e impurity of rivers, the soil-slip, of steep hillsides from lack of contour-ploughing--these. and other symptoms of a Hogar- thian Rake's Progress confront 'the wayfarer. A score of reasons can be fingered out, but rural depopulation, I think, underlies them all.
One of the saddest spectacles is the dereliction of parklands now that manors stand empty or are tenanted by foreign bodies lacking any ties with, interest in or knowledge of their environing demesnes. I know of one such park in the Home Counties that a few years ago grew good grass and roots, kept its groves and coppices free of ivy, took hay and at the same time grazed hundreds of red and fallow deer, a flock of black sheep, some white goats and a large herd of Highland cattle. Now the grass has all but vanished, and a jungle of thorns, thistles, nettles and weedy birch has usurped the 'legitimate office of fruitfulness.
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