AN AMERICAN IN ENGLAND.* FROM every good portrait one may

infer much about two persons, the sitter and the artist ; and so from the pleasant record of his rambles in English country places which Mr. Clifton Johnson has put together it is possible to learn a good deal, not only about England, but about America.

What prevails everywhere in the impression rendered is a grateful sense of mellowness. After the bleakness of America, on transition to an English April-

.' It was astonishing how velvety the grassfields all looked and how soft and rounded all the outlines of the landscape were. In part this gentleness comes from the kindly climate and the easy decay of the chalky underlying rock, but a considerable fraction of the country's pastoral mellowness is the result of the long subjection of the earth to the hand of man. Spade and plough have been chastening the land and wearing away its roughnesses for centuries."

Under men's hand, as Mr. Mabie puts it in his prettily written introduction to the book, the earth has grown companion- able; and though an English landscape is seldom populous—

for the hedgerows prevent a distant outlook and holdings are large, so that you will often see more sign of human life and habitation on a cross-country walk in Donegal

• Among English Hedgerows. Written and Illustrated by Clifton Johnson. With an Introduction by Ilamllton W. Mabic. London : Macmillan and Co. Os. Cd. net.] than in Berkshire—there is hardly ever the feeling of solitude. Where that does exist, it takes the force of con-

trast ; Stonehenge, as Mr. Johnson discovered, is one of the loneliest spots on earth ; and the whole of Salisbury Plain fills one with a sense of desolation that the writer of these lines has never felt on the wildest mountain sides. And here is the characteristic thing about Mr. Johnson, who is the American of New England, not from out West. All this gentle mellowness, all the civility of a landscape that has been wrought upon by man till it takes almost human feature, strikes him just as strangely as it strikes one bred among the heather or on the prairie ; but in quite a different way. He contrasts it, not with the free face of Nature, but with Nature half-broken in, where the gashes of man's first attack

are still raw. The houses of an English village are not spick- and-span boxes imposed upon the face of unwilling earth, but things with a history, that seem as if they had grown, each with its own individuality, weathered and mossed over into harmony with the surrounding colour scheme. Their

stability impresses the American ; everything has passed out of the experimental stage. "What the English build they build to last. Houses two or three hundred years old are to be found in every village, and their heavy walls of masonry seem likely to endure for ever." The bridges affect him in the same way; they are solid stonework, not some ingenious con• traption rigged up to serve a turn.

Yet the picture of rural life which Mr. Johnson draws with a curiously unemphatic fidelity is not painted in rose-colour. He lived apparently in the most modest way, lodging mostly at cottages, sometimes at a little inn, associating a good deal with farmers, but more often with the poorer class. What he saw he describes without humour, without prejudice, almost without comment ; the people seem to him picturesque, harmonious with the setting, like the women workers whom he photographs weeding a field with forks. But just as a closer view showed them "nearly all old, stumpy figured, and slouchy in dress," so the life that looks from the outside so leisurely and quaint is, as he represents it, sluggish and joy-

less. And over it lies the black shadow of the workhouse. Here is the presentment of the South Country labourer as it strikes this observer :- " Nor were the men workers less rudely rustic than the women. Indeed, it seemed to me that all the English farm-folk by the time they reached middle age be came what we would call ' characters.' In their looks they grow knotty, and gnarled. and earthy, and this outward appearance is more or less typical of their minds. In features the men are strongly individualised. No two are alike—a result in part due to the many odd and old- fashioned ways they have of trimming and training their beards. Clothing is quaint, and their heavy footwear, added tc their laborious lives, makes the movements of all except the more youthful and vigorous seem ungainly."

There is little room for pleasure in their lives, since to earn even twenty shillings a week it is necessary to work long

hours of overtime, and of what heavy cheerfulness there exists the public-house is the sodden centre. Mr. Johnson notes with obvious surprise the universality of beer-drinking. It is true there are the fairs and travelling shows, with swings and merry-go-rounds, which he details with laborious accuracy. "Punch and Judy " seems to have been a new spectacle to him, and he is filled with righteous indignation over the bad moral of the story ; the Punch whom he saw escaped the gallows. One old man with whom he made apparently a close alliance— an ex-policeman turned Beaton—was eloquent on the merits of Government employ and a pension, but the general feeling

was strong against the Army. Only the restless, he was told, took to it as a career, and these generally came back before long, and came back fit for little good. The men who went into soldiering in a businesslike spirit and stuck to it did well,

but they were the exceptions. Mr. Johnson sedulously refrains from contrasting what he saw with the chances of the same class in America—though the word "class "is misleading, for

he is surprised by the sharpness of class divisions here—but plainly he does not like the Union, with its necessary separation of old folks who have lived their lives together.

It is pleasanter, perhaps, to dwell upon an American's piety towards the home of his race. Mr. Johnson's due feet did not fail of their pilgrimage to the Nottinghamshire homes of the Pilgrim Fathers,—to Brewster's old manor house at Scrooby, and Bradford's cottage at Austerfield. Near this, also, at Tichill, he found himself for the first time " in the presence of a real castle, and there was no alloy in the pleasure of gazing up at these outer portals, so massive and so old, with the dappling shadows of the new-starting foliage falling on them from the big trees about." He pushed his exploration farther, and was rather overwhelmed with the splendours of Warwick and its priceless furniture eulogised by a professional guide. " When we finished our tour [of the castle] I never before had been so thankful that I was not an earl or a lord." The resident gentry, however, impressed him more favourably, for when he called upon the squire of whose "ancestral hall " he gives a photograph, and with unneces- sary humility presented himself at the backdoor, he found his host so kind and friendly and so attractive a personality that he "came away with more of a liking for the aristocracy as exemplified by him than was perhaps proper in a subject of our free American Republic." There is rather a funny passage which explains that a cromlech ("Kit's Coty House ") near Aylesbury is enclosed by a railing, " not that there is any danger of its being appropriated just as it is, in a lamp, at one time; but in the course of years, if allowed, the relic hunters would carry away every splinter of it piecemeal." All the enthusiasm even of American tourists would scarcely accomplish this under the period of a geological change; but the British 'Arry would doubtless cat his name on it if he were let. There are some curious inaccuracies in the book, as, for instance, the remark that the faded browns and yellow of grass are never seen in England,—this summer had another tale to tell ; and a small boy who accompanied Mr. Johnson on a walk seems to have imparted some very odd natural history, —for instance, that peewits build in the long corn and hay. Also when Mr. Johnson talks about a flock of blackbirds he probably means starlings. It is noticeable, too, that English orchards and apple-trees struck him as under- sized, English farms as large, and English rent as a mystery. He could not understand how the farmers paid it and lived. Of all counties in England—though he tramped through most of the South, through Nottingham, through York- shire near what he calls "Sheffield city," through the Lakes, through Kent and Sussex—it was Devon pleased him best, and he keeps it for his last chapter, whose closing words we cannot but quote

:-

"The whole English country impresses the traveller deeply with its quiet pastoral beauty, and one feels that Nature on this island is a lavish mother. It seemed to me that any man to whom England had once been home must always love it and always feel a longing home-sickness when away from it. The land is one that readily wins the affections of strangers from across the seas, and however often they visit it they always have the hope to see it yet once more."

One word more has to be said. We detest photographs; but Mr. Johnson has almost reconciled us to them. There must be about a hundred in the book, all showing scenes and types extremely well chosen, many of them so as to give the effect of a studied composition, and all astoundingly well reproduced. The book deserves to succeed, not only in America, but in the country which it so lovingly depicts.