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s every one knows, the only reason for coming to Selborne is Gilbert White. It is one of those English towns that are forever dedicated to a single memory. I suppose that nearly every one has read White's "Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne" or has intended to read it. It is one of those good intentions of which the devil makes his cobblestones, and is undeniably a book without which no gentleman's library is complete. I confess that a few of its chapters are full of charm, but I fear, on the whole, that it has bored me. Several times I have run ashoal in its famous pages, and a dozen markers here and there indicate, as on a beach, the extreme tide of my exhausted interest. But it is at least the prince of bedtime books

-a capsule to be taken without shaking among the cushions, a sleepy pellet when one is tucked inside the covers for the night.

And yet I find it interesting to be in Selborne. I like to think of this village curate who lived hereabout nearly all his life, who spent his leisure in rambling on the neighboring hills, who observed the nesting birds, the rising crops, the foliage changing with the

that lived in a muddy pool inside his garden, and contrasts the marking of sheep in the valleys near his own. It is all so casual, so seemingly lacking in conscious art-a mere record day by day and month by month of a keeneyed gentleman roaming the fields and hills and writing of what he sees.

Every school-boy knows,-Macaulay's school-boy, at least, who must have been a precious Rollo every one knows that White's "Selborne" is comprised of letters. And really it was lucky that no one of his village shared his avocation, or his observations would have spent themselves in unrecorded talk with his neighbors at the hearth; for one single crony in the twilight would have drained this flow of letters. It was lucky, too, that Gilbert White lived in the age of letterwriting, when roads were slow and long, and friends met chiefly in correspondence; when a triennial acquaintance face to face had to be patched and mended by letters against the wearing of the years.

A letter was then nothing to be scribbled at. It engaged one's evenings for a week, and was not written in the rush of business between the ringing of the telephone. One took his pen in hand and let the hours tick through endless pages. Sir Walter Scott once lamented to Joanna Baillie, the dramatist, that persons of kindred

taste did not grow up like beeches in a grove, but that they sprouted far apart. And so, luckily, the letters of Cowper were written, of Byron, and of a hundred others in those spacious horse-drawn days.

I fancy that ink-wells then were mighty cisterns that held the full gallon of a winter's correspondence, and that roosters who grew the chosen quill crowed with a prouder note than their fallen kin to-day, whose utmost boast is feather dusters and storage eggs. A waggish fellow has counted the pages of Pamela's letters, and by laying their total into hours at a swiftest rate of pen, has discovered that the dear creature must have sat at her desk each day from breakfast up to midnight, lunch and dinner on a tray! A spoon in the left hand! A quill in the right! And that she sadly neglected her dusting, which was, after all, the work for which she was paid. Our own good second maid, although she wastes time on her complexion and talks endlessly with her rival lovers on the telephone, does nevertheless find time to sweep a bit.

But a letter was a letter in those golden days, and it held a mighty seal. And the carrier put it in his boot among the pistols and jounced for a week to London. And he who received it got the neighbors in, and they broached a cask of ale and made a night of it. But Pamela's mighty well is dry at last, her pen is rusty with neglect; for now she throws her broken dishes into the sink and rattles to the movies in the flivver of her wicked master.

Gilbert White, having no crony for his passion and held by his fellowtownsmen as an odd stick of a genius, laid out his heart in letters; and that is

about all we know of him. An early biographer went to Selborne not long after White's death to pick up a fact or two, but he met with scant success. One villager, it is said, informed him that "he was thought very little of till he was dead and gone, and then he was thought a great deal of." This, although an excellent text for the honor that is paid to prophets, throws little light upon his life or the manner of his friendships. his friendships. Another neighbor remarked that "he was a quiet old gentleman with very old-fashioned sayings; he was very kind in giving presents to the poor, and used to keep a tortoise which crawled about his garden." Shakspere moved not more darkly in the mist. Gilbert White and this will have to serve exposed in his letters to fellow-naturalists the whole sequence of his studies; and when at the end the letters were set together and formed a book, it was he who was most amazed at the fame that came to him.

It is a slim volume of almost careless pages, and yet its author's fame is still fresh in memory. Such an unnecessary deal of scribbling we writers do when so slight a product persists so long! We perspire through a million words and run our tired volumes into sets, and the children's children of our generation elect at most to remember but a single book. We are the lucky dozen of our time if one book alone stands for a while above the general clutter of its ten thousand failures. Once every third blue moon a giant arises and fills his shelf with almost equal masterpieces, for who shall choose with general consent among the works of Shakspere or Thackeray or Dickens?-but most writers, and excellent writers too, must be content if

a single volume is reprinted for the second generation of young Lollypops grown up. What besides "Cranford" did Mrs. Gaskell write? Who reads Gray except in the "Elegy"? John Galt, I am told, labored until his long shelf was full, but the "Annals of the Parish" only is left. Of the mass of Coleridge no more than three or four poems are read by suffering students. Keats and Shelley even have shrunk to a dozen pages, and time nibbles at Browning's thriftless margin. One wonders if a cynical god never whispered to all these that their exalted work was done, that now they might give up the long fret of composition and run happy in the sunlight. The "Ancient Mariner" is finished, master poet. Lay down your pen! The "Grecian Urn" stands on its perfect page, and nothing you can do will stretch your memory a day. And yet they dip and scribble till their pens drop from their exhausted fingers, and the long darkness falls upon their eyes.

82

Gilbert White was born in Selborne in the year 1720, in a house on the main street that still stands, although altered, and is called the Wakes. Wake means a parish festival to commemorate the dedication of a church, but it is used also for a fair or market and even for a rowdy holiday. White was educated in the near-by town of Basingstoke and later at Oriel College, Oxford, where in 1744 he was elected to a fellowship. He then held successive curacies in the neighborhood of Selborne. In 1755 he settled in Selborne itself, inherited the Wakes in 1763, and lived there for the remainder of his life. The first letter of his "Natural History" is probably the tenth of

the series and is dated August 4, 1767. The series appeared as a volume in 1789. He died in 1793, having outlived by three years his allotted threescore and ten.

None of the ruffle of the world is marked upon the quiet pages of his book. And it is pleasant to think of a man cloistered in contemplation from the hurly-burly of his century, as if the Hampshire Hills were pads upon his ears. He was born in the year of the South Sea Bubble. He lived during England's conquest of two great empires, India and Canada. He might have read the speeches of Pitt and Burke, thundering a warning to Parliament lest the American colonies be lost. Some faint echo of the guns of Lexington must have sounded on his peaceful woodland. France! The rising of the third estate, the Bastille, the Revolution! Did not the tumbrils of the guillotine rumble into Selborne on some quiet night when the singing stars were hushed in clouds? As a child he might have seen Pope and Swift, and carried a cup at Buttons. In his full maturity he might have sat at the Mitre with Sam Johnson, in old age have known Robert Burns and Walter Scott. Yet his narrative never outruns the quiet parish lying obscurely in the hills between Winchester and the Portsmouth road. It is as if a single poem of fragile loveliness-a poem that might tire one a bit for its contentment and isolation-had been composed in a Paris attic when the sky burned red.

Having now consumed our bread and cheese at the Queen's Arms, we walked forth to see the town. It is an ordinary village, with no pretension of fine houses. At the top of almost its single street there is an open square with a generous tree. This square is

called the Plestor, or playing-place, where, writes Gilbert White, there stood "in old times, a vast oak, with a short squat body, and huge horizontal arms extending almost to the extremity of the area. This venerable tree," he continues, "surrounded with stone steps, and seats above them, was the delight of old and young, and a place of much resort in summer evenings; where the former sat in grave debate, while the latter frolicked and danced before them. Long might it have stood, had not the amazing tempest in 1703 overturned it at once." Under the succeeding sycamore Gilbert White must himself have sat through the English twilights, a silent sort of man, reserved among his neighbors, with his mind running on longer paths.

Almost adjoining the Plestor is the Wakes. It is rather a jumbled building of unsoftened outline as seen from the street, with upstart chimneys and newer roofs that rise too proudly above the older part, as if they followed a changing fashion down from London. But ivy runs across the front to shield its pretense.

And now our landlord was of service. He had suggested that we knock boldly and announce ourselves as pilgrims from overseas. A solemn footman took our names and disappeared-very good names in their way, as Alfred Jingle remarked to Mr. Tupman at the Rochester ball-"capital names for a small party, but won't make an impression in public assemblies." The footman, however, came back presently with word that we were welcome. And as I scraped my boots, I scraped my memory also for any stray facts in the life of Gilbert White, any phrases from his book, that would keep me from the shame of ignorance.

The study is shown, a great room with broad windows on the garden at the rear and a glimpse of wooded hills

-a room that is cluttered with his relics. It is here that Gilbert White composed his letters. "My great parlor," he wrote once to his sister, "turns out a fine warm winter room, and affords a pleasant equal warmth. In blustering weather the chimney smokes a little till the shaft becomes hot. The chief fault that I find," he continues, "is the strong echo, which, when many people are talking, makes confusion to my poor dull ears." There is still an echo in the room-an echo of its long silence through more than a hundred years.

The keeping of this stiff room is the fee, as it were, that the present owners pay the public for living in a celebrated house. It is held inviolate to satisfy tourist curiosity, and the past is its only life. These houses of the great linger on in sacred widowhood and pay eternally a cold devotion to the dead. At most now and then a housemaid comes in to dust, but I think she tiptoes among the bric-à-brac and is quite chilled by a ghostly presence. And really it must be rather horrid to live within four walls where a room is kept as a perpetual graveyard of consecration, where the coffin, as it were, and the flowers of ritual lie out exposed. It is a museum, a funeral, what you will, exempt from present life, and, until a pilgrim taps, its doors are shut upon the tomb. White's chair is shown, and no doubt a ribbon bars its use; and I seem to remember his ink-pot and his pens. There was a stuffy feeling in the place, as if vases, out of fashion and undervalued in the more human rooms, had been set here in a kind of discard under pretense of

antiquity, as we ourselves tote them to the attic whenever style has changed its whim. Gilbert White alive would have tossed up the window and let the wind blow in.

The house itself shows evidence of generous remodeling and enlargement. The entrance-hall seems once to have been the sitting-room. The low-ceiled kitchen, I think, was once the diningroom. I recall a monk's chair that folded to a table, a cradle that was turned to be a nursery for sprouting flowers, a bed that fell curiously from a cabinet in the wall with swingingdoors. But we went no farther among the rooms, and I would have preferred to turn my back upon the past and to range in the parts of present use and see how a present generation lives.

The doorman, having reaped his scornful profit, now consigned us to the gardener. The Wakes is crowded against the village street, but at the rear there are several acres of fine lawn overhung by a wooded hill. I asked the gardener if this wood was the hanger mentioned in the history, a single fact that lodged with me, and thereby gained great credit for erudition. A brick path leads across the lawn, and we were told that Gilbert White laid the path himself and walked there in muddy weather. It ascends to the left through a scanty grove of ripe old trees, each labeled with its

Latin, and issues to the hanger-"a vast hill of chalk, rising three hundred feet above the village. The

covert of this eminence is altogether beech, the most lovely of all forest trees."

To the right of the lawn is an inclosure of flowers and vegetables, and I may have seen the very patch of mud where the tortoise wallowed in hot weather. Altogether it is such a spot as one seldom finds except in England, tightly hidden from the village and yet open to the hills. Like Fabre's patch of stone and thistle and Burroughs's stretch of Catskills, it is an appropriate laboratory of living nature.

The gardener had now earned his half-crown. He wavered a bit whether he should not, as one friendly servant to another, consign us to the stableman for continuing fee, but finally released us directly to the street. The church with its graveyard was still to be seen, a weathered building of worn tablets, with a great yew near by. In almost every English graveyard there is a yew, and I have read, but know not the truth, that an early king, finding a shortage of wood suitable for bows, ordered that a yew be planted in every churchyard of the kingdom against the fear of a French invasion. And thus a measure of national defense by a kind of irony has made the yew a tree of mourning.