Round About a Great Estate

Publisher Marketing: Excerpt: ...over the highest trees and goes straight away for miles. Yet, though it is usual to speak of wild birds and of their freedom, the more you watch their ways the more you feel that the wildest have their routes and customs: that they do not act entirely from the impulse of the moment, but have their unwritten laws. How do the gnats there playing under the horse-chestnut boughs escape being struck down by the heavy raindrops, each one of which looks as if it would drown so small a creature? The numbers of insects far exceed all that words can express: consider the clouds of midges that often dance over a stream. One day, chancing to glance at a steeple, I saw what looked like thin smoke issuing from the top of it. Now it shot out in a straight line from the gilded beak of the weathercock, now veered about, or declined from the vane. It was an innumerable swarm of insects, whose numbers made them visible at that height. Some insects are much more powerful than would be supposed. A garden was enclosed with fresh palings formed of split oak so well seasoned (split oak is the hardest of wood) that it was difficult to train any creepers against them, for a nail could not be driven in without the help of a bradawl. Passing along the path one afternoon I heard a peculiar rasping sound like a very small saw at work, and found it proceeded from four wasps biting the oak for the materials of their nest. The noise they made was audible four or five yards away, and upon looking closer I found the palings all scored and marked in short shallow grooves. The scores and marks extended along that part of the palings where the sunshine usually fell; there were none on the shady side, the wasps preferring to work in the sunlight. Soon the clouds began to break, and then the sun shone on innumerable rain-drops. I at once started forth, knowing that such a storm is often followed by several lesser showers with brief intervals between. The deserted ice-house was rarely... Contributor Bio:  Jefferies, Richard John Richard Jefferies (6 November 1848 - 14 August 1887) was an English nature writer, noted for his depiction of English rural life in essays, books of natural history, and novels. His childhood on a small Wiltshire farm had a great influence on him and provides the background to all his major works of fiction. For all that, these show a remarkable diversity, including Bevis (1882), a classic children's book, and After London (1885), an early work of science fiction. For much of his adult life, he suffered from tuberculosis, and his struggles with the illness and with poverty also play a role in his writing. Jefferies valued and cultivated an intensity of feeling in his experience of the world around him, a cultivation that he describes in detail in The Story of My Heart (1883). This work, an introspective depiction of his thoughts and feelings on the world, gained him the reputation of a nature mystic at the time. But it is his success in conveying his awareness of nature and people within it, both in his fiction and in essay collections such as The Amateur Poacher (1879) and Round About a Great Estate (1880), that has drawn most admirers. Walter Besant wrote of his reaction on first reading Jefferies: "Why, we must have been blind all our lives; here were the most wonderful things possible going on under our very noses, but we saw them not."