the moorlands on the Cheviots. We can imagine the pleasure of the early walk among our flocks over the grassy hills or the heathery uplands, with the silence only broken by the bleating of sheep, the whistle of the plover, or the cry of the curlew. We can conceive the intense excitement of lambing - time, when hopes are blossoming into fruition, and the young ones are dropping into the folds by pairs; the lively scenes of the washing and shearing; the drafting off the surplus stock for despatch to the Falkirk Tryst or some other of the markets. But then for a skilled and scientific agriculturist, whose soul is in his pursuits, we know there can be nothing like a great farm in the fertile Lothians or the Carse of Gowrie, lying round its superb steading. Everything that can be done is done by steam-power; everything is ingeniously made the most of; the latest discoveries in agricultural chemistry have been pressed into the capitalist's service; and in the course of a walk over his ground, you may study the best and most practical of modern mechanical inventions. Yet the introduction of steam would not seem to have materially reduced the number of hands in the farmer's employment, nor those teams of sleek and powerful horses whose work appears to agree with them so well. But steam, and skill, and science have conspired to bring the land to the highest pitch of cultivation; the waving fields of golden grain are a sight to gladden the eye and heart, as is the straw in the bulging stack-yard, when the best of them have been cut and carried; and as for the turnips and mangels, as compared to what you see in the southern counties, they are an Indian jungle to an English pheasant - cover. Notwithstanding which, in point of picturesqueness and climate, and cheery surround

ings, a man of æsthetic temperament might not unnaturally prefer the south; but as we have already passed some time there with the parson and the squire, we do not mean to go back on a visit to the farmers.

Nor, after all we have been saying of farming and shooting, do we care to loiter among shepherds and keepers. Yet the men who have betaken themselves to such healthy occupations are very much to be envied, since their tastes and the manner of their bringing up has kept them below disturbing ambitions. Contrast their happy circumstances with those of the most highly paid labourers and mechanics-the collier who may be in the habit of working all day and sleeping all night; who seldom except of a Sunday has a look at the noonday sun; with his chances of being crushed, or imprisoned alive, or scorched and stifled in an explosion of choke-damp, and the certainty of having to breathe in foul air at a suffocating temperature, while exerting himself in a distorted attitude. Or with the fate of the Sheffield cutler, or the Manchester cottonspinner, or the Spitalfields silkweaver; or even with that of the men whose occupations are not absolutely unhealthy, but who have to huddle up their families in a small room or two in some crowded court, and who are almost driven to drink as an antidote to the noxious atmosphere. If the keeper does not live near the black countries or some great manufacturing town, where the poachers go out in gangs and do not shrink from bloodshed on occasion, the worst hardship he has to put up with is a healthy midnight walk to see that all is right in the covers, with the possibility, perhaps, of a chase and a round at single-stick should he chance to come across some trespasser. He is paid for taking the pleasures that cost his

BECAUSE of the climate we so naturally abuse, there is no place like England for the pleasures of the country, rain and sunshine, snow and frost, bring out a world of beauties in an enchanting variety of landscape. There are lakes and streams that are swarming with fish, in spite of the growth of manufacturing industries; game abounds in field, fell, and wood, notwithstanding occasional indifference to preserving it; and a succession of invigorating sports falls in with the several seasons. It is no amour propre of patriotism that makes us believe that in these matters we are far better off than our neighbours; and indeed they are ready to acknowledge it themselves, by culti vating the tastes that are instincts with Englishmen. You have only to cross the Channel to be conscious at once of a change. There is as charming scenery among the orchards of Normandy as any to be found in the hop-gardens of Kent. The granite precipices of Penmark and the Pointe de Raz on the Breton coast are nearly as wild as anything in Devon or Cornwall. Where the Grand line of railway from Liège to Cologne is carried along the slopes of the valley of the Vesdre, you look down on meadows and rushing streams that remind you of the pastoral picturesqueness of Herefordshire. But everywhere you are struck by the sharp lines of demarcation that are drawn between the country and the towns. Here and there you may come upon an isolated château that looks as if it had been transplanted from some neighbouring boulevard, and then adapted to its rural site by being fitted with turrets and statues. If there is a park,

it is shut in from plebeian intrusion by forbidding walls of stone; and the highest praise you can possibly bestow on such a place is, that there are turf and flower-beds that remind you of England. No thought of coveting it ever comes across your mind, except in so far as it may be the sign of an easy fortune. On the contrary, you are inclined to pity the owner, and to wonder what in the world he does when he goes there. Doubtless he has the means of amusing himself indoors, so far as the cellar, salle-à-manger, and a billiard-room can help him. The ladies, in toilets of affected simplicity, may saunter on the terrace of an evening, and sip their coffee in a frescoed temple covered with creepers, looking down on the waterlilies in a formal fish-pond. But theirs, after all, is only the life of the town, with all that is dull in the country superadded. The brandnew stucco of the façade-that formidable wall, with its gilded grills and its bolted posterns-are disagreeably suggestive of antipathies of class, and the absence of those kindly feelings that are insensibly fostered in the course of generations by a neighbourly intercourse between the landlord and his people. The foreign proprietor cannot hunt, and there is little for him to shoot. The fields look all that is desirable for partridges, but they are cut up in infinitesimal patches among a society of jealous little owners, who would open full cry on their more wealthy neighbour if he followed a pack over their patrimonies. His woods are very attractive to the artist, but they have none of the undergrowth that shelters groundgame; and if he went in for pheasant-breeding, he would have to

bring up his birds by hand in wiredin aviaries like those of the Jardin d'Acclimatation.

Go where you will abroad, there are the same signs of conspicuous segregation between the men of the country and those of the town; and the exceptions only prove the rule. In Brittany and some other of the more wild and woodland provinces of France, there are still seigneurs who live in their ancestral châteaux, devoting themselves to the chase of the wolf, and having off-days among the hares, the woodcocks, and the partridges. But they are a class by themselves, and the wolf-hunting is supposed to be matter of necessity, so that the dignity of master of the hounds is frequently an official appointment. Volunteers flock to the rendezvous clad in garments of sheep-skin and armed with antiquated weapons, heavily loaded with slugs and B.B. No authority can repress the excitement or keep the vociferous field in check, when the game is fairly afoot; and fatal accidents are of frequent occurrence when a hail of shot is drifting through the covers. It is much the same in Germany; and there things have been getting worse than they were, since the peasants swept the country of game in the civil troubles of 1848. Some great land-owners in Bohemia, Northern Bavaria, and elsewhere, have wonderful quantities of hares and pheasants. In the neighbourhood of their vast woodland preserves, you see each outlying patch of grain protected from the ravages of deer and wild boars by chevaux de frise of stacked thorn - bushes. But even there sport is the monopoly of an aristocratic few, who seclude themselves in their domains for a short hunting season; as the Kings of Bavaria or Italy, the Emperor of Austria, or the Prince of Thurm

and Taxis, enjoy the chase of the chamois or izzard in the magnificent solitudes of their mountain hunting-grounds. Elsewhere you have occasional grand days among the game with comparatively pitiful results; but there is little of those everyday country sports which are so keenly appreciated by thousands of Englishmen. Indeed the evidences of life of any kind are few and far between. Nothing can be more beautiful than the Black Forest, for example: you may walk on day after day from BadenBaden towards Stuttgart, through noble woods of feathering beechtrees, or grand glades of cleanstemmed pines; that, with the light falling in streams through their boughs on the bilberry carpet beneath them, remind you of labyrinths of long-drawn aisles in the most superb of Gothic cathedrals. Every here and there you come out on some sequestered valley, with fields that are waving with the haycrops and the ripening grain, sloping down to the sides of some murmuring brook that babbles along between its banks in a series of rushes and cascades. But you may walk on there day after day, and never raise a hare or flush a covey. Game there must be, no doubt, for you find it not unfrequently figuring on the dinnertable. But it has a perverse knack of keeping out of your way, and cannot in any case be very abundant. The roes and the foxes that lurk in the recesses of the woods either see or scent you as you approach through the open; for of course, in the absence of undercover, they get preternaturally shy and suspicious.

As for human habitations, the country is fairly populous, and human habitations there are; but there is scarcely a trace of the existence of a squirearchy or of a com

fortable class of gentlemen farmers. Here and there in the depths of the forest you come on the picturesque huts of the charcoal-burners or woodmen; now and again you stumble out upon a clearing with some sylvan lodge, the dwelling of the forester, whose duty is to keep an eye on them, and whom you have possibly come across in the course of the morning, with a dachshund or two at his heels. Generally, however, the people are huddled together, and each of the greater valleys has its village. Nothing can be more quaint than the many - gabled houses with their rustic woodwork interlaced through the rough lime walls, hanging along the slope in the single street that leads down to the little place, with the village inn and the posthouse. There is a pleasant odour of fresh hay and newly-milked cows; everybody seems in comfortable circumstances, and the local authorities look after the poor; but it is plain that they must labour hard to live, and that life shows its serious side to all of them. Not a man of them who does not place the summum bonum of recreation in a Sunday or saint's day that is celebrated by a free indulgence in beer and tobacco, or a longer chat on local politics. Naturally that marked feature is brought out conspicuously in those writers of the nation, who are the most keen to appreciate all that is most enchanting in the scenery of their respective countries. Our remarks on the Schwarzwald, though the results of a long familiarity with it, might have been borrowed almost verbatim from the pages of Hackländer, who narrates in his 'Pictures of Travel' the very excursion we have been imagining. Perhaps no French novelist of our own time or of any other, excelled more absolutely in delicate landscape - drawing than

George Sand, and at the same time she had made herself the unrivalled mistress of the subtle refinements of rustic character. Her whole heart went out in her writings; she made her enchanting studies either from memory or observation of scenes endeared to her by happy associations; and her dreams of the most perfect lot on earth were closely linked with a life in the country. In 'Flamarande,' one of her latest works, her love for nature is as fresh, and her pen as forcible, as in 'Le Meunier d'Engibault' or 'La Petite Fadette.' Yet even George Sand in her inimitable descriptions gives us the idea of an enthusiastic and emotional amateur looking at the beauties of nature through an æsthetic medium, as she might admire them on the canvas of a Corot or Jules Breton. You see the old château lost among the woods and rocks, tenanted now by the family of the farmer who has succeeded to its ancient lords. You see the lonely mill among the meadows and the water - courses, among osier - beds and clumps of the drooping alders and sedges, swarming with water-hen. You are wrought insensibly into easy sympathy with the hopes and hardships, the griefs and the joys, of the hard-working people who have their homes there. You are made to fancy that retreat among such soothing influences would be more tranquillising to the jaded spirit, and as satisfactory in the long-run, to the blasé hermit, as the gloom and asceticism of the medieval convent; and that even a short sojourn in summer would be no disagreeable variety to men and women of the world, though the fare might be simple and the post irregular. But the very longings with which you are inspired must arise from some passing impulse of misanthropy. You are to court solitude from an ephemeral passion for it, and you