To leap the fecund years to the Patrins of her later youth is to follow the same whimsical and reflective vein. This book, deriving its fortunate title from patrin, “a Gypsy trail: handfuls of leaves or grass cast by the Gypsies on the road, to denote, to those behind, the way which they have taken,” is primarily for him whom reading “maketh a full man.” The style, with a scholarship better tempered and easier to carry, being, as it were, woven into chain mail, not the armor of her earliest adventuring, is the despair of the less agile and instructed mind. It is tinctured with her personal quality, and is incredibly rich, the richer when you return to it after absence and intercourse with more immediate things, to find fruits of her commerce with far off civilisations and loving sentience to the “hills of home.” Like the buyer in Goblin Market, she drips with juices from the very fruits of life, antidote for our dull ambitions: the years “wasted in prison on casuist industries.” It is full of a not too quaint and bookish but an altogether delicious persiflage. She praises the scholar’s right to “fall back with delight upon a choice assortment of ignorances.” Yet, with whatever innocent suavity she puts it, you suspect her of having few scholarly ignorances of her own to fall back upon. So absolutely four-square was her tower of recondite knowledge that you imagine her as having some ado to prevent its shadow from falling on the reader less equipped and terrifying him into escaping her spell altogether. It is a book of praise. Most of all does she advertise the great narcotic of out-of-doors: the enchanting diversion of walking until the rhythm of the first arduous stretch dulls into the monotony of muscles settling into their slowly apprehended task. She betrays an unimpeachable bodily sanity. Though urban by birth, she is also, through adoptive kinship of Pan and all the nymphs, a sylvan, to her “a dear Elizabethan word.” You may find her beside the sea until conscious response to it ebbs into that trance of wonder which is the withdrawal of the soul into ultimate chambers, the inviolable retreat whence it comes forth washed clean of the injuries time has dealt it. She sings a remorseful dirge over the “defeated days” of captive animals. She quickens her pace, at moments, to the measures of a hilarious mind. Throughout that mischievous “encourager of hesitancy,” the Harmless Scholar, she all but dances. “The main business of the scholar,” she informs you, with a wicked twinkle behind her spectacles, “is to live gracefully, without mental passion, and to get off alone into a corner for an affectionate view of creation.”