It had been part of the author’s scheme that, during the initial stages of the story, some doubt should remain in the reader’s mind as to the legitimacy of a foundling child whom the heroine had taken under her care, and it was this suspended uncertainty which had so sorely troubled the soul of the judge’s wife. She felt confident, as she was good enough to assure me, that the doubt would be cleared up in the end, and that the cause of morality and decorum would be ultimately vindicated, but she found it nevertheless intolerable that the innocent minds of her daughters should be haunted, even for a season, by so questionable a problem. I never realised till I occupied the editorial chair how many people there are whose insanity takes a Shakespearian form. There was, I think, never a week passed without the reception of one or more articles intended to elucidate the authorship of the plays; and although the readers were by no means in entire agreement in ascribing them to Bacon, they were absolutely unanimous in the belief that the claims of Shakespeare were wholly and ludicrously inadmissible. It is pleasant, however, to reflect that an editor’s duties yield many happier experiences, and bring him into contact with men and women whom otherwise it might not be his good fortune to know. It was in this way that I made the acquaintance of poor Richard Jefferies, whose delightful articles, under the heading of “The Game-keeper at Home,” had been already published in the _Pall Mall Gazette_. Jefferies’s appearance, even at our first meeting, gave me the unhappy impression that he was not destined for a long life. But despite his nervous temperament that was evidently in a large measure dependent upon the frailty of his physical constitution, he was a man of great simplicity and charm of manner. The love that he had for the things of outward nature was clearly a passionate possession that absorbed his life. Of the teeming life of the country, from the waving ears of corn down to the minutest flower or the smallest insect that inhabited the shadowed world at their feet, he was a loving and constant observer whose eyes never wearied in their task. With Jefferies the enjoyment begotten of this watchful brooding over the things of the country was, I think, all-sufficing. He seemed never desirous to link it in association with any more directly human impulse or emotion, and in this way his writings, as it seems to me, make a separate claim, distinct from that of any other author, whether in poetry or in prose, who have confessed a like passion for the beauty of the outward world.