"The Story of Bevis" is the story of Guido writ large. It is also the story of Jefferies himself as a boy. Observe, most writers of fiction, if they were proposing to write the story of a boy, would first create an imaginary boy, and then surround him with imaginary adventures, invented on purpose for that boy. Jefferies does nothing of the kind. It is not his method. He remembers his own boyhood--the most delightful part of it--when he played with his brother and his cousin upon the shores of the lake behind the farmhouse, and made his canoe, and paddled about the water exploring the creeks and islets, the bays and harbours of that wonderful coast. The boy, Bevis, is, in fact, himself. Therefore, he does all the things that Jefferies and his brother did in their boyhood. Bevis even makes a raft, and, when the raft is made, he sails down the Mississippi as far as Central Africa, where, of course, he encounters savages, and has to fight them. To discover an unknown island on such a voyage is an adventure certain to be met with. To build a hut, to provision a cave, and to dwell for a while upon that island is another adventure equally certain when one goes to Central Africa, and there is no reason at all why such a story should ever have any end. Consequently, there is none--only a full stop, and then a line with "Finis" written under it. In fact, there never was such a book of boy's make-believe. Observe, if you please, a thing which shows the real genius of the writer. It is that you feel, all the time you are reading the book, the village itself only a quarter of a mile from Central Africa. The bailiff, and the dogs, and the village lads are always coming across us in the midst of the Central African jungle in the most natural and absurd way. For boys, as Jefferies remembered, are never quite carried away by their own imaginations. There are many very fine passages in the book, which has only one fault--it is three times as long as it should have been. The conception is delightful. In the execution the author has not known when to stay his hand. Perhaps one of those limitations of which I have spoken already was an imperfect faculty of selection. For boys, the story should have been compressed into one volume. One cannot understand, indeed, how his publishers consented to put forth the book in three-volume novel form. Nobody, after the first chapter, could possibly accept it as a three-volume novel. But it contains many very striking and beautiful and poetic pages. For instance, Bevis watches the sunrise: