"Bevis gathered the harebell, and ran with the flower in his hand down the hill, and as he ran the wild thyme kissed his feet and said, 'Come again, Bevis, come again.' At the bottom of the hill the waggon was loaded now; so they lifted him up, and he rode home on the broad back of the leader." There is one more story. I must not quote it, because it is too long, but I cannot pass it over in silence. It will be found in "Nature Round London." It is the story of a trout, and it has always filled me with the most profound and most sincere admiration. So little did Jefferies understand that he was here working out a picture of the most original kind, of the deepest interest, that he actually divides it in two, goes off to something else, and then returns to it. His inexhaustible mind scattered its treasures about as lavishly as Nature herself scatters abroad her flowers and her seeds, and with almost as little care about arrangement, selection, and grouping. CHAPTER XII. CONCLUSION I think that I have never read, in all the sad chronicles of hapless authors, anything more pitiful than the history of the last years of this life so short, yet so rich in its sheaves of golden grain and piles of purple fruit. Everything possible of long-continued torture, necessity of work, poverty, anxiety, and hope of recovery continually deferred, are crammed into the miserable record which closes this volume. Jefferies fell ill in December, 1881, five years and a half before the end. He was attacked by a disease for which an operation of a very severe and painful nature is the only cure. It is, however, one which, in the hands of a skilful surgeon, is generally successful. Horrible to relate, in his case, the operation proved unsuccessful, and had to be repeated again and again. Four times in twelve months the dreadful surgeon's knife was used upon this poor sufferer. For a whole year he could do no work at all. The modest savings of the preceding years were spent upon the physicians and the surgeons, and in the maintenance of his household, while the pen of the breadwinner was perforce resting. Before he was able to take pen in hand again, he was reduced to something approaching destitution. You shall read directly how, when he recovered, hope immediately returned, and he was once more happy in the thought that now he could again work, though it was to begin the world once more. Alas! the interval of hope was brief indeed. Another, and a more mysterious disease attacked him. He felt an internal pain constantly gnawing him; he could not eat without pain; he grew daily weaker; he was at last no longer able to walk; he could only crawl.