In thinking of Jefferies and the country life, one is continually tempted to compare him with Thoreau. There are some points of resemblance. Neither Thoreau nor Jefferies had a scientific training. I do not gather from any page in the works of the latter that he was a scientific botanist, entomologist, or ornithologist. Both were men of few wants and simple habits. Neither went to church, yet in the heart of each there was a profound sense of religion, which, in the case of Jefferies, took the form of a firm faith in the future destiny of the soul. Both men were impatient of authority and of imitation. Each desired to be self-sufficient. What Emerson says of Thoreau in respect of open air and exercise might have been written of Jefferies. "The length of his walk uniformly made the length of his writing. If shut up in the house he could not write at all." In both men there was to be observed a great strength of common-sense. And again, there was this other point common to both, that no college--I here imitate Emerson on Thoreau--ever offered either of them a diploma or a professor's chair: no academy made either man its corresponding secretary, its founder, or even its member. And the following passage, written by Emerson of Thoreau, might be equally well written, _mutatis mutandis_, of Jefferies: "Thoreau dedicated his genius with such entire love to the fields, hills and waters of his native town, that he made them known and interesting to all reading Americans, and to people over the sea. The river on whose banks he was born and died he knew from its springs to its confluence with the Merrimack. He had made summer and winter observations on it for many years, and at every hour of the day and night. Every fact which occurs in the bed, on the banks, or in the air over it; the fishes, and their spawning and nests, their manners, their food; the shad-flies which fill the air on a certain evening once a year, and which are snapped at by the fishes so ravenously that many of these die of repletion; the conical heaps of small stones on the river-shallows; the huge nests of small fishes, one of which will sometimes overfill a cart; the birds which frequent the stream, heron, duck, sheldrake, loon, osprey; the snake, muskrat, otter, woodchuck and fox, on the banks; the turtle, frog, hyla, and cricket, which make the banks vocal--were all known to him, and, as it were, townsmen and fellow-creatures; so that he felt an absurdity or violence in any narrative of one of these by itself apart, and still more of its dimensions on an inch-rule, or in the exhibition of its skeleton, or the specimen of a squirrel or a bird in brandy. He liked to speak of the manners of the river, as itself a lawful creature, yet with exactness, and always to an observed fact. As he knew the river, so the ponds in this region."