English villages lived on the produce of the estate:  game, fish, and fowl, and the stock at the farm supplied his simple wants throughout the year.  Huge game larders are yet to be seen in the lower regions of the manor house; you must pass through them to reach the still more ample wine cellars.  Nearer London there is not much connection nowadays between the house and the land—­you must walk on the roads; but away in the country it is over the broad fields that you roam.  Even on a small manor of two thousand acres you may walk a dozen miles in an afternoon and not pass the boundary fence.

It is very surprising that there is not more demand for country houses in England when one considers that an extensive demesne may be rented at a price which is paid for a small flat in unfashionable Kensington.  The local term in Gloucestershire for renting a manor is “holding the liberty”—­the old Saxon word.  The term is singularly expressive of the freedom possessed by the man who exchanges the life of the town or the villa for a manor in one of the remote counties.  He who enjoys the sporting rights, with license (as the leases run) to hunt, fish, course, hawk, or sport without the labour and loss of farming the land, possesses all the pleasures of the squire’s existence with few of its drawbacks and responsibilities.  Yet many a fine old house in the country remains unlet because the life is considered a dull one by those who have not been brought up to it.  With nature’s book spread so amply before our eyes, the country is never dull.  At no time of life is it too late to commence the study of this book of nature.  The faculty of observation is one that is easily acquired.  It is not a case of nascitur non fit.  With tolerably good eyesight and a determination to learn, a man soon

     “Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
      Sermons in stones, and good in everything.”

And the habit of observing once acquired, we can never lose it till we die.

Of course those who rent a place in preference to purchasing it miss one of the greatest and most useful privileges the country can confer—­that of following in the footsteps of him who

     “Strove for sixty widow’d years to help his homelier brother
          man,
      Served the poor and built the cottage, rais’d the school
          and drained the fen.”

These are the true delights of a country existence; and it is, I think, incumbent on the really rich men of England, if they have the welfare of the nation at heart, to hold a stake, however small, in the land, even at a sacrifice of income.  I refer to men with incomes ranging from ten to a hundred thousand pounds per annum, who would not feel the loss of interest that would possibly accrue on an exchange of investment from “the elegant simplicity of the three per cents.” to an agricultural estate in the country.  They may be giving gold for silver in the transaction, but will be amply repaid in a thousand different ways.  How infinitely preferable the existence of the poor countryman, even though times be hard, to that of the misguided being of whom it may be said: