rest upon it, as if they would protect and altogether cover the poor old boot in its last resting-place.  It is as if Mother Nature, who lost sight of her product at the tanner’s yard, meant to claim her own trampled child again at last, after all its wanderings.  So we go on, noting a sardine tin gleaming brightly in the amber sunlight, through a hazel hedge, and presently another old boot.  Some hawthorn berries, some hoary clematis we notice—­and then another old boot.  Altogether, it may be remarked, in this walk the amateur nature-lover saw eleven old boots, most of them dropped in the very sweetest bits of hedge tangle and grassy corner about Banstead.

It is natural to ask, “Whence come all these old boots?” They are, as everyone knows, among the commonest objects in a country walk, so common, indeed, that the professional nature-lover says very little about them.  They cannot grow there, they cannot be dropped from above—­they are distinctly earth-worn boots.  I have inquired of my own domestic people, and caused inquiry to be made in a large number of households, and there does not appear to be any regular custom of taking boots away to remote and picturesque spots to abandon them.  Some discarded boots of my own were produced, but they were quite different from the old boot of the outer air.  These home-kept old boots were lovely in their way, hoary with mould running into the most exquisite tints of glaucophane and blue-grey, but it was a different way altogether from that of the wild boot.

A friend says, that these boots are cast away by tramps.  People, he states, give your tramp old boots and hats in great profusion, and the modesty of the recipient drives him to these picturesque and secluded spots to effect the necessary change.  But no nature-lover has ever observed the tramp or tramp family in the act of changing their clothes, and since there are even reasons to suppose that their garments are not detachable, it seems preferable to leave the wayside boot as a pleasant flavouring of mystery to our ramble.  Another point, which also goes to explode this tramp theory, is that these countryside boots never occur in pairs, as any observer of natural history can testify....

So our Cockney Jefferies proceeds, presently coming upon a cinder path.  They use cinders a lot about Sutton, to make country paths with; it gives you an unexpected surprise the first time it occurs.  You drop suddenly out of a sweetly tangled lane into a veritable bit of the Black Country, and go on with loathing in your soul for your fellow-creatures.  There is also an abundance of that last product of civilisation, barbed wire.  Oh that I were Gideon! with thorns and briers of the wilderness would I teach these elders of Sutton!  But a truce to dark thoughts!