Farmer Yellowleas a fat capon or two in the season.  The fresh, rough, heathery parts of human nature, where the air is freshest, and where the linnets sing, is getting encroached upon by cultivated fields.  Every one is making himself and herself useful.  Every one is producing something.  Everybody is clever.  Everybody is a philanthropist.  I don’t like it.  I love a little eccentricity.  I respect honest prejudices.  I admire foolish enthusiasm in a young head better than a wise scepticism.  It is high time, it seems to me, that a moral game-law were passed for the preservation of the wild and vagrant feelings of human nature.

I have advertised myself to speak of vagabonds, and I must explain what I mean by the term.  We all know what was the doom of the first child born of man, and it is needless for me to say that I do not wish the spirit of Cain more widely diffused amongst my fellow-creatures.  By vagabonds, I do not mean a tramp or a gipsy, or a thimble-rigger, or a brawler who is brought up with a black eye before a magistrate in the morning.  The vagabond as I have him in my mind’s eye, and whom I dearly love, comes out of quite a different mould.  The man I speak of, seldom, it is true, attains to the dignity of a churchwarden; he is never found sitting at a reformed town-council board; he has a horror of public platforms; he never by any chance heads a subscription list with a donation of fifty pounds.  On the other hand, he is very far from being a “ne’er-do-weel,” as the Scotch phrase it, or an imprudent person.  He does not play at “Aunt Sally” on a public race-course, he does not wrench knockers from the doors of slumbering citizens; he has never seen the interior of a police-cell.  It is quite true, he has a peculiar way of looking at many things.  If, for instance, he is brought up with cousin Milly, and loves her dearly, and the childish affection grows up and strengthens in the woman’s heart, and there is a fair chance for them fighting the world side by side, he marries her without too curiously considering whether his income will permit him to give dinner-parties, and otherwise fashionably see his friends.  Very imprudent, no doubt.  But you cannot convince my vagabond.  With the strangest logical twist, which seems natural to him, he conceives that he marries for his own sake, and not for the sake of his acquaintances, and that the possession of a loving heart and a conscience void of reproach is worth, at any time an odd sovereign in his pocket.  The vagabond is not a favourite with the respectable classes.  He is particularly feared by mammas who have daughters to dispose of,—­not that he is a bad son, or likely to prove a bad husband or a treacherous friend; but somehow gold does not stick to his fingers as it does to the fingers of some men.  He is regardless of appearances.  He chooses his friends neither for their fine houses nor their rare wines, but for their humours, their