Mollycoddles that we moderns are! Even if it were what then? Life is vastly overrated in these days; too much is done for the survival of the unfittest. But is it? Those heroes who laid the proud Armada low were bred under roofs of thatch.

What walks there are in this old-world village! There are footpaths everywhere, and none of

them lead whither Richard Jeffries' footpaths led him- back to a railway station, and so to London. The great iron road is so far away that not even the engine's shriek carries to this quiet dell. There is a meandering valley called "The Lythe," the village has a vocabulary of its own, and there is a choice of two paths towards

the old priory, whither it leads. The one on the left of the valley dips down over a swelling hill, passes through such a wicket-gate as Constable would have loved, winds leisurely on under the shadow of the stately beeches, crosses a meadow or two in luscious grass, strikes into a wild copse, where the bracken and bramble and dogrose tangle themselves across the footway, and emerges in a field where a prostrate stone coffin is nearly all that remains of the priory which reared its head here five hundred years ago. Yet not quite all. In the corner of the farmhouse garden is a small arbour, bright still with the tiles which sandalled monkish feet pressed in the far-off years. What a gulf yawns between our time and theirs! But are we on the right side of it?

By the letter of law, Selborne belongs to Lord Selborne, and other landowners; by the gavelkind of genius it belongs to Gilbert White. Born here, nurtured here, pastor here, died here, buried here, such is the record of his simple history. The village is permeated with his presence still; his footprints may be traced through the length and breadth of the parish.

It is a feasible theory that Selborne itself is responsible for what Gilbert White was and did.

Environment is a persistent moulder of character. Selborne," says Frank Buckland, "was a big bird-cage in which White himself was enclosed even more than the birds." To-day it is a pilgrimage which only the earnest devotee thinks

of making; there are five full miles between it and the nearest railway station. In White's time the village was even more effectually cut off from the outer world. Then the only approach was along those fearsome "hanging lanes," which, disused for many a year, still survive in a wild jungle condition as samples of the roads

our forefathers traversed. Few were the visitors coming and going; the inaccessibility of the parish was responsible for it becoming a nest of smugglers. White was driven to seek companionship among the fowls of the air

Little change has come over Selborne during the hundred-odd years that have passed since Gilbert White's death. From the entrance to the village on the Alton Road to a hundred yards or so east of the house in which he lived, the change would hardly be perceptible even to his keen eye. The old village-green-" vulgarly called the Plestor," says White-is unaltered, save that the sycamore-tree in the centre has increased in girth with advancing years. Gilbert White's house, too, has enlarged its borders and taken on a slightly modern air, yet it is not so refashioned that its former owner would be in danger of passing it even on the darkest night; many of those cottages in which the curatenaturalist took such excusable pride, remain to shame the twentieth-century spirit with their picturesque harmonies of half timber and thatch; and the church itself is practically unchanged from the aspect it wore on that July day, more than a century ago, when the beloved pastor of this old-world village was carried through its