lf no better loves
The field where she was bred,
Than I the habit of these groves,
My own inherited.

I know my quarries every one,
The meuse where she sits low;
The road she chose to-day was run
A hundred years ago.

The lags, the gills, the forest ways;
The hedgerows one and all,
These are the kingdoms of my chase,
And bounded by my wall.

Nor has the world a better thing,
Though one should search it round,
Than thus to live one's own sole king,
Upon one's own sole ground.

I like the hunting of the hare;
It brings me day by day,
The memory of old days as fair,
With dead men past away.

To these, as homeward still I ply,
And pass the churchyard gate,
Where all are laid as I must lie,
I stop and raise my hat.

I like the hunting of the hare;
New sports I hold in scorn.
I like to be as my fathers were,
In the days e'er I was born.

[Sidenote: THE ROWFANT BOOKS]

We are indeed just now in a bookish and poetical district, for a little
more than a mile to the east of Crabbet, in a beautiful Tudor house in a
hollow close to the station, lived Frederick Locker-Lampson, the London
lyricist; and here are treasured the famous Rowfant books and
manuscripts which he brought together--the subject of graceful verses
by many of his friends. Not the least charming of these tributes
(printed in the _Rowfant Catalogue_ in 1886) are Mr. Andrew Lang's
lines:

TO F. L.

I mind that Forest Shepherd's saw,
For, when men preached of Heaven, quoth he;
"It's a' that's bricht, and a' that's braw,
But Bourhope's guid eneuch for me!"

Beneath the green deep-bosomed hills
That guard Saint Mary's Loch it lies,
The silence of the pasture fills
That shepherd's homely paradise.

Enough for him his mountain lake,
His glen the hern went singing through,
And Rowfant, when the thrushes wake,
May well seem good enough for YOU.

For all is old, and tried, and dear,
And all is fair, and round about
The brook that murmurs from the mere
Is dimpled with the rising trout.

But when the skies of shorter days
Are dark and all the "ways are mire,"
How bright upon your books the blaze
Gleams from the cheerful study fire.

On