THE FLANNEL-SHIRT LIFE In _The Story of My Heart_ Richard Jefferies begins his enchanting pages with the expression of that desire which every son of Adam feels at times--the longing for wild, unartificial life.

"My heart," he says, "was dusty, parched for want of the rain of deep feeling; my mind arid and dry, for there is a dust which settles on the heart as well as that which falls on a ledge....

A species of thick clothing slowly grows about the mind, the pores are choked, little habits become part of existence, and by degrees the mind is inclosed in a husk." Then he goes on to tell of a hill to which he resorted at such moments of intellectual depression, and of the sensations that thrilled him as he moved up the sweet short turf.

The very light of the sun, he says, was whiter and more brilliant there, and standing on the summit his jaded heart revived, and "obtained a wider horizon of feeling." Thoreau, too, went to the woods because he wanted to live deliberately, and front only the essential facts of life.

"I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms." This longing for a return to nature in minds less imaginative than Thoreau's and Jefferies' results in globe-trotting or colonisation--according to circumstances,--it wakes the gipsy in our blood, be we gentle or simple, and sends us wandering over the waste places of the earth in quest of glory, adventure, or a gold mine--anything so long as it entails wandering.