Abstract
IN this dainty little volume, the author affords English readers a most interesting series of glimpses of the charms and passing events of everyday country life in the United States, after the fashion which so many writers have made familiar in England. A close observer o#f nature, and evidently imbued with the spirit that everything has an interest of its own, if looked at in the proper light, the author has hit upon a congenial subject, and treated it in a manner which affords an excellent example of the best style of “nature-teaching.” The scene is laid in a southern county lying to the westward of the Alleghanies and eastward of the Mississippi, nearly midway between the mountains and the river; and whether describing ploughing with mules or oxen, discoursing of the quail, the partridge or the opossum, discussing shooting and fox-hunting or writing on horses, cows and pigs, the author is equally at home and equally interesting. Some of the information given, such as the fact that the Derby is a race for three-year-olds (p. 255) and that female foxes are properly called vixens (p. 305) is perhaps somewhat superfluous, for English readers at any rate; and we rather fail to see why pigs are called cousins of opossums (p. 149).
Next to the Ground; Chronicles of a Country Side.
By Martha McCullock Williams. Pp. xii + 386. (London: Heinemann, 1902.)
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L., R. Next to the Ground; Chronicles of a Country Side . Nature 67, 54–55 (1902). https://doi.org/10.1038/067054c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/067054c0
