His ultrasensitive ears hear every groaning branch - every "plashy tramp," every "shadowy object of alarm."

AT LAST HE MADE his plashy way back.

He's not the only might-have-been in American poetry, just one of the saddest - his poetic powers were soon lost in "rosy depths" and the "plashy brink."

"Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole", a line from one of Boot's countryside columns, has become a famous comic example of overblown prose style.

'TIS SPRING, AND FEATHER-FOOTED through the plashy fen passes the questing vole.

Down the steep, plashy path they poured all together, the Bhagat and his brothers, down and down till the deer's feet clicked and stumbled on the wall of a threshing-floor, and he snorted because he smelt Man.

It was an heroic spectacle, that of the Reverend Elmer Gantry climbing from the second-story balcony through Sharon's window, tiptoeing across the room, plumping on his knees by her bed, and giving her a large plashy kiss.

Boot is the young author of a regular column on country life for a London newspaper named the Daily Beast; his affected style is typified in the notorious sentence "Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole".

Myriads of white storks, of course, but also, as I am credibly informed, the occasional black stork too, God bless her, a bird that I have never yet beheld, a dweller in the plashy forests of the remotest north.'

In another letter in the same issue we found the poet Anthony Hecht upbraiding the novelist Alison Lurie for failing to notice a light-fingered borrowing by the novelist Peter Ackroyd from the poet Wordsworth about some sentimental mist glittering over some plashy earth.