Where is now the man who will induce me
to lend him such books?
In those days I held a student's ticket at the South Kensington Museum,
an institution I enriched with specimens of rana graeca from near Lake
Stymphalus, and lizards from the Filfla rock, and toads from a volcanic
islet (toads, says Darwin, are not found on volcanic islets), and slugs
from places as far apart as Santorin and the Shetlands and Orkneys,
whither I went in search of Asterolepis and the Great Skua. The last
gift was a seal from the fresh-water lake of Saima in Finland. Who ever
heard of seals living in sweet land-locked waters? This was one of my
happiest discoveries, though the delight of my friend the Curator was
tempered by the fact that this particular specimen happened to be an
immature one, and did not display any pronounced race-characters. I have
early recollections of the rugged face and lovely Scotch accent of Tam
Edwards, the Banffshire naturalist; and much later ones of J. Young,
[24] who gave me a circumstantial account of how he found the first snow
bunting's nest in Sutherlandshire; I recall the Rev. Mathew (? Mathews)
of Gumley, an ardent Leicestershire ornithologist, whose friendship I
gained at a tender age on discovering the nest of a red-legged
partridge, from which I took every one of the thirteen eggs. "Surely six
would have been enough," he said - a remark which struck me as rather
unreasonable, seeing that French partridges were not exactly as common
as linnets. He afterwards showed me his collection of birdskins,
dwelling lovingly, for reasons which I cannot remember, upon that of a
pin-tail duck.
He it was who told me that no collector was worth his salt until he had
learnt to skin his own birds. Fired with enthusiasm, I took lessons in
taxidermy at the earliest possible opportunity - from a grimy old
naturalist in one of the grimiest streets of Manchester, a man who
relieved birds of their jackets in dainty fashion with one hand, the
other having been amputated and replaced by an iron hook. During that
period of initiation into the gentle art, the billiard-room at "The
Weaste," Manchester, was converted every morning, for purposes of study,
into a dissecting-room, a chamber of horrors, a shambles, where headless
trunks and brains and gouged-out eyes of lapwings and other "easy" birds
(I had not yet reached the arduous owl-or-titmouse stage of the
profession) lay about in sanguinary morsels, while the floor was
ankle-deep in feathers, and tables strewn with tweezers, lancets,
arsenical paste, corrosive sublimate and other paraphernalia of the
trade. The butler had to be furiously tipped.
There were large grounds belonging to this estate, fields and woodlands
once green, then blackened with soot, and now cut up into allotments and
built over. Here, ever since men could remember - certainly since the
place had come into the possession of the never-to-be-forgotten Mr.
Edward T. - a kingfisher had dwelt by a little streamlet of artificial
origin which supported a few withered minnows and sticklebacks and dace.
This kingfisher was one of the sights of the domain. Visitors were taken
to see it. The bird, though sometimes coy, was generally on view.
Nevertheless it was an extremely prudent old kingfisher; to my infinite
annoyance, I never succeeded in destroying it. Nor did I even find its
nest, an additional source of grief. Lancashire naturalists may be
interested to know that this bird was still on the spot in the 'eighties
(I have the exact date somewhere [25]) - surely a noteworthy state of
affairs, so near the heart of a smoky town like Manchester.
Later on I learnt to slay kingfishers - the first victim falling to my
gun on a day of rain, as it darted across a field to avoid the windings
of a brook. I also became a specialist at finding their nests. Birds are
so conservative! They are at your mercy, if you care to study their
habits. The golden-crested wren builds a nest which is almost invisible;
once you have mastered the trick, no gold-crest is safe. I am sorry,
now, for all those plundered gold-crests' eggs. And the rarer ones - the
grey shrike, that buzzard of the cliff (the most perilous scramble of
all my life), the crested titmouse, the serin finch on the apple tree,
that first icterine warbler whose five eggs, blotched with purple and
quite unfamiliar at the time, gave me such a thrill of joy that I nearly
lost my foothold on the swerving alder branch - -
At this point, my meditations were suddenly interrupted by a vigorous
grunt or snort; a snort that would have done credit to an enraged tapir.
My friend awoke, refreshed. He rubbed his eyes, and looked round.
"I remember!" he began, sitting up. "I remember everything. Are you
feeling better? I hope so. Yes. Exactly. Where were we? An
injunction - what did you say?"
At it again!
"I said it was the drawback of old people that they never know when they
have had enough of an argument."
"But what is an injunction?"
"How many more times do you wish me to make that clear? Shall I begin
all over again? Have it your way! When you go into Court and ask the
judge to do something to prevent a man from doing something he wants to
do when you do not want him to do it. Like that, more or less."
"So I gather. But I confess I do not see why a man should not do
something he wants to do just because you want him not to do it. You
might as well go into Court and ask the judge to do something to make a
man do something he does not want to do just because you want him to do
it."
"Ah, but he must not, in this case.
