THE CANADIAN ENTOMOLOGIST 6 



peccaries, yaks and gnus, and I had already had several very exciting tele a tetes 

 when I spied a heavily built shaggy sort of antelope — like an African wilde- 

 beeste in the centre of a large barred cage, staging intently at me with full, soft, 

 gazelle-like eyes; this gentle, melting gaze drew me to the bars in a kind of 

 fascination, and the llama (so I found it was called) came slowly forward as 

 though to be petted; suddenly, at short range, it spluttered out full in my face a 

 deluge of sour-smelling bread ma§h — having secretly stowed away this am- 

 munition as cud in the top story of its stomach. 



Fortunately, there were no witnesses to this second humiliation and I 

 soon regained my composure. But the rest of the day lives mainly in my memory 

 as a long and dreary succession of disagreeables deepening into horror, in which 

 screeching parrots, chattering apes, and the dumb tragedy of live rabbits fed to 

 coiled staring serpents, figure prominently. On the way home, to cap it all, I 

 had the misfortune to sit down in the railway carriage on my very latest toy, 

 a box of gaily coloured tin ducks and fish that would swim about if you wielded 

 over them the magic wand of a little steel magnet; the glass lid caved in, and 

 two of my aquatic treasures, a green carp and a mandarin drake, met in fatal 

 embrace that reduced them both to a shapeless crumple of painted tin. 



However, that day of disasters had long vanished from the scene, and 

 nothing untoward marred the re-appearance of the Zoo in our boyhood's drama. 

 And when we, later, discovered the South Kensington Museum, this formed 

 an even stronger attraction, and many a happy hour did we spend in that fairy 

 land of Natural History. Two other places we unearthed in London where it 

 was just possible for self-respecting humanity to eke out an existence not wholly 

 miserable. In a dingy street of Camberwell where "Mourning Cloaks" {Vanessa 

 antiopa) had once flown in the fabulous past, we discovered — sole survival of 

 this age of myth — an ancient dealer in butterflies and moths, setting-boards, 

 cork, pins, and nests of little wooden ointment boxes in which to store our 

 captures. Nearer home still, at Heme Hill, under the sooty arch of a railway 

 viaduct stood a fancier's shop with a most extensive assortment of pets, and 

 often after school we would hurry over to make a purchase. 



I don't suppose we had any Quixotic notion of inoculating all London with 

 the serum of rusticity, but we certainly made a most heroic effort to cure our 

 own little suburban corner of all its ailments by a healthy transfusion of country 

 blood; we fairly filled the back yard with white rats, mice, rabbits, Belgian 

 hares, guinea pigs, and pigeons; while in every spare room and corner of the 

 house itself we staked claims for swarms of tiny squatters; caterpillars striped 

 and spotted, smooth, horned and hairy, butterflies and moths, dragonflies, 

 beetles and spiders, were constantly escaping from their glass-lidded confines 

 to disturb the calm of Olympus. We had even in one of the bedrooms an 

 active industry of bird-stufiing and pelt-curing that has long mouldered away 

 in my memory to a confused tangle of wire, cotton-wool, cayenne pepper and 

 scalpels. 



The district of West Dulwich in the early eighties still retained no small 

 tang of the country about its atmosphere. There were traces here and there, 

 within a stone's throw of our house in unoccupied fields, muddy pools, and 

 decrepid old willows, of what had once been a sparkling meadow-brook flowing 

 past the old-fashioned residence of Rosendale Hall, which tradition averred 



