50 THE CANADIAN ENTOMOLOGIST 



scious, except in the first days of early Spring, of the individual notes of colour 

 and music and fragrance that blended in these hours of happy reverie. 



Wherever I went, seemingly, I must first make myself acquainted with 

 any new feature of living Nature that came within my ken, be it insect, bird, or 

 flower, before I could give myself over to the contemplation and enjoyment of 

 earth. But once the new had become the familiar, I was satisfied, and fell back 

 on the old pleasures of memory and association. Thus the first two years of 

 my residence at Oxford kept me busy with the surface fossils of the stone-brash; 

 repeated visits must be made" to Ififiey to see the wonderful fritillaries in bloom, 

 trips taken up the Cherwell at the season of the cowslip, and whole days spent 

 haunting the edge of Wytham Wood for the enthralling song of the nightingale; 

 the same with first days in Buckingham and Worcestershire, in Somerset and 

 Devon. New discoveries brought keen pleasure and delight, but these were as 

 nothing to the ecstasy of revisiting; when the novelties had been caught up 

 in a network of associations, and their beauty enhanced a thousandfold by the 

 host of memories they awakened, all bathed in a subtle atmosphere of emotion. 

 And perhaps of greater value still for the mind in its maturing, were the hours 

 of conscious meditation and reflection on Nature and life, for which all this 

 raw material of observation was, I must believe, an instinctive preparation. 



There comes to most of us in the exuberance of youth, a day when we are 

 impatient of all tradition, and even feel guilty of a certain dishonesty in the 

 placid acceptance of current opinion. I was about sixteen when the eternal 

 riddle of existence first propounded itself to me, and none of the conventional 

 readings brought satisfaction or peace of mind. This was a year after my 

 brother went abroad, the first summer holidays spent in Scotland without his 

 companionship. Our host was always the same, an old army doctor whose 

 acquaintance we had first made shortly before my father's death. He had 

 lectured at Netley, .seen service in India, and returned to his native Scotland 

 on retirement. Bred up a staunch old Presbyterian, and by nature a rigid 

 moralist and strict disciplinarian, he was yet a man of great tolerance, quite 

 free from dogma, and generous in his sympathies; a great reader (though shy 

 of fiction and poetry alike), open-minded and of liberal view, a scholar and a 

 scientist, he was, as you may easily understand, a believ^er in evolution and an 

 ardent disciple of Darwin. 



I cannot enough admire our host's patient forbearance with his two school- 

 boy guests and their sad lack of seriousness. On our first visit to him after 

 settling in the south of England, a prolonged spell of bad weather (coupled in 

 Slyboots' case with a touch of bronchitis) prevented us from going out very much, 

 and we made almost daily raids on the village library for story books. My 

 favorite author was Ballantyne, my brother's was Kingston, but neither of us^ 

 had the remotest idea of how or why his favt)rite author made such a strong 

 appeal to him. I fancy the doctor must have been aching to see us tackle 

 something better worth while, but he nc\-er interfered and apparently even 

 gleaned no small amusement from some of our frequent disputes; for I can still 

 hear his guflfaw over what I fondly imagined a shrewd stroke of mine at the 

 close of a battle royal with Slyboots: "Well! if Slyboots would have it, the 

 reason I liked Ballantyne best was because he gave you more for your money; 

 there were whole chapters at the end of Kingston, and sometimes even in the * 



