THiE CANADIAN ENTOMOLOGIST 197 



ihere can be none of the rich content of human thou^^ht and the depth of human 

 emotion behind those warblings ; yet as we listen the heart aches with infinite 

 yearning, we are under the spell of enchantment and it sways our whole being. 

 It is recorded somewhere how Shelley was rudely awakened from a dream of 

 love once by the sight of his inamorata's healthy zest over a mutton chop ; he 

 would have had the same revulsion of feeling in a Cambridge lane with me while 

 listening to the Nightingale on a sunny day oi June ; in the very midst of one 

 of its divinest passages, its throat feathers stirring to the liquid melody, the 

 bird stopped short and darted down to gobble a big grub, like the greediest 

 fowl on wings — a prima donna ^nd a glutton ! 



Soon after this trip to High Park. I went to spend the summer on Centre 

 Island with some city friends, and at the close of the year was appointed to the 

 staff of the Smith's Falls High School, on the Rideau River, some fifty miles 

 south of Ottawa. 



This was my first year in a country district and I hugely enjoyed meet- 

 ing the natural conditions of an Ontario winter. Many a time as children in 

 Scotland we had battled our way to school through blizzards of snow, had 

 eagerly consulted the glass to see if "the black frost" was going to make the 

 ponds bear, and one winter had twice seen with bulging eye's the mercury fall 

 below zero. Sledges and skates had long vanished away, but again and again 

 I found the experiences of this first real winter in Canada send my thoughts hark- 

 ing back over fifteen years and more to the Perthshire home. 



It may have been this that made me more than usually homesick on the 

 approach of Spring. I hungered for the sight of English hedgerows with sweet 

 violets, primroses, hyacinths and half a hundred other familiar sights. I had 

 forgotten for the moment all the novelties that had come in their stead, and 

 this nostalgia lasted on all through the dreary days of March and early April, 

 when nothing seems to be alive, and all the highways and byways stick up their 

 effective "No Trespass" sign, daubed in inches of mud and slush. Another 

 torture of Tantalus that aggravated my hunger later on was to be sent on some 

 wild goose chase of eager anticipation, as when I was told of a bed of cowslips 

 and found marsh marigolds, honeysuckle that proved to be columbine. Yellow- 

 hammers that were Flickers ; I had even a childish disappointment over the 

 "Daddy-long-legs" when it turned oar a spider instead of a crane-fly. 



Our school had only three assistants, and it was practically Hobson's 

 choice for companionship ; the only man on the staff besides myself was the 

 teacher of Science, and we had already fallen into the daily habit of walks to- 

 gether long before the winter ended. 



The course of work for Science then in the Junior School was almost 

 entirely Botany, and I watched with considerable interest his preparations for 

 identifying flowers, an art till then wholly unintelligible to me. Half in a spirit 

 of fun I rigged myself out willi a little linen-tester for a magnifying-glass. a pair 

 of small needles sunk over head and ears (if they had them) in the pith core of 

 a lilac twig, and a copy of Spotton's High School Botany; in three days I had 

 outstripped even the most eager of his pupils ; in a week the jest was deadly 

 earnest, and in a month the zealot became a hopeless monomaniac. I still 

 hated to pick the flowers to pieces, and the tedium of working out some of the 



