284 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS 



some yards away, and, dashing at it, he tore it 

 violently from the stalk with his two paws and began 

 devouring it as if mad with hunger, taking huge bites 

 and working his jaws like a chaff-cutter. 



Sitting upright devouring his mushroom, he looked 

 like a quaint little red man eating a round piece of 

 bread-and-butter twice as broad as himself. Then 

 suddenly, after a few more bites, he dashed the 

 mushroom to the ground as if he hated the taste of 

 it, and scampering off out of the hollow, vanished 

 from sight among the trees. 



With such things as these to be seen, the very 

 thought of work gave me a sensation of weariness and 

 disgust: to sit down to a pile of old note-books, 

 some of them more than a year old, patiently and 

 laboriously to sift out two or three observations 

 worth recording out of every hundred, seemed an 

 intolerable burden, and not worth the candle. Even 

 the sight of a black redstart (with greetings from 

 Holland) and the romps of a fantastic squirrel seemed 

 more to me a hundred times than the sights of a 

 year ago. To go back to such stuff was to leave living, 

 breathing, palpitating nature to finger bundles of 

 old faded photographs and muse on dusty memories. 

 Why then go back? Why indeed! Ah! how easy 

 to ask that question; how often we ask it and there 

 is no answer but the old one; because of the eternal 

 desire in us, which must have fretted even the hearts 

 of the men who dwelt in caves; to reveal, to testify, 

 to point out the path to a new enchanted realm 

 which we have discovered; to endeavour to convey 



