198 BRITISH BIRDS. 



going straight to his point ; it was a bare list of names 

 he wanted — no notes. Those might come after, if re- 

 quired to amplify the record. 



For five-and-thirty years the friendship so begmi grew 

 and ripened, and not a year but carries pleasant memories 

 — memories of his infinite good nature, of sound, clear 

 yiews, counsel and advice, of self-sacrifice where needed ; 

 in a word, of true friendship. Howard Saunders was, 

 before everything, a man of the world in the best sense. 

 He realized the age in which he lived, and, after that, two 

 attributes in him always struck me as remarkable — I 

 refer to method and memorj^. These qualities are no 

 mere natural inheritance as some may suppose. The 

 aptitude, of course, in greater or less degree, is innate. 

 The finished j)roduct, such as his, has been acquired solely 

 by mental and personal effort and no small perseverance ; 

 without that, it is not too much to say that his life's work 

 €Ould never have attained that high level we all recognize 

 and admire. 



Howard Saunders was a worker : he performed prodigies, 

 yet without " fussiness " or display. In his hundreds of 

 letters to me those stereotyped jjhrases " in haste " or 

 " written against time " find no place. To possess time 

 enough for all its manifold uses means method. Those 

 who saw in j)i*ogress the MS. of, say, his " Manual " 

 — those acres of paper covered with pasted slips, dotted 

 with notes, corrections, contradictions and excisions ; 

 illegible with transpositions, interpolations, questions and 

 references — a maddening labyrinth of detail — will yet 

 remember how, in the midst of it all, he could always 

 spare an hour for a friend, given ungrudgingly and without 

 a suspicion of interrupted trains of thought. 



Again, as to memory : to such perfection had that 

 faculty been brought that his brain became literally a 

 compendium of precise science, a living encyclopaedia, and 

 that by no means confined to ornithology. Hardly a 

 subject, scientific or other, but had its allotted pigeon- 

 hole within that spacious storage. Thus, at a recent 



