42 THE EEPOET OF THE No. 36 



Certainly, not even the Siamese twins were more inseparable; we even slept 

 together, in a little attic at the end of a long passage off the kitchen staircase. 



Our partnership had not long been formed before we were sent to attend an 

 institution in the town called " Morrison's Academy." Here we took an active 

 part in the school games and made many friends and acquaintances. These 

 Avere always boys who loved country life, and though none of them ever drew 

 so close to David and Jonathan as to come between us, it often meant that three 

 or even four of us would start out together for a holiday tramp. 



Whenever I ponder over this community life of a boys'' school, I am filled 

 with wonder at the vast mass of tradition preserved in such a place. It offers 

 a good illustration of the close analogy between children and savages; an immense 

 lore is handed down unconsciously by bigger boys to the small fry from one 

 generation to another. A great deal of this knowledge is forgotten by the in- 

 dividuals as they grow up, but it still survives in the schoolboy community. If as 

 old men we could go back like Mr. Bultitude in '' Vice Versa " to our school 

 days we should be reminded of a thousand facts and fancies, primitive beliefs 

 and superstitions, that the young barbarians of to-day have inherited by unbroken 

 tradition from us boys of fifty years ago. 



Local names (and even book names) for flowers and insects of wayside and 

 wood, for beasts of the field and fowls of the air; original remarks, shrewd observa- 

 tions and quaint reasonings about their appearance, their habits, their haunts; 

 all these form a common stock of ideas, food for conversation and thought as 

 well as a basis for action, among hundreds of school boys more or less guiltless of 

 the three E's of Beading, Eiting and 'Eithmetic. 



" Slyboots " and I fell heirs at an early age to' a collection of birds' eggs 

 made by our elder brothers when they were at school at Glen Almond. This 

 Avas quite an extensive collection, ranging in size from a swan's to a golden crested 

 wren's (gold-crowned kinglet's) ; it represented not only most of our inland birds 

 of Perthshire from game birds and birds of prey to the sparrows and warblers, 

 but sea birds like guillemots, razorbills, herring-gulls, curlews, sea-mews and terns. 



Largely through our big brothers' kind offices we soon learned to associate 

 every egg with the name of the bird that laid it; then we made it our daily 

 business to recognize every bird we saw in the countryside by its plumage, flight, 

 song, habits and haunts ; we even ferreted out, in the home of a companion, a 

 large work in several volumes on Birds, British and Foreign; we used to pore over 

 its pages, especially the colored illustrations, till we knew the appearance of many 

 birds, even hawks, ducks, and seagulls, far beyond the ken of our county. (120 

 birds' names.) 



We were very tender-hearted for boys, and largely eschewed the society of 

 the rough and tumble urchins who robbed birds' nests. A golden rule impressed 

 on us almost from infancy was never to take more than one or two eggs at most 

 from a nest, and always to leave at least half the clutch, or the birds would 

 desert; indeed, we rarely took eggs at all, if we had any others of the same kind 

 already. My- recollection of the neighborhood is that, among the grown-ups at 

 least, bird life was greatly respected. I well remember once with what a thrill 

 of dread it struck me while bending over a " mossie cheeper's " nest by the 

 roadside, to hear a cottager call out as she passed " Eh, laddie, ye'll never thrive, 

 harrying the birds' nests !" 



It was certainly a good thing that we had only one collection between us 

 and seldom went in company on these excursions. For with the crowd there 



