1919 ENTOMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 43 



was a regular code of law — an immemorial custom; as soon as a nest was 

 spied, " Bags I first !" came the cry, " second !"' " third !" and so on ; here, bird's 

 nesting was a ruthless pursuit, hardly an egg could escape, and the boys' sharp 

 eyes went everywhere. My brother and I jogged along a much more innocent 

 way, drinking in beauty and pleasure at every turn, and fostering a love of nature 

 that has never left us. That we really were more innocent must have been obvious 

 to the gang of nest-harriers and bird-killers, the bigger boys of the town, who 

 despised us as simpletons and gulled us shamelessly in our chafferings and barters 

 at school. As, for instance, on the flagrant occasion when I was persuaded that a 

 lesser redpoll's egg of mine was only an undersized chaflfinch's and agreed to 

 dicker it for a cock's egg, which I was told was of very rare occurrence, as 

 indeed it is. 



Among the birds familiar even in childhood were three especially that filled 

 us by their cry with a strange sense of mystery; one was the cuckoo whose 

 influence on his boyhood Wordsworth has immortalized ; another was the corn 

 crake or landrail that called from the depths of the meadow grass below our 

 attic window on warm June nights; and the third was the lapwing or crested 

 plover. This last was known to our fraternity as the " peewit " or " peesweep." 

 Like other shore birds, waders and runners (the sandpiper, for instance) this 

 plover has a wonderful instinct for luring enemies away from its brood; when 

 surprised near its nest, it will hobble and flutter and run just ahead of you^ 

 trailing a wing on the ground and holding out various signals of distress till it 

 has coaxed you far from the danger zone; then up it soars with loud cries of 

 triumph or derision; in the air it wheels round and round with calls of alarm; 

 naturally, you hunt beneath this magic circle expecting to find the nest; but its 

 circle is really an eccentric one, a sort of horizontal spiral whose centre is con- 

 tinually shifting; and it is safe to say that the nest is never under these move- 

 ments of the bird, which are simply an ingenious form of camouflage or decoy. 

 Like many of the birds that build little or no nest and breed gregariously, the 

 plover often fails to hatch its young, and addled eggs are not infrequently 

 met with. 



I remember one day when my brother and I had found some of these plovers' 

 eggs by going to and fro through a piece of bare pasture, we happened in with 

 a gang of four or five bigger boys. They too had been hunting for peewits' 

 eggs and had met with considerable success. They hailed us, and we drew 

 together for a spell beside a cattle trough filled with water. One of the older 

 boys asked us if we knew the way to tell fresh eggs from bad ones; on our 

 replying in the negative, he showed us how, as he said, the fresh floated while 

 the bad ones all sank; this was a wonderful discovery to us, and when he added 

 to his kindness by exchanging our eggs that sank for some of his that floated we 

 were overjoyed. As we turned to go, a wave of emotion seemed to overcome 

 him — I suppose he was fairly nauseated with our innocence — he seized one of the 

 freshest of the eggs (for it was floating high on the surface of the trough) and 

 threw it full in my face. I was wearing, I remember, a new cricket cap of 

 bright blue flannel ; the shell of the bomb exploded on the peak of my cap and 

 ] was deluged with the contents of this miniature Chinese stink-pot and very 

 badly gassed. 



One memorable summer when I was eight or nine years old, we went to stay 

 in Kent with some relatives in a large country house with extensive gardens and 

 grounds. All kinds of wonders met us here, in the woods, hyacinths and wonderful 



