194 THE BIRD WATCHER 
that it was not till long afterwards that it became 
absorbed into Londogglike the village that you once 
used to live in. Considerations of this kind add 
a charm, I really do believe, even to the character- 
drawing of Jane Austen. We are not so lucky with 
the other—the gunpowder. It is always, I confess, 
a little unpleasant to me to find Mr. Bennet going 
pheasant-shooting. I always wish he hadn’t, such 
an esprit fin as he is. Bingley—or even Darcie—but 
I can’t see Mr. Bennet pheasant-shooting. However, 
those were not the days of battues, and he would 
have worn knee-breeches, not knickerbockers. 
Ravens, however, are very wary, and I hope may 
be able to hold their own in this their last stronghold 
of the British Isles, in spite of all the efforts of their 
unworthy and little-souled persecutors. Things seem 
to me to go very strangely in this world, and only 
satisfactorily to the optimist. In the days when 
Britain was full of birds and animals, before there 
were railways or breechloaders, before there was a 
large population, before the fens were drained or the 
broads crowded, in those days there were no naturalists, 
and now that there are naturalists the materials for 
natural history have disappeared, or are fast disappear- 
ing. Railways, towns, factories, golf-links, breech- 
loading guns, quietude banished, solitude overrun— 
all is over, and the real naturalist is not a man for this 
world. But regrets are useless, so let me on to the 
affairs of state. 
Along the opposite shores of the bay that skirts this 
