126 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 



little interference from man, who is apt in his ignorance to shoot the 

 policeman under the belief that he is killing the thief. The owls and 

 kestrels which prey upon mice, the numerous birds which feed upon 

 insects and grubs, would long ago have been exterminated, if the 

 power of past generations of farmers had been equal to their folly, 

 and just when they congratulated themselves that they had secured 

 their crops, the whole would have vanished like the verdure of 

 Egypt under the inroad of locusts. Nothing has done so much to 

 propagate sounder opinions as the essays and example of Waterton. 

 The inside of Walton Hall, like the outside, told you at once that 

 you were in the home of a naturalist. Along the bannister-side of 

 the stair-case were cases of stuffed birds, and on the wall side hung 

 pictures, one of them a painting by Captain Jones, a school-fellow of 

 Waterton, and representing the cayman dragged along the sandy 

 bank of the Essequibo with the Wanderer on its back. At the head 

 of the stair-case was an open room, called the organ gallery, which 

 was rilled with stuffed animals and pictures, and continued the array 

 of art and nature which faced each other on the stair-case. Here, 

 too, was a clock, three hundred years old, which had belonged to Sir 

 Thomas More, and which struck the hours so clearly that when the 

 windows were open it could be heard on the edge of the lake. 

 Nearly all the creatures with which we become familiar in the de- 

 lightful pages of the Wanderings were represented in the Walton 

 Hall Museum. There you might gaze at the splendid jacamars, 

 refulgent in gold and metallic green, the milk-white campanero, or 

 bell-bird, whose romantic toll will cheer the traveller in its native 

 forests at a distance of three miles, the beautiful hou-tou, so called 

 from the sound of its plaintive note, the toucans with their bright 

 coloured and enormous beaks, the gorgeous cotingas, and many other 

 glories of the tropics. Mixed up with the genuine specimens was 

 Waterton's taxidermic frolic, the nondescript, and a creature he 

 called Noctifer, or the spirit of the dark ages, which was made of the 

 gorget and legs of a bittern, and the head and wings of an eagle owl, 

 so skilfully blended that no one but an ornithologist could have de- 

 tected the playful imposition. The whole of the collection had been 

 prepared by the hands of its owner, and every animal was in an atti- 

 tude true to life, and the best for displaying its beauties of form and 



