AND THE REV. R. CHURTON. 215 



LETTER XVIII. 



FROM MR. CHURTON TO GILBERT WHITE. 



Brasen-Nose, Oct. 25, 1789. 

 DEAR SIR, 



THE date of your last and still unanswered letter I am 

 ashamed to mention. However, though I have not written to 

 you, I am glad to hear my friend Miss Reeve has been seeing 

 you. Very learned and, I hope you think, very civil, a 

 knight's eldest daughter with perhaps a thousand pound for 

 every year of her age, or at least half as many. Hendon 

 House near Maidenhead is in a most charming country, and 

 as yet perhaps a non-descript. As you are perfectly acquainted 

 with every quadruped and bird and insect and flower near 

 Selborne and have introduced them to the public and to im- 

 mortality, it will be a pleasant circumstance to vary the scene, 

 and add celebrity to Windsor and its neighbourhood. 



" Methinks I see thee straying on the ' thicket 



And asking every ' bird that roves the sky 



' If ever it have ' seen fair Selborne's down." 



I cannot say but I am interested in this expected migration. 

 I can then whip over to see you often and take a dinner or a 

 bed for a single night and return to college. But Selborne is a 

 long way off. And yet it is worth going a long way to see, 

 if it agrees at all with the account which a very curious and 

 interesting book in my room gives of it. You must know 

 that I am reading this work with great avidity in the very 

 few leisure moments that I can find or steal, and I am only 

 sorry that the Index to a volume containing such a variety of 

 useful and authentic information is not much more copious. 

 If you are acquainted with the writer of this " good book," 

 you may tell him, with my humble service, that I hope to be 

 able to give him some papers that may help in the second 

 edition to remedy this single defect. But it is time to answer 



