INTRODUCTION 



I FIRST met the author of this book as one of a 

 band of young enthusiasts calling themselves 

 "The Woodlanders," living their week-ends and 

 holidays in a bark hut at Olinda, and hunting wild 

 things very keenly and successfully with a camera; 

 quite content to live close to Nature and to study it 

 without collecting it. Most boys begin an intimate 

 friendship with Nature as collectors, but if the author 

 of this book ever had that failing it was before I met 

 him, and that is so very long ago that there is no need 

 to embarrass either of us over so small a matter of 

 dates. In the social intercourse of the human race 

 the character reader is often of more consequence than 

 the anatomist though each may follow his bent with- 

 out necessarily belittling the researches of the other. 

 Mr. Barrett's standpoint to Nature has ever been a 

 friendly, even a loving one, full of quiet but deep 

 sentiment, which in his younger days he would have 

 been slow to acknowledge, because we all like to be- 

 little our own emotions. It is one of the very widest 

 of our unconvincing fictions. His soft side for 

 Nature was backed by courage and conviction, and 

 where the protection of wild things was concerned 

 no one amongst all the naturalists I have known was so 

 quick to recognize his duty in suppressing and pre- 

 venting wrong, and to do it without any regard at all 

 for personal consequences or convenience, recalling in 

 this something of the Kipling line, "Oh, beware my 

 country, when my country grows polite." His sense 

 of duty, while finding very quiet expression, was con- 

 spicuously strong it was that same sense of duty 

 which induced him, when he had already given 

 hostages to fortune, to put aside all thoughts of per- 

 sonal comfort and preferment and throw in his lot 

 with "the army that never was broken." 



