4 SIR WILLIAM FLOWER CHAP. 



in my second year of studentship the curatorship falling vacant, I 

 was asked to undertake the office. Here I was in my glory, and 

 although later on the more practical work of the surgical profession 

 had its attractions also, attractions which at one time nearly 

 carried me off into the stream of London hospital practice, I 

 finally returned to the old love, and, through a succession of 

 fortunate incidents, the museum under my care, instead of the one 

 little box with which I began, is now the largest, most complete 

 and magnificently housed in the world. 



One of the first specimens I possessed was a little stuffed bird 

 with a brown back and white underneath and a very short tail. I 

 saw it in the window of a pawnbroker's shop in my native town, 

 Stratford-on-Avon. I often passed the shop and looked at it with 

 wonder and admiration. At last I summoned up courage to ask 

 the price. "Threepence," was the answer. This was a serious 

 consideration ; but the financial difficulty being overcome, I 

 carried the bird home in triumph. Having access to a copy of 

 Bewick's British Birds, I identified it as the dipper or water-ousel, 

 and even learnt its scientific name, Cinclus aquaticns. It was 

 wretchedly stuffed. Though more than fifty years have passed 

 since I saw it last, for during an absence at school it, with many 

 other treasures, fell into places where " moth and rust do corrupt," 

 its appearance is still fixed in my mind's eye, with its hollow back 

 and crooked legs sticking out of impossible parts of its body. 

 That bird became part of my permanent stock of ornithological 

 knowledge, and ever since, whether by a mountain stream in the 

 Highlands of Scotland, or a rocky river in the Harz or Thuringian 

 Forests in Germany, when I see a dipper flitting over the rushing 

 water or diving beneath the surface, it seems an old familiar friend 

 of my childhood. 



We get an interesting glimpse of him as a boy 

 in an undated letter from his aunt, Amelia Greaves, 

 to her sister, Mrs. E. F. Flower : 



MY DEAR CELINA I only write to tell you of the admiration 

 which William gained yesterday. I assure you I felt very proud of 



