A FORLORN QUEST, ETC. 217 



has since published important works on our snakes 

 and lizards. 



Dr. Gerald Leighton, with whom I had long 

 enjoyed that postal acquaintance which often 

 exists between men interested in natural history, 

 invited me to visit him at Grosmont, near Here- 

 ford, where he then had a practice. I accepted 

 with pleasure and spent many agreeable hours 

 dissecting adders and discussing their life story, 

 and above all the one problem more fascinating 

 than the rest, in his surgery, the walls of which 

 were lined with every stage of adder in pickle- 

 jars, material for the forthcoming book. To the 

 pleasure of reading his letters about scrambles 

 in and out of quarries, firing gorse, digging out 

 mole-runs, kills and escapes, I now added the joy 

 of toiling in his tracks for three blazing days of 

 June, the thermometer at 95 in the sun, the soil 

 brick-hard after a drought that had already lasted 

 three weeks. We plodded all over the beautiful 

 Kentchurch estate, crashing through larch woods 

 and glissading down red rocks. Every likely 

 ingle was examined, every clump of bracken dis- 

 turbed, every pile of timber prodded till not so 

 much as an ant could lie hidden. With all this 

 zeal, we got no adders. The odds against lighting 

 on a particular reptile anywhere in six or eight 

 thousand acres are heavy if you are looking for 

 it. Had a little child gone forth barefooted, it 



