4 DAYS STOLEN FOR SPORT 



imitate them so well as to deceive the birds them- 

 selves. The haunts and ways of animals were 

 quite familiar to him and I think he liked to let 

 me learn and share his joys ; and I did so until I, 

 too, became alert to every sound and got some 

 knowledge of its meaning, and thus became a lover 

 of the funny ways of living things. We have not 

 sat outside rabbit holes making noises like turnips 

 to draw their inmates out, as Mark Twain advised 

 an inquirer to do, but I have lain by Pavey's side 

 and heard him imitate the squeal a rabbit makes 

 when the stoat has got it, and watched the stoat 

 come from out the hiding-place to which we had 

 seen him run. When in business attire he was the 

 longest length of animated soot between Porlock 

 and Penzance, and, what is more, he could be 

 warranted not to change much in hue by the 

 severest scrubbing. So swarthy was the natural 

 skin beneath its borrowed coat that even in his 

 sweetest moments, when freed from soot, there 

 was no relief to his long length of blackness, until 

 you saw, high up, his huge red lips and glittering 

 teeth which loudly called attention to the, outwardly, 

 ugliest man I have ever seen. How ugly he was 

 may be gathered from the fact that I once mistook 

 him for the devil. 



I was playing truant from school with Stanbury, 

 and we were bird's-nesting. I, being the younger, 

 had to carry the spoils which were gathered in a 

 firm mud-lined nest. This did not prevent my 

 bending down so as to get a look skywards through 

 the bushes, the more readily to detect a nest. 

 While I was so employed a terrible eye looked 

 down on me from a black and terrible face, and, 



