AUTUMN, 191 2 287 



the stalk with his two paws and began devouring it as 

 if mad with hunger, taking huge bites and working his 

 jaws like a chaff-cutter. 



Sitting upright devouring his mushroom, he looked 

 like a quaint little red man eating a round piece of 

 bread-and-butter twice as broad as himself. Then 

 suddenly, after a few more bites, he dashed the mush- 

 room to the ground as if he hated the taste of it, and 

 scampering off out of the hollow, vanished from sight 

 among the trees. 



With such things as these to be seen, the very thought 

 of work gave me a sensation of weariness and disgust : 

 to sit down to a pile of old note-books, some of them 

 more than a year old, patiently and laboriously to sift 

 out two or three observations worth recording out of 

 every hundred, seemed an intolerable burden, and 

 not worth the candle. Even the sight of a black 

 redstart (with greetings from Holland) and the romps 

 of a fantastic squirrel seemed more to me a hundred 

 times than the sights of a year ago. To go back to 

 such stuff was to leave living, breathing, palpitating 

 nature to finger bundles of old faded photographs 

 and muse on dusty memories. Why then go back ? 

 Why indeed ! Ah ! how easy to ask that question ; 

 how often we ask it and there is no answer but the old 

 one ; because of the eternal desire in us, which must 

 have fretted even the hearts of the men who dwelt 

 in caves ; to reveal, to testify, to point out the path 

 to a new enchanted realm, which we have discovered ; 

 to endeavour to convey to others some faint sense or 



