168 HAMPSHIRE DAYS 



the artist and seekers after the picturesque, there is 

 much nay, there is more to attract in the northern 

 than in the southern half of the county. I, not of 

 them, go south, and by preference to one spot, because 

 my chief interest and delight is in life life in all its 

 forms, from man who walks erect and smiling looks on 

 heaven to the minutest organic atoms the invisible 

 life. It here comes into my mind that the very 

 smell of the earth, in -which we all delight, the smell 

 which fills the air after rain in summer, and is strong 

 when we turn up a spadeful of fresh mould, which the 

 rustic calls " good," believing, perhaps rightly, that we 

 must smell it every day to be well and live long, is after 

 all an odour given off by a living thing Cladothrix 

 odorifera. Too small for human eyes, which see only 

 objects proportioned to their bigness, so minute, indeed, 

 that millions may inhabit a clod no larger than one's 

 watch, yet are they able to find a passage to us through 

 the other subtler sense ; and from the beginning of our 

 earthly journey even to its end we walk with this odour 

 in our nostrils, and love it, and will perhaps take with 

 us a sweet memory of it into the after-life. 



Life being more than all else to me, I am drawn 

 to the spot where it exists in greatest abundance and 

 variety. 



I remember feeling this passion very strongly one 

 day during this summer of 1902 after looking at a 

 spider. It was an interesting spider, and I found it 

 within a couple of miles of Lyndhurst, of all places; 



