178 HAMPSHIRE DAYS 



forms a singular and delightful experience in the life of 

 many a naturalist, and is thereafter a pleasing memory 

 but nothing more. 



Selborne is now to me like any other pleasant rural 

 place : in the village street, in the churchyard, by the 

 Lyth and the Bourne, on the Hanger and the Common, 

 I feel that I am 



In a green and undiscovered ground ; 



the feeling that the naturalist must or should always ex- 

 perience in all places where nature is, even as Coventry 

 Patmore experienced it in the presence of women. He 

 had paid more than ordinary attention to their ways, 

 and knew that there was yet much to learn. 



How irrecoverable the first feeling is a feeling which 

 may be almost like the sense of an unseen presence, as 

 I have described it in an account of my first visit to 

 Selborne in the concluding chapter in a book on Birds 

 and Man was impressed upon me on the occasion of 

 a second visit two or three years later. There was then 

 no return of the feeling no faintest trace of it. The 

 village was like any other, only more interesting because 

 of several amusing incidents in bird-life which I by 

 chance witnessed when there. Animals in a state of 

 nature do not often move us to mirth, but on this occa- 

 sion I was made to laugh several times. At first it was 

 at an owl at Alton. I arrived there in the evening of a 

 wet, rough day in May 1898, too late to walk the five 

 miles that remained to my destination. After securing 



