INTRODUCTION 195 



cease to sing ; whether they were strict vegetarians or 

 preferred animal food ; when the mistle-thrushes came 

 to the yew-trees ; but his admirations were exhausted, 

 and indignation took their place, when the turkeys were 

 mauling his young laurels, when the bullfinches were 

 destroying his fruit-buds, so that he shot a score in one 

 day, and when he "paid Will Dewey for eight dozen of 

 young sparrows." 



He suffered from animal implume as well as from 

 the feathered tribe. John, a young nephew, scorches and 

 suffocates his cucumbers. The nursery man, Murdoch 

 Middleton, is negligent in executing his orders, supplies 

 him with plants which are wrongly named, pear-trees 

 which are cankered and distempered. The Cantaleupe 

 melon sent to him by the famous Philip Miller, author of 

 the " Gardeners' Dictionary," " though it promised well, 

 was very abominable. The rind was an inch thick and 

 finely embossed, but there was little flesh and less 

 flavour." This fruit, originally imported from Cantaleupe, 

 ten leagues from Rome, was a speciality with Gilbert 

 White, not so much as being of all the melons the 

 most palatable, but chiefly because its successful culture 

 was a chief ambition among gardeners, and required all 

 their care and skill. On his return from Oxford or 

 from visits to friends, he hastens to inspect his beds 

 of Cantaleupes, as a young mother rushes to the nursery 

 after absence, or a schoolboy home for the holidays to 

 his pony in the stable. His anxious interest in the 

 culture of this beautiful and refreshing fruit is con- 

 tinually expressed in his " Kalendar," and here is a quaint 

 illustration of his manifold methods to ensure success 

 in an entry on March 15, 1755: "Carried Mr. Garnier's 

 Cantaleupe seed (being but two years old) in my breeches 

 pocket for six or eight weeks." 



As for the hallucination that in the merrie old times 

 of our ancestors the sun shone always by day and the 

 moon by night, and that storms and tempests were 



