THE "WONDERS OF THE SHORE. O 



to .the ghastly woollen caricatures which they had 

 superseded. 



You cannot deny, I say, that there is a fasci- 

 nation in this same Natural History. For do 

 not you, the London merchant, recollect how but 

 last summer your douce and portly head-clerk 

 was seized by two keepers in the act of wander- 

 ing in Epping Forest at dead of night, with a 

 dark lantern, a jar of strange sweet compound, 

 and innumerable pocketsful of pill-boxes ; and 

 found it very difficult to make cither his captors 

 or you believe that he was neither going to burn 

 wheat-ricks, or poison pheasants, but was simply 

 " sugaring the trees for moths," as a blameless 

 entomologist? And when, in self-justification, 

 he took you to his house in Islington, and 

 showed you the glazed and corked drawers full 

 of dflicate insects, which had evidently cost him 

 in the collecting the spare hours of many busy 

 years, and many a pound too, out of his small 

 salary, were you not a little puzzled to make out 

 wliat spell there could be in those "useless" 

 moths, to draw out of his warm bed, twenty 

 miles down the ICastern Counties Kailway, and 

 into the damp forest like a decr-stcaler, a sober 

 white-headed Tim Linkinwater like him, your 



