xxviii MEMOIR 



memory enabled him to draw upon, it would have 

 been impossible for him to keep up to date with 

 the outdoor subjects on which he wrote without the 

 opportunities of absence from London, which his 

 school vacations afforded him, and his readers already 

 know to a great extent how these vacations were 

 spent. In the New Forest, he studied the glades 

 around Rufus' Stone, and strove to unravel the 

 mystery of the Red King's death, or drifted with the 

 flood-tide up the Beaulieu river, watching the swans 

 nesting among the pink-flowered thrift on its banks, 

 and the many-hued medusae floating up with the salt 

 tide from the sea. In the Norfolk marshes with the 

 old gunner Barrett, he lay in wait for the flighting 

 geese ; or underneath the tall cliffs of " the Wight," 

 he watched the culver peregrines winging out to the 

 horizon, or the black lines of cormorants coming home 

 to roost. In Berkshire he noted the rise and fall of 

 the dewponds on the downs, and counted the dragon- 

 flies by the old canal, or watched the great chub 

 cruising below the bridge at Clifton Hampden, and 

 the woodpeckers raiding ants' nests in the old camp 

 on Sinodun Hill. 



Together with a brother or a friend he usually took 

 a modest shooting in Berkshire or Suffolk, and latterly 

 he spent some time each year in fishing in the north 

 of England, under the shadow of the Pennine Range. 

 This was a new pleasure to him, and largely in a 

 new country ; but in the words of the friend to 

 whom he was indebted for this fresh interest, " His 

 extraordinary keenness and youthfulness endeared him 



