LIFE OF DR. ROLLESTON. XI 



1 He was very fond of animals and birds, and dissecting them. I 

 once went in to call him for dinner, and the table was spread all 

 over with birds and a foumart (polecat) he had dissected, and he 

 showed me the different parts of the stomach. The white cat was 

 brought up for me to see; he was waiting to dissect it, he said.' 

 Not less significant of his future was his setting up heaps of 

 stones to record the death of a favourite animal or other event. 

 A boy who at eight years old piled up in the plantation a 

 memorial cairn to commemorate his sister's recovery from 

 scarlatina, was well started on the line for an explorer of 

 ancient burial-mounds. George Rolleston had all the love of 

 shooting and fishing of a Yorkshire moorland lad, but in later 

 life his sensitiveness as to giving pain increased from year 

 to year, till he came to look on field sports with horror. 

 He used often to tell how when a boy he once went out 

 shooting with a man-servant, and seeing something move in the 

 hedge he fired at it, when the supposed rabbit dropped into 

 the ditch, and the serving-man remarked it was 'only a boy.' 

 Rolleston threw down his gun in despair, but the man consoled 

 him with, 'Never mind, Master George, there's plenty more in 

 Maltby.' After all, the boy was unhurt, and it was the sports- 

 man's mind that received the shock. 



At ten years old he was sent to the Grammar School at 

 Gainsborough. With pride in this advancement, when his 

 eldest sister, who had taught him writing, now recommended 

 his attending to it, he wrote a reply so characteristic that it 

 has been kept — ' I have now no person to call " upstroke " and 

 " downstroke." I have now such a great deal of writing every 

 day and night, and if it is not written well it is not signed, so 

 that there is no need of that friendly advice.' He stayed about 

 two years at Gainsborough, and afterwards went to the Collegiate 

 School at Sheffield, then under Dr. Jacob. His schoolfellows 

 remember him getting candle ends and sitting up to read at 

 forbidden hours, and sending fags to bring him books as he lay 

 in bed in the early summer mornings. At seventeen he com- 

 peted for an open scholarship at Pembroke College, Oxford, and 



