Countrymen's Nature Lore 145 



or a blind-worm, he kills it for looking like an adder, 

 and makes no experiments to discover whether the 

 inference of its poisonousness is justified. Occa- 

 sionally his prejudice makes him slightly ludicrous. 

 There is perhaps some excuse for the conster- 

 nation caused in a potato allotment by the dis- 

 covery of a death's head hawk-moth. The terrific 

 emblem on its thorax appears too expressly signifi- 

 cant to be anything but a direct menace and warning ; 

 and when a large moth of diabolical appearance 

 takes to squeaking, there is no knowing what it 

 will do next. Yet there is no particularly sinister 

 suggestion about most of the hawk-moths' cater- 

 pillars, except their large size and haughtily pur- 

 poseful appearance ; and when a privet-hawk 

 caterpillar that has occasion to cross a gravel path 

 sees the lord of the garden crouching, with spade 

 uplifted to meet its spring, it must surely form a 

 poor impression of humanity. 



Here and there a shepherd or gamekeeper or 

 labourer is found with a natural fondness for live 

 creatures, and gifts of observation which have 

 been well exercised by a lonely outdoor life. Such 

 men have sometimes a wonderfully minute know- 

 ledge of certain aspects of wild life, and have seen 

 some of its rarer and stranger incidents. But, 

 devoid of educated training, the best of them are 

 apt to slide unknowingly from accurate and valuable 

 observation into accounts, not of what they saw, 

 but of what they inferred or imagined. Good 

 observation is closely dependent upon swift infer- 

 ence ; but the discipline of knowledge is required 

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