248 THE LAND'S END 



This may appear an extreme case : I do not think 

 so : I have conversed about the creatures with too 

 many rustics and country people of all denominations 

 to think it anything out of the common scores and 

 hundreds of rustics all over the country, and if I 

 want to hear something fresh and interesting I go to 

 the boy and not to his stolid father, or hoary-headed 

 less stolid grandfather, who have both pretty well for- 

 gotten all they once knew. 



Of course there are exceptions, especially among 

 gamekeepers, although in a majority of cases their 

 observation is of that baser kind which concerns itself 

 solely with the things that profit. But there is also 

 the nobler kind of observer, the one in a thousand 

 whose keen boyish interest in all living things is not 

 lost when he is called on to take a part in the serious 

 business of life. Ceasing to be a boy he does not 

 put away this boyish thing, this secret delight in 

 nature which others outlive. It is in him like the 

 memory of a first love, the image of a vanished form 

 which endures in the mind to extreme old age and out- 

 lasts and has a lustre beyond all others. It is this 

 surviving feeling of the boy which makes the native 

 naturalist, the man with keen observant eye and 

 retentive memory ; and however illiterate he may be, 

 or unsocial in disposition, or uncouth or repellent in 

 manners, it is always a delight to meet him, to conquer 

 his rudeness or reserve and to listen to the strange 

 experiences garnered in his memory. 



In the chapter on Cornish imagination something 

 was said about the actions of animals, even of those 



