24 BIOGRAPHY. 



most common-place of human beings, and yet no one could 

 be in his company for iive minutes without feeling himself 

 in the presence of no ordinary man. He had no idea that 

 he was doing anything out of the general course of things 

 if he asked a visitor to accompany him to the top of a 

 lofty tree to look at a hawk's nest ; or if he built his 

 stables so that the horses might converse with each other 

 after their work was over, or his kennel so that his 

 hounds should be able to see everything that was going on. 



Even the pigs came in for their share of his kindly 

 thoughtfulness. He used to say that in a wild state, 

 swine were not dirty beasts, but that when they are penned 

 into small sties, as is usually the case, they have no op- 

 portunity of being clean. So he had his sties built of 

 stone, with a stone platform in front, sloping and chan- 

 nelled so as to be easily and thoroughly cleansed, and 

 having a southern aspect so that the pigs might enjoy 

 the beams of that sun which their master loved so much 

 himself. 



On these warm stone slabs they used to lie in a half- 

 dozing state, and Waterton often used to point out the 

 multitudinous wasps that came flying into the sties and 

 picked off the flies from the bodies of the drowsy pigs. 

 If the sties at Tudhoe had been like those at Walton Hall, 

 he would not have issued from them in the highly per- 

 fumed state which he so amusingly describes. See p. 7. 



Some persons thought that his rooted abhorrence of 

 mourning was eccentric. If so, the eccentricity is now 

 shared by many, including myself, who have abandoned 

 on principle the black crape, gloves, hat-bands, mutes, 

 black feathers, black-edged writing paper, and other 

 conventional signs of grief. 



Waterton however carried the principle still further, and 

 could never be induced to wear even a black coat of any 



