74 



W 



CHAPTER V. 



NEWMARKET IN THE OLDEN TIME. 



**'Tis sixty years since." 



Waverley. 



E were once killing a little time in a circulating 

 library, when we stumbled on the biography 

 of our greatest English entomologist, who died at the 

 age of ninety. Making allowance therefore for in- 

 fancy, he must, to judge from his published senti- 

 ments, have lived for nearly seventy years in an insect 

 world of his own. The lamp of his zeal never waxed 

 dim. A year or two before his death, he was seen 

 trudging forth, with his lantern, into the wood be- 

 hind his parsonage, to learn if the Formica riifa (red 

 ant) really worked or shut up at midnight ; and he 

 was in perfect ecstacies, one afternoon, when he 

 found a golden bug sporting on the window-sill. 

 Half a century before, he had shown equally strong 

 emotions when he discovered something of the same 

 genus, " but new to me," on his stocking, at a little 

 inn in Norfolk. A sociable gig-ramble of a month, 

 which he had undertaken, through some of the east- 

 ern counties, with a friend (after whom he had chris- 

 tened several insects), caused him to be dressing there 

 on that memorable morning, and brought him, on 

 the evening of July 3rd, 1797, to the friendly portals 

 of The Ram at Newmarket, into which Lord Orford 

 had driven his Stag four-in-hand with such hot haste 



