xxxii MEMOIR. 
days,' who by their frank love of truth and justice 
have made our name respected from one hemisphere 
to the other. I retain a dear memory of him," he 
concludes, "and grieve to think that so much manly 
spirit has so soon been quenched." 
This manly love of truth here noticed, his zeal 
in action, and energy for work, had marked Frank 
Oates conspicuously from a boy. Life was for him no 
lounge, merely to be dreamed through, but an active, 
burning reality, from which the fruit that the hour 
yielded was to be plucked and harvested. From 
his earliest days, when he watched at springtide the 
coming of the swallow, or lurked in autumn by the 
hedgerow, to note the flocks of redwings as they 
passed — from the time when those authors whom he 
loved had given him his first glimpses into that 
distant realm of nature where his imagination loved 
to wander, and he hoped one day to follow them — 
till the arrival of the period when that desire was at 
length destined to be realized, and he had threaded 
the forests of tropical America, and roamed through 
the thorny wastes of Southern Africa, was he ever 
adding something to his knowledge of nature, some- 
thing to his love of science, or something to his 
appreciation of the beautiful. With him, indeed, 
were no half measures. His interest once fairly 
roused in any subject, he gave to it the strength of 
his whole soul ; a purpose once formed rarely failed 
