CHAPTER VII 

 A VILLAGE IN HAMPSHIRE 



DR. McTAGGART, in an essay on inunortality, main- 

 tained that the mind is a kind of natural sieve. 

 When we set out from the terminus of this world at 

 the end of our lives, we retain or ought to retain as our 

 luggage only the true essentials of our individual know- 

 ledge and experience. They are our ticket as well as 

 our luggage, and will carry us into a country of new 

 knowledge and new experience just so far as our book- 

 ing allows. Not being the authority on future worlds, 

 which many others claim to be nowadays, I do not 

 pretend to apply the simile to any other worlds but 

 this one, and more narrowly in this chapter to that 

 particular North Hampshire village which I have visited 

 many times in spring, summer and autumn. 



I remember a casual remark of Mr. Hudson's to the 

 effect that unless birds are seen emotionally, the mental 

 image of them cannot be retained. Thus, when we 

 see birds at their very best, our emotions respond to 

 them the more eagerly, and the image we carry away 

 is the more vividly stamped. These investments of the 

 backward-looking mind among the most solid securities 

 — solid because they are the most enduring, and the 

 most enduring because certain selected circumstances 

 have been unusually favourable to them — remain as 

 sound and bright as heretofore, as others have been 

 (to mix metaphors) moulted off. I shall write this 

 chapter, then, upon the theme of " birds at their best." ' 



1 Birds, of course, are usually at their best — ^physiological as 

 well as mental and aesthetic — in the spring, with its nuptial flights 

 and dances, its devotion and parental care, and so on. But I am 

 taking a more personal point of view. 



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