INTRODUCTION xix 



I feel drawn to them. I should like to offer them 

 cooling drinks. Not that all my midday guests 

 are equally welcome : I could dispense, for instance, 

 with the grey-ringed bee which has just recon- 

 noitred my ear for the third time, and guesses it 

 is a key-hole — she is away just now, but only, I 

 fancy, for clay to stop it up with. There are 

 others also to which I would give their congi if they 

 would take it. But good, bad, or indifferent they 

 give us their company whether we want it or 

 not." 



Eha certainly found company in beasts all his 

 life, and kept the charm of youth about him in 

 consequence to the end. If his lot were cast, as 

 it often was, in lonely places, he kept pets, and 

 made friends besides of many of the members of 

 the tribes on his frontier; if in Bombay city he 

 consoled himself with his aquarium and the museum 

 of the Bombay Natural History Society. When 

 the present writer chummed with him in a flat 

 on the Apollo Bunder in Bombay, he remembers 

 well that aquarium and the Sunday-morning expedi- 

 tions to the malarious ravines at the back of Malabar 

 Hill to search for mosquito larvae to feed its inmates. 

 For at that time Mr. Aitken was investigating 

 the capabilities for the destruction of larvae, of a 

 small surface-feeding fish with an ivory-white spot 

 on the top of its head, which he had found at 

 Vehar in the stream below the bund. It took 

 him some time to identify these particular fishes 



