happiness of his breed depends upon it. The world 

 is theirs to arrange. So they tell themselves. A word 

 or two from me — "Now, then" — and they have all 

 that arranging to do over again. 



Can I trust Mr. Gilbert White with a syllable or 

 two? He keeps his countenance turned toward the 

 wild. Tunes his ear to nature's sounds. On foot or 

 horseback every day, over the parish. 



Hears the inward melody of a black-cap. Titlark 

 as it feeds in a nearby pasture. Notes the songs 

 down. Chamois linings 



to his breeches pockets. 

 Seven pockets to his 

 jacket. Papers in each 

 of them. Sermons, care- 

 folly docketed receipts. 

 Most recent letters. Scraps 

 with dates and birdsongs. 

 Halves of a broken plover egg 

 in pocket. 



Mr. Gilbert White rears the cucumber. 

 Coddles the melon. Improves the polyanth and 

 hyacinth. Wages endless war to keep peaches 

 and nectarines and apricots whole and unblem- 

 ished. Mellow wall fruit. Catches hornets with 

 half-glasses of his own strong-beer. Birdlime on 

 the end of a hazel twig. Treacle in a bottle. A 

 bounty for wasps' nests and the capture of 

 queens. Fifty thousand wasps destroyed in a 

 single summer. Plundering invaders. "Felon 

 race," he calls them. "Worthless souls" — a harsh 

 judgment even from one who loves apricots. 

 Nothing to be done about the humans who steal 

 his wall fruit in the night. 



Sixpence he offers for stories of the bird of 

 many names: goatsucker, churn-owl, fern-owl, 

 eve-jar, puckeridge, Caprimidgus. The Selborne 

 boys deliver. What they saw, where and when. 

 Neighbors, strangers, carry curiosities to him. 

 Young snipe, three snipe's eggs. Common sea-gull 

 still aHve. Barnacle goose shot on a Bramshot pond. 

 Butterflies, land-rail, half-fledged fern-owls. Three- 

 pound trout, tine pike. Hairball from the stomach 

 of a fat ox. Male otter, twenty-one pounds, taken 

 in the rivulet below Priory Longmead. Last of its 

 kind ever fo imd in the parish. 



Mr. Gilbert White visits the farmers to see what 

 carcasses they nail to the ends of their barns. The 

 countryman's museum. Two albino rooks, a 

 peregrine falcon. Takes up the corpses in 

 his Norway-doe gloves. Runs his fingers 

 against the grain of the feathers. Death- 

 clasped feet, sunken eye, flighdess wings. 



Sunday comes and he stands before 

 the village in the stone shade of St. 



Mary's. The Reverend Gilbert White of Selborne 

 in the County of Southampton. Curate for an ab- 

 sentee vicar. Clean white surplice. Plain, unaffect- 

 ed voice, learned accent. A gentle tone for cHmac- 

 tic words. Easter. 



"Let us therefore rejoice," Mr. Gilbert White 

 says, reading from his own handwriting, "& be 

 glad on this day of Christian triumph; for our last 

 & most formidable enemy is now destroyed. All 

 his attempts upon the Captain of our salvation 

 f , were weak &: vain; and all the power 



/iu?n4Zyyt^ t^l/i. ?ne^, of Hell cannot now prevail 

 1^ ^ ^ ^ against them that fight under 



sJAC^ Jau UHiuit^ '^^^^^ t^vl^</t^ his standard." 

 ^ " ^ ^ , Death — the most for- 



ty 66 COtMie^Ca^, ... ^/Cu t;^e^ midable enemy— he says 



lamb who was slain 

 now liveth again," he believes. 

 And so he says aloud to his parishioners. Though 

 on this earth, the lamb who is slain is supper. 



^ met Mr. Gilbert White when he was twen- 

 ^ ty years old. The human year 1740, and I 

 just come to England. Stolen from the ruins I 

 was basking on. Jut of wall that had stood forev- 

 er in sight of the Mediterranean Sea. In earshot 

 of its mild tides. Thrust into a heavy bag by 

 hand unseen. Stowed in darkness. Forgotten. 



Then the wind set up a groaning in the ship's 

 bowel where I lay. Keel rising and falling. Months 

 perhaps, many days and weeks certainly. Plum- 

 meting toward somewhere unsurmisable. Toward 

 England, as it happened. 



Mr. Henry Snooke was the vicar of Ringmer. 

 A churchman, like his nephew, Mr. Gilbert 

 White. Business in the diocese of Chichester — a 

 ballot — took Mr. Henry Snooke down to that 

 sea-town one day. Chance encounter with a 

 drunken sailor. Disconsolate tortoise wrapped in a 

 scrap of soiled huckaback. 



Half a crown swapped hands. One pair rope- 

 chafed, salt-bitten. The other as smooth and white 

 as Mr. Gilbert White's writing paper. I was 

 laid in a covered basket and 

 slung at a servant's side. 

 Free at last from keel- 

 heaving, I think. 



44 



NA ICJRAI HIS I (IKY February 2006 



