IFlature Motes : 
tTbe Selbovne Society’s flOagasine. 
No. 72. DECEMBER, 1895. Vol. VI. 
AN EPISCOPAL SELBORNIAN. 
O truer Selbornian could there be than the late Bishop 
of Chichester. He has gone from us at ninety-three, to 
the last full of keen and happy life, and young to the 
end, because constant touch with Nature ever renewed 
his youth. Of whom else could it be said that regularly in 
April, up to this very year in which he died, he could hear for 
himself, and discover with unaided ears, the earliest little 
“ chink ” of Gilbert White’s first ocean runner, the chiff-chaff — 
not much louder than the clink of a shilling and half-a-crown — 
aad mark it as the token of spring ? And this was not a final 
accession of the power of hearing, for when he was nearly eighty- 
nine he wrote from Chichester, October 17, 1890 : — “ I heard our 
white owl this evening, to my content, for I feared the bird had 
been shot.” 
But the same mind was still carrying in its wide grasp the 
earliest remembrances of the furthest horizon of youth — natural 
history notes, specially on birds — made before Waterloo, and not 
long after Trafalgar. One of the Bishop’s favourite birds was 
the kingfisher. He remembered, as a Hampshire boy, at Good- 
worth Clatford, how he had set a small glass globe filled with 
goldfish in the open air, for the health of the captive fish, near 
a stream in the garden, and that kingfishers bred there, and that 
as a boy he had watched the young kingfishers fly over and fish, 
and fret the water, not quite able to swallow the fish. He also 
remembered his father. Rev. Richard Durnford, teaching Wil- 
liam Howley — then a Fellow of Winchester College, afterwards 
the Archbishop of Canterbury — who crowned our Queen — how 
to fish with a worm. 
It may be that the nearness of Goodworth Clatford, Hants, 
