White s Selborne Today 
noons in the observation of 
a house-martin’s nest build¬ 
ing, and taking infinite 
pains to record the exact 
amount of the rainfall to 
a month. 
The village street is so 
narrow, and Gilbert White’s 
house stretches out to such 
length that it is no easy 
matter to photograph it 
satisfactorily. At any rate, 
I have seen no picture of 
it that portrayed it so com¬ 
pletely and attractively as 
the photograph my friend 
and I took one bright Sun¬ 
day morning and which is 
reproduced here. After¬ 
ward we climbed up the 
steep zigzag path past the 
Wishing Stone to the top 
of the Hanger, the wooded 
hilltop so often mentioned gilbert white’s house at selborne 
in White’s “Natural His- 
church in which he occasionally preached, 
and where his bones have rested since 1793. 
It is possible that the most noted of the long 
line of Selborne curates preached good ser¬ 
mons, but the fancy is persistent that the 
song of a rare bird coming to him through 
an open window in the midst 
of a discourse used to make 
him pause for a word and in¬ 
wardly wish that he could 
hurry the service to a close 
and hasten out into the pleas¬ 
ant churchyard before his 
feathered friend had vacated 
his place in the branches of the 
yew tree at the church door. 
That giant yew must have 
lived through a deal of his¬ 
tory. It is as vigorous now as 
it w'as in the latter part of the 
seventeen hundreds, when 
Gilbert White wrote of it in 
his “Antiquities of Selborne:” 1 
“In the churchyard of this 
village is a yew tree, whose' 
aspect bespeaks it to be of a 
great age ; it seems to have 
“THE LITTLE CHURCH IN WHICH HE OCCASIONALLY PREACHED” i See Letter V, “ Antiquities of Selborne.” 
tory of Selborne,” and through a gap in the 
foliage we secured a view of the whole of this 
metropolis of peace, with its total of some 
thirty houses. We could look down into 
Gilbert White’s orderly garden, and could 
see beyond it the square tower of the little 
