“Look, look! There’s lovely hair.”
The boy got up obediently.
“There’s lovely hair,” she repeated, indicating some one passing; “she isn’t good-looking to it, but it is lovely now. Look! isn’t it?”
The boy, I think, agreed before sitting down. What impressed him most was the girl’s frank enthusiasm. She remained standing and looking out. But in a moment something else had pleased her. She beckoned to the boy, still with her eyes on the street, and said,—
“There’s a nice little boy.” As she said this she tapped the glass and smiled animatedly. So in half a minute up came another boy of about the same age as the first, and took a seat at the next table, smiling but not speaking. Only when he had half eaten a cake did he begin to talk casually about what had been passing at school—how an unpopular master had been ragged, but dared not complain, though nobody did any work. The girl listened intently, but when he had done, merely asked,—
“Have you ever been caned?”
“Lots of times,” he answered.
“Have you?” she asked the boy at her own table.
“Once,” he laughed.
“Have you?” she mused. “I haven’t. My mother told them they were to cane me at one school, and they did try once, but I never went back again after.” ... On finishing her lunch, she got up and strode out of the room silently, without a farewell. She was shorter than I had guessed, but more unforgettable than Prince Lee Boo. I put the book away unopened. Even what passes for a good book is troublesome to read after a few days out of doors, and the highest power of most of them is to convey an invitation to sleep. And yet I thought of one writer at Wells, and that was Mr. W. H. Hudson, who has written of it more than once. He says that it is the only city where the green woodpecker is to be heard. It comes into his new book, “Adventures among Birds,” because it was here that he first satisfied his wish to be in a belfry during the bell-ringing and hear “a symphony from the days of the giants, composed (when insane) by a giant Tschaikovsky to be performed on ‘instruments of unknown form’ and gigantic size.” But the book is really all about birds and his journeys in search of them, chiefly in the southern half of England. It is one of his best country books. It is, in fact, the best book entirely about birds that is known to me. The naturalist may hesitate to admit it, though he knows that no such descriptions of birds’ songs and calls are to be found elsewhere, and he cannot deny that no other pages reveal English birds in a wild state so vividly, so happily, so beautifully. Mr. Hudson is in no need of recommendation among naturalists. This particular claim of his is mentioned only in order to impress a class of readers who might confuse him with the fancy dramatic naturalists, and the other class who will appreciate the substantial miracle of a naturalist and an imaginative artist in one and in harmony.