December 31.
Reminiscences
For the past few days I have been living in a quiet hermitage of retrospect. My memories have gone back to the times—remote, inaccessible, prehistoric—before ever this Journal was begun, when I myself was but a jelly without form and void—that is, before I had developed any characteristic qualities and above all the dominant one, a passion for Natural History.
One day a school friend, being covetous of certain stamps in my collection, induced me to "swop" them for his collection of birds' eggs which he showed me nestling in the bran at the bottom of a box. He was a cunning boy and thought he had the better of the bargain. He little realised—nor did I—the priceless gift he bestowed when his little fat dirty hands decorated, I remember, with innumerable warts, picked out the eggs and gave them to me. In fact, a smile momentarily crossed his face, he turned his head aside, he spat in happy contemplation of the deal.
I continued eagerly to add to the little collection of Birds' eggs, but for a long time it never occurred to me to go out into the country myself and collect them,—I just swopped, until one day our errand boy, who stuttered, had bandy legs, and walked on the outside of his feet with the gait of an Anthropoid, said to me, "I will sh-how you how to find Birds' n-nests if you like to come out to the w-woods." So one Saturday, when the backyard was cleaned down and the coal boxes filled, he and I started off together to a wood some way down the river bank, where he—my good and beneficent angel—presently showed me a Thrush's nest in the fork of a young Oak tree. Never-to-be-forgotten moment! The sight of those blue speckled eggs lying so unexpectedly, as I climbed up the tree, on the other side of an untidy tangle of dried moss and grass, in a neat little earthenware cup, caused probably the first tremor of real emotion at a beautiful object. The emotion did not last long! In a moment I had stolen the eggs and soon after smashed them—in trying to blow them, schoolboy fashion.
Then, I rapidly became an ardent field naturalist. My delight in Birds and Birds' eggs spread in a benignant infection to every branch of Natural History. I collected Beetles, Butterflies, plants, Birds' wings, Birds' claws, etc. Dr. Gordon Staples in the Boy's Own Paper, taught me how to make a skin, and I got hold of a Mole and then a Squirrel (the latter falling to my prowess with a catapult), stuffed them and set them up in cases which I glazed myself. I even painted in suitable backgrounds, in the one case a mole-hill, looking, I fear, more like a mountain, and in the other, a Fir tree standing at an impossible angle of 45°. Then I read a book on trapping, and tried to catch Hares. Then I read Sir John Lubbock's Ants, Bees and Wasps, and constructed an observation Ants' nest (though the Ants escaped).
In looking back to these days, I am chiefly struck by my extraordinary ignorance of the common objects of the countryside, for although we lived in the far west country, the house, without a garden, was in the middle of the town, and all my seniors were as ignorant as I. Nature Study in the schools did not then exist, I had no benevolent paterfamilias to take me by the hand and point out the common British Birds; for my father's only interest was in politics. I can remember coming home once all agog with a wonderful Bird I had seen—like a tiny Magpie, I said. No one could tell me that it was, of course, only a little Pied Wagtail.
The absence of sympathy or of congenial companionship, however, had absolutely no effect in damping my ardour. As I grew older my egg-collecting companions fell away, some took up the law, or tailoring, or clerking, some entered the Church, while I became yearly more engrossed. In my childhood my enthusiasm lay like a watch-spring, coiled up and hidden inside me, until that Thrush's nest and eggs seized hold of it by the end and pulled it out by degrees in a long silver ribbon. I kept live Bats in our upstairs little-used drawing-room, and Newts and Frogs in pans in the backyard. My mother tolerated these things because I had sufficiently impressed her with the importance to science of the observations which I was making and about to publish. Those on Bats indeed were thought fit to be included in a standard work —Barrett-Hamilton's Mammals of Great Britain and Ireland. The published articles served to bring me into correspondence with other naturalists, and I shall never forget my excitement on receiving for the first time a letter of appreciation. It was from the author of several natural history books, to
"W.N.P. BARBELLION, ESQ.,
Naturalist,
Downstable,"
and illustrated with a delightful sketch of Ring Plovers feeding on the saltings. This letter was carefully pasted into my diary, where it still remains.