After all, it is perhaps unfair to say that I had no kindred spirit with me in my investigations. Martha, the servant girl who had been with us for 30 years, loved animals of all sorts and—what was strange in a country girl—she had no fear of handling even such things as Newts and Frogs. My Batrachia often used to escape from their pans in the yard into Martha's kitchen, and, not a bit scandalised, she would sometimes catch one marching across the rug or squeezing underneath a cupboard. "Lor'!" would be her comment as she picked the vagrant up and took it back to its aquarium, "can't 'em travel?" Martha had an eye for character in animals. In the long dynasty of cats we possessed one at length who by association of opposite ideas we called Marmaduke because he ought to have been called Jan Stewer. "A chuff old feller, 'idden 'ee?" Martha used to ask me with pride and love in her eyes. "He purrs in broad Devon," I used to answer. Marmaduke need only wave the tip of his tail to indicate to her his imperative desire to promenade. Martha knew if no one else did that every spring "Pore 'Duke," underneath his fur, used to come out in spots. "'Tiz jus' like a cheel 'e gets a bit spotty as the warm weather cums along." Starlings on the washhouse roof, regularly fed with scraps, were ever her wonder and delight. "Don' 'em let it down, I zay?" In later years, when I was occupied in the top attic, making dissections of various animals that I collected, she would sometimes leave her scrubbing and cleaning in the room below to thrust her head up the attic stairs and enquire, "'Ow be 'ee gettin' on then?" Her unfeigned interest in my anatomical researches gave me real pleasure, and I took delight in arousing her wonder by pointing out and explaining the brain of a Pigeon or the nervous system of a Dog-fish, or a Frog's heart taken out and still beating in the dissecting dish. She, in reply, would add reflections upon her own experiences in preparing meat for dinner—anecdotes about the "maw" of an old Fowl, or the great "pipe" of a Goose. Then, suddenly scurrying downstairs, she would say, "I must be off or I shall be all be'ind like the cow's tail." Now the dignified interest of the average educated man would have chilled me.
By the way, years later, when he was a miner in S. Wales, that historic errand-boy displayed his consciousness of the important role he once played by sending me on a postcard congratulations on my success in the B.M. appointment. It touched me to think he had not forgotten after years of separation.
[1] So it proved. See September 26 et seq.
[2] In "La Recherche de l'Absolu" (Balzac).
[3] See September 3 (next entry), "A Jolt," and September 24 (infra).
[4] The handwriting is painfully laboured, very large across a page and so crooked as to be almost undecipherable in places.
[5] This is from a letter written by the dying Keats in Naples to his friend Brown.
[6] Contrast with it Wordsworth rotting at Rydal Mount or Swinburne at Putney.