though I believe that I have never spent an unbroken year in England since I was seventeen. I inherited the love of travel, sport and natural history. My uncle, the late R. Elwes of Congham, Norfolk, author of “A Sketcher's Journey round the World,” was, however, I believe, the only member of my family who has ventured before the public as an author.
In 1854 I was sent to a private school kept by an old-fashioned clergy- man in a beautiful country near Tunbridge Wells. Judging from a picture by Eddis, I was at that time “a pretty boy,” and was much chaffed on arrival at school about my clothes. But though I have no recollections of my studies there, it was a school where boys were encouraged in running about the country in pursuit of birds’ eggs and butterflies, and collecting was to our great pleasure and advantage the fashion.
Our school bounds were very limited and no bird had much chance of making a nest within them without discovery and on the weekly half- holidays we ransacked the surrounding country in search of objects to enrich our collections. The boys of the surrounding villages were called to our aid as well, various dodges being employed by the rival collectors to anticipate the return of some delegate to more distant places than we could reach, so as to have first pick of his plunder. Two of the great objects of our desires were a hawfinch’s nest and a Great Northern Diver’s egg. The former were much scarcer in England then than they seem to be now; the latter could only be obtained by purchase at a price which was almost prohibitive in those days—ten shillings, I think. There was a certain ornithologist named Dunn who then lived at Stromness in the Orkney Islands, who published a catalogue of birds’ eggs, which we studied with as much care and anxiety as any art connoisseur studies a sale list of pictures, to see how many of these northern treasures could possibly be acquired out of an income of a shilling a week.
The eggs were sent by post packed in chip boxes, which sometimes arrived considerably broken, and great was the ingenuity displayed in mending up the broken eggs so that they would present a decent appear¬ ance when bedded in cotton wool. I added largely to my purchases by money paid for catching rats, at the rate of twopence each, and can re¬ member as well as if it was yesterday some of the favourite runs and holes which were specially good places for setting my traps. The best was in a corner of the stable yard where, imitating the device of the beaver trappers in North America, I set my trap below the surface of a pool of liquid manure through which the rats had to pass to get out of the granary.
This reminds me of an. egg sale which took place in London about the year 1866, in which four genuine Great Auks’ eggs, which had been discovered in some old collections, were offered. The value of a Great Auk’s egg was then about £25, and I wrote to my father asking him to let me have the money to buy it. As he refused I never got a Great Auk’s egg, but I know for a fact that one of those very eggs was sold thirty or forty years later at ten times the price. Some years later, however, I was fortunate enough to become the possessor of one of the last pairs of Great Bustard’s eggs, taken on or near my grandfather’s property at Congham, which were given me by the Rev. J. Pitt of Rendcombe, a celebrated character in his time, and a very fine old sportsman who had
