wards I went to Cambridge where he was then an undergraduate and met him, he still put me off with promises, which have never been fulfilled. I was told many years after that his collection was the finest in England, and that some of the most valuable rarities in it were the old Swiss Cantonal stamps from my collection.
In those days there was a man named Knox, usually known as “Cad Knox,” who sold “sock” on the wall, and had a small bird-stuffer's shop in an alley east of the High Street at Eton. From him I took lessons in bird-skinning, at which I afterwards became fairly adept. Starlings were the favourite birds for practice, as they have a tough skin and feathers which are not easily soiled. He would not let us use any plaster of Paris or arsenical soap until the body of the bird was separated from the skin, and as fast as this was done his hungry children seized the body and put it in the frying-pan for their dinner. There was another bird-stuffer named George Hall who had a little shop in Brocas Lane, son of the well-known old waterman Jack Hall, whose engraved portrait is known to many old Etonians of the twenties and thirties of last century.
At that time there was no school library, and as I was very fond of reading I used to go on wet afternoons to Fryalton and Drake’s shop halfway up High Street, where boys were kindly allowed by the proprietor to sit down in the back shop and read any book they found on the shelves. I began to take in Morris’s British Birds, which was then coming out in parts, but as I got to know a little more about birds than most boys of my age I became dissatisfied with it and gave it up.
The only master I was ever “up to” of whom I preserve a kindly recol¬ lection was the Reverend Mr. Stone, a very pleasant man who certainly understood me better than any of the others, some of whom were no doubt very able men according to their knowledge, but seemed to fail to realise that all boys could not be taught the same thing in the same way.
When I left Eton I was sent to the care of the then British Chaplain at Brussels, the Reverend Mr. E. Jenkins, in whose house, in the Rue des Champs Elysées, I passed a year or so in learning French, which I have found of great service on many occasions since; but for some reason my recollections of that period are extremely faint, as they are of the other boys there with me. One thing I do remember is the glorious flute-like note of the Golden Oriole in the garden, and the magnificent tall clean stems of the beech trees in the Foret de Soignies. After a year at Brussels I went to a regular crammer to be prepared for the Army examination. He lived at Surbiton, and was no doubt a very good crammer, but from other points of view anything but a desirable man. Some of the other lads there were rather a rowdy lot, and one of them succeeded in making me drunk on port, which so heartily sickened me of this wine, or indeed of any liquor, that I have never since—not even on a guest night in a Highland regiment, or at the Beefsteak Club at Cambridge, or at a students’ beer supper in Dresden—had a drop more than was good for me.
After passing my examination I had to wait some months before getting my commission, and my father thought it would be a good thing for me to learn German, though I would much rather have gone bird collecting in Scotland. But it was decided that I should go to Dresden, where I spent
