INTRODUCTION
“When one preserves one’s senses and faculties and suffers no pain, old age would be no grievance , but for one—yet oh ! that is a heavy calamity—the surviving one's friends.”—Horace Walpole to Horace Mann.
Most of the schoolfellows whom I left at Eton sixty-eight years ago, numbering between eight and nine hundred, must have passed to their rest by this time—many of them having risen to distinction in science or literature, in arms or civil life, in politics or commerce. Among them was Henry John Elwes, whose life-work was at once so varied and so thorough as to win a distinction well-nigh peculiar to himself. Born in that section of society which its detractors denounce as “ the idle rich,” from middle life onward an opulent landowner, he fulfilled Francis Bacon’s ideal of a life of “ leisure without loitering,” travelling far, frequently and adven¬ turously, never without a definite purpose.
My acquaintance with Elwes at Eton was slight. We were in the same school division, but were boarded in different houses. He figures in memory of those far-off days as a handsome, dark-eyed boy, holding somewhat aloof from his schoolfellows and showing no effective interest in games. I have learnt since that he spent much of his play hours rambling by the riverside and in country lanes watching birds. Ornithology was certainly his first love, the earliest of a long series of contributions to the literature of that branch of science being a paper in the Ibis in 1869 on the wildfowl of the Outer Hebrides. Elwes and I had each been entered for a commission in the Scots Fusilier Guards (now the Scots Guards), but whereas he passed the qualifying examination successfully, I failed in- gloriously to do so, and many years passed before we met again. Five years' service with the colours did nothing to abate or divert his keen interest in natural history, and in 1870, perusal of Hooker’s fascinating Himalayan Journals having fired him with a desire to visit India, Elwes carried it into effect with characteristic promptitude. Not only so, but having traversed Sikkim in Hooker’s footsteps to the frontier of forbidden Tibet, on being turned back from the Donkia Pass by the Tibetan frontier guard, he slipped aside to another pass, through which he penetrated as far as the Cholamo Lake, returning thence to Sikkim from the north by the same pass from which he had been turned back on attempting it from the south.
It was during this expedition that Elwes first took serious note of trees and herbs. To his early passion for birds he had already added the study
and collection of Lepidoptera, and his fellow-traveller on this occasion was
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