In those days I held a student's ticket at the South Kensington Museum, an institution I enriched with specimens of rana graeca from near Lake Stymphalus, and lizards from the Filfla rock, and toads from a volcanic islet (toads, says Darwin, are not found on volcanic islets), and slugs from places as far apart as Santorin and the Shetlands and Orkneys, whither I went in search of Asterolepis and the Great Skua. The last gift was a seal from the fresh-water lake of Saima in Finland. Who ever heard of seals living in sweet land-locked waters? This was one of my happiest discoveries, though the delight of my friend the Curator was tempered by the fact that this particular specimen happened to be an immature one, and did not display any pronounced race-characters. I have early recollections of the rugged face and lovely Scotch accent of Tam Edwards, the Banffshire naturalist; and much later ones of J. Young, [24] who gave me a circumstantial account of how he found the first snow bunting's nest in Sutherlandshire; I recall the Rev. Mathew (? Mathews) of Gumley, an ardent Leicestershire ornithologist, whose friendship I gained at a tender age on discovering the nest of a red-legged partridge, from which I took every one of the thirteen eggs. "Surely six would have been enough," he said--a remark which struck me as rather unreasonable, seeing that French partridges were not exactly as common as linnets. He afterwards showed me his collection of birdskins, dwelling lovingly, for reasons which I cannot remember, upon that of a pin-tail duck. He it was who told me that no collector was worth his salt until he had learnt to skin his own birds. Fired with enthusiasm, I took lessons in taxidermy at the earliest possible opportunity--from a grimy old naturalist in one of the grimiest streets of Manchester, a man who relieved birds of their jackets in dainty fashion with one hand, the other having been amputated and replaced by an iron hook. During that period of initiation into the gentle art, the billiard-room at "The Weaste," Manchester, was converted every morning, for purposes of study, into a dissecting-room, a chamber of horrors, a shambles, where headless trunks and brains and gouged-out eyes of lapwings and other "easy" birds (I had not yet reached the arduous owl-or-titmouse stage of the profession) lay about in sanguinary morsels, while the floor was ankle-deep in feathers, and tables strewn with tweezers, lancets, arsenical paste, corrosive sublimate and other paraphernalia of the trade. The butler had to be furiously tipped.