But when I looked back, and when, regaining the road, I went on my way, and indeed for long hours after, I saw the boy vaguely, almost like a boy of mist, and was hardly able to recall his features, so faintly had he impressed me; while the spider on {160} her flower, and the small male that wooed and won her many times yet never ventured to take her, were stamped so vividly on my brain, that even if I had wished it I could not have got rid of that persistent image. It made me miserable to think that I had left, thousands of miles away, a world of spiders exceeding in size, variety of shape and beauty and richness of colouring those I found here--surpassing them, too, in the marvellousness of their habits and that ferocity of disposition which is without a parallel in nature. I wished I could drop this burden of years so as to go back to them, to spend half a lifetime in finding out some of their fascinating secrets. Finally, I envied those who in future years will grow up in that green continent, with this passion in their hearts, and have the happiness which I had missed. I, of course, knew that it was but the too vivid and persistent image of that particular creature on which my attention had been fixed which made me regard spiders generally as the most interesting beings in nature--the proper study of mankind, in fact. But it is always so; any new aspect, form, or manifestation of the principle of life, at the moment it comes before the vision and the mind, is, to one who is not a specialist, attractive beyond all others. But, after all is said and done, I have as a fact spent many of my Hampshire days at a distance from the spots I love best, and my subject in this chapter will be of my sojourn in that eastern corner of the county, in the village and parish which all {161} naturalists love, and which many of them know so well. [Sidenote: Visitors to Selborne] It is told in the books that some seventy or eighty years ago an adventurous naturalist journeyed down from London by rough ways to the remote village of Selborne, to see it with his own eyes and describe its condition to the world. The way is not long nor rough in these times, and on every summer day, almost at every hour of the day, strangers from all parts of the country, with not a few from foreign lands, may be seen in the old village street. Of these visitors that come like shadows, so depart, nine in every ten, or possibly nineteen in every twenty, have no real interest in Gilbert White and his work and the village he lived in, but are members of that innumerable tribe of gadders about the land who religiously visit every spot which they are told should be seen.