One morning, while staying at the village, in July 1901, I went at six o'clock for a stroll on the common, and, on going up to the Hanger, noticed a couple of bicycles lying at the foot of the hill; then, half-way up I found the cyclists--two young ladies--resting on the turf by the side of the Zigzag. They were conversing together as I went by, and one having asked some question which I did not hear, the other replied, "Oh no! he lived a very long time ago, and wrote a history of Selborne. About birds and that." To which the other returned, "Oh!" and then they talked of something else. {162} These ladies had probably got up at four o'clock that morning, and ridden several miles to visit the village and go up the Hanger before breakfast. Later in the day they would be at other places where other Hampshire celebrities, big and little, had been born, or had lived or died--Wootton St. Lawrence, Chawton, Steventon, Alresford, Basing, Otterbourne, Buriton, Boldre, and a dozen more; and one, the informed, would say to her uninformed companion, "Oh dear, no; he, or she, lived a long, long time ago, somewhere about the eighteenth century--or perhaps it was the sixteenth--and did something, or wrote fiction, or history, or philosophy, and that." To which the other would intelligently answer, "Oh!" and then they would remount their bicycles, and go on to some other place. [Sidenote: Selborne revisited] Although a large majority of the visitors are of this description, there are others of a different kind--the true pilgrims; and these are mostly naturalists who have been familiar from boyhood with the famous Letters, who love the memory of Gilbert White, and regard the spot where he was born, to which he was so deeply attached, where his ashes lie, as almost a sacred place. It is but natural that some of these, who are the true and only Selbornians, albeit they may not call themselves by a name which has been filched from them, should have given an account of a first visit, their impression of a spot familiar in description but never realised until seen, and of its effect on the mind. But no one, so far as I know, has told of a second or of any subsequent {163} visit. There is a good reason for this, for though the place is in itself beautiful and never loses its charm, it is impossible for anyone to recover the feeling experienced on a first sight. If I, unlike others, write of Selborne revisited, it is not because there is anything fresh to say of an old, vanished emotion, a feeling which forms a singular and delightful experience in the life of many a naturalist, and is thereafter a pleasing memory but nothing more. Selborne is now to me like any other pleasant rural place: in the village street, in the churchyard, by the Lyth and the Bourne, on the Hanger and the Common, I feel that I am In a green and undiscovered ground;