"His father brought him down from town, a bright-eyed, fair-haired boy of twelve or thirteen, who had no suspicion that I knew all about his iniquities. When his father departed, I had a little of the usual talk with a new boy, about work and games and so on; and then I asked him what he meant to be. 'I mean to be like Livingstone,' he replied. I had seen Livingstone when he came to Cambridge, in 1857, I think, and spoke in the Senate House, appealing for a Universities Mission to Central Africa; so we talked Livingstone and Africa, and Natural History. I soon saw that he had the fire and the modesty of genius and was a delightful creature. "He was quite exemplary as a young member of the House and School, so far as I knew. He was 'late' for chapel sometimes in long summer afternoons; how much late I did not inquire. I guessed what he was about and he did his lines like a man. "He was extraordinarily acute in all his senses--sight, hearing, smell, taste. He asked me, for example, one day to some brook a few miles away to watch kingfishers. We crawled up warily when we got near the spot. He could see exactly what they were catching and carrying, from a distance at which I could only see a bird flying. His power of hearing was also more than acute. One day at our table in hall I told a lady who sat next me that a nightingale had been heard singing in somebody's spinney. We decided to drive down to it after dinner, and on reaching the spot, we found Selous already there, roaming about in the spinney. I called to him, and he came to the edge of the wood. 'What are you doing there?' 'Looking for a nightingale's nest, sir.' 'But why here?' 'I heard you say at dinner that one was singing here.' Now he was sixteen or eighteen feet away, at a different table, and we were fifty in hall, talking and clattering with knives and forks. And yet he heard me distinctly. He could disentangle the voices, and listen to one, as a dog can follow one scent among many. Then as to smell and taste. He told me that when he shot a new bird with his 'tweaker'--you will learn presently what the 'tweaker' was in his case--he always _tasted_ its flesh. "He was extremely accurate in his observation, and in his estimates of distance, size, number, etc.; in fact, he was the most truthful observer I can imagine; free from all exaggeration and egotism, and he retained this simplicity and accuracy and modesty all his life. He was a beautiful runner, a football-player with singular dash and a first-rate swimmer; but he left Rugby at seventeen, I think, so that he did not win any great athletic distinctions at school. "But I must tell you some stories about him.