This manly love of truth here noticed, his zeal in action, and energy for work, had marked Frank Oates conspicuously from a boy. Life was for him no lounge, merely to be dreamed through, but an active, burning reality, from which the fruit that the hour yielded was to be plucked and harvested. From his earliest days, when he watched at springtide the coming of the swallow, or lurked in autumn by the hedgerow, to note the flocks of redwings as they passed--from the time when those authors whom he loved had given him his first glimpses into that distant realm of nature where his imagination loved to wander, and he hoped one day to follow them--till the arrival of the period when that desire was at length destined to be realized, and he had threaded the forests of tropical America, and roamed through the thorny wastes of Southern Africa, was he ever adding something to his knowledge of nature, something to his love of science, or something to his appreciation of the beautiful. With him, indeed, were no half measures. His interest once fairly roused in any subject, he gave to it the strength of his whole soul; a purpose once formed rarely failed in its fulfilment; and such was the elasticity of his temperament that he would turn from one subject to another, each as a mere refreshment from the last. To this was added, in no common measure, a certain freshness and buoyancy of the spirit, which enabled him in a moment to throw off the spell which bound him, and join on occasion in the frolic of the hour. A peculiar brightness characterized his being, and rendered the common incidents of life attractive to him; and should any be found who regard as incongruous the lightness of spirit which occasionally manifests itself even in the ensuing pages, in connexion with more serious subjects, such ones may read with interest the following extract from the writings of the late Charles Kingsley, with reference to this very tendency, as manifested in another posthumous author, whose book was edited by a friend. “With a reverence for the dead,” he says, “which will at once be understood and honoured, he [the editor] has refrained, perhaps here and there too scrupulously, from altering a single word of the documents as he found them, respecting even certain scraps of Cambridge and Winchester slang, which may possibly offend that class of readers who fancy that the sign of magnanimity is to take everything _au grand sérieux_, and that the world’s work must needs be done upon stilts; but which will be, perhaps, to the more thoughtful reader only additional notes of power, of that true English ‘Lebensglückseligkeit,’ as the German calls it, which makes a jest of danger and an amusement of toil. Jean Paul makes somewhere the startling assertion that no man really believes his religious creed unless he can afford to jest about it. Without going so far as that, I will say boldly,” adds the writer, “that no man feels himself