Cockburn’s rarest and most precious; and it’s the last bottle; and a great many people would have fits if they knew I poured it into fizzy lemonade. But Convolvulus Hawks are rarer even than rare wine, and deserve a proper libation when they appear.”

We drank to the moth ceremonially; then we sat down, and there was a moment’s silence, and suddenly we all three asked questions simultaneously:

“Sir, have you read all the books in this room?”

“Sir, are you really a fisherman as well?”

“Sir, did you play cricket for Somerset?”

Mr. Chorlton poured himself out another glass of port.

“I’ve read most of the books; not quite all; but I’ve still got a few years, I hope, to go on reading. Yes, I am a fisherman, and one day I’ll teach you how to catch chub with a fly. And I did play for Somerset, and fielded against Archie Maclaren’s 424, which as you know is the highest score in county cricket. Look it up in Wisden, and you’ll find out roughly how old I am; if you can do the sum, which is doubtful.”

It was dark before we left. We made Mr. Chorlton show us the caterpillars—which turned out to be Kentish Glories—and then he tied us each a chub-fly out of a starling’s feather and a brown hen’s hackle, and finally we persuaded him to read us the Frogs’ Chorus from Aristophanes which always delighted us with its deep-throated “Brekekoex-koex-koex.” He said good-bye to us, and added:

“Now for an hour I am going to contemplate Sphinx Convolvuli and finish the port.”

“The whole bottle?” asked Donald, full of awe.

“The whole bottle,” he said firmly.

As we went down the drive between the dark rhododendrons Dick put into words what we were all thinking. “He can read a Latin book as if he were reading the paper,” he said, “and Greek as easy as English. And he knows every moth that flies. And he’s a fisherman. And he’s played county cricket. What a mixture of things he can do!”

“And the port,” we said. “Don’t forget the port. He’s going to drink the whole bottle!”

I think we all resolved that when we grew up we’d be like Mr. Chorlton; and it wasn’t a bad resolution, for I’ve never met another man who could so beautifully walk the tightrope between the bios praktikos and the bios theoretikos and get so much pleasure out of the two kinds of life which lie on either side.

A Liberal Education

We had other schoolmasters.

Pistol, Bardolph and Nym were back from the war, unchanged and unreformed. Pistol complained that the damp trenches had touched up his sciatickee, Nym had a new wound, this one in his backside, Bardolph had seen no Germans, for he had spent most of the time in gaol. These three musketeers, to the great alarm of our parents, now took us under their distinguished patronage, and taught us how to set wires for hares, how to caulk a leaking boat, how to cook moorhens on a camp fire, and how to look innocent when we had our pockets full of things which shouldn’t be there. Others contributed their knowledge and experience to make sure that we had a liberal education. A man called Jim Meadows, who was a porter and billposter employed by my uncle’s firm, showed us how to make bird-lime out of boiled holly-bark and, with a decoy, to catch linnets and larks on Brockeridge Common. I don’t know whether the Wild Birds’ Protection Act was in existence at that time; I think it was; but it made no difference to Jim Meadows, who went about openly carrying clap-nets with which he cleverly swept goldfinches off the thistle-heads. He lived in an alley—not Double Alley, but one nearly as bad—where he kept in a home-made aviary canaries, bullfinches, jackdaws, magpies and even owls; he also kept, uncaged, somebody else’s wife.

Old Jim introduced us to the dawn and the dusk, taught us much about walking in the woods at night, about traps and nets and ferrets, and above all about birds. For although he caught and caged them, inflicting great cruelty without even understanding that he was being cruel, he loved birds and knew more about their songs, their nests, and their habits than many naturalists who write books. Jim couldn’t write at all; in my uncle’s office, if it were necessary for him to sign anything, he would explain, “I’m no scholard,” and make a cross on the paper: Jim Meadows, his mark. Yet he made a lot of money, partly out of the canaries, which were famous songsters, and partly out of antique furniture, which he could price more surely than most dealers. Whatever he made he drank; and when he was drunk he would go off and commit an assault upon the pusillanimous husband of his mistress, adding injury to insult.

A professional fisherman called Bassett was another of our holiday schoolmasters. He got well paid by the gentry for taking them out in his boat and showing them the likeliest places for sport, yet he would often sacrifice the chance of earning ten shillings to spend the afternoon with us and to teach us what he knew. He taught us one thing that nobody else could: he taught us to be quiet. Chatter and sudden movement he abominated; he was the stillest person I have ever known, as still as the cat waiting for the mouse, as the stilt-legged heron fishing in the shallows. When he rowed the boat you could not hear the splash of the oars nor the creaking of the rowlocks; whenever he moved his action was slow, calculated and completely silent.