A Last Diary | Page 3

and I believe there is to be found among the latter's still unexamined literary remains a sympathetic sketch of the personality of John Cummings. In his infancy Barbellion nearly died from an attack of pneumonia, and from that early illness, one is inclined to think, his subsequent ill-health originated. He was a puny, undersized child, nervously shy, with a tiny white face and large brown melancholy eyes. He was so frail that he was rather unduly coddled, and was kept at home beyond the age at which the rest of us had been sent to school. I taught him in my father's officestudy to read and write, as well as the rudiments of English history and English literature, and a little Latin. Up to the age of nine, when he started to attend a large private school in the town, he was slow of apprehension, but of an inquiring mind, and he rarely forgot what he had once learnt. He was nearly twelve years old before his faculties began to develop, and they developed rapidly. He revealed an aptitude for mathematics, and a really surprising gift of composition; some of his school essays, both in style and manner, and in the precocity of their thought, might almost have been written by a mature man of letters. The headmaster of the school, who had been a Somersetshire County cricketer, and whose educational outlook was dominated by his sense of the value of sports and games, was a little disconcerted by this strange, shy boy and his queer and precise knowledge of outof-the-way things, but he had the acumen to recognise his abilities and to predict for him a brilliant future. He read all kinds of books, from Kingsley to Carlyle, with an insatiable appetite. It was about this time, too, that he began those long tramps into the countryside, over the hills to watch the staghounds meet, and along the broad river marshes, that provided the beginnings and the foundation of the diary habit, which became in time the very breath of his inner life. He loved the open air, and all that the open air meant. After hours of absence, we knew not where, he would return glowing with happy excitement at some adventure with a friendly fisherman, or at the identification of a rare bird. Even now the wonder of the world was gripping him in its bewitching spell. In later days he expressed its power over him in words such as these, with many variations :
"Like a beautiful and terrible mistress, the world holds me its devoted slave. She flouts me, but I love her still. She is cruel, but still I love her. My love for her is a guilty love for the voluptuous curves of the Devonshire moors, for the bland benignity of the sun smiling alike on the just and on the unjust, for the sea which washes in a beautiful shell or a corpse with the same meditative indifference. "
In these early years, I remember, the diary took the outward form of an old exercise book, neatly labelled and numbered, and it reflected all his observations on nature. The records, some of which were reproduced from time to time in The Zoologist, were valuable not only in their careful exactitude, but for their breadth of suggestion, and that inquiring spirit into the why of things which proved him to be no mere classifier or reporter. They were the outcome of long vigils of concentrated watching. I have known him to stay for two or three hours at a stretch in one tense position, silently noting the torpid movements of half a dozen bats withdrawn from some disused mine and kept for experiments in the little drawing-room that was more like a laboratory than a place to sit in. He probably knew more about North Devon and the wild creatures that inhabited its wide spaces than any living person. Sometimes he was accompanied on his journeys, which occupied most of his spare time and the greater part of the week-ends, by two or three boisterously high-spirited acquaintances of his own age, who, though leagues removed from him in character and outlook, seemed to find a mysterious charm in his companionship, and whose solemn respect for his natural history lore he cunningly made use of by employing them to search for specimens under his guidance and direction.
When he was fourteen years of age his fixed determination to become a naturalist by profession was accepted by all of us as a settled thing. My father, whose income was at this time reduced through illness by about half, generously encouraged him in his ambition by giving him more pocket money than any of his brothers and sisters had received in palmier days, in order that he might add