The passion for such sport died out slowly and for no clearly
ascertainable reason, as did, in its turn, the taste for art and
theatres and other things.
Sheer satiety, a grain of pity, new
environments - they may all help to explain what was, in its essence, a
molecular change in the brain, driving one to explore new departments of
life.
And now latterly, for some reason equally obscure, the natural history
fancy has revived after lying dormant so long. It may be those three
months spent on the pavements of Florence which incline one's thoughts
to the country and wild things. Social reasons too - a certain weariness
of humanity, and more than weariness; a desire to avoid contact with
creatures Who kill each other so gracelessly and in so doing - for the
killing alone would pass - invoke specially manufactured systems of
ethics and a benevolent God overhead. What has one in common with such
folk?
That may be why I feel disposed to forget mankind and take rambles as of
yore; minded to shoulder a gun and climb trees and collect birds, and
begin, of course, a new series of "field notes." Those old jottings were
conscientiously done and registered sundry things of import to the
naturalist; were they accessible, I should be tempted to extract
therefrom a volume of solid zoological memories in preference to these
travel-pages that register nothing but the crosscurrents of a mind which
tries to see things as they are.
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