That Pacified Her, And I Took Down The Old Skull, Which Looked More Dreadful Than Ever When I Climbed Up To It, For Though The Dome Of It Was Bleached White, The Huge Eye Cavities And Mouth Were Black And Filled With Old Black Mould And Dead Moss.

Doubtless it had been very many years in that place, as the long nails used in fastening it there were eaten up with rust.

When I got back to London the box with the skull in it was put away in my book-room, and rested there forgotten for two or three years. Then one day I was talking on natural history subjects to my publisher, and he told me that his son, just returned from Oxford, had developed a keen interest in osteology and was making a collection of mammalian skulls from the whale and elephant and hippopotamus to the harvest- mouse and lesser shrew. This reminded me of the long-forgotten skull, and I told him I had something to send him for his boy's collection, but before sending it I would find out what it was. Accordingly I sent the skull to Mr. Frank E. Beddard, the prosector of the Zoological Society, asking him to tell me what it was. His reply was that it was the skull of an adult gorilla - a fine large specimen.

It was then sent on to the young collector of skulls - who will, alas! collect no more, having now given his life to his country. It saddened me a little to part with it, certainly not because it was a pretty object to possess, but only because that bleached dome beneath which brains were once housed, and those huge black cavities which were once the windows of a strange soul, and that mouth that once had a fleshy tongue that youled and clicked in an unknown language could not tell me its own life-and-death history from the time of its birth in the African forest to its final translation to a wall over a stable door in an old house near London.

There are now several writers on animals who are not exactly naturalists, nor yet mere fictionists, but who, to a considerable knowledge of animal psychology and extraordinary sympathy with all wildness, unite an imaginative insight which reveals to them much of the inner, the mind life of brutes. No doubt the greatest of these is Charles Roberts, the Canadian, and I only wish it had been he who had discovered the old gorilla skull above the stable door, and that the incident had fired the creative brain which gave us Red Fox and many another wonderful biography.

Now here is an odd coincidence. After writing the skull story it came into my head to relate it to a lady I was dining with, and I also told her of my intention of putting it in this book of Little Things. She said it was funny that she too had a story of a skull which she had thought of telling in her volume of Little Things; but no, she would not venture to do so, although it was a better story than mine.

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