Of course there are exceptions, especially among gamekeepers, although in a majority of cases their observation is of that baser kind which concerns itself solely with the things that profit. But there is also the nobler kind of observer, the one in a thousand whose keen boyish interest in all living things is not lost when he is called on to take a part in the serious business of life. Ceasing to be a boy he does not put away this boyish thing, this secret delight in nature which others outlive. It is in him like the memory of a first love, the image of a vanished form which endures in the mind to extreme old age and outlasts and has a lustre beyond all others. It is this surviving feeling of the boy which makes the native naturalist, the man with keen observant eye and retentive memory; and however illiterate he may be, or unsocial in disposition, or uncouth or repellent in manners, it is always a delight to meet him, to conquer his rudeness or reserve and to listen to the strange experiences garnered in his memory.
In the chapter on Cornish imagination something was said about the actions of animals, even of those we are most familiar with, which come as a great surprise, and I gave an account of one--an incident I witnessed of a rock-pipit which, caught by a violent gust of wind just at the moment when its wings being set for the gliding descent to earth could not be used to resist the current, was blown away into the midst of a band of hovering herring gulls and very nearly lost its life. One knows that one will never witness just such an incident again, but there will be others equally unexpected and strange for the watcher. In the course of this book I have related a few: one of a gannet falling from a great height like a stone into the sea just by the side of a herring gull floating on the surface, and one of a fox, standing like a carved figure on a big rock, savagely attacked by a raven and refusing to be driven from its stand.
Here I cannot resist the temptation to introduce an incident of this kind, but far more wonderful than any one I have related in this or any other book, which was witnessed not by a naturalist but an artist, my friend Mr. R. H. Carter, of the Land's End. He was with his friend, the late Rev. F. C. Jackson, Rector of Stanmore, who used to take his holidays in West Cornwall and was himself something of an artist. They were sketching one day on the huge cliffs of Tol-Pedn-Penwith, near the Land's End, when Mr. Carter noticed that some animal had been recently scratching the earth at the foot of a huge pile of rocks near where he was sitting. There was a large hollow place under the rock into which one could see, as there was an opening on a level with the ground on one side, and it struck him that a badger had taken refuge in this cavity, and had been obliged to scratch a little earth away to squeeze his body in. He called his companion's attention to it, and getting down on the turf and lying flat so as to bring their eyes on to a level with the floor they gazed into the cavity. They could see no animal, but the light was dim inside, and Mr. Jackson proceeded to twist up half a dozen wax matches into a small compact ball, which he lighted and then carefully pushed in right to the middle of the hollow space. The burning wax made a good light, but still they could see no creature, only at one side, a foot or so from the light, there was a dark patch which they could not make out; it was, they imagined, a hole in the rock which showed black. Presently, as they gazed in, still trying to penetrate into that dark hole with their sight, a paw was seen to emerge and move towards the light until the whole foreleg of a badger was revealed; then the paw scraped up a little loose soil from the floor and carefully drew or jerked it over the burning ball of wax and put the light out.