.. which he himself
brought up from the stables....
"The boy is such an ass ..." Spalton told me laughingly, "that it's a
veterinarian he needs, not a doctor."
* * * * *
There was Speedwell, the young naturalist ... a queer, stooping, gentle,
shy thing, who talked almost as an idiot would talk till he got on his
favourite topic of bird and beast and flower. In personal appearance he
was a sort of Emerson gone to weed ... he walked about with a quick,
perky, deprecative step....
"--queer fish," John remarked of him, "but, Razorre, you ought to come
on him in the woods ... there he is a different person ... he sits under
a tree till he seems to become part of the vegetation, the landscape ...
when I had him out to camp with me last summer he would go off alone and
stay away till we thought he had got lost, or had walked into a pond, in
his simpleness, and drowned...."
We followed him, and watched him....
There he sat ... in his brown corduroys ... his lock of hair over his
eyes ... that simple, sweet, idiotic expression, like sick sunshine, on
his mouth....
And after a while the birds came down to him ... pecked all around him
... and a squirrel climbed up on his shoulder ... he seemed to have an
attraction for the wild things ... it wasn't as if they just accepted
him as a part of the surroundings .
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