There was
one golden Saturday when we missed the rendezvous at Pinner and
had a picnic by ourselves instead; and, after that, many other
golden Saturdays when some unaccountable accident separated us
from the party. I remember particularly a day in Highgate Woods--
a good place for losing a botanical lecturer in; if you had been
there, you would have seen two little boys very content, lying
one each side of a large stone slab, racing caterpillars against
each other.
But there was one episode in my career as a natural scientist--a
career whose least details are brought back by the magic word,
caterpillar-- over which I still go hot with the sense of
failure. This was an attempt to stuff a toad. I don't know to
this day if toads can be stuffed, but when our toad died he had
to be commemorated in some way, and, failing a marble statue, it
seemed good to stuff him. It was when we had got the skin off him
that we began to realize our difficulties. I don't know if you
have had the skin of a fair-sized toad in your hand; if so, you
will understand that our first feeling was one of surprise that a
whole toad could ever have got into it. There seemed to be no
shape about the thing at all. You could have carried it--no doubt
we did, I have forgotten--in the back of a watch. But it had lost
all likeness to a toad, and it was obvious that stuffing meant
nothing to it.
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