This last was to a great snail which he raked out from among some tender
plants that had been half eaten away.

"Yes, Nat, get all the knowledge you can and work hard at your books."

But somehow I didn't get on well with the other boys, for I cared so
little for their rough games. I was strong enough of my age, but I
preferred getting out on to Clapham Common on half-holidays, to look for
lizards in the furze, or to catch the bright-coloured sticklebacks in
the ponds, or else to lie down on the bank under one of the trees, and
watch the efts coming up to the top to make a little bubble and then go
down again, waving their bodies of purple and orange and the gay crests
that they sometimes had all along their backs in the spring.

When I used to lie there thinking, I did not seem to be on Clapham
Common, but far away on the banks of some huge lake in a foreign land
with the efts and lizards, crocodiles; and the big worms that I
sometimes found away from their holes in wet weather became serpents in
a moist jungle.

Of course I got all these ideas from books, and great trouble I found
myself in one day for playing at tiger-hunting in the garden at home
with Buzzy, my aunt's great tabby tom-cat; and for pretending that Nap
was a lion in the African desert. But I'll tell you that in a chapter
to itself, for these matters had a good deal to do with the alteration
in my mode of life.

CHAPTER TWO.

FIRST THOUGHTS OF HUNTING.

As I told you, my uncle had no children, and the great house at
Streatham was always very quiet. In fact one of my aunt's strict
injunctions was that she should not be disturbed by any noise of mine.
But aunt had her pets--Buzzy, and Nap.

Buzzy was the largest striped tom-cat, I think, that I ever saw, and
very much to my aunt's annoyance he became very fond of me, so much so
that if he saw me going out in the garden he would leap off my aunt's
lap, where she was very fond of nursing him, stroking his back,
beginning with his head and ending by drawing his tail right through her
hand; all of which Buzzy did not like, but he would lie there and swear,
trying every now and then to get free, but only to be held down and
softly whipped into submission.

Buzzy decidedly objected to being nursed, and as soon as he could get
free he would rush after me down the garden, where he would go bounding
along, arching his back, and setting up the fur upon his tail. Every
now and then he would hide