even knew
the names of most of the colonels in command; and he would squander
sunny hours prone on the lawn, heedless of challenge from bird or beast,
poring over a tattered Army List. My own accomplishment was of another
character--took, as it seemed to me, a wider and a more untrammelled
range. Dragoons might have swaggered in Lincoln green, riflemen might
have donned sporrans over tartan trews, without exciting notice or
comment from me. But did you seek precise information as to the fauna of
the American continent, then you had come to the right shop. Where and
why the bison "wallowed"; how beaver were to be trapped and wild turkeys
stalked; the grizzly and how to handle him, and the pretty pressing
ways of the constrictor,--in fine, the haunts and the habits of all that
burrowed, strutted, roared, or wriggled between the Atlantic and the
Pacific,--all this knowledge I took for my province. By the others my
equipment was fully recognized. Supposing a book with a bear-hunt in
it made its way into the house, and the atmosphere was electric with
excitement; still, it was necessary that I should first decide whether
the slot had been properly described and properly followed up, ere the
work could be stamped with full approval. A writer might have won
fame throughout the civilized globe for his trappers and his realistic
backwoods, and all went for nothing. If his pemmican were not properly
compounded I damned his achievement, and it was heard no more of.

Harold was hardly old enough to possess a special subject of his own. He
had his instincts, indeed, and at bird's-nesting they almost amounted to
prophecy. Where we others only suspected eggs, surmised possible eggs,
hinted doubtfully at eggs in the neighbourhood, Harold went straight for
the right bush, bough, or hole as if he carried a divining-rod. But this
faculty belonged to the class of mere gifts, and was not to be ranked
with Edward's lore regarding facings, and mine as to the habits of
prairie-dogs, both gained by painful study and extensive travel in those
"realms of gold," the Army List and Ballantyne.

Selina's subject, quite unaccountably, happened to be naval history.
There is no laying down rules as to subjects; you just possess them--or
rather, they possess you--and their genesis or protoplasm is rarely to
be tracked down. Selina had never so much as seen the sea; but for
that matter neither had I ever set foot on the American continent,
the by-ways o