way from her usual haunt.

Again; I knew a lover of setting, an old sportsman, who has often told me
that soon after harvest he has frequently taken small coveys of
partridges, consisting of cock-birds alone; these he pleasantly used to
call old bachelors.

There is a propensity belonging to common house-cats that is very
remarkable; I mean their violent fondness for fish, which appears to be
their most favourite food: and yet nature in this instance seems to have
planted in them an appetite that, unassisted, they know not how to
gratify; for of all quadrupeds cats are the least disposed towards water,
and will not, when they can avoid it, deign to wet a foot, much less to
plunge into that element.

Quadrupeds that prey on fish are amphibious: such is the otter, which by
nature is so well formed for diving, that it makes great havoc among the
inhabitants of the waters. Not supposing that we had any of those beasts
in our shallow brooks, I was much pleased to see a male otter, brought to
me, weighing twenty-one pounds, that had been shot on the bank of our
stream below the Priory, where the rivulet divides the parish of Selborne
from Harteley Wood.

LETTER XXX.

SELBORNE, _Aug. 1st_, 1770.

Dear Sir,--The French, I think, in general are strangely prolix in their
natural history. What Linnaeus says with respect to insects holds good
in every other branch: "_Verbositas praesentis saeculi_, _calamitas
artis_."

Pray how do you approve of Scopoli's new work? As I admire his
"Entomologia," I long to see it.

I forgot to mention in my last letter (and had not room to insert in the
former) that the male moose, in rutting time, swims from island to
island, in the lakes and rivers of North America, in pursuit of the
females. My friend, the chaplain, saw one killed in the water as it was
on that errand in the river St. Lawrence: it was a monstrous beast, he
told me; but he did not take the dimensions.

When I was last in town, our friend Mr. Barrington most obligingly
carried me to see many curious sights. As you were then writing to him
about horns, he carried me to see many strange and wonderful specimens.
There is, I remember, at Lord Pembroke's at Wilton, a horn room furnished
with more than thirty different pairs; but I have not seen that house
lately.

Mr. Barrington showed me many astonishing collections of stuffed and
living birds from all quarters of t