says coo-coo, coo, coo-coo, coo until the melancholy sweet monotony of
that sound is as thoroughly mixed up in my brain with 110° in the shade
as physic in my infantile memories with the peppermint lozenges which
used to 'put away the taste,' But as for these creatures, which confess
the heat and come into the house and gasp, I feel drawn to them. I
should like to offer them cooling drinks. Not that all my midday guests
are equally welcome: I could dispense, for instance, with the
grey-ringed bee which has just reconnoitred my ear for the third time,
and guesses it is a key-hole--she is away just now, but only, I fancy,
for clay to stop it up with. There are others also to which I would give
their _congé_ if they would take it. But good, bad, or indifferent they
give us their company whether we want it or not."

Eha certainly found company in beasts all his life, and kept the charm
of youth about him in consequence to the end. If his lot were cast, as
it often was, in lonely places, he kept pets, and made friends besides
of many of the members of the tribes on his frontier; if in Bombay city
he consoled himself with his aquarium and the museum of the Bombay
Natural History Society. When the present writer chummed with him in a
flat on the Apollo Bunder in Bombay, he remembers well that aquarium and
the Sunday-morning expeditions to the malarious ravines at the back of
Malabar Hill to search for mosquito larvae to feed its inmates. For at
that time Mr. Aitken was investigating the capabilities for the
destruction of larvae, of a small surface-feeding fish with an
ivory-white spot on the top of its head, which he had found at Vehar in
the stream below the bund. It took him some time to identify these
particular fishes (_Haplochilus lineatus_), and in the meantime he
dubbed them "Scooties" from the lightning rapidity of their movements,
and in his own admirable manner made himself a sharer of their joys and
sorrows, their cares and interests. With these he stocked the ornamental