in order to show what good teeth they have. William John McNabb, I am
sure, never did that.

We need not grumble at our contemporaries, however, for not being so
fine as William John McNabb. To children, for all we know, the world
may still seem to be full of people who laugh because they are happy
and smile because they are kind. The world will always remain to a
child the chief of toys, and the hum of insects as enchanting as the
hum of a musical top. Even those of us who are grown up can recover
this enchantment, not only through the pleasures of memory but through
the endless pleasures of watching the things that inhabit the earth.
The world is always waiting to be discovered in full, and yet no life
is long enough to discover the whole of a single county, or even the
whole of a single parish. Who alive, for instance, knows all the moles
of Sussex? I confess I got my first sight of one a few days ago, and,
though I had seen dead moles hanging from trees and had read
descriptions of moles, the living creature was as unexpected as if one
had come on it silent upon a peak in Darien. I had never expected it
to look so black and glossy in the midday sun or to have that little
pink snout that made me think of it as a small underground pig. I had
always been told, too, that the sound of a footstep would frighten a
mole, but this mole only began to show fright at the sound of voices.
Then it began to tear its way into the undergrowth with paws and snout
ever trying to overtake each other. Mr Blunden has described how

The lost mole tries to pierce the mattocked clay
In agony and terror of the sun.

I got much the same impression of agony and terror as this poor
creature dug its way into the grass and ferns and, coming out at the