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