you’re looking rather cheap.  What have you been doing?”; and when we answered bitterly:  “Counting turbots’ eggs,” they would hurry off with an apprehensive look on their faces.  The naturalist, it is clear, must be capable of a persistence that is beyond the reach of most of us.  I calculate that, if he were able to work for 14 hours a day, counting at the rate of 10,000 an hour, even then it would take him 122-214 days to count the eggs of a single turbot.  After that, it would take a chartered accountant at least 122-214 days to check his figures.  One can gather from this some idea of the enormous industry of men of science.  For myself, I could more easily paint the Sistine Madonna or compose a Tenth Symphony than be content to loose myself into this universe of numbers.  Pythagoras, I believe, discovered a sort of philosophy in numbers, but even he did not count beyond seven.

After the fishes, the reptiles seem fairly modest creatures.  The ordinary snake does not lay more than twenty or thirty eggs, and even the python is content to stop at a hundred.  The crocodile, though a wicked animal, lays only twenty or thirty; the tortoise as few as two or four; and the turtle does not exceed two hundred.  But I am not really interested in eggs—­not, at least, in any eggs but birds’ eggs—­or should not have been, if I had not read The Encyclopædia Britannica.  The sight of a fly’s egg—­if the fly lays an egg—­fills me with disgust—­and frogs’ eggs attract me only with the fascination of repulsion.  What one likes about the birds is that they lay such pretty eggs.  Even the duck lays a pretty egg The duck is a plain bird, rather like a char-woman, but it lays an egg which is (or can be) as lovely as an opal.  The flavour, I agree, is not Christian, but, like other eggs of which this can be said, it does for cooking.  Hens’ eggs are less attractive in colour, but more varied.  I have always thought it one of the chief miseries of being a man that, when boiled eggs are put on the table, one does not get first choice, and that all the little brown eggs are taken by women and children before one’s own turn comes round.  There is one sort of egg with a beautiful sunburnt look that always reminds me of the seaside, and that I have not tasted in a private house for above twenty years.  To begin the day with such an egg would put one in a good temper for a couple of hours.  But always one is fobbed off with a large white egg of demonstrative uncomeliness.  It may taste all right, but it does not look all right.  Food should appeal to the eye as well as to the palate, as everyone recognises when the blancmange that has not set is brought to the table.  At the same time, there is one sort of white egg that is quite delightful to look at.  I do not know its parent, but I think it is a black hen of the breed called Spanish.  Not everything white in Nature is beautiful.  One dislikes instinctively white calves, white horses, white elephants and white