There can be nothing more distressing to a man of strictly honourable intentions than to have to creep about hedges furtively like a criminal in order to get a good look at a bird.  Why he should want to look at birds at all it is difficult to explain.  I suppose it is a sort of disease, like going to the “movies” or doing exercises.  All I know is that, if you get it, you get it very badly.  You would stop Shakespeare himself, if he were reciting a new sonnet to you, and bid him be quiet and look half-way up the elm where the nuthatch was beating away—­up and down, like a blacksmith—­at a nut or something in a knob of the tree.  St Paul might be reading out to you the first draft of his Epistle to the Romans; you would quite unscrupulously interrupt him with a “Hush, man!  There’s a tree-creeper somewhere about.  Listen, there he is!  If you keep quiet, perhaps we’ll be able to see him.”  I assure you, it is as bad as that.  As for a man who takes out a noisy dog, or who whacks at loose stones with his stick on the road, you would regard him as a misbehaved and riotous person and would not call him your friend.  Everything has to be subordinated to the hope of catching sight of a hypothetical bird—­which you have probably seen dozens of times already.  Truly, there is no accounting for human vices.  There is, however, at least this to be said in favour of bird-watching, that it is the pleasantest of the vices, that it is cheaper than golf, and does not harden the arteries like tea-drinking.  And after all, if one is going to get excited at all, one may as well get excited about the colours and songs of birds as about most things.

XIX

THE DAREDEVIL BARBER

To roll over Niagara Falls in a barrel is an odd way of courting death, but it seems that death must be courted somehow.  Danger is more attractive to many men than drink.  They prefer gambling with their lives to gambling with their money.  They have the gambler’s faith in their lucky star.  They are preoccupied with the vision of victory to the exclusion of all timid thoughts.  They have a dramatic sense that sets them anticipatorily on a stage, bowing to the applause of the multitude.  It is the applause, I fancy, rather than the peril itself, that entices them.  The average boy who performs a deed of derring-do performs it before his admiring fellows.  Even in so small a thing as ringing a bell and running away he likes to have spectators.  Few boys ring bells out of mischief when they are alone.  Poor Mr Charles Stephens, the “Daredevil Barber” of Bristol, who lost his life at Niagara Falls in his six-foot barrel the other Sunday, made sure that there would be plenty of witnesses of his adventure.  Not only had he a party of sightseers in motors along the road following the cask on its perilous voyage but he had a cinematograph photographer ready to immortalise the affair on a film.  Two other persons, it is said, had already accomplished