along the green banks of the Dee, or among the tidal islands at the mouth of the river, overgrown by waving seaweeds, and fringed with great white bunches of blossoming scurvy-grass.  He loved to hunt for crabs and sea-anemones beside the ebbing channels, or to watch the jelly-fish left high and dry upon the shore by the retreating water.  Already, in his simple way, the little ragged bare-footed Scotch laddie was at heart a born naturalist.

Very soon, Tam was not content with looking at the “venomous beasts,” as the neighbours called them, but he must needs begin to bring them home, and set up a small aquarium and zoological garden on his own account.  All was fish that came to Tam’s net:  tadpoles, newts, and stickleback from the ponds, beetles from the dung-heaps, green crabs from the sea-shore—­nay, even in time such larger prizes as hedgehogs, moles, and nestfuls of birds.  Nothing delighted him so much as to be out in the fields, hunting for and taming these his natural pets.

Unfortunately, Tam’s father and mother did not share the boy’s passion for nature, and instead of encouraging him in pursuing his inborn taste, they scolded him and punished him bitterly for bringing home the nasty creatures.  But nothing could win away Tam from the love of the beasties; and in the end, he had his own way, and lived all his life, as he himself afterwards beautifully put it, “a fool to nature.”  Too often, unhappily, fathers and mothers thus try to check the best impulses in their children, under mistaken notions of right, and especially is this the case in many instances as regards the love of nature.  Children are constantly chidden for taking an interest in the beautiful works of creation, and so have their first intelligent inquiries and aspirations chilled at once; when a little care and sympathy would get rid of the unpleasantness of having white mice or lizards crawling about the house, without putting a stop to the young beginner’s longing for more knowledge of the wonderful and beautiful world in whose midst he lives.

When Tam was nearly five years old, he was sent to school, chiefly no doubt to get him out of the way; but Scotch schools for the children of the working classes were in those days very rough hard places, where the taws or leather strap was still regarded as the chief instrument of education.  Little Edward was not a child to be restrained by that particular form of discipline; and after he had had two or three serious tussles with his instructors, he was at last so cruelly beaten by one of his masters that he refused to return, and his parents, who were themselves by no means lacking in old Scotch severity, upheld him in his determination.  He had picked up reading by this time, and now for a while he was left alone to hunt about to his heart’s content among his favourite fields and meadows.  But by the time he was six years old, he felt he ought to be going to work, brave little mortal that he was; and as his father and mother thought so too, the poor wee mite was sent to join his elder brother in working at a tobacco factory in the town, at the wages of fourteen-pence a week.  So, for the next two years, little Tam waited upon a spinner (as the workers are called) and began life in earnest as a working man.