rm to the touch as though some inner virtue had grown, all unsuspected
by us, in the heart of this glacial ball. I picked up a lump of chalk
with its cold greenish shadows, and powdered it in my fingers, wondering
why it looked so suddenly bright. It confirmed my existence. Its smell
was better than any news I have heard of late.

I saw suddenly the gleaming coast of a continent of dark cloud, and the
blue ocean into which it jutted its headlands; memory had suddenly
returned. At that moment the sun touched my hand. All this was what we
used to know in a previous life. When I got home I took down _Selborne_.
Two photographs fell out of it, and when I picked them up--they were
those of a young amateur and were yellow with age--spring really began to
penetrate the bark. But it was not the spring of this year.

How often, like another tortoise, has the mind come out of its winter to
sun itself in the new warmth of a long-gone Selborne April? Did Gilbert
White imagine he was bequeathing light to us? Of course not. He lived
quietly in the obscure place where he was born, and did not try to
improve or influence anybody. It seems he had no wish to be a great
leader, or a great thinker, or a great orator. The example of Chatham did
not fire him. He was friendly with his neighbours, but went about his
business. When he died there did not appear to be any reason whatever to
keep him in memory. He had harmed no man. He left us without having
improved gunpowder. Could a man have done less?

Think of the events which were stirring men while he was noting the
coming and going of swallows. While he lived, Clive began the conquest of
India, and Canada was taken from the French. White heard the news that
our American colonists had turned Bolshevik because of the traditional
skill of the administrators of other people's affairs at Whitehall. The
world appears to have been as full then of important uproar as it is
to-day. I suppose the younger Pitt, "the youngest man ever appointed
Prime Minister," had never heard of White. But Gilbert does not seem to
have heard of _him_; nor of Hargreaves' spinning jenny, nor of the
inventor of the steam engine. "But I can show you some specimens of my
new mice," he remarks on March 30, 1768. That was the year in which the
great Pitt resigned. His new mice!

Yet for all the stirring affairs and inventions of his exciting time,
with war making and breaking empires, and the foundations of this
country'