books as Williams’s ‘Wild Sports of the East,’ Campbell’s ’Old Forest Ranger,’ Lloyd’s ‘Scandinavian Adventures,’ and last, but not least, Waterton’s ‘Wanderings,’ to see what valuable additions to true zoology—­the knowledge of live creatures, not merely dead ones—­British sportsmen have made, and still can make.  And as for the employment of time, which often hangs so heavily on a soldier’s hands, really I am ready to say, if you are neither men of science, nor draughtsmen, nor sportsmen, why go and collect beetles.  It is not very dignified, I know, nor exciting:  but it will be something to do.  It cannot harm you, if you take, as beetle-hunters do, an india-rubber sheet to lie on; and it will certainly benefit science.  Moreover, there will be a noble humility in the act.  You will confess to the public that you consider yourself only fit to catch beetles; by which very confession you will prove yourself fit for much finer things than catching beetles:  and meanwhile, as I said before, you will be at least out of harm’s way.  At a foreign barrack once, the happiest officer I met, because the most regularly employed, was one who spent his time in collecting butterflies.  He knew nothing about them scientifically—­not even their names.  He took them simply for their wonderful beauty and variety; and in the hope, too—­in which he was really scientific—­that if he carefully kept every form which he saw, his collection might be of use some day to entomologists at home.  A most pleasant gentleman he was; and, I doubt not, none the worse soldier for his butterfly catching.  Commendable, also, in my eyes, was another officer—­whom I have not the pleasure of knowing—­who, on a remote foreign station, used wisely to escape from the temptations of the world into an entirely original and most pleasant hermitage.  For finding—­so the story went—­that many of the finest insects kept to the tree-tops, and never came to ground at all, he used to settle himself among the boughs of some tree in the tropic forests, with a long-handled net and plenty of cigars, and pass his hours in that airy flower garden, making dashes every now and then at some splendid monster as it fluttered round his head.  His example need not be followed by everyone; but it must be allowed that—­at least as long as he was in his tree—­he was neither dawdling, grumbling, spending money, nor otherwise harming himself, and perhaps his fellow creatures, from sheer want of employment.

One word more, and I have done.  If I was allowed to give one special piece of advice to a young officer, whether of the army or navy, I would say—­Respect scientific men; associate with them; learn from them; find them to be, as you will usually, the most pleasant and instructive of companions:  but always respect them.  Allow them chivalrously, you who have an acknowledged rank, their yet unacknowledged rank; and treat them as all the world will treat them, in a higher and truer state of civilisation.  They