Places where I gathered flowers and gazed with interest at the catkins
of the hazel, have now become places covered with ironworks, where
steam hammers make their perpetual thuds, and through which
railway-sidings everywhere ramify. Quiet lanes in which, during early
boyhood, I went with a companion trying to catch minnows with a
hand-net in a clear little stream running by the hedge, have been
transformed into straight roads between land-allotments, with
scattered houses built by artizans. And where I picked blackberries,
factories now stand.
[Footnote 50: From Part I, Chapter II, of the "Autobiography."
Spencer's boyhood was passed in Derby. Copyright, 1904, by D. Appleton
& Co., by whose kind permission passages from this work are printed
here.]
There was a garden of some size behind the house containing fruit
trees, and permitting a certain amount of floriculture; and my father
rented an additional piece of land close by as a vegetable-garden. Not
infrequently I had to join in gardening--more frequently, indeed, than
I liked. Often when I ought to have been busy at some task which my
father had set to me, I was otherwise occupied--throwing stones at the
birds that settled on the walls and hedges; observing the bees on the
kidney-bean flowers, piercing the base of each corolla to reach the
honey; or, at a disused pump-trough containing stagnant water,
watching the larvæ of the gnats as they came wriggling to the surface,
putting out their tails to breathe, and then descending. Most children
are instinctively naturalists, and were they encouraged would readily
pass from careless observations to careful and deliberate ones. My
father was wise in such matters; and I was not simply allowed but
encouraged to enter on natural history.
The majority of my activities, however, were those of the ordinary
schoolboy, who, on Saturday afternoons and the like occasions of
leisure, is commonly given to country rambles and the search for
hedge-side treasures. During my early years the neighboring regions of
Osmaston and Normanton were explored by me in all their details: every
hedge becoming known in the course of expeditions, now in the spring
seeking birds' nests, now gathering violets or dog-roses, and later in
the year collecting sometimes mushrooms, sometimes blackberries,
sometimes hips and haws, crab-apples and other wild products. Beyond
the pleasurable exercise and the gratification to my love of
adventure, there was gained during these excursions much miscellaneous
knowledge of things, and the perceptions were beneficially
disciplined. Of all the occupations, however, to which holidays were
devoted, I delighted most in fishing. There was the river Derwent, at
that time not the black dirty stream it is now, but tolerably clear
and containing a fair supply of various fish; and there were the
canals, which, on the whole, served better for boys' fishing. Many
happy half-days, and, during the midsummer holidays, many whole days,
were spent on their banks. Along with such exercise of skill as
fishing itself implies, there came the exercise of skill in making
fishing-tackle; for I was not so amply furnished with pocket-money
that I could buy all the appliances I required. I was, I suspect, led
by my father in that case, as in other cases, to use my own powers of
manipulation for satisfying my needs. I made my own floats, and also
"hair-tackles," as they were locally called--each some six feet of the
line next the hook, made of single horse-hair instead of silk-worm
gut. I remember I was cautious and systematic enough to use a test
before trusting any one of them....
When I was something like nine or ten years old, the love of this
sport led very nearly to loss of life. I fell into deep water in the
Derwent and was close upon drowning. It is a curious fact that whereas
dreams are, while in progress, regarded as real, the reality was in
this case taken for a dream. During the first part of my immersion I
thought to myself--"Oh, it is all a dream!"; and only after coming to
the surface once or twice discovered that I was actually in the water.
A youth of some sixteen or seventeen plunged in and rescued me. His
name was George Holme. He was at that time a mill-manager. As may be
inferred from the fact that he was the one out of a considerable
number of spectators who risked himself to save me, he was of superior
nature morally; and he turned out in after life to be also a man of
much faculty. Gradually rising, he became a wealthy manufacturer; and
was led, by the development of his business, to establish trade
connections in various parts of the world--one being pushed even into
Central Asia. When sixty he became mayor of Derby and magistrate. He
had in a high degree that which another friend of mine describes as
the business instinct--an instinct which experience tells him is quite
special, and may or may not accompany other superiorities....
I may here name the fact that I was in boyhood extremely prone to
castle-building--a habit which continued throughout youth and into
mature life: finally passing, I suppose, into the dwelling on schemes
more or less practicable. In early days the habit was such that on
going to bed it was a source of satisfaction to me to think I should
be able to lie for a length of time and dwell on the fancies which at
the time occupied me; and frequently next morning, on awaking, I was
vexed with myself because I had gone to sleep before I had reveled in
my imaginations as much as I had intended. Often these dreams,
becoming literally day-dreams, quite filled my unconsciousness when
walking. Even in the streets my state of abstraction was such that I
occasionally talked aloud as I went along: a fact of which I was from
time to time made aware by people who turned to look at me.
V