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passeth all thynges.
    â€˜That,’ he would say, ‘was written about 1540. It is a sobering thought to an old schoolmaster that in spite of four hundred years of education boys haven’t improved one whit since that time!’
    Mr Chorlton, who detested winter walking, refused to accompany us at this time of year. There were no moths to lure him up to the larch plantation, so he stayed at home, rearranging his collection, reading Aeschylus, Horace, and the wine-merchants’ catalogues, and drinking port. This gave him his annual attack of gout which always lasted from Christmas until the first butterflies came out at Easter. Instead of him, we had for companions the bird-catcher, Jim Mellor, who despite the Wild Birds’ Protection Act still carried on a profitable illicit trade in goldfinches; the fisherman Bassett, who took us live-baiting for pike whenever a frost kept the river within its banks; the three musketeers, who brought rabbit-nets and graciously allowed us to use our ferret, Boanerges, to bolt the rabbits; and - most unexpectedly - the old Rector of Brensham, who turned out to be a fine naturalist and was delighted to show us badgers’ and foxes’ tracks when the first light snow covered Brensham Hill.
    This good and gentle clergyman, whose name was Mr Mountjoy, remained sufficiently boyish at the age of seventy to borrow our catapults for an occasional pot-shot at a sitting rabbit or crow. (‘I deplore blood sports,’ he said, ‘but you can scarcely call it a blood sport if you never hit anything.’)He was not in the least embarrassed to be seen in the company of Pistol, Bardolph and Nym, who shamelessly used his cloth as cover for their poaching, disappearing into the bushes to set their wires and hastily returning to his side if the keeper came into view. ‘What are you men doing up here?’ asked a keeper once, knowing only too well. ‘A-walking with His Reverence,’ they growled. ‘His Reverence invited us to come for a stroll.’ For a long time we thought that Mr Mountjoy in his very great innocence was unaware of the three scoundrels’ frightful reputation; we were somewhat surprised, therefore, when one day he turned to Pistol with a diffident smile and said in his precise way: ‘I’m going to ask you a question and I hope you won’t mind answering it to satisfy my idle curiosity:
What’s the food really like in jail?’
    One of his hobbies was keeping bees. He had about fifty hives in his garden, and told us that their total population was nearly four million. ‘That’s as many bees as there are people in a great city. What a vast kingdom I rule!’ On the first spring days he would stand contentedly for hours watching the workers sally forth and come back with the yellow crocus-pollen upon them; but at high summer he would often load some of the hives in the back of his small open car and go prospecting far afield for patches of beanflower or clover or saintfoin, and then beg the owner’s permission to leave a hive or two there so that his bees could gather the honey. It was a familiar sight to see the Rector driving down the lanes with half a dozen skeps occupying the back seat while a little swarm of his turbulent passengers rose from them like a thin smoke and swirled about his head.
    He was also a keen ornithologist. I suspect that Mr Mountjoy, like another and greater parson-naturalist, took more interest in his feathered parishioners than his human ones, was less concerned with his Easter sermon than withthe arrival of various little migrants about that season. Certainly he spent more time in the fields and woods than in his church or rectory. He was inordinately fond of fishing, especially pike-fishing, and it was scandalously related of him that between christenings he would keep his live bait in the font. He was often in trouble with the stricter section of his congregation for offences of