Page:Bird Haunts and Nature Memories - Thomas Coward (Warne, 1922).pdf/190

136 At last, for the price of a drink, he disclosed the locality, but either the information was incorrect or the stock had been exterminated: the eager collectors who hurried to the spot, to the very tree, failed to find a single larva, pupa, or moth. More liquor loosened his tongue, and he admitted that the moths had been left in pawn against his score at a low beer-house, but when the searchers investigated they were met with the disquieting information from the landlady that, thinking the "flies" of no value and that they would never be reclaimed, she had "stuck the box behind the fire." Œcophora woodiella (Curtis) has never been seen since. Three specimens remain: two were in the Manchester Museum, but one of these is now in the British Museum, and the third, the one Curtis named and figured, is in Australia. The fifty or sixty others which were taken about 1840 on Kersal Moor perished in the flames.

Yet another, a true naturalist at heart but not always accurate, was my first taxidermist. Ducks, gulls, and waders, sometimes song birds, purchased in the market, or the victims of the uncertain aim of my boyhood's gun, were "put into skin" for me, their necks often woefully stretched, their bodies bloated by too much tow; but until I could make a skin for myself all my spare cash passed into his hands. Many were his stories of the "pothunting" fraternity, mouching along the hedgerows with a gun, men who shot for "sport," but who traded any good species they obtained. Many a rare migrant or accidental wanderer passed through his unskilful hands. He would give me specimens of snakes and lizards, fresh-water sponges, or rare plants. He was a constant reader of the popular natural history journals that flourished in those days, but he did not write himself. Later he became poetical, and many a doggerel verse, recalling days gone past, has been penned for me. He