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AN OLD SUFFOLK NATURALISTS
though it were ridiculous to look to heredity for its explanation, nor is it found in schoolmasters. I had no scientific instruction, and set no foot within a lecture hall. Lacking these, I persisted tili the bump of Observation shed its contents.' Mr. Smith was a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, though not of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology; and this Frontispiece of 1923, though poor, is the best ofhimnowavailable. Actually he was clean-shaven, and latterly bald excepting a grey rim of hair ; the eyes were dark brown, beady and piercing ; the legs rather bowed, but he was a powerful runner and could overtake most insects ; usually he wore blue serge, very thick boots, and a dicky with vivid red tie. He died at St. Margaret's College on 10 November 1926, aged sixty-six, as is commemorated on the head-stone erected by friends, old pupils and friendly societies, over his grave in Gisleham churchyard. This I copied to-day, 1 September 1941, when it was in beautiful butterfly Company, amid Large-tortoiseshells, Painted-ladies and Peacocks, flaunting on Buddleia-flowers in the adjacent rectory garden. His extensive collection of Moths was bequeathed to the Lowestoft Literary and Scientific Association, who have loaned it for exhibition to the Public Library there, where I recently enjoyed the privilege of rearranging it in a new-provided forty-drawer cabinet; but the majority of the Micro-lepidoptera, upon which he latterly specialised, are in Norwich Castle Museum. This cabinet very narrowly escaped total demolition when Lowestoft Library was shorn in half by a bomb on 6 March last; most luckily it happened to be in the part left Standing, and on 8 July the Librarian assured me that the collection yet remains in perfect order. I have much enjoyed collecting these rather meagre details of a man whose apparent worth grows upon one with the lapse of years ; it too often happens that one's retiring friends loom larger when lost.
THE THUNDER STORM. BY A MEMBER.
L o w on the horizon was a black line, like a flat coast viewed from the sea. Around me the sun shone in all the wealth of his young spring glory; the Larks upraised their triumph song from the placid ether overhead and on every side the Gorse was decked with flowers most loved of Linne, while between alternate patches of tawny Bracken vied with new-thrust Thornleaf. I was amidst a heathery heath, with beauteous Nature spread broadcast all round ; and I was passing into Night!—Ahead to right and left wefe banked dense slate-black masses of cumuluscloud, but further intensified by a rather paler space between ; and these upreared themselves imperceptibly, with so sluggish