CHARLES WATERTON.
[To MIR EDITOR or MI SPIOTATOILI Si,—.In reference to your article on Waterton, the naturalist, in last week's Spectator, in regard to his irritability, it may interest your readers to know how the late J. G. Wood, who worked under Waterton for some years, used to "manage his master's eccentricities. Whenever he wished to gain information about a bird or animal, which Waterton would never give readily, instead of asking the question direct, Wood used to refer to the specimen by a name he knew to be incorrect. This brought down a torrent of contempt and abuse on his bead, but with the storm came the desired information, and much more than the questioner asked for. Waterton's power of endurance and religious feeling, to which you refer, were shown in his pilgrimage to Rome, when he walked the last fourteen miles of the journey barefooted, with bleeding feet. His ingenuities for preserving his birds seemed inexhaustible. One of the most amusing for preserving his game was that of placing dummy wooden pheasants, roosting in the trees, at the outskirts of the park, at which the neighbouring miners were "potting" in the dusk, while the birds were beirtg safely fed near the house at the other end of the estate. The Waterton family countenance must have been an exceptionally characteristic and lasting one, for the type of face survived for some three hundred years. In the dining-room of Deeping Waterton" Hall, where his son Edmund lived, was a seventeenth-century portrait of one of his ancestors which might have done duty as the portrait of the then master of the house but for the dress, so exactly were the features alike in the living and dead faces. The Waterton pedigree is an exceptional one, going back in an unbroken line to Saxon times. Among its notable person- ages is Sir Thomas More, whose clock was still going in the hall at Deeping Waterton a few years ago.—I am, Sir, &c., ELtrox STOCK.
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