Urban Naturalists
Our country folk continue to wonder at the urban children that have crowded into their midst. It is noticed that the visitors, though much further advanced in knowledge of the world, have sometimes a less certain knowledge of the elemental facts of .life. It is, of course, natural, and was generally expected, that they would have little knowledge of what may be called natural history ; but the depths of this ignorance had not been fully plumbed or imagined. For example, a small London child was shown a good crop of plums on a tree in a cottage garden. Her astonishment was great, and since the children of the town are much more articulate than those of the country, she at once expressed her surprise : " I thought plums came in packets," she said. There is one game that is common, it seems, to town and country ; the game of Conkers, which is doubtless a corruption of conqueror. It is played by the agency of a horse-chestnut at the end of a string. The implements compete with one another, and in the duel the unbroken chestnut wins. Two small Cockneys who had been playing the game desired more chestnuts, and having discovered that chestnuts grew on trees, they took handfuls of stones from a roadside heap and began bombarding a lime-tree ; but to their disappointment no chestnuts were brought down.
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