Agile at Eighty

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 91, 21 March 1941, Page 5

Agile at Eighty

HERE is a saying that every other Yorkshireman is an oddity or a character. If this is true, Ebor may be an oddity-perhaps that’s not for me to say. But I can, and do, declare that the Squire of Walton Hall was an oddity and a character. He was one of the most remarkable naturalists who have ever studied the ways of the creatures of the wild. Once

he set out on a series of adventurous and dangerous journeys in Guiana in search of the poison with which the Indians tipped their arrows. On one of his visits to Europe he went to Rome and while there he climbed to the top of the lightning conductor at St. Peter’s. Then, at a distance of over four hundred feet above street level he stood on the head of the angel on the Castello.

Waterton left his glove on the top of the lightning conductor, but as this spoiled the conductor’s usefulness he was compelled by the authorities to climb up again and bring it down. Charles Waterton was a climber all his life, and even when he was over eighty years of age he would shin up a tree more

like an agile cat than a human being. On his jaunts into the jungles of South America he was dressed only in a shirt, a pair of trousers, and a hat. He went barefoot, carrying with him a gun to provide’ food and specimens of rare and new animals. In one of his books he wrote: "There is not much danger in roving among snakes and animals, if you only have self-command. You must not approach them abruptly, if you do you will have to pay for your rashness. They will always retire from the face of a man unless pressed by hunger or suspicious of an attack, as in the case of a

snake being trod upon.-

From

Ebor's Scrapbook

2YA March 3.)