For on that very morning he had seen a fox cross his path.
A somewhat similar effect is produced on our minds if we have what may be called a sense of historical time--a consciousness of the transitoriness of most things human--if we see institutions and works as the branches on a pine or larch, which fail and die and fall away successively while the tree itself lives for ever, and if we measure their duration not by our own few swift years, but by the life of nations and races of men.

It is, I imagine, a sense capable of cultivation, and enables us to look upon many of man's doings that would otherwise vex and pain us, and, as some say, destroy all the pleasure of our lives, not exactly as an illusion, as if we were Japanese and had seen a fox in the morning, but at all events in what we call a philosophic spirit.
What troubled me most was the consideration of the effect of the new conditions on the wild life of the plain--or of a very large portion of it.

I knew of this before, but it was nevertheless exceedingly unpleasant when I came to witness it myself when I took to spying on the military as an amusement during my idle time.

Here we have tens of thousands of very young men, boys in mind, the best fed, healthiest, happiest crowd of boys in all the land, living in a pure bracing atmosphere, far removed from towns, and their amusements and temptations, all mad for pleasure and excitement of some kind to fill their vacant hours each day and their holidays.

Naturally they take to birds'-nesting and to hunting every living thing they encounter during their walks on the downs.