Sometimes, When Walking Along, And Thinking Of Everything Else But It, The Beautiful Peacock Butterfly Suddenly Floats By The Face Like A Visitor From Another World, So Highly Coloured, And So Original And Unlike And Unexpected.

In bright painters' work like the wings of butterflies, which often have distinct hues side by side, I think

Nature puts very little green; the bouquet is not backed with maiden-hair fern; the red and the blue and so on have no grass or leaves as a ground colour; nor do they commonly alight on green. The bright colours are left to themselves unrelieved. None of the butterflies, I think, have green on the upper side of the wing; the Green Hairstreak has green under wings, but green is not put forward.

Something the same may be noticed in flowers themselves: the broad surface, for instance, of the peach and apricot, pink without a green leaf; the pear tree white, but the leaves come quickly; the apple, an acre of pink and white, with the merest texture of foliage. Nor are there many conspicuous green insects-the grasshopper; some green flies; the lace-fly, a green body and delicate white wings. With the wild flowers, on the contrary, there seems to come a great deal of green. There is scarcely a colour that cannot be matched in the gay world of wings. Red, blue, and yellow, and brown and purple - shaded and toned, relieved with dots and curious markings; in the butterflies, night tints in the pattern of the under wings, as if these were shaded with the dusk of the evening, being in shadow under the vane. Gold and orange, red, bright scarlet, and ruby and bronze in the flies. Dark velvet, brown velvet, greys, amber, and gold edgings like military coats in the wild bees. If fifteen or twenty delicate plates of the thinnest possible material, each tinted differently, were placed one over the other, and all translucent, perhaps they might produce something of that singular shadow-painting seen on the wings of moths. They are the shadows of the colours, and yet they are equally distinct. The thin edges of the flies' wings catch the sunbeams, and throw them aside. Look, too, at the bees' limbs, which are sometimes yellow, and sometimes orange-red with pollen. The eyes, too, of many insects are coloured. They know your shadow from that of a cloud. If a cloud comes over, the instant the edge of the shadow reaches the Grass moths they stop, so do some of the butterflies and other insects, as the wild bees remain quiescent. As the edge of your shadow falls on them they rise and fly, so that to observe them closely it must not be allowed to overlap them.

Sometimes I think insects smell the approaching observer as the deer wind the stalker. The Gatekeeper butterfly is common; its marking is very ingenious, may I say? regular, and yet irregular. The pattern is complete, and yet it is incomplete; it is finished, and yet it suggests to the mind that the lines ought to go on farther. They go out into space beyond the wing. If a carpet were copied from it, and laid down in a room, the design would want to run through the walls. Imagine the flower-bird's wing detached from some immense unseen carpet and set floating - it is a piece of something not ended in itself, and yet floating about complete. Some of their wings are neatly cut to an edge and bordered; of some the edge is lost in colour, because no line is drawn along it. Some seem to have ragged edges naturally, and look as if they had been battered. Towards the end of their lives little bits of the wing drop out, as if punched. The markings on the under wings have a tendency to run into arches, one arch above the other. The tendency to curve may be traced everywhere in things as wide apart as a flower-bird's wing and the lines on a scallop-shell.

I own to a boyish pleasure in seeing the clouds of brown chafers in early summer clustering on the maple hedges and keeping up a continual burring. They stick to the fingers like the bud of a horse-chestnut. Now the fern owl pitches himself over the oaks in the evening as a boy might throw a ball careless whither it goes; the next moment he comes up out of the earth under your feet. The night cuckoo might make another of his many names; his colour, ways, and food are all cuckoo-like; so, too, his immense gape - a cave in which endless moths end their lives; the eggs are laid on the ground, for there is no night-feeding bird into whose nest they could be put, else, perhaps, they would be. There is no night-feeding bird to feed the fern owl's young. Does any one think the cuckoo could herself feed two young cuckoos? How many birds would it take to feed three young cuckoos? Supposing there were - five - young cuckoos in the nest, would it not take almost all the birds in a hedge to feed them? For the incredible voracity of the young cuckoo - swallow, swallow, swallow, and gape, gape, gape - cannot be computed. The two robins or the pair of hedge-sparrows in whose nest the young cuckoo is bred, work the day through, and cannot satisfy him; and the mother cuckoo is said to come and assist in feeding him at times. How, then, could the cuckoo feed two or three of its offspring and itself at the same time? Several other birds do not build nests - the plover, the fern owl. That is no evidence of lack of intelligence. The cuckoo's difficulty, or one of its difficulties, seems to be in the providing sufficient food for its ravenous young. A half-fledged cuckoo is already a large bird, and needs a bulk of soft food for its support.

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