By Way of an Introduction. 1 1 



To my notion the regular entomologists have been too 

 anxious to collect beautiful butterflies that will mount 

 well and make a pretty showing in their cabinets, but I 

 am, like my friend Brady, more interested in the '' cinther 

 of the wurruld," that is to say, in the things that come 

 near to me in my house and garden creatures that I 

 meet in the sugar-bucket and around the kitchen sink, 

 that take a nip out of me, or ruin my winter overcoat- 

 than I am in the beauteous creatures that wag their 

 painted vans through the summer air. \Yith cuch vulgar 

 things as these collectors do not bother. I did my best to 

 get a mounted specimen of the common clothes-moth in 

 the museums of Xew York, Brooklyn, and Washington. 

 A magazine editor was willing to take an article on that 

 subject if he could illustrate it with striking and dramatic 

 pictures. His idea was to have the ferocious moth 

 represented in the act of swooping down on a man, biting 

 a piece out of his trousers, and flying away with its booty 

 in its beak. When I told him that the clothes-moth 

 hadn't any beak, hadn't any mouth to bite with, he looked 

 at me in such a funny way. If he hadn't been a magazine 

 editor and so under heavy bonds to be dignified, he would 

 have said: "Go wan! What are you givin' us? ; But 

 though he did not thus openly doubt my word, I could 

 see that he had half a notion to back out then and there, 

 and say that he was very sorry, but they already had 

 several articles of a similar nature on hand. On publica- 

 tion, however, he managed to take the curse off, so to 

 speak, by printing a picture of a moth with a proboscis 

 as long as a watch-spring. I might deny in the letter- 

 press till I was black in the face that moths had mouths, 

 but he had cast an anchor to windward by means of the 

 picture of the long tongue with w r hich the moth sucks the 

 honev out of a woolen blanket. 



