A Race after a Butterfly 
faced a cannonade in those days than a bevy of boarding-school 
misses, but there was no alternative. There were the dreaded 
females at the windows (for it was Saturday, and vacation hour), 
and there was my butterfly. Sweating, blushing, inwardly 
anathematizing my luck, I rushed past the school, only to be 
overwhelmed with mortification by the rascally porter of the 
institution, who was sweeping the pavement, and who bawled 
out after me: “Oh, it ’s no use; you can’t catch it's! It ’s fright¬ 
ened; you ’re so ugly! ” And now. it began to rise in its flight. 
It was plainly my last chance, for it would in a moment be lost 
over the housetops. I made an upward leap, and by a fortunate 
sweep of the net succeeded in capturing my prize. 
Many years later, after a long interval in which ornithology 
and botany had engrossed my mind to the exclusion of ento¬ 
mology, my boyish love for the butterflies was renewed, and I 
found out the name of the choice thing I had captured on that hot 
July day on the streets of Salem, and returned to North Carolina 
for the special purpose of collecting a quantity of these superb in¬ 
sects. My quest was entirely successful, though my specimens 
were not taken at Salem, but under the shadow of Mount 
Mitchell, in the flower-spangled valleys which lie at its feet. 
Genus BRENTHIS, Hubner 
“The garden is fragrant everywhere; 
In its lily-bugles the gold bee sups, 
And butterflies flutter on winglets fair 
Round the tremulous meadow buttercups.” 
Munkittrick. 
Butterfly .—Small or medium-sized butterflies, very closely ap¬ 
proximating in form and color the species of the genus Argynnis, 
in which they are included by many writers. The principal 
structural difference between the two genera is found in the fact 
that in the genus Brenthis only one of the subcostal nervules 
arises before or at the end of the cell of the primaries, while in 
Argynnis the two innermost subcostal nervules thus arise. In 
, Brenthis the palpi are not as stout as in Argynnis , and the short 
basal spur or branch of the median vein of the front wings, 
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