THE MAKING OF AN ISLAND 149 



again it might have come all the way from North America, for 

 the hat was an old one. In the shelter of one of the palms I 

 scraped together a little soil, planted the seed and ringed it about 

 with a circle of conchs to mark the spot. It was a bare hope, 

 for even if it sprouted, unless the plant were one of those re- 

 markable creations which fertilized itself or reproduced freely, 

 it was foredoomed to failure. Nearly ten years later when I 

 returned to Sheep Cay for another purpose I remembered and 

 looked for it in vain. The circle of conchs had vanished and 

 even the cocoanut had died and fallen to the ground where it 

 was rapidly becoming a portion of the beach. 



While I was musing over the plant I thought the island was 

 to add still another resident to its tiny quota, for the flickering 

 yellow body of a Catopsila butterfly floated by on the wings 

 of the wind. But the insect made no attempt to reach the cay 

 and drifted over the foam of the reef and was blown further 

 out to sea. It reminded me of the mystery of a late September 

 afternoon in 1927 when I saw a great horde of Tieris butter- 

 flies, tiny creatures with wings of yellow and orange edged 

 with black, gather together on the hot sands of the beach mid- 

 way between Lewes and Rehobeth in Delaware and then sud- 

 denly rise on a gentle west wind and drift out in a great 

 streaming ragged line into the darkening wastes of the Atlantic 

 Ocean. They went to a certain death. One by one their fragile 

 bodies fell to the waters to flap dismally for a few moments, 

 to float quietly on the waves for a while and then, waterlogged, 

 to slip down into the cold green depths. Thousands of them. 

 A few have been known to reach Bermuda where they have 

 been reported on rare occasions only to disappear as mysteri- 

 ously as they came. The Catopsila butterflies, which belong 

 to the same great family, have been seen doing the same thing 

 along the coasts of northern South America, setting out in 

 great swarms into the Caribbean from which there is no re- 



