BUTTEKFIiY HUNTING IN fiKEECE IN THE YEAK 1900. 65 



filled with hddreichi : at least, nothing to be regretted, as far as I was 

 concerned ; but, as is the case with most things, people are either born 

 entomologists, or they are not, and with Marcus I fear this was no 

 latent undeveloped gift. I could never get him to be more than 

 spasmodically interested in the pursuit, or to take a really serious view 

 of it and realise the importance to be attached to a new capture. He 

 always persisted in treating the matter more or less as a joke, but 

 unfortunately the boys of Kalavryta turned the joke against himself, and 

 he was so grievously ujiset that, I believe, for a short time these children 

 made his life almost a burden to him. They would persist in follow- 

 ing him down the street, calling after him "Pettalutha! Pettalutha!" 

 (Butterfly! Butterfly!). They also tormented him with samples of 

 crushed specimens which they had spent the whole of their playtime 

 in catching, till, I regret to say, Marcus completely lost his temper, 

 and was constantly appealing to me to devise some means of relieving 

 him from an annoyance to which, through following in my steps, he 

 had found himself exposed. It was in vain that I begged him to treat 

 the whole affair with the indifference due to such an insignificant 

 matter as the ridicule of a few children, he would nevertheless work 

 himself into a state of agony, concoct all sorts of unnecessarily strong 

 measures to be adopted, all of which I vetoed as being only calculated 

 to make matters worse. " You don't know Greek," he would tell 

 me " so you don't understand what they say. Why, what do you 

 think two grown-up men remarked to each other as we rode into 

 that village to-day ? ' Surely it is not so hot yet, but those two 

 people seem ready to go to Corfu.' " This required an explanation, 

 which was that the Island of Corfu is the chosen site for a large 

 lunatic asylum, and is, in fact, quoted in Greece, in the same way as 

 in England we should mention Bedlam for an insinuation of this 

 kind. It was useless to tell Marcus that it was their ignorance in 

 not recognising a scientific pursuit, not our madness in pursuing it, 

 that prompted these remarks, the few sparks of enthusiasm which I 

 had hitherto been able to ignite in him were now entirely extinguished 

 by the ridicule of his own countrymen, and what little love of the 

 thing I had been able to inspire in him completely vanished after 

 "this business with the boys," as he was pleased to term it, till it 

 became extremely evident that Marcus, though a most excellent 

 courier and interpreter, would never develop into a full-blown ento- 

 mologist. 



Notwithstanding, it still remained an unsolved problem in my 

 mind — as I believe it to be, more or less, in the minds of all entomo- 

 logists — why everyone in the world is not of the same persuasion as 

 themselves, for, to them, indeed, is life worth living, spent in long, sunnv 

 hours of healthy exercise, inhaling the pure mountain air, free from 

 the ties and tyrannies of civilised society. For all day long the song 

 of the summer wind is in their ears, the very soul of the summer is 

 theirs ; they have felt the slow pulsations of her warm, throbbing 

 heart. Then comes the evening, and as they watch the day dying 

 over the mountains, and the sun which has shone unceasingly all 

 through its long bright hours, sinking beneath some distant summit, 

 and the warm, short twilight of the south, spreading her shadowy 

 arms across the valley, there comes, may be, into the hearts of these 

 travellers of science a wonderful sense of gratitude for this glorious 



