1919 ENTOMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 45 



to my amazement that a cluster of tiny yellow-silk cocoons had rent my larva 

 in twain just about amidships. I took the box to my father and asked him, did 

 caterpillars ever have young ones? The phenomenon was as big a puzzle to him, 

 1 remember, as to me, but he advised me to keep the brood under their glass 

 lid aiul see what would happen. I don't think either of us was much wiser for 

 seeing some small winged flies in the box a little later; I know I wasn't. The 

 other incident was even more disappointing. In a lane near the town I found one 

 day a strange chrysalis lying on the ground. It was certainly somewhat hard, 

 but I suspected no guile, and, taking it home carefully, kept it for months in a box 

 of bran; when at last I realized it wasn't going to hatch out, into some gorgeous 

 new butterfly, "like the other chrysalises,"'! shed tears of disappointment. My 

 chrysalis, in fact, was nothing more or less than a common date stone. 



However, all tb'is had been years before when I was quite little. Now I was 

 nearly ten and had a partner almost two years older. Our collection grew apace 

 in its first two seasons, and many notable accessions were made to it; among 

 these, 1 remember, a large box of tropical butterflies bought at a bazaar; the 

 pupa of a Death's Head Sphinx dug up in the potato garden ; a magnificent green 

 caterpillar with purple diagonal stripes on its sides and a horn on its tail found 

 on a weeping willow at the end of the lawn; several rich velvety brown cater- 

 pillars of an Emperor moth taken feeding on heather up in the hills; and, superb- 

 est of all, our first Peacock butterfly. 



This regal beauty is not found in Perthshire, but one of our next door 

 neighbors, a boy five years my senior, had a fine collection of Lepidoptera and 

 offered one of these gorgeous things as a prize to whichever of us could beat the 

 other in a fight. Now David and Jonathan often fought in the heat of some 

 momentary difference, but to be asked to stand up to one another in cold blood 

 seemed a little too much ; still, peradventure, for the sake of a Peacock butterfly ! 

 At last we managed to strike a bargain with the stony-hearted judge ; whichever 

 threw the other in a wrestling bout should have the butterfly, and we flew together 

 before our chieftain in a close Scotch hug not unworthy of Donald Dinnie at 

 the annual gathering of the Highland games in Strathearn. Whether " Slyboots " 

 had figured it all out beforehand or not I shall never know, but I found it far easier 

 to throw him in the wrestling bout than to pick up his friendship after the fall. 

 The butterfly was mine, when we turned moodily away to go home : it was his ten 

 minutes later when we entered the parsonage gate, deep in friendlv converse and 

 of joyful countenance. 



If you think for one moment our little lives by now were full to bursting 

 with all this hotch-potch of country fare in the few short months of a Highland 

 summer, you've sadly forgotten the days of your youth. Children are much like 

 dogs, they have a voracious appetite and they cover far more ground in the course 

 of a day's journey than your so])er-paced man ; they haven't his steadiness of 

 purpose and they hate to stay on the high road ; but they're all eyes and ears 

 and full of tireless energy, forever ranging over the surface of things, if never 

 digging deep. 



Between you and mc and the gatepost, then, I haven't as yet so much as 

 hinted at our really and truly favorite sport of the summer, a sport that at one 

 time grew to a devouring passion and threatened to swallow up all its rivals. 

 This Aaron's rod of our childhood was the rod that according to Dr. Johnson 

 has a worm at one end and a fool at the other, but so long as the worm caught 

 fish we didn't care a button what names vou called the fisherman. As long. 



