THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 5 
needlewomen) —has all but vanished from your 
drawing-room since the “ Lady-ferns” and “ Venus’s 
hair” appeared; and that you could not help your- 
self looking now and then at the said “ Venus’s 
hair,’ and agreeing that Nature’s real beauties were 
somewhat superior to the ghastly woollen caricatures 
which they had superseded. 
You cannot deny, I say, that there is a fasci- 
nation in this same Natural History. For do not 
you, the London merchant, recollect how but last 
summer your douce and portly head-clerk was 
seized by two keepers in the act of wandering in 
Epping Forest at dead of night, with a dark lan- 
tern, a jar of strange sweet compound, and innu- 
merable pocketfuls of pill-boxes; and found it very 
difficult to make either his captors or you believe 
that he was neither going to burn wheat-ricks, nor 
poison pheasants, but was simply “sugaring the 
trees for moths,” as a blameless entomologist ? 
And when, in self-justification, he took you to his 
house in Islington, and showed you the glazed and 
corked drawers full of delicate insects, which had 
