THE PUSS MOTH. 95 



that lie who watches the progress of any insect, new 

 or old, known or unknown, from the egg to maturity 

 is certain to discover some fact about it previously 

 unknown. 



There is a strange charm about this study. " Do 

 not you," says Kingsley in his delightful Glaucus, 

 " 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 

 lantern, ajar of strange sweet compound, and in- 

 numerable pocketsful of pill-boxes ; and found it 

 very difficult to make either his captors or you be- 

 lieve 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 evidently 

 cost him in the collecting the spare hours of many 

 busy years, and many a pound too out of his small 

 salary, were you not a little puzzled to make out 

 what spell there could be in those ' useless moths ' 

 to draw out of his warm bed, twenty miles down the 

 Eastern Counties Railway and into the damp forest 

 like a deer-stealer, a sober white-headed Tim Linkin- 

 water like him, your very best man of business, 

 given to the reading of Scotch political economy, 

 and gifted with peculiarly clear notions on the cur- 

 rency question ? " There is, I say again, a strange 

 charm about this study. Perhaps one of its sources 

 is this constant discovery, constant acquisition of 

 knowledge. It is like travelling in a foreign laud 



