244 THE RING OF NATURE 



the bare branches, but the buds hold themselves 

 for the winter that by hereditary experience 

 they know must intervene before the spring 

 message, delivered often in far colder weather, 

 tells them that it is indeed tune to open. Even 

 the hazel catkins that are half-sized before the 

 leaves have fallen very rarely open before the 

 turn of the year, immediately after which they can 

 be seen swinging as ' lambs' tails,' though the 

 twigs be rimed with frost. 



Her wild children that run about, Nature 

 catches one by one and forces to take the sleep that 

 is good and safe for them. The wasp and the late 

 butterfly remain at the banquet of St. Martin's 

 Summer as long as they can. By day they feast 

 on the ivy blossoms or the more generous artificial 

 nectaries of the garden. Each night they find 

 some cranny to shelter them from the cold, but 

 their sleep is apt to get longer and longer, their 

 hour of rising later and later each day, till the 

 long sleep of winter overtakes them. We say 

 lightly of our own dozes of eight hours apiece, 

 that sleep is mimic death. How much more then 

 is death imitated by the sleep of the brimstone 

 butterfly, which keeps it for months so motionless 

 that not even the microscope can detect any 

 outward sign of life, or of the wasp, whose limbs 

 are so brittle that they will break but never bend, 

 till life reinvades them, oils them, and sets them in 

 new motion. 



The butterflies that hibernate in our country 



