THE MAKERS OF SUMMER. 227 



Sometimes I think insects smell the approaching 

 observer as the deer wind the stalker. The Gatekeeper 

 butterfly is common ; its marking is very ingenious, 

 may I say ? regular, and yet irregular. The pattern is 

 complete, and yet it is incomplete ; it is finished, and yet 

 it suggests to the mind that the lines ought to go on 

 farther. They go out into space beyond the wing. If 

 a carpet were copied from it, and laid down in a room, 

 the design would want to run through the walls. 

 Imagine the flower-bird's wing detached from some 

 immense unseen carpet and set floating — it is a piece ot 

 something not ended in itself, and yet floating about 

 complete. Some of their wings are neatly cut to an 

 edge and bordered ; of some the edge is lost in colour, 

 because no line is drawn along it. Some seem to have 

 ragged edges naturally, and look as if they had been 

 battered. Towards the end of their lives little bits of 

 the wing drop out, as if punched. The markings on the 

 under wings have a tendency to run into arches, one 

 arch above the other. The tendency to curve may be 

 traced everywhere in things as wide apart as a flower- 

 bird's wing and the lines on a scallop-shell. 



I own to a boyish pleasure in seeing the clouds of 

 brown chafers in early summer clustering on the maple 

 hedges and keeping up a continual burring. They stick 

 to the fingers like the bud of a horse-chestnut. Now 

 the fern owl pitches himself over the oaks in the evening 

 as a boy might throw a ball careless whither it goes ; 

 the next moment he comes up out of the earth under 

 your feet. The night cuckoo might make another of his 

 many names ; his colour, ways, and food are all cuckoo- 

 like ; so, too, his immense gape — a cave in which end- 

 less moths end their lives ; the eggs are laid on the 

 ground, for there is no night-feeding bird into whose 



Q2 



