The Banded Monk 



distant fields; they go to the box, tap at it, fly 

 round and round it. 



I had read of these marvels; but seeing, 

 seeing with one's own eyes, and at the same 

 time experimenting a little is quite another 

 matter. What does my penny purchase hold 

 in store for me? Will the famous Bombyx 

 emerge from it? 



Let us call her by her other name: the 

 Banded Monk. This unusual name of Monk 

 is suggested by the male's dress: a monk's 

 frock of a modest rusty brown. But in this 

 case the stuff is a delicious velvet, with a pale 

 transversal band and a little white, eye-shaped 

 dot on the front wings. 



The Banded Monk is not, in my region, a 

 common Moth whom we are likely to catch 

 if the fancy takes us to go out with a net at 

 the proper season. I have never seen it about 

 the village, especially not in my lonely enclo- 

 sure, during all the twenty years that I have 

 spent here. I am not a fervent hunter, I ad- 

 mit; the collector's dead insect interests me 

 very little; I want it alive, in the full exercise 

 of its faculties. But I make up for the ab- 

 sence of the collector's zeal by an attentive eye 

 for all that enlivens the fields. A Moth so 



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