36 TUMBLES OF A VOtMINIC 



But the snowdrops are all faded now ; even the but- 

 terflies are rousing from their winter sleep, and, coming 

 out from faggot piles and roofs and hollow trees, and all 

 the hiding places where, as autumn days grew chill, 

 they closed their worn and stiffening wings, lend their 

 notes of colour to the very sunshine. The great purple 

 eyes of the peacock are dimmed, and the butterfly that 

 suns itself now on a warm stone, opening and shutting 

 its torn wings, has little of the beauty of the splendid 

 new-born insect that with swift and powerful flight 

 sailed over the autumn fields. The Painted Lady of 

 the spring-time is but the phantom of the magnificent 

 beauty of the summer. But the Brimstone shows upon 

 his yellow wings less sign of fading and rough usage, 

 and, as he flits lightly here and there along the hedge-row 

 and across the fields, he looks as bright and beautiful as 

 when in warm days of last September he made his first 

 appearance. 



The starling on the housetop has long been prophesying 

 spring. Nowhere, perhaps, are the signs of its approach 

 more plain to read than in his heightened colour and 

 his borrowed song. The armies of starlings that mus- 

 tered in the autumn and kept together through the 

 winter months are beginning to disband. The town 

 starling, however, never leaves for long his native heath 

 among the chimney-tops. All the year his voice is 

 heard. In the gloomiest days he keeps alive for us the 

 memory of spring and spring-tide singers. When the 

 ground is white with snow we hear upon the housetop 

 the twitter of the swallow. We recognise among the 



