THE MAKERS OP SUMMER. 225 



he is a friend. I have always let them build about the 

 house, and shall not drive them away. 



If you do not know anything of insects, the fields 

 are somewhat barren to you. The buttercups arc beau- 

 tiful, still they are buttercups every day. The thrush's 

 song is lovely, still one cannot always listen to the 

 thrush. The fields are but large open spaces after a 

 time to many, unless they know a little of insects, when 

 at once they become populous, and there is a link found 

 between the birds and the flowers. It is like opening 

 another book of endless pages, and coloured illustrations 

 on every page. 



Blessings on the man, said Sancho Panza, who first 

 invented sleep. Blessings on the man who first invented 

 the scarlet geranium, and thereby brought the Humming- 

 bird moth to the window-sill ; for, though seen ever so 

 often, I can always watch it again hovering over the 

 petals and taking the honey, and away again into the 

 bright sunlight. Sometimes, when walking along, and 

 thinking of everything else but it, the beautiful Peacock 

 butterfly suddenly floats by the face like a visitor from 

 another world, so highly coloured, and so original and 

 unlike and unexpected. In bright painters' work like 

 the wings of butterflies, which often have distinct hues 

 side by side, I think nature puts very little green ; the 

 bouquet is not backed with maiden-hair fern; the red 

 and the blue and so on have no grass or leaves as a 

 ground colour ; nor do they commonly alight on green. 

 The bright colours are left to themselves unrelieved. 

 None of the butterflies, I think, have green on the upper 

 side of the wing ; the Green Hairstreak has green under 

 wings, but green is not put forward. 



Something the same may be noticed in flowers 

 themselves : the broad surface, for instance, of the 



