250 A MAGNIFYING FANCY. 



elegant and graceful tribe. " Truly," said we, as we looked 

 upon her gauzy wings of delicate green, mingled in their 

 iridescence with rainbow hues " truly it is a pity, my little 

 lady, that there's so precious little of you ; that all this tissued 

 bravery, and even those eyes of gold, should, only for lack of 

 size, be overlooked by nearly all other eyes, save those only 

 of some lace-winged lover, who for beauty, perhaps, may have 

 no eye at all!" Our winged fair-one had, at all events, no 

 ear for admiration expressed in (to her) an unknow r n tongue ; 

 for before our complimentary address was ended she had dis- 

 appeared. 



Only suppose, thought we, pursuing the train of fancy 

 brought and left behind by the gauze-winged sylph ; suppose 

 that, by the touch of some Circe's wand, all the insect forms 

 creeping and flying and floating around us now less seen 

 than heard and felt were all at once enlarged to the pro- 

 portions they assume to the eye in that amusing raree-show, 

 the solar microscope verily we should feel somewhat ill at 

 ease in the strange company wherein we should figure then 

 as insects most insignificant as performers playing certainly 

 no first fiddle. 



" Gorgon and hydra and chimera dire" 



would not then exist only in the realms of imagination ; but 

 fill to suffocation the atmospheric and the aqueous fluids, and 

 walk in appalling reality on the solid earth. And amidst the 

 crowd of shapes terrific, small, we take it, would be our in- 

 clination to single out for admiration such among them as our 

 lace- winged elegante; or, with the poet, to admire in 



" The beetle panoplied in gems of gold," 

 the semblance of 



" A mailed angel on a battle day." 



At this moment a host not of angels, but of blood-thirsty 



