128 HAMPSHIRE DAYS 



wings half open and head feathers raised, struck 

 repeatedly at it with the greatest fury until it was 

 killed. Then, in the same savage hawk-like manner, 

 the dead thing was torn up, the pipit swallowing pieces 

 so much too large for it that it had the greatest trouble 

 to get them down. The gentle, timid, little bird had for 

 the moment put on the " rage of the vulture." 



In the southern half of the New Forest, that part of 

 the country where insects of all kinds most abound, the 

 moths and butterflies are relatively less important as a 

 feature of the place, and as things of beauty, than some 

 other kinds. The purple emperor is very rarely seen, 

 but the silver-washed fritillary, a handsome, conspicu- 

 ous insect, is quite common, and when several of these 

 butterflies are seen at one spot playing about the 

 bracken in some open sunlit space in the oak woods, 

 opening then* orange-red spotty wings on the broad 

 vivid green fronds they produce a strikingly beautiful 

 effect. It is like a mosaic of minute green tesserae 

 adorned with red and black butterfly shapes, irregularly 

 placed. 



But here the most charming butterfly to my mind is 

 the white admiral, when they are seen in numbers, as in 

 the abundant season of 1901, when the oak woods were 

 full of them. Here is a species which, seen in a collec- 

 tion, is of no more value aesthetically than a dead leaf 

 or a frayed feather dropped in the poultry-yard, or an 

 old postage stamp in an album, without a touch of 

 brilliance on its dull blackish- brown and white wings ; 



