SOME ENGLISH BUTTERFLIES 



others seen more rarely, make up the large and brilliant 

 vanguard of the returning butterfly year ; and yet 

 none of this band are true children of the reviving 

 spring, but all are age-worn survivors of last Septem- 

 ber's sun, which, by a special dispensation of Nature, 

 have slept out the winter's dark and cold. If they 

 are closely scanned, basking on the warm gravel walk 

 as is the habit of the red " Vanessae," the eye will mark 

 at once how sadly they are scarred and worn with 

 accident and age. The strong, compact wings of the 

 Brimstones seem usually in better case, but even the 

 Brimstones appear tarnished and faded under the first 

 suns of spring. The battered brightness of these 

 hibernating butterflies in the new spring sunshine is in 

 striking harmony with the withered and sluggish torpor 

 which the earth still shows under the first full flood of 

 revivifying light. The earth, too, is defaced and sore 

 with winter, cumbered with bleached and matted her- 

 bage where the new shoots are only now swiftly spring- 

 ing, and bared to the brilliant sun with still arid and 

 frost-scarred clods. Such days have all the poignancy 

 of a siege relieved ; and the touch of pathos in this 

 contrast is nowhere expressed more fully than when a 

 torn red Tortoiseshell butterfly, that winter has scarcely 

 spared, alights in the new March sunshine on a golden, 

 fresh-blown dandelion flower, brilliant in every petal 

 with the tender luxuriance of spring. 



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