BRITISH BUTTERFLIES 



Spring waxes and deepens, the young leaves spread 

 and glisten where all was bare, and presently there 

 comes the day when the first new butterflies of the 

 year wing their way abroad in the morning sunshine, 

 with an unstained freshness of life and colour as 

 beautiful as the larch's misty green, or the song of 

 the chaffinches in the limes. The day of last year's 

 veterans is done, as soon as their eggs have been 

 laid on the young nettle or buckthorn shoots, to 

 bring forth in due time, through threefold mutations 

 of development, the full brood of late summer and 

 early autumn. In harmony with the whole tone 

 of the spring, the colours of the April butterflies are as 

 delicate and fresh as those of the Vanessae and the 

 Brimstones are deep and full. The Common White 

 of the cabbage-gardens has a cool purity of colour, 

 as it flutters down a moist upspringing hedge-bank of 

 blue speedwells and starry stitchwort, which we forget 

 to notice when high summer has multiplied its numbers. 

 Much more beautiful still is the Orange-tip of the May 

 lanes and meadows, dusted and chequered with gold 

 and green on its under surface, and with half the white 

 fore-wings of the male dipped in a brilliant orange-red. 

 It lives out its life during the flower-time of the white 

 cow-parsley, mimicking this blossom, which it loves 

 to haunt, by the fretted whiteness of its wings ; and 

 its pure tints brightly flushed with mounting summer 



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