BRITISH BUTTERFLIES 



that appears, in certain summers, in such large and 

 brilliant companies as to become one of the most 

 conspicuous of the butterflies of the wood. Often the 

 high oak-crowns, or the lower sapling shoots, are alive 

 in June with the shot purple of these busy little butter- 

 flies, dancing and resting on the sprays and extremities 

 of the boughs ; and sometimes the fancy takes them to 

 descend in mass to the bramble-blossoms of some 

 woodside hedge, where the orange-dotted grey of their 

 under wings contrasts in singular beauty with the rich 

 velvety bloom and flashing plaques of their upper sur- 

 face. The bloom of the Purple Hairstreak is peculi- 

 arly delicate and fugitive, even for the gloss of a butter- 

 fly's wing ; the lightest touch destroys it, and its 

 frailty is only equalled by the dark velvety green of the 

 larger, glade-loving Ringlet, with its varying series 

 of fine golden circles, which flaps abroad, in uncon- 

 querable, somnolent hardihood, even under the wettest 

 and most lowering skies. 



In the week when the days are longest, the hayfields 

 and hedgesides suddenly become alive with the com- 

 mon Large Meadow Brown, a butterfly which is even 

 hardier than the Ringlet of the woods, and through 

 long weeks of forbidding and flooded summers, is 

 sometimes almost the only butterfly to be seen. It 

 belongs to the same great general group as the Ringlets, 

 a group which includes not only its own warmer- 



12 



