20 THE BOOK OF THE OPEN AIR 



in its red, and the strangely-fretted and the touch of pathos in this contrast 

 Comma, with its outline like a jagged is nowhere expressed more fully than 

 shell. These, with three or four others when a torn red Tortoiseshell butter- 

 seen more rarely, make up the large fly, that winter has scarcely spared, 

 and brilliant vanguard of the return- alights in the new March sunshine on 

 ing butterfly year ; and yet none of a golden, fresh-blown dandelion flower, 

 this band are true children of the brilliant in every petal with the tender 

 reviving spring, but all are age-worn luxuriance of spring, 

 survivors of last September's sun, Spring waxes and deepens, the 

 which, by a special dispensation of young leaves spread and glisten where 

 Nature, have slept out the winter's dark all was bare, and presently there 

 and cold. If they are closely scanned, comes the day when the first new 

 basking on the warm gravel walk as is butterflies of the year wing their way 

 the habit of the red " Vanessae," the abroad in the morning sunshine, with 

 eye will mark at once how sadly they an unstained freshness of life and 

 are scarred and worn with accident colour as beautiful as the larch's 

 and age. The strong, compact wings misty green, or the song of the chaf- 

 of the Brimstones seem usually in finches in the limes. The day of last 

 better case, but even the Brimstones year's veterans is done, as soon as 

 appear tarnished and faded under the their eggs have been laid on the 

 first suns of spring. The battered young nettle or buckthorn shoots, to 

 brightness of these hibernating butter- bring forth in due time, through 

 flies in the new spring sunshine is in threefold mutations of development, 

 striking harmony with the withered the full brood of late summer and 

 and sluggish torpor which the earth early autumn. In harmony with the 

 still shows under the first full flood of whole tone of the spring, the colours 

 revivifying light. The earth, too, is of the April butterflies are as delicate 

 defaced and sore with winter, cum- and fresh as those of the Vanessae 

 bered with bleached and matted and the Brimstones are deep and full, 

 herbage where the new shoots are The Common White of the cabbage- 

 only now swiftly springing, and bared gardens has a cool purity of colour, 

 to the brilliant sun with still arid and as it flutters down a moist upspringing 

 frost-scarred clods. Such days have hedge-bank of blue speedwells and 

 all the poignancy of a siege relieved; starry stitchwort, which we forget to 



