24 THE BOOK OF THE OPEN AIR 



brings forth the smaller but beautiful In the week when the days are 

 Hairstreak butterflies, of which even longest, the hayfields and hedgesides 

 the commoner species are curiously suddenly become alive with the corn- 

 fitful and capricious in their periodic mon Large Meadow Brown, a butter- 

 appearances. The Green Hairstreak fly which is even hardier than the 

 is perhaps the most generally dis- Ringlet of the woods, and through 

 tributed of all this tribe ; but it is long weeks of forbidding and flooded 

 the Purple Hairstreak that appears, summers, is sometimes almost the 

 in certain summers, in such large and only butterfly to be seen. It belongs 

 brilliant companies as to become one to the same great general group as 

 of the most conspicuous of the butter- the Ringlets, a group which includes 

 flies of the wood. Often the high oak- not only its own warmer-coloured 

 crowns, or the lower sapling shoots, kinsman, the Small Meadow Brown, 

 are alive in June with the shot purple but also the rare Large Heath and the 

 of these busy little butterflies, dancing very common Small one of every 

 and resting on the sprays and extremi- waste and grass-patch, the Wood 

 ties of the boughs ; and sometimes Argus, the warm, stone-basking Wall 

 the fancy takes them to descend in or Gatekeeper, the Grayling of the 

 mass to the bramble-blossoms of some July wolds and moorlands, and 

 woodside hedge, where the orange- numerous butterflies more. Often by 

 dotted grey of their under wings con- the very side of the Swiss glaciers, 

 trasts in singular beauty with the rich some sober, graceful little insect may 

 velvety bloom and flashing plaques of be seen contentedly basking on the 

 their upper surface. The bloom of the hungry boulders, and this will be one 

 Purple Hairstreak is peculiarly deli- of the " Browns " ; and on our own 

 cate and fugitive, even for the gloss of Cumberland mountains, never at a 

 a butterfly's wing ; the lightest touch height much less than 2,000 feet above 

 destroys it, and its frailty is only the sea, there dwells one dusky, 

 equalled by the dark velvety green of orange-flushed little creature, the 

 the larger, glade-loving Ringlet, with Mountain Ringlet, which is our special 

 its varying series of fine golden circles, English representative of the Alpine 

 which flaps abroad, in unconquerable, butterfly fauna, and a relic of the 

 somnolent hardihood, even under the glacial age. There is a rare pleasure 

 wettest and most lowering skies, in seeing this valorous film of life 



