176 LIFE AND SPORT IN HAMPSHIRE 



dance in the grass field. Each season there is some- 

 thing fresh to notice about pearl skippers, as about the 

 ghost moths. The ghost moth seems to .live without 

 food. I have not seen a sign of its refreshing itself, 

 though it belongs to the somewhat fat-bodied, substan- 

 tial class of insects, and one thinks of these commonly as 

 being feeders. Whether the ghost moth would " come to 

 sugar " the syrup of strong drink and treacle mixed 

 by which the collector traps many moths I do not 

 know. But in nature there seems to be no sugar 

 for a ghost moth save the sugar of love. In that 

 extraordinary life, of which only about one twenty- 

 fourth (sometimes perhaps no more than one forty- 

 eighth) is given to wakefulness and action, there seems 

 to be no time or inclination for anything but dancing. 

 How different is it with the pearl skipper ! When 

 last I visited his patch of ground on the hillside he 

 seems as wedded to one little place as the marbled- 

 white the sun was behind clouds, and only the common 

 white butterflies, which are less dependent on sunshine 

 than most others, were a- wing. But ere long the pearl 

 skippers appeared, and this is how they spent their 

 afternoon: they drew sweet-meats from the dwarf 

 thistles and the lesser scabious, or sunned and showed 

 off on the ground or on a blossom when the sun was 

 out, and, when it was in, they closed tight their nattily- 

 cut and stiff little wings and dozed on the ground or 

 on a low-growing flower in the turf. The process of sun- 

 ning and showing off was always exactly the same. 



